MIRACLE WHIPPED:

China's revolutionary myth (GWYNNE DYER, 9/01/06, Japan Times)

Back in the late 1980s, when mocking the few remaining Communist believers had become a popular indoor sport in the former Soviet Union, one of my favorite gambits was to point out that Russia would have done far better economically if the Communist revolution of 1917 had never happened at all. No matter how pessimistic your assumptions about the way that a non-Communist Russia would have developed, it simply couldn't have done as badly as the Communists did.

To prove your point, all you had to do was to pick some other country that had been at about the same stage of industrial development as Russia just before World War I -- Italy was the most obvious candidate -- and to compare the outcomes in the present.

Italy went through the Great Depression in the 1930s (which the Soviet Union escaped), and was on the losing side in World War II. Nobody would claim that post-1945 Italian governments (all 50-odd of them) have been models of good governance, and Italy is far poorer in natural resources than Russia. And yet, by the late 20th century Italians were four or five times richer than Russians, purely because they had avoided Communist rule. They were a lot freer, too.

The Soviet Communists always compared the circumstances before the revolution (which were pretty dreadful) with the situation 70 years later, and gave "the Revolution" full credit for all the changes for the better -- as if other Russians, using less violent and oppressive means, could never have changed the country. Even in the late 1980s, they effectively claimed that it would still be like 1917 in Russia if the Communist revolution had not happened.

So here we are again, with the Chinese Communist regime taking credit for all the improvements in China since they won the civil war in 1949, and foreign leftists like Hugo Chavez holding out China as an example of what wonderful things can be accomplished under "socialism." But what would China be like now if the Communists had not won power in 1949? Much richer, much freer, and not much less equal, either.

The right comparison is not between China in 1949 and China now. It is between China's economic progress since 1949 and that achieved by its neighbors that were in a roughly similar state of development at that time. The two closest parallels are South Korea and the "other China," Taiwan.

IT'S JUST MUSIC:

There Is Silence in the Streets; Where Have All the Protesters Gone? (ANDREW ROSENTHAL, 8/31/06, NY Times)

It was almost painful the other night to hear Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young sing about a war whose purpose Americans never really understood, started by a president who didn’t tell the truth and then waged the war ineptly. And that was before they sang about Iraq. [...]

[W]hen those four men sang their protest songs four decades ago, their lyrics echoed and personified a powerful political movement sweeping America. Now they are entertainment, something to leave behind in the concert hall.

There were a few political booths outside the Theater at Madison Square Garden. But the concert-tour T-shirt salesmen were getting all the business. The most noticeable sound was the cellphones being restarted by those few who had bothered to turn them off during the concert.

This, perhaps, is the ultimate difference between the Vietnam generation and the Iraq generation: When you hear Young and Company sing of “four dead in Ohio,” their Kent State anthem, it’s hard to imagine anyone on today’s campuses willing to face armed troops.

GENTLEMEN NOW AFEATHERBED:

President Bush Addresses American Legion National Convention (George W. Bush, Salt Palace Convention Center, Salt Lake City, Utah, 8/31/06)

At this hour, a new generation of Americans in uniform is showing great courage in defending our freedom in the first war of the 21st century. I know that Legionnaires are following this war closely, especially those of you with family and friends who wear our uniform. The images that come back from the front lines are striking, and sometimes unsettling. When you see innocent civilians ripped apart by suicide bombs, or families buried inside their homes, the world can seem engulfed in purposeless violence. The truth is there is violence, but those who cause it have a clear purpose. When terrorists murder at the World Trade Center, or car bombers strike in Baghdad, or hijackers plot to blow up planes over the Atlantic, or terrorist militias shoot rockets at Israeli towns, they are all pursuing the same objective -- to turn back the advance of freedom, and impose a dark vision of tyranny and terror across the world.

The enemies of liberty come from different parts of the world, and they take inspiration from different sources. Some are radicalized followers of the Sunni tradition, who swear allegiance to terrorist organizations like al Qaeda. Others are radicalized followers of the Shia tradition, who join groups like Hezbollah and take guidance from state sponsors like Syria and Iran. Still others are "homegrown" terrorists -- fanatics who live quietly in free societies they dream to destroy. Despite their differences, these groups from -- form the outlines of a single movement, a worldwide network of radicals that use terror to kill those who stand in the way of their totalitarian ideology. And the unifying feature of this movement, the link that spans sectarian divisions and local grievances, is the rigid conviction that free societies are a threat to their twisted view of Islam.

The war we fight today is more than a military conflict; it is the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century. (Applause.) On one side are those who believe in the values of freedom and moderation -- the right of all people to speak, and worship, and live in liberty. And on the other side are those driven by the values of tyranny and extremism -- the right of a self-appointed few to impose their fanatical views on all the rest. As veterans, you have seen this kind of enemy before. They're successors to Fascists, to Nazis, to Communists, and other totalitarians of the 20th century. And history shows what the outcome will be: This war will be difficult; this war will be long; and this war will end in the defeat of the terrorists and totalitarians, and a victory for the cause of freedom and liberty. (Applause.)

We're now approaching the fifth anniversary of the day this war reached our shores. As the horror of that morning grows more distant, there is a tendency to believe that the threat is receding and this war is coming to a close. That feeling is natural and comforting -- and wrong. As we recently saw, the enemy still wants to attack us. We're in a war we didn't ask for, but it's a war we must wage, and a war we will win. (Applause.)

In the coming days, I'll deliver a series of speeches describing the nature of our enemy in the war on terror, the insights we've gained about their aims and ambitions, the successes and setbacks we've experienced, and our strategy to prevail in this long war. Today, I'll discuss a critical aspect of this war: the struggle between freedom and terror in the Middle East, including the battle in Iraq, which is the central front in our fight against terrorism.

To understand the struggle unfolding in the Middle East, we need to look at the recent history of the region. For a half- century, America's primary goal in the Middle East was stability. This was understandable at the time; we were fighting the Soviet Union in the Cold War, and it was important to support Middle Eastern governments that rejected communism. Yet, over the decades, an undercurrent of danger was rising in the Middle East. Much of the region was mired in stagnation and despair. A generation of young people grew up with little hope to improve their lives, and many fell under the sway of radical extremism. The terrorist movement multiplied in strength, and resentment that had simmered for years boiled over into violence across the world.

Extremists in Iran seized American hostages. Hezbollah terrorists murdered American troops at the Marine barracks in Beirut and Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia. Terrorists set off a truck bomb at the World Trade Center. Al Qaeda blew up two U.S. embassies in East Africa, and bombed the USS Cole. Then came the nightmare of September the 11, 2001, when 19 hijackers killed nearly 3,000 men, women, and children.

In the space of a single morning, it became clear that the calm we saw in the Middle East was only a mirage. We realized that years of pursuing stability to promote peace had left us with neither. Instead, the lack of freedom in the Middle East made the region an incubator for terrorist movements.

The status quo in the Middle East before September the 11th was dangerous and unacceptable, so we're pursuing a new strategy. First, we're using every element of national power to confront al Qaeda, those who take inspiration from them, and other terrorists who use similar tactics. We have ended the days of treating terrorism simply as a law enforcement matter. We will stay on the offense. We will fight the terrorists overseas so we do not have to face them here at home. (Applause.)

Second, we have made it clear to all nations, if you harbor terrorists, you are just as guilty as the terrorists; you're an enemy of the United States, and you will be held to account. (Applause.) And third, we've launched a bold new agenda to defeat the ideology of the enemy by supporting the forces of freedom in the Middle East and beyond.

The freedom agenda is based upon our deepest ideals and our vital interests. Americans believe that every person, of every religion, on every continent, has the right to determine his or her own destiny. We believe that freedom is a gift from an almighty God, beyond any power on Earth to take away. (Applause.) And we also know, by history and by logic, that promoting democracy is the surest way to build security. Democracies don't attack each other or threaten the peace. Governments accountable to the voters focus on building roads and schools -- not weapons of mass destruction. Young people who have a say in their future are less likely to search for meaning in extremism. Citizens who can join a peaceful political party are less likely to join a terrorist organization. Dissidents with the freedom to protest around the clock are less likely to blow themselves up during rush hour. And nations that commit to freedom for their people will not support terrorists -- they will join us in defeating them. (Applause.)

So America has committed its influence in the world to advancing freedom and democracy as the great alternatives to repression and radicalism. We will take the side of democratic leaders and reformers across the Middle East. We will support the voices of tolerance and moderation in the Muslim world. We stand with the mothers and fathers in every culture who want to see their children grow up in a caring and peaceful world. And by supporting the cause of freedom in a vital region, we'll make our children and our grandchildren more secure. (Applause.)

Over the past five years, we've begun to see the results of our actions -- and we have seen how our enemies respond to the advance of liberty. In Afghanistan, we saw a vicious tyranny that harbored the terrorists who planned the September the 11th attacks. Within weeks, American forces were in Afghanistan. Along with Afghan allies, we captured or killed hundreds of al Qaeda and Taliban fighters; we closed down their training camps, and we helped the people of Afghanistan replace the Taliban with a democratic government that answers to them. (Applause.)

Our enemies saw the transformation in Afghanistan, and they've responded by trying to roll back all the progress. Al Qaeda and the Taliban lost a coveted base in Afghanistan and they know they will never reclaim it when democracy succeeds. And so they're trying to return to power by attacking Afghanistan's free institutions. And they will fail. (Applause.) Forces from 40 nations, including every member of NATO, are now serving alongside American troops to support the new Afghan government. The days of the Taliban are over. The future of Afghanistan belongs to the people of Afghanistan. And the future of Afghanistan belongs to freedom. (Applause.)

In Lebanon, we saw a sovereign nation occupied by the Syrian dictatorship. We also saw the courageous people of Lebanon take to the streets to demand their independence. So we worked to enforce a United Nations resolution that required Syria to end its occupation of the country. The Syrians withdrew their armed forces, and the Lebanese people elected a democratic government that began to reclaim their country.

Our enemies saw the transformation in Lebanon and set out to destabilize the young democracy. Hezbollah launched an unprovoked attack on Israel that undermined the democrat government in Beirut. Yet their brazen action caused the world to unite in support for Lebanon's democracy. Secretary Rice worked with the Security Council to pass Resolution 1701, which will strengthen Lebanese forces as they take control of southern Lebanon -- and stop Hezbollah from acting as a state within a state.

I appreciate the troops pledged by France and Italy and other allies for this important international deployment. Together, we're going to make it clear to the world that foreign forces and terrorists have no place in a free and democratic Lebanon. (Applause.)

This summer's crisis in Lebanon has made it clearer than ever that the world now faces a grave threat from the radical regime in Iran. The Iranian regime arms, funds, and advises Hezbollah, which has killed more Americans than any terrorist network except al Qaeda. The Iranian regime interferes in Iraq by sponsoring terrorists and insurgents, empowering unlawful militias, and supplying components for improvised explosive devices. The Iranian regime denies basic human rights to millions of its people. And the Iranian regime is pursuing nuclear weapons in open defiance of its international obligations.

We know the death and suffering that Iran's sponsorship of terrorists has brought, and we can imagine how much worse it would be if Iran were allowed to acquire nuclear weapons. Many nations are working together to solve this problem. The United Nations passed a resolution demanding that Iran suspend its nuclear enrichment activities. Today is the deadline for Iran's leaders to reply to the reasonable proposal the international community has made. If Iran's leaders accept this offer and abandon their nuclear weapons ambitions, they can set their country on a better course. Yet, so far, the Iranian regime has responded with further defiance and delay. It is time for Iran to make a choice. We've made our choice: We will continue to work closely with our allies to find a diplomatic solution -- but there must be consequences for Iran's defiance, and we must not allow Iran to develop a nuclear weapon. (Applause.)

In Iraq, we saw a dictator who harbored terrorists, fired at military planes, paid the families of Palestinian suicide bombers, invaded a neighbor, and pursued and used weapons of mass destruction. The United Nations passed more than a dozen resolutions demanding that Saddam Hussein fully and openly abandon his weapons of mass destruction. We gave him a last chance to comply -- and when he refused, we enforced the just demands of the world. And now Saddam Hussein is in prison and on trial. Soon he will have the justice he denied to so many for so long. (Applause.) And with this tyrant gone from power, the United States, Iraq, the Middle East, and the world are better off. (Applause.)

In the three years since Saddam's fall the Iraqi people have reclaimed sovereignty of their country. They cast their ballots in free elections. They drafted and approved a democratic constitution and elected a constitutional democracy at the heart of the Middle East. Over the same period, Iraq has seen a rise of terrorist and insurgent movements that use brutal and indiscriminate violence to frustrate the desire of the Iraqi people for freedom and peace. Al Qaeda terrorists, former elements of Saddam's regime, illegal militias and unlawful armed groups are all working to undermine Iraq's new democracy. These groups have different long-term ambitions, but the same immediate goals. They want to drive America and our coalition out of Iraq and the Middle East, so they can stop the advance of freedom and impose their dark vision on the people of the Middle East. (Applause.)

Our enemies in Iraq have employed ruthless tactics to achieve those goals. They've targeted American and coalition troops with ambushes and roadside bombs. They've taken hostage and beheaded civilians on camera. They've blown up Iraqi army posts and assassinated government leaders. We've adapted to the tactics -- and thanks to the skill and professionalism of Iraqi and American forces, many of these enemies have met their end. At every step along the way, our enemies have failed to break the courage of the Iraqi people; they have failed to stop the rise of Iraqi democracy -- and they will fail in breaking the will of the American people. (Applause.)

Now these enemies have launched a new effort. They have embarked on a bloody campaign of sectarian violence, which they hope will plunge Iraq into a civil war. The outbreak of sectarian violence was encouraged by the terrorist Zarqawi, al Qaeda's man in Iraq who called for an "all-out war" on Iraqi Shia. The Shia community resisted the impulse to seek revenge for a while. But after this February bombing of the Shia Golden Dome Mosque in Samarra, extremist groups mobilized and sectarian death squads formed on the streets of Baghdad and other areas. Our Ambassador reports that thousands of Iraqis were murdered in Baghdad last month, and large numbers of them were victims of sectarian violence.

This cruelty and carnage has led some to question whether Iraq has descended into civil war. Our commanders and our diplomats on the ground in Iraq believe that's not the case. They report that only a small number of Iraqis are engaged in sectarian violence, while the overwhelming majority want peace and a normal life in a unified country. Iraqi leaders from all backgrounds remember the elections that brought them to power, in which 12 million Iraqis defied the car bombers and killers to claim, "We want to be free." (Applause.)

Iraq's government is working tirelessly to hold the nation together and to heal Iraq's divisions, not to exploit them. The Iraqi people have come a long way. They are not going to let their country fall apart or relapse into tyranny. As Prime Minister Maliki told the United States Congress, "Iraqis have tasted freedom and we will defend it absolutely." (Applause.)

America has a clear strategy to help the Iraqi people protect their new freedom, and build a democracy that can govern itself, and sustain itself, and defend itself. On the political side, we're working closely with Prime Minister Maliki to strengthen Iraq's unity government and develop -- and to deliver better services to the Iraqi people. This is a crucial moment for the new Iraqi government; its leaders understand the challenge. They believe that now is the time to hammer out compromises on Iraq's most contentious issues.

I've been clear with each Iraqi leader I meet: America is a patient nation, and Iraq can count on our partnership, as long as the new government continues to make the hard decisions necessary to advance a unified, democratic and peaceful Iraq. Prime Minister Maliki has shown courage in laying out an agenda to do just that -- and he can count on an ally, the United States of America, to help him promote this agenda. (Applause.)

On the security side, we're refining our tactics to meet the threats on the ground. I've given our commanders in Iraq all the flexibility they need to make adjustments necessary to stay on the offense and defeat the enemies of freedom. We've deployed Special Operation forces to kill or capture terrorists operating in Iraq. Zarqawi found out what they can do. We continue to train Iraqi police forces to defend their own nation. We've handed over security responsibility for a southern province to Iraqi forces. Five of Iraq's 10 army divisions are now taking the lead in their areas of operation. The Iraqi security forces are determined; they're becoming more capable; and together, we will defeat the enemies of a free Iraq. (Applause.)

Recently, we also launched a major new campaign to end the security crisis in Baghdad. Side by side, Iraqi and American forces are conducting operations in the city's most violent areas to disrupt al Qaeda, to capture enemy fighters, crack down on IED makers, and break up the death squads. These forces are helping Iraq's national police force undergo retraining to better enforce law in Baghdad. And these forces are supporting the Iraqi government as it provides reconstruction assistance.

The Baghdad Security Plan is still in its early stages. We cannot expect immediate success. Yet, the initial results are encouraging. According to one military report, a Sunni man in a diverse Baghdad neighborhood said this about the Shia soldiers on patrol: "Their image has changed. Now you feel they're there to protect you." Over the coming weeks and months, the operation will expand throughout Baghdad. until Iraq's democratic government is in full control of its capital. The work is difficult and dangerous, but the Iraqi government and their forces are determined to reclaim their country. And the United States is determined to help them succeed. (Applause.)

Here at home we have a choice to make about Iraq. Some politicians look at our efforts in Iraq and see a diversion from the war on terror. That would come as news to Osama bin Laden, who proclaimed that the "third world war is raging" in Iraq. It would come as news to the number two man of al Qaeda, Zawahiri, who has called the struggle in Iraq, quote, "the place for the greatest battle." It would come as news to the terrorists from Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Sudan, Libya, Yemen and other countries, who have to come to Iraq to fight the rise of democracy.

It's hard to believe that these terrorists would make long journeys across dangerous borders, endure heavy fighting, or blow themselves up in the streets of Baghdad, for a so-called "diversion." Some Americans didn't support my decision to remove Saddam Hussein; many are frustrated with the level of violence. But we should all agree that the battle for Iraq is now central to the ideological struggle of the 21st century. We will not allow the terrorists to dictate the future of this century -- so we will defeat them in Iraq. (Applause.)

Still, there are some in our country who insist that the best option in Iraq is to pull out, regardless of the situation on the ground. Many of these folks are sincere and they're patriotic, but they could be -- they could not be more wrong. If America were to pull out before Iraq can defend itself, the consequences would be absolutely predictable -- and absolutely disastrous. We would be handing Iraq over to our worst enemies -- Saddam's former henchmen, armed groups with ties to Iran, and al Qaeda terrorists from all over the world who would suddenly have a base of operations far more valuable than Afghanistan under the Taliban. They would have a new sanctuary to recruit and train terrorists at the heart of the Middle East, with huge oil riches to fund their ambitions. And we know exactly where those ambitions lead. If we give up the fight in the streets of Baghdad, we will face the terrorists in the streets of our own cities.

We can decide to stop fighting the terrorists in Iraq and other parts of the world, but they will not decide to stop fighting us. General John Abizaid, our top commander in the Middle East region, recently put it this way: "If we leave, they will follow us." And he is right. The security of the civilized world depends on victory in the war on terror, and that depends on victory in Iraq. So the United States of America will not leave until victory is achieved. (Applause.)

Victory in Iraq will be difficult and it will require more sacrifice. The fighting there can be as fierce as it was at Omaha Beach or Guadalcanal. And victory is as important as it was in those earlier battles. Victory in Iraq will result in a democracy that is a friend of America and an ally in the war on terror. Victory in Iraq will be a crushing defeat for our enemies, who have staked so much on the battle there. Victory in Iraq will honor the sacrifice of the brave Americans who have given their lives. And victory in Iraq would be a powerful triumph in the ideological struggle of the 21st century. From Damascus to Tehran, people will look to a democratic Iraq as inspiration that freedom can succeed in the Middle East, and as evidence that the side of freedom is the winning side. This is a pivotal moment for the Middle East. The world is watching -- and in Iraq and beyond, the forces of freedom will prevail. (Applause.)

For all the debate, American policy in the Middle East comes down to a straightforward choice. We can allow the Middle East to continue on its course -- on the course it was headed before September the 11th, and a generation from now, our children will face a region dominated by terrorist states and radical dictators armed with nuclear weapons. Or we can stop that from happening, by rallying the world to confront the ideology of hate, and give the people of the Middle East a future of hope. And that is the choice America has made. (Applause.)

We see a day when people across the Middle East have governments that honor their dignity, unleash their creativity, and count their votes. We see a day when leaders across the Middle East reject terror and protect freedom. We see a day when the nations of the Middle East are allies in the cause of peace. The path to that day will be uphill and uneven, but we can be confident of the outcome, because we know that the direction of history leads toward freedom.

In the early years of our republic, Thomas Jefferson said that we cannot expect to move "from despotism to liberty in a featherbed." That's been true in every time and place. No one understands that like you, our veterans, understand that. With the distance of history, it can be easy to look back at the wars of the 20th century and see a straight path to victory. You know better than that. You waged the hard battles, you suffered the wounds, you lost friends and brothers. You were there for dark times and the moments of uncertainty. And you know that freedom is always worth the sacrifice.

You also know what it takes to win. For all that is new about this war, one thing has not changed: Victory still depends on the courage and the patience and the resolve of the American people. Above all, it depends on patriots who are willing to fight for freedom. (Applause.) Our nation is blessed to have these men and women in abundance. Our military forces make this nation strong; they make this nation safe; and they make this nation proud. (Applause.)

We thank them and their families for their sacrifice. We will remember all those who have given their lives in this struggle -- and I vow that we will give our men and women in uniform all the resources they need to accomplish their missions. (Applause.)

One brave American we remember is Marine Corporal Adam Galvez, from here in Salt Lake City. Yesterday Adam's mom and dad laid their son to rest. We're honored by their presence with us today. (Applause.) About a month ago, Adam was wounded by a suicide bomb in Iraq's Anbar Province. When he regained consciousness, he found he was buried alive, so he dug himself out of the rubble. And then ran through gunfire to get a shovel to dig out his fellow Marines. As soon as he recovered from his injuries, Adam volunteered to go back to the front lines. and 11 days ago, he was killed when a roadside bomb hit his convoy.

Here is what Adam's mom and dad said about the cause for which their son gave his life: "Though many are debating the justification of this war, Adam believed in his country -- Adam's belief in his country did not waver, even to the point of the ultimate sacrifice. It's our hope and our prayer that people share the same conviction and dedication to our troops and fellow Americans." (Applause.)

Our nation will always remember the selflessness and sacrifice of Americans like Adam Galvez. We will honor their lives by completing the good and noble work they have started. (Applause.) And we can be confident that one day, veterans of the war on terror will gather at American Legion halls across the country, and say the same things you say: We made our nation safer; we made a region more peaceful; and we left behind a better world for our children and our grandchildren. (Applause.)

Thanks for having me. May God bless our veterans. May God bless our troops. And may God continue to bless the United States of America. (Applause.)

MORE ANGLO THAN ASIAN:

Japan firmly on a conservative path (Hisane Masaki, 9/01/06, Asia Times)

Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe, now widely believed to be a shoo-in to succeed Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi in September, has made it clear, if ever there was any doubt, that he will pursue an ultra-conservative, nationalistic and pro-US political and foreign-policy agenda.

Abe's policy goals as the new prime minister will include, among other things, giving Japan a greater military role abroad through such means as promulgating a new constitution to replace the post-World War II pacifist constitution, strengthening a security alliance with the United States, and forging a thinly veiled alliance of Asia-Pacific democracies to counter China.

These goals, coupled with Abe's nationalist views on history, hawkish stance on such countries as China and firm support for the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo seen as glorifying Japan's militaristic past, will stoke concerns among Asian neighbors, especially China and South Korea.

Under the Koizumi administration, Japan has undergone a dramatic transformation through his policy of promoting fierce restructuring of companies and right-sizing the government.

The bitterly fought postal-reform bill that was passed in the diet (parliament) is a case in point. Koizumi boosted his popularity when he won the elections over the bill, ushering in a long-awaited change to jump-start the economy after the bursting of the bubble economy in the mid-1980s.

Masami Morishima, a businessman in his early 40s who started his own Internet publishing company three years ago, agrees. "Koizumi's reforms have taught ordinary Japanese that we need to be able to develop our own goals rather than depend on our companies to lead us. We must learn to be competitive and be respected for our ability, which is a new concept," he said.

The net result today is an economy that showed a growth of 3.2% in the fiscal year that ended in April, and a stock market that rose 66% in three years.

A report by the Japan Institute for Social and Economic Affairs, a leading think-tank, says the Japanese economy has recovered thanks to reforms in labor, finance, accounting and corporate governance.

The University of California's Steven Vogel writes in the report that the remodeled Japan differs from the earlier version in several ways. For one, Japanese companies are re-evaluating their long-term relationships with banks, workers and other firms. They are also more variable in their practices and more open to having foreign managers and business partners.

ACCEPT:

Iranian President Meets Press and Is Challenged (MICHAEL SLACKMAN, 8/31/065, NY Times)

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad meant to use Tuesday to focus attention on his challenge to the president of the United States: a face-off in a live televised debate.

But at a freewheeling two-hour news conference, Mr. Ahmadinejad also found himself challenged by local reporters who questioned the government’s economic program and its tolerance of a critical press.

The marathon question-and-answer session offered a window into one of the many contradictions of Iranian politics and governance: even as the government grows more authoritarian, it is openly criticized and challenged on its performance.

THE FIRST QUESTION IS ESPECIALLY PERCEPTIVE....:

The Word - World Book Club (BBC)

Scottish Crime novelist Ian Rankin is this month's guest on World Book Club. He joined Harriett Gilbert and an invited audience at The Edinburgh International Book Festival to discuss the novel that really made his name; Black and Blue.

You can discover what the real life police force think of his fictitious Inspector Rebus, and what plans he has for Rebus' retirement and where Ian Rankin and fellow Scottish authors go for inspiration and a cup of tea.

BY THE MIDTERM WOULD HAVE BEEN BETTER...:

The US view of Iraq: we can pull out in a year (Julian Borger, August 31, 2006, The Guardian)

The top US general in Iraq yesterday predicted that Iraqi forces would be able to take over security in the country with "very little coalition support" within a year to 18 months. General George Casey did not say anything specific about parallel withdrawals of US troops. Instead, he said American-led coalition forces would pull back into large bases and provide support before leaving. [...]

Despite the violence, Gen Casey was optimistic that Iraqi forces were on schedule to take primary responsibility for security by late 2007 or early 2008. "I don't have a date, but I can see over the next 12 to 18 months, the Iraqi security forces progressing to a point where they can take on the security responsibilities for the country, with very little coalition support," he said in Baghdad. In remarks published by the Associated Press, he added: "We have been on a three-step process to help build the Iraqi security forces." The first step had been to train and equip them and the second was to "put them in the lead, still with our support". The last step would be to "get them to the stage where they independently provide security in Iraq."

SHOULDN'T "BUCKING" BE "WELCOMING"?:

Boyle Included In Nominees for Appeals Court (Associated Press, August 31, 2006)

Bucking opposition in the Senate, President Bush on Wednesday nominated five people for the U.S. Court of Appeals, including one whom Democrats have threatened to block with a filibuster.

News that Bush had decided to nominate the conservative jurists came before Bush spoke at a fundraiser for Bob Corker, who faces a tough Senate race against Democratic nominee Harold Ford Jr.

"I need a U.S. senator who understands that we need people on the bench who will strictly interpret the Constitution and not use the bench to legislate," Bush said.

A White House statement said Bush was nominating Terrence Boyle of North Carolina and William James Haynes II of Virginia to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, Michael Brunson Wallace of Mississippi for the 5th Circuit, and William Gerry Myers III of Idaho and Norman Randy Smith of Idaho for the 9th Circuit.

HYSTERIA DOESN'T CHANGE FUNDAMENTALS:

Gas prices tumble: Major threats have failed to materialize so far; Storm veers away from refineries in Gulf of Mexico (CURTIS RUSH, 8/31/06, Toronto Star)

Gas prices continue to plummet, with some motorists paying less than 79 cents a litre — just in time for the last long weekend of the summer.

Motorists who were shelling out as much as $1.20 per self-serve litre earlier in August are now paying 33 per cent less — and the outlook is for prices to remain moderate.

PJ CARLESIMO HAS SOME 'SPLAININ' TO DO:

Sprewell choked me during sex - woman (The Associated Press, 8/31/06)

A woman has accused former Knicks star Latrell Sprewell of choking her while they were having sex, Milwaukee police said yesterday.

BLUE AMERICA'S MAYOR:

Ex-Rudy aide picked wrong guy: cops (ALISON GENDAR and ROBERT F. MOORE, 8/31/06, NY DAILY NEWS)

The former Giuliani administration aide found strangled in a million-dollar Manhattan apartment was killed by a male prostitute he picked up for $40 in cocaine, sources said

YOU GET WHAT YOU TOLERATE:

Deaths from cocaine double and toll is set to grow (MICHAEL HOWIE AND JASON CUMMING, 8/31/06, The Scotsman)

LETHAL cocktails of cocaine and alcohol will wreak a "heavy toll" in years to come, the country's drugs tsar warned yesterday as fresh figures revealed the Class A drug was responsible for a record number of deaths last year.

In Scotland's capital alone, cocaine is now present in the blood of about 15 per cent of people who have died from drugs.

And Tom Wood, chairman of the Scottish Association of Alcohol and Drug Action Teams, warned the number of people dying after taking cocaine was likely to rise even higher. [...]

"Five years ago there wouldn't have been a trace of cocaine in the deaths. But the drug was present in a number of cases last year and more this year," Mr Wood said.

"The increased use of cocaine, particularly combined with alcohol, will reap a heavy toll in coming years."

NO UNION SINECURE LEFT BEHIND:

Klein: We gotta keep the rejects (ERIN EINHORN, 8/31/06, DAILY NEWS)

Forty-four assistant principals are so inept that no city school wants to hire them - but they'll all have jobs when classes begin next week, Schools Chancellor Joel Klein bemoaned yesterday.

Klein said he must waste "millions of dollars creating jobs we don't need" - money that could be used to hire 80 teachers - because the assistant principals' jobs are protected by their union contract and state law.

WHEN YOU HAVE SO MUCH FOOD YOU BURN IT FOR FUEL IS YOUR SYSTEM REALLY FRAGILE?:

Will the End of Oil Be the End Of Food? (Jason Mark, August 31, 2006, AlterNet)

In response to alarms about the fragileness of the food system, some farmers are taking initiatives to wean themselves from petroleum and find more sustainable ways of growing food. One of the most popular approaches is biofuels. For farmers, it's a solution to high oil prices that makes intuitive sense, as it raises the possibility of growers cultivating their own fuel, just as most farmers did a century ago when they harvested oats to feed their horse teams.

Phil Foster is one farmer who has made a commitment to reducing his farm's reliance on fossil fuels. A prominent California organic fruit and vegetable grower who is a supplier to Whole Foods, Foster runs nearly all of the trucks and tractors on his 250-acre farm on B100-pure biodiesel. The remainder of his machines -- older tractors with more finicky engines -- operate on B30, which is a blend of biodiesel and conventional petroleum diesel. At the same time, Foster is trying to reduce the amount of electricity his farm pays for. Several years ago he installed a bank of solar panels to help power his packing shed, refrigerators, irrigation pumps, and sales office. He calculates that the sun provides about 20 percent of his energy.

For Foster, using biodiesel and employing solar technology isn't just an effort to be environmentally correct. It's simply smart business, he says, a way to ensure that his farm will be economically sustainable over the long run.

"It was kind of a no-brainer for me to move in that direction," Foster said. "Especially in a business like ours, customers that buy organic would tend to like their growers to be kind of on the forefront. As a business that wants to think about longevity, I want to know how we can position ourselves."

Organic growers aren't the only ones bullish on the future of biofuels. Large, conventional grain farmers are also looking at biofuels as a way to reduce their costs, and many corn growers are hoping to make money by selling their surplus harvest to ethanol processors.

THE REALITIES OF SELF-GOVERNANCE:

Abbas urges prisoners' document reply (Kahled Abu Toameh and JPost Staff, Aug. 30, 2006, THE JERUSALEM POST)

Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas will ask Hamas and Islamic Jihad to respond within a week on the prisoners' document , PA journal Al-Ayam reported on Thursday.

The PLO Executive Committee approved the plan and Abbas discussed the initiative on Wednesday with PA Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh.

According to the proposal, authority for negotiations with Israel would be granted to the PLO and Abbas, and the PA government should deal with internal issues while being committed to a recognition of Israel and a peace process on the basis of a two state solution and UN decisions.

Abbas launched a scathing attack Wednesday on armed groups that are firing rockets from the Gaza Strip, saying they were responsible for bringing death and destruction to the Palestinians.

THEIR SECRET WEAPON

Pinocchio and friends converted to Islam (Malcolm Moore, The Telegraph, August 31st, 2006)

Pinocchio, Tom Sawyer and other characters have been converted to Islam in new versions of 100 classic stories on the Turkish school curriculum.

"Give me some bread, for Allah's sake," Pinocchio says to Geppetto, his maker, in a book stamped with the crest of the ministry of education.

"Thanks be to Allah," the puppet says later.

In The Three Musketeers, D'Artagnan is told that he cannot visit Aramis. The reason would surprise the author, Alexandre Dumas.

An old woman explains: "He is surrounded by men of religion. He converted to Islam after his illness."

Tom Sawyer may always have shirked his homework, but he is more conscientious in learning his Islamic prayers. He is given a "special treat" for learning the Arabic words.

C’mon, ‘fess up. This kind of stuff upsets you far more that you would like to admit, and you aren't exactly sure why. We rational worldly Westerners may respond smartly to bombs on airplanes, but it’s unseemly for us to get agitated about these cultural digs and take them seriously, and besides, if we did we just might say something intemperate. It’s not unlike like the non-stop flow of anti-Semitic bile out of Iran, to which not one leader in the West has responded despite all the bumph we like to tell ourselves about how we would never, ever stand by and allow a repeat of the Holocaust. The fact is we are tongue-tied and impotent in the face of all these cultural and rhetorical taunts. We can’t seem to bring ourselves to defend our own cultural heritage anymore, at least not in public. It's as if we’ve all become Jerry Seinfelds. They know it, and we know they know it, but then so did Jerry.

Is it too much to dream that somewhere in this great land there is one public body or even private publisher with enough wit and pride to respond by announcing they will soon be releasing Turkish editions of Ali Baba and the Forty Disciples and Aladdin Sits Shiva?

OUR FRIEND, THE CAR

Door closing on 'dull' design (Melissa Leong, National Post, August 31st, 2006)

Last week, Carl Zehr drove through a new subdivision in Kitchener and saw a wall of garages.

He looked at the rows of semi-detached homes with double-car garages in front, separated by swatches of concrete and small tufts of grass.

"When you looked at these in multiples, side by side if you were looking [down the street], you saw nothing but garage doors," said Mr. Zehr, Kitchener's Mayor.

"There has to be a better way."

On Monday, the city's municipal council voted unanimously to ban two-car garages in front of semi-detached homes, beginning in 2007. Mr. Zehr said the new zoning bylaw is not simply about ridding communities of what urban planners and architects call "snout houses."[...]

"When you build garages, what you get is not only an unpleasing building that looks at times like a car wash, you also create a situation by which a large segment of the sidewalk is paved -- not leaving room for trees," Mr. Friedman said.

"The street is, therefore, very dull. Developing something like this is an anti-social statement."
Valerie Shuttleworth, director of planning and urban design in Markham said the town was one of the first in Greater Toronto to wage war on the garage.

In the mid-'90s, the town set limits on the size of garages and began developing communities with lanes to access detached garages behind houses.

She said she didn't get to know her neighbours until she moved to an area without front-facing garages.

Of course, the modern tragedy is that most folks would trade the neighbours for a third SUV any day.

IDENTIFYING THE PROBLEM IS THE FIRST STEP:

BoSox close in on Wells trade; Padres likely buyer (Buster Olney, 8/31/06, ESPN The Magazine)

The Red Sox moved steadily toward the completion of a trade of veteran left-hander David Wells, identifying Triple-A catcher George Kottaras as the player they want if they complete a deal with the Padres.

Glenn Ford, longtime film actor, dies at 90. (AP, 8/30/06)

Actor Glenn Ford, who played strong, thoughtful protagonists in films such as "The Blackboard Jungle," "Gilda" and "The Big Heat," died Wednesday, police said. He was 90.

A HEALTHY DOSE OF INTOLERANCE:

'Hate the Sin but Love the Sinner': Not Scriptural, Not Catholic Doctrine (Erven Park, June 2006, New Oxford Review)

-- "But to God the wicked and his wickedness are hateful alike" (Wisd. 14:9).

-- "Neither shall the wicked dwell near thee: nor shall the unjust abide before thy eyes. Thou hatest all the workers of iniquity: thou wilt destroy all that speak a lie" (Ps. 5:6-7).

-- "For there is no good for him that is always occupied in evil and giveth no alms: for the Highest hateth sinners, and hath mercy on the penitent" (Ecclesiasticus 12:3; RSV-CE Sir. 12:3,6).

-- "A good man out of the good treasure of his heart bringeth forth that which is good: and an evil man out of the evil treasure bringeth forth that which is evil" (Lk. 6:45).

-- "As it is written: Jacob I have loved, but Esau I have hated. What shall we say then? Is there injustice with God? God forbid. For he saith to Moses: I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy; and I will shew [deny] mercy to whom I will shew [deny] mercy" (Rom. 9:13-15).

A further teaching from Proverbs is instructive: "Six things there are, which the Lord hateth, and the seventh His soul detesteth: Haughty eyes, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood. A heart that deviseth wicked plots, feet that are swift to run to mischief. A deceitful witness that uttereth lies, and him that soweth discord among brethren" (6:16-19).

Note that the "things" listed that "the Lord hateth" are the sinners who commit the listed offenses. It is not a list of the sins in the abstract. The sinner attains the anger and rejection of God by the sins he commits through his own free will. It goes without saying, then, that if you hate the evildoer's sin you cannot love the sinner who is its author. You cannot separate the sinner from his sin. The sinner is hateful when he commits the sin and this needs to be clearly understood. Sins are not condemned to Hell for eternity; it is the unrepentant sinner.

AND THEY WONDER WHY NO ONE TAKES THEM SERIOUSLY ANYMORE:

Pay To Be Saved (NAOMI KLEIN, August 29, 2006, The Nation)

The Red Cross has just announced a new disaster-response partnership with Wal-Mart. When the next hurricane hits, it will be a co-production of Big Aid and Big Box.

This, apparently, is the lesson learned from the government's calamitous response to Hurricane Katrina: Businesses do disaster better.

"It's all going to be private enterprise before it's over," Billy Wagner, emergency management chief for the Florida Keys, currently under hurricane watch for Tropical Storm Ernesto, said in April. "They've got the expertise. They've got the resources."

But before this new consensus goes any further, perhaps it's time to take a look at where the privatization of disaster began, and where it will inevitably lead.

The first step was the government's abdication of its core responsibility to protect the population from disasters.

BUT IT WAS STILL A COOL IDEA, DR. FREUD

Traumatic memories recalled better than positive events
(Quentin Casey, National Post, August 30th, 2006)

A new Canadian study shows that victims of traumatic events can recall their experiences vividly and with great detail, even after many years, refuting a popular belief that we repress many of our bad memories.

In fact, the study indicates that traumatic memories, such as those of physical or sexual assault, are recalled with much better accuracy than positive memories.

"The vast major of people [believe] in repression ... that we go through a horrific event and that our unconscious minds will force it out of our recollection," said Steve Porter, study co-author and a Dalhousie University psychology professor. "We really found no evidence of that."

Which is why we all remember Jimmy Carter.

FROM THE FILES OF THE UNLIKELY:

RARE COMPANY (CLARK SPENCER, 8/30/06, MiamiHerald.com)

According to Elias Sports Bureau, Marlins second baseman Dan Uggla is just the fourth player in the past 50 years to record at least 20 home runs and 75 RBI in his debut season in the majors. The others: the St. Louis Cardinals' Albert Pujols and Hall of Famers Orlando Cepeda and Frank Robinson.

Uggla said he doesn't think he's suddenly destined for the Hall of Fame, especially since he already is 26.

''Pujols was 21 when he did it, so I'm five years older,'' he said. ``But, to be next to those guys in that category means a lot to me.''

BUT, WAIT, ISN'T WAL-MART EVIL?:

How Many Lightbulbs Does it Take to Change the World? One. And You're Looking At It.: For years, compact fluorescent bulbs have promised dramatic energy savings--yet they remain a mere curiosity. That's about to change. (Charles Fishman, September 2006, Fast Company)

Compact fluorescents emit the same light as classic incandescents but use 75% or 80% less electricity.

What that means is that if every one of 110 million American households bought just one ice-cream-cone bulb, took it home, and screwed it in the place of an ordinary 60-watt bulb, the energy saved would be enough to power a city of 1.5 million people. One bulb swapped out, enough electricity saved to power all the homes in Delaware and Rhode Island. In terms of oil not burned, or greenhouse gases not exhausted into the atmosphere, one bulb is equivalent to taking 1.3 million cars off the roads.

That's the law of large numbers--a small action, multiplied by 110 million.

The single greatest source of greenhouse gases in the United States is power plants--half our electricity comes from coal plants. One bulb swapped out: enough electricity saved to turn off two entire power plants--or skip building the next two.

Just one swirl per home. The typical U.S. house has between 50 and 100 "sockets" (astonish yourself: Go count the bulbs in your house). So what if we all bought and installed two ice-cream-cone bulbs? Five? Fifteen?

Says David Goldstein, a PhD physicist, MacArthur "genius" fellow, and senior energy scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council: "This could be just what the world's been waiting for, for the last 20 years."

Swirl bulbs don't just work, they pay for themselves. They use so little power compared with old reliable bulbs, a $3 swirl pays for itself in lower electric bills in about five months. Screw one in, turn it on, and it's not just lighting your living room, it's dropping quarters in your pocket. The advantages pile up in a way to almost make one giddy. Compact fluorescents, even in heavy use, last 5, 7, 10 years. Years. Install one on your 30th birthday; it may be around to help illuminate your 40th.

In an era when political leaders and companies are too fainthearted to ask Americans to sacrifice anything for the greater good, the modern ice-cream swirl bulb requires no sacrifice. Buying and using it helps save the world--and also saves the customer money--with no compromise on quality. Selflessness and self-satisfaction, twirled into a single $3 purchase.

So far, the impact of compact fluorescents has been trivial, for a simple reason: We haven't bought them. In our outdated experience, they don't work well and they cost too much. Last year, U.S. consumers spent about $1 billion to buy about 2 billion lightbulbs--5.5 million every day. Just 5%, 100 million, were compact fluorescents. First introduced on March 28, 1980, swirls remain a niche product, more curiosity than revolution.

But that's about to change. It will change before our very eyes. A year from now, chances are that you yourself will have installed a swirl or two, and will likely be quite happy with them. In the name of conservation and good corporate citizenship, not to mention economics, one unlikely company is about haul us to the lightbulb aisle, reeducate us, and sell us a swirl: Wal-Mart.

In the next 12 months, starting with a major push this month, Wal-Mart wants to sell every one of its regular customers--100 million in all--one swirl bulb. In the process, Wal-Mart wants to change energy consumption in the United States, and energy consciousness, too. It also aims to change its own reputation, to use swirls to make clear how seriously Wal-Mart takes its new positioning as an environmental activist.

It's a bold goal, a remarkable declaration of Wal-Mart's intention to modernize and green up a whole line of business using market oomph. Teaming up with General Electric, which owns about 60% of the residential lightbulb market in the United States, Wal-Mart wants to single-handedly double U.S. sales for CFLs in a year, and it wants demand to surge forward after that.

BETTER SUNG:

-INTERVIEW: Love is red, death is blue: Greil Marcus and Sean Wilentz discuss their amazing new anthology of writing about the American ballad -- and wonder whether Republicans sing better songs of passion and murder than Democrats do. (Charles Taylor, 2004-11-17, Salon)

CT: Forgive me for going relevant on you, but this week everyone is talking about national division. One of the things that struck me here is that in a lot of these songs the America that's being sung about is part of the America that the left is now being encouraged to look down on, in the wake of the election. The passage that smacked me in the head, reading it now, is the one from Steve Erickson's essay where he writes about Lincoln's second inaugural address: "He argued that in fact the country, had, for all its short history, existed as an affront to God in its embrace of slavery, that the Civil War was in fact God's retribution against America for the sin of slavery, that if the nation was destined to fight another 250 years of civil war -- one year for every year slavery existed -- in order to redeem itself, if the nation was to shed its blood to the last drop in order to cleanse itself of the sin, then that was what it would do." Reading that in a week when we hear that God won the election, and the idea that if God is made part of politics it is also the most reactionary part of politics, brought me up short. I don't agree that if the idea of God is present in politics it's reactionary, because then you don't have --

S.W.: Martin Luther King.

Exactly.

G.M.: Well, you know, Steve Erickson's piece is a terrifying piece of writing because he is able to achieve a kind of suspension. There's an argument he makes about there being three Americas, the one that existed before Lincoln's second inaugural, the one that existed afterward, and the one that may have only existed in Lincoln's imagination for weeks or months. And again, it's "In this part of the story, nothing happens," it's the calling up of that void, that place that is a vortex where you can suddenly be sucked into a recognition that we are playing with fire. That when he talks about American identity, the American story, the American mission, the American obligation to live up to its own promises or confront their betrayal, those things are so big, they're so frightening, that people can run from those questions in any direction.

What Steve is writing about here is Randy Newman's "Sail Away" and "Louisiana, 1927," two songs on either side of Lincoln's great divide. You know, people have often said, "Why do you have to pick these songs apart, and why do you have to analyze them, and you put so much meaning on them, and you just destroy them by burdening them with all this significance." And here's Steve Erickson, not burdening these songs with any significance but drawing a whole version of the American story out of them. He's saying, "No, it's not a question of what you put on a song. It's a question of what you can get out of a song and what you can get out of a song is maybe 10 percent of what's in it, whatever the song is." That to me is what's going on here.

S.W.: There is a ballad language that we were out to try and rediscover. And it's a language that no one can quite put a fix on. I think that one of the problems that you might have had, Charley -- and again, I don't want to be too relevant -- is that in some ways the ballad language, the music of America, was actually sung better by the Republicans than by the Democrats. The Democrats don't know how to sing that way; it sounds very technocratic. I think it's one of the reasons why the Democrats lost, actually. Whereas, whatever you think of their politics, when George Bush talks of slavery he talks of the sin of slavery. Well, that's not a whole lot different than what Abraham Lincoln was saying. Regardless of his politics, it's a language he has, and it's that language that's in danger of being lost and we wanted to recover it.

What bothered me isn't what Erickson was saying -- I liked what he was saying. What bothered me was something you're hitting on now, which is the idea that if you speak as he is speaking you are acceding to the most reactionary side of politics.

S.W.: Well, I think that's wrong ...

I do, too.

S.W.: Look, God is part of the language of America. From the first European who settled here, God was here. So let's be honest about it, what's the point in running away from it? It's there. Greil often quotes David Thomas' line, "What the ballad wants, the ballad gets." And what the ballad wants in part, some ballads, is about God, and about a life of the spirit. Indeed, it's not even just about God, it's about a Christian God, and you have to deal with that as part of the language. It's not always there, but it is there.

G.M.: You know, there was a column written by Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times, and the same sort of thing has been written and said by all kinds of people throughout the entire election season. People were voting against their own interests, their own economic interests. If they voted for Bush, people without a lot of money, they were voting against themselves. Well, people want the opportunity to vote for more than themselves --

Someone wrote in to the Times and said they were voting their interests because their interests were more spiritual than economic.

TAKING OWNERSHIP (via AWW):

DuPont Moves away From Pensions (Randall Chase, 8/28/06, AP)

Chemical manufacturer DuPont Co. is changing its retirement plan for U.S. employees to boost participation in its 401(k) plan while lessening dependence on the company's traditional pension plan.

As part of the changes, employees hired on or after Jan. 1, 2007, will not be eligible to participate in DuPont's pension plan and will not receive a company subsidy for retiree health care or retiree life insurance.

ZZZZZZZZZ....:

Canada falling off the map with American travellers (TAVIA GRANT, 8/30/06, Globe and Mail)

Canada has an image problem south of the border. It's not that Americans have a bad impression of their northern neighbour — it's that they have no impression at all.

UNDER PRESSURE:

Vietnam frees dissident from jail (BBC, 8/30/06)

Prominent Vietnamese dissident and pro-democracy activist Pham Hong Son has been released early from prison.

Mr Son was jailed more than four years ago, after he translated an article on democracy and posted it on the internet.

The release was part of a general amnesty of more than 5,300 prisoners to mark National Day on 2 September.

The move follows diplomatic pressure from the US and other Western nations on Vietnamese human rights.

A series of crucial votes is due to take place in the US Congress on normalising trade ties with Vietnam, and President George W Bush is due to visit Vietnam in November.

THERE'S A READING LIST FOR YA:

A Master and a Masterpiece (OTTO PENZLER, August 30, 2006, NY Sun)

In the evolution of the modern police story, there is a straight line from Ed McBain, the greatest of all procedural writers, to Joseph Wambaugh, who showed the real life of police officers, on and off the job, to James Ellroy, whose ambitious novels involve cops as they are integrated into a greater political and sociological universe.

Tips of the hat go to other significant figures, such as Lawrence Treat, who invented the procedural; Robert Daley, whose best sellers rivaled the successes of Mr. Wambaugh's in the 1970s; Georges Simenon, whose Maigret novellas relied more on intuition than procedure; the impeccable Michael Connelly; the inspired Lucas Davenport in the Prey series of John Sanford; the always inventive George Pelecanos; and the British superstars: Ian Rankin, Peter Robinson, and John Harvey.

Mr. Ellroy is probably best known for "L.A. Confidential" and, the world being what it is, this is largely due to the Oscar-nominated film based on it. This may well change as the movie version of "The Black Dahlia" will be released next month and which, if advance word is any indication, is a humdinger. To coincide with the opening of the motion picture, a new trade paperback edition of "The Black Dahlia" has just been released.

CHANGE IS BAD:

Bring Back the Wax Paper and Bubble Gum (TIM MARCHMAN, August 30, 2006, NY Sun)

When I started grousing about baseball cards, I knew I had become an old man. It was just last week. My wife and I were waiting in line at our local big box store, and one of the displays at the checkout was a four-foot tall case full of boxes of baseball cards.

"You can't even buy a damn pack of baseball cards these days," I grumbled. "Look, they put the packs in the boxes, and you have to buy them 10 at a time. In my day you bought a pack for fifty cents, and it came with gum. And it was a wax pack, and the cards were made out cardboard. Cardboard! I used to trade them with my friend Jeff, he lived on the other side of Jamaica Avenue," etc.etc. I was not far from claiming I used to fix them to my bicycle wheels with clothespins. I picked up one of the boxes, as if to sneer at it, while my wife scowled at me.

LIKEWISE, THE CONFEDERATES WANTED THE UNION TO DISARM:

Hezbollah's post-war strategy (Roger Hardy, 8/30/06, BBC News)

An opinion poll published on Monday suggests that half the country favours Hezbollah's disarmament - one of the demands made in the UN ceasefire resolution.

The poll, in a French-language Lebanese daily, found 51% in favour and 49% against.

Not surprisingly, an overwhelming majority of Shia - the bedrock of the movement's support - think it should keep its weapons.

But most Christians and Druze want it to disarm.

Hezbollah is confident that is not going to happen.

HAD ENOUGH?:

Gasoline prices could keep falling (James R. Healey, 8/30/06, USA TODAY)

Gasoline prices are falling fast and could keep dropping for months.

"The only place they have to go is down," says Fred Rozell, gasoline analyst at the Oil Price Information Service (OPIS). "We'll be closer to $2 than $3 come Thanksgiving."

Travel organization AAA foresees prices 10 cents a gallon lower by the end of next week.

THE "ALLIES":

Justice demanded for WWII death trains (STEVE RENNIE, 8/30/06, Toronto Star)

A Thornhill family is one of more than a dozen from Canada planning to take France and its national railway company to court for helping the Nazis ship their relatives to death camps.

Paris-based lawyer Avi Bitton told the Star in a telephone interview yesterday that "about 15 Canadian families" will join between 250 and 300 other families from France, Belgium, Israel and the United States in seeking compensation from the French government and its rail company, Société Nationale des Chemins de fer Français, for their part in the World War II deportations.

AS IF IT WEREN'T THIRD WORLD ENOUGH....:

Russians take stake in EADS (Seattle Times, 8/30/06)

A state-owned Russian bank reportedly bought a minority stake in EADS, the parent of plane maker Airbus, jostling financial markets as analysts weighed the uncertain political impact against potential business wins for EADS in Russia.

The Moscow-based daily newspaper Vedomosti reported Tuesday that Vneshtorgbank bought between 4.5 and 4.8 percent of European Aeronautic, Defence & Space for $1 billion and is seeking a management role.

MORE:
A380 test flight canceled over technical glitch (AFP, 8/29/06)

A test flight by Airbus' problem-plagued A380 was called off in mid-flight Tuesday because of a fault with the super jumbo's landing gear controls, the company said.

NOTHING COSTS MORE THAN IT USED TO:

All music downloads from largest record seller will be free (Charles Duhigg and Dawn C. Chmielewski, 8/30/06, Los Angeles Times)

Music fans for years have been telling record labels what they want to pay for downloaded songs: nothing.

The labels now are starting to agree that free might work for them, too.

Universal Music Group's announcement Tuesday that it is licensing its digital catalog to a Web site offering free, legal downloads marks a significant shift in an industry long criticized for fighting, rather than harnessing, the Internet's potential.

The Web site, backed by New York company SpiralFrog, hopes to make money selling advertisements that play while songs download.

Search engine Google plans to offer consumers the chance to download and print classic novels free of charge.

The firm's book search tool will let people print classics such as Dante's Inferno or Aesop's Fables, as well as other books no longer under copyright.

Until now, the service has only let people read such books on-screen.

YOU MEAN THE MINUTEMEN WON'T TAKE THE JOBS?:

Growers say fruit's ready, but workers are scarce (Joe Mullin, 8/30/06, Seattle Times)

Heinz Humann was late this year. Later than he's ever been.

His workers finished thinning out apple and pear trees to prepare for the harvest in mid-August. But they should have been finished a month earlier. The past few months, it's been tough for Humann to find enough workers for what he can afford to pay. He's had plenty of work, he says. But it seems there's no one willing to do it.

Add to that the other issues that hurt his bottom line, such as taxes and environmental regulations, and "I can see the writing on the wall," he says.

"We're doomed."

Like Humann, apple growers all over Washington this summer are complaining that a heated immigration debate in the U.S. has combined with a late cherry harvest to create a shortage of agricultural workers, perhaps the worst they've seen.

THE ARAB CERVANTES:

First Arab Nobel winner for literature dies at 94 (AP, 8/30/06)

Naguib Mahfouz, who became the first Arab writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature for his novels depicting Egyptian life in his beloved corner of ancient Cairo, died Wednesday, his doctor said. He was 94.

Mahfouz's Nobel Prize brought international recognition to a man already regarded in the Middle East as one of its best writers and premier intellectuals.

The Egyptian writer, Ahdaf Souief, who knew Mahfouz well, said the writer was a "massively important influence" on Arabic literature.

He said: "He was our greatest living novelist for a very long time... Mahfouz was an innovator in the use of the Arabic language.

"He also embodied the whole development of the Arabic novel starting with historical novels in the late 1940s through realism, through experimentalism and so on."

He added: "He single-handedly went through the whole development of the Arabic novel and made innovation possible for generations of writers after him."

The Cairo Trilogy - Palace Walk, Palace of Desire and Sugar Street, all of which appeared in the 1950s - detailed the adventures and misadventures of a Muslim merchant family.

The books introduced a character who became an icon in Egyptian culture: Si-Sayed, the domineering father who holds his family together.

Controversy came in 1959 with the publication of the novel Children of Gebelawi.

First serialised in Egyptian newspapers, it caused an uproar and was banned by the Egyptian religious authorities on the grounds it violated Islamic rules by including characters who clearly represented God and the prophets.

But it was published in Lebanon and later translated into English.

IT AIN'T ROCKET SCIENCE:

Another night with Doug Mirabelli as his batterymate and another terrific performance for Josh Beckett.

ROVEBOT UNMASKED:

First Source of C.I.A. Leak Admits Role, Lawyer Says (NEIL A. LEWIS, 8/30/06, NY Times)

Richard L. Armitage, a former deputy secretary of state, has acknowledged that he was the person whose conversation with a columnist in 2003 prompted a long, politically laden criminal investigation in what became known as the C.I.A. leak case, a lawyer involved in the case said on Tuesday.

Mr. Armitage did not return calls for comment. But the lawyer and other associates of Mr. Armitage have said he has confirmed that he was the initial and primary source for the columnist, Robert D. Novak, whose column of July 14, 2003, identified Valerie Wilson as a Central Intelligence Agency officer.

The identification of Mr. Armitage as the original leaker to Mr. Novak ends what has been a tantalizing mystery.

MORE:
Plame Out: The ridiculous end to the scandal that distracted Washington (Christopher Hitchens, Aug. 29, 2006, Slate)

I had a feeling that I might slightly regret the title ("Case Closed") of my July 25 column on the Niger uranium story. I have now presented thousands of words of evidence and argument to the effect that, yes, the Saddam Hussein regime did send an important Iraqi nuclear diplomat to Niger in early 1999. And I have not so far received any rebuttal from any source on this crucial point of contention. But there was always another layer to the Joseph Wilson fantasy. Easy enough as it was to prove that he had completely missed the West African evidence that was staring him in the face, there remained the charge that his nonreport on a real threat had led to a government-sponsored vendetta against him and his wife, Valerie Plame.

In his July 12 column in the Washington Post, Robert Novak had already partly exposed this paranoid myth by stating plainly that nobody had leaked anything, or outed anyone, to him. On the contrary, it was he who approached sources within the administration and the CIA and not the other way around. But now we have the final word on who did disclose the name and occupation of Valerie Plame, and it turns out to be someone whose opposition to the Bush policy in Iraq has—like Robert Novak's—long been a byword in Washington. It is particularly satisfying that this admission comes from two of the journalists—Michael Isikoff and David Corn—who did the most to get the story wrong in the first place and the most to keep it going long beyond the span of its natural life.

As most of us have long suspected, the man who told Novak about Valerie Plame was Richard Armitage, Colin Powell's deputy at the State Department and, with his boss, an assiduous underminer of the president's war policy.

UNBUBBLIN' CRUDE:

Oil Prices Fall Below $70 a Barrel (Brad Foss, 8/29/06, AP)

Oil prices fell sharply for the second straight day on Tuesday, dipping below $70 a barrel as Tropical Storm Ernesto veered away from the oil and gas region of the Gulf of Mexico.

"A lot of people were banking on an active tropical (storm) season and so far it has been nonexistent in relation to platforms in the Gulf of Mexico," said James Cordier, president of Liberty Trading in Tampa, Fla.

MORE:
Falling gas prices reflect break from adversity (PATRICK BRETHOUR, 8/30/06, Globe and Mail)

Pump prices have dropped below $1 a litre for the first time in five months -- and the cost of a fill-up is likely to drop even more in coming weeks.

NOISE, NO LIGHT:

Threat Assessment: Two new books shed light on the ideological and organizational roots of al-Qaeda. (Aziz Huq, 08.28.06, American Prospect)

For all the cheap talk of civilizations clashing, few have examined Osama bin Laden’s particular ideological concoction. Mary Habeck, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University’s international affairs school, takes it seriously. Her Knowing the Enemy: Jihadist Ideology and War on Terror is one of the clearest and most concise introductions to the peculiar blend of eschatological egomania and Islam that al-Qaeda proposes. Like Christian theology and exegeses, Quranic readings have run in various directions. Habeck sketches one discrete tradition, running from 14th-century jurist Ibn Taymiyya to 20th-century Egyptian radicals Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb. Her focus then turns to Islamist ideas of political theory, from its wide-eyed embrace of Samuel Huntingdon’s thesis to an erosion of strict religious rules for war.

Echoing Peter Bergen, Habeck argues that al-Qaeda’s failed to achieve the principle ideological goal on 9-11 -- catalyzing a global war between Islam and Christianity. Only thanks to the ill-conceived and recklessly executed Iraq War, among other things, did bin Laden’s vision gain fresh currency.

MORE:
Al-Qaeda (and US) eclipsed by rise of Iran (Mahan Abedin, 8/30/06, Asia Times)

One of the more interesting results of the Israel-Hezbollah War has been the sidelining of the global jihadi movement and the broader Salafi currents that sustain it. Despite all its rhetoric of a global jihad against the enemies of Islam, al-Qaeda and the broader Salafi-jihadi movement were reduced to mere spectators as Hezbollah, once again, dealt a serious blow to Israeli prestige.

While some analysts interpreted Ayman al-Zawahiri's latest message as an olive branch to Iran, Hezbollah and Shi'ite militants more broadly, it in fact was not a departure from the terror network's stance on sectarian relations in Islam. In any case, al-Qaeda is increasingly a marginal component of the Salafi-jihadi movement, and its ideological influence on the new generation of radicals is nowhere near as strong as is often assumed. [...]

Simply put, al-Qaeda views the struggle against the West in general and the United States in particular as of primary importance. Sectarian squabbles within Islam can only be addressed once the external enemy has been forced to withdraw from the Muslim world. This is not too dissimilar from the geopolitical aspirations of the followers of so-called "Mohammadean Islam" who have been striving for the withdrawal of the West from the Middle East and other Islamic lands long before the emergence of bin Laden and al-Qaeda.

In fact, al-Qaeda is a secret admirer of the discourse of Islamic Iran and has rarely (if ever) attacked the leaders of the Islamic Republic. However, the Iranians have always maintained their distance not only because of the extreme Sunnism (as opposed to Salafism) of bin Laden and Zawahiri but also because of genuine contempt for the terror network.

Iranian leaders regard their "Islamic revolution" as the vanguard of the global Islamic movement and any competitor (especially one as pretentious as al-Qaeda) is regarded with deep suspicion and disdain. Moreover, there is genuine revulsion of al-Qaeda tactics. This is not only because al-Qaeda targets innocent civilians, but because the Iranians fear that terror attacks against US interests consolidate American hegemony in the region and beyond. These fundamental divisions between Iran and al-Qaeda are likely to deepen as the geopolitical weight of the Islamic Republic continues to grow.

THERE IS NO SPAIN:

Indepedenzia Day: The Basque people may disapprove of ETA’s tactics, but they are still determined to gain independence. (Sarah Wildman, 08.25.06, American Prospect)

Every year, in the Basque city of San Sebastian, demonstrators seeking independence gather hours before the commencement of "Semana Grande," a week-long festival of bull fights, outdoor concerts, and fireworks. In years past, it wasn’t uncommon for Molotov cocktails to be lobbed from the crowd towards the police, who responded in kind. Last summer 20 protestors were injured -- hit by rubber bullets fired by the police when the crowd grew violent. The day before this year's protest, a Basque woman in her late twenties told me that, throughout her teens, violent clashes with the police took place frequently. She would be minding her own business in Parte Vieje, the old city, and suddenly a Pamplona-like stampede would come rushing down the street and sweep her up. She would then dive into the nearest bar, whereupon the barkeep would quickly rattle down the metal "We're closed" cage until the violence ceased.

This year was the first Semana Grande protest since the violent Basque separatist group ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, or Basque Homeland and Freedom) announced its ceasefire back in March. Hours before the demonstration, many in town weren't sure it would take place -- Madrid’s famous Judge Baltazar Garzon initially banned the protest, accusing ETA’s political arm, Batasuna, of organizing the event. In the end, ETA’s signature snake and axe were nowhere to be found. Only the flag of Euskal Herria, the Basque region, remained.

ETA may not have been there (though members were spotted in the crowd by the local media), but the Basque quest for independence appears undimmed.

ONE OF THESE DAYS THEY'LL "DISCOVER" SOMETHING THE ANCIENTS DIDN'T KNOW:

Nuns prove God is not figment of the mind (Roger Highfield, 30/08/2006, Daily Telegraph)

[T]he God module, as some scientists call it, is a mirage, according to the study by Dr Mario Beauregard, of the Department of Psychology at the Université de Montréal and his student Vincent Paquette, published in the journal Neuroscience Letters. [...]

Rather than reveal a spiritual centre in the brain, a module of neural circuits specifically designed for religious experience, the study demonstrated that a dozen different regions of the brain are activated during a mystical experience.

In other words, mystical experiences are mediated by several brain regions and systems normally implicated in functions such as self-consciousness, emotion and body representation.

In the past, some researchers went as far as to suggest the possibility of a specific brain region designed for communication with God. This latest research discredits such theories.

TO DRILL IS TO FIND:

Cash-strapped Cambodia eyes black gold: US oil giant Chevron is poised to prove Cambodia is sitting on oil reserves worth $1 billion annually. (Adam Piore, 8/30/06, The Christian Science Monitor)

Oil companies from China, Vietnam, South Korea, and Japan are all vying for offshore contracts. The UN Development Program (UNDP) identified oil as the best hope for the country's future, and released estimates widely cited in the development community. In Chevron's "Block A" alone, the first of six demarcated offshore zones, the government share of oil and gas revenues are expected to top between $700 million to $1 billion a year.

By some estimates - according to the UNDP - it's not unreasonable to believe that in the coming years, revenue from gas and oil deposits will more than double Cambodia's GDP, which now stands at about $5 billion (much of that is from foreign aid). And that's not even counting the disputed zones between Thailand and Cambodia, which could be the richest of all.

WHERE ENGLAND BELONGS:

Brussels is using terrorism to further its federal ambitions (Daniel Hannan, 29/08/2006, Daily Telegraph)

Oh, come off it, Hannan, I hear you say. Even you Euro-phobes must accept that there are some things that we ought to do together. I mean, if the terrorists are operating at an international level, don't we need to take them on at an international level?

Yes, indeed - and we have been doing so for decades without any help from Brussels. Sovereign states have evolved highly developed mechanisms for police and judicial co-operation: the Hague Convention, extradition treaties, intelligence sharing, Interpol, mutual recognition of court orders, acknowledgement of sentences spent in each other's prisons.

What is being proposed now, in effect, is that such collaboration should principally be administered by the EU. I don't know about you, but this doesn't make me feel any safer. It is these same Euro-apparatchiks, after all, who have brought us the Common Agricultural Policy, the destruction of North Sea fish stocks, and accounts that have not been approved in 12 consecutive years. Why should they be any better at thwarting bombers than they are at, say, thwarting fraudsters within their own bureaucracy? [...]

Five years on, it is hard to identify a single anti-terrorist success that can be attributed to Brussels. On the other hand, we have just won a mighty victory through old-fashioned police co-operation between three countries which, although on different continents, are united by language, history and law. Why should such joint operations be improved by bringing Britain's procedures into line with Europe, rather than the Anglosphere?

AQUAMEN:

The 40-Year-Old Virgin Swimmer: In a (completely misguided) bid to make the 2008 Olympic team, ex-NCAA swimmer W. HODDING CARTER is training like he did in college. And that means spring break. Only this time our party frogman is cruising the British Virgin Islands under his own power. (W. Hodding Carter, October 2006, Outside)

IT'S A LOT HARDER THAN YOU MIGHT THINK to swim from island to island across four-knot currents, gargling salt water hour after hour, getting chased by sharks, and towing your worldly possessions on a five-foot surfboard while flying the British flag. (It's even harder when you're told on your very first day in the British Virgin Islands that your British naval flag is actually a Swiss flag.) What with the jellyfish, hecklers, and excessive rum intake, you might even think twice about swimming your way through the Caribbean.

But that's what I did for spring break.

[...]

PREPARATIONS WERE SIMPLE. I chose the British Virgin Islands because they looked close to one another on a Web site's cartoon map. The southeast trade winds dictated a southwesterly route: Virgin Gorda, Ginger, Cooper, Peter, and Norman. Ginger Island was uninhabited, so I'd have to camp, but the rest was resort splendor all the way. Twenty miles of fun-filled Caribbean waters, if you could put out of your mind what the St. John–based kayak guide told me:

"Oh. Ginger, huh?" Arawak Expeditions owner Arthur Jones said when he heard my plan. "I don't know—it's pretty sharky. I remember hearing about someone else who tried that off St. John a while back, and she had to stop halfway through because of a shark. It just started following her and getting closer and closer. But I don't know. Maybe that was just a rumor."

DIDN’T MOM TELL YOU NOT TO PICK AT SORES

'Til levels of unsuitable dysfunction do us part (Robert Fulford, National Post, August 29th, 2006)

The word (dysfunction–ed) first appeared in 1916 as a way to describe medical failure. An article in the British Medical Journal said: "endocrine dysfunction incriminates variously the thyroid, parathyroid, ovarian and pituitary glands." Today we apply the word to any cluster of humans who have trouble getting through life. It sounds as if it means a lot but it explains nothing.

This kind of language oversimplifies a complex reality. It packs human experience into categories that exist only as terminology. It also implies a smug belief that there are appropriate and inappropriate ways for human beings to align themselves. But in truth, every family is unique. Each intimate liaison is different.

How different? Consider John Bayley's book, Elegy for Iris, about his marriage to a difficult, probably unknowable woman, Iris Murdoch. For 40 years Bayley cherished their "apartness" and "the joys of solitude." He loved to be cherished "yet to be alone." Compare that with Robertson Davies: "Marriage is a framework to preserve friendship."

High divorce rates have transformed the meaning of marriage. It has lost its status as a more or less automatic passage in life and become something to brood about. Once we discovered it could be abandoned, more or less at will, we began to look at it critically. All this has failed to catch the attention of those who hate gay marriage because it undermines "real" marriage. "Real" marriage, in truth, has changed so much as to be barely recognizable.

We have fallen into the habit of treating marriage as an object, as if it exists on its own, independent of the people involved. In Deja Vu, a 1997 movie by Henry Jaglom, a man asks his wife, "What do you think of our marriage?" He then says that, from his standpoint, "the marriage is fine." It's just that he's in love with someone else and wants to leave.

A favourite niece was married a few weeks ago. It was joyful and lovely, but I was somewhat thrown to see a “service” held in a gorgeous little chapel with a minister in full Anglican robes from which all prayers and religious references were completely excluded, apparently by design. I mentioned to my wife that it felt a bit like attending a lecture by Dawkins in the Sistine Chapel, which earned me one of those terrifying “Don’t you dare start!” looks. They didn’t make any vows about fidelity or sickness or whatever, but they did promise to be each other’s best friends, to talk about everything and to support each other’s life goals. They were obviously blissful and I fervently wish them a long, happy life filled with endless hours spent talking about everything under the sun. Except, perhaps, the state of their marriage.

BRING BOB DOLE:

Working For Lieberman (JACK KEMP, August 29, 2006, Copley News Service)

Despite my partisan credentials, I'm announcing my intentions to go to Connecticut in September to work for and raise funds for Mr. Lieberman. He is running as an independent, but he has announced he'll join the Democratic caucus. When Joe called, I jokingly told him I'd be happy to come to Connecticut and speak for him or against him, whichever would do the most good. I'll be making joint appearances in Connecticut with him and his wife, Hadassah, in the very near future.

I believe in the Lincolnian ideal that you serve your party best by serving your country first, and I can't think of a better way of serving our nation than by re-electing Mr. Lieberman to the U.S. Senate. As a Republican, I don't want the Democratic Party to lose a Scoop Jackson Democrat and become isolationist in the face of Islamic fundamentalism with its message of jihad, hatred, and blood libel against America and Israel. [...]

Mr. Lieberman does not need me to defend his record, but having worked with him as secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the late 1980s and early ‘90s on issues of affordable housing, home-ownership opportunities for low-income families, enterprise zones for urban, and rural America, and access to capital for men and women of color, I believe his re-election to the U.S. Senate is necessary to expanding the war on poverty by including private enterprise.

For all these reasons and more, I look forward to helping re-elect Sen. Joe Lieberman.

HE IS WHO W PORTRAYED McCAIN AS:

The Conservative Case Against Rudy Giuliani In 2008 (John Hawkins, 8/29/06, Right Wing News)

Rudy Giuliani, a contender for the Presidency in 2008, is receiving an inordinate amount of positive attention. That's quite understandable since Rudy is charismatic, did a great job on the campaign trail for President Bush in 2004, and his phenomenal performance after 9/11 was much appreciated.

However, likeable or not, having Rudy as the GOP's candidate in 2008 would be a big mistake. Here's a short, but sweet primer on some of Rudy's many flaws. [...]

An Anti-Second Amendment Candidate

In the last couple of election cycles, 2nd Amendment issues have moved to the back burner mainly because even Democratic candidates have learned that being tagged with the "gun grabber" label is political poison.

Unfortunately, Rudy Giuliani is a proponent of gun control who supported the Brady Bill and the Assault Weapon Ban.

Do Republicans really want to abandon their strong 2nd Amendment stance by selecting a pro-gun control nominee?

Soft On Gay Marriage

Other than tax cuts, the biggest domestic issue of the 2004 election was President Bush's support of a Constitutional Amendment to define marriage as being between a man and a woman. Unfortunately, Rudy Giuliani has taken a "Kerryesque" position on gay marriage.

Although Rudy, like John Kerry, has said that marriage should remain between a man and a woman, he also supports civil unions, "marched in gay-pride parades ...dressed up in drag on national television for a skit on Saturday Night Live (and moved in with a) wealthy gay couple" after his divorce.

DOIN' IT FOR THEMSELVES:

Islamic Revival Led by Women Tests Syria’s Secularism (KATHERINE ZOEPF, 8/29/06, NY Times)

These are the two faces of an Islamic revival for women in Syria, one that could add up to a potent challenge to this determinedly secular state. Though government officials vociferously deny it, Syria is becoming increasingly religious and its national identity is weakening. If Islam replaces that identity, it may undermine the unity of a society that is ruled by a Muslim religious minority, the Alawites, and includes many religious groups.

Syrian officials, who had front-row seats as Hezbollah dragged Lebanon into war, are painfully aware of the myriad ways that state authority can be undermined by increasingly powerful, and appealing, religious groups. Though Syria’s government supports Hezbollah, it has been taking steps to ensure that the phenomenon it helped to build in Lebanon does not come to haunt it at home.

In the past, said Muhammad al-Habash, a Syrian lawmaker who is also a Muslim cleric, “we were told that we had to leave Islam behind to find our futures.”

“But these days,” he said, “if you ask most people in Syria about their history, they will tell you, ‘My history is Islamic history.’ The younger generation are all reading the Koran.”

Women are in the vanguard. Though men across the Islamic world usually interpret Scripture and lead prayers, Syria, virtually alone in the Arab world, is seeing the resurrection of a centuries-old tradition of sheikhas, or women who are religious scholars. The growth of girls’ madrasas has outpaced those for boys, religious teachers here say.

There are no official statistics about precisely how many of the country’s 700 madrasas are for girls. But according to a survey of Islamic education in Syria published by the pan-Arab daily Al Hayat, there are about 80 such madrasas in Damascus alone, serving more than 75,000 women and girls, and about half are affiliated with the Qubaisiate (pronounced koo-BAY-see-AHT).

MORE:
Interview with Iranian Activist Shirin Ebadi: In early August, Nobel Laureate Shirin Ebadi learned through the press that her human rights center in Tehran had been declared illegal. SPIEGEL ONLINE spoke with her about an Iranian government breaking its own laws and activism in the face of prison -- or worse. (Der Spiegel, 8/28/06)

SPIEGEL ONLINE: You have been threatened with arrest unless you close down the Center for Defense of Human Rights in Tehran. But according to Iranian law, NGOs are free to operate.

Shirin Ebadi: The constitution guarantees that social organizations are free to conduct their activities, so long as they don't engage in disorderly conduct, or betray the laws of Islam. "Free" means that they don't need permission. Therefore, an NGO like ours, which is working for human rights, does not need the government's approval. [...]

SPIEGEL ONLINE: You are saying, however, that the Iranian state is the party acting illegally in this situation, and not your center?

Ebadi: I am simply asking: How did we all of a sudden become illegal? We are legal, we have always been legal. We are a human rights organization. We defend people accused of political crimes for free. Yes, the country is breaking the law. The country is breaking its own laws.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: What are you going to do now?

Ebadi: We're going to continue. I have no choice but to continue. That's our responsibility -- because we, unlike the Interior Ministry, we respect the law. I will fight as long as I'm alive.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Even if this means going to prison?

Ebadi: Yes. I will fight as long as I have to.

FUSS ABOUT NOTHING:

D.C. motorists get a 'break' as gas prices drop (Patrice Hill, August 29, 2006, THE WASHINGTON TIMES)

Gas prices are dropping quickly thanks to an early end to the summer driving season and the dearth, so far, of devastating Gulf Coast hurricanes.

The price of regular grade is falling faster in the Washington area than nationally. At $2.86 a gallon yesterday morning, it's down 10 cents in the past week and 26 cents from a peak of $3.12 a little more than a month ago, according to GasBuddy.com. [...]

Energy analysts credit the early beginning of the school year and early end to vacation season that normally lasts until Labor Day, which is next weekend. Oil prices also have been declining. Yesterday, the price of premium crude plummeted $1.90 to $70.61 a barrel in New York trading after the threat to Gulf Coast oil fields and refineries from Tropical Storm Ernesto was downgraded.

Ernesto was "a whole lot of fuss about nothing, so the price is coming down," said William Adams, chief energy strategist at LaSalle Futures Group Inc.

Hold on to your gas cap. Gasoline prices are falling faster by the day.

Crude oil and wholesale gasoline prices tumbled Monday on news that Hurricane Ernesto had been downgraded and was no longer threatening the Gulf of Mexico's oil fields.

"The price of gasoline is falling more quickly than injured Browns players out in Berea," said Ben Brockwell, senior analyst and director of data pricing for the Oil Price Information Service.

SOMETIMES HE ALMOST SEEMS TO GRASP CLINTONISM:

Obama chides Africa on visit (Washington Times, August 29, 2006)

If Africans welcoming home a native son thought that rising Democratic star Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois came only in praise of the continent of his roots, they were mistaken.

In South Africa last week, he took the government to task for its tepid response to the AIDS epidemic that has ravaged sub-Saharan Africa. He also criticized the government of President Thabo Mbeki for its "quiet diplomacy" with Zimbabwe, demanding that more pressure be put on Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe.

Kenya risks losing its status as a model of African democracy if it does not urgently crack down on corruption that has reached crisis levels and stifled development, Mr. Obama said yesterday.

WONDERFUL:

60 Years Later, Rollins Defies Expectations (WILL FRIEDWALD, August 29, 2006, NY Sun)

After nearly 60 years as a major player, Mr. Rollins has perfected a highly personal brand of jazz (with pop and heavy Afro-Caribbean elements), which begins with his band. Where the standard front line of a modern jazz group is trumpet and sax, Mr. Rollins's co-star is trombonist Clifton Anderson (also his nephew, and the producer of his new album). He also features electric guitar (Bobby Broom) rather than piano as his customary chordal instrument, electric bass (Bob Cranshaw) instead of acoustic (except for one tune), and a two-man percussion section consisting of the fine Victor Lewis on drums and Kimati Dinizulu sporting a battery of African instruments (including apentema, apente, sankofa, kyene, djembe, and conga). With the exception of Mr. Lewis, this is the same band that performs on Mr. Rollins's new album, "Sonny, Please," the first release on his own label, Doxy Records. [...]

The most substantial (and unexpected) new contribution to Mr. Rollins's repertoire, both at the show and on the new album, is "Serenade." Adapted from the 1900 ballet "Serenade Les Millions d'Arlequin" by the lesser-known Paduan composer Ricardo Drigo (born 1846), the piece was first heard as a pop song in England, played by British dance bands around the time of the composer's death in 1930. It's a beautiful tune and Mr. Rollins makes the most of it. Although there were solos by Messrs. Anderson and Broom, as well as an unnecessary percussion interlude, the charm here is in the pure, sonic pleasure of hearing Mr. Rollins's deep, rich tenor tone essay this lovely line. It's one of the most pleasing sounds in all of nature.

At this point, Mr. Rollins introduced "J.J." (as in Johnson), the latest in his series of short, poignant dedications to fallen comrades (such as "Wynton" for Wynton Kelly and "Remembering Tommy," for Tommy Flanagan, on the album). He played "Don't Stop the Carnival," but then, surprisingly, stopped the carnival well before the rabble-raising climax all were expecting.

What he did do, however, was launch into an unexpected encore: It began with "I See Your Face Before Me," and from there launched into a glorious, unaccompanied coda, in which he played long chunks of whatever tunes he felt like. It could have been called "Oh Look at Me Now Thinking About You and the Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeeze Singing Polly-Wolly-Doodle All the Day." Finally, the rhythm section rejoined him on Irving Berlin's "They Say It's Wonderful." If that is indeed what they say, and they are talking about Sonny Rollins, then they're right.

STILL A WAR TO BE WON:

Fostering Democracy (DANIEL SILVERBERG and YOONAH LEE, August 29, 2006, NY Sun)

As international news focuses on the conflict in the Middle East, the nuclear stand-off in Iran, let alone the war in Iraq, America should not lose sight of other parts of the world where it can foster democracy through more traditional means. Vietnam is a prime example. The Administration's recent decision to approve Vietnam's entry into the World Trade Organization — a decision that must be ratified by the U.S. Senate — is an important step towards opening Vietnam to reform and strengthen a critical partnership in Asia. Yet absent a strong-minded commitment to democratic development in that country, long-term economic growth in Vietnam is still in doubt.

In recent years, America has not only normalized relations with Vietnam, but has also dramatically expanded economic ties, to both countries' benefit. Trade has ballooned to over $6 billion annually, and Vietnam's annual exports to America have grown at an audacious 40% rate per year over the last six years.These developments are occurring against a backdrop of growing Chinese regional competition and America's desire to counterbalance that influence in Southeast Asia with the ASEAN regional grouping. America needs new partners in Asia, and Vietnam is a prime candidate.

At the same time, there has been a real downside to Vietnam's growth. With increasing economic freedom, the one-party Communist regime grows increasingly intolerant of domestic dissent. The Communist party has brazenly oppressed its own people, particularly targeting political activists who believe that the government needs to reform. One needs to look no further than the case of Dr. Pham Hong Son to understand that greater freedoms in Vietnam have made its government increasingly nervous about how they will be exercised.

MARCHIN' TO THE BIG KETTLE DRUM (via Tom Morin):

American Idolatry (Spengler , 8/29/06, Asia Times)

Young people are as resentful as they are narcissistic, and the easily reproduced, droning complaint of country music satisfied both criteria.

The resentful country folk who formed the first audience for the now-dominant style in American music turn up in literature as noble, suffering peasants fighting for a traditional way of life, as in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. Nothing could be further from the truth. American farmers were migratory entrepreneurs who did well during World War I, when agricultural exports surged, and very badly during the 1920s, when exports fell, and even worse during the 1930s. Country people were resentful because they were becoming poorer. That was unfortunate, but feeling sorry for one's self is no excuse to inflict the likes of Hank Williams on the world. The object of high art is to lift the listener out of the misery of his personal circumstance by showing him a better world in which his petty troubles are beside the point. What is the point of music that assists the listener in wallowing in his troubles? Some country-music fanciers no doubt will find this callous, and I want to disclose that I do not care one way or another whether their wife left them, their dog died, or their truck broke down.

Word-play aside, what does this have to do with idolatry? Resentment is simply an expression of envy, the first and deadliest of sins. Adam and Eve envied God's knowledge of good and evil, Cain envied Abel, Ishmael envied Isaac, Esau envied Jacob, Joseph's brothers envied the favorite son, and the Gentiles envied the nation of Israel. Why reject what comes from on high to worship one's own image, unless you resent the higher authority?

The culture of resentment runs so deep in the American character that the self-pitying drone of immiserated farmers, amplified by the petulant adolescents of the 1950s as a remonstration against parental authority, now dominates the musical life of American Christians. Not only Christian country, but Christian rock and Christian heavy metal have become mainstream commercial genre. I agree with the minority of Christians who eschew Christian rock as "the music of the devil", although not for the same reasons: it is immaterial whether Christian rock substitutes "Jesus Christ" for "Peggy Sue", permitting its listeners to associate putatively Christian music with secular music with implied sexual content. It is diabolical because the style itself is born of resentment.

There are American Christians who had no choice but to invent their own music, namely the African-American Church, whose spirituals are gems of rough-hewn beauty. It is no coincidence that black church music maintains the closest ties to classical music, and that the pre-eminence of African-American singers on the operatic stage stems from the music training of church choirs.

By and large, though, the evangelicals ought to know better. Americans, like the English, have Georg Frideric Handel's "Messiah" and other great classical works, and access to a musical tradition that is one of the supreme achievements of the human spirit. As I wrote in another context (Why the beautiful is not the good, May 17, 2005):

Pearls grow in oysters to soothe irritation; the high art of the West grew pearl-like in Christendom around an abrasion it could not heal: the refusal of mere humans to place all their hopes upon the promise of life after death. Christianity made Europe by offering the kingdom of heaven to barbarian invaders, while allowing them to keep their tribal culture. The high art of the West gave these rude men a presentiment of the kingdom of heaven and formed an authentic Christian culture opposed to pagan holdovers.

The Beautiful is not the Good. The Good is sui generis, independent of any beauty devised by human craft. But we willfully choose what is ugly over what is beautiful because we are ugly, and prefer to worship our own ugliness rather than the beauty created by an inspired few. That is not merely execrable bad taste. Ultimately it is a form of idolatry. The evangelicals' inability to rise above the ambient culture is their great failing.

ANOTHER CROSS TO BEAR:

Sectarianism in Labour's rotten burghs (Alan Cochrane, 29/08/2006, Daily Telegraph)

Why has Ruth Kelly been moved to denounce the decision by the prosecuting authorities in Edinburgh to caution the Celtic goalkeeper for making the sign of the cross in front of supporters of his side's bitter rivals, Rangers? It seems, at first glance, to be bizarre, almost medieval, behaviour.

That Miss Kelly has waded into this controversy, when she normally eschews all attempts to get her to talk about her Roman Catholicism and her membership of Opus Dei, reveals a growing anger among London Labour over the behaviour of the Scottish party.

Although Tony Blair faces many big challenges in the months ahead - not least his annual conference in Manchester in October - he knows that his biggest test will come next May with the elections to the Scottish Parliament at Holyrood. While the result will have no formal impact on his Downing Street tenure, a defeat in Scotland will be seen as a damning and perhaps clinching verdict on his premiership. [...]

Devolution was supposed to finish the Nationalists. It hasn't. But it may just end up finishing Labour.

NO, NO, I WANTED TO BE LEFT A LITTLE LESS ALONE....:

Busy nurses 'leave elderly to starve' (Celia Hall, 29/08/2006, Daily Telegraph)

Vulnerable, elderly patients are starving in hospital because nurses do not have time to help them to eat, a charity says today.

Age Concern says that six in 10 older patients were at risk of malnutrition in hospital and those over 80 had levels of malnutrition that were five times higher than younger patients.

It found that nine in 10 nurses said they did not always have time to help patients who needed assistance to eat.
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Two thirds of general hospital beds are occupied by the elderly.

BEGIN AGAIN:

TV star Nasrallah impresses people on all sides in hopeful Lebanon (Patrick Bishop, 29/08/2006, Daily Telegraph)

[D]espite Nasrallah's standing, it is clear that few Lebanese even among his own Shia supporters have the stomach for a resumption of war and want him to turn his energies to rebuilding the country.

The interview was the first he has given since the war ended and was clearly designed to calm fears that there would be any second round of fighting. It contained a frank admission that, had he known the destruction that would result from the capture of two Israeli soldiers, he would never have allowed the operation to go ahead.

He also said that the strengthened deployment of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (Unifil), which starts this week, had nothing to fear from his men, "as long as their mission is not to disarm the resistance".

He added that, if the Lebanese Army, which is moving to take control of the south of the country for the first time in decades, came across an armed man, "they have the right to disarm him". Nasrallah also went out of this way to emphasise that the political capital Hizbollah had won with its "victory" against Israel would not be used to impose a Shia hegemony on the country's religious and sectarian patchwork.

Nasrallah chose to give the interview to the liberal, secular New TV station, rather than to his propaganda outlet, al Manar, and the questioner was a woman journalist, Maryam al Bassam.

It was watched by almost everyone in Lebanon and dominated coffee shop conversation yesterday. In Nasrallah's home village of Bazouriyeh, near Tyre, Shia residents were proud of the impression he had made.

A MATTER OF LIFE OR....WHAT WAS THE QUESTION?:

South Korea: Lowest Birthrate in the World (Peter J. Smith, August 28, 2006, LifeSiteNews.com)

South Korea now claims the lowest birthrate in the world according to South Korea’s National Statistical Office, which confirms population data just released by an independent study.

According to the Korean Herald, the National Statistical Office (NSO) has announced that the South Korea’s total fertility rate dropped to 1.08 last year, and reports the number of newborns has also dropped nearly 8 percent to 438,000. The fertility rate is the lowest in the world, and broke South Korea’s 2004 record of 1.16.

Most of the first generation of secular Zionism departed from this world in the 1970s. It was a generation that enjoyed an exclusive privilege: The maintenance of a clear Jewish identity despite their secular way of life, which did not support this identity. However, in the process of generational change, this privilege was lost.

The experiment by generation A to provide generation B with an Israeli identity as a substitute, or alternately, a new Jewish identity, failed, and Israeli society lost the source of its strength in its existential struggle.

The Jewish and Zionist mission was replaced by a normal Israeli mission, which is the natural default option. The current prime minister expressed it well in his speech on election night: "Normal life in a country that is fun to live in."

And so, the serving elites of generation A, which followed the light of the Jewish-Zionist mission, were replaced by exploiting generation B elites, and the phenomena of degeneration emerged.

This created the unprecedented phenomenon of citizens seeking normalcy while contending with a blurred Jewish identity and being imprisoned in a giant ghetto of a Jewish state, which is abnormal by definition. This is an intolerable contradiction that gave rise to proposals for a solution premised on forcing normalcy upon the entire ghetto.

With our hearts and minds reinvigorated by a weekend away from the fray, it's time to respond to the most recent below-the-belt hits from the right-wing.

First, I'm compelled once again to point out the baffling government fetish about baby-making. This country already has the highest fertility rate in the industrialized world, and the population is growing by about 3.2 million people each year. But apparently that's not enough for our leaders, who have a serious preoccupation with procreation, which is apparently more important than, well, anything else.

Last week, Washington State joined 45 other states in denying equal marriage rights to same-sex couples. Why? Because procreation, sayeth the state Supreme Court judges, "is a legitimate government interest furthered by limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples".

HOW DO YOU DEPROGRAM THE MULTICULTISTS? (via Tom Morin):

Headteacher who never taught again after daring to criticise multiculturalism (Karyn Miller, Melissa Kite, James Orr, Nina Goswami, Roya Nikkhah, 27/08/2006, Daily Telegraph)

Early yesterday afternoon, Ray Honeyford was listening with unconcealed delight to the radio commentary from the C&G Cup final at Lord's cricket ground as the Sussex batsmen, already 68 for 5, battled to find some form. Lancashire, Mr Honeyford, noted cheerfully, were doing rather well, as he watched through the window while his wife, Angela, and a friend tended to the garden. "My wife does all the gardening," Mr Honeyford says, "partly because I'm too lazy, partly because she doesn't want my help." He motions towards the potted flowers that sit on the polished table in the centre of his living room. He says he cannot name them, this by way of proving his horticultural ignorance.

The plants are Angela's, as are the prints of the Cezanne paintings and the black and white family pictures that line the walls of the living room of their modest house in Bury, Manchester. There are some framed medals of Mr Honeyford's uncle, a "Manchester lad like me", who was killed in the First World War, but nothing that reflects his own career as a teacher. No qualifications behind glass to recall the achievements of the boy from the large impoverished family who had initially failed his 11-plus, but nevertheless managed to become a Bachelor of Arts by correspondence and then a Master of Arts.

Ray Honeyford
Ray Honeyford was vilified for his views

There are no photographs of him pictured with his students. But that was all a long time ago now. Mr Honeyford, 72, "retired" more than 20 years ago as the headmaster of a school in Bradford. Or, at least, that was when he was vilified by politically correct race "experts", was sent death threats, and condemned as a racist. Eventually, he was forced to resign and never allowed to teach again.

His crime was to publish an article in The Salisbury Review in 1984 doubting whether the children in his school were best served by the connivance of the educational authorities in such practices as the withdrawal of children from school for months at a time in order to go ''home" to Pakistan, on the grounds that such practices were appropriate to the children's native culture. In language that was sometimes maladroit, he drew attention, at a time when it was still impermissible to do so, to the dangers of ghettoes developing in British cities.

Mr Honeyford thought that schools such as his own, the Drummond Middle School, where 95 per cent of the children were of Pakistani or Bangladeshi origin, were a disaster both for their pupils and for society as a whole. He was a passionate believer in the redemptive power of education, and its ability to integrate people of different backgrounds and weld them into a common society. He then became notorious for, among other things, his insistence that Muslim girls should be educated to the same standard as everyone else.

Last week, 22 years on, he was finally vindicated. The same liberal establishment that had professed outrage at his views quietly accepted that he was, after all, right. Ruth Kelly, the Communities Secretary, made a speech, publicly questioning the multiculturalist orthodoxies that, for so long, have acted almost as a test of virtue among "right-thinking" people. As Miss Kelly told an audience: "There are white Britons who do not feel comfortable with change. They see the shops and restaurants in their town centres changing. They see their neighbourhoods becoming more diverse.

Detached from the benefits of those changes, they begin to believe the stories about ethnic minorities getting special treatment, and to develop a resentment, a sense of grievance. We have moved from a period of uniform consensus on the value of multiculturalism, to one where we can encourage that debate by questioning whether it is encouraging separateness. These are difficult questions and it is important that we don't shy away from them. In our attempt to avoid imposing a single British identity and culture, have we ended up with some communities living in isolation of each other, with no common bonds between them?"

Miss Kelly's speech comes two decades too late to save the career of Mr Honeyford. And asked last week whether the minister's speech would change anything, Mr Honeyford shrugged resignedly and said it was too late for that, too.

$55 TRILLION PAUPERHOOD:

Net Worth--and the Dollar--Rise Again (Michael Mandel, 6/12/06, Business Week)

The amount of (pessimistic) nonsense that is written about the U.S. economy is truly extraordinary. The usual rap is that the U.S. is borrowing its way into oblivion--and eventually we are going to get our come-uppance when the dollar plunges and no one wants to lend to us anymore.

But oblivion is looking pretty good these days. Despite all the pessimism and all the borrowing, the country's net worth continues to rise, according to the latest figures from the Federal Reserve!
[...]

Let's look at a chart first. I calculate a concept that I call "real adjusted net worth per capita". That's equal to household net worth, minus government net debt, adjusted for inflation, and divided by the size of the population.

Here's what the chart looks like.

Real adjusted net worth per capita rose to $142,000 in the first quarter of 2006 (in 2000 dollars). That's up 6% over a year earlier, and higher than the previous peak.

You can see from the chart that there is a long-term upward trend, distorted by the late 1990s boom. So even with all of our borrowing, our net worth has been increasing.

Take a look at the Federal Reserve's latest data on the balance sheets of households and corporations. Over the past year household net worth, which is the net of all assets minus liabilities, increased by $4.9 trillion, to a record $53.8 trillion. The boost reflected more than just higher home prices, with gains in financial assets -- from bank deposits to stocks and bonds -- contributing the lion's share. Those increases are partly why household spending has been so resilient over the past year in the face of surging gasoline prices and rising interest rates.

With the economy beginning to slow, the current expansion has a chance to become the first sustained period of economic growth since World War II that fails to offer a prolonged increase in real wages for most workers. [...]

[H]ealth care is far more expensive than it was a decade ago, causing companies to spend more on benefits at the expense of wages. [...]

[P]olls show that Americans are less dissatisfied with the economy than they were in the early 1980’s or early 90’s. Rising house and stock values have lifted the net worth of many families over the last few years, and interest rates remain fairly low. [...]

Total employee compensation — wages plus benefits — has fared a little better. Its share was briefly lower than its current level of 56.1 percent in the mid-1990’s and otherwise has not been so low since 1966. [...]

Average family income, adjusted for inflation, has continued to advance at a good clip, a fact Mr. Bush has cited when speaking about the economy.

The nation's real median income was up 1.1 percent from 2004 to 2005, reaching more than $46,000, the US Census Bureau reported Tuesday. That's about $500 more than last year.

At the same time, the poverty rate has stabilized, after ticking upward for several years.

One of the joys of my working life is that I get to read papers like "The State of Working America" from the Economic Policy Institute. [...]

To start with, they make some adjustments to the usual measures of the income of a nation, the GDP, by adjusting for different price levels. This gives us the so called Purchasing Power Parity numbers (PPP) and the USA is set as being 100 on the scale. Only one of the advanced industrial nations has a greater income per capita, Norway, at 105. Given that Norway gets some 20% of its GDP from pumping oil and gas out from beneath the North Sea and is, thus, almost a petro-state, it would be fair to say that the USA is, in fact, the large country with the highest income per head in the world without depleting its natural capital. Good, so far something we knew already.

We're also told on page 6 that if we look at the average of the countries studied without the USA and compare that to the USA's performance, that income growth rates are higher in the USA. 1.8% to 1.9% in 1989-2000, and 1.1% to 1.3% in 2000-2004. So not only richer but getting even richer faster, as well.

Furthermore:

"The U.S. average from 2000 to 2005 was 1.7%, well above the OECD average of 0.7% in real compensation growth. Four countries fared better than the United States, most notably Norway with 2.3% growth. Note also that Germany had negative real compensation growth from 2000-05."

Things are actually looking pretty good for the US economy, then -- wealthier to start with, getting richer faster and productivity growth is also highest in the USA, meaning that this trend is only likely to continue. Looking at all of that it's really rather difficult to see that there's anything wrong with the way things are being managed (or not). [...]

In the USA the poor get 39% of the US median income and in Finland (and Sweden) the poor get 38% of the US median income. It's not worth quibbling over 1% so let's take it as read that the poor in America have exactly the same standard of living as the poor in Finland (and Sweden). Which is really a rather revealing number don't you think? All those punitive tax rates, all that redistribution, that blessed egalitarianism, the flatter distribution of income, leads to a change in the living standards of the poor of precisely ... nothing.

MORE:
Bubbling Crude? (Robert J. Samuelson, July 26, 2006, Newsweek)

Despite all the griping, gasoline is still affordable. Even at $3 a gallon, it costs Americans only about 4 percent of their disposable income, reports economist Nigel Gault of Global Insight. The same is true globally. At $70 a barrel, global crude sales would total about $2.2 trillion annually; that's still a tiny share of the $50 trillion world economy.

Meanwhile, this is nearly dispositive, Catering to Ignorance (Russell Roberts, 8/28/06, Cafe Hayek)

YOU CAN TAKE THE CARDINAL OUT OF GERMANY...:

Pope sacks astronomer over evolution debate (SIMON CALDWELL, 8/23/06, Daily Mail)

Pope Benedict XVI has sacked his chief astronomer after a series of public clashes over the theory of evolution.

He has removed Father George Coyne from his position as director of the Vatican Observatory after the American Jesuit priest repeatedly contradicted the Holy See's endorsement of "intelligent design" theory, which essentially backs the "Adam and Eve" theory of creation.

Benedict favours intelligent design, which says God directs the process of evolution, over Charles Darwin’s original theory which holds that species evolve through the random, unplanned processes of genetic mutation and the survival of the fittest.

CHOOSE LIFE:

The Battle for India (Robert T. McLean, 8/28/2006, American Spectator)

The Bush Administration inherited few initiatives that Washington could build on, but the president has taken advantage of some inherent qualities that both the United States and India possess and some burdens that each must address.

The United States and India are both longstanding democracies that happen to be fighting Islamic fanaticism and facing the prospect of China's uncertain intentions that accompany its ever-expanding regional and global influence. Despite an increase in economic cooperation between Beijing and New Delhi -- according to some analysts, China should become India's largest trading partner next year -- geographic and historical factors continue to contribute to mutual suspicion. Less than helpful in this situation has been the strengthening of the traditional alliance between Beijing and Islamabad. Compounding this problem is China's construction at the Port of Gwadar in Pakistan, which essentially gives Beijing a naval presence on both sides of the Indian subcontinent.

Fortunately, a majority in Congress understand the implications of nuclear cooperation between the United States and India. On July 26, the House of Representatives passed the United States and India Nuclear Cooperation Promotion Act of 2006 recognizing India as a nuclear weapons state. The Senate is expected to pass its own version of the bill next month, but it is imperative that excessive additional conditions are not placed on New Delhi as such an alteration of the original text of the agreement could jeopardize the entire bilateral strategic partnership. Although ties are consistently improving between Washington and New Delhi, setbacks this fall could push the Indians to conclude that the politically homogenous governments in Beijing and Moscow are more reliable partners than the politically tempestuous United States.

However, in the end it most likely that the nuclear agreement will become law and President Bush and Prime Minister Singh will continue to strengthen their relationship. While New Delhi has yet to sign on to the Proliferation Security Initiative, the biennial American led RIMPAC naval exercises held this summer included India as an observer nation for the first time. India's desires to become a permanent member of the UN Security Council should also play to Washington's advantage. While this is unlikely to occur in the near future, the United States could highlight the actual roadblocks in this effort as both China and Russia strongly oppose Japan's -- who along with Germany and Brazil would likely have to accompany India in any addition -- request to be admitted as a permanent member.

HE'D NOT HAVE BEEN SURPRISED THAT THE HYPOTHESES JUST GOT STRINGIER:

The Unimportance
of Evolution (G. K. Chesterton, March 15, 1930, America)

It is of course immensely interesting to those whose business it is to be interested in it; as the smallest star in the Nebula of Andromeda is intensely interesting to an astronomer; or the minutest shade of variety in duckweed may be of vast importance to a botanist. That sort of really scientific science the Church entirely approves, often munificently patronizes and, for the most part, very wisely lets alone. But it is not essential that the guardian of faith and morals should pronounce upon duckweed.

It may seem like a joke to say that Evolution as such is no more serious than the Derby winner. But horse racing is in the same moral world as horse breeding. And horse breeding is a perfect example of the really impartial and scientific study of Evolution.

The whole argument is concerned with whether animal life as such went through a process of adaptation or selection like that of horse breeding; and whether it is possible to have horse breeding without a horse breeder. In our human experience we know it is done by a directive will; and it would seem most reasonable that where it could not be done by a directive human will, it might be done by a directive Divine will. Darwin and others maintained, more or less doubtfully, that it might be done by a sort of prolonged coincidence; a chapter of accidents.

Darwin's theory of how this might have occurred has been largely abandoned by the latest scientific men; and indeed is only still accepted as a piece of Victorian respectability by old-fashioned people like Bishop Barnes. But in any case, it never went very far towards touching the primary problems; and Darwin himself hardly pretended that it did.

The truth is that the enemies of Christianity, the men who started with a prejudice against religion long before they had studied any science, tried to stretch these very thin and stringy theories, or rather hypotheses, of the nineteenth-century biologists, and make them impinge somehow on Christian philosophy; drawing all sorts of philosophical morals from them which the biological suggestions did not really support, even if they had been true.

BILL WHO?:

Shopping for Support Down the Wrong Aisle (Sebastian Mallaby, August 28, 2006, Washington Post)

Once upon a time, smart Democrats defended globalization, open trade and the companies that thrive within this system. They were wary of tethering themselves to an anti-trade labor movement that represents a dwindling fraction of the electorate. They understood the danger in bashing corporations: Voters don't hate corporations, because many of them work for one.

Then dot-bombs and Enron punctured corporate America's prestige, and Democrats bolted. Rather than hammer legitimately on real instances of corporate malfeasance -- accounting scandals, out-of-control executive compensation and the like -- Democrats swallowed the whole anti-corporate playbook.

To see the difference between then and now, just look at the Clintons. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Hillary Clinton sat on Wal-Mart's board; and when Sam Walton died in 1992, Bill Clinton lauded him as "a wonderful family man and one of the greatest citizens in the history of the state of Arkansas.'' Campaigning in the New Hampshire primary that year, Bill Clinton came proudly to the rescue of a local company called American Brush Co. by helping it become a Wal-Mart supplier.

Times change.

MORE:
Wal-Mart's A Diversion: On any list of the nations major concerns, the giant retailer would not rank in the first 50. So why are Dems spending so much time talking about it? (Robert J. Samuelson, 9/04/06, Newsweek)
What else do they have?

STARVING THE TAX-EATERS:

Federal Jobs Decline As Contractor Market Expands (Cecilia Kang, August 28, 2006, Washington Post)

A closer look at July's employment data for the Washington area underscores a shift in the economy, with the number of jobs in the federal government shrinking and the number at companies that serve the government expanding. [...]

The number of federal government jobs, meanwhile, fell 0.6 percent, to 341,900.

HIGH LIFE:

Tigers to call up No. 1 pick (AP, 8/27/06)

General manager Dave Dombrowski said lefty Andrew Miller, Detroit's No. 1 draft pick in June, will be called up Tuesday from Class A Lakeland before the Tigers open a three-game series at Yankee Stadium in New York.

FIRST ORDER:

Order in the Courts (J ALEXANDER THIER, 8/28/06, NY Times)

A few weeks ago the new Parliament approved a fresh slate of Supreme Court justices — a strong group of professionals and reformers that includes several of Afghanistan’s pre-eminent legal minds.

This court represents a sea change from the judiciary that has been in place since the collapse of the Taliban. For the first time in its history, Afghanistan may have a real system of checks and balances. But the United States and its partners must seize this opportunity and act quickly to support the new court, and not squander another chance for meaningful reform.

It’s the big bang moment of democracy, when the three branches of government all come into being, each with its own powers and limitations. We are witnessing in Afghanistan today what the American founders understood so well: alone, factions and institutions will abuse their power, but in combination they will constrain and balance one another, creating stability amid competition and turmoil.

Afghanistan’s Parliament, still struggling to find its feet, has played a critical role in this constitutional drama. Last spring, the body rejected the previous chief justice, Fazel Hadi Shinwari, a fundamentalist firebrand whom President Hamid Karzai had appointed in deference to Islamist demands. Rising to the challenge, Mr. Karzai then nominated Abdul Salam Azimi, a moderate Islamic scholar and the primary drafter of Afghanistan’s new democratic constitution. The Parliament approved Mr. Azimi as chief justice, along with a slate of other moderates.

Chief Justice Azimi and his associates have substantial experience and a demonstrated desire to build an effective system that promotes the rule of law.

MORE:
As violence drops in Baghdad, national reconciliation makes gains (Multi-National Force--Iraq, 27 August 2006)

Meanwhile, in Washington, Iraq's Deputy President Adil Abd al-Mahdi met with U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon on Friday to further discuss Iraq’s country’s commitment to reconciliation.

Following a meeting at the Pentagon, Rumsfeld and al-Mahdi spoke with reporters about progress in Iraq. The secretary praised the work of Iraqi security forces, which he said now number more than 267,000. He said there has been a reduction in the levels of violence, particularly in areas U.S. and Iraqi forces have been able to clear.

In spite of the gains in security, Rumsfeld stressed the Iraqi people and their government hold the key to long-term stability and security.

"The important thing is for the Iraqi government to achieve success with respect to their reconciliation process," he said. "This is not purely a military problem, and it is not going to be solved purely by military forces."

Rumsfeld said the Iraqi government is committed to achieving reconciliation among various groups.

"Admittedly, it is a lot easier to talk about it than to do it," he said. "It's been done in other countries. I believe it can be achieved here. They're going to have to work very hard on it, and it's going to take some time, but it is a process, not an event."

Al-Mahdi said the process is taking place. The national unity government of Iraq has both a working reconciliation plan and a good plan to secure Baghdad, two steps that counter those who would push Iraq toward a civil war, he said.

"At least 20 of the groups are dialoguing now with the government," he said. "We have to see the results. We have to see the impact of this. We are optimistic."

The Iraqi government is open to proposals from those willing to put their arms aside and find a solution, al-Mahdi said, but government forces will continue to put pressure on insurgents and terrorists.

"The government is stronger than ever," he said. "Our armed forces are getting much better than before in number, in quality, in operations. They are leading operations now."

Al-Mahdi said seventy percent of Iraq is now stable and secure, which makes the Iraqi people "fully optimistic" about their future.

"The Iraqi people think that there is no other issue but victory in Iraq," he said. "The Iraqi people can't leave the country. There is no withdrawal for the Iraqi people. The multi-national forces are supporting Iraqi people and will continue to support and have the sympathy of Iraqis."

"BACTERIA OF STUPIDITY":

'Gaza caught in anarchy and thuggery' (Khaled Abu Toameh, Aug. 28, 2006, THE JERUSALEM POST)

Dismissing Israel's responsibility for the growing state of anarchy and lawlessness in the Gaza Strip, [ Ghazi Hamad, spokesman for the Hamas-controlled Palestinian Authority,] said it was time for the Palestinians to embark on a soul-searching process to see where they erred.

"We're always afraid to talk about our mistakes," he added. "We're used to blaming our mistakes on others. What is the relationship between the chaos, anarchy, lawlessness, indiscriminate murders, theft of land, family rivalries, transgression on public lands and unorganized traffic and the occupation? We are still trapped by the mentality of conspiracy theories - one that has limited our capability to think."

Hamad admitted that the Palestinians have failed in developing the Gaza Strip following the Israeli withdrawal and in imposing law and order. He said about 500 Palestinians have been killed and 3,000 wounded since the Israeli pullout, in addition to the destruction of much of the infrastructure in the area.

By comparison, he said, only three or four Israelis have been killed by the rockets fired from the Gaza Strip over the same period.

"Some will argue that it's not a matter of profit or loss, but that this has an accumulating effect" he said. "This may be true. But isn't there a possibility of decreasing the number of casualties and increasing our gains by using our brains and making the proper calculations away from demagogic statements?"

The Hamas official said that while his government was unable to change the situation, the opposition was sitting on the side and watching and PA President Mahmoud Abbas was as weak as ever.

"We have all been attacked by the bacteria of stupidity," he remarked. "We have lost our sense of direction and we don't know where we're headed."

Hizbullah last night admitted it would not have captured the two Israeli soldiers last month had it known a war would follow. [...]

"We did not think, even one percent, that the capture would lead to a war at this time and of this magnitude," Hassan Nasrallah, the cleric who leads Hizbullah, told Lebanon's New TV channel. "You ask me, if I had known on July 11 ... that the operation would lead to such a war, would I do it? I say no, absolutely not." He said Italy would play a part in negotiating the soldiers' eventual release. "Contacts recently began for negotiations," he said. "It seems that Italy is trying to get into the subject." From the start, Mr Nasrallah has said he wanted to exchange the soldiers for Lebanese and Palestinians held in Israel.

BATHOS AND THE AGING REBEL ROCK STAR

Keef faces cigarette rap (The Guardian, August 28th, 2006)

Keith Richards is used to an occasional run-in with the police, most notably drug charges during the 60s and 70s, but his law-breaking days appeared to be behind him. But the legendary rock band's guitarist is now being investigated by Glasgow city council after it received reports that he had broken Scotland's smoking ban.

Council officials confirmed yesterday they are to launch an inquiry to whether the Stones' axeman lit up on stage at Glasgow's Hampden Park last Friday night when the band played there in their Bigger Bang European tour.

A city spokesman said: "This has been brought to our attention and we will be looking into it. Glasgow city council takes its responsibility for enforcing the smoking ban very seriously."

No doubt some around these parts will celebrate this as the triumph of a puritan nation, but isn’t charging Keith Richards with smoking while applauding his music a little like potting Linda Lovelace for indulging in a post-coital cigarette?

VIRGINS AND DYNAMOS:

RAFSANJANI'S DAUGHTER TAKES ACTIVE ROLE: Religion 'not limiting' women in Iran (GARY TEGLER, 8/28/06, The Japan Times

Born into an educated, politically active family in Iran, Fatemeh Hashemi defies the image of Muslim women often held in Japan.

"Ninety-nine percent of Iranians are religious. This says nothing against modernity," Hashemi, the eldest daughter of Hashemi Rafsanjani, president of Iran from 1989 to 1997, said in an interview Sunday.

"The Shiite sect has an element of dynamism and you can adapt yourself and the laws to new conditions. Religion is not a limitation or restriction for progress. Seventy percent of university students are female. The rate of literacy among women when the revolution took place (in 1979) was 32 percent. This has now changed to 84 percent," she said. [...]

Fifteen years ago, she founded the Women's Solidarity Association, one of three NGOs she currently heads. The association's objectives are to review women's problems in Iran and to make recommendations to the government. Her efforts, and those of her cohorts, brought about changes to Iranian laws, particularly those that pertain to marriage and a woman's right to work and be educated.

LESS DIALOGUE, MORE PRESSURE:

Abe mulling harder line against North Korea (Japan Times, 8/28/06)

Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe is considering tougher measures against North Korea than those adopted by Junichiro Koizumi if he becomes prime minister next month, hoping to help settle the issue of Japanese abductions, government sources said Sunday.

As prime minister, Abe would boost the power of a government task force on the abductions and push ahead with new measures for economic sanctions in cooperation with the ruling coalition parties, the sources said.

They said these plans would represent a policy shift from Koizumi's "dialogue and pressure" against North Korea to one stressing "pressure."

DEMOGRAPHIC DECLINES DON'T HAVE SOFT LANDINGS:

10m want to quit 'over-taxed' UK (David Cracknell, 8/27/06, Times of London)

ONE in five Britons — nearly 10m adults — is considering leaving the country amid growing disillusionment over the failure of political parties to deliver tax cuts, according to a new poll.

The extensive survey conducted by ICM, the polling company, shows that — contrary to the current approach of both Labour and the Tories — an overwhelming majority of voters do want to see cuts in income and inheritance tax.

THE KIDS CAN BE CORRECT OR WE CAN BE POLITICALLY CORRECT:

Teacher's gender affects how well kids learn, study suggests (BEN FELLER, 8/28/06, Associated Press)

For all the differences between the sexes, here's one that might stir up debate in the teacher's lounge: Boys learn more from men and girls learn more from women.

That's the upshot of a provocative study by Thomas Dee, an associate professor of economics at Swarthmore College and visiting scholar at Stanford University. His study was to appear Monday in Education Next, a quarterly journal published by the Hoover Institution. [...]

His study comes as the proportion of male teachers is at its lowest level in 40 years. Roughly 80 per cent of teachers in U.S. public schools are women.

Dr. Dee's study is based on a nationally representative survey of nearly 25,000 eighth-graders that was conducted by the Education Department in 1988. Though dated, the survey is the most comprehensive look at students in middle school, when gender gaps emerge, Dr. Dee said.

He examined test scores as well as self-reported perceptions by teachers and students.

Dr. Dee found that having a female teacher instead of a male teacher raised the achievement of girls and lowered that of boys in science, social studies and English.

Looked at the other way, when a man led the class, boys did better and girls did worse.

The study found switching up teachers actually could narrow achievement gaps between boys and girls, but one gender would gain at the expense of the other.

Dr. Dee also contends that gender influences attitudes.

For example, with a female teacher, boys were more likely to be seen as disruptive. Girls were less likely to be considered inattentive or disorderly.

In a class taught by a man, girls were more likely to say the subject was not useful for their future. They were less likely to look forward to the class or to ask questions.

GUYS JUST WANNA HAVE FUN

Failing boys put university drive in doubt (Julie Henry, The Telegraph, August 27th, 2006)

Government plans for half of young people to go to university are being scuppered by boys' underachievement, figures have revealed.

Data published last week by the University and Colleges Admission Service show that 30,000 more girls than boys have gained places at university so far this year. On some degree courses, such as psychology, girls outnumber boys by more than four to one and almost twice as many have been accepted onto law courses.

The gap between the number of British male and female undergraduates studying at universities has increased from 170,510 in 2000 to 295,575 in 2005. The difference is such that the proportion of women aged 18 to 30 attending university, which currently stands at 47 per cent, is likely to hit the Government's target of 50 per cent by the end of the decade. Boys, however, languish at 37 per cent and show little sign of improving.[...]

John Dunford, the general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said: "Much higher proportions of boys than girls are disinclined to work hard at school.

''I think it can be traced to the way in which girls and boys are treated differently at a very early stage.

More likely it can be traced to their perceptions of what will be expected of them at a much later stage.

SOME MORE CALM AND REASONED DEBATE BETWEEN THE SEXES

Guys, a word of advice (India Knight, The Times, August 27th, 2006)

There’s a huge hoo-ha in America about an article published on the business website Forbes.com. It starts off like this: “Guys: a word of advice. Marry pretty women or ugly ones. Short ones or tall ones. Blondes or brunettes. Just, whatever you do, don’t marry a woman with a career.”

The writer, Michael Noer, cites at length a piece in Social Forces, a US research journal, that has apparently found marrying a working woman dramatically ups the risk of having a difficult marriage and that “professional women are more likely to get divorced, more likely to cheat, less likely to have children and, if they do have kids, they are more likely to be unhappy about it. Even those with a ‘feminist’ outlook are happier when their husband is the primary breadwinner” [...]

You can imagine the outcry the article has caused. Women readers aren’t happy and the website has now posted a spirited riposte by one of its female correspondents alongside Noer’s original feature.

What is interesting about all of this is that I suspect Noer’s central point — that working women are trouble and that you’re better off with a docile little breeder or, indeed, a trophy wife — is more widely held by men than you or I might imagine. It’s not a viewpoint they like to trumpet in mixed company, obviously, but I’ve heard it expressed more times than I care to remember in private.

It stems in part from a sweet but inane desire for alpha malehood — me man, me provide, me gain big-eyed gratitude for ace wage-earning skills — and from chronic sexual insecurity. If your nice little wife is safely at home all day, instead of running around the boardroom with men who might — the horror — be somewhat more alpha than you, she’s more likely to admire your manly skills and talents when you come home at night, and not realise what she’s missing. [...]

The point, surely, is that women should have the freedom to do exactly what they wish to do with their lives...

Surely you don’t think we are crazy enough to wade into this one. But, careers or no careers, any man or woman who is thinking of marrying someone whose opening gambit is that they should have the freedom to do exactly what they wish to do with their lives should consider holy orders instead.

GARBAGE IN, GARBAGE OUT

The potholes in college students' minds (Michael Skube, Houston Chronicle, August 26th, 2006)

We were talking informally in class not long ago, 17 college sophomores and I, and on a whim I asked who some of their favorite writers are. The question hung in uneasy silence. At length, a voice in the rear hesitantly volunteered the name of ... Dan Brown.

No other names were offered.

The author of The DaVinci Code was not just the best writer they could think of; he was the only writer they could think of.

In our better private universities and flagship state schools today, it's hard to find a student who graduated from high school with much lower than a 3.5 GPA, and not uncommon to find students whose GPAs were 4.0 or higher. They somehow got these suspect grades without having read much. Or if they did read, they've given it up. And it shows —— in their writing and even in their conversation.

A few years ago, I began keeping a list of everyday words that may as well have been potholes in exchanges with college students. It began with a fellow who was two months away from graduating from a well-respected Midwestern university.

"And what was the impetus for that?" I asked as he finished a presentation.

At the word "impetus" his head snapped sideways, as if by reflex. "The what?" he asked.

We just can't imagine what the problem could be.

BLAIR DERANGEMENT SYNDROME

Compliant and subservient: Jimmy Carter's explosive critique of Tony Blair (John Preston and Melissa Kite, The Telegraph, August 27th, 2006)

Tony Blair's lack of leadership and timid subservience to George W Bush lie behind the ongoing crisis in Iraq and the worldwide threat of terrorism, according to the former American president Jimmy Carter.

"I have been surprised and extremely disappointed by Tony Blair's behaviour," he told The Sunday Telegraph.

"I think that more than any other person in the world the Prime Minister could have had a moderating influence on Washington - and he has not. I really thought that Tony Blair, who I know personally to some degree, would be a constraint on President Bush's policies towards Iraq."

In an exclusive interview, President Carter made it plain that he sees Mr Blair's lack of leadership as being a key factor in the present crisis in Iraq, which followed the 2003 invasion - a pre-emptive move he said he would never have considered himself as president.[...]

At 81, Mr Carter - the 39th American president, from 1977 to 1981, and the winner of the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize - plainly has no intention of sitting on his porch and nodding quietly away as the sun goes down over his peanut farm.

There is nothing like those good old southern manners in a guest.

ABOUT TIME THEY GOT AROUND TO OPPOSING THE STAMP TAX:

Tories vow to scrap stamp duty on shares to boost pensions (Melissa Kite, 27/08/2006, Daily Telegraph)

The Conservatives open up an important offensive today against Gordon Brown by unveiling plans to abolish stamp duty on shares.

Outlining the party's first tax-cutting proposal, the shadow chancellor, George Osborne, said the move would form part of a package of measures designed to increase competitiveness and boost the value of pensions.

In an interview with The Sunday Telegraph, Mr Osborne said: "Of all the damaging things Gordon Brown has done to the economy, the single most destructive has been the attack on personal pensions. 'Repairing the damage done to the pensions system has got to be a top priority for the next Conservative government.
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"Sadly, simply reversing the pensions tax he imposed in 1998 wouldn't work, as many final salary schemes have closed. 'We need to look at new ways of repairing the damage and that is why I am particularly keen to look at stamp duty on shares."

He welcomed a Bow Group pamphlet, to be published tomorrow, which calls for abolition of the tax.

A LATE HIT AFTER THE WHISTLE

Reuters car hit by Israeli airstrike (Globe and Mail, August 26th, 2006)

Israeli aircraft fired two missiles early Sunday at an armoured car belonging to the Reuters news agency, wounding five people, including two cameramen, Palestinian witnesses and hospital officials said.

The Israeli army said it did not realize the car's passengers were journalists and only attacked because the vehicle was driving in a suspicious manner near Israeli troops in the middle of a combat zone.

Sure it was.

THE UNHOLY GAME:

Celtic player's sign of cross caution 'will make Scotland a laughing stock' (ARTHUR MACMILLAN, Scotland on Sunday)

THE decision by the Crown Office to caution a Celtic footballer for "inciting" Rangers supporters will make Scotland the "laughing stock of the world", it was claimed yesterday, amid growing anger about the decision.

Labour MP Jim Devine condemned the warning given to Artur Boruc, who reportedly crossed himself in front of rival fans during an Old Firm game.

The MP for Livingston, who is a lifelong Celtic supporter, described the decision as an embarrassment, as footballers in "virtually every stadium in the world" went through a match ritual, including blessing themselves.

Strathclyde Police investigated claims that Boruc, 26, angered a section of the home support after allegedly making the religious gesture at the start of the second half of the match at Ibrox stadium on February 12.

Officers later submitted a report to the procurator fiscal, who then issued the goalkeeper with a warning. [...]

However, Devine said yesterday: "I find it sad that some people in the 21st century find this offensive and feel the need to make a complaint to police about it. Surely the police and Crown Office could be spending their time more effectively than responding to a complaint about a ritual that takes place on a routine basis in just about every football match. I will be writing to the Crown Office for a full explanation of their decision as this could end up happening every week."

The Catholic Church described the decision to warn the Polish footballer about his conduct as "alarming".

MORE:
SENSELESS SHAMING OF BORUC (Sunday Mail, 8/27/06)

NEWS that Celtic goalkeeper Artur Boruc has been rapped by police for crossing himself at a match has sent shockwaves around the world.

From the U.S. to the Far East, bulletins reported how a Catholic footballer was accused of a crime for making the sign of the cross.

And every time the story is retold it is explained how sectarian hatred is a scar on Scottish society.

The image of Scotland being beamed around the globe is not one we can take any pride in.

First Minister Jack McConnell once said that sectarianism was Scotland's "secret shame".

Well, whether you think Boruc is guilty of a crime or not, it is a secret no more.

The whole world thinks we are a narrow-minded petty little nation.

TWO-FER (via Tom Morin):

Publicans smoulder as smoke ban hits drink sales (David Lister, 8/24/06, Times of London)

PUBLICANS in Scotland are demanding millions of pounds in compensation after their trade association published figures yesterday suggesting that alcohol sales in pubs, hotels and restaurants had dropped by 11 per cent since the smoking ban.

However, Andy Kerr, the Scottish Executive’s Health Minister, immediately challenged the survey’s findings. He said: “I have not met a single person who wants to turn the clock back and reintroduce smoking in restaurants and pubs. Indeed, feedback to me has been quite the opposite.”

AIMED AT W, GOT POWELL:

The Man Who Said Too Much (Michael Isikoff, 8/27/06, Newsweek)

In the early morning of Oct. 1, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell received an urgent phone call from his No. 2 at the State Department. Richard Armitage was clearly agitated. As recounted in a new book, "Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War," Armitage had been at home reading the newspaper and had come across a column by journalist Robert Novak. Months earlier, Novak had caused a huge stir when he revealed that Valerie Plame, wife of Iraq-war critic Joseph Wilson, was a CIA officer. Ever since, Washington had been trying to find out who leaked the information to Novak. The columnist himself had kept quiet. But now, in a second column, Novak provided a tantalizing clue: his primary source, he wrote, was a "senior administration official" who was "not a partisan gunslinger." Armitage was shaken. After reading the column, he knew immediately who the leaker was. On the phone with Powell that morning, Armitage was "in deep distress," says a source directly familiar with the conversation who asked not to be identified because of legal sensitivities. "I'm sure he's talking about me."

Armitage's admission led to a flurry of anxious phone calls and meetings that day at the State Department. (Days earlier, the Justice Department had launched a criminal investigation into the Plame leak after the CIA informed officials there that she was an undercover officer.) Within hours, William Howard Taft IV, the State Department's legal adviser, notified a senior Justice official that Armitage had information relevant to the case. The next day, a team of FBI agents and Justice prosecutors investigating the leak questioned the deputy secretary. Armitage acknowledged that he had passed along to Novak information contained in a classified State Department memo: that Wilson's wife worked on weapons-of-mass-destruction issues at the CIA. (The memo made no reference to her undercover status.) Armitage had met with Novak in his State Department office on July 8, 2003—just days before Novak published his first piece identifying Plame. Powell, Armitage and Taft, the only three officials at the State Department who knew the story, never breathed a word of it publicly and Armitage's role remained secret.

Armitage, a well-known gossip who loves to dish and receive juicy tidbits about Washington characters, apparently hadn't thought through the possible implications of telling Novak about Plame's identity.

THE REST IS JUST A FORMALITY:

The McCain Makeover (Glenn Frankel, August 27, 2006, Washington Post Magazine)

DON'T LOOK NOW, but 26 months before November 2008 the race for president has already started. McCain and his potential rivals are out on the campaign trail virtually every week. They are raising money and support for federal and state candidates in the 2006 election. But they are also collecting chits, building name recognition and garnering backers for the presidential campaign to come.

"Teddy White must be turning over in his grave," says John Weaver, McCain's chief campaign strategist, referring to the late author of The Making of the President books. "I can't believe we're doing this so early."

But doing it they are. And no one more assiduously, nor with more apparent success, than McCain, who has vaulted to the front of the GOP field. Early polls indicate he gets twice as much support as any other likely Republican candidate except Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City, who runs close behind. Even in liberal, blue-state strongholds such as Massachusetts, McCain runs even with or better than the two most recognizable Democratic names, Hillary Clinton and Al Gore. As a former Navy pilot who was shot down over Hanoi and spent more than five years as a prisoner of war, he's got impeccable military credentials and stature, and a reputation for bipartisanship and fierce independence that appeals to a broad spectrum of voters. He's also got star power: Turn on your television most days, and you'll find McCain on one of the morning talkfests or on "Larry King Live," "Imus" or "Hannity and Colmes."

Many of the Republican professionals who once wrote off McCain as the loosest of political cannons say they are surprised and impressed at the careful, disciplined way he and his staff have gone about establishing his as yet undeclared candidacy. He is laboring hard to become the presumptive candidate for a party that almost always nominates the presumptive candidate.

"He's very much where George W. Bush was in 1998 and '99 -- getting his team established, trying to create that same air of inevitability that Karl Rove tried to create around Bush," says Saul Anuzis, chairman of Michigan's Republican Party, referring to Bush's political Rasputin.

Still, there are many rivers to cross before November 2008. McCain has to vanquish a formidable cast of possible Republican opponents, which could include Sens. George Allen (Va.), Sam Brownback (Kan.), Bill Frist (Tenn.) and Chuck Hagel (Neb.), along with Newt Gingrich, Giuliani and Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. He also faces a host of enemies among Republican interest groups and social conservatives who have not forgiven or forgotten his run as an iconoclastic insurgent in 2000 and who dislike some of the positions he currently holds on litmus-test issues such as the gay marriage amendment (he's against it) and stem cell research (he's for it).

WASN'T THIS THE ISSUE DEMOCRATS WOULD RIDE TO POWER?:

Split Remains: NEWSWEEK Poll: A possibly revolutionary innovation in stem-cell research hasn’t changed American opinions on the topic (Arian Campo-Flores, 8/27/06, Newsweek)

According to the latest NEWSWEEK Poll, 48 percent of respondents favor federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research, while 40 percent oppose it. That’s little different from the results of an October 2004 poll, taken in the heat of a presidential campaign, which found that 50 percent of registered voters favored the research and 36 percent opposed it.

BUT THEIR FACES ARE WELL SPITED:

Lieberman’s Run Shadows House Campaigns in Connecticut (JENNIFER MEDINA, 8/27/06, NY Times)

As Senator Joseph I. Lieberman begins to mount a vigorous and well-financed re-election campaign as an independent, many Connecticut Democrats say they are worried that his bid could jeopardize their party’s ability to win in three hotly contested House races this fall.

Mr. Lieberman, a centrist Democrat who lost in the Aug. 8 Democratic primary to Ned Lamont, a wealthy businessman, is now running on his own line. With polls showing that many Democrats are eager for a change, Democratic officials say they expect Mr. Lieberman to campaign aggressively to win over Republican and unaffiliated voters.

If he does, Democratic strategists say, he may well attract voters to the polls who are likely to support the state’s three Republicans in Congress: Nancy Johnson, Rob Simmons and Christopher Shays.

“He has a Republican vote, that’s the fact,” said Tom Matzzie, the political director of Moveon.org, a liberal group that is backing Mr. Lamont and the Democratic challengers in the three House races. And those voters, he said, are “likely to vote as Republicans in every race.”

BACK TO THE ANGLOSPHERE:

The Americanization of Canada by Harper (Haroon Siddiqui, Aug. 27, 2006, Toronto Star)

You may like or dislike his act as the chief cheerleader for Israel and the United States. You may even feel cheated that he had kept his ideology well concealed prior to and during the last election. But at least you know where he stands now.

What you do not know, except in a vague way, is where the main Liberal leadership aspirants stand. They stand in different spots, on different days.

Harper's assertion that the Israeli actions in Lebanon were a measured response to the provocations of Hezbollah was only the start of his reading from the American script.

Bush stalled a ceasefire. So did Harper.

Bush said no to American troops in a multinational force. Harper said no to Canadian participation.

Bush cast the Israeli offensive as a "struggle between the forces of freedom and the force of terror." So did Harper.

Bush tied Lebanon to the larger (failed) war on terrorism. So did Harper.

At times, Harper sounded more hawkish than the Republican neocon hawks.

RESPONSIBILITY SOCIETY:

Palestinian PM optimistic about journalists' release (CNN, 8/27/06)

The Palestinian prime minister said late Saturday that he hopes two Fox journalists kidnapped earlier this month will be released "in the coming hours," his office said.

The kidnappers have promised Ismail Haniyeh, a member of Hamas who came to power earlier this year, that the journalists will not be hurt, according to Haniyeh's staff.

"There is progress in the issue of the journalists, and there are promises also that they won't be harmed," Haniyeh told the Palestinian news service, Ramattan.

"The interior minister, Said Siyam, is personally following this matter, and we hope it will be resolved in a way befitting us as a resistant and civilized Palestinian people," he said.

MORE:
Fox News Journalists Released in Gaza (Doug Struck, 8/27/06, Washington Post)

Two Fox Television journalists held for 13 days in the Gaza Strip were released Sunday after they were shown on a videotape saying they converted to Islam.

The two journalists, American Steve Centanni, 60, and New Zealand cameraman Olaf Wiig, 36, "have liberated themselves" by converting to Islam, according to the statement accompanying a videotape from a group calling itself the Holy Jihad Brigades.

After their release, Centanni and Wiig told reporters that they hoped that their experience would not scare other journalists from reporting on the Palestinians. After a brief news conference, they headed by van for Jerusalem, CNN reported.

Separately, an Egyptian newspaper reported that a deal was close for a prisoner exchange that would release two Israeli soldiers whose abduction had sparked the 33-day war in south Lebanon.

THERE IS NO BRITAIN:

Poll: SNP set to seize power at Holyrood (EDDIE BARNES, 8/27/06, The Scotsman)

ALEX Salmond is on track to take Scotland to the brink of independence, according to a startling new poll which shows the SNP has opened up a clear lead over Labour.

With just eight months to go until the Holyrood elections, the party has established a four-point lead over its nearest rivals, and appears to be pulling away.
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The SNP claims that if the poll result was repeated at voting booths next year it would eradicate Labour's majority at the Scottish Parliament.

If Salmond becomes First Minister, he has pledged to introduce a bill for an independence referendum within 100 days of taking up office.

THE RIGHT'S BIG DIG:

Billions at stake in border contract (Dave Montgomery, 8/27/06, McClatchy Newspapers)

The Bush administration is expected next month to choose an industry consortium to erect a high-tech security shield along the U.S. borders, launching one of the federal government's most ambitious public-works projects in years.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) calls the proposed Secure Border Initiative Net (SBInet) the "most comprehensive effort in the nation's history" to gain control of more than 6,000 miles of border with Mexico and Canada, and 2,000 miles of coastline.

SBInet is a centerpiece of President Bush's efforts to fortify the U.S.-Mexico border at a time Congress is locked in a struggle to revise the nation's immigration laws. Administration officials say they intend to proceed with the security net regardless of the outcome of the debate over immigration legislation.

The multibillion-dollar undertaking has ignited a contract battle among industry teams headed by four leading defense companies — Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon — and Ericsson, the Swedish-based telecommunications giant with U.S. headquarters in Plano, Texas.

IT'S WHAT WE DO:

Dollars, democracy and Venezuela (Ian James, 8/26/06, The Associated Press)

The U.S. government is spending millions of dollars in the name of democracy in Venezuela — bankrolling human-rights seminars, training emerging leaders, advising political parties and giving to charities.

But the money is raising deep suspicions among supporters of President Hugo Chávez, in part because the U.S. has refused to name many of the groups it's supporting.

Details of the spending emerge in 1,600 pages of grant contracts obtained by The Associated Press through a Freedom of Information Act request. [...]

While USAID oversees much of the public U.S. spending on Latin America, the Bush administration also has stepped up covert efforts in the region. This month, Washington named a career CIA agent as the "mission manager" to oversee U.S. intelligence on Cuba and Venezuela.

The Bush administration has an $80 million plan to hasten change in Cuba, where Chávez has sworn to help defend Fidel Castro's communist system. The U.S. also is spending millions on pro-democracy work in Bolivia, where Bush has warned of "an erosion of democracy" since a Chávez ally, socialist Evo Morales, was elected president in December.

Chávez makes no distinction between the programs supported by U.S. funds and the secret effort he claims the CIA is pursuing to destabilize his government. And it appears a crackdown on the U.S. aid is looming as Chávez runs for re-election in December.

Plane Crashes Near Ky. Airport (Judy Sarasohn, 8/27/06, Washington Post)

A Comair flight carrying 50 people crashed a mile from Lexington, Ky.'s airport early this morning shortly after takeoff. Only one person survived and is in critical condition, according to airline, airport and hospital officials. [...]

The twin-engine aircraft, a Bombardier Canadair CRJ-100, can carry up to 50 passengers, according to Delta's Web site.

GETTING TO MONO ISN'T THAT EASY:

How right wing the left sounds after its moment of racial truth (Rod Liddle, 8/27/06, Sunday Times of London)

Quick, somebody buy a wreath. Last week marked the passing of multiculturalism as official government doctrine. No longer will opponents of this corrosive and divisive creed be silenced simply by the massed Pavlovian ovine accusation: “Racist!” Better still, the very people who foisted multiculturalism upon the country are the ones who have decided that it has now outlived its usefulness — that is, the political left.

It is amazing how a few by-election shocks and some madmen with explosive backpacks can concentrate the mind. At any rate, British citizens, black and white, can move onwards together — towards a sunlit upland of monoculturalism, or maybe zeroculturalism, whatever takes your fancy.

That multiculturalism really is officially dead and buried can be inferred both from Ruth Kelly’s comments last week and, indeed, from the title of the commission that the government had convened in the wake of the July 7 terrorist attacks last year and to which her observations were made.

In fairness, Kelly, the communities and local government secretary, merely posed the question as to whether the creed had resulted in division and alienation. “Have we ended up with some communities living in isolation from each other?” she asked. That she was speaking wholly rhetorically is evident from the title of the commission: the Commission for Integration and Cohesion. You don’t get either of those things with multiculturalism: they are mutually exclusive.

THE ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY LEARNS HOW TO COUNT

Gays must change, says archbishop (Jonathan Wynne-Jones, The Telegraph, August 27th, 2006)

The archbishop of Canterbury has told homosexuals that they need to change their behaviour if they are to be welcomed into the church, The Sunday Telegraph can reveal. Rowan Williams has distanced himself from his one-time liberal support of gay relationships and stressed that the tradition and teaching of the Church has in no way been altered by the Anglican Communion's consecration of its first openly homosexual bishop.

The declaration by the archbishop - rebutting the idea that homosexuals should be included in the church unconditionally - marks a significant development in the church's crisis over homosexuals. According to liberal and homosexual campaigners, it confirmed their fears that the archbishop has become increasingly conservative - and sparked accusations that he has performed an "astonishing" U-turn over the homosexual issue.

Liberals who had previously hailed his appointment said they are dismayed that he appears to have turned his back on an agenda that he previously championed.

However, the archbishop's comments have received strong support from traditionalists. The Rev Rod Thomas, a spokesman for the evangelical pressure group Reform, said: "There is no doubt that he is distancing himself from the views that he has previously expressed. He's right to want to see people converted. The fact that he's saying this is a hugely welcome development."

Maybe he finally decided that the fun of marching on Gay Pride Day wasn’t worth tossing out the plinth of civilization after all.

AND THEN THERE'S THE ONE COUNTRY THAT ACTUALLY DOES STUFF:

France about-turns into a bigger military mess (Michael Portillo, 8/27/06, Sunday Times of London)

‘Il faut aller à Gorazde.” (“We must push through to Gorazde.”) The French defence minister would repeat it like a chant. It was 1995. In Srebrenica, a United Nations so-called safe haven in Bosnia, 8,000 men had been slaughtered by Bosnian Serbs.

Gorazde was another enclave that the UN had promised to defend. But the French and British forces in the region were many miles away. As participants in a UN humanitarian mission they were lightly armed. They had lorries, not tanks, and no aircraft. So the idea of pushing through to Gorazde was fanciful.

It had been a French general, Philippe Morillon, who as head of the UN forces in the former Yugoslavia had first pledged to protect Srebrenica. He did not have the resources to keep that promise and Dutch UN forces in the city did nothing to prevent the massacre. [...]

There is a cultural difference between the French and the British obvious in their diplomatic styles. The French believe that what they say is at least as important as what they do. They spin grandiloquent phrases and strike postures. Rhetoric is away of life and if you point out it is divorced from all strategic reality that is thought to be nitpicking.

The British, on the other hand, get engrossed in tedious detail like: “Is this practical? Who is going to supply the troops? What will be their rules of engagement?” With Lebanon the French have discovered phrase-making is not enough. In recent days they have become very practical, bleating that there are no established rules of engagement (governing what the soldiers can do and when they can fire) almost as though they were British.

LET'S NOT GET CARRIED AWAY:

'US Ryder Cup team rivals only Liechtenstein navy for intimidation power' (Rick Reilly, 8/26/06, Sports Illustrated)

[I] have turned European because I’m bloody sick of the US getting the haggis stomped out of it by the Europeans in these Ryder Cup golf matches.

Every two years the Euros dye their hair and smoke their cigars and get drunk and wave their blue Euro flags and beat us like Dickens’s orphans, then sing songs shoulder-to-shoulder and laugh and dance on the clubhouse roof and wave their private parts in our general direction.

No more. I’m a Euro now. Changed my passport and everything. I like real football now, not fat guys in helmets. I no longer see the point in regular dental check-ups. I tan by 40-watt bulbs. I eat tatties and neeps in my flat and see what’s on the telly. Ooh, brilliant! It’s Mr Bean!

I’d been considering turning Euro for a few years now, but on Monday, when the American team was announced for next month’s Ryder Cup at the K Club in Ireland, it ripped me knittin’, as we say down at the pub.

Have you seen the US team? It has all the intimidation power of the Liechtenstein navy. It would have a hard time beating the Winnetka Country Club ladies’ B team. It’s the single worst squad we’ve ever taken to a Ryder Cup, and that’s saying something, considering the last batch got pummelled 18½-9½.

“We’ll definitely be the underdog,” Phil Mickelson says. “You lose four of the last five Cups, you’re the underdog.”

This outfit would be the underdog to a stiff breeze. Or do Brett Wetterich, Zach Johnson, J.J. Henry and Vaughn Taylor make your timbers shiver? It sounds like somebody’s Webelos troop.

NEOCONS ARE JUST ANOTHER VARIETY OF URBAN INTELLECTUALS:

Wal-Mart Drives Democrats Batty: The left's dunderheaded broadsides at the nation's biggest employer. (Jonah Goldberg, August 24, 2006, LA Times)

[B]DS sufferers have a related secondary affliction: WMDS. This refers not to the unfound weapons of mass destruction but to Wal-Mart derangement syndrome. And the Democratic Party is ministering to these patients with reckless abandon.

The New York Times reported recently that the Democrats have, en masse, declared their party to be the enemy of the mega-box store. Sen. Joe Biden Jr. (D-Del.) recently delivered a "blistering attack" on the company at an anti-Wal-Mart rally in Iowa, and other Democrats have appeared at similar events. Indeed, one of the few times Lieberman and Lamont appeared at the same event during their primary contest was at an anti-Wal-Mart clambake in the Nutmeg State.

This bonfire of buffoonery is helping me learn to love Wal-Mart.

THE ENCHANTED KINGDOM

The undress code that’s the height of teen fashion (James Bone, The Times, August 26th, 2006)

Sightseers in the trendy Vermont town of Brattleboro may get more of an eyeful than they bargained for.

All summer, youths have been taking advantage of a loophole in local laws to strut their stuff naked in the town.

The young men and women, many still in their late teens, are not merely indulging in the long-cherished Vermont tradition of nude sunbathing and skinny-dipping. They have been riding their bicycles naked down Main Street, busking in the buff and congregating for nude hula-hoop contests in a car park.[...]

Vermont — increasingly populated by well-heeled refugees from Boston and New York — has no state-wide ban on nudity, but some of its cities and towns have passed their own ordinances. Not Brattleboro, the first English settlement in Vermont in 1724, which has a large community of artists and writers and a proud history of nakedness.

This summer about two dozen youths, including a self-declared anarchist who calls himself “Pat the Bunny”, have been engaged in a polite social rebellion by taking off their clothes.

“We have a nuclear power plant a few miles away and a ridiculous war in the Middle East,” said Ian Bigelow, 23, who had gathered with some of his friends outside a book store. “So why is it such a big problem if we get nude?”

Ah, beautiful, bucolic Vermont, where your ice cream cone comes with a free geo-political lecture, where you can drive for hundreds of miles fruitlessly seeking a hamburger but the antique shops outnumber convenience stores, where you can listen to childless boomers that do crafty things wallow in middle-aged bitterness and raise Bush Derangement Syndrome to a whole new level of madness, where there are almost no road signs because life is just about meandering without purpose and where serious people can argue that public nudity is a weapon in the anarchist struggle for universal peace and justice without being certified.

Vermont offers us a glimpse into a childless future where a whole population is dedicated to neurotic self-indulgence. It is, of course, mad, bad and dangerous to know, but my goodness it is pretty. Why does the left get to live in all the gorgeous places?

OF COURSE, IF THEY GOT RID OF THE DICTATORS THEY'D BE RID OF US TOO:

When Muslims kill Muslims (SALIM MANSUR, 8/26/06, Toronto Sun)

[W]hen it comes to maiming and killing, the Arab-Muslim world holds a place of prominence. In particular, the ancient land between two rivers, now Iraq, has proven to be greatly fertile as killing fields.

The most famous massacre in Muslim history by armed might of the state took place at Karbala on the banks of the Euphrates in 680. On that terribly bloody day, Husayn bin Ali -- grandson of Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, by his daughter Fatima -- was brutally killed and decapitated as he was offering his mid-afternoon prayers.

Husayn's male companions were slaughtered by the army of Yazid, the caliph (Islam's supreme ruler), while women and children in the company of Husayn, including his wife and daughter, were abused and carried as war trophies to the capital of the expanding Arab-Islamic empire in Damascus.

The people of Karbala and surrounding areas passively watched as Muhammad's family and its claim to leadership of Muslims ended in tragedy. But belated grief tore the Arab-Muslim world apart, and its wounds continue to torment in countless ways a people for whom the massacre in Karbala has become the template of their history.

Karbala is a necessary reminder of Muslims being unequalled tormentors and killers of Muslims. Saddam Hussein as the ruling tyrant in Baghdad was only the most recent incarnation of an Arab Macbeth and the Mongol Genghis Khan rolled into one megalomaniacal killer.

It also illuminates the sheer hypocrisy of Arabs and Muslims who selectively and for political purposes rage against the United States and Israel (and not, for instance, against Russia or China despite the brutal suppression of their respective Muslim minorities) for Arab-Muslim casualties in conflicts that have been, almost without exception, precipitated by Arab-Muslim dictators and demagogues.

MORE:
Iraqi Tribal Leaders Gather for Unity Conference (VOA News, 26 August 2006)

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki hosted the war-torn nation's various tribal factions at a national unity conference Saturday in Baghdad.

Mr. Maliki told the hundreds of tribal leaders that national unity is the key to "liberating" Iraq from the presence of foreign forces and from terrorists.

DEMOCRAT ISSUES:

Issues Await if Democrats Retake House (CARL HULSE, 8/26/06, NY Times)

Rusty from being out of power for 12 years, Democrats are rethinking how they should parcel out coveted committee chairmanships and the other plums that would come with House control at a time when the party’s potential chairmen are increasingly being portrayed by Republicans as liberal extremists.

WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH JAKARTA?:

Most Indonesians oppose strict Islamic system - poll (Reuters, 8/24/06)

Most Indonesians do not favour adopting a strict Islamic system in which sharia laws would enforce the wearing of head-scarves for women or stoning for adultery, a survey showed on Thursday.

But 80 percent supported a crackdown on alcohol, gambling and prostitution, according to results of the survey conducted by the Indonesian Survey Circle, a prominent private pollster.

The survey, with a margin of error of 3.8 percent, was conducted in July and August and covered 700 people across the world's most populous Muslim nation.

Almost 70 percent in the poll backed the current secular system in which all religious faiths enjoy an equal status.

MORE:
Muslim women in U.S. assert their rights: Some use contracts in an effort to protect themselves (NAHAL TOOSI, 8/26/06, The Associated Press)

Should anything go wrong in her marriage, Zaynab Abdul-Razacq is confident that her rights will be well-protected. Her husband has guaranteed it in writing.

The young Muslim couple chose a path advocated by Islamic scholars concerned about women's rights: drawing up a Muslim marriage contract that takes into account modern needs. [...]

Islamic law experts who advocate for better treatment for women say the documents can help them assert rights under religious law that long have been played down by men. Advocates contend that their approach is well within Islamic law, even though skeptics say the interpretation is too influenced by Western thinking.

The contract is especially useful in the United States, where Muslims come from a variety of ethnic backgrounds and follow different customs and levels of observance.

The document can accommodate views ranging from liberal to conservative.

Karamah, an organization of female Muslim lawyers based in Washington, D.C., is developing a "model" marriage contract that can be adjusted to meet the requirements of family law in different parts of the country, said Azizah al-Hibri, a founder of the group, whose name means "dignity" in Arabic.

THAT'S THE TICKET:

"Non-Combatant" Lieberman Won't Back Democratic Candidates (Melinda Tuhus, August 25, 2006, New Haven Independent)

Declaring himself a "non-combatant," U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman, in remarks at a New Haven press event Friday, raised anew the question of whether his "independent" candidacy will help Republicans hold onto three Congressional seats in Connecticut -- and control of the U.S. House of Representatives. [...]

“It’s a little awkward for me now” to endorse the Democratic candidates in the general election, he said, “since they all endorsed my opponent,” Democratic primary winner Ned Lamont.

The comment was significant because analysts from both major parties believe that Lieberman's campaign could help the three Republicans keep their jobs in the face of tough challenges. Lieberman's strongest support -- 75 percent in the most recent Quinnipiac poll -- comes from Republicans. If he succeeds in drawing more Republican voters to the polls to support his candidacy, that could help the Republican Congressional candidates. Those three races are considered among the 10 most competitive Congressional races in the country; both parties consider the races key to deciding which party controls the House in 2007. National Republican strategists and donors have come forward to help Lieberman's campaign; party leaders have abandoned the nominal Republican in the Senate race, Alan Schlesinger. Prominent Republicans like Shays and former Republican House leader Newt Gingrich have endorsed Lieberman.

SAFER SERVING:

Service in Iraq: Just How Risky? (Samuel H. Preston and Emily Buzzell, August 26, 2006, Washington Post)

The ratio of deaths to person-years, .00392, or 3.92 deaths per 1,000 person-years, is the death rate of military personnel in Iraq.

How does this rate compare with that in other groups? One meaningful comparison is to the civilian population of the United States. That rate was 8.42 per 1,000 in 2003, more than twice that for military personnel in Iraq.

The comparison is imperfect, of course, because a much higher fraction of the American population is elderly and subject to higher death rates from degenerative diseases. The death rate for U.S. men ages 18 to 39 in 2003 was 1.53 per 1,000 -- 39 percent of that of troops in Iraq. But one can also find something equivalent to combat conditions on home soil. The death rate for African American men ages 20 to 34 in Philadelphia was 4.37 per 1,000 in 2002, 11 percent higher than among troops in Iraq. Slightly more than half the Philadelphia deaths were homicides.

The death rate of American troops in Vietnam was 5.6 times that observed in Iraq.

More seriously, as we've noted in the past, the cost of replacing evil regimes and the ease with which we can do it raises obvious questions about whether we aren't obligated to do so more frequently. How, for example, can we justify not democratizing Cuba and North Korea when it's so easy and cheap to do so much good?

WILSONIANISM FOR NON-RACISTS:

True Believers (Elizabeth Edwards Spalding, Spring 2006, Wilson Quarterly)

As the president who led the United States while it was becoming a world power, Wilson casts an especially long shadow. He learned from his father, a prominent Presbyterian minister, and his mother, whose father was also a Presbyterian minister, that he was one of God’s special people. This Presbyterian elect was predestined to achieve salvation in the next world and to show signs of that saved state in this world. Its responsibilities were apparent to Wilson. The Bible, he wrote, “reveals every man to himself as a distinct moral agent, responsible not to men, not even to those men whom he has put over him in authority, but responsible through his own conscience to his Lord and Maker.” Wilson believed that he was called to carry his private, saved state into his public, political life. His understanding of Christianity gave him a strong sense of selection, even a destiny he perceived as prophetic.

Imbibing the Social Gospel of the late 19th century, Wilson came to trust in the promise of redemption in politics, especially foreign policy. In 1911, a year before he won the White House, he declared that America was born a Christian nation “to exemplify that devotion to the elements of righteousness which are derived from the revelations of Holy Scripture.” The administrative hand of modern social science would bring about needed political reform at home and, eventually, abroad. In Wilson’s eyes, World War I was a crusade in which the New World would redeem the Old World, first in battle and then in the Covenant—a biblical word Wilson quite deliberately chose—of the League of Nations. While only the elect could be saved for eternity, he thought it his Christian duty to save the world temporally.

Though Bush has sometimes been compared to Wilson, the religious sentiments he expresses have a different ring. He appears to have rejected the patrician faith of his father in favor of that old-time religion, which is precisely what the Social Gospel meant to overcome by stripping away earlier Christianity’s concern with individual sin and traditional morality.

As integral as Bush’s faith is to his domestic agenda of compassionate conservatism, faith-based initiatives, and an ownership society, it is even more central to his foreign policy, and he has said as much in media interviews. As with Wilson, this influence has generally been misread—misunderestimated, to use the president’s own telling neologism.

When he first campaigned for the presidency, Bush argued that America had failed to articulate a coherent post–Cold War foreign policy; the humanitarian internationalism of the Clinton era had spread the United States too thin. Such views led some to say that Bush was a hard-eyed foreign-policy “realist” and others to call him a nationalist. What these arguments missed is that Bush, in fact, had a powerful worldview built on his evangelical beliefs that God is loving and compassionate, that every person is a child of God and thus endowed with equal dignity, that everyone should love his neighbor as himself, and that the hand of God is at work in good government. For Bush, the principles of freedom, democracy, and self-government should protect individuals, allowing them to enjoy their God-given freedom in this world, including the free will to strive for salvation in the next world.

Many of Bush’s subsequent public statements set forth this worldview. In his second inaugural address, which some regard as the speech that marks his “Wilsonization,” Bush said that “America’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one,” and the rhetoric continued in that vein. “Across the generations, we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government, because no one is fit to be a master, and no one deserves to be a slave.” He concluded that “it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world. . . . History has an ebb and flow of justice, but history also has a visible direction, set by liberty and the author of liberty.” Bush aimed to link America’s first principles and most Americans’ faith in God to the nation’s purpose in the world. Had he been transformed into a Wilsonian idealist?

In Bush’s mind, he had not, in fact, changed—international circumstances had. “We have a place, all of us, in a long story,” he proclaimed in his first inaugural address, “a story we continue, but whose end we will not see. It is the story of a new world that became a friend and liberator of the old, the story of a slaveholding society that became a servant of freedom, the story of a power that went into the world to protect but not possess, to defend but not to conquer.” In that same speech, delivered the better part of a year before September 11, he also spoke of America remaining engaged in the world by history and by choice, “shaping a balance of power that favors freedom.” After the terrorist attacks, Bush depicted the new conflict as a battle between good and evil, memorably remarking at Washington’s National Cathedral on September 14, 2001, that “three days removed from these events, Americans do not yet have the distance of history. But our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.”

In speeches and statements throughout his presidency, Bush has defined a relationship between freedom and peace that is distinctly un-Wilsonian. His 2005 State of the Union address encapsulates his reasoning: The peace that freedom-loving peoples seek will be achieved only by eliminating the conditions that feed radicalism and ideologies of murder and tying U.S. efforts to specific regimes and allies, rather than to an international organization and collective security as Wilson did. “The only force powerful enough to stop the rise of tyranny and terror, and replace hatred with hope, is the force of human freedom,” he said, and then repeated the main policy goal of his second inaugural. “Our enemies know this, and that is why the terrorist Zarqawi recently declared war on what he called the ‘evil principle’ of democracy. And we’ve declared our own intention: America will stand with the allies of freedom to support democratic movements in the Middle East and beyond, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.”

Bush has also been likened in some respects to Ronald Reagan. Think of the presidential rhetoric of the two—Reagan’s “evil empire” and Bush’s “axis of evil” immediately come to mind—or their status as political leaders with Western sensibilities (both cowboy and civilizational) who rejuvenated the Republican Party. When it comes to faith and foreign policy, however, it is more fruitful to compare the Methodist Republican Bush with the Baptist Democrat Harry Truman.

As it is for Bush, the touchstone for Truman was Jesus’ life and teachings. Before, during, and after his presidency, he frequently referred to the Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount, and he would trace the biblical connections between the Ten Commandments and the sermon, with special attention to Deuteronomy, Isaiah, Micah, and Joel. All of this led him to conclude that people should live by the Great Commandment as imparted by Jesus in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. “If you will read this tenth chapter of Luke,” said Truman, “you will find out exactly what a good neighbor means. It means to treat your neighbor as you yourself would like to be treated. Makes no difference whether he is of another race or another creed or another color. He is still your neighbor.” Truman thought that the restatement of the Great Commandment and Jesus’ story of the Good Samaritan applied to both domestic and foreign policy, teachings that Bush has clearly internalized as well.

THE PROTEAN BLIGHT

The left's new bad guy (Andrew Coyne, National Post, August 26th, 2006)

The reflexive oppositionism of so much of the left, its instant identification with whoever or whatever is most hostile to the society of which it is a part, most closely resembles that of the undergraduate. It is a badge, a pose, a lifestyle, an arrangement of reality that is pleasing to believe, a reminder to the believer of the third eye of enlightenment that is his gift.

Yet in this country it can take on a rather uglier form, insofar as the object of its loathing can be displaced onto another society, quite apart from our own. Until now, the locus of this disaffection was the United States. Lately, disturbingly, it has centred more and more on Israel. Anti-Americanism has mutated into something that might at best be called anti-Israelism, and at times looks alarmingly like anti-Semitism. Which brings us to the present wretched state of the Liberal party.

That the party's left wing has long been a hotbed of anti-Americanism is news to no one. Indeed, so entrenched was this attitude among certain sections of the ruling party that it resembled something of a state religion. (A leftist in the States is compelled by his beliefs to remain profoundly alienated from his country, and from such notions as patriotism. In Canada, such was his patriotism.)[...]

Or perhaps there is a link between them: between the pseudo-neutrality that is one strain of recent Liberal foreign policy, and the anti-Americanism, shading into anti-Israelism, that is the other. An unwillingness to take sides was, of course, one of the ways in which we were supposed to distinguish ourselves from the Americans: They were warlike and ideological, we were peacekeeping ecumenicals.

But perhaps there was something else at work. A refusal to make moral judgments, to distinguish between the merely flawed and the truly evil, may in time lead to an inability to do so. Having gotten out of the habit of judgment, the muscles can atrophy: If "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter," then it is all too easy to forget, not only who the terrorists are, but who are the freedom fighters. If anti-Semitism is the "socialism of fools," perhaps anti-Israelism is the pacifism of knaves.

One reason why both Christians and Jews are having such difficulty in recognizing and opposing anti-Semitism today is that they associate it historically with an exclusionary, aggressive, ethnocentric self-adoration. We are all very slow to see that in our era it thrives more among self-hating universalists.

LISTEN, WATCH, READ:

This has worked surprisingly well, so maybe we'll try it every few weeks: how about some discussion and recommendations?

Here are three questions about what you've found especially good to read, listen to, or watch recently--the less well-known your discovery the better since I'm really just fishing for ideas (we'll phrase the questions for maximum hippness, but don't fret if you still use a Betamax and an 8-track player):

My favorite recent discovery for my iPod is:

Zoysia (The Bottle Rockets)

Mike Daley recommended them and they are a terrific, The Band-like, band.

And, if you just want to grab a couple MP3s for your iPod, try Satellite & Mr. Grieves by TV on the Radio.

My favorite recent discovery at Netflix is:

Here's one that's hard to watch, but necessary: The Grey Zone

and one that's easy to enjoy: The World's Fastest Indian

I can't overstate how difficult it is to watch the Grey Zone, which tells the story of the Sonderkommandos at Auschwitz, Jews who were co-opted to assist in the gassing and disposal of fellow victims before being killed themselves after a few months work. The 12th of 13 cycles of Sonderkommandos revolted and did some considerable damage to the facilities, but their story is still bleak. Perhaps no other film has ever captured the extreme arbitrariness of the way death lurked at every moment in the camps and this reates a tension in every scene that is almost unbearable. It's a movie of extraordinary power, but genuinely disturbing.

World's Fastest Indian, on the other hand, is the immensely amiable truish story of New Zealand motorcycle enthusiast, Burt Munro, who improbably set speed records at the Bonneville Salt Flats beginning in his early 60s, on a bike he'd pretty much rebuilt in his garage. Anthony Hopkins plays Munro as a kind of Candide who actually does live in the best of all possible worlds.

Together the two movies are bookends of the best and worst of humanity.

My favorite recent book discovery is:

Feeding the Monster (Seth Mnookin)

No one needs another triumphalist text about how the Sox finally won a World Series--but Mr. Mnookin has written something quite different, a book about how business considerations and personality conflicts shape the odd melanges we end up seeing on the diamond. Buster Olney's Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty makes an excellent companion piece.

I SMELL AN ELECTION:

Is Bernanke Finally Getting It? (Liz Moyer, 8/25/06, Forbes)

U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke may finally be getting it. In his maiden keynote address at Friday’s session of the annual gathering of central bankers and economists in Jackson Hole, Wyo., Bernanke gave barely a hint of his next move on interest rates.

Instead, an end to protectionism was his theme--and a chance at new surges in productivity. By implication, of course, that’s a prescription for restrained inflation and an end to rate increases.

THE LIBERAL PARTY IS THERE TO PRESERVE DISORDER:

Chaos mars Liberal caucus retreat (JOAN BRYDEN, 8/25/06, CP)

The fabled big red machine desperately needs a tune-up.

That's the conclusion some Liberals have drawn following a three-day caucus retreat that was chaotic at times, obscured by self-induced controversy at other times. Interim leader Bill Graham insisted Thursday that the gathering was a great success.

IF NO ONE LIKES YOUR IDEAS DON'T SHARE THEM:

Speak Not: Why the Democrats should be the party of no ideas (Peter Beinart, 08.25.06, New Republic)

A few weeks ago, congressional Democrats announced their agenda for the fall campaign. Its substance was unremarkable: raising the minimum wage, making college tuition tax-deductible, putting more money into alternative energy. But the really encouraging part was the public reception. Or should I say, the lack of public reception: Barely anyone noticed. And, for Democrats, that's very good news.

DISENGAGING TOO SOON:

Iranian Moviegoers Dispense With Art for Love and Laughter (REUTERS, 8/24/06)

This summer’s top film in Iran was “Ceaseire,” a saccharine comedy in which two sexy newlyweds get so competitive with each other that they have to consult a psychologist to avoid divorce. [...]

“Most people like comedies because they do not have much to laugh about these days,” said Navid Etminan, a 25-year-old student in line to watch the film. “Artistic movies can reach out to foreign audiences, but not to ordinary people.”

The success of “Ceasefire” comes as Iranian cinemas enjoy a boom, fueled largely by a greater number of homegrown romantic comedies, which have lured people back to the big screen. Movie theaters took in more than $2 million between March and May this year, up 100 percent from the same period last year, the state cinema authority Farabi reported.

“The stories are far better in this year’s films,” said Akbar Nabavi, a cinema critic and documentary producer, adding that that’s how to attract an audience.

Romantic comedies fill a vacuum: people want to be amused, but Hollywood’s offerings often do not fit the bill in Iran, where censorship has been a constant factor since the 1979 Islamic Revolution and even before. With state-imposed cultural restrictions, many foreign films are heavily edited to meet the country’s strict Islamic codes or may be banned. And although people can watch blockbuster comedies from the United States and elsewhere on pirated DVD’s, many cannot understand them because they are not subtitled or dubbed.

There is also little appetite for films by acclaimed Iranian figures like Abbas Kiarostami and Jafar Panahi, among the directors praised abroad for using innuendo and metaphor in ways similar to those used by Eastern European directors who navigated the strictures of communist governments.

“People had got fed up with stupid political games and they showed their lack of interest by turning their backs on movies as symbols of the political trends,” Mr. Nabavi said.

MACHINE DREAMS:

Reds tied for first (JOHN FAY, 8/25/06, Cincinnati ENQUIRER)

The Reds started the epic 10-game West Coast road swing by moving into a virtual tie for first place in the National League Central.

"It was nice to get off on the right foot," catcher David Ross said.

You could say that.

The Reds came back from three runs down to beat the San Francisco Giants 6-3 before a crowd of 38,754 at AT&T Park Thursday night.

"The whole key for us is that - with everything that's gone on - we've stayed so loose," reliever David Weathers said. "To us, 3-0 is nothing. With our offense, we never feel like we're out of it."

THE ARBITRARY IS INFINITELY ARGUABLE:

Pluto vote 'hijacked' in revolt (Paul Rincon, 8/25/06, BBC News)

A fierce backlash has begun against the decision by astronomers to strip Pluto of its status as a planet.

On Thursday, experts approved a definition of a planet that demoted Pluto to a lesser category of object.

But the lead scientist on Nasa's robotic mission to Pluto has lambasted the ruling, calling it "embarrassing".

And the chair of the committee set up to oversee agreement on a definition implied that the vote had effectively been "hijacked".

REWARDING SAVINGS, PUNISHING CONSUMPTION:

States attack property taxes (Dennis Cauchon, 8/24/06, USA TODAY)

At least 10 states have cut property taxes this year or are preparing to do so, part of a tax mini-rebellion that has been brewing alongside higher home prices.

States are raising other taxes, especially the sales tax, and spending budget surpluses to replace lost property tax revenue. That makes the trend more of a tax shift than a net tax cut. Political leaders are pledging that local government and schools, which depend on property taxes, will be protected.

YOU CAN BE A SPIRITUAL JAILHOUSE AS LONG AS YOU CRANK OUT TRINKETS FOR US:

Chinese Peasants’ Advocate Sentenced to 51 Months in Jail (JOSEPH KAHN, 8/25/06, NY Times)

A Chinese court sentenced an advocate of peasants’ rights to more than four years in prison on Thursday after a trial his lawyers say was a sham.

The rights advocate, Chen Guangcheng, was convicted of destroying property and organizing a mob to block traffic. He earned the enmity of local Communist Party leaders in Shandong Province, in eastern China, when he sought to organize a class-action lawsuit against forced abortions and sterilizations there.

The New China News Agency announced the sentence, four years and three months, in a terse dispatch on its English-language news wire. The information did not appear in Chinese, and other state-run media have been banned from reporting on the matter.

Mr. Chen’s two-hour trial last week and the long sentence announced Thursday appear to reflect a concerted effort by Chinese authorities to punish lawyers and rights advocates, who increasingly in recent years have helped defend people aggrieved about land seizures, environmental abuses, religious persecution and population controls.

A Chinese researcher for The New York Times was acquitted Friday of state secrets charges but was convicted of fraud and sentenced to three years in prison, one of his defense lawyers said.

Zhao Yan, 44, was detained in 2004. The government has not released details of the charges, but the case is believed to stem from a Times report on then-Chinese leader Jiang Zemin's plans to relinquish his post as head of the military.

Mr. Zhao's lawyer, Guan Anping, said he didn't know whether Mr. Zhao would appeal the conviction, which was handed down by the Beijing No. 2 Intermediate People's Court.

Mr. Zhao's case was dismissed in March in an apparent effort to minimize strains with Washington before President Hu Jintao visited the United States. The charges were later refiled and Mr. Zhao stood trial in June.

IF CAESAR'S WIFE HAS TO BE CLEANER THAN OTHERS, WHAT OF CAESAR?:

Spitzer Took Rides on Private Plane of Gambling Figure (JACOB GERSHMAN, August 25, 2006, NY Sun)

Republican candidate for governor, John Faso, says his Democratic opponent, Eliot Spitzer, violated state lobbying rules by underpaying for flights on a private jet belonging to a casino developer who is part of a group bidding on the state racing franchise.

On May 24 and 25, Mr. Spitzer and a campaign staffer used a private jet owned by the developer, Richard Fields, to shuttle between fund-raisers in Phoenix, Tucson, Ariz., and Cincinnati. The campaign reimbursed Mr. Fields a total of $4,300 for three flights.

Mr. Faso is contending that Mr. Spitzer underreported the cost of the flights by tens of thousands of dollars and is asking the state lobbying commission to investigate the matter. The Faso campaign is accusing Mr. Spitzer of underpaying for the flights by $37,678.

In a statement, Mr. Faso said, "Mr. Spitzer has basically accepted and not reported a donation of as much as $38,000 from somebody who is currently lobbying to allow an out-of-state Indian tribe to build more casinos in New York. This is the perfect example of how Eliot Spitzer holds others to higher standards than he holds himself."

THINK OF IT AS SOCCER:

The Crisis Facing Israel: Settling for a Draw with Hezbollah (Ilan Goren, 8/25/06, Der Spiegel)

A few days after the outbreak of hostilities -- when the Israeli military operation against Hezbollah, codenamed "Fitting Retribution," was still in the aerial strikes stage -- a new song was born. A group of young musicians were commissioned by a morning news show to write a funny, frivolous piece of pop -- a sort of anthem that would both unite people and make them laugh. A group called "Frishman and the Pioneers" came up with "Yalla Ya Nasrallah," a war song full of Hebrew and Arabic slang and slurs aimed at the leader of Hezbollah. The song's chorus goes like this:

"Yalla, ya Nasrallah,
we'll screw you, Inshallah
and send you back to Allah
with all your Hezbollah"

The piece was dripping with parody and cynicism -- yet recalled older Israeli ditties that meant every word they said about Israel's effortless defeat of the Arabs in previous wars. And July 2006 was no time for slightly veiled cynicism in Israel. The song was taken at face value and it turned out to be a huge hit -- especially on the Internet. It also became a popular mobile phone ring tone.

Such was the atmosphere in mid-July -- it was all about crushing Hezbollah and teaching it a lesson it wouldn't soon forget. The Israeli public was confidently assured by the country's leadership that a vigorous air campaign would rapidly eliminate the threat posed by Katyusha rockets fired from southern Lebanon at Israeli towns across the border.

The offensive would also, the government explained, bring home the two Israeli soldiers abducted by Hezbollah on July 12 -- the move which triggered hostilities. The Israeli chief of staff, General Dan Halutz, threatened that Israel would "take Lebanon back 20 years" if the soldiers weren't returned.

Ilan Goren is a television reporter for "Channel 10 News" in Israel. He spent much of the Lebanon war reporting from the front lines. At the moment, he is working on a program on Israeli fighter pilots for CNN.
Defense Minister Amir Peretz likewise got into the chest thumping by promising Hezbollah head Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah that he would "never forget the name Amir Peretz." Liberal journalists, lefty artists and non-political finance managers all underwent a quick about face. The message was that this time, we Israelis really and truly meant business. A bumper sticker issued by the country's second-largest bank and distributed by the country's most popular daily paper summed up the mood: "We Shall Win!" it boldly announced from the back bumper of thousands of cars. It was as if Israelis were on a high -- inebriated by the sweet smell of sure victory in a just cause.

More than a month of sobering up has passed since then. [...]

There are, of course, essential differences from the 1973 debacle. In July 2006, unlike October 1973, Israel was not faced with a threat to its existence. Hezbollah has inflicted great pain, but has never posed a threat to Israel's survival.

BUT SELF-DEFENSE IS A HUMAN RIGHT:

Sadr's Militia and the Slaughter in the Streets (Ellen Knickmeyer, 8/25/06, Washington Post)

The Mahdi Army is the militia of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, now one of the most powerful figures in the country.

The death squads that carry out the extrajudicial killings are widely feared but mysterious. Often, the only evidence is the bodies discovered in the streets. Several commanders in the Mahdi Army said in interviews that they act independently of the Shiite religious courts that have taken root here, meting out street justice on their own with what they believe to be the authorization of Sadr's organization and under the mantle of Islam.

"You can find in any religion the right of self-defense," said another commander, senior enough to be referred to as the Sheik, who was interviewed separately by telephone. Like the others, he lives and works in Sadr City, a trash-strewn, eight-square-mile district of east Baghdad that is home to more than 2 million Shiites. They spoke on condition that their names not be revealed and that specific areas of Sadr City under their control not be identified.

"The takfiris , the ones who kill, they should be killed," said the Sheik, using a term commonly employed by Shiites for violent Sunni extremists. "Also the Saddamists. Whose hands are stained with blood, they are sentenced to death."

"This is part of defending yourself," the commander said. "This is a ready-made verdict -- we don't need any verdict."

Before Feb. 22, when the bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra unleashed a wave of sectarian killing and retribution, U.S. authorities and others believed the primary force behind Shiite death squads was the Badr Brigade, the militia of another large Shiite organization, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. But since the bombing, the Mahdi Army appears to have taken the lead in extrajudicial trials and executions, according to Joost Hiltermann, a project director in Jordan for the Brussels-based International Crisis Group.

IF W HAD DONE THE SAME HE'D HAVE BEATEN AL GORE:

McGavick reveals '93 DUI charge in unusual letter on his personal life (Alicia Mundy, 8/25/06, Seattle Times)

Republican Senate candidate Mike McGavick issued an unusual confession Thursday, discussing his failed first marriage, mistakes as a father, layoffs he executed at Safeco — and revealing a 1993 drunken-driving charge.

He also acknowledged that, while working as a political operative for then-Sen. Slade Gorton, he ran an ad that inaccurately characterized an opponent's views.

McGavick surprised supporters, Democrats and the media as much by how he divulged his personal history as by the content of the admissions.

THE PERFECT ELECTORAL ENVIRONMENT FOR DEMOCRATS?:

France's surprise summer best-seller is by ... a politician (JOELLE DIDERICH, 8/25/06, The Associated Press)

Forget Dan Brown and "The Da Vinci Code."

The best-seller French people are taking to the beach this summer is a political manifesto by conservative Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, considered a front-runner in the race for the presidency in 2007.

Within two weeks of its publication July 17, "Témoignage" ("Testimony") had risen to second place in the weekly top 10 list published by trade paper Livres Hebdo. In the week ending Aug. 13, it stood at No. 3, behind two novels by popular French author Marc Levy.

FORTUNATELY, AS STRAIGHT WHITE MALES WE'RE IMMUNE:

tarantism (Word a Day, 8/25/06)

(TAR-uhn-tiz-uhm) noun

An uncontrollable urge to dance.

[After Taranto, a town in southern Italy where this phenomenon was experienced during the 15-17th centuries. It's not clear whether tarantism was the symptom of a spider's bite or its cure, or it may have been just a pretext to dodge a prohibition against dancing. The names of the dance tarantella and the spider tarantula are both derived from the same place.]

NOT SUCCEEDING AS QUICKLY AS YOU'D LIKE ISN'T FAILING:

Shanghai Surprise: The World's Ports Experience an Unexpected Boom (Thomas Schulz, 8/25/06, Der Spiegel)

Globalization has come to Hong Kong Bay -- in the form of a traffic jam. Like a string of pearls, giant steel container ships extend far out into the South China Sea, most of them more than 200 meters (656 feet) long and weighing upwards of 10,000 tons, their decks loaded to capacity with pants for H&M, cell phones for Nokia and athletic shoes for Nike.

Space is at a premium in Hong Kong harbor these days. An average of 18 massive container ships drop anchor there each day of the year, and the endless docks behind the harbors quay walls are filled with 60,000 containers, stacked high, at any given time. And yet this still isn't enough to make Hong Kong the world's largest port, a distinction it lost last year after holding it for decades. Despite Hong Kong's booming business, Singapore grew even faster.

But Anthony Tam isn't overly concerned. "As long as we're all making these kinds of profits, it doesn't really matter," he says. Tam works for Hutchison Port Holdings (HPH), the world's largest port operator, with 251 terminals in 43 ports, from the Bahamas to Panama, Singapore to Poland. Here in Hong Kong, the company's homeport and headquarters, HPH owns 14 of the harbor's 24 berths.

"There isn't any more room for expansion here," says Tam. "But these days you can't go wrong building a port just about anywhere." HPH's current construction projects include a deepwater terminal in Shanghai, three kilometers (about two miles) of quaysides in Malaysia and two container facilities in Oman. It's also investing €200 million ($255 million) in its Panama terminals.

Many of the world's other ports are also undergoing new construction, expansion and upgrading at a feverish pace. With economies under enormous pressure to maintain unimpeded access to the highways of globalization, they're pumping billions into redeveloping old port facilities and building new ports from scratch. Private port operators are also scrambling to stay in the race, as they face the prospect of takeover battles and more and more financial investors eying highly profitable container transshipment companies.

SHOCKING:

So when you have Mirabelli catch Beckett he throws just fine, thanks. Of course, he left in the 7th with a blister, which he develops from gripping the breaking ball that bad catchers are afraid to call for....

DANCIN' WITH THE ONES WHAT'LL BRING HIM BACK:

No hugs or kisses for Lieberman at submarine session (Associated Press, August 24 2006)

"I did say to Joe on the way in I wasn't going to hug him," said Republican Gov. M. Jodi Rell.

Lieberman, who met with other public officials at a strategy session to protect the Submarine Base New London on Thursday, is counting on the support of independents and Republicans in the general election. But he does not want to alienate Democrats.

He also did not shy away from Republicans Thursday as they marked their successful campaign a year ago to keep the New London Submarine Base open.

U.S. Rep. Rob Simmons, R-Conn., walked over to greet Lieberman when he arrived. The men shook hands and smiled.

"After you, Senator," Simmons said as the men approached the building.

"Team Connecticut," Simmons said, referring to the bipartisan campaign to keep the base open.

"I agree. It's a model," Lieberman said.

YET YOUR 8TH GRADER WILL BE ASSIGNED ARTHUR MILLER INSTEAD:

Vasily Grossman: The Russian writer's novel "Life and Fate"—often compared with "War and Peace"—was first published in English in the mid-1980s. But only now is interest taking off among a wider public (Robert Chandler, September 2006, Prospect)

Grossman is in many respects an old-fashioned writer, and perhaps for that reason literary critics have shown little interest in him. For many years it was historians—above all, Antony Beevor and Catherine Merridale—who affirmed his importance. Beevor's recent translation of Grossman's war diaries (A Writer at War, from which several quotations in this article are taken) has done more than anything to bring the writer to a wider public. Since publication of the diaries last year, sales of Life and Fate in Britain have grown from around 500 copies a year to 500 a month. And in March, a Guardian article by Martin Kettle praising Life and Fate led to it briefly becoming the second most popular book at Amazon UK.

Grossman is a steady writer; he never sets out to dazzle the reader. So it is perhaps appropriate that his recognition has come about only gradually. Nevertheless, it has been clear for some time that Life and Fate is finding its place in the world. Since 2005, the centenary of Grossman's birth, there have been two new editions of his classic in English. And in the 1990s two biographies in English were published: Frank Ellis's Vasiliy Grossman: The Genesis and Evolution of a Russian Heretic and John and Carol Garrard's The Bones of Berdichev. The latter emphasises Grossman's importance as a witness to the Shoah. There is perhaps no more powerful lament for east European Jewry than the letter that Anna Semyonovna, a fictional portrait in Life and Fate of Grossman's mother, writes to her son and smuggles out of a town occupied by the Nazis. The Last Letter, a one-woman play based on this letter, has been staged by Frederick Wiseman both in Paris and in New York. A Russian version was staged in Moscow in December 2005.

Grossman will be remembered not only for his evocation of wartime Stalingrad and his accounts, both journalistic and fictional, of the Shoah. He has also left us one of the most vivid accounts of famine in world literature; his last major work, the unfinished novel, Everything Flows, includes an account of the 1932-33 terror famine in Ukraine. It is typical of Grossman that Anna, the sympathetic narrator of this chapter, is herself implicated, as a minor party official, in the implementation of measures that exacerbate the famine. We cannot help but identify with Anna and so we too feel guilty; Grossman does not allow the reader the luxury of indignation. Everything Flows also includes an extraordinary mock trial: the reader is asked to pronounce judgement on four informers. The arguments Grossman gives to both prosecution and defence are lively and startling; as a reader, one is constantly changing one's mind.

Grossman is still not widely read in contemporary Russia. Nationalists cannot forgive him for a long meditation in Everything Flows on "the slave soul" of Russia. Many Russians have simply not yet had time to digest the vast amount of previously forbidden literature that was first published in the late 1980s. The Uzbek writer Hamid Ismailov, for example, has told me that he read so much during those years that he can no longer remember who wrote what. And then, after the collapse of communism, Russians were thrown into a world so unfamiliar and frightening that they had little time or energy to think about their Soviet past.

But many other groups of readers are now being drawn to Grossman: Ukrainian émigrés, who value him for his writing about the terror famine; Jews, who value him for what he has written about the Shoah; people with an interest in the history of the second world war and the relationship between communism and fascism; journalists, who see him as an exemplary war correspondent. It is interesting that a recent European conference celebrating the centenary of Grossman's birth was held at a Catholic centre in Turin and that several of the writers, critics and journalists who most admire Grossman—Gillian Slovo, Martin Kettle and John Lloyd among others—are ex-Marxists. Both Catholics and Marxists tend to expect art not only to be a source of joy, but also to provide moral guidance and a greater understanding of reality.

FIXING THE CAUSES WOULD BE NICE, BUT WE KNOW WE CAN DO SOMETHING ABOUT THE EFFECTS:

Lives of crime: Tony Blair's "tough on the causes of crime" and David Cameron's "hug a hoodie" speeches reflect the dominant sociological model of crime. But research into the "criminal personality" suggests some people from troubled backgrounds are far more likely to offend than others. Policymakers are taking an interest (David Rose, August 2006, Prospect)

For most of the past century, analysis of the origins of crime has been dominated by sociological models. When Tony Blair declared in 1992 that his party would be "tough on the causes of crime," his audience presumed that he meant that Labour would try to eliminate crime-generating social ills such as poor housing, unemployment and inadequate schools. Discussion of the possible roots of offending and antisocial behaviour within individuals rarely formed part of elite public discourse. Punishment, the courts held, should be regulated by the severity of the crime, not the criminal's propensity to commit further offences.

One of the few challenges to this orthodoxy was made in the 1960s by Hans J Eysenck, for many years a professor at the Institute of Psychiatry. Eysenck believed that criminals' personalities could be rigidly categorised and that most of their behaviour was inherited. But his work on crime was attacked by mainstream sociological criminologists and had little influence on policy. Indeed, for most criminologists the concept of a personality more likely to commit crime was abhorrent.

The resistance to Eysenck was especially fierce because he was writing during the vogue for "radical criminology," when crime was seen as a social construct and the "labelling" of deviants an aspect of social control. Thirty years later, intellectual fashion has shifted beyond recognition, with, for example, a heavy new emphasis on the experiences of victims of crime. Nevertheless, investigation of the factors that put an individual at high risk of engaging in criminal and antisocial behaviour remains controversial, and most criminologists continue to steer well clear of it.

Some consideration of the risk profile of individuals has, in fact, long been part of penal policy, especially in assessing prisoners for parole. But its scope is increasing. The 2003 Criminal Justice Act introduced "indefinite public protection" sentences for convicts judged at high risk of reoffending, and its provisions have been widely used: by the end of June 2006, a year after the relevant provisions of the act came into force, more than 1,000 people had received the indefinite sentence.

The act, and the new emphasis on risk assessment in general, entail a big shift from the principle that has governed sentencing in the past—that of punishment tailored to fit the crime, of proportionate "just deserts." Although it has been subjected to little public debate, this new approach requires penal decision-makers—other than those dealing with murder—to take a radical step: to assume some of the characteristics of the insurance actuary, and to base the length of incarceration on future probabilities. At the same time, the act contains an analysis of offending that departs significantly from sociological models. Under its terms, many of those judged to pose a high risk will have been assessed by forensic psychologists or psychiatrists, on the grounds that they exhibit a "dangerous severe personality disorder," or DSPD—a disorder that makes them likely to reoffend.

It is unfortunate that the term DSPD does not match any accepted clinical definition. Some of those who have already been so described are psychopaths—callous, emotionally affectless, careless of the damage their crimes cause to their victims. Others, however, have been diagnosed with conditions including borderline personality disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder, as well as the much more common antisocial personality disorder. Nevertheless, the approach that the 2003 act represents poses important questions to which sociological theories of crime have no answers. Why do some people from deprived or abusive backgrounds become violent criminals, while others, whose upbringing appears to have been equally disadvantageous, go on to lead productive, law-abiding lives? Might there be ways to spot high-risk individuals before they commit serious offences, perhaps even in childhood? And are there interventions that might modify children's behaviour over the long term, diverting the course of those at high risk before they reach adulthood?

The focus on future risk requires a means to differentiate between individuals from similar environments. It places the offender, not the crime, at the centre of the penal decision-making universe, and asks those who make such sentencing decisions to base them on clinical assessments of the defendant's personality and its associated disorders. It hands great power over individuals' future to a group unused to wielding it—forensic psychologists and psychiatrists, and academic researchers in this field.

Even those most wedded to a sociological model of offending accept that a relatively small proportion of those convicted of criminal offences account for a very large proportion of total crime.

UNFORCED CONTRADICTIONS:

The proxy war: The battle of summer 2006 may be a prelude to a bigger conflict between the US and Iran (Amir Taheri, September 2006, Prospect)

Finally, another event, less well understood in the west, was also unravelling within Lebanon itself: a power struggle within Hizbullah, as the authoritarian style of its secretary general, Hassan Nasrallah, began to come under criticism from factions inside or close to the movement. A number of prominent Hizbullah figures questioned Nasrallah's habit of excluding them from high-level decision-making on security grounds. The argument advanced by Nasrallah's critics was simple: the party had succeeded in driving Israel out of southern Lebanon in 2000 and thus had no reason to continue as a semi-clandestine armed group. With 14 seats in the 128-seat parliament and two cabinet portfolios (for water/power and employment) in the Siniora government, it was time for Hizbullah to become a mainstream party, relinquishing the weapons it claimed it needed against Israel. Nasrallah and his group also faced criticism on theological grounds, because they regard Iran's leader Ali Khamenei as the "supreme guide" of Shi'ism while more than 90 per cent of Lebanese Shias follow either Grand Ayatollah Ali-Muhammad Sistani in Najaf, Iraq, or Ayatollah Muhammad-Hussain Fadhlallah in Beirut. By late June, Nasrallah, for the first time since taking over in 1992, faced the beginnings of a revolt within his ranks.

How did these events combine to trigger the conflict? Iran was anxious to divert attention from its confrontation with the UN over the nuclear issue. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the most radical president of the Islamic Republic since the 1980s, has been projecting a new image of revolutionary Iran as the leader of the Muslim world in a "clash of civilisations" with the US. His dream has faced one big problem: Iran is a Shia power, while the overwhelming majority of Arabs, and other Muslims, are Sunnis. The only way for a Shia power to claim pan-Islamic leadership was to promise to "wipe Israel off the map." Ahmadinejad's message was simple: where pan-Arabism, Arab socialism and Sunni Islamism had failed to deliver, revolutionary Shi'ism under Iranian leadership would succeed. It was necessary for Ahmadinejad to drag Israel into a limited but costly conflict to expose its vulnerability. The place to do that was Lebanon, where the pan-Shia Hizbullah movement, with sustained support from Iran, had been preparing for another round of asymmetrical war against Israel since the previous round ended in 1996.

Syria too needed a diversion, and saw a new crisis between Israel and Lebanon as convenient. A mini-war between Israel and Hizbullah would revive the idea that there is "no peace in the middle east without Syria." It would divert attention from the Hariri murder investigation, tempt Washington into reviewing its policy of shunning Syria, and persuade conservative Arab states that they needed the Ba'athists in Damascus to counterbalance the rise of Iran.

The new Israeli government might not have wanted this conflict in Lebanon. But it knew that southern Lebanon, from where Israel had withdrawn its troops six years earlier, had become another example of "land-for-war." Back in 2000, Olmert and his then party, Likud, had criticised the handover of southern Lebanon to Hizbullah; he could not now allow Hizbullah to use southern Lebanon as a base for a new offensive. Israel also knew of the thousands of missiles, including advanced anti-tank ones, supplied by Iran to Hizbullah, and of the preparations that Hizbullah had made for a long conflict with the Jewish state. In his television address declaring "victory" over Israel on 14th August, Nasrallah claimed that the main reason for his success was the fact that Hizbullah had spent years preparing for the fight. The unexpected difficulties that the Israelis faced in southern Lebanon seemed to confirm this claim.

For its part, the US has regarded Lebanon as part of the broader Iranian battlefield, which also includes Syria. Some American analysts looked on with a mixture of admiration and trepidation as Iran extended its influence to the shores of the Mediterranean via Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. (In June 2005, Iran's defence minister Ali Shamkhani boasted that for the first time since the 7th century, Iranian power had returned to the Levant.) Yet any plan to create a new "American" middle east—based on open societies, democratic institutions and market economies—was unlikely to succeed without substantial policy changes, if not actual regime change, in Tehran. The new Iranian leadership was determined to defeat the Bush strategy by offering its alternative vision of an "Islamic" middle east. Provoking a mini-war in Lebanon was the surest way of isolating the pro-western democratic forces and moderate Arab elites that Bush wished to mobilise in support of his vision.

Lebanon was the natural choice for the proxy war that may be the prelude to the main conflict between the US and Iran. After Bahrain, Lebanon is the smallest Arab state. It covers territory less than 1 per cent of Iran's. It also has the highest proportion of non-Muslims in the Arab world—some 40 per cent of the population (in other Arab states, non-Muslims account for between zero, in Saudi Arabia, and 15 per cent, in Egypt). To complicate matters further, Lebanese Muslims are divided into three sects: Shias (40 per cent), Sunnis (15 per cent) and Druze (5 per cent). And that is not all. Many of Lebanon's 18 communities have often looked to outside powers to defend their rights and, in some cases, even save them from annihilation by rivals. Years of civil war, followed by Syrian occupation and by an Israeli military presence in the south, had left Lebanon without proper state structures. Syria decided who would be president and prime minister of Lebanon and, with Iran's accord, also shaped the Lebanese parliament. The absence of state structures enabled Iran to build Hizbullah into a state within a state. By the time this summer's mini-war started, Hizbullah controlled almost a fifth of Lebanon's territory and over 10 per cent of its population. The party collected its own taxes, through the religious toll known as khoms (one fifth of all incomes), and ran banking and insurance systems, schools, hospitals and social welfare schemes (see Judith Palmer Harik, p24). It also owned and managed farms, factories, supermarkets, transport networks, travel agencies and even matrimonial services—activities that employed the bulk of the population under its control. To underline its independence, Hizbullah flew its own flag, had its own national anthem and even maintained "embassies" in several capitals. [...]

But Hizbullah cannot be understood merely as an Iranian proxy. Many Lebanese Shias take pride in its success in putting their community at the centre of national politics for the first time. While aware of the organisation's darker side, especially its links with Tehran and its terrorist history, some non-Shias, including quite a few Christians, have rallied to it for nationalist and anti-Israel/US reasons.

The complexity of Hizbullah's position is illustrated by the fact that it is the only Lebanese political group to be in the government and in opposition at the same time. The present government's "project of peace" is backed by a coalition of parties that include Hizbullah. At the same time, Hizbullah is the leading partner in the so-called "project of defiance" alliance of opposition parties, which includes a bloc led by the Christian Maronite leader, former general Michel Aoun, and is tacitly backed by Emile Lahoud, the Syrian-imposed president of the republic.

The prospect of a Lebanese government dominated by Hizbullah is not fanciful. In addition to its well-armed militia, which is certainly stronger than the national army, Hizbullah has plenty of money and could, given the chance, neutralise its domestic political opponents with a mixture of assassinations and bribery. Its next move is certain to be an attempt at seizing control of the reconstruction projects with support from Iran and Syria. Iran has already announced a massive aid package, which, as always, comes with many strings attached.

The ceasefire ordained by the UN may or may not last as long as the last one, introduced in 1996. But even if it does, it will solve none of the problems that led to the fighting.

NOW HE'S THROUGH:

Alleged Slur Casts Spotlight On Senator’s (Jewish?) Roots (E.J. Kessler, August 25, 2006, The Forward)

When Senator George Allen of Virginia used a racial slur for dark-skinned North Africans, “macaca,” during a recent encounter with a young Indian American cameraman from his opponent’s campaign, many wondered where he had learned the word.

Macaca means “monkey,” but Allen’s campaign insisted that the word was made up, an inside joke on the young man’s hairstyle. But some commentators noted that Allen’s mother is “French Tunisian,” speculating that Allen, who speaks French, had picked up the epithet from her. (Allen’s late father was famed Washington Redskins football coach George Allen.)

WELL, IT'S NOT LIKE YOU CAN ADD A GUY FOR BASTILLE DAY:

Mets’ Grass Gets Green-er (Forward Staff, August 23, 2006)

On August 22, just five days before this year’s Jewish Heritage Day, the team acquired Arizona Diamondbacks slugger Shawn Green, a bona fide Jew who even has been known to sit out games on Yom Kippur.

THERE'S YOUR NEXT SECRETARY OF STATE:

Exclusive: Zoellick to Join McCain; Aides Eye Early '07 Campaign Launch (Mike Allen, 8/24/06, TIME)

Former Deputy Secretary of State Robert B. Zoellick is planning to join the presidential campaign of Sen. John McCain next year, overseeing development of domestic and foreign policy, Republican officials tell TIME. [...]

Although much attention has been given to the fund-raising and campaign machine McCain is assembling, his advisers also are deep into planning a large policy and issue apparatus. McCain sources said it's too early to describe the theme of his policy, but said it will be "bedrock conservatism, Main Street Republican, what we got used to in the Reagan administration and with former President Bush." Among his star recruits:

--Phil Handy of Florida, who handles Gov. Jeb Bush's financial trusts and was named by the governor to chair the Florida State Department of Education, will be an education adviser, political adviser and fund-raiser for McCain's campaign, the officials said. That strengthens McCain's growing ties with Gov. Bush.

--Phil Gramm, the former U.S. Senator from Texas, will have a broad economic-policy portfolio, from trade and budget policy to private property rights. Another leader of the economic team will be Gerald Parsky, President Bush's California chairman and a former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury. Also working on fiscal policy will be two former directors of the Congressional Budget Office: Dan Crippen, a budget and domestic policy adviser to President Ronald Reagan who chaired a panel advising NASA on changes after the space shuttle Columbia disaster, and Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who also was chief economist of President Bush's Council of Economic Advisers. Crippen will be staff director of issue development.

--Former Sen. Dan Coats (R-Ind.) will help with defense policy, and is a key link to evangelical Christians.

Zoellick, a Harvard Law graduate who later was an executive vice president at Fannie Mae, has held senior positions under the last three Republican Presidents.

GONNA FLY NOW:

Jazz trumpeter Maynard Ferguson dies at age 78 (Reuters, 8/24/06)

Jazz trumpeter and big-band leader Walter "Maynard" Ferguson, famed for his screaming solos and ability to hit blisteringly high notes, has died at age 78, associates said on Thursday. [...]

Ferguson started his career at 13 when he performed as a featured soloist with the Canadian Broadcasting Co. Orchestra.

He played with several of the great big-band leaders of the 1940s and '50s, including Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Barnett, Jimmy Dorsey and Stan Kenton, with whom he was a featured performer.

He became known with the Kenton band for being able to hit "ridiculous high notes with ease," according to jazz critic Scott Yarnow.

Mr. Ferguson had a stratospheric style all his own. He possessed “a tremendous breadth of sound and an incomparable tone,” said Lew Soloff, a prominent trumpeter who started out with Mr. Ferguson in the mid-1960’s. The writer Frank Conroy once noted, “He soared above everything, past high C, into the next octave and a half, where his tone and timbre became unique” — sometimes reaching, as Mr. Schankman said, “notes so high that only dogs could hear them.”

He pleased far more crowds than critics. John S. Wilson, reviewing Mr. Ferguson’s big band at the 1959 Newport Jazz Festival for The New York Times, called it “screaming” and “strident.” Yet that same year the readers of Down Beat magazine voted the band the world’s second-best, outranked only by Count Basie’s.

Today, record collectors pay hundreds of dollars for rare Fergusons. “Very few rock superstars can command that kind of prices for used CD’s or records,” said John Himes, who runs the Maynard Ferguson Album Emporium in Cypress, Calif.

FIRST THEY CAME FOR THE HOBBIT, THEN PLUTO....:

Prof: U.S. liberals on slope to extinction (UPI, 8/24/06)

U.S. liberals face extinction if they don't start having enough babies to keep up with conservatives, a Syracuse University professor told ABC News.

Professor Arthur Brooks said after studying numbers from the governmental General Social Survey, he found 100 unrelated liberal adults have 147 children, while 100 unrelated conservatives have 208 kids.

Brooks said that makes a difference, as 80 percent of people with political opinions vote like their parents.

JACKSONIAN EVANGELISM:

God's Country?: : Religion has always been a major force in U.S. politics, but the recent surge in the number and the power of evangelicals is recasting the country's political scene -- with dramatic implications for foreign policy. This should not be cause for panic: evangelicals are passionately devoted to justice and improving the world, and eager to reach out across sectarian lines. (Walter Russell Mead, September/October 2006, Foreign Affairs)

Religion has always been a major force in U.S. politics, policy, identity, and culture. Religion shapes the nation's character, helps form Americans' ideas about the world, and influences the ways Americans respond to events beyond their borders. Religion explains both Americans' sense of themselves as a chosen people and their belief that they have a duty to spread their values throughout the world. Of course, not all Americans believe such things -- and those who do often bitterly disagree over exactly what they mean. But enough believe them that the ideas exercise profound influence over the country's behavior abroad and at home.

In one sense, religion is so important to life in the United States that it disappears into the mix. Partisans on all sides of important questions regularly appeal to religious principles to support their views, and the country is so religiously diverse that support for almost any conceivable foreign policy can be found somewhere.

Yet the balance of power among the different religious strands shifts over time; in the last generation, this balance has shifted significantly, and with dramatic consequences. The more conservative strains within American Protestantism have gained adherents, and the liberal Protestantism that dominated the country during the middle years of the twentieth century has weakened. This shift has already changed U.S. foreign policy in profound ways.

These changes have yet to be widely understood, however, in part because most students of foreign policy in the United States and abroad are relatively unfamiliar with conservative U.S. Protestantism. That the views of the evangelical Reverend Billy Graham lead to quite different approaches to foreign relations than, say, those popular at the fundamentalist Bob Jones University is not generally appreciated. But subtle theological and cultural differences can and do have important political consequences. Interpreting the impact of religious changes in the United States on U.S. foreign policy therefore requires a closer look into the big revival tent of American Protestantism.

Why focus exclusively on Protestantism? The answer is, in part, that Protestantism has shaped much of the country's identity and remains today the majority faith in the United States (although only just). Moreover, the changes in Catholicism (the second-largest faith and the largest single religious denomination in the country) present a more mixed picture with fewer foreign policy implications. And finally, the remaining religious groups in the United States are significantly less influential when it comes to the country's politics. [...]

Evangelicals, the third of the leading strands in American Protestantism, straddle the divide between fundamentalists and liberals. Their core beliefs share common roots with fundamentalism, but their ideas about the world have been heavily influenced by the optimism endemic to U.S. society. Although there is considerable theological diversity within this group, in general it is informed by the "soft Calvinism" of the sixteenth-century Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius, the thinking of English evangelists such as John Wesley (who carried on the tradition of German Pietism), and, in the United States, the experience of the eighteenth-century Great Awakening and subsequent religious revivals.

The leading evangelical denomination in the United States is the Southern Baptist Convention, which, with more than 16.3 million members, is the largest Protestant denomination in the country. The next-largest evangelical denominations are the African American churches, including the National Baptist Convention, U.S.A., and the National Baptist Convention of America (each of which reports having about 5 million members). The predominately African American Church of God in Christ, with 5.5 million members, is the largest Pentecostal denomination in the country, and the rapidly growing Assemblies of God, which has 2.7 million members, is the largest Pentecostal denomination that is not predominately black. The Lutheran Church­Missouri Synod, which has 2.5 million members, is the second-largest predominately white evangelical denomination. Like fundamentalists, white evangelicals are often found in independent congregations and small denominations. So-called parachurch organizations, such as the Campus Crusade for Christ, the Promise Keepers, and the Wycliffe Bible Translators, often replace or supplement traditional denominational structures among evangelicals.

Evangelicals resemble fundamentalists in several respects. Like fundamentalists, evangelicals attach a great deal of importance to the doctrinal tenets of Christianity, not just to its ethical teachings. For evangelicals and fundamentalists, liberals' emphasis on ethics translates into a belief that good works and the fulfillment of moral law are the road to God -- a betrayal of Christ's message, in their view. Because of original sin, they argue, humanity is utterly incapable of fulfilling any moral law whatever. The fundamental message of Christianity is that human efforts to please God by observing high ethical standards must fail; only Christ's crucifixion and resurrection can redeem man. Admitting one's sinful nature and accepting Christ's sacrifice are what both evangelicals and fundamentalists mean by being "born again." When liberal Christians put ethics at the heart of their theology, fundamentalists and evangelicals question whether these liberals know what Christianity really means.

Evangelicals also attach great importance to the difference between those who are "saved" and those who are not. Like fundamentalists, they believe that human beings who die without accepting Christ are doomed to everlasting separation from God. They also agree with fundamentalists that "natural" people -- those who have not been "saved" -- are unable to do any good works on their own.

Finally, most (although not all) evangelicals share the fundamentalist approach to the end of the world. Virtually all evangelicals believe that the biblical prophecies will be fulfilled, and a majority agree with fundamentalists on the position known as premillennialism: the belief that Christ's return will precede the establishment of the prophesied thousand-year reign of peace. Ultimately, all human efforts to build a peaceful world will fail.

Given these similarities, it is not surprising that many observers tend to confuse evangelicals and fundamentalists, thinking that the former are simply a watered down version of the latter. Yet there are important differences between the fundamentalist and the evangelical worldviews. Although the theological positions on these issues can be very technical and nuanced, evangelicals tend to act under the influence of a cheerier form of Calvinism. The strict position is that Christ's sacrifice on the cross was only intended for the small number of souls God intended to save; the others have no chance for salvation. Psychologically and doctrinally, American evangelicals generally have a less bleak outlook. They believe that the benefits of salvation are potentially available to everyone, and that God gives everyone just enough grace to be able to choose salvation if he wishes. Strict Calvinist doctrine divides humanity into two camps with little in common. In the predominant evangelical view, God loves each soul, is unutterably grieved when any are lost, and urgently seeks to save them all.

All Christians, whether fundamentalist, liberal, or evangelical, acknowledge at least formally the responsibility to show love and compassion to everyone, Christian or not. For evangelicals, this demand has extra urgency. Billions of perishing souls can still be saved for Christ, they believe. The example Christians set in their daily lives, the help they give the needy, and the effectiveness of their proclamation of the gospel -- these can bring lost souls to Christ and help fulfill the divine plan. Evangelicals constantly reinforce the message of Christian responsibility to the world. Partly as a result, evangelicals are often open to, and even eager for, social action and cooperation with nonbelievers in projects to improve human welfare, even though they continue to believe that those who reject Christ cannot be united with God after death.

Evangelicals can be hard to predict. Shocked by recent polls showing that a substantial majority of Americans reject the theory of evolution, intellectuals and journalists in the United States and abroad have braced themselves for an all-out assault on Darwinian science. But no such onslaught has been forthcoming. U.S. public opinion has long rejected Darwinism, yet even in states such as Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina, which have large actively Christian populations, state universities go on teaching astronomy, genetics, geology, and paleontology with no concern for religious cosmology, and the United States continues to support the world's most successful scientific community. Most evangelicals find nothing odd about this seeming contradiction. Nor do they wish to change it -- unlike the fundamentalists. The pragmatism of U.S. culture combines with the somewhat anti-intellectual cast of evangelical religion to create a very broad public tolerance for what, to some, might seem an intolerable level of cognitive dissonance. In the seventeenth century, Puritan Harvard opposed Copernican cosmology, but today evangelical America is largely content to let discrepancies between biblical chronology and the fossil record stand unresolved. What evangelicals do not like is what some call "scientism": the attempt to teach evolution or any other subject in such a way as to rule out the possibility of the existence and activity of God.

Evangelicals are more optimistic than fundamentalists about the prospects for moral progress. The postmillennial minority among them (which holds that Christ will return after a thousand years of world peace, not before) believes that this process can continue until human society reaches a state of holiness: that the religious progress of individuals and societies can culminate in the establishment of a peaceable kingdom through a process of gradual improvement. This is a view of history very compatible with the optimism of liberal Christians, and evangelicals and liberal Christians have in fact joined in many common efforts at both domestic and international moral improvement throughout U.S. history. Although the premillennial majority is less optimistic about the ultimate success of such efforts, American evangelicals are often optimistic about the short-term prospects for human betterment. [...]

The growing influence of evangelicals has affected U.S. foreign policy in several ways; two issues in particular illustrate the resultant changes. On the question of humanitarian and human rights policies, evangelical leadership is altering priorities and methods while increasing overall support for both foreign aid and the defense of human rights. And on the question of Israel, rising evangelical power has deepened U.S. support for the Jewish state, even as the liberal Christian establishment has distanced itself from Jerusalem.

In these cases as in others, evangelical political power today is not leading the United States in a completely new direction. We have seen at least parts of this film before: evangelicals were the dominant force in U.S. culture during much of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth. But the country's change in orientation in recent years has nonetheless been pronounced.

Evangelicals in the Anglo-American world have long supported humanitarian and human rights policies on a global basis. The British antislavery movement, for example, was led by an evangelical, William Wilberforce. Evangelicals were consistent supporters of nineteenth-century national liberation movements -- often Christian minorities seeking to break from Ottoman rule. And evangelicals led a number of reform campaigns, often with feminist overtones: against suttee (the immolation of widows) in India, against foot binding in China, in support of female education throughout the developing world, and against human sexual trafficking (the "white slave trade") everywhere. Evangelicals have also long been concerned with issues relating to Africa.

As evangelicals have recently returned to a position of power in U.S. politics, they have supported similar causes and given new energy and support to U.S. humanitarian efforts. Under President Bush, with the strong support of Michael Gerson (an evangelical who was Bush's senior policy adviser and speechwriter), U.S. aid to Africa has risen by 67 percent, including $15 billion in new spending for programs to combat HIV and AIDS. African politicians, such as Nigeria's Olusegun Obasanjo and Uganda's Yoweri Museveni, have stressed their own evangelical credentials to build support in Washington, much as China's Sun Yat-sen and Madame Chiang Kai-shek once did. Thanks to evangelical pressure, efforts to suppress human trafficking and the sexual enslavement of women and children have become a much higher priority in U.S. policy, and the country has led the fight to end Sudan's wars. Rick Warren, pastor of an evangelical megachurch in Southern California and the author of The Purpose Driven Life (the single best-selling volume in the history of U.S. publishing), has mobilized his 22,000 congregants to help combat AIDS worldwide (by hosting a conference on the subject and training volunteers) and to form relationships with churches in Rwanda.

Evangelicals have not, however, simply followed the human rights and humanitarian agendas crafted by liberal and secular leaders. They have made religious freedom -- including the freedom to proselytize and to convert -- a central focus of their efforts. Thanks largely to evangelical support (although some Catholics and Jews also played a role), Congress passed the International Religious Freedom Act in 1998, establishing an Office of International Religious Freedom in a somewhat skeptical State Department.

Despite these government initiatives, evangelicals, for cultural as well as theological reasons, are often suspicious of state-to-state aid and multilateral institutions. They prefer grass-roots and faith-based organizations. Generally speaking, evangelicals are quick to support efforts to address specific problems, but they are skeptical about grand designs and large-scale development efforts. Evangelicals will often react strongly to particular instances of human suffering or injustice, but they are more interested in problem solving than in institution building. (Liberal Christians often bewail this trait as evidence of the anti-intellectualism of evangelical culture.)

U.S. policy toward Israel is another area where the increased influence of evangelicals has been evident. This relationship has also had a long history. In fact, American Protestant Zionism is significantly older than the modern Jewish version; in the nineteenth century, evangelicals repeatedly petitioned U.S. officials to establish a refuge in the Holy Land for persecuted Jews from Europe and the Ottoman Empire.

U.S. evangelical theology takes a unique view of the role of the Jewish people in the modern world. On the one hand, evangelicals share the widespread Christian view that Christians represent the new and true children of Israel, inheritors of God's promises to the ancient Hebrews. Yet unlike many other Christians, evangelicals also believe that the Jewish people have a continuing role in God's plan. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, close study of biblical prophecies convinced evangelical scholars and believers that the Jews would return to the Holy Land before the triumphant return of Christ. Moreover, while the tumultuous years before Jesus' return are expected to bring many Jews to Christ, many evangelicals believe that until that time, most Jews will continue to reject him. This belief significantly reduces potential tensions between evangelicals and Jews, since evangelicals do not, as Martin Luther did, expect that once exposed to the true faith, Jews will convert in large numbers. Luther's fury when his expectation was not met led to a more anti-Semitic approach on his part; that is unlikely to happen with contemporary evangelicals.

Evangelicals also find the continued existence of the Jewish people to be a strong argument both for the existence of God and for his power in history. The book of Genesis relates that God told Abraham, "And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee. ... And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee all families of the earth be blessed." For evangelicals, the fact that the Jewish people have survived through the millennia and that they have returned to their ancient home is proof that God is real, that the Bible is inspired, and that the Christian religion is true. Many believe that the promise of Genesis still stands and that the God of Abraham will literally bless the United States if the United States blesses Israel. They see in the weakness, defeats, and poverty of the Arab world ample evidence that God curses those who curse Israel.

Criticism of Israel and of the United States for supporting it leaves evangelicals unmoved. If anything, it only strengthens their conviction that the world hates Israel because "fallen man" naturally hates God and his "chosen people." In standing by Israel, evangelicals feel that they are standing by God -- something they are ready to do against the whole world.

I DON'T THINK THAT WORD MEANS WHAT YOU THINK IT MEANS:

The new axis of intervention (John Feffer, 8/25/06, Asia Times)

There is a new force in foreign policy: the "axis of intervention". Two allies are official members: the United States and Israel. With its recent invasion of Somalia, Ethiopia has joined the grouping. A fourth nation, Japan, is petitioning for membership. [...]

The new axis of intervention targets not only sovereign states such as North Korea and non-state actors such as Hezbollah. With the news of Israeli attacks against Red Cross vehicles and a clearly marked United Nations observation post in Lebanon, the real target of the axis of intervention becomes clear: the institutions of international law. By resorting to military force and scorning diplomacy, both Israel and the United States have undermined the UN and key global agreements such as the Geneva Conventions. It remains to be seen whether Japan and Ethiopia will sign on to this larger agenda.

The possibilities of global cooperation opened up by the end of the Cold War have come to a dead end. The axis of intervention promises a future that resembles the distant past, what the English theorist Thomas Hobbes called the "war of all against all". It is a world, ironically, where both aggressive countries like the US and Israel and aggressive non-state actors like al-Qaeda and the Islamic courts will feel right at home.

However, more importantly, we have Redefined Sovereignty to have a normative component and now require that governmens be consensual and protect the inalienable rights of those they govern. It's hard to imagine a less Hobbesian development.

Meanwhile, if Mr. Feffer can be excused not understanding the revolution that the United States has effected in sovereignty over the course of its history, it's less easy to excuse his failure to acknowledge that the axis also includes Britain, Australia, Canada, Poland, etc.

THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS SPECIES:

Butterfly Kiss-Off (JEFFREY A. LOCKWOOD, 8/24/06, NY Times)

The North American Butterfly Association is as unhappy as a butterfly in a Buffalo blizzard (the association points out that these fragile creatures could suffer such a fate). Their primary concern is the release of butterflies from one locale into a different region. Federal regulations prohibit the shipments to states where a species doesn’t naturally occur, as if Long Island was the same ecological system as Albany.

The butterfly association also raises the concern that interbreeding of otherwise separate populations could cause genetic deterioration of endemic varieties that have adapted to local conditions and warp migratory behaviors. In principle, the farm-raised butterflies may also carry unfamiliar strains of pathogens, although diseased larvae rarely survive to adulthood.

RARE ROCK NON-IDIOTS (via M. Ali Choudhury):

Megadeth targets United Nations on new album (Billboard, 8/23/06)

Heavy metal maven Dave Mustaine is so angry with the United Nations that he is naming his group Megadeth's next album "United Abominations."

"I was watching TV and saw the trucks that said 'UN' on them and said, 'Man, you are so uncool, ineffective, anything," the singer/guitarist said in a recent Billboard interview.

"I thought, 'Wow, I've got to run with this. I got it -- United Abominations, 'cause it's an abomination what they're doing!"

DON'T THERE HAVE TO BE TEN?:

Astronomers Say Pluto Is Not a Planet (The Associated Press, August 24, 2006)

Leading astronomers declared Thursday that Pluto is no longer a planet under historic new guidelines that downsize the solar system from nine planets to eight.

BOB MITVAH:

The beginning of the Feller legend (Anthony Castrovince, 8/24/06, MLB.com)

The boy stood tall on the mound.

He peered into the mitt of catcher Charlie George much the same way he'd stared at the outhouse at which he chucked baseballs as a boy back on the Iowa farm where he cut his baseball teeth.

But on this day -- 70 years ago this week -- the target sat on a grander stage.

And on this day, the boy, named Bob Feller, would become a man.

The date was Aug. 23, 1936, and the event was an otherwise nondescript, series-ending ballgame at League Park between the second-place Cleveland Indians and the lowly St. Louis Browns.

The Tribe was looking for a series sweep of the visitors, but general manager Cy Slapnicka and manager Steve O'Neill also wanted to get a look at what this 17-year-old pitching sensation, who'd come out of the cornfields of the Hawkeye State, could do in the big leagues.

MIXING METAPHORS:

The Pentagon Plans for The Long War: The Pentagon is close to approving a command for Africa, where poverty and corruption make it a vulnerable area for extremists and terrorists (SALLY B. DONNELLY, 8/24/06, TIME)

In what may be the most glaring admission that the U.S. military needs to dramatically readjust how it will fight what it calls 'the long war,' the Pentagon is expected to announce soon that it will create an entirely new military command to focus on the globe's most neglected region: Africa.

Pentagon sources say that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is close to approving plans for an African Command, which would establish a military organization to singlehandedly deal with the entire continent of Africa. It would be a sign of a significant strategic shift in administration policy, reflecting the need to put more emphasis on pro-active, preventative measures rather than maintaining a defensive posture designed for the Cold War.

IT'S THE INCOMPETENCE, NOT THE CONFLICTS:

A Matter of Appearances (NY Times, 8/24/06)

When Judge Anna Diggs Taylor was given the job of deciding whether the Bush administration’s wiretapping program was unconstitutional, she certainly understood that she would be ruling on one of the most politically charged cases in recent history. So it would have been prudent for her to disclose any activity that might conceivably raise questions about her ability to be impartial. Regrettably, it was left to a conservative group, Judicial Watch, to point out her role as a trustee to a foundation that had given grants to a branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, a plaintiff in the case.

TOO BLUE:

Giuliani Aide Found Strangled in Manhattan (RUSSELL BERMAN, August 24, 2006, NY Sun)

A man who once served as a press secretary to Mayor Giuliani was strangled to death in his Greenwich Village home Monday night as an apparent tryst turned fatal, police said.

The body of Martín Barreto, 49, was found lying naked on the bed of his eighth floor apartment in the Albert building at 23 E. 10th St., near University Place. He died of "asphyxia due to compression of the neck" and his death has been ruled a homicide, the medical examiner's office said yesterday.

No arrests have been made. Police were looking for two people who they believe entered his apartment Monday evening based on interviews with a doorman at the building, sources said. There were no signs of a break-in, and the door was locked when police entered the home. An open condom wrapper and lubricant were found near the body, the sources said.

IT'S THE VOTES THAT KILL:

The Beginning of Iran's End (JONATHAN PARIS, August 24, 2006, NY Sun)

The Lebanon war has brought two issues into focus: Iran's war of radical ideas, and the opportunity of the West to ultimately return Iran to its people and its national self-interest. The weakest links in the Iranian arsenal against the West are the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hamas, Hezbollah, and Syria. One by one, their potency is being diminished. The Islamic Jihad, a wholly financed subsidiary of Iran without mass support among the Palestinians, has launched a dozen suicide bombings and hundreds of rockets against Israel since the hudna of early 2005. They have been decimated by the IDF in the two months since the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit on June 25. Implicated in that kidnapping, Hamas, which poses as the government of the Palestinian Authority, has been shunted off the headlines. Rendered impotent on the Gaza battlefield, Hamas is looking less and less like an effective resistance movement. [...]

That leaves the Iranian regime with a lot of short sticks.The best strategy of the West against Mr. Ahmadinejad is to do the unexpected: continue to break Iran's weak sticks, one by one, and then undermine Iran quietly from the inside.The Iranian regime thinks of itself as carpet weavers, patiently working for a long-term victory.The West can defeat the Iranian regime not through appeasing it and striking some grand bargain that leaves it intact to bully the region and provoke ideological wars against Arabs and Israelis alike, but through a step by step strategy of stripping the Iranian regime of its sticks and leaving it and Mr. Ahmadinejad with nowhere to go but down.

MORE:
Sweating Out the Truth in Iran (MAZIAR BAHARI, 8/24/06, NY Times)

Fantasizing has become something of a national sport here. Our president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, predicted that the national soccer team would finish third or fourth in the World Cup. He also thinks we can become a nuclear powerhouse, even though we have a hard time manufacturing safety matches or making light bulbs with life expectancies of more than two weeks. By the way, the soccer team didn’t make it out of the first round. [...]

Iran helped create Hezbollah in the early 1980’s, it is Hezbollah’s most vocal supporter, and before the war it sent the group millions of dollars of cash, medicine, arms and of course posters of Ayatollahs Ruhollah Khomeini and Ali Khamenei, which accompanied every aid package and arms shipment.

Does this Iranian aid make Hezbollah Iran’s puppet? From all evidence, Hezbollah, to a great extent, makes decisions independently of Iran. Hezbollah is an indigenous Lebanese armed resistance group that owes its popularity to Israeli atrocities, biased American policies and corrupt Lebanese politicians. When the United States and Israel try to portray Hezbollah as an Iranian proxy, they are pointing the finger in the wrong direction.

But Iran definitely uses the threat of its influence over Hezbollah to further its objectives. And its prime objective is the survival of the Islamic regime at any price. The clerics and non-clerics (they are now mostly non-clerics) in power in Iran are not the old revolutionary zealots the Americans tend to imagine. They are pragmatic men who have enjoyed the fruits of power for 27 years and don’t want to lose them. In the aftermath of Sept. 11, Iranian statesmen were so scared of American retaliation that for the first time since the revolution, no one chanted “Death to America” in Iran for 10 days.

The regime’s rhetoric about the United States and Israel is a remnant of the time when seizing embassies and staging revolutions were in vogue. But now the Islamic Republic has one of the world’s younger populations. Most young Iranians I know don’t care for their fathers’ ideals. They prefer the better things in life, like plasma TV’s on which to watch Britney Spears and the exiled Iranian pop diva Googoosh on illegal satellite channels. (No, Mr. Cheney, they don’t want the United States to invade their country.) The government spends much of its $60 billion in annual oil revenue to import goods and keep its youth happy.

The paradoxes of the regime have exposed its hypocrisies. On one hand, the fiery slogans are the raison d’être of the Islamic Republic, and on the other, acting openly on those slogans would spell its demise. The most expedient thing to do has been nothing, while continuing to chant.

Up until the start of the war in Lebanon, that was just fine.

WHAT ARE A FEW BROKEN WINDOWS....:

50 crimes a day 'too trivial' to prosecute (MICHAEL HOWIE, 8/24/06, The Scotsman)

MORE than 50 offences a day reported by police to prosecutors are going unpunished because they are judged to be "too trivial", new figures have revealed.

A report published today shows more than 19,000 incidents were discarded by prosecutors in 2004-5 because further action would be "disproportionate".

They called and asked if we could edit the question so their world audience would appreciate it and it was a bit shorter. So we dropped the opening clause. The producer said: "No, keep that--we love the moral decline stuff...."

HIP-GOP:

Steele gaining blacks' support (Jon Ward, August 24, 2006, THE WASHINGTON TIMES)

The Maryland Democratic Party's traditional support among blacks appears to be slipping, now that hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons -- who has helped register thousands of Democratic voters -- has endorsed Republican Michael S. Steele for the U.S. Senate. [...]

"Russell Simmons is one of the leading progressive voices in America," said Donna Brazile, who managed Al Gore's 2000 presidential campaign.

"This is a major endorsement for Lieutenant Governor Steele that will help him attract young people, as well as black voters," Ms. Brazile said. "Once again, this should serve as a wake-up call to Democrats not to take their most loyal constituents and voters for granted."

MORE:
African-American women step up in business world (Jim Hopkins, 8/24/06, USA TODAY)

[N]ew research, published last week by the Small Business Administration, shows that women drove much of the growth in black entrepreneurship.

Black women owned 547,341 companies in 2002, up 75% from five years before, when the Census Bureau last counted. The number owned by men rose a smaller 29%, to 571,670, says the study by economist Ying Lowrey in the SBA's Office of Economic Research.

For the first time since the government began counting, black women now likely own more companies than black men, assuming growth rates stayed constant after 2002, says Gwen Martin, director of research at the Center for Women's Business Research.

Black women, like all female owners, still lag behind men by some key measures. The majority of their companies are part-time ventures, often run from home at night or on weekends to supplement daytime pay. Just 5% had employees, vs. 10% for black men. Annual revenue averaged about $39,000, vs. $114,000 for black men, Lowrey's research shows.

NEUTRON BOMBS WOULD HAVE BEEN QUICKER:

Europe’s Eroding Wealth of Knowledge (JEAN PISANI-FERRY, 23 August 2006, Financial Times)

Europe is much better endowed with buildings and machines than brains.

There is a clear gap between the US and the EU as regards human capital. The US economy is ahead of the pack for both human and physical capital, the EU for physical capital only. This shows up in trade structures. The US mostly exports skills-intensive goods, such as high-technology products, while the EU specialises in goods of high capital intensity and medium-skill intensity, such as cars and chemicals.

This puts the US and the EU in different positions vis-à-vis globalisation. Harvard University’s Richard Freeman notes that globalisation means an almost sudden “doubling of the global labour force”: that is, the entry into the world economy of new workers initially deprived of access to capital. In this context, there is an advantage in specialising in capital-intensive goods for which there are few competitors. In the short run, globalisation increases the world demand for those goods – and the countries that specialise in them benefit from a form of rent. Its trade specialisation puts Europe on the side of globalisation’s winners, as its advantage is actually strengthened by the entry of new players. This explains why European exports have thrived in recent years – and suggests that many complaints about the effects of globalisation ignore its benefits to Europe.

The good news, however, may stop here. Europe’s high savings helped in accumulating capital in the low capital mobility context of the past, but those times have gone and capital is gradually moving to the countries with good economic institutions, infrastructures and human capital. With migrations, human capital to some extent agglomerates at the same places. Here the EU risks being at a disadvantage because of its slowness in Developing and upgrading its education systems, especially universities and other tertiary institutions. Also, few countries have devised a skilled migration policy that makes them an attractive place to study and work.

The US has about equal infrastructure, more investment in human capital, better economic institutions and a more active skilled migration policy. Capital is thus more inclined to move there as well as to the best-performing emerging countries. This should erode Europe’s comparative advantage.

FRANKEN, MY DEAR, I DON'T GIVE A DAMN:

WDOD Radio Switches From Air America To Music Format (Judy Frank, August 23, 2006, The Chattanoogan)

Chattanooga’s oldest radio station, WDOD, has ended its 11-month experiment with progressive talk radio.

At 10 a.m. this past Monday, the station switched to a format featuring musical oldies and standards from the late 1950s and the 1960s and 1970s, according to Danny Howard, director of programming and operations for WDEF and WDOD.

WHAT W TAUGHT HIM:

Exclusive: McCain's Web Team. And Nicco Mele. (SHIRA TOEPLITZ and MARC AMBINDER, 8/23/06, Hotline)

Over the past several months, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has quietly recruited for his presidential campaign some of the most influential online strategists in the country, including one of the main architects of Howard Dean's pioneering website.

John Weaver, McCain's chief political strategist, confirmed today that Nicco Mele, the webmaster of Dean for America, is among those who have committed to help. Mele's work on Dean's campaign, which including , led Esquire to name him as one of the country's "best and brightest." His firm, EchoDitto, lists more than twenty major Democratic and liberal firms and candidates as clients. Mele did not respond to an e-mail seeking immediate comment.

Also committing, according to Weaver: Mike Connell of New Media Communications. He designed, developed and managed the Bush campaign's websites in 2000 and 2004.

Max Fose, McCain's webmaster in 2000, is also back on board. And so is GOP technological entrepreneur Becky Donatelli, the CEO of Campaign Solutions. Donatelli helped to coordinate online fundraising for McCain in 2000.

"We're honored such top professionals in this field support a potential McCain candidacy," said Weaver.

The range of experiences brought by these consultants suggests that McCain's web strategy will be integrated with the campaign's message, donation and political operations -- just like Dean's was in the primary, -- and certainly hewing to example set by the Bush campaign in 2004. Bush raised more money from the ‘Net than any candidate in history and campaign used its website to track thousands of volunteers and motivate Bush supporters.

ROOTS:

Unions tighten grip on Labour (Graeme Wilson, 24/08/2006, Daily Telegraph)

The big unions have tightened their grip on Labour as the party struggles to repay more than £28 million in loans, it emerged yesterday.

New figures show that £3 in every £4 Labour receives in donations now comes from the unions, compared with just over half last year.

The party's growing dependence on union cash will increase fears that ministers will have to bow to their demands at next month's TUC conference to scrap plans to give private firms a bigger role in the NHS and schools.

It also underlines how the cash for peerages scandal and the ensuing police investigation have scared off many of the rich businessmen and wealthy donors who have supported New Labour.

SHOULDN'T TAKE AN ACT OF GOD TO GET BLACKS BETTER SCHOOLS:

New year, new school concepts in New Orleans: Charter schools, student input, hope - and controversy - are hallmarks of the revamped school system to come. (Stacy A. Teicher, 8/24/06, CS Monitor)

Parents face potentially bewildering choices: There are 31 autonomous charter schools, some monitored by the state and others by the local Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB). Only five schools are still operated directly by OPSB. Seventeen schools are run by the state-controlled Recovery School District (RSD). After Katrina, RSD's authority was expanded by the legislature so it could take control of schools that had performance scores below the state average, even if they were meeting yearly progress goals. That gave the state authority over more than 100 schools.

"Individual parents might say, 'Oh, this school looks a little better ... but public education has always been a local responsibility, and long term you need an engaged community," says Theresa Perry, a professor at Simmons College in Boston and part of the National Coalition for Quality Education in New Orleans.

THE ANGLOSPHERE AND EVERYTHING ELSE:

The Complete List: The Top 100 Global Universities (Aug. 13, 2006, Newsweek)

In response to the same forces that have propelled the world economy toward global integration, universities have also become more self-consciously global: seeking students from around the world who represent the entire spec­ trum of cultures and values, sending their own students abroad to prepare them for global careers, offering courses of study that address the challenges of an inter­ connected world and collaborative research programs to advance science for the benefit of all humanity. To capture these developments, NEWSWEEK devised a ranking of global universities that takes into account openness and diversity, as well as distinction in research.

Meanwhile, the reality is that considered just as educational institutions all 25 of these are as good or better than any of the schools on the list.

YOU CAN'T UNPRINT THE LEGEND:

Pie in the Sky? (Brian James, September 2006, History Today)

On Sunday, September 17th, Britain will once again remember the epic struggle of Fighter Command in the Second World War at a service of thanksgiving and rededication in Westminster Abbey before a congregation of airmen past and present. Like the great flypast of three hundred airplanes last September, the event will encourage Britons everywhere to recall how a handful of heroes saved these islands from invasion. But is this true – or the perpetuation of a glorious myth?

It is not mere revisionist history that puts this question, and indeed offers the suggestion that it would be at least equally fitting if, on this Battle of Britain Day, the Royal Navy were to send its ships in procession along our coasts – for it was the navy, not the RAF, that prevented a German invasion in 1940. This is the contention of three senior military historians at the Joint Services Command Staff College. Together they run the High Command course that teaches the past to the air marshals, generals and admirals of the future. What today’s senior officers learn of Britain’s military history they learn from this trio – and some of what they may be told goes against many popular beliefs.

In the words of Dr Andrew Gordon, head of maritime history:

I cheered like crazy at the film of the Battle of Britain, like everyone else. But it really is time to put away this enduring myth. To claim that Germany failed to invade in 1940 because of what was done by the phenomenally brave and skilled young men of Fighter Command is hogwash. The Germans stayed away because while the Royal Navy existed they had not a hope in hell of capturing these islands. The navy had ships in sufficient numbers to have overwhelmed any invasion fleet – destroyers’ speed alone would have swamped the barges by their wash, hardly a need for guns.

It could perhaps be argued that Andrew Gordon looks back to the past from a sailor’s perspective. Yet Dr Christina Goulter, the air warfare historian, supports his argument.

While it would be wrong to deny the contribution of Fighter Command, I agree largely with Andrew’s perspective that it was the navy that held the Germans from invading. As the German general Jodl put it, so long as the British navy existed, an invasion would be to send ‘my troops into a mincing machine’.

It is amusing though how patently idiotic is the notion of a German invasion of Britain.