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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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?

---

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.

---

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.

---

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".

---

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.

---

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.

---

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?

---

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.

---

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.

---

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%.

---

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?

---

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...

---

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.

---

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.

---

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

---

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.

---

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.

---

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?

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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."

---

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.

---

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

U.S. can sit back and watch Europe implode (MARK STEYN, February 27, 2005, Chicago SUN-TIMES)

I had the opportunity to talk with former French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing on a couple of occasions during his long labors as the self-declared and strictly single Founding Father. He called himself ''Europe's Jefferson,'' and I didn't like to quibble that, constitution-wise, Jefferson was Europe's Jefferson -- that's to say, at the time the U.S. Constitution was drawn up, Thomas Jefferson was living in France. Thus, for Giscard to be Europe's Jefferson, he'd have to be in Des Moines, where he'd be doing far less damage.

But, quibbles aside, President Giscard professed to be looking in the right direction. When I met him, he had an amiable riff on how he'd been in Washington and bought one of those compact copies of the U.S. Constitution on sale for a buck or two. Many Americans wander round with the constitution in their pocket so they can whip it out and chastise over-reaching congressmen and senators at a moment's notice. Try going round with the European Constitution in your pocket and you'll be walking with a limp after two hours: It's 511 pages, which is 500 longer than the U.S. version. It's full of stuff about European space policy, Slovakian nuclear plants, water resources, free expression for children, the right to housing assistance, preventive action on the environment, etc.

Most of the so-called constitution isn't in the least bit constitutional. That's to say, it's not content, as the U.S. Constitution is, to define the distribution and limitation of powers. Instead, it reads like a U.S. defense spending bill that's got porked up with a ton of miscellaneous expenditures for the ''mohair subsidy'' and other notorious Congressional boondoggles. President Ronald Reagan liked to say, ''We are a nation that has a government -- not the other way around.'' If you want to know what it looks like the other way round, read Monsieur Giscard's constitution.

But the fact is it's going to be ratified, and Washington is hardly in a position to prevent it. Plus there's something to be said for the theory that, as the EU constitution is a disaster waiting to happen, you might as well cut down the waiting and let it happen. CIA analysts predict the collapse of the EU within 15 years. I'd say, as predictions of doom go, that's a little on the cautious side.

But either way the notion that it's a superpower in the making is preposterous. Most administration officials subscribe to one of two views: a) Europe is a smugly irritating but irrelevant backwater; or b) Europe is a smugly irritating but irrelevant backwater where the whole powder keg's about to go up.

For what it's worth, I incline to the latter position.

Maybe Mr. Estaing meant he'd found his own Sally Hemmings?

---

COALMINER'S SON:

Biden: Clinton Hard to Beat in 2008 Race (AP, 2/27/05)

"I think she'd be incredibly difficult to beat," the Delaware Democrat said Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press." "I think she is the most difficult obstacle for anyone being the nominee." [...]

"She is likely to be the nominee," Biden said. [...]

Biden said he is thinking about running again, 20 years after his first failed bid for the White House because "there's a lot at stake."

There was an awkward moment when the Senator, asked if he was running, said: "I'm Joe Biden and I'm reporting for duty."

---

WE ARE ALL PLATONISTS NOW:

TIME BANDITS: What were Einstein and Gödel talking about? (JIM HOLT, 2005-02-28, The New Yorker)

Gödel entered the University of Vienna in 1924. He had intended to study physics, but he was soon seduced by the beauties of mathematics, and especially by the notion that abstractions like numbers and circles had a perfect, timeless existence independent of the human mind. This doctrine, which is called Platonism, because it descends from Plato’s theory of ideas, has always been popular among mathematicians. In the philosophical world of nineteen-twenties Vienna, however, it was considered distinctly old-fashioned. Among the many intellectual movements that flourished in the city’s rich café culture, one of the most prominent was the Vienna Circle, a group of thinkers united in their belief that philosophy must be cleansed of metaphysics and made over in the image of science. Under the influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein, their reluctant guru, the members of the Vienna Circle regarded mathematics as a game played with symbols, a more intricate version of chess. What made a proposition like “2 + 2 = 4” true, they held, was not that it correctly described some abstract world of numbers but that it could be derived in a logical system according to certain rules.

Gödel was introduced into the Vienna Circle by one of his professors, but he kept quiet about his Platonist views. Being both rigorous and averse to controversy, he did not like to argue his convictions unless he had an airtight way of demonstrating that they were valid. But how could one demonstrate that mathematics could not be reduced to the artifices of logic? Gödel’s strategy—one of “heart-stopping beauty,” as Goldstein justly observes—was to use logic against itself. Beginning with a logical system for mathematics, one presumed to be free of contradictions, he invented an ingenious scheme that allowed the formulas in it to engage in a sort of double speak. A formula that said something about numbers could also, in this scheme, be interpreted as saying something about other formulas and how they were logically related to one another. In fact, as Gödel showed, a numerical formula could even be made to say something about itself. (Goldstein compares this to a play in which the characters are also actors in a play within the play; if the playwright is sufficiently clever, the lines the actors speak in the play within the play can be interpreted as having a “real life” meaning in the play proper.) Having painstakingly built this apparatus of mathematical self-reference, Gödel came up with an astonishing twist: he produced a formula that, while ostensibly saying something about numbers, also says, “I am not provable.” At first, this looks like a paradox, recalling as it does the proverbial Cretan who announces, “All Cretans are liars.” But Gödel’s self-referential formula comments on its provability, not on its truthfulness. Could it be lying? No, because if it were, that would mean it could be proved, which would make it true. So, in asserting that it cannot be proved, it has to be telling the truth. But the truth of this proposition can be seen only from outside the logical system. Inside the system, it is neither provable nor disprovable. The system, then, is incomplete. The conclusion—that no logical system can capture all the truths of mathematics—is known as the first incompleteness theorem. Gödel also proved that no logical system for mathematics could, by its own devices, be shown to be free from inconsistency, a result known as the second incompleteness theorem.

Wittgenstein once averred that “there can never be surprises in logic.” But Gödel’s incompleteness theorems did come as a surprise. In fact, when the fledgling logician presented them at a conference in the German city of Königsberg in 1930, almost no one was able to make any sense of them. What could it mean to say that a mathematical proposition was true if there was no possibility of proving it? The very idea seemed absurd. Even the once great logician Bertrand Russell was baffled; he seems to have been under the misapprehension that Gödel had detected an inconsistency in mathematics. “Are we to think that 2 + 2 is not 4, but 4.001?” Russell asked decades later in dismay, adding that he was “glad [he] was no longer working at mathematical logic.” As the significance of Gödel’s theorems began to sink in, words like “debacle,” “catastrophe,” and “nightmare” were bandied about. It had been an article of faith that, armed with logic, mathematicians could in principle resolve any conundrum at all—that in mathematics, as it had been famously declared, there was no ignorabimus. Gödel’s theorems seemed to have shattered this ideal of complete knowledge.

That was not the way Gödel saw it. He believed he had shown that mathematics has a robust reality that transcends any system of logic. But logic, he was convinced, is not the only route to knowledge of this reality; we also have something like an extrasensory perception of it, which he called “mathematical intuition.” It is this faculty of intuition that allows us to see, for example, that the formula saying “I am not provable” must be true, even though it defies proof within the system where it lives. Some thinkers (like the physicist Roger Penrose) have taken this theme further, maintaining that Gödel’s incompleteness theorems have profound implications for the nature of the human mind. Our mental powers, it is argued, must outstrip those of any computer, since a computer is just a logical system running on hardware, and our minds can arrive at truths that are beyond the reach of a logical system.

The Materialists still take it rather poorly when you point out that their Reason and Logic rest on a basis of Faith (or intuition as Godel would have it). But Godel was correct, it simply means that our access to ultimate reality is not rational, but faith-based.

---

SUMMERS OF THEIR DISCONTENT:

Summers' Remarks Supported by Some Experts (MATT CRENSON, 2/27/05, AP)

"Among people who do the research, it's not so controversial. There are lots and lots of studies that show that mens' and womens' brains are different," says Richard J. Haier, a professor of psychology in the pediatrics department of the University of California Los Angeles medical school.

What does actual science have to do with academic arguments?

---

WHERE'S HER BROTHER WHEN HER COLUMN NEEDS HIM?:

W.'s Stiletto Democracy (MAUREEN DOWD, 2/27/05, NY Times)

It was remarkable to see President Bush lecture Vladimir Putin on the importance of checks and balances in a democratic society.

Remarkably brazen, given that the only checks Mr. Bush seems to believe in are those written to the "journalists" Armstrong Williams, Maggie Gallagher and Karen Ryan, the fake TV anchor, to help promote his policies. The administration has given a whole new meaning to checkbook journalism, paying a stupendous $97 million to an outside P.R. firm to buy columnists and produce propaganda, including faux video news releases.

The only balance W. likes is the slavering, Pravda-like "Fair and Balanced" coverage Fox News provides. Mr. Bush pledges to spread democracy while his officials strive to create a Potemkin press village at home. This White House seems to prefer softball questions from a self-advertised male escort with a fake name to hardball questions from journalists with real names; it prefers tossing journalists who protect their sources into the gulag to giving up the officials who broke the law by leaking the name of their own C.I.A. agent.

These folk wonder how the moron keeps hganding them their butts on a serving tray but then obsess over such trivialities during a week when Mr. Putin pledged that Russia would not retreat from democracy, Togo and Egypt were forced to hold elections for their next leaders, the Palestinians forced a reformist cabinet on their elected leadership and then denounced a terrorist act against Israel, and Syria began the process of withdrawing from the Lebanon. Ms Dowd can identify 52 different varieties of navel lint but wouldn't know a world historical shift if it hit her in the head.

---

YES, BUT IT'S NOT A COMPLIMENT:

Winston Churchill, Neocon? (JACOB HEILBRUNN, 2/27/05, NY Times Book Review)

Douglas J. Feith was becoming excited. After spending an afternoon discussing the war in Iraq with him, I asked what books had most influenced him. Feith, the under secretary of defense for policy and a prominent neoconservative, raced across his large library and began pulling down gilt-edged volumes on the British Empire. Behind his desk loomed a bust of Winston Churchill.

It was a telling moment. In England right-wing historians are portraying the last lion as a drunk, a dilettante, an incorrigible bungler who squandered the opportunity to cut a separate peace with Hitler that would have preserved the British Empire. On the American right, by contrast, Churchill idolatry has reached its finest hour. George W. Bush, who has said ''I loved Churchill's stand on principle,'' installed a bronze bust of him in the Oval Office after becoming president. On Jan. 21, 2005, Bush issued a letter with ''greetings to all those observing the 40th anniversary of the passing of Sir Winston Churchill.'' The Weekly Standard named Churchill ''Man of the Century.'' So did the columnist Charles Krauthammer, who in December 2002 delivered the third annual Churchill Dinner speech sponsored by conservative Hillsdale College; its president, Larry P. Arnn, also happens to belong to the International Churchill Society. William J. Luti, a leading neoconservative in the Pentagon, recently told me, ''Churchill was the first neocon.'' Apart from Michael Lind writing in the British magazine The Spectator, however, the Churchill phenomenon has received scant attention. Yet to a remarkable extent, the neoconservative establishment is claiming Churchill (who has just had a museum dedicated to him in London) as a founding father.

Like their absurdly high regard for Harry S. Truman, their love of Churchill derives from failure to understand the reality of his tenure beyond opposing Hitler.

---

CONSERVATIVE REVOLUTIONARIES (via Daniel Merriman):

American Politics In The Networking Era (Michael Barone, Feb. 25, 2005, National Journal)

In mid-2003, when former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean surged ahead of other Democrats in fundraising and in the polls, much attention was given to campaign manager Joe Trippi's use of the Internet. He used it to bring volunteers and money into the campaign, and to allow Dean supporters to add their own words, literally, in the campaign blog. Many political supporters were impressed, and rightly so, that the Dean campaign amassed a list of 600,000 e-mail addresses. But few reporters at the time took note of the number of e-mail addresses the Bush campaign had collected: 6 million.

Over two years, the Bush campaign built an organization of 1.4 million active volunteers. This was unprecedented. By way of comparison, the Democratic National Committee has said it enlisted 233,000 volunteers during the 2004 campaign. The Bush volunteers worked not just in heavily Republican neighborhoods -- only 15 percent of Republican voters, Mehlman calculated, live in precincts that vote 65 percent or more Republican. Instead, they went everywhere, especially to rural counties, many of them slow-growing places where most politicians figure there are no more votes to be won, and to the fast-growing exurban areas at the edges of metropolitan areas, where most of the young families moving in tend to be Republican. Just as Sam Walton figured he could make huge profits selling things to people in low-income rural areas and in low-fashion exurbs, so Mehlman calculated that he could wring votes out of areas that most political strategists and political reporters ignored.

To make sure that those volunteers were achieving their goals, Mehlman established metrics -- numerical goals, measured by third parties. Every week, the leaders of the local, state, and national organizations got reports on whether those metrics had been achieved. Productive volunteers were given positive reinforcement, sometimes a call from Mehlman himself. Unproductive volunteers were replaced or persuaded to do more. Mehlman's management was very much like former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's management of the New York City Police Department: Precinct commanders were given goals -- low crime numbers -- which were independently validated. Those who produced were promoted; those who failed lost their jobs. As a result, crime in New York was cut by more than 50 percent -- more than even Giuliani thought was possible.

This is not command-and-control management, but management by networking, by holding people accountable and letting them learn from each other how to do better. And in post-industrial America, it got better results than command-and-control management. In crucial states with the largest volunteer organizations, the numbers speak as loud as Giuliani's -- turnout rose 28 percent from 2000 in fast-growing Florida and 20 percent in slow-growing Ohio.

The Bush campaign used connections -- networks -- to recruit volunteers and identify voters. The campaign built on existing connections -- religious, occupational, voluntary -- to establish contacts. If a Bush volunteer was a Hispanic accountant active in the Boy Scouts, the campaign would reach out through him to other Hispanics, accountants and their clients, and Boy Scout volunteers. Of course, the campaign put much effort into contacting people in religious groups -- particularly evangelical Christians, but also Catholics and Orthodox Jews. And the Bush campaign reached out to people with shared affinities who tend to be Republicans. The campaign consulting firms National Media and TargetPoint identified Republican-leaning groups -- Coors beer and bourbon drinkers, college football TV viewers, Fox News viewers, people with caller ID -- and devised ways to connect with them.

As Thomas Edsall and James Grimaldi wrote in The Washington Post after the election, "Surveys of people on these consumer data lists were then used to determine 'anger points' (late-term abortion, trial lawyer fees, estate taxes) that coincided with the Bush agenda for as many as 32 categories of voters, each identifiable by income, magazine subscriptions, favorite television shows, and other 'flags.' Merging this data, in turn, enabled those running direct-mail, precinct-walking, and phone-bank programs to target each voter with a tailored message."

Presidential campaigns from 1968 up through 2000 spent most of their time, money, and psychic energy on devising television ads to appeal to undecided and weakly committed voters. Bush-Cheney '04 spent unprecedented amounts of time, money, and psychic energy on networking -- making connections with voters -- through advertising, to be sure, but also through personal contact. The Democrats' turnout drive depended on paid workers persuading strangers to get out and vote. The Republicans' turnout drive depended on volunteers persuading people with whom they had something in common to get out and vote. In industrial America, the Democrats' way may have been more effective. In Information Age America, the Bush campaign's strategy was more effective.

In his book Bowling Alone, Harvard professor of public policy Robert Putnam argued that America is suffering from a decline in social-connectedness -- in people voluntarily working and playing together, being active in those voluntary associations that Alexis de Tocqueville identified as one of the defining characteristics of democracy in America in the 1830s. The Bush campaign, by assembling a core of 1.4 million volunteers, increased social-connectedness in America in an important way.

Anyone who has volunteered and worked actively for a political campaign knows that it is a way to make new friends, to establish ties with people with whom you will work together again, on political campaigns but also on community projects and in voluntary associations of all kinds. Volunteer campaign work has reverberations over the years. Rove and Mehlman believed that it was possible to build such a large volunteer organization, but only for an incumbent president whom people had come to know well and admire, or even love. The Republicans will not have an incumbent to campaign for in 2008. But the 2004 Bush campaign created a quantum of social-connectedness that the Republican nominee in 2008 can build on, a long-lasting asset for the Republican Party.

In the process, the Bush campaign reshaped the electorate. People who have voted once are more likely to vote than are people who have never voted. The Bush campaign added more people to the electorate in 2004 than the Democrats did, and that achievement is likely to reverberate in elections to come. It could even lead to the kind of natural majority for the party that the Democrats built in the 1930s and the Republicans built in the 1890s, majorities that pretty much prevailed for more than 30 years.

The beautiful part of the story is that for the MSM it was just obvious that the stuffy old GOP couldn't revolutionize politics using the Internet and they certainly couldn't hope to win a turnout war. So they mostly ignored all the signs of what was happening around them. Meanwhile, because Joe Trippi and Howard Dean fit their preconceived notions of what revolutionaries should be like, they badly overestimated the likely impact of their Internet efforts, which were more harmful than helpful.

---

THEY OUGHT TO HAVE IT IN ATLANTIC CITY:

2008 Presidential Race Gets Its First Cattle Call (Dana Milbank, February 27, 2005, Washington Post)

Technically, this first '08 campaign event is the bipartisan meeting of the National Governors Association. But as many as 15 of the nation's 50 governors are considering a bid for the presidency, and both parties have learned the benefits of nominating a governor. [...]

So here's a scouting report on the guvs of 2005 -- and the would-be presidents of 2008:

Republicans

Arnold Schwarzenegger (Calif): Needs constitutional amendment -- quickly.

Mitt Romney (Mass.): Prettier than John Edwards.

George E. Pataki (N.Y.) : He'll have to outfox Rudy.

Jeb Bush (Fla.): Many hope he'll break his promise not to run.

Haley Barbour (Miss.): Deep ties to Washington steakhouse of dubious value.

Mike Huckabee (Ark.): Recent weight loss increases speculation.

Mark Sanford (S.C.): Can't run if his friend John McCain does.

Bill Owens (Colo.): Embarrassed by Democratic victories in his state in '04.

Democrats

Tom Vilsack (Iowa): Early favorite to win the Iowa caucuses.

Mark R. Warner (Va.): A southern Democrat.

Phil Bredesen (Tenn.): Could do better in his state than Al Gore did.

Bill Richardson (N.M.): Dogged by his Energy Department tenure.

Jennifer M. Granholm (Mich.): Waiting for the Schwarzenegger amendment to pass.

Janet Napolitano (Ariz.): Her home state may be too red for Democrats to win.

Rod Blagojevich (Ill.): His home state may be too blue to matter.

Jeb is the clear class of this field, but Mr. Milbank's assertion that the two parties have learned a lesson is debatable. The Democratic front-runner and prohibitive favorite is, once again, a Northeastern senator. Meanwhile, in the absence of Jeb, the main GOP buzz surrounds a mayor and a cabinet secretary.

---

NO HIGH SCHOOLER LEFT BEHIND:

High Schools Are 1.0 in a 5.0 World, Gates Says (Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, February 27, 2005, LA Times)

"Training the workforce of tomorrow with today's high schools is like trying to teach kids about today's computers on a 50-year-old mainframe," said Gates, whose $27-billion Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has made education one of its priorities.

"Everyone who understands the importance of education, everyone who believes in equal opportunity, everyone who has been elected to uphold the obligations of public office should be ashamed that we are breaking our promises of a free education for millions of students," added Gates, to strong applause.

Virginia Gov. Mark R. Warner, chairman of the nonpartisan association, said high school education was in need of an overhaul to raise standards and to closely align instruction with the requirements of colleges and employers.

"It is imperative that we make reform of the American high school a national priority," Warner, a Democrat, said.

The governors' winter meeting coincides with a push by President Bush to extend elements of his No Child Left Behind initiative from the primary grades to the high school level.

The President should put Mr. Gates in charge of a panel to make reccomendations for how to improve H.S. education. His imprimatur would make it easier to pass the next package of reforms.

---

BORN VS MADE:

Immigration — What Europe Can Learn From the United States: Do the benefits of immigration outweigh the potential disadvantages? This questions has long been debated in Europe. Martin Hüfner — Chief Economist at Munich-based HVB Group — examines the U.S. example. He finds that immigration not only increases economic growth and unemployment, but also offers a range of other benefits. (Martin Hüfner, February 22, 2005, The Globalist)

The German Federal Office of Statistics has just published an estimation that the number of immigrants to Germany declined significantly in 2004.

Overall net immigration — that is, immigrants minus emigrants — was only 75,000. Ten years ago, the number was almost 400,000. And even between 2000 and 2003, the average was still about 200,000.

Keeping out immigrants will only be possible if one were to construct a European wall akin to the famous Chinese wall — not a realistic assumption.

There are no comprehensive statistics available yet for all of 2004, but since Germany is the biggest country in the European Union, it is safe to assume that in Europe as a whole, the number of immigrants has come down in 2004.

Some people who think that the number of foreigners in Europe is already too high will welcome this decline. I think, however, that this is a mistake, at least from an economic point of view. Europe does not need less immigration — but more.

The reason is quite simple. If we look at international statistics, countries with a higher rate of population growth are often more successful economically.

The United States is a prominent example. There, the economy is expanding by a long-term average rate of 3.5% per year. More than one percentage point of this increase can be attributed to the increase in population.

Immigration makes America as America makes its immigrants American. Immigration will unmake Europe, because its nations are premised on blood and soil, not ideas.

As much as some folks despise the notion that certain radical political ideas and their advocates have at times been branded un-American in our history, it reflects the fact that there are core ideas around which we are organized--ideas accessible to everyone, regardless of race, creed, or color. On the other hand, no one is ever said to be un-French or un-German--they are not German or not French by reason of ethnicity.

---

SAT + BS:

SAT's Essay Question Spells Stressful Prep (Rebecca Trounson, February 27, 2005, LA Times)

Writing, Audrianna Galvin says forthrightly, has never been her strong suit.

So the teenager was more than a little anxious when makers of the SAT college entrance exam announced in 2002 that a revised version of the test would, for the first time, include a handwritten essay.

"The whole idea of the writing section just really freaked me out," said Audrianna, 16, a junior at the private Buckley School in Sherman Oaks. "I thought, 'How on earth could I do that?' "

Now, with the debut of the new, longer SAT — and its fear-inducing writing section — two weeks away, Audrianna says she is feeling somewhat better. She has gained some confidence from hours spent on preparation, in classes and on her own. "But I'm still pretty nervous," she admits.

Other college-bound students are also stressed over the high-stakes test. They're filling test prep classes in record numbers, mainly, they say, to practice for the essay. For the exam itself, they will have 25 minutes to write, clearly and persuasively, on such broad philosophical topics as "Do people need to keep secrets or is secrecy harmful?"

Some students also seem loath to be among the first to face the new SAT. Enrollments for its initial offering, on March 12, are significantly lower than those for the essay-less test last March. Officials with the College Board, which owns the exam, said the 11% dip in registration is similar to a drop in March 1994, when an earlier revision of the test was introduced.

But many counselors and other experts are urging students — and parents — to keep calm. They point out that the essay, the subject of most of the nervous chatter surrounding the new test, will count for only about one-ninth of a student's overall score.

"They all need to take a deep breath and relax," said Jennifer Karan, director of SAT and ACT programs for Kaplan Test Prep.

When I took the English Achievement Test with Essay in November 1978 the essay was something to the effect of: "We have met the enemy and he is us: Discuss."

Conveniently for us, but sadly for the victims, the test coincided with early reports of the Jonestown Massacre.

---

BREAKNECK PACE:

Minds are changing (Michael Barone, 3/07/05, US News)

Nearly two years ago I wrote that the liberation of Iraq was changing minds in the Middle East. Before March 2003, the authoritarian regimes and media elites of the Middle East focused the discontents of their people on the United States and Israel. I thought the downfall of Saddam Hussein's regime was directing their minds to a different question: how to build a decent government and a decent society. I think I overestimated how much progress was being made at the time. But the spectacle of 8 million Iraqis braving terrorists to vote on January 30 seems to have moved things up to breakneck speed.

Evidence abounds. Consider what is happening in Lebanon, long under Syrian control, in response to the assassination, almost certainly by Syrian agents, of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri. Protesters have taken to the streets day after day, demanding Syrian withdrawal. The Washington Post 's David Ignatius, who covered Lebanon in the 1980s and has kept in touch since, has been skeptical that the Bush administration's policy would change things for the better. But reporting from Beirut last week, he wrote movingly of "the movement for political change that has suddenly coalesced in Lebanon and is slowly gathering force elsewhere in the Arab world." Ignatius interviewed Walid Jumblatt, the Druze leader long a critic of the United States. Jumblatt's words are striking: "It's strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq. I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, 8 million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world. The Syrian people, the Egyptian people, all say that something is changing. The Berlin Wall has fallen. We can see it." As Middle East expert Daniel Pipes writes, "For the first time in three decades, Lebanon now seems within reach of regaining its independence."

We aren't even two years out from March 2003--Mr. Barone underestimated rather than overestimated.

---

SOMETIMES THE INEVITABLE TAKES 7,000 YEARS:

President of Egypt Calls for Open Election: The announcement follows recent White House criticism of Mubarak's iron-fisted regime. (Megan K. Stack and Sonni Efron, February 27, 2005, LA Times)

Noting that Egypt needed "more freedom and democracy," Mubarak said he'd sent a letter to lawmakers asking them to amend the constitution to open the presidential election to political competition. [...]

After years in which his seemingly permanent hold on the presidency was seldom questioned out loud, Mubarak has been pelted with growing criticism. His tight grip on power has provoked demonstrations in the streets of Cairo and has drawn mounting calls for constitutional reform. Rumors that Mubarak's son, Gamal, was being groomed to succeed his father as president have intensified the anti-government grumblings of disgruntled Egyptians.

At the same time, the United States, Egypt's crucial ally and largest international donor, has shifted its tone, becoming more critical of Mubarak's iron-fisted regime. Bush rapped Egypt in his State of the Union address for failing to reform, and Rice reinforced that criticism last week with the cancellation of her trip.

Bush administration officials have not threatened, publicly or privately, to slash aid to Egypt. "Egypt is a very proud nation, and there's no point in humiliating them," said an administration official, who spoke under the condition of anonymity. "It would be counterproductive to do so."

The United States has prepared a $1-billion economic aid package aimed at revamping Egypt's deeply troubled banking sector. The package was ready Jan. 23, but it has not yet been signed. The administration has given no explanation for the delay.

"There were pressures building up to such a decision. The country is in crisis," said Abdel Moneim Abul Fotouh, a senior leader in the Muslim Brotherhood, a popular party that has been officially banned in Egypt for decades but has joined the ranks of parliament by running its members as independents. "The regime moved wisely."

Among ordinary Arabs who have watched the upheaval unleashed by the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and bemoaned long-standing U.S. alliances with tyrannical Arab governments, U.S. calls to democratize the region have been received with a mix of skepticism and hope.

Despite widespread doubt over U.S. intentions, themes of democracy and reform are much on the minds of Arabs this year. Voters have gone to the polls in Iraq, the Palestinian territories and Saudi Arabia, and an unprecedented wave of popular protest has welled up in Lebanon against Syrian domination.

But many analysts view Egypt, the most populous Arab nation, as the true testing ground for whether democracy can take hold.

Egypt's state-run television, which carried Mubarak's speech live Saturday morning, praised the president's announcement as "a historical decision in the nation's 7,000-year-old march toward democracy."

---

THAT TWO FOR THE PRICE OF ONE DEAL FINALLY PAYS OFF:

Clinton Taiwan trip upsets China (Chris Hogg, 2/27/05, BBC News)

Former US President Bill Clinton has arrived in Taiwan, a visit that has drawn criticism from China.

Mr Clinton will give a speech about democracy and is expected to meet Taiwan's President, Chen Shui-bian.

China fears Mr Chen wants to push towards independence for Taiwan - a move it would regard as an act of war.

With Ms Clinton prodding the Iraqis towards greater liberalism and Mr. Clinton poking the ChiComs oin the eye, we can for once say that both Clintons are rendering exemplary public service.

---

WALK A MILE FOR A CAMEL'S NOSE UNDER THE TENT:

GOP May Seek a Deal on Accounts: Anxious Lawmakers Negotiate With Democrats on Social Security Changes (John F. Harris and Jim VandeHei, February 27, 2005, Washington Post)

As described in interviews, most of these compromises would involve Bush significantly scaling back his proposals for restructuring the popular benefits program. In exchange, he could still claim an incremental victory on what he has described as his core principles: enhancing the long-term solvency of Social Security and giving younger Americans options to invest more of their retirement money.

In one example, Rep. E. Clay Shaw Jr. (R-Fla.) said, a compromise might involve merging Bush's proposal with plans -- some backed by Democrats -- that create government-subsidized savings plans outside Social Security. Under this scenario, Bush's proposal to divert 4 percent of an individual's Social Security payroll tax would become 2 percent or less.

"The president could claim a real victory just by getting personal accounts," said Shaw, who has shared his ideas with Vice President Cheney and White House senior adviser Karl Rove. "It may be that a hybrid" is the key to compromise.

Meanwhile, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) said that he is discussing with Democratic colleagues a compromise plan that would guarantee low-income beneficiaries will do better under a new program than the existing system, even if this increases the program's cost.

White House officials said Bush is open to such a compromise and will continue to signal this publicly in the days ahead.

Just get the concept in place and make sure that earnings from personal accounts are counted against your eventual SS entitlement and it is a massive victory. You can jigger the numbers in 2007, once the Senate is 60-40.

---

WE HAVEN'T FORGOTTEN YOU EITHER:

US Offers Strong Support for Burmese Democracy Activists (Serena Parker, 26 February 2005, VOA News)

Paula Dobriansky, U.S. undersecretary of state for global affairs, says the United States stands in solidarity with those in Burma who are denied basic rights.

"We will continue to help the people of Burma in their struggle," she said. "We need to press the world to stand firm against the junta, and remind people everywhere precisely what is going on in Rangoon."

She accused the military government in Burma of harassing political opponents through widespread intimidation, violence and unwarranted arrests.

"With conduct like this, it is very clear why our Secretary of State, Dr. Condoleeza Rice, recently noted that Burma is one of the world's 'outposts of tyranny,'" said Ms. Dobriansky.

---

HE'S LEAVIN'...:

EDWARD PATTEN | 1939-2005: Motown singer was the pillar of the Pips (JACK KRESNAK, February 26, 2005, Detroit FREE PRESS)

Edward Patten was not just any Pip.

Besides singing bass and then tenor -- his voice had incredible range -- on harmonies backing up the group's lead singer, Gladys Knight, Patten also served as one of the group's choreographers as well as the treasurer who made sure that promoters paid and that the travel and accommodation plans were set.

"When Edward and Langston George became part of the Pips, we danced a whole 'nother way," said William Guest, one of the original Pips. "He was that type of guy. He made sure that we did things right. We called him Daddy Patten. He was no more than two to three years older than me and a year older than Langston, but we respected him."

Patten, who had lived in Detroit since 1964 when Gladys Knight and the Pips joined Berry Gordy Jr.'s Motown records, died early Friday at St. Mary Hospital in Livonia. He was 65 and had been in ill health since a series of strokes beginning in 1995 left him unable to sing.

Patten, Guest and Knight are cousins.

Who didn't grow up dreaming of being the Pips' bass?

---

GOD IS AS WE FIND HIM, NOT AS WE'D LIKE HIM:

Unintelligent Design (JIM HOLT, 2/20/05, NY Times Magazine)

From a scientific perspective, one of the most frustrating things about intelligent design is that (unlike Darwinism) it is virtually impossible to test. Old-fashioned biblical creationism at least risked making some hard factual claims -- that the earth was created before the sun, for example. Intelligent design, by contrast, leaves the purposes of the designer wholly mysterious. Presumably any pattern of data in the natural world is consistent with his/her/its existence.

But if we can't infer anything about the design from the designer, maybe we can go the other way. What can we tell about the designer from the design? While there is much that is marvelous in nature, there is also much that is flawed, sloppy and downright bizarre. Some nonfunctional oddities, like the peacock's tail or the human male's nipples, might be attributed to a sense of whimsy on the part of the designer. Others just seem grossly inefficient. In mammals, for instance, the recurrent laryngeal nerve does not go directly from the cranium to the larynx, the way any competent engineer would have arranged it. Instead, it extends down the neck to the chest, loops around a lung ligament and then runs back up the neck to the larynx. In a giraffe, that means a 20-foot length of nerve where 1 foot would have done. If this is evidence of design, it would seem to be of the unintelligent variety.

Such disregard for economy can be found throughout the natural order. Perhaps 99 percent of the species that have existed have died out. Darwinism has no problem with this, because random variation will inevitably produce both fit and unfit individuals. But what sort of designer would have fashioned creatures so out of sync with their environments that they were doomed to extinction?

The gravest imperfections in nature, though, are moral ones. Consider how humans and other animals are intermittently tortured by pain throughout their lives, especially near the end. Our pain mechanism may have been designed to serve as a warning signal to protect our bodies from damage, but in the majority of diseases -- cancer, for instance, or coronary thrombosis -- the signal comes too late to do much good, and the horrible suffering that ensues is completely useless.

And why should the human reproductive system be so shoddily designed? Fewer than one-third of conceptions culminate in live births. The rest end prematurely, either in early gestation or by miscarriage. Nature appears to be an avid abortionist, which ought to trouble Christians who believe in both original sin and the doctrine that a human being equipped with a soul comes into existence at conception. Souls bearing the stain of original sin, we are told, do not merit salvation. That is why, according to traditional theology, unbaptized babies have to languish in limbo for all eternity. Owing to faulty reproductive design, it would seem that the population of limbo must be at least twice that of heaven and hell combined.

It is hard to avoid the inference that a designer responsible for such imperfections must have been lacking some divine trait -- benevolence or omnipotence or omniscience, or perhaps all three.

Mr. Holt's objection that "any pattern of data in the natural world is consistent with his/her/its existence" is obviously true of Darwinism as well, but still sillier is that even as he notes the doctrine of Original Sin he manages to ignore its implications. No one who's read the Bible would claim that the God described therein is especially benevolent, omipotent, omnipresent, or omniscient. Thus:

002:025 And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not
ashamed.

003:001 Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field
which the LORD God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea,
hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?

003:002 And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit
of the trees of the garden:

003:003 But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the
garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall
ye touch it, lest ye die.

003:004 And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die:

003:005 For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your
eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good
and evil.

003:006 And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and
that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to
make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and
gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.

003:007 And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they
were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made
themselves aprons.

003:008 And they heard the voice of the LORD God walking in the garden
in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves
from the presence of the LORD God amongst the trees of the
garden.

003:009 And the LORD God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where
art thou?

003:010 And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was
afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.

003:011 And he said, Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou
eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou
shouldest not eat?

003:012 And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me,
she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.

003:013 And the LORD God said unto the woman, What is this that thou
hast done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I
did eat.

003:014 And the LORD God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done
this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast
of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt
thou eat all the days of thy life:

003:015 And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between
thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou
shalt bruise his heel.

003:016 Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and
thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and
thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over
thee.

003:017 And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the
voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I
commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is
the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all
the days of thy life;

003:018 Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and
thou shalt eat the herb of the field;

003:019 In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou
return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for
dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.

003:020 And Adam called his wife's name Eve; because she was the
mother of all living.

003:021 Unto Adam also and to his wife did the LORD God make coats of
skins, and clothed them.

003:022 And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us,
to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand,
and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:

003:023 Therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden,
to till the ground from whence he was taken.

003:024 So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the
garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned
every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.

Then:

004:003 And in process of time it came to pass, that Cain brought of
the fruit of the ground an offering unto the LORD.

004:004 And Abel, he also brought of the firstlings of his flock and
of the fat thereof. And the LORD had respect unto Abel and to
his offering:

004:005 But unto Cain and to his offering he had not respect. And Cain
was very wroth, and his countenance fell.

004:006 And the LORD said unto Cain, Why art thou wroth? and why is
thy countenance fallen?

004:007 If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? and if thou
doest not well, sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be
his desire, and thou shalt rule over him.

004:008 And Cain talked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass,
when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel
his brother, and slew him.

004:009 And the LORD said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he
said, I know not: Am I my brother's keeper?

004:010 And he said, What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother's
blood crieth unto me from the ground.

004:011 And now art thou cursed from the earth, which hath opened her
mouth to receive thy brother's blood from thy hand;

004:012 When thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield
unto thee her strength; a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou
be in the earth.

And:

006:005 And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth,
and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was
only evil continually.

006:006 And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth,
and it grieved him at his heart.

006:007 And the LORD said, I will destroy man whom I have created from
the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping
thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I
have made them.

Capped, most importantly by:

Matthew 27:46 And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?

A God who can despair of Himself is a radically different being than the one Mr. Holt has summoned from the pamphelets full of vapid objections such folk hand around.

---

AS GOD IS MY WITNESS, IT JUST TIPPED ITSELF...:

The Tipping Points (THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN, 2/27/05, NY Times)

The other night on ABC's "Nightline," the host, Ted Koppel, posed an intriguing question to Malcolm Gladwell, the social scientist who wrote the path-breaking book "The Tipping Point," which is about how changes in behavior or perception can reach a critical mass and then suddenly create a whole new reality. Mr. Koppel asked: Can you know you are in the middle of a tipping point, or is it only something you can see in retrospect?

Mr. Gladwell responded that "the most important thing in trying to analyze whether something is at the verge of a tipping point, is whether it - an event - causes people to reframe an issue. ...A dumb example is the Atkins's diet, which reframes dieting from thinking about it in terms of avoiding calories and fat to thinking about it as avoiding carbohydrates, which really changes the way people perceive dieting."

Mr. Koppel was raising the question because he wanted to explore whether the Iraqi elections marked a tipping point in history. I was on the same show, and in mulling over this question more I think that what's so interesting about the Middle East today is that we're actually witnessing three tipping points at once.

We are, of course, far past the Tipping Point in two of the cases he discusses and just past in the third. But this is likely to be a kind of outlier column as Mr. Friedman manages to work himself into the essay and thinks things may be tipping because even he finally recognizes that they are, but doesn't find room to mention the Tipper-in-Chief who's been telling anyone who'd listen that we'd crossed the Rubicon for several years now.

---

EVERYONE WANTS THE RIGHT TO SPEAK, JUST NOT TO BE HELD RESPONSIBLE FOR WHAT THEY SAY:

The Wrath Of God: As evangelical Christians force a Scottish cancer charity to refuse money raised from a benefit performance of controversial show Jerry Springer – The Opera, Iain S Bruce reports on the emergence of new militant faith groups who are no longer prepared to turn the other cheek (Iain S. Bruce, 2/27/05, Sunday Herald)

Firing the opening salvoes of a campaign that looks set to rage for decades to come, last week they launched an attack that took Britain by surprise when the evangelical cadre Christian Voice stepped in and, demonstrating the militant guerrilla tactics set to become a familiar feature of 21st-century politics, pressured a small Scottish cancer charity, Maggie’s Centre, into rejecting a £3000 donation. The proceeds of a benefit performance by the cast of the controversial mus ical Jerry Springer – The Opera could have had a significant impact upon the work of Maggie’s Centre, but amid reported warnings of picket action and the thinly veiled threat that accepting the funds could lead to a backlash from devout donors, the Glasgow-based voluntary organisation felt compelled to decline.

It was, Labour MP John Cryer told parliament, the work of “fundamentalist thugs,” an act of theological blackmail so far beyond the pale that it beggared belief. Sending a storm of liberal outrage sweeping through the nation’s media and provoking a deluge of hate mail directed at the perpetrators, it was an incident that the popular consensus might hope was a single unacceptable aberration but was in fact merely a taste of things to come. [...]

Britain is waking up to a new breed of faith that seems a million miles from the traditional forms of religious expression in this country. No longer content to remain in society’s shadows, they are stepping out into the light, armed with a reinvigorated brand of militant faith and a fundamentalist agenda on which they insist there will be no compromise. Radical, committed and apparently no longer prepared to turn the other cheek, they have presented the nation’s policy makers with an unexpected new challenge, and from Holyrood to the House of Commons apparatchiks have been sent scurrying to identify who these people are and exactly what it is that they want.

Attempting to flush out the facts on who is behind the emerging new strain of vigorous British puritanism is no easy task, however. Drawing its footsoldiers from a plethora of small-time fellowships and organisations such as Christian Voice, MediaMarch, the Christian Institute and Mediawatch UK, the movement consists of dozens of self-starting, autono mous groups. Although frequently sharing similar principles and providing each other with mutual support, very few formal links exist between such operations, so precisely mapping out the UK’s radical-Christian power structure is currently close to impossible.

What is clear, however, is that these groups represent a political foe to be reckoned with. Attracting members from both the established mainstream church and congregations from the far fringes of the Christian faith, these self-funding organisations are believed to have total backing worth in excess of £20 million a year and are rapidly turning themselves into highly organised and zealously committed campaigning machines.

Identifying the individuals behind this emerging movement is less difficult. Typically middle-aged churchgoers ensconced in the warm embrace of traditional family units, they are the progeny of a liberal generation who believe that their parents’ quest for self-expression and freedom has led society to the brink of doom, creating a world where there is no longer much honour, safety or respect.

Isn't the problem that having a traditional family makes you seem radical?

---

WHERE'S MY ORANGE TIE?:

Bush cancels St Patrick’s Day party and tells Adams: you’re not wanted here (Ed Moloney and Torcuil Crichton, 2/27/05, Sunday Herald)

US President George W Bush is expected to announce in the next few days that this year’s St Patrick’s Day party in the White House will be cancelled in response to allegations that Sinn Fein members, including leader Gerry Adams, authorised December’s £26.5 million IRA bank robbery in Belfast.

The White House snub will further isolate Sinn Fein from the political mainstream, and comes as a man surrendered himself to police in connection with the IRA murder of a Belfast man that has thrown the organisation into crisis.

How about inviting Adams to the White House but arresting him out front? It would clear a bit of the stain of Bill Clinton letting him in the place and make for a sweet perp walk.

---

STATEHOOD SUFFICES:

Palestinians Angry Over Tel Aviv Attack (MOHAMMED BALLAS, 2/27/05, Associated Press)

Palestinians expressed anger Saturday at an overnight suicide bombing in Tel Aviv that killed four Israelis and threatened a fragile truce, a departure from former times when they welcomed attacks on their Israeli foes.

Official condemnations and denials were followed by public anger toward the perpetrators as Israeli blamed Syria and the Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad, which claimed responsibility for the attack.

For several years now folks have said that if you just give the Palestinians a state they'll quickly shift their focus from Israel to their own internal problems and "hawks" have scoffed.

---

THE PRESIDENT WHO OPPOSED KILLING HITLER AND FIGHTING STALIN:

EXCERPT: Chapter One: The Plot to Murder Hitler (The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman and the Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1941-1945 By Michael R. Beschloss)

[H]itler was burrowed in at the Wolf's Lair, his field headquarters near Rastenburg, in a melancholy, dank East Prussian forest. At noon, in a log barracks, he listened to a gloomy report from one of his army chiefs about Germany's retreat on the Eastern front. In the steamy room, Hitler took off the eyeglasses he vainly refused to use in public and mopped his forehead with a handkerchief. SS men and stenographers stood around the massive, long oak table like nervous cats. Maps were unfurled. Hitler leaned over them and squinted through a magnifying glass, grimacing at the bad news.

Into the room strode a thirty-seven-year-old officer named Claus von Stauffenberg. He was a Bavarian nobleman, with blond hair and sharp cheekbones, who had lost an eye and seven fingers to an Allied mine in Tunisia while fighting for Germany. Unknown to the Führer or the other two dozen people in the chamber, Stauffenberg was part of a secret, loosely rigged anti-Hitler conspiracy that included military officers, diplomats, businessmen, pastors, intellectuals, landed gentry.

Some wanted historians of the future to record that not all Germans were Nazis. Some simply wanted to spare their nation the full brunt of conquest by the Soviet, American and British armies. Still others were unsettled by Hitler's war against the Jews. For years, the plotters had tried to kill Hitler with rifles and explosives, but the Führer had always survived.

Disgusted by what he heard about Nazi brutality in Russia, Stauffenberg had taught himself how to use his remaining three fingers to set off a bomb. By luck, in July 1944, he was summoned to the Wolf's Lair to help brief Hitler about the Eastern front. When Stauffenberg entered the room, the Führer shook his hand, stared at him appraisingly, then returned to his maps.

Inside Stauffenberg's briefcase, swaddled in a shirt, was a ticking time bomb. While the Army chief droned on, Stauffenberg put the briefcase under the table. Leaving his hat and belt behind, as if he were stepping out for a moment, Stauffenberg walked out of the room and left the barracks.

About a quarter to one came a loud boom and swirl of blue-yellow flame, followed by black smoke.

Outside the barracks, Stauffenberg saw men carry out a stretcher on which lay a body shrouded by what seemed to be Hitler's cloak. Rushing to his car for a getaway flight to Berlin, he presumed that Adolf Hitler was no more. Stauffenberg hoped that next would come a public declaration of Hitler's assassination, an Army revolt and establishment of an anti-Nazi government in Berlin.

But when he arrived at General Staff headquarters on Bendler Street, there was only disarray. Fellow plotters were not convinced that Hitler had been killed. Aghast, Stauffenberg cried, "I myself saw Hitler carried out dead!"

But he was wrong. Striving for a better view of the maps, one of the Führer's aides had pushed the briefcase behind one of the table's massive supports, protecting Hitler from certain death. Stauffenberg and his adjutant, Werner von Haeften, a collaborator, had felt too rushed to put a second bomb in the briefcase. Had they done so, Hitler would have certainly been killed.

Instead, when the smoke cleared Hitler was still standing. With bloodshot eyes staring out from a soot-blackened face, he tamped down flame from his trousers. His hair stood out in spikes. His ruptured eardrums were bleeding. His right arm dangled numb at his side.

A weeping Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel threw his arms around Hitler: "My Führer, you're alive! You're alive!"

After donning a fresh uniform, seemingly exhilarated by his survival, Hitler was almost merry. "Once again everything turned out well for me!" he chortled to his secretaries. "More proof that fate has selected me for my mission!" That afternoon he showed his scorched clothes to the visiting ousted Italian dictator Benito Mussolini: "Look at my uniform! Look at my burns!" Hitler had the uniform sent to his mistress, Eva Braun, for safekeeping as proof of his historical destiny.

When generals telephoned from the far reaches of the German Reich to learn whether, as some had heard, Hitler was dead, the Führer was furious that they should even raise the question. With froth on his lips, he shouted, "Traitors in the bosom of their own people deserve the most ignominious of deaths....Exterminate them!...I'll put their wives and children into concentration camps and show them no mercy!" He even confronted his Alsatian dog: "Look me in the eyes, Blondi! Are you also a traitor like the generals of my staff?"

It did not take Hitler's men long to discover who was behind the plot. In Berlin, Stauffenberg and three fellow plotters were arrested. A five-minute trial, "in the name of the Führer," found them guilty of treason. In a shadowy courtyard, they were hauled before a firing squad.

Just before his execution, remembering his country before Hitler, Stauffenberg cried out, "Long live eternal Germany!"

An hour after midnight on Friday, July 21, Berlin time, Hitler spoke by radio from the Wolf's Lair. After a burst of military music, he declared, "Fellow members of the German race!" An "extremely small clique of ambitious, unscrupulous and foolish, criminally stupid officers" had plotted to kill him and the German high command - "a crime that has no equal in German history."

The plotters had "no bond and nothing in common with the German people." He was "entirely unhurt, apart from minor grazes, bruises or burns." Failure of the plot was "a clear sign from Providence that I must carry on with my work."

Hitler had come to power claiming that Germany had lost World War I because craven politicians in Berlin had betrayed the generals. The newest plotters, he now said, had planned to "thrust a dagger into our back as they did in 1918. But this time they have made a very grave mistake." His voice rose to a shriek: "Every German, whoever he may be, has a duty to fight these elements at once with ruthless determination....Wipe them out at once!"

Fearing for his life, Hitler never again spoke in public. By his orders, hundreds of suspected conspirators were arrested, tortured and executed. Another five thousand of their relatives and suspected anti-Nazi sympathizers were taken to concentration camps. A decree went out for Stauffenberg's family to be "wiped out to its last member."

Hitler ordered some of the chief plotters "strung up like butchered cattle." A motion picture of their execution was rushed to the Wolf's Lair for the Führer's enjoyment. By one account, Hitler and his chief propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, watched in the Führer's private theater as the shirtless men on the screen swung from piano-wire nooses, writhing and dying while their carefully unbelted trousers fell off to reveal them naked.

Goebbels had demanded for years that Hitler's enemies be stalked with "ice-cold determination." But when the top Nazis watched the ghoulish flickering images of the lifeless plotters, it was later said, even the cold-blooded Goebbels had to cover his eyes to keep from passing out.

As Hitler finished his speech from the Wolf's Lair, Franklin Roosevelt gave his own radio address from California. Speaking from a private railroad car at the San Diego naval base, he accepted the 1944 Democratic nomination for President. For wartime security reasons, the public was told only that the base was on the "Pacific coast."

The President was taking a five-week, fourteen-thousand-mile military inspection trip of the Pacific Coast, Hawaii and Alaska. His special nine-car railroad caravan had moved slowly from Chicago to Kansas City, El Paso and Phoenix, to "kill time" before his arrival in San Diego and spare him from having to sleep at night in a moving train. Secret Service agents had tried to keep Roosevelt's exact whereabouts a secret. At each stop, the President and his party were asked to stay aboard the train. But Roosevelt's famous Scottie dog, Fala, had to be taken off to relieve himself. When Pullman porters and ticket takers saw Fala, they knew who was really aboard the train called "Main 985."

One might have expected Roosevelt to be delighted when he heard the news of a coup that might topple Adolf Hitler. If a new, post-Hitler government accepted the Allied demand for unconditional surrender, it would save millions of lives and let the Big Three - Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill - throw Allied forces fully into the war against Japan.

But Roosevelt knew that life was rarely that uncomplicated. For months, American intelligence had secretly warned him of plots against Hitler. In early July 1944, Allen Dulles of the Office of Strategic Services reported from Bern, Switzerland, that "the next few weeks will be our last chance to demonstrate the determination of the Germans themselves to rid Germany of Hitler and his gang and establish a decent regime." Eight days before Stauffenberg set off his bomb, Dulles warned that "a dramatic event" might soon take place "up north."

Roosevelt would have certainly realized that a new, post-Hitler junta would probably demand a negotiated settlement. It might insist that certain members of the German military high command, government and other institutions stay in place. This would frustrate his declared intention to remake postwar Germany from the ground up so that it could never threaten the world again. Official Allied policy was unconditional surrender. But Roosevelt knew that if a rump post-Hitler government sued for peace, it would be difficult for Churchill and himself to persuade their war-exhausted peoples to keep fighting and lose hundreds of thousands more lives.

Dulles had reported that one group of anti-Hitler conspirators wanted "to prevent Central Europe from coming...under the control of Russia." As Roosevelt knew, Churchill might be sorely tempted by a deal with a new German government that could save British lives and block the Soviets in Europe, provoking an immediate confrontation with Stalin.

It would be one thing if, despite his conscious decision not to help hasten Hitler's fall, FDR had at least succeeded in his own scheme, but instead he lost half of Germany, which remained a flashpoint for the next half century.

---

THE REVOLUTION TRAILING IN HIS WAKE:

For Bush, a Long Embrace of Social Security Plan (RICHARD W. STEVENSON, 2/27/05, NY Times)

The conservative economists and public policy experts who trooped in to brief George W. Bush on Social Security not long after he was re-elected governor of Texas in 1998 came with their own ideas about how to overhaul the retirement program. But they quickly found that Mr. Bush, who was well into preparations for his first presidential race and had invited them to Austin for the discussion, already knew where he was headed.

"He never said, 'What should I do about Social Security?' " said one of the participants in the meeting, Martin Anderson, who had been a domestic policy adviser in the Reagan administration. "On the day we talked about Social Security, he said, 'We have to find a way to allow people to invest a percentage of their payroll tax in the capital markets. What do you think?' "

Mr. Bush had long been intrigued by the idea of allowing workers to put part of their Social Security taxes into stocks and bonds. One Tuesday in the summer of 1978, in the heat of his unsuccessful race for a House seat from West Texas, Mr. Bush went to Midland Country Club to give a campaign speech to local real estate agents and discussed the issue in terms not much different from those he uses now.

Social Security "will be bust in 10 years unless there are some changes," he said, according to an account published the next day in The Midland Reporter-Telegram. "The ideal solution would be for Social Security to be made sound and people given the chance to invest the money the way they feel."

Two decades later, Mr. Bush's desire to change Social Security intersected with the promotion of private accounts by well-financed interest groups and conservative research organizations, which viewed the concept as innovative if ideologically explosive. What was once a fringe proposal has been propelled to the forefront of the national agenda in one of the biggest gambles of Mr. Bush's political career, and in one of the most concerted challenges since the New Deal to liberal assumptions about the relationship of individuals, the government and the market.

So he was a revolutionary even back when he was just a moronic preppy skating on his Dad's name? Who'da thunk...

---

WHY NOT JUST BAN DISCRIMINATION AGAINST SAILORS?:

Discrimination bill snubs gays to save Muslim vote (David Cracknell, 2/27/05, Times of London)

GAY RIGHTS campaigners have been snubbed by the government for fear of upsetting Muslim voters who are regarded as more important to Labour’s election campaign.

This week a new bill giving Muslims protection against religious discrimination will be published, but there will be no equivalent right for gays, as had been planned by ministers.

Downing Street fears that Muslims, whose votes could be the key to saving the seats of many Labour MPs, might feel offended if they were “lumped together” with homosexuals.

The change comes despite the fact that there are thought to be around 3m gay voters, compared with 1.3m Muslims of voting age in Britain.

Under the bill, it will become illegal for the provider of any goods or services — such as a hotel, shop, pub or restaurant — to refuse to serve someone on the grounds of their religion. It is already illegal to do so on the basis of race or gender.

The demographic trends aren't hard to figure, are they?

---

"WHO HE IS":

Despite severe combat injuries, sergeant fulfills pledge made to troops (Steve Liewer, February 27, 2005, Stars and Stripes)

One month after a rocket-propelled grenade blew off his leg, mangled his arm and tore a gash in his head while his convoy patrolled in Iraq, 1st Sgt. Brent Jurgersen fulfilled a pledge he made to troops of the 1st Squadron, 4th Cavalry Regiment when they left for the Middle East a year ago. He vowed he would personally lead them home.

So he and his wife, Karin, flew home to Schweinfurt last week from Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, where he awoke from a drug-induced coma less than three weeks ago. On Wednesday night, Jurgersen — the non-commissioned officer-in-charge of 1-4 Cavalry’s headquarters troop — greeted 80 of his soldiers behind a curtain in the gym at Conn Barracks.

Then he led them out.

“He made a promise to his men. He kept it,” Karin Jurgersen said. “That’s who he is.”

---

IF THE EXPERIMENT IS IMPLODING LEAVE THE LAB:

More Dutch Plan to Emigrate as Muslim Influx Tips Scales (MARLISE SIMONS, 2/27/05, NY Times)

Paul Hiltemann had already noticed a darkening mood in the Netherlands. He runs an agency for people wanting to emigrate and his client list had surged.

But he was still taken aback in November when a Dutch filmmaker was shot and his throat was slit, execution style, on an Amsterdam street.

In the weeks that followed, Mr. Hiltemann was inundated by e-mail messages and telephone calls. "There was a big panic," he said, "a flood of people saying they wanted to leave the country."

Leave this stable and prosperous corner of Europe? Leave this land with its generous social benefits and ample salaries, a place of fine schools, museums, sports grounds and bicycle paths, all set in a lively democracy?

The answer, increasingly, is yes. This small nation is a magnet for immigrants, but statistics suggest there is a quickening flight of the white middle class. Dutch people pulling up roots said they felt a general pessimism about their small and crowded country and about the social tensions that had grown along with the waves of newcomers, most of them Muslims."The Dutch are living in a kind of pressure cooker atmosphere," Mr. Hiltemann said.

Why would anyone with a family, or plans for one, and an interest in the future stay in Europe?

---

DOGPILE ON THE RABID:

Israel Blames Syria for Suicide Bombing (AP, Feb 26, 2005)

Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz blamed Syria on Saturday for a suicide bombing that killed four Israelis in Tel Aviv, and Israel's Army Radio reported that he also froze plans to hand over security responsibilities in the West Bank to the Palestinians.

Israeli security officials also said they may resume assassinations of the leaders of the militant Islamic Jihad group, which claimed responsibility Saturday for the bombing. The officials said on condition of anonymity that the recent cease-fire forged with the Palestinians no longer applies to Islamic Jihad, which has links to Syria.

Cut to the chase--do Assad.

MORE:
Islamic Jihad claims responsibility (Matthew Gutman and Jpost Staff, Feb. 26, 2005, THE JERUSALEM POST)

The Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility on Saturday evening, from Damascus, for the deadly attack in Tel Aviv on Friday night.

"The period of calm was set for one month, and that month is over," said Abu Tark, a senior member of the Jihad movement. "Israel did not obey the agreement, and that's what led to our action."

The announcement confirms the security establishment's earlier suspicions, which also estimated that the Hizbulla was not involved.

Defense officials estimated that the Islamic Jihad in Damascus had operated via one of its cells in the Tulkarm area.

---

AN 80 YEAR ROLL:

Wrong-way evolution of the creationist movement (Patrick Chisholm, 2/23/05, csmonitor.com)

Christian fundamentalists often have been accused of wanting to alter the laws and institutions of the United States. Actually it is usually the other way around; most of the time they only try to prevent America's laws and institutions from being radically altered. One example is their battle to stem the banning of Christmas symbols and celebrations.

But there is one area where many Christian fundamentalists do indeed want to impose radical change: the teaching of Biblical creationism vs. evolution in public schools.

After losing favor since the Scopes trial 80 years ago, the creationist movement seems to be making inroads again. In Dover, Pa., school administrators recently ordered biology teachers to declare in class that "Darwin's theory... is a theory, not a fact. Gaps in the theory exist for which there is no evidence." In an Atlanta suburb in 2002, stickers were placed on textbooks stating that "evolution is a theory, not a fact ..." Then, last month, a judge ruled the stickers unconstitutional.

In 1999, the Kansas state board of education voted to remove most references to evolution from state education standards, a decision that was reversed two years later.

According to a CBS poll conducted last fall, two-thirds of Americans favor teaching creationism in public schools together with evolution, and 37 percent want to totally replace the teaching of evolution with creationism.

Of course, we won the Scopes trial too.

---

FAITH IN THE DUALITY:

Editorial: Listen to the Presbyterians (Taipei Times, Feb 24, 2005)

The Presbyterian Church in Taiwan on Tuesday issued a "Statement on Justice and Peace," advocating that Taiwanese sovereignty and independence should be the basis for interparty cooperation and negotiation. The statement also said that the quest for justice and peace is the common responsibility of the international community from which Taiwan long has been ostracized in violation of universal principles of justice and peace. The statement ended by calling for the establishment of a new relationship between Taiwan and China, saying that the two nations should recognize each other based on the principles of equality, mutual benefits and peaceful co-existence. [...]

The Presbyterian Church in Taiwan fought fiercely against the KMT's authoritarian rule. The atmosphere around Tainan Theological College and Seminary, which was responsible for training new missionaries, became one of fear, as the elderly warned young people not to linger near the school, so as not to be arrested by the Taiwan Military Garrison Command for no reason. The Thai-Peng-Keng Maxwell Memorial Church was even seen as a base for the pro-independence movement.

With such a unique historical background, although Christianity is not the most common religion here, the political concern of the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan actually represents the origins of Taiwan awareness.

All through the 1970s, the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan resisted political oppression. Following its 1971 "Statement on our National Fate," in which it recommended holding "elections of all representatives to the highest government bodies" and called on the international community to recognize that the people of Taiwan had the right to decide their own future, there were many other statements. In 1975, it published a call for the government to deal with Taiwan's foreign affairs situation and guarantee the livelihood of the people. In 1977 the Church made its declaration on human rights, demanding that Taiwan's future be decided by the people who lived in Taiwan and calling on Taiwan to become a new and independent nation.

Whenever there has been unrest in society, the Presbyterian Church has come forward to declare their love of God, and their love of Taiwan. Tuesday's statement is something that the president and premier should certainly heed.

Taiwan is not and never will be a part of China.

---

GOT TO ADMIT IT'S GETTING BETTER?:

Here's a post that makes for amusing reading today. Doesn't it seem like years ago that John Kerry and company were whining that we were losing the WoT?

---

THEY LED, NOW SHOULD FOLLOW:

Putting faith in people (Amy Doolittle, 2/23/05, THE WASHINGTON TIMES)

On the desert sweeps of Morocco, a cross-cultural conversation is well under way. Evangelical Christians, long viewed as hostile to Islam and its followers, actively are participating in conversations with the Moroccan government, businesses and community leaders.

The goal is to develop understanding between the two very different perspectives.

Friendship Caravan is the flagship organization for this conversation. Founded by photojournalist Michael Kirtley after the September 11 attacks, it is now headlining an unprecedented effort focused on helping American evangelicals and Moroccan Muslims understand each other.

But it wasn't evangelicals -- eager to spread the Gospel and proselytize the nonbelievers -- who first pursued the relationship, says Mr. Kirtley; it was the Moroccan government. [...]

Morocco's citizens are almost entirely Muslim. Like most Muslim societies, the country maintains laws restricting evangelism. Evangelicals had reason to be surprised when their delegation experienced a warm welcome in Morocco, both from the government and the people.

"The delegation came back with the willingness on the part of the Moroccan government to allow ... Christianity in that county," Mr. Cizik says. "In everyone's estimation it's a breakthrough of sorts. It's never been done before. We see it now as we saw it before -- as an overture by the Moroccan government not to be ignored."

Despite what have been seen in the past as insurmountable differences between Christian and Muslim societies, says Mr. Kirtley, Moroccan Muslims have begun to recognize the common ground the two groups hold.

"On both sides there is a feeling of a lot of common ground, especially with the evangelical Christians because Morocco is a conservative society," Mr. Kirtley says. "When Christians and Moroccans get together, they find things they have in common [such as] feelings against abortion, gay marriage, family and faith in terms of public life. I think this is one of the reasons that the two groups have hit it off so well."

Behind Morocco's pursuit of friendship, says evangelical leader Josh McDowell, is the desire for peace.

"They want sincere, healthy relationships with evangelical Christians. They believe as I do that the greater the understanding of people of faiths of each other, the greater chance of peace in the world," Mr. McDowell says.

One irony of the last several years is that on 9-11 King Mohamed VI's Morocco was one of the most reform-minded Arab nations and perhaps our best ally in the Islamic world. But now he and they have some catching up to do.

---

CAN THE REVOLUTION BE STOPPED?:

The French Reconnection: Europe's most secular country rediscovers its Christian roots. (Agnieszka Tennant, 02/25/2005, Christianity Today)

At the beginning of the 21st century, the postmodern French have deconstructed deconstructionism, seen through the utopia of socialism, and realized that wine and other sensual delights only go so far in filling what French philosopher Blaise Pascal described as the "God-shaped void." According to France Mission, an opinion poll conducted in March 2003 showed that 32 percent of those who call themselves Christians have recently returned to the faith. In 1994, only 13 percent said so.

You see this trend in the writings of French intellectuals and philosophers who are products of the 1960s sexual revolution when "it was forbidden to forbid," says Mark Farmer, former pastor of a Baptist church across from the Louvre. The most articulate plea for France to re-examine its Judeo-Christian roots came recently in Jean-Claude Guillebaud's critically acclaimed Re-founding the World: The Western Testament.

"What's this? A French intellectual starting his book with a quote from Psalm 1?" Farmer recalls his reaction to first paging through the volume. "And he's got a chapter on the apostle Paul? He starts the book by saying that the 20th century has been a century of disillusion. Marxism, evolution, socialism, hedonism, wars have all failed us. He says it's easy to be pessimistic, but there are some things that we appreciate about our civilization. For example, the notion of right and wrong that transcends any culture—where does that come from? He stops short of saying that he himself has become a Christian, but he's led the horses to the water."

The sales of another book—the Bible—are at a historic high, according to the French Bible Society. In 2003—which Christians promoted as the Year of the Bible—FBS's publishing house sold an unprecedented 100,000 Bibles and 50,000 New Testaments, says Christian Bonnet, the group's secretary general. At the time of our conversation, the Bible with life application notes for seekers, La Bible Expliquée, had just sold a record 80,000 copies in one month. In the last 15 years, Bonnet says, secular bookstores, "which never wanted to sell Bibles before," and major supermarket chains began selling Bibles.

The search for God in the most secular country of Europe is so universally felt that even a business journal—the equivalent of Forbes or Fortune—was compelled to publish a special issue in July and August of 2003 whose cover exclaimed, "God, the Stocks Are Rising!" Its 72 pages describe the surge of interest in religion and its effect on the business world, says Paris-based International Teams missionary Steve Thrall. The contents page announces that "after a materialistic 20th century, religions are coming back in force. In France, this rise in spirituality is pushing out secularism in both schools and business."

The accelerated growth of Islam in France, to nearly 5 million adherents now, has rightly received much attention from the American media. But few people realize that French evangelicals have experienced healthy—sevenfold!—growth since 1950, and that evangelistic influences such as the Alpha course are revitalizing faith in the nominally Catholic and practically secular nation. [...]

Of France's 60 million inhabitants, about 40 million consider themselves Catholic, but only about 5 million attend church each month. Up to 5 million are Muslim and 650,000 are Jewish. One million are Protestants; about 650,000 of them belong to the often austere and liturgical Reformed and Lutheran churches, but only a small proportion attend church regularly. Up to one-third of these mainline church attenders are likely evangelical-minded. Finally there are the 350,000 evangelical churchgoers. Most French are then deists, agnostics, or atheists. Or seekers.

It's unwise to underestimate Christianity, but it's fighting against two centuries of secular rationalist damage there.

---

IN THE NAVY:

The British navy's pink carpet (The Japan Times, Feb. 27, 2005)

'Rum, sodomy and the lash" are the words Winston Churchill is popularly credited with using to sum up the traditions of Britain's Royal Navy. (A former assistant has said that Churchill never uttered the famous phrase but wished he had.) Either way, the idea that Her Majesty's naval forces have always been a hotbed of homosexual activity is hardly new. The only thing that has changed over the years is the official response to such activity, which has ranged from a blind eye, to strictly enforced prohibition, to reluctant tolerance and now -- in possibly a worldwide first -- caring solicitude.

Note how the slippery slope tracks precisely with how little sea they have to protect? Now that they're down to just guarding the Thames they can turn them into party boats.

---

WE MAKE OUR OWN REALITY

Does Canada stand for anything? (National Post, February 26th, 2005)

Our refusal to participate in the U.S. ballistic missile shield, a project that would protect Canadian and American cities alike from immolation, is perhaps the best example yet of how thoroughly fantasy and reality diverge in Ottawa. On Thursday, our government declared it would have nothing to do with the shield -- a foolish gesture meant to placate the pacifists in the Liberal caucus. But the next day, our PM advanced the conceit that the Americans would still have to consult with us before activating the system. One can practically hear the howls of laughter emanating from the few Washington officials who still bother to inform themselves of Ottawa's pronouncements: Can anyone seriously imagine that the President would ask our PM for permission to shoot down a missile heading for a U.S. target?

Should it ever see the light of day, Canada's much-delayed foreign policy review will be a chance for our government to see our country the way other nations see us, and respond accordingly. Nobody is suggesting a full u-turn in our foreign policy, or that we become a lapdog to the United States. Rather, what the federal government should do is consider how some of its previously touted principles could serve as the bedrock for a newly engaged nation.

At the core of both the "responsibility to protect" doctrine flirted with by Mr. Martin, and the "human security" agenda trumpeted by Chretien-era foreign minister Lloyd Axworthy, is the notion that Canada should be part of an international effort to bring a better life to those oppressed by war, dictatorship and human rights violations. For all our grousing about U.S. policy, how different are such principles from George W. Bush's declared aim to spread liberty? History shows that freedom and "human security" go hand-in-hand. How can we shy away from the U.S. effort to spread the former if we hope to make good on rhetoric concerning the latter?

We stand at a crossroads. Either we will continue to shrivel into our role as the world's impotent scold. Or we can begin to reclaim our status as a leader on the international stage. We urge the Prime Minister and his Cabinet to use the upcoming foreign-policy and military reviews to restore Canada's place in the world community and put an end to our unconscionable drift.

A noble thought, and one repeated in many editorials, but the Post is not following through with the logic of its own painful insights. The problem is not error, but madness. While one can at least give the Europeans the compliment of having a discernible ideological coherence to their follies, Canada is simply floundering in a miasma of Boomer cant. To use an analogy familiar to fans of this site, it is as if Canadian policy and Canadian public opinion are guided by a chaotic process of random mutation with no natural selection to guide towards survivability and fitness.

---

EVEN A BLIND NATIVIST FINDS AN ACORN NOW AND THEN:

Tancredo's foolish crusade on China (Rocky Mountain News, February 26, 2005)

Should we even be making a fuss over a congressional resolution that is doomed to humiliating defeat - and which the White House, State Department and Pentagon have all understandably chosen to snub with silence? We're talking about Rep. Tom Tancredo's call last week for the Bush administration to scrap the One China policy and resume formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan.

There are enough Republicans who hate Communist repression of Christianity and enough Democrats who hate free trade that it should be possible to force a policy change towards China.

---

TO WAGE IT IS TO WIN IT:

Official: Pakistan Dismantled al-Qaida (RIAZ KHAN, 2/26/05, ASSOCIATED PRESS)

Pakistan has "broken the back" of al-Qaida by dismantling its network and arresting hundreds of suspects, a top government official said Saturday. [...]

"The remnants of al-Qaida are on the run. Their network is no more in tact. They are scattered and not in a position to even plan attacks," Sherpao said in this northwestern border city. "The al-Qaida leadership is no more effective."

Pakistan has arrested more than 700 al-Qaida suspects since the Sept. 11 attacks, including top leader Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who was captured near the capital, Islamabad, in March 2003.

There's always just one concern when America goes to war, that it will choose to stop too soon, due to popular pressure from within, and not complete the job it set out to do. As Mr. Bush pushes even our putative allies to liberalize their regimes and as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia--two of the allies who need reforming--crack down on the terrorists within their borders, the possibility exists that we will complete, and therefore win, a war for the first time in our history.

---

PARADIGMIN' IN THE ROUGH:

Why Not Here? (DAVID BROOKS, 2/26/05, NY Times)

This is the most powerful question in the world today: Why not here? People in Eastern Europe looked at people in Western Europe and asked, Why not here? People in Ukraine looked at people in Georgia and asked, Why not here? People around the Arab world look at voters in Iraq and ask, Why not here?

Thomas Kuhn famously argued that science advances not gradually but in jolts, through a series of raw and jagged paradigm shifts. Somebody sees a problem differently, and suddenly everybody's vantage point changes.

"Why not here?" is a Kuhnian question, and as you open the newspaper these days, you see it flitting around the world like a thought contagion. Wherever it is asked, people seem to feel that the rules have changed. New possibilities have opened up. [...]

It's amazing in retrospect to think of how much psychological resistance there is to asking this breakthrough question: Why not here? We are all stuck in our traditions and have trouble imagining the world beyond. As Claus Christian Malzahn reminded us in Der Spiegel online this week, German politicians ridiculed Ronald Reagan's "tear down this wall" speech in 1987. They "couldn't imagine that there might be an alternative to a divided Germany."

But if there is one soft-power gift America does possess, it is this tendency to imagine new worlds. As Malzahn goes on to note, "In a country of immigrants like the United States, one actually pushes for change. ... We Europeans always want to have the world from yesterday, whereas the Americans strive for the world of tomorrow."

One need not have drunk the Kool-Aid to recognize that there's just one man responsible for the fact that so many are asking this question right now.

MORE:
The tide of freedom (SALIM MANSUR, 2/26/05, Toronto Sun

Shakespeare's Brutus declares, "There is a tide in the affairs of men," and its meaning, when properly grasped, opens new chapters in human history.

The abiding tide in human affairs is that of freedom, sometimes receding and at other times in full flood.

It is in the wake of this tide beginning to swell in the Middle East that U.S. President George Bush arrived in Europe this week.

Bush -- like Ronald Reagan, his political hero -- has shown an uncanny ability to grasp the meaning of freedom's tide in history and boldly "take the current when it serves" to expand liberty's realm.

He's more the wakemaker, no?

---

ASSAD STANDS ALONE:

Egypt's Mubarak Calls for Multi-Party Presidential Elections (VOA News, 26 February 2005)

In a historic move, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has ordered the constitution changed to allow more than one candidate to run for president.

In a televised address Saturday, Mr. Mubarak called for the constitutional amendment to be made before May, in time for September's presidential elections.

---

QUICK, BLAME THE SHI'A:

Three arrested for Tel Aviv bomb (Associated Press, February 26, 2005)

Palestinian security forces have arrested at least three suspected militants in connection with a suicide bombing that killed four Israelis at a Tel Aviv nightclub, acting on orders from Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas to track down and punish those responsible.

Palestinian security officials pointed to the Lebanese guerrilla group Hezbollah, which has been trying to disrupt an informal Mideast truce, as the apparent mastermind of the attack. Abbas hinted at Hezbollah involvement, holding a "third party" responsible for the bombing. [...]

The bomber was identified as Abdullah Badran, 21, a university student from the village of Deir al-Ghusun near the West Bank town of Tulkarem. His parents said he was a devout Muslim, but had no history of militant activity.

The three main militant groups - Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades - denied involvement, and none hung the customary posters of congratulations at the bomber's home.

The Palestinian interior minister, Nasser Yousef, said Palestinian security forces have arrested two militants in connection with the attack. Local security officials in Tulkarem said the two men have ties to Islamic Jihad, and that more arrests were expected.

Palestinian security officials had said they were investigating whether Badran was recruited by local militants from Al Aqsa, which has ties to to Abbas' ruling Fatah movement, at the behest of Hezbollah. Often, there is overlap and coordination between militant groups, particularly Islamic Jihad and Al Aqsa.

Mr. Abbas' desire to deflect blame from Fatah and its allies is understandable, if transparently false.

---

ELEMENTARY ERROR, MY DEAR BACON:

Cosmos' Missing Matter Could Be in Their Sights: A hydrogen mass is a major clue in one of the deepest mysteries of the universe, scientists say. (John Johnson, February 26, 2005, LA Times)

The discovery of a big ball of hydrogen 50 million light-years from Earth may help unravel one of the thorniest problems in modern cosmology: Where is the missing dark matter in the universe?

Researchers at Cardiff University in Wales have measured a giant ball of hydrogen in the Virgo Cluster of Galaxies that they believe to be part of a much larger invisible galaxy of whirling debris.

If the finding stands up under the scrutiny of other cosmologists, it would be the best evidence yet that most of the matter in the universe is made up not of stars, but of a cold and invisible material known as dark matter. [...]

Other possible dark galaxies have been announced before, only to turn out to contain hidden stars when observed with high-powered telescopes. Others turned out to be the remains of colliding galaxies. The Cardiff team spent much of the five years since detecting the hydrogen ball eliminating other possibilities.

They found no stars and no traces of a galactic collision.

"As Sherlock Holmes said, 'When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever is left — however improbable — must be the truth,' " said Mike Disney of the Cardiff team.

If it wasn't so funny it would be sad that this is what passes for "scientific reasoning" these days.

---

BEGIN THE NEOCON DRUMBEAT:

Toss Bashar Assad Out of Both Lebanon and Syria: The assassination of Rafik Hariri is the final straw. The world should help the two nations oust this tyrant. (Danielle Pletka, February 25, 2005, LA Times)

If Syria is responsible for the assassination of Lebanon's former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri — as many observers believe — it is only the most recent in a long line of that country's transgressions. And it must not go unanswered.

It marks a moment when much of the world is united against the regime of Bashar Assad, Syria's tyrannical dictator. It is clear that quashing Assad in Lebanon would strike a blow for liberty there. As important, it could strike a blow for a free Syria, and wider liberty in the Arab world. [...]

But liberty for Lebanon should not be the endgame for the United States, France or the United Nations. Syria itself must be freed from the Assad dictatorship, with its legacy of poverty, corruption and death, including the 1982 murder of up to 20,000 opponents of the regime in the city of Hama.

The costs of standing up to Syria in Beirut and in Damascus should not be insurmountable. Assad is feeling the world's censure now, claiming that he will begin to remove troops from Lebanon. A small increase in pressure might move him out altogether.

And Sunni Arab governments in the region may well be amenable to challenging the Alawite status quo. Even the Shiite-dominated government in Iraq has taken a stand against Assad, closing its border with Syria several times. If Syria continues on its current path it could find itself an island in its own region, denied trade, tourism, hard currency. A free Lebanon could even exclude Syrian guest workers — now exported to Lebanon's free market to relieve high unemployment at home.

How about a book for correctly picking when Baby Assad steps down or calls an election to choose his own replacement?

---

THE SHIELD (via Michael Burns):

HILL'S IRAQ SLAP (NILES LATHEM, February 25, 2005, NY Post)

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has touched off a diplomatic flap with Iraq's incoming government by questioning whether the leading candidate to become the next prime minister is too close to Iran's ayatollahs.

The likely new prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, shot back at Clinton, who just completed a visit to Iraq, by questioning her credibility as a spokeswoman for U.S. foreign policy.

"Hillary Clinton, as far as I know, does not represent any political decision or the American administration and I don't know why she said this," al-Jaafari told The Times of London.

"She knows nothing about the Iraq situation," he added.

Clinton had infuriated al-Jaafari — selected this week by the dominant Shiite political conglomerate to become prime minister — by saying his past connections to Iran are cause for "concern."

The former first lady, considering running for president in 2008, ignited the diplomatic tempest after she appeared on NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday and noted al-Jaafari's leadership of the Dawa Party, a conservative Shiite group with longstanding ties to Iran.

"There are grounds for concern and for vigilance about this," said Clinton, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

It's obviously in our interest--and that of the Iraqis--to have a "bad cop" prodding them when they show signs of getting out of line. That Ms Clinton would take on such a thankless role suggests she's capable of putting public concerns ahead of private interest.

---

IN THE BOX:

Amid a Lukewarm Europe, Bush Finds a Fan in Slovakia (ELISABETH BUMILLER, February 26, 2005, NY Times)

A respite came in Slovakia, where crowds cheered Mr. Bush's talk of freedom and the country's prime minister, Mikulas Dzurinda, raved about his meeting with the American president.

"I like Bush," Mr. Dzurinda told American reporters over lunch on Thursday. "You know why? Because he told me that he doesn't like to write, but he likes to speak to people, and I am the same."

President and prime minister also bonded, Mr. Dzurinda reported, over the complications of raising girls. "He has two daughters; I have two daughters," Mr. Dzurinda said. "The older is 20, the younger 17 - you can imagine." And did Mr. Bush commiserate about his party-loving twins?

Mr. Dzurinda wiped his brow with great drama and laughed. "We share some experiences," he replied. [...]

Mr. Bush prides himself on his plain-spoken English and Texas style, so he surprised an audience of Europeans on Monday in Brussels by quoting a French existentialist.

"Albert Camus said that 'Freedom is a long-distance race,' " Mr. Bush said in his opening speech about the future of the United States and Europe. "We're in that race for the duration and there is reason for optimism."

The full Camus quote, from "The Fall," is not quite so cheery: "I didn't know that freedom is not a reward or a decoration that is celebrated with Champagne. Nor yet a gift, a box of dainties designed to make you lick your chops. Oh, no! It's a choice, on the contrary and a long-distance race, quite solitary and very exhausting. No Champagne. No friends raising their glasses as they look at you affectionately. Alone in a forbidding room, alone in the prisoner's box before the judges, and alone to decide in face of oneself or in the face of others' judgment. At the end of all freedom is a court sentence; that's why freedom is too heavy to bear, especially when you're down with a fever, or are distressed, or love nobody."

Can Ms Bumiller really not figure out that's why they chose the quote for his visit to Europe?

---

I DON'T KNOW, WHAT GAME ARE YOU PLAYING?

I'm not sure if this was covered while I was away, but in trying to catch up upon my return, I loved the juxtaposition of these two stories:

JUDY WOODRUFF'S INSIDE POLITICS: Rep. Hinchey Calls for Media Scrutiny (CNN, 2/22/05)

WOODRUFF: As we reported a little while ago in our blog segment, the Internet is abuzz with reaction to comments by New York Democratic Congressman Maurice Hinchey. The congressman over the weekend shared his views about the now disputed CBS News report about President Bush's Air National Guard service. Representative Maurice Hinchey is with me now, he joins us from Albany, New York. . . .

REP. MAURICE HINCHEY (D), NEW YORK: Well, Judy, what I said came in response to a question from one of my constituents. There were about 100 people there. And they asked some questions about media manipulation. They were concerned about the issue of Armstrong Williams, for example, people being hired by this administration to pretend that they were giving objective news and information but were really putting forth the point of view of the administration rather than doing it objectively. And also the issue with Mr. Gannon, who was admitted to the White House press corps but who was not a legitimate press person, and was there just to throw softballs to the president.

And then the issue of the CBS Dan Rather event came up, and I said that there were false documents or documents which were falsified and presented as being accurate and there was a question as to where those documents came from. And in the context of the discussion I suggested that -- my theory was that I wouldn't be surprised if it came from the White House political operation, headed up by Karl Rove.

WOODRUFF: Well, I'm reading here a transcript of what you said, you said: "I have my own beliefs about how that happened. It originated with Karl Rove in my belief in the White House." What do you know that you base that on?

HINCHEY: Well, I think there's a great deal of circumstantial information and factual information. . . .

WOODRUFF: But, at this point, it is just imagination, is that correct?

HINCHEY: It's a possibility, yes. It's a possibility based upon circumstantial evidence and the history of his behavior over the course of several decades. . . .

WOODRUFF: But some would say, listening to what you said and hearing your acknowledgment that you don't have any proof, that it's irresponsible or -- let me ask you, do you think it's responsible for you to say this without evidence?

HINCHEY: I think it's very responsible of me to speculate about where this manipulation is coming from. Yes. I think it's important to speculate about it, I think it's important to discuss it and I think it's important to try to stimulate the investigative agencies to look into this. (Emphasis added)

In Secretly Taped Conversations, Glimpses of the Future President (David D. Kirkpatrick, NY Times, 2/20/05)

As George W. Bush was first moving onto the national political stage, he often turned for advice to an old friend who secretly taped some of their private conversations, creating a rare record of the future president as a politician and a personality.

In the last several weeks, that friend, Doug Wead, an author and former aide to Mr. Bush's father, disclosed the tapes' existence to a reporter and played about a dozen of them. . . .

Preparing to meet Christian leaders in September 1998, Mr. Bush told Mr. Wead, "As you said, there are some code words. There are some proper ways to say things, and some improper ways." He added, "I am going to say that I've accepted Christ into my life. And that's a true statement."

But Mr. Bush also repeatedly worried that prominent evangelical Christians would not like his refusal "to kick gays." . . .

He refused to answer reporters' questions about his past behavior, he said, even though it might cost him the election. Defending his approach, Mr. Bush said: "I wouldn't answer the marijuana questions. You know why? Because I don't want some little kid doing what I tried."

He mocked Vice President Al Gore for acknowledging marijuana use. "Baby boomers have got to grow up and say, yeah, I may have done drugs, but instead of admitting it, say to kids, don't do them," he said. . . .

The private Mr. Bush sounds remarkably similar in many ways to the public President Bush. Many of the taped comments foreshadow aspects of his presidency, including his opposition to both anti-gay language and recognizing same-sex marriage, his skepticism about the United Nations, his sense of moral purpose and his focus on cultivating conservative Christian voters. . . .

The New York Times hired Tom Owen, an expert on audio authentication, to examine samples from the tapes. He concluded the voice was that of the president. . . . [Who said that Rathergate wouldn't change journalism?]

Mr. Bush knew that his own religious faith could be an asset with conservative Christian voters, and his personal devotion was often evident in the taped conversations. When Mr. Wead warned him that "power corrupts," for example, Mr. Bush told him not to worry: "I have got a great wife. And I read the Bible daily. The Bible is pretty good about keeping your ego in check."

The Democrats would have a much better chance of figuring out what game to play if they could first figure out where the arena is.

Semi-selfreferential comment: We had a great vacation, but the only BrothersJudd moment I had (other than noticing the large number of churches on a poor island) came on our first travel day. Last Sunday, scurrying to make one of those Atlanta connections in which you are given 45 minutes to complete a substantial leg of your journey on foot, we passed a closed Chick-Fil-A in the airport. It didn't really matter to us, as (a) we had no time and (b) we would have gone to the Cinnabon next door, anyways.

---

TIME TO THREATEN THEIR PAYOLA:

Rice Calls Off Mideast Visit After Arrest of Egyptian (JOEL BRINKLEY, Feb. 25, 2005, NY Times)

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Friday abruptly called off a planned trip to several Middle Eastern countries that had been scheduled for next week, a decision that came apparently because of the arrest of a leading Egyptian opposition politician last month.

The decision highlighted a rift with an important ally over President Bush's push for democratic change. It came a day after Mr. Bush's tense meeting with Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian president, who was clearly uncomfortable with Mr. Bush's criticism of Russia's democracy. [...]

The immediate trigger for the tensions was the arrest on Jan. 28 of Ayman Nour, a member of Egypt's largely powerless Parliament and head of an opposition party called Al Ghad, or Tomorrow. When Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit visited Washington last week, Ms. Rice made her displeasure clear, officials said.

After the meeting, Mr. Gheit protested that Mr. Nour's arrest was an internal Egyptian matter, and Suleiman Awad, the spokesman for President Hosni Mubarak, said he rejected "any foreign interference in Egypt's internal affairs."

Some members of Congress then began urging Ms. Rice not to attend the meeting of Arab and Group of 8 nations in Cairo. One of them, Representative Adam Schiff, a California Democrat who is on the Middle East subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, co-sponsored a resolution condemning Egypt for arresting Mr. Nour.

"To attend a conference on democracy in Egypt right now would be the height of irony," Mr. Schiff said in an interview on Friday. "The State Department must send the message to Egypt that it is on the wrong track, that we are no longer willing to overlook these things."

Remember how the President couldn't possibly mean all this liberty guff and certainly wouldn't apply it to "allies"?

---

WHAT CRIMINAL DOESN'T HAVE HIS OWN INTERPRETATION OF THE LAW?:

Murky Debate on Abortion Law: Kansas legislation states precisely its terms for ending pregnancies late in the term. But how doctors interpret those rules may not be clear. (P.J. Huffstutter and Stephanie Simon, February 26, 2005, LA Times)

The law in Kansas is explicit: A fetus old enough to survive outside the womb cannot be aborted — unless continuing the pregnancy would endanger the woman's life or irreversibly harm her physical or mental health.

In demanding access to the medical records of women who had late-term abortions, Kansas Atty. Gen. Phill Kline suggested this week that doctors might be violating that law by aborting viable fetuses too freely.

His aggressive action earned praise from abortion opponents, some of whom maintain a vigil in front of hundreds of white crosses pounded into the grass outside the state's sole late-term abortion clinic, here in Wichita.

"The attorney general is doing his job. He's enforcing the law," said Troy Newman, president of the abortion protest group Operation Rescue West.

But abortion providers — and patients — say the thought of a prosecutor sifting through medical charts to second-guess their choices terrifies them. [...]

Fetal viability and maternal health can be assessed using objective scientific measures, but there is inevitably a subjective component, said Janet Crepps, a staff attorney with the Center for Reproductive Rights in New York

"If you look far enough, you can probably find a doctor who will have a different opinion, especially in an area as politically charged as abortion," Crepps said. "That's why physicians feel vulnerable" when prosecutors demand that they open their medical charts.

Easy enough to avoid prosecution. Don't kill.

---

WHO AMONG US HASN'T SHARED THE URGE:

Thompson shot self while talking with wife (AP, 2/25/05)

The widow of journalist Hunter S. Thompson said her husband killed himself while the two were talking on the phone.

---

EARLIER, FASTER NEXT TIME:

Revenge killings in Iraq on the rise (HANNAH ALLAM, Feb. 25, 2005, Knight Ridder Newspapers)

Shiite Muslim assassins are killing former members of Saddam Hussein's mostly Sunni Muslim regime at will and with impunity in a parallel conflict that some observers fear could snowball into civil war.

The war between Shiite vigilantes and former Baath Party members is seldom investigated and largely overshadowed by the mostly Sunni insurgency. The U.S. military is preoccupied with hunting down suicide bombers and foreign terrorists, and Iraq's new Shiite leaders have little interest in prosecuting those who kill their former oppressors or their enemies in the insurgency.

The killings have intensified since January's Shiite electoral victory, and U.S. and Iraqi officials worry that they could imperil progress toward a unified, democratic Iraq.

"It's the beginning, and we could go down the slippery slope very quickly," said Sabah Kadhim, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry. "We've been so concerned with removing terrorists and Islamists that this other situation has reared its ugly head. Both sides are sharpening their knives."

Since the Jan. 30 elections, Shiite militants have stepped up their campaign to exact street justice from men who were part of the regime that oppressed and massacred members of their sect for decades. While Shiite politicians turn a blind eye, assassins are working their way through a hit list of Saddam's former security and intelligence personnel, according to Iraqi authorities, Sunni politicians and interviews with the families of those who've been targeted.

The failure to do this right off the bat, in 2003, was a huge mistake and provided the insurgency with leadership that could have been neutralized instead.

---

EVERYONE OUT OF STEP BUT US

Archbishop fears Anglican split over gays
(AP/CP, February 25th. 2005)

On Thursday, the Anglican leaders asked the U.S. Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada to withdraw from a key council of the global communion for three years because of the election of a gay bishop in the United States and the blessing of same-sex unions there and in Canada. Some fear the move could be the first step toward a permanent split in the 77-million-strong church.

The request was made following a Northern Ireland meeting that the Anglican leaders, or primates, convened on the crisis.

In a statement, the bishops called on the U.S. and Canadian churches to “voluntarily withdraw their members from the Anglican Consultative Council for the period leading up to the next Lambeth Conference,” an international Anglican gathering to be held in 2008.

The Episcopal Church, which is the U.S. province of Anglicanism, precipitated the most serious rift in the communion's history when it consecrated V. Gene Robinson as bishop of New Hampshire in November 2003. Robinson lives with his long-time male partner. Conservatives have also criticized North American dioceses for allowing blessing ceremonies for same-sex couples.

The North Americans have been asked not to attend the next meeting of the consultative council, a body of bishops, priests and lay people from national Anglican churches who meet and consult in between the once-a-decade Lambeth Conferences for the primates.

Anglican leaders also recommended, however, a special hearing be organized at the council's gathering in June to allow the North American churches to send representatives who could explain their views on homosexuality.

“In the meantime, we ask our fellow primates to use their best influence to persuade their brothers and sisters to exercise a moratorium on public rites of blessing for same-sex unions and on the consecration of any bishop living in a sexual relationship outside Christian marriage,” the statement said.

Despite the rift, Archbishop Andrew Hutchison, primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, said the meeting was conducted on good terms.

The strategy of the pro-gay, liberal forces seems to be to keep the issue a subject of perpetual dialogue that is never brought to a head and resolved. Presumably this stems from their conviction they are the voice of cutting-edge progressive enlightenment and that the ignorant conservatives will eventually find their way out of the darkness or die off.

---

ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST:

Togo's military-installed president says he will resign (AP, 2/25/05)

Togo's military-installed president said late Friday that he was stepping down after three weeks in office because of mounting pressure at home and abroad.

"I've taken the decision to step down from the office of president in the interest of Togo," President Faure Gnassingbe said on state radio.

Gnassingbe had been under growing pressure from the United States, the United Nations and West African leaders to resign since he was installed Feb. 5 after the death of his father...

The dominoes are falling quickly now.

---

DEAD END:

Suicide bomber kills at least five outside of Tel Aviv nightclub (AP, 2/25/05)

A Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up in a crowd of young Israelis waiting outside a nightclub near Tel Aviv's beachfront promenade just before midnight Friday, killing up to five people, wounding dozens and shattering an informal Mideast truce.

About 20 to 30 people were waiting to get into the Stage club on Herbert Samuel street, close to the promenade. "I was near the club. There were about 20 people outside. Suddenly, there was an enormous explosion," said a witness, identified only as Tsahi.

There were conflicting reports of who was behind the attack. Israeli media said the militant group Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility.

NPR is reporting that Islamic Jihad says they did it. At any rate, it's a perfect opportunity for Israel to say that Palestine now has a democratic government that represents its people and has foresworn violence while Islamic Jihad represents no one but bitter-enders whose day has passed. Marginalize them even further.

---

TWO FAVORITES:

-VIDEO: Washington Journal: Mark Steyn (C-SPAN, 2/25/05)

It doesn't get any better than Brian Lamb interviewing Mark Steyn.

---

LET NORK BE A LESSON:

Taking on Tehran (Kenneth Pollack and Ray Takeyh, March/April 2005, Foreign Affairs)

Although Iran's hard-line leadership has maintained a remarkable unity of purpose in the face of reformist challengers, it is badly fragmented over key foreign policy issues, including the importance of nuclear weapons. At one end of the spectrum are the hardest of the hard-liners, who disparage economic and diplomatic considerations and put Iran's security concerns ahead of all others. At the opposite end are pragmatists, who believe that fixing Iran's failing economy must trump all else if the clerical regime is to retain power over the long term. In between these camps waver many of Iran's most important power brokers, who would prefer not to have to choose between bombs and butter. [...]

Iran's conservative bloc is riddled with factions and their contradictions. But whereas reformers and conservatives differ over domestic issues, the divisions within the conservative faction chiefly relate to critical foreign policy issues. Stalwarts of the Islamic revolution launched by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979 still control Iran's judiciary, the Council of Guardians (the constitution's watchdog), and other powerful institutions, as well as key coercive groups such as the Revolutionary Guards and the Islamic vigilantes of the Ansar-e-Hezbollah. The hard-liners consider themselves the most ardent Khomeini disciples and think of the revolution less as an antimonarchical rebellion than as a continued uprising against the forces that once sustained the U.S. presence in Iran: Western imperialism, Zionism, and Arab despotism. Ayatollah Mahmood Hashemi Shahroudi, the chief of the judiciary, said in 2001, "Our national interests lie with antagonizing the Great Satan. We condemn any cowardly stance toward America and any word on compromise with the Great Satan." For ideologues like him, international ostracism is the necessary price for revolutionary affirmation.

The pragmatists among Khomeini's heirs believe that the regime's survival depends on a more judicious international course. Thanks to them, Iran remained a regular player in the global energy market even at the height of its revolutionary fervor. Today, these realists gravitate around the influential former president Hashemi Rafsanjani and occupy key positions throughout the national security establishment. One of the group's leading figures, Muhammad Javad Larijani, a former legislator, argues, "We should not have what I would call an obstinate policy toward the world." Instead, the pragmatic conservatives have tried to develop economic and security arrangements with foreign powers such as China, the European Union, and Russia. In reaction to the United States' overthrow of two regimes on Iran's periphery--in Afghanistan and Iraq--they have adopted a wary but moderate stance. Admonishing his more radical brethren, Rafsanjani, for example, has warned, "We are facing a cruel and powerful U.S. government, and we have to be cautious and awake."

In a similar vein, the issue of Iraq is also fracturing the theocratic regime. In the eyes of Iran's reactionaries, the Islamic Republic's ideological mission demands that the revolution be exported to its pivotal Arab (and majority Shiite) neighbor. Such an act would not only establish the continued relevance of Iran's original Islamic vision but also secure a critical ally for an increasingly isolated Tehran. In contrast, the approach of Tehran's realists is conditioned by the requirements of the nation-state and its demands for stability. For this cohort, the most important task at hand is to prevent Iraq's simmering religious and ethnic tensions from engulfing Iran. Instigating Shiite uprisings, dispatching suicide squads, and provoking unnecessary confrontations with the United States hardly serves Iran's interests at a time when its own domestic problems are deepening. As a result, Tehran's mainstream leadership has mostly encouraged Iraq's Shiite groups to participate in reconstruction, not to obstruct U.S. efforts, and to do everything possible to avoid civil war. Hard-liners, meanwhile, have won permission to provide some assistance to Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army and other Shiite rejectionists.

Teetering between the two camps is Iran's supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei. As the theocracy's top ideologue, he shares the hard-liners' revolutionary convictions and their confrontational impulses. But as the head of state, he must safeguard Iran's national interests and temper ideology with statecraft. In his 16 years as supreme leader, Khamenei has attempted to balance the ideologues and the realists, empowering both factions to prevent either from achieving a preponderance of influence. Lately, however, the Middle East's changing political topography has forced his hand somewhat. With the American imperium encroaching menacingly on Iran's frontiers, Khamenei, one of the country's most hawkish thinkers, is being forced to lean toward the pragmatists on some issues.

More than any other issue, the pursuit of nuclear weapons has exacerbated tensions within Iran's clerical estate. The theocratic elite generally agrees that Iran should maintain a nuclear research program that could eventually allow it to build a bomb. After all, now that Washington has proved willing to put its provocative doctrine of military pre-emption into practice, Iran's desire for nuclear weapons makes strategic sense. And Tehran cannot be entirely faulted for rushing to acquire them. When the Bush administration invaded Iraq, which was not yet nuclearized, and avoided using force against North Korea, which already was, Iranians came to see nuclear weapons as the only viable deterrent to U.S. military action.

The key, of course, is for us to demonstrate that nukes aren't a deterrent. A strike on North Korean nuclear facilities would take care of that.

But the rest of the essay raises an obvious question: how many totalitarian regimes have ever made the choice to pursue economic development at the cost of abandoning military aspirations? Any? If you can't afford to have elections can you afford to appear weak?

---

BETTER CHECK THE SMOKE DETECTORS (via The Other Brother):

Boston Arena May Be Named for Derek Jeter (AP, 2/25/05)

The arena is in downtown Boston, the heart of Red Sox Nation. There couldn't be a bigger insult than to name it after the captain of the hated New York Yankees.

But that's just what Manhattan lawyer Kerry Konrad aims to do next Tuesday after his $2,325 bid won an eBay auction giving him the one-day naming rights to the FleetCenter.

Konrad's proposed name: the Derek Jeter Center, after the Yankee shortstop.

His winning bid threw the FleetCenter brass into a dilemma.

---

WE'VE GOT AN OPENING IN AUGUST...:

'U.S. will get Syria out by May': Former Lebanese PM says war in Iraq will allow his country to be free (Aaron Klein, February 25, 2005, WorldNetDaily.com)

The U.S. led war against terrorism and its advances in Iraq and Afghanistan have enhanced the climate in the Middle East and will enable the international community to force Syria to withdraw its troops from Lebanon likely by May, former Lebanese Prime Minister Michel Aoun told WorldNetDaily today in an exclusive interview.

"The U.S. and EU are backing us in our movement to free Lebanon," said Aoun, speaking to WND from France. "They are interfering through diplomacy and threats of sanctions, and the situation is such today that Syria must comply. If the U.S. and Europe follow through, Syria will be obliged to withdraw before Lebanese elections in May."

Just in time for the June strikes on Iran that Seymour Hersh is predicting. Looks like Kim Jong-il gets his in July.

---

WHITE FLIGHT:

Dean visiting GOP strongholds: Mixed reception likely in Kansas (John Mercurio, 2/24/05,
CNN)

Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean on Thursday began a two-day visit to the GOP stronghold of Kansas, hoping to erase the notion that his party has surrendered so-called "red states" to Republicans. [...]

Dean is likely to face a mixed reception in Kansas, which at 43 percent trails only Nebraska and Utah in the percentage of population registered as Republicans.

The state hasn't gone for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1964, and President Bush beat John Kerry among Kansans in November by 25 percentage points.

That, Dean said, is precisely why he's traveling there. "I don't think Democrats are ever going to be a national party unless we bring our message to every state, and that includes Kansas," he told the Kansas City Star.

Some local Democrats appear unconvinced.

Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, a Democrat who scored a surprising win in 2002 but is a top GOP target next year, won't appear with Dean during his two-day visit.

An aide noted that Sebelius remained neutral in the DNC race and backed Kerry in the presidential primary.

Rep. Dennis Moore, the state's only congressional Democrat, is traveling out of the country and won't return until next week.

The idea that Democrats' problem is that people aren't hearing them is utter lunacy. Good news for the few Red State Democrats though, the Shuttle is scheduled to start flying again soon and they may be able to pull a Jake Garn and actually leave the planet Earth when Dr. Dean comes to town.

---

HOW YA GONNA KEEP 'EM DOWN ONCE THEY SEEN IRAQIS:

A Specter is Haunting Arabia (Uriah Kriegel, 02/25/2005, Tech Central Station)

Would the Lebanese uprising against Syrian occupation have happened had we not invaded Iraq two years ago? There is every reason to think not. And this genuine display of People Power is only a manifestation of a deeper undercurrent slowly swarming and propagating throughout the Arab world.

A specter is haunting the Middle East -- the specter of freedom. [...]

If none other, this one prediction of the war's proponents appears to have come true: the experimentation with political freedom in the heart of Arabia is indeed spreading the notion of freedom across that land. What used to be a monolithic realm of self-anointed monarchies is starting to show another face, with democratically elected governments now ruling the Iraqi, Afghani, and Palestinian populations.

We should therefore credit the recent display of Lebanese empowerment to the Bush Doctrine. We have been discussing endlessly the supposed insurgency in Iraq. I say "supposed" because a relentless string of bloodbaths initiated by foreigners who murder innocent locals would not normally be described as an "insurgency." But a genuine insurgency may yet take shape in the Middle East over the next few months, or perhaps more realistically, the next few years. Namely, a Lebanese insurgency against the Syrian occupation.

Not just the Middle East either: Georgia, the Ukraine, Togo...

---

DIVE IN (via Rick Turley):

Ex-Steeler Swann Raising Money for Bid (AP, Feb 24, 2005)

Former Pittsburgh Steelers star Lynn Swann has formed a campaign committee to raise money for a potential run for governor in 2006. [...]

A Quinnipiac University poll of voters conducted earlier this month showed Rendell winning a hypothetical matchup against Swann, 50 to 34 percent.

He can expect to see a lot of George W. Bush if he wins the nomination. It's the ideal party-building candidacy.

---

NEED HELP RELOADING THAT GUN?:

The Online Insurgency: MoveOn has become a force to be reckoned with (TIM DICKINSON, Rolling Stone)

They signed up 500,000 supporters with an Internet petition -- but Bill Clinton still got impeached. They organized 6,000 candlelight vigils worldwide -- but the U.S. still invaded Iraq. They raised $60 million from 500,000 donors to air countless ads and get out the vote in the battle-ground states -- but George Bush still whupped John Kerry. A gambler with a string of bets this bad might call it a night. But MoveOn.org just keeps doubling down.

Now that Howard Dean has been named chair of the Democratic National Committee -- an ascension that MoveOn helped to engineer -- the Internet activist group is placing another high-stakes wager. It's betting that its 3 million grass-roots revolutionaries can seize the reins of the party and establish the group as a lasting political force. "It's our Party," MoveOn's twenty-four-year-old executive director, Eli Pariser, declared in an e-mail. "We bought it, we own it and we're going to take it back." [...]

So who is MoveOn? Consider this: Howard Dean finished first in the MoveOn primary. Number Two wasn't John Kerry or John Edwards -- it was Dennis Kucinich. Listing the issues that resonate most with their membership, Boyd and Blades cite the environment, the Iraq War, campaign-finance reform, media reform, voting reform and corporate reform. Somewhere after freedom, opportunity and responsibility comes "the overlay of security concerns that everybody shares." Terrorism as a specific concern is notably absent. As are jobs. As is health care. As is education.

There's nothing inherently good or bad in any of this. It's just that MoveOn's values aren't middle-American values. They're the values of an educated, steadily employed middle and upper-middle class with time to dedicate to politics -- and disposable income to leverage when they're agitated. That's fine, as long as the group sticks to mobilizing fellow travelers on the left. But the risks are greater when it presumes to speak for the entire party. "The decibel level that MoveOn can bring is very high," says Bill Carrick, a longtime Democratic strategist.

Like so many other Internet start-ups, MoveOn has raised -- and burned through -- tens of millions of dollars, innovating without producing many concrete results. Any reasonable analysis shows its stock may be dangerously overvalued. Those banking on MoveOn had better hope it is more Google than Pets.com. Because should the group flame out, the Democrats could be in for a fall of Nasdaq proportions.

Here's the most obvious question that the suicidal path of the Democratic Party raise: is there no adult supervision?

---

THE FRENCH REVOLUTIONARIES VS THE ENGLISH/AMERICAN:

In Reagan's Footsteps: Europe decides that Bush may be right after all. (Wall Street Journal, February 25, 2005)

Europe, collectively and in its several parts, requires a functioning relationship with the U.S. to secure its vital interests. The same cannot be said of America's requirements of Europe. President Bush was gracious when he acknowledged the willingness of Germany and France to contribute to the training of Iraqi policemen. But the one (yes, one) French officer now detailed to the task will probably not turn the tide of war.

Probably the most important component is that President Bush's vision of spreading democracy--of getting to the "tipping point" where tyrannies start to crumble--seems not only to be working but also winning some unexpected converts. Just ask the Lebanese who are suddenly restive under Syrian occupation. As a result, European politicians are in a poorer position to lecture this President about the true ways of the world.

This isn't to say that Mr. Bush can or should be indifferent to the attitudes of his European counterparts. They have agreed to put differences about Iraq behind them, which is good. The U.S., France and Germany also seem to be reasonably united in their concern about Russia's imperial pretensions and attenuated civil liberties. But potentially larger differences loom before them, above all over the nuclearization of Iran and the lifting of the post-Tiananmen arms embargo to China.

In each case, fundamental U.S. strategic interests--the security of Taiwan and Israel; the sovereignty of Iraq; naval supremacy in the Persian Gulf--stand at odds either with European commercial interests or ideological hobbyhorses (the French infatuation with "multipolarity"). If smoother diplomacy, both public and private, can avert another Iraq-style eruption without compromising U.S. interests, so much the better.

Then again, if Europe continues to demand a high price for its political favors, the Bush Administration would do well to shop for partners and ad hoc coalitions elsewhere. America's cultural links to Europe may be precious, but there is no law of nature or history that requires both sides of the Atlantic to act in concert. To the extent that Europeans continue to value the relationship, it is up to them to demonstrate it, chiefly by not acting as freelancers or spoilers in areas of vital U.S. concern.

Even folks like the WSJ editorial board keep saying things like this but what culture do we share with a secular statist Realist Europe?

---

"HEARD 'ROUND THE WORLD":

Pat Metheny: An Idealist Reconnects With His Mentors (BEN RATLIFF, 2/25/05, NY Times)

IT was one of the coldest days of the winter and the guitarist Pat Metheny was only a few minutes late, but he had called ahead. When he arrived at our meeting place, a small recording studio within Right Track Studios in Midtown Manhattan, he arranged his stuff on the couch - including some musical scores - and sat down in a swivel chair before the 96-channel console. Mr. Metheny grew up in the rural Midwest but seems Californian: he has the inner glow. He had no socks on and looked comfortable.

"Basically, it's impossible," he said flatly, and smiled. "My taste, my general connection to music, I mean, you know, it just, I mean, even now, I think it just can't be done."

My proposal was that we listen together to a few pieces of music (not his) that affected him strongly. It could be any music: the point wasn't desert-island endorsements or a strict autobiography of influence; it was to talk about how music works. I had defined "a few" as three, or even one long piece, like a whole record. But Mr. Metheny took the challenge seriously.

"For me to say I'm going to build a case that describes something, under the guise of, you know, three songs - it actually shuts me down a little bit," he said, seeming pained. "The whole idea of style and genre is actually something I've willfully resisted from the very early stage. So if I pick this and then I pick that, it creates these two pillars. But I think I know what you're looking for, which has nothing to do with what I'm talking about."

He began to warm up. "I don't think too much about stuff like this, and it's been kind of a musical psychoanalysis. Most musicians are occasionally asked to put together their 10 favorite albums, but you're looking for the undercurrents to it all."

"You've got it perfectly," I said.

He produced a disc, onto which he had burned six pieces of music. "Well, then, let's start with Sonny Rollins and Paul Bley." [...]

In 1963 Sonny Rollins made a fascinatingly tense record with his saxophone-playing role model, Coleman Hawkins. Called "Sonny Meets Hawk!," the recording had an almost transparently psychological subtext: Mr. Rollins wasn't trying to best or outsmart Hawkins so much as to be very, very himself, with all possible eccentricities, in the face of his idol's magnificence.

"He was a young guy at the time," Mr. Metheny marveled, listening to Mr. Rollins's emphatic, darting lines in "All the Things You Are," harmonically at odds with Hawkins's, on the opening chorus. "That feeling is such a great feeling - like 'I can play anything, and it's all good.' Not to analyze it, but Hawk was kind of like his father. And it's like Sonny's saying, "yeah, but . . . ."

What especially attracts Mr. Metheny to the track, though, is Paul Bley's piano solo. It is made of elegant, flowing phrases that dance in and around the tonality and the melody of the song; it builds momentum and becomes carried away with itself. Mr. Metheny calls the solo "the shot heard 'round the world," in terms of its aftereffects in subsequent jazz, especially through Keith Jarrett. He describes Mr. Bley's solo as having an "inevitability."

"His relationship to time," Mr. Metheny said, "is the best sort of pushing and pulling; wrestling with it and at the same time, phrase by phrase, making these interesting connections between bass and drums, making it seem like it's a little bit on top, and then now it's a little bit behind." (He held an index finger straight up, and moved it slightly to the right and left, like a bubble in a carpenter's level, or an electronic tuning meter.)

"But there's also this X factor," he continued. "It's the sense of each thing leading very naturally to the next thing. He's letting each idea go to its own natural conclusion. He's reconciling that with a form, of course, that we all know very well. And he's following the harmony, but he's not. It just feels like, 'Why didn't anybody else do that before?' "

There is a plainspokenness, a kind of folkish natural feeling, to Bley's lines and his harmony, I added. Is the idea of "inevitability" related to that?

"Well, for me," he answered, "let's keep jazz as folk music. Let's not make jazz classical music. Let's keep it as street music, as people's everyday-life music. Let's see jazz musicians continue to use the materials, the tools, the spirit of the actual time that they're living in, as what they build their lives as musicians around. It's a cliché, but it's such a valuable one: something that is the most personal becomes the most universal."

---

DOES SHE EVEN KNOW A RECIPE ENDS WITH A CAKE? (via Glenn Dryfoos):

Our Godless Constitution (BROOKE ALLEN, February 21, 2005, The Nation)

It is hard to believe that George Bush has ever read the works of George Orwell, but he seems, somehow, to have grasped a few Orwellian precepts. The lesson the President has learned best--and certainly the one that has been the most useful to him--is the axiom that if you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it. One of his Administration's current favorites is the whopper about America having been founded on Christian principles. Our nation was founded not on Christian principles but on Enlightenment ones. God only entered the picture as a very minor player, and Jesus Christ was conspicuously absent.

Our Constitution makes no mention whatever of God.

The author seems to know equally little about the Founders, the Constitution and religion (Puritans in the 1790s?). But the most obvious error is to read the Constitution in the abstract and to read only its technical provisions. It is merely a means; its ends stated in the too often ignored Preamble:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

All the Founders were trying to do was to set up institutions that would vindicate the principles of the Declaration:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

For the Founders, as for most of us still, governments exist among men only n order to secure the gifts of the Creator and derive their legitimacy from the degree to which they succeed. As John Adams put it: "You have rights antecedent to all earthly governments; rights that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws; rights derived from the Great Legislator of the Universe."

---

A THOUGHT EXPERIMENT: OR, WHY GALILEO SHOULD HAVE BURNED:

I wonder if I might beg your indulgence and even asjk your participation in a brief thought experiment. The Daytona 500 was run on Sunday--the Great American Race--and some details about it are of interest. For one thing the political associations, such that democrats were recently fretting over their inability to appeal to NASCAR fans. Also, the odd fact that it is pretty much the Superbowl of NASCAR, but is the first race rather than the last. And apparently it know gets a bigger tv audience than the NBA Finals. But, at any rate, suppose you were trying to explain the race, its attraction, and its importance to someone, how would you rate the following factors (you needn't do them all, maybe just the first two or three):

The racetrack

The drivers and their stories

The cars, their owners and sponsors

The qualities of auto racing

The pit crews and the work they do

The infield

The television coverage

The win itself, the checkered flag/trophy/prize money

UPDATE: It was an unforgivable parlor trick, I know, but you'll note from the comments that the answer is not, as Galileo and the Materialists insist, the infield, despite the physical fact that the race circles it. Indeed, nothing is further from the center of the story than the geometrical center of the race.

---

I'VE JUST FOUND ME A NEW BOX OF MATCHES (via Bryan Francoeur via Ed Driscoll

---

GOOD AND PAWLENTY:

Conservatives Say Pawlenty Is Potential Presidential Candidate: Minnesota Governor Has a Conservative Fan Base -- Those Who Are Hunting for the Ideal Candidate (MARC AMBINDER, Feb. 10, 2005, ABC News)

The confetti had barely settled after the inauguration of George W. Bush when hundreds of the nation's top conservative activists gathered in Orlando, Fla., during the last week in January for a meeting of the Council on National Policy.

Members of the council, an influential and private group that works behind the scenes to influence Republican politics, were already pondering the election in 2008.

Several noted that for the first time in many presidential cycles, prominent social conservatives have yet to identify a potential favorite.

In informal conversations, as described by two of the participants, more than a dozen names were thrown around -- most notably that of popular conservative Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty. Other potential candidates such as Tennessee Sen. Bill Frist and Florida Gov. Jeb Bush were discussed as well, though Bush has said he will not run in 2008.

The participants, including respected commentator Paul Weyrich and the Eagle Forum's Phyllis Schlafly, agreed that prominent conservatives should coordinate efforts to cultivate the candidate who best represents "values voters," and Pawlenty fits that description.

"He seems to be in line with the views of what we now call the 'values voters,' which are very important to the future of the Republicans," said Weyrich, who says he remains undecided about whom he'll support in 2008.

---

A WARNING TO LARRY SUMMERS:

Murder at Harvard (American Experience, 2/28/05, 9pm, PBS)

In November 1849, Dr. George Parkman, one of Boston's richest citizens, suddenly disappeared. The police conducted an extensive search of the city and dredged the Charles River. Parkman had last been seen walking towards the Harvard Medical College. The Medical School's janitor, Ephraim Littlefield, who had a suspicion where Parkman might be found, spent two grueling nights tunneling beneath a basement laboratory looking for clues. What he discovered horrified Boston and led to one of the most sensational trials in American history.

Inspired by a book by historian Simon Schama, Murder at Harvard uses drama and documentary to re-examine this grisly episode. Schama plays a key role in the film as a "time-traveling" detective who puts himself in the place of the story's central characters, trying to uncover the "truth" behind the case. Weighing and sifting the evidence, he probes the lingering mysteries of this notorious trial and the larger philosophical question of how we can ever know what happened in the past.

MORE:
'Murder at Harvard': Medical College case riveted 19th century Boston (Beth Potier, Harvard Gazette)

The disappearance of a prominent Bostonian. Dismembered body parts in the bowels of Harvard Medical College. A trial that pitted a Harvard professor deeply in debt against a grave-digging janitor.

Fact or fiction? History textbook or detective novel?

Both, said historian Simon Schama and filmmakers Eric Stange and Melissa Banta.

The three visited the Harvard Film Archive Wednesday (Sept. 25) to screen their new film, "Murder at Harvard," scheduled to air on the Public Broadcasting Service's "American Experience" series in 2003. The film and the book that inspired it, Schama's 1991 "Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations," take an unorthodox route through historical storytelling, one that makes frequent visits to fiction, arriving at a truth that may be even more precise than the facts suggest.

In history, said Schama, "you have to feed both the imagination and reason."

-An Aristocrat's Killing (Craig Lambert, July/August 2003, Harvard Magazine)
-Shooting Back (Eric Stange, April 2001, Common-Place)
-All about George Parkman (Katherine Ramsland, Crime Library)

---

AS THE CULTURE WAR BECOMES A ROUT:

Adelphia Reverses Decision on Porn: Soon after starting to show hard-core fare, the cable firm stops offering it amid activist pressure. (Lorenza Muñoz and Sallie Hofmeister, February 25, 2005, LA Times)

The heat generated by Adelphia Communication Corp.'s decision to air hard-core pornography apparently was too hot for Southern California's largest cable operator.

In a quick about-face, Adelphia stopped offering customers the opportunity to purchase triple-X programming after receiving tens of thousands of complaints from anti-porn activists and expressions of concern in investment circles that the hard-core fare could complicate the company's pending sale.

Do Democrats still think they can get as far Right as the nation?

---

THE EXPLANATION IS PRETTY SIMPLE...:

George Bush's Stepford Critics: You're likely to recant, zombie- like, if you betray the president. (JONATHAN CHAIT, February 25, 2005, LA Times)

Most presidents have to face betrayal sooner or later. (See John Dean revealing Nixon's cover-up, or David Stockman revealing the underside of Reagan's fiscal policies.) What's uncanny about the Bush administration is that its dissidents invariably recant, usually in zombie-like fashion.

...they're wrong.

---

SECULARISM ISN'T WORKING (via mc):

French finance minister quits: Unemployment rate rises to 10% in January (Emily Church, Feb. 25, 2005, MarketWatch)

French Finance Minister Herve Gaymard resigned on Friday after less than three months on the job amid a scandal over his taxpayer-funded Parisian apartment and as the French unemployment rate rose to 10 percent.

His resignation, which had been anticipated as concerns grew over his 14,000 euros-a-month ($18,500) a month apartment, came on the day France joined Germany with the dubious distinction of an unemployment rate at double-digit percentage levels.

French unemployment lifted to a five-year high of 10 percent in January, up from 9.9 percent in December, the Insee statistics agency said. Economists had projected the jobless rate to hold steady at 9.9 percent.

The German jobless rate in January rose to 11.4 percent, a post-war high.

U.S. Q4 GDP stronger than first estimated (Greg Robb, 25, 2005, MarketWatch)

The U.S. economy grew at a 3.8 percent annual rate in the fourth quarter, stronger than the 3.1 percent estimated a month ago, the Commerce Department reported Friday.

And Fred Kaplan and company wonder why W didn't drink up their wisdom?

---

THE WALL WENT UP THAT THE "WALL" MIGHT COME DOWN:

Palestinian Lawmakers OK New Cabinet; Most Arafat Loyalists Out: Much of the slate is made up of reform- minded technocrats and first-timers. (Henry Chu, February 25, 2005, LA Times)

Palestinian lawmakers ended days of rancorous debate Thursday and broke with the legacy of Yasser Arafat, giving their approval to a reformist Cabinet filled with technocrats and newcomers and nearly devoid of the late president's loyalists.

The 24 ministers, nearly three-quarters of them freshmen and two of them women, were sworn in late Thursday and were to start work today as the Palestinian Authority's first post-Arafat government.

In a sign of how the political scene has shifted since Arafat's death in November, the lineup includes only a couple of people, including Deputy Prime Minister Nabil Shaath, who are considered part of the old guard that surrounded Arafat.

Shaath, who also has the information portfolio, is the Cabinet's only elected legislator. Most of the new ministers are academics and professionals, a concession by Prime Minister Ahmed Korei to lawmakers who had insisted that the government abandon the cronyism and corruption of past years in favor of expertise.

The transformation of the Middle Easty is proceeding so smoothly and at such a rapid pace that we'll start to see stories any day now about how everyone knew it was inevitable and supported it 100% and George Bush just followed along--which is the Left's version of Reagan winning the Cold War. If he plays his cards right, Mr. Abbas could even be their Gorbachev...

---

JUST AN OLD-FASHIONED COUPLE:

Court: Man can sue over 'surprise' pregnancy (ABDON M. PALLASCH, February 25, 2005, Chicago Sun-Times)

If a woman performs oral sex on a man, leaves the room, secretly uses that sperm to impregnate herself, then sues the man for child support, is that "extreme and outrageous" conduct?

Yes it is, the Illinois Appellate Court ruled this week.

The justices said Chicago doctor Richard Phillips can try to convince a jury that his ex-fiancee pulled that trick on him, causing him emotional distress.

The ex-fiancee, Sharon Irons, also a doctor, says Phillips got her pregnant the old-fashioned way -- sexual intercourse -- and concocted the oral sex story as a novel excuse to get out of paying child support for their 5-year-old daughter.

---

DEBT? NO SWEAT:

Argentina Prepares to Shed Its Debt, Reenter Fiscal Markets: Deadline arrives for bondholders to decide whether to accept about one-third the value. (Héctor Tobar, February 25, 2005, LA Times)

Argentina is expected to complete the largest debt restructuring in history today, hoping to end the long saga of financial excess, collapse and default that has made the country's name synonymous with fiscal irresponsibility.

Today is the deadline for President Nestor Kirchner's take-it-or-leave-it offer to worldwide investors who own the nearly $103 billion in bonds and interest that Argentina defaulted on three years ago: Accept payment in a new series of bonds that will, on average, pay back investors one-third the value. Most are expected to take it, but some have already filed lawsuits. [...]

Despite the seemingly bad terms of Kirchner's offer, financial observers say about 75% of the bondholders are expected to accept. Officials at the International Monetary Fund and other agencies have said that would probably end Argentina's status as a financial pariah.

The debt restructuring will allow the nation to regain access to world financial markets.

Yet folk still can't grasp that we have the ChiComs over a barrel.

---

IN-SOURCING:

FDI open house in India (Kunal Kumar Kundu, 2/25/05, Asia Times)

India on Thursday liberalized rules for foreign investment in the real estate sector by deciding to allow 100% foreign direct investment (FDI) in construction. "The cabinet cleared the proposal for 100% FDI on the automatic approval route in the construction development sector," India's Commerce and Industry Minister Kamal Nath announced after a cabinet meeting. Till now, overseas firms were allowed in only after clearance from the highly bureaucratic Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB).

"Foreign investors can enter any construction development area, be it to build resorts, townships or commercial premises, but they will have to construct at least 50,000 square meters within a specific time-frame," said Nath, without specifying the timeframe. "This will ensure they do not hold onto land for speculative purposes."

Nath said higher foreign investment in the real estate and construction sectors would boost employment and generate "positive spin-offs" for India's labor-intensive cement, steel and brick industries.

---

THE DUFFEL BAG WILL HOLD MORE HEADS:

Iraqi Forces Capture Top Zarqawi Aide (VOA News, 25 February 2005)

Authorities in Baghdad say Iraqi security forces have captured the leader of an al-Qaida terrorist cell allegedly responsible for a series of beheadings.

The government identified the cell leader as Mohammed Najam Ibrahim, and said he worked closely with Iraq's most-wanted fugitive, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. He was arrested in Baquba, 60 kilometers north of the Iraqi capital.

---

PARADIGMATIC FOR THE PEOPLE:

The War on the War on Poverty: Bush's theory of domestic policy is more profound than "compassionate conservatism." (MYRON MAGNET, February 25, 2005, Wall Street Journal)

Implicit in compassionate conservatism was the epochal paradigm shift that is now all but explicit. Taken together, compassionate conservatism's elements added up to a sweeping rejection of liberal orthodoxy about how to help the poor, which a half century's worth of experience had discredited. If you want to help the poor, compassionate conservatives argued, liberate them from dependency through welfare reform; free their communities from criminal anarchy through activist policing; give them the education they need to succeed in a modern economy by holding their schools accountable; and let them enjoy the rewards of work by taxing their modest wages lightly--or not at all.

For the worst-off--those hampered by addiction or alcohol or faulty socialization--let the government pay private organizations, especially religious ones, to help. [...]

[T]he second Bush term is bringing the War on Poverty--demonstrably a cataclysmic mistake--to an end. A glance at the administration's recent budget shows the ongoing dismantling of antipoverty programs: a sharp reduction in the Community Development Block Grant, the main conduit for funneling federal money to cities; the reduction in HUD money for Section 8 subsidized housing vouchers, which abets the formation of dysfunctional single-parent families and destabilizes respectable working-class neighborhoods; and the shrinkage of ever-expanding Medicaid. Welfare is now temporary assistance in adversity, not a permanent way of life; and we can expect welfare reform's conditions to become even stricter when the 1996 Act finally gets reauthorized.

Supporters of the old paradigm are naturally apoplectic over such a transformation; and their outrage reveals just how sweeping a welfare state they really champion. As Georgetown law professor Peter Edelman, who resigned from the Clinton administration to protest the president's signing of the 1996 welfare reform, told columnist William Raspberry: "For virtually all of my adulthood, America has had a bipartisan agreement that we ought to provide some basic framework of programs and policies that provide a safety net, not just for the poor but for a large portion of the American people who need help to manage." How large a portion? Well, figures Mr. Raspberry, "the lower third of the economy." Think about that: nearly 100 million Americans as clients of the federal government. This is not temporary assistance but a European-style "social-democratic" (that is, socialist) welfare state. It is the political culture of America's old cities, with their hordes of government-supported clients, employees, and retirees--a culture that has produced slow or negative job and population growth. And this is exactly what the Bush administration does not want.

The failure of the European model, explicitly based on the belief that free-market capitalism is dangerous and needs to be tied down with a thousand trammels, like Gulliver, is one of the signal facts of our era, along with the failure of communism. In Europe, the idea that capitalism creates a permanently jobless class has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, as strict regulation and the high taxes needed to pay lavish welfare and unemployment benefits have resulted in half the U.S. rate of job creation, twice the rate of unemployment, and thus little opportunity.

Meanwhile retirees, often young and vigorous, go off for government-funded visits to health spas at taxpayer expense. Even if this were morally sustainable, it is not economically so, as even Gerhard Schroeder has learned. But with so many voters on the dole, or employed by the government to administer the vast welfare-state apparatus, who knows whether reform or collapse will occur first?

It's in this context that we should understand President Bush's campaign for Social Security reform. It is part of the large and coherent world view that has evolved out of compassionate conservatism.

While the Democratic version of same--the Third Way--has become extinct.

---

SURROUNDED:

China unhappy over US Patriot missiles to India (APP, 2/25/05)

A spokesman of the Chinese Foreign Office Kong Quan Thursday said that his country has taken note of reports regarding the sale of US anti-ballistic missile system to India, hoping that the relevant countries would ensure peace and stability in South Asia.

India is pivotal in the Axis of Good because it has Islam's Eastern flank and China's Western.

---

THE AMERICAN/SHI'ITE ALLIANCE:

Democratic Terrorists?: Lebanon could emerge as the center of a new Middle East. But first the United States may have to come to terms with Hizbullah (Christopher Dickey, Feb. 24, 2005, Newsweek)

[I]f we really want to liberate the Lebanese, lumping Hizbullah together with Osama bin Laden’s lunatic cronies is counterproductive, a point that was often made by the late prime minister Hariri himself. In fact, more than a quarter of Lebanon’s people are Shiites, and Hizbullah is the most revered of the Shiite political parties, precisely because its militia fought so long and hard against the Israelis. It’s already represented in the Lebanese Parliament and on any day of the week, Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah can put as many people in the streets as all the anti-Syrian protest groups combined. Moreover, its interest in fighting Israel is much less ideological and much more local than is usually portrayed. Hizbullah wants Palestinian land liberated so Lebanon can send back hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees on its territory, most of whom are in Shiite areas. That’s a very tough political problem, but hardly the kind of cosmic, confrontational ideology that drives Al Qaeda.

Now, as Druze opposition leader Walid Jumblatt is making clear, Hizbullah has to decide whether it thinks the future of Lebanon lies with Syria or with the Lebanese people. If it turns against Damascus, then Syria’s Lebanese holiday is over. So, instead of isolating and excoriating Hizbullah at this point, Washington might do better by looking for ways to encourage it to join the opposition and draw it into the pro-democracy movement. Certainly that’s what Walid Jumblatt has been thinking.

Turn terrorists into democrats? That’s not as incongruous as it sounds. The Palestine Liberation Organization was a terrorist group, by most definitions. Now its leaders are hailed as legitimate elected officials. Twenty-five years ago one of the most infamous international terrorist organizations in the world was a Shiite group called the Dawa Party, many of whose cadres eventually became involved with Hizbullah and carried out terrorist acts that included kidnapping Americans and blowing up the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait. (The Dawa was fighting Saddam Hussein, in fact, and Washington and Kuwait were backing him.) Now Dawa Party leader Ibrahim Jaafari may well become the new elected prime minister in Baghdad, with Washington’s blessing. So, if politics have made terrorists our strange bedfellows in Palestine and Iraq, why not Lebanon? It’s a tough call, and there’s no guarantee Hizbullah will take on this role. But only if it does is there a real chance Beirut can emerge as the center of the center of the new, democratic Middle East.

Hezbollah, like Hamas, has for some time been just a political party waiting to happen and there's nothing incongruous about our emerging alliance with the Shi'a.

MORE:
Lebanon's fate hinges on the Nasrullah factor (Sami Moubayed, 2/25/05, Asia Times)

Any person who was in Beirut on May 24, 2000, the day Hezbollah liberated South Lebanon, understands how immensely popular the enigmatic Hasan Nasrullah is in the country's Muslim, and particularly Shi'ite, community. Any person watching his speech five years later, this month, after the US started to press for the withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon, and the disarming of Hezbollah, of which Nasrullah is the head, knows how easy it might be for the United States to get Syria to leave Lebanon, but how difficult, if not impossible, it would be to disarm or weaken the Shi'ites. [...]

The Shi'ites of Lebanon, like the Shi'ites of Iraq, are a majority who have long suffered from Sunni domination, especially during the 400-year rule of the Ottoman Empire in what is present-day Lebanon. Located in the eastern Bekka Valley, they survived during the early years of the 20th century through trade with Palestine, which was cut off completely by the creation of Israel in 1948. Preoccupied with domestic issues, consecutive Lebanese regimes paid little attention to the plight of the Shi'ites, and they were forgotten, politically and economically, during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.

While government funds poured into the modernization of Beirut, making it the "Switzerland of the East" during the 1960s, the Shi'ite districts were neglected, receiving 0.7% of the state budget in 1974, although they made up 20% of the population at the time. Their representatives in parliament were all absentee feudal landlords who paid little attention to their plight, making the Shi'ites an economic under-class during the booming years of Beirut. [...]

The popularity that Hezbollah accumulated in the 1990s was due to two things: its massive media machine, and the countrywide educational and social network of schools, charities, hospitals and mosques that they operated, often under Nasrullah's direct supervision. Hezbollah put a lot of money into rebuilding poverty stricken neighborhoods of the Shi'ite community, and subsidizing housing in South Lebanon, after the Israeli withdrawal in 2000.

Much of the money initially came from Iran, but after gaining nationwide popularity in 2000, Hezbollah began to raise a lot of money on its own. On every road leading into Beirut, and on every route to the Shi'ite neighborhoods, Hezbollah youth would create friendly roadblocks, adorned with pictures of Nasrullah, the yellow flag of Hezbollah, booming nationalist songs, and a charity box. These petty donations added up and pretty soon larger donations came in from the emigrant Shi'ite community in the US, Latin America and Africa.

Needy families in the Shi'ite community received sealed envelopes from the secretary general of Hezbollah at the start of every month, with a decent stipend. This endeared him to the lower class of the Shi'ite community, which 30 years earlier Musa al-Sadr had described as the "wretched of the Earth".

Part of Nasrullah's success was that while always appealing to the Shi'ites, he never mentioned pan-Shi'ite loyalties, and always claimed to be speaking for Lebanon. This was not the case with Musa al-Sadr, who rose to power in the 1960s and 1970s through emphasis on Shi'ite nationalism as part of the greater Lebanese nationalism.

This different approach gave Nasrullah a fairly large following among the Sunnis of Lebanon as well. Like Sadr, however, he fully understood the multitude of Lebanon's confessional system, never once calling for an Islamic state in Lebanon, and always proclaiming to be a firm believer in the right of all Lebanese, regardless of religion, to live in harmony. Sadr, on the other hand, had referred to the Shi'ites as "disinherited", criticizing Maronite arrogance toward the Shi'ite community and the disproportionate representation of Shi'ites in senior political posts. While Sadr was highly critical of the Lebanese army for failing to protect the South from Israeli attacks in the 1970s, Nasrullah requested the protection of no one, claiming that Hezbollah can do well in South Lebanon without assistance from the Lebanese army. This was partly in order to maintain his hold over the South, and mainly to have a free hand in launching sporadic cross-border attacks against Israel.

Nasrullah liberates South Lebanon
Nasrullah's attacks on Israel usually resulted in retaliatory attacks on South Lebanon. In 1999, however, Israel's new prime minister Ehud Barak responded by bombing Beirut, causing much discontent among non-Shi'ite civilians who did not want to pay the price for Nasrullah's war. They quickly silenced their grumbling when one year later on May 24, 2000, Nasrullah liberated South Lebanon from the Israeli occupation it had been under since 1978. He was hailed throughout the Arab and Muslim world as a great leader, the only Arab to fight a war and emerge victorious against Israel since 1948.

Many speculated that he would now lay down his arms, and transform Hezbollah into a political party, but Nasrullah had other plans. He refused to disarm, just as he is doing today with regard to Resolution 1559, claiming that Israel still occupies Sheba Farms in South Lebanon.

President Emile Lahhoud could do little to stop him, since by that point Hasan Nasrullah was literarily the strongest man in Lebanon, supported wholeheartedly in his war against Israel by both Syria and Iran. The death of Syria's president Hafez al-Assad in June 2000 left the activities of Hezbollah unchecked inside Lebanon, since only Asad had the influence to dictate policy on the Shi'ite guerillas.

They maintained a strong relationship with Syria's new leader, Assad, based on common objectives in the Middle East, but no longer received orders from Syria. They informed the Syrian government of their plans, received guidance, supported Assad, and often relied on the Syrians for advice, but apart from that, this is where Syrian influence ended.

Nasrullah's team entered the political arena, running for parliament and winning 12 seats in 2000. In 1992, they had won eight seats in the 128-seat parliament. Hezbollah refused to assume government office, however, because according to Nasrullah, this would make the party bear responsibilities for mistakes done by any regime, whereas in the resistance it remains purified from political corruption and blundering.

Force them to take power.

---

THE DEMOCRATS VS. SOCIAL SECURITY:

Competing Visions For Social Security (Jonathan Weisman, February 24, 2005, Washington Post)

[O]ut of political pragmatism, those who hope to preserve a basic structure established by Franklin D. Roosevelt -- mainly Democrats -- have obscured both tax increases and benefit cuts, using a variety of mechanisms that make the proposals remarkably complex. [...]

Democrats and liberal economists have focused on bringing Social Security's finances into line without fundamentally altering the system. But their formal proposals would not simply raise taxes and reduce benefits. One prominent Democratic plan, proposed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Peter A. Diamond and Brookings Institution economist Peter R. Orszag, would use a nine-stage battery of revenue-raisers and benefit reductions to produce a Social Security system that would be both in balance and more generous for poor workers, widows, the disabled and children who survive the death of their parents.

"It was designed by looking at particular sources of imbalance that seemed to us worth addressing," Diamond said.

Under the plan, all new state and local government workers would be brought into the Social Security system, effectively expanding the Social Security tax base to cover the 25 percent of government workers who now are exempt. Diamond and Orszag would also raise the cap on wages subject to payroll taxes to about $105,000 for now.

To raise more revenue, they would impose a 3 percent tax on all earnings above the cap. They would also slowly raise the current 12.4 percent Social Security tax rate to 14.2 percent in 2055.

Benefits would be cut, on a scale that starts with trims of only 0.6 percent for a worker currently 45 years old but rising to 8.6 percent for a future retiree who is now 25. And under a complex formula, cuts would hit more affluent retirees the hardest, while benefits for low-wage workers would rise.

Dean Speaks to Cornell Community: Party leader introduces Democrats' new strategy (Julie Geng, 2/24/05, Cornell Sun)

Dean began by speaking on what he thought was the most important issue today: the proposed privatization of Social Security. He said that President George W. Bush was trying to appeal to 20- and 30-year-olds through privatization, but claimed that in fact that generation would end up having to pay the $2 trillion bill for it.

"I think that privatizing Social Security has much more to do with the enormous amount of money that corporate Wall Street poured into the President of the United States's campaign than [helping] senior citizens," Dean said. "[Social Security] was a response toward [overcoming] abject poverty...it is not meant as a retirement program...it was meant as a social safety net for people who had reached the end of their working careers and did not deserve, after a long lifetime of dignified work, to live in poverty. ... It's not supposed to be a pension."

Dean pointed out that, while he would not endorse this, if Social Security were left alone for 30 years, its benefits would be reduced to 80 percent of what it is now. He acknowledged that while there were indeed problems with the program, turning to Wall Street was not the answer.

The President needs to just start beating Democrats with the fact that their position on SS requires benefit cuts and/or tax hikes.

---

A FAIR TEST FOR THE PRESIDENT:

Egypt's Brutal Answer (Washington Post, February 24, 2005)

ON MONDAY President Bush again called on Egypt to "lead the way" toward democratic change in the Middle East. Apparently Hosni Mubarak, the country's leader for the past 24 years, wasn't listening. Later that same day, Mr. Mubarak's agents renewed their "interrogation" of Ayman Nour, the imprisoned head of the liberal Tomorrow Party. Six hours later -- at 1 a.m. -- Mr. Nour, a diabetic with a history of heart trouble, was "sweating, vomiting and holding his left arm," his wife told the Reuters news agency. Authorities refused his doctor's request that he be hospitalized; instead, he was taken Tuesday to a prison clinic. The Egyptian Human Rights Organization has issued a statement warning that Mr. Nour's life is in danger. Mr. Mubarak's relationship with the United States, and the U.S. aid that props up his regime, should be in danger too.

Were Egypt to respond to Mr. Bush's call, Mr. Nour would likely do some of the leading. Though only in his forties, he has served in the powerless Egyptian parliament for a decade and, like much of the Egyptian elite, has grown steadily more insistent in demanding political change. [...]

The Bush administration has been relatively assertive in protesting Mr. Nour's imprisonment, but Mr. Mubarak has been provocative in his defiance.

Here's one, like Syria was, where Congress could actualy prod the Administration.

---

OW REVOIR:

Why French teachers have the blues (François Buglet, 2/25/05, Expatica)

French is disappearing from European classrooms in favour of English
The predominance of English on the internet, the relative ease of learning basic English and the perception that English is "cooler" - thanks in large part to popular music and films - means French is becoming ever more restricted to older generations and the upper classes of many countries where it used to be the second language of choice in schools.

Getting rid of the language is a good start.

---

HE WENT, HE LISTENED, HE IGNORED:

Bush Listened to Europe: Now watch him ignore all the advice he got. (Fred Kaplan, Feb. 24, 2005, Slate)

Which part was he supposed to listen to; the pro-Saddam part; the pro-ChiCom part; or the pro-mullahcracy part?

---

TORQUEMADA WOULD HAVE BEEN IMPRESSED

Harvard chief's 'sexism' apology (The Times, February 25th, 2005)

Harvard University president Lawrence Summers appears to have saved his job after apologising for politically incorrect remarks about differences between men and women.

Dr Summers, who was Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, escaped a confidence vote yesterday at the second faculty meeting since his comments about women's ability in maths and science.

"I am determined to set a different tone," Dr Summers said. "I pledge to you that I will seek to listen more, and more carefully, and to temper my words and actions in ways that convey respect and help us work together more harmoniously."

Dr Summers had suggested that innate differences between the sexes may account for the lack of female professors in maths and science.

One of the most bizarre features of our times is how so many modern parents sacrifice so much to send their kids to institutions dedicated to closing their inquiring minds.

---

S.A.D. DOCTRINE:

Schumer Signals 'Nuclear' War on Nominees (Robert B. Bluey, Feb 24, 2005, Human Events)

Senate Democrats are preparing to once again filibuster President Bush's judicial nominees despite efforts by Senate Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter (R.-Pa.) to extend an olive branch in hopes of reconciling differences. Liberal Sen. Chuck Schumer (D.-N.Y.) dismissed Specter's gesture Thursday and all but declared war on the nominees Bush resubmitted to the Senate last week.

Hoping to avoid the so-called "nuclear" option that would change the Senate's filibuster rule, Specter said he would tackle the nomination of William Myers III to the 9th Circuit appeals court next Tuesday. Myers, by Specter's calculation, is only two votes shy of the 60 needed to avoid a filibuster. He would have 58 votes if all Republicans and three supportive Democrats--Senators Joe Biden (Del.), Ben Nelson (Neb.) and Ken Salazar (Colo.)--vote for his confirmation. Needing only two other Democrats, Specter suggested Schumer could be a possible convert.

"Senator Schumer has made the public comment that there ought to be balance on all of the circuits, and the 9th Circuit is a very liberal circuit," Specter told reporters. "I think William Myers would give some balance to the 9th Circuit, and that is going to be one of the arguments that I am going to make."

But only moments after Specter concluded his wide-ranging 40-minute press briefing in the Capitol, Schumer took center stage to declare his opposition to Myers--and the other six nominees whom Democrats filibustered in Bush's first term. "Unless there's new and dramatic information, we feel nothing has changed and they should continue to be blocked," Schumer said in response to a question from HUMAN EVENTS.

The theory, though not the reality, of nuclear deterrence was that each side could destroy the other so neither would launch: Mutual Assured Destruction. Democrats have adopted the novel strategy of provoking a nuclear war even though they're disarmed.

---

WEREN'T THEY LISTENING TO HIS INAUGURAL ADDRESS?:

Putin humiliated next to Bush (UPI, 2/24/05)

As Russia analysts James M. Goldgeier and Michael McFaul had put it in a commentary in the current issue of the Weekly Standard:

"If the president neglects to affirm his commitment to freedom with Putin at his side, Bush will be signaling that his words don't count."

So most of us were expecting the issue to be raised, if only in passing.

But no one could have been prepared for what was about to unfold.

While observing diplomatic niceties, President Bush's opening remarks included a pointedly blunt statement of his concern that Russia was not fulfilling "fundamental" democratic principles.

And this was nothing to what President Putin was forced to endure in the subsequent questions, every single one of which focused on democracy.

We could tolerate a fair amount of authoritarianism from Mr. Putin if he were enacting the fundamental reforms that Russia requires and if he were co-operating with us in places like Iran in the meantime. He's not.

---

RUDEBOYS CANNOT FAIL:

Tent city rises to pressure Syria (P. Mitchell Prothero, 2/23/05, THE WASHINGTON TIMES)

In a land where civil war is endemic but political protest is almost unknown, long-feuding Muslims, Christians and Druze are camping out just blocks from the parliament saying they will not leave until either Syrian troops leave their country or the government falls. [...]

In Mainz, Germany, President Bush -- who has called repeatedly for Syrian troops to leave Lebanon -- said Syrian intelligence services should get out of the country, as well. French President Jacques Chirac said Tuesday evening that Syrian "special service operatives controlling Lebanon are in fact more questionable than the military occupation."

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak also has taken interest in the situation, dispatching his intelligence chief to Damascus for talks with President Bashar Assad.

But regional analysts say Mr. Assad is most likely to be unnerved, not by foreign political pressure but by the unprecedented protest movement sparked by the Feb. 14 assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

---

CAN TOM TANCREDO EVEN FIND TIMBUKTU OH A MAP?

Heart of Christianity shifts from Europe - to Timbuktu (John Hooper, February 23, 2005, The Guardian)

Down the centuries, sages and saints have wrangled over whether the centre of Christianity is in Rome or Constantinople, Nazareth or Jerusalem. Until yesterday, no one mentioned Timbuktu.

Yet according to the results of an American research project, the geographical "centre of gravity" of Christendom lies near the historic trading city of mainly Muslim Mali. And by the end of the century, it could be in Nigeria.

The shift away from Europe reflects the zeal of missionary work in Africa over recent decades and is evidence of how Christianity has become predominantly a religion of the developing world, according to the report by the Study of Global Christianity.

Using historical data, it plotted the shifting trends of the religion over the past two millennia.

Starting in Jerusalem, the centre of gravity for Christianity moved to Constantinople - now Istanbul. The Christianisation of Europe thereafter meant that Budapest was its centre by 1500, though the colonisation of the Americas pulled it across Europe to Madrid by 1900. Since 1982, however, Christianity's centre has moved relentlessly south.

"The slope we're on now is steeper than at any other time in Christian history," Todd Johnson, the study's author, told Reuters news agency. "It's really a massive shift."

He added: "Timbuktu used to be considered the middle of nowhere."

Growing awareness of that shift in the Roman Catholic church, the biggest Christian denomination, has prompted speculation that the next pope could be from Latin America, Africa or Asia.

Which is why Atlanticists are living in a past that, like Europe, no longer matters to America.

---

SO WHY DO THEY CALL IT NATIONAL HEALTH? (via brian boys):

How sweet it is: Girl eats real food for first time in 7 1/2 years after doctors at Stanford solve mystery (Dave Murphy, February 24, 2005, SF Chronicle)

From the time Tilly Merrell was a year old, doctors told her family she would never have a normal life -- or even a normal meal.

British doctors found that the food she swallowed went into her lungs instead of her stomach, causing devastating lung infections. They said she had isolated bulbar palsy, and their solution was to feed her through a stomach tube. Forever.

But having a backpack with a food pump wired to her stomach wasn't much of a life for a girl whose favorite smell is bacon frying -- a girl who once broke through a locked kitchen door in an effort to sneak some cheese. So her family got help from their community of Warndon, about 120 miles north of London, raising enough money to take Tilly, now 8, on a 5,000-mile journey they hoped might change her life, a journey to Lucile Salter Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford University.

Doctors at Packard were intrigued that she had no neurological symptoms often associated with the palsy. In all other ways, she was a normal child with a mischievous smile and a truckload of energy. After seeing her Feb. 7, they ran three tests and found out what was wrong with her.

Nothing.

---

AND THEN THE PEOPLE ROSE UP AND KILLED THE MEAN, RACIST, SEXIST, HOMOPHOBIC, FUNDAMENTALIST, CAPITALIST KING

A History of Flawed Teaching (Sam Wineburg, Los Angeles Times, February 24th, 2005)

Imagine this: Nearly a third of the students who apply to Stanford's master's in teaching program to become history teachers have never taken a single college course in history. Outrageous? Yes, but it's part of a well-established national pattern. Among high school history teachers across the country, only 18% have majored (or even minored) in the subject they now teach.

I don't doubt the dedication of these people. The application statements I read at Stanford shine with a commitment that renews one's faith in the passion of today's youth. And nearly every one of these young people is willing to forsake a more lucrative career — in law, medicine, business — to pursue teaching.

But how can you teach what you don't know? Would someone who wanted to teach calculus dare to submit a transcript with no math courses? Would a prospective chemistry teacher come to us with a record devoid of science? Yet with history, the theory goes, all you need is a big heart and a thick book.

The state of California encourages this state of affairs. Although it requires teachers to earn a rigorous teaching credential before they may teach math, English, biology or chemistry in the public school system, there is no such credential for history. Instead, the state hands out a loosey-goosey "social science" credential.

To qualify to teach history in California (and in many other states), you can possess a major in almost anything — anthropology, psychology, ethnic studies. All you've got to do is earn the "social science" credential and pass a multiple-choice exam of historical facts. But a storehouse of facts is the beginning, not the end, of historical understanding.[...]

Lack of knowledge encourages another bad habit among history teachers: a tendency to disparage "facts," an eagerness to unshackle students from the "dominant discourse" — and to teach them, instead, what the teacher views as "the Truth." What's scary is the certainty with which this "Truth" is often held. Rather than debating why the United States entered Vietnam or signed the North American Free Trade Agreement or brokered a Camp David accord, all roads lead to the same point: our government's desire to oppress the less powerful. It is a version of history that conjures up a North Korean reeducation camp rather than a democratic classroom.

One need not be a conspiracy theorist to believe Professor Wineburg is missing the underlying design behind what he seems to think is just a bureaucratic omission. The secular modernist project hangs on the belief that history is a steady march from ignorance and oppression to enlightenment and freedom. It has no interest in inculcating any doubt on this and no use for any view of the past as other than a sad and simplistic litany of cruelty and ignorance we must abjure and reject. Modern history does not require trained teachers because it is taught to confirm simplistic prejudices, not to expand culture and knowledge.

---

IF THEY SAW IT THEY'D WANT TO PAVE IT:

Take a Walk on the Wild Side (JIM DOHERTY , 2/24/05, NY Times)

Call it the grizzly test. Require all would-be developers to take it. If you want to drill for oil in the refuge, first you have to spend a couple of weeks roughing it there. No guns, no phones, no guides. Just you and the bears. Let them look into your heart. If they're reassured by what they see, you pass; if they feel threatened, well, according to Ave Thayer, there are worse ways to go.

Those who survive the grizzly test earn the right to submit their drilling proposals to Congress. But who knows? Perhaps a solitary stint in the refuge is enough to make even the most avaricious developers think twice. Once they've discovered for themselves how magnificent the refuge is; once they've watched caribou lope across the tundra, listened to wolves howl, beheld the mesmerizing effects of light and shadow on limestone mountains riddled with caves and turreted with hoodoos - once, in short, they understand why so many folks consider the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge sacred ground, they might undergo a change of heart and decide to leave it the way it is. Which is to say, undisturbed.

Jonah Goldberg's trip there several years ago raised the question of whether it wouldn't doom ANWR if folks actually had to experience it:

Yes, the drilling would be in ANWR, but it wouldn't be where the beauty shots are. It's like doing an on-location report on New York City's urban blight and crime, but broadcasting from a café in Rockefeller Center. The coastal plain is, in fact, a vast tract of peat bog and mud puddles (sounds like a crime fighting duo: "Tune in this fall to see Pete Bog and his fast-talking streetwise sidekick Mudd Puddles, tackle evildoers. Tuesdays at 9.").

The coastal plain is a breeding ground for all sorts of awful flying critters. There are trillions of mosquitoes. There are these creatures called warble flies and nosebots, two bumblebee-like flies that cause the caribou unrelenting grief. I could swear I even saw Alan Dershowitz whiz past my ear.

Sure, it's possible to think this spot is beautiful. People find all sorts of things beautiful these days. In fact, a man sold a can of his own excrement at an auction for tens of thousands of dollars a few years back. If that's art, hell, then the coastal plain is Shangri-frickin'-La.

And, of course, both Alaskans and the native people who actually do live there support drilling.

MORE:
Crude Reality: As the brutal battle over proposed drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge grinds on, a former oil worker returns to the North Slope in search of the truth about the pro-exploration argument. His conclusion? (Brace yourself.) The unthinkable is the right thing to do. (David Masiel, February 2004, Outside Magazine)

I have listened to the debate over Arctic drilling for 20 years, and I believe it is far from finished, that it will never be finished until oil is obsolete or the first production wells start pumping ANWR crude into the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. Election-year politics may have buried ANWR for now, but two points are clear: If reelected, George W. Bush will continue his pursuit of drilling in ANWR. And no matter who is elected, Alaskan lobbyists and politicians will never let this one go—there's simply too much at stake. "It's never decided," Senator Stevens has vowed several times, "until I win."

Meanwhile, both pro- and anti-drilling camps have dug their heels into the Arctic permafrost, each side deploying an array of facts and statistics, all of them "true," and most mutually exclusive. The Bush administration insists that, in the wake of 9/11, America's longtime goal of reversing dependence on foreign oil has become a necessity. The oil companies pledge that drilling can be done cleanly, thanks to new technologies like extended-reach drilling and man-made ice roads that melt every spring.

Environmentalists stress that any development is too much: The 1002 is home to the largest concentration of onshore polar bear dens in the world, the summer home to some 138 species of migratory birds, and the calving grounds of the 123,000-member Porcupine caribou herd. Even 2,000 acres of development, opponents argue, would create a maze of pipelines and service roads extending impacts a hundredfold. Moreover, they say, a defeat here will mortally wound the very idea of wilderness protection.

There's also the little matter of how much oil there is (no one really knows) and whether oil companies can ever be trusted as stewards (no one knows that, either). As if this weren't enough, native Alaskans themselves are divided: The Inupiat Eskimo of the North Slope largely favor drilling, but the Gwich'in Athabascans, to the south, don't.

I was divided myself. My family's ties to the oil business go back three generations. My grandfather was a tanker captain for Standard Oil, my father the president of Chevron Pipeline Company. My sister, brother-in-law, and cousin, not to mention half a dozen friends—oil people, all. On the North Slope, I'd gained intense respect for the people who work there, but I'd also seen the ways that the Arctic's harsh, remote conditions could drive crews to cut corners.

So, in 2002, I decided to drill into the issue—to drill into myself, frankly. My approach was admittedly personal. In my tiny way, I had helped bring drilling to ANWR, and I couldn't forget that bear as he escaped across the ice. I wondered, Is it possible to take care of the bear and still feed the machine?

After a journey that took me back to the Arctic for the first time in 13 years, and through dozens of interviews with policy analysts, native Alaskans, wildlife biologists, and congressional staff experts, I became convinced of only one thing: Both sides are far too entrenched to see the other side clearly.

It's time for a compromise, and as much as I can hear the cries of readers rising out of their chairs in choked protest, the reality of ANWR begs something new. Distasteful as it is, it's time to allow at least some drilling in the refuge. [...]

When old hands grumble about environmental standards, it's a good sign things are moving in the right direction. But anecdotal evidence is hardly proof. So I turned to my own contacts, including the CFO of one of the four largest oil companies in the world, who agreed to speak to me on condition of anonymity.

"We're the deep pockets," my friend told me. "Oil spills mean lost product plus cleanup costs. And ever since the Exxon Valdez, the bar has continually been raised. We're paying clean-up costs on operations from 20 years ago that were in full compliance of laws at the time. I tell my managers this all the time: Don't tell me you disposed of waste materials in some landfill and it's all according to EPA regulations, because I'm going to assume at some point we'll be required to go back and clean up—at greater costs. We want zero discharges."

In other words, economics ensures clean drilling. Another contact, the general manager of health, safety, and environment for the overseas branch of a major oil company, spelled it out for me: "The real reason for clean operations," he said, scribbling something on a piece of paper, "is this." He shoved the paper across the table. On it, he'd drawn a giant dollar sign.

---

THE ALLIES THE NATIVISTS HATE:

Gay Marriage Stirs New York Evangelicals (Ben Smith, 2/24/05, NY Observer)

On Feb. 4, the Reverend Joe Mattera got a call from WMCA, the popular New York Christian radio station. The host was looking for his comment on a State Supreme Court ruling in favor of same-sex marriage.

Mr. Mattera, a trim 46-year-old with a thick Brooklyn accent, didn’t like what he heard, so he dashed off an e-mail to his network of 500 evangelical Christian ministers.

The ruling marked "the greatest threat ever launched against traditional marriage," the e-mail said, calling for a Valentine’s Day rally on the steps of City Hall. "No anti-gay banners permitted," it added.

When Mayor Bloomberg decided to split the baby on gay marriage earlier this month, appealing the court’s decision while coming out for expanding the definition of marriage, Mr. Mattera and the Christian Right were hardly at the top of his list of worries. There were angry gay-rights groups and outraged Democratic candidates. The people Mr. Mattera represents—who are among the roughly 50 percent of New Yorkers who oppose same-sex marriage—have had little voice in a public debate between the left and the center-left.

That may be about to change. Mr. Mattera and his allies have begun to harness the city’s booming evangelical Christian population—numbering as many as 1.8 million, according to one recent survey—into the kind of political force that has already changed the face of American politics.

"One of these days, we’re going to wake up and you’ll have a female, Hispanic, Pentecostal Mayor saying that the public schools will have abstinence education," said Tony Carnes, a Columbia University researcher and writer for Christianity Today. His survey of evangelical churches (financed by Brooklyn’s Christian Cultural Center) counted between 1.5 million and 1.8 million believers last year. That number, however rough, includes booming Hispanic and Chinese churches in storefronts and basements, as well as older African-American congregations with traditions of more liberal politics.

New York has just begun to take note of the evangelicals’ existence, with a New York Times story last year turning up unlikely supporters of President Bush. But the political infrastructure is only beginning to keep up with the evangelical movement’s numbers in New York.

Same-sex marriage, however, could be the force that turns New York’s evangelicals into a political movement, much like Roe v. Wade energized conservative Christians across America.

Nice one about the Mayor splitting the baby, huh?

---

CAN IT REALLY HAVE TAKEN HIM FOUR DAYS TO FIGURE THIS OUT?:

The Private Bush (Howard Kurtz, February 23, 2005, Washington Post)

Doug Wead may have done George Bush a favor.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not a fan of secretly recording conversations with a friend and then releasing them to the world, muttering about the importance of history, while using the tapes to hype your forthcoming book. The word betrayal is the mildest one I can think of. And trying to justify it, rather than admit the self-serving nature of your little scam, only makes it worse.

But the debate over the tapes story, which was broken by the New York Times, has mostly been about the motivation of Wead, a man most of us had never heard of before. What Bush said when he didn't know he was being recorded hasn't stirred a whole lot of controversy.

That may be because the tapes make Bush look good, in the sense that there's very little separation between the Bush we hear in private, unaware that his pal has the recorder going, and the George W. Bush we have come to know in public.

---

HIS CHICAGO IS TOO PROGRESSIVE FOR THE REACTIONARY PARTY:

A Tale of Two Daleys: Chicago's mayor doesn't have a theory of governance. He just likes to solve problems. (JOSEPH EPSTEIN, February 24, 2005 Wall Street Journal)

Rich Daley appears to have no theory of government, but merely a boundless appetite for governing. He is a fix-it, a problem-solving, man, treating the city of Chicago as if it were an unending episode of "This Old House"--and he seems to be turning the old heap into a damn stately mansion.

But perhaps the real secret behind the Daley family success is the fixed but limited ambition of both father and son. Neither Dick nor Rich Daley ever aspired to rise any higher than Mayor of the City of Chicago. Dick Daley, doubtless, enjoyed being a kingmaker and a power in the Democratic Party; this would appear to be less true of Rich Daley, but then the age of king-making Democratic Party bosses seems to be over. A homeboy, the current mayor does not wish to become governor or a U.S. senator, or--here's a thought to pass on to the search committee in Cambridge--the next president of Harvard. That goes a good way to explaining why he is so good at his job and why he is likely to be able to keep it for as long as he likes.

He may not have the theory down, but Mayor daley is the last Third Way politician in the Democratic Party and offers thereby the only viable alternative to compassionate conservatism. It speaks volumes of the plight of the Democrats that the mildly innovative Rudy Guiliani is a front-runner for the GOP's presidential nomination but the truly innovative Mayor Daley doesn't get a mention for theirs.

---

YOU GO, BOY:

China Objects to Clinton's Taiwan Visit (Luis Ramirez, 24 February 2005, VOA News)

China is objecting to former President Bill Clinton's plans to meet Sunday with Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian in Taiwan. [...]

[F]oreign Ministry spokesman Kong Quan expressed displeasure over the former president's plans to visit Taiwan and meet with leader Chen Shui-bian.

"As a former U.S. president, he should know China's position on the Taiwan issue," he said. "He should honor his commitment to the Chinese government, including abiding by the one-China policy."

There are already two, with more to follow.

---

"THANK YOU FOR YOUR CONTRIBUTIONS TO FREEDOM'S CAUSE":

President Addresses and Thanks Citizens of Slovakia (George W. Bush, Hviezdoslavovo Square, Bratislava, Slovakia, 2/24/05)

Thank you all. Dobrý deò. (Applause.) Mr. President, Mr. Chairman, Mr. Prime Minister, thank you for your strong leadership and friendship. Mr. Mayor, distinguished guests, citizens of a free Slovakia. (Applause.) Thank you for your hospitality. Laura and I are honored, extremely honored to visit your great country. We bring greetings and we bring the good wishes of the American people. (Applause.)

With us here today is a group of remarkable men and women from across Central and Eastern Europe, who have fought freedom's fight in their homelands and have earned the respect of the world. We welcome you. We thank you for your example, for your courage and for your sacrifice. (Applause.)

I'm proud to stand in this great square, which has seen momentous events in the history of Slovakia and the history of freedom. Almost 17 years ago, thousands of Slovaks gathered peacefully in front of this theater. They came, not to welcome a visiting President, but to light candles, to sing hymns, to pray for an end to tyranny and the restoration of religious liberty. (Applause.)

From the hotel to our left, communist authorities watched thousands of candles shining in the darkness -- and gave the order to extinguish them. The authorities succeeded in crushing that protest. But with their candles and prayers, the people of Bratislava lit a fire for freedom that day, a fire that quickly spread across the land. (Applause.) And within 20 months, the regime that drove Slovaks from this square would itself be driven from power. By claiming your own freedom, you inspired a revolution that liberated your nation and helped to transform a continent. (Applause.)

Since those days of peaceful protest, the Slovak people have made historic progress. You regained your sovereignty and independence. You built a successful democracy. You established a free economy. And last year, the former member of the Warsaw Pact became a member of NATO, and took its rightful place in the European Union. Every Slovak can be proud of these achievements. And the American people are proud to call you allies and friends and brothers in the cause of freedom. (Applause.)

I know that liberty -- the road to liberty and prosperity has not always been straight or easy. But Americans respect your patience, your courage and your determination to secure a better future for your children. As you work to build a free and democratic Slovakia in the heart of Europe, America stands with you. (Applause.)

Slovaks know the horror or tyranny, so you're working to bring hope of freedom to people who have not known it. You've sent peacekeepers to Kosovo, and election observers to Kiev. You've brought Iraqis to Bratislava to see firsthand how a nation moves from dictatorship to democracy. Your example is inspiring newly-liberated people. You're showing that a small nation, built on a big idea, can spread liberty throughout the world.

At this moment, Slovak soldiers are serving courageously alongside U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. Some have given their lives in freedom's cause. We honor their memory. We lift them up in our prayers. Words can only go so far in capturing the grief of their families and their countrymen. But by their sacrifice, they have helped purchase a future of freedom for millions. Many of you can still recall the exhilaration of voting for the first time after decades of tyranny. And as you watched jubilant Iraqis dancing in the streets last month, holding up ink-stained fingers, you remembered Velvet Days. For the Iraqi people, this is their 1989, and they will always remember who stood with them in their quest for freedom. (Applause.)

In recent times, we have witnessed landmark events in the history of liberty, a Rose Revolution in Georgia, an Orange Revolution in Ukraine, and now, a Purple Revolution in Iraq. With their votes cast and counted, the Iraqi people now begin a great and historic journey. They will from a new government, draft a democratic constitution, and govern themselves as free people. They're putting the days of tyranny and terror behind them and building a free and peaceful society in the heart of the Middle East, and the world's free nations will support them in their struggle. (Applause.)

The terrorist insurgents know what's at stake. They know they have no future in a free Iraq. So they're trying desperately to undermine Iraq's progress and throw the country in chaos. They want to return to the day when Iraqis were governed by secret police and informers and fear. They will not succeed. The Iraqi people will not permit a minority of assassins to determine the destiny of their nation. We will fight to defend this freedom and we will prevail. (Applause.)

Victory in this struggle will not come easily or quickly, but we have reason to hope. Iraqis have demonstrated their courage and their determination to live in freedom, and that has inspired the world. It is the same determination we saw in Kiev's Independent Square, in Tbilisi's Freedom Square, and in this square almost 17 years ago. (Applause.)

We must be equally determined and also patient. The advance of freedom is the concentrated work of generations. It took almost a decade after the Velvet Revolution for democracy to fully take root in this country. And the democratic revolutions that swept this region over 15 years ago are now reaching Georgia and Ukraine. In 10 days, Moldova has the opportunity to place its democratic credentials beyond doubt as its people head to the polls. And inevitably, the people of Belarus will someday proudly belong to the country of democracies. Eventually, the call of liberty comes to every mind and every soul. And one day, freedom's promise will reach every people and every nation. (Applause.)

Slovakia has taken great risks for freedom in Afghanistan and Iraq. You have proved yourself a trusted friend and a reliable ally. That is why I recently announced a new solidarity initiative for nations like Slovakia that are standing with America in the war on terror. We will help you to improve your military forces so we can strengthen our ability to work together in the cause of freedom. We're working with your government to make it easier for Slovaks to travel to the United States of America. (Applause.) Hundreds of thousands of our citizens can trace their roots back to this country. Slovak immigrants helped build America and shape its character. We want to deepen the ties of friendship between our people, ties based on common values, a love of freedom, and shared belief in the dignity and matchless value of every human being. (Applause.)

The Velvet Generation that fought for these values is growing older. Many of the young students and workers who led freedom's struggle here now struggle to support families and their children. For some, the days of protest and revolution are a distant memory. Today, a new generation that never experienced oppression is coming of age. It is important to pass on to them the lessons of that period. They must learn that freedom is precious, and cannot be taken for granted; that evil is real, and must be confronted; that lasting prosperity requires freedom of speech, freedom to worship, freedom of association; and that to secure liberty at home, it must be defended abroad. (Applause.)

By your efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq and across the world, you are teaching young Slovaks these important lessons. And you're teaching the world an important lesson, as well: that the seeds of freedom do not sprout only where they are sown; carried by mighty winds, they cross borders and oceans and continents and take root in distant lands.

I've come here to thank you for your contributions to freedom's cause, and to tell you that the American people appreciate your courage and value your friendship. On behalf of all Americans, dakujem, and may God bless you all.

---

BIOLOGY VS IDEOLOGY:

Sex Ed: THE SCIENCE OF DIFFERENCE (Steven Pinker, 02.07.05, New Republic)

Summers did not, of course, say that women are "natively inferior," that "they just can't cut it," that they suffer "an inherent cognitive deficit in the sciences," or that men have "a monopoly on basic math ability," as many academics and journalists assumed. Only a madman could believe such things. Summers's analysis of why there might be fewer women in mathematics and science is commonplace among economists who study gender disparities in employment, though it is rarely mentioned in the press or in academia when it comes to discussions of the gender gap in science and engineering. The fact that women make up only 20 percent of the workforce in science, engineering, and technology development has at least three possible (and not mutually exclusive) explanations. One is the persistence of discrimination, discouragement, and other barriers. In popular discussions of gender imbalances in the workforce, this is the explanation most mentioned. Although no one can deny that women in science still face these injustices, there are reasons to doubt they are the only explanation. A second possibility is that gender disparities can arise in the absence of discrimination as long as men and women differ, on average, in their mixture of talents, temperaments, and interests--whether this difference is the result of biology, socialization, or an interaction of the two. A third explanation is that child-rearing, still disproportionately shouldered by women, does not easily co-exist with professions that demand Herculean commitments of time. These considerations speak against the reflex of attributing every gender disparity to gender discrimination and call for research aimed at evaluating the explanations.

The analysis should have been unexceptionable. Anyone who has fled a cluster of men at a party debating the fine points of flat-screen televisions can appreciate that fewer women than men might choose engineering, even in the absence of arbitrary barriers. (As one female social scientist noted in Science Magazine, "Reinventing the curriculum will not make me more interested in learning how my dishwasher works.") To what degree these and other differences originate in biology must be determined by research, not fatwa. History tells us that how much we want to believe a proposition is not a reliable guide as to whether it is true.

Nor is a better understanding of the causes of gender disparities inconsequential. Overestimating the extent of sex discrimination is not without costs. Unprejudiced people of both sexes who are responsible for hiring and promotion decisions may be falsely charged with sexism. Young women may be pressured into choosing lines of work they don't enjoy. Some proposed cures may do more harm than good; for example, gender quotas for grants could put deserving grantees under a cloud of suspicion, and forcing women onto all university committees would drag them from their labs into endless meetings. An exclusive focus on overt discrimination also diverts attention from policies that penalize women inadvertently because of the fact that, as the legal theorist Susan Estrich has put it, "Waiting for the connection between gender and parenting to be broken is waiting for Godot." A tenure clock that conflicts with women's biological clocks, and family-unfriendly demands like evening seminars and weekend retreats, are obvious examples. The regrettably low proportion of women who have received tenured job offers from Harvard during Summers's presidency may be an unintended consequence of his policy of granting tenure to scholars early in their careers, when women are more likely to be bearing the full burdens of parenthood.

Conservative columnists have had a field day pointing to the Harvard hullabaloo as a sign of runaway political correctness at elite universities. Indeed, the quality of discussion among the nation's leading scholars and pundits is not a pretty sight. Summers's critics have repeatedly mangled his suggestion that innate differences might be one cause of gender disparities (a suggestion that he drew partly from a literature review in my book, The Blank Slate) into the claim that they must be the only cause. And they have converted his suggestion that the statistical distributions of men's and women's abilities are not identical to the claim that all men are talented and all women are not--as if someone heard that women typically live longer than men and concluded that every woman lives longer than every man. Just as depressing is an apparent unfamiliarity with the rationale behind political equality, as when Hopkins sarcastically remarked that, if Summers were right, Harvard should amend its admissions policy, presumably to accept fewer women. This is a classic confusion between the factual claim that men and women are not indistinguishable and the moral claim that we ought to judge people by their individual merits rather than the statistics of their group.

Many of Summers's critics believe that talk of innate gender differences is a relic of Victorian pseudoscience, such as the old theory that cogitation harms women by diverting blood from their ovaries to their brains. In fact, much of the scientific literature has reported numerous statistical differences between men and women. As I noted in The Blank Slate, for instance, men are, on average, better at mental rotation and mathematical word problems; women are better at remembering locations and at mathematical calculation. Women match shapes more quickly, are better at reading faces, are better spellers, retrieve words more fluently, and have a better memory for verbal material. Men take greater risks and place a higher premium on status; women are more solicitous to their children.

Of course, just because men and women are different does not mean that the differences are triggered by genes. People develop their talents and personalities in response to their social milieu, which can change rapidly. So some of today's sex differences in cognition could be as culturally determined as sex differences in hair and clothing. But the belief, still popular among some academics (particularly outside the biological sciences), that children are born unisex and are molded into male and female roles by their parents and society is becoming less credible.

What makes this all especially delicious for us superstitious bigoted chauvinists of the Right is the way secular rational Academia rejects science completely when it conflicts with their politics.

---

DOUG WHO?:

From Psst to Oops: Secret Taper of Bush Says History Can Wait (DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK, 2/24/05, NY Times)

All week, Doug Wead has said the reason he secretly recorded some of his phone calls with President Bush was for history's sake.

But Wednesday, after a blast of criticism, Mr. Wead abruptly decided he had spoken too soon. "History can wait," he said, promising to turn over the tapes to Mr. Bush.

The disclosure that he had such tapes, recordings that spanned two years before the 2000 presidential election when he was an evangelical adviser to Mr. Bush, was published in The New York Times on Sunday.

Since then, Mr. Wead has appeared on several television news and talk shows to defend his actions, insisting several times that he had never sought to profit from the tapes and had decided to release some of them only after the president's re-election.

"My thanks to those who have let me share my heart and regrets about recent events," Mr. Wead wrote in the statement, posted on his Web site Wednesday. "Contrary to a statement that I made to The New York Times, I know very well that personal relationships are more important than history."

Mr. Wead, an author who drew on the tapes obliquely for one page in his recently published book, "The Raising of a President: The Mothers and Fathers of Our Nation's Leaders," said, "I am asking my attorney to direct any future proceeds from the book to charity and to find the best way to vet these tapes and get them back to the president to whom they belong."

The White House declined to add to its previous statements that Mr. Bush "was having casual conversations with someone he believed was his friend."

It's obviously easy for the President in this instance, because the "revelations" are so complimentary to him, but note how blithely he's ignored the whole dust-up in stark contrast to Democrats of late.

---

ASSAD ON THE RACK:

Iraq video claims to show rebels' confessions (MAGGIE MICHAEL, February 24, 2005, ASSOCIATED PRESS)

The Syrian intelligence officer who appeared on the U.S.-funded Iraqi state television station had a stark message about the insurgency-- he'd helped train people to build car bombs and behead people.

"My name is Anas Ahmed al-Essa. I live in Halab. I am from Syria," he said by way of introduction-- naming what he said was his home in Syria.

"What's your job?" he was asked by someone off-camera. "I am a lieutenant in intelligence."

Then a second question. "Which intelligence?" The reply: "Syrian intelligence."

And so began a detailed 15-minute confession broadcast by al-Iraqiya TV on Wednesday, in which the man, identified as 30-year-old Lt. Anas Ahmed al-Essa, said his group was recruited to "cause chaos in Iraq ... to bar America from reaching Syria."

"We received all the instructions from Syrian intelligence," said the man, who appeared in the propaganda video along with 10 Iraqis who said they had also been recruited by Syrian intelligence officers.

crank...crank...crank...

---

HOLY ROLLING:

Church auctioning off basement bowling alley (RUMMANA HUSSAIN, February 24, 2005, Chicago Sun-Times)

Parishioners at St. Mary of the Angels Church lost interest decades ago in the basement bowling alley.

Now they're about to lose the alley -- to the highest bidder.

The Bucktown church's vintage Brunswick six-lane B-1 bowling alley -- complete with original ball holders, ball polishers, two seats and pin washer -- will be auctioned off on eBay today with the starting price of $9,000.

The bowling alley was probably installed shortly after the church at 1850 N. Hermitage was built in 1920 for Polish immigrants, according to Diane Hudec, vice president of auctionBay Inc., the Chicago eBay consignment company handling the auction that will benefit the church.

The bowling alley wasn't used much after World War II, and most parishioners are not even aware it's there. It has been used for storage for 60 years, Hudec said.

Before the Internet, cosmic bowling and even television, churches were neighborhoods' primary social centers, so it was common for them to have a bowling alley, according to Jim Dressel, editor of the Chicago-based Bowlers Journal International, the oldest sports magazine in the country. Dressel said he doesn't know whether any other church in the Chicago area has an alley.

The Grandmother Judd used to take us to a church in Brooklyn with a bowling alley in the basement, which was wicked cool--only problem? you had to run to the end of the lane after each frame and set the pins by hand. It made bowling the most physically exhausting sport on Earth.

---

SHORT-SIGHTED:

The Downside of Democracy: What if the U.S. doesn't like what the voters like in the Mideast and beyond? (Juan Cole, February 24, 2005, LA Times)

With the emergence of Shiite physician Ibrahim Jafari as the leading candidate for Iraqi prime minister earlier this week, the contradictions of Bush administration policy in the Middle East have become even clearer than they were before.

President Bush says he is committed to democratizing the region, yet he also wants governments to emerge that are friendly to the U.S., benevolent to their own people, secular, capitalist and willing to stand up and fight against anti-American radicals.

But what if democratic elections do not produce such governments? What if the newly elected regimes are friendly to states and groups that Washington considers enemies? What if the spread of democracy through the region empowers elements that don't share American values and goals?

The recent election in Iraq is a case in point. The two major parties in the victorious Shiite alliance are Jafari's party, the Dawa, founded in the late 1950s to work for an Islamic republic, and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, or SCIRI, the goal of which can be guessed from its name. To be fair, both have backed away from their more radical stances of earlier decades. But both parties — and Jafari himself — were sheltered in Tehran in the 1980s by Washington's archenemy, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and both acknowledge that they want to move Iraq toward Islamic law and values. [...]

Although the Palestinian elections in January were widely viewed as a success — producing a pragmatic prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas — remember that the radical fundamentalist party, Hamas, boycotted those elections. Then, less than three weeks later, local elections were held — and Hamas won decisively in the Gaza Strip, leaving it more influential than before and poised for even bigger wins in next July's legislative elections.

And in recent years, democratization has also put Hezbollah in the Lebanese parliament. Serbian nationalists have won seats in Belgrade.

Are such outcomes acceptable to the Bush administration?

Strange that Professor Cole has so little faith in Islam. Nevermind that Hamas and Hezbollah are rapidy transforming into normal political parties as the prospect of power beckons, the Iranians are notoriously pro-American and pro-liberalization, so much so that their government is on borrowed time--opposed even by Ayatollah Khomeini's grandson woirking with the Shah's son--and is terrified of Iraq, whose Shi'ite clerics view Khomeinism as a heresy. Indeed, Shi'ism generally seems compatible, even unusually compatible, with liberal democracy. Mr. Cole seems like one of those Soviet experts of the '80s predicting long life for the Iron Curtain and discerning a hostility to the West where none in fact existed.

---

DOES BABY ASSAD HAVE ANY SUPPORT LEFT? (via John Thacker):

Lebanese business leaders plan strike to demand government resign (AFP, 2/23/05)

Leaders of Lebanon's banking, industrial and commercial sectors said they would shut down next Monday to demand the country's pro-Syrian government resign and that a "neutral" one replace it.

The strike would coincide with an expected vote of confidence in parliament, two weeks after the murder of former premier Rafiq Hariri in a bomb blast for which the opposition has pinned blame on the government and its Syrian backers.

"The economic authorities call for the formation of a new and neutral government which has the people's support, and the trust of the international community and Arab countries," the private sector said in a statement carried by the official news agency ANI.

---

WHOSE DAY IS IT FOR THE EPIPHANY?:

Could George W. Bush Be Right?: Germany loves to criticize US President George W. Bush's Middle East policies -- just like Germany loved to criticize former President Ronald Reagan. But Reagan, when he demanded that Gorbachev remove the Berlin Wall, turned out to be right. Could history repeat itself? (Claus Christian Malzahn, February 23, 2005, Der Spiegel)

Quick quiz. He was re-elected as president of the United States despite being largely disliked in the world -- particularly in Europe. The Europeans considered him to be a war-mongerer and liked to accuse him of allowing his deep religious beliefs to become the motor behind his foreign policy. Easy right?

Actually, the answer isn't as obvious as it might seem. President Ronald Reagan's visit to Berlin in 1987 was, in many respects, very similar to President George W. Bush's visit to Mainz on Wednesday. Like Bush's visit, Reagan's trip was likewise accompanied by unprecedented security precautions. A handpicked crowd cheered Reagan in front of the Brandenburg Gate while large parts of the Berlin subway system were shut down. And the Germany Reagan was traveling in, much like today's Germany, was very skeptical of the American president and his foreign policy. When Reagan stood before the Brandenburg Gate -- and the Berlin Wall -- and demanded that Gorbachev "tear down this Wall," he was lampooned the next day on the editorial pages. He is a dreamer, wrote commentators. Realpolitik looks different.

But history has shown that it wasn't Reagan who was the dreamer as he voiced his demand. Rather, it was German politicians who were lacking in imagination -- a group who in 1987 couldn't imagine that there might be an alternative to a divided Germany. Those who spoke of reunification were labelled as nationalists and the entire German left was completely uninterested in a unified Germany.

When George W. Bush requests that Chancellor Schroeder -- who, by the way, was also not entirely complimentary of Reagan's 1987 speech -- and Germany become more engaged in the Middle East, everybody on the German side will nod affably. But despite all of the sugar coating the trans-Atlantic relationship has received in recent days, Germany's foreign policy depends on differentiating itself from the United States.

And differentiating yourself from America has always meant opposing the spread of liberty.

---

RESPONSIBILITY WORKS?:

Maybe docs can just say 'I'm sorry' (JIM RITTER, February 24, 2005, Chicago Sun-Times)

State legislators are considering a surprisingly simple solution to the medical malpractice mess.

When doctors and hospitals screw up, they should just say "I'm sorry" and offer prompt compensation.

Patients treated this way, the theory goes, are less likely to sue for malpractice, and this in turn could help rein in skyrocketing malpractice insurance costs. [...]

Several hospitals in other states have begun apologizing for mistakes and offering compensation. One of the first is the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Lexington, Ky. The VA's candid policy has resulted in more malpractice claims but lower payments, according to a 1999 study in the Annals of Internal Medicine. An editorial in the journal said the VA policy "seems to be the rare solution that is both ethically correct and cost-effective."

University of Michigan Health System began a similar policy in 2002. The average number of legal actions pending against the system has dropped to about 130, from 275. The system also is saving about $1.5 million per year in legal bills.

"Patients are far more forgiving than we give them credit for," said Rick Boothman, the system's chief risk officer.

---

NEW PALESTINE:

Russia's forgotten war (Ilyas Akhmadov, February 24, 2005, Boston Globe)

TODAY'S SUMMIT in Bratislava between President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin is a golden opportunity for reassessing conflict and peacemaking in the age of terrorism. It is an opportunity to nudge one of the bloodiest conflicts in European history since the end of World War II toward a peaceful resolution. The war in question is the forgotten conflict between Russia and Chechnya.

The summit falls around the 61st anniversary of Stalin's effort on Feb. 23, 1944, to wipe out the Chechen nation by deportation in cattle cars to Central Asia and Siberia. This was recognized as an act of genocide by a resolution of the European Parliament in 2004. The memory of the deportations motivated the Chechen drive for independence, and in 1991 the Republic of Chechnya proclaimed its independence. Unable to remove the Chechen president by covert means, the Russian military launched its first war into Chechnya in December 1994.

During this decade-long war, more than 200,000 individuals -- one quarter of the Chechen population -- have lost their lives, including thousands of children. Roughly 300,000 Chechens have fled to escape annihilation. Tuberculosis, cardiac problems, deafness, and depression are rampant. As families have been destroyed, some surviving kinfolk have been driven out of desperation to suicide bombing attacks against Russia.

For Russia, Chechnya and the northern Caucasus region have been turned into a tinderbox of armed confrontations. Over the course of the last decade, the Russian military has lost more men than the total number of combat deaths in the Soviet Union's intervention in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

The war in Chechnya has consumed a large portion of Russia's defense budget. Opinion polls in Russia indicate growing restiveness at Putin's inability to bring the conflict to an end.

If Mr. Putin feels the need to put up a security wall or something in order to save face by all means let him, but it's time for Russia to quit Chechnya once and for all.

---

ITS BEEN A LONG, LONG TIME COMING:

Let us pray together: More Muslim women are fighting for equal treatment in the mosque (Vanessa E. Jones, February 24, 2005, Boston Globe)

Sitting in the mosque on Shawmut Avenue, Faaruuq justifies the separation of women and men by reiterating the Islamic ritual laws often used by those defending this practice. Women aren't required to do their Friday communal prayers in mosques. Men must pray shoulder to shoulder. Men and women must pray in separate lines. Add constraints created by a lack of space and a sweep of Islamic conservatism descending on some American mosques, and the result is separate and sometimes unequal conditions for women.

A national survey released by the Council on American-Islamic Relations suggests the problem is growing. Fifty-two percent of mosques put female congregants behind a partition or in a separate room in 1994. Sixty-six percent of mosques did so in 2000.

After years of whispered complaints, people are now beginning to discuss how to tackle the issue. Should it be done from within via quiet discussions with mosque leaders? Or should objectors take Nomani's cue and embark on attention-grabbing activism reminiscent of the civil rights era? Complicating the answer are fears by some that focusing on this issue reflects negatively on a community already embattled by bad press.

"They feel it's airing the dirty laundry," says Ingrid Mattson, a professor at the Hartford Seminary in Connecticut and the first female vice president of the Islamic Society of North America, "or that Muslims have enough problems, that Muslims are stereotyped and discriminated against so much, that this will only make it worse. I understand those concerns because it is a very difficult time for Muslims. . . . In the end, I think you just have to deal with the issue."

A handful of Muslim organizations are beginning to do that. The New York-based Women in Islam plans to release a brochure on the topic next month. The Council on American-Islamic Relations is working on a similar project. And the ISNA's Leadership Development Center is developing a guide that will discuss the woman's place in the mosque, among other issues.

"What you're seeing now," says Omid Safi, a professor of Islamic Studies at Colgate University and cofounder of the Progressive Muslim Union of North America, a newly formed organization working to reform Islam from within, "is a large number of American Muslims, some converts, some second generation, some African-American Muslims, who are saying, 'We don't care what you did back in Egypt or in Pakistan. We care about how we do it here. Our interpretation of Islam is just as valid as everybody else's.' "

Pity the poor isolationists--they wish for America to withdraw from the affairs of the world, but instead we are the Wittenberg of Islam's Reformation and George Bush its Luther.

---

CHOICE FOLLOWS NO CHOICE:

Health of a Nation: Entrepreneurs are sick of sky-high health insurance premiums, and the government is scrambling for reform. But can Uncle Sam save the deteriorating state of health care? (Joshua Kurlantzick, March 2005, Entrepreneur)

On the campaign trail, President Bush emphasized several potential reforms that he believes could lower premiums and improve access to care. For one, Bush has pushed for the expansion of association health plans (AHPs). AHPs would let business trade groups offer health insurance plans to their members. The association plans would be exempt from state insurance regulations, which can add costs to small employers' premiums; many large employers are already exempt from these state regulations. In theory, by banding together in AHPs, small employers could negotiate with insurers for better rates. Congressional staffers expect an AHP bill to pass Congress this year, since Bush is expected to push for it.

Bush has also focused on health savings accounts, or HSAs. In one presidential debate, he said, "Health-care costs are on the rise because the consumers are not involved in the decision-making process. It's one of the reasons I'm a strong believer in health savings accounts." HSAs combine a high-deductible health plan with a savings account so employees can save the money allotted if they don't spend it on care. They first became officially available in 2004. By giving consumers the ability to judge the costs and benefits of their health coverage, and to save the unspent money (HSAs can be taken with workers from job to job), HSAs may prompt consumers to use care more wisely, thereby cutting costs.

In a March 2004 study by Mercer Human Resource Consulting, nearly 75 percent of employers said they are very or somewhat likely to offer their employees a high-deductible health plan with an HSA by 2006. Employees may not welcome the news. According to a study by Washington, DC, benefit consulting firm Watson Wyatt Worldwide released in January, less than one third of workers who have health insurance know what HSAs are. Once respondents were given an explanation of the plans, 57 percent said they did not want to pay higher deductibles.

Bush plans to expand HSA utilization, partly by offering tax credits to small companies that contribute to employees' HSAs. He has also proposed extending tax credits for low-income health-care purchasers and has suggested capping the amount employers buying traditional insurance can spend tax-free--a means of encouraging them to shift to HSAs.

The paradox is that choice will only work if folks don't have a choice whether to be in HSA's in the first place. Make them universal and start them at birth.

---

THE DEAD DON'T VOTE:

Lawmaker finds a generation gulf on Social Security (Peter S. Canellos, February 24, 2005, Boston Globe)

The almshouse, a citadel of rust-colored brick overseen by a master and matron, was a place of fear for penniless elderly and orphans in the early decades of the 20th century.

By the time Richard E. Neal, the city's current US representative, was orphaned in the 1960s, the almshouse was gone -- rendered obsolete by Social Security. A monthly survivor's benefit enabled Neal to go to college and made it easier for his younger sisters to live with relatives.

Neal's experiences have made him a fierce defender of the traditional Social Security system, and now he is putting his story on display to build opposition to President Bush's plan to allow people to invest portions of Social Security taxes in private investment accounts.

But he has found that some people's experiences send them in different directions.

This week, as he brought his story home to Springfield, he discovered that loyalty to the current system fades with successive generations -- especially among those with no connection to the time before Social Security, from fears of the almshouse to the devastating loss of savings accounts and stock-market investments in the Depression.

If time starts flowing backwards the Democrats are sitting pretty.

---

IMAGE?:

Racist incidents jarring the French (Katrin Bennhold, February 24, 2005, International Herald Tribune)

Swastikas on the walls of a Paris mosque. An arson attack on a railway carriage commemorating French Jews who were deported to Nazi camps in World War II. Blatant anti-Semitic comments by a comedian.

A recent string of racist incidents in France has shaken the political establishment at a time when the country is battling its image abroad as a country where anti-Semitism is making a powerful comeback and anti-Arab sentiments are rising.

Jean-Claude sipped his Vichy water and wondered how people could think his country anti-Semitic.

---

ARAFAT'S DEAD AND ALL THINGS ARE POSSIBLE:

Arafat loyalists lose out in compromise deal (SORAYA SARHADDI NELSON, 2/23/05, Knight Ridder Newspapers)

Rebellious Palestinian legislators on Wednesday pushed more Yasser Arafat loyalists out of the Cabinet in a compromise struck after the intervention of Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas.

The political struggle leading to the deal reflected the restiveness and growing power of the younger guard of legislators. They've long been angry over the unwillingness of leaders who returned from exile with Arafat more than a decade ago to share power with the homegrown generation of Palestinian politicians.

With an election looming in July, legislators are also anxious to show a commitment to a financial and political overhaul of the Palestinian Authority, which has been plagued with corruption. They're particularly worried about the success of the Islamic militant group Hamas in recent local elections, fearing that Hamas candidates may put in a strong showing in July's election as well.

Under the agreement reached at a closed-door meeting between Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia and legislators from the dominant Fatah political faction, only two of the old guard - Qureia and the man he wants for his deputy, Nabil Sha'ath, will remain in the 22-member Cabinet to be ratified by the full Palestinian legislative council Thursday afternoon.

---

EICHMAN IN BAGHDAD:

Kurd who will seal Saddam's fate: Favourite for presidency insists on a federal, secular state (Anthony Loyd, 2/24/05, Times of London)

JALAL TALABANI, the former Kurdish guerrilla commander, prisoner and outlaw who seems likely to become Iraq’s President, has more reason than most to want Saddam Hussein dead.

The enmity between the two men is such that on one occasion, during the brutal struggle between Saddam’s forces and the Kurds in northern Iraq, Saddam offered an amnesty to every Kurdish fighter except Mr Talabani.

As President, Mr Talabani would have a chance to turn the tables on the fallen dictator. If Saddam is convicted of war crimes, including the slaughter of more than 182,000 Kurds, Mr Talabani would sign his execution warrant.

But he has a problem. “I’ve thought about it and this is one of my big problems,” he told The Times in an interview at his base in Qala Chwallan, northern Iraq. “Why? Because as a lawyer I signed an international appeal against executions and now this gentleman will be sentenced to death, and Iraqi people want to sentence him, to kill him. What can I do?”

Asked if he can resolve the dilemma, he laughed. “I hope so.”

Can what remains of the Left's opposition to the war--basically the Tmes editorial page, Hollywood and congressional Democrats--really endure War Crimes coverage?

---

FIRST KIDS PICKED:

India asks Israel for technical assistance to develop SLBM (Ran Dagoni, 23 Feb 05, Globes)

''Defense News'' reports that India has given the go-ahead to its Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) to speed up development of a submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM). India has asked Israel for "technical assistance" on the development work. Russia also wants to provide "aid".

The missile program is called "Sagarika". Defense News'' quotes top DRDO scientists as saying that they have received permission to extend the missile's range from the originally planned 1,000 kilometers to 2,500 kilometers. The Sagarika currently has a range of only 300 kilometers. A top Indian scientist said extending the Sagarika's range was intended to give it nuclear deterrent capability.

Okay, we get Israel, India, Taiwan, Japan, Australia, Britain and Poland and the other side gets? Who that matters?

---

PREPARED:

Ex-Israel air chief's appointment fuels speculation over Iran strike (AFP, Feb 23, 2005)

With the appointment of former air force supremo Dan Halutz as new chief of staff, Israel has put the ideal man in charge of the military for any potential air strike against Iranian nuclear facilities.

Chosen Tuesday by Defence Minister Shaul Mofaz to succeed the outgoing General Moshe Yaalon, Haalutz is the first man with an air force background to be chosen as chief of staff in the history of the Jewish state.

Like Mofaz, who was Yaalon's immediate predecessor, outgoing deputy chief of staff Halutz is also of Iranian origin.

---

A MAN'S GOTTA DRAW THE LINE SOMEWHERE:

Reid says Howard Dean is "not some wild-eyed, left-wing nut" (KRNV-TV, Feb 23, 2005)

Senator Harry Reid admits Howard Dean was not his first choice to be the new chairman of the national Democratic Party.

And he says he told the Vermont governor so much. But the Nevada Democrat told reporters in Reno Wednesday he's impressed with how Dean has, "taken the darts that were thrown at him" during the primary election. [...]

Reid says, Dean is "not some wild-eyed, left-wing nut."

Glad we cleared that up.

---

HELLO KITTY NATION:

Koizumi angry at two cops fleeing from club-wielding man (Japan Today, February 23, 2005)

Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi said Tuesday he has told Japan's public security chief to review police training and preparedness after viewing a television news report about a man easily chasing off two police officers.

"I couldn't believe it when the police officers fled instead of trying to seize the suspect when he came at them," Koizumi said, referring to footage of an incident aired by Fuji Television Network on its morning news program.

Where's Stacey Koon when you need him?

---

EVEN DEMOCRATS HAVE TO BE ABLE TO FIGURE OUT THIS ONE'S TOXIC:

Vague attempts (John McCaslin, THE WASHINGTON TIMES)

First it was Iowa and Connecticut. Then, we wrote recently, Texas.

Now, an Assembly bill has been introduced in New York to make hunting a punishable act of animal cruelty. Do we sense a pattern across this country, similar to what has beguiled Britain?

Anti-hunting lawmakers, confirms the U.S. Sportsmen's Alliance, are introducing "vague or poorly worded" animal-cruelty legislation in an effort to outlaw hunting. The latest New York bill, introduced by Democratic Assembly member Alexander Grannis, seeks to revise the state's definition of animal cruelty to include "killing or injuring ... wild game and wild birds."

---

SABER'S POISED:

Syria elite seeks Lebanon pullout (Nicholas Blanford, 2/24/05, Times of London)

ABOUT 140 Syrian intellectuals and human rights activists yesterday published an open letter urging Damascus to withdraw its estimated 14,000 troops from Lebanon to avoid further international censure.

The letter, addressed to the Lebanese opposition, said: “We support your demand for the withdrawal of the Syrian Army from Lebanon and in correcting the Syrian-Lebanese relationship.”

Syria deals harshly with political dissent. The intellectuals who signed the letter criticising their Government risk being jailed. [...]

Michel Kilo, a Syrian human rights activist and one of the letter’s signatories, said Syria had to change its policies towards Lebanon. “You have the international community against Syria. The Lebanese are no longer with Syria. The Syrians are feeling scared and isolated,” he told The Times.

More than 100 Syrian journalists rallied in Damascus yesterday to denounce the Hariri murder. The rally “reflects the sadness of the man in the street in Syria after the misfortune which has struck our two brotherly countries”, Saber Falhout, head of the Syrian General Union of Journalists, said.

As Walid Jumblatt put it:

"It's strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq," explains Jumblatt. "I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, 8 million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world." Jumblatt says this spark of democratic revolt is spreading. "The Syrian people, the Egyptian people, all say that something is changing. The Berlin Wall has fallen. We can see it."

---

Dumb and Dumber: Revisiting Conservatives as the Stupid Party (Orrin C. Judd, 02/23/2005, Tech Central Station)

---

DOES THE TIDE COME BACK TO DOVER BEACH?:

In a secular ocean, waves of spirituality (Peter Ford, 2/23/05, The Christian Science Monitor)

On the face of it, religion has continued to suffer setbacks in Europe recently. Just last year, the French government reinforced its secular approach by banning Muslim head scarves and other religious symbols from schools.

Catholic teaching on such questions as abortion, contraception, divorce, and homosexuality, meanwhile, is honored more in the breach than in the observance.

That would seem to continue a secularist trend visible in Europe for several decades. That trend is offset, however, by a growing awareness that European secularism is an aberration in a world where religion is largely on the rise.

The prominent role that religion continues to play in American public life, meanwhile, has undermined the widespread European view that modern societies inevitably grow more secular, and that religion is an attribute of underdevelopment.

"A preoccupation with spirituality is much more present now at a religious and philosophical level" than it was a few years ago, says Dominique Moisi, a French political analyst.

In Britain, the country's largest bookseller has noticed that preoccupation, and moved to meet it. Expanding the shelf space it devotes to religious and spiritual books, "we have increased our range over the last few years," says Lucy Avery, a spokeswoman for the Waterstone's chain.

Sales of such books rose by nearly 4 percent last year, she adds, and titles such as the Dalai Lama's "The Art of Happiness" and a modern-language "Street Bible" have become bestsellers.

"I have noticed that a lot of general-interest publishers are turning to religious books now for commercial reasons, because that is what the public wants," says Laurence Vandamme, a spokeswoman for Cerf, the largest French religious publisher.

In France, leading philosopher Régis Debray, once a comrade in arms of Che Guevara in the Bolivian mountains, has devoted two of his most recent books to explorations of God and religion. Le Monde, the French establishment's newspaper of record, this year launched a glossy bimonthly "World of Religion."

"The need for meaning affects the secularized and de- ideologized West most of all," wrote Frédéric Lenoir, the editor of the new magazine, in his first editorial. "Ultramodern individuals mistrust religious institutions ... and they no longer believe in the radiant tomorrow promised by science and politics; they are still confronted, though, by the big questions about origins, suffering, and death."

Rocco Buttiglione, a confidant of the pope who was denied a bid to join the European Commission last year because of his staunch Catholic views on social issues, has a ready answer to such questions. "For a long time they told us that science and maths would give us the identity we need," he says. "Both failed. Now when Europeans ask themselves 'Who are we?' they don't have an answer. I suggest we are Christians."

That opinion is not widely shared. Critics point to the millions of immigrant Muslim Europeans living in France, Germany, Britain, and Spain, not to mention Europe's indigenous Muslims in the Balkans.

Nor are there many signs of a resurgence of organized religion on a continent where church attendance has been plummeting almost everywhere in recent decades.

Yet 74 percent of Europeans say they believe in a God, a spirit, or a life force, according to the latest findings of the European Values Study, a 30-year, Continentwide survey. And youth workers in Britain are finding "consistent evidence ... that a secular generation is being replaced by a generation much more interested in spiritual issues," says Stuart Murray-Williams, a theologian at Oxford University who recently published a book entitled "After Christendom."

A wide array of religious groups has sprung up across Europe to meet that generation's needs, most notably Buddhist communities.

"I've noticed a steady increase in interest," says Suvannavira, a Russian-born, British-educated monk who runs the Western Buddhist Order's Paris outpost in a cramped storefront meditation center. "Our order has doubled in size since 1990."

"The discourse has changed," Dr. Murray-Williams says. "Ten or 15 years ago, any mention of spiritual experiences would have drawn blank looks. Today people are hungry to talk about them." Murray-Williams says it's too soon to say what all this portends.

"There is a kind of inchoate spirituality that could be significant, or it could be a passing trend," he says. "It will be a while before we know whether or not it is strong enough to challenge the culture of secularism."

That culture is showing signs of wear, argues Jacques Delors, who once bemoaned Europe's lack of "soul" when he was president of the European Commission. "I fear that the construction of Europe is sinking into absolute materialism," he worries. "Things aren't going well for society, so society is little by little going to start asking itself what life is for, what death is, and what happens afterwards."

We've examples of great civilizations, cultures, and nations that sank into a materialist wallow but rather fewer instances (none?) of such stopping the slide and reviving themselves. The reasons are obvious: everyone would like to be relieved of the burden of morality and personal responsibility. The question now is, once relieved will they resume the weight? It doesn't seem overlikely.

MORE:
Economists want to know: Do Europeans work less because they believe less in God? (Joshua S. Burek, 2/22/05, CS Monitor)

[R]esearchers are reexamining whether there might be a link between religious belief and economic performance.

In a 2003 study of nearly 60 countries, Harvard researchers Robert Barro and Rachel McCleary found that certain religious beliefs did contribute to economic growth. Notably, they concluded that a belief in hell was a slightly more potent economic spur than a belief in heaven.

Last year, Niall Ferguson, a professor of history at Harvard University, examined the connections between faith and work ethic in light of divergent trends he found in the United States and Europe.

Religious belief in North America has "been amazingly resilient" amid big economic gains, he says, disputing the notion that wealthier countries necessarily become less religious.

But abroad, Ferguson noted that a decline in European working hours coincided with a decline in faith.

---

THAT'S NOT HOW YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO PLAY THEIR GAME:

Same Old Bush (Dan Froomkin, February 22, 2005, Washington Post)

A reporter from the French newspaper Le Monde began a meandering question by noting that Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, on a scouting trip to Europer earlier this month, described himself as a new Rumsfeld. (That was to distinguish from the "old Rumsfeld" who had condemned European countries that refused to back the war against Iraq.)

"Same old Bush," the president interrupted.

---

AH, YES, 9-11 AS THE REICHSTAG FIRE...:

When Democracy Failed - 2005: The Warnings of History (Thom Hartmann, 2/23/05, CommonDreams.Org)

This weekend - February 27th - marks an important historical anniversary. One that the corporate media is not likely to cover. The generation that experienced this history firsthand is now largely dead, and only a few of us dare hear their ghosts.

It started when the government, in the midst of an economic crisis, received reports of an imminent terrorist attack. A foreign ideologue had launched feeble attacks on a few famous buildings, but the media largely ignored his relatively small efforts. The intelligence services knew, however, that the odds were he would eventually succeed. (Historians are still arguing whether or not rogue elements in the intelligence service helped the terrorist. Some, like Sefton Delmer - a London Daily Express reporter on the scene - say they certainly did not, while others, like William Shirer, suggest they did.)

But the warnings of investigators were ignored at the highest levels, in part because the government was distracted; the man who claimed to be the nation's leader had not been elected by a majority vote and the majority of citizens claimed he had no right to the powers he coveted.

He was a simpleton, some said, a cartoon character of a man who saw things in black-and-white terms and didn't have the intellect to understand the subtleties of running a nation in a complex and internationalist world.

His coarse use of language - reflecting his political roots in a southernmost state - and his simplistic and often-inflammatory nationalistic rhetoric offended the aristocrats, foreign leaders, and the well-educated elite in the government and media. And, as a young man, he'd joined a secret society with an occult-sounding name and bizarre initiation rituals that involved skulls and human bones.

Nonetheless, he knew the terrorist was going to strike (although he didn't know where or when), and he had already considered his response. When an aide brought him word that the nation's most prestigious building was ablaze, he verified it was the terrorist who had struck and then rushed to the scene and called a press conference.

"You are now witnessing the beginning of a great epoch in history," he proclaimed, standing in front of the burned-out building, surrounded by national media. "This fire," he said, his voice trembling with emotion, "is the beginning."

60.6 million American fascists can't be wrong.

---

THEY PLAN TO FILL THE STANDS WITH ROBOTS TOO

Brave new world. Get ready for robots that can think (Jodie Sinnema, Edmonton Journal, February 23rd, 2005)

Bowling is creating a 67.5-kilogram robot capable of speeds up to 20 kilometres an hour to play soccer with and against humans on Segway human transporters. The robot, worth at least $14,000 US, will adapt its kicking strategies and goal-scoring manoeuvres depending on how aggressive or defensive other players are or how muddy the turf is.

The U of A already has soccer-playing robots, but ones much smaller than Timmy that play with golf balls on fields about three times the size of a ping-pong table. Those robots only play each other and, being programmed in similar ways, don't have to reason with intellectual teammates who dribble down the field or deke the goalie by veering suddenly to one side, Bowling said.

Unlike these smaller soccer aficionados, Timmy -- fondly named after the wheelchair-bound cartoon character from South Park -- will soon be weaned off his joystick and given camera eyes and will have to play on his own with no human intervention, Bowling said.

In May, Timmy will be off to Atlanta, Ga., to compete with other robots and their human counterparts on Segways. Similar research is being done at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pa., where Bowling taught until last year. By 2050, robotics experts aim to field a team of robots that will trounce humans in soccer.

Word has it they are completely stumped on how to make them fake injuries.

---

W OUTLASTS ANOTHER ONE:

After Thompson's suicide, attorney saw clues (David Abel, February 22, 2005, Boston Globe)

The decision, he said, had nothing to do with the reelection of George W. Bush or the current trend in national politics, which provided a certain grist for Thompson's mill.

---

MAKING PATRICK HENRY PROUD:

Beirut's Berlin Wall (David Ignatius, February 23, 2005, Washington Post)

"Enough!" That's one of the simple slogans you see scrawled on the walls around Rafiq Hariri's grave site here. And it sums up the movement for political change that has suddenly coalesced in Lebanon and is slowly gathering force elsewhere in the Arab world.

"We want the truth." That's another of the Lebanese slogans, painted on a banner hanging from the Martyr's Monument near the mosque where Hariri is buried. It's a revolutionary idea for people who have had to live with lies spun by regimes that were brutally clinging to power. People want the truth about who killed Hariri last week, but on a deeper level they want the truth about why Arab regimes have failed to deliver on their promises of progress and prosperity.

A crowd was still gathered at Hariri's resting place well after midnight early yesterday. Thousands of candles -- many bearing Christian icons, others Muslim designs -- flickered in a semicircle around the grave and melted together into a multicolored patina of wax. Mourners have written angry messages in Arabic on a nearby wall denouncing Syria, whose troops occupy Lebanon and which many Lebanese blame for Hariri's murder. "The Ugly Syrian," says one. "Get Out of Here," says another. For people who have been frightened even to mention Syria's name, it must feel liberating just to write those words.

Over by the Martyr's Monument, Lebanese students have built a little tent city and are vowing to stay until Syria's 15,000 troops withdraw. They talk like characters in "Les Miserables," but their revolutionary bravado is the sort of force that can change history. "We have nothing to lose anymore. We want freedom or death," says Indra Hage, a young Lebanese Christian. [...]

"It's strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq," explains Jumblatt. "I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, 8 million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world." Jumblatt says this spark of democratic revolt is spreading. "The Syrian people, the Egyptian people, all say that something is changing. The Berlin Wall has fallen. We can see it."

You bet, they're nothing like us.....

---

THIS IS WHAT IT SOUNDS LIKE WHEN HAWKS CRY:

Bush gets weak support
for program cuts: Even loyal Republicans oppose many plans (The Associated Press, Feb. 22, 2005)

Bush’s rationale for the cuts is the need to control relentless federal deficits that the White House expects to set a third straight record this year, hitting $427 billion. He also would slow the growth of the Pentagon’s budget and pluck savings from Medicaid, farm aid, veterans payments and other benefit programs.

“The principle here is clear: Taxpayer dollars must be spent wisely, or not at all,” Bush said in his State of the Union speech this month.

Many interest groups and members of Congress, including plenty of the president’s fellow Republicans, think what’s unwise are his proposed cuts. That’s why his plan to save $15.3 billion by eliminating 99 programs and cutting 55 others faces bleak prospects.

Was anything in life ever more certain in life than that when you challenged supposed budget hawks of both parties to "put up or shut up" they'd shut up?

---

RATHER THE FUSELAGE (via Jim Yates):

Breaking the grip of secular fundamentalists (Steve and Cokie Roberts, Feb 21, 2005, Jewish World Review)

Democrat Tim Roemer won a Congressional seat in a Republican state, Indiana. As a member of the 9/11 Commission, he had strong credentials on fighting terrorism. Yet his bid for the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee went nowhere, and for one reason: as a practicing Catholic, he opposes abortion in most cases.

"It was a very difficult mountain to climb from the beginning, and people tried to hang a radioactive anvil around my neck on abortion," says Roemer. "They threw a couple of kitchen sinks and then some at us, with phone banks and mailings and efforts to derail the candidacy just based on that one issue."

Instead, the new chairman is Howard Dean — a favorite of pro-choice activists, and a leader of what evangelical Christian writer Jim Wallis calls the "secular fundamentalist" wing of the Democratic Party.

Which choice made more sense for a minority party that's lost control of every branch of government? A man of faith who doesn't need a visa to visit Red State America? Or a classic Northeastern intellectual who said, during his failed bid for the 2004 Democratic nomination, that he had just discovered that Southern voters take religion seriously?

From any practical perspective, Roemer was the better option, but the abortion rights lobby was simply too powerful.

Wing? Secular fundamentalism is the raison d'etre of today's Democratic Party.

---

BACK TO THE BASE:

Poll: Schwarzenegger's Approval Rating Slipping (Reuters, 2/22/05)

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's job approval rating remains high, but his support has slipped from the lofty levels during his first year in office, according to a poll released on Wednesday. [...]

The poll found 55 percent of registered California voters approve of Schwarzenegger's job performance and 35 percent disapprove. [...]

The sliding job performance rating reflects an increasingly negative view among Democrats and independents of the Republican governor. By contrast, he retains overwhelming support from Republicans, according to the poll.

The most important thing to take from this poll is that Arnold remains popular and easily re-electable despite now being seen more clearly as a standard issue Republican.

---

KEEPING THE SEAT WARM FOR CHIEF BROWN:

Defining Limits of Eminent Domain: High Court Weighs City's Claim to Land (Charles Lane, February 23, 2005, Washington Post)

There were two empty chairs at the bench, with Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist absent because of illness and Justice John Paul Stevens out because his flight from Florida, where he maintains a home, had been canceled.

That created an opportunity for Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, the most senior remaining justice, to become the first woman to preside over an oral argument at the court.

Sounding skeptical that there could be a blanket rule against using eminent domain to promote private redevelopment, O'Connor pressed Bullock repeatedly to say under what circumstances it might be allowable.

When Bullock suggested that a "minimum standard" might be to require cities to show there is a good chance that the promised public benefits of redevelopment might materialize, O'Connor replied, "Do you really want the courts in the business of deciding whether a hospital will be successful . . . or a road will be successful?"

But when Wesley W. Horton rose to argue on New London's behalf, O'Connor asked whether it would be "okay" for a city to replace a Motel 6 with a Ritz-Carlton "if the city felt Ritz-Carlton could pay more tax."

Horton said yes, prompting several justices to pepper him with questions about the basic fairness of shifting resources from one set of private owners to another, richer, set.

"What this lady [Kelo] wants is not more money," Justice Antonin Scalia said. "She says I'll move if it's for the public good, but not just so that someone else can pay more taxes. This is an objection in principle that 'public use' in the Constitution seems to be addressed to."

The simple decision seems to be to compensate owners as if the development were going to be successful.

---

THE ERA OF BETTER GOVERNMENT IS STARTING:

Government for Hire (STEPHEN GOLDSMITH and WILLIAM D. EGGERS, February 21, 2005, The New York Times)

In the past, those of us who wished to limit government's monopoly over public services were content to make the case for greater private delivery and then leave it up to the bureaucrats to figure out how to do it. But not enough attention has been devoted to one of the central policy and management issues of our time: what kinds of systems, organizational structures and skills are needed to operate a government that increasingly orchestrates (rather than owns) resources and purchases (rather than directly provides) services?

It must be recognized that involving partners to produce government services places more - not less - responsibility on public officials. It requires them, often with declining resources, to provide more public service than before, but produce less of it themselves. This in turn demands a different set of governmental abilities. It requires public leaders who understand that their job is to produce public value and not merely to manage activities.

This new breed of leadership must recruit managers skilled in negotiation, contract management and risk analysis who will tackle problems unconventionally and focus on results rather than on defending bureaucratic turf. Ultimately, this means fewer people overall at the lower and middle levels, but more highly skilled individuals at the top who are properly paid.

Record baby boomer retirements over the next four years - up to 50 percent in some federal agencies - provide an opportunity to transform the public work force without layoffs. But to attract a new kind of public employee, the government has to change outdated seniority rules, narrow job classifications and archaic hiring practices.

Management must move to center stage. Holding providers accountable and measuring and tracking their performance has to become a core government responsibility that is as important, if not more so, than managing public employees.

Public officials must be careful to retain control of outcomes even while their private partners directly manage services. This requires a delicate balancing act, building in the needed flexibility to enable dynamic change, while not becoming a captive of private vendors.

It's time to put the debate aside.

The size, power, expense and arrogance of government grow unless restrained. I’m not anti-government. But the more we rely on the government to do things for us, the less freedom we have, the less responsibility we take for ourselves and for others, the less potential we achieve. Often best public policy lies with some combination of government, the private sector, and not-for-profit organizations, and more likely at the local level which is closer to problems and better able to come up with solutions.

In the words of Daniel Webster, “Human beings will generally exercise power when they can get it, and they will exercise it most undoubtedly in popular governments under pretense of public safety.” C.S. Lewis agreed, “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny that sincerely exercises for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.” Edmund Burke wrote: “The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedience and by parts.” And columnist Jonah Goldberg says:

The doctrine of limited government holds that government is, well, limited — that governmental neglect at the federal level is in fact benign. Conservative dogma holds that the people cannot develop the habits of the heart necessary to take care of themselves if they are being taken care of by the government. Moreover, a government that provides services simply because they are demanded is a government that reserves the right to take as much of my property and wealth as it deems necessary to meet the demands of somebody else….

We used to believe that since men are not angels, limited government is necessary. Now it seems to be that until men are made into angels — and by our own hand — unlimited government is required. After all, flawed men will make demands on the government when they are hurting and until those flaws and those pains are remedied, their demands must stir the government "to move."… We know from history that every new program creates constituencies who will fight like hell to prevent a final, program-ending, victory.

In his book What’s So Great About America Dinesh D’Souza puts it this way:

The founders took special care to devise a system that would prevent, or at least minimize, the abuse of power. To this end they established limited government, in order that the power of the state would remain confined. They divided authority between the national and state governments. Within the national framework, they provided for separation of powers, so that the legislature, executive and judiciary would each have its own domain of power. They insisted upon checks and balances, to enhance accountability.

In general the founders adopted a “policy of supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives.” (Federalist Papers No. 51, James Madison) This is not to say that the founders ignored the importance of virtue. But they knew that virtue is not always in abundant supply. The Greek philosophers held that virtue was not the same thing as knowledge – that people do bad things because they are ignorant – but the American founders did not agree. Their view was closer to that of St. Paul: “The good that I would, I do not. The evil that I would not, that I do.” (Romans 7:19) According to Christianity, the problem of the bad person is that his will is corrupted, and this is a fault endemic to human nature. The American founders knew they could not transform human nature, so they devised a system that would thwart the schemes of the wicked and channel the energies of flawed persons toward the public good.

Likewise, commentator Andrew Ferguson says, “Government can work – can indeed be a positive good. With vigilant oversight, it can live within its means, deliver its services with relative efficiency, and make the lives of citizens safer, richer, and more convenient.” And Wade Horn, the Assistant Secretary for Children and Families in the US Department of Health and Human Services under President George W. Bush, has said the principle should be “not about expanding government; it is about doing it better.”

I worked with federal government employees as a contractor for 13 years, and found that they get a bad rap. Some were terrific, many were good, some were duds. While the civil service system does shield civil service employees from politicians’ whims, it gives little incentive to excel and protects those who aren’t “good enough for government work.” The same for the aspects of the contracting process which stifle initiative. We knew that the profit percentage on a government contract had to be less than for a commercial client. But we did not make enough money to invest too many of our own nickels in proactive work that could pay off for the taxpayer.

Stephen Goldsmith is former Indianapolis Mayor and currently is Professor of the Practice of Public Government at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. According to his faculty profile, “As Mayor of America’s 12th largest city, he reduced government spending, cut the city’s bureaucracy, held the line on taxes, eliminated counter-productive regulations and identified more than $400 million in savings. He reinvested the savings by leading a transformation of downtown Indianapolis that has been held up as a national model.”

In his book The Twenty-First Century City – Resurrecting Urban America, Goldsmith gives credit to a combination of actions: competition between private companies and government departments to provide public services, better understanding of what it costs to provide that service, the setting and measuring of performance goals that are customer-focused, and giving unionized public employees the opportunity to “be as innovative, effective, and cost-conscious as their private sector counterparts – and they can prove it in the marketplace.” He says:

The president of the local chapter of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Workers put it much more simply. Because we broke up our government monopoly and allowed city workers to compete to please customers, he said, “city workers are no longer asked to park their brains at the door when coming to work.”

Among the big accomplishments were higher quality operations for a lower cost of the city airport, wastewater plants, jails, recreational facilities; conversion of a newly closed naval base to private hands that saved 2,000 jobs, added 700 more jobs and avoided $180 million in federal expense for the closure in the process; reduced crime and improved quality of life in neighborhoods.

Of the many things they did, here’s one small example. The city decided to put up for competitive bid some street maintenance. City workers were asked to bid. Goldsmith writes:

The workers complained they could not possibly compete while carrying unreasonable overhead in the form of managers’ salaries. For a mere ninety-four workers in the street repair division there were thirty-two politically appointed supervisors – an absurd ratio, especially considering that most of the supervisors were relatively highly paid. In part to call my bluff, union employees told us that if we serious about competition we would eliminate several of these supervisors to give the union a real chance to compete.

By normal political standards the union’s demands would have been a show stopper. The supervisors were registered Republicans. I was a Republican mayor. These managers, and their patrons in the party, had supported my election. The union had supported the opposition and campaigned strongly against me. Now the union wanted me to fire politically connected Republicans to help a Democratic union look good.

We did it. We had to. If I had blinked and shielded my fellow Republicans, the message would have been clear: we were not serious about competition. In addition to laying off or transferring fourteen of the thirty-two supervisors, we provided the workers with a consultant to help them prepare their bid.

The union was surprised, impressed, and probably nervous. Workers now knew that they, too, would be finding new jobs if they failed to draw up a competitive plan.

Making workers responsible for their own destiny sent a clear message that for the first time in ages management recognized that the men and women who do the job know better than anyone what it takes to get it done….

For example, street repair crews previously consisted of an eight-man team that used two trucks to haul a patching device and a tar kettle. Once in charge, the city workers saw that my remounting the patching equipment they could eliminate one of the trucks, and by doing do reduce the crew from eight to five.

The city employees bid significantly below their private competitors and won the job decisively. While the city previously spent $425 per ton filling potholes with hot asphalt, the new proposal reduced the city’s cost to $307 per ton – a 25 percent savings.

We were shocked. In fact, many within city government doubted the union proposal. But when DoT actually did the work, workers not only met the bid price, they beat it – by $20,000. They increased the average production of a work crew from 3.1 to 5.2 lane miles per day – a 68 percent efficiency increase.

In New York City and State, where public employee unions have enormous power to block attempts to improve efficiency and outcomes, we’ve been less successful. Today New York City employs about 100,000 more workers than it did forty years ago, a 30% increase, while the population size has stayed about the same.

For those who would condemn Goldsmith and his allies as heartless he says:

We cannot simply pull out of communities destroyed by poor services and unwise welfare state intervention. But government’s involvement must take a new form, fostering market-produced prosperity instead of making income transfers through welfare. First, government must do right by its basic responsibilities – safety, schools, and infrastructure. Second, government needs to help remove the structural barriers to investment by helping reduce the cost of investing in homes or jobs by the private sector.

---

ON TO DAMASCUS:

Lebanon's Prime Minister Offers to Step Down (Edward Yeranian, 23 February 2005, VOA News)

Lebanon's pro-Syrian prime minister signaling he is ready to resign to help restore order in the country. Many Lebanese blame Syria for a huge bomb attack that killed former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri and 17 others last week. Syria has denied a role in the Hariri assassination, but tensions are running high.

Lebanon's pro-Syrian Prime Minister Omar Karameh says he is ready to quit and other top Syrian allies in the government are sounding worried. Mr. Karameh told Beirut's An Nahar newspaper that he would be willing to give way if there was "consensus over a new government, rather than chaos."

Opposition politician Marwan Hamadeh, who survived an alleged Syrian attack on his life last November, also insists the government must go, because "things can not continue as they are."

A famous economic maxim: when things can't continue as they are they don't.

---

AMONG THE UNBELIEVERS:

Bush does Brussels: President George W Bush's visit to Brussels was carefully coordinated to convey the impression that he needs Europe to fulfill his mission for the world. But the European Union was not falling for that sucker punch. (Pepe Escobar, 2/23/05, Asia Times)

Bush's trip may have been to Brussels, but it was all about Asia (China) and the Middle East (Palestine, Iraq, Syria, Iran). Bush insisted at all stops he now wants a "partnership" with Europe: Chirac and Schroeder, on the record, praised the new tune, but their diplomats insist that only facts will test the rhetoric. "It may be the same wine in a different bottle," quipped a diplomat. Bush certainly did not engage in his trademark born-again Christian fundamentalist rap that makes cultured Europeans cringe. But he insisted he wants to see "an arc of reform from Morocco to Bahrain, passing through Iraq and Afghanistan", which for many a European still means regime change by force. [...]

Bush in Brussels vaguely "encouraged" the EU's diplomatic approach [to Iran], but he didn't endorse it - ringing alarm bells in every diplomatic desk, just as former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter revealed in the US that Bush had personally signed an order for an air attack on Iran planned for next June. But some more optimistic diplomats, taking Rice and Bush at their word, agree that the EU's step-by-step strategy may suit Washington for the moment because "as they have admitted, they are not contemplating a military strike against Iran" [...]

As a public relations exercise, Bush in Brussels was carefully coordinated by Washington to convey to the world the impression that Bush II needs Europe to fulfill his self-imposed mission. But the EU made it clear: forget about a dependent relationship between a hyperpower and its vassals. Jose Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission - a pro-American - put it nicely as "America needs Europe and Europe needs America". But skepticism remains the name of the game in Brussels: "Style may have changed, but not substance," warns a diplomat. "We know the neo-conservatives remain at the core of the new Bush administration, formulating policy. With these people, dialogue is impossible. They are ideologues, and the EU has no ideology."

This may be the smartest thing Mr. Escobar has ever written. The trip is a nice bit of lip service, but we're not going to ever be serious allies again with people who don't any longer share the ideas that undergird our culture.

MORE:
Pope Calls Gay Marriage Part of 'Ideology of Evil' (Philip Pullella, 2/22/05, Reuters)

Homosexual marriages are part of "a new ideology of evil" that is insidiously threatening society, Pope John Paul says in a new book published Tuesday.

In "Memory and Identity," the Pope also calls abortion a "legal extermination" comparable to attempts to wipe out Jews and other groups in the 20th century. [...]

The 84-year-old Pontiff's book, a highly philosophical and intricate work on the nature of good and evil, is based on conversations with philosopher friends in 1993 and later with some of his aides.

In one section about the role of lawmakers, the Pope takes another swipe at gay marriages when he refers to "pressures" on the European Parliament to allow them.

"It is legitimate and necessary to ask oneself if this is not perhaps part of a new ideology of evil, perhaps more insidious and hidden, which attempts to pit human rights against the family and against man," he writes.

The Pope's fifth book for mass circulation, issued by Italian publisher Rizzoli, sparked controversy in Germany and elsewhere after Jewish groups protested against leaked excerpts comparing the Holocaust to abortion.

In at least two sections of the book, the Pope talks about the Nazi attempt to exterminate Jews and the wholesale slaughter of political opponents by Communist regimes after World War II.

In following paragraphs he says that legally elected parliaments in formerly totalitarian countries were today allowing what he called new forms of evil and new exterminations.

"There is still, however a legal extermination of human beings who have been conceived but not yet born," he writes.

"And this time we are talking about an extermination which has been allowed by nothing less than democratically elected parliaments where one normally hears appeals for the civil progress of society and all humanity," he writes.

And they say they have no ideology...

---

RUNNING ON FUMES:

China fumes as Japan and the US discuss security: Beijing feels left out (Jing-dong Yuan, 2/24/05, Asia Times)

What alarmed Beijing is what it views as the unprecedented clarity with which Washington and Tokyo define their security interests and security perimeter in the region, which now clearly includes the Taiwan Strait. This is seen by China as exceeding the jurisdiction of a bilateral US-Japan security pact, whose original objective was the defense of Japan. While the US-Japan joint statement issued last weekend also made a point to "develop a cooperative relationship with China, welcoming the country to play a responsible and constructive role regionally as well as globally", the spat and misunderstanding that could arise from this development could cast a shadow over the long-term stability in the region.

Beijing's strong reaction to a significant extent reflects the divergent perspectives of China on the one hand, and the US and Japan on the other, over the future of the region's security architecture, and their mutual suspicion and concerns over each other's long-term intentions.

It's easy enough to move from left-out to let-in--reform your government.

---

UNIFY IRAQ, DIVIDE IRAN:

Enter a unifier and a healer: The key questions for the United States regarding the future government of Iraq relate to the possibility of it being too Islamic, too close to Iran and too hostile to US forces in the country. On all counts, Ibrahim Jaafari, the man most likely to be the next premier, scores well. On paper at least. (Ehsan Ahrari, 2/24/05, Asia Times)

Ibrahim Jaafari is the United Iraqi Alliance' (UIA's) unanimous choice for the premiership of Iraq. He is not a novice, in the sense that he was long in opposition to Saddam Hussein's rule. He served as vice president in the interim Iraqi government. His Da'wa (Islamic Call) Party has long advocated an Islamic government; however, that aspiration is either tempered or even abandoned when faced with the awesome responsibility of governing Iraq. [...]

Jaafari has demonstrated his sophistication as a candidate for the job for several days, if not weeks. Indeed, if one had any doubts regarding the potential emergence of the UIA as a viable ruling party in Iraq, those doubts should have been dispelled right after the elections. The party has made it known its readiness to be all-inclusive and shunned from all manifestations of parochialism. The all-inclusive aspect of its characteristic was clear by its readiness to go out of its way in actively seeking the cooperation of the Sunni minority, a group that boycotted the election and then showed deep resentment about the possibility of the emergence of Shi'ite dominance in the next government.

The UIA acted as if the Sunni resentment was not even there. It has made it clear that it has every intention of making the Sunnis a real partner in the next government. The UIA's spurning of parochialism will be further demonstrated in its refusal to entertain any ideas that would jeopardize the unity of Iraq. The Kurdish groups had better re-examine all their aspirations that even remotely resemble the weakening the integrity of Iraq.

The administration of US President George W Bush has been besieged by a number of questions related to Jaafari, his Da'wa Party and the UIA. The question that is uppermost in Washington now is whether the UIA's commitment to avoid establishing an Islamic government in Iraq is real. Jaafari has shown special sensitivity to this issue. In fact, he recently made quite a revealing comment in this regard. He said, "Every country has its own character. Not all Iraqis are Muslims. Not all Muslims are Shi'ite. Not all Shi'ites are Islamic. We have to have a system that is open to all components of society."

The next significant question in Washington is how close Iraq will get to Iran. In the Pollyannaish world of the neo-conservatives there is no room for any nuanced approach toward Iran. Either a country can be a friend of the US and enemy of Iran, or vice-versa. There is no way any country can be a friend of Iran and remain close to the US.

Indeed, those who fret about how close Iraq could be to Iran are missing the point--the more liberal Iraq and Ayatollah Sistani will likely have a greater influence on the mullahcracy than vice versa and help bring about reform in Iran, at which point they'll both be our allies.

---

CAN'T BE GOING BOTH WAYS:

Romney's stance on civil unions draws fire: Activists accuse governor of 'flip-flopping' on issue (Frank Phillips, February 23, 2005, Boston Globe)

A national gay and lesbian Republican organization yesterday accused Governor Mitt Romney of "flip-flopping" on civil unions for same-sex couples, and other gay activists and Democrats complained that Romney was reinventing himself as a conservative to run for president.

In his speech Monday night, part of what many GOP activists see as the early signs of a presidential campaign, the governor said, "From day one I've opposed the move for same-sex marriage and its equivalent, civil unions." He briefly reviewed the Supreme Judicial Court decision that said gay couples could marry and said, "Some are actually having children born to them."

Yesterday the Log Cabin Republicans sharply rebuked the Massachusetts governor, saying his remarks indicate he is backsliding on his 2002 campaign commitment to support some benefits for gay couples.

He's running nationally now, not locally.

---

BRING BACK PAUL O'NEILL!:

Retirement plan sees million-dollar babies: A former Treasury secretary says the federal government should start an investment account for all babies -- and it will grow to a million dollars by the time they turn 65. (KEVIN G. HALL, 2/23/05, Miami Herald)

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.

To move away from Social Security's chronic funding problems, O'Neill suggests that the government put $2,000 in a special investment account for every newborn American. The government would invest $2,000 more each year until the child reaches 18.

The money would be invested in a conservative index of stocks and bonds and couldn't be touched until retirement. The investment would grow at a compounded rate, meaning that as the value of assets in the account grows, profit would be reinvested so the account would grow even more. Without adding a single cent beyond compounding after the child turns 18, he or she would retire at age 65 with $1,013,326 in the account, O'Neill said.

''If you do the arithmetic, the $1 million would provide an annuity of $82,000 a year for 20 years,'' O'Neill said in an interview.

O'Neill assumes a 6 percent annual return on investment. He calls that figure conservative since it represents the worst performance to date of any 25-year cycle on Wall Street.

This is where the death of the Democratic Party matters. It's the kind of idea they'd get behind if they were still functional and could easily win as part of broad SS reform.

---

BINK-BINK:

The only French God: Thought itself (Michael Moriarty, February 21, 2005, Enter Stage Right)

Upon completing Our Oldest Enemy by John J. Miller and Mark Molesky (an insightful history of Franco-American relations), I concluded that the French brand of Marxism is a veritable religion unto itself, a behemoth that dwarfs even the Roman Catholic Church at the height of its power. The Vatican of French Communism is the United Nations Secretariat Building in Manhattan. It is seen as the House of Reason, a sturdy branch on the tree of humanist evolution. The sacredness of life itself must bow before the God of Thought.

"Liberté, égalité, fraternité" are still only aspects of a God called Life. Why the Paris commune didn't include that divine word in its manifesto is perhaps the most profound reason for the repeated failure of the Napoleonic revolution and the certain cause of its ultimate demise at a final Waterloo – the U.S. presidential election of 2008. Even if these geniuses succeed in turning that election into our Alamo, that battle was only one defeat in a war of ultimate American superiority of soul.

Michael Moriarty, who portrayed the Assistant DA Ben Stone in Law and Order, lobs some blistering and insightful invective across the Atlantic. This is all the more amazing because he is a product of an Ivy League education and an actor.

---

UNDER PRESSURE:

Bush Turns Heat on Syria, But to Wait on Sanctions (Lucy Fielder, 2/23/05, Reuters)

President Bush demanded Wednesday that Syria pull its security services as well as its army from Lebanon, echoing France's remarks that Syrian intelligence controlled the country.

But Bush said before seeking U.N. sanctions, Washington would see how Syria responded to international clamor for it to quit Lebanon, which has grown louder since a massive bomb killed former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri last week.

"We will see how they (the Syrians) respond before there are any further discussions about going back to the United Nations," Bush told a news conference he held with German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder in Mainz, Germany.

Washington has cranked up pressure on Lebanon's "oppressive neighbor" Syria over the past week, recalling its Damascus ambassador.

You don't hear much from even those on the Left about how awful it is that the President is effecting regime change unilaterally.

MORE:
Iraqi insurgents said trained in Syria (UPI, 2/23/05)

Iraqi insurgents told Iraqi television Wednesday they were taught in Syria how to prepare and detonate cars bombs and roadside explosives.

Also a Syrian national, going by the name of Anas the Syrian, appeared on television and confessed he was a first lieutenant in Syrian intelligence.

The insurgents -- many former officers of the dissolved Iraqi army -- confessed to several crimes, including the kidnappings and killings of Iraqis working as translators with the U.S. forces. They also admitted to bombing attacks against multinational troops in the city of Mosul, north of Iraq.

They said they were trained in Latakia, Syria, by Syrian intelligence officers.

The televised confessions have been going on for three days and are bound to cause a crisis in relations between Iraq and neighboring Syria.

---

THE URTEXTS ARE LIKE CRAZY AUNTS IN THE ATTIC:

The Philosophy Gap: Another argument between the left and the center? Democrats have to dig deeper than that. (Michael Tomasky, 02.22.05, American Prospect)

We’ve known for a long time about these striations within the conservative movement. But we’ve also observed conservatives’ unanimity at election time, or when a major piece of legislation is up for consideration. We’ve explained this by citing their superior discipline. And it’s true, they are more disciplined. Conservative people by nature are more likely to heed their authority figures than liberal people are.

Relatedly, we’ve also explained it by citing their much stronger focus on getting and holding power. They set most of their differences aside, we argue, in the interest of winning, and when they do have disputes, they deal with them privately. The February 20 New York Times piece by David L. Kirkpatrick, in which he scored the great scoop of getting David Wead to hand him over the Bush tapes, underscored this. Bush’s insistence early in the 2000 campaign that the meeting with the religious right be private and unpublicized reflected his obvious realization that a public meeting could make him beholden to a group that scares a lot of Americans, so he made that group the promises he felt he needed to make behind closed doors. And the group, rather than denouncing him and running to the newspapers, said, “We understand, that’s fine.”

Both explanations are true, and I’ve written about both at different times. But both are about tactics. But what, I’ve been wondering lately, if there’s a deeper answer to the question of greater conservative sense of purpose? What if it’s not just about tactics, but about philosophy?

I’ve long had the sense, and it’s only grown since I’ve moved to Washington, that conservatives talk more about philosophy, while liberals talk more about strategy; also, that liberals generally, and young liberals in particular, are somewhat less conversant in their creed’s history and urtexts than their conservative counterparts are (my excellent young staff excepted, naturally; I’m mostly wondering if young Democratic Hill aides have read, for example, The Vital Center or any John Dewey or Walter Lippmann or any number of things like that).

Mr. Tomasky ignores the obvious point here: conservative texts are still read because, grounded in the profound judeo-Christian comprehension of human nature, they proved prescient and timeless, while the writings of the Left, derived from such nonsense as Materialism, Rationalism, Marxism, Freudianism, Darwinism, atheism, pragmatism, and a whole host of other trendy -isms, are even more embarrassing to read today than they were at the time.

---

NOT EVEN A WORTHY FOE (via Jim Yates):

The Traffic Accident in Syria in 1994 that May Lead to Lebanon's Freedom in 2005 (Daniel Pipes, 2/22/05, NY Sun)

The fate of Syria was in good measure determined on January 21, 1994. That's when, driving at a too-high speed to the Damascus airport for a skiing trip abroad, Basil Al-Assad crashed the Mercedes he was driving, killing himself and his passengers.

The accident had great consequence because Basil, then 31, was being groomed to succeed his father, Hafez Al-Assad, as dictator of Syria. All indications pointed to the equestrian, martial, and charismatic Basil making for a formidable ruler.

After the car crash, his younger brother Bashar got yanked back from his ophthalmologic studies in London and enrolled in a rapid course to prepare as Syria's next strongman. He perfunctorily ascended the military ranks and on his father's demise in June 2000 he, sure enough, succeeded to the presidential throne. (This made Bashar the second dynastic dictator, with Kim Jong Il of North Korea having been the first in 1994. The third one, being Faure Gnassingbé of Togo, emerged earlier this month. Other sons waiting in the wings include Gamal Mubarak of Egypt, Saifuddin Gadhafi of Libya, and Ahmed Salih of Yemen. Saddam Hussein's pair never made it.)

The possibility existed that Bashar, due to his brief Western sojourn and scientific orientation, would dismantle his father's totalitarian contraption; Bashar's early steps suggested he might do just that, but then he quickly reverted to his father's autocratic methods - either because of his own inclinations or because he remained under the sway of his father's grandees.

His father's methods, yes, but not his skills.

Bad systems produce bad leaders.

---

BEGINNINGS:

Palestinians Demand New Cabinet Roster: Prime minister, bowing to lawmakers' calls to bar Arafat cronies, agrees to revamp the lineup. The debate spotlights a growing rift. (Laura King, February 23, 2005, LA Times)

Back in the era of Yasser Arafat, Palestinian lawmakers were inclined to rubber-stamp just about anything their longtime leader asked of them. Even if they didn't, the autocratic Arafat would simply ignore their wishes.

But this week, something unusual happened in the halls of the Palestinian parliament. Lawmakers rose up and vehemently declared they did not want corruption-tainted cronies of Arafat to serve in the new Cabinet.

On Tuesday, after two days of stormy debate, some of it held in the predawn hours, Prime Minister Ahmed Korei agreed to overhaul the Cabinet lineup. In a face-saving compromise, he told lawmakers he had decided to appoint technocrats rather than politicians to key posts and promised to present a new roster of ministers for approval as early as today.

Reform-minded lawmakers cheered the turn of events, even while warning that only the final outcome would tell whether things had really changed since the wheeler-dealer days of Arafat, who died Nov. 11.

"This is the beginning of what could be very good news," said Mustafa Barghouti, who ran for the Palestinian Authority presidency last month on a reformist platform. "It shows that people are really fed up with nepotism and corruption and are seeing how democracy can change that."

---

TIME TO DIG UP THE KRUGERANDS...AGAIN:

The Overstretch Myth (David H. Levey and Stuart S. Brown, March/April 2005, Foreign Affairs)

Would-be Cassandras have been predicting the imminent downfall of the American imperium ever since its inception. First came Sputnik and "the missile gap," followed by Vietnam, Soviet nuclear parity, and the Japanese economic challenge--a cascade of decline encapsulated by Yale historian Paul Kennedy's 1987 "overstretch" thesis.

The resurgence of U.S. economic and political power in the 1990s momentarily put such fears to rest. But recently, a new threat to the sustainability of U.S. hegemony has emerged: excessive dependence on foreign capital and growing foreign debt. As former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers has said, "there is something odd about the world's greatest power being the world's greatest debtor."

The U.S. economy, according to doubters, rests on an unsustainable accumulation of foreign debt. Fueled by government profligacy and low private savings rates, the current account deficit--the difference between what U.S. residents spend abroad and what they earn abroad in a year--now stands at almost six percent of GDP; total net foreign liabilities are approaching a quarter of GDP. Sudden unwillingness by investors abroad to continue adding to their already large dollar assets, in this scenario, would set off a panic, causing the dollar to tank, interest rates to skyrocket, and the U.S. economy to descend into crisis, dragging the rest of the world down with it.

Despite the persistence and pervasiveness of this doomsday prophecy, U.S. hegemony is in reality solidly grounded: it rests on an economy that is continually extending its lead in the innovation and application of new technology, ensuring its continued appeal for foreign central banks and private investors. The dollar's role as the global monetary standard is not threatened, and the risk to U.S. financial stability posed by large foreign liabilities has been exaggerated. To be sure, the economy will at some point have to adjust to a decline in the dollar and a rise in interest rates. But these trends will at worst slow the growth of U.S. consumers' standard of living, not undermine the United States' role as global pacesetter. If anything, the world's appetite for U.S. assets bolsters U.S. predominance rather than undermines it. [...]

At the peak of its global power the United Kingdom was a net creditor, but as it entered the twentieth century, it started losing its economic dominance to Germany and the United States. In contrast, the United States is a large net debtor. But in its case, no plausible challenger to its economic leadership exists, and its share of the global economy will not decline. Focusing exclusively on the NIIP obscures the United States' institutional, technological, and demographic advantages. Such advantages are further bolstered by the underlying complementarities between the U.S. economy and the economies of the developing world--especially those in Asia. The United States continues to reap major gains from what Charles de Gaulle called its "exorbitant privilege," its unique role in providing global liquidity by running chronic external imbalances. The resulting inflow of productivity-enhancing capital has strengthened its underlying economic position. Only one development could upset this optimistic prognosis: an end to the technological dynamism, openness to trade, and flexibility that have powered the U.S. economy. The biggest threat to U.S. hegemony, accordingly, stems not from the sentiments of foreign investors, but from protectionism and isolationism at home.

And it is precisely the isolationists and protectionists, of Left and Right, who always insist that decline is imminent even as we keep rising.

---

APPARENTLY THERE WAS YELLOWCAKE IN THE BOMB:

Who killed Rafik Hariri? (Patrick Seale, February 23, 2005, The Guardian)

If Syria killed Rafik Hariri, Lebanon's former prime minister and mastermind of its revival after the civil war, it must be judged an act of political suicide. Syria is already under great international pressure from the US, France and Israel. To kill Hariri at this critical moment would be to destroy Syria's reputation once and for all and hand its enemies a weapon with which to deliver the blow that could finally destabilise the Damascus regime, and even possibly bring it down.

So attributing responsibility for the murder to Syria is implausible.

Didn't the Guardianistas learn anything from the whole WMD dog and pony show? It doesn't matter who did it--the assassination can be blamed on Syria and used as the lever for regime change, at least in Lebanon, and possibly in Syria.

MORE (via Tom Morin):
Pat can't figure it out either, Baiting a trap for Bush? (Pat Buchanan, February 21, 2005, Creators Syndicate, Inc.)

If Syria's Bashar Assad was behind the assassination of ex-Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri of Lebanon, he is, in the edited version of Gen. Tommy Franks' phrase, "the dumbest ... man on the planet."

The Beirut car-bombing that killed Hariri smashed Assad's hope of any rapprochement with the United States, forced him into a collision with President Bush, united the Lebanese in rage at Damascus and their own pro-Syrian government, and coalesced world pressure on Assad to get his 15,000 troops out of Lebanon.

The blowback from this atrocity, fully predictable, is Syria's isolation. Hence, it makes no sense for Bashar to have done it.

---

UNIVERSALIZING THE PARTICULAR (via Jim Siegel):

The case for Judeo-Christian values: Part V (Dennis Prager, February 15, 2005, Townhall)

Judeo-Christian values combine the two religions' strengths -- the Jewish emphasis on moral works in this world with the Christian emphasis on keeping God at the center of one's values and works.

Another example is the American Christian's ability to remain God-centered and hold onto traditional beliefs while fully participating in modern society. This has not generally been the case in Jewish life. Over the centuries, God-centered and Torah-believing Jews retreated from mainstream society. They did so because: 1) anti-Semitism forced Jews into ghettos; 2) Jewish ritual laws increasingly restricted contact with non-Jews; and 3) Jews are a people, not just a religious group.

On the other hand, Jewish rituals have kept Judaism and the Jews alive while the abandonment of ritual (for example, Sabbath observance) has hurt Christianity. And Jewish peoplehood has ensured action on behalf of persecuted fellow Jews while Christians usually did little on behalf of persecuted fellow Christians -- as, for example, those many Christians terribly persecuted under Communism; the Copts in Egypt; the Maronite Catholics in Lebanon; and the Christians of Sudan.

In sum, despite whatever differences they have, Jews and Christians need each other and Judaism and Christianity need each other. The Judeo-Christian values system has become a uniquely powerful moral force. Among its many achievements is that it is the primary contributor to America's greatness.

One germane point that Mr. Prager ignores is that Christians, in particular Americans, have acted on behalf of the persecuted of every faith everywhere, because Christyianity is universalist rather than particularist. Thus America will liberalize Egypt, Syria and Lebanon in their entirety.

---

INALIENABLE:

Judge Prolongs "Right-to-Die" Case: An emergency stay blocks the removal of Terri Schiavo's feeding tube, the same day a Florida court cleared the way for the move. (John-Thor Dahlburg, February 23, 2005, LA Times)

The long legal battle over a severely brain-damaged woman was extended at least one more day Tuesday, when a Florida appeals court cleared the way for the removal of Terri Schiavo's feeding tube, only to have another judge order it kept in place.

The emergency stay, issued by Pinellas Circuit Judge George W. Greer, expires at 5 p.m. today. David C. Gibbs III, an attorney for Schiavo's parents, said he would argue that enough issues remained unresolved in the case that Greer should extend his ban on disconnecting the tube indefinitely.

Bob and Mary Schindler have been fighting for years to keep their daughter alive. They were at her bedside in a hospice Tuesday, fearing her food and water supply might be cut off, when they learned of Greer's order.

"They believe God answered their prayers. Their daughter is alive for another day," Gibbs said.

We the People are the only thing that stands between Terry Schiavo and the husband who wants to be rid of her. For now, at least, the system is working.

---

WE'D AS SOON DIE ON VERY RARE OCCASSION AS PAY EVERY DAY:

Paying the Price for Safety (JIM HALL, 2/23/05, NY Times)

THE Air Transport Association, the lobbying group for the United States airline industry, is loudly protesting legislation backed by the Bush administration to increase a security fee by $3 per flight, to $5.50. At the same time, some Republican leaders in Congress are saying that aviation security should once again be the responsibility of the private sector.

How soon we forget.

On Sept. 11, 2001, America paid a horrible price in part because of flaws in the aviation security system. Now we risk repeating some of the mistakes that led to 9/11.

As a member of the Gore Commission on Aviation Safety and Security in 1996 and 1997, I saw the airline industry lobby against security enhancements that might have prevented 9/11. That was the second time the airline industry fought the recommendations of a presidential commission on safety and security. In 1990, the industry resisted the recommendations of President George H. W. Bush's commission on aviation security and terrorism.

Mr. Hall repeats the fundamental mistake that all those who've looked to assign blame for 9-11 have made--it's not about the airlines; it's about us. Americans are not willing to pay for the kind of safety the experts want.

---

THAT DAMNABLE LURE

Question of the Day (MSNBC, February 23rd, 2005)

---

THE RISING TIDE LIFTS ALL BOATS:

New Revenue to Help Fill Projected Gap (Evan Halper, February 23, 2005, LA Times)

An infusion of cash from robust business growth and improving stock market returns is flowing into California's coffers, leading the nonpartisan legislative analyst to predict Tuesday that the state's budget gap will shrink substantially.

---

TRUST THE FACULTY?:

Bucking the Deans at Dartmouth: A new challen