TigerHawk

Only Rhode Island and Massachusetts have dumber drivers:

The state of Rhode Island leads the nation in driver cluelessness, according to the survey. The average test score there was 77, just eight points above a failing grade.

Those in neighboring Massachusetts were second worst and New Jersey, third worst.

GMAC Insurance administered a questionnaire to more than 5,000 drivers around the country, and learned that New Jersey's drivers were dumber than those of 47 other states. Dumber than, for example, drivers in Mississippi. Or West Virginia. Or any number of other places upon which New Jerseyans would heap scorn. The various pathologies described in the study seem particularly common in the Garden State:

According to the study, many drivers find basic practices, such as merging and interpreting road signs, difficult.

For instance, one out of five drivers doesn't know that a pedestrian in a crosswalk has the right of way, and one out of three drivers speeds up to make a yellow light, even when pedestrians are present, the study said.

What do they think windshield wipers are for?

State rankings here. Iowa, the first state to issue me a driver's license, has the third most knowledgeable drivers in the country. For what that's worth.

Bizarrely, Massachusetts and New Jersey are also ranked second and third, respectively, in per capita income. So they have that going for them.
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Too bad there's nobody there to get the memo. I rarely get worked up about the accounting profession, but I must admit I find this simply staggering. Arthur Andersen was one of the Big Six accounting firms, an employer of thousands of people providing services to hundreds of companies around the world. Its conviction, overturned today, spelled its demise. It is not hard to conclude today that Andersen was liquidated as a result of a combination of large, stupid investments made by the management and board of Enron, the greedy and probably fraudulent activity of a few senior managers at Enron, with the complicity of a few auditors at Andersen. For the entire firm to have been destroyed by a weak and reckless case, now proven to be so by the Supreme Court's decision, seems tragic, foolish, disorienting in its wicked and cavalier destruction of the lives of so many.

To find individuals culpable for bad behavior and punish them is sensible and proper. It is what allows our economic system, built on its foundation of trust, to thrive. To shut entire companies down by government fiat does the opposite -- it saps our system of its risk taking appetite and fosters paranoia. It reeks of Putin's Russia, not the American way.

I hope somebody notices.
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Tigerhawk posts expansively on the reformulation of American Foreign Policy in the Bush II Administration and its related influence on the expansion of democracy in the middle east and elsewhere. The question being debated in many quarters is the impact of our military triumph in Iraq on the peaceful expansion of democracy. The problem with empirically proven results dumped in the lap of nonbelievers is that it makes the nonbeliever either acknowledge being wrong -- never easy -- or casts them into a state of perpetual denial. Many continued to believe the earth was flat long after it had been proven round, but after decades, maybe a century, most people came around to it. Heretics they called them. Some were burned for embracing the obvious before the reactionaries figured it out. Fortunately, we live in a more benign world today.

I'll be less nuanced and perhaps a little more strident than Tigerhawk. History books will ultimately write that the expansion of peaceful democratic movements on the heels of the war in Iraq came about as a direct consequence of the most credible projection of American power since WWII. Kennan's strategy of containment of the USSR, while understandable in light of the duration and brutality of WWII, did ultimately condemn hundreds of millions of people to the fate of autocrats around the world, whether it was Stalin, Ho Chi Minh, Castro, or Mao. Furthermore, we explicitly supported non-communist tyrants like Pinochet or the Shah as containment bulwarks. And we failed to provide support to democracy movements in Hungary (1956), Czechoslavakia (1968) and China (1991). Many thousands died because American policy did not rescue them from the iron hand of tyrants. Even in 1991, when we committed billions and American lives to the First Persian Gulf War, we left the tyrant in place to again kills thousands of his people -- this after he had already gassed the Kurds and sufficiently threatened Israel with nuclear devastation that the Israelis felt compelled to flatten Osirak, Saddam's nuclear project. So advocates of liberty inside of tyrannically run countries did not have an active friend or protector in America - until 2003 in Iraq. Until then, we hadn't dumped containment in favor of something less cynical, although the Soviet Union was long gone. We even referred actively to our strategy for dealing with Saddam as containment, even though the notion of treating Saddam like the USSR is really quite silly.

In 2003 in Iraq, we upended a fellow who had miscalculated his fate, but not as stupidly as some might think, because we had no record of sacrificing blood and treasure to extend liberty. Osama thinks he won the Cold War, not us, because the Wahhabis spilled more blood against the Soviets in Afghanistan than we ever did. We spilled none. And when we pulled our guys out of Somalia, and didn't properly respond to our embassy bombings and walked away from Iran, we left ourselves with no credibility. Power becomes meaningless if not used effectively, and with political will and purpose.

There is a reason these democracy movements are happening now and not being crushed by the local tyrant. None of Assad, or Qaddafi or some other petty thug want to be pulled from a spiderhole, photographed in their briefs or getting their teeth cleaned. Nobody envies Uday and Qusay (anymore). Osama and Zarqawi may be legendary heroes to some freaks, but to most thoughtful people they are cockroaches and aspiring tyrants crawling around from cave to cave, running for their lives, having midnight surgery in a dirty room to remove shrapnel from some sensitive body part. We are CREDIBLE. Really CREDIBLE. Nobody of any import really longs to tangle with America at the moment. Even Chirac and Schroeder may be having some regrets. It doesn't seem that Blair and Howard are.

Today, advocates of freedom in these cesspools of tyranny feel protected in a way they never have before. And they are testing the tyrants resolve to roll out the troops. They would never have done that before the Iraq War. Just look at the empirical evidence...they never did.
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A former FBI official says he was the source called "Deep Throat" who leaked secrets about President Nixon's Watergate coverup to The Washington Post, Vanity Fair reported Tuesday. W. Mark Felt, 91, who was second-in-command at the FBI in the early 1970s, kept the secret even from his family until 2002, when he confided to a friend that he had been Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward's source, the magazine said.

Felt has long been a candidate.

Wow.
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Joshua Micah Marshall's much ballyhooed group blog project is up and running. This is probably the greatest concentration of moderate lefty brainpower in the blogosphere. Let's see if it lives up to its hype.
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Thanks to the big "non" on Sunday, the dollar is up to 0.81 Euros this morning, which is its highest level since last summer. The World's Greatest Currency is up 10.5% against the Euro since the beginning of this year, and 5% since the New York Times shorted the dollar ("The dollar is heading down, no matter what").
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It is broken record time. Yes, I'm back to writing about the Alternative Minimum Tax. If you don't care about the Alternative Minimum Tax, skip to the next post, which is much more interesting.

The New York Times is going after the AMT again, having modified its proposal of March 13. Then it described taxpayers earning between $100,000 and $200,000 as "middle class," a classification that may match the self-perception of those people but which is wholly at odds with the redistributional politics usually practiced at the Times. It has since scaled back its proposal for AMT reform to exempt taxpayers making less than $100,000, without (of course) admitting that it has changed its point of view, or explaining why.

But that's not why I'm irritated.

The Times thinks that the real atrocity is that there is "a special low rate on investment income" in the personal income tax, meaning by this that long-term capital gains and dividends are taxed at 15% regardless of bracket, whereas wages and other ordinary income are taxed at 35% in the top bracket.

Then, to fight excessive tax sheltering, Congress should close a gaping loophole in the law that allows wealthy investors to avoid paying the alternative tax on much of their investment income. Here's how the loophole works: The tax rate on investment income is typically much lower than the rate on wages and salary. For example, the tax on a $1,000 capital gain from the sale of stock generally comes to $150, while the tax on $1,000 of salary can be as high as $350. The special low rate on investment income allows investors to avoid paying tens of billions of dollars in taxes each year. And yet the alternative tax does not treat that super-low rate as a tax shelter. (emphasis added)

Never mind that the "super-low rate" that the Times describes is not a "loophole" at all -- it is out there in plain sight. If the lower rate for capital gains and dividends is a "loophole," so is the tax credit for having children or the deduction for state taxes. No, that is not what annoys me.

I am annoyed because capital gains and dividends are not, in fact, taxed at lower rates than wages. Rather, they are taxed at higher rates, because the underlying corporation has already paid corporate income tax at roughly 34% on its profits. When all is said and done, a $1 of corporate profit that is paid out in dividends to its stockholders is taxed at more than 43%, a rate substantially higher than wages. The Times, of course, knows this, but would prefer to describe this lower rate as "super-low" and a "loophole."

There are certainly principled arguments for reform of the AMT, and it may even make sense to exempt people who make less than $100,000 per year, as the Times proposes. But the editors would be a lot more persuasive if they weren't so unabashedly disingenuous when they write about tax policy.

We now return to regularly scheduled blogging.
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There is no denying that the democratic reforms in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, the Palestinian Authority, Ukraine, Georgia and even Egypt are remarkable and wonderful. The question is, why have they occurred? Like so much else in American and now global politics, supporters of the Bush administration have tended to attribute much if not all of this progress to the example of the Iraq war and subsequent elections, while critics have claimed that these reforms would have occurred regardless. For example, Adam Shatz wrote in the Los Angeles Times a couple of months ago that the American invasion of Iraq was counterproductive:

If anything, the war was a gift to the jihadists. And to the extent that the Middle East has moved toward democracy, it's as much in spite of American pressure as because of it.

It has seemed to me that both explanations were needlessly reductionist. How can it be that the Iraq war and its example could be responsible for so much (in the pro-Bush version) or be so meaningless (in the anti-Bush conception)? The answer, I think, is that the example of Iraq is not the cause of these positive changes that have occurred, but it is the product of the same American foreign policy that has also had an enormous influence in these other places.

Imagine how pleased I was, therefore, to read Lawrence F. Kaplan's essential article in the current issue of The New Republic (June 6 & 13, 2005), unfortunately available online only by subscription. Kaplan writes it thusly:

Both arguments reflect what Georgetown University's Robert Lieber calls a reductio ad Iraqum, in which every accomplishment or setback of U.S. foreign policy traces back to Iraq. Neither version of events fares well under scrutiny. When democracy blossums in several different places at once in a region whose political culture hasn't budged in 60 years, it's illogical to credit internal forces alone. At the same time, crediting the inspirational effect of Iraq's elections with events in places as far-flung as Ukraine and Egypt goes too far -- and, in slighting the U.S. role as an agent of democracy in every one of them, not far enough.

Each camp approaches the events of this spring from a different direction, but both end up in the same place: repeating the claim that "people power," triggered either by unique circumstances or the example of Iraq, accounts for the democratic wave sweeping over the Middle East and Central Asia, and that it alone can accomplish the ends of U.S. foreign policy in the region. What neither mentions is that, absent direct U.S. intervention, not one of these movements would have succeeded. This holds true in Egypt, Ukraine, Georgia, the Palestinian Authority, Lebanon, Kyrgyzstan, and wherever else democracy has gained a foothold since the invasion of Iraq. Has that invasion changed the world directly? Maybe. Maybe not. What we do know is that it changed the orientation of U.S. foreign policy. And that is changing the world.

Kaplan, I believe, captures the point perfectly. Whatever the original rationale for the war, the Bush administration's commitment to free and fair elections in Iraq and the determined response of the Iraqi people has turned the United States into the leading champion for democracy in many places beyond Iraq. This is probably as much a function of bureaucratic dynamic as preconceived grand strategy. Having argued that democratic elections were the antidote to jihad in Iraq, one could almost see the Bush administration becoming captured by its own argument and applying it suddenly and dramatically all over the world. If, after all, democracy is the solution to Islamic fascism in Iraq, why shouldn't it be everywhere else?*

In any case, Kaplan goes on to detail how and why American policy is fostering democratic movements elsewhere.

In Lebanon, popular outrage at the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri on February 14 put thousands of demonstrators in the streets, launching the Cedar Revolution. But it was the United States -- joined this time by France -- that translated outrage into concrete results... What resulted was, in the words of U.N. envoy Terje Roed-Larson, a "unique, remarkable, and broad consensus" at the Security Council that the Syrians must withdraw before Lebanon's upcoming elections -- a U.S.-led consensus that Syrian officials themselves credit for their retreat...

The U.S. involvement in last December's Orange Revolution in Ukraine followed exactly the model of its involvement in 2003's Rose Revolution in Georgia, where Washington subsidized a democratic movement from within and pressured an undemocratic regime from without. Over the past two years, the United States has poured roughly $65 million in democracy aid into Ukraine -- funding, among other things, the exit poll showing that pro-Kremlin candidate Prime Minister Victor Yanukovich had lost the presidential election he claimed to have won last year, as well as training sessions for the judges who dismissed the outcome...

The least publicized example of U.S. involvement is Kyrgyzstan's Tulip Revolution. There, in a country most Americans have never heard of -- but home to a vital U.S. airbase -- Washington flexed its muscle from the back of a truck. As part of his campaign against political dissent on the even of parliamentary elections in February, President Askar Akayev cut off power to a U.S.-funded printing press -- on which opposition newspapers calling for his ouster depended. Overnight, the U.S. Embassy trucked over generators to restart the presses, which, via articles detailing electoral fraud and growing popular unrest, would soon engineer Akayev's downfall. The highest per capita recipient of U.S. aid in Central Asia, Kyrgyzstan was already home to an assortment of U.S.-funded TV and radio programs and, most important, a U.S. Embassy unusually committed to promoting democracy -- so much so that Akayev's government forged documents purporting to show it plotting his demise. As opposition leader Edil Baisilov told the Associated Press after Akayev fled the country in March, "It would have been absolutely impossible for this to have happened without [U.S.] help."

Kaplan also discusses the case of Egypt, reminding us of Secretary Rice's decisive expression of "displeasure."

Kaplan concludes that "[t]here is a lesson here, and a reminder, for a nation chastised by the war in Iraq: When it comes to democratization, either the decisive push will come from Washington or it may not come at all."

In any case, if this formulation is correct -- that the United States is systematically destabilizing authoritarian regimes in order to "drain the swamp" that breeds jihadism and otherwise advance American security -- how should we consider the Iraq war in this framework? Proponents of the war might argue that it is but one example of American support for status quo-busting democracy, and in addition to Afghanistan the only example of armed intervention. Principled opponents of the war would argue that the United States should have supported democratic movements on its own initiative, rather than having to have been boxed into that position as a consequence of its counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq, and that American support for democracy would be far more popular in most of the world if the United States had not invaded in the first place. The response, of course, is that American coercion would not have been nearly as credible were it not for our demonstrated willingness to go to war. While this last argument is one that I strongly agree with, there is no doubting that historians will argue its validity for at least two generations.

Finally, there will be -- and already is -- a lively debate in the Arab world about the consequences of American policy, and a derivative argument in the West about the "lively debate" in the Arab world. Kaplan cites numerous examples of Arab and Muslim politicians and activists who credit George Bush with the progress that has already been made, but for every supporter there are many more who are baffled by this application of American power. See, for example, this cartoon, published yesterday:



According to the unofficial TigerHawk advisor on such matters, the signs call for the withdrawal of Israel from the occupied territories. The Israeli soldier is saying that all of this democracy belongs to the American, the message being that if you let the Arab peoples say what they really think, then they will stand in opposition to Israel and the American connection to it.

At first blush, this looks like an extremely anti-American cartoon. After all, it assumes the unbreakable linkage between the hated Israelis and the United States. But does it not also implicitly credit the United States for promoting reforms that will advance Arab democracy? Why else would the Israeli soldier be blaming the American soldier for all this democracy? In the cartoonist's vision, America might well be responsible for the democratic reforms in the Arab world, but is too stupid to realize that it has unleashed forces that will rise up against its ally, Israel.

Perhaps. But stupid is as stupid does. The United States -- and its allies with the vision to support popular movements in the Arab world -- are betting that Arabs with a stake in their future and power to throw out their own governments will realize that they have more to live for than can be accomplished by detonating a bomb belt on a crowded bus.
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*I'm well aware that President Bush and others raised the "democracy rationale" before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. It is also the case, though, that the democracy rationale has assumed a much greater significance since then. This is not, as cynics suggest, because the WMD rationale failed. Rather, it is because both the United States and Ayatollah al-Sistani realized that forceful advocacy for democracy was the necessary response to Sunni intransigence. Forced, then, to make the case for democracy in Iraq, the Bush administration became much more comfortable -- and persuasive -- arguing that it was a plausible solution in other contexts.
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New Sisyphus explains the "non" vote perfectly:

A great nation has been asked to vote itself out of existence, to subsume its identity in a larger mix.

We know not what the ultimate destiny of the French shall be, but it shall not be this, of that we are certain. France is eternal, great and glorious; it shall not whimper and walk off the world stage mixed with Belgians.

It is true that other peoples of Europe have already ratified the Constitution, but the Spanish are not a people in the way the French are. What does a Catalonian have to lose in moving his remote capital from a government he dislikes and distrusts from Madrid to Brussels? The Italians are similarly divided, as any member of the Northern League would explain to you. As for the Germans, their entire post-war ideology has been based on denying that they are a great people with a unified destiny; for them that reality will always bear the taint of evil.

In the next few days, the Dutch will also rally to their senses and—we feel confident in predicting this—will also soundly reject the proposed Constitution. Had they an opportunity to vote the British would similarly reject the proposal. (Is there no man more blessed with luck in the entire field of European politics than the Right Honorable Anthony Blair, MP?)

Read the whole thing.
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Not my word for it:

Eighty-one beauties from Albania to Zambia applied a final layer of make-up and worked up their best smiles on Monday for the climax of a Miss Universe tournament that once again failed to avoid controversy.

On the first leg of Reuters huge slideshow I thought that Miss Canada, one Natalie Glebova, was a contender...



...until I saw her in her "national costume."



WTF? She would have looked better in a hot "Mountie" uniform, to wit:



UPDATE: Miss Canada actually won(!), notwithstanding the blue plumage. Come to TigerHawk for all your major beauty pageant predictions.
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This is the coolest "powers of ten" slideshow that I've seen. Definitely worth a look.

CWCID: Toothdigger's Comeback.
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For those of you who stop here before going to Instapundit, I commend to you this well-documented and sober discussion of the abuse of prisoners in the custody of the American military. Those of us who are strong supporters of the American military and its deployment in the war on Islamic fascism need to speak out. The left may have insufficient credibility with our military to provoke reform, but perhaps those of us with a long track record of supporting our soldiers can have an impact.

I will have more on this subject later.
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Evidence that the Muslim troubles in the south of Thailand may expand into a jihadist struggle were illustrated by the May 19 raid on an Islamic school at Ban Taloh Kapo village in the Ya Rang district of Pattani province. According to a report in the Bangkok Post Thai soldiers were led to the school after two persons, arrested on charges of setting fire to Buddhist schools, confessed that they had received military training there.

What made the raid notable was the uncovering, amid the discovery of firearms and ammunition, of evidence of Arabic language documents and al-Qaeda training CDs. Col. Chatuporn Kalampasut, commander of the 22nd Task Force said he believed the school was "linked to a separatist network which has created unrest in the South" and that "the school's owner … is a leader of the network."

Link.
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PostSecret is an ongoing community art project where people mail-in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard.

Some of the postcards are simply astonishing, and virtually all of them ring true. See, for example:


Go here and start scrolling.
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Roger L. Simon reports that Syrian blogger-dissidents need your help. Syrian blogger Ammar Abdulhamid is calling for the blogosphere to flood the Syrian embassy, its UN delegation, and any other Syrian target with emails calling for the release of the Atassy 8, "prisoners of conscience" in Syria.

[T]he Atassy 8 may not be known to you, you may not know what they have done over the years, you may not know what their exact political philosophy is (I don’t think they know that themselves really), but suffice it to know that they were committed to democracy, committed to reform and committed to dialogue. That should be enough for them to deserve our support.

So, flood the embassies with your emails, this is the least that we can do. Student groups that can hold vigils for their sake are more than encouraged to do so. Those who can write articles, op-eds or blog entries about them, go ahead and do so. Freedom for the Atassy 8 and all prisoners of conscience in Syria should be our rallying cry from now on. No reform package will be accepted from this regime if it does not include strict guarantees for our basic freedoms. We will not live at the whim of anyone. (emphasis in original)

Here are some early targets:

Syrian Embassy in Washington, DC
syrembas@syrembassy.net
Fax: (202) 232-4357

Ministry of Tourism:
Fax: +963 11 2242636
Email: min-tourism@mail.sy

Syrian Arab News Agency
sana@net.sy

Be loud, be clear, and be persuasive. The world's dictators need to know that transparency is the friend of freedom and rule of law.

UPDATE: The original title to this post was inaccurate, so it has been revised. That will change the permalink, so if you have linked to it you will need to fix the link.
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Paul Krugman spoke yesterday afternoon to a self-selected audience at the Princeton University Store, which hosted the event to draw in alumni during Reunions weekend. The ostensible purpose of the appearance was to sell The Great Unraveling, but Krugman spoke for almost ninety minutes on a wide range of subjects to a packed room.

 

The audience was heavily skewed toward older alumni -- say, 40th reunion on up -- and very young alumni. The former applauded Krugman for his strident opposition to the Bush Administration's proposals to reform Social Security, and the latter asked freighted questions about Bush's "lies" in connection with the Iraq war. No apparent conservative asked a question.

I typed six single-spaced pages of notes -- an abbreviated transcript -- during both his short introductory remarks and through the questions and answers, and if I posted it all it would be too much Krugman by almost any standard. There were, however, some highlights.

Krugman's "reluctance" to write on politics

In his introductory remarks, Krugman characterized himself as an economist with a facility to explain his profession in plain English. When the Times approached him in 1999 to write a regular column, he imagined that he would write about such things as the currency crisis in Argentina and fiscal policy. Instead, he says, he found himself increasingly concerned about the direction of the country during the 2000 election campaign.

It became clear to me that something funny was going on. People were being profoundly dishonest. The issue that radicalized me in 2000 was the issue of Social Security, so in some sense we have come full circle. Then from then on things became increasingly political.

And I hate it, by the way. I wish we didn’t live in that kind of world. I’m a moderate Democrat.

The big thing in The Great Unraveling is that I went out on a limb and said that these are not just bad guys from my point of view, but that we are facing a radical challenge. I have slimmed it down: Basically we have a coalition between a radical religious right and a radical economic right that has come to power in Washington, and does not take for granted things as they were. That we are trying to completely change how the Senate does business as just one small example.

That Paul Krugman thinks we are trying "to completely change how the Senate does business" and that the audience nods approvingly does indeed suggest that somebody is being profoundly dishonest.

Daniel Okrent's "very peculiar blast"

Newshounds know that the outbound public editor of The New York Times, Daniel Okrent, took a shot at Paul Krugman in his farewell article last Sunday. Okrent went out of his way to snark:

Op-Ed columnist Paul Krugman has the disturbing habit of shaping, slicing and selectively citing numbers in a fashion that pleases his acolytes but leaves him open to substantive assaults. Maureen Dowd was still writing that Alberto R. Gonzales "called the Geneva Conventions 'quaint' " nearly two months after a correction in the news pages noted that Gonzales had specifically applied the term to Geneva provisions about commissary privileges, athletic uniforms and scientific instruments. Before his retirement in January, William Safire vexed me with his chronic assertion of clear links between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, based on evidence only he seemed to possess.

No one deserves the personal vituperation that regularly comes Dowd's way, and some of Krugman's enemies are every bit as ideological (and consequently unfair) as he is. But that doesn't mean that their boss, publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr., shouldn't hold his columnists to higher standards.

I didn't give Krugman, Dowd or Safire the chance to respond before writing the last two paragraphs. I decided to impersonate an opinion columnist.

One of Krugman's "acolytes" asked him in sympathetic terms if he had anything to say about Okrent's charge. Many of the people in the audience did not understand the reference to Okrent, so Krugman explained that "the public editor" of the Times -- Krugman never once used Okrent's name himself -- "took a very peculiar blast" at him about the misuse of numbers without supplying any evidence. Krugman said that he had exchanged emails with "the public editor" in the last few days in response to the article, and that Okrent had not supplied any instance of Krugman misrepresenting numbers. He attributed Okrent's criticism to pressure from conservatives, and said that Okrent had questioned him about his columns via email since Okrent had come to the paper a year and a half ago, but that he (Krugman) "always had an answer." Okrent, who was "under constant pressure" from conservatives, finally gave up asking Krugman about the columns and "built up a list of grievances in his mind" which he uncorked in his final column.

Basically, Krugman believed that Okrent had a psychological need borne of pressure from conservatives to find misrepresentations in Krugman's work. According to Krugman, there are no such misrepresentations.

On the distribution of income

One old alumnus fairly bitterly asked whether we were heading toward a world in which a small group of people would make "a minimum of $3 million a year" and most everybody else would earn "a maximum of $3 per hour". Even Krugman had to admit that "it doesn't work that way," but went on to claim that all the improvements in income distribution that had occurred between the Crash of '29 and the late 1970s had been erased, that "we are back to 1920s income distribution -- the Great Gatsby has returned," and that social mobility is declining and "is actually a lot lower in the United States than in Western Europe." Any of the Krugman fans out there want to point us toward the data that prove that last point?

On politics and universities

Another person asked whether universities were "cultivating" this trend toward extreme income distribution. This question had some promise if answered honestly -- one might ask whether the bloated inefficiencies of most universities didn't push tuition beyond the reach of the middle class, for example -- but Krugman dodged it. He emphasized that it was "important to maintain independence of thought," and digressed that David Horowitz was leading an "organized campaign" against that. "Whenever I give a large class, I assume that somebody in there is feeding any example of bias back to him."

A subsequent questioner suggested that Krugman was "censoring" what he said in class, and he denied it. But he did say that he was very careful to label political opinions as such and that when he gave an assignment on a political subject such as fiscal policy, he asked the student to argue both sides on the exam. Krugman quite clearly offered these two precautions into evidence as steps he had taken to innoculate himself against the accusation that he was politically biased in his classes. When the audience tisk-tisked and looked grim, as if these concessions were themselves evidence of rising fascism, it was genuinely hard not to burst out laughing.

The crushing of dissent

One of the younger generation asked why the "Downing Street" memorandum had not received more coverage in the United States, and whether Krugman thought "that the Bush Administration has initimidated the media to the point where they can’t even report on the truth any more?"

"Hell yes," said Krugman. Huh? "Everybody understands that if you are critical of the administration, they will come down on you. They will put pressure, they will scream at the editors, and they will try to destroy your credibility."

Well, Paul, destruction of credibility is the sine qua non of refutation, and any editor who can't deal with somebody from the White House staff screaming at them isn't very committed to free speech.

Shorting the dollar

Krugman was at his most interesting when he talked about economics. He was asked "what are the changes for a big currency crash" and what would its effects be on politics and the economy? Krugman replied that this question is best answered by asking and answering four other questions:

Is the current balance of payments sustainable? If not, will it end with a wimper or a bang? Whether with a wimper or a bang, how bad is the end going to be? What are we going to do? My answers are, in order: "No," "bang," “I don't know, but have a bad feeling about it,” “and run away.” The current balance of payments is not sustainable. Almost always these things come to an abrupt end. We are going to have a “Wile E. Coyote” moment. The case for a big fall in the dollar is overwhelming, with the one caveat that if you think about the alternatives you say, oh, wait a minute, what is so attractive about the Euro or the yen. But we are living way beyond our means, and the Europeans are not. So I think it happens quite suddenly when it happens. How bad? There is one big difference between the United States and Argentina, for example. Our foreign debt is in our own currency. We do not have the Argentina problem, but there may be other stuff. Housing already looks like a bubble. If interests rates go up – which they would if the dollar plunged – housing would be in trouble. Ultimately, I don’t know, for sure, how bad it would be. For what it's worth, Robert Rubin and Paul Volcker, who are the two clamest men I know, are both very concerned about this.

As regular readers know, I have argued repeatedly that the dollar will generally rally against most foreign currencies because the alternatives are so poor. However, I agree with Krugman that there is something going on with American investment flows that is historically anamolous and potentially troubling:

[Our balance of payments] is a very weird situation. The way it is suppose to work is that rich advanced countries lend some of their extra savings to poor countries where the opportunities are. Capital is supposed to flow from the rich countries to the poor countries. What we have instead is that the U.S. is sucking in huge amounts of capital from the rest of the world for the purpose of high consumption, instead of investment, and a lot of that capital is coming from China and oil producing countries. It should be unstable. As a share of GDP, the current account deficit is bigger than most precedents. So far, however, the Chinese are still buying lots and lots of dollars. I believe it is going to blow, but if you had believed me all along and speculated on that you would have lost money.

Krugman also answered several questions about universal health care, said that Brad DeLong was his "favorite econo-blogger" and sympathized with a half dozen "questioners" who stood up and made speeches about the United States becoming an authoritarian country. One woman who looked about 60 claimed she "grew up in Stalin's Russia" and that a lot of the things she saw in the United States today reminded her of Russia under Uncle Joe. Another perfectly respectable-looking member of the audience offered a long rant about the rise of fascism and compared the intimidation of the press in the United States today to the suppression of the press in Germany during the 1930s. Krugman politely deflected these questions with a smile, probably aware that some blogger would be all over him if he agreed. He did not, however, take issue with these people, but only suggested that it would be a poor tactic if he wrote so bluntly in his column:

You have to modulate yourself so you don’t lose people. I cannot write two columns a week saying “gee, this looks like the road to fascism.” It won’t do any good. We all have to pick and choose.

Finally, Krugman confided some optimism.

Weirdly, I’m feeling somewhat encouraged. I was deeply encouraged that Joe Lieberman voted against John Bolton yesterday... If you compare the way things are today to the way you felt after the election, you want to give Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi a Nobel prize for politicking.

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Japanese diplomats investigated claims Friday that two former Japanese soldiers have been hiding in the mountains of the southern Philippines since World War II.

The health ministry, in charge of repatriating Japanese overseas, said it was sending an official to the southern Philippine city of General Santos on Saturday to join Japanese embassy officials attempting to reach the pair....

In September, a Japanese national in the lumber business ran into the men in the mountains, the Japanese newspaper Sankei Shimbun reported. It was learned later that they wanted to go back to Japan but were afraid of facing a court-martial for withdrawing from action, the newspaper said.

Another source told the paper there may be more than 40 other Japanese soldiers living in the mountains, and they all want to return to Japan, the Sankei said.

The family of one of the soldiers released this picture of their lost soldier.

In this undated photo released by a family member and obtained by Kyodo News, Japanese Imperial Army soldier Tsuzuki Nakauchi is seen aboard a military horse. Pfc. Nakauchi is believed to be one of two former Japanese servicemen who have been hiding in the mountains of the southern Philippines island of Mindanao since World War II. Diplomats from Japan on Friday May 27, 2005, investigated the astonishing claims of two men who say they are former Japanese soldiers who have been hiding in the mountains of southern Philippines since World War II. Japanese Embassy representatives went to the region to interview the men in a meeting that was being arranged by a third person who contacted the mission, embassy official Masaru Watanabe said. Japanese Embassy spokesman Shuhei Ogawa cautioned that it was too early to draw any conclusions, saying there was no evidence yet that the men were WWII fighters. (AP Photo/Kyodo News)

Imagine how alienated these men would feel in modern Japan, and how shocked modern Japan might feel by the return of these men. If the Japanese react the way I imagine Americans would, these soldiers would be on television before they had ever watched television, an astonishing idea. Would the return of perhaps 40 soldiers from Imperial Japan -- soldiers that have not lived through the occupation of Japan and its forced democratization under the United States -- change the political consciousness of that country just as it is flexing its muscles for the first time in sixty years? If these Japanese ba'al t'shuva remind Japan of its martial history, will adventurism abroad become more popular in a wave of nostalgia, or less popular in a fit of revulsion?
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Colombian artist Fernando Botero's "Sitting Woman," a bronze sculpture made in 1976, was sold at auction for 688,000 dollars -- a record for a Botero sculpture.

Sold at Christie's late Wednesday, the sculpture went for the fourth highest price for a Latin American work for the auction house.

Would Botero's art be worth so much if he hadn't devoted the last year to bashing the United States?
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Condoleezza Rice has been hammering away at Syria in recent weeks, at one point saying that "Syria that needs to understand that it should not think itself immune from the way that the region is going." This is widely understood as an accusation that Syria has been supporting the reactionaries in Iraq, at least to the extent of ignoring their use of its border as an entrance and an exit.

Syria has responded with extended whining, finally declaring that it would no longer share intelligence or otherwise cooperate with the United States. Presumably to bolster the point that the United States would regret losing that cooperation, Syria announced yesterday that in recent weeks it had arrested 1,200 would-be insurgents who were attempting to cross from its territory into Iraq.

"We gave a lot of information to the United States on these issues, which prevented many attacks, but regrettably, the United States did not recognize such kind of help," [Syria's ambassador to the United Nations, Fayssal Mekdad,] said in an interview.

The Associated Press, it seems, has written this story upside down. If Syria has, in fact, been able to arrest more than a thousand insurgents in just the last few weeks, why hasn't it been doing that for the last two years? Syria, in its braggodocio, has implicitly confessed that it has been able to stop insurgents from crossing the border all along, and effectively admitted the charges against it.

UPDATE: Ooops. I spelled the Secretary of State's first name wrong. That's something that definitely would not happen in the mainstream media, so they have that going for them!
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If Arthur Chrenkoff is looking for another "good news" beat, perhaps he should turn next to Israel and its neighbors. There is more than hatred in the region, and therefore a chance at peace in the long run. For example, Haitham Sabbah, a Palestinian living in Jordan, wonders whether SESAME can become an "oasis of peace" in the Middle East.

Here’s some good news from the Jordan: Israel, Iran, Syria, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Palestine Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Algeria, Jordan and many other countries from around the globe ... need no “Open SESAME magic” to be able to cooperate on an advanced scientific project.

In Al-Balqa’ Applied University, just north of Amman - and at a comfortable distance from the spotlight thrown by political conflicts - representatives of these countries are involved in developing SESAME, an acronym for Synchrotron-light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East.

It’s a rare and possibly unique example of scientific cooperation between Israel and so many Arab countries. Libya is expected to join soon as an observer....

The political importance of the project cannot be underestimated. Scientists in the region work together in a spirit of cooperation for the sake of developing the Middle East.

SESAME, the Middle East’s first major international research center, is a synchrotron accelerator. It uses magnets to create a circular path for electrons traveling at nearly the speed of light, producing a beam of bright ultraviolet and X-ray light, about the diameter of a human hair, that is directed down beam lines to end stations.

SESAME's web site is here. The project obviously bears watching, yet Technorati reveals essentially no coverage from the blogosphere.

Sabbah, by the way, is an excellent blogger. I do not agree with his politics (he is more than a little anti-American), but he writes well on a very wide range of topics. I have blogrolled him under "Regional Blogs" down the sidebar.
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Paul Mirengoff of Power Line gives voice to the ambivalence that many conservatives feel about embryonic stem cell research.

President Bush has said that he will veto legislation Congress is likely to pass calling for federal funding of embryonic stem cell research on stem cell lines other than those previously approved by the administration. It would be the first time Bush has used his veto power.

This issue divides conservatives and it's easy for me to see why, since I'm of two minds about it myself. On balance, while I admire Bush for taking a principled stand on the issue, I tend to think he's taken the wrong stand.

I agree. If I had a chance to direct investment in embryonic stem cell research, I would do so. But Mirengoff is falling into a trap that the Democrats have set. This debate is not -- as the Democrats and the MSM contend -- a struggle between religious moralists who want to ban embryonic stem cell research and seekers of truth who want to save humanity from devestating pathologies. Stem cell research will not be stopped. It is happening all over the place, with federal funds on the grandfathered lines, with state funds in New Jersey and California, without restriction in the private sector, and in many other scientifically advanced countries of the world. No disease will go uncured -- at least not in the long run -- because the government of the United States does not fund stem cell research.

No. This argument is about convenience for a few American university professors. They want to be able to experiment with embryonic stem cells without soiling themselves in the for-profit sector or moving to a foreign country. Never mind that they could save the world from a lab in a British university or an American biotech company -- they only want to do their work if they can do it in the comfort of federally subsidized laboratories in American universities, not caring that the subsidy itself is deeply offensive to millions of people.

That the mainstream media has taken up the cause of these professors as if it were anything other than self-serving says a great deal about the contempt that the elite press has for religious people.

UPDATE: Daniel Gottesman argues against the position I've taken in this post in an interesting comment.
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Neo-Neocon expresses beautifully a sentiment I'd venture many feel about politically correct commentary and Islam. Those who forcefully argue that we must be especially culturally sensitive about Islam are either fools, cowards or the bad guys. How many culturally insensitive comments are made daily in the liberal press about Evangelicals, Jews and Catholics, to name a few? Yet those comments don't give rise to violence or murder, do they? Yet make an intellectually sound comment or critique of Islam, and the next thing you know, you have a death sentence hanging over your head - please note Theo Van Gogh's rather culturally insensitive murder after he made a movie about it. Or the dozens of similar death sentences issued for writers and critics of Islam.

Where is the MSM outrage there?
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Yesterday and today are given over to a management off-site meeting, which has been declared "e-free," probably to prevent me from blogging through the boring parts. Normally, the first night of these two day meetings involves a dinner, but last night we all dressed up and boarded a bus for Manhattan to attend a fund-raiser for the Children's Brain Tumor Foundation. This organization does amazing work, both to support research into the identification and cure of pediatric brain cancer, and to help families who have been stricken with this tragedy. Please consider clicking through and making a donation. It is a wonderful cause.

Our CEO supports the Children's Brain Tumor Foundation, so he naturally asked the professional firms who service our company to pitch in, and many of them did. For those of you who are familiar with the first firm, here is photographic evidence of their participation:



If you are in both serious legal trouble and have some money or a good insurance company, there is no better friend. And, by the way, if you are a bloodsucking leech of a plaintiff, there is no worse enemy.
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Scientists have discovered Comedy Central in the brain - specific tissue regulating the ability to understand sarcasm.

People with damage to the right frontal lobe, right behind the eyes, are unable to appreciate this kind of humor.

In sarcasm, "the literal meaning is different from the true meaning, and some people just don't understand that difference," said Simone Shamay-Tsoory, a psychologist at the Rambam Medical Center and University of Haifa in Israel. Her study appears in the May issue of the journal Neuropsychology.

I have always thought that people who do not understand sarcasm are brain damaged. How right I was.
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Context.
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If, as is being reported, Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi has fled Iraq to a "neighboring country" so that he can recover from gunshot wounds to his lung, we should chalk it up as a victory for the good guys. The question is, has Zarqawi built a command-and-control structure that can survive his departure?

I'm sure you all agree that it will be very interesting to discover which "neighboring country" he has fled to.
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Scary.

Via Instapundit.
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Having been driven into the caves in Afghanistan and western Pakistan and having learned the the Sunni Triangle of Iraq is less a "haven" than a killing field, al Qaeda is looking for a new base of operations from which it can operate free of Western entanglements. There is growing evidence that Al Qaeda is embedding itself into the slums and villages of West Africa.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote this long post about al Qaeda's "investments" Mauritania. Now we have this report, which claims that Liberia's revolting former president Charles Taylor was on al Qaeda's payroll.

Liberia's exiled former president, Charles Taylor, received money recently from an al-Qaida operative and is trying to destabilize west Africa, prosecutors for Sierra Leone's U.N.-backed war crimes tribunal said Tuesday.

Chief prosecutor David Crane said Taylor harbored members of al-Qaida including those who allegedly took part in the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1997, and was allegedly in contact with a member of the terrorist network as recently as last month.

"Al-Qaida has been in west Africa. It continues to be in west Africa, and Charles Taylor has been harboring members of al-Qaida," Crane said, adding that he believes west Africa is going to become the next Afghanistan.

Taylor counts among his various sordid colleagues a Middle Eastern businessman named Mohamed Mustafa Fadhil. Fadhil has long been on the FBI's "most wanted" list of terrorists, and has been indicted in the Southern District of New York for his alleged involvement in the bombings of the American embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya in August, 1998.

This is going to be a long war.
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Specially designed Cassini orbits place Earth and Cassini on opposite sides of Saturn’s rings, a geometry known as occultation. Cassini conducted the first radio occultation observation of Saturn’s rings on May 3, 2005.

Three simultaneous radio signals of 0.94, 3.6, and 13 centimeter wavelength (Ka-, X-, and S-bands) were sent from Cassini through the rings to Earth. The observed change of each signal as Cassini moved behind the rings provided a profile of the distribution of ring material as a function of distance from Saturn, or an optical depth profile.

This simulated image was constructed from the measured optical depth profiles. It depicts the observed ring structure at about 10 kilometers (6 miles) in resolution. Color is used to represent information about ring particle sizes in different regions based on the measured effects of the three radio signals.

Purple color indicates regions where there is a lack of particles of size less than 5 centimeters (about 2 inches). Green and blue shades indicate regions where there are particles smaller than 5 centimeters (2 inches) and 1 centimeter (less than one third of one inch). The saturated broad white band near the middle of ring B is the densest region of ring B, over which two of the three radio signals were blocked at 10-kilometer (6-mile) resolution, preventing accurate color representation over this band. From other evidence in the radio observations, all ring regions appear to be populated by a broad range particle size distribution that extends to boulder sizes (several to many meters across).

Link.

Consider this the monthly TigerHawk gratis promotion of the space program.
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NSFW, but very cool.
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In order to reach the rather tepid agreement Tigerhawk earlier described to defuse the filibuster controversy, it seems the Republican crowd needed somebody to sell them out. And that person, if Senator Frist's recent threat to renew the "constitutional/nuclear option" is correct, was John McCain -- undoubtedly preparing to seize the "middle ground" for his presidential run. Giuliani is lucky to sit this one out.
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According to al Qaeda in Iraq, which apparently can get Reuters to report its press releases:

"O nation of Islam ... Pray for the healing of our Sheikh Abu Musab al-Zarqawi from an injury he suffered in the path of God," said a statement from the Al Qaeda Organization for Holy War in Iraq. Its authenticity could not be verified.

"The injury of our leader is an honor and an incentive to tighten the noose on the enemies of God and a reason to step up our attacks on them," the statement said.

Old news to readers of TigerHawk, I might add.
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Reinterpreted by a Palestinian. This guy should hook up with Fernando Botero.

If the world held Americans to the same low standards that it applies to Muslims, it would expect deadly riots and fist-pumping demonstrations in the streets of Cedar Rapids.
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China is "upset" over a Japanese war shrine. While I am also at least a little troubled by Japan's cultural unwillingness to accept culpability for its atrocities in Asia during the thirties and forties, the "Toilet-Koran" kerfuffle has burned out my sympathy for international rage over perceived slights or even alleged desecretations.

So I have a proposal for the Japanese: We'll build memorials to their war dead, and they'll flush the Korans down the toilet and interrogate the prisoners at Gitmo. That'll confuse everybody, and probably get better results.
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Link to the pdf file here.

A quick read of the lefty blogs suggests that they are less annoyed by the compromise than the righty blogs (or at least the righty blogs that care a lot about this issue). Or, to put it differently, the lefty blogs are happy that the conservatives are so annoyed.

As regular readers of this blog know, judicial filibusters have not been one of my big issues. However, I think that the Republicans handled this issue all wrong from the get-go. Whether or not abolishing judicial filibusters would have increased the leverage of sitting Republicans over these few nominees, we know that abolition would have weakened the Senate as an institution vs. the executive branch. This is because the possibility of a filibuster forces the executive branch to negotiate. Eliminate that possibility, and you weaken the Senate. Eventually, enough Republicans figured out that weakening the Senate's institutional muscle was not in their interest, even if it got a few more conservative judges through. They will face the wrath of Dobson, but so what? Where are the Christians going to turn?

Of course, this exercise also proves that the bleating on the left about "theocracy" and all the rest of their scaremongering is just so much hot air. When push came to shove, the fundamentally conservative -- as in non-changing -- Senate came to its senses. This showdown amounted to brinksmanship, not too different from traditional bladder-burster filibusters of old.

CWCID (for the links): AMERICABlog.

UPDATE: Michelle Malkin has a complete round-up of conservative rage and betrayal angst, including her own. Not having consumed this particular Kool-Aid, I seem to be immune to whatever it is that has gotten the right in such a twist over all this.
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One of the great things about life tenure is you get to write stuff like this (pdf, footnote 1) and it carries, er, the force of law:

1 The trial transcript quotes Ms. Hayden as saying Murphy called
her a snitch bitch “hoe.” A “hoe,” of course, is a tool used for
weeding and gardening. We think the court reporter, unfamiliar
with rap music (perhaps thankfully so), misunderstood Hayden’s
response. We have taken the liberty of changing “hoe” to “ho,” a
staple of rap music vernacular as, for example, when Ludacris
raps “You doin’ ho activities with ho tendencies.”

Word.

CWCID: Adam.
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Margaret Wise Brown, the author of Goodnight Moon and more than 100 other children's books, would have been 95 today. If she hadn't died in 1952.

How many millions of parents have memorized Goodnight Moon, and reluctantly caved when their toddler demanded "Moon!" for the umpty-umpth time?

Of course, many people do not appreciate the best line of the book, which must be yelled and accompanied by a fist-pumping salute: "Good night mush!"
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SportsProf had his first blogiversary yesterday, and he celebrated with a highlights post. Well worth checking out, and encourage him to cough up that novel he has inside.
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The artist, one "Diamonster," invested 500 hours creating this "painting" with MS Paint, plus a little touchup with Photoshop. Count me as impressed.

CWCID: My favorite Tunisian blogger, Subzero Blue, who observes that the artist must have "nerves of steel" to do something like this in MS Paint. Indeed.
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Major K. explains why he fights:

We are fighting this war on their turf, not ours. We do this for two reasons: First, so that our neighborhoods, buildings and innocent civilians don't get blown up or shot by the arhabi as they did on 9/11. This allows a lot of Americans to live in blissful ignorance of what war and real poverty are like. The idea of the local police station in Anytown, USA being attacked with mortars and machine guns several times a week is inconceivable to Americans. I like it that way. Second, we fight on their turf so that they alienate themselves from their local sympathizers. When a bomb goes off or a rocket impacts, it destroys the very roads, buildings and other infrastructure of the people that the arhabi claim to be fighting for. This is why the Iraqis hate the arhabi, but a lot of them are still scared of them.

Better there than here. Be thankful that we have soldiers like the Major to bear our standard Over There.
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If you nudge this robot, it steps forward and catches its balance—much like a human.

The machine called RABBIT, which resembles a high-tech Tin Man from "The Wizard of Oz," minus the arms, was developed by University of Michigan and French scientists over six years. It's the first known robot to walk and balance like a human, and late last year, researchers succeeded in making RABBIT run for six steps. It has been able to walk gracefully for the past 18 months.

Link. Live motion video here.

Compare and contrast:





Does anybody else think that RABBIT's resemblence to the Terminator skeleton is disturbing?
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The New York Times reports this morning on a new study by the Pew Institute, which seeks to tease out the impact of bloggers on the mainstream media's agenda. The study looked at various of the "blogstorms" for which we (as a class) have taken so much credit, and apparently concludes that they are more potent when there is a totem or document that bloggers can latch on to. The article (on page C5 of the business section) focuses on Ra^therGate, and concludes that it would not have gained the traction that it did if the memos had not been available in digital form for dissection.

For all that, though, the most crucial factor contributing to blog influence in that issue may have been the smoking gun: digital copies of the 1970's-era documents and their impossibly modern fonts.

These became powerful totems because they could be relentlessly examined, tinkered with, traded and discussed online by blogs of all political stripes, each with its own agenda and each contributing to a buzz that ultimately could not be ignored.

Interestingly, the author of the column, Tom Zeller Jr., refers to the Killian memos as "forged Vietnam-era documents," which boosts his credibility on the subject of blogging far above, say, this fool (via Mark Tapscott and Instapundit). Or this guy.

Zeller quotes the study's author, George Washington University Professor Michael Cornfield [he isn't from Iowa, is he? - ed.], who has this to say about the impact of blogging:

"The blogosphere is half forensic lab and half tavern," said Michael Cornfield, an adjunct professor at the Graduate School of Political Management at George Washington University and the chief author of the study.

"The magic of the Internet is you can be looking at evidence, at direct documentation, while you're talking," Mr. Cornfield said, referring to the fake memos that turned blogs into influential buzzmakers. "It would be as if the Nixon tapes were available in MP3 format during Watergate."

I think this is as decent a metaphor as I have seen. Bloggers as a group combine two attributes -- the ability to assemble expertise on almost any topic at extreme speed, and the propensity to write at very high velocity. This combination of expertise and velocity comes at the cost, perhaps, of sobriety (there's the tavern metaphor) and deliberation. However, the competing tendency of bloggers to edit each other, also at high velocity, limits the potential damage of errors of fact.

UPDATE: I'll have more to say on the underlying report at the other end of the work day.
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The Glittering Eye has its skivvies in a twist over, er, SkivviesGate. His argument is, essentially, that da law is da law:

Saddam Hussein is a prisoner of war. We are obligated by the treaty to protect him from public curiosity. That taking pictures of him in his underwear and then allowing those pictures to be published in a newspaper is a failure to protect him from public curiosity would appear to be self-evident. That it is a failure to secure “respect for his person and his honor” would also appear to be self-evident. If you don't believe so, just read any of the many outraged comments from Iraqis.

That Saddam Hussein is vile and loathsome is irrelevant. The United States is a party to a treaty and the terms of that treaty should be scrupulously observed.

I agree with those who point out that in the total scheme of things a picture in his skivvies is small potatoes compared with the thousands or hundreds of thousands of atrocities that Saddam committed, ordered to be committed or condoned. But that, too, is irrelevant. The issue isn't Saddam, it's the United States.

Well, sure. Far be it from me to come out and approve of a palpable violation of the law. But was the leaking of these photos some sort of heinous crime, or was it the moral equivalent of stealing from the Mafia?

In any enterprise as large and chaotic as war, violations of law are bound to occur. In this war, more than any before it, the violations of one side -- the United States and its allies -- are exposed to the scrutiny of billions of people. In virtually every case, American violations of law were brought to light after they had been investigated by the United States itself. Even in SkivviesGate, the United States responded quickly at the highest levels. How a government responds to a violation of international law is important. Notwithstanding the partisan bleatings of the left, I cannot think of another example in history of a government responding as openly as the United States has to charges of war crimes (other than perhaps Israel on various occasions). How many internal investigations did the Russians launch during their long occupation of Afghanistan? Did Saddam prosecute any of his own soldiers for the crimes they committed in his wars against Iran and Kuwait? I think we know the answers to both questions.

The other fairly obvious point is that the Geneva Conventions protect the dignity of soldiers in part because rank-and-file grunts are considered to have been doing their duty, substantially under compulsion. They are, to a great degree, innocent, insofar as they had no meaningful choice but to fight for their country. Saddam, however, is a dirtbag of a different order. While it is true that he is a prisoner of war because of his membership in the Iraqi military, his culpability is of a palpably more heinous nature than that of the typical soldier for whom the Geneva Conventions were devised.

SkivviesGate has not degraded the rule of law. It has reinforced the rule of law. The United States has responded with an almost laughable gravity to a technical violation of the Geneva Conventions. Indeed, most of the public expressions of rage at the United States over this episode are disingenuous (not that of The Glittering Eye), and motivated by purposes other than concern for the rule of law.
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Occasionally, one or another of The New Yorker's writers tries so hard to turn his or her nose up you wonder whether they break their neck in the event. In this week's "On Television" column, Nancy Franklin certainly comes close in dishing an entirely gratuitous slam at Desperate Housewives:

[ABC]’s series “Desperate Housewives,” whose juicy title belies its unyielding dullness, became an instant Sunday-night hit upon its début, in October...

"Unyielding dullness"? This from the television critic? Desperate Housewives is one of the most original shows on television. It is hilarious. Unless and until she retracts her unaccountable trashing of the Housewives, Nancy Franklin is not fit to review television for people who enjoy television. It is a top show for a reason.

The magazine's movie reviewer, however, has acquired a big fat target this week. Anthony Lane's review of Sith is hilarious, at least if you've already seen the thing.

What can you say about a civilization where people zip from one solar system to the next as if they were changing their socks but where a woman fails to register for an ultrasound, and thus to realize that she is carrying twins until she is about to give birth?

And don't miss:

The general opinion of “Revenge of the Sith” seems to be that it marks a distinct improvement on the last two episodes, “The Phantom Menace” and “Attack of the Clones.” True, but only in the same way that dying from natural causes is preferable to crucifixion. So much here is guaranteed to cause either offense or pain, starting with the nineteen-twenties leather football helmet that Natalie Portman suddenly dons for no reason, and rising to the continual horror of Ewan McGregor’s accent. “Another happy landing”—or, to be precise, “anothah heppy lending”—he remarks, as Anakin parks the front half of a burning starcruiser on a convenient airstrip. The young Obi-Wan Kenobi is not, I hasten to add, the most nauseating figure onscreen; nor is R2-D2 or even C-3PO, although I still fail to understand why I should have been expected to waste twenty-five years of my life following the progress of a beeping trash can and a gay, gold-plated Jeeves.

"A gay, gold-plated Jeeves"? Bwahahaha!

CWCID: Mrs. TigerHawk.
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Bloggledygook explains, in the clearest possible terms, why we must take Islam seriously and ask when it will reform:

But all this [squabbling between the Bush administration and the press] is only a means to confuse the real and pressing issue facing the media, government and military. This issue is not who is most honest and who has what agenda, but what is to be done about Islam. No one from any institution of American life has as yet enunciated the dangers of failing to demand that Muslims the world over take control of their religion and either reform or eliminate those that would destroy a centuries-old spiritual path that boasts peaceful adherents in every country on earth, a tradition of scientific and cultural innovation and at least, a history of tolerance and peaceful respect of other religious practices.

When the president tosses yet another off-handed "Islam is Peace" remark he does no service to the thousands who have been slaughtered and oppressed so "peacefully." When the media refuses to use certain words (e.g. "terrorist") for fear of insulting Muslims and seeming to be on the side of the US government, thus inciting yet another Islamist riot, it hardly demonstrates an understanding of the stakes in this fight. Neither the government nor the media wish to call out the foe, no matter that that very same foe yells in our face each and every day what its intentions are.

Read the whole thing, and consider the possibility that we treat Muslims as if they are not responsible for their actions because we -- meaning the Western media and policy elites -- do not believe that they are capable of responsibility. This is contemptuous and racist, and does not make this war any easier to win.

The Bush Administration, for its part, has shown massively more respect for Muslims than the Western media, the Western left, or the rulers of most Muslim countries. It shows this respect by demanding that Muslims entrust their populations with the franchise, and by insisting that Muslims conduct themselves according to the standards of the world. This is shocking for Muslims, who are used to Westerners who treat them with kid gloves for fear that they will riot, blow themselves up, and shout "death to America," and they are enraged that an American president would demand this of them. This Muslim rage, though, is that of a teenager who is finally being called to account for his behavior. In a few years, or a generation, Muslims may look back and marvel that George W. Bush was the first Western leader who did not condescend to them, but respected their faith and expected that they behave themselves in accordance with its highest ideals, not the degraded perversion of it that moves them to lethal riots or to strap on bomb belts and slaughter innocents by the thousands.

CWCID: Instapundit.
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No. Really.

Nine militants held by Palestinian security forces over a suicide bombing in Israel have begun a hunger strike to demand their release, security officials said on Sunday.

Of course, they are going on the hunger strike to gain press coverage that will make it harder for Abbas to crack down on terrorism. Reuters has chosen to cooperate with these would-be suicide bombers and give them that press coverage. Am I the only person who sees anything wrong with that? I would think that the prospects for peace in Palestine would be improved if Reuters did not give these people precisely the publicity that they need to put pressure on the fragile Palestinian Authority. Better that they die of starvation silently in a PA jail than loudly in an explosion on a bus or in a cafe. Let them die without their propaganda victory.
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I will admit that I'm not very spiritual when it comes to the politics of the life sciences. I think that the theory of evolution is science and "intelligent design" is not, I have no objection to research involving human stem cells, and I do not subscribe to the principles behind the opposition to regulated therapeutic human cloning (recognizing that there may be any number of practical objections).

However, I also respect the fact that people on the other side of each of these issues make complex arguments that deserve respect. The editors of The New York Times have nothing but contempt for these people, and they proved it this morning. In an editorial about recent advances in cloning by South Korean scientists (which research was roundly condemned by President Bush yesterday), the Times seems to think that this argument is about American industrial policy:

South Korean scientists stunned their rivals around the world last week by announcing that they had produced the first human embryos that were genetic matches for diseased or injured patients, and had done so by a highly efficient method that could bring further rapid advances in cloning. It was sobering evidence that leadership in "therapeutic cloning" has shifted abroad while American scientists, hamstrung by political and religious opposition, make do with private or state funds in the absence of federal support.

In case you missed the argument that this is really a fight about trade policy, the Times repeats it for you:

In the upcoming struggles over stem cell legislation, supporters of sound science must ensure that no ban is imposed on therapeutic cloning that would further shackle American researchers while scientists in Asia and Britain forge ahead.

If you believe that opposition to therapeutic cloning and stem cell research is a moral imperative, the editors of the Times have just expressed their contempt for you. The argument embedded in this editorial is that there is no moral debate to be had if America might lose its commercial advantage in the life sciences industry. Right and wrong are not even on the table. To the Times, the fight over stem cell research simply a question of smart industrial policy versus nonsensical voodoo.

Perhaps the Times is not standing up for American industry, but is concerned about the careers of American university professors (the only meaningful group of scientists who are dependant on federal funds). If its argument is about desire of scientists for subsidies, may I respectfully suggest that their alternative is to move somewhere else. Tens of thousands of scientists come from other countries to the United States every year because this is a more hospitable environment to live and work. If a few Americans have to move elsewhere to conduct research that the American electorate deems immoral, it will be no great loss.

The advances in South Korea prove a point that I have long believed: opposition to stem cell research and therapeutic cloning in the United States will not have a meaningful long-term impact on the development of derivative treatments, because scientists elsewhere in the world will develop them. Yes, America will have given up some business in the upholding of a moral principle. Even if you disagree with the arguments that sustain that principle, how does this policy reflect poorly on the United States? How many other countries in the world make such decisions?

The secular left may, in an uncharacteristic moment of reflection, wonder why it can't win elections in this country. One reason is that it persists in expressing contempt for people of faith, as the Times has done in this editorial.
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What percentage of American marriages will end in divorce? Did you ever hear somebody claim that 50% of marriages will break up? Red State Rant explains why the real proportion is much lower. RSR quotes The New York Times from a month ago:

The method preferred by social scientists in determining the divorce rate is to calculate how many people who have ever married subsequently divorced. Counted that way, the rate has never exceeded about 41 percent, researchers say. Although sharply rising rates in the 1970's led some to project that the number would keep increasing, the rate has instead begun to inch downward.

Other data suggests that it is lower still.
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In case you thought otherwise, among the various methods for debating the confirmation of judicial nominees or procedural devices for permitting or blocking a vote on same, there is no principled basis for defending one position against another. This is a bare-knuckle political fight motivated by the fire-breathers on both sides of the argument. The threat inflation and ridiculous preening of Frist, Conryn, Santorum, Reid, Harkin, Kerry, Kennedy and virtually everybody else who has pronounced on the subject are nothing but spin, as empty of content as a shouting match on "Hardball."

The United States Senate is not a "democratic" institution, at least not in any real meaning of the word. It is quite deliberately anti-democratic. That is why tiny little inconsequential states like North Dakota get the same number of Senators as California. Therefore, there is no real basis -- other than past practice -- for the idea that legislation or judicial confirmations or anything else should pass with 51 votes. If the Senate wanted to get together and pass a rule that required 67 votes to pass anything, I am not aware of any provision in the Constitution that would prevent it from doing so. The same is true for all the other countless procedural devices and precedents that govern the Senate.

At the same time, of course, the Republican argument that every nominee is "entitled to a vote" is absurd. The nominees are not entitled to a damn thing. The interests of the nominee are inconsequential.

The fact is, the Republicans won the last election big time, and their constituents want them to use their considerable power to deliver a conservative judiciary. There is really nothing the Democrats can do about it within the Senate, so they are trying to raise the political cost to Republicans by making up all sorts of nonsense about the filibuster being essential to the protection of "minority rights" and and hoping that the press and the Great Unwashed will get the impression that the Republicans are acting like unprincipled bullies. The Republicans are, of course, bullies, as are all ascendant political parties. They are no more or less unprincipled than the Democrats, though, as this story makes clear.

The Republicans, for their part, want to act like bullies -- which is only natural -- but they don't want the voters to get that impression -- which also is only natural -- so they have made up all sorts of silly arguments about the nominee being "entitled" to a vote. Yeah. They're standing up for the little guy, that's the ticket.

This fight is about the allocation of power inside and outside the Senate. There is no truth or justice in this quarrel, only victory or defeat. I do not say this cynically -- as my regular readers know, I am not a cynic -- but because I have not heard an argument advanced by either side that is grounded in principle rather than public relations.
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There's nothing like a lazy Saturday afternoon for a blogjam. Here's what I found on my stroll through the blogroll:

Ann Althouse has piles, and a house that sounds a lot like ours.

Gregory Djerejian (The Belgravia Dispatch) explains the spat between Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Reynolds. Better than either of them have, I might add.

A Different River explores the true record of Janice Rogers Brown, the Circuit Court of Appeals nominee over which the Democrats in the Senate have gone to the mat. A principled examination of her record reveals that she is far more liberal than her critics, including The New York Times (which said she was "an extreme right-winng idealogue"), claim. It is almost as though the Democrats are blocking the vote on her nomination because they are afraid that in a couple of short years a Republican President will appoint the first black woman to the United States Supreme Court. But that can't possibly be the reason. Can it?

Firewolf's twin sister committed suicide on Friday, May 13th. The service was this afternoon. Click through and wish him well.

Tom Kirkendall has an outstanding post that indicts the mainstream media for turning a blind eye to prosecutorial misconduct in business cases. Using the Houston Chronicle as his foil, Kirkendall shows how prosecutors regularly deploy tactics against executives that would and do draw howls of protest if used against politicians. If you believe that the criminalization of American business has gone too far and the media bears no small responsibility, you must read Kirkendall's post. (And, by the way, if you don't believe that, you are either a commie, a partisan hack, or a professor.)

Little Green Footballs (and others) catch the Palestinian Authority republishing the notorious anti-Semitic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Sadly, this story is not in the least bit surprising.

Scrappleface: 'Baghdad Mosque Closings Spark Weapons Shortage'.

"My children and I stood on line at a back-alley dealer for seven hours just to buy mortar rounds," said one unnamed local resident. "My uncle just called and he's got one rocket-propelled grenade left, and has completely exhausted his family's supply of roadside bombs."

Indeed, industry sources report that the price of all kinds of small armaments jumped 73 percent within minutes of the announcement that the mosques would close.

Bwahahaha!

Finally, Dr. Sanity takes a hard look at assymetry in the writing of headlines at The New York Times.
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The United States dollar, which The New York Times claimed on April 2 was "heading down, no matter what" on account of Bush administration economic policies, rose a fourth week in a row against the Euro, the only real alternative reserve currency. Indeed, just yesterday the dollar was higher compared to the Euro than at any other time in 2005. At the end of 2004, a Euro was worth more than $1.36, and now it is worth a tad over $1.25, an improvement of approximately 8% against that currency.

I appreciate that I'm something of a broken record on this point. However, I'm going to keep it up until The New York Times admits that it is no more capable of predicting the direction of financial markets than any other soothsayer, and that short-term movements in financial markets bear essentially no relationship to the fiscal policies of any administration. Or until I get bored, which condition is far more likely to be satisfied.
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A new study proves for the first time that men actually do a bigger share of household chores than their wives admit. Shedding new light on the decades-old battle between men and women over housework, the study of 265 married couples with children, published this month in the Journal of Marriage and Family, shows that wives estimate, when asked, that their husbands do 33% of the housework. But when researchers tracked men's actual housework time, they found husbands were shouldering 39% of the chore load.

This doesn't mean that I'm not a bundle of self-deception, too, but we knew that.

Husbands aren't getting off the hook entirely, though. They still give themselves too much credit, the study shows, claiming they do 42% of the work around the house.

Of course, if women have been underestimating the percentage of housework that their husbands do, does that not mean that they as well have been giving themselves "too much credit"? It is safe to say, I think, that most people give themselves too much credit.
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Muslim protesters today called for the bombing of New York in a demonstration outside the US embassy in London.

There were threats of "another 9/11" from militants angry at reports of the desecration of the Koran by US troops in Iraq.[sic]

The protest was organised by groups including the Muslim Council for Britain and the Muslim Parliamentary Association of the UK. The former organization had this to say about the attacks of September 11:

Prominent British Muslims have denounced al-Qaeda, and appealed to the media to separate the words "Islamic" and "terrorist".

"It is misguided to describe the attacks [on the World Trade Center] as Islamic," said Mahmud al-Rashid from the Muslim Council of Britain.

There are rules of engagement in Islamic law, and attacking both civilian and economic targets is illegal, he said.

Perhaps the BBC understood Mahmud's wish that the media separate the words "Islamic" and "terrorist" as a denunciation of al Qaeda. It seems, however, the Mahmud was more interested in winning the propaganda fight than discussing his religion.

The latter organization had this to say about the re-election of George W. Bush:

Commenting on the re-election of George Bush as President of the United States, Dr. Ghayasuddin Siddiqui, Leader of the Muslim Parliament has called it “a very sad day for mankind”. “It is a victory for corporate theocracy”, he said.

Just as you would read on Democratic Underground.
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A friend of mine, who often comments very thoughtfully on this blog, has a younger brother who is a reservist serving in Iraq. His recent dispatch home is revealing, not the least for his dim view of the new Iraqi army. Note also the active role played by Ukranian forces in the mission described.

Hi. It's 2300 over here. I woke up this morning at 0300 to go on a mission, to make a starting point at 0430. We drove in a convoy to a place called Suena. We set up in a staging area, and then drove over to the fuel point at the brigade tactical operations center to top off our tank and link up with some Marines and military intelligence types. While I was gone, an Iraqi dropped an AK-47 which was not on safe and the weapon accidentally discharged. An Iraqi soldier received an entrance wound to his right flank, and an exit wound to his right abdomen. I met the ambulance at the brigade toc, as it was the medevacc site. We dressed his wounds, started an IV, and waited an hour for the Ukrainians to send out an evac helicopter. It was a Hoplite, escorted by a HindD. (I remember my aircraft types from my air defense artillery days.)

We drove back to the staging area, grabbed a quick meal ready to eat, and then set off on an operation designed to apprehend insurgents. (I can relax a little on operations security now that the operation is over.) Things got all jacked up for a while, since we were at the rear, in order to allow the Iraqis to run things. It was a giant cluster fuck for a while. We hit two mosques and several private residences. There was a sniper in one mosque, but he fled after firing a few rounds. He was wounded in his thigh, and apprehended. We then played hide and seek for seven hours. Almost two hundred individuals were detained. While I was in an uparmored Humvee, trying to locate the source of some incoming rounds, an Iraqi soldier shot himself in the foot. This is discouraging, because we kept yelling at the Iraqi soldiers, telling them to take their fingers off of the trigger until they had acquired a target and were ready to fire. They keep walking around, swinging their loaded weapons nonchalantly, and pointing them indiscriminately. They then are surprised when fraticidal or self-inflicted gunshot wounds occur.

We never did find the source of the incoming fire. Later in the day, we heard additional fire from the same location, and someone spotted the shooters fleeing. We attempted to pin them down in a large area of cultivated fields which had been freshly irrigated and which sported seven foot tall plants. We had a Ukrainian helicopter circling the field for a while, but it couldn't fire its cannon for fear of causing casualties to our forces. (The cannon requires a region 200 meters square for its targets. Soviet made. Not very accurate.) We tried to drive our Humvee over the fields to push the insurgents towards our blocking formation on the other side of the field. We did flush out several, but the Humvee got stuck and eventually was buried up to the transmission in the soft mud. We winched the Humvee out with another Humvee, but the quarry had fled by the time we were operational again. Damn. We were less than 100 meters from where the bird was circling, and we almost had them all.

Eventually, we concluded the operation at about 2000, as the sun was sinking over the Tigris river, and the muezzin were calling out for evening prayers. We saddled up and drove back to Numaniyah, arriving on post at about 2200. The Iraqi soldiers at two of our checkpoints had not waited for orders to join up in the convoy. They had just jetted out when they got bored. (Actually, the Marines had jetted at about 1400, as soon as the excitement was over, avoiding the tedious mopping up of cordoning off buidings and fields and conducting searches.) We wasted about 45 minutes trying to locate our lost sheep, and finally just headed for home, where we found them. If they were Americans, they would get smoked for pulling nonsense like that. Since they are Iraqis, nothing much is going to happened. Just like the Iraqi whose weapon accidentally discharged. In an American unit, he would face a field grade article 15, an official letter of reprimand, and a summary court martial, with a reduction in rank of one pay grade. In the Iraqi, he will get away with saying, "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to."

We all decided to postpone recovery for tomorrow, and I just got done cleaning my weapon and restocking my aid bag (you have to stay ready) and I've checked my email before hitting the sack for the night. I am pretty tired, but I can't sleep just yet. I think I may have earned my combat medic badge for today's action. [Deleted editorial comment that does not bear repeating. - ed.] If I get it, fine, but if not, oh well. Or, as they say in Arabic, inshallah (God willing, or, it was the will of Allah that I missed formation by half an hour). Just wanted to let you know that I'm still alive, glad to still be alive, and looking forward to seeing you all again one day. Inshallah.

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'Storm To Have No Effect On Florida' - headline, Local6.com.
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According to the Social Security Administration, Madison was the third most popular name for girls born in 2004. Who are the people naming their baby girl "Madison"? I've met umpty-ump babies during the past couple of years, and not met one "Madison." Why is this a trend?

And when is "Jefferson" going to become a popular name for girls?
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Email of the day:

Maybe someone can help me me get this straight, my head is spinning right now - we're dealing with a guy whose resume includes filling 290-300 mass graves with maybe 300,000 of his countrymen (those discovered so far, with new ones uncovered as recently as week before last). Many of these graves contained only women and children. And we're supposed to feel outrage because someone happened to photograph this dude in his tightie-whities? Is it rude to ask where all the Geneva-type watchdogs were when the bodies were piling up? I guess my grasp of international politics is just not nuanced enough.

Context.
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You must read this, esp the bit with Steyn. Tell me Steyn doesn't make you laugh out loud sometimes. Read the whole thing. Keep scrolling. The interview with Moran is good too.
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I took the kids (2 boys, 10 and 6) to Opening Day yesterday at the Sony Imax theater. Let me offer 3 brief reactions:

1) My 10 year old - That was the best one yet! It was really cool and violent.

2) My 6 year old - Daddy, I'm scared, can I sit on your lap?

3) Me - 39 year old - It was a bit violent for my taste with my kids there. The actor playing Darth Vader was embarrassingly bad. I can't imagine what photos he has of George Lucas or something. It sounded like he was reading lines from a teleprompter, and angry looks on his face looked more like constipation than evil. Even Natalie Portman, who I think is a wonderful actress, was handed a bowlful of pits for lines rather than cherries. R2D2 and Yoda were the best. And they really wasted Jimmy Smits too, giving him almost no lines.

It was also a depressing storyline without any happiness at the end. There is a particularly evil scene as Skywalker moves to the Dark Side and attacks the Jedi that I thought demonstrated very poor judgment to show to kids, especially little ones. It's pretty much all bad news folks. Don't go to get happy. It won't happen -- unless you're in the mood for a divorce or something. And leave time for a stiff drink after.

Last point - Lucas does try to do some Anti Bush politicking. But it's basically inane and didn't ruin the show for me. Only one line is a blatant moonbat attack, and it's so stupid it's basically funny. Take it with a grain of salt. As I often comment at cocktail parties, why does anybody really care what a guy like George Lucas thinks anyway? He's such a freakin' expert on foreign affairs? Look at his movies -- they're always shooting at each other or hacking each other up, and the bad guys usually break even with the good guys. What, he's such a diplomat?

Not a great one, folks, in one person's humble view...
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Major K.'s Counterintelligence Chief, Lt. C., is running for Congress. Lt. C. has his own blog, and would quite obviously make an excellent Member. On the matter of women in combat:

The House of Representatives (The very house which I hope to one day be a member of) is attempting to (once again) pass a resolution barring women from front line combat. News flash honorable ladies and gentleman elected to high office to serve and execute the public trust. There is no such thing as a front-line. Not now, nor ever again. Minding your own business here can see you killed by a snipers bullet. Standing in line to get a drink in the DFAC (cafeteria) can get you blown up. Driving in an armored HMMWV can get you killed. PFC Sam Huff, was 18. She was barely a woman, and barely old enough to vote. She died in combat. To say that women should not serve in combat is degrading, if a woman chooses to serve in the armed forces then the risk that is inherent to service should be shared and shouldered by all.

He would have my vote in a trice, and will get my dollars once he is home and campaigning.

His opponent in that battle would be Maxine Waters. I think it is safe to say that a blog-financed campaign against Rep. Waters would raise a lot of money.

Lt. C.:



I suspect that in the next three decades there will be many politicians emerging from the more the many hundreds of thousands of Americans who will have served in Iraq by the time the dust settles over there. I have no idea what their impact will be on American political discourse, but it will be profound.

UPDATE: Austin Bay wrote about the "new greatest generation" last fall.

A new greatest generation is emerging -- in Afghanistan, in Iraq and in the other, less-publicized battlegrounds of the War on Terror.

Focused on the U.S. political cycle, America's press elites are missing the extraordinary story of the 19-through-35 year olds who are winning this war. The detailed history of this new cohort of American and Free World leaders -- the people who will shape the 21st century -- is being written by themselves, chiefly on the Internet, via email or web logs.

This is a battle-honed bunch with exceptional talent and motivation, young people with a mature balance of idealism and realism, youthful cool and professional competence. I saw this cool and competence on every patrol and convoy I made this past summer in Iraq.

Keep your eyes open, and you will see America's next generation of leaders grow up on the battlefields of the Middle East. Hire them if you can, and remember their names. They will be running the country in thirty years.
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I am home, quietly blogging at my perch in the kitchen, munching on reheated Domino's pizza.

I certainly appreciate that just about everybody in the world has been to Las Vegas and that amateurish photographs of the place are probably a waste of bandwidth, but that does not trump my yearning to share.

Wednesday was given over to meetings until the cocktail hour, but we did manage to change into casual clothes and see some of the sites.

Here's a view of "Paris" from my friend's room at the Bellagio:



We wandered over there, of course. Here is the blogger himself in front of the petit Arc de Triomphe:



We then went to dinner at an excellent restaurant called Alize. They served, inter alia, tiny little dishes of melon and proscuitto "compliments of the chef," to wit:



Ok. I admit that this is a sort of "Sissy Willis" shot, absent (of course) the aesthetically pleasing formatting and wildly creative connection to some current event.

After dinner, we saw "Second City Scriptless" at the Flamingo. I had my doubts about improv in Las Vegas -- it seems much better suited to the city of its birth -- but dammit if they didn't put on a hilarious show. It was excellent. If you like comedy and you are in Vegas, by all means burn a couple of hours at "Second City Scriptless."

We finished up the evening with a walkabout of some length. Treasure Island's "Pirate" show was cancelled due to high winds, so we went to the Venetian in search of ice cream. The fake ceiling is so deceptive that it almost looks like early evening in Venice:



The same winds killed off the fountain show back at the Bellagio, but I did get this shot of my hotel from across the artificial lake:



Count the floors of the Bellagio. You see how many? Maybe 15. Even allowing for a few floors below, the building does not appear to be more than 20 stories high. But my room was on the "30th floor," according to the desk clerk at check-in and the buttons on the elevator. It turns out that hotels in Las Vegas often skip a few floors -- not just unlucky 13 -- when they number them. Presumably they do this because they think it will appeal to their guests, who presumably think it is cool to stay in a room on a high floor. Isn't this running the risk that people will feel bamboozled when they figure out the fraud? Or perhaps guests who care about the number of their floor in the abstract are not the sort of people to wonder whether it might not just be another illusion.
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But we're stuck on the taxiway. While our gate is open, there are fourteen
(count 'em, 14!) jets lined up ahead of us to get through some bottleneck
between where we are right now and our gate. Unspecified "construction" is
to blame. The captain is unwilling to speculate when he will drive us the
last 200 yards.

This is frustrating, insofar as it is almost 10:30 at night, I am very
tired, and have to shake the dew off the kidneys. Between capturing the
bags and driving to Princeton, I don't imagine I will be home before 12:30
am.

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Yesterday my department (at the request of our CEO) threw an afternoon party for the rest of our organization. We all had assigned tasks, and in my case it was to spin the tunes, which in this particular case was a mix of mostly soul, funk, latin, and ska. Here is the music I played while coworkers ate hotdogs and drank Bud on a beautiful afternoon in Virginia.

Cold Bear-The Gaturs
Grazing in the Grass-Hugh Masekela
It's Gonna Rain-Gentleman June Gardner
Mulin' Around-Sugarman Three
How Long Do I Have to Wait-Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings
Mean Man-Betty Harris
The World-Sandi & Mateus
Peter Gunn Mambo-Jack Costanzo
Todos-Nombres
Cosita Linda-Jump with Joey
Hopscotch-Bigger Thomas
He Wants Me Back-Dance Hall Crashers
Doors of Your Heart-English Beat
Dance Wid Me-Hepcat
Friend-Stubborn All-Stars
Tear Drops From My Eyes-New York Ska-Jazz Ensemble
Tommy's Song-Hepcat
Jungle Music-Rico Rodriguez
Mr. Big Stuff-Jean Knight
Running Out-Mabel John
Come Back Baby-Aretha Franklin
Rise and Fall of Flingle Blunt-PJ and the Galaxies
When the Cat's Away-Jr. Wells
Goodbye Stevie-Spencer Davis Group
Coming Home Baby-Mel Torme
Jump Jive and Wail-Louis Prima
Mona-The Toasters
Provocation-Jump With Joey

It was a great afternoon, although I mourn for the wonderful songs left unplayed.
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"Progressive jihad" has been declared against this blog! By this guy. I trust that our many loyal readers of the left will spring to our defense...

If not, we may have to declare a "figurative Abu Ghraib" back at him.
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For those interested in supremely intelligent market and economic analysis, I recommend to you Bill Gross, the manager of the largest bond portfolio on the planet, at Pacific Investment Management (PIMCO). He tends to be a a little on the negative side (he's a bond guy after all, not a blue sky equity guy), but his analysis is brilliant. Much better than, say, the New York Times Currency Trading Department.
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As previously reported, I am in Las Vegas attending the Bank of America Securities 2005 Health Care Conference. We are staying at The Bellagio, one of the many over-the-top casino hotels on the strip. It is famous for its fountains, immortalized in the movie Ocean's Eleven and photographed from my room last night:



Speaking of my room, the place was overbooked when we arrived late last night. Rather than confront the potential of my decompensating rage, the delightful desk clerk gave me an upgrade to a suite. This was a pleasant surprise, since I had had quite a long day, starting at 5:30 a.m. on the east coast.

As you can see, it has excellent conditions for blogging, including high speed internet coming up from behind the couch, which faces a large-screen television.



I rarely get to stay in such places on somebody else's dime, and I'm way too self-denying to spend my own money on such extravagance. Fun, nonetheless.

You have to be careful in such digs, though. The Bellagio warns its guests at check-in that the minibar operates by a motion detector. If you touch something, you own it. Jostle the nice arrangement of salty snack foods, and you just bought $40 of chips and peanuts. This strikes me as punitive. I asked the clerk whether this system pissed off a lot of guests, and she conceded in subaudible tones that it did. She said that if I picked something up but didn't eat it I should call the front desk in real time and they would correct it. At the Bellagio's prices, that's a fail-safe I do not want to test.

I had to hop out of bed early this morning to get to a 7 am breakfast meeting. Here's the sunrise view of the Strip from my window:



Wish you were here.
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In the course of the last few days, it seems various writers of different political persuasions have observed that there are profound and serious challenges that arise in a War like that the US is now fighting; that mistakes are made; that we must adapt to our enemy and learn from mistakes; and that there is a need -- a requirement -- to see things through a prism other than partisanship, other than the personal. Tom Friedman does it, sort of (in a Newsweek apologist kind of way) in his piece in today's NYT. Glenn Reynolds makes a similar observation in his critique of Andrew Sullivan. Perhaps most eloquently, John Lewis Gaddis (thanks to Roger Simon) has made a series of comments regarding the Bush Administration's foreign policies which at once credit the Administration for its breathtaking policy reformulation, criticizes it for its errors, then praises them for adapting and listening. Gaddis is a must read. He is no partisan. He is a brilliant historian who can set current policies and events into a much broader and intelligent framework through which to view them. He can link the Bush Doctrine to the Monroe Doctrine. Whereas current MSM reporting would have you believe Bush is in unprecedented territory, Gaddis helps you understand that, far from it, the current Administration is speaking very much within the confines of our uniquely American history.

This intelligence and understanding of America and its history is a piece of what's missing in today's press. The only history the MSM seems to have gotten (and none too well) is from Vietnam in the Nixon years and forward. They don't like war. No kidding. But, really, who does? The Marine who's really fighting it? Broad press dislike for war is like my child's dislike for anything unknown to him - it reflects ignorance, fear of the unknown and uncertainty, but not experience, not wisdom. Nobody dislikes war more than those fighting it, but they do it for a reason. And when war comes to you, as it did to us, you need to respond as we have. Wise heads can disagree, but ultimately must achieve consensus to wage a war.

The MSM are just so profoundly unserious about the waging of it, it's difficulties, and the fundamental challenges, mistakes and learning and adaptation that come from it. It's difficult. But there's no turning away from it. The other guy is out to get you. He can't be negotiated with. You must unconditionally defeat him. The MSM doesn't care. It will sacrifice American military lives for the story - or so says Mike Wallace, a dean of American investigative journalism (from Glenn Reynolds).

In light of these events, people may be forgiven for doubting the patriotism of many folks in Big Media. And there's evidence that they should. In his book Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy, James Fallows describes an episode of PBS's program, "Ethics in America," in which host Charles Ogletree asked leading journalists if they would allow American troops to be killed in order to get a story. CBS correspondent Mike Wallace said yes, he'd go for the story, and denied any ethical conflict: "You don't have a higher duty. No. No. You're a reporter!" After some hemming and hawing, Peter Jennings agreed. Should American reporters worry about the death of American troops? No -- their only loyalty is to the story

.


The story missed, in all this, is the historical brilliance with which the War in Iraq is actually being waged despite its difficulty. From the defeat of Saddam's regime, to the defeat of al qaeda and baathist holdouts in Iraq, the creation of a new popularly elected government, the restoration of Iraqi economy and infrastructure, and on and on. The MSM is caught up in a perpetual desire to create a Watergate and be the next Woodward and Bernstein, while the Middle East goes through a democratic revolution the US started and the UN collapses under what may ultimately be the largest global financial fraud ever -- and they miss it completely. Compare that to the Carter Administration Era's failed effort to conduct a hostage rescue in Tehran that killed our serviceman and literally never got off the ground. American capabilities, in a difficult and complex environment, have never been greater. War is hard, but it seems intelligent mainstream reporting is impossible.

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This satellite image taken May 16, 2005 shows the bottle-shaped B-15A iceberg adjacent to the landfast Aviator Glacier ice tongue, toward the top of the image. The Drygalski ice tongue, near the bottom, was struck a glancing blow by the drifting B-15A a month ago. Pieces of Drygalski broken off by the blow can be seen drifting through the sea on either side of B-15A. Credit: ESA/ Envisat.

A huge wandering iceberg is tearing up the Antarctic like a slow-moving bull in a frozen China shop.

The roaving destructor, named B-15A, slammed into the Drygalski ice tongue a month ago and broke off at least two city-sized chunks. Now it is poised to strike another feature sticking out from the continent.

At 71 miles (115 kilometers) long, B-15A is the largest free-floating object in the world.

Why B-15A? It broke off from B-15.

The straight news articles are not yet blaming this mother of all 'bergs on global warming, but there is, of course, an environmental angle. If it gets stuck, ice will pile up behind it, which may "thwart" animals that need to move from land to the open sea.
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Obviously, I have to clean up the previous three posts. Among various
screw-ups, apparently Blogger posting by email no longer takes HTML tags.
I'll fix it later, since I'm wandering around the airport looking for my
bags right now. Sorry for the mess.

UPDATE: Mess cleaned up.
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Since I have five hours on the flight out to Las Vegas, I thought I would live-blog my flight from US Airways Flight 99, seat 22D. Of course, this won't post until we're wheels down, but I'm hoping that you will nevertheless feel as though you're along for the ride.

I'm actually typing this out on my Blackberry so that it will post when we land instead of the next time I sync my laptop, so please forgive the typos and other sins of thumb-typing.

I'm digging through the 3802 emails in my Inbox while I wait for the beverage service libations to come around. My five-spot is at the ready. My thirst, which is deep, will be slaked.

Digging through emails for industry analysts, I note that it is "Digestive
Disease Week": DDW is the largest meeting of the year for gastrointestinal professionals. The meeting, which is being held in Chicago this year, will feature clinical symposia on a broad range of GI topics. The hot technology will be Given Imaging's "PillCam" technology, the applications for which I would think are obvious even to our readership. My understanding is that it is considered extremely unprofessional to use the words "fart" or "technicolor yawn" during DDW's scientific sessions, but for all I know I'm misinformed.

On the way to the lavatory, I noticed a woman in an aisle seat reading Freakonomics. Naturally, I stopped all traffic in the aisle to talk to her about it. It's a long flight, and there's no reason not to be neighborly.

At the lavatory cluster, the line draws down to just me and a woman. She points to one of the lavatories and says "that guy's been in there a while - I don't think I want to use that one." Agreed. You don't want to use an airplane lavatory after it has been occupied for too long. Let somebody else, er, wipe the slate clean.

Watching the Dennis Quaid future classic, "In Good Company." Drinking a Heineken. Eating the giant bag of peanuts that I bought at the airport.

The movie isn't bad as romantic comedies go, apart from its deeply inaccurate and contemptuous portrayal of corporate America. But that's par for the course from Hollywood.

The flight attendants on this plane enforce seatbelts very diligently, even though the ride is smooth as silk. Is that a US Airways thing, or do they know something I don't?

I've resumed chewing through emails.

Wandered down the aisle to talk to my friend. He was doing emails.

Wandered back to my seat, and on the way got in a conversation with the Freakonomics woman about Christopher Hitchens (I'm starting his Letters to a Young Contrarian. She reports that she loves his writing because he is "so clear." Indeed. All friendly-like, I say that I also like to see him on television because he is so eloquent. She reports that she doesn't have a television. She has money to fly to Vegas and buy hardcover books and she doesn't own a television? What kind of freak-o are we talking to here? I high-tail it back to 22D, hoping for another beverages service.

Hitchens, writing in July 2001, addressed the soul of every blogger writing then and now, or at least every blogger who is not an utter waste of bandwidth:

It's too much to expect to live in an age that is actually
propitious for dissent. And most people, most of the time, prefer to seek approval or security. Nor should this surprise us (and nor, incidentally, are those desires contemptible in themselves). Nonetheless,there are in all periods people who feel themselves in some fashion to be apart. And it is not too much to say that humanity is very much in debt to such people, whether it chooses to acknowledge that debt or not.

Perhaps Hitchens is deluded with self-importance to identify humanity's debt to the contrarian, but I don't think so. He wrote these words before September 11, and therefore before his break with the left. Indeed, he had just testified against the canonization of Mother Theresa, and was still reveling in his struggle with Henry Kissinger over that man's place in history. It would be but two months later that al Qaeda's war would inspire Hitchens again to the contrary position, this time against the intellectual left's "herd of independent minds." Hitchens is one of few established progressive intellectuals to have broken from the herd, and in such role has more eloquently furnished the arguments for resisting Islamo-Arab fascism than most of the hawks on the right who have actually planned, directed and fought the war. In this capacity he is a contrarian without being a dissenter, for while he is opposing conventional wisdom, he is supporting the government. In July 2001, Hitchens was struggling to define a difference between contrarians and dissenters. A few months later, the difference would be much more evident.

We're being welcomed to Las Vegas. That's it for now.

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As regular readers have already seen, I've gotten some great help today from
my longstanding co-blogger, Charlottesvillain, and the inaugural post from
our new partner, Cardinalpark. Cardinalpark has so distinguished himself as
a sharp and eloquent commenter that we thought it was high time to promote
him to posting privileges. I hope you enjoy his contributions, and give him
the support he deserves.

For my part, I'm on to Las Vegas for two days of meetings, so my posts will
be catch as catch can for a couple of days. Keep the fires burning in my
absence.

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Last week I attended the annual conference of the CFA Institute, held in Philadelphia, where I had the privilage to hear José Piñera speak on the topic of social security reform, and specifically about the feasibility of moving the US to a system of private accounts. Piñera, now a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, was the architect of the Chilean retirement system, a system of private accounts that now has a 95% participation rate. A charming and engaging speaker, Piñera explained the foundations of the Chilean program point by point (these points are also summarized in an opinion piece he wrote for the New York Times in December 2004):

• The program was voluntary for existing workers, who could choose to stay in the old program or move into the new program of private accounts. All new workers were put into the new program.
• Existing workers choosing to opt out of the old program were given a "recognition bond" that represented their accrued contributions to date. The bond was no more or less credit worthy than existing promises by the government to pay benefits upon retirement.
• A minimum pension is guaranteed, whether you stay in the old or new system. Upon retirement, if funds in your private account are insufficient to purchase an annuity representing the minimum pension, the government makes up the difference. This mechanism provides a safety net for those who, for whatever reason, have not been able to make contributions to their accounts.
• Program participants choose from among several private management firms who offer investment options. The firms are supervised by the government, and are engaged in no other business. Early in the program, investment options were quite limited to increase the chances of the program's success.
• Over time, more options have been added, and now include international securities and equities, both of which were not permitted at inception.
• The system was sold to the people over a period of years, primarily by showing them an account book that would belong to them. They didn't care about funding gaps. They wanted to see what they would get, and Mr. Piñera showed them.
  

An essential point in the argument in favor of a move to private accounts is that the move has no economic transition costs to the economy. In actuality, it brought substantial economic benefit to Chile as it very quickly lead to the accumulation of a substantial pool of investment capital. It also changed the perspective of the Chilean people. In Piñera's words,

Since they have a personal stake in the economy, workers cheer the stock market's surges rather than resenting them, and know that bad economic policies will harm retirement benefits. When workers feel that they themselves own a part of their country's wealth, they became participants and supporters of a free market and a free society.

The funding gap would still exist, of course, but, as Piñera pointed out, the US capital markets are far more equipped to handle this problem than the Chilean capital markets were.

Asked whether he thought a change to private accounts would be feasible in the US, Piñera scoffed and said of course. 50% of US citizens are already investors, compared with 0% in Chile at the inception of the program. The biggest obstacle in his view is the growing entitlement culture in the US which seems to see government as the solution to all problems, at the cost of personal accountability.

After hearing the presentation, I could only marvel at how well Mr. Piñera was able to use his alloted hour, and just how terrible the Bush administration has been at communicating the benefits of a new retirement system based on private accounts.

For readers interested in more, Mr. Piñera has two white papers available at Cato. They are Liberating Workers: The World Pension Revolution, and Empowering Workers: The Privatization of Social Security in Chile.

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Tigerhawk has graciously afforded me the opportunity to vent on his property, and I've taken him up on it. I hope I don't soil the nicely tended lawn. Thanks TH for the megaphone...

It cannot be a coincidence that the traditional US media has, in the last twelve months, authored some of the more spectacular mistakes in its history. Newsweek's WaterFlush, CBS's RatherGate and CNN's Eason Jordan Davos Debacle not only reflected immense anti-war, anti-military bias, they were also just remarkably incompetent journalism. And this incompetence, in an age of immediate and global reach, can get people hurt or killed.

In many respects, individual opinion (or bias) stirs passion, and passion intelligently and honestly deployed can do wondrous things.

But then, let's recall this:

Which emerged from this (abstract from NYT website):

Op-Ed article by Eason Jordan, chief news executive of CNN, says now that Saddam Hussein's regime is gone, world can expect to hear many gut-wrenching tales from Iraqis about decades of torment; says he has tales as well, learned during 13 trips he made to Baghdad over last 12 years to lobby government to keep CNN's Baghdad bureau open and to arrange interviews with Iraqi leaders; says he saw and heard awful things that he could not report because doing so would have jeopardized lives of Iraqis, particularly those on CNN's Baghdad staff; says secret police terrorized all Iraqis working for international press services; says some vanished forever, others disppeared and then surfaced later with tales of being tortured; says one of CNN's Iraqi cameramen was abducted, beaten and horribly tortured; says he is still haunted by story of woman captured by secret police after speaking with CNN on phone; says plastic bag containing her body parts was left on doorstep of her family's home.

Political bias alone cannot explain the reprehensible editorial judgment applied by Eason Jordan in this instance or in Davos, or by Dan Rather and his staff, or Michael Isikoff and his editors. In all but the most fraudulent cases, bias merely tends to fuel choice of and hunger for a story, rather than factual content. That's why the traditional media has done such a poor job covering the UNSCAM investigation, leaving it to dogged bloggers like Roger Simon, or the Swift Boat Veterans. Bias clearly led them away from those important stories which their viewership ultimately demanded.

Nor is it merely incompetence, though incompetence (perhaps spurred by a perception of urgency) plays an important part. While journalists tend to foster the view that they are professionals, they are not uniformly trained and schooled as, say, lawyers or doctors have been. Some are excellent. Many (most?) are quacks. And it has become evident that their employers do not rigorously train journalists, or aggressively weed our poor performers. What, after all, defines a poor performer?

It is an absence of clearly articulated and applied, generally accepted standards which is eroding trust and interest in traditional broadcast and print media. Americans fervently believe in tolerance and a free exchange of ideas; many are willing to fight and die for those and other ideals. But must those same Americans rescue Eason Jordan if he's trapped in Fallujah when he has conspired with Saddam to defraud CNN viewers so that he can maintain preferential access? Shouldn't CNN simply close its Baghdad office? Is Ted Turner a citizen of the world, or of this country? Glenn Reynolds expertly covers this topic here.

Many editors and journalists will scream "censorship". But the traditional broadcast and print media is in crisis, and it requires a significant dose of regulation to restore trust. It can either come from within, with the development of stringent and transparent reporting and editorial standards, with enforcement mechanisms which penalize non-adherents, or it will come from outside. And there needs to be a serious and public debate on those standards so that reporters and editors understand clearly what they are meant to do for the "public they serve." Corporations are variously overseen by the Financial Accounting Standards Board, the Securities and Exchange Commission and, as Eliot Spitzer has made clear, the State's Attorney. The Securities Industry is self regulated by the Securities Industry Association and also answers to the SEC and State's Attorney. Physicians and Lawyers similarly have regulatory bodies to whom they must answer, both their own and third parties. And then of course there is recourse to malpractice litigation. How about publishers, editors and reporters? When was the last time a libel suit scared anybody?

The coincidence driving these truly large and absurd errors in reporting happens to be the confluence of a presidency and a war which is unpopular with the traditional media. We have suffered both of these before. However, the current unprecedented decline of editorial and journalistic excellence reflects atrocious and often reprehensible standards inconsistent with the traditional American notion of free expression. In this era of instant global reach, the issue of uniform standards and ethics must be addressed.
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Heh:



Indeed. Rob's inspiration for this fine bit of work is here, specifically here. Context here.
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Saddam Hussein's spies planned a wide-ranging scheme to bribe members of the French political elite in the run-up to the Anglo-American invasion, including an offer to help fund President Jacques Chirac's 2002 re-election campaign.

That bid failed, according to Iraqi secret service papers seen by The Daily Telegraph, when Mr Chirac's aides allegedly said they did not need the cash.

Link.

This reminds me of the old economist joke:

An economist is chatting up a beautiful woman at a cocktail party.

"Would you sleep with me if I pay you a million dollars?" the economist asks the woman.

"Sure," says the hottie.

"Well, would you sleep with me if I paid you one dollar?"

Woman: "What kind of woman do you think I am?"

Economist: "We have established what kind of woman you are, and now we're trying to ascertain the clearing price."

We know what kind of woman Jacques Chirac is, too.

CWCID: Expat Yank.
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This must be very frustrating to the editors of The New York Times:

The dollar rose to a seven-month high against the euro on Monday after a slew of strong economic data eased worries that the United States would have difficulty financing its gaping current account deficit.

And this($):

The U.S. Dollar Index against major currencies last Friday posted its first weekly close above its 55-week moving average since April 2002. That's a key resistance level, a kind of psychological barrier that helps define which way the market is moving.

Why? Because on April 2, 2005, the editors shorted the dollar:

The dollar's current uptick is just a breather in its overall downward trajectory.... The dollar is heading down, no matter what.

The Times was so certain that the dollar would fall as the consequence of Bush Administration policies, its readers might be forgiven for wondering why we need currency markets at all.

In fact, the Times seizes on any downturn in just about any market as proof of the Bush Administration's "mismanagement" of the economy, and it attributes any strength in any market to other causes. Its editorials on the intersection of politics and the financial markets are irrational and unprincipled.
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Even if true, it was unbelievably irresponsible for Newsweek to have published the "toilet Koran" story. That they published it on the basis of an anonymous source in the middle of war in which disinformation has figured prominently is almost beyond comprehension. Are the editors completely ignorant of the world? Or do they want to sabotage America's war effort? Is there a third, more benign explanation?

UPDATE: Juan Cole points out that Newsweek's "retraction" really isn't a retraction.

Isikoff's source, in other words, stands by his report of the incident, but is merely tracing it to other paperwork. What difference does that make? Although Pentagon spokesman Lawrence DiRita angrily denounced the source as no longer credible, in the real world you can't just get rid of a witness because the person made a minor mistake with regard to a text citation. It is like saying that we can't be sure someone has really read the Gospels because he said he read about Caiaphas in the Gospel of Mark rather than in the Gospel of John.

Newsweek has, in other words, confirmed that the source did read a US government account of the desecration of the Koran.

In this view of the world, Newsweek remains credible. But that does not mean that the report is responsible. As I wrote at the top of the post, Newsweek should not have published the Koran desecration story it even if it is true.

UPDATE: Chapati Mystery (via Rezwanul) has an excellent discussion of the importance of the Koran to Muslims, and the subtle differences within the Muslim world in the protests over allegations of its desecration (echoing a point I made in the comments).

Why is the tearing or flushing of a copy of Qur'an such grievous offense? For Muslims, Qur'an is not a compilation of reports about God by prophets or disciples, but the exact, direct and inviolable speech of God. Singlevoiced and unidirectional, it is the suprahistorical word of God. The sanctity and sacredness of Qur'an transcends its physicality while at the same time is contained within it. A Muslim dare not even touch it without ritual purity.

But, there are still some differences that need elaborating. The Afghanis and Pakistanis are burning and dying in the streets while the Saudis are merely expressing their "ire". Explanation lies in the difference in the treatment of the "book" vs. the "text" between Arabia and South Asia. In South Asia, the physical Qur'an becomes a holy relic - to be placed in a scented and clean spot above head; to be handled with veneration and respect. In Wahhabi Saudi Arabia, such veneration is frowned upon and they are apt to treat it just as a special book.

This regional difference may explain why Afghanis reacted violently, and the Iraqis have not reacted.

UPDATE (Monday night): Newsweek has now actually retracted the story.
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Literally:

Iraq’S most wanted terrorist, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, has been seriously wounded, according to a doctor who claims to have treated him last week.

The doctor told an Iraqi reporter in the western city of Ramadi that Zarqawi was bleeding heavily when he was brought into hospital on Wednesday. After treating his wounds the doctor tried to persuade him to remain, but the Jordanian-born terrorist’s minders drove him away.

The claim was supported yesterday by a senior commander in the Iraqi resistance who had been to Ramadi to investigate the report.

Good news, if true.
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Last Tuesday, a federal appeals court dismissed a lawsuit that sought to force Dick Cheney "to turn over the records of private meetings that his office held in 2001 to shape the administration's energy policy." Not surprisingly, the New York Times characterizes this as Dick Cheney's "right to conceal." The Times, staring at an 8-0 ruling by the circuit court of appeals, is calling for a change in the law to force future White House task forces to open their proceedings.

At the same time, the New York Times is defending the "right" of Judith Miller, one of its reporters, to refuse to testify in the Plame investigation.

In fact, Dick Cheney and the New York Times are fighting for the same principle.

Dick Cheney argued that if government were forced to disclose all conversations that it had in the development of legislation, many people with valuable advice or knowledge would refuse to participate if their identity were disclosed.

"The president must be free to seek confidential information from many sources, both inside the government and outside," Judge A. Raymond Randolph wrote for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

In other words, we need to protect the privacy of certain communications in order to ensure that the communication occurs at all.

This is precisely the same argument that the mainstream media makes in support of press shield laws. The press, including the New York Times, contends that it must be permitted to conceal its sources from prosecutors and other litigants so that those sources will talk to reporters without fear of reprisal.

"We are deeply dismayed at the U.S. Court of Appeals' decision to affirm holding Judith Miller in contempt, and at what it means for the American public's right to know," Times Publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. said in a statement. "If Judy is sent to jail for not revealing her confidential sources for an article that was never published, it would create a dangerous precedent that would erode the freedom of the press."

In other words, we need to protect the privacy of certain communications in order to ensure that the communication occurs at all.

Of course, the Times would argue that its private communications involve exposing the activities of government to benefit the public interest, whereas Dick Cheney is trying to conceal the activities of government to benefit private interest. Obviously, one might plausibly argue precisely the reverse: that the New York Times is trying to profit from private communications to the benefit of its stockholders, and Dick Cheney is trying to preserve candor in government in the publiic interest.

The New York Times would be more persuasive in its editorial if it at least tried to distinguish its argument in the Judith Miller case from Dick Cheney's in the energy task force case. The problem is, any such distinction would be fine indeed.
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Sometime tonight, Technorati will index its ten millionth blog. That's a lot of farookin' blogs!

The first time I looked at Technorati, which I believe was in December 2003, it had indexed well under 2,000,000 blogs. I started TigerHawk that month, and thought I was late to the party. Now I believe there will come a day when Technorati indexes 100 million blogs.
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The process by which Princeton's "selective" eating clubs choose their members is known as the "bicker," named for the bickering among members about whom to admit. There are five "selective" clubs. The balance of the dozen or so remaining clubs are "open," choose their members through a lottery system, and claim the moral high ground on account of their, er, openness.

I belonged to The Tiger Inn, one of the selective clubs. Which just goes to show that selectivity is a fairly flexible concept when Princeton eating clubs are concerned.

Here is a particularly flattering picture of The Glorious Tiger Inn:



Back in "the day," the selective clubs were very un-PC. We had lots of jocks, many of the stupid little student behavior scandals that periodically rock American universities, and three of the selective clubs -- including TI -- were "no girls allowed." Against that backdrop, I was quite surprised to read this in the back of South Park Conservatives:

The more politically correct culture prevailing at other schools, particularly the Ivies, can be a problem for conservative students. Several first-year Princeton students, for instance, believed that being seen as a conservative would make it harder for them to be chosen for membership by one of the school's prestigiious "bicker" eating clubs -- key sources of social standing on a status-conscious campus and the places to party. "I've avoided writing any major articles for the Tory because I'm afraid it could hurt me when it reaches the time for me to bicker," one freshman confessed. Two other students hestitated to talk with me for the same reason, while a third said that she too wouldn't write for the Tory until she had made it into a club.

Say it ain't so!
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Arthur Guiterman was an American poet and editor who wrote insightful and funny rhymning poems that told stories. He lived from 1871 to 1943. Most of his poems were published between about 1910 and 1940.

My grandmother had rather unaccountably memorized this Guiterman poem, "The Legend of the First Cam-u-el," and taught it to me and my cousins growing up. Read it aloud. Watch carefully for the punchline, and consider whether the Saudis would appreciate it.

The Legend of the First Cam-u-el: An Arabian Apologue

Arthur Guiterman

Across the sands of Syria,
Or possibly Algeria,
Or some benighted neighborhood of barrenness and drouth,
There came the Prophet Samu-u-el
Upon the Only Cam-u-el –
A bumpy, grumpy Quadruped of discontented mouth.

The atmosphere was glutinous;
The Cam-u-el was mutinous;
He dumped the pack from off his back; with
Horrid grunts and squeals
He made the desert hideous;
With strategy perfidious
He tied his neck in curlicues, he kicked his paddy heals.

Then quoth the gentle Sam-u-el,
“You rogue, I ought to lam you well!
Though zealously I’ve shielded you from every
grief and woe,
It seems, to voice a platitude,
You haven’t any gratitude.
I’d like to hear what cause you have for doing
thus and so!”

To him replied the Cam-u-el,
“I beg your pardon, Sam-u-el,
I know that I’m a Reprobate, I know that I’m a
Freak;
But, oh! This utter loneliness!
My too-distinguished Onliness!
Were there but other Cam-u-els I wouldn’t be
unique.”

The Prophet beamed beguilingly.
“Aha,” he answered, smilingly,
“You feel the need of company? I clearly under-
stand.
We’ll speedily create for you
The corresponding made for you –
Ho! Presto, change-o, dinglebat!” – he waved a
potent hand,
And lo! From out Vacuity
A second Incongruity,
To wit, a Lady Cam-u-el was born through magic
art.
Her structure anatomical,
Her form and face were comical;
She was, in short, a Cam-u-el, the other’s counter-
part.

As Spaniards gaze on Aragon,
Upon that Female Paragon
So gazed the Prophet’s Cam-u-el, that primal
Desert Ship.
A connoisseur meticulous,
He found her that ridiculous
He grinned from ear to auricle until he split his lip!

Because of his temerity
That Cam-u-el’s posterity
Must wear divided upper lips through all their
solemn lives!
A prodigy astonishing
Reproachfully admonishing
Those wicked, heartless married men who ridicule
their wives.
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Playing this game. Unless, of course, you abhor re-killing zombies.

CWCID: Cassandra, who finds all the cool games before I do.
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On the off-chance that you get an erection in the presence of your nurse, be forewarned:

We were advised [in nursing school back in 1968] that we would be facing situations previously unknown to us. Even though we were expected to conduct ourselves in nothing less than a professional manner at all times, it was possible that due to the combination of young women, male nakedness and the Playboy version of the posssiblities during encounters with nurses, some of the male patients might behave in a manner that was disrespectful and have an erection.

This, of course, was unacceptable and had to be discouraged. The best way to go about this was to to carry a metal teaspoon in your uniform pocket. If any one would dare disrespect you by having an erection, all you had to do was to take out the spoon and give a good solid *thwap* to the offending penis and that would cause deflation and make it crystal clear that you would allow no more of that sort of thing.

We could hardly get to the cafeteria fast enough to get our spoons. There we were on the following morning - 6:30 am, nervous and not entirely sure what to expect from our first day on the floors, but we at least had the certainty of knowing that we were well-prepared to handle that one situation. We carried those spoons for weeks until it became clear that we would not be needing them after all.

During my many years as a nurse, I have seen hundreds and hundreds of penises of every shape and size and have never once had to deploy the teaspoon. So far.

Suzette has been nurse blogging all week in recognition of National Nurses Week. She has featured a great New Jersey nurse every day this week, finishing on this Friday the 13th with herself! Go here and roll through the preceding posts.
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I'm in the middle of the blog-hot Freakonomics, the book by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner that is generating a lot of press and blog coverage for its arguments about the impact of legal abortion on the crime rate. But you should read the book because it's interesting.

For example, in a chapter that explains why sumo wrestlers throw matches, we learn about social structure of elite sumo:

The incentive scheme that rules sumo is intricate and extraordinarily powerful. Each wrestler maintains a ranking that affects every slice of life: how much money he makes, how large an entourage he carries, how much he gets to eat, sleep, and otherwise take advantage of his success. The sixty-six highest-ranked wrestlers in Japan, comprising the makuuchi and juryo divisions, make up the sumo elite. A wrestler near the top of this elite pyramid may earn millions and is treated like royalty. Any wrestler in the top forty earns at least $170,000 a year. The seventieth-ranked wrestler in Japan, meanwhile, earns only $15,000 a year. Life isn't very sweet outside the elite. Low-ranked wrestlers must tend to their superiors, preparing their meals and cleaning their quarters and even soaping up their hardest-to-reach body parts. So ranking is everything.

I should say.

UPDATE: Steven D. Levitt writes a blog!
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Cassandra explains why the faculty's opposition to ROTC is both unprincipled and deplorable.
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Here's the easy-to-read version.

I have to admit, I never would have predicted that after more than a year The New York Times would cover this feature. They probably suppose that it counts as penance, like a bundle of "Hail Marys".

If you are unfamiliar with Arthur Chrenkoff's "good news" series, go here and scroll down the right sidebar. There you will find a vast archive of bi-weekly posts rolling up good news from Iraq and Afghanistan.
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If you want to stay abreast of all the latest developments involving robot camel jockeys...



...you need to check out...



...The Emirates Economist, here, here (on the exploding job market for IT guys who identify with camels), and here.
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At .7882 Euros to the U.S. dollar, the greenback is stronger today against the Euro than it was on election day.



The question is, will The New York Times notice? Oh, I know it will report the exchange rates in the business section and it might even run an article there commenting on the dollar's rally, but will it display a headline on the front page that reads "Dollar stronger today than on November 2," or something comparable?

The reason I ask, of course, is that less than a month ago the Times thought it reasonable to compare the levels of the stock market on April 14 and November 2. The front page headline read "STOCKS PLUNGE TO LOWEST POINT SINCE ELECTION." So I'm wondering whether the editors of the Times will -- in the spirit of fairness -- observe on the front page that the dollar is stronger today than it was six months ago.

I'm not holding my breath.

Of course, you might reasonably argue that the strength of the dollar is not nearly as important to public policy or politics as the value in the stock market. I might even agree with you. The problem is, though, that the Times has also made a big stink about the value of the dollar on foreign exchange markets. On April 2, for example, the Times editors twisted their hankies at length over weakness in the dollar, proclaiming that its value is "heading down, no matter what." Not only was this bad for America, but according to the Grey Lady the Bush administration was to blame.

Unfortunately for the currency traders on the NYT's editorial board, six weeks later the dollar is stronger than it was on both April 2 and November 2, 2004. Indeed, if the editors of the Times had shorted the dollar in accordance with their prediction that it was "heading down, no matter what," their trade would be in a losing position.

Since at least the beginning of the year, the editors of The New York Times have repeatedly offered ephemeral weakness in one or another financial asset as proof that the Bush Administration has mismanaged those parts of the economy entrusted to the federal government. The stock market is down since some arbitrary day in the past? According to the Times, that's the Bush Administration's fault. The dollar is "heading down, no matter what"? The Times is so confident that the world's reserve currency is on the brink of collapse one is forced to wonder why we bother with foreign exchange markets at all, or why the editors haven't all retired with the millions they have made trading currency. And when the dollar rises, we can be damned sure that there won't be the faintest peep of an "oops" from the editors.
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The most cluttered house in the Western world. Unbelievable.

CWCID: Subzero Blue.
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'U.S. scientists create self-replicating robot' - headline, Reuters.
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The Daily Princetonian is reporting that Michael Scott Doran, Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton, is the Bush Administration's pick to replace Elliot Abrams to head the Israel-Palestine desk at the National Security Council.

Professor Doran is thought to be hawkish by the standards of American academics, and is often described as a protege of Bernard Lewis, the famous historian of the Middle East, Islam and the Arab world. He has written extensively on the impact of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs and the relevance of that vacillating war to American strategy. In particular, Professor Doran has argued that the issue of Palestine is more symbolic in Arab politics than it is substantive to Arab interests. In addition, he has argued against the idea that resolution of the conflict in Palestine will have a significant impact on support -- such as it is -- for al Qaeda in the Arab world. Professor Doran argued more than two years ago that there was, in effect, no concession that Israel could make that would satisfy Arab radicals:

When toppling Saddam Hussein rose to the top of the Bush administration's foreign policy agenda, a chorus of voices protested that Washington had misdiagnosed the root cause of its Middle Eastern dilemmas. "It's Palestine, stupid!" was the refrain heard not only from European and Arab capitals, but from some quarters in the United States as well. These voices argued that attacking Iraq while the Israelis were reoccupying Palestinian lands would substantiate the claim, already widespread in the Middle East, that the United States had declared war against all Arabs and Muslims. The ensuing backlash would undermine the American position in the region and wreak havoc on American interests. What Washington really needed to do was postpone or abandon a showdown with Saddam and focus instead on achieving a breakthrough in the Palestinian-Israeli negotiations.

Unqualified U.S. support for Israel, the critics reason, drives a wedge between Washington and the Arabs, most of whom support Palestinian aspirations; for the United States to improve its regional position, it must remove the wedge by tilting somewhat toward the Palestinians. The problem with this argument is that it rests on two hidden and faulty assumptions: about how much Washington would have to change its stance, and about how much goodwill that change would produce.

Unfortunately, Americans and Arabs nurture such different conceptions of what constitutes a just solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that it is hard to imagine Washington ever adopting a policy toward it that would be truly popular in the Arab world. The most "pro-Palestinian" policy realistically conceivable would look something like the Clinton plan presented in late 2000, but even this would entail major Palestinian compromises (such as the renunciation of the right of pre-1967 refugees to return to their homes inside Israel proper). Under the right conditions, a handful of Arab leaders might be induced to endorse such a settlement, but they would be denounced by others as puppets of Washington and the Jews. Suicide bombings would very likely continue, and the United States would still find itself entangled in a passionate communal conflict. The Palestine wedge would thus remain in place -- smaller and less troubling, perhaps, but a wedge nonetheless.

Assuming that Professor Doran still believes what he wrote in 2003, his elevation to the National Security Council strongly suggests that the United States won't be selling out Israel to appease al Qaeda any time soon.

Bookmark the link and read the whole thing at your next opportunity.

Regular TigerHawk readers are also familiar with Professor Doran's work on al Qaeda. At the end of March I covered his public lecture on al Qaeda's "grand strategy" at Princeton and wrote about it here. It turned into my most widely-read post.

Michael Scott Doran is an excellent choice for the National Security Council, and another example of the high-powered talent that the Bush administration is bringing into its campaign to modernize the politics of the Arab world.

UPDATE: According to the Washington Post, Elliot Abrams was not head of the Israel/Palestine desk at NSC (as reported by The Daily Princetonian), but "special assistant to the president and senior director for Near East and North African affairs."
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I had to travel a lot last year. One happy consequence is that I am "gold" on Continental this year, which means more frequent upgrades. Such as today, on the flight to Boston. Your favorite blogger is livin' large, and damn happy about it.

Even if it is just a 40-minute flight.
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Slowly but surely, the blogosphere is driving transparency in the most opaque public policy there is, tax law and regulation. In this crisp and revealing post, TaxProf Blog catches the New York Times in another bit of creative graphsmanship. In effect, the Times excluded the impact of the earned income tax credit from a graph of marginal rates by income level, portraying them as less progressive than they in fact are. (CWCID: Andrew Sullivan.)

If you want to prepare for the imminent burst of tax legislation, go to the web site of the President's bipartisan Advisory Panel on Tax Reform. There is a lot of very interesting information, much of it geared to non-specialists who nevertheless have an interest in federal taxation. The Panel has been doing a lot of work, and has solicited two rounds of comments from the public, all of which are available here.

I was too lame to put in the Official TigerHawk tax reform proposal within the comment period, but I'll offer it here to my enormously influential readership. You will probably agree that its enactment is not possible politically, even or especially with an all-Republican government, but that doesn't mean we can't dream:

1. Raise the exemption on the estate tax to $25 million, and index it to inflation. Lower the estate tax to 15% on everything above that level. Wipe out the estate planning industry, which is a dead weight loss to the economy. [Note that there is no good reason not to abolish the estate tax entirely, but even in America populist sentiment probably requires that at least vast fortunes see some redistribution in the transfer between generations.]

2. Abolish the step-up of capital gains basis at death. Death should have essentially no tax consequences, including tax windfalls, so there is no good reason for the step-up. Liquidation of assets, however, should have tax consequences. Therefore, family farms and businesses will no longer be sold just to pay taxes, but if they are sold capital gains taxes should be paid.

3. Abolish the corporate income tax. The corporate income tax is enormously expensive to plan around and collect, and it distorts corporate behavior. Wipe out the tax departments of major law firms, and the tax practices of big accounting firms. Significantly diminish the tax departments of corporations. Save the economy a bundle in dead weight loss. Watch while corporate America scrambles to reallocate income back into the United States. Watch the dollar rise. Watch campaign contributions to members of Congress go away because rifle-shot tax breaks are no longer possible (oops!).

4. Now that you've wiped out the corporate income tax, make both dividend and interest income ordinary income (effectively raising the rates on both). Define long-term capital gains as genuinely long-term (I would say five years). The only argument for the lower rate on capital gains is inflation uncertainty, and that's fairly predictable over 5 years, so it can be priced into the value of the asset at acquisition. In fairness, it is less predictable over longer periods of time, so the lower rates are justified. [I appreciate that you could prevent the taxing of purely nominal "inflation gains" by indexing the cost basis to inflation, but that's more complicated than the rough justice of using a lower rate for genuinely long-term capital gains.]

5. Phase out the home mortgage interest deduction over, say 20 years. I would kill off 5% of the interest deduction every year for the next two decades. It is a stupid deduction because it inspires people to overinvest in housing and it creates a bias in favor of ownership over renting. And don't give that American dream nonsense: there are all sorts of countries with high home ownership rates and no mortgage interest deduction.

6. Abolish the deduction for state and local taxes. Force people to care about the thieving weasels in their own states and cities. It is the right and just thing to do -- there is no reason why the citizens of low tax states should subsidize the political decisions of citizens of high tax states. Abolishing this deduction would be the smartest progressive reform -- and it would be progressive -- that the Republicans could make, and they should enact it even if they ignore all of the rest of it.

7. Phase in a scaled tax on fossil fuels, or even the Clinton BTU tax (which was a good idea). If you do it slowly enough, even Americans will adjust their behavior so that they spend the same amount on gasoline and fuel, more or less. The difference will be that more of the money will go to our government instead of the disgusting governments that pump most of the world's oil.

8. Raise the cap on Social Security taxes to $250,000. Raise the age for first benefits to 67, full benefits to 70. This business about working half your damn life and expecting somebody to take care of you the other half has got to stop. I'm getting sick and tired of looking at perfectly healthy -- indeed, glowing -- magazine cover photographs of entirely unproductive retired people who are living high off the hog because Social Security and Medicare cover the basic costs. If you want to retire before you have to, save your money and do it without going on the dole.

9. Abolish the impact of marriage on income taxes. Everybody files as an individual. You have dependents, or you don't. The taxpayers in the house can allocate the dependents and few remaining deductions in whatever fashion keeps their taxes the lowest. Fortunately, under the TigerHawk scheme there won't be many deductions to allocate.

10. Do a huge pile of math, and solve for marginal tax rates that get as back to more or less the same percentage of GDP that we started with. Suck up some dislocation in the economy, but after a year or two watch everything start to rock.

Comments?
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By now all newshounds know that an inactive grenade was found near the site where President Bush made a speech in Tbilisi, Georgia. At least some of the paranoids in the Democratic Underground believe that Karl Rove planted the grenade:

Here's my theory: We all know Bush has been treated like the demon he is when he goes overseas, where people with actual critical thinking skills and a real media know who he is and aren't as susceptible to the Pravda-like pro-Bush propaganda we have rammed down our throats on a daily basis.

This latest trip was different -- cheering mobs, large crowds, etc. What a great visual -- now, Rove must be thinking, how to make it last longer? how to make these glowing images shoot around the world?

Isn't an "attempt" on Bush's life the perfect foil? It will force the media to ruminate on it, show the positive background footage and have all the pundits marvel at what a wonderful trip this was and how out of place this act of hostility seemed.

Whatever did happen, we do know this: It's not what they're saying. I would believe nothing from this crowd.

Responses include:

I opened this thread thinking "oh great, here comes some wacky far-fetched explanation" yet finished the thread thinking "shit, that's actually probably right!"

Nothing would surprise me anymore, and your explanation is actually logical.

And don't miss:

Seriously, if "conventional wisdom" is any gauge, the people here on DU are far more tethered to reality than the inside-the-Beltway whores, the religiously insane Falwells and Dobsons, and the mindless sheep who accept everything they're told and question nothing.

Or finally this:

But [the assassination of Bush] might be something the real powers-that-be are keeping in their back pocket: one final, grand use for the puppet. We all at one time or another have entertained the scenario, then came to the inevitable conclusion that it wouldn't change anything and only could make it worse. But think of the new possibilities such a chess move would open up for the other side. These people with their grand designs for the world have, I suspect.

Bwahahaha! The theory is that Karl Rove faked an extremely serious crime in a foreign country by either duping the security services of both countries or suborning them, all because it would improve Bush's press coverage?

As many have pointed out, if Karl Rove is that good, why do the Democrats even both coming to work in the morning?

CWCID: Wizbang.
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Al-Qaeda has been pouring vast sums into mosques and Islamic schools in Mauritania, hoping to recruit insurgents and send them to the front lines of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, police said Tuesday.

Police commission spokes-man Yahsdhou Ould Amar said in a statement that by tapping into "powerful networks for external development," the Islamist terror network of Osama bin Laden has financed religious teachers and mosques so as to easily spread its message to young people.

Al-Qaeda has also spent an untold sum to "dragoon the women in our country, to pressure them into being veiled at all times in public," Amar said of a practice that was heretofore uncommon in Mauritania despite the widespread observance of Islam among its 2.7 million people.

Mauritania is one of only three Arab countries that recognizes Israel (the other two being Egypt and Jordan). It is located in the western Sahara:



This report is another one of al Qaeda's footprints in the sands of the Sahara. On April 28, Reuters reported that al Qaeda trainees had been arrested slipping back from camps in the Algerian desert:

The government of Mauritania claims to have arrested the leaders of a terrorist cell that the US military has linked to Al Qaeda...

The statement said seven people had been arrested but police sources said 18 suspects had been placed under arrest in two days of raids against alleged Islamists.

According to police, the detentions followed the departure a few weeks ago of 20 Mauritanians sent to train in guerrilla camps in the remote southern Algerian desert.

The western press -- Reuters and Agence France, at least -- have reacted to the reports of the government of Mauritania with some skepticism. The president of the country, Maaouya Ould Taya, is friendly to Israel by the standards of Arab regimes and has been trying to get closer to the United States. He is no democrat, either, so he is susceptible to the suspicion that he is trumping up the presence of al Qaeda in his country to justify strong-arm tactics against domestic opponents and get closer to the United States. The United States, for its part, has been worried about the spread of al Qaeda into the Sahel. The discovery of oil off Mauritania's coast hasn't diminished American interest, either.

However mixed the motives of the storytellers here, it does seem that al Qaeda has been operating in Mauritania at some level.

The most notorious of Mauritania's radical Islamists is a high-ranking al-Qaeda leader, Abu Hafs al-Mauritani (Mahfouz Ould al-Walid). Abu Hafs acts as a spiritual advisor to al-Qaeda, though he has no special following in this regard. He followed Bin Laden from Sudan to Afghanistan where the U.S. believes he played an important role in planning the East African embassy attacks and 9/11. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz has suggested that Abu Hafs was the prime al-Qaeda advocate for cooperation with Saddam Hussein. In the months after 9/11 Abu Hafs acted as an al-Qaeda spokesman, denying responsibility for the attacks. Abu Hafs was mistakenly reported killed by the U.S. in Afghanistan in January 2002. He is now believed to be in Iran, possibly under detention.

Less well known is a relative through marriage, Mohammadou Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian who acted as liaison between the Hamburg cell and Osama bin Laden in planning the 9/11 attacks. Ould Slahi is reported to have made two trips to Afghanistan for al-Qaeda training. In 1999 Ould Slahi was in Montreal, where he is alleged to have helped Ahmad Ressam with the "Millennium Plot" bombing attempt. Arrested by Mauritanian police in 2001, Ould Slahi is now believed held in a special CIA unit at Guantanamo Bay.

Both the United States and NATO have sent military advisors to Mauritania, the Americans to train the army and NATO to study Mauritania's coastal security.
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From the May 11 issue of the Princeton Alumni Weekly:

President Tilghman and other judges react to a performance by Honey Loquacious, aka Rachman Blake ’07, the winner of the first All-Ivy Drag Competition April 16 on the south lawn of Frist Campus Center, at which drag queens and kings from five schools strutted their stuff for about 500 onlookers. The celebrity judges ranked the contestants on “gender accuracy,” “talent,” and “creativity.” Blake, a soccer player, said that he plans to abandon cross-dressing before beginning his investment banking career. “It’s just fun, but this doesn’t exactly fit well with the corporate world,” he said.

I'm sure that Senate Majority Leader Frist wishes that they had held the "All-Ivy Drag Competition" somewhere other than the eponymous Campus Center. I'm also sure that Rachman Blake hopes that the trading desk guys at his new employer don't Google "Rachman Blake" any time in the next, er, forty years.
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Link.
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Oh craaaap...

CWCID: Cassandra (again).
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Cassandra says that the person who posted this game is evil. It is not unlike Cassandra to see very stark good vs. evil distinctions. Her frontiers are unambiguous. However, in this case I must agree. Clearly this game is a plot by al Qaeda (or maybe the Chinese) to undermine the productivity of the American economy at its foundation.
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Deutsche Welle has an awesome collection of photo essays up that show then-and-now pictures of the impact of World War II (and Israel's first war of independence) on cities around the world.

Americans in Paris:



Times Square on VE-Day:



Hiroshima:

Aug. 7, 1945: A column of smoke rises 20,000 feet (over 6,000 meters) over Hiroshima the day after the US dropped an atomic bomb.

And finally, an image that is far too familiar in 2005:

Dec. 1947: A Jewish ambulances makes its way through the masses in downtown Jerusalem.

If you have broadband and some time to kill, check it out.
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Nicholas von Hoffman has an excellent article in the current issue of The Nation about the business of liberal talk radio. Von Hoffman looks at the different approaches of Air America -- a network -- and syncator Democracy Radio. Most of his essay is such a nuts and bolts discussion of the structure of the radio business that it is startling to read it in The Nation. At the end, though, he echoes a theme that has been much discussed on both right and left:

Thousands of hours of liberal blabbery on hundreds of stations will go part of the way toward changing the impression that this is a right-wing world, that reaction is the default setting and that anything to the left of Tom DeLay is a foreign, New York kind of idea. Reactionaries must not be allowed to make all the noise, but lib-lab noise-making will not assure the winning of elections. It can make liberalism respectable in the eyes of the impressionable, feckless, white-collar American masses; it can validate it, but it will not put a lefty in the White House any more than Limbaugh and his clonish imitators captured Congress for Jesus and the big-money people in 1994. He helped, but untold numbers can't stand listening to call-in programs. They find hearing talk-radio--left, right or center--akin to having a tooth drilled. All the callithumpian, pot-walloping noise in the world will not break liberalism out of the ghetto in which it is currently confined. Not alone. Not by itself.

Progressive talk-radio has to be for something. You can't live off a straight diet of political paranoia. Liberalism has to have its thrilling moments, its heroes. It has to have a platform, a positive agenda, a program. But the invention of same is not the job of a small group of overwrought men and women leaning into microphones. When liberalism and liberals do find their platform, their new, progressive talkers will surely broadcast it. And if all will not be good, it will be better than it has been.

Walter Cronkite couldn't have said it better. And he should know.
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Arianna Huffington's group blog and news service, the Huffington Post, has gone live. I scanned the first day's offerings and almost immediately had to suppress the urge to poke my eyes out. The problem with rounding up celebrities and politicians to blog is that they have too much to lose, so they have to be all sober and respectable instead of harsh. Walter Cronkite is explicit in this, at least:

I'll launch my first contribution right here: Arianna, I offer this first editorial opinion that you settle for "interesting" and recognize that it is not a synonym for "entertaining."

I hope she doesn't take his advice. Unfortunately, most of today's bloggers seem to have.

Larry David, however, is the jewel in the crown. Liberal is he, young Jedi, but funny he is, too. On why he "supports" John Bolton:

I know this may not sound politically correct, but as someone who has abused and tormented employees and underlings for years, I am dismayed by all of this yammering directed at John Bolton. Let's face it, the people who are screaming the loudest at Bolton have never been a boss and have no idea what it’s like to deal with nitwits as dumb as themselves all day long. Why, even this morning my moronic assistant handed me a cup of coffee with way too much milk in it. I was incensed.

"You stupid ignoramus," I screamed, doing all I could to restrain myself from tossing the luke-warm liquid in her face. “There's too much freaking (I didn’t say freaking) milk in here! What the freak is wrong with you?!”

“I’m sorry, sir,” she stammered. Like sorry’s going to fix everything. I’m not interested in sorry. Sorry doesn’t cut it with me.

“Look, you idiot,” I continued, “I wouldn’t mind so much if you gave me too little milk. Little can be fixed. We can add to little.”

“Shall I get you another cup?”

“No, I’ll suck on my thumb. Yes, get me another cup, you douche bag! And chew on this -- it’s going to cost you a dollar!”

Heh.

UPDATE: Slate's Jack Shafer reviews the Huff Post here. Indeed.
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There are a couple of elections, one next weekend and another just completed, that you don't hear much about in the American media.

In Taiwan, next weekend's special election is turning into a referendum on President Chen's China policy. I hope Chen's party suffers at least enough symbolic defeat to forestall a declaration of independence, for reasons discussed ad nauseum on this blog.

Meanwhile, Fatah and Hamas duke it out in elections among the Palestinian Arabs. Fatah "won," but I have no idea whether they exceeded expectations going in to the election. There is bound to be much more intelligent discussion of the elections elsewhere. For a detailed take from a lefty Brit who blogs from Bethelem (he is a pro-Palestinian activist), go here. His tight discussion on the politics of Bethlehem is very interesting:

In order to understand the real significance of the Bethlehem vote, attention must be paid to detail. In Bethlehem seven seats were reserved for Muslim candidates and eight for Christian candidates. This meant that unlike the other 2,519 candidates competing for 906 seats in the 84 municipal councils throughout the rest of the West bank and Gaza, the competition was not a straight Fatah verses Hamas (Islamic Resistance Movement) match. Rather it was a contest between differing streams within Fatah, the relatively localized PFLP and an array of indepdent candidates. This being the case, Bethlehem, was dubbed as 'one of the most hotly contested areas’. However, it was also one of the four municipalities’ where Hamas made some real headway.

Ultimately, six of the seven ‘'Muslim'’ seats went to Hamas (with the Islamic Jihad taking the eighth) while the eight seats reserved for Christian candidates were divided equally between the PFLP and Fatah. Perhaps the UK could learn another lesson, or rather put substance behind its rhetoric of ‘cultural and religious’ diversity. In the UK on Thursday only four out of the 646 seats were taken by Muslim candidates, however, at least 19 Muslim MPs would need to be elected in order to reflect the community's estimated 3 percent of the electorate (roughly 1.1 million).

Although the election results have still to be officially announced by the Central Election Committee (CEC), the unofficial election results indicate that overall Fatah has won a majority in 45 of the local councils, while Hamas has won 23 and the remaining 16 councils are shared between the PFLP and independent candidates lists. The next stage of Palestinian democratization (aside of course from the withdrawal of the Israeli occupation army and the destruction of the separation wall) is scheduled for 17 July 2005, when the electorate will once again go to the ballot box to elect members to the Palestinian Legislative Council.

Meanwhile, the car horns continue but for tonight I cannot. The noise is too overwhelming. I wonder what it sounds like at home?

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Major K., who knows whereof he speaks:

There is a wide variance in the quality of Iraqi Army units. Some are showing espirit d'corps and proficiency that would give some American units a run for their money. Others are lazy, corrupt and unprofessional. This is part of the growth process involved in training any new military force where there has been a power vacuum or power struggle in the past. Any soldier who has trained forces from a developing nation will back me up on this, particularly if they are US Army Special Forces, who specialize in this sort of thing...

Right now we are getting some complaints about one of the units here involving, theft of valuables at checkpoints, apathy to local threats, heavy-handedness, shooting at anything that moves at night, etc. At the same time, another unit here is loved by the locals and taking it to the arhabi(terrorists) as if these Soldiers are invincible. They are known as the Wolf Brigade, and they are the self-styled rockstars of the Iraqi Army. We sure are glad to have them here.

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John Shabe explains.
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In honor of Mother's Day, which is generally scorned in my family as a "Hallmark holiday," I present the TigerHawk Mother, enjoying the company of friends on a, er, recent birthday:

 


And here's the loving and insufficiently recognized mother of the TigerHawk children, Mrs. TigerHawk (accompanied, of course, by the load who writes this blog):

 


Happy Mother's Day!
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Our Spaniels:

 


Our Spaniels and their birth family:

 


The Presidential Spaniel:



Springer Spaniels, The Ultimate Dog^TM. Just sayin', is all.
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Mrs. TigerHawk is out of town for the weekend, which puts me in charge of the entire menagerie, including the Daughter and the Horse. The Horse does not have quite the requirement for anonymity as the Daughter, so I'm pleased to report that his name is Jack Frost. And for those of you who might have reason to be amused that my wife owns a horse with such a name, consider this my solemn testimony that Jack had his name before he joined our family.

In any case, Jack Frost is a soulful fellow. Lest there be any doubt:

 


It had been a long time since I had seen the TH Daughter riding or otherwise interacting -- it is really a mother-daughter "thing" in our family -- so I was extremely impressed with her competence. Here she is very professionally cleaning Jack's hooves during the pre-ride groomification:

 


Not only did the cloudy day clear up while we were in the barn, it warmed up. Here's a full frontal of the Daughter and the Horse coming at your photographer.

 


And, finally, the big action shot:

 


I'm a proud father.
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I missed this story when it surfaced a couple of weeks ago. Apparently people are worshiping at a stain of some sort under a Chicago underpass. The faithful believe that it looks like the Virgin Mary.



I dunno. To my tired eyes, it looks a lot less like the Virgin Mary -- at least as I imagine her -- than this grilled cheese sandwich.



[UPDATE: A very astute reader points out that the revelatory grilled cheese in question looks a lot more like Marlene Dietrich than the Virgin Mary. Hmmm...



He's got a point.]

Presumably, God can make a Virgin Mary likeness anyway he wants. Nobody having reported a spontaneous cubist Virgin Mary, it is safe to say that God doesn't think much of that school.

Why am I bringing up this old news now? Because apparently Illinois DOT workers painted over the stain, probably to keep pilgrims from gathering in throngs along the Kennedy Expressway. The stain had turned controversial, somebody having drawn the words "Big Lie" in shoe polish over it. No matter. A couple of car wash workers "used their lunch break" to scrub away the paint and the shoe polish. The stain is back, as are the pilgrims.
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An American in Egypt feels the winds, or at least the breezes, of change:

So we are sitting there waiting with everyone else and the gentleman next to us started asked us where we were from etc. Yeah, we are Americans and came to see what is up. He made some comment about Mubarak being a dictator and how he loved Americans. Trained that Egyptians are brilliant at separating Americans from the US administration, I gave him the old, “Yeah well Bush is dumb and does not understand the region”. All of the sudden, my friend and I were the center of hostile attention by all those in earshot. You would of thought I insulted the Pope on Sunday. I then was subjected to multiple people explaining that I was wrong. All the previous American presidents were supporting dictatorships but Bush - well he understands and is smart. Another chap tried to outdo his party colleagues by saying “and the FM Condaleeeeza is very clever” as he pointed to his temple. I quickly readjusted and said, “Well maybe you’all are right.”

CWCID: The Big Pharoah.
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Daniel Pipes apparently advocates routine traffic stops as a means of combating terrorism. He has compiled a list of links to reports of arrests that have come out of hometown police work, to wit:

News comes today that Sami Ibrahim Isa Abdel Hadi, 39, was stopped for tailgating on Route 46 in Ridgefield Park, New Jersey. Turns out, once the Bergen County police officer called in Abdel Hadi's North Carolina license plates, he learned that Abdel Hadi is illegally in the United States and is on several federal agency terror watch lists. Even more interestingly, Abdel Hadi has a valid temporary I.D. from for L & L Painting to paint the George Washington Bridge.

There are, of course, countless traffic stops every day, almost none of which result in the arrest of terror suspects. Anecdotes are not evidence that routine stops are a useful means for hunting bad guys. In Pipes' defense, though, I do not know that he actually advocates more stops or random stops. He may just, in fact, be praising them.
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Blogger Saudi Jeans writes that "those Wahabbis are really hijacking Islam." He links to this article in the online Arab News, in which an Arab woman writes about the changing treatment of women at the Grand Mosque:

From Yanbu, where my family lived years ago, it was an easy drive on the weekend to go to Makkah. We’d visit my mother-in-law and all the aunties and other relatives. We’d pray at the Grand Mosque. Then, we’d shop. I never thought twice about hopping in the car and driving to Makkah...

Then, suddenly, about a decade ago things began to change at the Grand Mosque. Yes, the numbers coming for Umrah and Haj seemed much larger. But that cannot explain the difference in the mood and behavior of the crowds. Circumambulating the Kaaba began to require the skills of a wrestler. After suffering the pushing, elbowing and jostling of the crowd, I would return home and usually find that I’d been seriously bruised...

Then, five years ago in the spring, an incident happened in the mosque. Even now when I think of it, tears come to my eyes. It was during the Maghrib prayer. I was standing at the end of a row with my eyes closed, listening to the imam recite. There was a tap on my shoulder. “Ghati Wajhik,” came an insistent female whisper. My eyes flew open. I was being told to cover my face during the prayer. I stared straight ahead. Again the instruction came and again I ignored it. The woman standing behind me moved away. I was not left alone for long though.

While I was on my knees, two women covered from head to toe, except for their eyes, appeared at my side. They had some sort of badge sewn to the front of their hijab. One grasped my right wrist and ordered me in clear English, “Sister, cover your face.” I was shocked. Around me, despite the interruption, other women were trying to continue in their prayer but inquisitive looks were being thrown my way. To make a long and ugly story short, I spent the entire remainder of the prayer on my knees receiving a lecture. I could not escape, as making an aggressive move in the Holy Mosque was unacceptable to me.

I have been unable to return to the Grand Mosque since that day. Every time I consider the idea, I am overcome with a feeling of panic. I have shared my experience with many other women in the hope of finding solace. Sadly, too often the women relate to me accounts that are just as unpleasant or even worse than mine. Rudeness and ignorance should find no foothold in the holiest place in Islam, but somehow it seems that certain people have forgotten the basic tenets of our faith.

The Wahabbis, as Princeton's Michael Scott Doran has put it, "spend a lot of time defining who is and who is not a believer. They start dividing up the bad guys into all sorts of different kinds of bad guys." The Wahabbis do not care that a highly articulated definition of apostasy is far tougher on thoughtful believers than on non-believers. The question is, will Wahabbism's bright lines strengthen Islam even as they harden it, or will they drive the umma into schism?
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Austin Bay, Robert Spencer and others are tracking news reports that describe the alleged intelligence bonanza that we have uncovered in connection with the capture earlier this week of Abu Faraj al-Libbi, a senior al Qaeda operative. We apparently have his notebook -- whatever that might be -- and a laptop computer.

I am, perhaps, a little more troubled by this news than either Bay or Spencer. Not that we have this information -- who could be against that? -- but that you, me and six billion other people know that we have this information. We caught this guy three days ago, apparently under circumstances that made it difficult to cover up his capture. But how is it that the media is in a position to confirm that we have his laptop and notebook? Will not "the Libyan's" compatriots do everything they can, as quickly as they can, to render al-Libbi's information obsolete? Wouldn't it have been wiser to leave them wondering whether we learned anything useful from al-Libbi?

If al-Libbi's information turns out to have been significant, we probably degraded its value by publicizing our possession of it. If so, both the leaker and the news outlets who published the story have done us a great disservice. Indeed, that may have been the leaker's intention -- Pakistan's intelligence service is riddled with jihadi sympathizers. It is entirely possible that the stories about the notebook and the laptop were leaked with the nefarious purpose of warning the Islamists to get out of Dodge.

UPDATE: This, on the other hand, is what I want to see -- news of a capture weeks after the fact:

US and Iraqi forces say they have captured an associate of Iraq's most-wanted terrorist.

They say the aide to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (AH'-boo MOO'-sahb ahl-zahr-KOW'-ee) was arrested in western Iraq last month.

UPDATE: The Times of London is reporting in tomorrow's edition that Abu Faraj al-Libbi may not be a very big guy after all. This ugly bastard may be middle management, and have been confused for a big cheese still at large. Using the notorious "some believe" construct (if "some believe," why not tell us who?), the Times hints that the mistake, if there was one, might have been on purpose:

Some believe al-Libbi’s significance has been cynically hyped by two countries that want to distract attention from their lack of progress in capturing Bin Laden, who has now been on the run for almost four years.

That strikes me as asinine. It is far more plausible that a mid-level flunky made a boo-boo, and Musharraf, Bush and Rice ran their victory laps without doing sufficient due diligence.
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A mysterious outbreak of chlamydia, a bacterial infection which humans pass to each other through sex, has killed a dozen penguins at the San Francisco Zoo, a zoo spokeswoman said on Friday.

Heh. Er, not that I'm laughing about dead penguins or anything.

But wait, that's not all:

The outbreak was the second Penguin Island mystery to stump zoo officials in recent years.

The zoo's penguins in December 2003 began swimming nonstop in circles after six new penguins were introduced to the colony. Normally the birds occasionally splash about in their pool. They went around and around until mid-February 2004.

"Even when the pool was drained they would walk around in circles," Chan said.

That's San Francisco penguins for you.
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Most people know that Islamic law severely limits charging or paying interest. I did not know, though, that some Muslims also wonder whether Sharia permits insurance:

Western-style insurance is a tricky product for Islamic bankers. For a start, some Muslims also view insurance as betting against God's will, and thus a failure of faith. That problem was quickly overcome. "The scholars agree that we are put down on Earth with free will," explained Dawood Taylor, a British convert to Islam who heads the insurance project. "When asked the question: 'Shall I tie up my camel or leave his fate to the will of Allah?' they answered: 'Tie up your camel, and then look to the will of Allah.'"

Tie up the camel, save for a rainy day, use a stitch in time, and buy insurance.

CWCID: The Emirates Economist.
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Michael Totten is back from Lebanon with powerful evidence of Western cultural imperialism:



Via Glenn.
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A year ago, it would have been impossible for any conservative to imagine cheering while Lanny Davis -- Bill Clinton's Special White House Counsel -- sandbags Paul Volcker, inflation-fighting hero of old.

What a difference a year makes.

Lanny Davis represents Robert Parton, one of the dissident members of the Volcker panel, which investigated the UN oil-for-food scandal. Parton was apparently bound by a confidentiality agreement, and got caught between an American rock and the United Nations hard place when a Congressional committee hit him with a subpoena to produce documents and testify. Anti-UN Congressmen, of course, want to find out whether the Volcker panel's report -- which Annan has characterized as "exonerating" -- was a whitewash, and Parton wants to help them.

Davis, apparently, has found a way for Parton to produce his wad of incriminating documents to Congress.

Documents potentially devastating to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan were handed over yesterday to a congressional committee in an explosive new development in the U.N. oil-for- food scandal.

House International Relations Committee Chairman Henry Hyde (R-Ill.) announced that Robert Parton, who resigned in protest from the investigation headed by Paul Volcker, had complied with the panel's subpoena.

Davis apparently accomplished this with a deft bit of lawyer's tradecraft:

There was high drama surrounding the subpoena of Parton because he was subject to a confidentiality agreement with the Volcker panel. Immunity laws typically keep U.N. officials out of reach of congressional subpoenas.

After secretly receiving the subpoena last Friday, Parton's lawyer, Lanny Davis, asked Volcker and U.N. lawyers if they would instruct Parton to defy a congressional subpoena — but did not actually tell them he had been subpoenaed.

When the Volcker committee and the United Nations did not reply, Parton had "no choice" but to comply with the committee's subpoena, a source said.

Does anybody think the "source" for the Post's story is anybody other than Lanny Davis?

Amy Guttman better hope that these documents don't get published before Penn's commencement!

UPDATE: The Wall Street Journal persuasively argues that conservatives who want to get to the bottom of the oil-for-food scandal are playing right into the hands of the United Nations establishment:

But for Republicans to now focus their attention on the bona fides of the Volcker probe because of the claims of a disgruntled investigator is to shoot the wrong target. Sure it will get some good headlines for the Members, and it may even further damage Mr. Annan's credibility. But it will also damage the Volcker probe, perhaps irreparably, and just when his Committee is getting into the meat of the scandal, which is why and how Oil for Food got started and why it was allowed to prop up Saddam Hussein for so many years.

Put simply, the Volcker Committee will be crippled if it cannot guarantee its witnesses--many of them not beyond reproach--that their confidential testimony won't end up being aired on C-SPAN as part of a Congressional hearing...

We aren't conspiracy theorists, but from the point of view of the U.N.'s most rabid defenders it's hard to imagine a better turn of events than this Congressional detour. Preoccupy the Volcker Committee with this side issue until its funding runs out in August. Chill its investigators, and its witnesses, into inactivity or silence. Damage Mr. Volcker's personal reputation, so that any final report can be attacked as suspect. The only people thrilled with all this must be the people who profited from Oil for Food.

So perhaps conservatives should not be cheering on Lanny Davis. That will resolve some serious cognitive dissonance.
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According to this report, the United States is building up its forces in the western Pacific.

B-2 Spirit stealth bombers and F-15E fighter jets were deployed in Guam recently on a rotation basis. Experts noted the bombers and fighters have the range to strike North Korea's nuclear facilities and high-profile stocks of missiles in the event of any conflict....

These military developments in the western Pacific are part of the U.S. deterrent against any possible North Korean aggression, but also could heighten tensions on the Korean Peninsula as Washington's patience wears thin in dealing with Pyongyang, some Korean military officials said.

"Though the U.S. military says the deployments are part of rotations planned beforehand and unrelated to any particular threat, the updated capabilities as well as current military capabilities are remarkable," said a Korean military officer on condition of anonymity.

For the first time, a B-2 Spirit bomber squadron with stealth functions was deployed in late February for a two-month tour of duty at Andersen Air Force Base in Guam to enhance regional security in the western Pacific, according to U.S. Air Force officials. But the squadron is extending its stay for an indefinite time.

If you're going to walk as softly as we have, you had better have a tight grip on the big stick.
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Dan O'Byrne has written a wonderful post about Bruce Springsteen's slide into partisan politics. It perfectly captures, I think, the feelings of those of us who wonder how the man who wrote "Into the Fire" could have such a profound hostility to the first American president who fought back. If you love Springsteen's music and voted for our president, read the whole thing.

Saw it at Sluggo's.
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It doesn't take much for TigerHawk to complain about Penn, although we usually confine our snarkiest comments to its basketball team. In this case, though, we are appalled that Penn has recruited Kofi Annan, who has presided over one of the largest financial scandals in the history of the world, to speak at its commencement. Penn's president, Amy Gutmann, thinks that Annan makes an excellent role model:

At the University of Pennsylvania, an address by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan on May 16 will mark the school's 249th commencement. The selection committee at the Ivy League institution is confident the words of Annan, recipient of the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize, will mesh seamlessly with a graduating class that university president Amy Gutmann says is more globally interconnected than ever before.

"Annan's commitment to international peace, human rights, and the universal values of equality, liberty, opportunity and human dignity make him the perfect speaker to address Penn students," said Gutmann, who will preside over her first Penn commencement since assuming the presidency in July 2004.

No word yet on whether the Wharton School will extend an invitation to Ken Lay.

UPDATE: One of the Volcker panel's dissident members has complied with the Congressional subpoena and turned over allegedly incriminating documents to Congress.
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Some citizens are up in arms over the town's decision to erect a monument to the TV show 'Bewitched.'

The 9-foot tall bronze statue of sitcom character Samantha Stephens astride a broom, one of a series of sculpture nationwide proposed by TV Land cable network, is near where 20 people were sentenced to death during the witch hysteria of 1692.

Hey, I like Bewitched as much as the next guy, but a statue of Samantha trivializes the real history of Salem, and detracts from the romantic mythology that there actually were (and still are) witches there (putting aside the fact that Bewitched took place in Westport, CT, not Salem). Hey, I have some other ideas. How about statue of Hawkeye Pierce in the Korean DMZ? I'm sure someone could find a good place for this guy as well.
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An interesting debate is going on in anticipation of the Israeli pullout from Gaza. What should be done with abandoned settlements? The Jerusalem Post thinks settlers should be allowed to destroy their homes upon eviction.

Consequently, in addition to not only the right, but also the obligation, of the settlers to destroy their homes, the government has the obligation to carry out its original decision. If the homes are abandoned and/or handed over to the Palestinians, the latter will see it as confirmation of their belief that terrorism pays off and that they are on the right road in a war that will eventually return them to Jaffa, Haifa, Acre and Jerusalem.

Israel's momentary profit from being represented in the world media as a peace lover giving the keys of Jewish displaced persons' homes to the Palestinians will be swallowed up by a long-term loss: unambiguous encouragement of the enemy to continue its war against the kibbutzim in the region, against Ashkelon and Ashdod, from the Gaza Strip, and against the heart of Israel from Judea and Samaria.

The MSM, of course, will flock to the scene in the event of such destruction, and the picture won't be pretty. Interviews with the Palestinian homeless next to burning Jewish houses will be ubiquitous.
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An essay in photographs by Arthur Chrenkoff: Why it does not pay to piss off America. Heh. Bwahahahaha!

Via Instapundit.
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If you don't know the story of Cinco de Mayo, be sure to read Dr. Demarche's post this morning. He explains how a Mexican army defeated Napoloeon III's attempt to grab a beachhead on North America. Napoleon III, sort of the Jacques Chirac of his time, was concerned about the growth of American power and wanted to use the Confederacy to contain the United States. If you are happy you don't need your passport to go to Virginia, thank the valiant Mexican soldiers who won a big one at Vera Cruz.
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Beware the passive voice. Writers and speakers use the passive voice to avoid assigning responsibility for something. Did you ever try to run a screw-up to ground, only to hear your employee say "I was told to do this"? The employee is covering for the person who told them to do the stupid thing he or she did.

Since every writing course and style manual in the history of the world warns against the passive voice, professional writers who use it do so on purpose. Consider this report in an article about today's horrific suicide bombing in Kurdish Iraq:

Sectarian violence has worsened since the January 30 elections when the Sunnis — dominant under deposed dictator Saddam Hussein — were sidelined.

"Were sidelined"? Who "sidelined" whom? To the writer of the story, almost anybody could be responsible, up to and including the Americans or the Shiites. We know that the writer intentionally avoided assigning responsibility for this to the people actually killing innocent civilians because it would have been easy -- and even obvious -- to write the same sentence in the active voice, to wit:

Sectarian violence has worsened since the Sunnis -- dominant under deposed dictator Saddam Hussein -- boycotted the January 30 elections.

The writer used the passive voice because he did not want to conclude that the Sunnis of Iraq are responsible for the fix they are in. Indeed, had he fingered the Sunnis, he would have realized that the violence is not "sectarian" in the usual meaning of the word. The Kurds are also Sunni. This terrorism and the Sunni's boycott of the elections are both tactics in the continuous Sunni war to regain control of Iraq.
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Three snails listed as extinct have been rediscovered in the Coosa and Cahaba rivers, the Nature Conservancy announced Tuesday.

Not quite the same as the sighting of the ivory-billed woodpecker, but better than not rediscovering three species of snail.
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John Kerry, a millionaire married to a billionaire, used campaign funds to pay for overdue parking tickets. According to a spokesman for the Federal Election Commission, "congressmen are entitled to pay for parking tickets and other expenses from their campaign funds as long as they were 'campaign-related.'"

No decently run public company in America would allow its employees to expense parking tickets, even if they were, er, "incurred" on company business. Not only is the idea inherently offensive, but it creates a moral hazard. Why would employees be careful about where they park if the company is going to indemnify them for the ticket?

So while it may be just fine under our laughable campaign finance laws for members of Congress and presidential candidates to use campaign funds to pay civil penalties -- a parking fine is a civil penalty, in case nobody noticed -- it is wholly inconsistent with the experience of most of the American electorate. The interesting question is whether John Kerry understands that and does not care, or whether he just doesn't understand it.

Via Roger.
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Abu Faraj al-Libbi, described by some counterterrorism officials as the third-most senior leader in the Al Qaeda terrorist network, was arrested on Tuesday, the Pakistani information minister, Sheikh Rashid Ahmed, said this afternoon. A native of Libya, Mr. Libbi was captured during a raid in South Waziristan, the tribal redoubt of Al Qaeda fighters and their Islamist sympathizers, Mr. Ahmed said.

Ugly bastard. And what's with the pigmentation thing he has going? Is he trying to disguise himself to look like Michael Jackson?

[UPDATE (11 pm Wed): It was the Michael Jackson thing!

Alleged al-Qaeda No.3 Abu Faraj al-Libbi looked more like a businessman with his trimmed beard and smart collar and tie when his picture first featured on a Pakistani most wanted poster last year.

But a very different face appeared on Wednesday in the first photograph after his capture. Not just the straggly beard and haunted look, but the facial blotching caused by the skin disorder leucoderma, or vitiligo, the condition suffered by pop star Michael Jackson.

You read it here first! Sort of.]



No, there isn't anything wrong with picking on the physical features of bad people. Here at TigerHawk, we believe in dehumanizing the enemy. Especially when they are as significant as al-Libbi:

An American counterterrorism official described the arrest of Mr. Libbi as the most important blow to Al Qaeda since the arrest of Khalid Sheik Mohammed more than two years ago.

The official described Mr. Libbi as having risen to become the third most important figure in the Al Qaeda leadership, after Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. The official said that Mr. Libbi had assumed some of Mr. Mohammed's leadership role after his arrest, and had played a key role in directing Al Qaeda operations including planning for attacks against the United States homeland.

There is an interesting off-hand remark in this New York Times article suggesting that the war in Iraq may indeed be distracting al Qaeda from attacking Western targets.

Other members of the Al Qaeda leadership have been better known, but some of them have been in Iran for more than a year, where their role has been constrained, the official said.

Constrained because they are surrounded like everybody else in Iran.

Video here.

CWCID: LGF.
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'Texas considers ban on sexy cheerleaders' - headline, AFP.

That means no more of these...



This issue has apparently distracted the Texas chapter of the ACLU from its campaign against capital punishment:

"Without a specific definition of what these kids cannot perform, the sky is the limit," the ACLU warned. "Any complaintant can construe any dance step, cheer or movement of any sort as sexually suggestive."

I think this law is OK, as long as somebody attaches a rider that bans ugly waitresses. After all, somebody is going to have to find jobs for all those unemployed sexy cheerleaders. We don't want them out on the street.
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There are definitely days when I want to give our employees one of these (and, candidly, when my boss should give me one):



And one of these in every conference room might help (if you want to reduce headcount):



Check out Despair, Inc., dedicated to the "art of demotivation." But not before you take your Prozac.

CWCID: A reader.
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After watching the TigerHawk daughter throw some wicked strikes...
 


...I wandered over to the Princeton filibuster in front of the Frist Campus Center (previously reported here). It was into its 177th hour, a performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream:

 


There wasn't anybody around at 7:05 pm, I learned, because they were all off watching themselves on Hardball, which had been out that afternoon filming. I, of course, drove home at breakneck speed in order to catch the coverage. I missed the first few minutes, but I did manage to get the TiVo on at about 7:15. Chris Matthews was torturing a pair of undergraduates, including this guy, Asheesh Siddique.
 


Siddique acquitted himself well -- he was less nervous than the young Republican in trotted out to speak for the anti-filibuster side -- but he was also more evasive.

Matthews: "Asheesh, are you a Democrat?"

Siddique: "I'm actually an independant, I would consider myself a progressive. But there are many Republicans who take very principaled positions that I admire, including John McCain who supports the right of the minority to filibuster."

Matthews: "I couldn't hear you -- are you a Democrat?"

Siddique: "I'm an independant -- I'm [hesitates and stammers] actually registered as an independant -- I'm not [uh, uh, etc.] a member of any political party."

Matthews: "Why are you so political on this issue and not political on registration? If you're so interested in politics, why haven't you identified with one of the parties?"

Siddique: "I don't believe that - that politics should operate within the sort of discourse of political parties. I think that politics is really sort of a vocation, a way of engaging with certain ideals. I come to it from a more philosophical orientation."

Matthews: "Ashish, who'd you vote for for President last November?"

Siddique: "I'd rather not say."

Matthews: "Why?"

Siddique: "Because I [stutters] just think the whole issue of parties..."

Matthews: "OK. Let's try to get some candor here from the other side..."

If Matthews were a little more prepared for his interview, he would have known that Siddique posts on the Princeton Progressive Review blog. Had Matthews scrolled back to a random day last fall -- say, November 2 -- he would have seen this post, in which Siddique wrote:

"In particular, if we were asked to make a single judgment on the presidency of George W. Bush, it would be this:

George W. Bush was the worst president
in the history of the United States of America."

I think we know who Siddique voted against. If Matthews had been prepped to his rep, he would have trotted out that post.

That having been said, both students acquitted themselves better than I would have at that age. Both were more articulate and argued their points at least as eloquently as experienced professional spinners would have. Indeed, the Princeton "filibuster" is itself a civil and very creative demonstration. My hat's off to them.
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From high brow journals to small town dailies, the slow death of classical music has become a topic of concern.

For this reason, I am gratified to know of this particular site, which is clearly doing its part to keep classical music a vibrant and relevant part of our culture.

I appreciate classical music to a degree (although I generally gravitate toward Jamaican music, jazz, soul, and funk) but far prefer it live than reproduced. The string quartet Bond, pictured below, is just one very compelling argument for being there.



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Judy McGuire, who writes the hilarious (and adult rated) "Date Girl" column in the weekly New York Press, gets the feature in this week's issue. She takes on all facets of spring in New York with both barrels blazing, as usual:

As many New Yorkers are originally from elsewhere and grew up with luxuries like lawns, the tiniest patch of syringe- and poo-littered grass inexplicably compels even the most uptight lady to strip down to her skivvies in order to soak up cancerous, wrinkle-causing rays. Interestingly enough, these same bikini-clad sun-worshippers get annoyed when the hordes of the horny comment on their state of undress. Ladies, you're wearing panties in midtown. C'mon. I'm not saying anyone deserves to be accosted, but either develop a thicker skin, or put on some pants.

When you're still having snowstorms into late March, by the time spring really kicks in, it's understandable that one could get a little over-excited about not having to wear 10 sweaters and woolen undergarments. But 55 degrees does not mean it's time to bust out the bikini. The frenzied and premature leap into summer—mile-long lines for Shake Shack (they're burgers, people!) and overnight proliferation of scanty clothing—has convinced me that the collective IQ of New York drops 10 points in direct proportion to each degree warmer the weather.

66. It's sunny! I wanna eat outdoors! C'mon—don't be a party pooper! I don't care if we're sitting at a sidewalk table on a truck route. Exhaust fumes aren't so bad, silly! Look, I can get a tan with my omelet! Hey—where's that guy going with my purse!

67. With the shucking of coats comes a two-week period during which certain men are so captivated by the sudden reappearance of boobies that they find it impossible to look anywhere but at your tits.

69. Guess what this makes me think of? Yeah, dude! 69!

70. Normally sensible men replace their Converse with the dreaded mandal.

71. Normally sensible men accessorize the aforementioned mandal with man-diggers. Please note: Pants or shorts. There is no in-between.

72.–74. It's around this time that those annoying couples whom everyone hates on sight decide to bust out the PDAs. Please note that dry humping is no more acceptable in May than it is in December.

75. B-cup or better should be wearing a bra. No, really.

76. The sight of so much bare flesh causes single people across the city to gouge out their own eyes, while coupled folks start to seriously believe they're hot enough to consider trading up.

77. Time to rewax. Ouch.

78. Citizens across the city schedule tetanus shots as unwise footwear choices force thousands into the city's already overburdened emergency rooms.

79. One more degree and it's summer!

80. Now the stupid really starts.

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While we twist our collective hanky over the filibustering of judicial nominees, the women of Kuwait have more fundamental rights to worry about. Kuwait's parliament has failed to pass legislation that would give women the right to vote in municipal elections.

The Bill was passed in principle by the parliament on April 19.

However, during yesterday's crucial second round voting out of the 60 lawmakers present, 29 voted for the Bill, while 29 conservative MPs abstained and two members rejected the law. All 13 ministers voted for the Bill.

Speaker Jasem Al Kharafi declared after the vote that the Bill was neither approved nor rejected and that another vote must be taken to break the deadlock. No date was set for the new vote.

Kuwaiti suffragettes are not happy:



CWCID: The Emirates Economist.
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So reports the Arab press:

US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld paid a secret visit to former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and offered him freedom and possible return to public life if he made a televised request to armed groups for a ceasefire with allied forces, a media report said.

Saddam promptly rejected the offer, Ynetnews reported quoting a London based Al Quds Al Arabi daily. The visit came during Rumsfeld’s visit to Iraq about two weeks ago and was known only to a few Iraqi officials in Jordan, the Arab daily reported quoting sources.

Some two weeks ago the British Telegraph had reported that Iraqi gunmen were offered a “deal” to halt all terror attacks in return for a reduced sentence for Saddam, likely to be sentenced to death.

This strikes me a nonsense. First, it is entirely against the character of either Donald Rumsfeld or George Bush. Second, even if a plea from Saddam would defang the Ba'athists who want to return to power, why would al Qaeda care? Finally, this smells like Sunni propaganda designed to make Americans look weak in Arab eyes.
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Yesterday morning I published this post, which covered a very creative demonstration at Princeton University in support of the filibuster. I argued that rather than abolishing the filibuster, the Republicans should reform the filibuster rules to require actual sustained debate (which I will call the "Nostalgia Option").

[I]t would be a mistake for the Republicans, in a moment of ephemeral ascendancy, to abolish it even for judicial nominations. Once abolished for one thing, people will want to change the rules for tax increases, entitlement programs, environmental laws and attorney general nominations. However, I think that these Princeton students have the right idea: If you are going to filibuster, then you should have to filibuster. Filibusters should come at some personal and political cost. We should abolish the candy-ass filibusters of modern times, and require that if debate is not closed it must therefore happen.

The prospect of John Kerry, Hillary Clinton or Ted Kennedy bloviating for hours on C-SPAN would deter filibusters except when the stakes are dire, if for no other reason than the risk that long debate would create a huge amount of fodder for negative advertising. If Frist were to enact the "reform" of the filibuster instead of its repeal, he would sieze the high ground. He could take the position that the Republicans are merely rolling back the "worst excesses" of the long period of Democratic majority in the Congress, and that filibusters will still be possible if Senators are willing to lay it all on the line.

I was very gratified when Glenn Reynolds (among others) picked up the argument, not once but twice. In the second link, Professor Reynolds was responding to criticisms from Mickey Kaus and others who argue that the Nostalgia Option won't work. Mickey and Glenn kept it up for much of the day, resulting in Kaus taking a "final" position of highly qualified support in favor of the Nostalgia Option:

A "real filibuster" requirement is a legitimate middle ground of sorts, in that it might open the way for some nominations--mainly those wildly popular with the public, but not with the filibusterers--that the status quo (fake filibusters) would not allow. But it's not in the middle of the middle ground! It's 90% of the way toward the Dems' position. ...

For my part, I continue to believe that it is not in the best interests of Republicans to abolish the filibuster -- they will need it themselves some day, and no Supreme Court nominee is worth giving up that protection over the long term. Having said that, I also believe that the reality of a traditional filibuster -- which nobody has seen or experienced in all its harshness for more than 30 years -- would appear through C-SPAN and the blogosphere to be so asinine that the risk of political backlash against the minority would rise rapidly as the days went by. The risk of backlash might not be obvious at the beginning of the debate, just as it wasn't obvious to Newt Gingrich that the Republicans in Congress would take the heat for shutting down the federal government a decade ago, but it would become obvious after just a few days. And even if the traditional filibuster worked to frustrate the first Republican nominee, would Democrats really want to repeat the ordeal for the next nominee? They might look like heroes the first time, and jackasses donkeys the second time.

None of the big blog discussion today, however, addressed a very interesting point raised in this comment to my original post. Our commenter observed that current rules would effectively require that the Republicans keep 51 Senators in the chamber even while the Democrats rotated speakers in and out.

You know, I always thought a Mr.Smith-style filibuster required stamina on the part of the filibusterer, not the filibusterees. But that hasn't been true since Byrd used a simple majority vote to change the filibuster rules, back in '75. Now, even a "real" filibuster is practically cost-free for the minority (they can tag-team, and only one need be present), but is very costly for the majority (almost everybody must be continually present). That kind of perverse incentive is why we have these 'fake' filibusters in the first place. Taken together (cost-free even if you have to hold the floor, and you usually don't have to hold it anyway) explains why (a) we've had so many "filibusters" in the past 30 years, and (b) why their use has expanded to the executive calender instead of being restricted to the legislative calender.

[T]he problem is a "real filibuster" really requires a rules change too, and how do you enact that rules change, without some nuclear parliamentary trick? Under current rules, it takes "three-fifths of all Senators elected" to break a filibuster, not (as it was during 1917-1949 and 1959-1975) [such-and-so] “of all Senators voting and present."

The commenter goes on to quote a post from Free Republic a few days back:

Currently a quorum is required while a filibuster is being conducted (51 members present). That means the Republicans would have to have at least 51 of their 55 members on the floor in addition to the one filibustering Democrat Senator. The other Democrats could be home asleep in their beds under the current rules since it takes 60 votes (three-fifths of all elected Senators) for cloture. If the Senate was operating under the older-style cloture (with today's three-fifths instead of the older two-thirds) rule of 'three-fifths of Senators voting and present,' then the Democrats would have to have a minimum of 31 Senators present to ensure that the presence of 51 Republican Senators would not allow the 'three-fifths of Senators voting and present' to achieve a successful cloture vote. The reason that the Republicans must have at least 51 members (out of their current 55) present on the floor is that if they only had 50 members present, once the single filibustering Democrat got tired he could simply walk off the floor of the Senate with the other 30 Democrats and there would be no quorum (51 members) present and hence no Senate business may take place.

My commenter concludes:

Without some change to rule XXII, the Mr.-Smith-Goes-To-Washington filibuster is an imaginary figment: the minority pays a very small price in caucus support, because only one member at a time must be present on the floor. But, they can force the other party to pay a very high price -- because almost every member of the majority must remain continually present. After about three days of this, which group of pampered grandees will fold: the well-rested minority, or the exhausted pajama-clad majority?

At least under the old rules, it was an endurance test on both sides, instead of only on the side that nominally has the votes to win the issue on the merits.

All well taken -- some rule change would be necessary, and it would take some form of "nuclear option" to get us there. However, the Nostalgia Option modified per my commenter has several advantages over straight-up abolition of filibusters for judicial nominations. First, it does not look results-oriented. The Nostalgia Option would be a good answer for all filibusters. Second, it preserves the filibuster against the day when Republicans next find themselves in the minority. Third, it makes the minority pay a price for the filibuster, which would narrow the circumstances under which it would be invoked. That price might include looking like a fool on C-SPAN or incurring the wrath of every Senator, interest group or apple pie constituency that wants its pet legislation passed rather than see John Kerry intone about sports he doesn't understand.

And it would make for great political theater, perhaps the best reason to get behind the Nostalgia Option.

UPDATE: Patterico made an appearance in the comments with a link to this post, suggesting the "conventional warfare option." Patterico's idea is that the majority could pass a non-binding resolution that would -- in effect -- prove that the pending filibuster was frustrating the will of the majority. If this happened too many times, the public would start to "get it" and pressure would build on the Democrats.

My own view is that Patterico's suggestion would be very useful for pressuring "holds," which are another procedure under which even a single Senator can bottle up a nomination in committee. I'm not sure, however, that Patterico's "conventional warfare option" has quite the propaganda value for Republicans that he suggests. Why? Because most voters don't care about the appointment of judges. The appointment of judges never shows up in any poll of big public concerns. However, those who do care are passionate about it, and they all understand what is going on already. These voters care only about the results. If they support the nominee, they already oppose filibusters, and if they oppose the nominee, they love the filibuster.

The advantage of the Nostalgia Option is that it has the potential to make the minority look very foolish to all voters. I think that potential far exceeds the political risk to the majority, which is that the Senate gets shut down for a week.

Mickey Kaus, meanwhile, posted a rejoinder to this rejoinder. Among other worthy objections (which are largely opposite speculations about the political consequences of the Nostalgia Option), he offers an email from a reader that makes this point:

[T]he real filibuster option instantly turns a full TV network that everyone with basic cable has into a 24 hour nonstop Democratic ad, with no GOP responses. Tired of talking about judges? How about Social Security day. Followed by minimum wage day. Followed by Delay is a crook day. All with the national press actually paying at least a lot more attention than they normally would to whatever senators are going on about. ...

And remember, Dems can leave a standing offer to yield to the GOP for purposes of passing anything that's popular or necessary enough to get the public's attention and risk turning PR against them.

I think it would be impossible for 45 Senators to maintain message discipline over such big chunks of time. Bloggers and even the MSM would cherry-pick the speeches for slip-ups, which would be the only news coming out of the Senate. Not many people would watch C-SPAN, but they would all watch the gaffs that would run each night on the evening news, even CBS.

UPDATE: The filibuster plague spreads to Kuwait.
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...and that means the Kentucky Derby. I'll leave it to others to handicap this year's event, and move right into issues of critical importance no matter which steed crosses the finish line first. Of course I refer to that delectable concoction, the mint julep (one of only two instances, IMO, in which good bourbon should be mixed with anything other than water, the other being a manhattan).

There are many variations of the mint julep, usually dependent upon whether or not mint is incorporated into the making of syrup or crushed directly into the drink. Here's a basic recipe.

INGREDIENTS:
2 cups water
2 cups white sugar
1/2 cup roughly chopped
fresh mint leaves
32 fluid ounces Kentucky bourbon
8 sprigs fresh mint
leaves for garnish

DIRECTIONS:
Combine water, sugar and chopped mint leaves in a small saucepan. Bring to a boil over high heat until the sugar is completely dissolved. Allow syrup to cool, approximately 1 hour. Pour syrup through a strainer to remove mint leaves.

Fill eight cups or frozen goblets with crushed ice and pour 4 ounces of bourbon and 1/4 cup mint syrup in each. (Proportions can be adjusted depending on each person's sweet tooth). Top each cup with a mint sprig and a straw. Trim straws to just barely protrude from the top of the cups. Serve juleps on a silver platter.

Try it. You'll like it.

One school of julep thought insists that fresh mint sprigs be cut so as one's nose is buried in them with every sip, a practice that I recommend as long as the mint is young and fresh.

Of course an authentic Kentucky variation, found in the now classic Book of Bourbon (recently updated), describes the painstaking process of carefully procuring the fresh mint, precisely measuring out the sugar and branch water, and then throwing it all away and enjoying your whisky neat. I can also recommend this recipe, particularly if your whisky is this or this.
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The diplomatic dance among China, Taiwan and the United States stepped up in tempo over the weekend. While I claim no expertise in the politics of the region, it seems to me that the Western press has largely missed the impact of American diplomatic moves during the last three days.

The background, for those of you who do not follow such matters, is that Taiwan is ruled today by President Chen Shui-bian's Democratic Progressive Part (DPP), which has made a lot of noise about independence over the last three years. This is, of course, anathema to the People's Republic of China, which has always been willing to tolerate a politically separate Taiwan as long as it maintains the fiction that there is only "one China." China eventully reacted to pro-independence demonstrations in Taiwan by enacting the now infamous "anti-secession" law. The new law really did nothing but restate the central tenet of China's fifty-year policy toward Taiwan, but it unleashed no end of hanky-twisting in the West because it derailed France's bid to lift Europe's embargo of certain weapons sales to Beijing. Chen also makes the United States nervous, because he sometimes acts as though the American security guarantee is unconditional, which it is not.

On Friday we woke to the spectacle of the leader of Taiwan's Kuomintang (KMT) in Beijing, shaking hangs with China's President Hu Jintao and officially settling the 80 year Chinese civil war that ended in substance when the Communists drove the KMT and Chiang Kai-Shek from the mainland in 1949. Since the KMT are not in power in Taiwan, this gesture appeared to be aimed at domestic constituencies in both Taiwan and China. I wrote on Friday:

This would have been a useful gesture from the KMT a few years ago, when it was in power in Taiwan. Now the KMT is in opposition to Taiwan's ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which has been pushing at the boundaries of full-fledged independence (at no small risk to the United States, I might add).

With the minor qualification that I know next to nothing about Taiwanese politics, today's handshake seems like a transparent attempt to suck up to Taiwanese voters and other actors who are worried about recent sabre-rattling with China. The message from both China and the KMT is clear: only the KMT can restore the status quo ante, which is a tacit understanding that Taiwan will remain unmolested by the PRC and free to get rich only so long as it does not represent itself as either China or an independent country.

The United States jumped on the KMT's opening directly and publicly, telling President Chen in unusually blunt terms that he had better also reach out to China:

"We all have a shared goal of peace and stability in the region, and we believe cross-Strait dialogue is important to promoting peace and stability in the region," McClellan said at the White House. "We welcome dialogue between China and leaders in Taiwan. Now, we believe that it's most important that there be dialogue between Chinese leaders and the elected representatives of the government of Taiwan."

He said the United States thus hopes "that this would be a sign that China would continue to move forward on a dialogue with President Chen and representatives of his government."

In diplomatic terms, this amounts to a public order from the United States -- the wobbly guarantor of Taiwan's security -- that Chen knock off the independence talk and start getting serious about getting along with the mainland.

Then yesterday we saw Chen send a not-so-secret "secret message" (mirror here) to China asking for discussions.

On Sunday, President Chen said that he had asked James Soong, the chairman of the small People First Party, to convey a message to China's leaders when Mr. Soong travels to the mainland on Thursday for a weeklong trip. Using Mr. Soong as an envoy amounts to the most direct contact between Taiwan and China since President Chen's election five years ago.

The president said that the message was based on a 10-point consensus that he had reached Feb. 24 with Mr. Soong on cross-strait relations and other issues.

The president's remarks on Monday suggest that the message includes a request for cross-strait military coordination.

But the details of the message were being kept so secret that even the Taiwan cabinet official in charge of relations with mainland China, Joseph Wu, the chairman of the Mainland Affairs Council, had not been told.

President Chen runs a party that is pushing Taiwan to declare independence. Presumably Joseph Wu, the chairman of Taiwan's Mainland Affairs Council, also wants independence. However, the declaration of Taiwan's independence would put both the United States and China in a very tough spot, including perhaps military confrontation. China would be forced to take action or lose all credibility. While the United States' guarantee of Taiwan's security technically does not apply if Taiwan declares independence, the Taiwan boosters on the American right will push the Bush Administration very hard to confront China if China mobilizes against Taiwan. To diffuse the risk of such a confrontation, therefore, the United States has exerted enormous pressure on Chen to cool the tension with Beijing -- McClellan's mild remarks had to have been merely the public evidence of that pressure. Chen is trying to do that without alerting his own pro-independence constituents.

Pro-independence forces in Taiwan clearly see it this way:

[Philip] Hsu [assistant professor of political science at National Taiwan University] also accused the US government of clandestinely encouraging President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) to sign a 10-point consensus with People First Party (PFP) Chairman James Soong (宋楚瑜) -- a move regarded as curbing Taiwan's independence forces.

The US even publicly "directed" Chen to act moderately and reasonably while attending the March 26 demonstration against China's "Anti-Secession" Law, Hsu said.

Unfortunately, we have to meddle in Taiwan's internal politics as long as we are committed to our guarantee of Taiwan's security, itself a relic of the Cold War that we should seriously consider abandoning.

UPDATE: Philip Bowring wrote this morning about the consequences of all of this to Taiwan's domestic politics. He agrees that the KMT was working domestic constituencies, and adds the wrinkle that Lien Chan was trying to revive his own future within the KMT. Bowring, like most of the rest of the Western MSM, does not mention the American arm-twisting.
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Or would be, if she didn't live in an Arab country:

Doha: A Muslim wife who sent a message jokingly to her husband through short messaging service (SMS) on his mobile that she wanted divorce from him, was shocked when she returned home to find that she was actually divorced. She told her (former) husband that she was only joking but he refused to budge saying it was a bad joke and she must pay the price for it, according to Al Sharq. Left with no choice, the woman went to the court and got the divorce formalised, the daily said.

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Unlike many of my comrades fellow travellers fellow bloggers over here on the right side of the 'sphere, I have no problem with commies moonbats per se. I just don't like lefties who don't have a sense of humor. Come to think of it, I'm not long on wingnuts conservatives who don't have a sense of humor, either.

In any case, even left-wing protests at the TigerHawk alma mater tend to be moderate in tone and free of a lot of the craziness that seems to attend lefty activism on the West Coast. There are relatively few BushHitler signs and that sort of nonsense.

There is a very smart and entertaining protest going on right now, in fact, and I went down to pay it a visit at 7 a.m. this rainy Sunday morning. An enterprising clot of activists is conducting a "filibuster" in front of -- I kid you not -- the Frist* Campus Center. They have been speaking for something like 118 hours, and plan to keep going at least through Wednesday. This fellow has been reading the Bible for hours, having worked his way through the gospels. He had "skipped a few" and was reading Revelations during my brief visit.
 


Here's a side view of the protest -- there were a lot of people there at 11:30 last night, but being a college campus there was nobody watching at 7. They'll be back, though.
 

TigerHawk exclusive photographs.

For those of you who want to keep up with the action, there's a webcam and lotso' links here. The "filibuster's" official site has received more than 58,000 visits in less than three days, mostly via lefty blogs. Technorati shows only 20 links, but I think that its taxed servers are running far behind reality.

Because the protestors are friendly and moderate, they have gotten various politicians to speak, including our own Congressman Rush Holt. CNN has been out there, and one of the organizers, a very friendly junior named "Karen," told me that Air America was going to interview them. I expect that they will get more of the MSM next week. 'Prince' coverage here.

The official TigerHawk position on the filibuster, by the way, is that it would be a mistake for the Republicans, in a moment of ephemeral ascendancy, to abolish it even for judicial nominations. Once abolished for one thing, people will want to change the rules for tax increases, entitlement programs, environmental laws and attorney general nominations. However, I think that these Princeton students have the right idea: If you are going to filibuster, then you should have to filibuster. Filibusters should come at some personal and political cost. We should abolish the candy-ass filibusters of modern times, and require that if debate is not closed it must therefore happen.

The prospect of John Kerry, Hillary Clinton or Ted Kennedy bloviating for hours on C-SPAN would deter filibusters except when the stakes are dire, if for no other reason than the risk that long debate would create a huge amount of fodder for negative advertising. If Frist were to enact the "reform" of the filibuster instead of its repeal, he would sieze the high ground. He could take the position that the Republicans are merely rolling back the "worst excesses" of the long period of Democratic majority in the Congress, and that filibusters will still be possible if Senators are willing to lay it all on the line. Indeed, even the students at Princeton would be hard-pressed to argue against such a reform of the filibuster, since extended speechifying is precisely the means they have used to make their point.

UPDATE: Welcome Instapundit readers! If you're unfamiliar with TigerHawk's eclectic offerings, please take a moment to look around.

UPDATE: MUSC Tiger points out that Dick Morris made the same argument a couple of days ago.

UPDATE (Sunday night): As predicted, the MSM is picking up the story. WaPo here.

Final UPDATE (Monday night): Recognizing that I am hardly the first to this idea, thanks to Instapundit's exposure my post seems to have triggered a mini-debate today. I have more developed thoughts and links here.
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*Yes, it is the same Frist. Or essentially the same Frist. Bill Frist (Princeton '74) is from a very rich Princeton family with a number of alumni. Some years ago they contributed a big wad to build the University's first real student center. Not surprisingly, it is named after them. It's just up the road from Carl Ichan laboratory and (Meg) Whitman College. Princeton's that kind of place.
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