THE WORST CASE SCENARIO IS AN IMPROVEMENT:

UN is like the Twilight Zone, says Bolton: In his first interview with a British newspaper, America's ambassador to the United Nations tells Alec Russell why it is in dire need of reform ((Filed: 01/05/2006, Daily Telegraph)

America's bantam cock of an ambassador is something of a cult figure at the UN.

When meetings end he is followed by a crowd of cameramen keen to capture that famous walrus moustache and his colourful asides. Rival ambassadors salute his skill as a communicator and his diligence.

He keeps Washington rather than New York hours, starting work before dawn and often going to bed by nine. While he speaks off the cuff, he assiduously takes notes of others' speeches, the opposite of the usual UN style.

He is far less haughty than many of his predecessors.

But it is exasperation as much as envy that defines reactions to him in the UN. His undiplomatic ways have infuriated even America's allies and UN officials pushing for reform.

Eight months after President George W Bush made his highly contentious appointment, no one could suggest he has "gone native".

A long-term conservative hawk, in 1994 he said the UN could easily do without the top 10 of its 39 floors. He also said there was no such thing as the UN, just an international community that can be led by the US.

His language is a little more circumspect now but only a little. Has his opinion changed? "It's exactly what I expected ... an organisation that needs substantial reform," he replied

"This atmosphere is like a bubble. It is like a twilight zone. Things that happen here don't reflect the reality in the rest of the world.

"There are practices, attitudes and approaches here that were abandoned 30 years ago in much of the rest of the world. It's like a time warp. I think that's not useful for the organisation."

UN officials mutter that far from helping to push through much-needed reforms to ensure embarrassments such as the oil-for-food scandal are never repeated, his methods have impeded the chances of agreement.

In December, he forced a six-month limit on the UN budget, infuriating the developing world, by making further funding dependent on the passage of key reforms.

America's EU allies, especially Britain, had to negotiate a compromise - "they pulled his chest hairs from the fire" said a veteran UN observer.

Mr Bolton rolls his eyes when asked if he is combative because he is not really interested in reform. "That criticism is a complete non sequitur," he retorts. "My stance is not combative. I would describe it as assertive.

"We feel strongly that we need reform. Condoleezza Rice said last September we want a revolution of reform. It's not often an American secretary of state calls for revolutions."

Revolution is only an appropriate course of action when you don't mind the risk of completely annihilating the institution and starting from scratch. It's appropriate at the UN.

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CUT TO THE CHASE AND EVICT THE OTHER 16 MILLION, TOO:

Ayaan Hirsi Ali Loses Her Home (HotAir, 4/30/2006)

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is the Somali-born Dutch parliamentarian whose outspokenness on the rights of women under Islam has made her a marked woman. Islamists have issued a fatwa calling for her death. And now she’s been evicted by court order at the request of her neighbors, who find her security concerns a nuisance. The Dutch court used superseding European law as the basis of its ruling:

The court considers in its ruling that the neighbors have been put into a situation that has contributed to them feeling less safe in their own house. That feeling is extended to the communal living spaces of the apartment complex, but also to their own apartments. The court argues that this is a severe violation of one’s private life (as per Article 8 of the European Treaty for Human Rights).

The EU Treaty for Human Rights is, no doubt, nearly as elastic as the US Constitution, interpreted by the Ninth Circuit. However, there seems to be a flaw in the ruling. Where can she live without neighbors feeling "less safe"? It would seem that the only way to vindicate the human rights of European residents is preemptive guillotining.

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CONFUSING THE ACTOR AND THE LINES:

The Rehabilitation of the Cold-War Liberal (PETER BEINART, 4/30/06, NY Times Magazine)

Consider George W. Bush's story: America represents good in an epic struggle against evil. Liberals, this story goes, try to undermine that moral clarity, reining in American power and sapping our faith in ourselves. But a visionary president will not be constrained, and he wields American might with relentless force, until the walls of oppression crumble and the darkest region on earth is set free.

If this sounds familiar, it should. It was Ronald Reagan's story as well. To a remarkable degree, the right's post-9/11 vision relies on a grand analogy: Bush is Reagan, Tony Blair is Margaret Thatcher, the "axis of evil" is the "evil empire," the truculent French are the truculent French. The most influential conservative foreign-policy essay of the 1990's, written by the Weekly Standard editor William Kristol and Robert Kagan of the Carnegie Endowment, was titled "Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy." And since 9/11, most conservatives have seen Bush as Reaganesque. His adherence to a script conservatives know by heart helps explain their devotion, which held fast through the 2004 election, and has only recently begun to flag, as that script veers more and more disastrously from the real world.

Liberals don't have a script because they don't have a Reagan.

reagan and W are actually secondary to the script, which is indeed what the Left lacks because it no longer believes in good and evil, nevermind that America is the former.

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HAD ENOUGH?:

Six years later, the Dow is back:
Propelled by the economy, the Dow is nearing its all-time high of 11,723 from 2000. (Ron Scherer, 5/01/06, The Christian Science Monitor)

Despite soaring oil prices, the Dow, watched as a barometer of the economy and Main Street, has regained more than 4,000 points that slipped away after the dotcom bust and the 2001 recession. Now, the average is closer than it's ever been to its Jan. 14, 2000, high of 11,723 - a number that brings back memories of taxi drivers talking about their stock portfolios and a book predicting a 36,000 level for the Dow.

Behind the rebound is a solid economy, emphasized last Friday when the Commerce Department reported that the nation's gross domestic product grew at a swift 4.8 percent, the best growth in 2-1/2 years. [...]

Some analysts expect the next leg in the economy to be powered by the capital spending of cash-rich companies.

Yet Democrats are so deranged by George W. Bush they seem to be serious about running their midterm campaign on the notion that folks will want to make a radical change in the country's direction.

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A BIG FENCE WITH A WIDE GATE:

Poll finds Californians back comprehensive immigration policy (Mark Z. Barabak, April 30, 2006, Los Angeles Times)

Californians generally favor a carrot-and-stick approach to illegal immigration, mixing tougher border enforcement with a guest-worker program and a pathway to citizenship for people already in the United States, according to a new Los Angeles Times Poll.

By a ratio of more than 3 to 1, those surveyed said they preferred a comprehensive approach to the immigration issue, which President Bush and a bipartisan group of U.S. senators advocate, rather than the more punitive legislation passed by the House of Representatives.

Just gain control over the process and we can admit them by the millions without so much angst.

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TRAGIC ABOUT ANNE FRANK...BUT, ON THE BRIGHT SIDE, I GOT A NEW LIVER OUT OF THE DEAL!

American vampire (Debra J. Saunders, April 25, 2006, SF Chronicle)

TWO YEARS ago, the New York Times ran a story about a 48-year-old Brooklyn woman who, facing death after years of dialysis treatments and failing health, received a kidney from a Brazilian peasant who was paid $6,000 for the organ. The chilling story bared the human misery that surrounds the black market on human parts. Some donors faced ill health and even (unlike the recipients) prosecution. The kidney recipient talked to the Times reporter, but felt enough shame that she did not want her name in the newspaper.

Last week, The Chronicle ran a story by reporter Vanessa Hua about a San Mateo man who flew to Shanghai and paid $110,000 for a liver -- with nary a thought about human-rights activists' contention that China has executed prisoners in order to harvest their organs. Not only was Eric De Leon's name in the paper, he even has a blog about his Shanghai transplant. The man clearly is not ashamed.

Last year, the Chinese deputy health minister admitted, as he promised reform, that the organs of executed prisoners were sold to foreigners. This month, the South China Morning Post reported that a leading Chinese transplant surgeon estimated that more than 99 percent of transplanted organs in China came from executed prisoners. [...]

[A]s the De Leons blogged, "You and I have no right and are in no position to know and/or judge China's judicial system." In De Leon's America, you don't judge, you use other people's parts.

There seems little doubt that in a food shortage such folks would dumpster dive at abortion clinics to find meat for dinner.

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THREE-FER (via Gene Brown):

A battle for oil could set the world aflame: International powers will do everything to protect their access to dwindling resources. We are mad not to have an alternative strategy (Will Hutton, April 30, 2006, The Observer)

Oil is transforming world politics. Iran can afford to face down the wrath of the West and be robust about becoming a nuclear power because it has the cast-iron support of China - secured by oil.

In November 2004, Iran gave China the rights to exploit the giant Yadavaran field. Importantly, China plans to bring this oil into China, not across the Indian Ocean and through the Malacca Straits, but by pipeline across central Asia, free from the surveillance of the US fleet. China's attitude to Iran is foretold; it has refused to condemn Sudan over the killings in Darfur since Sudan allowed it to build a 500-mile pipeline to the coast. Ahmadinejad can therefore be 100 per cent certain that China will veto any attempt to win UN approval for military intervention in Iran.

China feels acutely vulnerable over oil. It has no strategic oil reserves and deputy chief of the Chinese General Staff, General Xiong Guangkai, has called for a build-up of both reserves and military capacity and for a fleet to defend its oil tankers. Iran is part of this equation. So is winning control of oil and gas reserves in the East China Sea, where the key is the disputed sovereignty of the uninhabited Senkaku Islands.

In February of last year, Japan formally occupied the islands to back up its sovereignty claim; in April, China replied with an ultimatum to Japan to withdraw and in September sent a naval force to patrol the disputed territory.

So far, China has backed off, but there is no question that it expects at least a compromise settlement that the Japanese, themselves vulnerable over oil, are reluctant to concede. The US has to be careful to keep China onside.

There's no bad reason to regime change China, but doing it over the issues of Iran, Japan and oil would be quite sensible.

MORE:
Japan to step up its Asia security role: Accord on realignment of US forces in Japan, expected Monday, aims to boost security cooperation. (Bennett Richardson, 5/01/06, The Christian Science Monitor)

An agreement to realign US forces in Japan, to be finalized Monday in Washington, marks another step forward for Tokyo's ambitions to play an integral part in maintaining stability in a potentially volatile Asia-Pacific region. [...]

The agreement is expected to lead to closer cooperation between the two militaries, as well as a more equal security partnership. The accord provides for the relocation of both a US division headquarters from the state of Washington and the Japanese Ground Self-Defense Forces Command to Camp Zama in Kanagawa, making intelligence sharing more comprehensive. It also establishes joint US-Japan use of the air base at Yokota, near Tokyo.

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TUESDAY'S CHILD:

Where's the dissent about source of quote? (MARK STEYN, 4/30/06, Chicago Sun-Times)

John Kerry announced this week's John Kerry Iraq Policy of the Week the other day: "Iraqi politicians should be told that they have until May 15 to deal with these intransigent issues and at last put together an effective unity government or we will immediately withdraw our military."

With a sulky pout perhaps? With hands on hips and a full flip of the hair?

Did he get that from Churchill? "We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, at least until May 15, when I have a windsurfing engagement off Nantucket."

Actually, no. He got it from Thomas Jefferson. "This is not the first time in American history when patriotism has been distorted to deflect criticism and mislead the nation," warned Sen. Kerry, placing his courage in the broader historical context. "No wonder Thomas Jefferson himself said: 'Dissent is the greatest form of patriotism.' "

Close enough. According to the Jefferson Library: "There are a number of quotes that we do not find in Thomas Jefferson's correspondence or other writings; in such cases, Jefferson should not be cited as the source. Among the most common of these spurious Jefferson quotes are: 'Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.' "

Such petulance would have seen us withdraw from Germany before Adenauer was in place.

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WHISTLING PAST TORA BORA:

Osama Needs More Mud Huts (Fareed Zakaria, May 8, 2006, Newsweek)

Al Qaeda Central, by which I mean the dwindling band of brothers on the Afghan-Pakistani border, appears to have turned into a communications company. It's capable of producing the occasional jihadist cassette, but not actual jihad. I know it's risky to say this, as Qaeda leaders may be quietly planning some brilliant, large-scale attack. But the fact that they have not been able to do one of their trademark blasts for five years is significant in itself.

Moreover, bin Laden's latest appeals have a very changed character. His messages used to be lyrical, sharp and highly intelligent. They operated at a high plane, rarely revealing anything about Al Qaeda's operations. In fact, intelligence agencies looked for small signs—an offhand reference, an item of apparel—to reveal where Al Qaeda would strike next. Bin Laden's most recent appeal is a mishmash of argument and detail, and seems slightly crazed. He has broadened his verbal attacks against the "Zionist-Crusaders" to include the United Nations and China. The latter he condemns because it "represents the Buddhists and Pagans of the world."

Like Hitler crazily declaring war on the United States after Pearl Harbor, bin Laden is adding to his slew of formidable enemies: China was the only major world power that was unconcerned about him. (And his reference to the United Nations as a "Zionist-Crusader tool" would surely surprise most Israelis.) Bin Laden also makes some plaintive appeals to Muslims to rise up and attack the "crusaders" in the west of Sudan. This shows desperation because there are no "crusaders" in Sudan. The troops there are African Union peacekeepers. But more interestingly, the victims in Darfur are Muslim. Bin Laden's real objective appears to be to support the government in Sudan—which once housed him—as it brutally exterminates tribes that oppose it. What does this have to do with Islam? Most revealingly, bin Laden makes a parochial appeal for foreign aid, to help those Qaeda supporters in Waziristan who have been rendered homeless by Pakistani Army attacks. That suggests he and his friends are having a rough time. Strip away the usual hot air, and bin Laden's audiotape is the sign of a seriously weakened man.

The change in tone may just be because OBL is dead these past five years.

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SWING KIDS:

A Walk May Not Be as Good as a Hit (ALAN SCHWARZ, 4/30/06, NY Times)

David Neft, a retired vice president for research at Gannett and an editor of several baseball statistical tomes, was looking at OPS recently and realized it needed some updating. When he started his work, he harked back to his Columbia University economics classes.

"You look at it like opportunity cost," Neft, 69, said. "It isn't just what you do with capital, but what you could have done."

When considering the value of a batter's walks, he reasoned, the benefit of reaching first base should first be diminished by the opportunity cost of his power being unplugged.

"Not all walks are created equal — they're batter-dependent," Neft said. "Any manager is less upset when his pitcher walks the cleanup hitter than when he walks the No. 9 hitter. They aren't crazy. They intuitively understand this concept."

Neft prefers to view walks somewhat backward, through the eyes of the pitcher. In figuring what he calls on-base advantage, walks (and times hit by pitch) are weighted not as full-unit successes for the batter, but by their marginal benefit beyond the batter's sidestepped slugging percentage.

For example, walks for Pujols are worth only .110 to him (1 minus his gargantuan .890 slugging percentage entering Friday's games). To a less brawny batter like his St. Louis teammate Yadier Molina, walks are worth .792 (1 minus .208).

However jarring to those riding the modern walk bandwagon, Neft's refinement makes perfect sense. From the pitcher's standpoint, a batter expected to slug 1.000, on average, should always be walked because his average hit is more damaging than a walk.

Meanwhile, walking a player with a .000 slugging percentage is grounds for an early shower, because he is no threat in the first place. The higher the slugging percentage, the less costly the walk.

Neft then adds a batter's on-base advantage to slugging percentage for a refined OPS — call it OAPS — to get a better idea of how dangerous a hitter has actually been. This does not knock Pujols off his perch as the season's best hitter so far, but it does bring him back to the pack somewhat. His 1.385 OPS is 82 percent higher than the National League average of .760; his 1.250 OAPS is 63 percent higher than average.

In contrast, players who rarely walk, like the Blue Jays' Alex Rios and the Rangers' Kevin Mench, move up in the rankings because their slugging is unleashed more often.

While Pujols, Jason Giambi and other players who walk frequently sit in dry dock for a dozen or more plate appearances every month, the likes of Rios and Mench are getting to swing the bat (for now) and have their slugging affect games.

"It doesn't always make much difference in rating hitters, but it's a more realistic reflection of what's going on in the game," Neft said.

The other night Hector Luna stole second with Albert Pujols up with predictable results. Even on a passed ball or wild pitch the runner should stay at first when Albert is at the plate.

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WHEN ZINGERS ARE TRUISMS:

Bush Addresses Press Alongside Lookalike (ELIZABETH WHITE, 4/30/06, Associated Press)

The featured entertainer was Stephen Colbert, whose Comedy Central show "The Colbert Report" often lampoons the Washington establishment. [...]

He...paid mock tribute to Bush as a man who "believes Wednesday what he believed Monday, despite what happened Tuesday."

You could hardly ask for a better pocket definition of a conservative--someone who doesn't abandon core principles because of a bad day.

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EVEN JUAN COLE FINDS AN ACORN ONCE IN AWHILE (via Pepys):

Barnes & Noble Goes to Baghdad: A brilliant plan to send American books to the Middle East. (Fred Kaplan, April 28, 2006, Slate)

Juan Cole, a blogger and professor of Middle Eastern history at the University of Michigan, has come up with an intriguing idea for how to fill this gap. He wants to hire skilled linguists to translate into Arabic the classic works of American political thought—especially those works that deal with freedom of religion, division of powers, sovereignty of the people, and equal rights. He has in mind the essays and speeches of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Tom Paine, Benjamin Franklin, Martin Luther King Jr., and Susan B. Anthony; a solid history of American Jews and other minority groups; maybe a few good books, written by American historians, about Iraq. Cole also wants to subsidize Middle Eastern publishers to print these books in large numbers and at low prices, and he wants to pay fees to book dealers throughout the region—just as publishers pay Borders and Barnes & Noble here—to display the books prominently.

This isn't just an idea. Cole has established the Global Americana Institute and the Library of Americana Translation Project. Since he outlined the idea in his blog late last year, readers have sent him $13,000. He claims that some foundations are "jumping-up-and-down enthusiastic" to pour in the big bucks, once he obtained the legal status of a nonprofit organization. The federal government just gave him this status two weeks ago. He's filling out the grant applications now. He also recently returned from the Beirut international book fair, where he says several Middle Eastern publishers and dealers expressed great interest in the project (and, no doubt, in the prospect of the money).

Mr. Kaplan didn't work himself into such high dudgeon when an Israeli think tank similarly took it upon itself to translate the great works of Anglo-American liberalism into Hebrew. Of course, one has to not understand de Tocqueville at all to see something wrong with such projects being voluntary citizen initiatives rather than government projects.

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YOU MEAN PAT BUCHANAN'S KIDS DON'T WORK THERE?:

Immigration's Bottom Line: How a Restaurant and Its Workers Ripple Through the Economy (Neil Irwin and Dana Hedgpeth, April 30, 2006, Washington Post)

At table 10 of the Oval Room, a high-price lawyer slurped an $8 bowl of asparagus soup. Over at table 71, a crowd of Office and Management and Budget staffers toasted a retiring colleague, while at table 76, a White House correspondent leaned in to hear what her lunch partner was saying.

In the kitchen of the restaurant, there was a different kind of kaleidoscope. The sous-chef, a Panamanian immigrant, directed two cooks from El Salvador, one from Guatemala and one from Honduras. A Salvadoran immigrant ran the food to the tables. All the activity was monitored by the general manager, an Austrian by birth, who needs to satisfy the owner, originally from India.

Just as all of those workers depend on the swirl of official Washington business for their livelihood, official Washington depends on them. Tomorrow, immigrant groups plan to boycott workplaces and stores to prove just that point. But one day of activity at the Oval Room, a sleekly designed spot a block from the White House, shows how difficult it is to make any kind of simple calculation.

The tangled web of economic connections among immigrants and those born in the United States creates jobs at a Philadelphia seafood distributor and revenue for the local cable company, even as it causes a financial drain on local hospitals and schools. The impacts are so intertwined that significant changes to immigration laws could change the nation's commerce in unforeseen ways.

"We would not exist without immigrant labor," said Ashok Bajaj, owner of the restaurant. "If the laws change, the entire economics of the restaurant industry would change, too."

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FIRST, MAKE IT FUNNY:

A Children's Cartoon From the Middle East Has a New Mideast Peace Plan (JACQUES STEINBERG, 4/30/06, NY Times)

The show, "Ben and Izzy," is about the sometimes-rocky friendship between two 11-year-old boys — one American, one Arab. Though the show is meant, first and foremost, to be entertaining, each character serves at least partly as a proxy for the anxieties of the Middle East. As the queen's involvement and its lavish promotion suggest, the series' pedigree is unique. [...]

"Ben and Izzy," which features three-dimensional, computer-generated graphics evocative of "Toy Story" and "Finding Nemo," is being produced by a fledgling Jordanian media company named Rubicon, which regards Pixar, the American animation studio that made those movies, as a role model. Led by Randa Ayoubi, 43, a Jordanian woman who was first exposed to American cartoons through imported episodes of "Tom and Jerry" and "The Flintstones," Rubicon aspires to demolish the boundaries separating the world's children by exporting animated shows and movies produced in the Mideast. The venture also hopes to turn a profit, and "Ben and Izzy" is its calling card.

Whether or not "Ben and Izzy" ever gets the opportunity to find an audience — in America, the creators have made preliminary presentations not only to Cartoon Network but also Discovery Kids and PBS, among others —the story of the show's creation is compelling in its own right, as if a United Nations meeting had played out in the back room of a television studio.

The international crew behind "Ben and Izzy" is led by an American, David Pritchard, a onetime "Simpsons" producer whom Rubicon hired as the series' executive producer. Among the others on his creative team are three Iraqis — one is the lead animator; two others are artists — as well as a Jordanian (the art director) and a Palestinian (technical director). Rounding out the roster is King Abdullah II of Jordan — who, when not running his country, relaxes with the queen by watching "The Simpsons" via satellite. (Their four young children, Queen Rania said in a recent telephone interview from Amman, are devotees of American fare like reruns of "Lizzie McGuire" on the Disney Channel, "SpongeBob SquarePants" on Nickelodeon and "Dexter's Laboratory" on the Cartoon Network.)

Mr. Pritchard, who was also a producer of "Family Guy" and before that an international banker with business in Jordan, said he has met with the king throughout the early development of "Ben and Izzy," to show him drafts of scripts and even some rough animation. Among the investors in Rubicon is the King Abdullah II Fund for Development, which was established by royal decree in 2001 to invest in technology and other ventures.

The main advice the king has given him, Mr. Pritchard said the other day by telephone from Amman, "is to make sure it's funny." The creators say they have taken that dictum to heart, providing Benjamin Martin (the American, whose grandfather, like Izzy's, is an archeologist) and Izzy Aziz (born in Jordan, his full given name is Issam) all manner of raucous adventures. Traveling back through moments in history, they are to be accompanied by a genie named Yasmine and one step ahead of an evil, obese antiquities dealer named Clutchford Wells.

But the real goal of "Ben and Izzy" is more serious: to help young Americans and Arabs steer clear of the prejudices of their parents and grandparents, which may have been reinforced by the Sept. 11 attacks and the war in Iraq. In promotional materials, Ben the American is described as "a symbol for his country" who is "big" and "energetic," but "on the negative side, he is a bit xenophobic, self-centered, needs-to-win competitive."

"Like his native land," the creators write, "he sometimes blunders into situations without thinking."

Izzy the Jordanian, by contrast, is "slight of build, sinewy and studious," but "on the downside, Izzy can be a little too serious, self-righteous, superior, even devious."

The boys don't like each other at first — they argue but don't fight with guns or knives, the promotional materials point out — but they will ultimately learn "that as a team, they can outsmart almost anyone."

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SHIFTING SANDS:

Saudi Arabia's unseen reform: Saudi Arabia is mainly viewed by others as a traditionally conservative society, particularly in its attitudes towards women. But, below the surface change is happening, even if reformers are wary of moving too quickly in case they face a traditionalist backlash. (Bridget Kendall, 4/30/06, BBC)

The protest by Saudi women who dared flout the ban on driving during the first Iraq war in 1991 had been disastrous, prompting a wave of conservative anger. That mistake must not be repeated this time.

"We lost 30 years, derailed by those who rejected the Western model and wanted to go back to the 14th century," said one woman, a senior executive in an oil company.

"We can't afford to lose more time. We educated Saudi women have been quietly empowering ourselves for decades." she went on, "Now we hope society is ready. But we mustn't alarm anybody."

The key, all agreed, was women's education.

Saudi universities are segregated, separate campuses for men and women, to the extent that male lecturers as a rule only interact with female students via videophone linkups.

But there are now more female than male students in Saudi Arabia all keen to seize new opportunities and an inevitable threat to young Saudi males, already facing rising unemployment.

From a European point of view, it is reform at snail's pace. Seen through Saudi eyes, there is a definite shift taking place.

And the key, it seems, is that it has been blessed by the country's new ruler, King Abdullah.

There is no democracy here.

There are no political parties, or even a proper parliament. And criticism of the ruling Royal Family is out of the question.

Ask someone about Saudi princes and you will find the conversation soon peters into silence.

But a reform-minded King can send a signal no-one will disobey, even if privately they are against it.

Absolute monarchy has its uses.

Of course, one of the key reforms is to retain the monarchy but make it not absolute.

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GOOD RIDDANCE:

France speculates on PM's future (Andre Vornic, 4/30/06, BBC News)

There is widespread speculation in France that the prime minister might be forced to resign over his implication in a long-running legal case.

A military official told magistrates Dominique De Villepin ordered him to probe corruption allegations against Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy.

The prime minister denies targeting his government rival, who has since been cleared in the case.

But the charge is a further blow after his failure to reform labour markets.

It may be possible to argue that France isn't objectively an enemy of the United States, but it's not possible to argue that Mr. de Villepin isn't.

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THE ANTI-JACOBS:

Liberal thinker JK Galbraith dies (BBC, 4/30/06)

Renowned economist and liberal thinker John Kenneth Galbraith has died in the US at the age of 97.

He died on Saturday of natural causes in hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts, his son Alan said.

The Canadian-born Harvard professor wrote over 30 books on socio-economic issues, the most famous of which was The Affluent Society in 1958.

He moved in political circles, advising Democratic presidents and serving as John F Kennedy's envoy to India.

Consider that when a mystified Richard Hofstadter wrote about American anti-intellectualism in the early 60s, Mr. Galbraith was the public intellectual par excellence. If you wanted to capture his philosophy in a couple lines you could do worse than this:

The lesson of the whole post-Keynesian world is that governments are now responsible for economic performance. Any notion that poor performance can't be remedied by the state is a reversion to 19th-century attitudes, which I'm not prepared to accept.

The result was that he did as much as anyone to give us the nightmare of the 70s and the twenty five years since we elected Ronald Reaghan have largely been an effort to undo the damage Mr. Galbraith helped cause.

MORE:
John Kenneth Galbraith, 97, Dies; Economist Held a Mirror to Society (HOLCOMB B. NOBLE and DOUGLAS MARTIN, 4/30/06, NY Times)

John Kenneth Galbraith, the iconoclastic economist, teacher and diplomat and an unapologetically liberal member of the political and academic establishment that he needled in prolific writings for more than half a century, died yesterday at a hospital in Cambridge, Mass. He was 97.

Life holds no more bitter irony than to be an iconoclast who discovers late in life that the icons were right.

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APT SYMBOL:

The Towering Dream of Dubai (Anthony Shadid, April 30, 2006, Washington Post)

"The only limitations are your own limitations," [Ahmad Sharaf] said matter of factly. "No one tells you that it cannot be done, that it should not be done. The only pushback has always been let's do it bigger, let's do it better, and let's do it smarter."

He reflected on what was being built -- the Dubai model, as its advocates call it, the region's most ambitious experiment in bringing success to an Arab city by shearing away the qualities that have long defined it as Arab.

"You know how the West was won?" Sharaf asked of the American experience. "From the Eastern seaboard to the West, you had to build a railroad -- the fastest way to get there and the most efficient way to get there to exploit the resources."

"Dubai," he said confidently, "is the railroad for the Middle East."

Railroad is a metaphor often heard in Dubai, an autocratic city-state ruled by a dynasty that evokes a language uncommon in the Arab world today: an utter confidence, brimming with pride and optimism, that collides with the dejection heard elsewhere in the Middle East. It has emerged as a 21st-century phenomenon, a city of perspectives, whose globalization suggests its inspiration and the discontent of those left behind.

To Sharaf and others, Dubai is the answer to the Arab world's ills, so diverse that conversations in taxicabs are sometimes a patois of Arabic, English and Hindi. Its architecture suggests Pharaonic ambition; at 3 billion square feet, the amusement park known as Dubailand will be three times the size of Manhattan, complete with a replica of the Eiffel Tower and a 60,000-seat stadium. The city's growth, vision and dynamism -- to advocates, at least -- chart a way forward for Arab development independent of the Bush administration's emphasis on democratic reform. Arab expatriates who have flocked here declare Dubai a success and say that the Arab world needs a success story.

"We're seeing the beginning of an Arab renaissance, and I find it very hopeful," said Nasser Saidi, a former Lebanese minister and the chief economist of the Dubai International Financial Center.

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SADLY, INTELLECTUALS ARE BRAINERS:

Father of the Bush Doctrine: George Shultz on pre-emption and the Revolt of the Generals. (DANIEL HENNINGER, April 29, 2006, Opinion Journal)

[George Shultz] recently sent me a speech on terrorism that he gave last month at the Woodrow Wilson International Center at Princeton. There is a quote in it from a speech he gave back in 1984, which of course is also the title of George Orwell's predictive novel. What Mr. Shultz had on his mind in 1984 was also eerily predictive. It was dealing with terrorism: "We must reach a consensus in this country," he said 22 years ago, "that our responses [to terrorism] should go beyond passive defense to consider means of active prevention, pre-emption and retaliation."

Arguably, this makes George Shultz the father of the Bush Doctrine, or at least its most controversial tenet--pre-emption. I asked how he arrived at the idea. "Being a Marine [1942-45, Pacific theater], probably my worst day in office was when the Marine barracks were bombed in Beirut." On the morning of Oct. 23, 1983, a suicide bomber drove an explosives-filled truck into the barracks and killed 220 Marines and 21 other U.S. service personnel. [...]

"I worried a lot about terrorism," Mr. Shultz told me, "and I didn't think we had an adequate strategy." So in that 1984 speech, the next sentence says this: "The question posed by terrorism involves our intelligence capability, the doctrine under which we would employ force, and most important of all our public's attitude toward this challenge."

I wonder out loud whether this view made people nervous back then. GS: "President Reagan thought it was OK, but there were a lot of people that didn't." DH: "Now it's part of the Bush doctrine." GS: "I think the idea that you would do everything you can to prevent what is coming at you by way of something very disruptive--a 9/11--it's a no-brainer."

Was a no-brainer. President Bush's approval rating is in the dumpster, and much of the public is discomfited by the violent reports out of Iraq, which ironically are the product of the same mentality that killed the Marines in 1983. The Iraq war may or may not turn out well, but clearly now it is in a dark moment. When I put this to the former secretary of state, his response, characteristically, is optimism: "I think this is the most promising moment, almost, in the history of the world--a time when the information age has made it clear to people what it takes for them to get ahead in their lives and succeed, to have prosperity, to have growth, and it's a critical matter not to have that great opportunity aborted by a wave of radically inspired terrorists. So we have to confront this, and we have to do it on a sustainable basis because it's going to take a long time."

So what, then, would he say to the people who've come to feel that because of the constant bombings and the struggles of the new Iraqi government that we're not going to make it? "We don't want to give up. The more you talk about not making it, the more you encourage the people who are trying to be sure the Iraqis don't make it. You encourage them to keep doing what they're doing."

Mr. Shultz associated himself with the Bush presidency early on, introducing the Texas governor to Condoleezza Rice at the Hoover Institution in 1998. In light of that, I asked what Mr. Shultz made of the idea that the Bush foreign policy and Iraq war were sprung from a coven of neoconservatives.

"I don't know how you define 'neoconservatism,' " he replied, "but I think it's associated with trying to spread open political systems and democracy. I recall President Reagan's Westminster speech in 1982--that communism would be consigned to 'the ash heap of history' and that freedom was the path ahead. And what happened? Between 1980 and 1990, the number of countries that were classified as 'free' or 'mostly free' increased by about 50%. Open political and economic systems have been gaining ground and there's a good reason for it. They work better. I don't know whether that's neoconservative or what it is, but I think it's what has been happening. I'm for it."

Though the Right viewed Mr. Schultz wth suspicion, as a crypto-dove, and trusted Cap Weinberger, as an uber-hawk, the reality was that the Secretary of Defense served his institution--ladling on more money and opposing deployments--while it was Mr Schultz who was willing to utilize the military in foreign affairs. The current "revolt of the generals" is merely a function of a SecDef who isn't a captive of his own bureaucracy.

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MAYBE BELICHEK REALLY IS A GENIUS:

Pats grab hanging Chad: Trade up for Florida WR (Dan Ventura, April 30, 2006, Boston Herald)

The Patriots gave Chad Jackson their version of the Wonderlic test.

The fact that they moved up 16 spots in the second round to select the Florida wide receiver 36th overall would lead one to assume Jackson passed the test with flying colors.

“They gave me some of their offensive alignments when they were down here and I broke it down for them. Then when I went up there to New England to visit them, they re-quizzed me on it again and I read it to them off the board,” Jackson said. “They were the only team that did that to me, so I felt like they were pretty interested in me. I had at least four or five visits with them and I felt pretty good after every one of them.”

Given the interest, Jackson felt pretty confident that he would hear his name called when the Patriots were picking 21st in the first round. When the selection of Minnesota running back Laurence Maroney crossed the screen, Jackson was a bit miffed.

“I thought I would be taken there, especially after seeing them four or five times,” he said. “But I know on draft day, everything changes. I’m just happy that they picked me pretty high in the second round.”

How the heck did he manage to draft both?

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MEANWHILE, ALONG THE AXIS OF GOOD:

Turkey, Israel make undersea connections (Jay Bushinsky, April 30, 2006, THE WASHINGTON TIMES)

Leaders in Israel and Turkey envision a network of four underwater pipelines for transporting Russian oil and natural gas, with feeder lines to Jordan, the Palestinian Authority and Lebanon.

The joint Turkish-Israeli development plan holds the promise of accelerating economic growth in the Middle East. A $50 million feasibility study is financed by the Luxembourg-based European Investment Bank, officials from Turkey and Israel say.

India is a main backer of the proposed network of pipelines because of the energy needs of its fast-growing economy.

Jews/Muslims/Hindus working together--the End is here.

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HEY, ART DOESN'T HAVE TO SUCK! (via Mike Daley):

Bright Spots: The Harlem Studio of Art (Roger Kimball, 4.28.2006, New Criterion)

So much distasteful rubbish is foisted upon us today in the name of culture that it is easy to fall prey to despondency and think: "The game's up! Our culture is rotten to the core. Cyril Connolly was right when he complained that it was `Closing time in the gardens of the West.'" It's easy, but it's mistaken. Really, if you look, there are plenty (well, some) bright spots in our culture. And if it is important to expose the rotten bits (and that is important), it is also important to celebrate the good, the salubrious, the vital, the hopeful. It's not just that despair is a sin, as the Doctors of the Church remind us: it's also that there really are plenty of things worth admiring if only we have the patience to see them.

To that end, I herewith inaugurate an occasional series of musings I shall denominate Bright Spots: good things, promising things in our culture that have been unfairly neglected or are as yet insufficiently known. My first offering is The Harlem Studio of Art, a classically-oriented art school and atelier in the upper reaches of Manhattan. Directed by Andrea J. Smith, the Harlem Studio offers students something almost unheard of today: rigorous training in modeling, one-point perspective, cast drawing, and all the other technical aspects of art that, based in Renaissance practice, one used to assume would be part of an artist's training but, for at least the last five or six decades, have gone the way of good manners and other accoutrements of civilization. It is a small atelier, with only a handful of students, but it makes a big impression and has already begun to attract a number of talented students and artists interested in continuing rather than destroying the tradition of our artistic heritage.

Make sure to follow the link to see the artwork.

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I'M NOT A NAZI, I JUST VOTE THAT WAY:

'Vote BNP and you're as bad as they are' (Melissa Kite, 30/04/2006, Sunday Telegraph)

With fears growing that the BNP will harvest a big protest vote and gain council seats on Thursday, particularly in east London, the Tories are effectively telling people toying with the idea of voting for Nick Griffin's gang that they ought to be ashamed of themselves. [...]

Eric Pickles, the Conservative deputy chairman and local government spokesman, told The Sunday Telegraph yesterday: "We are not differentiating between the candidates who stand for the BNP and the people who vote for them. We believe it is a shameful act to vote for the BNP, no matter how badly you feel you have been let down by Labour. These people are motivated by race and it is not an acceptable use of a protest vote to vote for the BNP."

The Conservative attack tells its own story. Put bluntly, the Tories do not have as much to lose from insulting prospective BNP supporters as Labour does. Mr Pickles's comment is a clear indication that the majority of BNP support this week will come not from the Right, but from the Left and disaffected Labour voters.

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HMMMM, PIE:

Friend Pepys needs to make an apple pie and wondered if anyone had a good recipe or link to one.

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BLACKS VS. TEACHERS:

Chartering a course: Lifting cap on schools paves the way for proper learning (Stanley Crouch, April 27, 2006, NY Daily News)

We should all know by now that the public school system needs to be overhauled, and the changes will not come about as quickly as necessary. There will be battles with the unions, which hold failed practices in place while providing cover for the many incompetents whose terrible or substandard work disgraces what is one of our noblest professions.

Yet the public school student gets ever closer to high school graduation while these various, intricate battles are fought. That is why change at a swift but responsible speed is always of optimum importance. Given that fact, it is more than irresponsible for New York State to keep in place its cap on charter schools.

Mayor Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein are serious about bringing New York's public schools out of the darkness. That is why they want the cap removed. It is but one way to address a crisis in which many kids suffer from poor preparation or the intellectual suicide symbolized by dropping out. [...]

The public should support Bloomberg and Klein in fighting to lift the cap on charter schools. While the battle with the teachers union continues, we should seek out as many alternatives that go beyond talk as possible.

Even though suburban whites are unethusiastic about them, the GOP should push universal education vouchers, not just because they're a worthwhile reform but because they divide two core Democrat constituencies.

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TRUMAN'S DEAD, PAL:

Enough Already (TIM ROEMER, 4/29/06, NY Times)

In 1946, Karl Frost, an advertising executive, suggested a simple slogan to the Massachusetts Republican Committee: "Had Enough? Vote Republican!" Frost recognized that these simple words could unite his national party and blame its opponents, who controlled Congress, for causing or failing to solve the many problems facing the country, including meat shortages, economic difficulties and labor unrest. The strategy worked: in 1946, both houses of Congress flipped.

Sixty years later, Democrats would be smart to turn Karl Frost's slogan on Karl Rove's strategy.

"Had Enough? Vote Democratic!"

GDP Growth Strongest in 2 - 1 / 2 Years (Reuters, 4/29/06)

The U.S. economy grew at its fastest rate in 2-1/2 years during the first quarter on strong spending and investment, while moderate price rises reinforced hopes for a pause in U.S. interest rate rises this summer.

Gross domestic product grew at a 4.8 percent annual rate in the January-March quarter, the Commerce Department said on Friday, more than twice the fourth quarter's 1.7 percent rate.

It was the best quarterly GDP performance since a 7.2 percent spurt in the third quarter of 2003.

"This rapid growth is another sign that our economy is on the fast track,'' President George W. Bush told reporters.

In 1946 the GDP shrank and US Debt hit a historic high of 120%. Asking voters if they've had enough of an economic boom is political suicide.

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WE ALL BUY THE BUSH DOCTRINE NOW:

Pressure grows for Darfur peace (BBC, 4/29/06)

The UN's top human rights official, Louise Arbour, is due in Sudan amid growing pressure on the government to end fighting in the Darfur region.

It comes as campaigners prepare to hold mass rallies across the US calling for an end to killings in Darfur.

On Friday, US President George W Bush endorsed the rallies, saying "genocide" in Sudan was unacceptable.

Let us hear no more about how America oughtn't intervene unilaterally in sovereign states for the sole purpose of vindicating human rights and liberal democracy.

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THEY WERE BETTER OFF WITH SCHROEDER:

German Leader Rides a Wave Of Popularity Into Washington (Craig Whitlock, April 29, 2006, Washington Post)

Six months ago, Chancellor Angela Merkel was battling for her political survival. Her party was forced to share power after a dismal campaign in which it squandered a double-digit lead in the polls, as voters expressed doubts about her policies and her lack of charisma.

Next week, when she arrives in Washington to meet with President Bush, Merkel will be greeted as perhaps the most popular politician in Europe. Her approval ratings in opinion polls top 80 percent, a sharp turnabout from September, when her Christian Democrats won only 35 percent of the vote in national elections. [...]

During the campaign, Merkel scared many voters by vowing to shake up the German welfare state model that many economists blame for dampening growth and contributing to high unemployment. She also promised to raise the national sales tax rate from 16 percent to 19 percent, an idea that didn't win her much applause on the stump.

Her strategy nearly backfired when the Christian Democrats lost a large lead during the campaign and barely captured a plurality on election day. Since then, she's changed her tack and tried to assuage voters that any policy changes will be modest and gradual. Her cabinet, for instance, has agreed to raise the retirement age from 65 to 67, but the extension won't fully take effect until 2029.

"There will not be a big bang in Germany which will suddenly move us on, but we need to move fast and decisively every day even if we do not see the fruits of our labors for three or four years," Merkel told the German Banking Congress in a speech Tuesday in Berlin. "Change is so often associated in Germany with a turn for the worse. People need to see it as an opportunity as well."

Her predecessor, Gerhard Schroeder, spent years tinkering with the welfare system, to the dismay of millions of Germans. Now the public seems generally pleased with the toned-down approach. A poll released Friday by the television network ZDF put Merkel's job approval rating at 83 percent, according to a survey of 1,200 voters.

To be popular in a social welfare state is to be failing its people by pleasing them.

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HOW DO YOU SAY BLASPHEMY IN SPANISH?:

President Wants Anthem Sung in English (Jim VandeHei, April 29, 2006, Washington Post)

President Bush yesterday said "The Star-Spangled Banner" should be sung in English, not Spanish, and condemned plans by some immigrant groups to stage a work protest on Monday to sway the debate over the nation's immigration laws.

With passions running high over the release of "Nuestro Himno," a Spanish-language version of the national anthem, Bush told reporters that people who want to be citizens of the United States should learn English and "ought to learn to sing the national anthem in English." [...]

On the national anthem controversy, Bush, who speaks Spanish, was pulled into the debate after British music producer Adam Kidron released the Spanish version yesterday. Kidron said he wanted to honor U.S. immigrants.

In a statement released after Bush spoke, Kidron said: "The intention of recording 'Nuestro Himno' (Our Anthem) has never been to discourage immigrants from learning English and embracing American culture."

So long as they learn English there's nothing wrong with singing the Star-Spangled Banner in other languages. The real problem with this version is that they changed the words, Nuestro Himno (Chicago Tribune, 4/26/06):

Verse 1

Oh say can you see, a la luz de la aurora/Lo que tanto aclamamos la noche al caer? Sus estrellas, sus franjas flotaban ayer/En el fiero combate en senal de victoria,/Fulgor de lucha, al paso de la libertada,/Por la noche decian: "Se va defendiendo!"

Coro: Oh, decid! Despliega aun su hermosura estrellada,/Sobre tierra de libres, la bandera sagrada?

Chant:

It's time to make a difference the kids, men and the women/Let's stand for our beliefs, let's stand for our vision/What about the children los ninos como P-Star

These kids have no parents, cause all of these mean laws.

See this can't happen, not only about the Latins.

Asians, blacks and whites and all they do is adding

more and more, let's not start a war

with all these hard workers,

they can't help where they were born.

No flag burning, no cartoons of Muhammed, and leave the National Anthem alone.

MORE:
The Japanese, who face the prospect of having to allow huge immigration as they age, have wisely chosaen to focus on the assimilation angle, Diet handed 'patriotic' education bill: Proposed change of '47 law has foes, including teachers, fearing Big Brother (AKEMI NAKAMURA and HIROKO NAKATA, 4/29/06, Japan Times)

The government submitted a bill to the Diet Friday that will revise the Fundamental Law of Education for the first time since its enactment in 1947 to include fostering "patriotism."

Drafted during the Allied Occupation, the present law does not mention patriotism because the word was associated with Japan's wartime totalitarianism and militarism, according to scholars.

Conservative politicians have long sought to emphasize the concept in school curricula, but Japan "has been sensitive about patriotism, mainly due to memories of the (totalitarian) education before and during the war," said Hidenori Fujita, a professor at International Christian University in Tokyo.

"Patriotism" as stipulated in the bill, however, goes beyond the usual definition of love, loyalty and zealous support of a nation, by requiring people to cultivate "an attitude that respects tradition and culture, loves the nation and homeland that have fostered them, while respecting other countries and contributing to international peace and development."

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NOW YOU'RE TALKIN'!:

Prostitution Alleged In Cunningham Case (Jo Becker and Charles R. Babcock, April 29, 2006, Washington Post)

Federal authorities are investigating allegations that a California defense contractor arranged for a Washington area limousine company to provide prostitutes to convicted former congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R-Calif.) and possibly other lawmakers, sources familiar with the probe said yesterday. [...]

The Cunningham investigation's latest twist came after Mitchell J. Wade, a defense contractor who has admitted bribing the former congressman, told prosecutors that Wilkes had an arrangement with Shirlington Limousine, which in turn had an arrangement with at least one escort service, one source said. Wade said limos would pick up Cunningham and a prostitute and bring them to suites Wilkes maintained at the Watergate Hotel and the Westin Grand in Washington, the source said.

This scandal has always been in desperate need of a sex angle, though hookers and the Watergate seems almost cliche.

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THE QUESTION IS WHY WE ALLOW THE CHICOMS AND RUSSIANS TO MAINTAIN NUKES:

Report Sets Stage For Action on Iran: U.N. Nuclear Agency Provides Evidence Needed to Open Security Council Debate (Molly Moore and Dafna Linzer, April 29, 2006, Washington Post)

In a sharply worded report, the International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed Friday that Iran is accelerating its uranium enrichment efforts and hiding crucial information about its nuclear program. The report opens the way for the U.N. Security Council to debate potential actions against Iran.

The Vienna-based U.N. nuclear monitoring agency said serious gaps in the information provided by Iran made it impossible "to provide assurance about the absence of undeclared nuclear materials and activities" or to assess the role of the Iranian military in the nuclear work.

The eight-page report provided official evidence that the United States, Britain and France have sought to launch a push for possible sanctions against Iran. But Russia and China, also permanent members of the Security Council, have repeatedly expressed skepticism with that approach.

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HEY IT'S GOOD TO BE BACK HOME AGAIN:

Tories quietly expand NORAD (BRUCE CAMPION-SMITH, 4/29/06, Toronto Star)

Stephen Harper's government has quietly committed Canada to "indefinite" participation in NORAD and agreed to give the military alliance new responsibilities to watch for a terror attack by sea.

Fresh off his softwood lumber truce, Harper's government yesterday gave another boost to Canada-U.S. relations when it signed off on the renewal of the landmark North American Aerospace Defence Command treaty.

Defence Minister Gordon O'Connor and David Wilkins, the U.S. ambassador in Canada, signed the new pact at a "ceremony in Ottawa," according to Janelle Hironimus, a spokesperson with the U.S. State Department.

U.S. hails new era after deal (GRAHAM FRASER, 4/29/06, Toronto Star)

U.S. Ambassador David Wilkins yesterday called the softwood lumber deal the proof that Canada matters in Washington, and the precursor of a new era of co-operation between the two countries.

"Leadership matters," he told a Public Policy Forum conference in Ottawa. "Call it a breath of fresh air, a new effort, new energy, a renewed momentum, whatever term you want to describe it — but there is a sense, in my opinion, both in Washington and in Ottawa, that we are entering a positive, productive stage in our relationship."

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REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY:

Hamas’ Impossible Mission (Ramzy Baroud, 29 April, 2006, Countercurrents.org)

It should be established by now that most Western governments are the least interested in honoring the decided democratic choice of the Palestinian people, which elevated to power a movement that is branded ‘terrorist’ by Israel, thus by much of the Western hemisphere.

Since facts and common sense are of little concern to those who hastily decided to withhold badly needed funds to support the battered economy of the Occupied Territories, there would be no need to once again marvel at the rhetorical inconsistencies of the Bush Administration and of the European Union.

So what if Hamas has adhered to a virtually unilateral ceasefire for over a year, while Israel did not? So what if the newly formed government has given ample evidence that it is keenly interested in dialogue, not violence? So what if the majority of the Palestinian people have adamantly and repeatedly -- according to recent public opinion polls -- expressed their interest in a negotiated settlement with Israel? Indeed, so many “so whats” that hardly matter now, since it is quite clear that the US and the EU’s real intentions are to topple the Palestinian government, along with the sham of a doctrine which claims that democratizing the Arabs is the ultimate policy objective of Bush and Blair.

Not just democracy, but liberal democracy. All Hamas has to do is the will of the Palestinian preople --accept the Palestinian state that's been on offer since Oslo and peaceful co-existence with the state of Israel and folks'll shovel money at them.

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HATERS OF THE OLD HATE THE NEW TOO:

The United States Of Israel? (Robert Fisk, 28 April, 2006, The Independent)

Stephen Walt towers over me as we walk in the Harvard sunshine past Eliot Street, a big man who needs to be big right now (he's one of two authors of an academic paper on the influence of America's Jewish lobby) but whose fame, or notoriety, depending on your point of view, is of no interest to him. "John and I have deliberately avoided the television shows because we don't think we can discuss these important issues in 10 minutes. It would become 'J' and 'S', the personalities who wrote about the lobby - and we want to open the way to serious discussion about this, to encourage a broader discussion of the forces shaping US foreign policy in the Middle East."

"John" is John Mearsheimer, a political scientist at the University of Chicago. Walt is a 50-year-old tenured professor at the John F Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. The two men have caused one of the most extraordinary political storms over the Middle East in recent American history by stating what to many non-Americans is obvious: that the US has been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interests of Israel, that Israel is a liability in the "war on terror", that the biggest Israeli lobby group, Aipac (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee), is in fact the agent of a foreign government and has a stranglehold on Congress - so much so that US policy towards Israel is not debated there - and that the lobby monitors and condemns academics who are critical of Israel.

"Anyone who criticises Israel's actions or argues that pro-Israel groups have significant influence over US Middle East policy," the authors have written, "...stands a good chance of being labelled an anti-Semite. Indeed, anyone who merely claims that there is an Israeli lobby runs the risk of being charged with anti-Semitism ... Anti-Semitism is something no-one wants to be accused of." This is strong stuff in a country where - to quote the late Edward Said - the "last taboo" (now that anyone can talk about blacks, gays and lesbians) is any serious discussion of America's relationship with Israel.

Walt is already the author of an elegantly written account of the resistance to US world political dominance, a work that includes more than 50 pages of references. Indeed, those who have read his Taming Political Power: The Global Response to US Primacy will note that the Israeli lobby gets a thumping in this earlier volume because Aipac "has repeatedly targeted members of Congress whom it deemed insufficiently friendly to Israel and helped drive them from office, often by channelling money to their opponents."

It makes perfect sense for academics/intellectuals to hate the great Jewish state, Israel, and the great Christian one, America. We are, after all, their enemies.

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A BUSH GROWS IN THE MEADOWLANDS?:

Draft surprise: It's Williams at No. 1 (Kristie Rieken, 4/28/06, The Associated Press

The Houston Texans' decision to snub Heisman Trophy winner Reggie Bush and sign defensive end Mario Williams with the No. 1 pick in the NFL draft has cut a slack-jawed swath across the NFL. [...]

The Texans' move left the New Orleans Saints with an opportunity to take Bush as the No. 2 pick. Saints spokesman Greg Bensel said Friday night the team had no comment.

J-E-T-S, JETS, JETS, JETS....

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SO WE WON'T NEED TO FEEL ANY SYMPATHY WHEN THE BUBBLE BURSTS:

Trading Frenzy Adding to Rise in Price of Oil (JAD MOUAWAD and HEATHER TIMMONS, 4/29/06, NY Times)

In the latest round of furious buying, hedge funds and other investors have helped propel crude oil prices from around $50 a barrel at the end of 2005 to a record of $75.17 on the New York Mercantile Exchange last week. Back in January 2002, oil was at $18 a barrel. [...]

"Clearly the big attraction of commodity markets like oil is that they've been going up," said Marc Stern, the chief investment officer at Bessemer Trust, a New York wealth manager with $45 billion in assets. "Rising prices create interest."

This year alone, oil prices have gained 18 percent; they were up 45 percent in 2005 and 28 percent in 2004, a performance far superior to the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index, whose gains in these years have been in the single digits. And to some extent, the rising price of oil feeds on itself, by encouraging many investors to bet that it is likely to continue doing so.

"The hedge funds have come roaring into the commodities market, and they are willing to take risks," said Brad Hintz, an analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein & Company, an investment firm in New York.

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IT'S ALL SOCIAL ENGINEERING -- THE BLUE PRINTS JUST VARY (via Pepys):

Well, Well: You don't have to hate oil companies to want an excess-profits tax (Michael Kinsley, April 28, 2006, Slate)

Taxes are not a form of punishment. And you don't need to find wrongdoing to justify a special tax on their profits. You only need a pocket calculator—to figure out how much they owe.

The math is rough, but it's not complicated. About a third of the oil consumed in the United States comes from wells in the United States. That's about 150 million barrels a month. The oil industry refers to this as "production," but a more accurate term would be "extraction." Nature produced the oil and charges nothing for it.

Oil is oil, no matter where it comes from, so the price of those 150 million barrels will go up and down with the price of the 300 million or so barrels we import every month. A year ago, that price was about $46 a barrel. Now it's more than $70 a barrel. The cost of extracting those 150 million American barrels depends a lot on how you figure it and varies well by well. But we can make a few reasonable simplifying assumptions. First, no one was forced to pump oil at gunpoint a year ago. So, however you figure it, in April 2005 it must have been possible to extract 150 million barrels of oil out of American ground for less than $46 a barrel, including a reasonable profit.

Costs change. Wells have to be pumped harder or they run dry. Gradually, we are running out and need to import more and more. But these changes are nothing like the fluctuations in the price for which oil can be sold. If 150 million barrels could be extracted a year ago for $46 a barrel, it shouldn't cost much more than that to extract another 150 million barrels in 2006.

Let's round off a bit and say that American oil extractors are getting an extra $25 a barrel. For 150 million barrels a month, that's $45 billion a year. And that's just for the oil that's extracted. The oil that remains in the ground is also about $25 a barrel more valuable. And other energy resources—used and unused—are more valuable by a similar amount.

To get this windfall, the oil companies didn't have to conspire with the Bush administration to start a war in Iraq. They didn't have to conspire among themselves to raise prices at the pump. If you own oil anywhere in the world, you didn't have to do a damned thing. Just close your eyes, make a wish, open them, and—surprise—you're getting an extra $25 a barrel.

Ordinarily, and wisely, the U.S. government doesn't try to guess what is or is not a reasonable profit and doesn't try to tax away profit that is unreasonable. As a general principle, the government tries to tax all business profits at a rate that will produce enough revenue to help cover the cost of government without unduly destroying the incentive to produce. Under Republican administrations, the government usually goes further and gives business a bunch of absurd tax breaks. The oil industry has been a special pet over the years.

Ordinarily, we shouldn't want the government to decide when profits become "excess." But the case of huge profits from the run-up in oil prices is different for two reasons.

Actually, taxes are inevitably a form of punishment which is why they effect social engineering whether you want them to or not. So the simple question here is which is more desirable for our society, cheaper gas and increased dependence on the petrostates or more expensive gas with the corresponding reductions in its use. If you want the former then, by all means, tax profits but accept the consequences and stop whining about war for oil, but if you want the latter then tax the sale of gas itself at a higher rate.

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THE ANTI-ARABIST:

Bernard Lewis Marking 90 At Grand Fete (ELI LAKE, April 28, 2006, NY Sun)

There are few academics or historians who have matched the achievements of the emeritus Princeton University professor. He has written more than 24 books, received 15 honorary degrees, and fluently speaks, according to Ms. Churchill, eight languages which include the four languages of the Middle East - Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, and Turkish - as well as Danish.

A former student of Mr. Lewis's and scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, Ruel Marc Gerecht, said his book, "The Muslim Awakening of Europe," is "one of the best history books ever written. It is one of the rare history books that has a chance to still be read 50 years after it was published." Even his rivals acknowledge his intellectual power. The late literature professor Edward Said built much of his popular theory of Orientalism, the view that Western analysts and historians write about indigenous cultures as a rationalization for their exploitation, as an attack on Mr. Lewis.

Mr. Lewis debated Mr. Said and author Christopher Hitchens in 1983 on the topic of Orientalism that many of Mr. Lewis's followers believe marked the decline of their mentor's field. "They believed it was a predatory conspiracy of western imperialists," Mr. Lewis said. "I took the view this was a legitimate branch of scholarship. Since then the Saidian view has triumphed in western universities."

Mr. Lewis's ideas about the Middle East are also more current today than they were 30 years ago. His name is invoked almost constantly by critics of neoconservatives for the counsel he provided to Vice President Cheney about Iraq and the Middle East. Mr. Lewis first met with the vice president in 1990 on the eve of the first Gulf War. On the eve of the Iraq war, Mr. Cheney went on NBC's "Meet the Press" and called Mr. Lewis "one of the great students" of the Middle East.

Mr.Lewis says his role in shaping war policy has been exaggerated. "I do meet people and talk to people I am not a consultant or adviser. I do not have any security clearances," he said.

"To say Bernard is a double barreled fan of democracy in the Muslim world is not exactly right," Mr. Gerecht said. "What Bernard Lewis has shown is the extent to which a lot of very bad Western ideas have implanted themselves in the Muslim world. The better one, the hardest one to absorb, democracy, has not. But there is reason to believe that might be changing."

On a deeper level, however, Mr. Lewis has become one of the most relevant intellectuals on the region in the twilight of his life. In 1976, he wrote an essay for Commentary called "The Return of Islam" that made the case that Islam was emerging as the primary way Arabs identified themselves and predicted the rise of Islamic demagoguery. At the time, this insight deflated much of the claims of the waning pan-Arabists of the region. In 1978, Mr. Lewis began translating the writings of Ayatollah Khomeinei - before the 1979 revolution in Iran. His scholarship provoked the late senator, Henry "Scoop" Jackson, to ask the CIA formally about the exiled cleric in Paris, who famously insisted his writings (since proved not only authentic but prescient) were forgeries. Mr. Lewis wryly notes that the only texts of Khomeini's "Islamic Government" were in Persian and Arabic. "This meant that most of Washington could not understand it," he said.

Professor Samuel Huntington has even credited Mr. Lewis with coining the phrase, "conflict of civilizations."

Born in London in 1916, Mr. Lewis became interested in studying the Middle East, according to Ms. Churchill during his bar mitzvah.

Perhaps Mr. Lewis's fundamental insight is that because something has clearly gone wrong in Islam things will have to change. There is danger in that, but also reason for optimism.

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R.I.P.:

Steve Howe, 1958-2006: Troubled ex-pitcher dies in car accident (BEN WALKER, 4/28/06, The Associated Press)

Steve Howe, the relief pitcher whose promising career was derailed by cocaine and alcohol abuse, died Friday when his pickup truck rolled over in Coachella, Calif. He was 48.

Mr. Howe was killed at 5:55 a.m. about 130 miles east of Los Angeles, said Dalyn Backes of the Riverside County coroner's office. He had been in Arizona on business and was driving back to the family home in Valencia, Calif., business partner Judy Welp said. Mr. Howe's vehicle drifted and hit a center divider, and police said he wasn't wearing a seatbelt.

Toxicology tests had not yet been performed.

The hard-throwing lefty was the 1980 National League Rookie of the Year with the Los Angeles Dodgers, closed out their 1981 World Series championship and was an All-Star the next year.

But for all of his success on the field, Mr. Howe was constantly troubled by addictions — he was suspended seven times and became a symbol of the rampant cocaine problem that plagued baseball in the 1980s.

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TIME TO FORGIVE THE BENSONS:

Shinjo leaves the ballpark for a quiet life of nude modelling (Mainichi Daily News, 4/26/06)

"I've decided to take my uniform off at the end of this season."

With these words, Nippon Ham Fighters outfielder Tsuyoshi Shinjo announced his plans to end one of the more unconventional careers in Japanese professional baseball.

What the fans at Tokyo Dome didn't realize when 34-year-old Shinjo told them on April 18 that he was removing his uniform, was that he was speaking literally, according to Shukan Gendai (5/6-13).

Many were shocked that Shinjo chose a mid-April date to announce his plans to quit -- the season was only a few weeks old, after all -- most say it's characteristic behavior for the player nicknamed "Spaceman," who's as well known for his tendency to come out of left field (even though he's a centerfielder) as for his baseball. [...]

Post-baseball life doesn't appear to be too lonely for Shinjo, though. The enormously popular outfielder is already apparently being swamped with offers for work once he's finished playing. And that's where it comes to taking his uniform off for the last time. As it turns out, it seems likely that his baseball uniform won't be the only garments Shinjo plans to shed.

"Actually, Shinjo's thinking about releasing a collection of nude photos. Straight after he announced his retirement, the president of a major talent agency Shinjo is expected to join on his retirement called the player and said, 'If you're gonna do nude stuff, let me look after it for you.' And, as a bit of an extra for his real fans, there's also talk of Shinjo and his wife doing a nude shot together. If they don't want to go all the way, it could be a shot of them in some pretty racy underwear. The Shinjos are a lot more appealing than David and Victoria Beckham," Motoji Takasu, a publishing company producer, tells Shukan Gendai.

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DOCK ELLIS* SMILES:

Bean ball: Jose Mesa is three-for-three in hitting former teammate Omar Vizquel (John Dawson, 5/06/06, World)

San Francisco Giants infielder Omar Vizquel must wish Colorado pitcher Jose Mesa would try to kill him more softly. Baseball's most heated feud got a bit hotter in April when the Giants traveled to Colorado to play the Rockies. There, for the third time since 2002 when the infielder penned a book slamming Mr. Mesa's performance in the 1997 World Series, Mr. Vizquel stepped into the batter's box against the hard-throwing reliever. And just like the two previous times, Mr. Vizquel got to first with a fastball in his back.

How did Mr. Vizquel offend Mr. Mesa? In his book, Omar! My Life on and off the Field, Mr. Vizquel blamed his then-teammate for collapsing in the 9th inning of Game 7 against the Florida Marlins in 1997. "The eyes of the world were focused on every move we made," Mr. Vizquel wrote in his 2002 autobiography. "Unfortunately, Jose's own eyes were vacant. Completely empty. Nobody home."

Folks could have expected the hard-throwing right-hander to be miffed. Mr. Mesa was beyond that, though. "I will not forgive him," Mr. Mesa told reporters after the book was released. "Even my little boy (Jose Jr.) told me to get him. If I face him 10 more times, I'll hit him 10 times. Every time. I want to kill him." Mr. Mesa has repeated the death threats.

(*)

“‘You are scared of Cincinnati.’ That’s what I told my teammates, "Every time we play Cincinnati, the hitters are on their ass.”

In 1970, ‘71, and ‘72, he says, the rest of the league was afraid of the Pirates. “they say, 'Here come the big bad Pirates. They’re going to kick our ass!’ Like they give up. That’s what our team was starting to do." Cincinatti will bull[****] with us and kick our ass and laugh at us. They’re the only team that talk about us like a dog. Whenever we play that team, everybody socializes with them.” In the past the roles had been reversed. “When they ran over to us, we knew they were afraid of us. When I saw our team doing it, right then I say, "We gunna get down. We gonna do the do. I’m going to hit these motherf******s.’” [...]

Taking his usual warm-up pitches, Dock noticed Pete Rose standing at one side of the batter’s box, leaning on his bat, studying his delivery. On his next-to-last warm-up, Dock let fly at Rose and almost hit him.

A distant early warning.

In fact, he had considered not hitting Pete Rose at all. He and Rose are friends, but of course friendship, as the commissioner of baseball would insist, must never prevent even-handed treatment. No, Dock had considered not hitting Pete Rose because Rose would take it so well, ”He’s going to charge first base, and make it look like nothing.” Having weighed the whole matter, Dock decided to hit him anyway.

“The first pitch to Pete Rose was directly toward his head,” as Dock expresses it, “not actually to hit him, ” but as “the message, to let him know that he was going to get hit. More or less to press his lips. I knew if I could get close to the head that I could get them in the body. Because they’re looking to protect their head, they’ll give me the body.” The next pitch was behind him. “the next one, I hit him in the side.”

Pete Rose’s response was even more devastating than Dock had anticipated. He smiled. Then he picked the ball up, where it had falled beside him, and gently, underhanded, tossed it back to Dock. Then he lit for first as if trying out fro the Olympics.

As Dock says, with huge approval, “You have to be good, to be a hot dog.”

As Rose bent down to pick up the ball, he had exchanged a word with Joe Morgan who was batting next. Morgan taunted Rose, “He doesn’t like you anyway. You’re a white guy.”

Dock hit Morgan in the kidneys with his first pitch.

By this time, both benches were agog. It was Mayday on May Day. The Pirates realized that Dock was doing what he said he would do. The Reds were watching him do it. “I looked over on the bench, they were all with their eyes wide and their mouths wide open, like, 'I don’t believe it!’

“The next batter was [Dan] Driessen. I threw a ball to him. High and inside. The next one, I hit him in the back.”

Bases loaded, no outs. Tony Perez, Cincinnati first baseman, came to bat. He did not dig in. “There was no way I could hit him. He was running. The first one I threw behind him, over his head, up against the screen, but it came back off the glass, and they didn’t advance. I threw behind him because he was backing up, but then he stepped in front of the ball. The next three pitches, he was running, "I walked him.” A run came in. “The next hitter was Johnny Bench. I tried to deck him twice. I threw at his jaw, and he moved. I threw at the back of his head, and he moved.”

With two balls and no strikes on Johnny Bench—-eleven pitches gone: three hit batsmen, one walk, one run, and now two balls—-[manager, Danny} Murtaugh approached the mound. “He came out as if to say, 'What’s wrong? Can’t find the plate?’” Dock was suspicious that his manager really knew what he was doing. “No,” said Dock, “I must have Blass-itis.” (I was genuine wildness, ªnot throwing at batters—-that had destroyed Steve Blass the year before.)

“He looked at me hard,” Dock remembers. “He said, 'I’m going to bring another guy in.’ So I just walked off the mound.”

---

GETTING JANE RIGHT (via Pepys):

Jane Jacobs, 1916–2006: New York’s indispensable urban iconoclast (Howard Husock, 27 April 2006, City Journal)

In a way, Jane Jacobs, who died this week, did to urban renewal what Rachel Carson did to DDT and Ralph Nader did to the Corvair. The Death and Life of Great American Cities marked Jane Jacobs as one of the great protest authors of the early 1960s. Upon the release of her book in 1961, the idea of wholesale government clearance of poor urban neighborhoods, whether for housing or highways, almost immediately fell out of favor. It is not surprising that three decades after its release, Death and Life was included in the Modern Library series of classics.

Despite her prominence, Jacobs was almost universally misunderstood. Her role in the public life of New York in the 1960s may explain some of this misunderstanding. Her opposition, to the point of arrest, to plans for a highway through Washington Square Park and to a development scheme that would have destroyed hundreds of buildings in the West Village led her to be seen as the mother of all preservationists, pedestrians, and community activists. And because she moved to Toronto, in part because of opposition to the Vietnam War, it is assumed she was a woman of the Left.

That she was none of these is not superficially apparent from her work. Because Death and Life poetically describes the rhythms of neighborhood street life—its teeming sidewalks, local characters, and small merchants—Jacobs is frequently invoked as the patron saint of old neighborhoods, protecting them from rapacious developers who would supplant the last drugstore that still has a soda fountain. Because she wrote of the value of small blocks and smaller buildings, it is easy to infer that she was a Jeffersonian opponent of bigness per se, whether of new developments or firms—or even cities, if they got too large.

But Jane Jacobs had no more desire to buffer cities from change than Herman Melville had to save the whale. For Jacobs, change was the very essence of city life. One cannot seek through public policy to “freeze conditions and uses as they stand. That would be death,” she wrote in Death and Life. Indeed, her great trilogy of works on cities—The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), The Economy of Cities (1969) and Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984)—are a plea for us to understand the dynamism, crucial to human progress, that arises in cities relatively unfettered by government. “Most city diversity,” she wrote in Death and Life, “is the creation of incredible numbers of different people and different private organizations, with vastly differing ideas and purposes, planning and contriving outside the framework of public action. The main responsibility of city planning and design should be to develop—insofar as public policy and action can do so—cities that are congenial places for this great range of unofficial plans, ideas, and opportunities to flourish.”

The Jane Jacobs story is a remarkable one. [...]

The real Jane Jacobs not only enjoyed busy city blocks but deplored high levels of welfare spending that inhibit urban economies. The real Jane Jacobs not only enjoyed the great variety of small businesses which cities offer, but questioned the public operation of services such as transit that preempt the formation of private competitors.

To get Jane Jacobs right, start with her reasons for opposing urban renewal. Her opposition was not primarily based on aesthetic and planning concerns, though there is no doubt that the design of public housing deeply concerned and offended her. In her view, the quintessential housing-project design of the high-rise tower set in a plaza or park defied common sense. Plazas that people don’t regularly traverse for a wide range of reasons—some going to work, some to the library, some to their homes—are apt to become dangerous gauntlets, as are the long corridors in high-rises, where the neighborly eyes Jacobs found watching the street in old neighborhoods are absent. The wealthy might be able to afford doormen and security patrols, but, Jacobs made clear, the less affluent need the self-policing that older, unplanned neighborhoods can provide.

But the heart of Jacobs’s quarrel with the advocates of urban renewal and city planning involved much more than design considerations. In her view, urban renewal was simply one manifestation of a set of beliefs that threatened to smother the economic life of cities as well as to level old neighborhoods. Put another way, Jacobs actually saw herself as an apostle, not an opponent, of progress, but was convinced that policies pursued in the name of economic and aesthetic improvement were actually anti-modern and would deaden the city’s economy.

---

BANKING ON HYSTERIA FATIGUE?:

Bush Set to Approve Takeover of 9 Military Plants by Dubai (JIM RUTENBERG and DAVID E. SANGER, 4/28/06, NY Times)

President Bush is expected on Friday to announce his approval of a deal under which a Dubai-owned company would take control of nine plants in the United States that manufacture parts for American military vehicles and aircraft, say two administration officials familiar with the terms of the deal.

The officials, who were granted anonymity so they could speak freely about something the president had not yet announced, said that the final details had not yet been set and that Mr. Bush might put conditions on the transaction to keep military technology in the United States. [...]

[R]epresentative Peter T. King, Republican of New York, the chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security and one of the foremost critics of the ports deal, said on Thursday that he would not necessarily have a problem this time around, in large part because the White House had given the deal a thorough review.

The only difference is that Mr. King realizes he made an ass of himself last time.

---

FROM UPSTART TO INSTITUTION IN 25 EASY YEARS:

Dartmouth Review Celebrates 25 Years (GARY SHAPIRO, 4/28/06, NY Sun)

The peal of the old Dartmouth Indian war cry “Wah-hoo-wah”resounded as the Dartmouth Review, the insouciantly conservative student publication, celebrated its 25th birthday at a dinner in Manhattan last week. For a quarter century, its jaunty pages have enlivened the idyllic campus in Hanover, N.H., challenging liberal presuppositions — sometimes raucously — while earning recognition as a model for conservative newspapers nationwide. Distributed door to door to every student and mailed to subscribers across the country, the Review has been at the center of stormy cultural and political debates since its inception.

Alvino-Mario Fantini ’90 told The New York Sun that some friends on campus stopped talking to him after they learned he worked for the Review. “All we wanted to do was spark debate and discussion on campus and have an exchange of ideas,which is what you would think a university is for,”he told the Sun. [...]

The Review began when disaffected editors fell out with the Daily Dartmouth over issues such as endorsing a conservative trustee candidate.

The review was hatched at the home of emeritus professor Jeffrey Hart, and it went on to raise a ruckus during the culture wars, on subjects ranging from shantytowns and South African divestiture to trying to restore the school’s Indian symbol, which was perceived as politically incorrect.

The Review, Ms. Dhillon noted, harbored “a withering disdain for anodyne and characterless school mascots.” Ms. Ingraham recalled how the Review hired the Gallup organization to conduct a poll of all living Indian chiefs in the United States and found that 82.7 percent thought the college should keep the Indian mascot.

Whereas the late Dartmouth president James Freedman thought the college experience could be exemplified in the lonely act of “writing poetry or mastering the cello or solving mathematical riddles or translating Catullus,” the Review sought to tap into an older Romantic Dartmouth model of the warrior poet.

Mr. Hart, writes Joseph Rago in the anthology, would crank a mechanical wooden hand to drum loudly on a mahogany table when faculty meetings grew tedious. He sported an anklelength raccoon coat at football games, Mr. Robinson recalled, dipping into a hip flask to take a swig when Dartmouth scored. Preferring, Mr. Rago wrote,“the exuberance of the Jazz age to the austerity of the Carter years,” Mr. Hart wore a chauffeur’s cap and drove around in a secondhand Cadillac taking up three metered spots on campus.In response to stickers advising, “Turn out the light. Energy is scarce,” Mr. Hart added, “In that case, produce more energy.”

“For me,” Thomas “Harry” Camp said, “the Dartmouth Review embodied the Dartmouth spirit: A hard-working and highly intellectually stimulating atmosphere that nonetheless always found time for barbecues, cocktails, and croquet.”

Hard to recall how outraged folks were when it started at the very notion that a college campus would have a conservative publication. When people fret about how the culture wars are going just consider how far we've come even in Acadenia in just 25 years.

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LOCAL INTELLIGENCE AND IRAQI TROOPS FIGHTING AND DYING--GOOD/GOOD:

Local al-Qaida in Iraq leader killed (THOMAS WAGNER, April 28, 2006, ASSOCIATED PRESS)

U.S. forces killed a local al-Qaida in Iraq leader and two other insurgents in a raid north of Baghdad on Friday, and roadside bombs killed an American soldier and an Iraqi policeman, officials said.

Separately, the death toll in two days of fighting in Baqouba, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad, climbed to 58, including seven Iraqi soldiers, Maj. Gen. Ahmed al-Awad said.

U.S. forces, acting on Iraqi intelligence, raided a house where Hamid al-Takhi, the local al-Qaida in Iraq leader, and the two other insurgents were hiding just outside Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad, the U.S. military said.

Al-Takhi, known as the "emir" of Samarra, was gunned down while fleeing the house, and the other two militants were killed while trying to defend it with grenades, the U.S. military said. After they were killed, the U.S. troops found a car parked nearby containing a grenade launcher, rockets, AK-47s, grenades and a shotgun, the U.S. military said.

---

SO THOSE AL QAEDA THREATS WERE PRETTY EFFECTIVE, HUH?:

NATO to intensify its role in Sudan's Darfur region (Nicholas Kralev, 4/28/06, THE WASHINGTON TIMES)

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said yesterday that NATO leaders have agreed to take on a more "robust" role in Sudan's Darfur region and urged other international bodies to prepare the way.

NATO diplomats said that earlier disagreements among the allies over involvement in Darfur had been resolved, but impediments remained, such as the Sudanese government's objection to a U.N. peacekeeping mission.

"Everybody recognizes that the [African Union] mission, while it has been successful thus far, is not robust enough to deal with the continued violence in Darfur and, particularly, problems that are emerging in western Darfur given the situation and problems on the border with Chad," Miss Rice said.

Cave men can't stop the Crusade.

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TINY BUBBLES AND BIG WHINING:

U.S. Economy Still Expanding at Rapid Pace (DAVID LEONHARDT and VIKAS BAJAJ, 4/28/06, NY Times)

Gas prices are rising, as are mortgage rates. House prices in many once-hot markets have started slipping. The American automobile industry shows no sign of recovery. And the paychecks of most workers have not even kept up with inflation over the last four years.

Yet the national economy continues to speed ahead, with families and businesses spending money at an impressive pace. Forecasters expect the Commerce Department to report this morning that the economy grew at a rate of around 5 percent in the first quarter, the biggest increase since 2003.

The industries leading the way are ones that have been receiving far less attention than cars or real estate, though they have been adding thousands of new workers each month. In the last year, hospitals, doctors' offices and other health care employers have created almost 300,000 jobs; restaurants have added 230,000; and local governments — including schools — have added 170,000.

"The good news for the U.S. is that growth has diversified," said Nariman Behravesh, chief economist at Global Insight, an economic research firm. "We aren't just relying on the consumer and housing."

U.S. Economy Grew 4.8% in 1st Qtr, Most in Two Years (Bloomberg, 4/28/06)

The U.S. economy expanded in the first quarter at an annual pace of 4.8 percent, the fastest in more than two years, led by resurgent consumer spending and the biggest jump in business investment since 2000.

The rise in gross domestic product, the value of all goods and services produced in the U.S., followed a 1.7 percent annual rate of increase in the previous three months, the Commerce Department reported today in Washington. Consumer spending on durable goods such as appliances rose the most since 2001.

Growth in jobs and wages and unseasonably warm weather spurred shopping at retailers and auto dealers, while businesses invested in equipment and software at the fastest pace in six years. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke yesterday said growth may moderate as the year progresses and allow the Fed to pause in its series of interest-rate increases.

MORE:
Market fuel prices drop (Patrice Hill, April 28, 2006, THE WASHINGTON TIMES)

Oil and gasoline prices took another tumble in New York trading yesterday on signs of increasing supplies and slackening demand in the United States and China, adding to an 18-cent drop in wholesale gas prices that likely will produce relief at the pump in the days ahead. [...]

The biggest factors causing price drops have been signs that demand for gas is running about 1 percentage point behind last year's level -- most likely in response to the rapid run-up in pump prices since last month -- even as refineries are racing to take advantage of high prices and increase scarce supplies of summer fuels.

"At the end of the day, the best cure for high prices is high prices," said David Hackett, president of Stillwater Associates LLC, an energy-consulting company, noting that consumers are angry about high prices and apparently are beginning to balk at paying them.

If the Fed treats such price hikes as unsustainable they are.

---

RES IPSA:

'What the hell is going on?' (PETER HOWELL, 4/28/06, Toronto Star)

Those who say it is too soon for a film like United 93 should ask themselves if fear is keeping them from the truth.

On that terrible day of Sept. 11, 2001, we all kept wishing it were only a movie. I recall interviewing a woman who said, "If only Harrison Ford would come and save us from this."

Now the terror attacks of 9/11 have become a movie, one that paradoxically makes the horror seem more real. As real as the stomach ache I got watching United 93, brought on by the almost unbearable tension it achieves merely by presenting what we already know.

And yet this is a picture we all must see. It is a movie that matters.

The best films show without telling. There is no need for elaborate voiceovers or character exposition if what you are imparting reaches the corner of the brain where understanding is instinctual.

United 93, sensitively written and skilfully directed by Britain's Paul Greengrass, is such a work. It seeks not to take sides — both hawks and doves can and will embrace it — but rather to light history's lamp, so that clearer insights can be gained.

It continues to amaze how we've dropped the images of that day down the memory hole even as we fight a war.

MORE:
Too Soon to Forget (James Pinkerton, 28 Apr 2006, TCS)

"United 93" is a paradoxical film.

On the one hand, it reminds us of the power of cinema. It's a difficult film to watch, but it's even more difficult not to be affected by it. Yet on the other hand, "93" uses few of the tricks directors use to enhance effect. It doesn't have to -- the thing speaks for itself.

Hijacking the Hijacking: The problem with the United 93 films (Ron Rosenbaum, April 27, 2006, Slate)

Could it be that the three films are a symptom of our addiction to fables of redemptive uplift that shield us from the true dimensions of the tragedy? Redemptive uplift: It's the official religion of the media, anyway. There must be a silver lining; it's always darkest before the dawn; the human spirit will triumph over evil; there must be a pony.

That's always been the subtextual spiritual narrative of media catastrophe coverage: terrible human tragedy, but something good always can be found in it to affirm faith and hope and make us feel better. Plucky, ordinary human beings find a way to rise above the disaster. Man must prevail. The human spirit is resilient, unconquerable. Did I mention there must be a pony?

9/11 is no different. Flight 93 has become 9/11's pony. The conjectural response to the hijacking has become (even more than the courage of the rescuers in the rubble) the redemptive fable we cling to, the fragment we shore against our ruin. Or so it is as envisioned in The Flight That Fought Back and Flight 93 and now United 93. A film in which, we are told by its production notes, we see "the courage that was born from … the crucible" of 9/11. A story of "something much larger than the event itself," Greengrass tells us, a story in which "we … find wisdom." One almost hears the subtext: This is "the feel-good film about 9/11."

To question this is not meant to take anything away from the heroism of the passengers on Flight 93. (Although to imply that they were the only ones who displayed courage in the face of the events of that day is to slight the cops and firefighters who rushed into the Twin Towers, many of whom never returned alive.)

Still, the director makes a case that, even more than the "first responders," the Flight 93 passengers were the first to recognize and confront the barbarism of al-Qaida, "the first people to inhabit the post-9/11 world," the first to discover the "shape [of] something larger than the event itself—the DNA of our times," Greengrass—who seems to want to control the response of the first responders to his film—tells us.

But is the fable of Flight 93 the recompense that it's been built up to be? Does what happened on Flight 93 represent a triumph of the human spirit, a microcosmic model and portent of the ultimate victory of enlightenment civilization over theocratic savagery, as the prerelease publicity about the new film insists? Or is the story of United Flight 93 a different kind of portent, not "the DNA of our times," but rather the RIP?

I guess it depends on your definition, your threshold of uplift. Yes, it appears from the cockpit recordings recently released that something noble—a passenger uprising that disrupted the hijackers' plans—happened on that flight. But is it possible to separate it out from the other events of the day? In three out of four cases savage mass murderers prevailed. A "war on terror" has ensued; a war in Iraq followed. In neither case is it clear that the outcome is going to be favorable. The story of 9/11 as a whole increasingly seems a portent that Flight 93 was an aberration, and that those intent on suicidal martyrdom may well prevail over those who value human life over holy books. This possibility is something no one likes to dwell on, and in that sense the "triumphant" fable of Flight 93, genuinely heroic as it is, represents a comforting diversion. There must be a pony.

As a matter of fact though, rather few people--though obviously far too many--have been killed by al Qaeda while America has rapidly defeated it and radically altered the culture of the Middle East. The takeaway from 9-11 isn't ultimately nutbags killing Americans but Americans retaking control of history. After all, there are a fair number of Pear Harbor flicks too and it's hardly because we're afraid that Japan won.

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ONE COULD DO WORSE:

10 great places in the USA to look up to a tree

"Only God can make a tree," poet Joyce Kilmer wrote. But it's people who plant them — and save them. Today is National Arbor Day. For inspiration, visit some of the USA's national champion trees or nominate the one in your backyard for the National Register of Big Trees. (The new 2005-06 list is online at americanforests.org and will be in the next issue of American Forests magazine, due next week.) Deborah Gangloff, executive director of American Forests, describes some of the champions to Anne Goodfriend for USA TODAY.

MORE:
-National Arbor Day Foundation
-Arbor Day (Wikipedia
-Experiment takes root to keep American chestnut from perishing (JON RUTTER, 4/12/06, Lancaster Sunday News)

Forty years ago, from a remote bluff haunted by the stumps of a once great forest, Derek Pritts spirited a piece of the Holy Grail.

It was a single, toothed, canoe-shaped leaf, still green. "I was the only one in my class to find an American chestnut," Pritts recalled of that long-ago sapling. "I was very excited."

Pritts was a boy then, intent on a sixth-grade science project in rural Fayette County.

He went on to earn a Penn State degree in agriculture and become a waterways conservation officer for the Pennsylvania Fish & Boat Commission here.

But he never forgot his childhood vow to "set things right" for the trees decimated by blight in the early 1900s.

Two weeks ago at Speedwell Forge Lake, he and other chestnut lovers embarked on a groundbreaking project to do just that.

They are establishing two groves of trees with seedlings and seed nuts gleaned through The American Chestnut Foundation and the American Chestnut Cooperators Foundation in 12 states.

Birches (Robert Frost, 1920)

When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy's been swinging them.
But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay.
Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-coloured
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground,
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm,
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows--
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father's trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer. He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It's when I'm weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig's having lashed across it open.
I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate wilfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:
I don't know where it's likely to go better.
I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree~
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

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AN IDEAL WAY TO FORCE INNOVATION:

White House wants to change mileage standards for passenger cars (AP, 4/27/06)

The Bush administration asked Congress on Thursday to give it the authority to change fuel economy standards for passenger cars amid rising gas prices and growing concerns about the nation's energy security.

Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta wrote House and Senate leaders asking for Congress to — for the first time — allow it to create a similar program it recently completed for pickups, sport-utility vehicles and vans.

"Along with other previously announced energy policies, the president believes these actions are critical to promoting our nation's energy security and independence," Mineta wrote.

Set higher standards and let automakers innovate ways to attain them.

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YET ANOTHER JOB ONLY ILLEGALS WILL WORK:

TSA tries bonuses to retain workers (Thomas Frank, 4/27/06, USA TODAY)

The Transportation Security Administration will pay airport screeners up to a $1,000 bonus to entice them to stay at the turnover-plagued agency as it prepares for a summer of record air travel.

Roughly one in four screeners left last year, a rate nearly twice the rest of the federal workforce. Gale Rossides, an associate TSA administrator, said the bonuses are aimed at preventing a screener shortage during the upcoming peak travel months — when long lines could lead to higher security risks for travelers. [...]

Screeners make $23,504 to $44,580 depending on experience and where they work. Rossides said many screeners leave in their first year as they struggle to adjust to fluctuating work schedules and a "hectic pace."

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A LONG WAY FROM THE NORTHWEST:

Commenter Tim Fellows and daughter, Kelly, stopped by during their college visit last week.

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A CHEERY MESSAGE OF HOPE FROM AL

A terrifying, Gore-splattered frightfest! (Chris Knight, National Post, April 28th, 2006)

With the Hot Docs film festival starting its 10-day run in Toronto today, the Trailer Tracker turns its gaze to another new documentary that looks at the hot topic of global warming.

"It will shake you to your core," it begins, spelling out the words in a font that must be Helvetica Ominous. "If you love your planet ... If you love your children ... You have to see this film."

And then comes the voice. Not the deep trailer voice, but the slightly more nasal and southern-sounding voice of Al Gore, the also-ran (and also-won) of the 2000 presidential election. His latest stump speech is not to get elected, but to save the planet: "If you look at the 10 hottest years ever measured," he says, "they all occurred in the last 14 years, and the hottest of all was 2005."

An Inconvenient Truth is director Davis Guggenheim's documentary about Gore's pro-Earth, anti-warming message of hope and, some say, more than a little fear. The trailer flashes through quick images of floods, fires, melting ice, hurricane-force winds and general catastrophe to the sound of beating kettle drums, while Gore intones: "This is really not a political issue so much as a moral issue."

The printed message picks up again by asking, "Last August ... Did the planet betray us ... Or did we betray the planet?" The shots of smoke rising from New Orleans seem like an echo of the smoking towers of New York on 9/11, a point Gore drives home by asking, "Is it possible we should prepare against other threats besides terrorists?"

Finally, as the scary music swells, we see the effects of rising ocean levels on Florida, Shanghai, Calcutta and lower Manhattan, which would become lower-than-sea-level Manhattan. "Think of the impact of a couple of hundred thousand refugees," Gore says, "and then imagine 100 million."

The trailer can be seen at (here). The film opens on June 2. It should be a hot ticket.

Surely this one will knock Reefer Madness off the cult circuit.

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PRESS, HAVE MERCY:

Can George Bush win back the press? (Howard Fineman, MSNBC, 4/27/06)

For the first time in his political career, George W. Bush finds himself in an uncomfortable position: he has to deal with the press on its terms, not his. For such a proud, controlling –- and, some would say arrogant -– guy, meeting the media at least half way won’t be easy. But he has no choice if he wants the last third of his presidency to amount to much. Bush has the charm to succeed, but the effort may require more candor than he can afford, more humility than he has, and more changes in policy than he will allow.

Put aside all the laughable assertions in that paragraph, and focus closely on the contention that Bush must -- absolutely must -- cuddle up to Mr. Fineman's journalistic colleagues in order to save his presidency.

Why exactly is that necessary? If the press simply reports the news and doesn't actually set the terms of the debate, that is at least a questionable proposal. If, on the other hand, journalists are like the rest of the human race and have real problems separating their biases from their work, then this idea may make some sense. For those with eyes to see, Mr. Fineman has just put a torch to the journalist's catechism.

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NOT WAITING ON THE KING:

M's starters armed with hope (Bob Finnigan, 4/28/06, Seattle Times)

[T]he team ranked sixth in the league in earned-run average entering Thursday's games, with a 4.64 mark.

Even better, the starters have a 4.21 ERA, which was fourth in the league.

"We're only a couple of dozen games into the season, and it's a good start," said Jamie Moyer, who has had his team in every one of his five games. "But you have to get into the meat of the season to tell for sure who and what we are as a staff.

"However, on the whole, we have good ability and good arms. And some of our guys have shown maturation, that they've learned how to pitch. Others seem to be still learning."

The learned left-hander said the addition of Jarrod Washburn is a significant plus to the rotation.

"He knows what he's doing and he's a true competitor," Moyer said. "He's got some good ideas and he's not shy about expressing them."

Moyer also spoke well of the bullpen, where Rafael Soriano, in particular, J.J. Putz and lefty George Sherrill have given Hargrove a solid group to hold leads through the seventh and eighth innings.

One American League scout singled out that group, saying, "The back end of their bullpen looks good, kids coming of age."

Should closer Guardado continue his mysterious misery, Soriano and Putz give Seattle real options in his place.

Inside the numbers, the rotation is averaging almost six innings per starts and have held the opposition to three runs or fewer in 16 of 23 games.

With Soriano scored on in only one of 11 games, Sherrill in two of 11 and Putz three of 11, relievers have retired 37 of 60 first batters and stranded 24 of 34 inherited runners.

Washburn in particular is one of the most underrated starters in the AL.

Meanwhile, Up in flames - Indians burn Beckett, Sox (Jeff Horrigan, April 28, 2006, Boston Herald)

Prior to last night’s game, Red Sox manager Terry Francona lauded Josh Beckett for his fiery disposition on the mound, which has drawn the ire of opposing batters.

Hours later, however, Beckett was burned like never before on a major league mound, which resulted in a humiliating, 15-3 loss at Jacobs Field.

Beckett (3-1) turned in what was statistically the worst start of his career by getting pounded for a personal-worst nine runs on six hits and five walks in only 3 2/3 innings, including three home runs for the second consecutive outing. It marked the first time that a Red Sox pitcher allowed nine runs in a start since June 29, 2004, when Derek Lowe gave up nine in an 11-3 defeat at Yankee Stadium, and the most overall runs surrendered by the Sox since a 15-2 loss to Toronto at Fenway Park last July 1.

“There’s no excuse for tonight,” Beckett said. “It was brutal, brutal, brutal.”

If baseball were easy Europeans would play it.

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THOSE COMMERCIAL BREAKS WON'T COME QUICKLY ENOUGH:

Rosie O'Donnell Named New 'View' Co-Host (Access Hollywood, 4/27/06)

Access Hollywood has learned that Rosie O'Donnell will be named as the newest co-host of "The View," replacing the exiting Meredith Vieira.

ABC will reportedly make the official announcement will be made tomorrow, Friday, April 28.

O'Donnell will replace Vieira who is leaving to replace the departing Katie Couric on NBC's "Today."

They don't deserve Patricia Heaton anyway.

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THE WIND BAG VS WIND POWER:

Kennedy faces fight on Cape Wind: Key lawmakers oppose his bid to block project (Rick Klein, April 27, 2006, Boston Globe)

As record oil prices turn attention to the need for renewable fuels, momentum is building in Congress to buck Senator Edward M. Kennedy's bid to block the proposed Cape Cod wind energy project, potentially reviving efforts to construct the sprawling windmill farm in Nantucket Sound.

The chairman and the top Democrat on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources committee said yesterday that when the bill Kennedy backs that would effectively halt the wind farm comes up for a vote in the Senate, they will object on procedural grounds. They say they'll argue that a renewable energy project shouldn't be lumped in with a bill governing the Coast Guard.

Meanwhile, a group of rank-and-file House members, worried about the political ramifications of rejecting alternative energy sources while motorists pay $3 a gallon at the gas station, have persuaded House leaders to sidetrack the entire bill for at least several weeks, even though it was slated for action this week. The delay could give supporters of the wind farm time to make their case to members of Congress.

''Are we going to be for developing alternative energy or not?" said Representative Charles Bass, a New Hampshire Republican who helped persuade House leaders to table the bill until at least mid-May. ''The longer you delay it, the longer there is for people to examine the issue, and to determine what's going on here."

If you just put a propeller in front of him when he talks the Senator could power at least a third of Washington DC.

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TO HANSEN AND FUKUYAMA, WE MODESTLY ADD THE NAME JUDD

Why Run After a Ball (Simon Jeffery, Guardian Newsblog, April 27th, 2006)

Iraq the Model reveals the radical Shia cleric's views on the beautiful game. It is not clear when his comments were made, but the tone of them makes it unlikely that either the prospect of an Arsenal versus Barcelona Champion's League final or "Big Phil" Scolari taking on the England job would do much to sway him.

Football - according to Iraq the Model's translation - has done little but distract Arab minds while, Mr Sadr suggests, the US and Israel "mostly turned to scientific things".

He explains: "The west made things for us that distract us ... made us run after a ball, habibi."

The cleric asks what it means to "see a man, big tall and wide and Muslim" run after a ball (clearly, he is no fan of soon-to-retire Zinedine Zidane). He suggests the goals a believer pursues should be those that "reach for the satisfaction of almighty Allah".

Mr Sadr then delivers the thrust of his argument - that Arabs would do better if they wasted less time on football.

Canadian hockey consultants are on their way as we speak

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NOT MUCH OF A DILEMMA:

Hamas Poses Dilemma for Egypt, Jordan (Ori Nir, April 28, 2006, The Forward)

Jordan and Egypt, the two Arab countries that have signed peace treaties with Israel, have called on Hamas to endorse the Arab League's peace plan of 2002, which involves full recognition of and peace with Israel in return for an Israeli withdrawal to the pre-1967 borders. Egypt and Jordan are not conditioning their contact with Hamas on its acceptance of the Arab League plan, but officials in both Cairo and Amman are making it clear to Hamas that it will enjoy only limited support unless it accepts Israel and renounces terrorism.

"The issue for [Jordan's King] Abdullah and Mubarak is not so much changing Hamas as it is not creating the conditions for it to become a successful alternative to Fatah," said a Western diplomat in Washington who follows Arab politics. "For both of them, the notion that an Islamist party across the border can take power and effectively rule is a serious threat," the diplomat said.

That sense of threat, experts say, is shared by other Arab regimes, albeit to a lesser extent.

In an interview with the Forward, the Arab League's ambassador to Washington, Hussein Hassouna, confirmed that such thinking in Arab capitals "might be in the background." He emphasized, however, that the Arab League does not support the isolation of Hamas. Instead, he said, the goal should be "to convince the new government to evolve its position [in support of a two-state solution] by engaging them."

For Jordanian and Egyptian officials, popular support in their countries for the Palestinian population makes it difficult to pressure Hamas, some observers said.

"They are going to have to try to walk a tightrope on this thing, so they are seen as supporting the Palestinian people but not necessarily supporting Hamas," said Edward Walker, former assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs. Walker also served as America's ambassador to Israel.

"It's a tricky road," said Walker, who is now president of Washington's Middle East Institute, "but clearly, they do not want to see [the Hamas government] succeed."

It's not all that tricky, just condition the support on Hamas's acceptance of Israel, like everyone else is doing.

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PRETTY STEEP UNION DUES (via Pepys):

Unions' Advice Is Failing Teachers: Labor groups have joined forces with investment firms to steer members into savings plans that often have high expenses and poor returns. (Kathy M. Kristof, April 25, 2006, LA Times)

Some of the nation's largest teachers unions have joined forces with investment companies to steer their members into retirement plans with high expenses that eat away at returns.

In what might seem an unlikely partnership, the unions endorse investment providers, even specific products, and the companies reciprocate with financial support. They sponsor union conferences, advertise in union publications or make direct payments to union treasuries.

The investment firms more than recoup their money through sales of annuities and other high-fee products to teachers for their 403(b) plans — personal retirement accounts similar to 401(k)s.

New York State United Teachers, for instance, receives $3 million a year from ING Group for encouraging its 525,000 members to invest in an annuity sold by the Dutch insurance giant.

The National Education Assn., the largest teachers union in the country with 2.7 million members, collected nearly $50 million in royalties in 2004 on the sale of annuities, life insurance and other financial products it endorses.

Teachers unions across the country — including those in Las Vegas and San Diego and statewide teacher associations in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Oregon — have struck their own endorsement deals.

Unions in Dallas, Miami, Phoenix, Seattle and Atlanta, among others, refer members to products approved by the NEA and typically receive a share of endorsement revenue in return.

Many teachers say they presume an endorsement means their union has used its clout to get the best price, as unions do on products from eyeglasses to automobiles. But when it comes to retirement accounts, union backing is often a sign that the product will cost more, not less.

Buyers of an NEA-endorsed annuity sold by Security Benefit Life Insurance Co. pay annual fees totaling at least 1.73% of their savings. That is about 10 times as much as they would pay in 403(b) plans available from Vanguard Group, T. Rowe Price and other low-cost mutual fund providers.

The costliest option in the NEA-endorsed plan charges 4.85% a year. That means an investor would have to earn a return of nearly 5% just to break even.

Union leaders defend the endorsement deals and the prevalence of high-fee annuities.

Bad enough the unions exist to benefit teachers at the expense of students, but if they can't even get that part right they're really pointless.

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HUMANS ARE DISGUSTING---NEWS AT ELEVEN

Sigmund the Fraud (Roger Scruton, The Spectator, April 29th, 2006)

Freud was born 150 years ago, on 6 May 1856, the same year as Wagner finished work on Die Walküre, the work which dramatises all the themes, from dreams to incest, that were to fascinate Freud. There is no doubt in my mind that it was Wagner, not Freud, who got things right, and that a knowledge of Wagner’s masterpiece casts serious doubts on Freud’s claims to originality. However, Freud’s reputation remains as great today as it was in my youth, when the Kleinians, the Jungians and the Adlerians were disputing his legacy. The idea of sexual repression has entered the culture, as has the doctrine (not one of Freud’s) that repression is harmful. It is almost universally assumed that the mind has a large unconscious component, that the sex drive (the ‘libido’) is the motive of our primary attachments, and that we all have ‘complexes’ instilled in childhood according to the archetypal patterns proposed by Freud. And every now and then some commentator will tell us that these assumptions are not merely true but also the proven results of a genuine science. Freud, who assumed the mask of the objective observer, who presented his results as the inescapable conclusions of arduous empirical study, who repeatedly claimed that his psychological discoveries would one day be grounded in biology, is now widely accepted at mask-value. Freud the artist, Freud the literary critic, Freud the high priest of manipulation, Freud the sex-obsessed and cold-blooded enemy of womankind are rarely put on display, though all those personae lie behind the mask, and each is much closer to the original inspiration than the Freud to whom psychology now defers. [...]

It is especially hard to recognise the true nature of Freud’s genius, which lay not in his theories, which are bunkum, nor in his practice, which was inspired quackery, but in his astonishment. Freud saw mysteries where others saw facts. He recognised that the influence of parents on their children ran through deep and hidden channels, that it showed itself in every aspect of their future lives, and in no matter more fatefully than that of sexual desire. He pondered the mysteries of guilt, anxiety and mourning and tried to fathom them. He was amazed by both jokes and dreams, and offered a crazy diagnosis of their meaning. Where others saw muddle and eccentricity he imagined diseases of the soul, and set out to vanquish them. And in his case studies he presented unforgettable portraits of wrecked human beings, about whose flailing carcasses he patrolled like a jackal, tearing off pieces and holding them up to the light, which he imagined to be a light of science, but which was in fact a light of the imagination, transfiguring all on which it fell.

Freud suffered from the ‘charm of disenchantment’. Like Marx he was irresistibly drawn to explanations that demean us, and which turn our world-view upside down — or set it, as Marx insisted, ‘on its feet’. This is apparent in Freud’s theory of the ‘incest tabu’, which begins from a characteristic gesture of astonishment. Why is it that incest is not just avoided but forbidden? What explains the horror and the sense of pollution that caused Jocasta to hang herself and Oedipus to stab out his eyes? Freud leaps at once to his conclusion: that which is forbidden is also desired. And the horror is needed because the desire is great. If it is so great, it must be there in all of us, repressed but simmering, seeking the channels through which to flow in some disguised but virulent version.

A real scientist, observing the facts, would draw the opposite conclusion. Incest arouses horror not because we desire it but because we don’t. Why don’t we? First, because incest undermines the relationships on which the home is built, and so impedes the transfer of social capital; second, because communities that permit incest pay a genetic price. The horror is there because societies that lack it have all died out. The Freudian story is a fiction, believed not because of its explanatory power but because of its charm. We are thrilled by disenchantment, which seems to set us free from social norms. We watch with fascination as our ideals are punctured, and our gods brought down to earth. After this Götterdämmerung, we imagine, there will be a bleak but permissive dawn.

Even today, therefore, people are drawn to the most disenchanting of Freud’s theories, which is the theory of infantile sexual-ity. And once again the theory is upside-down. Children develop from blobs of needy flesh to rational adults, and their sexuality develops with them. Only with puberty does it begin to focus on the Other, since only then can sexual desire be integrated into personal life. Were it otherwise, then chaos would ensue, both in the home and in the reproductive potential of the community. Paedophilia horrifies us; but societies without the horror have all died out.

Freud simply cannot accept that kind of explanation. Instead of reading childish sexuality forward into its mature realisation in adult desire, he reads adult desire backwards, into the naive titillations of the child. By thus polluting the image of childhood he casts a spell over his readers. This is how it must be, he implies; and as with the theory of incest, we acquiesce in fascination as our last picture of innocence is destroyed.

As with his spiritual cohorts, Marx and Darwin, Freud was a superb conjurer. He somehow managed to reduce our notion of man to an insignificant, meaningless, enslaved and rather sordid accident while at the same time persuading us that he held the key to significance, meaning, liberation and purpose.

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OUR GUY:

Iraq cleric calls for disarmament (BBC, 4/27/06)

Ayatollah Ali Sistani, one of Iraq's most senior Shia clerics, has called for the next government to dismantle militias operating in the country.

The grand ayatollah said only the government should have weapons, and its forces should be loyal to the nation - not to individual political parties. [...]

During a meeting in Najaf, the ayatollah told Mr Maliki he had to end bombings, drive-by shootings and kidnappings, fight corruption and restore electricity and clean drinking water.

Ayatollah Sistani also urged Mr Maliki to form a government of leaders who would put the national interest above "their personal, party or sectarian interests".

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LIVE FREE AND QUICK DRAW:

House OKs deadly force in public (KEVIN LANDRIGAN, 4/27/06, Nashua Telegraph)

The gun owners lobby scored a surprising reversal Wednesday, winning final approval of a bill that lets anyone use deadly force when attacked in public – even if retreating from an attacker is an option.

Under current law, deadly force can be used only if people are threatened in their home, or if in public they are the target of a deadly attack, a kidnapping or attempted rape. In other situations, retreat is required.

After a campaign by gun rights groups, House membersWednesday embraced expanding the deadly force law, on a vote of 193-134. Only five weeks ago, they had cast a lopsided measure against a similar bill.

The Senate already approved the bill, which goes now to Gov. John Lynch. The governor has “concerns” about the bill, but has yet to decide if he’ll sign or veto it, according to his communications director, Pamela Walsh.

There has to be some bogus bill the GOP could bring to the floor in Congress along these lines that would make Democrats go on record against the gun wahoos. Nothing would help more in the Fall.

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FROGONOMICS:

In iTunes War, France Has Met the Enemy. Perhaps It Is France. (AUSTAN GOOLSBEE, 4/27/06, NY Times)

In their fervor to free listeners from the shackles of their iPods, French politicians have abandoned one of the guiding principles of antitrust economics: penalize companies that harm consumers, not the ones that succeed by building better products.

Antitrust authorities normally follow well-established procedures when considering such moves. They weigh the loss to consumers of not being able to play iTunes songs on other players against the damage that forcing iTunes to open might have on innovation. France's own Competition Council did a similar analysis in 2004 and ruled that Apple's refusal to share the iTunes codes did not harm consumers. The legislature paid no mind to such analysis and seems not to have considered innovation at all. Therein lies the danger.

Apple largely created the online market for legal music. The record labels' own attempts flopped embarrassingly. Until iTunes, virtually no one paid for online music. Since then, iTunes has sold more than one billion songs. Its success comes largely from two crucial innovations.

First, Apple's music store is simple and works extremely well with the iPod. Find the music. Click "Buy It." Drag the files onto the iPod icon. That's it. Experiences with other players and music stores are far more complicated.

Further, iTunes keeps getting better. Apple has added video capability, celebrity play lists, exclusive music, the ability to convert home movies into iPod format, and many other features — all free.

Second, iTunes has lots of music. Largely because of the innovative iTunes FairPlay copy protection and digital rights management software, Apple persuaded major record labels to let them sell much of their best content online. The combination of simplicity and variety proved a huge winner.

If the French gave away the codes, Apple would lose much of its rationale for improving iTunes. [...]

Sharing the iTunes codes would undermine the two innovations that Apple used to create the online market for legal music in the first place. With France accounting for only 5 percent of iTunes sales, Apple would probably shut down iTunes in France rather than give up the codes.

We could use some more trusts that give away their product for free.

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AND THAT'S HOW THE STEP-CHILD GOT RED HAIR... (via Pepys):

The Murderer Next Door: The limits of sociobiology: a review of The Murderer Next Door: Why the Mind Is Designed to Kill, by David M. Buss (Theodore Dalrymple, 24 April 2006, City Journal)

All this fits quite well with the data, as does the fact that stepfathers are 40 times more likely to kill a stepchild than is a biological father to kill his child. A stepfather wants his woman to attend to his offspring, not those of another man (do not lions routinely kill the cubs of the lioness’s former impregnator?). But the example of stepchildren actually demonstrates the limitations of sociobiological explanation as well as its strengths: for the fact is that, even if stepfathers kill stepchildren 40 times more often than biological parents, only one in 2,000 stepchildren dies at his stepfather’s hand.

With this statistic in mind, it follows that the best reproductive strategy for men, if they were really concerned mainly to spread their genes, would be to father as many children as possible, and then desert them to the care of stepfathers, secure in the knowledge that only one in 2,000 of their children will be killed. The time that a biological father would otherwise have devoted to—wasted in—supporting his own offspring would now be free to devote to impregnating hundreds or thousands of women and thereby spreading his genes far and wide. Meanwhile, hundreds or thousands of foolish stepfathers would be raising children who were not theirs, and in the process putting themselves hors de combat in the biological competition.

One might argue that something approaching this state of affairs has developed in the western world’s lower-class ghettoes. But then why has it not existed throughout human history, if the principle determinant of human behavior were of the kind sociobiologists propose?

There is nothing in Buss’s book as to why the murder rate in the United States was 1.5 per 100,000 in 1900 and 10 per 100,000 in 1990 (and the rate would have been 50 per 100,000 if not for improvements in the medical treatment of trauma). There is nothing either as to why the murder rate in Japan was one eleventh that of the United States in 1990. Are the Japanese sociobiologically different from the Americans? Were the Americans of a century ago sociobiologically different from the Americans of today?

The explanatory force of sociobiology, contrary to its practitioners’ claims, is slight when it comes to human behavior—precisely where the discipline’s aspirations are greatest.

One of the most amusing things about Darwinists is the staggering amount of nonsense they're required to believe while denouncing faith.

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BUT SCIENTIFIC I.D. IS COMPLETELY DIFFERENT....:

Science in Wonderland: Getting some perspective (250 million years' worth) on the evolution controversy. (John Wilson, 04/05/2006, Christianity Today)

The contempt that many scientists have expressed for Intelligent Design knows no bounds, but it can be summarized in a single dismissive sentence: "It's not science." Now string theory—that's another matter. String theory generates articles and grants and symposia. String theory has charismatic spokesmen like Brian Greene. (What is string theory? Ah, the universe is … made up of these … strings. Best if you read Greene's book, The Elegant Universe, or watch the accompanying DVD. You still won't understand it, but your ignorance, like mine, will be better informed.)

The man who is sometimes referred to as the father of string theory is Leonard Susskind, who is Felix Bloch Professor of Theoretical Physics at Stanford University and who recently published a book called The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design. You might wonder what a theoretical physicist is doing messing with questions of Intelligent Design. Isn't that a job for biologists?

Well, do you remember talk a few years back about the extreme improbability of all the conditions required for life as we know it evolving just so? The reaction of the science establishment was to huff and puff and hint darkly about stealth creationism. But many cosmologists took the question seriously—so seriously, in fact, that some of them began to argue that our universe is but one of an unimaginable number of universes, say 10500, in which case the features of any one universe (ours, for instance) are unremarkable.

This theory has not met with, shall we say, universal approbation, not least because it can't be empirically tested. You could even say it's not science, and some have said that, but they don't hiss the way they do when they talk about Intelligent Design.

And here is an interesting footnote. At the end of an interview in New Scientist, Leonard Susskind, a very engaging character, is asked—if his theory is ultimately not borne out—"Are we stuck with Intelligent Design?" And Susskind gives a candid answer that no doubt provoked wrath among many of his colleagues:

I doubt that physicists will see it that way. … I am pretty sure that physicists will go on searching for natural explanations of the world. But I have to say that if that happens, as things stand now, we will be in a very awkward position. Without any explanation of nature's fine-tunings we will be hard pressed to answer the ID critics. One might argue that a hope that a mathematically unique solution will emerge is as faith-based as ID.

Susskind was really very naughty to say that, and you can sense that he knew it.

Just stay in one place and the scientists will come back to you eventually.

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IF JAILBIRDS VOTE THEN WHY CAN'T I? (via Bryan Francoeur):

Songbirds can learn basic grammar (AP, 4/26/06)

The simplest grammar, long thought to be one of the skills that separate man from beast, can be taught to a common songbird, new research suggests.

Starlings learned to differentiate between a regular birdsong "sentence" and one containing a clause or another sentence of warbling, according to a study in Thursday's journal Nature.
Brother Francoeur wants to know how long before Spain gives them the vote.

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HOW'S THAT PORT SALE GOING?:

In U.A.E., Tradition Yields to Times (Anthony Shadid, April 27, 2006, Washington Post)

Zaabi lives in Fujairah, one of seven small monarchies that make up the United Arab Emirates, along the turquoise waters of the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. When she was a child, fishing and farming brought in a few dollars. Today, the annual per capita income is more than $21,000 and nearly 10 percent of the world's oil is within the emirates' borders. There are 88 cellphones for every 100 people.

From beneath her black gown, Zaabi pulled out one of those devices and belted out a string of salutations.

"I'll call you later," she shouted. "I have guests now."

And back she ventured to a reservoir of memory, the relics of another life that she has collected over the years near her home.

"There weren't dishwashers in those days," she said. "It was all by hand, and it was torture."

She pointed to a lantern, obsolete with the advent of electricity. "We used this back then," she said.

Zaabi grasped a hanging bag, woven of palm fronds, where fruit and salted meat once hung, cooled by a breeze. Then she hurried to a sheepskin pouch that, when shaken, turned milk to cheese.

"Beautiful!" she cried out, and she moved on to a saddle, stitched of worn leather.

"You'd put it on the donkey's back and then you would ride," she said -- two days to Abu Dhabi, the capital, or two months across the desert to Mecca, the destination of the Muslim pilgrimage. "Thank God, it's not like that now."

"Sheik Zayed," she said simply. "God rest his soul."

Sheik Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan was the founder of the United Arab Emirates, in 1971, and he presided over the country's modernization until his death in 2004. A simple man, albeit with tremendous wealth, he is remembered fondly here, credited by many with maintaining tradition amid change. Those forces are still at work today -- with the breakneck growth of booming Dubai, where English has become a lingua franca, and with the vestiges of the past in a place like Fujairah, population 130,000, where conversations celebrate the success of Dubai, the U.A.E. capital, and recoil at its materialism, competition and, in the eyes of some, greed.

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YOU DO THE MATH:

Conservatives grow more popular (ALEXANDER PANETTA, 4/27/06, Canadian Press)

The Conservatives have seized a commanding lead in popularity over the Liberals and inched into majority-government territory, says a new survey released Wednesday.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Tories held a 15-point advantage over the Liberals and broke past what is considered the benchmark for winning a majority government, says the Decima poll.

Nothing's impossible in politics, but the idea that Democrats will sweep the GOP from office in November requires a belief that America will trand to the Left at a time when every other nation in the Anglosphere, plus Germany, Poland, & Japan are trending Right. Theoretically possible, but it has never happened before.

MORE:
No Outcry About Lobby Scandal, Lawmakers Say (Jeffrey H. Birnbaum and Thomas B. Edsall, 4/27/06,
Washington Post)

The scandal surrounding disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff has been a Washington obsession for months, but Republican lawmakers who returned from a two-week recess this week said they felt free to pass a relatively tepid ethics bill because their constituents rarely mention the issue.

One key component of the inside the Beltway belief in a Democrat takeover is the insistence that 1994 was about scandal, not about ideas. The opposite is, of course, the case

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BOY, HE SURE RACED DOWN THAT DEAD END (via Matt Murphy):

What FDR Teaches Us: Long Shadow: A new book relives his first 100 days. Have a look, Mr. President. (Jonathan Alter, 5/01/06, Newsweek)

On one level, it's unfair to compare a sitting president to his predecessors, especially when he has more than two and a half years to go. And it's doubly unfair to compare George Walker Bush, currently experiencing some of the lowest approval ratings in the history of polling, to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who is on the list of even conservative historians as one of our best presidents. But juxtaposing the two men may shed some light on both Roosevelt's unusual gifts and Bush's current troubles. FDR's presidency can offer some useful lessons—for today's White House, and for anyone intrigued by the mysteries of leadership. [...]

Two weeks after barely dodging assassination in Miami in February of 1933, Roosevelt took office and performed a similar conjuring act on a larger stage. With the banks closed and millions of Americans wiped out, FDR used his "first-class temperament" to treat the mental depression of Americans without curing their economic one. In the days following his "fear itself" Inaugural and first "Fireside Chat," the same citizens who had lined up the month before to withdraw their last savings from the bank (and stuff it under the mattress or tape it to their chests) lined up to redeposit patriotically. This astounding act of ebullient leadership marked the "defining moment" of modern American politics, when Roosevelt saved both capitalism and democracy within a few weeks and redefined the bargain—the "Deal"—the country struck with its own people.

In "The Defining Moment," my new book examining FDR's election and storied Hundred Days, I don't draw explicit comparisons with Bush. But they're hard to ignore.

In fact, as David M. Kennedy points out in his entirely orthodox liberal history of the period for the Oxford History of the United States, Freedom from Fear, FDR's hundred Days were a complete flop and it was only several terms later that the economy started growing again in any meaningful way, largely because we were building stuff to sell to the Europeans who were at war. Meanwhile, the notion that capitalism and democracy were in any peril is the kind of claptrap you get from folks who don't believe in them to begin with, else they'd not think them so fragile.

It is worth considering though what George W. Bush would have accomplished with a congressional majority and a landslide victory of the size that FDR was handed by circumstances in 1932. The undoing of the New Deal/Great Society would be much further along, with personalized retirement accounts, universal school vouchers and perhaps even some kind of universal HSAs. We'll likely still manage to undo the damage FDR caused, but it will take a while longer.

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THANKS, NANCY:

America, Minus A Human Factor: From Guns to Bunions, A Statistical Portrait That Doesn't Quite Add Up (Joel Garreau, 4/27/06, Washington Post)

In 1979, there were an estimated 29,869,000 pot tokers in this country, but that number dropped pretty steadily, to 18,710,000 in 1998. Cocaine users dropped dramatically, from 10,459,000 in 1982 to 3,664,000 in 1995, before going up by half a million two years later. What was that about? Crack?

Such random, mind-boggling connections are the beauty and sensational weirdness of the recently released, 28.5-pound, $825, five-volume Historical Statistics of the United States, Millennial Edition.

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WHEN ROVEBOTS WRITE:

Bad Fences Make Bad Neighbors (Joseph Richey, 4/27/06, AlterNet)

President Bush has publicly promoted a guest worker program and called massive deportation "unrealistic," but when he's not on the podium, he's already expanding an immigration plan that's not so immigrant-friendly.

With Bush's approval, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff has ordered new and expanded programs on the frontier in Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and internally at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and its Office of Detention and Removal (DRO). Their 2007 budget request seeks ten times more funding for detention and removal than it does for employer violations and apprehension.

Precisely the message the Administration is trying to sell.

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ONCE IT STARTS SETTING NEW HIGHS EVEN THE MSM HAS TO PAY ATTENTION:

Dow ends at 6-year high (Chris Sanders, 4/26/06, Reuters)

Stocks ended higher on Wednesday, with the Dow industrials hitting a 6-year high, buoyed by stronger-than-expected earnings from companies such as top brewer Anheuser-Busch Cos. and a key broker's dropping its "sell" rating on General Motors Corp.

The latest string of results in a stronger-than-forecast earnings season overshadowed investors' worries about rising interest rates after orders in March for durable goods such as airplanes and refrigerators surpassed expectations. [...]

The Dow Jones industrial average ended up 71.24 points, or 0.63 percent, at 11,354.49, its highest close since January 19, 2000.

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COME MONDAY IT'LL BE ALRIGHT (via John Beckwith):

Monday's act heroic after 30 years (Ben Platt, 04/25/2006, MLB.com)

It was 1976, a fun year for America. It was the country's bicentennial, the war in Vietnam had ended a year earlier and everyone really wanted to put all the problems from the 1960s, Watergate and Vietnam behind them and just enjoy the country's yearlong 200th birthday party.

On April 25, the Chicago Cubs were visiting Dodger Stadium for a three-game series. Playing center field for the Cubs was Rick Monday, the first player taken in the amateur draft that was created 11 years earlier. Monday was born and raised in Santa Monica, Calif., so playing in front of his friends and family was always special to him. On this day, fate would hand Monday a moment that people still talk about with reverence 30 years later. Monday recounts the moment in his own words.

"In between the top and bottom of the fourth inning, I was just getting loose in the outfield, throwing the ball back and forth. Jose Cardenal was in left field and I was in center. I don't know if I heard the crowd first or saw the guys first, but two people ran on the field. After a number of years of playing, when someone comes on the field, you don't know what's going to happen. Is it because they had too much to drink? Is it because they're trying to win a bet? Is it because they don't like you or do they have a message that they're trying to present?

"When these two guys ran on the field, something wasn't right. And it wasn't right from the standpoint that one of them had something cradled under his arm. It turned out to be an American flag. They came from the left-field corner, went past Cardenal to shallow left-center field.

"That's when I saw the flag. They unfurled it as if it was a picnic blanket. They knelt beside it, not to pay homage but to harm it as one of the guys was pulling out of his pocket somewhere a big can of lighter fluid. He began to douse it.

"What they were doing was wrong then, in 1976. In my mind, it's wrong now, in 2006. It's the way I was raised. My thoughts were reinforced with my six years in the Marine Corp Reserves. It was also reinforced by a lot of friends who lost their lives protecting the rights and freedoms that flag represented.

"So I started to run after them. To this day, I couldn't tell you what was running through my mind except I was mad, I was angry and it was wrong for a lot of reasons.

They also have the game call by Vin Scully, who speaks for every decent American.

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THE DRAGON OROBOUROUS (via Pepys):

China grapples with a labor dragon (Antoaneta Bezlova, 4/27/06, Asia Times)

Labor unrest has surged despite the Chinese authorities' efforts to keep workers quiet. The CCP has found itself unable to intervene because the proportion of the workforce belonging to the official state-run trade union, the All China Federation of Trade Unions, has declined and now represents a minority of workers.

Most of the industrial workforce no longer works in state factories, but in private enterprises, foreign-invested factories, and a huge cluster of enterprises run by local governments. Even in state factories, union enrollment has been falling, since the legal union body is run by the CCP.

The result has been a proliferation of underground and illegal trade unions and a dramatic surge in labor disputes.

"The government's use of anti-union tactics such as crackdowns on industrial actions and imprisonment of those fighting for workers' rights is simply fanning the flames of what is emerging to be a major threat to their own rule," said the ICFTU report.

China labor watchers said many of the disputes related to workers demanding that employers paid them the minimum wage. Many employers have been able to take advantage of the ignorance of their workforce and pay rates half those set by the authorities, and they add on unrestricted overtime.

For example, in the export-processing hub of Shenzhen, which offers the highest minimum wage, the rate is set at 690 yuan (US$85) per month. But studies show that average manufacturing wages are only between 38% and 75% of this minimum.

However, there is growing pressure from inside and outside the country to raise labor regulations to international standards.

As your economy develops and folks demand rights, including decent wages, you price their labor right out of the market and the jobs move to the next country.

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A RECORD MADE TO BE BROKEN:

Record 20,692 foreign kids lack Japanese fluency (Japan Times, 4/27/06)

The number of foreign students in public schools who require classes in Japanese as a second language rose to 20,692 as of last September, up 5.2 percent from the prior year and topping 20,000 for the first time, the education ministry said Wednesday.

From Ireland, EU hears hum of cheap labor: By Monday, Western Europe must decide whether to lift restrictions on low-wage Eastern European immigrants. (Peter Ford, 4/27/06, The Christian Science Monitor)

Foreigners, who made up 3 percent of the population six years ago, now make up nearly 10 percent, says Macdara Doyle, spokesman for the Irish Congress of Trade Unions. "This is going to have massive economic and social consequences that are going to start showing up soon," he warns.

So far, most of the economic consequences have been good. The Eastern European migrants have filled gaps in the job market, fueling the "Celtic Tiger" boom that has seen the highest growth rates in Europe, and increased the government's tax and social security revenues.

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PROTECTION MONEY:

$ 26 billion bill coming Japan's way: Pentagon (JJapan Times, 4/27/06)

Tokyo will be paying an estimated $ 26 billion or more to implement the overall U.S. military realignment in Japan over six to seven years, compared with Washington's share of $ 4 billion, a senior Pentagon official said Tuesday.

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THE SCOTS-IRISH WOULD OUTDO THE UN:

Peace Corp. (Boston Globe, 4/23/2006)

THREE YEARS OF FIGHTING in the Darfur region of Sudan have left an estimated 180,000 dead and nearly 2 million refugees. In recent weeks, both the UN and the US have turned up the volume of their demands to end the violence (which the Bush administration has publicly called genocide), but they've been hard pressed to turn their exhortations into action. The government in Khartoum has scuttled the UN's plans to take control of the troubled peacekeeping operations currently being led by the African Union, and NATO recently stated publicly that a force of its own in Darfur is ''out of the question."...

But according to J. Cofer Black, vice chairman of the private security firm Blackwater, there is another option that ought to be on the table ...

A few weeks ago, at an international special forces conference in Jordan, Black announced that his company could deploy a small rapid-response force to conflicts like the one in Sudan. "We're low cost and fast," Black said, "the question is, who's going to let us play on their team?"...

Private military companies have had a hard time convincing the international community that privatizing peacekeeping would be as good for Darfur, and for the rest of the world, as for their industry.... Kofi Annan ... [once declared] that "the world is not yet ready to privatize peace."

Just as with health care, education, telephones, and every other pastime, so with peace. If you oppose privatizing it, you oppose it.

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IT'S A BOUNTIFUL CROP:

Kerry still undecided on Nantucket Sound wind farm (Andrew Miga, AP, 4/26/06)

Think of all the John Kerry jokes you could wring out of that headline alone.

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WORK WITH ME, ME (via Tom Morin):

The dying animal: In the post-religious world of Philip Roth's fiction, humans do not have immortal souls. Death and desire is all we are. A S Byatt on a brief and bleak morality tale for our times: a review of Everyman by Philip Roth (A S Byatt, New Statesman)

Philip Roth is the great recorder of Darwinian Man - "unaccommodated man", who is no more than "a poor, bare, forked animal", as old King Lear observed. Roth has understood what it means to be a conscious creature, driven by sexual desire towards the death of the body, nothing more. [...]

Roth's characters inhabit a truly post-religious world, in which we do not have immortal souls, only sick, lively desire, and the dying of the animal. [...]

The body - his body, everyman's body - is the solid certainty in the story. [...]

Roth works with things, not with symbols or metaphors, but he chooses them craftily.

Though Ms Byatt cleverly gets off a couple double entendres there, she's obviously quite wrong about Mr. Roth, whose work is too onanistic to be Darwinian.

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BUT WHAT IF THE WALL IS PAPER?:

The spy who loved us - Oleg Penkovsky: KGB defector Oleg Penkovsky was dying to give America the Soviets' deepest secrets, So how did the CIA lose him?: The Spy Who Saved the World
by Jerrold L. Schecter, Peter S. Deriabin (Tim Weiner, May 1992 , Washington Monthly)

The Central Intelligence Agency knew little of value about the Soviet Union in the summer of T1960, when presidential candidate John F. Kennedy was terrifying voters with the fraudulent but powerful image of a missile gap. The fear of Soviet nuclear superiority was founded in ignorance. In 1960, there was no CIA station chief in Moscow and no station to speak of, no CIA officer who spoke Russian, no way to penetrate the steely Soviet shield -no one, in short, to listen when Oleg Penkovsky, a deeply disgruntled colonel in Soviet military intelligence who knew the truth about Soviet missilery, tried to deliver himself unto America. [...]

This book has something of the air of an official history, which should come as no surprise given that one author is a journalist and former White House spokesman and the other a KGB defector who served as a consultant to the CIA for 30 years. But the authors go beyond even the agency's glowing appraisal to anoint Penkovsky savior of the world, the spy whose intelligence kept the Berlin crisis of 1961 and the Cuban missile crisis from exploding into nuclear war.

The transcripts of Penkovsky's debriefings were generously bequeathed to the authors by the CIA under the Freedom of Information Act. (They were published in 1965, albeit in sanitized, souped-up, and somewhat fictionalized form, with the CIAs editorial assistance, as a purported spy's diary, The Penkovsky Papers. The current book's co-author, Peter Deriabin, translated the edited transcripts of the original CIA bestseller.) Lengthy excerpts of the conversations between Penkovsky and the CIA over the months in which they communed form the basic text of this book. They show-as The Penkovsky Papers did not -that this most valuable agent revealed that the Soviets were playing a game of liar's poker with their nuclear weapons.

U.S. strategic doctrine of the day called for the destruction of the Soviet Union and all its satellites with more than 5,000 nuclear weapons in the event of a Soviet invasion of Europe. Everything of strategic value from Poland to the Pacific would have been reduced, as a U.S. naval officer who saw the war plan of the late fifties observed, to "a smoking, radiating ruin" within two hours. The plan was developed after the U.S. Air Force invented the "missile gap" by creating and leaking estimates during the late fifties that the Soviets had hundreds of ICBMs and soon would have thousands.

Penkovsky divulged that the Soviets had a mere handful of ICBMs, whose electronics and fuel systems were dubious. Fans of Le Carre will see in Penkovsky the basis for Dante, the physicist in The Russia House who reveals Soviet rocketry to be as efficient as Soviet econometrics.

In their first meeting, Penkovsky told the CIA that "the Soviet Union is definitely not prepared at this time for war... Khrushchev is not going to fire any rockets." There was no Soviet ICBM force worth the name, though the Soviets were struggling furiously to catch up with the U.S.-a goal they would not achieve for nearly 20 years.

Not only was Khrushchev lying when he claimed Moscow was squeezing out intercontinental ballistic missiles "like sausages," but the Soviet Union's sausages were horsemeat. The economy was crumbling because "everything is subordinated to the armaments race." Penkovsky continued:

[In a land war in Europe] countless numbers of officers and soldiers would simply desert to the other side. This is because all of these ideals for which many of our fathers, brothers, and relatives died have turned out to be nothing but a bluff and a deceit. There is always the promise that things will be better, but actually nothing is better and things are only getting worse. I swear to you that only in Moscow and Leningrad can one even purchase decent food.... [Outside the cities] it is difficult to get bread. There are no roads, which results in unbelievable transportation delays and breakdowns; grain is rotting since it cannot be delivered.

The enemy was really nothing more than Upper Volta with rockets-and not many rockets at that.

Some myths are too precious for even the Right to give up, like the notion that the USSR was a threat and nuclear war unwinnable.

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TURNING YOUR COUNTRY INTO THE HOLLAND TUNNEL APPROACH SEEMS A DUBIOUS PROPOSITION:

Japan pins hopes on 'speed dates' (Duncan Bartlett, 4/26/06, BBC World)

It's not everybody's idea of romance: meeting a rapid succession of people from the opposite sex, with bare minutes to make a connection before a bell signals it's time to move on.

But speed dating parties, as such events are known, are proving increasingly common in many countries.

In Japan, though, some are paid for by the government.

The hope is that by encouraging people to date, marry and start a family, the current demographic trend leading towards a shrinking population can be arrested.

It might not seem the most obvious scheme to tackle a falling birth rate, but it has proved extremely popular, and speed dating events happen across Japan every night of the week.

They seem to radically underestimate how much they need to change their culture.

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HOW'S THIS DIFFER FROM WHAT THEY WANT TO DO WITH THE GUYS AT GITMO?:

900 foreign criminals go missing (Alan Travis, April 26, 2006, The Guardian)

An urgent hunt for more than 900 freed prisoners who should have been deported was under way last night after Charles Clarke shouldered responsibility for a "shocking administrative blunder" that had allowed them to stay in the country.

The Home Office said it had so far managed to track down only 107 of the 1,023 foreign nationals convicted of serious crimes who should have faced deportation over the past seven years.

Officials could not confirm that the five convicted killers and nine rapists in the list had been tracked down.

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DOESN'T THE XENOTURBELLA DESERVE AT LEAST FREEDOM OF THE PRESS? (via Bryan Francoeur):

Socialists: Give apes human rights (Spain Herald, 4/25/06)

The Spanish Socialist Party will introduce a bill in the Congress of Deputies calling for "the immediate inclusion of (simians) in the category of persons, and that they be given the moral and legal protection that currently are only enjoyed by human beings." The PSOE's justification is that humans share 98.4% of our genes with chimpanzees, 97.7% with gorillas, and 96.4% with orangutans.

To be a secularist is to believe that the shared bits matter more than the distinctions.

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A CORRECT FORECAST FOR ONCE:

President Announces Tony Snow as Press Secretary (George W. Bush, James S. Brady Briefing Room, 4/26/06)

THE PRESIDENT: Good morning. I'm here in the briefing room to break some news. I've asked Tony Snow to serve as my new press secretary.

Tony already knows most of you, and he's agreed to take the job anyway. (Laughter.) And I'm really glad he did. I'm confident Tony Snow will make an outstanding addition to this White House staff. I am confident he will help you do your job. My job is to make decisions, and his job is to help explain those decisions to the press corps and the American people.

He understands like I understand that the press is vital to our democracy. As a professional journalist, Tony Snow understands the importance of the relationship between government and those whose job it is to cover the government. He's going to work hard to provide you with timely information about my philosophy, my priorities, and the actions we're taking to implement our agenda.

He brings a long record of accomplishment to this position. He has spent a quarter of a century in the news business. He's worked in all three major media -- print, radio and television. He started his career in 1979 as an editorial writer for The Greensboro Record in North Carolina. He's going to -- went on to write editorials for The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk. He ran the editorial pages in both The Daily Press of Newport News and The Washington Times. He's written nationally syndicated columns for both The Detroit News and USA Today.

During his career in print journalism, he's been cited for his work by the Society for Professional Journalists, the Associated Press, and Gannett. For seven years, he served as the host of "FOX News Sunday." Most recently, he reached Americans all across our country as the host of "The Tony Snow Show" on FOX News Radio, and "Weekend Live with Tony Snow" on the FOX News Channel.

He's not afraid to express his own opinions. For those of you who have read his columns and listened to his radio show, he sometimes has disagreed with me. I asked him about those comments, and he said, "You should have heard what I said about the other guy." I like his perspective, I like the perspective he brings to this job, and I think you're going to like it, too.

Tony knows what it's like to work inside the White House. In 1991, he took a break from journalism to serve as Director of Speechwriting and Deputy Assistant to the President for Media Affairs. He's taught children in Kenya. He belongs to a rock band called Beats Working. He's a man of courage, he's a man of integrity, he loves his family a lot. He is the loving husband of a fine wife, and the father of three beautiful children.

He succeeds a decent and talented man in Scott McClellan. I've known Scott since he worked for me in Texas. We traveled our state together, we traveled our country together, and we have traveled the world together. We have also made history together. Scott should be enormously proud of his service to our nation in an incredibly difficult job. I've always -- I will always be grateful to him. I will always be proud to call him, "friend."

I appreciate Scott's offer to help Tony Snow prepare for his new job, and I'm proud to welcome Tony as part of our team.

MR. SNOW: Well, Mr. President, I want to thank you for the honor of serving as Press Secretary. And just a couple of quick notes, I'm delighted to be here. One of the things I want to do is just make it clear that I -- one of the reasons I took the job is not only because I believe in the President, because believe it or not, I want to work with you. These are times that are going to be very challenging. We've got a lot of big issues ahead, and we've got a lot of important things that all of us are going to be covering together.

And I am very excited, and I can't wait, and I want to thank you, Mr. President, for the honor, and thank all you guys for your forbearance, and I look forward to working with you.

Thanks.

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NO LONGER CHRETIENOUS:

Ottawa considers joining rival to Kyoto Protocol (BILL CURRY, 4/26/06, Globe and Mail)

The Conservative government is considering joining the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate, considered a more lax rival to the Kyoto Protocol.

Environment Minister Rona Ambrose said yesterday that she is taking a close look at the partnership of the six countries -- the United States, India, China, Australia, South Korea and Japan -- that together produce more than half of the world's greenhouse gases.

Not a tough call whether to side with the US, India, and Australia or France and Germany, is it?

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HOLING MOSES:

Jane Jacobs, 89; Writer, Activist Spoke Out Against Urban Renewal (Adam Bernstein, April 26, 2006, Washington Post)

Jane Jacobs, 89, a writer and activist who condemned urban-renewal efforts for devastating inner-city neighborhoods and, despite an initial reputation as a radical and heretic, was vindicated as an influential thinker on city planning, died April 25 at a hospital in Toronto. She apparently had a stroke, according to media reports.

The urban-renewal movement of the mid-20th century spent hundreds of millions of dollars clearing communities that were deemed slums, building low-income housing projects and creating parks and highways. Anyone criticizing the model, with its political backing, was not looked on kindly.

In this atmosphere came Mrs. Jacobs, a middle-aged, self-taught architectural and urban-planning specialist with Architectural Forum magazine. She was an incautious woman, at times disheveled in appearance, who tended to anger very powerful people. Several times, she courted arrest to speak out against plans by Robert Moses, a New York City commissioner whose portfolio included oversight of the city's parks and roads.

In her name-making book, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" (1961), she recorded what she considered the human toll of urban renewal.

She spoke of the displacement of thousands of residents and the destruction of small, if untidy, communities whose diversity she said was crucial to a city's allure. She maintained that urban renewal worsened the problems it was intended to solve: high crime, architectural conformity and a general dullness infecting daily life.

She attacked the arrogance of city planners for making decisions without consulting those affected.

"The planner's greatest shortcoming, I think, is lack of intellectual curiosity about how cities work," she told the New York Times in 1969. "They are taught to see the intricacy of cities as mere disorder. Since most of them believe what they have been taught, they do not inquire about the processes that lie behind the intricacy. I doubt that knowledgeable city planning will come out of the present profession. It is more likely to arise as an offshoot of economics."

When "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" was published, the director of the American Society of Planning Officials urged members to "batten down the hatches." The usually urbane urban-planning expert Lewis Mumford, insulted by his portrayal in the book, wrote a critique of Mrs. Jacobs printed in the New Yorker magazine under the heading "Mother Jacobs' Home Remedies for Urban Cancer."

Others considered her a visionary.

Jane Jacobs, Urban Activist, Is Dead at 89 (DOUGLAS MARTIN, 4/25/06, NY Times)

Jane Jacobs, the writer and thinker who brought penetrating eyes and ingenious insight to the sidewalk ballet of her own Greenwich Village street and came up with a book that challenged and changed the way people view cities, died today in Toronto, where she lived. She was 89.

She died at a Toronto hospital, said a distant cousin, Lucia Jacobs, who gave no specific cause of death.

In her book "Death and Life of Great American Cities," written in 1961, Ms. Jacobs's enormous achievement was to transcend her own withering critique of 20th-century urban planning and propose radically new principles for rebuilding cities. At a time when both common and inspired wisdom called for bulldozing slums and opening up city space, Ms. Jacobs's prescription was ever more diversity, density and dynamism — in effect, to crowd people and activities together in a jumping, joyous urban jumble.

Ms. Jacobs's thesis was supported and enlarged by her deep, eclectic reading. But most compelling was her description of the everyday life she witnessed from her home above a candy store at 555 Hudson Street.

She wrote the book on cities (WARREN GERARD, Apr. 26, 2006, Totonto STAR)

Jane Jacobs was an urban fable.

She was a writer, intellectual, analyst, ethicist and moral thinker, activist, self-made economist and a fearless critic of inflexible authority.

Jacobs died yesterday in a Toronto hospital. She was 89. Her 90th birthday would have been next week.

An American who chose to be Canadian, Jacobs was a leader in the fights to preserve neighbourhoods and kill expressways, first in New York City, and then in Toronto.

Her efforts to stop the proposed expressway between Manhattan Bridge on east Manhattan and the Holland Tunnel on the west contributed toward saving SoHo, Chinatown, and the western part of Greenwich Village.

In Toronto, her leadership galvanized the movement that stopped the proposed Spadina Expressway. It would have cut a swath through the lively Annex neighbourhood and parts of the downtown.

Toronto Mayor David Miller, who called Jacobs both a friend and a mentor, interrupted yesterday's city council meeting to announce to his colleagues that Jacobs had died.

"The power of her ideas is what helped make this city choose a different path, a path where you have vibrant downtown neighbourhoods where people could live, a path where you didn't have expressways cutting through neighbourhoods," Miller told reporters.

"She gave me all sorts of advice over time. The way she gave you advice was she invited you over for tea. And you had tea and you talked and if you were smart, you kept quiet and you listened because you could really learn from Jane Jacobs."

Her son, Ned Jacobs, said in an interview from Vancouver that his mother had been in hospital for a few days.

"She died of old age. She just wore out," he said. "Every part of her was worn out. She was working as best she could right to the end."

Her first book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in 1961, became a bible for neighbourhood organizers and what she termed the "foot people."

It made the case against the utopian planning culture of the times — residential highrise development, expressways through city hearts, slum clearances and desolate downtowns.

She believed that residential and commercial activity should be in the same place, that the safest neighbourhoods teem with life, short winding streets are better than long straight ones, lowrise housing is better than impersonal towers, that a neighbourhood is where people talk to one another. She liked the small-scale.

Former Toronto mayor David Crombie said that while people see her as a city builder, affecting the city form, her impact was much bigger and deeper.

"The most important thing she did for me and us was remind us that ideas matter, and the ideas that were most important are the ones that mattered to us," Crombie said.

Not hard to best Robert Moses and Lewis Mumford now, but she did it when they were riding high.

MORE:
-Jane Jacobs (Wikipedia)
-Jane Jacobs Writing on the Web (The Preservation Institute)
-The Jane Jacobs Home Page
-INTERVIEW: Jane Jacobs Interviewed by Jim Kunstler (Metropolis Magazine, March 2001)
-INTERVIEW: City Views: Urban studies legend Jane Jacobs on gentrification, the New Urbanism, and her legacy. (Interviewed by Bill Steigerwald, June 2001, Reason)
-T.O. owes debt to Jacobs (CHRISTOPHER HUME, 4/26/06, Toronto Star)

More than most cities, Toronto owes a huge debt of gratitude to Jane Jacobs.

Jacobs, who died yesterday eight days short of her 90th birthday, loved this city almost as much as it loved her.

Even if she hadn't moved here from New York in 1968, she would have left this town a different place. But the mere fact of her presence, which the city wore like a badge of honour, ensured that her ideas were always close to the centre of any debate about the future of urbanism in Toronto.

Plain-spoken, utterly unpretentious, self-taught and full of sly humour, Jacobs was disarming in the directness of her opinions. She despised jargon and railed against experts, especially planners and politicians, whom she considered the cause of many of the problems that have plagued North American cities since the end of World War II.

In her seminal 1961 work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, she did for urbanism what Rachel Carson's Silent Spring did for the environment. Though untrained in any formal sense — she studied neither urban planning nor architecture nor economics — Jacobs had the power of being able to see what was actually in front of her, rather than what she was told to see.

Indeed, she used to say she wrote Death And Life after having visited countless urban renewal projects in the 1950s that were never quite as their promoters described.

-Jane Jacobs (1916-2006) (FEE, April 26, 2006)
-REVIEW: of THE NATURE OF ECONOMIES By Jane Jacobs (CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT, NY Times)
-REVIEW: of DARK AGE AHEAD By Jane Jacobs (MICHIKO KAKUTANI, NY Times)
-REVIEW: of Cities and the Wealth of Nations by Jane Jacobs (John Chamberlain, The Freeman)
-REVIEW: of Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics by Jane Jacobs (Peter J. Boettke, The Freeman)
-Building on Ideas for Urban Conservation (LINDA BAKER, March 4, 2001, NY Times)
-ARTICLE: Jane Jacobs still helping to shape cities: "Death and Life of Great American Cities" author influential guide to new generation of urban planners (CNN, November 23, 2000)
-PROFILE: CITIES AND SONGS (Adam Gopnik, 2004-05-17, The New Yorker)

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WESTERN SELF-LOATHING

Lazy and deceitful (Charles Clarke, The Guardian April 25, 2006)

Writing on these pages, Jenni Russell claimed that "Tony Blair's administration is removing the safeguards that protect all of us from the whims of a government and the intrusion of a powerful state. It is engaged in a ferocious power-grab." These are ridiculous assertions, unsupported by any hint of understanding of the balance of powers that exist in our society. This and other articles in the press are symptomatic of a more general intellectual laziness that seeks to slip on to the shoulders of modern democratic states the mantle of dictatorial power. Some of this flows from criticism of the US, particularly the policies of the Bush administration, notably in relation to Iraq, but more generally it is in criticism of the response of the US and UK to 9/11. Such criticism fails to understand the immense significance of 9/11.

From 1945 until the end of the 20th century it was the fight for democracy against dictatorship that dominated the media and politics. In that climate, the human rights of the individual in relation to the state were pre-eminent. It was in response to those imperatives that the UN conventions and the European convention on human rights were established.

However, as democracy has advanced so powerfully across the world, other rights become important too. The right to go to work safely on the tube. The right not to be killed by someone who has served his sentence for violent crime but remains dangerous. The right to live at home without being disturbed by antisocial behaviour outside the front door. None of these removes the right of any individual to exercise their freedoms in relation to the state. None of them removes the obligation on the state to operate in accordance with its national and international obligations under law. But when we respond, for example, with counter-terror legislation or proposals to control those criminals who are dangerous to society, many in the media retort that we are destroying democracy and constructing tyranny. And too many resort to misrepresentation and deceit to try to strengthen their case.

The left and far too many libertarians have locked themselves into a mindset where decency, public order and civility are viewed as antithetical to freedom.

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SHORT BATTLE IN OUR LONG WAR:

Al-Qaeda jihad vs US 'long war' (Paul Reynolds, 4/26/06, , BBC News)

We...now have two almost simultaneous documents from the leading forces in the war and they are worth comparing.

There will be those who say that any comparison is odious but no professional intelligence officer I know would allow emotion to obscure analysis and it is on that basis that I proceed. [...]

The al-Qaeda leader lists about 20 struggles worldwide. It is important to know what they are. [...]

It is evident that Bin Laden has lost none of his determination in the years since 11 September 2001 ("the Manhattan conquest").

His manifesto is characterised by absolutism. Even the fight in Iraq is pitched in terms of protecting "monotheism", which is an implied rejection of the Iraqi majority, the Shias, according to Islamic scholars. [...]

Critics are already saying that the Pentagon will no doubt also demand the big-ticket items like new jet fighters and heavy equipment for the army.

But the thinking behind the review is to configure forces to better prevent or counter the kind of surprise attacks launched by al-Qaeda and its network of networks.

What the review does not get into, because it is not meant to, is the place that military tactics occupy in the wider strategy in such a long war.

The document does allude to this at the end by stating: "The United States will not win the war on terrorism... by military means... simultaneous, effective interaction with civilian populations will be essential to achieve success."

And of course the lesson from the Cold War is that it was not won by military means, though military strength certainly played a key role. It was won by one system collapsing.

That last is the only bit that approaches genuine insight here. The real takeaway is that the jihad movement is in the midst of an existential crisis, with pretty much the entire Islamic world liberalized or liberalizing to one degree or another. Its long war, which we could maybe date from the 80s, looks to be ending in collapse by the late aughts. Meanwhile, for America this is just the latest chapter in The Long War that has lasted for centuries. Islamicism is just the latest and last absolutist ism to claim that it offers a viable alternative to liberal parliamentary democracy and not only is it the weakest of the challengers so far but, coming so late in process, it finds few who take its claims seriously--unlike its fellow ideologies -- communism, nationalist socialism, etc. In effect, the system has already collapsed, all al Qaeda has left is faux military means. It can run around like a chicken with its head cut off -- and C-4 strapped to its back -- for awhile, but it's already lost the War.

MORE:
Sudan, torn by war, could be vulnerable to al-Qaeda, experts say (Mohamed Osman and Alfred De Montesquiou, 4/24/06, ASSOCIATED PRESS)

Sudan dismissed Osama bin Laden's renewed calls for “jihad” in its troubled Darfur region, saying on Monday that it will not harbor terrorists or allow foreign interference in the country. [...]

The call made headlines in most of Sudan's newspapers Monday, but Khartoum's leadership seemed eager to dissociate itself from bin Laden, who was based in the country through much of the 1990s but thrown out in 1996.

“We are not concerned with such statements, or any other statement that comes from foreign quarters about the crisis in Darfur,” Sudanese Foreign Ministry spokesman Jamal Eldin Mohammad Ibrahim was quoted as saying by the Al Sahafa newspaper.

Sudan will cooperate with the international community to solve the ongoing humanitarian crisis “and we will not host any terrorist,” the spokesman said.

Osama no friend of Palestinians: The Islamic fundamentalism purveyed by al-Qa'ida is the enemy of moderate Muslims and secular Palestinians (Richard King, April 26, 2006, The Australian)

That sympathy for the Palestinian cause is widespread in the Islamic world is so obvious that it hardly needs to be said. But bin Laden is also very aware that Palestine is a hot-button issue in the West, where many liberal and left-wing commentators seem willing and even eager to believe that the rise of Islamic fundamentalism is attributable to American support for Israel. His pronouncements from the mid-1990s on are peppered with references to the Palestinians, but in recent years they have become more frequent. In my view, the reason for this is simple: these references have fallen on fallow ground.

Take, for example, Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden, published by the left-leaning Verso Books. This book is a collection of bin Laden's pronouncements from 1994 to 2004, required reading for anyone interested in the real objectives of al-Qa'ida. And yet certain editorial decisions would appear to betray a hidden agenda.

For example, bin Laden's first major pronouncement (December 1994) is headed "The betrayal of Palestine". But the statement has less to do with Palestine than it does with the hated House of Saud and its tendency to put big business before Islam. The volume's editor, Bruce Lawrence, has chosen to give the issue of Palestine a prominence that the text does not warrant.

Probably Lawrence takes it for granted that bin Laden is motivated by the Palestinian cause. If so, he is certainly not alone. Recently, I had a conversation with a friend who said that she had a soft spot for bin Laden. I pointed out that bin Laden probably didn't have a soft spot for her - a female liberal and a lover of music - and that the kind of society he'd like to create would be a pretty grim place for her and her daughters.

Hamas rejects bin Laden message (Al-Jazeera, 23 April 2006)

Hamas and a Sudanese rebel group have distanced themselves from a statement from Osama bin Laden condemning the West for its actions in both countries. [...]

Bin Laden also called "upon the mujahidin and their supporters in Sudan and its surroundings - including the Arabian Peninsula - to prepare to lead a prolonged war against the "crusader robbers in western Sudan".

Ahmed Hussein, from the Justice and Equality Movement, a Sudanese rebel group, said: "We categorically reject these declarations.

"His words are completely disconnected from the reality in Darfur. Bin Laden is still preaching the theory of an American-Zionist conspiracy when the real problem comes from Khartoum, which is a Muslim government killing other Muslims."

He warned that such comments risked "encouraging the Khartoum regime to perpetuate injustice and its strategy against Darfur".

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SUMMER DECAMP:

Rice joins Rumsfeld in surprise visit to praise Iraq progress (AP, 4/26/2006)

America's top two foreign policy officials flew unexpectedly into Iraq separately Wednesday in a strong show of support for the country's emerging new government. [...]

"We just want to make sure there are no seams between what we're doing politically and what we're doing militarily," Rice told reporter on her plane en route to Iraq. "Secretary Rumsfeld and I are going to be there together because a lot of the work that has to be done is at that juncture between political and military."

She and Rumsfeld planned to meet jointly with the newly designated prime minister and Rice scheduled a separate one-on-one meeting with him for later.

Casey did not elaborate on his timeline for reducing U.S. forces, but he has said in the past that a "fairly substantial" reduction could be made this year if the insurgency did not grow worse and if Iraq made continued progress on the political and security training fronts.

Asked whether the breakthrough agreements last weekend to name Jawad al-Maliki as prime minister and to fill six other top government posts moves U.S. officials closer to implementing the expected troop reductions this year, Casey replied, "It certainly is a major step in the process."

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THEY KEEP TELLING US THEY DON'T OPPOSE LEGAL IMMIGRANTS:

Bush, senators agree on alien citizenship, shut out critics (Stephen Dinan, April 26, 2006, THE WASHINGTON TIMES)

President Bush and a group of senators yesterday reached general agreement on an immigration bill that includes a pathway to citizenship for many illegal aliens. [...]

"There was a pretty good consensus that what we have put into the Hagel-Martinez proposal here is the right way to go," said Sen. Mel Martinez, Florida Republican. "I think he was very clear [on] pathway to citizenship, so long as it goes to the back of the line, and he even opened the door here for something we've haggled back and forth on, that you can shrink the time for people to become citizens by simply enlarging the number of green cards."

And Sen. Sam Brownback, Kansas Republican, said Mr. Bush "endorsed the concept of an earned citizenship."

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TO BE ABLE TO MARCH INTO HELL FOR A HEAVENLY CAUSE

Chirac unveils his grand plan to restore French pride (Angelique Chrisafis, The Guardian, April 26th,2006)

The French president, Jacques Chirac, yesterday unveiled what he hopes will be his great legacy to France's struggle against the global dominance of the US: a series of technological projects including a European search engine to rival Google.

Mr Chirac, who walked out of an EU summit last month when a fellow Frenchman committed the grave offence of speaking English, styles himself as the defender of France in the globalised world.

After the biggest street protests in decades forced him to stage a U-turn on employment reform last month, Mr Chirac is keener than ever to be remembered for doing something positive for French pride. Yesterday, he announced that he would provide €2bn (£1.4bn) in funding for a series of innovative grands projets, including a Franco-German search engine to compete with Google and Yahoo!.

Named Quaero - Latin for "I search" - the search engine aims to be the first to efficiently sort through audio, images and video. It would search the growing array of podcasts and videoclips on the web and deliver the information to computers and mobile phones. Quaero has been a pet project of Mr Chirac's for some time. In his new year speech at the Elysée Palace, he spoke of the need to "take up the global challenge posed by Google and Yahoo!".

A government-sponsored Internet search engine in French? We would have counseled taking a page from the Gideons and distributing complimentary copies of Being and Nothingness in the worlds’ hotel rooms, but we've always lacked the vision thing.

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HAT TRICK:

It’s Manny to the rescue -- Blast saves Schilling, Sox (Jeff Horrigan, April 26, 2006, Boston Herald)

Minutes after Curt Schilling squandered a one-run lead by heading back to the mound despite an already-high pitch count, Manny Ramirez swooped in and made everything right again by slamming a three-run home run with two outs in the eighth inning to send the Red Sox to an 8-6 victory over the Indians.

Ramirez went 3-for-4 against his former team and had an adventurous night on the basepaths before he snatched it back with his third homer of the season and the 438th of his career. The opposite-field swat, which tied Ramirez with Andre Dawson for 32nd on the all-time list, sent the Sox to their sixth straight win at Jacobs Field since the start of the 2002 season. It also improved Ramirez to .355 lifetime against the team he played for from 1993-2000.

“I don’t know why people worry about Manny not hitting,” said David Ortiz, who was intentionally walked immediately prior to the homer. “He’s going to hit. He’s always been a hitter. In this day, people look at who’s hot and who’s not, which is the right thing to do. He’s coming back. Then what are they going to do?”

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AND FOLKS WONDER WHY OUR DEBT IS SO UNIQUELY VALUABLE? (via Pepys):

America's economic hegemony is safe (Gerard Baker, 4/25/06, Times of London)

BARRING some wholly unexpected statistical oddity, we will get another spectacular signal of the health of the American economy this Friday.

The gross domestic product figures for the first quarter are expected to show that America’s output expanded at an annual rate of about 5 per cent in real terms in the three months to the end of March. In this age of exaggerated gloom about the condition of the world, with all its imbalances, inequalities and uncertainties, it is worth pausing for a moment simply to reflect on the scale of US economic success.

Given that the United States is a $12 trillion ($6,700 billion) economy, the new data mean that in the first quarter the US added to global output an amount that, if sustained at that pace for a year, would be about $600 billion — roughly the equivalent of adding one whole new Brazil or Australia to global economic activity every year, just from the incremental extra sweat and heave and click of 300 million Americans.

Think of it another way. In an era in which China embodies the hopes and fears of much of the developed world, the US, with a growth rate of half that of China’s, is adding roughly twice as much in absolute terms to global output as is the Middle Kingdom, with its GDP (depending on how you measure it) of between $2 trillion and $4 trillion and its growth of about 10 per cent. [...]

[O]n current trends, for at least the next decade the US will actually keep growing in total dollar or yuan numbers by a larger amount than will China (even if the yuan is substantially revalued, by the way). And beyond that ten-year horizon, can anybody really be confident that China will maintain its current rate of growth?

Consider just the GDP per capita numbers for 2005:

China: $6,300

America: $42,000

Folks who imagine an America in decline are engaged in a truly odd form of wishful thinking.

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DESTROYING THEIR PARTIES TO SAVE THEM:

Koizumi era one of change, tension (HIROKO NAKATA, 4/26/06, Japan Times)

Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, who pledged to "destroy" his own Liberal Democratic Party when he became its president five years ago, will probably be remembered for putting in place much-needed structural reforms.

But as Koizumi marks his fifth year in office Wednesday, many observers say his administration will also be remembered for souring Japan's relations with other parts of Asia and for chipping away at the middle class. [...]

"More than 50 years after the war, Koizumi is the . . . first prime minister who takes responsibility for what he pledges to the public," said Hidekazu Kawai, a professor of comparative politics at Chubu University.

One of the highlights of Koizumi's stint thus far was the LDP's landslide victory in last September's House of Representatives election, which gave him a broad mandate to privatize the nation's postal system -- something he had sought to do for years.

Throughout his term, Koizumi has promoted administrative reforms under the slogan "No growth without reform."

Similar to his fellow Third Wayers, George W. Bush, who came to office bent on transforming a conservatism that had backstabbed his father, and Tony Blair, of whom Geoffrey Wheatcroft wrote upon his election: "Someone who knows him says, 'You have to remember that the great passion in Tony's life is his hatred of the Labour Party.'"

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OUGHTN'T WE DIG UP GALILEO AND BURN THE CORPSE? (via AOG)

Exploring Stephen Hawking's Flexiverse (Amanda Gefter, 20 April 2006, New Scientist)

Hawking and Hartle's original work on the quantum properties of the cosmos suggested that imaginary time, which seemed like a mathematical curiosity in the sum-over-histories approach, held the answer to understanding the origin of the universe.

Add up the histories of the universe in imaginary time, and time is transformed into space. The result is that, when the universe was small enough to be governed by quantum mechanics, it had four spatial dimensions and no dimension of time: where time would usually come to an end at a singularity, a new dimension of space appears, and, poof! The singularity vanishes.

In terms of the universe's history, that means there is no point A. Like the surface of a sphere, the universe is finite but has no definable starting point, or "boundary". Hence the idea's name: the no-boundary proposal.

This has led Hawking to define a new kind of cosmology. The traditional approach, which Hawking calls "bottom-up" cosmology, tries to specify the initial state of the universe and work from there. This is doomed to fail, Hawking says, because we know nothing about the starting conditions. Instead, he suggests, we should use the no-boundary proposal to do "top-down" cosmology, where the only input into our models of the universe comes from what we observe now - together with the idea that our universe has no boundary in the past.
Improbable tuning

The result of this process, he says, solves a long-standing problem of cosmology: fine-tuning. Most cosmologists think, for example, that the universe went through an early burst of rapid expansion, or "inflation". There is some evidence to support the claim, but there's also a problem. Standard inflationary models require a very improbable initial state, one that must have "finely tuned" values that cause inflation to start, then stop in a certain way after a certain time: a complicated prescription whose only justification is to produce a flat universe without any strange topology, and so on - a universe like ours.

Such a prescriptive method makes hard and unsatisfying work of producing the universe we see today. While a cosmologist can put these values into the equations "by hand", it is not exactly a satisfactory way to develop our model of how the universe works. In the no-boundary theory, however, there simply is no defined initial state. "In the usual approach it is difficult to explain how inflation began," says Hawking. "But it occurs naturally in top-down with the no-boundary condition. It doesn't need fine tuning."

To do top-down cosmology, Hawking and Hertog first take a whole raft of possible histories, all of which would result in a universe with features familiar to us. "We then calculate the probability for other features of the universe, given the constraints," Hertog says. Specify a universe that is three-dimensional and flat, for instance, and you can have histories that involve inflation and histories that don't. "Top-down cosmology does not predict that all possible universes have to begin with a period of inflation, but that inflation occurs naturally within a certain subclass of universes," Hertog says. The process creates a probability for each scenario, and so Hertog can see which kind of history is most likely. "What we find is that the inflating histories generally have the largest probability."

In many ways, top-down cosmology is an unsettling idea. Usually, science demands that our observations come out as output - we certainly don't expect them to be the input. That, after all, denies us the chance to see if the theory matches up with observations. What's more, the sum over histories is formed by calculating the various probabilities for a universe like ours to arise out of literally nothing: that means we can never know anything for certain about how our universe got to be as it is.

We shouldn't be surprised, Hertog says: quantum theory has long shown us that it is impossible for us to know everything about the world around us. In "classical" physics, we can predict both the exact momentum and position of a particle at any time, but quantum mechanics doesn't allow it. No one suggests that quantum mechanics is wrong because of this, Hertog points out - and experiments have shown that it is not. What quantum theory has given us now, Hertog says, is some indication about the nature of inflation, where before we had none. "Before, we had no prediction at all - and indeed no notion of likeliness - on this issue."

For many, it remains a difficult argument to swallow. Science since Copernicus has aimed to model a universe in which we are mere by-products, but top-down cosmology turns that on its head, rendering the history of the universe a by-product of our observations. All in all, it is very like the "anthropic landscape" argument that is causing controversy among string theorists (see "Putting the you into universe").

Princeton University physicist Paul Steinhardt is certainly unimpressed by Hawking and Hertog's scheme. "It's kind of giving up on the problem," he says. "We've all been hoping to calculate things from first principles. Stephen doesn't think that's possible, but I'm not convinced of that. They might be right, but it's much too early to take this approach; it looks to me like throwing in the towel."

Stanford University's Andrei Linde is similarly unconvinced. There are a number of technical assumptions that make him sceptical. "I don't buy it," he says.

The merits of Hawking and Hertog's new approach to cosmology might be decided by experiment. The theory predicts specific kinds of fluctuations in two cosmological phenomena: the cosmic microwave background radiation produced just after the big bang, and the spectrum of primordial gravitational waves. These fluctuations arise from applying the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics to Hawking and Hertog's scheme: in this scenario, the universe's shape is never precisely determined, but is influenced by other histories with similar geometries.

If Hawking and Hertog are right, quantum uncertainty will manifest as slight differences from what standard inflationary theory predicts for the CMB. The top-down predictions only differ from the standard cosmological model at a level of precision that has not yet been reached in observations, however. The top-down signature in the gravitational wave spectrum should be easier to differentiate, but since we haven't yet detected any gravitational waves, we'll have to wait for that proof too.

For Hawking and Hertog, there's simply no doubt that top-down cosmology is the only answer. It's simple: if you can't know the initial state of the universe, you can't work forwards from the beginning: the top-down approach is the only one that works.

Hartle agrees. Hawking and Hertog's scheme may seem strange, but it is the only way forward because we are part of the experiment we are trying to observe. "It's a different viewpoint, but it's sort of inevitable," he says. "Colsmologists certainly should be paying attention to this work."

The trouble, of course, is that if they are right, we're involved in the making of that history. In that case, we have a new set of instructions for building a universe. Step one: look around you. Step two: find the set of all possible histories that end up as a universe like the one you see. Step three: add them together and create a history for yourself.

It's entirely predictable that physics is collapsing towards a homocentric view of the Universe, but Hawking is, of course, quite wrong about there not being an Observer all along.

MORE:
SWIMMING TO PRIMORDIA:
Robert Wright interviews Brian Swimme on cosmic evolution (Slate)

Brian Swimme is a mathematical cosmologist on the graduate faculty of the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. [...]

Wright: And and and this this gets at a question I have... now you definitely with this story you want to do some things that religion has traditionally done, orient people, inform their values and so on... one thing a lot of religions have done is give people a sense that things were meant to be you know... there was a God that designed the universe or there were some supernatural order that imbues their own life with purpose. And there, as I read you, you are kind of teetering on the edge of that but not quite doing it. Right?

Brian Swimme: Yes. That's right. Teetering is not a word I'd use but it would certainly... there I guess it's trying so hard to get a feel for the way in which there is a random dimension to the universe without question.

Wright: Let me give you let me give you an example ...

Brian Swimme: Yes.

Wright: ... of you talk in "The Universe Story" about several kind of parameters of the universe that were just quite exquisitely fortuitous from our point of view. If they had been off a little in either direction, things would have collapsed, life could have been impossible or something. Here's just one example, you're talking about the curvature of space time which I can't quite imagine clearly but anyway ... the curvature of space time: "Had the curvature been a fraction larger the universe would have immediately collapsed down into a massive black hole. Had it been a fraction smaller the universe would had exploded into a scattering of lifeless particles. Thus the curvature of the universe is sufficiently closed to maintain a coherence of it's various components and sufficiently open to allow for a continued creativity." Now a lot of other you know...

Brian Swimme: Yes. Yes.

Wright: ...gravitational constant whatever I don't know if you mention that one but there are various things you do mention...

Brian Swimme: Right.

0:09:27.000

Wright: Now some people conventionally religious people have looked at these things and have said clearly the universe was designed for a purpose it's just too good to be true. What's what's your view on that?

Brian Swimme: Well I guess first of all it'd be the word design because as soon as you use the word design at least for me it then you're talking about a designer and so you have you have someone sort of outside the universe, Newton's idea was tinkering with it so you set the universe and kind of run run and tinker with it but I think what is what word discovers something way more exciting that is that universe is finding it's way, the universe is you know probing and exploring and it is from the beginning it's it's in search of something. Now I mean that I'm personifying by using that...

Wright: Yes.

Brian Swimme: ... and that is that does make it hard I think...

Wright: Well but how literally do you mean the the personification. I mean is the you know... you do think the universe is a living system?

Brian Swimme: Yes.

Wright: And now living systems do have purposes though in the sense I mean even evolutionary biologists would say that an animal you can say is "designed by natural selection" and that's why it pursues goals like getting it's genes into the next generation and and and and goals that are subordinate to that I mean when we think of a living system we think of something that is the result of at least a process of design even if it's a kind of impersonal process like natural selection and something that has it's own little set of goals, right?

Brian Swimme: Yes.

Wright: Is that what you mean to imply?

Brian Swimme: I do...

Wright: About... you do? So the universe does have a purpose.

Brian Swimme: I would not call it it's own little set of goals.

Wright: No. Well if it's the universe it's big goals. Obviously.

Brian Swimme: Yes. I think that the universe does have purpose it does have direction in the sense that but they're not in my own way of thinking they're not fully formed. There are I think something like, go back early in the universe, I think there are literally an infinite of things that are possible but out of all those universe is always striving to give birth to the to the richness that's there potentially that'd be one way of how I'd talk about it so that it it could be that the universe would be very very different than it is right now, but it would still have something like life and something like a kind of rich inner-connected world of our planet. That'd be how I'd look at it. Those those those aims are present somehow, darkly, and then how are they present? Well. I don't know. I mean, we just found this out. We just discovered all this.

0:12:32.000

Wright: You mean by "all this" you mean?

Brian Swimme: I mean the the discovery of the big bang cosmology...

Wright: Right.

Brian Swimme: ... is extremely recent. We've been humans for 150,000 years.

Wright: Right.

Brian Swimme: And now just just just like yesterday we discovered some of the details of this happening we call the universe and so I it's going to take us time to to sort out really what's going on. When... to talk about designers... I think I think that's unfortunately collapsing back into a previous way of thinking that isn't... it's more exciting than that.

Wright: But but purpose is a word you are willing...

Brian Swimme: Yes.

Wright: ... to use.

Brian Swimme: Yes I am.

Wright: So the universe has a purpose?

Brian Swimme: Yes.

Wright: And you don't exactly what it is but you got a feeling that sentient life is part of the point.

Brian Swimme: Yes. Yes I do. Right. Sentient life and and and display of all kinds of energy constellations. So that the universe starts off so simple really in terms of of of it's structure and yet over time it just it throws out all this exotic stuff. So I think that is part of one of the main aims of the universe...

Wright: To display...

Brian Swimme: Yes...

Wright: ... beautiful stuff...

Brian Swimme: Yes.

Wright: But there wouldn't be much point in displaying beautiful stuff if there weren't creatures capable of apprehending beautiful stuff. I mean who is it showing off for?

Brian Swimme: Well, that's a good question. But it may it may just that alone may be what the universe is about... it doesn't happen without...

0:14:20.000

Wright: This is kind of it reminds me of kind of Whitehead a little bit.

Brian Swimme: Oh yes I would say that the three thinkers...

Wright: He was a process theologian, right?

Brian Swimme: Process... yes.

Wright: And and and do you have a good thumbnail definition of that or should we pass over that? What what what does process theology mean?

Brian Swimme: He would be a he would be a you know the first process thinker that gave birth to process theology. He was really doing cosmology. And his his I give you here's a thumbnail sketch of Whitehead... His idea was that we have in science exhausted the mechanistic metaphor and it it took us places but it was it was no longer viable in terms of what we learned but especially the quantum world so he was attempting to give a framework for understanding the universe with organism as the fundamental concept not machine. That would be one way to think about it. And then his idea of organism would be that that the fundamental reality of the universe is an experience in subject so his phrase is outside of experiencing subjects there's nothing nothing just bright nothingness. So not only would ... he would say it's not just display but it's the richness the intensity of the experience that would be what the universe is aiming at.

0:15:42.000

Wright: Ok. The so really I'm a little surprised because you're being more explicit than I think you generally are in your writing about the idea that the universe has a purpose. Maybe I mean I haven't read every word you've written but but but I'm a little surprised and what I was going to ask you was isn't this one thing that religions have traditionally done that you're world view doesn't do... that is to say by suggesting an over-arching purpose imbue people lives with a meaning from beyond in some sense... I mean would you say your world view has a transcendent source of meaning in it?

Brian Swimme: You see when you words like beyond then I start to loose my confidence because I'm really working out of primarily the scientific data so also like the word beyond or also transcendence I get a little bit uneasy...

Because his story has melded seemlessly into the One Story.

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SNOW JOB:

Fox News's Snow on Verge of Being White House Press Secretary (Howard Kurtz, April 26, 2006, Washington Post)

Fox News commentator Tony Snow has decided to accept the White House press secretary's job after top officials assured him that he would be not just a spokesman but an active participant in administration policy debates, people familiar with the discussions said yesterday.

Snow's appointment could be announced as early as today. The only potential obstacle would be the results of a CAT scan taken Thursday, which he hopes will reveal no recurrence of the cancer that forced him to have his colon surgically removed last year, these sources said.

A director of speechwriting for President George H.W. Bush, Snow views himself as well-positioned to ease the tensions between this White House and the press corps because he understands both politics and journalism, said the sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the appointment has not been announced.

If he really thinks that he doesn't understand them.

MORE:
Tony Snow to Be Named White House Press Secretary (Melissa Drosjack, 4/25/06, Fox News)

Tony Snow will be named new White House press secretary on Wednesday morning, FOX News has learned. Snow is expected to be at the White House for the announcement. He has been mulling the offer for the last several days.

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WHICH IS WHY THE MILITARY SHOULD BE BASICALLY DISBANDED BETWEEN WARS:

Rage at Don: The war on Rumsfeld is really a bureaucratic turf battle. (BRENDAN MINITER, April 25, 2006, Opinion Journal)

On Sept. 10, 2001, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld held a town hall meeting at the Pentagon and identified what he saw as the gravest threat to national security: the Pentagon's own bureaucracy. "With brutal consistency, it stifles free thought and crushes new ideas. It disrupts the defense of the United States and places the lives of men and women in uniform at risk," he said. He may have underestimated both the size and tenacity of this foe.

In the opening pages of their new book about the Iraq war, "Cobra II," Michael R. Gordon and Gen. Bernard E. Trainor quote the Sept. 10 speech to frame the battle that has raged inside the Pentagon for five years. As the nation has weathered the most deadly terrorist attack on its soil in history, fought a global war on terror and liberated two countries, there has been a battle inside the Pentagon over the size, organization and weaponry of the U.S. military. And that battle has only intensified as the bureaucracy that Mr. Rumsfeld chastised for being stuck in a Cold War mindset has picked up allies in Congress, the military and in some quarters of the administration. It is this coalition that is now pushing for Mr. Rumsfeld to be fired.

But it's not just the defense secretary's head the former generals, anonymous leakers and senators are after. This is a classic Washington turf and policy war. In the balance is the nation's ability to fight the war on terror and confront other threats around the globe.

Bureaucracies serve their own interests.

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GOOD SO COMMON IT'S THE PLATFORM OF THE GOVERNING PARTY:

The Left's Big Ideas (E. J. Dionne, 4/26/06, Real Clear Politics)

What has become clear in recent months is that the impatience on the center-left with the hopeless endeavor of waiting for workaday politicians to come up with ideas -- Godot would deliver faster -- has spilled over the barriers of conventional politics. The brooding, musing and, yes, thinking since President Bush's victory in 2004 is starting to show results.

The biggest change is that moderates and liberals have begun to accept that they cannot simply adjust to conservative dominance of the political debate and alter their ideas to fit the current consensus. As Michael Tomasky writes in the current issue of The American Prospect, Democrats and their allies must destroy the current political ``paradigm'' based on ``radical individualism'' and replace it with a politics of the ``common good.'' Only a larger argument rooted in a different conception of government and society, Tomasky argues, will allow the party to ``do a lot more than squeak by in this fall's (or any) elections based on the usual unsatisfying admixture of compromises.''

In describing his common-good approach, Tomasky notes it has significant implications in challenging Democrats to stand for more than ``diversity and rights,'' however valuable these commitments might be. Both diversity and rights, he argues, would be better defended in a common-good framework.

Here are three common good proposals they could run on: universal education vouchers, universal health savings accounts, and universal retirement accounts. Of course, the fact that those are all part and parcel of the current political paradigm of George Bush's Republican Party puts paid to the truly deranged notion that the Left has to fight off radical individualism.

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PATIENT, HEAL THYSELF:

Overeaters, smokers and drinkers: the doctor won't see you now: Health care is meant to be open to everyone equally. But some doctors question, even deny, treatment to those with certain vices. (NICHOLAS KOHLER AND BARBARA RIGHTON, 4/18/06, Maclean's)

At issue: health care for patients with self-destructive vices -- overeating, smoking, drinking or drugs. More and more doctors are turning them away or knocking them down their waiting lists -- whether patients know that's the reason or not. Frightening stories abound. GPs who won't take smokers as patients. Surgeons who demand obese patients lose weight before they'll operate, or tell them to find another doctor. Transplant teams who turn drinkers down flat. Doctors say their decisions make sense: why spend thousands of dollars on futile procedures? Or the decision is the product of frustration: why not make patients accountable for their vices? Others call it simple discrimination. But in a health system with more patients than doctors can treat, where doctors have discretion over whom they'll take on, some say it's inevitable that problem patients will get shunted aside in favour of healthier, less labour-intensive cases.

So here's the question: if people won't stop hurting themselves, can they really expect the same medical treatment as everyone else? Health care in Canada is supposed to be about equal treatment for all comers. For some doctors, however, there are patients who are less equal than others. Winnipeg GP Frederick Ross is one. In 2002, he told his patients he'd no longer see them if they continued smoking. "I said, this is stupid. I told my patients, you have three months to quit or I am going to ask you to find another doctor," recalls Ross, a genial man. "I said, your smoking is impeding my progress in treating you." Some people left in a huff. One challenged him on the basis of human rights (a tribunal later threw the case out). Others -- hundreds, he says -- stayed and quit smoking.

Cutting out the cigarettes might have helped some patients avoid an appointment with Dr. Alberto de la Rocha. As a former thoracic surgeon in Timmins, Ont., de la Rocha operated on lung cancer patients for 17 years before quitting. "I burned out in an atmosphere of indifference and lack of accountability -- public and personal accountability," says de la Rocha, who is now a medical officer of health in northeastern Ontario. Smoking, says de la Rocha, goes hand in hand with entitlement. "It goes like this: 'I am sick. You are the guy who is supposed to cure me. You are going to do that in whatever condition I am in and that is my right.' "

Not in my operating room, said de la Rocha, who decreed that his lung cancer patients would have to minimize their risks of a heart attack on the table or of post-op respiratory complications by not smoking for at least five weeks before surgery.

Obviously it makes even more sense where health care is rationed, but is good policy regardless.

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BETTER THEM THAN THE FRENCH (via Tom Morin):

Time for a Tex-Mex Marshall Plan (Steven Hill, April 23, 2006, Washington Post)

Two years ago, the European Union admitted 10 new members. Like Mexico, all of these nations were poor, some of them fairly backward and most recently ravaged by war and communist dictatorship.

To deal with the situation, the leaders of the European Union wisely created policies for fostering regional economic and political integration that make efforts such as the North American Free Trade Agreement "look timid and halfhearted by comparison," according to Bernd Westphal, consul general of Germany.

Europe realized it had to prevent a "giant sucking sound" of businesses and jobs relocating from the 15 wealthier nations to the 10 poorer ones. It also had to foster prosperity and the spread of a middle class in these emerging economies and prevent an influx of poor workers to the richer nations.

So for starters it gave the new states massive subsidies -- billions of dollars' worth -- to help construct schools, roads, telecommunications and housing, thus making these nations more attractive for business investment. [...]

This bold yet carefully planned E.U. approach suggests the direction that policy between the United States and Mexico should take. Increasingly the demands of the global economy will push North American regional integration out of the realm of a shadow economy and flawed free trade agreement. But what might such an American-Mexican union look like?

It would start with massive subsidies from the United States to Mexico, a Tex-Mex Marshall Plan, with the goal of decreasing disparities on the Mexican side of the border and fostering a climate riper for investment. This would create more jobs in Mexico and foster a middle class, homeownership and better schools, roads and health care. Fewer Mexicans would then want to emigrate north. Instead, they'd stay home, becoming consumers of U.S. products.

Though he's often praised for it, Bill Clinton's failure to extract significant reforms from Mexico as a condition of propping up the peso was a terrible mistake.

Of course, we essentially funnel them billions in aid already, THE SILENT GLOBALIZATION OF REMITTANCES (Richard Reeves Mon Apr 24, 2006, Yahoo)

More than 20 million Latin American and Caribbean citizens living abroad sent home an average of $2,500 each last year, according to Business Week magazine. The total sent was $52 billion, an increase of almost 10 percent over 2004.

This is how it works, according to Geri Smith of that magazine, who chronicled the life of a young Mexican husband and wife who left $4.25-an-hour work in the fields of California to work in a pork-packaging plant in Iowa: "They each earn $12 an hour now, and after income taxes and
Social Security are withheld -- yes, they do pay U.S. taxes -- they clear about $3,500 a month. That's nearly 10 times what they could earn in Mexico, and it's enough to buy a used two-bedroom trailer and a 1998 pickup truck to cart their two preschool children around town. Once a month, he wires $250 to his 50-year-old mother in Mexico City."

A former Washington Post reporter, Robert Suro, added this in a foundation-funded study a few years ago: "During the course of the summer in Los Angeles, Esteban did everything, including painting, landscaping, loading and unloading trucks at garment district warehouses. The pay was always close to the minimum wage and always in cash. Esteban figured that he wired home (to Mexico) between $150 and $250 a week. Housing was a blanket on the floor of a church-run shelter. All his belongings fit into a small gym bag. 'On Saturday,' he said, 'I send back whatever I have and keep $5 for myself.'"

Officials of the IMF and many government economists argue that private consumption is less efficient than planned development. Maybe, but private consumption is the American way, and is also a way to make America more secure. Without remittances, the world, and particularly North America, would be a more dangerous place. It is not in the interest of a rich country such as the United States to have even more poor and desperate people living just across its southern border. Legal or illegal, those remittances make Mexico and Central America more stable and the United States more safe.

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IF ONLY WE HADN'T PROTECTED CARMAKERS:

Michigan pulling itself out of slump (Haya El Nasser, 4/25/06, USA TODAY)

Detroit, Michigan's most populous city, has shrunk by more than 50,000 people this decade to about 900,000. Its biggest industry, automobiles, has been battered by global competition.

One of its largest employers, General Motors, lost $10.6 billion last year and has offered buyouts to more than 100,000 workers.

But fresh county population estimates from the Census Bureau show modest turnarounds in several other parts of the state. Sixty of Michigan's 83 counties have grown this decade, and 19 had population gains of at least 5%.

"It's an industrial state in significant transition," says Keith Schneider, deputy director of the Michigan Land Use Institute.

Michigan is moving away from manufacturing and tapping its intellectual base around universities and medical centers. It's not clear how the GM buyouts will affect migration and retirement patterns.

It was Michigan's great misfortune that Ronald Reagan's protectionist import quotas artificially propped up the American automobile industry. Happily, the two most recent presidents have been free traders.

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PRO-LIFE PROPHYLACTIC:

Will all autos some day have breathalyzers? (Jayne O'Donnell, 4/25/06, USA TODAY)

Could the day be coming when every driver is checked for drinking before starting a car?

Widespread use of ignition interlock devices that won't allow a car to be started if a driver has had too much alcohol, once considered radical, no longer seems out of the question. Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) gives a qualified endorsement to the idea. New York state legislators are considering requiring the devices on all cars and trucks by 2009. And automakers, already close to offering the devices as optional equipment on all Volvo and Saab models in Sweden, are considering whether to bring the technology here. [...]

MADD and others trying to reduce the 17,000 alcohol-related fatalities a year say ignition interlocks are the only sure way to separate potential drunken drivers from their "weapons." [...]

Barry Sweedler, a former National Transportation Safety Board official, is trying to persuade automakers to put the wiring for ignition interlocks in all cars to make it easier to install the devices. And once interlocks can automatically check alcohol levels without any action from drivers, Sweedler thinks they should be standard equipment on cars.

Current technology requires a driver to blow heavily into a breathalyzer device before starting the car and regularly while driving. With that system, "Unless a person is an offender, to require it for everyone is too intrusive," says Sweedler, past president of an anti-impaired-driving group that has sponsored ignition interlock conferences for the past six years.

George Ballance, director of sales and marketing for device maker DraegerSafety, says his company advocates interlocks as part of teen driving laws and insurance company discounts.

"We want to get on the preventive side of the cycle and not just be on the court-ordered side," he says.

Preventing five 9-11s a year seems eminently worthwhile.

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SNOWY WHETHER:

Sources: Tony Snow likely to take White House post (Suzanne Malveaux, 4/25/06, CNN)

Sources close to the White House said Monday that Fox anchor Tony Snow is likely to accept the job as White House press secretary, succeeding Scott McClellan.

The sources said they expect him to announce his decision within the next few days.

A source familiar with the discussions said Monday that newly appointed Chief of Staff Josh Bolten asked Snow to make a decision by early this week.

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NEXT STEP, REPLACE THE DISK WITH A DOWNLOAD:

Amazon offers on-demand DVD manufacturing service (Monica Soto Ouchi, 4/25/06, Seattle Times)

For those obsessed with the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, the PBS mainstay "Nova" or Matt Lauer, Amazon has something for you.

The online retailer Monday began offering a service that allows film studios and TV networks to sell more obscure or niche titles through an on-demand DVD manufacturing service.

The Media Gateway program — developed by Amazon subsidiary CustomFlix Labs — encodes films and TV shows in a digital format and archives the content.

When a customer orders a film or show on Amazon, the online retailer manufactures the DVD and ships it to the customer. While film studios and TV networks already sell their most popular titles online, the service erases the financial risk associated with manufacturing DVDs and holding inventory for lesser-known works.

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Welcome to custom-made online radio (Althea Legaspi, April 23, 2006, Chicago Tribune)

There's that legendary record store person who knows everything, and when you mention a band, he or she has about 10 suggestions for what you might like. In these brick-and-mortar-less days of online music, he is now a program that runs on your computer.

Pandora.com and Last FM do their jobs in different ways, but both are that future: music boiled down to a science, where radio plays only the music you like. Your "neighbours" have similar tastes, and you can discover new music, regardless of label affiliation and without repetitive set playlists. Welcome to personalized radio. Oakland-based Pandora and London-based Last FM are helping artists and listeners find each other in a way traditional and Internet radio have never done before.

While customized Internet radio has been in existence for years, in which a listener can pick specific genres and artists to tailor a station, Pandora looks to the actual composition, analyzing musical attributes that describe a song. Initially named Savage Beast and created in 2000 to be a recommendation service licensed to companies such as Best Buy and AOL, it evolved into Pandora by mid-2004. Through its Music Genome Project, Pandora's filter, it discovers and catalogs some 400 genes -- such as vocal tonality, instrumentation and mood. The genes are the basis of how songs are grouped together on a Pandora "radio station."

Listeners create a station simply by typing in a song name or artist, and Pandora launches a radio stream, playing songs that have similar attributes to the individual user's selection. Each listener can then fine-tune the personal station, giving a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" to songs, and Pandora responds, paring the attributes more specifically to the user's taste. Conversely, users can add more music to expand the musical gene pool. Listeners can share their personally created "radio stations" with others by e-mail and can also view top stations being played.

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BENEFITS OF REJOINING THE ANGLOSPHERE:

Softwood lumber deal appears close (BARRIE MCKENNA AND STEVEN CHASE, 4/25/06, Globe and Mail)

Canada and the United States appear very close to a historic breakthrough in the enduring softwood lumber dispute.

Industry sources who have been briefed on the discussions told The Globe and Mail that U.S. President George W. Bush called Stephen Harper on the weekend to outline an offer. In it the United States would lift duties on Canadian lumber and return most of the $5-billion it has collected from Canadian lumber companies. [...]

Mr. Bush wants to remove a long-standing irritant from relations with his country's largest trading partner and get a deal before U.S. Trade Representative Rob Portman moves to the White House as budget director. Mr. Harper has made repairing strained Canada-U.S. relations a priority.

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REMEMBER BACK WHEN THE MCCARTHY IN THE CASE WAS EXPOSING MOLES?:

Joseph Wilson's Revenge: Why no special prosecutor for the latest CIA leak case? (Christopher Hitchens, April 24, 2006, Slate)

[M]ary McCarthy has been given the sack. And the New York Times rushes to her aid, with a three-hankie story on April 23, moistly titled "Colleagues Say Fired CIA Analyst Played by the Rules." This is only strictly true if she confined her disagreement to official channels, as she did when she wrote to Clinton in 1998. Sadly enough, the same article concedes that McCarthy may have lied and then eventually told the truth about having unauthorized contact with members of the press.

Well! In that case the remedy is clear. A special counsel must be appointed forthwith, to discover whether the CIA has been manipulating the media. All civil servants and all reporters with knowledge must be urged to comply, and to produce their notes or see the inside of a jail. No effort must be spared to discover the leaker. This is, after all, the line sternly proposed by the New York Times and many other media outlets in the matter of the blessed Joseph Wilson and his martyred CIA spouse, Valerie Plame.

I have a sense that this is not the media line that will be taken in the case of McCarthy, any more than it was the line taken when James Risen and others disclosed the domestic wiretapping being conducted by the NSA. Risen's story is also the object of an investigation into unlawful disclosure. One can argue that national security is damaged by unauthorized leaks, or one can argue that democracy is enhanced by them. But one cannot argue, in the case of a man who says that his CIA wife did not send him to Niger, that the proof that his wife did send him to Niger must remain a state secret. If one concerned official can brief the press off the record, then so can another.

It has long been pretty obvious to me that the official-secrecy faction within the state machinery has received a gigantic fillip from the press witch hunt against Lewis Libby and Karl Rove. What bureaucrat could believe the luck of an editorial campaign to uncover and punish leaking? A campaign that furthermore invokes the most reactionary law against disclosure this century: the Intelligence Identities Protection Act? It was obvious from the first that the press, in taking Wilson and Plame at their own estimation, was fashioning a rod for its own back. I await the squeals that will follow when this rod is applied, which it will be again and again.

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UNIVERSALLY ACCESSIBLE IDEALS, NOT BLOOD AND SOIL:

Common ground on who's American: Amid a heated immigration debate, a survey finds behavior is more important than background. (Daniel B. Wood, 4/25/06, The Christian Science Monitor)

In survey responses, Dr. Straughn says he found support for the concept that America is different from other nations, which are defined by common language, homogenous people, or geography. By contrast, Americans generally see the US as defined by ideas and philosophies, which can change over time. [...]

[A] solid majority, 86 percent, believes immigration improves America with new ideas from different cultures and roughly the same percentage say groups should adapt to the larger US community.

The great irony is that immigrants come here because they believe in those American ideals while nativists dream of forsakinmg those ideals and making America more like those other nations that identify themselves by ethnicity.

MORE:
A high fence and a big gate (Thomas Friedman, NY Times)

America today is struggling to find the right balance of policies on immigration.

Personally, I favor a very high fence, with a very big gate.

So far, neither President Bush's proposal to allow the nation's 11 million illegal immigrants to stay temporarily on work visas, nor the most hard-line Republican counterproposal, which focuses only on border security, leaves me satisfied. We need a better blend of the two - a blend that will keep America the world's greatest magnet for immigrants. [...]

An amnesty for the 11 million to 12 million illegal immigrants already here is hardly ideal. It would reward illegal behavior. But since we are not going to deport them all, some version of the Arlen Specter bill seems like the right way to go: Illegal immigrants who were in the U.S. before Jan. 7, 2004, could apply for three-year guest-worker visas, each renewable one time if the applicant pays a $1,000 fine and passes a background check. After six years, if the immigrant learned sufficient English and paid another $1,000 fine and back taxes, he or she could start to apply for citizenship.

But because I strongly favor immigration, I also favor a high fence - if not a physical one, then at least a tamperproof national ID card for every American, without which you could not get a legal job or access to government services. We will not sustain a majority in favor of flexible immigration if we can't control our borders.

Good fences make good immigration policy. Fences make people more secure and able to think through this issue more calmly.

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REGIME CHANGE IS A WOMEN'S ISSUE:

Study reveals domestic abuse is widespread in Syria: The first study of its kind in the country shows 25 percent of women may be victims of violence. (Rhonda Roumani | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor)

[A] new study released earlier this month that says as many as 1 in 4 Syrian women may be victims of physical violence is beginning to reveal just how widespread a problem domestic abuse is throughout the country.

The study, funded by the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) and conducted by the state-run General Union of Women, is the first of its kind to try to quantify and explain the types of violence Syrian women face.

As Phyllis Chesler and Donna M. Hughes argue in the essay we included in Redefining Sovereignty, feminists need to work with religious conservatives if they are to help liberate women in the Islamic world.

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THE SCRIPT IS SELF-EVIDENT:

http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0425/p01s02-woap.html>China's many messages to quell unrest: To ensure stability, Communist leaders invoke Mao, Confucius, and Buddha. (Robert Marquand , 4/25/06, The Christian Science Monitor)

"It is a very intelligent strategy," says a Western historian here. "If people are nostalgic for Mao [Zedong] and old moral values, they've got Lei Feng [a model soldier lauded for selfless service]. For those who say China has lost its traditions, they promote Confucianism. For those who long for spirituality, it is Buddhism. The party is saying, 'you name it, we've got it.'"

But the disparate propaganda campaigns often seem like unrelated story lines in search of a central script.
Only the One Story will help the Chinese, but it will end the PRC.

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CAN'T TELL YOUR PURPLES FROM YOUR REDS WITHOUT A SOCRECARD:

Introducing the Purple Party: Depressed about the Democrats? Revolted by the Republicans? You’re not alone. Here in New York (with its Republican mayor and Democratic voters), a third way is being plotted. Follow the purple-brick road. (Kurt Andersen, New York)

In the last four mayoral elections, I’ve voted for the Republican three times—Giuliani in 1993 and 1997, and Bloomberg last fall. Each of those Republican votes felt a little less transgressive and weird.

I don’t consider myself a true Democrat. Yet my mayoral votes notwithstanding, I am not now nor have I ever been a Republican, and could never be unless the Lincoln Chafee–Olympia Snowe–John McCain wing of the party were to take decisive control, or hell freezes over. For me, what has happened politically in New York City stays in New York City. [...]

Republicans used to brag that theirs was the party of fresh thinking, but who’s brain-dead now? All the big new ideas they have trotted out lately—privatizing Social Security, occupying a big country with only 160,000 troops, Middle Eastern democracy as a force-fed contagion—have given a bad name to new paradigms.

As for the Democrats, the Republicans still have a point: Where are the brave, fresh, clear approaches passionately and convincingly laid out? When it comes to reforming entitlements, the Democrats have absolutely refused to step up. Because the teachers unions and their 4 million members are the most important organized faction of its political base, the party is wired to oppose any meaningful experimentation with charter schools or other new modes. Similarly, after beginning to embrace the inevitability of economic globalization in the nineties, and devising ways to minimize our local American pain, the Democrats’ scaredy-cat protectionist instincts seem to be returning with a vengeance. On so many issues, the ostensibly “progressive” party’s habits of mind seem anything but.

However, what makes so much of the great middle of the electorate most uncomfortable about signing on with the Democratic Party is the same thing that has made them uncomfortable since McGovern—the sense that the anti-military instincts of the left half of the party, no matter how sincere and well meaning, render prospective Democratic presidents untrustworthy as guardians of national security. It’s no accident that Bill Clinton was elected and reelected (and Al Gore won his popular majority) during the decade when peace reigned supreme, after the Cold War and before 9/11. [...]

So the simple question is this: Why can’t we have a serious, innovative, truth-telling, pragmatic party without any of the baggage of the Democrats and Republicans? A real and enduring party built around a coherent set of ideas and sensibility—neither a shell created for a single charismatic candidate like George Wallace or Ross Perot, nor a protest party like the Greens or Libertarians, with no hope of ever getting more than a few million votes in a presidential election. A party that plausibly aspires to be not a third party but the third party—to winning, and governing.

Let the present, long-running duopoly of the Republicans and Democrats end. Let the invigorating and truly democratic partisan flux of the American republic’s first century return. Let there be a more or less pacifist, anti-business, protectionist Democratic Party on the left, and an anti-science, Christianist, unapologetically greedy Republican Party on the right—and a robust new independent party of passionately practical progressives in the middle.

It’s certainly time. As no less a wise man than Alan Greenspan said last month, the “ideological divide” separating conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats leaves “a vast untended center from which a well-financed independent presidential candidate is likely to emerge in 2008 or, if not then, in 2012.”

And it’s possible—indeed, for a variety of reasons, more so than it’s been in our lifetimes. In 1992, a megalomaniacal kook with no political experience, running in a system stacked powerfully against third parties, won 19 percent of the presidential vote against a moderate Democrat and moderate Republican—and in two states, Perot actually beat one of the major-party candidates. In 1912, former president Teddy Roosevelt, running as a third-party progressive, got more votes than Taft, the Republican nominee. The Republicans, remember, began as a dicey new party until their second nominee, Lincoln, managed to get elected president.

It wouldn’t be easy or cheap to create this party. It would doubtless require a rich visionary or two—a Bloomberg, a Steve Jobs, a Paul Tudor Jones—to finance it in the beginning. And since a new party hasn’t won the presidency in a century and a half, it would have to struggle for credibility, to convince a critical mass of voters that a vote for its candidates would be, in the near term, an investment in a far better political future and not simply a wasted ballot.

Is this a quixotic, wishful conceit of a few disgruntled gadflies? Sure. This is only a magazine; we’re only writers. But the beautiful, radical idea behind democracy was government by amateurs. As the historian Daniel J. Boorstin wrote, “An enamored amateur need not be a genius to stay out of the ruts he has never been trained in.” We have a vision if not a true platform, sketches for a party if not quite a set of blueprints. Every new reality must start with a set of predispositions, a scribbled first draft, an earnest dream of the just possibly possible. In our amateur parlor-game fashion we are very serious about trying to get the conversation started, and moving in the right direction.

And New York, as it happens, is the ideal place to give birth to such a movement. This city’s spirit—clear-sighted, tough-minded, cosmopolitan, hardworking, good-humored, financially acute, tolerant, romantic—should infuse the party. Despite our lefty reputation, for a generation now this city’s governance has tended to be strikingly moderate, highly flexible rather than ideological or doctrinaire. While we have a consistent and overwhelming preference for Democratic presidential candidates, for 24 of the past 28 years the mayors we have elected—Koch, Giuliani, Bloomberg—have been emphatically independent-minded moderates whose official party labels have been flags of convenience. (And before them, there was John Lindsay—elected as a Republican and reelected as an independent before becoming an official Democrat in order to run for president.) Moreover, New York’s stealth-independent-party regime has worked: bankruptcy avoided, the subways air-conditioned and graffiti-free, crime miraculously down, the schools reorganized and beginning to improve.

We’re certainly not part of red-state America, but when push comes to shove we are really not blue in the D.C.–Cambridge–Berkeley–Santa Monica sense. We are, instead, like so much of the country, vividly purple. And so—for now—we’ll call our hypothetical new entity the Purple Party.

“Centrist” is a bit of a misnomer for the paradigm we envision, since that suggests an uninspired, uninspiring, have-it-both-ways, always-split-the-difference approach born entirely of political calculation. And that’s because one of the core values will be honesty. Not a preachy, goody-goody, I’ll-never-lie-to-you honesty of the Jimmy Carter type, but a worldly, full-throated and bracing candor. The moderation will often be immoderate in style and substance, rather than tediously middle-of-the-road. Pragmatism will be an animating party value—even when the most pragmatic approach to a given problem is radical.

Take health care. The U.S. system requires a complete overhaul, so that every American is covered, from birth to death, whether he is employed or self-employed or unemployed. What?!? Socialized medicine? Whatever. Half of our medical costs are already paid by government, and the per capita U.S. expenditure ($6,280 per year) is nearly twice what the Canadians and Europeans and Japanese pay—suggesting that we could afford to buy our way out of the customer-service problems that afflict other national health systems. Beyond the reformist virtues of justice and sanity, our party would make the true opportunity-society argument for government-guaranteed universal health coverage: Devoted as the Purple Party is to labor flexibility and entrepreneurialism, we want to make it as easy as possible for people to change jobs or quit to start their own businesses, and to do that we must break the weirdly neo-feudal, only-in-America link between one’s job and one’s medical care.

But the Purple Party wouldn’t use its populist, progressive positions on domestic issues like health to avoid talking about military policy, the way Democrats tend to do. We would declare straight out that, alas, the fight against Islamic jihadism must be a top-priority, long-term, and ruthless military, diplomatic, and cultural struggle.

We would be unapologetic in our support of a well-funded military and (depoliticized) intelligence apparatus, and the credible threat of force as a foreign policy tool. We would seldom accuse Democrats of being dupes and wimps or Republicans of being fearmongers and warmongers—but we would have the guts and the standing to do both.

Mr. Andersen may not be willing to face it, but what he's talking about -- except on replacing morality with permissiveness -- is the kind of party that George W. Bush is leading. The only thing he really needs to accept is that universal health care will come in the form of things like HSAs, not a Canadian-style plan, but you'd think a guy whjo wants new ideas would be readyt to jettison that old, failed one.

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DR. STRANGELUBE, OR HOW WE LEARN TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE EXPENSIVE PETROLEUM:

Why we should love high oil prices (Martin Vander Weyer, 25/04/2006, Daily Telegraph)

The official figure for inflation, reported last week, is a barely significant 1.8 per cent - because, while fuel has risen, the cost of manufactured goods, including clothing and electrical goods imported from low-wage Asian countries, has fallen dramatically. [...]

[T]here are sound, non-doomster arguments why the price is just as likely to fall back in the medium term, and it is worth rehearsing the reasons why a period of relatively high oil prices has not been entirely a bad thing.

For a start, it changes the power structure and investment profile of the global oil industry. At current price levels, oil companies can exploit deep offshore deposits in the North Sea, the Caspian and the Gulf of Mexico, and reopen smaller, depleted wells in Texas and elsewhere.

The frozen wastes of Siberia and Central Asia look a lot less inhospitable than they used to.

Suddenly Canada, one of our closest allies, is a big player in the 21st-century energy game, with its vast wilderness tracts of tar-soaked sands in northern Alberta.

All these new and mostly non-Opec sources can now feasibly be brought on stream, along with new refining capacity in which the industry was reluctant to invest when prices were low.

All these factors combine to mean that we are slightly less at the mercy of the Opec cartel and the violent instability of the Middle East.

Meanwhile, at the consumer end of the equation, higher oil prices engender better environmental and economic behaviour. [...]

Eventually, however - experts disagree widely as to when, but it won't be soon - the world will run out of oil. By the time it happens, man will have harnessed new energy from the sun, the tides, the wind, the hydrogen cell and advanced forms of nuclear fission.

The present phase of high prices will help both to retard the exhaustion of oil and to accelerate the search for alternatives. It may be uncomfortable and worrying in the short term, but in the long term we may even be thankful for it.

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High gas prices propel a new 'moped madness': Scooters and mopeds see a rise in sales - and cachet - thanks in part to a youth energy ethic. (Patrik Jonsson, 4/25/06, The Christian Science Monitor)

The moped and its bigger, flashier cousin, the scooter, are swarming out of Jimmy Carter's America and into George W. Bush's republic - a movement propelled by soaring gasoline prices surpassing those of the late 1970s and by legions of Americans who take seriously the call for oil independence. If the serious intent is mixed with a little fun from "moped gangs" who call themselves the Heck's Angels or the Hardly Davidsons, so much the merrier.

Though Gen-Xers and baby boomers are among those flinging a leg over these two-wheelers, the vehicles may owe their newfound cachet to their embrace by a younger set. Sometimes called "the millennials," they are said to embody a sense of social purpose, adopt a "team" approach to life, and rebel from their elders by hewing to the small-scale. It's an attitude with a simple message: Small-bore is cool.

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LEARNING NOTHING FROM HISTORY (via Pepys):

Bush's Thousand Days (Arthur Schlesinger Jr., April 24, 2006, Washington Post)

The issue of preventive war as a presidential prerogative is hardly new. In February 1848 Rep. Abraham Lincoln explained his opposition to the Mexican War: "Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose -- and you allow him to make war at pleasure [emphasis added]. . . . If, today, he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, 'I see no probability of the British invading us'; but he will say to you, 'Be silent; I see it, if you don't.' "

This is precisely how George W. Bush sees his presidential prerogative: Be silent; I see it, if you don't . However, both Presidents Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower, veterans of the First World War, explicitly ruled out preventive war against Joseph Stalin's attempt to dominate Europe. And in the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, President Kennedy, himself a hero of the Second World War, rejected the recommendations of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for a preventive strike against the Soviet Union in Cuba.

Just imagine how many tens of millions of lives would have been saved and how much better off the world would be today had we regime changed the Soviets in the 40s. Mr. Schlesinger's argument is that the hundred million killed by communism were a fair price to pay for a legal nicety.

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STEERING MAVERICK:

Gearing Up for '08? McCain Befriends Old Enemies: He's Receiving Money From People Who Attacked Him in 2000 (JAKE TAPPER, April 23, 2006, ABC News)

In March 2000, in the thick of that highly-charged GOP presidential competition between McCain and then-Gov. George W. Bush, Texas businessmen Sam and Charles Wyly -- major contributors to Bush -- funded a $2.5 million advertising campaign by a group calling itself "Republicans for Clear Air" that ran an ad against McCain in California, New York and Ohio.

Initially the Wylys did not acknowledge they were responsible for the ads -- and once it came out that they were they and the Bush 2000 presidential campaign denied any coordination, which would have been a violation of Federal Election Commission laws. McCain's campaign filed a complaint with the FEC alleging the Wylys broke the law.

The candidate himself referred to the brothers as "Wyly coyotes" and asked a campaign audience in Boston, "Are we going to allow two cronies of George W. Bush to hijack this election? Tell them to keep their dirty money in the state of Texas, my friends. Don't spread it all over New England and America."

But now the candidate from Arizona, planning a potential run for president in 2008, seems to have a different relationship with the coyotes.

Sam Wyly and his wife Cheryl have given McCain's political action committee a total of $10,000, according to records on the PAC's Web site. Additionally, Sam, Cheryl, and Charles Wyly are all co-chairing a May 15 fundraiser for McCain's PAC, to be hosted in Dallas, and featuring Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman.

"This all seems to me to be a reflection of the fear that lots of old-line Republicans have of what lies ahead in 2008," said Norm Ornstein, congressional scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, "and the ability of McCain to seduce them in a sense into a belief that he's the only guy that can win."

It's just his turn at the top and they'd use the same tactics to stop an insurgency against him. The party is hierarchical and challengers aren't welcome.

MORE (via Peps):
He's a weasel, but he's my weasel (Jonathan Chait, April 23, 2006, LA Times)

Remaining competitive for the Republican Party's 2008 nomination has required McCain to mend fences with the conservatives who savaged him during the 2000 primary season and after. Most of the concessions he has made to the right, though, have been symbolic.

He lavished extravagant praise on President Bush for his leadership in the war on terror, even though McCain criticized most of Bush's specific decisions, such as letting Osama bin Laden escape and invading Iraq with too few troops. His overtures to Jerry Falwell and his endorsement of "intelligent design" sent friendly signals to conservatives without actually binding McCain to legislative positions if he wins.

These are, certainly, acts of weaselry. But like I said, I don't really care. Politicians can always persuade themselves to make small compromises in the pursuit of a larger good. I think McCain has a genuine desire to transform his party and his country, and he's willing to say things he doesn't agree with in order to be able to do it.

It's possible he was lying then and he's telling the truth now. But why would he? The liberal positions he took during the GOP primaries made him radioactive to the base and killed his campaign. They nearly got him run out of the party he hoped to lead. If he was acting out of expediency, he would have toed the line.

The more pertinent question is, will McCain make specific promises to the right that he can't weasel out of? His vote to extend the Bush tax cuts he once opposed is a bad sign (though he hasn't said he'd veto any tax hike). Also, can McCain get through a GOP primary without committing himself to a series of litmus tests? Will he surround himself with conventional right-wing staff?

I suspect that if he emerges victorious from the primaries, he will have had to shed many of his ideals. It's not attractive. On the other hand, it's better than a Republican who didn't have to sell his soul to get the nomination. I'd prefer somebody who's uncomfortable in Karl Rove's Republican Party to somebody who genuinely likes it.

Boy, Mr. Chait's head is gonna explode when the Senator hires Karl Rove.

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ARE THEY SHOCKED BY SUNRISE?:

Katrina's Tide Carries Many to Hopeful Shores (JASON DePARLE, 4/23/06, New York Times)

LITHONIA, Ga. One afternoon last August, a young bus driver headed to an office in a suburb of New Orleans, humming the song to an old television show. He arrived just before his wife, who was pregnant with their first child and escorting four troubled teenagers from the alternative school where she worked.

At 24, the driver, Whitney Marcell, weighed 300 pounds, and answered to the name Big Man. His wife, Jeralyn, who goes by Fu, had just turned 28. She brought along the hard-faced adolescents because her own hard life had presented her with a gloriously teachable moment: Big Man and Fu, up-from-nothing products of New Orleans's roughest projects, were about to buy their first home.

"Are you sure you can afford it?" friends had sniped, but Mr. Marcell's only worry about the $86,500 loan was whether the terms would let him pay it off early. The couple signed a pile of legal papers and left the office owning a house in New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward.

As he packed that night, Mr. Marcell returned to the song from "The Jeffersons," a sitcom about a dry cleaner and his wife who had risen to the black bourgeoisie. Like his television heroes, George and Louise, Mr. Marcell crooned about "moving on up," then startled himself by crying.

Two days later, Hurricane Katrina struck with biblical force, destroying the Marcells' new home, and chasing them to the outskirts of Atlanta, where they became part of the largest American diaspora since Dust Bowl days. But despite the loss of nearly everything they owned, the Marcells say they have moved up again.

The median household income in their new neighborhood is nearly twice that in the Lower Ninth Ward, and more than four times that in the projects where they had lived. Though they had recently worked their way out of poverty in New Orleans, the Marcells say this mostly black suburb offers much safer streets, better schools and a stronger economy.

The Marcells' journey illustrates one surprising benefit from an otherwise terrible storm: the exodus took low-income families to areas richer in opportunity.

It's kind of troubling how often the staff of america's leading newspaper is surprised by the utterly predictable.

MORE (via Tom Morin):
Movin' on up? : Two large-scale studies examine how neighborhoods affect the well-being of children and whether moving can make a difference. (TORI DeANGELIS, July/August 2001, Monitor on Psychology)

In two groundbreaking mega-studies, social scientists are examining how factors in poor urban neighborhoods affect a particularly vulnerable population: minority children and adolescents. These studies coincide with a major federal policy effort to improve conditions for the urban poor by tearing down urban housing projects and working to better integrate communities along racial and class lines--an experiment that's still in its infancy.

In one study, researchers are part of a government project to help poor families move to better communities. The study is showing dramatic results: Child and adolescent arrests for violent crime decreased by as much as 40 percent when the young people's families were offered the chance to move to affluent areas.

In the other large-scale study, social scientists are looking within poor communities to ascertain what helps some children fare well--despite where they live--while others are pushed into criminal behavior and academic failure.

These studies provide a fresh look at a subject tarnished by partisan bickering about race, class and poverty, study investigators say.

"From a research perspective, this research is giving us the best demonstration we've ever had of how neighborhoods affect kids," says Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, PhD, a psychologist and investigator in both studies and Virginia Marx Professor of Child Development and Education at Columbia University's Teachers College.

Indeed, say researchers, both studies show that neighborhood characteristics and family factors seem to have a profound effect on how well children do socially and academically.

If only we could summon the political will to depopulate every urban area.

MORE MORE (via Tom Morin)
Katrina and China's whirlwind growth (Spengler, 4/25/06, Asia Times)

The best thing the US could do for the poor people of its urban ghettos is to expel them. One does not do poor people a favor by concentrating them in government housing (or for that matter refugee camps) where they depend on the public dole. Given the incidental costs of major hurricanes, there probably are cheaper ways to accomplish this, eg, simply pay them to leave.

This is difficult to accomplish in a democracy, to be sure, for the elected representatives of immiserated black Americans form a bloc large enough to thwart legislative attempts to better their conditions. Were the urban poor dispersed into the rich regions of the country, they no longer would vote as a bloc for the sort of congress members who now conspire to keep them poor.

It was the great luck of the poor blacks of New Orleans that a great wind came along to carry them away from servitude to their political leaders. The Black Caucus of America's Congress keeps urban blacks as political hostages, much as the regimes of the Arab world have exploited Palestinian refugees, whom they refuse to take in, and expel when convenient. [...]

Many of Katrina's refugees are ascending out of the humiliating poverty that blighted their lives back home. Now they will have the means to watch sex and violence on plasma-screen televisions, spend their free time in the esthetic dystopia of shopping malls, and worship in mega-churches.

Will more money make them happier? I do not think so, any more than the loss of traditional Chinese culture in the globalized urban jungle of the coastal cities will make Chinese peasants happier. With the admonition Careful what you wish for, I addressed that issue in a March 21 review of Rod Dreher's book Crunchy Cons.

What it will do, however, is enable them to contemplate their unhappiness with a sense of empowerment. People with money, education and opportunity may be as miserable as any illiterate dirt farmer, but they have the means - how did Thomas Jefferson put it? - for the pursuit of happiness.

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FLEXING THEIR LITTLE GRAY CELLS

The madness of bombing Iran (Robert Skidelsky, The Times, April 23rd, 2006)

Note: You have to feel sorry for the left sometimes. It took them three hard and turbulent years, but they finally convinced themselves that, while Saddam was not exactly a gentleman, his errors and excesses paled beside the greatest genocidal crime of the century---the undermining of international law by Bush and Blair. But there is no rest for the weary and suddenly they are faced with the task of defending their blessed multilateralism in the face of an even more dangerous and renegade lunatic from Iran. They are hard at it all over the MSM and the blogosphere and you are invited to share your favourite example (with links if possible) of the stupidest, most fatuous idea for bringing Iran to heel within their sacrosanct transnational system. Here is mine:

First, it needs to be trumpeted that a military strike now would be illegal under international law. The UN Security Council would never authorise it, since Iran has not breached the terms of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty that allows every signatory to develop nuclear energy for peaceful use. However, the hawks no longer even talk about the need to get Security Council approval —this is the measure of the damage to international law that Bush and Blair have inflicted.

The United States (or Israel) would claim it was acting in self-defence. But by long-established customary law a pre-emptive strike is justified only to defend against an “imminent and certain” attack. True enough, what happens tomorrow is never certain, but if another country’s troops start massing at one’s frontier that would be pretty good evidence of hostile intention. To claim the right of self-defence against a threat that may or may not emerge in five years’ time is to claim the right to wage aggressive war whenever one chooses. This was one of the two grounds on which Nazi leaders were convicted and executed at Nuremberg. [...]

People who support military action ask: how do we know that Iran isn't lying when it says that its uranium enrichment programme is intended only for civilian use? Surely, this is a clear case for invoking the precautionary principle: the risk may be slight but the consequences of ignoring it may be catastrophic. But no one is arguing that the risk should be ignored. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty now also allows for intrusive inspections. Hans Blix has written: “If you want a control system that gives a maximum of assurance, you can . . . require that inspectors have the right to go almost anywhere, any time, and demand any kind of documents.” Iran has accepted this protocol and operating under it the International Atomic Energy Agency has found no evidence that it is developing a weapons programme. However, the protocol could be strengthened for states such as Iran whose leaders make Hitlerian pronouncements.

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INQUISITION AT HOME, CRUSADES ABROAD:

The 'American Inquisition' (James Reston Jr., 4/17/2006, USA Today)

Through the mist of time, the Spanish Inquisition has come down to us as one of the most barbarous periods in all of history. Its viciousness peaked in the late 15th century, during the reign of the messianic "Catholic kings," Ferdinand and Isabella.

Paranoia gripped Spanish society as the Inquisition coincided with a Christian war against the Muslims of southern Spain. Clandestine trials, secret prisons, rampant eavesdropping, torture, desecration of Islam's holy books, and gruesome public executions created an atmosphere of pervasive terror. Suspects were assumed to be guilty, with no recourse to a defense, to a jury, or to a legitimate court.

In the chaos now roiling the Western world, does any of this sound familiar?

It is time to ask whether the United States, with some of these same touchstones, is entering a period of its own peculiar Inquisition. Of course, there are no burning places for heretics in America now. No Tomás de Torquemada presides over this period of internal anxiety and investigation.

But the word, inquisition, is not exclusive to Spain in the Middle Ages. It is a useful term for historians to characterize phases of history that are distinguished by religious intolerance, by Christian holy war and Islamic jihad, by racial profiling and xenophobia, by show trials, and by snooping of secret police.

This country, too, is seized with collective paranoia. President Bush knows, as Ferdinand, Isabella and Torquemada knew, that constant warnings about secret terrorists are a powerful deterrent to dissent and a useful tool for consolidating political power.

Bush, like his Spanish precursors, presses for a unity of faith and a credo of purification. His faith mixes the secular and the spiritual. Its hallmarks are Jeffersonian democracy for all the world, unquestioning patriotism and revitalized Christianity. Unbelievers in this holy trinity are to be ferreted out. Not to subscribe to the methods in the war on terrorism is not so much dissent as heresy.

the key to America's greatness, of course, is that it is nearly always in the grip of its own peculiar Inquisition. From our periodic religious revivals, anti-intellectualism, persistent Puritanism, and enduring messianic streak to annihilating the South to make it extend democracy to blacks to the successive suppression of anarchists, Klansmen, Socialists, Nazis, Communists, radicals, militiamen, etc., to our Jacksonian foreign policy we have required extreme conformity to the Founding ideals not just at home but progressively abroad as well.

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Dissident President: George W. Bush has the courage to speak out for freedom. (NATAN SHARANSKY, April 24, 2006, Opinion Journal)

There are two distinct marks of a dissident. First, dissidents are fired by ideas and stay true to them no matter the consequences. Second, they generally believe that betraying those ideas would constitute the greatest of moral failures. Give up, they say to themselves, and evil will triumph. Stand firm, and they can give hope to others and help change the world.

Political leaders make the rarest of dissidents. In a democracy, a leader's lifeline is the electorate's pulse. Failure to be in tune with public sentiment can cripple any administration and undermine any political agenda. Moreover, democratic leaders, for whom compromise is critical to effective governance, hardly ever see any issue in Manichaean terms. In their world, nearly everything is colored in shades of gray.

That is why President George W. Bush is such an exception. He is a man fired by a deep belief in the universal appeal of freedom, its transformative power, and its critical connection to international peace and stability. Even the fiercest critics of these ideas would surely admit that Mr. Bush has championed them both before and after his re-election, both when he was riding high in the polls and now that his popularity has plummeted, when criticism has come from longstanding opponents and from erstwhile supporters.

With a dogged determination that any dissident can appreciate, Mr. Bush, faced with overwhelming opposition, stands his ideological ground, motivated in large measure by what appears to be a refusal to countenance moral failure.

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A CHILDISH PEOPLE DEMANDS A NANNY STATE:

France: The Children's Hour (William Pfaff, May 11, 2006, NY Review of Books)

Over a month of demonstrations by French students, workers, and would-be workers have delivered a devastating blow to the government of Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, which was forced to withdraw its new law meant to increase employment opportunities for young people lacking formal qualifications. Hundreds of thousands—the organizers say millions— have been in the streets of cities across the country. Students left their classes and blocked others from attending. Some universities and lycées shut down to prevent violence between striking students and those anxious to study for impending examinations. The Sorbonne's auditorium was temporarily occupied, and classrooms there and elsewhere trashed. These events have dominated the political scene. Foreign observers were waiting for the revolution.

All this activity was intended to force the withdrawal of a minor change in the French government's employment legislation, which mainly would have benefited the young people in the ghetto suburbs who last fall were rioting nightly and burning thousands of automobiles in outrage at their "exclusion." The scale of the affair has been grotesquely out of proportion to its ostensible purpose. Yet it has turned into a symbolic event of high significance. The protests became a challenge to a certain model of capitalist economy that a large part, if not most, of French society regards as a danger to national standards of justice—and, above all, to "equality," that radical notion which France is nearly alone in proclaiming as a national cause, the central value in its republican motto of "liberty, equality, fraternity."

Villepin surely had no notion of the consequences when he launched what seemed to him a small but constructive employment initiative, intended to loosen current inhibitions to job creation by encouraging the hiring of the unqualified young. Villepin's measure created a new "first-job contract" that would make it easier for employers to hire people for two-year trials, with the possibility of discharging them, without explanation, if they didn't work out (or if the employer no longer could afford them). Under the long-prevailing system, such dismissals were largely forbidden. [...]

The message of the mostly Muslim suburbs resembles the message of class conflict in the past—the demand for equality. The crucial difference is that the conflict is no longer one economic class against another, which was a purposeful conflict, but protest by those excluded for cultural and racial reasons (which money doesn't cure) from the larger society. The response to that exclusion can only be immigrant assimilation. This was understood and is not impossible, since France has always been more colorblind than any other country in Europe—assimilation for the French is a matter of language and culture. But whether the public response will be adequate remains to be seen; so does the degree to which the Muslim minority is prepared to be assimilated.

Villepin, in putting forward a change in the employment laws, inadvertently opened a fundamental question about what economic and social model should be adopted in France, just as two years ago the referendum on the European constitution posed disturbing questions about the political future of the European Union and the direction being taken by European capitalism.

The French obviously are not alone in their concerns. A kindred debate about "models" of capitalism persists in Germany, which has suffered recent labor unrest, connected to demands for wage sacrifices by workers, and in the European Commission itself, which since EU expansion to twenty-five members has, under the commission presidency of Portugal's José Manuel Barroso, tipped away from the established "European social model," with its emphasis on provisions for welfare, and toward Anglo-American market capitalism, provoking considerable controversy. Even Britain saw its biggest strike since the 1920s on March 28, when workers for local authorities protested against proposed changes in their pensions.

Two hundred years of failure for the French model and a hundred million dead isn't enough?

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THE NGO AT THE END OF HISTORY:

A Million Paths to Peace (Michael Strong, 24 Apr 2006, Tech Central Station)

Something extraordinary is happening in global development circles. For the first time since the 19th century, progressive activists are embracing trade as positive tool for change. The global NGO Oxfam is the latest progressive interest group to change its tune. It has launched a campaign to end agricultural subsidies in the developed world.

This could represent a fundamental turning of the tide from a world based on nationalism and violence to a world based on commerce and peace.

Oxfam has a new section on its website devoted to "the private sector's role in development," where they acknowledge that "Oxfam GB believes that the private sector plays a central role in development, impacting on or contributing to poverty reduction in many different ways." The awkward "impacting on," rather than simply "contributing to," poverty reduction rings of compromise language, perhaps included to satisfy lingering "old Left" market resentments among certain Oxfam stakeholders, but we should be strictly grateful for the core thesis: "The private sector plays a central role in development."

In a recent paper, Columbia University political science professor Erik Gartzke shows that economic freedom (as measured by the Fraser Economic Freedom Index) is about fifty times more effective than democracy in diminishing violent conflict. Although it is not literally true that two nations with McDonald's do not go to war with each other, nations with high levels of economic freedom are far less likely to be engaged in violent conflict than are nations without economic freedom. The democratic peace turns out to be the free market peace.

Evangelizing for democracy and capitalism is the transnationalism of the Right.

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THE BNP WEPT:

Anthony killer attacked (JOHN KAY, 4/24/06, The Sun)

RACIST killer Michael Barton has been beaten up in jail by three black prisoners. [...]

Last month he was switched to a young offenders’ institution — and found more than 20 per cent of the 150 inmates were black.

They immediately targeted Barton, who was branded a “racist thug” at his trial, and three of them attacked him when he took a shower.

As Barton screamed in terror, they beat him with their fists and slashed his face with a makeshift weapon constructed from razor blades.

He was left with cuts and severe bruising which needed treatment in the prison’s health centre.

The three prisoners responsible confessed and were punished with loss of privileges — but Barton was too scared to make an official complaint.

An insider at the institution, Moorland, near Doncaster, South Yorks, said yesterday: “He is now living in fear of his life and has become a gibbering wreck.

“He is no longer the swaggering racist thug he was now he is surrounded by so many black faces in a closed environment. The fact he was branded a racist thug by a judge has made him a number one target for revenge attacks.”

It would seem they traded some privileges for the privilege--an eminently fair trade.

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THE BIGGEST MISTAKE IN IRAQ WAS BEING INSUFFICIENTLY RUMSFELDIAN:

Judging Rummy (Gregory Scoblete, 24 Apr 2006, Tech Central Station)

Donald Rumsfeld returned to the post of Defense Secretary in 2000 with a clear view of both the politics and the instrument. He promised to transform the military from the plodding, manpower intensive force of the Cold War into a leaner, networked military which would employ superior firepower and maneuver to compensate for fewer soldiers and lighter ground vehicles. This military, with its emphasis on remotely piloted aircraft and high altitude, precision strike capability, could produce quicker victories against a broader array of threats -- and with fewer casualties. It would have fewer massive bases overseas and more "forward operating sites" -- bare-bones facilities where supplies, troops and equipment could be "surged" in the event of conflict.

This vision of "military transformation" was not uniquely Rumsfeld's. Many scholars and service-members had been promoting the "revolution in military affairs" before he arrived at the Pentagon. But Rumsfeld seized on it with a single minded determination. The theory of transformation had the usual retinue of critics and cheerleaders, but the press was largely interested in which weapons system were on the chopping block (and by extension, which pork-addled members of Congress were positioning themselves between the knife) - not to mention how the Army was peeved at Rumsfeld's management style. Rarely did the press focus on the core question of just what political ends this Rumsfeldian military was being built to accomplish. The transformation debates took place in what was, before the Iraq war, a political vacuum.

Rumsfeld knew what kind of military he was building and he knew what that military was supposed to do. In a January 2002 speech, he listed six criteria:

"First, to protect the U.S. homeland and our bases overseas. Second, to project and sustain power in distant theaters. Third, to deny our enemies sanctuary, making sure they know that no corner of the world is remote enough, no mountain high enough, no cave or bunker deep enough, no SUV fast enough to protect them from our reach. Fourth, to protect our information networks from attack. Fifth, to use information technology to link up different kinds of U.S. forces so that they can in fact fight jointly. And sixth, to maintain unhindered access to space and protect our space capabilities from enemy attack."

It was a mission, he later said, that was "determined and inviolable." What it was not was a colonial army, a manpower-intensive force designed to occupy nations or failed states and restore working political institutions (let alone electric or sewer systems). Rather, Rumsfeld was building an army for what Council on Foreign Relations fellow Walter Russell Mead termed "Jacksonian" America -- an army to fight and win wars, not perform social work. [...]

In a revealing interview with talk show host Rush Limbaugh, Rumsfeld said he spends his days "working on transformation and seeing that we manage the force in a successful way, and working on things involving Iraq." That the present, hot war in Iraq ranked third among the Defense Secretary's priorities was illuminating, but not surprising. In a profile of Rumsfeld, Washington Post Magazine writer David Von Drehle noted how the secretary viewed his job as ensuring that the Iraq war did not siphon off funds and resources destined for transformative weapons systems. He never envisioned -- let alone desired -- a prolonged occupation to reconstitute Iraq as a liberal democracy and is determined to ensure (by the military he is building) that it is not a precedent.

Iraq would be more stable today had we withdrawn as quickly as the Rumsfeld transformation would envision.

MORE:
Japan, US Clear Last Big Hurdle for Defense Realignment (Steve Herman, 24 April 2006, VOA news)

The last major stumbling block has been cleared for the United States and Japan to initiate a realignment of American forces in Japan. The breakthrough came when the two allies agreed on dividing the cost of transferring thousands of U.S. Marines from southern Japan to a U.S. island in the western Pacific.

Japan's Defense Agency Director General Fukushiro Nukaga says Tokyo will contribute $6 billion of the total cost, which will exceed $10 billion. The Japanese share will include some loans.

Nukaga says during their meeting Sunday, the two allies agreed on all points related to moving the Marines.

U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says the deal will improve security for both countries.

"We have come to an understanding that we both feel is in the best interests of our countries," he says.

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LAUGHING AT PHAROAH:

In Egypt, Revival of Political Farce: Renowned Comic Navigates Censorship to Tackle Contemporary Ills (Daniel Williams, 4/24/06, Washington Post)

If Albert Brooks, the American comedian, was really "Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World," as the title of his satirical movie said, all he had to do was go into a Cairo video shop and pick up one of two dozen uproarious films by Adel Imam. [...]

Fifty years ago, Imam emerged as a new character on Egypt's stage and screen: the ugly matinee idol. "He was the first Egyptian superstar who was not handsome," said Samir Farid, a veteran film critic. Farid once likened Imam to E.T., Steven Spielberg's extraterrestrial, a comparison that grated on Imam. These days, he's at ease with such descriptions but adds, "Yes, I was not handsome, but I got a lot of girls." [...]

Arguably, Imam's most memorable movie was "Terrorism and the Kebab," from 1993, in which he played a citizen caught up in a bureaucratic nightmare in the halls of Mugamma, Cairo's central government office building, when he seeks documents to transfer his son from one school to another. A pious clerk is too busy praying to take care of Imam's business. A rifle falls into Imam's hands; he takes over the building and negotiates for a shipment of fresh roasted ground lamb to feed a band of followers. He and his comrades chant "Kebab, kebab, or your life will be hell," while police and ministers line up outside Mugamma for an assault.

Brooks's 2005 movie was less a parody of Muslims than of Americans who assume Muslims are all terrorist sympathizers, with the notion that making them laugh would be a daunting chore. Imam runs counter to the stereotype. He speaks out against terrorism. He played the lead in "The Terrorist," a film about a fugitive assassin who takes refuge with a family of well-off Muslims and has to hide his distaste for their lifestyle of unveiled women and Western music. The film was made under heavy police guard.

Imam was already the target of radical Islamic ire when, a decade before, he performed in the southern town of Assiut in protest against bombings and assassinations. "You could see the fanatics on the roofs with their rifles," he said. "But people came and they sold music on the street, something the fanatics had banned. The fanatics published pamphlets about me. They called me a homosexual, but I knew for a fact I was not," he said with a lusty laugh. [...]

He described Egyptians as "schizophrenic" about the United States. "We send lots of immigrants to America," he said, "but we dislike its bias to Israel."

He called Gamal Abdel Nasser, the army officer who overthrew Egypt's monarchy and became a hero throughout the Middle East, "Egypt's first true president." Asked whether he was Egypt's last true president, Imam was silent. No reference to The Big Man. A bit later, he said, "Egypt is not like Iraq under Saddam Hussein. People insult the president every day."

Like many of his generation, Imam longs for a Cairo of the past: cosmopolitan, smaller, orderly and easygoing. That memory is part of the appeal of his role as Zaki. "He lived through a beautiful time when Egypt was privileged with multiple ethnicities and religions," he said. "The city looked beautiful. Buildings were more beautiful than in Paris. Now they are filled with garbage."

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EVER TRY WHITE CHOCOLATE?:

New Orleans mayor loses support of whites (MICHELLE ROBERTS, 4/24/06, Chicago Sun-Times)

Nagin garnered less than 10 percent of the vote in predominantly white precincts, according to GCR & Associates Inc., a consulting firm analyzing demographic data for the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority.

He received 65 percent or more of the vote in predominantly black neighborhoods, the consultant found.

Those divisions are all the more important because the city is more white than it was before Katrina hit Aug. 29: Fewer than half the city's 455,000 residents have returned, and most of those displaced are black. Only about 20,000 evacuees participated in Saturday's election by absentee ballot, fax and satellite stations, although an unknown number returned to the city to vote in person.

Nearly half of voters in predominantly white areas turned out, compared with about 30 percent of registered voters in black neighborhoods, which also tended to be the worst hit by flooding.

Landrieu, who is white, finished with 29 percent of the overall vote to Nagin's 38 percent. He finished second in black neighborhoods to Nagin and second in white neighborhoods to overall third-place finisher Ron Forman, bolstering his claims that he can help bring together racially diverse groups to help New Orleans emerge from the devastation left by Hurricane Katrina.

Hard to see how the Mayor adds many votes to his total, especially since turnout tends to drop in run-offs.

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SWEETHEART, DON’T TAKE THIS THE WRONG WAY, BUT...

Shopping brain cells identified (The Times, April 24th, 2006)

A part of the brain that helps people to make economic choices has been identified by a group of American scientists. Researchers at Harvard Medical School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, have pinpointed a network of nerve cells in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) section of the brain, right, that measure the value of specific items, helping the brain to decide what it wants and how much it is willing to pay for it. The findings, which are based on a study of macaque monkeys, are published today in the journal Nature.

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ANTI-IMMIGRATION EPICENTER:

Readers Write: Immigration Debate (Maria Luisa Tucker, April 24, 2006, AlterNet)

Over the last few weeks I have written a series of pieces advocating compassionate immigration reform that includes earned citizenship for this country's 11 million to 12 million undocumented immigrants. The first article, "Sí, Se Puede!" described the enthusiasm of the burgeoning movement for immigrants' rights. "Immigration Debate Creates Strange Bedfellows" looked at the strange political alliances created by the fracas, and finally, "Defining the Melting Pot" recounted the huge April 10 rally in New York.

The passion of the debate following these articles took me by surprise. [...]

The majority of commentators voiced opposition to legalization for undocumented immigrants, and scolded me personally and AlterNet at large for supporting such a proposition. Metahope asked, "Alternet, why are you supporting illegal immigrants rights over the rights of American citizens?" Metahope, like many others, viewed undocumented immigrants as a major threat, saying that "illegal immigrant scabs are destroying unions in Brooklyn, N.Y., and all over the United States They work hard at undermining our economic security … They don't deserve our largesse … They are lower than saboteurs, they are infestations."

Many agreed, though in less harsh terms, that illegal immigration is a threat to blue-collar citizens. Clocksmith wrote, "I am tired of hearing that illegal immigrants do the jobs that Americans won't do. If these jobs paid a fair and decent wage, Americans would do them." Clocksmith summed up the most consistent argument against illegal immigration (and immigration in general) -- the belief that immigrants "keep wages depressed for the rest of us" and make life more difficult for American workers. [...]

Medstudgeek felt that citizens who support illegal immigrants were insensitive to the repercussions on black American workers: "Notice that civil rights *leaders* are supporting immigration while ordinary blacks frequently oppose it. Why? Because, for sociological reasons, young black men always go to the bottom of the employment pile. Immigrants take spots ahead of them. The only way to help black people out of poverty is to create a scarcity of labor."

Similarly, Feller wrote, " racism has nothing to do with the majority of players in this game. It's money. MONEY. Bucks. The practical effect of a successful Latino immigrant movement will be additional misery for young African-Americans. Similarly for many poor white high school and college dropouts." [...]

Disagreeing with my pro-immigrant stance, one reader attributed my politics to a personal identity crisis. "Maria's a wannabe," gotmyeyeonyou wrote. "Tucker has written articles before about how she's pissed that her parents were 'forced' into speaking only English, so she's been reduced to pandejo status among the 'real' Hispanics this grave injustice of being denied her true destiny of speaking Spanish as a native is now the basis of her entire political/social outlook."

The subtext, of course, was both a questioning of my own ethnic authenticity and a tendency to characterize nonimmigrants who supported the immigrant rallies as elitists, hyperpolitically correct "faux liberals," corporate sympathizers or, more simply, sheep following some party line. Which party line, however, was up for debate, proving just how tangled the immigration debate has become:

"Are you all dupes for the Democratic Party?" asked jyork. "They sold out to their corporate money base and here you are doing it too." Yet, in another thread JPHickey wondered if I and/or AlterNet at large were "covert Bush administration spin doctors."

Because opposition to immigration is inextricably bound up with racial politics, isolationism, and protectionism its natural appeal is to the Left.

MORE:
Meanwhile, the actual future of the West lies in a competition for immigrants to fill open jobs and kleep economies and social welfare systems from tanking,
Alberta too hot for some (PATRICK BRETHOUR, 4/24/06, Globe and Mail)

The rising tide of Alberta's economy has created an undertow for non-energy businesses, which have had to endure the strains of superheated growth without the massive revenues of an oil producer. “As a manufacturing company, it's been miserable,” Mr. English said.

The province's dominant energy sector is struggling with the same problem, although it is one largely of its own creation. Husky Energy Inc. president and chief executive officer John Lau warned last week of the spread of the labour shortage, saying that his Calgary-based company is now looking outside of the country to build a massive bitumen upgrader because there are not enough workers locally. [...]

[T]he labour shortage problem turned critical for Raydan after it launched an expansion in Nisku, and found that it took nearly a year to find the 30 workers it needed. “We wanted to increase the size of our facility, but we couldn't find the people,” he said. A second phase of the expansion seemed out of reach.

Mr. English soon was having to pay close to double the hourly wages of his competitors in Ontario — not surprising when the McDonald's fast-food restaurant in nearby Leduc is hiring workers at $9.50 an hour, substantially higher than Alberta's hourly minimum wage of $7.

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SOCIAL DARWINISM SCORES AGAIN:

Asexuals Unite (Traci Hukill, April 24, 2006, AlterNet)

What do you do if you're a self-proclaimed asexual and you fall in love with another asexual?

You cuddle and kiss and talk a lot. You go to dinner parties, bicker over movies, sleep in the same bed. Maybe you even snuggle up and spoon, the two of you curled up in a cozy double-S.

But it does not occur to you to make the beast with two backs. Your sexual congress is permanently adjourned. You're in love, you're just not making any.

That's more or less the explanation given by Paul Cox, a 21-year-old Long Island University student. While organizing meet ups of New York asexuals last year, Cox met a young woman from the Brooklyn group and started spending a lot of time with her. All his time, actually, and for months, until she pointed out that their friendship had blossomed into a romance. Cox didn't even realize what was happening. "She's the one who dragged it out of me and drilled it into my head," he says, still sounding a little baffled.

Sounds like normal male-female relations. Cox says everything about them is normal. "It's kind of amazing how little of a difference it makes that we're not actually sexually attracted to each other," he says. "The longer we're in this, the more trivial it seems."

The Asexuality Visibility and Education Network couldn't have said it better.

Their not mating is an act of mercy to the species.

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BAD ANIMATRONICS, GOOD ANALYSIS:

Bin Laden's chilling call to arms (BEN LYNFIELD IN JERUSALEM AND MICHAEL THEODOULOU, 4/24/06, The Scotsman)

AL-QAEDA leader Osama bin Laden issued ominous new threats in an audiotape broadcast yesterday on Arab television, accusing Western civilians of supporting a war on Islam and urging his followers to go to Sudan to fight a proposed UN peacekeeping force.

The speaker, who sounded like the Saudi-born militant, also said that the West's shunning of the Hamas Palestinian government showed it was waging a "crusader-Zionist war" on Muslims.

In the tape, bin Laden blamed Western civilians for causing death and destruction in the Muslim world because they had re-elected their leaders.

While OBL most likely died at Tora Bora, al Qaeda correctly points out that our peacekeeping efforts in Sudan are just another aspect of the Crusade, that the political leaders waging it have paid little or no price at the polls, and that citizens are responsible for the actions of their governments.

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YOU MISSED TWO BODYGUARDS:

Removing America's Blinders (Howard Zinn, April 24, 2006, The Progressive)

[I]f we know some history, if we know how many times Presidents have made similar declarations to the country, and how they turned out to be lies, we will not be fooled. Although some of us may pride ourselves that we were never fooled, we still might accept as our civic duty the responsibility to buttress our fellow citizens against the mendacity of our high officials.

We would remind whoever we can that President Polk lied to the nation about the reason for going to war with Mexico in 1846. It wasn't that Mexico "shed American blood upon the American soil," but that Polk, and the slave-owning aristocracy, coveted half of Mexico.

We would point out that President McKinley lied in 1898 about the reason for invading Cuba, saying we wanted to liberate the Cubans from Spanish control, but the truth is that we really wanted Spain out of Cuba so that the island could be open to United Fruit and other American corporations. He also lied about the reasons for our war in the Philippines, claiming we only wanted to "civilize" the Filipinos, while the real reason was to own a valuable piece of real estate in the far Pacific, even if we had to kill hundreds of thousands of Filipinos to accomplish that.

President Woodrow Wilson -- so often characterized in our history books as an "idealist" -- lied about the reasons for entering the First World War, saying it was a war to "make the world safe for democracy," when it was really a war to make the world safe for the Western imperial powers.

Harry Truman lied when he said the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima because it was "a military target."

Everyone lied about Vietnam -- Kennedy about the extent of our involvement, Johnson about the Gulf of Tonkin, Nixon about the secret bombing of Cambodia, all of them claiming it was to keep South Vietnam free of communism, but really wanting to keep South Vietnam as an American outpost at the edge of the Asian continent.

Reagan lied about the invasion of Grenada, claiming falsely that it was a threat to the United States.

The elder Bush lied about the invasion of Panama, leading to the death of thousands of ordinary citizens in that country.

And he lied again about the reason for attacking Iraq in 1991-- hardly to defend the integrity of Kuwait (can one imagine Bush heartstricken over Iraq's taking of Kuwait?), rather to assert U.S. power in the oil-rich Middle East.

Given the overwhelming record of lies told to justify wars, how could anyone listening to the younger Bush believe him as he laid out the reasons for invading Iraq?

Hard to take him seriously when he leaves Lincoln and FDR, not because they lied any less but for fear of offending blacks and Jews who were liberated by such lies, as were the Iraqis.

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IT'S A HARD REPUBLIC TO HATE THAT MUCH, HUH?:

Learning to Love America (Nina Burleigh, April 24, 2006, AlterNet)

In the fall of 2004, we enrolled our son in kindergarten at the Narrowsburg School. The school's reputation among our friends, other "second-home-owners," was not good. "Do they even have a curriculum?" sniffed one New York City professor who kept a weekend home nearby. Clearly, Narrowsburg School was not a traditional first step on the path to Harvard. As far as I could tell, though, no one besides us had ever set foot inside the building. When my husband and I investigated, we were pleasantly surprised. The school had just been renovated; it was clean, airy, cheerful. The nurse and the principal knew every one of the 121 children by name. Our son would be one of just twelve little white children in a sunny kindergarten class taught by an enthusiastic woman with 18 years' experience teaching five-year-olds.

Still, for the first few months, we felt uneasy. Eighty of Narrowsburg's 319 adults are military veterans and at least ten recent school graduates are serving in Iraq or on other bases overseas right now. The school's defining philosophy was traditional and conservative, starting with a sit-down-in-your-seat brand of discipline, leavened with a rafter-shaking reverence for country and flag. Every morning the students gathered in the gym for a "Morning Program," open to parents, which began with the Pledge of Allegiance, followed by a patriotic song, and then discussion of a "Word of the Week." During the first few weeks, the words of the week seemed suspiciously tied to a certain political persuasion: "Military," "tour," "nation" and "alliance," were among them.

But it wasn't until our boy came home with an invitation in his backpack to attend a "released-time" Bible class that my husband and I really panicked. We called the ACLU and learned this is an entirely legal way for evangelicals to proselytize to children during school hours. What is against the law is sending the flyer home in a kid's backpack, implying school support. After we called to inquire about the legality, the ACLU formally called the principal to complain. She apologized and promised never to allow it again. While we were never identified as the people who dropped the dime to the ACLU, there was clearly no one else in the school community who would have done so -- and the principal never looked at us quite as warmly again.

Shortly afterward, another parent casually told me that she wanted to bring her daughter's religious cartoon videos in to share with the class but couldn't because "some people" might object. When we later learned that the cheery kindergarten teacher belonged to one of the most conservative evangelical churches in the community, we were careful not to challenge anyone or to express any opinion about politics or religion, out of fear our son would be singled out. Instead, to counteract any God-and-country indoctrination he received in school, we began our own informal in-home instruction about Bush, Iraq and Washington over the evening news.

Politically, Narrowsburg is red dot in a blue state. It is not named for any small-town frame of mind, but for the way the Delaware River narrows at the edge of town, then widens into a serene, lakelike eddy that at twilight mirrors the lights of town and the ranch-style houses on the flats. The towering pines along the river are nesting spots for bald eagles that soar year-round in pairs above Main Street and swoop down into the river to sink their talons into trout sighted from a hundred feet up. That year, driving to school every morning along the water, my son and I witnessed the wind gradually scrape away the bright foliage, the snow fall and the ground freeze. In the white, leafless months, we could see the entire span of the Delaware River valley from the car, a long arc of pastoral perfection.

If you knew nothing else of the world, if you were just five or six or ten years old, and this place was your only America, you wouldn't have any reason at all to question the Narrowsburg School's Morning Program routine. Hand over heart, my son belted out the Pledge with gusto every morning, and memorized and sang the Star Spangled Banner. I never stopped resisting the urge to sit down in silent protest during the Pledge. But I also never failed to get choked up when they sang "America the Beautiful."

The bizarre thing is to simultaneously recognize the value of such a place and seek to destroy it.

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HOMO ECONOBUS:

Drivers switch to public transit (Barbara Hagenbaugh, 4/24/2006, USA TODAY)

•Washington, D.C. Thursday was the sixth-busiest day in history on Metrorail, the area's train system, while Tuesday was the ninth busiest. There were no special events in the area to explain the higher ridership. "We think gas prices had something to do with it," Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority spokeswoman Candace Smith says.

•Salt Lake City. Ridership is up 50% on the 19-mile, light-rail system in Salt Lake City from a year ago. The Utah Transit Authority has added 10 used rail cars it bought from San Jose, Calif., to meet demand. But in some cases, cars are becoming so packed that the doors are dragging on the platforms at stops because of the increased weight, spokesman Justin Jones says.

Riders responding to onboard polling increasingly are saying they are motivated to take public transportation because of higher gas prices, Jones says.

•Tulsa. Tulsa Transit's March ridership was the highest since August 2003. For the fiscal year, which began in July, trips on the bus system are up 28% from the prior year.

•San Francisco. After taking a "nosedive" in recent years, ridership on Bay Area Rapid Transit is up 4.1% this fiscal year, which began July 1, spokesman Linton Johnson says. He attributes the gain to heavier traffic and higher gas prices.

The increase in ridership, or number of trips, is similar to last year when gasoline prices hit record levels, William Millar, of the American Public Transportation Association, says. The number of trips nationwide was up 5% in August and September compared with the same months in 2004. "It looks like history is repeating itself," he says. "The spike in gas prices is causing many people to look for ways to beat the high cost, and trying transit is one of the things they are doing."

Always fun to listen to free market ideologues who insist that people will drive no matter what fuuel costs.

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THREE RUN HOMER TRUMPS SOLO SHOT:

Ortiz’ bunt a hit: More may be in store (Tony Massarotti, April 24, 2006, Boston Herald)

Seemingly irked by a defensive alignment that cost him at least one hit yesterday, Ortiz bunted for a single in the sixth inning of the Red Sox’ 6-3 win over the Toronto Blue Jays at Rogers Centre. As many teams do against left-handed power hitters, the Blue Jays were dramatically overshifted to the right side when Ortiz pushed a bunt toward the open area near third base for an easy single.

Toronto manager John Gibbons had just summoned left-handed reliever Scott Schoeneweis to pitch to Ortiz, but the slugger’s decision to bunt seemingly had as much to do with fighting the alignment as it did with his desire to get the right-handed-hitting Manny Ramirez to the plate. [...]

“He (bunted) on his own. I would never tell him to do that,” Francona said. “At the same time, you have Manny hitting (next). I don’t have a problem with it, if that’s what you’re asking.”

The one who should be questioned is Terry Francona. The Jays then intentionally walked Manny to get to Trot Nixon, who's helpless against lefties, and Mr. Francona didn't go to Wily Mo Pena who owns them.

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LOOKING FOR THE FOX, CHECK WHO'S GUARDING THE HENS:

Biggest number of offenders are "registered counselors" (Julia Sommerfeld and Michael J. Berens, 4/24/06, Seattle Times)

To be a manicurist in the state of Washington, you must take 600 hours of training and pass both a written exam and a skills demonstration.

To cut hair, you need 1,000 hours of training and the two tests.

But to be a registered counselor, someone who will help guide troubled clients through some of their most difficult life challenges, you need take only a four-hour AIDS-awareness class. That's it — that and a $40 registration fee. You don't even need a high-school diploma.

That sounds like an invitation for trouble — and it is.

In the past decade, the state has sanctioned 104 registered counselors for sexual misconduct. That's more than for any other health profession, and more than the cases involving doctors, dentists and registered nurses combined. It's just a fraction of the actual incidents of abuse, since, experts say, most go unreported.

Likewise pedophiles seek out jobs in the clergy and schools.

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IF YOU EVER DOUBT HIS SPECIAL PROVIDENCE, RECALL WE SURVIVED THIS CLOWN (via Pepys):

Been there, done that: Talk of a U.S. strike on Iran is eerily reminiscent of the run-up to the Iraq war. (Zbigniew Brzezinski, April 23, 2006, LA Times)

IRAN'S ANNOUNCEMENT that it has enriched a minute amount of uranium has unleashed urgent calls for a preventive U.S. airstrike from the same sources that earlier urged war on Iraq. If there is another terrorist attack in the United States, you can bet your bottom dollar that there also will be immediate charges that Iran was responsible in order to generate public hysteria in favor of military action.

But there are four compelling reasons against a preventive air attack on Iranian nuclear facilities:

First, in the absence of an imminent threat (and the Iranians are at least several years away from having a nuclear arsenal), the attack would be a unilateral act of war. If undertaken without a formal congressional declaration of war, an attack would be unconstitutional and merit the impeachment of the president. Similarly, if undertaken without the sanction of the United Nations Security Council, either alone by the United States or in complicity with Israel, it would stamp the perpetrator(s) as an international outlaw(s).

It's nonsense, of course, but were it really the case that a Democrat wouldn't attack Iranian nuclear facilities, or any other such enemy, without the UN okay they'd never win another election. Giving France, China, and Russia a veto over our national interest would be an act of political suicide. The reality is that a President Gore or Kerry would be likewise preparing an attack and the only difference is that they'd have the full support of the other party.

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THE CAMPAIGN SUPPLIES ITS OWN GAFFER:

TV station catches gaffe by McKinney (BRIDGET GUTIERREZ, 04/24/06, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution)

[Cynthia McKinney], who has been in the media spotlight since she scuffled with a Capitol Hill police officer last month, was caught bad-mouthing a senior staffer Saturday.

Unfortunately for McKinney, a DeKalb County Democrat who is running for re-election in the 4th Congressional District, a TV microphone she was wearing picked up her indelicate grumbling.

"Crap!" an irritated McKinney is heard saying after ending an interview with CBS 46 in which reporter Renee Starzyk repeatedly asked about the fallout from the police dust-up. "You know what? They lied to Coz and Coz is a fool."

McKinney, apparently realizing her blunder, then returned to face the camera and tell the reporter that comments about her communications director, Coz Carson, were off the record.

But the TV stationed aired the footage Saturday and the story later was picked up by CNN.

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THE FRENCH COULDN'T FIGURE THIS OUT UNTIL AFTER LE PEN WON:

Cameron calls on voters to back anyone but the BNP (George Jones, 24/04/2006, Daily Telegraph)

David Cameron called yesterday on voters in next month's English local elections to support any party other than the far-Right British National Party.

The Conservative leader accused the BNP of "thriving on hatred" and wanting to set one race against another.

"I hope nobody votes for the BNP. I would rather people voted for any other party," Mr Cameron told Sky News.

You expect it of the French, but the Brits are too decent to vote for nazis.

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HISTORY ALWAYS REPEATS ITSELF (via Pepys):

President Lincoln 'Lied' Us Into War Too (Thomas Bray, 4/23/06, Real Clear Politics)

One is struck by the parallels in reading Doris Kearns Goodwin's masterful new book, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.

Lincoln repeatedly asserted that his aim was to prevent the spread of slavery, not eliminate it in the South. "I believe I have no lawful right to do so," Goodwin quotes him as saying. Thus when he finally issued his Emancipation Proclamation two years into the war, freeing the slaves in the Confederate states, his Northern critics claimed that he had misled the country. A bloody and unnecessary war was being fought in a Utopian effort to bring the blessings of democracy to a people who had little experience with it.

Oh, and by the way, where did this President get off claiming, as Lincoln did, that his implied powers as Commander in Chief allowed him to tinker with institutions, such as slavery, expressly acknowledged in the Constitution? Or suspending the writ of habeas corpus, perhaps the most fundamental bulwark of liberty in the Anglo-Saxon tradition?

Convenient too that folks forget that their immigrant forefathers engaged in genuinely traitorous draft riots.

MORE:
Is U.S. being transformed into a radical republic? (Lawrence Wilkerson, April 23, 2006, Baltimore Sun)

We Americans came not from a revolution but from an evolution.

That is in large part why our so-called revolution produced success while most throughout history did not. We came as much from the Magna Carta as from our own doings, as much from British common law and parliamentary development as from the Declaration of Independence and Continental Congress.

Unlike the true revolution on the other side of the Atlantic that led to Napoleon's dictatorship and strife and conflict all across Europe, our evolution founded the greatest country the world has ever seen. That was true in every element of power and in the uniqueness that makes us great, our constant striving for "a more perfect union" and, as we do so, our open arms for the other peoples of the world "yearning to be free."

As Alexis de Tocqueville once said: "America is great because she is good. If America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great."

In January 2001, with the inauguration of George W. Bush as president, America set on a path to cease being good; America became a revolutionary nation, a radical republic. If our country continues on this path, it will cease to be great - as happened to all great powers before it, without exception.

Only someone who would still attribute those lines to de Tocqueville long after they've been debunked could write an essay this inane.

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THE LEADERS DON'T MATTER:

'We would have been close even if 9/11 hadn't happened' (Con Coughlin, 23/04/2006, Daily Telegraph)

How easy was it to establish a good working relationship with Bush after Clinton?

"Even those who most strongly disagree with President Bush in the international community would say that he is both extremely courteous and very straightforward. I suspect it would still have been a good, close, working relationship if September 11 had not happened, but obviously that redefined the relationship at every single level. If you look at the joint press conference we gave after meeting for the first time in February 2001, I was talking about the whole issue to do with proliferation, of nuclear and biological weapons, of terrorism, because I had become increasingly concerned about it.

"By 2001, before September 11, I was already in a pretty tough mode towards global terrorism or the proliferation of nuclear weapons. [I was] becoming increasingly alarmed at the number of terrorist incidents and also that this terrorism seemed to be aimed at creating the largest number of casualties."

From a very early stage in Blair's premiership, he seemed determined to have a close working relationship with the White House. How much was this down to the influence of Baroness Thatcher and the other people he conferred with when he first became Prime Minister, and how much was it his own judgment that Britain's defence and security needs were best served by having a close alliance with the US?

"Yes, it's true a lot of people expressed that view. But I had come to the conclusion before we came to office - and even more so afterwards - that the transatlantic alliance was crucial to the security of the world.

"The American relationship is absolutely central. I run our foreign policy on the basis that Britain should have strong alliances in Europe and maintain its pivotal alliance with America. I would not have committed this country to conflict simply on the basis of the American relationship."

Irrespective of who the president is?

"Absolutely. Irrespective of who the president is."

Clearly this was very much in your mind when 9/11 happened. You were straight out there…

"Yeah."

Standing shoulder to shoulder, there's no daylight between us?

'I never had a moment's doubt about this. Because 9/11 for me was, 'Right, now I get it. I absolutely get it.' This has been building for a long time. It is like looking at a picture and knowing it was important to understand it, but not quite being able to make out all its contours. And sudd