TigerHawk

Macro photographs of eyes, human and otherwise. Cool.

CWCID: Good Shit.

Legal Insurrection argues that Arlen Specter's defection to the Donks may have made it easier for Republicans to block President Obama's judicial appointments, including the replacement for Justice David Souter, who announced his retirement today. The reason is that Senate Judiciary Committee rules require the consent of at least one member of the minority party to report a nomination to the Senate floor. With Specter now in the majority, who will be the default acquiescing Republican? Joe Biden, please meet petard.

CWCID: Glenn Reynolds.

The Morgan Lewis law firm has promulgated a useful FAQ (pdf) for employers who wonder how to deal with employees that may have swine flu. The short version: Tread very carefully lest you violate somebody's rights.

The Morgan Lewis memo, plus a conversation that I had earlier today over another swine flu story, reminds me of a hypothesis that I have had for some years: That the massive expansion of individual rights in rich countries in the last fifty years derives substantially from the invention of antibiotics and the mitigation of infectious disease as a leading cause of death. The perhaps temporary defeat of infectious disease as a major threat in rich countries has meant, first, that we no longer have to take swift and harsh public health measures to contain epidemics, and, second, that there are no longer visible examples of the brisk application of the police power without associated due process. From a post I wrote more than five years ago, when perhaps eight people a day read this blog:

It is no coincidence that the rise of legally cognizable individual rights in the United States and Europe during the last 50 years corresponded with the antibiotics era. When virulent infectious diseases posed a mortal threat to virtually all Americans -- as they did before World War II -- we needed government to act swiftly, and without anything resembling due process, to quarantine infected or even merely exposed individuals in order to isolate outbreaks before they spread widely. We understood instinctively that we had to impose harsh measures on individuals in order to protect the public. We didn't give a damn that sometimes we had to board people up in their houses or make them take a shot because we knew that the consequences of doing otherwise could be devastating. Does anybody believe that smallpox could have been confined to its tiny little lockbox if vaccination for the disease had been voluntary?

The defeat, or at least the subsidence, of infectious disease since World War II meant that we no longer needed our government to impose these harsh obligations on individuals for the public good. As a result, we see very few examples today of individuals who are required to bear great (or even small) individual burdens for the benefit of the public, so any such circumstance looks like a great injustice and therefore becomes the subject of litigation.

Is it just me, or has religious, national and commercial sensitivity jumped the shark?:

"We should call this Mexican flu and not swine flu," Israeli deputy health minister Yakov Litzman -- an ultra-Orthodox Jew -- said April 27. He stated that the reference to pigs is offensive to Jews and Muslims, whose respective religions prohibit consumption of pork. Pork producers -- likely worried about their product's image -- also have reservations about the name "swine flu."

Of course, Mexicans probably find "Mexican flu" offensive, but the name does seem to fit with the tradition of naming flu pandemics after the places where they were originally identified. On the other hand, there's debate about whether the current swine flu even originated in Mexico. "It was a human who brought this to Mexico," the Mexican ambassador to China told the New York Times, saying that the person was from someplace in "Eurasia." (The virus contains part of a swine flu virus of Eurasian origin.)

Meanwhile, "North American influenza" is the name suggested by the World Organisation for Animal Health.

Say it ain't so!. Are we not allowed any illusions?

In case you were wondering how big President Obama's promised $100 million in budget cuts looks compared to the total federal budget or even the deficit, this video ought to help:

Wow, there's some tough managerial discipline. I'm sure Ford and Toyota are hoping he brings the same budgetary scalpal to General Motors' bloated overhead.

My only objection, since I am a numismatist, is that the narrator refers to one cent pieces as "pennies." Please. Pennies are an English thing, and we do not have them here. What are we, self-hating Americans? 'Course, he redeems himself by pulling out the "wheaties," which I would do, too, but still.

CWCID: Megan McArdle.

Stratfor's morning letter (subscribe here!) focuses on the dismal GDP report, and in particular the massive inventory drawdown that sucked more than 2% out of GDP. We are in the middle of the largest reduction of inventory in the American economy since records have been kept. This adversely effects GDP, since changes in inventory reflect changes in economic production. The good news, if there is any, is that a big reduction in inventory will eventually force the supply chain (whether stores, wholesalers, or intermediate producers) to restock, and that will drive first longer work hours and then more employment. In other words, a reduction in inventory is a precursor to economic recovery, painful as it is to endure. That this reduction has been so long and so deep already may mean that the bounce back will also be stronger than usual.

In any case, why are businesses reducing inventory so severely? Because of the credit crunch. It takes cash to build or buy inventory (depending on your point in the supply chain), and most companies borrow that cash by one means or another. Well, if banks and other lenders are reducing their exposures to businesses that have less than ideal credit profiles, those businesses will have to get cash for growth from some other source. The easiest and most obvious place for businesses that make or trade in stuff is inventory, which can be liquidated for cash. If the business can replace less inventory than it sells, it will use the surplus cash to pay down loans that cannot be refinanced in the current market.

The question, of course, is whether credit will be available to increase inventory when the demand shows up to justify it.

If you have sex with another woman and do not remember it, is it cheating?

Hey, somebody out there "gets" my sense of humor! I was worried that I was all alone.

If you need a break from the world of men (used in the species sense, rather than the gender), check out this wonderful slide show of ospreys on the hunt. Really great stuff if you like birds of prey. Which I obviously do.

I was otherwise engaged yesterday afternoon when news of the Specter defection broke, but have taken in some number of blogger and talking-head reactions since (see Memeorandum for a huge blog round-up). Lest anybody was wondering, my opinions are as follows:

This is very bad news for Republicans and conservatives. Why? Because it will probably lead to the enactment of laws and entitlements that will become all but impossible to repeal no matter how robust the ultimate reaction against them (if there is such a reaction).

The lust for ideological purity within the Republican party is a fool's errand. Neither conservatives nor -- thank the Lord, Allah, and Yahweh -- liberals have the votes to enact every aspect of their agenda except under very rare circumstances. Those circumstances only arise in times of great national crisis or when an ideological candidate is able to manufacture broad appeal by dint of his personality. Ronald Reagan was such a conservative, and Barack Obama is such a liberal. Sad to say, there is no obvious Ronald Reagan in the Republican party today who can lead it back. Therefore, conservatives will only be able to regain some measure of power by making common cause with moderates.

On the right, the big divide between conservatives and moderates is on "social" issues, and the right losing support for its purest positions. Whatever conservatives may feel, strident opposition to gay marriage will make it impossible for conservatives to win votes from more than a small fraction of educated professionals, no matter how fervently such people respect "tea party" principles of low taxes, small government, and individual achievement. Too many of us have gay friends, family, and employees not to want them to be happy in marriage. Even I, who travel in conservative circles and absolute defend the right of Miss California and others to hold their opinions, am offended by a lot of the conservative rhetoric against gays. Republicans, who claim to be pro-family, should loudly decide that support for gay marriage is pro-family and pro-stability. Which, by the way, it is. Similarly, the pure position on abortion will never win the day no matter how fervently the pro-life activists press their message. Conservatives should push for a program to make abortion as rare as possible, but that would require them to support widespread contraception which offends too many in their ranks.

Republicans, and conservatives, need to find a way to appeal to ethnic minorities. Even in the age of Obama it can be done, but only by reshaping the debate over immigration. Republicans have been the party of American nativists since they absorbed the "Know Nothings" just before the Civil War, and everybody knows that (without necessarily knowing the history). That legacy means that even well-intentioned complaints about "border security" sound like nativism to ethnic minorities. Conservatives need to understand that. Instead, conservatives should work diligently to attract ethnic minorities by emphasizing the thing that immigrants care about the most: Opportunity.

This is just cruel. Hilarious, but cruel. And there are a couple of good questions at the end of the post.

MORE: OK, just catching up here. The Feds knew the flyover could cause a panic and still ordered that the flight be kept secret? Brilliant, and not as the word is used in the Guinness ads.

More linkage here and here. And I simply love the questions about CO2 emissions -- Sing it along with me: "I'll believe global warming is a crisis when the people who say it is a crisis act like it is a crisis" -- and the request that we learn who the passengers were so we can run the names up in "Open Secrets." It will be very interesting to see whether there were any big fish on that plane.

Larry Kudlow via Glenn Reynolds:

What is going on in this country? The government is about to take over GM in a plan that completely screws private bondholders and favors the unions. Get this: The GM bondholders own $27 billion and they’re getting 10 percent of the common stock in an expected exchange. And the UAW owns $10 billion of the bonds and they’re getting 40 percent of the stock. Huh? Did I miss something here? And Uncle Sam will have a controlling share of the stock with something close to 50 percent ownership. And no bankruptcy judge. So this is a political restructuring run by the White House, not a rule-of-law bankruptcy-court reorganization.

I was pretty busy yesterday -- in New York, actually -- so by the time I got to the ridiculous "9/11 photo op" story I did not have anything original to add. I suppose I could have pointed out that "stupid is as stupid does" or ask "are these the people we want to put in charge of our health care" or say the almost de rigueur "can you imagine the reaction from the media if Bush had been this stupid?" or "now we know why they are more worried by the damage done by waterboarding than the damage done by terrorism -- they do not understand the latter," but there is nothing original in these.

Seriously, though, watch this video of New Yorkers panicking at the sight of the low-flying jet with the trailing fighters and then explain this stupidity. The people who hatched this idea or signed off on it really do not understand what 9/11 was all about. My concern is that they are actually senior enough -- the White House signed off on the offending "mission" -- to influence American policy.

MORE: Patterico makes a good point in this last post-script.

FURIOUSLY MORE: You have to love that the New York Times noted in both its story and the caption to the accompanying photograph that President Obama was "furious." Apparently no-drama Obama keeps his cool when some dictator lectures him or, we hope, there is a real crisis, but if his image is at stake he becomes "furious." You can almost hear Rahm Emanuel and the President talking this through:

"Sir, much as you hate the drama, this time we should go with 'furious.'"

"Well, Rahm, perhaps you are over-rating furiousity as an emotion; the people voted for no-drama Obama, and that's what they got."

"Mr. President, you really need to be furious. Trust me on this."

"OK. But let's not be furious too often."

If it were not for all the math, I'd love to be an actuary. They get to study the net effects of different activities in isolation and often come up with very counterintuitive results. See, e.g., this abstract of a paper that purports to show that bicycle helmet laws may have a net negative public health effect because, to be reductionist about it, requiring helmets makes biking so uncool or uncomfortable that people do much less of it than when helmets are not required. From the paper itself (click through the link in the abstract):

Generally there has been solid support for bicycle helmet laws in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, less so in the US and the UK, and little support in northern European countries such as the Netherlands and Denmark, where cycling is far more popular. Reasons for lack of support include the following. First, helmets reduce cycling and hence the impact of "safety in numbers." Second, helmets may promote the view and possible misconception that cycling is a relatively dangerous activity. Third, helmets may draw attention and harm prevention activities away from the real causes of cycling accidents. Finally, helmets may promote the view that cycling is a non normal activity only to be undertaken with specialized equipment.

A reduction in cycling has negative environmental and health consequences. DeMarco (2002) opines: "Ultimately, helmet laws save a few brains but destroy many hearts." Ignoring any environmental costs associated with reduced cycling, the efficacy of helmet laws hinges on whether the positive direct benefits (fewer head injuries) outweigh the indirect negative effects (less exercise).

...should be thankful that they are not Icelandic bankers.

Look on the bright side. I've always said that.

Miss USA pageant officials apparently tried to get Miss California to "apologize" for parroting Barack Obama's position on marriage, which is that it ought to be between a man and a woman. Now, I do not agree with either of them on this subject, but why the hell should she apologize for honestly answering a direct question that called for an opinion? This episode is driving the chattering classes insane precisely because it reveals how intolerant they are of simple opinions with which they disagree, especially when those views reflect, well, intolerance.

Just remember, the right of freedom of speech is only relevant to people who express opinions that offend the powerful. There is no other need for it.

I admire a person who can do even a mundane job with skill, humor, and aplomb. Well, I just got the best shoe shine I have ever had from Kevin Tucker, who works a stand just outside Grand Central Station on 42nd Street. Now, Kevin claims he gives the best shine in New York and will devote the entire shine to an amusing monologue about the secrets of a great shine, the importance of a great shine to attracting women and success in business, and the influence of the Navy on his shoe-shining skills. He says that he views every shine for a new customer as "an audition" for all their business. Sadly, I do not pass by Grand Central too often, but Mr. Tucker did get a free TigerHawk endorsement out of it. If you go that way, take the time -- "perfection cannot be rushed" -- and get yourself a great shine.

Don't blow Mother's Day.

Hope and change: An alarmist with a history of wildly inaccurate predictions is slatedly to become head of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, which tracks data on Arctic sea ice, among other things. Meanwhile, Arctic sea ice area is barely below the satellite-era baseline, and global sea ice is now almost a million square kilometers above the baseline. Oh, but you say the problem is that it is too "thin"? Is it actually thinner than it was in 1959?

Bereft as I am of creativity and scheduled to spend most of the day in New York with bankers in the age of TARP, herewith a bushel of links and random observations.

The Obama administration is rolling back financial transparency requirements for labor unions, including with regard to leadership compensation, at the same time that the Democrats are proposing rules that will subject corporate executive compensation to a vote of stockholders. Anybody see anything cynical in that?

"Busting Bank of America": The editors of the Wall Street Journal are brutal on the beating that the government has given to Bank of America and the consequences, unintended or otherwise, thereof. Money quote:

No wonder no banker in his right mind trusts the Fed or Treasury, and no wonder nobody but Pimco and other Treasury favorites is eager to invest in the TALF, the PPIP, or any of the other programs that require trusting the government as a business partner.

The political class has spent the last few months blaming bankers for everything that has gone wrong in the financial system, and no doubt many banks have earned public scorn. But Washington has been complicit every step of the way, from the Fed's easy money to the nurturing of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and since last autumn with regulatory and Congressional panic that is making financial repair that much harder. The men who nearly ruined Bank of America have some explaining to do.

The Obama administration is dispatching its point man on Iran, Dennis Ross, to the Middle East this week in an effort to win greater Arab support for Washington's engagement strategy toward Tehran, U.S. officials said.

A number of Arab governments in recent weeks have voiced concern about the U.S. outreach, fearing it could help entrench Iran as a Mideast power while failing to end its nuclear program, the U.S. officials said.

Arab governments have been seeking assurances from Mr. Ross and other U.S. officials that Washington's overtures toward Iran won't undercut their security interests, U.S. and Arab diplomats said. The Arab governments are asking the U.S. to consult regularly with them as President Barack Obama seeks to hold high-level negotiations with Tehran aimed at ending its nuclear activities.

"The discomfort among the Arabs is quite real. They have deep anxieties about Iran," said a senior U.S. official working on the country. "The first thing is to be in the position of consulting with them, and taking into effect their concerns."

Harkness Tower, which I climbed to the very top of on an icy day in January 1981 (photo credit: A Yalie).

Another phone camera picture, this time from the top of the berm along the Delaware-Raritan Canal tow path. I took it this afternoon in the stretch between Province Line Road and I-295 in Lawrence Township. If you saw how built up the area is, you would be surprised at the large expanse of woods and swamp lands near the canal.

For glory among the esteemed TigerHawk readership, identify the building in this mystery photo submitted by a loyal reader who shot it this morning. The more context you can provide, the more glory!

Ben Stein has a great column about salesmen in today's New York Times. Although I have never been a particularly comfortable salesman myself, I have had jobs that required genuine selling and was reasonable successful at it. Stein's article brings wonderful perspective to the subject, and some very useful advice for young people. Indeed, if you are one of my young people, be sure to read the whole thing.

McCosh Walk, around 11 a.m. today, via the camera in my Blackberry.

Apropos of nothing, check out this nifty map (via Paul Kedrosky) of the progression of plague across Europe during the "Black Death" of the mid-fourteenth century.

Plague, of course, is bacterial, and its bubonic version (the most common) spreads via "blocked" fleas (friendly reminder that the TH Father was an expert on 14th century Europe, and I once wrote a moderately learned post on the subject). The map above shows how quickly the disease can spread when flea-ridden men and animals travel by foot. The pattern would be different in the jet era, with hot spots emerging around transportation centers. Let's hope -- no, let's pray -- we do not see similar such maps produced for swine flu in the coming months.

There's an almost certainly apocryphal exam legend at Princeton (and probably other universities). The philosophy professor poses the question "What is courage?," and the only A+ grade goes to the student who writes simply "This is." on the inside of his blue book and hands it in.

Well, parking this car on the Princeton campus -- just outside of Murray-Dodge Hall not one hour ago -- might similarly qualify.

The opposition is out there.

Why fasting may lead to more comfortable and effective chemotherapy.

If this does not bring a smile to your face you are much crankier than you ought to be. Apparently this was shot live after only two rehearsals.

The swine flu outbreak in Mexico is beginning to get ugly, dominating headlines from the Drudge Report to the World Health Organization (bipartisan blog roundup here). Once upon a time we had a president who incurred great political risk (notwithstanding claims, improbable as they may seem, that his motivations were cynical) to protect us against this sort of thing.

MORE links here, plus helpful flu pandemic survival resources.

STILL MORE (Sunday morning): Apparently the Ford Administration was, on this issue at least, substantially more clued in than the Obama administration. Blog round-up here.

So, I received an email from a massive internet-related company that began with the following two sentences (emphasis added):

We've recently sent you a Personal Identification Number (PIN) via standard mail. You should expect to receive it within about 2-4 weeks.

We caught the 6:30 flght out of Cedar Rapids, switched in Chicago, and landed in Newark around 11:30 this morning. No matter how often I fly, which is frequently, I will not get over the miracle of jet travel. It astonishes me every time I think about it.

Anyway, I caught a phone camera picture of Manhattan and the crashed TH Teenager as we approached. You do not often see such a well-defined layer of smog.

Almost two years ago I stumbled across a study that seemed to show that painting rooftops and pavement white would so increase the reflectivity of the earth's surface that it would compensate for a substantial amount of the increased average global temperature due to anthropogenic global warming. Well, others are now asking why that solution is not on the table today.

USA Today has an interesting Flash file that maps volunteerism around the country. It is both interesting and gratifying that there is no discernable electoral trend as between states -- the most giving people seem well-distributed around the country regardless of "red or blue" status. Of course, finer differences might be obscured within state populations, but it is still nice that American volunteerism, one of our graet national strengths, seems to be widely dispersed. Good, we need that.

...read Stuart Taylor's essay on the "truth commission" that we really need.

"A democracy as resilient as ours must reject the false choice between our security and our ideals," President Obama said on April 16, "and that is why these methods of interrogation are already a thing of the past."

But is it really a false choice? It's certainly tempting to think so. The fashionable assumption that coercive interrogation (up to and including torture) never saved a single life makes it easy to resolve what otherwise would be an agonizing moral quandary.

To be sure, the evidence in the public record is not conclusive. It comes mainly from Bush appointees and Central Intelligence Agency officials with records to defend and axes to grind. There is plenty of countervailing evidence coming from critics who have less access to the classified information that tells much of the story and have their own axes to grind. There are also plausible arguments for renouncing coercive interrogation even if it does save some lives.

But it would be an abdication for the president to proceed on the facile assumption that his no-coercion executive order is cost-free. Instead, he should commission an expert review of what interrogators learned from the high-value detainees both before and after using brutal methods and whether those methods appear to have saved lives. He should also foster a better-informed public debate by declassifying as much of the relevant evidence as possible, as former Vice President Cheney and other Republicans have urged.

Word.

With an afternoon to kill in Iowa City, the TH Teenager and I decided to check out the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum in nearby West Branch. Hoover, it seemed to us, was newly relevant.

It is a fascinating afternoon, and you find yourself hurtling along Interstate 80 through Iowa I strongly recommend stopping for a while at the site. Hoover was born in West Branch, traveled the world accomplishing engineering and humanitarian marvels in an unbelievably brilliant pre-presidential career, and then returned to West Branch after his death to be buried there along with his astonishing wife, Lou Henry Hoover. Their graves are a few hundred yards from the house in which he was born and the Quaker meeting house in which he worshipped as a child. The museum and library sit in the middle.

I do not propose a long dissertation on Hoover -- just visit the place, or read the biographical bits inside of Amity Shlaes' excellent The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression -- but I was struck by the relevance of Hoover's warnings for our own time. Along with the obligatory Herbert Hoover presidential shot glass -- you know you want one -- I bought a coffee mug with a sarcastic warning from Hoover from 1936 that resonates today:

And, yes, I do intend to wear the replica campaign button around town...

I'll report on any particular reactions.

Judging from the books available in the museum's bookstore, Herbert Hoover could use a new biographer. Amity Shlaes did a great job in a chapter, but his pre- and post-presidential accomplishments were so extraordinary that he deserves a much warmer home in our historical memory. It is a shame that Stephen Ambrose did not take up the task. Hoover needs somebody who writes as well.

We would not be loyally serving you, our readers, if we failed to link to Amazon's massive spring clothing sale. All, or at least most, of the top brands!

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the well-meaning Iowans who named this road (intersecting Highway 1 between Solon and Iowa City) were unfamiliar with its slang meaning. Which is weird, because I'm fairly sure I knew the term when I was a kid growing up around here.

I'm going to submit this to the Fail Blog and see it makes the cut.

Touring the campus at Cornell College in Mt. Vernon, Iowa, I just learned that its King Memorial Chapel contains "the second largest pipe organ west of the Mississippi," the largest being in the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City. Which, of course, means that I have seen the two largest pipe organs west of the Mississippi in the last four weeks. I bet not many people can say that.

The New York Times is featuring on its front page a story about states that are shortening the hours of offices and agencies and furloughing their employees in order to save money. So, you can imagine the lede:

Licenses for same-sex marriages were supposed be issued in Iowa starting this Friday. But because of a crimped state budget, court employees will be on mandatory furlough that day and the courts will be closed. Gay couples cannot start filing for their licenses until Monday.

Der Spiegel is running a story about how dire things are in the United States -- "Soup Kitchens and Tent Cities: Crisis Plunges US Middle Class Into Poverty." No excerpt can really capture the tone of the thing -- which seems a lot like schadenfreude to me -- so click through if you are interested. There is an audience in Europe for American failure, no doubt about it.

There is no question that the economic downturn is extremely tough on some people, those who have lost their jobs or their houses or have struggled to keep businesses alive. On the one hand. On the other hand, it does not yet seem to be worse than the grinding economy of the late seventies and early eighties, when I (at least) came of age. The unemployment rate was in double digits and inflation had imposed a 15% tax even on cash, a delight that we have not (yet) endured in the current crisis. My sense is that it sucked more then, but I have also changed so it is difficult to judge. I am at once much more aware of economic conditions -- growing a business has become terribly difficult -- and personally less sensitive to them.

The question, it seems to me, is not how difficult things are now. Tough times are tough times. The question is how long it takes us to recover, or whether we are watching a transformation to a permanently lower standard of living. There are many people in the chattering classes both here and in Europe who seem to welcome the idea. Not me, I think it would be a tragedy. I quite enjoy the fruits of the mass consumer economy (even if I also believe that people need to relearn thrift and financial wisdom).

And, of course, there is the point that troubles most conservatives: Are the government's programs to revive the economy and engineer hope and change now condemning us and our progeny to a permanently lower standard of living? That is my great fear as my own children embark on the journey of life.

CWCID: Dum Spiro Spero.

Behold the view from my window on the fourth floor of the Marriott in Coralville, Iowa, the bit of sprawl outside of Iowa City. It is a surprisingly impressive hotel with an almost absurdly grandiose driveway.

The Coralville Marriott has a number of other distinguishing features, including a permanent display of Iowa arts and crafts behind glass. For instance, here is a work (or works) titled "Iowa Corn and Beaded Iowa", Mixed media with beads, by Thomas Wegman, Iowa City (via cellphone camera):

There is also a lovely library devoted to "Iowa authors" -- meaning the many big guns who have studied or taught at the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop -- that is so impressive it will almost certainly be the subject of another post. Everybody from John Irving to Donald Justice to Kurt Vonnegut to John Cheever to Z.Z. Packer. It is fairly obvious that if you want to write fiction or poetry this is a great place to be.

Anyway, I had a very nice dinner tonight with one of our local readers at a sports bar and restaurant on the Coralville strip called "The Vine." It is, of course, festooned with "TigerHawk" banners, which made me very happy. But the fun did not stop there. Only when I arrived at the place did I realize that it had been built virtually on the spot of the Alama Friendship Inn, the motel at which I had my first real job (running the night desk, doing odd jobs, and occasionally cleaning rooms, but that's another blog post). The Vine is a great improvement.

More Iowa excitement tomorrow, after I retrieve the TigerHawk Teenager from his overnight stay at Cornell College.

MORE: Disturbing and entirely predictable local news.

Two readers have sent me emails complaining that the Google ads I've added in the last week are actually overlapping with text in the posts themselves and thereby making the blog impossible to read. I have had no such problems in either Explorer 7 or Mozilla, but perhaps people are using different browsers that do not display the blog properly. Anybody else out there with that experience? If so, what browser do you run?

UPDATE: I slightly narrowed the main column (from 75% of the total width to 70%) in the hope that would improve the experience with the ads. Other readers have suggested clearing your cache if you are among those with a problem. That said, we do not want to lose readers because the ads are covering up the posts, so please let us know if that is what you see.

"No one is above the law. It's time to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate and prosecute the architects of the Bush-era torture program."

On the one hand, it is a little hard to imagine falling asleep in a meeting with the president and the press. On the other hand, I rather notoriously nod off during meetings, especially in the middle of the afternoon and especially when I am not supposed to do anything, so I'm not going to come down on Larry Summers too hard. It is nice to see that the White House has become such a low-stress environment that people feel free to snooze when there is nothing much going on.

'Course, it would be a good idea to lose the photographers before nodding off. Then the only risk would be that Tim Geithner snaps a candid with his cell phone and leaks it to distract people from the more important distractions.

CWCID: Glenn Reynolds.

How convenient.

The argument against enhanced interrogation/torture. Because, you know, I'm nothing if not fair.

More later!

History blogger and TigerHawk cousin GreemanTim calls out the press for erroneously reporting that the attack on the Maersk Alabama was the first by pirates against an American-flagged ship since the Jefferson administration, an error that I myself have repeated (at least in conversation). There have been others.

Democrats who want to prosecute Bush administration officials for interrogation practices after 9/11 should follow the lead of the Obama administration, which wants to let bygones be bygones.

It's not what you think.

I've been fortunate to visit China, not counting Hong Kong, three times: 1984, 1986, and 2006. The change in the big cities, especially near the coasts, in the two decades between my visits as a student and the trip three years ago was nothing short of astonishing. If you had only seen the country in those first years after it opened up, you simply would not believe this astonishing gallery (not for dial-up) of post cards and other photographs of the new China. Or, at least, the wealthy parts.

I'm taking the TigerHawk Teenager out to Iowa tomorrow so that he can spend the night and attend classes at Cornell College in Mt. Vernon. I'll be staying in Iowa City tomorrow night; if there are local readers who would enjoy getting together for a beer at some point after about 7:30 send me an email and I'll let you know if I'm sufficiently recovered from my cold to meet you at some suitable watering hole.

Courtesy of McKinsey, behold a useful graphic that describes many of the various ways in which we might reform the provision of and payment for health care in the United States in order to dampen demand and alter the arc of treatment for many patients. We would not implement all of these reforms and there are others that might make sense, but the table is nevertheless a reasonably useful tool to put particular reform proposals into some context.

My favorite television talking head, Megyn Kelly, interviewed Miss California, Carrie Prejean, who seems to have tubed her chances at the Miss USA crown over her actually quite modest defense of traditional marriage. Bask in the blond rightiness:

If you are thinking that Ms. Prejean looks like a natural on a Fox News set, you are not alone. Allahpundit, who has a clip of her free-markety interview with Neal Cavuto, notes that Carrie opposes "bailouts and welfare" in addition to gay marriage. "Blonde, beautiful, and conservative: I’d be surprised if Ailes hasn’t signed her already."

Me, too.