Jumping To Conclusions

CNN tells us that Transportation Secretary Mineta pledges 'world-class' airport security that "does not tolerate screening mistakes." Oh, good. Even better, he has everything worked out:

"What we're trying to figure out is what are the best practices that we can employ to ensure that we have world-class security and world-class customer service," Mineta said in an interview last week. Whether it's the airport in Los Angeles, California, or Evansville, Indiana, "it's going to be uniform."

Just saw the CBS documentary on 9/11. I just hope some of the politicians, American and European, who have begun to waver were watching. Maybe they'll begin to remember why this war is "open-ended," why there's no "exit strategy" now, why the war can't stop at the borders of Afghanistan. This isn't the U.S. "getting even" with the perpetrators. This is the U.S. making sure nobody ever tries to do this again. The cost needs to be made high, not so that we'll feel better about ourselves, but so that the roguest of rogue states rethinks its support for terrorist organizations.


What's most striking about the documentary is the dignity, the calm professionalism of the firefighters. As the events unfold, you can see them getting more and worried, but they never panic. Until the buildings start coming down and they get the order to evacuate, they're headed in to help. The sickening thuds of bodies falling told them how bad it was, and they're startled, but they don't run. They wait to be told where to go and how to help. It's facile, but I can't help but contrast their behavior with those in the West Bank and elsewhere in the Middle East, cheering, dancing, and celebrating as they hear the news. Still, I spent most of the documentary thinking back to my own experience watching 9/11 unfold on television. The fear, the confusion, as wild rumors spread, the realization that some of the rumors were true, and the relief when others weren't. It's hard to believe it has been six months since then, that we identified who did it and responded already. People who thought this country was soft, who boasted that it would be another Vietnam if we tried to strike back, have already lost the battle. But the war's not over, and it's good to be reminded why it needs to continue.

According to the New York Times, there has been a rash of anti-South Asian hate crimes (Link requires registration.) in the last six months. Interestingly, the story cites a report "to be released on Monday," which raises some questions about the entanglement of advocacy groups and the media. But the big problem is that the report doesn't say anything at all. It has an impressive statistic: 250 incidents in the last 3 months of 2001, four times the typical rate of 400-500 incidents for a year.


Of course, read further and it's clear that there's no there there. The statistic involves incidents which were reported as bias incidents; it's quite logical to assume that reporting would have gone up significantly after 9/11, given all the attention paid to the potential problem. Moreover, it uses the classic advocacy group tactic of lumping together different times of problems and discussing the total number as though they were all the worst type. So in this case, there were 250 incidents, "including racial slurs, threatening phone calls and homicides."


It's the magic of the conjunction. After 9/11, fifty thousand people bought such items as nuclear weapons, mustard gas, and bottled water. Half of all marriages end in ways including divorce, annulment and the murder of a spouse. Two hundred million Americans suffer from such diseases as cancer, AIDS, and the flu.


But I shouldn't minimize the situation. After all, many of the victims cited in the report suffered tremendously: " In many instances, frightened drivers reported being targeted on the road by other drivers who would point fingers at them as if they were carrying guns." Uh oh. Those finger hate crimes.

Weird ideas from the editorial staff of the New York Times: America as Nuclear Rogue. (Link requires registration.) Referring, of course, to the supposed Nuclear Posture Review which was leaked to the L.A. Times this past weekend:

If another country were planning to develop a new nuclear weapon and contemplating pre-emptive strikes against a list of non-nuclear powers, Washington would rightly label that nation a dangerous rogue state. Yet such is the course recommended to President Bush by a new Pentagon planning paper that became public last weekend. Mr. Bush needs to send that document back to its authors and ask for a new version less menacing to the security of future American generations.

The review also calls for the United States to develop a new nuclear warhead designed to blow up deep underground bunkers. Adding a new weapon to America's nuclear arsenal would normally require a resumption of nuclear testing, ending the voluntary moratorium on such tests that now helps restrain the nuclear weapons programs of countries like North Korea and Iran.

An intramural basketball team at the University of Northern Colorado is protesting the mascot of a local high school (the "Fightin' Reds") by naming itself the "Fighting Whities." (The Rocky Mountain News reports that there may be a personal agenda behind the protests, unrelated to the politics of mascots; the protest leader's wife had a dispute with the high school.)

Little Owl said, "The Fighting Whities" issue is "to make people understand what it's like to be on the other side of the fence. If people get offended by it, then they know how I feel, and we've made our point."

Cuny said he, and most other young Indians, are more interested in larger issues, such as health care, tribal treaties with the federal government and mineral rights to their land, but offensive mascots are a starting point to deal with the weightier issues.

The French government apparently can't be bothered to support us in battle, but they do have time to harass innocent citizens (link requires registration). The New York Times reports on the French government's attempts to stop a French doctor from preserving his dead parents in cryonic storage:

But this time, local authorities said, enough is enough. They want both bodies removed and they have charged Rémy Martinot, a civil servant who works in Paris, with disturbing the peace.

"You can't just put a body in a fridge and call it a burial," said Christian Prioux, the lawyer arguing the case for the government. "It's illegal and it can't be allowed.

I can believe that Andrea Yates was convicted of murdering her children. What I can't believe is how quickly the jury made its decision. It took them less than four hours, after a three-week trial. Certainly Texas law made an insanity defense difficult (and Yates' actions made any other defense impossible), but I would have thought that the jury would have debated the issue for longer than it took them to decide what to have for lunch. It will be interesting to see what happens in the penalty phase of the trial, where Yates' mental illness (which both the prosecution and defense agreed existed) can be a mitigating factor.

As Damian Penny points out, there's a huge difference in the approach to defendants who are fathers and defendants who are mothers. There's a presumption that (as Yates' attorney argued), "If drowning five children by a loving mother isn't a gross psychosis, there isn't any such thing as gross psychosis," while a man who does the same is just evil.

And no, I'm not talking about Ruben Rivera stealing fellow Yankee Derek Jeter's glove. I'm talking about the election which just took place in Zimbabwe, where incumbent president Robert Mugabe has been declared the winner by incumbent president Robert Mugabe.

If Jesse Jackson wants to complain about oppressed blacks having an election stolen from them, perhaps he ought to start here, instead. But, hey, it's not as good a photo op, right? He wouldn't be able to use it to raise money which he could then avoid reporting to the IRS, so it's not nearly as compelling an issue. Plus, if he actually went there to protest, he might put himself at real risk, instead of the pretend risk of going to Florida. Certainly, though, Jesse Jackson is not the only hypocrite; the South African government, virtually alone among election observers, is claiming that the election was legitimate. When Africans can claim whites are oppressing blacks (or even that they did so centuries ago), as they did at the U.N. Racism Conference, they're eager to do so. But when a story doesn't fit that script, then they're uninterested.

Okay, not quite, but the New York Times reports that U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan has called on Israel to end its "illegal occupation" of Palestine. Generously, he also chided the Palestinians:

"To the Israelis I say: you have the right to live in peace
and security within secure internationally recognized borders. But you must end the illegal occupation," he said. "More urgently, you must stop the bombing of civilian areas, the assassinations, the unnecessary use of lethal force, the demolitions and the daily humiliation of ordinary Palestinians."

He continued: "To the Palestinians I say: you have the inalienable right to a viable state within secure internationally recognized borders. But you must stop all acts of terror and all suicide bombings. It is doing immense harm to your cause, by weakening international
support and making Israelis believe that it is their existence as a state, and not the occupation, that is being opposed."

The other problem? As this link explains (from Smarter Times), the Israeli "Occupation" isn't really an "Occupation" at all, let alone an "illegal" one.

Everyone agrees by now that a Palestinian state is inevitably the only long-term resolution to the conflict; the problem is that Israelis stubbornly insist on retaining a state of their own. And somehow I doubt Kofi Annan's stern lectures are going to make a big difference in whether Arafat et al. decide to blow up some more pizzerias.

The major story floating around the blogosphere, and now in the real world, is the Immigration and Naturalization Service's major screwup. Six months (to the day !) after 9/11, they formally notified a Florida flight school that two aliens, who just happened to be a couple of 9/11 hijackers, had been approved for student visas.

The primary focus of the coverage has been how bad the INS' security has to be that nobody noticed the names on the applications -- it's not as if "Mohamed Atta" is obscure anymore. And that's certainly a valid point. But ignore all that, pretend that these were two legitimate applicants, and this is still a debacle.

The INS notified the school of the visa approvals nineteen months after the visa applications were filed. A year and a half. What the hell good does that do? It's useless for the students, right? Well, not exactly. The INS solves the problem of not processing paperwork promptly, by not actually using the paperwork:

The schools are not required to deny instruction to foreign nationals while the visa applicants wait for an INS decision, officials said.

You could defend the INS by blaming the delay on their outside contractor, except that:

A spokeswoman for ACS Inc., the contractor that runs the London, Ky., processing center that mailed the paperwork to Huffman, said that INS rules allow the company to wait six months before sending approved student visa applications to flight schools. "There was no delay," said Lesley Pool. "We perform our services according to their dictates."

INS and Justice officials said last night that the company's latest contract, announced last fall, reduces the deadline to 30 days, officials said.

What a system. Aren't you glad the government has taken the responsibility for airport security away from the evil private sector? Don't you feel reassured?

Iain Murray makes an excellent point as to why economics are not the only thing that matter.

There are plenty of countries that are economically free but god-awful places to live -- Singapore, Bahrein and so on. What makes the Anglosphere a distinct branch of civilization is that the social and economic freedoms are all predicated on an older set of freedoms, freedoms from executive power, a restraint placed on government by the people that makes liberty, not safety or the common good or anything else, the main object of the constitution(s).

I hate to be judgmental, but I think the doctor who sent the elderly woman to the morgue alive just might not be a good doctor.

The color of her skin led the doctor to declare her dead and send her to the morgue.

The Washington Post informs us that Hispanic Lawmakers Defy Categorization, which is good to know, because many of us have been spending our free moments, between stereotyping blacks and Jews, trying to figure out how to "characterize" Hispanics. The rest of the article doesn't really say much of anything, except the usual "Hispanics are growing in numbers and are becoming more influential" banalities we can read anywhere.

Never let it be said that Arthur Schlesinger is behind the times. He has a hard-hitting news story in the current American Prospect which makes the heretofore unreported point that George Bush didn't win the popular vote sixteen months ago. He uses this newsflash as a jumping off point to discuss, in tedious detail, the history of the electoral college. You can't learn this stuff elsewhere -- at least not without staying awake in a high school social studies class. Amazingly, while listing the instances where the popular vote leader lost the election, it never once occurs to him that candidates campaigned, and voters voted, based on an electoral vote strategy, and might have acted differently if a different system were in place. But nevermind.

This all leads up to various proposals to "reform" the presidential election process, but I fell asleep while reading, so I can't summarize them. Mostly because, well, who cares? This is one of those issues of great interest to history professors and Al Gore, and nobody else. As Schlesinger himself notes, with regard to the 2000 election:

I expected an explosion of public outrage over the rejection of the people's choice. But there was surprisingly little in the way of outcry.

Let's see. Today we have Iran prosecuting a journalist, with the New York Times explaining

A state-run newspaper, Iran, unexpectedly announced on Saturday that the trial had begun last Thursday, just before President Mohammad Khatami's trip to Austria and Greece. During his past visits to European countries, hard-liners have arrested reformers back home in order to embarrass him.

And then in North Korean news, we have refugees seeking sanctuary in the Spanish embassy in Beijing, threatening suicide and asserting they face starvation and oppression at home. The refugees explained:

"We are now at the point of such desperation and live in such fear of persecution within North Korea that we have come to the decision to risk our lives for freedom rather than passively await our doom," said the statement by the Life Funds for North Korean Refugees. "Some of us carry poison on our person to commit suicide if the Chinese authorities should choose once again to send us back to North Korea."

Most of the time, when people talk about "media bias," they're talking about partisan bias, the idea that a reporter favors liberals or conservatives (usually liberals). But reporters try to be fair, and the real bias tends to show up in more subtle ways than trashing of politicians. Most of the time. But how about this New York Times story on recycling? Now, this isn't on the Op/Ed pages. This isn't in a column, or one of the "fluff" sections like Arts or House & Home. This isn't even labeled "news analysis," the Times' disclaimer that they're going to editorialize in the news section.

The headline alone gives away the bias: "Bloomberg puts doing well ahead of doing good," setting up the two schools of thought on recycling as the people who want to do good things and the people who want to save money. The Times does cite the mayor saying that some forms of recycling (non-paper) are fiscal negatives for the city, and backhandedly acknowledges -- in a single, throwaway sentence -- that he's correct:

Few people dispute Mr. Bloomberg's assertion that tough times demand tough choices.

But to a great degree, experts in consumer behavior say, the mayor's proposal -- and the anguished reaction that some people have had to it -- says a lot about the long strange trip that recycling has been through over the years.

Psychologists do not have a firm answer why saving and sorting took such root in the American psyche. Some think that it tapped into a frugal frontier impulse that is also behind the phenomenon of swap meets and garage sales, that one person's junk must surely be good for something. Other say it became a crutch, a way for Americans to feel as if they were contributing to the environment without actually changing their consumption driven behavior.

In any case, it is often said that more Americans recycle than vote.

So after setting up this premise, the article goes on to quote an assistant professor of sociology, who denigrates "narrow cost-benefit calculations," the Bronx borough president, who complains that "I think people are sort of in shock," an associate professor of environmental psychology and conservation behavior, who says that he "can imagine people thinking that the city is being hypocritical," and a professor of history (whose book "is considered one of the founding works in the field of eco-psychology"), who gripes that "I'm not sure what the measure is of something working in our society." Lots of experts on recycling, in other words. Oh, it also quotes the president of a company that tracks the waste industry, who says "There will be an increasing incentive to recycle," in support of an assertion by the reporter that "some researchers say that the Bloomberg administration may well have bet on the wrong horse."

There's not a single person quoted who thinks that "cost-benefit analysis" should be the basis for government decisions, let alone someone who agrees with Bloomberg's analysis that cost-benefit analysis comes out on the side of less recycling. There's not a single person quoted who thinks that recycling was a silly idea spread by environmental groups who mistakenly thought that raw materials were running scarce. There's not a single person quoted who thinks that recycling is a great idea but that it should be voluntary rather than government mandated. Is that because nobody thinks these things? I doubt it, since the Times' own columnist John Tierney has written about the bad math behind recycling economics. Couldn't this reporter at least have talked to him?

A column by David Ignatius in the Washington Post asks How can the United States sell a war against Iraq to skeptical Arabs and Europeans? How, indeed?

A good start would be to level with them and admit there is no solid evidence linking Baghdad to Osama bin Laden's terrorist attacks against America.

The Bush administration might win more support for its anti-terrorism effort if it offered less rhetoric and more straight talk about the dangers ahead. There has been a kind of bunker mentality in the administration's actions the past few months.

When you realize that U.S. officials go to sleep at night worrying about nuclear or biological attacks on Washington, you begin to understand their odd decisions: why they planned what amounted to an office of strategic deception in the Pentagon, why they began rewriting U.S. nuclear weapons doctrine, why they created a secret "shadow" government to carry on if the capital were obliterated. Most of these are bad ideas, but at least they become more comprehensible.

James Robbins in the National Review asks the same question I've been wondering about: who leaked the Nuclear Posture Review story, and why? He dismisses the idea that it was the Bush administration, and concludes it was probably disgruntled congressional Democrats. Worth a read.

Tipper Gore may run for the Senate, for her husband's old Tennessee seat. Special bonus: if she does, she might be running against Lamar Alexander. Who exactly thinks this is a good idea? Al Gore couldn't win his home state in the 2000 election, and Lamar "Plaid Shirt" Alexander couldn't even buy his mother's vote in the Republican primaries in 1996 or 2000, finishing just below "Let's cancel the whole thing and create a monarchy."

Charles Murtaugh has a good piece on left wing theology:

Why do bad things happen to good people? This is one of the questions that defines human existence, and in every culture, people have looked to religion for an answer.

What I only recently realized was how similar the theology of the far left is to that of the far right. It came to me in a flash last week, when I heard a interview with Noam Chomsky on a local NPR show, "On Point".

Megan McArdle analyzes the European Union as a corporate merger, pondering the question, what makes a merger successful?

So let's look at the EU "merger". Is there redundancy? Absolutely. Tons of it. But over half the French population is employed by the government -- think they're going to initiate massive cutbacks? The "merger" is introducing another layer of redundancy, not removing it.

How about transaction costs? Well, here we hit the mother load, in the form of national differences that restrict the flow of capital and labor between countries.

There's a third reason to merge, of course, and that's the hope that you can get rid of competition.

European dreams of becoming a superpower to rival or replace the US remain, for now, castles in the air.

Britain is isolated from continental Europe in supporting a United States attack on Iraq.

Germany's chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, yesterday brought into the open the growing rift between Britain and continental Europe over taking the "war on terror" to Iraq when he signalled he had no intention of participating in any unilateral military action launched against Baghdad by the United States.

In a move that highlighted the breach between Tony Blair and his European partners, Mr Schröder's spokeswoman confirmed a report that Germany would only join in a broadening of the US-led "war on terror" if the action were backed by the United Nations. "It's a position of principle of which our American partners are also aware," she said.

Mr Schröder's reported remarks chimed with the sceptical stance adopted by Paris. French government sources said Mr Schröder was "pretty much in line" with their view.

Tony Blair had better watch out, becausean attack on Iraq without UN authorisation would be illegal, according to Saddam Hussein The Guardian.

Pressing ahead against Iraq without council authorisation would be illegal under current international law and would undermine a significant accomplishment. The charter has helped prevent wars by maintaining a delicate balance between the good achieved by collective action and the catastrophic destruction that might result if an intervention conflicted with the vital interests of a major power.

Only those who have no reason to fear military force can contemplate a world without these protections. It is the possession of a credible nuclear deterrence - and plans for missile defence - that make Bush think he can disregard the UN. The UK, as a middle power, needs international law. The effective use of the UN, not Trident, is what enables the UK to punch above its weight.

Matt Welch dissects the strange story of the San Francisco Chronicle's pseudo-apology for falsifying quotes. That this story hasn't received more notice is disgraceful, but not all that surprising.

Charles Johnson takes on the New York Times' "unbelievable" attempt to whitewash the propaganda-spewing Arab News.

The Washington Post reports that Tipper Gore has decided not to run for Senate, after "consulting" with her family and other Democrats.

She said that although it "would be such an honor to work for the people of Tennessee," she had decided the time was not right to launch her political career.

The Times also notes that

Tipper Gore's decision brought relief to many of the former vice president's supporters. They feared that if she ran and lost the Senate race, her husband would have a more difficult time mounting another presidential bid in 2004.

On the third hand, does it really matter? Unless Al's "presidential bid" is for the presidency of Harvard, is there anybody operating under the delusion that he has a chance to defeat George Bush? Certainly, two years is an eternity in politics, where many things can happen, but "Al Gore being elected president" doesn't count as one of them.

Why does the New York Times bury this story on page A11? Palestinians in Ramallah show Support for Attacks, Not a Truce. These "attacks," of course, are not upon the Israeli troops that are supposedly provoking the Palestinians, but are upon Israeli teenagers walking home from school.

Today's attack "boosted the morale of our people," said Iyhab, a Palestinian fighter who would not give his full name, echoing the sentiments of numerous people interviewed here this afternoon.

In fact, Palestinians say that Yasir Arafat, their leader, has issued no order in recent days to stop the terror attacks and probably could not enforce one in any case.

"Internally, we are against any kind of cease-fire," said a fighter named Tasir, who would not give his last name but said he was a security officer for the Palestinian Authority. Several of his armed colleagues stood by nodding as he spoke.

"We are security people, and it is our responsibility to implement orders," he said. "But we are not in a position to implement any kind of cease-fire agreement. It is in our blood, every one of us. We will continue fighting."

Should I add the obligatory OpinionJournal's "Arafat won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1994" footnote? Seems like plagiarism, but I guess I should do it at least once in my life.

Apparently Iranian President Mohammad Khatami hasn't heard that using phrases like "Axis of Evil" will set back international relations by centuries.

But Mr. Bush's implied threat against Iran generated a discussion among politicians here about relations with the United States, with many arguing that anti-American oratory no longer serves Iran's interests. Some suggested that direct talks were the only way to avert the threat. The minister of defense, Ali Shamkhani, was summoned to Parliament to answer questions over hostile remarks by one of his commanders.

Davood Hermidas Bavand, an independent political analyst and a professor at Tehran University, said the implied American threat had changed the political situation here.

"Naming Iran part of an evil axis, and categorizing it along with Iraq and North Korea, have created serious concerns and worries which have changed the conditions," he said. "It is natural that under the new conditions, there would be suggestions for constructive dialogue, which is the first step for resolving any matter peacefully."

[By the way, the New York Times buried this story on page A12. If Iran had threatened to attack the U.S. in response, is there any doubt that it would have been on A1?]

Tim Blair points out the bizarre role-reversal by the left since the 1960s:

Which is precisely what our idealistic young anti-globs are fighting to maintain. What do they want? Over-regulated and burdensome taxation regimes, run by hidebound bureaucracies!When do they want it? NOW!

These anti-freedom monkeys are strange inheritors of the 1960s protest tradition. Hippies hated rules (or so they said); the anti-globs want rules for everything. They're a whole different breed of idiot. Witness how protests have changed over the past 25 years:

1967: Give peace a chance
2002: Give police states a chance

1967: LSD is good
2002: Genetically modified food is bad

1967: Ban the bomb!
2002: Ban the burger shops, shoe makers, crop scientists, coffee stores, trade, business, and commerce!

1967: Think global, act local
2002: Think local, act anti-global

1967: Expand your consciousness
2002: Throw rocks

Australia's Prime Minister John Howard rules out sanctions against Zimbabwe over Mugabe's stolen election. But he did agree, after meeting with South Africa and Nigeria, to support Zimbabwe's suspension from the Commonwealth for one year. That's right -- just one year. If Mugabe had stolen a Chevy Cavalier, he'd have gotten a more serious punishment. Next time Mugabe steals an election, Howard has threatened to send him his Christmas card three or four days late.

"Australia would like to see another election held in democratic circumstances as soon as possible," he told ABC Radio.

But Mr Howard said the most important thing was that the three leaders had adopted a consistent approach to anti-democratic action.

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan is complaining that Israel's behavior "has come to resemble all-out conventional warfare." Well, it's about time. Unfortunately, Annan couldn't find the time to send a similar letter to Yasir Arafat -- or at least not to leak it to the media.

Maybe if he had, the Palestinians would stop blowing up buses. Or maybe not. It's not as if people generally listen to Annan, after all.

Remember how the United States is evil because we make decisions without consulting the French first?

Well, our "allies" in France are now saying that they won't cooperate with the United States if Zacarias Moussaoui, the "20th hijacker," gets the death penalty.

[French rights groups] said Justice Minister Marylise Lebranchu told them in a letter that she had instructed her officials to contact the U.S. Justice Department to voice concern that information gleaned in France could put Zacarias Moussaoui on death row.

But at least it's good to know we're not the only ones exasperated by the French.

CLASHES between protesters and riot police threatened to overshadow the European summit in Barcelona last night, as Tony Blair stepped up the pressure on France over its refusal to import British beef.

...

The Prime Minister told Lionel Jospin, his French counterpart, that Britain was becoming increasingly irritated with France’s determination to defy international law and uphold the ban.

In yet another campaign finance rant, the New York Times explains that Campaign Reform's Time Has Come. The Times' vision of campaign finance "reform," of course, is that nobody should be allowed to have any say in elections, including candidates themselves. (Except, of course, for newspapers. More on that below.)

The bill aims at shutting down unlimited "soft money" donations to political parties from corporations, unions and rich individuals, and greatly curbing such donations for state and local parties.

It would also ban corporate and union funds to independent groups for sham issue ads running just before elections, and require disclosure for individual donors to such groups.

While the Times wants to prevent groups from advertising on television or radio in the months before an election -- on the theory that (gasp) rich people might tell you what they think, and us commoners (definition: everyone who doesn't work for the New York Times editorial staff) are just too darn stupid to see through these ads -- they don't propose limiting the rights of newspapers to accept ads or to editorialize in favor of candidates. While we can't put a precise monetary value on a New York Times endorsement, we can get a general idea. The New York Times accepts advertisements for the bottom right corner of the opinion page. They charge $30-40 thousand for one of these ads. In short, an editorial endorsement by the New York Times is essentially a $30,000 campaign contribution from the corporation which publishes the New York Times. (Yes, newspapers are corporations.) But that doesn't count as a "sham issue ad," in the mind of the Times' editors. Wonder why.

The United Nations has figured out how to cure poverty. And you'll be shocked to hear this one: rich countries need to give lots of money to poor countries.

In anticipation of the U.N. International Conference on Financing for Development, the United States and Europe each pledged billions of dollars to poor nations last week. But the United Nations says much more is needed – international development aid must double to $100 billion a year to meet the international goal of halving extreme poverty by 2015.

"It's a good beginning, but nobody has suggested that's all we need," U.N. spokeswoman Susan Markham said. "The donors have agreed we need to increase aid. The fact that they're even discussing an increase in (overseas development aid) is a breakthrough."

While we're solving that simple problem, the United States thinks that aid should only be given to countries that reform their politics and economies. For some reason, that isn't going over too big.

Many aid recipients say that conditioning aid amounts to meddling in their internal politics.

Advocates for the poor say some of the neediest live in countries whose governments are corrupt or totalitarian and they shouldn't be punished for the sins of their leaders.

Strangely, the U.S. government wants to test this strategy before implementing it on a wider scale.

The Bush administration has said that if its extra $5 billion in aid produces results, it will give more. But many criticized the United States, by far the world's richest country, for doing little to help the poorest.

In the blogosphere, Michael Moore-bashing is practically an olympic sport. As such, James Lileks takes the gold medal.

Absolute ego corrupts, absolutely. Mr. Moore, one suspects, will spend ten minutes at the podium denouncing tax cuts, and two hours denouncing his accountant for failing to write off a bottle of Dasani he drank on the book tour as a business expense. He’s a good multimillionaire, you see, but those other guys got their money the old-fashioned way: they snuck into the homes of the Working Poor and stole the golden eggs the exhausted laborers lay during the night.The only guy who earned his millions is Our Man Mike. Perhaps to show his good will, he's instructed his accountants to pay the pre-Bush estate tax rate in the event of his demise, instead of bequeathing it all to his daughter. It's not like she earned it, anyway.

Nobody ever accused the New York Times of being good winners. They're so thrilled that McCainShaysFeingoldMeehan passed the Senate -- the "biggest election reform in a generation" -- that they feel the need to resort to name-calling. They label "anonymous White House officials" who described the bill as "flawed and oversold" as "churlish." Two paragraphs later, the Times describes the bill as "not a panacea." See, that's the way the Times' editors are: people who disagree with their views, even if they say the same thing, are evil, intolerant, or narrow-minded. Or in this case, just "churlish."

In an attempt to canonize those who supported this unconstitutional bill, the Times adds, oddly:

Among Democrats, Senator Russell Feingold of Wisconsin not only helped lead the fight in Washington, but also put his beliefs into practice at home. Mr. Feingold refused soft-money donations for his own re-election struggle in 2000, ignoring supporters who warned it could cost him his seat. His victory was an advertisement for reform.

1. If Feingold could win re-election under the old system, without taking soft money, then doesn't that suggest that the need for "reform" is overstated?

2. If Feingold's victory is supposed to demonstrate that voters favor "reform", then shouldn't his slim 50-49 margin of victory call that into question? Moreover, shouldn't the overwhelming defeats of Bill Bradley, John McCain, and Ralph Nader suggest that voters couldn't care less about "reform"?

3. The Washington Post noted, about Feingold's election that

Fund-raising: Feingold raised more than $3.8 million, spent about $3.5 million and had $351,000 in cash on hand in mid-October. Neumann raised nearly $3.7 million, spent nearly $3.1 million and had about $591,000 in cash on hand.

Susanna Cornett at Cut on the Bias takes on the New York Times' blatant anti-gun bias (and blatantly bad reporting).

Nicholas Kristoff takes time out from paranoid anti-gun ranting to raise an interesting point: Is democracy our friend or enemy in the Muslim world? The response of much of the Muslim world to American pressure after 9/11 has been to crack down on radical Islam, which has had the side effect of eliminating what shreds of freedom and democracy exist. Kristoff questions whether America should be in the business of promoting authoritarianism, even in the name of suppressing anti-American, pro-terrorist extremists.

Kristoff cites Yemen's experience -- where fundamentalist Islam gained power through democratic means, and then lost public support because of its extremism. And he argues

Egypt has been torturing Islamic fundamentalists for decades. Same with Algeria. Yet the only place where fundamentalists seem to be clearly losing popularity is Iran, where they alienated ordinary people by ruling them.

It's a tough question, and for a change I don't have a flip, easy answer.

[Update: That doesn't mean other people don't; Stephen Green at Vodkapundit trashes the column. I don't disagree with Green's premises that (1) Kristoff is naive, and (2) Islamo-fascism is extremely dangerous, and that democracy shouldn't be exalted over more fundamental principles like human decency, the rule of law, freedom, etc. If democracy is simply a means for anti-democrats to gain power, it's worse than useless. I'm just not convinced that in the long term, propping up dictators on the lesser-of-two-evils theory that at least they're not Islamic religious fanatics will work. After all, that's the strategy that created the current Iranian regime.]

A horrifying explanation from the Chicago Tribune about their use -- or lack thereof -- of the word terrorism (from Romenesko via Media Minded. They've chosen to use the word for the attacks of September 11, but to "withhold that designation from other actions in other places (mainly the Middle East) where some people argue it is warranted."

Many readers contend that we've also seen terrorism in the detonations of suicide bombs at pizzerias and bar mitzvah parties in Jerusalem.

How to justify the difference? Well--and this is just one journalist's view--the Tribune is an American newspaper written principally for an American audience and owing its existence and independence to the American Constitution. Our perspective is inescapably American (which is not to say it is necessarily the same as that of the U.S. government). Inevitably, as the news of Sept. 11 is reported and interpreted, that perspective is reflected in the product. Indeed, it almost has to be if we are to speak intelligibly on those events to our audience. Our perspective on events in the Middle East also is American, which is to say it is not identical to that of any of the contending parties. To faithfully report and interpret the events there for our American audience, we must refrain from consistently labeling either party as terrorists, because to do so is, in effect, to declare it illegitimate.

Apparently one explanation for why black motorists are more likely to be stopped by police than white motorists is that black people speed more frequently. It seems that someone came up with the crazy idea that if we're going to criticize state troopers for unfairly stopping minorities, we ought to see whether troopers are unfairly stopping minorities. Unfortunately, the results came out wrong.

And the reaction to such a politically incorrect outcome? The Justice Department is refusing to officially release the results. Is there any doubt that had this study "proved" the accepted wisdom -- that racial disparities are inevitably the result of racism rather than behavior -- that it would have been on the front page, just like the study that supposedly "proves" that Minorities Get Inferior Care, Even if Insured? Is there any doubt that the coverup of the results would have resulted in a banner headline, with calls for hearings?

There have been questions raised about this speeding study -- but there are questions raised about every study. And as the Times reports, this study confirms another study which found the same thing

In North Carolina, for example, a professor hired in 2000 by the National Institute of Justice to study whether there are identifiable differences in driving behavior based on race, assigned teams of students to travel roads at the speed limit, record the race of drivers who passed them and use stopwatches to time the drivers' speed. Though the study has not yet been released, civil rights groups have dismissed its methods as "loony science" and called Matthew T. Zingraff, the lead researcher from North Carolina State University, a racist and a police apologist. Mr. Zingraff has said he was merely trying to find new data to quantify racial profiling.

Patrick Basham explains how campaign finance "reform" is really incumbent protection.

Overall, the reformed campaigns of the future will be less competitive, less controlled by candidates, more influenced by the mainstream media, and involve fewer voters. Most Americans support campaign-finance reform but this is not the future promised to them by campaign-finance reformers.

Another excellent primer from Megan McArdle, asking if Europe is free-riding on America's growth.

One of the mysteries, after all, for free marketeers, is why Europe’s growth isn’t much lower than it is. History teaches, after all, that excessively regulated societies are generally stagnant, yet Europe has managed respectable, if not stellar, growth.

The New York Times reports on the supposedly new phenomenon that college students nowadays aren't interested in political debate anymore, or are at least unwilling to engage in it. The article talks about an overemphasis on "tolerance" being part of the problem -- the Oprahfication of the world, where feelings are all that count. If you argue with someone, you might make them feel bad.

But I don't think this reluctance to debate has anything to do with the college generation. Look at Eric Alterman's whining about Andrew Sullivan in the latest Nation. Sullivan's criticism of the left is described by Alterman as "the will to censorship." That's right -- criticism of speakers is now considered "censorship." At least if those being criticized are on the left.

I think there's a good reason for it. The left has gotten so used to declaring everyone who disagrees to be racist, sexist, heterosexist, classist, speciesist, or all of the above, that they're afraid of actual debates. The only way to avoid being labelled a bigot is just not to say anything at all.

Or, at least it isn't dead on some campuses. The Washington Post reports that black colleges are facing racial discrimination lawsuits.

DOVER, Del. –– Kathleen Carter says that when she became chairman of the education department at historically black Delaware State University in 1995, she found herself facing more than the usual administrative hassles.

Carter, who is white, says she was told that she was usurping blacks' right to govern themselves and that whites in the department were trying to make blacks look bad.

One colleague called her "a white bitch," Carter said in a discrimination lawsuit she filed against the school, alleging she was denied tenure because of her race.

But Jane Buck, a former Delaware State psychology professor and national president of the AAUP, said a search committee at the school received about 100 applications for an opening a few years ago, and no black candidate turned up. The search was reopened, and the lone black applicant was hired.

"I perceived a great deal of pressure to see to it that we hired a black departmental member," Buck said.

The FBI is investigating a report that some of the 9/11 hijackers were treated for anthrax.

The two men identified themselves as pilots when they came to the emergency room of Holy Cross Hospital in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., last June. One had an ugly, dark lesion on his leg that he said he developed after bumping into a suitcase two months earlier. Dr. Christos Tsonas thought the injury was curious, but he cleaned it, prescribed an antibiotic for infection and sent the men away with hardly another thought.

But after Sept. 11, when federal investigators found the medicine among the possessions of one of the hijackers, Ahmed Alhaznawi, Dr. Tsonas reviewed the case and arrived at a new diagnosis. The lesion, he said in an interview this week, "was consistent with cutaneous anthrax."

Originally, everyone assumed the anthrax attacks were caused by terrorists. Lately, as the proof for that hypothesis has failed to turn up, a revisionist theory has sprung up that a disgruntled former member of the U.S. biodefense program is responsible for the attacks. But if the hijackers got anthrax four months before the other anthrax victims, that would either be one of the biggest coincidences in the history of the planet, or incredibly strong circumstantial evidence that there's a terrorist connection.

Islam is a religion of peace, and a Palestinian Group Says It Will Increase Bombings. This is, of course, after Israel pulled back its tanks from the "Occupied" Territories and began negotiating again, as insisted upon by Israel's "allies," including the United States.

This isn't Hamas or Islamic Jihad, by the way. This is the Al Aksa Brigades, affiliated with Yasir Arafat's Fatah organization.

Last fall, the group's leaders said it would target only soldiers and Israeli settlers. But that view changed early this year, in part because Hamas, the militant Islamic group, had raised its standing among Palestinians with its suicide attacks, and Fatah was losing influence.

The brigades have claimed responsibility for several recent suicide bombings, including one in an ultra-Orthodox religious neighborhood in Jerusalem on March 2 that killed nine Israelis, including six children.

Bashir, a 27-year-old fighter in the Aksa Brigades who would not give his last name, said he agreed with the decision to attack Israeli civilians because "wherever there is an occupier, we should consider them a target. Besides, Israel sees all of us as targets."

In talks with many Palestinians across the political and economic spectrum in recent days, most wholeheartedly support the suicide attacks and say they are helping to bring concessions from the Israelis.

Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, today condemned the latest suicide bombing by the group, on Thursday in Jerusalem, and called for an end to attacks on civilians. But Mr. Badawi said the Aksa Brigades would ignore that.

"He does not support what we are doing," he said with a shrug, sitting on a sofa in his living room with a large-caliber pistol stuffed between the cushions just to his right. "But we believe this is our national responsibility. We respect our leader, but the decisions to carry out attacks remains with the Aksa Brigades leadership."

...

But both Mr. Badawi and Mr. Khader said the group's leaders do not communicate with Mr. Arafat. Mr. Badawi said Mr. Arafat had never approached anyone from the Aksa Brigades to ask them to stop the suicide bombings in Israel — although the leader did make a public statement to that effect on Thursday.

He added that if Mr. Arafat reaches an agreement for a cease-fire, the Aksa Brigades will decide independently whether to abide by it.

The Washington Post reports on Maryland's efforts to make us "safer" by increasing the scope of law enforcement powers.

"I realize that this bill basically says you can tap someone's phone for jaywalking, and normally I would say, 'No way,' " said Del. Dana Lee Dembrow (D-Montgomery). "But after what happened on September 11th, I say screw 'em."

In January, Gov. Parris N. Glendening (D) formed a task force to pull a wide range of initiatives into one bill. Several of the task force proposals have since been stripped away by uneasy lawmakers, including restrictions that would have prevented foreign nationals from holding driver's licenses if their visas had expired.

The INS broke its own rules in giving special visa waivers to some 19 Pakistani crewmen from a ship which arrived last week. Fortunately, they were all responsible, law-abiding individuals. Well, except for the four crewmen who have now disappeared. None of them are actually proven terrorists, though, so there's nothing to be concerned about. And it's not fair to point fingers; the INS certainly can't be expected to identify every individual who might pose a risk. Well, except perhaps for the ones who've done this before.

An inspector also entered an improper birth date for one of the four missing Pakistanis. If the birth date had been entered correctly, INS would have found that the man had committed an immigration violation in Chicago several years ago, the INS official said. The error was not realized until the man disappeared, according to the official.

William Bittner, a longtime INS employee who oversees the agency's Norfolk field office, has been reassigned to the Arlington office, an INS official said.

The Washington Post has just come to the shocking conclusion that Europeans don't care about human rights. Well, not exactly; the Post says that Europeans "risk" sending that message.

Apparently now that the United States is no longer a member of the incredibly pointless United Nations Human Rights Commission, having been kicked off by the French, the UNHRC can't even be bothered to make a token effort to criticize Russia, or China, or even Cuba.

Though the U.N. commission has no real authority, Beijing has gone to great lengths to avoid the passage of resolutions in recent years, threatening would-be sponsors with economic and political retaliation. Both the Bush and Clinton administrations pressed resolutions anyway; with the United States gone this year, the European Union released its members to take action if they so choose. But so far none has done so -- not Britain, or Germany, or Italy or Spain -- and not France, or Sweden or Austria, the three countries that combined to muscle the United States off the commission last year. If that passivity continues, the message to China's Communist regime will be clear: Europe has no will to resist its suppression of political freedom, its torture and murder of the Falun Gong and other religious believers, its campaign against independent intellectuals or its crackdowns in Tibet and Muslim-populated Xinjiang province.

William Raspbery comes oh so near to revelation, before backing off. He analogizes the perceived corruption in NCAA sports to the perceived corruption in Washington, arguing that the only way to reform the system is to "separate winning and money."

There's some merit there. The corruption in college sports comes from the fact that the stakes are so high. When a winning program can potentially bring in millions of dollars in cash and television exposure, you're always going to have an incentive to cut corners to win. So the way to reform college sports is to eliminate those millions of dollars. Stop signing the television deals and the endorsement deals.

But after working this through, Raspberry adds:

Now suppose it's the case that politics conflict not only with grass-roots citizen involvement but also with the integrity and ideals we like to espouse -- and suppose that conflict is inescapable. What are we to do? Reducing the stakes is not an option. Does it follow from Loughran's analysis that reform is impossible -- that moneyed interests will find a way around the new legislation and that reform will be proved a delusion once again?

In fact, that's exactly what we need to do. Reduce the stakes. No alumni booster is going to buy an illiterate high school dropout, no college is going to admit him, if there's no reward at the end. Similarly, no corporation, no rich special interest, is going to buy a candidate if there's no reward at the end. In politics, the reward is legislation. A simple truth: if there are no regulations, there can be no loopholes. No loopholes means nothing to be bought. What's the point of bribing a politician if the politician can't give you anything? Developers can't buy zoning board members if there are no zoning boards. Energy companies can't pay to write the government's energy policy if the government doesn't legislate an energy policy. Accounting firms can't buy influence over accounting regulations if the government isn't writing accounting regulations.

Unfortunately, Raspberry botches the argument, turning it into just another call for bigger government. After concluding that you can't reduce the stakes, his proposal is "some combination of private contributions fully disclosed, public funding of campaigns and free TV ads." The worst of all worlds. Legislation,or at least access, being bought, government picking winners and losers, and more political advertising on television.

Romania and Bulgaria are hoping to join NATO, now that the organization looks likely to expand its membership significantly.

Determined to be on that list, Bulgaria and Romania are working closely with the United States in the campaign in Afghanistan to show how valuable they can be as military partners. The two countries "are making the best use of this tragic opportunity," the Bulgarian foreign minister, Solomon Pasi, said in an interview here in the Romanian capital.

...

And in the rush to impress the Bush administration, viewed as the critical voice in determining the final list of countries invited to join NATO, Romania and Bulgaria are refurbishing airstrips and ports with the implicit promise that if the United States wishes to use them in future campaigns, including in strikes against Iraq, they are available for the asking.

"The next time when [the United States] asks for support, or needs support, Bulgaria will be an excellent ally," said Pasi when asked about Iraq. Romanian officials echoed his comments.

The United States had been particularly concerned that the countries' military spending is low and that their armed forces cannot "inter-operate" with NATO's. Both countries have boosted their military budgets above 2 percent of their gross domestic products in an effort to accelerate the restructuring process and modernize equipment. At the same time, Romania is slashing the ranks of its top-heavy military and moving to create a professional, non-conscript army by the end of the decade, officials said.

Still, this does little to answer the long term question: what is NATO for? Certainly not to defend against a Warsaw Pact invasion. Does it even have a mission, and does expanding serve that mission? Right now, it seems that expansion is really just a way to avoid having to answer these questions. For NATO to turn down these applicants would require that NATO come up with a reason why. To keep expanding is just inertia. We've already seen that NATO is worthless as a military alliance; after all, even without NATO, the British can cooperate with us and the French can thumb their noses at us.

Maryland is taking steps towards legalizing medical marijuana. Or, at least, that's the lead in the Washington Post's coverage. Then you read this half-assed idiocy:

Under the measure, if defendants can prove to a judge or jury that they used marijuana exclusively for medical reasons, they would be subject to a $100 fine, instead of the current penalty -- a $1,000 fine and up to a year in jail.

I don't think Victor Davis Hanson is a big fan of Islamofascism.

So we should stop apologizing, prepare for the worst, hope for the best, and accept this animosity -- just as our forefathers once did when faced by similar autocrats and their captive peoples who threatened us in 1941. I don't know about the rest of America, but I am proud that thugs like Khaddafi, murderers like Saddam Hussein, inquisitionists like the mullahs in Iran, criminals in Syria, medieval sheiks in the Gulf, and millions of others who do not vote, do not speak freely, oppress women, and are not tolerant of religious, gender, or ethnic diversity don't like me for being an American. I would find it repugnant if they did.

No, their hatred is a badge of honor, and I would have it no other way. I am tired of the appeasers of the Middle East on our Right who fawn for oil and trade, and those pacifists and multiculturalists on the Left who either do not know, or do not like, what America really is. I'd rather think of all the innocent dead on 9/ 11 than give a moment more of attention to Mr. Arafat and his bombers.

The truth is that there is a great storm on the horizon, one that will pass — or bring upon us a hard rain the likes of which we have not seen in 60 years. Either we shall say "no more," deal with Iraq, and prepare for a long and hard war against murderers and terrorists — or we will have more and more of what happened on 9/11. History teaches us that certain nations, certain peoples, and certain religions at peculiar periods in their history take a momentary, but deadly leave of their senses — Napoleon's France for most of a decade, the southern states in 1861, Japan in 1931, Germany in 1939, and Russia after World War II. And when they do, they cannot be bribed, apologized to, or sweet-talked — only defeated.

Susanna Cornett has a very good discussion of some of the problems with the recently announced slavery reparations lawsuit.

But wait, isn't he benefiting from work done by slaves, for which they weren't paid? Yes, but so are the descendents of the slaves, even if you accept that they are not benefiting as much as other groups. So you would need to look at the relative harm - he has benefited, say, 10% or 25% or 50% more because one half of his ancestry is American of Anglo-European descent. And what about the generalized benefit of living in the United States versus Africa? Would it be reasonable to calculate what the average person in Africa has vs what the average African slave descendent in America has, and use that as a part of the reparation formula?

Another difficulty is identifying which people should benefit and how much. It isn't as if, in the case of the interned Japanese-Americans, it could be tracked that the family owned this property and it was taken so therefore this harm calculates to this amount, and this person is a direct descendent of the person who lost the property, so he/she should receive the money. First we would need to determine which people have no ancestors who were slaves, and whether they suffered specific harm because of the culture resulting from a history of slavery in this country. The next tier are people who have varying degrees of slave ancestry - 10%, 25%, etc. I think it unlikely we would find many if any at all that have 100% ancestry from slaves or slaveholders. Can you imagine the mess it would be to parse these issues? What about a Halle Berry - if her black father was descended from slaves, and her white mother from slaveholders, would that not be a wash?

Any damages won from the lawsuit would be put into a fund to improve health, education and housing opportunities for blacks, said attorney Roger Wareham, one of a group of lawyers who prepared the lawsuits.

''This is not about individuals receiving checks in their mailbox,'' Wareham said.

James Lileks has another hilarious screed, this one dissecting the latest silliness that is Nicholas Kristoff.

That's your best-case scenario. Unless, of course, Mr. Kristoff thinks that the Iraqi Chess Club will storm the palace, disband the Republican Guards, and proclaim an era of peace, democracy, normalization with Israel and Segways for all.

It also turns out that a British organization, Indict, is already pursuing an indictment against Saddam for war crimes.

And the Belgian organization Frown is already drafting plans to mount an international campaign of scowling, which will force his regime to divert precious resources to rubber chickens, joy-buzzers and Singing Telegram Gorillas to improve their standing abroad. Meanwhile, the French organization Surrender is drafting plans to cede Marseilles to whomever wants it, just in case.

Need I mention the plans of an American organization, Depose? They?re known informally as the Armed Services.

I've been holding off on commenting on the latest atrocity in Israel, mostly because it defies comment. I have no idea what one says when someone commits mass murder, picking targets for the crime of being Jewish and trying to eat dinner. Well, I know what some say.

"I am horrified at the level of violence reached. Civilians on both sides are by now the main victims of a conflict situation which they never chose to be part of," EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana said in a statement.

"I appeal to the parties to find, at this gravest of times, the courage to pursue last-ditch efforts to reach a ceasefire."

In Atlanta, Georgia, U.S. President George W. Bush said "callous cold-blooded...terrorist killing" in the Middle East must be stopped. "I condemn it in the strongest of terms."

The Secretary-General strongly condemns today's suicide bomb attack in the city of Netanya in Israel in which at least 15 Israeli citizens were killed and many others wounded. He reiterates his conviction that such terrorist attacks are morally repugnant and immensely harmful to the Palestinian cause. He extends his heartfelt condolences to the Government of Israel and to the families of the victims of this attack.

The Secretary-General urges all sides to exercise maximum restraint

and not to allow the enemies of peace to derail the current efforts to secure a durable ceasefire and to implement the Tenet and Mitchell plans.

And all this comes on the heels of the new report that Saddam Hussein is paying suicide bombers to kill Israelis (via Ken Layne.) This distribution took place in Tulkarm, where the Netanya bomber lived. I wonder if George Bush and the Europeans will begin to understand that killing Saddam Hussein -- that's right, killing, not deposing or overthrowing -- is part of the resolution to the Arab-Israeli conflict, rather than the reverse. I wonder if George Bush and the Europeans will begin to understand that the attempt to reach a ceasefire is a cause of, not a solution to, the conflict.

This is not a disagreement, or a dispute. This is war.

There are some who think that Saddam Hussein isn't a threat to the United States. There are some who think that he's just some two-bit dictator, no different than other third world tyrants. For them, this New Yorker piece should be required reading.

Chemical weapons had been dropped on Halabja by the Iraqi Air Force, which understood that any underground shelter would become a gas chamber. "My uncle said we should go outside," Nasreen said. "We knew there were chemicals in the air. We were getting red eyes, and some of us had liquid coming out of them. We decided to run." Nasreen and her relatives stepped outside gingerly. "Our cow was lying on its side," she recalled. "It was breathing very fast, as if it had been running. The leaves were falling off the trees, even though it was spring. The partridge was dead. There were smoke clouds around, clinging to the ground. The gas was heavier than the air, and it was finding the wells and going down the wells."

...

Gosden believes it is quite possible that the countries of the West will soon experience chemical- and biological-weapons attacks far more serious and of greater lasting effect than the anthrax incidents of last autumn and the nerve-agent attack on the Tokyo subway system several years ago—that what happened in Kurdistan was only the beginning. "For Saddam's scientists, the Kurds were a test population," she said. "They were the human guinea pigs. It was a way of identifying the most effective chemical agents for use on civilian populations, and the most effective means of delivery."

The Germans have a special interest in Saddam's intentions. German industry is well represented in the ranks of foreign companies that have aided Saddam's nonconventional-weapons programs, and the German government has been publicly regretful. Hanning told me that his agency had taken the lead in exposing the companies that helped Iraq build a poison-gas factory at Samarra. The Germans also feel, for the most obvious reasons, a special responsibility to Israel's security, and this, too, motivates their desire to expose Iraq's weapons-of-mass-destruction programs. Hanning is tall, thin, and almost translucently white. He is sparing with words, but he does not equivocate. "It is our estimate that Iraq will have an atomic bomb in three years," he said.

The censorship campaign finance "reform" law passed, and Bush violated his oath of office to sign it. And special interest groups like Common Cause claimed it would end corruption in politics. But as Robert Samuelson notes, this is about speech, and some politicians are "honest" enough to admit it:

"This bill . . . is about slowing political advertising and making sure the flow of negative ads by outside interest groups does not continue to permeate the airwaves," said Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.). "We must also close off the use of corporate and union treasury money used to fund ads influencing federal elections," said Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine). "I cannot believe the Founding Fathers thought that the right to put the same commercial on 5,112 times was intended to be protected by the First Amendment," said Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.).

You might ask: What's wrong with groups -- the National Rifle Association, the Sierra Club -- running ads to praise friends or pillory foes? That's democracy. You might wonder whether the First Amendment makes exceptions for "negative" speech (Cantwell), speech intended to influence elections (Snowe) or repetitive speech (Schumer). It doesn't. Finally, you might rightly suspect a role for incumbent self-protection. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) confessed that she would be well rid of "those vicious attacks" (advertisements) in the final 60 days before an election.

The Guardian reports that a new American newspaper, War Times, is being started to provide alternative coverage of the war in Afghanistan. I know it's going to be good:

The venture is supported by a number of academics, including Noam Chomsky, labour organisations and anti-war groups.

The pilot issue carried an interview with the actor Danny Glover, who said: "Bombing Afghanistan and creating the idea that the US is the judge, the jury and the executioner is the wrong way to respond."

The New York Timeshas suddenly rediscovered the First Amendment. Arguing against laws which restrict campaigning by judicial candidates, the Times notes:

Despite their good intentions, such prohibitions should not survive constitutional scrutiny. It is hard to imagine a more direct infringement on the free-speech rights of candidates.

Michael Judge writes about the silliness of anti-alcohol groups in the United States.

It gets worse. The American Medical Association is calling for local ordinances against "reckless marketing practices" that target students with ads for boozy events like Barenaked Ladies concerts and spring-break packages to Boca Raton. And college boards are listening. Berkeley is just one of the many campuses where events sponsored by alcohol and tobacco companies are no-nos.

Much of this hysteria has to do with the state of perpetual alarm trumpeted by groups like Columbia University's National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse.

...

The problem is that many Americans see boozing as somehow immoral and not a salutary part of social mores. Studies by the Berkeley Alcohol Research Group and a host of others find that nations that teach children moderation over abstinence, such as France, Spain and Italy, may have higher overall rates of alcohol consumption, but far lower rates of alcoholism and alcohol-related disease.

Citing California's huge budget shortfall and its growing number of overweight children, a state lawmaker is proposing a new tax on soda to fight childhood obesity.

...

The California Soda Tax Act by Sen. Deborah Ortiz (D-Sacramento) is seen as the leading edge of a broader initiative to tax or levy fees on a variety of eating and drinking habits. One lawmaker, in fact, has introduced a bill to study taxing a wider range of junk food to finance health programs for children. Another may try to impose a fee on retail sales of alcoholic beverages to bolster trauma rooms.

The larger problem, though, is that as Steven Milloy has pointed out, repeatedly, there's not much science behind the idea that obesity is increasing, let alone that it's really the serious problem activists claim it is.

Doesn't matter to activists, though:

Nonetheless, lawmakers are not stopping at soda and cigarettes as possible tax targets.

To address concerns that California students are struggling at school because they are sick, lawmakers led by Assemblywoman Wilma Chan (D-Alameda) are pushing a package of proposals to improve their health.

Chan has introduced a measure that would require the state to study the feasibility of taxing junk foods to pay for dental and health services for children.

After months of dithering, the European Union has finally come out decisively on the question of terrorism: they're in favor. The Greeks are the most explicit, arguing not merely that Arafat is necessary, but that he's really a nice guy:

Greek Foreign Minister George Papandreou condemned the Israeli military action, saying his country had "ties, both friendly and personal, with President Arafat."

"For us Arafat is not an enemy, and beyond this he is also a personal friend," said Papandreou, who also condemned the terror attacks on Israelis.

Spain, which holds the rotating EU presidency, said Israel's fight against terrorism and its response to recent attacks must be compatible with safeguarding the Palestinian Authority and its president -- "the legitimate representatives of the Palestinian people."

In France, President Jacques Chirac said "any attack on (Arafat's) ability to act, or on his person, would be extremely serious."

The French leader also urged Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to "immediately take all measures to stop the violence."

"Nothing can excuse or justify blind terrorism against civilians," Chirac told France-Info radio. "Everyone knows there cannot be a military solution to the conflict in the Middle East."

French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine accused Israel of obsessing over Arafat and trying to "asphyxiate" him.

"It's a complete illusion to believe that, even with Arafat elsewhere or replaced by whatever Palestinian chief, the problem would be different," Vedrine told RFI radio.

Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi's government asked Israel to guarantee Arafat's security and respect his elected position.

"It is fundamental that deeds are not carried out which can prejudice the prospects for a resumption of dialogue," a government statement said.

George Bush announces that "evil may be present, and it may be strong, but it will not prevail." Then he had the U.S. vote, with beacons of freedom and democracy like China, in favor of a Security Council resolution calling on Israel to withdraw from Ramallah. I suppose we should be grateful that the U.S. decided not to side with the Syrians (who also have a seat on the Council), who wanted the resolution to avoid any mention of the terrorist attacks.

Am I the only one seeing the influence of Colin Powell here? Bush 43 is turning into Bush 41, confusing the ends -- defeating terrorism -- with the means -- creating an Arab coalition. And Bush 43 was just slapped in the face for his efforts, as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait publicly reconciled with Saddam Hussein at the Arab summit.

When is Bush going to realize that rewarding terror makes him look weak, which makes it harder, not easier, to accomplish his goals? What Bush needs to realize is that ousting Saddam Hussein, right now, with or without any Arab support, will do far more to win the cooperation of our supposed "allies" than appeasing them will. Diplomats cannot win wars. And this is a war, not a "peace process."

My first InstaPundit link. For anybody visiting for the first time, welcome, and note that I really don't intend to make this an All-Middle East, All-The-Time blog. It's the primary focus of my attention right now, for obvious reasons, but I'd like to get back to domestic politics soon.

A day after backing a U.N. Security Council resolution which was critical of Israel, President Bush put the blame for events on the Palestinians, said that Arafat has to do more, and said that Israel has the right to defend itself.

Palestinian officials had hoped that pressure by Arab nations on the Bush administration would prompt it to restrain Israel. But speaking from his ranch in Crawford, Texas, Mr. Bush, who has refused from the beginning of his term even to shake Mr. Arafat's hand, said only that Israel should "make sure there is a path to peace as she secures her homeland."

The New York Times is free, of course, to feel however it wants about the president's middle eastern policy. But shouldn't it keep the blatant editorializing on the editorial page? David Sanger writes a piece about Bush's reaction to the current crisis in Israel:

Breaking a two-day silence on events in the Middle East, Mr. Bush summoned reporters to the gates of his ranch here during a driving rainstorm. He had just received news of yet another deadly bombing, this one in Tel Aviv, he said, and he pointedly made no effort to sound evenhanded about who was to blame for the rising violence.

Mr. Bush's strong statement went beyond similar comments on Friday by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. They were also striking for their clear association of the Palestinian leader with almost daily acts of terrorism, exactly the kind of comments the White House has tried to avoid in recent weeks for fear of further undercutting the chances of resuming peace negotiations.

Mr. Bush made a series of other phone calls today to affirm to Arab leaders that he remained committed to the peace process and planned to keep Gen. Anthony C. Zinni in the Middle East in the hope that talks might resume. But administration officials acknowledged that while the president had to keep alive talk of a peace process, his comments were detached from the reality in Jerusalem today. And Mr. Bush, at times drumming his fingers on a conference table, had the demeanor of a man who recognized the limits of his powers of persuasion, and had few illusions that he had the ability to change Mr. Sharon's strategy or Mr. Arafat's use of terror.

The article goes on in this vein, making it clear that in David Sanger's view, the formula for peace is for Bush to restrain Ariel Sharon, and disapproving of Bush's decision not to do so. Now, that may or may not be correct, but it seems to go slightly beyond the scope of the news section to determine.

Tom Friedman, the New York Times columnist who helped create the Saudi peace proposal scam, has finally figured out that it's a sham.

Israelis are terrified. And Palestinians, although this strategy has wrecked their society, feel a rising sense of empowerment. They feel they finally have a weapon that creates a balance of power with Israel, and maybe, in their fantasies, can defeat Israel. As Ismail Haniya, a Hamas leader, said in The Washington Post, Palestinians have Israelis on the run now because they have found their weak spot. Jews, he said, "love life more than any other people, and they prefer not to die." So Palestinian suicide bombers are ideal for dealing with them. That is really sick.

The world must understand that the Palestinians have not chosen suicide bombing out of "desperation" stemming from the Israeli occupation. That is a huge lie. Why? To begin with, a lot of other people in the world are desperate, yet they have not gone around strapping dynamite to themselves. More important, President Clinton offered the Palestinians a peace plan that could have ended their "desperate" occupation, and Yasir Arafat walked away. Still more important, the Palestinians have long had a tactical alternative to suicide: nonviolent resistance, à la Gandhi. A nonviolent Palestinian movement appealing to the conscience of the Israeli silent majority would have delivered a Palestinian state 30 years ago, but they have rejected that strategy, too.

The reason the Palestinians have not adopted these alternatives is because they actually want to win their independence in blood and fire. All they can agree on as a community is what they want to destroy, not what they want to build. Have you ever heard Mr. Arafat talk about what sort of education system or economy he would prefer, what sort of constitution he wants? No, because Mr. Arafat is not interested in the content of a Palestinian state, only the contours.

Let's be very clear: Palestinians have adopted suicide bombing as a strategic choice, not out of desperation. This threatens all civilization because if suicide bombing is allowed to work in Israel, then, like hijacking and airplane bombing, it will be copied and will eventually lead to a bomber strapped with a nuclear device threatening entire nations. That is why the whole world must see this Palestinian suicide strategy defeated.

But how? This kind of terrorism can be curbed only by self-restraint and repudiation by the community itself. No foreign army can stop small groups ready to kill themselves. How do we produce that deterrence among Palestinians? First, Israel needs to deliver a military blow that clearly shows terror will not pay. Second, America needs to make clear that suicide bombing is not Israel's problem alone. To that end, the U.S. should declare that while it respects the legitimacy of Palestinian nationalism, it will have no dealings with the Palestinian leadership as long as it tolerates suicide bombings. Further, we should make clear that Arab leaders whose media call suicide bombers "martyrs" aren't welcome in the U.S.

(Well, I shouldn't say that this is "the only question." Another important question is when Europe will figure this out.)

Bill Clinton regrets having pardoned Mark Rich. Many people would regret pardoning an indicted tax evader who fled the country to avoid a trial, because, after all, someone should have to face a jury before being absolved of any wrongdoing. But The Man Without Shame doesn't care about any of that. He

regrets a last-minute pardon he gave to fugitive financier Marc Rich because it has tarnished his reputation.

Speaking of a stinking mass of garbage, read the whole interview, and try not to retch as Clinton explains that the contributions from Rich's wife were just a coincidence, and that Clinton really did it to advance the mideast peace process (!)

The New York Times was a key figure in two of the landmark free speech cases in United States history. In New York Times v. Sullivan, the Supreme Court ruled that the freedom to criticize public officials was so important that even mistakes in that criticism didn't justify defamation suits, unless those mistakes were made recklessly or deliberately. And in the Pentagon Papers case, the Court ruled that even claims of dangers to national security couldn't justify prior restraint by the courts -- that is, a judge preventing something from being published. (*)

(*) For all my fellow attorneys out there, I know I'm oversimplifying. The nuances are unimportant here.

Thus, the Times' extremist views on campaign finance censorship are particularly galling. It's not merely their position on the so-called "reform" policy that is so irksome, but their willingness to distort and misrepresent in order to justify the unjustifiable.

Opponents of the law, starting with the National Rifle Association, have rushed into court to argue that it violates the First Amendment. Those arguments should be rejected.

What is being regulated here is not speech but money, and it is being done in ways the Supreme Court has expressly endorsed in its past decisions.

The court has long drawn a distinction between pure issue advocacy, which merits the highest level of First Amendment protection, and campaign ads, the financing of which Congress can regulate to protect the integrity of the electoral process.

In recent years, special interests have done an end run around contribution and spending rules by running ads in the days leading up to an election that purport to be about an issue but are actually campaign ads intended to help one candidate win. ("Call Congressman Smith," the paradigmatic phony issue ad goes, "and tell him to stop trying to destroy Social Security.")

Under the new law, such television ads would fall under the campaign finance limits if they were run within 60 days of an election, or 30 days of a party primary. The law's critics argue that this restriction violates freedom of expression, but they are wrong. Anyone has a right to buy genuine issue ads at any time, and they also have the right, under McCain-Feingold, to spend their quota of campaign donations to finance ads that are intended to help one particular candidate or party. No one is prohibited from speaking.

The only thing the campaign finance reform law prohibits is spending in excess of federal campaign limits to pay for a campaign ad masquerading as something else. The Supreme Court has long recognized that distinction. The McCain-Feingold law simply builds on that reasonable principle and sets out an improved, and updated, definition for when advertising crosses the line.

Opponents of the reforms protest that in some cases legitimate issue advocacy could be deterred in the final days of an election just because the ads mention the name of a candidate. An example they cite is a recent advertisement that urged House Speaker Dennis Hastert, who is up for re-election, to take action on a bill. But it does not unduly burden free expression to require that an ad run in a candidate's district close to Election Day be financed with money that is not illegal under campaign finance law.

Besides, bona fide issue ads that mention a specific candidate but are unrelated to a campaign are exceedingly rare in the days leading up to an election, when ad rates are high and everyone's attention is directed at the campaign.

Well, I'd like to run a campaign ad here: call the New York Times, and demand that they stop lying about this law. (If this works, I expect that the TImes will call for the outlawing of Blogger next.)

From a discussion on Libertarian Samizdata, about the European Union's latest boondoggle, a European global positioning system:

[T]he EU is riven with all the drawbacks of a totalitarian state and none of the advantages.

The Guardian reports, in its usual evenhanded fashion, that Palestinians are executing accused "collaborators" en masse. The Guardian at least admits that the treatment of the "collaborators" is brutal, but still manages to blame it on Israel.

Their bodies were dumped in a side street as a gruesome warning to anyone else contemplating spying for Israel against their own people.

The police and guards did not try to stop the gunmen, who also belonged to the al-Aqsa martyrs, because they did not want to raise tensions in the city which is surrounded by Israeli tanks, the security sources said.

The Palestinian attacks on collaborators have been based on well-founded suspicions about the level of penetration by the Israeli intelligence agencies of Palestinian society.

Confessions by arrested collaborators in the last 18 months have revealed the extent of the use of paid informers - often working for no more than a few hundred dollars - who have been recruited either through blackmail after being arrested by the Israelis, or because they were known to have a grudge against key militant figures.

At the very end, the Guardian slips in this little factoid:

In the last intifada, from 1987-93, more than 800 suspected collaborators were killed by fellow Palestinians.

As usual, Megan McArdle does an excellent job breaking down an issue into straightforward logic. In explaining why Kyoto isn't a good idea, she responds to the suggestion that we consume too much:

Which goes to show that deciding which things we need and which ones are superfluous sounds great – when you’re doing the planning. But they’re not going to just poll Thomas – they’re going to ask the other 270 million people in the country too. And you’d be surprised at how much of the stuff you like the majority might consider superfluous. The internet, for example. Or they might decide that you don’t need the option of not working for 3 years if you lose your job. They might decide that it’s not in society’s best interest to have you taken out of the labor force, what with the looming demographic crisis and all, and seize your “excess” savings. Or they might decide that being single (I’m presuming, from your posts), you’d be more energy efficient in a barracks with other single men, leaving apartments for families who “need” it more. Start imagining all the things that neighbors who don’t particularly like you might find superfluous in your lifestyle, and you begin to see what a world of trouble you might be letting yourself in for by trying to decide what we need and what we don’t.

I don't think Susanna Cornett likes David Sanger of the New York Times very much.

SANGER IS AT IT AGAIN: Doesn't this man have a bias-o-meter? On Sunday he wrote a flagrantly biased article about Bush and the response to the bombing at Haifa, which I posted about then. Today, with the collaboration of Michael Gordon, Sanger goes at it again with such outlandish bias that it should be on the editorial page, but isn’t even nominally labeled a “news analysis”. This was so meaty I just had to deconstruct it extensively.

WASHINGTON, April 1 — President Bush, under rising criticism for his handling of the growing violence in the Middle East, expressed frustration today that Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, has failed to denounce what he called the "constant attacks" of suicide bombers.

Mr. Bush, his voice tinged with resentment during brief comments in the Oval Office this morning, also grew testy about suggestions that he had kept his distance from the conflict. He said those who maintained he was insufficiently engaged "must not have been with me in Crawford when I was on the phone all morning long talking to world leaders."

“Tinged with resentment” and “testy” – who are you, Mr. Sanger, to make those value judgments? Maybe he was just thinking you were stupid. Who are “those who maintain he was insufficiently engaged”? You and the editorial board at the Times?

The Washington Post, despite publishing an excellent column the other day by George Will exposing McCainShaysFeingoldMeehan for what it is, joins the ranks of newspapers who see no problem with censoring others who wish to get involved in the election process. Responding to the Will editorial, the Post says:

Mr. Will seems worried that the National Rifle Association might be helpless to respond to a Post editorial.

The worst part is that the Post touts the discriminatory nature of the law as though it were an asset:

It is true that the law treats the press differently from other corporations; the limited restriction McCain-Feingold places on the NRA would not apply to The Post. But this is nothing new.

Corporations, after all, have long been banned from direct campaign spending, but the law has also made clear that this restriction does not include spending on "any news story, commentary, or editorial distributed through the facilities of any broadcasting station, newspaper, [or] magazine." The Supreme Court, ruling on a similar Michigan statute in 1990, upheld the distinction, saying that "the media exception ensures that the Act does not hinder or prevent the institutional press from reporting on, and publishing editorials about, newsworthy events." Importantly, the exemption protects the press only in its role as the press.

But of course a newspaper doesn't have to do that, because a newspaper owns its own soapbox. The Post here also joins the ranks of those who misrepresent the bill by claiming that it only affects ads "supporting or opposing" a particular candidate. But in fact the law bans ads before an election which mention a candidate.

The Post, as well as some other apologists for the campaign finance law, argue that because there are some methods by which the NRA can get around the restrictions, the law is not really censorship and not really unconstitutional. But even if these methods were not extremely restrictive and burdensome, these are exactly the sort of exceptions that later become "loopholes" in the discourse of "reformers." If these methods were not restrictive, there wouldn't be any point to the law. The authors of the law know that. The Post knows that. So the only conceivable explanation for their continued lies is that they know the law will benefit the media at the expense of everyone else.

Charles Johnson has a series of Talking Points for Arab Spokesmen:

* First, be sure to "condemn all forms of terror." (Nudge nudge, wink wink.) This is VERY IMPORTANT. It must be the FIRST THING you say. Americans have some kind of silly hangup about this.

* After getting that out of the way, move on to the REALLY IMPORTANT subject: Israeli "terror." Try to avoid using the word "but" in your segue; American interviewers are starting to get sensitive about this. Use the word "occupation" as much as possible.

Don't you feel sorry for him? The New York Times wants you to.

After more than 20 years of standing alongside American presidents in building peace in the region, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt is feeling undermined by Washington, upstaged by Saudi Arabia and vulnerable before an angry Arab population, officials here say.

Egypt, an important ally, is the largest recipient of American foreign aid after Israel. One Western diplomat who has been in frequent contact with him says the Egyptian leader fears that with growing numbers of student demonstrators and louder calls for an "Arab response" to Israel's military mobilization, he may be forced to put down the protests violently.

"They don't want to have to put down their own people," the diplomat said.

You should pity Hosni:

Mr. Mubarak, officials say, is seething over President Bush's approach to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. He is working the presidential phone lines to make what a spokesman described as a "forceful" appeal to President Bush to take a more muscular and balanced stance over the violence in the West Bank.

Like most Arab leaders, Mr. Mubarak has avoided denouncing in any sustained or forceful manner the Palestinian suicide bombings, which have both fueled Israel's military mobilization and created a convergence between antiterror statements by Mr. Bush and Mr. Sharon.

The Times also includes this howler:

The Arab view that the deaths of thousands of Palestinian civilians and the cruelties of 50 years of occupation have stirred a virulent new radicalism that will take years to get under control has far less resonance in the Bush administration.

The New York Times writes a followup to a story about a federal prosecutor who was killed six months ago. Apparently there are no leads. Of course, you couldn't fill a whole article with that, so the Times has to find an angle. So they pick gun control.

There aren't any facts to relate the story to gun control, so the Times uses insinuation. The article starts by describing Mr. Wales as a "prominent advocate of gun control," and then says that "the attack had all the signs of a professional hit." Then we get the obligatory quotes from anti-gun activists:

National gun-control and gun-safety groups are also stepping up calls for progress in the investigation. Mr. Wales, they say, was by far the most prominent gun-control advocate to die from gun violence, and many leaders of those groups fear that his killing may have been tied to that work.

"It's terrifying for anybody working in this field to think there could be a killer out there targeting them," said Matt Bennett, director of public affairs for Americans for Gun Safety, a nonprofit group based in Washington, D.C.

He was even singled out in an Internet discussion forum for gun proponents, described as "Tom Wales, yet another arrogant, gun-banning Jew, out in the open, unafraid." (Mr. Wales was not Jewish.)

Anyway, after all that, seven paragraphs which set the victim up as a martyr to gun policy, the Times then finally admits that there's no real story there.

There is no firm indication that any opponent of gun control was involved in his death, and many pro-gun groups have expressed great ire at the suggestion. Moreover, Mr. Wales had also prosecuted many people in 18 years here in the United States attorney's office, specializing in fraud and white-collar crime. Investigators have been exhaustively combing over those cases, looking for anyone who could be a suspect.

Ariel Sharon is floating the idea of exiling Yasir Arafat from Israel. As expected, Colin Powell is dismissive:

"Sending him into exile will just give him another place from which to conduct the same kinds of activities and give the same messages that he's giving now," Secretary of State Colin L. Powell told ABC's "Good Morning America." "So, until he decides that he's going to leave the country, it seems to me we need to work with him where he is."

The State Department has apparently just figured out that Israel is a dangerous place to live in or travel to. They've warned Americans in Jerusalem to leave, and issued a travel advisory against visiting Israel, the West Bank, or Gaza. Just in case there were any who hadn't worked this out for themselves by now.

So if we judge the State Department by this standard, Colin Powell ought to figure out that Yasir Arafat is a terrorist by the year 2078 or so. Good luck, Colin. We'll wait for you to catch up.

The New York Times reports that the New York Fire Department is going to try to recruit more minorities, "addressing a historical problem: its failure to hire enough blacks, Hispanics and women as firefighters." Note that there's no accusation of discriminatory hiring; the mere "failure to hire" them is sufficient to complain about. But the Times notes, disapprovingly:

But some in the department have long resisted any kind of quota, primarily because of a sense that the physical and written tests for firefighters are a form of merit system that should not be eliminated because that could put the safety of firefighters and the public at risk.

The Times is also upset that the department is going to raise standards, in particular by increasing the educational qualifications required. It will hurt the effort to increase the number of minorities, don't you know:

Sgt. Noel Leader, a co-founder of 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, criticized the Police Department's current effort to recruit candidates at Ivy League and other elite universities because those places "do not reflect the diversity" of New York City's population.

William Saletan in Slate explains why the Middle East peace process is a joke:

The Middle East is going to hell. Palestinians are blowing up Israelis. Israelis are shooting Palestinians. What is the United States doing about it? Not much. But don't worry, says U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell. Eventually, the Israelis will pull out of the West Bank, "and Tenet and Mitchell will be waiting for them."

If you don't know what Tenet and Mitchell are, you need a lesson in the three languages of the peace process: Hebrew, Arabic, and bureaucratic bullshit. Officially, Mitchell refers to an April 2001 list of recommendations for conducting peace talks, and Tenet refers to a June 2001 list of security measures each side must take to halt violence so that talks can proceed. Unofficially, Mitchell and Tenet, like Zinni, Oslo, and Madrid, are buzzwords designed to create an impression of progress where none exists.

The theory put forward by Powell, President Bush, the U.N. Security Council, and other peace process exponents is that Zinni will lead to Tenet, which will lead to Mitchell, which will lead to Oslo, which will lead to peace. But the history of the invention of these steps suggests the opposite. Mitchell was created because Oslo failed. Tenet was created because Mitchell failed. Zinni was created because Tenet failed. The peace process is growing ever more complicated not because each stage leads to the next but because it doesn't.

Michael Ledeen gets it. In the National Review, he writes:

Isn't it amazing how easily policymakers can be deflected from the main mission? Back when we were trying to bring down the Soviet Empire, our diplomats and analysts were forever finding treaties to negotiate, agreements to be reached, embassies, and consulates to open, confidence-building measures to be launched, and peacekeeping units to be dispatched. As if these had anything to do with the price of eggs, if you see what I mean. And yet these epiphenomena ate up enormous chunks of time, when time was at a premium.

So it is with the Middle East. A few years ago when Oslo was in vogue I won quite a number of bets from people who believed that peace was at hand. I took the position that you couldn't have peace without a convincing defeat of one side or the other, and that in any case you couldn't even address the Israel-Palestine issue unless the terror states — Iran, Iraq and Syria — were on board. And they weren't on board.

The very sad thing about Middle Eastern politics is not that terrorism against Israel is so vicious, but that people refuse to admit it, even when Palestinians proudly proclaim it.  For instance, Hamas leaders say that "Our spirit is high, our mood is good,"

By their estimation, the organization's two recent attacks — the one at a Seder on Passover night in a Netanya hotel that killed 25 people, and the other in a Haifa cafe that killed 15 — were the most successful they have ever made. That is true partly, Mr. Shanab said, because Hamas is now using weapons-grade explosives instead of home made bombs manufactured using fertilizer, a fact the Israelis have confirmed.

"Forty were killed and 200 injured — in just two operations," another of the leaders, Mahmoud al-Zahar, said with a smile.

Moreover, they openly proclaim their goal:

Hamas, the second most popular Palestinian movement, behind Fatah, is directed by a "steering committee," as Dr. Zahar put it, with five principal members. Interviews with four of them — a cleric, an engineer and two medical doctors — showed a leadership unyielding, determined and increasingly confident of achieving their goal, the eradication of Israel as a Jewish state.

...

The goals of Hamas are straightforward. As Sheik Yassin put it, "our equation does not focus on a cease-fire; our equation focuses on an end to the occupation." By that he means an end to the Jewish occupation of historical Palestine.

Hamas wants Israeli withdrawal from all of the West Bank and Gaza, the dismantling of all Israeli settlements and full right of return for the four million Palestinians who live in other states. After that, the Jews could remain, living "in an Islamic state with Islamic law," Dr. Zahar said. "From our ideological point of view, it is not allowed to recognize that Israel controls one square meter of historic Palestine."

Mr. Shenab insisted that he was not joking when he said, "There are a lot of open areas in the United States that could absorb the Jews."

After showing strength for a week, Bush reverses himself in the face of European whining, agreeing to send Colin Powell to Israel and asking Israel to withdraw from the so-called Occupied Territories. Bush did harshly criticize Arafat, saying "The situation in which he finds himself today is largely of his own making. He has missed his opportunities and thereby betrayed the hopes of his people," but then he rewarded Arafat by interfering with Israel's efforts to root out terrorists.

The most charitable interpretation of events is that Bush is publicly giving Arafat something -- Powell's visit -- so that Arafat can save face, and then in private Powell is going to deliver an ultimatum to Arafat. But Bush really doesn't have anything to offer Arafat, except the threat that he'll let Israel finish what it started. But Arafat has already seen that escalating the violence can create pressure on Israel. The problem with bluffing is: what if someone calls your bluff? The Arabs have already snubbed George Mitchell, George Tennet, Anthony Zinni, and Dick Cheney. What happens when they don't give Colin Powell the assurances that Bush wants? Or what happens if they do, and then a day later go back on their word? Does Bush finally admit his double standard, the one which insists that Israel act differently towards Arafat than Bush acted towards Bin Laden? Or does he join with the Europeans in selling out Israel?

Everything else is the fault of Ariel Sharon, so why not this, from the AP:

Three unarmed U.N. observers and two armed peacekeepers were injured in scuffles with Hezbollah forces in southern Lebanon Thursday, the U.N. peacekeeping force commander said.

The scuffle with Hezbollah forces broke out after an unarmed U.N. observer patrol reached the village of Mari, near the disputed Chebaa Farms area.

The observers - from Ireland, Norway and France - were confronted by Hezbollah gunmen who would not let them pass, a U.N. observer force officer said on condition of anonymity. An argument broke out, resulting in the gunmen beating up the observers.

A separate U.N. peacekeeping patrol - manned by armed Indian officers - was nearby at the time and intervened in the scuffle. This sparked a fist fight in which two Indians were hurt. Two U.N. vehicles were also damaged.

Col. Amol Astana, commander of the Indian peacekeeping contingent, said the patrol and the observers were confronted by eight to 10 armed Hezbollah members. Astana said his forces did not respond because their role is to act as peacekeepers. They reported the scuffle to Lebanese authorities.

Mickey Kaus, in Slate, analyzes the campaign finance "reform" bill, including the editorial coverage in the Washington Post and New York Times, and comes to the same conclusion I did: McCainShaysFeingoldMeehan is unconstitutional, and the Times and Post are being two-faced in their support of this law. Kaus looks at the role played by Paul Wellstone in passing the most egregiously unconstitutional part of the law:

Then along came Paul Wellstone, the Senate's most liberal member. Wellstone saw McCain-Feingold's protection of "advocacy" groups as a "loophole" allowing "special interests" to run last-minute election ads. (Since corporate and union money was already banished in the bill, Wellstone was presumably worried mainly about money from rich individuals.) Last year, Wellstone pushed an amendment to extend McCain Feingold's ban on last-minute ads to non-profits like "the NRA, the Sierra Club, the Christian Coalition, and others." Under the Wellstone Amendment, these organizations could only advertise using money raised under strict "hard money" limits—no more than $5,000 per individual. So if you wanted to give the Sierra Club $6,000 to denounce some environment-raping legislator, you'd be out of luck.

That Arab nations are anti-Israel is news to absolutely nobody. But the extent of their hatred for Israel, how far they're willing to go, would shock many. Damian Penny reports on a story from Bahrain, where a Model United Nations program condemned the American ambassador to Bahrain for asking for a moment of silence for Israeli civilians killed, after the delegates had already had a moment for the Palestinian dead.

Al Hekma International Model School student Hanan Al Mawla was angry. "I would have never expected that a day will come in this Arab Muslim country where we will be asked to show support for the Israeli citizens, who are killing the Palestinians on a daily basis."

I'm just stunned. As soon as I saw this, I wanted to smash something. This is absolutely unbelievable. Honest to God, WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE?!?

The message is clear: as far as the people of Bahrain are concerned, there is no such thing as an innocent Israeli. The death of an Israeli citizen, even a child, is something to be ignored, if not celebrated. This is just sick.

Steven Den Beste discusses diversionary tactics in war, noting that these are exactly what Saddam Hussein is using.

Right now, Iraq is trying to do that kind of thing to us. Rightfully fearing a straightforward military campaign by the US to conquer Iraq, the Iraqi government is trying to stir up enough trouble elsewhere to distract us and prevent us making the attempt. The most fruitful result of that has been from Iraq's overt and covert investment in the Palestinian Intifada; it's been extremely cost effective. Their hope is that continuing conflict in Israel will force us to postpone our attack on Iraq by waiting until peace has been imposed on the area. If they can manage to prevent that, they have the possibility of deferring our attack indefinitely.

Unfortunately, Tony Blair has fallen for it. He is reportedly going to ask Bush to postpone any operations against Iraq until the situation in Israel has stabilized.

I wanted to take down the latest idiocy from Mary McGrory, but Juan Gato got there first. A sample:

He did no such thing. Nobody knows exactly what Arafat wants -- it sure isn't peace -- but he wants above all to bait the brute Ariel Sharon. When he was interviewed in his bunker by cell phone and flashlight, Arafat told the Arabic-language al-Jazeera, "I want to be a martyr, martyr, martyr, martyr." His apologists say that shared death is the only thing he can proffer to the young, who have no homes, jobs or hopes.

Mary..."Nobody knows what Arafat wants"? He wants Israel destroyed! Pay attention here.

But if Arafat is not helping with deranged and despairing Palestinian teenagers, who blew up Jews at their Seder, what reason does anyone have for thinking Sharon's way will work any better?

I have composed a haiku to make her tired point more interesting:

Ariel is bad
Sharon equals terrorist
blah, blah, f-ing blah

Yes, Mary, they are all equally bad. Sure thing.

I don't generally link to Glenn Reynolds, because I figure anyone who reads this page also reads him, but I have to, here. He reports that the Nobel Prize Committee has finally started questioning that 1994 Nobel Peace Prize that was given for the Oslo accords. But not Arafat's prize! Rather, these jackasses are questioning Shimon Peres' prize.

On Thursday, George Bush made a major speech on the Israeli/Palestinian war, exciting those who felt that Bush "needed to do more" and annoying those who felt that Bush was appeasing terrorists. Everyone agreed, though, that this was a significant speech, signalling a change in direction for the United States. Everyone except Robert Fisk, that is. To Robert Fisk, there's no question of "balance." He doesn't think that Bush needs to condemn Israel as well as the Palestinians; he thinks that Bush should only be condemning Israel.

Ariel Sharon could not have done better. The heaping of blame upon an occupied people, the obsessive use of the word terror – by my rough count there were 50 references in just 10 minutes – and the brief, frightened remarks about "occupation" and (one mention only) to Jewish settlements and the need for Israeli "compassion" at the end were proof enough that President Bush had totally failed to understand the tragedy he is supposedly trying to solve.

The mugger became the victim and the victim became the mugger.

But of course, the White House, which according to the Israeli press has repeatedly been asking Mr Sharon how long he intends to reoccupy the Palestinian cities of the West Bank, is to give the Israeli Prime Minister more time to finish his invasion, destroy the Palestinian infrastructure and dismantle the Palestinian Authority.

The speech was laced with all the "war on terror'' obsessions: Iraq as a sponsor of terror for donating money to a family of Palestinian "martyrs'', and Syria for not making up its mind if it is "for or against terror''.

The Palestinian suicide bombings, however, were the core of Mr Bush's address. He talked of the 18-year-old Palestinian girl who blew herself up and killed a 17-year-old Israeli girl, the Jewish state's "dream'' of peace with its neighbours. "Terror must be stopped ... no nation can negotiate with terrorists ... leaderships not terror ... you're either with the civilised world or you're with the terrorists ... all in the Middle East ... must move in word and deed against terrorists ... I call on the Palestinian Authority to do everything in their power to stop terrorist activities.'' Arafat had agreed to control "terrorism'' – "he failed'.' The reoccupation of the West Bank was a "temporary measure'', Mr Bush announced, trusting the word of the Israeli occupiers. "Suicide bombing missions could well blow up the only hope of a Palestinian state.''

By the way, Fisk mentions "the reoccupation of the West Bank." Does that mean he's conceding that it wasn't occupied before the recent Israeli moves?

Only a heart of stone could not respond to the suffering of those Israeli families whose loved ones have been so wickedly cut down by the Palestinian suicide bombers. But where was Mr Bush's compassion for the vastly greater number of Palestinians who have been killed by the Israelis over the past 19 months, or his condemnation of Israel's death squads, house demolition and land theft? They simply didn't exist in the Bush speech.

The money for "martyrs" does not, of course, only go to the kin of suicide bombers – it goes to families of all those killed by Israelis, most of whom have been struck down by American-made weapons. Certainly, America has never offered to make reparations for the innocents killed by the air-to-ground missiles and shells it has sold to Israel.

The New York Times is upset because the Bush administration has announced its new "ergonomic" policy for workplace safety, and that policy is voluntary. You can tell the Times is upset, because they lead their coverage not with the justification for the policy, but with the criticism:

Democratic lawmakers and union leaders were quick to attack the new policy, calling it toothless and far weaker than the Clinton administration regulations that a Republican-dominated Congress repealed 13 months ago, with President Bush's encouragement.

Business groups, on the other hand, were mostly pleased. They had vigorously fought against mandatory ergonomic measures, contending that they could cost American companies $100 billion or more.

At a news conference at the Labor Department, Mr. Henshaw promised to put some teeth behind the voluntary guidelines, warning that OSHA would bring enforcement actions against industries that had high injury rates and took few steps to reduce them. He declined to identify the industries that government safety officials might focus on, saying only that the government would concentrate on industries with the highest rates of injuries.

Still, the Times has to give voice to the usual suspects to complain, from union lobbyists to Teddy Kennedy:

"Once again, the administration handed a win to big business at the expense of millions of average workers — especially women — who risk workplace injuries every single day," Mr. Kennedy said. "Today's announcement rejects substantive protections for America's workers in favor of small symbolic gestures."

An Italian court has ruled that parents have to provide child support, even if their "children" are adults, rich, and highly educated. This case involved a 30-year old lawyer with a several hundred thousand dollar trust fund who had turned down job offers that didn't interest him. But that didn't matter to the court:

The judges said a parent's duty of maintenance did not expire when their children reached adulthood, but continued unchanged until they were able to prove either that their children had reached economic independence or had failed to do so through culpable inertia. An adult son who refused work that did not reflect his training, abilities and personal interests could not be held to blame.

"You cannot blame a young person, particularly from a well-off family, who refuses a job that does not fit his aspirations," the judges said.

Commentators warned the decision could depress Italy's already low birth rate and discourage people from leaving home, getting married and having children.

Not everyone saw the ruling as a loafer's charter, however. "The verdict is innovative because of its precision," said lawyer Cesare Rimini. "The time limit must be reasonable, as must the aspirations of the young person."

But what's instructive is that all the news coverage of this ruling, including the people (for and against) chosen by the media to be quoted, focuses on the wisdom of this ruling as social policy. The idea that it's just wrong to be confiscating property from adults to be given to other, able bodied, adults is never even broached.

Shenanigans in Massachusetts: organizers of a ballot initiative drive to ban horse-slaughtering claim that their supporters were tricked into signing a petition against gay marriage. Of course, there are similarities between the two: both involve banning activities because of the "Ugh" factor, rather than for any real reason.

How do you define terrorism? Well, if you're William Raspberry, you don't bother. You just declare yourself confused, everyone bad, wash your hands of the whole thing, and go have dinner.

Here's where I get in trouble: Does it make sense to see the crisis in the Middle East as primarily the work of Palestinian terrorists driven by anti-Israeli hatred?

I certainly do not intend to praise the Palestinian suicide bombers who were, for a while during Passover, blowing themselves up on a daily basis. But to think of them as violence-prone cowards -- even to call them terrorists -- is to miss the most salient fact of their behavior: utter desperation.

I don't dispute that the suicide bombings constitute terrorism (even while the United Nations struggles to define the term). A good-enough working definition is violence, particularly against civilians and innocents, in furtherance of political ends.

But isn't it reasonable to examine those political ends? Isn't it reasonable also to ask what moral distinctions there are between what the suicide bombers (and those who dispatch them) are doing and what the Israeli forces have been doing?

President Bush has described the latter as justified in retaliating for the suicide bombings. Those who see the suicide bombers as heroes naturally view their actions as retaliation for the latest humiliation visited upon them by the Israelis. What seems obvious to me is that every act of violence, by both sides, is both aggression and retaliation -- and that it does no good to try to separate one from the other. One might just as well hope to settle claims on the land variously called Israel and Palestine by hiring a title-search company to look it up.

Just as Sept. 11 has changed the way we think of our security, so should the wave of suicide bombers change the way Israelis think of theirs. What's the point in making clear to those who would attack you that they do so at peril of their lives if they knowingly do so by giving their lives?

Are they terrorists? Certainly. But is Israeli President Ariel Sharon any less a terrorist because he does his thing through a uniformed military, with tanks and machine guns? There's terror -- and intransigence and duplicity -- on both sides, and precious little value in trying to determine which side owns the preponderance of guilt.

Or the preponderance of virtue, for that matter. Much is made of the concessions the Israelis offered -- and that the Palestinians (in the person of Yasser Arafat) rejected about 18 months ago. And hardly anything is made, in the United States, at least, of the Palestinians' earlier concessions -- particularly of Israel's right to exist within secure borders and the abandonment of the Israel-is-Palestine contention in favor of a Palestinian state made up of only the West Bank and Gaza.

But, as I say, there's not much point in reviewing the bidding now. What strikes me as essential is the recognition by each side of what the other side requires and a search for ways these requirements can be had without unacceptable peril.

For a long time, it seems to me, Israel preferred a stable strife to what it considered unpalatable concessions. The intifada, at first, and the suicide bombers now seem calculated to force serious negotiations and concessions by rendering the status quo intolerable.

Why is it so much easier for us in America to see Sharon's actions as in Israel's legitimate interest than to see the suicide bombers' as serving theirs?

This is one of the most muddled arguments I've read in a long time; at least the Europeans know what they want, even if it's wrong. Raspberry seems to have just turned on his television, seen a bunch of people getting killed, and decided it was too much trouble to figure out what was happening. But "a pox on both your houses" is literature, not foreign policy.

When Israel kills Palestinians, Israel gets denounced. (Of course, when Palestinians kill Israelis, Israel also gets denounced.) When the U.S. announces it will try Al Qaeda members in military tribunals, the U.S. gets denounced. So you'd think that Palestinians secretly sentencing other Palestinians to death would be major news, sparking international protests. But if it is, I've missed it. And it's not because the story is too new:

Killings of Palestinians suspected of collaborating with Israel have become almost a daily occurrence as the fighting with Israel has intensified in recent weeks. Last week, Palestinian militants killed 10 Palestinians on one day for allegedly cooperating with Israel. In the West Bank city of Ramallah last month, the corpse of an accused collaborator was strung up from a monument in the center of town.

File this tidbit from the Baltimore Sun under Big Time Oops:

Correction

---

Originally published April 2, 2002

An obituary in Saturday's editions of The Sun reported the death of Ralph D. Chester of Millers Island. Mr. Chester is not dead.

Mr. Chester was reported to have died by a family member, who called The Sun to provide material for the obituary. The Sun later determined that the family member who called has been estranged from Mr. Chester for several years.

The Sun regrets the error.

Did I ever mention that I love Mark Steyn? Not only does he see the Middle Eastern situation more clearly than more prestigious columnists like Tom Friedman, but he manages to avoid Friedman's pompous ignore-what-your-eyes-tell-you-because-I'm-an-expert approach to commenting on the situation. In describing the results of Dick Cheney's failed field trip through the Mideast:

Aside from the grim body-count, the whole period was a deranged exercise in unrealpolitik, with all parties negotiating fictions. The vice-president wanted Saudi Arabia to pretend to be his friend, the Arab League to pretend that the peace plan is for real, Ariel Sharon to pretend that Yasser Arafat is cracking down on terrorism, and Arafat to pretend that he wants to crack down on terrorism. Why? What’s the point? Where’s it get you? The only consolation is that Saddam’s rapprochements with his neighbours are also illusory. The Arab armies make Belgium look butch: when the Marines go into Iraq, they won’t be running into any Egyptian or Syrian units. Nor is it worth fretting over Saddam’s call to use the oil supply as a weapon: right now, those guys need to sell the stuff more than the West needs to buy it. On the other hand, if the old monster’s wheeze was to postpone the US invasion by whipping up the West Bank into full-scale war, everything’s going to plan.

That’s not how the rest of the world sees it, of course, no matter how many suicide-bomber belts and printing plates in assorted currencies are stacked in the counterfeit king’s corridors of power. The UN has long treated Arafat as the leader of a sovereign nation, as if to underline his inevitability: he’s already a head of state; all he needs is for those ‘intransigent’ Israelis to give him a state to be head of. The Australians and Canadians still deplore the violence ‘on both sides’, but the EU has pretty much given up on Israel: the famously ‘shitty little country’ is more trouble than it’s worth. Even in America, the airwaves are clogged with experts urging a withdrawal by Israel, as that will encourage Arafat to get ‘Oslo’ back on track, not to mention ‘Tenet’ and ‘Mitchell’, as if this Beltway-speak means anything when you’re all wired up and ready to blow.
It’s very difficult to negotiate a ‘two-state solution’ when one side sees the two-state solution as an intermediate stage to a one-state solution: ending the ‘Israeli occupation’ of the West Bank is a tactical prelude to ending the Israeli occupation of Israel. The divide among the Palestinians isn’t between those who want to make peace with Israel and those who want to destroy her, but between those who want to destroy Israel one suicide bomb at a time and those who want to destroy her through artful ‘peace processes’. Ayat Mohammed al-Akhras, the straight-A high-school student who blew herself up in a supermarket last week, devoted her farewell video to castigating the Arab League big shots for pussying around with peace plans and leaving the real work to Palestinian schoolgirl bombers. Her view would appear, from the polls, to be the opinion of the overwhelming majority. It’s useless to pretend there’s anything to negotiate.

ABC has announced that Nightline will stay on the air for two more years, in its current timeslot. Yawn. Does it really matter anymore? I was a big fan and regular watcher of Nightline years ago, but in an age when I can turn on at least 4 different channels and get news 24 hours a day -- including satellite interviews with people from around the world, Nightline just isn't all that exciting. I still think Ted Koppel is a better interviewer, and a more serious journalist, than the "personalities" which infest television news today. But it's a half-hour show, which means 22 minutes of broadcasting. It's just not that significant.

Israel has begun pulling its forces out of two West Bank towns. Does anybody think that this will satisfy anybody? Certainly not the Palestinians, who have finally admitted what we've always known -- that the so-called "peace process" is dead:

Yasir Abed Rabbo, the spokesman for the Palestinian Authority, said: "Sharon will not find local leaders who will be quislings for him. He has destroyed any future possibility of peace talks even before Secretary Powell arrives." In a written statement approved by Mr. Arafat, the Palestinian leadership said, "The Israeli prime minister has, de facto, declared the end of the peace agreements signed between the Palestinians and the Israelis."

The Colorado Supreme Court has ruled that both the federal and Colorado constitutions limit the powers of law enforcement to obtain bookstore records. The ruling wasn't, as some news outlets erroneously reported, that bookstore records must remain anonymous; the court merely held that law-enforcement must demonstrate a compelling government need for the records, and that the bookstore is entitled to a hearing before turning over the records. It applies only in Colorado, unfortunately.

This ruling provides an interesting contrast to last fall's USA Patriot Act, which (among many other things) explicitly empowers the FBI to obtain records from bookstores and libraries. Is this new ruling a sign that hysteria over the 9/11 tragedy -- the hysteria which led Congress to rush to enact the USA Patriot Act into law with minimal debate -- has evaporated? Let's hope so. I certainly don't want Americans to become complacent about dealing with Islamofascist terrorism, but I do hope it shows that Americans are realizing that restricting our own civil liberties isn't the answer.

The New York Times is annoyed at Ariel Sharon because he won't buy into their vision of Middle East peace, and because he's putting the interests of Israel ahead of those of President Bush.

It is increasingly clear that the costs to broader Israeli interests far outweigh whatever short-term security benefits this military operation may be yielding. Mr. Sharon's actions may be netting some terrorists and some of the terrible tools they employ, but they are inflaming the fury of thousands more Palestinians and millions of Arabs whose governments are being asked by Mr. Bush to press for more responsible Palestinian leadership. The prestige of the United States is on the line in an effort to help Israel, and the Israeli government is doing nothing to make the job easier.

The military operations, Israel's largest in the West Bank since it first occupied the area nearly 35 years ago, came in response to the attack by a suicide bomber on a Passover Seder in Netanya last month. Israel's declared objective is to dismantle the Palestinian terrorist infrastructure, but Mr. Sharon has also targeted leaders and offices of the Palestinian Authority.

More to the point, why does everyone get collective amnesia whenever they discuss Israel's actions? The wave of terrorist attacks on Israel were the reason for, not the result of, the Israeli "invasion" of the West Bank. Israel's "invasion" is not "inflaming" Palestinians; they were already inflamed. Israel's "invasion" is not "inflaming" the Arab world and preventing Arab states from cooperating in American peace efforts; the Arab world's refusal to condemn even the Netanya Pesach attack predates the Israeli "invasion" of the West Bank. We're not talking about full-fledged peace here, but the minimum standard of human decency and civilized behavior. If you can't condemn a murderous terrorist attack on a seder, you're not a potential ally or partner for peace. And nothing Israel does can change that.

Who is responsible for attacking several public figures with anthrax last year? We had the "terrorists did it" theory. We had the "Iraq did it" theory. We had the "rogue American scientists did it" theory. And now the Washington Post reports that everyone is baffled because the anthrax "recipe" used was very different than any known source of anthrax, domestic or foreign. The FBI is apparently sticking with the "domestic nutcase" theory, but that's complicated by the fact that the anthrax sample sent to Senator Leahy was ground more finely than even U.S. government laboratories had ever managed, which seems to point to someone with more resources than a single individual. This story isn't over yet.

It would be funny, if it weren't sad. The European Union -- the same group that just gave $44 million to Yasir Arafat last week is now threatening trade sanctions against Israel if they don't pull out of the West Bank immediately.

"The Israeli military operation must be halted, not in stages, not town by town. It must stop, and stop immediately," EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana told the parliament.

He argued that Israel was jeopardizing its own security because the destruction of the Palestinian Authority could leave no one to implement a peace plan negotiated last year by U.S. Central Intelligence Agency Director George Tenet.

But, see, this time it will be different. Because now Arafat will eagerly talk to Powell to work with Zinni to sign on to Tenet which will lead to Mitchell and then, sometime around when Ralph Nader becomes president of the U.S., we'll be back to Oslo.

Well, the Israeli offensive brought them more than a week of safety, but now the Palestinians have struck back, courageously blowing up a bus filled with commuters, killing at least 8 and wounding more than a dozen others. I'm sure, in some way, this is all Israel's fault -- because, after all, these sorts of things didn't happen before last week, when the Israeli "invasion" began.

Although in this case, it might be justified. Attorney General John Ashcroft announced on Monday that four associates of Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman's have been indicted for passing messages to Rahman's terrorist organization in Egypt. At least three of the people indicted worked on Rahman's defense team during previous terrorism trials in New York, including his attorney, Lynne Stewart.

The facts of the case shouldn't be too difficult to establish; a few years ago, it was openly noted in the Egyptian media that this was going on:

Last Thursday, the spiritual leader of the militant Al-Gama'a Al-Islamiya, Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, affirmed from his US prison that he has withdrawn his support for the group's unilaterally declared truce. However, the statement was not exactly a call to revive the armed struggle against the government. Abdel-Rahman said he would leave the final verdict on the fate of the cease-fire to the Gama'a leadership in Egypt. Abdel-Rahman is serving a life sentence for conspiring to blow up the World Trade Centre in New York.

[...]

Originally, Abdel-Rahman had formally declared his support for the cease-fire. However, on 14 June Abdel-Rahman through his American lawyer, Lynne Stewart, stated that he had withdrawn his support because he believed the government had failed to reciprocate. This statement left Gama'a leaders divided on whether Abdel-Rahman was actually advocating a new wave of violence or merely calling for a re-evaluation of political strategy.

Stewart, incidentally, has a rather, uh, interesting career, hanging out with the likes of nutcase Ramsey Clark. She has built a practice on defending the radical and unpopular, including mobster Sammy "The Bull" Gravano, Rahman, Larry Davis (an accused drug dealer who shot several members of the NYPD who came to his apartment to arrest him, claiming (successfully) self defense, and members of the "Ohio 7," a domestic terrorist group responsible for the murder of a New Jersey police officer, She also pled guilty once before to contempt charges for refusing to disclose the source of her fees in a drug case.

Everyone else has probably already linked to this, but it's such a good piece that I felt the need to do so, too. David Brooks explains why they hate us, where "they" is Europe and the Arabs, and "us" is the United States and Israel.

AROUND 1830, a group of French artists and intellectuals looked around and noticed that people who were their spiritual inferiors were running the world. Suddenly a large crowd of merchants, managers, and traders were making lots of money, living in the big houses, and holding the key posts. They had none of the high style of the aristocracy, or even the earthy integrity of the peasants. Instead, they were gross. They were vulgar materialists, shallow conformists, and self-absorbed philistines, who half the time failed even to acknowledge their moral and spiritual inferiority to the artists and intellectuals. What's more, it was their very mediocrity that accounted for their success. Through some screw-up in the great scheme of the universe, their narrow-minded greed had brought them vast wealth, unstoppable power, and growing social prestige.

Naturally, the artists and intellectuals were outraged. Hatred of the bourgeoisie became the official emotion of the French intelligentsia. Stendhal said traders and merchants made him want to "weep and vomit at the same time." Flaubert thought they were "plodding and avaricious." Hatred of the bourgeoisie, he wrote, "is the beginning of all virtue." He signed his letters "Bourgeoisophobus" to show how much he despised "stupid grocers and their ilk."

Of all the great creeds of the 19th century, pretty much the only one still thriving is this one, bourgeoisophobia. Marxism is dead. Freudianism is dead. Social Darwinism is dead, along with all those theories about racial purity that grew up around it. But the emotions and reactions that Flaubert, Stendhal, and all the others articulated in the 1830s are still with us, bigger than ever. In fact, bourgeoisophobia, which has flowered variously and spread to places as diverse as Baghdad, Ramallah, and Beijing, is the major reactionary creed of our age.

This is because today, in much of the world's eyes, two peoples--the Americans and the Jews--have emerged as the great exemplars of undeserved success. Americans and Israelis, in this view, are the money-mad molochs of the earth, the vulgarizers of morals, corrupters of culture, and proselytizers of idolatrous values. These two nations, it is said, practice conquest capitalism, overrunning poorer nations and exploiting weaker neighbors in their endless desire for more and more. These two peoples, the Americans and the Jews, in the view of the bourgeoisophobes, thrive precisely because they are spiritually stunted. It is their obliviousness to the holy things in life, their feverish energy, their injustice, their shallow pursuit of power and gain, that allow them to build fortunes, construct weapons, and play the role of hyperpower.

The Daily Californian, Berkeley's student newspaper, reported on Tuesday that the Deputy Mayor of San Diego is calling for a boycott of the Padres because their owner held a fund-raiser in favor of a ballot initiative which would ban racial profiling. (Via OpinionJournal's Best of the Web.) This is the "good" kind of racial profiling, as far as liberals are concerned -- the kind where the state collects racial data on job and college applicants -- and therefore opposition to it is racist. The article makes a faint attempt to be evenhanded, but can't quite manage it:

The recent census data, which demonstrates that California is a state without an ethnic majority, may have scared whites and provided the impetus for the initiative.

The New York Times is again upset about a campaign finance issue before Congress, but Jason Rylander tears their argument to shreds.

If you're in favor of burdensome, redundent reporting requirements, then join the NY Times in their sanctimony. But even if you truly care about regulating campaign spending, the bill before the House this week to eliminate duplicate filing requirements on state and local candidates and PACs is no Trojan horse. It doesn't weeken McCain-Feingold. It's a needed reform that restores some sense to the campaign finance system.

Hezbollah is stepping up its attacks from Lebanon on Israel's northern border. You'd think this would be big news, but it isn't. The Post headlines it, "Lebanese Border Skirmishes Could Spark Regional War." Could? What the heck do they think is going on now? Why are attacks on Israel seen as part of normal, everyday life in the Middle East, while Israel defending itself would be "war"?

"We thought that when the Israeli army withdrew, we'd finally get peace," said Valency Ahoun, the mayor of several Israeli villages along the northern border. "I cannot understand what Hezbollah is doing."

People often mock the federal government, and correctly so, for having dozens of pages of regulations to control the size of holes in swiss cheese or to define chocolate chip cookies. But at least Washington doesn't do these sorts of things by multinational committee, as the European Union does:

On Tuesday, the 15-member union’s regulatory committee discussed a proposal by the EU Commission to include the Feta cheese on its list of appellation of origin products. These products can only be marketed as such if made in a specific geographical area traditionally linked with the product. However since no votes where taken after the discussion, the vote would have to be postponed for the next committee meeting in the following months.

The Commission's proposal envisages a transitional period of 5 years, which would help the cheese producers to adapt.

[...]

This proposal will be discussed and voted upon in the next meeting of the member states’ regulatory committee, which is set to be in the next 2 or 3 months. In the absence of an agreement in the committee's next meeting, the question will be referred to the Council of Ministers. If no agreement is reached, the matter will be judged by the Commission, which had already come out in favour of the Greece proposal.

And these people expect to be taken seriously as an international political, economic, and military force?

Venezuelan President/Dictator Hugo Chavez has been removed from office in a coup, according to the Venezuelan military. He lost the support of the military after his supporters fired into a crowd of marchers who were protesting his attempt to install his cronies in charge of the state oil company, killing at least twelve.

Venezuela is a key source of oil for the United States, and Chavez's actions had prompted a strike which was threatening to disrupt the nation's oil supply. So while this might create a short term disruption, it's probably beneficial in the long run.

On the one hand, a military coup is hardly something to be glad about. On the other, the military ousted a pro-Castro, pro-Saddam demagogue who was becoming more and more authoritarian -- with one of his final acts being to shut down the television stations that were broadcasting the protest march.

I guess we'll have to see how this plays out -- and whether Europe gives even a fraction of the amount of attention to these events as they do to Israel.

The Washington Post reports that the resume of D.C. Fire Chief Ronnie Few had a few minor mistakes on it, such as claiming a degree from a college which he only attended briefly. The error has been blamed on "staff," as if some secretary just decided to inflate his credentials on her own. Then again, some Europeans keep putting "elected leader" on Yasir Arafat's resume, so I guess anything is possible.

There's an old legal aphorism that goes, "If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither on your side, pound the table." Paul Krugman does a lot of pounding the table. Today, since he has run out of things to make up about President Bush's social security or energy plans, he decides to slur Bush over Thomas White. White's the secretary of the army, and a former Enron executive who presided over one of the more questionable Enron subsidiaries, which makes him an easy target. But Krugman doesn't care about Thomas White; he wants to go after Bush.

I don't know if anyone has done a calculation, but it's obvious that the Bush administration has appointed a record number of corporate executives to high-level positions, often regulating or doing business with their former employers.

The administration clearly doesn't worry about conflicts of interest, but you don't have to posit outright corruption to wonder. For example: The secretaries of the Navy and Air Force are both lifelong defense-contractor executives. Won't they tend in the nature of things to believe that what's good for General Dynamics is good for America? Indeed, defense stocks have soared, partly because Wall Street analysts predict that profit margins on future contracts will be far higher than was considered appropriate in the past.

But there's a further question. Many of the business executives recently appointed to government positions first entered the private sector after prior careers in the Reagan and Bush I administrations. As Sebastian Mallaby put it in The Washington Post, they are "political types dressed up in corporate clothing: people who got hired by business because they knew government, then hired by government on the theory that they knew business." (Dick Cheney is the quintessential example.) So are they really good businessmen, or are they just crony capitalists, men who have lived by their connections?

Consider the case of Thomas White, secretary of the Army, a former general who became a top Enron executive in 1990.

[...]

Stories about Mr. White's questionable behavior at his current job have emerged only recently, but it has been apparent for months that he was a Potemkin executive: all facade, with nothing behind it. Given that he was hired for his supposed business skills, this means that he is like a surgeon general who turns out never to have finished medical school.

So why does this administration, which is waving the flag so hard its arms must hurt, leave the Army — the Army! — in the hands of a man who is, at best, a poseur?

One theory I've heard is that Mr. White can't be fired: that there are facts about the administration's relationship with Enron that it doesn't want to come out, and that Mr. White knows where the bodies are buried.

My preferred explanation, however, is that Mr. White has been protected by the administration's infallibility complex. In case you haven't noticed, this administration never, ever admits making a mistake; even when it makes a policy U-turn, it tries to rewrite history to pretend that everything is still going according to plan.

Is there any group other than the staff of the New York Times editorial board that could get excited enough about the World Assembly on Aging to write an editorial about what the delegates are discussing? It's a United Nations conference! They'll sit around for a week arguing that the United States should give away lots of money, write a report blaming Israel for something-or-other, and go home.

So Harvard's new president, Lawrence Summers, gets into a feud with Cornel West, so now we're stuck with him at Princeton? For someone who is so concerned with "respect," Princeton is actually somewhat of an odd choice for West (though he spent six years here earlier in his career) because African American Studies is a non-degree granting program, rather than a full department.

Coincidently, a devastating review of West's behavior during the Summers incident was just published by John McWhorter in City Journal. McWhorter takes West to task for playing the victim card when confronted by Summers with valid criticisms.

It's not hard to see why the rest of the world is so much less supportive of Israel than the United States is. Blame the media. The Reuter's headline for Saturday's recap of Middle Eastern events:Israel launches new raids in defiance of U.S. Last I checked, the U.S. asked Israel to withdraw and asked Arafat to condemn terror attacks, and to stop them. Neither side has complied. So why is the sole focus on Israel's behavior? How come the headline isn't: Palestinians blow up pedestrians in defiance of U.S.? Or, at least, Arafat refuses to denounce terror attacks in defiance of U.S.? After all, even today, President Bush reiterated his demands for Arafat:

"The president expects Yasser Arafat to denounce this morning's attack, to step up and show leadership," Fleischer said. "This is murder and Yasser Arafat needs to renounce it and renounce it soon, if not today."

The IRS employs approximately 100,000 people. Apparently none of them are paid to actually look at the tax returns we're all forced to file. According to the Washington Post, over the last two years, the IRS has mistakenly paid about $30 million to people claiming a tax credit for slavery reparations. There is, of course, no such credit allowed under the tax code. The Post tries to portray the recipients of these credits as innocent dupes of scam artists and urban legends, but it's a little hard to believe that they couldn't figure out that the credit didn't exist when they looked at their tax return and couldn't find a line to put it on.

Then again, Paul Krugman is a nationally prominent economist, and he sees imaginary line items on the 1040, so maybe I shouldn't be so judgmental.

Fighting between Maoist rebels and the Nepalese government have claimed at least 160 lives so far in a single battle.

"They are so ferocious that they killed officers ... even after they surrendered," Vohra said. "They were stripped naked, then paraded, and finally beheaded with khukris, he said, referring to the traditional Nepali knives.

Under intense pressure from the United States, Yasser Arafat vigorously denounced terrorism. Well, he kinda, sorta disagreed with terrorism. Actually, he didn't say anything; instead, he issued a press release. An eleven paragraph press release, of which one mentions yesterday's homicide bombing. Even then, it was carefully worded:

On this basis, we strongly condemn the violent operations that target Israeli civilians, especially the recent operation in Jerusalem.

But what was extremely conspicuous by its absence was anything stronger than a "condemnation." For instance, an order to his forces not to engage in terrorism. Or, heaven forbid, an order to his forces to arrest others engaging in terrorism. Not that even the most starry-eyed optimist expected that. Still, Colin Powell, desperate to pretend that diplomacy still has relevance here, seized on this statement as sufficient to justify a meeting on Sunday.

At this meeting, Yasser can pretend that he's really truly sorry and won't do it anymore, and Powell can pretend to believe him, and then Bush can pretend to be hopeful, and Sharon can pretend he cares, and then Arafat can get back to the business of terrorism and Europeans can get back to deploring the "cycle of violence" and condemning Israel, and Saddam Hussein can get back to encouraging attacks on Israel to distract Bush from attacking him.

Apparently, the people of Venezuela may still have Hugo Chavez to kick around anymore. The militarily-appointed interim president, Pedro Carmona, has stepped down. Large counterprotests against the coup have occurred, and Chavez is vigorously denying that he resigned.

The anti-Chavez forces apparently overplayed their hand; instead of forcing out Chavez and sticking with the constitutional order of succession, they decided to dissolve the government and promise elections down the road. Venezuela's neighbors weren't happy with this, and Chavez supporters weren't, either. Unfortunately, it could get ugly, depending on whether or not the military splinters, and how far they're willing to go to advance whatever agenda they decide upon. Just as I said the other day, I guess we'll have to see how this plays out.

Well, almost. Actually, Secretary of State Colin Powell accomplished exactly nothing by meeting with Arafat, who refused to renounce violence, or conduct any negotiations, until after Israel "withdraws" from the territory it "occupies."

A senior aide, Saeb Erekat, said Arafat stood by his commitments, including an end to violence. But, Erekat said after the three-hour meeting, that meant "once the Israelis complete the withdrawal we will, as Palestinians, then carry out our obligations."

Yasser Arafat's "condemnation of violence" was a feeble, perfunctory excuse for statesmanship, a face-saving gesture for Colin Powell to allow the Secretary of State to meet Arafat without looking like he was (too) soft on terrorism. As I noted the press release barely mentioned the terrorist attack of Friday, and spent most of its language condemning Israel. Still, even that was too much for our supposed "allies", who complained about Arafat being forced to make the statement.

``Once again, President Arafat yields to pressure, especially American pressure,'' said an unsigned column in the Saudi Al Watan daily.

[...]

``Wouldn't it have been better for President Arafat to change the rules of the game by taking a courageous decision to refuse to receive Powell before Israel pulls out of the Palestinian areas?''

But [Jordanian newspaper columnist] al-Majali called the U.S. demand for a statement from Arafat ``American political terrorism,'' saying, ``It is illogical to ask the victim to denounce terrorism and not to ask the butcher to stop his terrorism.''

Back to our "allies" the Saudis, who not only whined about it, but threatened the United States:

In the Saudi-owned, London-based Al Hayat daily, Saudi columnist Dawood al-Shirian also accused the United States of supporting Israel's West Bank offensive and warned it would prompt terrorist attacks against the United States.

Israel's incursion in the West Bank ``is more of a threat to American interests than the New York and Washington attacks and it will create a terror that is fiercer than al-Qaida's terror,'' al-Shirian wrote.

Add the Ukraine to the list of countries where Jews are being attacked by mobs shouting "Kill the Jews!" Ukrainian authorities are blaming it on "soccer hooliganism," saying it has no connection to anti-semitism.

Meanwhile, back in Tunisia, funeral services were held for the 13 dead as the result of a synagogue explosion that everyone except Tunis believes to be an attack.

I wonder how many other synagogues will be coincidentally, accidentally attacked while world leaders continue to blame all the problems of the world on Israel?

Damian Penny reports that the leftist British media (i.e., the Independent) don't even pretend to be objective in their coverage of the Arab-Israeli war, treating every secondhand Palestinian allegation as fact.

The folks at Libertarian Samizdata provide an argument why the International Criminal Court is a bad idea, even if its founders start with the best of intentions.

Bureaucracies, once established, tend not only to grow but also actively seek reasons for their continued existance and expansion. Just now, it is only the above-mentioned type of activities which are under the ICC's remit but how long will it be thus circumscribed? A brief to tackle 'crimes against humanity' can be interpreted in all manner of ways to cover all manner of policy decisions. A tough anti-immigration policy? A lack of welfare benefits? No nationalised 'free' health care? No state education programme? There are no end of people who earnestly believe that such things constitute 'crimes'.. The ICC may be benign but how long will it stay that way?

Last week, I wrote sarcastically about the World Conference on aging blaming Israel. Apparently, my only mistake was that I didn't provide hysterical quotes of outrage from Arab diplomats, because, as it turns out, the conference decided that everything really is Israel's fault.

Israel is now saying that rather than the "massacres" reported by people who weren't even there, rather than the "hundreds" rumored to have been killed (including by Israel's own army), only 45 Palestinians were killed during the fighting in Jenin. That number has not yet been independently verified, but since the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that the Israeli Army could not bury the bodies without any oversight, it will be. (Dare you to try to get a court ruling in Iraq, or the Palestinian Authority, which goes against army policy.)

In some ways, the entire discussion is perverse, as if tallying the number of dead changed the moral equation. If Israel is legitimately defending itself (and it is), then 20 dead or 200 is all the same. If Israel's actions were illegitimate, then 2 dead would be too many. But since public relations matters more than logic or morality, the lower the death toll, the better for Israel. More importantly, of course, is whether the dead are civilians or combatants -- though that may never be known to any degree of certainty. Still, the fewer the total dead, the fewer civilian casualties there could be. Either way, all supporters of Israel will breathe a sigh of relief if this lower total turns out to be the case, and those who cavalierly charged "genocide" will be even more thoroughly discredited than they already are.

Still, there was major destruction to the camp's infrastructure; let's see if Saudi Arabia holds a telethon to build new homes in Jenin, or if they're too busy giving money to homicide bombers and Yasser Arafat's corrupt, terrorist Palestinian Authority.

I'm sure about four people reading this site care about Cornel West leaving Harvard and coming to Princeton, but it's my site. West elaborated on why he left:

On Monday, West discussed the meeting with Summers that reportedly kindled their dispute.

He called Summers "the Ariel Sharon of American higher education" and a "bully."

According to the Washington Post, there's drinking going on in college. And apparently, some students drink too much.

The Post's spin: those students must not realize that drinking too much is dangerous. Unfortunately, there really isn't much in the way of evidence for this:

About 1,400 students a year succumb to drinking-related deaths, though fewer than 300 of those result from alcohol poisoning or choking in their sleep, a recent study showed.

For every such fatality, many college officials believe, there are 10 to 20 close calls where students end up in the emergency room just a drink or two away from death.

The European Union is worried about the money they're sending to Afghanistan:

THE European Union is losing patience with the Afghan interim government of Hamid Karzai, fearing that hundreds of millions of pounds in aid are being frittered away by stubborn officials with no understanding of economics.

There are fears that aid is vanishing into a bureaucratic maze where few records are kept. "There has to be some sort of transparency, otherwise our dollars will end up in somebody's Swiss bank account," said one official.

The Supreme Court has just voted to strike down a ban on child pornography that didn't involve actual children. The law proscribed pornography involving adults that looked like children, pornography involving computer-generated images that looked like children, and pornography marketed in such a way that it "conveys the impression" that children are involved. A surprisingly strong 6-3 first amendment vote -- which was actually even stronger, as all nine justices expressed concern about elements of the law. Only the section of the law forbidding "virtual child pornography" had any support, with three justices voting in favor and a fourth, Clarence Thomas, suggesting that if evidence arose that this hindered the prosecution of real child pornography cases, that he'd rethink his vote.

It's extremely encouraging that the court did not buy into the For The Children rhetoric of the law's proponents; politicians, after all, have a tendency to insist that everything from highway construction to farm support payments are necessary because of the welfare of children. One of the arguments made by proponents of the law was that this non-child-child-pornography could be used by pedophiles to seduce children; the Court didn't buy into this speculative causal link between speech and child abuse.

My initial impression of such a strong pro-free speech vote on such an unpopular subject, is that it suggests that other litigation which threatens free speech is in trouble. That includes lawsuits against Hollywood over Columbine-like tragedies, and McCainShaysFeingoldMeehan's campaign finance censorship law.

A new study was released showing that the overall condition of welfare children, since the 1996 national welfare reform, hasn't changed significantly. That's very good news; despite all the predictions of disaster from activists, there have been no catastrophes. Welfare rolls have been reduced substantially, and yet the horror stories of children starving to death just haven't materialized.

But that's not good news if you're pro-welfare, and evidently the media is. So how do they spin it? With the headline "Study: Welfare reform hasn't helped kids." That's not exactly inaccurate -- but as a friend pointed out, the headline could just as easily have been "Children not harmed by welfare reform," or it could have been "Taxpayers save money without affecting children."

Mothers facing new welfare rules are finding jobs and earning more money. But they haven't improved their parenting skills, they still have trouble paying rent, and they spend less time with their kids, according to a three-state study that examined details of family life.

So how can this not be good news?

A top welfare official in the Bush administration agreed that the system is not doing much to improve the lives of children. That's why the administration wants to add improving child well-being to the list of goals for the welfare law, which is being renewed this year, said Wade Horn, who heads the Administration for Children and Families at the Department of Health and Human Services.

"The current goal of welfare is not to improve the well-being of children," Horn said. "It's not an explicit goal."

Not that they had anything to do with it, but apparently that makes no difference. The mother of Charles Bishop, the idiot teenager who stole an airplane and crashed it into a Tampa building in January has sued the maker of the acne drug Accutane for causing her son's suicide. As Michael Fumento notes, there's no evidence whatsoever that Accutane causes depression or suicide. Moreover, there's no evidence, other than the mother's claims, that the kid even took Accutane; the autopsy found none in his system. And given that the kid left a note praising Osama Bin Laden, it's a little difficult to see how depression was even a factor.

But, hey, if you can profit off your son's death, why not?

Muslimpundit's back after an absence, and it was worth the wait, as he explains why Israel is so hated in the Arab world:

And traditionally, the place that Islamic theology, as well as those Muslim civilisations, accorded to Jews in this ecumenical outlook is that of a powerless, contemptible and weak people. Despite referring to Jews as the "People of the Book" in the Qur'an, Muslim scholars have, in their works, by and large emphasised Jews as an example of an inferior people. An examination of the ancient stories in the Qur'an that talk at length about God, Moses and the “transgressions” of the Children of Israel, provides a religious basis for this Muslim view. This is why, in traditional Islamic theology, as well as in history, Jews have by and large been accorded much tolerance by Muslims, but not necessarily respect.

And herein lies a very important point. This is yet another problem being faced by many Muslims, and especially Muslim opinion leaders (many of which ascribe to some sort of Islamism). When one hears about them pontificating on how Muslims should grant respect to others, there is, more often than not, a distinct difference in their usage of the word “respect”. It does not signify respect per se, as an Anglosphere resident would have it, but approximates only tolerance, almost always used in a sense of forced patience (e.g. see this previous post). In this manner, Muslim clerical views of non-Muslims, but especially where Jews and Christians are concerned, do not preclude Muslim feelings of superiority over them. This is how it has been in the centuries past, and unfortunately remains to this day. Many other religions have seen fit to dispense with, or at least significantly tone down, this believer/non-believer dichotomy; with some religions it did not constitute a bastion pillar of belief. Not so with Islam. Jews were by and large accorded tolerance in past Islamic civilisations, but the state only conferred upon them then what would now be considered as second class status. They were universally regarded as weak, cowardly and contemptible, and such stories emphasising such supposed attributes were commonly fed to the new generations of Muslims at the time.

The Washington Post reports on a relatively new development in crime control. ("Crime control" is their phrase, not mine. I guess they thought "crimefighting" sounded too much like a comic book.)

Jose Gonzalez was charged by Arlington police over the weekend with auto theft.

He had no clue it was the car that turned him in.

The late-model sedan he was driving was the Arlington County Police Department's new "bait car," wired to alert police when someone tries to steal it.

When the car called police, a map of Arlington flashed on a computer screen in the Emergency Communications Center, pinpointing the vehicle's location. Because the car was linked to a global positioning device, dispatchers tracked its movements on the computer screen and knew where to send two police cars.

The Washington Post reports that Congress has begun considering legislation to create a national ID card. The proposal being considered would turn the driver's license into a de facto national ID, by setting federal standards for the design and content of driver's licenses, and creating some unspecified sort of national database for sharing the information.

The problem is, nobody -- at least nobody involved in actually writing the laws -- has exactly thought through what this is supposed to accomplish. Such a proposal could be very effective at stopping underage drinking, but is unlikely to be a significant obstacle for terrorists. There are many separate issues:

1. Ensuring that the card is not a forgery.
2. Ensuring that the information on the card is accurate.
3. Ensuring that person with the card is the true owner of the card.
4. Ensuring that the true owner of the card is "reliable."

Let's look at a situation like September 11th: Mohammed Atta presents an identification card at the airport in order to be allowed to board the plane. The airline check-in counter employee first has to verify that the card is genuine, by checking a nationwide database (just as merchants do with credit cards). Then the employee has to verify that the card belongs to Atta, by comparing his biometric identification to that on the card. (This means that his fingerprints or retina or the like will have to be scanned at the check-in counter. Further, this means that every location which will require identification will require this scanning equipment. Every police car will require it, for traffic stops.)

That seems to be as far as legislators have thought. But there's more: none of that will help unless the information provided at the time Atta obtained the ID card is accurate. What if, when Atta applied for his driver's license, he did so under the name Bubba Jones? The airline counter employee will verify that he's Bubba Jones, the owner of the valid ID card. Of course, it could be mandated that Atta provide proof of identify at the time he applies for the card -- but that simply shifts the problem one level. How do we ensure that this proof of identity is valid? Couldn't that be forged?

But suppose you find a way around that problem, somehow. Your whole expensive, high-tech system is still worthless, because Mohammed Atta could apply under his real name, using valid documents, obtain a valid ID card, and then go hijack the airplane. Unless you have reason to suspect him in advance, and a national database listing everyone suspicious, it doesn't do any good to identify him. And unfortunately, that last step, the hard part, has nothing to do with a national ID system at all. It has to do with foreign intelligence.

And of course, all that assumes that a civil servant can't be bribed. How much do people think Department of Motor Vehicle employees get paid, anyway? For a small (by international conspiracy standards) $50,000 payment, don't you think one could be persuaded to look the other way as an inaccurate license is issued?

If I had won $110,333,333, you wouldn't be seeing any updates here for quite a long while. Sigh.

Forty-two failing schools in Philadelphia will now be managed by Edison Schools, two universities, and four smaller private management companies. The New York Times calls this "privatization," but it's not, really -- it's subcontracting. It's not a trivial distinction; the schools are still public, funded with tax dollars. They're just run by private companies. Still, it's a step.

This was supposed to happen months ago, but opposition by the Philadelphia mayor, parents, and (who else?) the teacher's union stalled the decision; this happened only because the governor had the authority to push it through in spite of the mayor. The union was particularly upset:

After the meeting, Jerry Jordan, a vice president of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, said he regretted that the panel had said so little about how the schools would be redesigned by the outsiders.

"They didn't spell anything out," Mr. Jordan said. "It's like, `Let's see what works.' It shows a total lack of respect."

And as further evidence that the schools desperately needed to be taken over:

After the roll was called, several dozen student protesters, who have long argued that it was undemocratic for a for-profit company to operate a public school, chanted, "Shame! Shame! Shame!" and "I am not for sale!"

Newark Mayor Sharpe James, who had been criticizing his opponent in the mayoral race for having an aide who visited a stripclub, actually had been there himself.

Mayor Sharpe James said today that he had visited a nightclub that investigators say offered sex on the side, but he said he had done so only in an official capacity to see that it was shut down.

In Wednesday's New York Times, Tom Friedman proposed that U.S. or NATO forces police a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. It sounds superficially like a good idea: if they can't live together peacefully, then we'll just make them do it. They really want to live in peace, and if it weren't for their leaders, they'd do so. So we'll just impose it on them, and everyone will live happily ever after.

Not quite. Robert Kagan explains in the Washington Post why that will never work. First of all, the United States is the only third party that Israel would ever trust, which means that the financial and personnel burden would fall entirely on us. And our troops would be targets, just as they were in Lebanon in the 1980s, when an earlier round of homicide-bombers killed 240 Marines. And even if, by some miracle, our troops didn't start as targets, they'd end up that way as soon as they took sides -- just as in Somalia.

Is there another option I'm missing? If not, the proposal for an international peacekeeping force looks less like a real plan than a desperate if noble attempt to solve the insoluble in the Middle East -- a deus ex America summoned to provide a miracle when all roads to peace have reached a dead end. Even Ehud Barak's idea of building a very, very big fence between Israel and the Palestinians looks better. Help us out, Tom.

What if the U.S. were planning to attack Iraq, and Israel were demanding that the United States show restraint? Victor Davis Hanson examines the Middle East from this opposite perspective.

Mr. Sharon: We know that. But the perception lingers that the present American administration is full of hawks, obsessed with Saddam — and wants to punish an old nemesis rather than deal with more fundamental social issues.

Mr. Powell: Mr. Bush was elected. There is no such thing as a "Bush-Saddam" grudge. We don't implement policy that way.

Mr. Sharon: But if you go into Iraq, won't you just raise another Saddam and more suicide bombing like 9/11? There will be an entire generation of Arabs who will hate you for attacking Baghdad — especially in such a one-sided, asymmetrical war, when the tanks and planes are all on your side. Aren't you worried that ten Arabs will die for every lost American — how will that play in Europe and the Middle East?

Mr. Powell: What would you have us do? Lose more of our kids to bombers for public relations? There are no easy solutions. Do you think we like going in where we are not wanted?

Mr. Sharon: Still, how can your planes separate the good from bad? Surely there are Iraqis who don't like Saddam. Must they suffer when your tanks crush houses and your planes shoot up streets? We already saw some of that collateral damage in Afghanistan and Mogadishu. We didn't want to say anything, but you guys killed more Somalis in 24 hours than our IDF killed Palestinians in an entire decade.

A small plane has just hit (11:45, EDT) the tallest building in Milan, Italy. It's 30 stories high, housing local government offices, and the plane hit around the 26th floor. Smoke is coming from the building, and an Italian legislator has already declared that it was a terrorist attack, though that's an unofficial announcement.

[Update: it seems that the legislator may have been jumping the gun to get himself on television; it now appears as if it may have been an accident. Only two people have been confirmed killed, but dozens have been hospitalized. Still, we're all jumpy, for obvious reasons.]

Bob Kuttner argues in The American Prospect that American politics may be close to a "tipping point" in favor of conservatism. His argument is that conservative media, think tanks, foundations, and the like are growing stronger, while liberal ones are growing weaker.

All of this has caused the ideological center of gravity in America to shift steadily to the right, even though polls show most Americans remain fairly liberal on the policy particulars. That is, most Americans say they would pay higher taxes to support things like universal health insurance, high-quality child care, and prescription drugs for all. Most Americans overwhelmingly support the present Social Security system. Most do not want to overturn Roe v. Wade. Most think workers should be paid a living wage and have the right to join unions. So, in a sense, elite opinion is far to the right of mass opinion and the political system is just not offering voters the menu they'd like to see. Political scientist Walter Dean Burnham termed this a "politics of excluded alternatives."

But elite opinion matters immensely, because it sets agendas and contours what politicians think is "mainstream." (So abstinence-only birth control is considered mainstream -- your tax dollars are supporting it -- but universal health insurance, which most Americans want, is considered utopian.)

Think about it: what's the last government program that was actually threatened by this supposed conservative dominance Kuttner sees? Is there a single government agency that is in danger of being closed? (The potential reorganization of the INS doesn't count; that's shuffling bureaucracies around, not eliminating them.) What was the recent response to 9/11? It was to federalize airport security personnel, as if making them government workers is going to improve them. The "prescription drug" benefit that Kuttner discusses as though it were a pipe dream was promised by both major party candidates in the last election. There's a debate over how to pay for it, and about whether to provide direct subsidies to individuals or to negotiate reduced costs through Medicare, and whether it can be afforded -- but nobody in the mainstream is saying that it's simply not the government's job to pay for drugs.

What kind of strange political world do we live in where a longshot proposal to privatize two percent of wages in social security is seen as a conservative "tipping point"?

Juan Gato dissects yet another idiotic column from Paul Krugman. Krugman has been ranting for months about Bush's tax cut, pretending there's a real "lockbox."

So Robert Kuttner thinks that the U.S. is becoming more conservative? Then perhaps he can explain a big defeat in the Senate for President Bush's ANWR drilling plan. The plan needed 60 votes to defeat a filibuster; it only got 46. It's hard to know precisely what to make of this one. For whatever reason, environmental lobbyists pulled out all the stops to defeat this one; the League of Conservation Voters threatened Congress that they'd count this vote double in their annual environmental rating of each congressman. I guess they've run out of fundraising issues to flog.

Of course, the New York Times showed more of its unbiased objective reporting, describing this as "an issue that has pitted Democrats and environmentalists against Republicans and petroleum interests," as if the only people who would benefit from drilling were oil companies, and as if their opponents were all altruists who cared about making the world a better place.

The Arab propaganda line has been that Israel has been massacring poor innocent civilians in Jenin, that without provocation Israel just decided to destroy the town (or "refugee camp," whichever sounds worse). This has been repeated so frequently that many members of the media were convinced that massive war crimes had taken place -- admittedly, aided by the fact that Israel wasn't letting independent observers into the town -- and any story to the contrary was described as pro-Israel bias.

So how do people explain this article in the Egyptian based Al-Ahram Weekly? It describes the Palestinian behavior in Jenin, approvingly, perhaps not realizing the significance:

Omar admits he is one of only a few dozen fighters not to emerge either dead or in plastic handcuffs from the fiercest battle waged by the Palestinians during the Israeli army's invasion of the West Bank.

Of his group of 30 gunmen, only four escaped from the camp on Wednesday, after the Palestinian arsenal ran dry. Most of the others were shot dead.

"Of all the fighters in the West Bank we were the best prepared," he says. "We started working on our plan: to trap the invading soldiers and blow them up from the moment the Israeli tanks pulled out of Jenin last month."

Omar and other "engineers" made hundreds of explosive devices and carefully chose their locations.

"We had more than 50 houses booby-trapped around the camp. We chose old and empty buildings and the houses of men who were wanted by Israel because we knew the soldiers would search for them," he said.

"We cut off lengths of mains water pipes and packed them with explosives and nails. Then we placed them about four metres apart throughout the houses -- in cupboards, under sinks, in sofas."

The fighters hoped to disable the Israeli army's tanks with much more powerful bombs placed inside rubbish bins on the street. More explosives were hidden inside the cars of Jenin's most wanted men.

Connected by wires, the bombs were set off remotely, triggered by the current from a car battery.

I'll wait to see the "international community" retract the claims of Israeli war crimes. But I won't hold my breath.

President Bush calls Ariel Sharon a "man of peace." Either Bush has stopped wobbling, or he really has adopted the "rope-a-dope" strategy. Perhaps he really didn't intend for Colin Powell to accomplish anything on his journey through the Middle East, and it was just a way to pretend he was doing something while really allowing Israel to continue its efforts to root out terror.

Certainly the statement didn't thrill Bush critics like David Sanger, who once again editorialized against Bush in the news section of the New York Times.

But even some members of Mr. Bush's administration seemed confused today about whether Mr. Bush had simply misspoken, or whether he was returning to the kind of statements he made at his Texas ranch over Easter weekend, which Israel took as a green light to press ahead with its military action.

The Washington Post reports on a dispute over the Bush administration's ideas about Head Start, and as usual, reports in a completely unbiased fashion. The paper's sub-headline?

Child Advocates Alarmed by Stress On Accountability

The really odd thing is that the dispute, as portrayed in the Post, is "play vs. learn." Which side of that debate should "child advocates" be on, if such an animal existed?

This is good news for civil libertarians: a police informant who lied when he implicated another was found liable for malicious prosecution after being sued by his "victim." All too frequently, prosecutors rely on questionable informants because they're convenient and helpful, whether or not they're honest. And once a prosecutor does use an informant, there's no incentive to prosecute him for perjury, so the informant has little to lose by lying. This isn't likely to set a significant precedent, because

1. In order to prevail in such a suit, a plaintiff has to prove to a jury that the defendant knowingly or recklessly lied.
2. People working as informants are often going to be judgment-proof

Mark Steyn proves once again that he has a clearer view of the Middle East than Colin Powell and his European fellow-travellers.

Odd, isn't it? The Americans are routinely accused of being (in Pat Buchanan's phrase) Israel's amen corner. But Washington is at least prepared to offer the odd, qualified criticism of Sharon. The rest of the world, by contrast, is happy to parrot Yasser's talking points without modifying a single semi-colon. In the last month, I've found as many Jew-haters on the Continent as in the Middle East, but the difference is that the Arabs are fierce in their hatred, no matter how contorted their arguments, while the Europeans are lazy, off-hand Jew-haters -- they don't need arguments, they're happy to let the Arabs supply the script. Thus, the extraordinary resolution this week by the UN Human Rights Commission which accuses Israel of many and varied human rights violations, makes no mention of suicide bombers, and endorses the movement for a Palestinian state by "all available means, including armed struggle" -- i.e., terrorism. The resolution could have been drafted by the Arab League or the PLO. Forty of the 53 nations on the Commission approved it, including six EU members: Austria, Belgium, France, Portugal, Spain and Sweden. Only five countries could summon the will to vote against: Britain, Canada, Germany, the Czech Republic and Guatemala. (The U.S. is not a member of the HRC, having been kicked off by a coalition of Euro-Arab schemers.)

This is only the most extreme example of how the less sense the Arabs make the more the debate is framed in their terms. For all the tedious bleating of the Euroninnies, what Israel is doing is perfectly legal. Even if you sincerely believe that "Chairman" Arafat is entirely blameless when it comes to the suicide bombers, when a neighbouring jurisdiction is the base for hostile incursions, a sovereign state has the right of hot pursuit. Britain has certainly availed herself of this internationally recognized principle: In the 19th century, when the Fenians launched raids on Canada from upstate New York, the British thought nothing of infringing American sovereignty to hit back -- and Washington accepted they were entitled to do so. But the rights every other sovereign state takes for granted are denied to Israel. "The Jews are a peculiar people: things permitted to other nations are forbidden to the Jews," wrote America's great longshoreman philosopher Eric Hoffer after the 1967 war. "Other nations drive out thousands, even millions of people and there is no refugee problem ... But everyone insists that Israel must take back every single Arab ... Other nations when victorious on the battlefield dictate peace terms. But when Israel is victorious it must sue for peace. Everyone expects the Jews to be the only real Christians in this world." Thus, the massive population displacements in Europe at the end of the Second World War are forever, but those in Palestine a mere three years later must be corrected and reversed. On the Continent, losing wars comes with a territorial price: The Germans aren't going to be back in Danzig any time soon. But, in the Middle East, no matter how often the Arabs attack Israel and lose, their claims to their lost territory manage to be both inviolable but endlessly transferable.

The Dutch government resigned recently after a report blamed it for the Serbian massacres of Bosnians in U.N. designated "safe areas" in the mid-1990s. The Dutch sin wasn't action, but inaction. But Samantha Power says that the Clinton Administration was guilty of the same sin.

Once Mladic seized Srebrenica on July 11, 1995, American policymakers were keenly aware that the men and boys were being separated from the women and children, that Dutch soldiers were barred from supervising the "evacuation," and that the Muslims' fate lay in the hands of Mladic, the local embodiment of "evil."

U.S. officials received hysterical phone calls from leading members of the Bosnian government who pleaded with Washington to use NATO air power to save those in Mladic's custody. One July 13 classified cable related the "alarming news" that Serb forces were committing "all sorts" of atrocities. On July 17 the CIA's Bosnia Task Force wrote in its classified daily report that refugee reports of mass murder "provide details that appear credible." In a July 19 confidential memorandum, Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights John Shattuck described "credible reports of summary executions and the kidnapping and rape of Bosnian women."

Yet, despite this knowledge, neither President Clinton nor his top advisers made the fate of the men and boys an American priority. The president issued no public threats and ordered no contingency military planning. Spokesman Nick Burns told the Washington press corps that the United States was "not a decisive actor" in the debate over how to respond. The most powerful superpower in the history of mankind had influence only "on the margins," in Burns's words.

Jean-Marie Le Pen, the French nationalist/racist/anti-Semite/insert-media-synonym-for-far-right-wing-here, scores a big upset, coming in second in France's national elections, ahead of socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin. This gives Le Pen the right to participate in the runoff election with incumbent president Jacques Chirac. That's, I gather, approximately the equivalent of Pat Buchanan beating out George Bush a few years ago for the Republican nomination.

Now, I admit I don't know enough about French politics to comment intelligently on them -- insert punchline here -- but a few thoughts:

• This is more of a rejection of France's mainstream parties than it is an embracing of Le Pen. At 17 percent, he didn't do that well -- just a few points higher than he was polling, or than he had received in the past. The big surprise was how poorly Chirac and especially Jospin did.
  
• Chirac will probably crush Le Pen in the general election. Jospin's socialist base isn't going to go to Le Pen.
  
• Although Le Pen's total wasn't that much higher than in previous elections, in politics appearance matters much more than reality. This is going to be seen as a big rejection for European integration and for immigration.
  
• The politics of European elites and the politics of European citizens don't seem to be quite in alignment.

Headline in the New York Times: Era of Uncontrolled Growth Is Ending at a California Lake.

The lake, 120 miles east of San Francisco, is one of the few in California with private houses on its shores, and therein lies a problem with which residents and local officials are only beginning to grapple.

In the last few years, with little planning and without a single environmental impact review, hundreds of houses and piers have been built on Lake Tulloch, and developers are eyeing more territory.

If there's a tragedy, the New York Times insists that legislation would have prevented it. If there's a tragedy and there's existing legislation, then the New York Times insists that enforcement would have prevented it. If there's a tragedy and there's existing legislation and enforcement, then the New York Times insists that more legislation and better enforcement would have prevented it.

And if some kids die while in daycare, then it must be the fault of "lax oversight." Nevermind that the deaths were the result of (1) kids being left unattended in hot cars in the summertime, and (2) a car accident. Apparently the Times thinks that the state of Tennessee should employ people to follow around daycare center employees 24/7.

It's more budget follies at the New York Times -- this one care of the editorial board, rather than Paul Krugman. (Count your blessings: at least this way we're spared talk of the mythical "lockbox.")

President Bush has been asserting lately that the budget is so tight there is barely enough money to pay for anything new besides the war on terrorism. He has begun issuing veto threats if Congress tries to defy his spending priorities. How bizarre it is, then, for him to contend at the same time that the nation needs another tax cut. Last week, the House went along, making permanent the ill-advised 10-year, $1.35 trillion tax reduction enacted last year. The Bush proposal would drain nearly $400 billion more over the next 10 years and cost at least $4 trillion in the decade after that. A more irresponsible position would be hard to imagine.

When they're discussing the "cost" of tax cuts, the problem is compounded. First, they have to guess how much money would be raised in the next decade under the old tax code. Then, they have to guess about the effects of a tax cut on the economy -- or, in Timesworld, simply pretend that there won't be any. Then they subtract fictional number B from fictional number A, and declare that the difference of two guesses is a real number.

The sad truth about budget politics this year is that Congress and the Bush administration have gotten themselves into such a box that irresponsible posturing becomes the easiest recourse. The tax cut of last year, along with the recent mild economic downturn, vaporized the revenues needed to deal with anything outside military and homeland defenses.

Oh, the rest of the editorial? I'll save you the trouble of going to the link: Republicans evil. Give money to rich people. Should take it away. Spend it on bureaucrats. Help poor.

Well, that may be true, but two bureaucracies are not better than one. And yet, the House of Representatives is set to turn the Immigration and Naturalization Service from one agency into two, and George Bush appears to be willing to support this approach. The theory is that the two functions of the INS -- providing services to immigrants and enforcing immigration law -- are in conflict, and that they should be handled by different agencies. Great. But how is that going to help solve the problem that the people working at the agency are incompetent civil servants who can't get fired, even if they give student visas to dead hijackers? How is that going to help solve the problem that the agency is using 30 year old computer systems that can't talk to each other?

It's not as if new people are going to be hired at the new and improved INS. The same employees will be there; they'll just be reporting to different people. And this is the brilliant idea our government has come up with to protect the country from terrorism? (Answer: no. This is the brilliant idea our government has come up with to protect incumbent Congressmen's jobs in the November elections. Once this law is passed, expect a spate of campaign ads from candidates explaining how they helped "reform" the INS.)

Glenn Reynolds pointed out this Associated Press story about the investigation of Michael Bellesiles. But what I noted was this ridiculously wimpy version of events:

But scholars and critics also became skeptical. Bellesiles has been accused of ideological bias, selective scholarship and misleading statements. Some corrections already have been made in the paperback edition, and Bellesiles' editor at Knopf, Jane Garrett, has said that "other corrections will be made in subsequent printings."

While researching a minor point, I happened to come across this account of Ronald Reagan's "Tear Down This Wall" speech. Guess who was opposed to Reagan including the powerful line in his speech? (Besides the French, I mean.) The usual suspects at the State Department, of course -- the same naysayers who thought that Dubya's "Axis of Evil" was too provocative. But also our current Secretary of State -- then-National Security Advisor Colin Powell, the man who later let Saddam get away, the man who now refuses to call Arafat a terrorist. Anybody seeing a pattern here?

President Bush is likely to endorse a bill currently making its way through Congress that mandates so-called mental health parity in insurance coverage. The Washington Post, as is typical, frames this as a debate between Republicans and business on the one hand and Democrats and "mental health advocates" on the other. (Because, after all, anybody who objects to big government hates mental health, as well.)

The main opposition has come from key GOP lawmakers in the House, who object to the higher cost the requirement would impose on employers.

The Post describes the primary debate as being over the increased cost of such additional insurance coverage. Is there nobody in Congress who actually thinks it's a bad idea to be micromanaging health insurance, regardless of the costs? If employers and insurers want to offer mental health coverage, let them. But why should Congress tell an employer what sort of insurance to offer? Whatever happened to letting people choose for themselves?

One can predict the chain of events to follow: Insurance costs will rise. Fewer Americans will have insurance. More and more politicians will campaign on the "Government needs to provide welfare insurance to those who don't have it" platform. And we'll all have to suffer through the agony of watching more Harry-and-Louise commercials.

And the worst part is, the people who really need mental health treatment the most are likely to be unemployed, so this proposed law would do little for them.

A Palestinian man was accused of threatening the use of anthrax, after being seen apparently throwing white powder into a mailbox during the height of the anthrax attacks last fall. An Arab immigrant accused of anthrax attacks -- I wouldn't have given good odds on the outcome. But on Thursday he was acquitted of all charges. It just shows how out of date the worldview of the left -- the assumption that the United States is a violent, racist, knee-jerk country -- really is. Even President Bush bought into this, at least a little, rushing to warn us after 9/11 not to overreact to the attacks and take out our anger on Middle Easterners. But maybe Americans are just a little more tolerant than that. Unlike, say, Palestinians, who lynch suspected collaborators without trial.

Palestinian terrorists (or, as the AP calls them, "gunmen") killed five Israelis and wounded more than a dozen others in an attack on the West Bank town of Adora. I expect that the "international community" will condemn the Adora killings as quickly and as forcefully as they condemned the Israeli incursion into Jenin. I also expect Ed McMahon to show up at my door with a check.

Somehow, I missed this story this week -- perhaps because it was buried in the paper -- but Tunisian authorities have finally admitted that the explosion at the Djerba synogogue two weeks ago was a terrorist attack, after initially claiming, implausibly, that it was a routine accident.

After the attack, a group directly linked in the past to al Qaeda, the Islamic Army for the Liberation of Holy Sites, asserted responsibility. Authorities are taking the claim seriously because a faxed statement by the group to two London-based Arabic newspapers contained the name of the truck driver before authorities had released it.

According to German media reports, Nawar, 25, who had lived in Lyon, in southern France, called a contact in Germany immediately before the blast. During the call, which was intercepted by German intelligence, the driver, when asked if he needed anything, replied, "I only need the command."

There are so many, particularly on the left, who claim that Muslim terrorism is caused by American foreign policy, or Israeli occupation, or both. Some of those who say this are motivated by anti-Semitism, and some by reflexive anti-Americanism. And some are just naive. These people want to justify homicide bombers by saying that the poor Palestinians just don't have any choice because they don't have F-15s and tanks. But this Tunisian atrocity wasn't an attack on Israel or the United States. This wasn't an attack by a poor starving refugee. This was a premeditated, well-financed attack on a Jewish target.

This is what Israel is fighting. This is what America is fighting. And these fights won't be won by negotiation or appeasement. They'll be won only when Islamo-fascism is so discredited by defeat that liberal democracy is seen as the only viable alternative.

Charles Johnson provides a sampling of what it would sound like if American diplomats talked to Arab countries the way Arab diplomats talk to us.

Some diplomats are annoyed at the United States because we keep using our influence in international affairs. The United States successfully pushed to have Jose Bustani, the head of the Organization for the Prevention of Chemical Warfare, removed from his post. This comes a week after the United States' successful effort to replace the head of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, thus "prompting concern among some countries about the way Washington is able to influence the fate of international officials who fall foul of its policies." Uh, isn't that the way it's supposed to work? Is the United States supposed to support international officials who don't act in our interests? Well, if you believe the French, the answer is apparently yes:

Some delegates shared Bustani's disquiet. "Multilateralism is based on the independence of international organizations and their leaders," says Anne Gazeau-Secret, the ambassador of France, which abstained in Monday's vote.

If other governments followed the US lead and sought to remove United Nations officials whom they disliked, she worried, "a chain reaction risks leading to the destruction of the multilateral system."

Incidentally, reading complaints such as the one above, one might get the impression that the United States sent in Navy Seals to arrest Bustani and remove him from office. In fact, the OPCW held a vote, which Bustani lost, 48-7. Uh, that sounds like multilateralism to me. (And the seven who voted in favor of Bustani? In addition to his home country of Brazil, the freedom-loving states of Belarus, China, Cuba, Iran, Mexico, and Russia. Is the United States supposed to be apologetic for disagreeing with this bunch?)

But it gets even more hypocritical: some complained because they alleged that the United States was using money to sway the outcome of the vote. (The U.S. hasn't yet paid half of its 20% share of the organization's $60 million budget.) So, according to the multilaterists, the United States should pay far more than its share but not have any special influence over the workings of the organization. Say, whatever happened to no taxation without representation, anyway?

Both the Israeli government and Palestinian leaders agreed to a U.S. proposal to end the siege of Arafat. Arafat wouldn't agree to hand over prisoners to Israel, and, given his history, Israel wouldn't trust Arafat to keep people in prison. So now the prisoners will stay in Arafat's custody, but American and British observers will monitor the situation to make sure they stay in prison. In exchange for allowing this, Arafat gets freedom of movement within the West Bank and Gaza.

The conventional wisdom is that this is supposed to provide Israel with some breathing room in its attempt to hold off the U.N. inquisition over the Jenin massacre hoax. Maybe it will. But since the U.N. has shown itself ready, willing, and able to blame Israel no matter what the situation, that seems a weak approach. Maybe it's just a way to hold Arafat more accountable for terrorist attacks like the one at Adora on Saturday. The Palestinian-apologist argument has been that Arafat can't be blamed for terrorist attacks because he was impotent as long as Israel was isolating him. Well, now he won't be isolated, and won't have that excuse.

That's certainly how President Bush sees it:

President Bush said yesterday he expects Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to "condemn and thwart terrorist activities" within the next 72 hours. Top Stories

     The president sent that message shortly after he personally negotiated a deal to end the Israeli siege that has trapped Mr. Arafat at his West Bank compound since March 29.

     Mr. Bush said the next few days will prove how serious the Palestinian chairman is about ending the violence.

     "His responsibility is just what I said — to renounce, to help detect and stop terrorist killings. And the message can't be more clear, and we're going to continue to hold people accountable for results," Mr. Bush said.

     Saying "much hard work remains" to reach peace in the Middle East, Mr. Bush focused on the role Mr. Arafat will play.

     "Chairman Arafat should now seize this opportunity to act decisively in word and in deed against terror directed at Israeli citizens," he said.

     Mr. Arafat "hasn't earned my respect," the president said. "He must earn my respect by leading."

[...]

     Having arranged the deal to free Mr. Arafat from his monthlong captivity in the West Bank town of Ramallah, Mr. Bush said: "Chairman Arafat is now free to move around and free to lead, and we expect him to do so. One of the things he must do is condemn and thwart terrorist activities."

It's hard to see what Israel has gained from this exchange. If history shows us anything, it's that Arafat never keeps his promises -- but that this failure by Arafat never helps Israel win the support of the so-called international community. So now Israel doesn't have the prisoners they want (unless Britain and the U.S. plan to keep their monitors there indefinitely), and Israel doesn't have Arafat. All Israel has is the quixotic hope that Arafat will suddenly turn into a statesman. When that doesn't happen, Sharon will be able to say, "I told you so" -- but that's not going to be much consolation.

Bill Clinton is having trouble raising money for his presidential library. He's short of his goal and hasn't yet collected the money that was already pledged. Or maybe he isn't having any trouble at all:

A spokeswoman for Mr. Clinton, Julia Payne, said that despite the concerns about the pace of the campaign, the former president has not had any trouble raising money or getting commitments for his library. Instead, he has devoted very little time in the last 15 months to the pursuit, focusing instead on raising money for dozens of other causes. Ms. Payne also predicted that Mr. Clinton would ultimately have no trouble raising the entire sum.

Stephanie Salter, a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, is a genius. She points out that the Bush Administration keeps publicizing captured Al Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah's warnings/rumors about future terrorist plans, even though those threats may not be credible. Some might think that the Bush administration was just being cautious, or that Tom Ridge was being self-aggrandizing (a la Gray Davis last year), or that individual administration employees were participating in the great Washington sport of leaking to the press. But not Stephanie Salter. Salter has figured out the Secret Bush Plot. (We know it's a Secret Bush Plot, because Salter is careful to mention the "hijacked presidential election.")

So why, given who Zubaydah is -- al Qaeda's chief of operations and a sworn enemy of the United States -- is the Bush administration so eager to leak his every utterance? And to the hated U.S. news media, no less?

It couldn't possibly be to stir up confusion and insecurity, could it? To keep much of America where it's been since the horrors of Sept. 11: scared and buying anything the White House sells?

Another victory for free speech, as the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 vote overturned a ban on advertising certain types of drugs. The government's seemingly indefensible position was that by keeping information about "compounded drugs" -- essentially, drugs custom-made for an individual customer -- from the public, that this would protect the public health. The logic, in part, was that if customers didn't know about the drugs, then customers couldn't ask about the drugs, and thus customers who didn't need the drugs wouldn't get them. But as the court held:

If the First Amendment means anything, it means that regulating speech must be a last — not first — resort. Yet here it seems to have been the first strategy the government thought to try.

Kudos to Eugene Volokh, whose analysis of the free speech proclivities of the Justices continues to hold true. "Liberal" Justice Steven Breyer wrote the dissenting opinion, in favor of restricting speech, just as Volokh's work suggests would be likely.

This ruling, while relatively insigificant itself, is yet another strong signal that the court is unlikely to look favorably on the advertising prohibitions contained in the McCainShaysFeingoldMeehan campaign finance "reform" bill. Historically, pornography and commercial speech have been the least-protected, first amendment-wise, and yet this court has now ruled, in the space of a month's time, in favor of freedom in each of these areas. Doesn't look too good for McCain.

Last week, the Washington Times carried an op/ed piece by Senators Dianne Feinstein and John Kyl, promoting their Victims' Rights Constitutional Amendment. (Or, rather, the "Feinstein-Kyl Victims' Rights Constitutional Amendment." I know Washington is all about promoting oneself, but isn't it a little unseemly to name a proposal for a constitutional amendment eponymously?)

We need a victims' rights constitutional amendment because of people such as Roberta Roper, Sharon Christian, Ross and Betty Parks and Virginia Bell. Ms. Roper was denied the opportunity to watch the trial of her daughter's murderer; Ms. Christian was not informed of her rapist's release from custody and ran into him two weeks after the attack; Mr. and Mrs. Parks were never consulted regarding a seven-year delay in the trial of their daughter's killer; and Ms. Bell suffered debilitating and expensive injuries from a mugging but received only $387 in restitution.

Indeed, it's not even clear what a constitutional amendment would accomplish in the instances described by the senators; most of them sound like bureaucratic failures, not constitutional ones. Indeed, as Feinstein and Kyl indicate, laws guaranteeing victims many "rights" already exist.

Moreover, mere state law has proven inadequate to protect victims' rights. For example, a U.S. Justice Department-sponsored report found that, even in states with strong legal protections for victims' rights, many victims are denied those rights. This report concluded that state safeguards are insufficient to guarantee victims' rights, and that only a federal constitutional amendment can ensure that crime victims receive the rights they are due.

So is there any real point here, other than pandering?

The New York Times discovers that international law isn't clear, and can't be enforced. Is this news to anybody except Noam Chomsky?

The New York Times loves this stuff: black and hispanic people pay higher interest rates for their mortgages than white people do. Or at least a new study being released today by the Center for Community Change claims that this is true. (According to the Times; I failed to find the study on the organization's badly-organized website.)

A far greater share of black and Hispanic homeowners with above-average incomes still have mortgages with higher interest rates than whites with comparable incomes, according to a study to be released today. The research suggests that conventional banks, despite recent progress, have failed to reach many minority borrowers who would qualify for good mortgages based on their salary and credit history, housing experts said.

In its most surprising finding, the study said that the racial disparities increased as homeowners' salaries rose. Among households that made at least 120 percent of the typical income in their metropolitan area, 32 percent of blacks held high-interest, or subprime, loans while only 11 percent of whites did. Among households that made 80 percent or less of the typical local salary, 56 percent of blacks had subprime loans and 25 percent of whites did.

"The market isn't working as it should," said Allen J. Fishbein, general counsel at the Center for Community Change, a housing advocacy group in Washington that conducted the study. "It's pretty striking."

The study's authors acknowledged that their findings did not prove that minority borrowers unfairly pay high mortgage rates, because applicants' credit histories were not considered. But the authors said the gaps between subprime lending to whites and minority borrowers were probably too big to reflect only credit differences.

Palestinian officials now admit that there was no Jenin massacre.

Palestinian officials yesterday put the death toll at 56 in the two-week Israeli assault on Jenin, dropping claims of a massacre of 500 that had sparked demands for a U.N. investigation.

The official Palestinian body count, which is not disproportionate to the 33 Israeli soldiers killed in the incursion, was disclosed by Kadoura Mousa Kadoura, the director of Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement for the northern West Bank, after a team of four Palestinian-appointed investigators reported to him in his Jenin office.

By the way, I think they call this "denial":

He no longer used the ubiquitous Palestinian charge of "massacre" and instead portrayed the battle as a "victory" for Palestinians in resisting Israeli forces. "Here the Israelis, who tried to break the Palestinian willpower, have been taught a lesson," Mr. Kadoura said.

I don't think any commentary I could provide would add anything to this story about school officials:

Angry parents demanded the resignation of a California high school vice principal Tuesday because she lifted the skirts of teenage girls at a dance in front of men and male classmates to make sure they were wearing "appropriate" underwear.

Parents at Rancho Bernardo High School in suburban San Diego say the vice principal, Rita Wilson, made the girls prove that they were not wearing thong underwear before they were allowed into the dance on Friday.

In some cases, said Rancho Bernardo parent Kim Teal, girls also were made to partially undress if Wilson or another teacher suspected that they weren't wearing bras.

Update: Having read the local coverage of the story, there's an even more horrifying element:

San Diego city police Officer Greg Bisesto said that while patrolling the dance, which was attended by about 725 students, he watched Wilson force dozens of girls to lift their skirts. He said he heard Wilson ask the questions: "Are you wearing underwear? If so, is it a thong? . . . Then let me check."

"I just thought, 'Oh, my God, what is she doing?' " Bisesto said. "This is totally out of line."

[...]

Bisesto, the police officer, said he approached Assistant Principal Michael Mosgrove and asked him to talk to Wilson about her behavior. Bisesto said he does not know if Mosgrove spoke with Wilson, but he said the examinations did not stop.

The Washington D.C. Department of Corrections apparently flips a coin to decide who to keep in jail.

A homeless man was mistakenly imprisoned at the D.C. jail and an adjacent correctional treatment facility for five months because Department of Corrections workers failed to update computer records to indicate that a court had ordered his release within two days of his arrest.

[...]

The District is facing a $440 million lawsuit filed on behalf of Joseph S. Heard, a deaf, mute and mentally ill man who was wrongfully kept behind bars at the jail for nearly two years after a misdemeanor trespassing charge against him was dismissed. Heard was freed in August when corrections officials discovered that files authorizing his release never arrived -- and that no one at the jail had bothered to check.

Another recent case of records mismanagement involved Michael D. Hamilton, 42, a convicted bank robber who is being held at the jail on a one- to three-year sentence for parole violation after serving more than 15 years in the Virginia prison system. On March 2, a Saturday, he was erroneously released from jail.

That night, a corrections records supervisor phoned the home of Hamilton's mother in Southeast Washington to say that the jail had made a mistake and that he had to return to the facility. Hamilton did so, but not until Monday morning. Relatives said he was granted permission by the records supervisor to finish out the weekend with his family, a claim the supervisor disputes.

How much money do you think the New York City Board of Education wasted to learn that some students are still upset about the attacks on 9/11? Which students are most affected?

Children who live or attend school near ground zero were most likely to experience mental health problems, but they were not so heavily affected as children from around the city who had relatives or acquaintances injured or killed in the attack. Symptoms included thinking obsessively about the attack; trying not to think, hear or talk about it; trouble sleeping; chronic nightmares; and shortened attention spans.

Josh Chafetz over at OxBlog explains why Pervez Musharraf's (probably) corrupt election victory wasn't such a bad thing:

And he's our Lizard, too. Sure, we're being hypocritical when we support a dictatorship anywhere. It is of such hypocrisies that international relations is made. And sure, we should support a return to a real democracy, with freely contested elections, as soon as possible. But right now, Central Asia is in crisis, and in times of crisis, even democracies have turned to temporary dictatorships. Ancient Greek and Roman republics had provisions allowing for the appointment of an absolute dictator during wartime, and even American presidents -- including Lincoln and FDR -- have assumed extraordinary powers during times of war. The ancient democracies understood that there was a crucial distinction between a dictatorship, which may sometimes be necessary temporarily to save the republic, and a tyranny, which is always antithetical to democracy. In modern times, we have found that stable democracies can dispense with dictatorships, even in times of crisis (although they may have to increase the power of the elected executive somewhat). But Pakistan has never been a stable democracy, and, in a time of crisis such as this, perhaps the best we can do is to make sure that its dictatorship does not degenerate into a tyranny. That is, we should make sure that Musharraf remains the best Lizard for the job, and we should seek to get lizards out of office entirely as soon as possible.

Airline pilots want to be armed. Twenty thousand of them signed a petition to Congress demanding that they be allowed to keep guns in the cockpit. Showing that they don't really understand the issue, flight attendants disagreed:

Responding angrily, the union for flight attendants declared that it would fight the proposal unless the pilots agreed to use their guns not only to defend themselves, but also to ensure the safety of passengers and crew throughout the airplane.

Besides, that response misses the point entirely; pilots wouldn't be using the guns to defend "themselves." They'd be using the guns to defend the cockpit. And defending the cockpit does "ensure the safety of passengers and crew throughout the plane." But most importantly, defending the cockpit protects us on the ground. If potential hijackers (nee Saudis) know that the pilots are armed, they may think twice about trying to hijack the plane in the first place, making everyone safer. 

Predictably, the disarm-Americans crowd was opposed, listing all the things that could go wrong, but ignoring the reasons why pilots would want to be armed.

Although a number of House members spoke in favor of arming pilots, Rep. James L. Oberstar (D-Minn.), ranking member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, opposed the effort.

Oberstar said arming pilots would give "new meaning to the flying shotgun in the days of the Wild West." Oberstar called the bill "impatient" because it would distract the TSA from the larger tasks ahead, such as using machines to screen all checked luggage for explosives by year's end.

Another Democrat, D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, said a gun in the cockpit could harm innocent bystanders. "We know guns in the homes are more likely to be used for killing relatives and for suicide," she said. "We have to consider guns in the cockpit might be used for more than the purpose intended."

It's a fundamental tenet of journalism that good news gets buried ("Plane didn't crash") and bad news gets front page headlines. Perhaps that's why the New York Times hides their story about reduced carbon monoxide in New York City's air deep within the paper.

While the city violated the federal standard more than 150 times in 1978 alone, it has met the standard for nearly 10 years, according to the E.P.A., in part because of pollution controls on cars, and cleaner fuels.

The big French election is tomorrow. Everyone seems convinced that Le Pen is going to be slaughtered. Le Pen certainly seems resigned to it now; he has started with claims of "fraud" before the polls even open. But he has made an attempt to appear more moderate:

Mr Le Pen appeared to play down his extremist reputation on the eve of polling, telling Israeli TV that French Jews had nothing to fear from his election.

The National Front leader once referred to the Nazi genocide of the Jews as a "detail of history".

But he assured Israelis that he had condemned recent anti-Semitic violence in France and said he would be happy to visit Israel.

Still, I'm with Glenn Reynolds on this one: my rational side says that Le Pen is repugnant, so no, I don't want him to win. But there's a bit of schadenfreude here. The French are fond of being so superior, so fond of telling us how "simplistic" we are compared to them, and yet someone far more extreme than any major American candidate is a finalist. Maybe if he does well, without winning, it will be a lesson to them.

Well, Jacques Chirac smashed his opponent, Jean Le Pen, in today's runoff presidential election in France. There was no hidden base of support for Le Pen, as he got only a slightly higher percentage of the vote (18%) than he did in the initial round of the election. Voters really did prefer the corrupt to the extremist.

But not quite as strongly as the media would like us to believe:

Turnout was estimated at about 80 percent, higher than in the first round April 21, when about 28 percent of voters stayed home. That high abstention rate, and the large number of votes going to minor candidates of the far left and far right, led to Le Pen's strong finish.

So, there's a half-full/half-empty glass here: on the one hand, Le Pen was overwhelmingly rejected, with 82% of the population voting against him. On the other hand, Le Pen got 18% of the vote. One-fifth of the population of France supported a candidate widely considered to be extremist, if not fascist. What does that say about the French electorate?

And of course, the French wouldn't be the French without controversy:

The idea that Chirac, having won with many votes from the left, is now set to roll back much of the left's legislation implemented during its five years in power, has Socialists and their labor union allies fuming. No sooner were the results announced than leftists began taking to the streets, protesting not against Le Pen, as they had for the last two weeks, but against Chirac.

At least 15 people killed, and 60 more wounded, in a homicide bombing on a pool hall near Tel Aviv. Is it just a coincidence that there was a major terrorist bombing soon after Arafat was let out of isolation? Is it just a coincidence that this happened while Sharon was in Washington meeting with President Bush? Yeah, right.

This happened soon after a deal to end the Bethlehem siege fell apart, a deal which would send some of the terrorists wanted by Israel to Italy, since nobody bothered to ask Italy and Italy doesn't really want them. And apparently the Palestinians, other than Yasser Arafat, don't like the idea either. Hey, I have an idea -- maybe Israel and the U.S. should insist that Arafat be replaced with someone who actually represents Palestinians.

The Justice Department submitted briefs to the Supreme Court on Monday that said that the Second Amendment protected an individual right, not just a collective right, to bear arms. That the current administration believes this isn't news, of course, but the Times felt the need to mention that John Ashcroft had previously announced his position to the National Rifle Association. Actually, mentioning the NRA wasn't quite enough, so the Times had to elaborate: he wrote a "letter to the rifle association's chief lobbyist."

And then the Times had to try to prove that this is a novel theory, that John Ashcroft was going against established law. Unfortunately, since he wasn't, the Times had to make something up:

The Supreme Court's view has been that the the Second Amendment protected only those rights that have "some reasonable relationship to the preservation of efficiency of a well regulated militia," as the court put it in United States v. Miller, a 1939 decision that remains the court's latest word on the subject.

In the absence of any evidence tending to show that possession or use of a 'shotgun having a barrel of less than eighteen inches in length' at this time has some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia, we cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear such an instrument. Certainly it is not within judicial notice that this weapon is any part of the ordinary military equipment or that its use could contribute to the common defense.

A recently-introduced feature of the search engine Google is a news search engine. Google gathers the most prominent headlines from around the web, sorting them by story, so you get several choices for most prominent events. Since Google displays them by headline, one of the cute features is that you get to see how different sources describe the same story. It struck me as worthy of comment today, as I happened to see the following headlines relating to a study about pesticides on organic food:

• Organic produce has pesticides, too, but far less than conventional food, study finds - Boston Globe
  
• Pesticides less evident in organic food  - SJ Mercury
  
• Organic produce not pesticide free  - Salt Lake Tribune
  
• Study Finds Far Less Pesticide Residue on Organic Produce  - NY Times
  

Note the different slants that different sources choose. The Globe and Times choose the most pro-organic spin, describing the food as having "far less" pesticides. The Mercury declines to editorialize, saying merely that the organic food has "less." And the Tribune takes the opposite approach, focusing on the negative side of organic food, that it isn't pesticide "free".

I don't know what was going through the minds of the editors who wrote those headlines, but it's hard to imagine that it's just a coincidence.

In Slate, Warren Bass argues that the popular new idea of building a fence around the West Bank won't solve Israel's security problem. He makes a three part argument: first, that it's technically too difficult to build an effective fence, partly because the border is too long and the terrain is rough, and partly because organized groups can always find ways around it. Second, that an effective fence will do more to stop trade, and thus destroy the Palestinian economy (sic), than it will do to stop terrorism.

And third, he argues that it isn't a diplomatic solution:

And that, ultimately, is the biggest reason to worry about the enthusiasm for a fence: It reinforces unilateralism and helps defer indefinitely the only possible solution—negotiated partition—that has any reasonable chance of bringing peace. Unilateral disengagement by Israel would replace the land-for-peace premise of U.N. Security Council Resolution 242 with land-for-violence; gut the long-standing Israeli insistence that negotiations are the lone legitimate way to resolve Arab-Israeli tensions; encourage Palestinian militance; reinforce Hezbollah's crowing insistence that force works and talks don't; and make Jerusalem and the rest of the new frontier into a new front line.

Of course, Israel will still need to decide how to handle the settlements, but to argue that a fence won't work because it will "encourage Palestinian militance" is insane. Is the Middle East suffering from a lack of militance right now?

William Safire goes on the offensive, insisting that the Iraq-Mohammed Atta connection is still valid. He says that Atta did meet an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague, and that the CIA is covering it up in order to cover their own asses over their screwups and their "inability to conduct covert operations."

Now, I don't have any way of knowing who's correct, but, as Safire says, the people saying the meeting did take place -- i.e., the Czech government -- have no apparent reason to lie, while the CIA does. Moreover, the fact that nobody in the Administration will deny it on the record speaks volumes.

Of course, in the end it shouldn't matter; Saddam needs to go, as soon as possible. Whether he was specifically involved in 9/11 is beside the point. He's an aggressive expansionist tyrant actively searching for weapons of mass destruction. So the only thing that this information can be used to accomplish is to quiet the Europeans down when they explain why we can't and shouldn't invade. But there's no possible way to shut them up, anyway, and even if we had absolute proof of Iraq's involvement, there would be plenty of European objections to our actions.

What is it with the anti-Israel Los Angeles Times? Everything that goes wrong in the Middle East is the fault of Ariel Sharon:

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon broke off his visit to Washington by essentially saying "forget it" to diplomacy after a Palestinian suicide bomber killed 15 Israelis near Tel Aviv. No matter how reprehensible such bombings are--and they are terrorism--the Bush administration cannot allow itself Sharon's spiteful luxury.

Only a sustained effort by other nations will force Israelis and Palestinians to the conference table.Los Angeles Times will again call the attacks "reprehensible. Which will be great comfort to the families of the victims.

Silly me; I thought that the idea of a pro-Second Amendment administration supporting the Second Amendment would be a big yawner of a story. But the New York Times and the Washington Post treated it as big news, and today, the Times' Bob Herbert froths at the mouth in his rush to condemn John Ashcroft. That's easy for Herbert, because Ashcroft represents everything Herbert hates.

The first rule of bashing politicians for supporting the Second Amendment is to mention the National Rifle Association as much as possible (six times in one column, for those of you scoring at home). If you gave Herbert a choice between the NRA and NAMBLA (which promotes sex between men and boys), he wouldn't have to think very long before choosing the latter. So not only does Herbert mention the NRA, but he argues, quite ludicrously, that Ashcroft only took the "transparently political" position because the NRA "just happened to have been a major Ashcroft campaign contributor." As if there were something wrong with taking political positions, and as if there were no supporters of the Second Amendment until the NRA came along. And this exemplifies Herbert's biggest failing as a pundit: he simply cannot accept -- in fact, cannot comprehend -- the idea of honest policy disagreement. Politicians who disagree with his views are not just wrong, but venal, greedy, stupid, selfish, and/or racist.

The N.R.A. has seldom had a better friend in government than Mr. Ashcroft. That was proved again on Monday when the Justice Department, in a pair of briefs filed with the court, rejected the long-held view of the court, the Justice Department itself and most legal scholars that the Second Amendment protects only the right of state-organized militias to own firearms. Under that interpretation, anchored by a Supreme Court ruling in 1939, Congress and local governmental authorities have great freedom to regulate the possession and use of firearms by individuals.

But even that isn't enough for Herbert, so he goes on to become the latest person to play politics with the war on terrorism:

How weird is it that in this post-Sept.-11 atmosphere, when the Justice Department itself is in the forefront of the effort to narrow potential threats to security, the attorney general decides it would be a good idea to throw open the doors to a wholesale increase in gun ownership?

But guns are evil, and Ashcroft is evil, and Herbert doesn't want to let anybody forget that.

The Bush administration, won a legal victory on Thursday, as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled unanimously that President Bush gets to appoint a member to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. The Commission has exactly zero authority, and slightly less importance than that. They issued a disputed report on the 2000 presidential election in Florida, which nobody cared about (probably because the result was preordained: "Republicans racist. Republicans bad. Democrats good.") And if you can name one other thing they've done, you need to get out of the house more. They issue reports from time to time, always finding racism. (Samples: "Racism's Frontier: The Untold Story of Discrimination and Division in Alaska" and "BRIEFING ON BIOTERRORISM AND HEALTH CARE DISPARITIES ")

As it happens, the Commission has another vacancy, but there appears to be some confusion about this one, as well. The Washington Post says:

With one seat open, to be filled by the Senate president pro tempore, Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.), Republicans have gained an additional voice in Kirsanow but are still unlikely to tip the balance of the commission.

The four Congressional appointments to the panel rotate between Democrats and Republicans, meaning Trent Lott, the Senate Republican leader, will select Mr. Redenbaugh's successor.

The Department of Education released the results of the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress exam, this one in history. And American students, particularly high school seniors, don't really know much of anything about it.

Only one in 10 high school seniors scored well enough on the exam, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, to be considered proficient in American history, while 17 percent of eighth graders and 18 percent of fourth graders reached that level.

Officials also were hard-pressed to explain why the overall results were so poor. Ravitch said they could reflect the fact that 54 percent of public high school students have history teachers who did not major or minor in the subject in college. In many schools, "the way they spell history teacher is c-o-a-c-h," she said.

Or, on the other hand, maybe Americans are just stupid.

Eugene Volokh argues that if the Supreme Court fully supports the individual rights interpretation of the Second Amendment, that this could help proponents of gun control:

And the right, if firmly accepted by the courts, may actually facilitate the enactment of modest gun controls. Today, many proposals, such as gun registration, are opposed largely because of a quite reasonable fear that they'll lead to D.C.-like gun prohibition.

But if the courts can make clear that the Constitution takes such a prohibition off the table, this slippery slope concern may become less serious. And some people may thus become willing to support compromise legislation, precisely because the core of the right will be protected--just as the radical and alarming Bill of Rights commands.

While this may be true for "modest gun controls" in general, I don't think that it will have much effect in terms of resistance to registration. Even with a formally-recognized right to own guns, many will still view registration as a potential prelude to a rapid and preemptive confiscation, because any government that contemplates consfiscating guns is likely to be indifferent to Constitutional concerns.

We have an empirical data point to work with: abortion. Abortion has been constitutionally protected for three decades, through the terms of five Republican and two Democratic presidents. The right has been upheld repeatedly by the Supreme Court, even though almost the entire Court has turned over since Roe v. Wade was decided (with only Chief Justice Rehnquist remaining). In sum, it's about as settled as a controversial Supreme Court ruling can possibly be.

And yet, this has not led to the end of the abortion debate. It has not led to the acceptance of "modest abortion controls." Every restriction, no matter how small, is treated as the camel's nose in the tent. Whether the issue is parental notification or "partial birth abortions" or a waiting period or mandatory counselling, the fight over abortion rights is as vicious as it ever was.

Why hasn't the Supreme Court's definitive stance ended the acrimony? Maybe it's because the abortion debate -- not just abortion itself -- is an industry. There are too many people, too many groups whose existence depends on the fight. The first rule of bureaucracies is that they're self-perpetuating. The National Organization for Women, the National Abortion Rights Action League, the Pro-Life Action League, the National Right to Life Committee -- these groups all have employees and vast fund-raising apparatuses. Sure, the 24-hour waiting period may be a relatively trivial issue, but if NARAL didn't make a mountain out of the molehill, what else would it have to do?

Similarly, on the gun control debate, you have the National Rifle Association, Gun Owners of America, the Violence Policy Center, the Brady Campaign, Americans for Gun Safety, and others. If the Supreme Court "settled" the gun control debate, and if both sides accepted it, what would these groups do to raise money? What incentive would the Violence Policy Center have for supporting only the "modest gun controls" Eugene Volokh mentions? How would the NRA stay in business unless it kept a high profile by fighting the "compromise legislation?"

We shall see.

NASA doesn't exactly keep up with the times, technologywise:

NASA needs parts no one makes anymore.

So to keep the shuttles flying, the space agency has begun trolling the Internet — including Yahoo and eBay — to find replacement parts for electronic gear that would strike a home computer user as primitive.

Officials say the agency recently bought a load of outdated medical equipment so it could scavenge Intel 8086 chips — a variant of those chips powered I.B.M.'s first personal computer, in 1981.

When the first shuttle roared into space that year, the 8086 played a critical role, at the heart of diagnostic equipment that made sure the shuttle's twin booster rockets were safe for blastoff.

Today, more than two decades later, booster testing still uses 8086 chips, which are increasingly scarce. NASA plans to create a $20 million automated checking system, with all new hardware and software. In the meantime, it is hoarding 8086's so that a failed one does not ground the nation's fleet of aging spaceships.

Of course, in a few decades, you'll probably be able to buy a whole shuttle on Ebay.

David Sanger, the New York Times' official hatchet man on the Bush Administration, now turns his sights on Karl Rove.

Karl Rove, President Bush's top political adviser, is expanding his White House portfolio by inserting himself into the debate over how to deal with the Middle East, trade, terrorism, Latin America and other foreign policy matters, say outside advisers and administration officials, including some who are rankled by his growing involvement.

Mr. Rove's influence beyond domestic affairs has developed gradually and is hard to measure. As one of the president's closest advisers, he offers his counsel in private, usually only for the president's ears.

Yet increasingly, officials in the administration see or imagine his influence, citing the political significance of such instances as the president's turning his back on free trade to offer protection to farmers or steelworkers.

So where does this come from? Aha:

Increasingly, administration officials say, Mr. Rove's involvement has put off Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who is described by associates as questioning why someone with a background in domestic politics should be an important voice in foreign policy. They said Secretary Powell was not happy in January when Mr. Rove told the Republican Party's winter assembly in Austin, Tex., that the party should use Mr. Bush's handling of the war in Afghanistan for political advantage.

[...]

State Department officials are less charitable, perhaps because Mr. Rove is considered far more hawkish than Secretary Powell, and far more attuned to domestic politics.

When you read the word "controversial" in the newspaper, just remember that what it really means is that the reporter disagrees with the idea:

During the 2000 election campaign, pro-Israel groups were among the biggest contributors to U.S. Rep. Peter Deutsch of Florida. The Fort Lauderdale Democrat got $23,400, more than he received from groups representing education and health care interests.

But Deutsch says the pro-Israel money had nothing to do with his May 2 vote for a controversial House resolution expressing unequivocal support for Israel.

In Israel, Likud has voted against the establishment of any Palestinian state, and this is being portrayed as a major step backwards for Ariel Sharon and for peace. Perhaps I'm an eternal optimist, but I don't think this is a big deal.

First, this was not a Knesset vote. It was merely a party resolution with no force of law, allowing the party members to politically posture for their constituents without doing any real harm. This isn't even anything new, since Likud has never endorsed the idea of a Palestinian state.

Second, this seems like just another good cop-bad cop routine. Many in Europe, and some in the U.S., consider Sharon an extremist, an obstacle to peace. Now Sharon gets to point to this resolution and say, "See, I didn't support this. I'm a moderate." All those EUrocrats who fantasize about Shimon Peres coming back and making everything better now see what the consequences of ousting Sharon would really be. This strengthens Sharon's hand in dealing with the world, which strengthens his hand in dealing with the Palestinians.

Susanna Cornett catches the Newspaper of Record lying about Cuba's bioweapons program:

Another point of interest - compare this excerpt from the Associated Press article on iWon:

Bush administration officials stood by Undersecretary of State John Bolton's earlier remarks that he believed Cuba had "provided dual-use biotechnology to other rogue states."

Secretary of State Colin Powell noted that it was not a new statement by the Bush administration.

To this excerpt from the NY Times:

His comments came as Secretary of State Colin L. Powell cast some doubt on assertions last week by a senior State Department official that Cuba was making such weapons.

Huh?

When Israelis break the law, the government does something about it:

Right-wing extremist Noam Federman was arrested Monday on suspicion of being involved in the plot to detonate a powerful bomb in the courtyard of a school for Arab girls in the A-Tur neighborhood of East Jerusalem two weeks ago.

The Jerusalem Magistrates Court extended Federman's remand Tuesday for a further eight days. Federman is a long-time supporter of assassinated Kach leader, Meir Kahane, and lives in the Jewish enclave of Hebron.

By the way, the paper describes those arrested as "suspected Jewish terrorists." Calling a terrorist a terrorist? Maybe Reuters should take notes.

Apparently there's a big federal government spending program somewhere that doesn't have the desired effect. A new study shows that the government's anti-drug advertisements don't work. In fact, the study showed that there might have been an increase in drug use among people who saw the ads, though "it noted that further analysis was necessary before the ads could be directly tied to the increase."

Of course, you have to wonder about the quality of the results when you read:

The survey revealed no decline in the rate of drug use among those surveyed. But 80 percent of the parents who viewed the ads aimed at them were positively influenced to ask their child questions about their social lives and become more involved.

Certainly, the anti-drug commercials are the most benign element of the country's national drug policy. Trying to convince people not to use drugs is infinitely better than forcibly drug-testing them, kicking them out of school and/or their jobs, giving them criminal records, possibly locking them up, and otherwise invading their privacy and destroying their lives. But why would anybody who was rational think that kids (or adults, for that matter) choose to use drugs, or not, based on obvious, heavy-handed propaganda?

The anti-drug ads are designed to approach teen-agers on their own turf, offering electric guitar and skateboarding as cool alternatives to a generation too complex for "Just Say No."

I happened to run across this idiotic piece by Helen Thomas, who can't figure out why the United States might want to act against Iraq. Her argument is a combination of every logical fallacy one can imagine.

She starts with moral equivalence:

Yes, it violated U.N. resolutions in 1998 by ousting international weapons inspectors who were trying to make sure that it was not secretly producing chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.

But other nations, including Israel, have violated U.N. resolutions, and we have not tried to oust their leaders.

Then we get projection:

One explanation for Bush's fixation on ousting Saddam Hussein is that he wants to avenge his father, who was victorious against Iraq in the Persian Gulf war in 1991 but failed to unseat its ruler. Conservatives have long accused the elder Bush of not finishing the job in Baghdad.

However, considering the human cost, surely personal vengeance is not a valid reason to start a Middle East conflagration. Such a drastic move would anger even more the already alienated Arab world against America.

Then we get "everyone else is doing it":

Another of the administration's arguments for an attack is that Iraq is a brutal dictatorship. It is, absolutely. But so are other nations -- Sudan, North Korea, Iran, Burma, Libya, for example. And Bush isn't trying to take them down.

Iraq may be making doomsday chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. But wouldn't the United States make a more persuasive case if it would publicly lay out whatever evidence it has, such as satellite photos?

Assuming that Iraq has those weapons, it is not alone. There are many nations, including the United States, that have nuclear arsenals.

And finally, we get to the Rodney King approach: can't we all just get along?

It would be better to keep international pressure on the Iraqi regime for unrestrained U.N.-conducted weapons inspections that might lead to a peaceful solution. A second round of negotiations on the subject resumed at the United Nations last week with Iraq hoping to extract some concessions -- lifting economic sanctions against the country and eliminating the no-fly zones overhead -- in exchange for its permitting the return of the inspectors.

What I can't figure out is why this editorial is coming out now (well, actually a week ago, but I just saw it.) It's a rehash of arguments that have been made for months.

A less-reported side of the DNA-testing-in-the-criminal-justice-system debate: convicts who fight for DNA testing which then confirms their guilt. I knew it happened sometimes, but not this much:

Harvey's guilt did not surprise experts in DNA testing, including his attorney, Peter Neufeld, co-founder of the Innocence Project at Cardozo Law School in New York. About half of all conclusive post-conviction tests inculpate the inmate, rather than prove his innocence.

"We always knew Harvey was a rapist. Now we know this man who claimed to be innocent is a liar," Horan said. "I was satisfied [with Harvey's guilt] from the beginning. That's why I opposed the waste of resources. . . . [The lab] could have spent the time on cases where the victims haven't had their day in court."

Of course, DNA testing isn't a panacea; there are many cases in which it's inapplicable. But given the level of accuracy compared with other evidence, it's hard to justify not using it whenever the results could be exculpatory.

Good piece from Rob Walker in The New Republic on how bad the evening network news shows really are.

Having recently spent three weeks as one of the 25 million or so Americans who watch the networks' flagship broadcasts (a habit that, like many millions of other Americans, I gave up long ago), I have a news flash for both sides: If the network news divisions think they are producing an evening broadcast so noble that it deserves to be defended from the corporate huns, they're kidding themselves. And if the evening news isn't dramatic enough for those corporate honchos, it's not for lack of trying. It's not just the much-noted increase in "soft" news features that now eats up a large portion of each broadcast; even the hard news now comes with a hard sell in which emotional impact trumps intellectual content with appalling consistency. The evening anchors may still look and talk like paragons of wisdom and integrity right out of our nostalgia-clouded memory of The Good Old Days, but their broadcasts are something else. Or as they might put it, "Shameless hype. Trumped-up melodrama. It pretends. To be a public service. But just how dumb is your evening news?"

[...]

One of television's advantages over print is, of course, the power of actual footage. But often this seems to be the tail that wags the dog. One evening Jennings introduced the post-headlines segment by saying, "The Senate Judiciary Committee today agreed to delay the vote on a controversial White House nomination to a federal court." He showed a clip of Senators Orrin Hatch and Patrick Leahy quietly bickering at the hearing. "The question is," Jennings said, "do they or do they not know their microphones are not open?" The back-and-forth between Leahy and Hatch lasted about a minute, and then Jennings repeated his question: "Did they or did they not know their microphones were open?" Here are some other questions: Who was the nominee? For what court? What's the controversy? The clip shed no light on any of this, and neither did Jennings. (It was Thomas Pickering, nominated for the Fifth Circuit, who was at the center of a tussle over his civil rights record.) This segment, too, seemed designed to elicit a kind of content-free outrage: Viewers should be angry at all this pointless bickering between senators--and it must be pointless, given that the broadcast never explained what it was about.

I happened to catch Peter Jennings as a guest on Bill O'Reilly yesterday. For some reason, O'Reilly's argument was that the networks need to present more opinion, more commentary. But Jennings sensibly wondered why anybody should care what he thinks about various stories. And given how little news they actually show, to provide commentary wouldn't leave time for anything else other than commercials. Besides, Glenn Reynolds provides all the punditry this country needs.

Nicholas Kristoff comes to the conclusion that it's not all Arafat's fault that there's no peace between Israel and Palestinians. His argument?

1. Arafat was right not to negotiate at Camp David, because, after all, President Clinton and Ehud Barak were so desperate for peace that they made even more concessions to Arafat later on.

2. After these extra concessions were made,

   This is the moment when Mr. Arafat should have leaped. Instead he dithered, and then went to the White House on Jan. 2, 2001, to deliver a final answer — which was so murky with reservations that when the Palestinians had left the room, Mr. Clinton and his advisers huddled to try to figure out what Mr. Arafat had said.

   I think Arafat said something like, "It depends on what the meaning of 'is' is."

3. Arafat stalled until the Israeli elections forced a halt to negotiations, and then Palestinian violence led to Ariel Sharon's victory.

All in all, it is fair to fault Mr. Arafat for lacking the courage to strike a deal at Taba; for being a maddening, vacillating and passive negotiator; for condoning violence that unseated the best Israeli peace partner the Palestinians could have had. But the common view in the West that Mr. Arafat flatly rejected a reasonable peace deal, and that it is thus pointless to attempt a strategy of negotiation, is a myth.

Remind me, if I'm ever on trial, not to hire Kristoff to deliver my closing argument to the jury.

Did it ever occur to Kristoff that Arafat's problem wasn't a lack of "courage," but a lack of will? Showing he doesn't get it, Kristoff quotes:

"Arafat was the way he always was — you can't pin him down — but he wanted to continue negotiating," recalled Robert Malley, a Clinton aide in the room.

Oh, great. Now that the "revelations" that the Bush administration was "warned" about 9/11 have become public, be prepared for a whole lot more of this:

American intelligence agencies have intercepted a vague yet troubling series of communications among Al Qaeda operatives over the last few months indicating that the terrorist organization is trying to carry out an operation as big as the Sept. 11 attacks or bigger, according to intelligence and law enforcement officials.

"It's again not specific — not specific as to time, not specific as to place," one senior administration official said.

[...]

The intercepted communications do not point to any detailed plans for an attack, and even the messages mentioning mass casualties do not refer specifically to the use of weapons of mass destruction like chemical, biological or nuclear devices.

Do we pay people to gather this sort of "information"? No, I shouldn't say that. It's tempting to make fun of it, but in fact it's the direct, foreseeable end result of the partisan criticism coming from Tom Daschle and his ilk. If you attack people for not revealing the information they have, then they're going to respond by revealing all the information they have, whether it's useful or whether it's something someone read in a fortune cookie.

Where's the harm in that? Simple: there's an unlimited amount of data that can be gathered. That's the (relatively) easy part. The government employs people to sift through it and separate the wheat from the chaff -- the difficult part. In the scapegoating environment which surrounds congressional hearings, people are going to be afraid to do that. Nobody in his right mind would want to be the person with an unconnected dot on his desk (or worse yet, in his trash can) when the next attack comes. So the wheat stays mixed in with the chaff, the hard work never gets done, and the real information is never identified as such.

And then there's the boy-who-cried-wolf atmosphere which is going to be created. The public -- and even law enforcement -- is going to stop taking warnings seriously when they come every week and never pan out. When the true warning comes, people won't know the difference.

I was just watching television, and happened to catch the latest War on Drugs commercial. Throwing out the bad acting and boiling it down to its essence:

Don't do drugs, or your parents might ground you.

If there's anybody who's still foolish enough to believe that Israel's neighbors are really interested in peaceful coexistence with Israel, nothing will convince them. For the rest of us, this story -- of continued attempts to delegitimize Israel's existence, won't really come as a surprise: Iran and other Muslim states are trying to get Israel expelled from the International Olympic Committee.

The dispute over the status of Israel emerged Wednesday as the world's 199 national Olympic committees opened their general assembly in the predominantly Muslim country of Malaysia.

Despite pressure from Iran and some Arab countries, Israeli delegates were granted visas and allowed to attend the meetings.

However, in a sign of the political sensitivities here, no high-ranking Malaysian government official attended the opening ceremony, and the Israeli flag was not displayed with the other national flags.

But the real obscenity was the argument made:

Iranian Olympic chief Mostafa Hashemi, who sent the letter to Rogge, said the IOC should abide by its own charter.

"The Olympic Charter talks about peace and cooperation and says there should be no discrimination," he said. "The Israelis are committing genocide. With genocide, it's not possible to make peace."

Headline in the Washington Post: Chandra Levy Ruled A Homicide Victim . Glad we cleared that up, for the three or four people who thought she was killed by a swarm of killer squirrels.

The Supreme Court sensibly refused to hear the appeal of a dental hygienist who was removed from his job after his dentist-boss discovered he was HIV-positive. The Eleventh Circuit had held that the risk of passing the disease to patients justified the dentist's decision.

Waddell's lawyers argued that the appeals court ignored a previous Supreme Court decision and conflicts with rulings from other federal appeals courts. They asked the high court to use the case to underscore that an employer must have objective medical evidence to claim that an employee poses a risk to the health or safety of others.

Otherwise, ``a host of imaginable disasters could be hypothesized to exclude virtually any individual with a disability,'' Waddell's lawyers wrote.

``If left uncorrected, the 11th Circuit's decision threatens to undermine the public's confidence in the safety of dental treatment and the nation's health care system,'' the American Dental Association said in a friend of the court brief filed in Waddell's case.

There might be reasonable arguments against the dentist's decision -- but if that's the best one people can come up with, there obviously aren't. In fact, come to think of it, any political position justified on arguments about "undermining the public's confidence" is clearly a losing position. It doesn't really mean anything. Why can't people own cell phones? It might undermine public confidence in the nation's communications infrastructure. (See how easy it is?)

Sure, you have to feel sorry for the poor dental hygienist -- but it's easy for advocacy groups who will never be treated by this guy to insist that other members of the public ought to be guinea pigs to see how safe it really is. These are the same people, ideologically speaking, who endorse the "precautionary principle" in government regulation, which says that new technologies (genetically modified food, for instance) ought not to be allowed until they're proven safe. But when it comes to someone in a protected class, all of the sudden the principle gets reversed.

The Justice Department is accusing at least three Florida counties of violating the Voting Rights Act, as part of the 2000 election fiasco fallout.

Also in the third county, the Civil Rights Division's investigation "indicated that a lack of bilingual poll workers resulted in considerable confusion at the polls, and that some poll workers were hostile to Hispanic voters."

In previous documents, the government has said that Orange and Osceola counties failed to have enough Spanish-speaking poll workers and did not provide election information in both Spanish and English.

The government alleges that Miami-Dade officials did not do enough to help Haitian American voters understand the ballot, according to a copy of a proposed agreement between the county and the Justice Department.

Last week, the New York Times wrote a story about schools that are removing, or considering removing, so-called "junk food" from their cafeterias and/or vending machines. Then, in response, they printed six letters to the editor. What were those six?

1. Junk food is bad, and schools need to provide recess for children.
   
2. We must teach nutrition in schools. (by a professor of nutrition).
   
3. The content of junk foods need to be regulated more by the government.
   
4. Kids need to be taught about nutrition.
   
5. Junk food needs to be banned from society.
   
6. Junk food needs to be banned. Commercials for junk food should be, also.
   

Opinionjournal linked to the story of an FAA whistleblower who got his job back. He had warned his supervisors, and later the FBI, "that an airport security trainee might be linked to a Sept 11. hijacker." For doing so, he was fired(!)

That's absurd enough. But the part that didn't get emphasized:

"We concluded that his whistle-blowing activity was a contributing factor in the decision to fire him," said special counsel spokeswoman Jane McFarland. "The supervisors are going to get a letter of caution into their personnel file. When you reasonably believe that you're raising a matter of national concern or public health and safety, you should be protected."

The United Nations is finally doing something right, and some people are complaining about it.

U.N. war crimes prosecutors have been providing the United States with evidence of international terrorist activities they come across during their investigations, according to senior U.S. and U.N. officials.

Officials declined to characterize the nature or quality of the evidence. But the assistance underscores the deepening cooperation between U.N. agencies and the United States on anti-terrorism matters since the Sept. 11 attacks.

The assistance has alarmed some U.N. officials, who fear it may feed a perception that the United Nations is an instrument of U.S. military and foreign policy. They voiced concern that the assistance may compromise the United Nations' efforts to establish democracy in such places as Bosnia and endanger the lives of U.N. employees, particularly in the Middle East, where they would make an easy target for Islamic militants.

I didn't realize, incidentally, that fighting terrorism was merely "U.S. military and foreign policy." I thought it was pretty well accepted that it was a worldwide priority -- at least outside the Muslim world. And if providing information about terrorism compromises other U.N. efforts, then perhaps those other efforts ought to be reconsidered.

Just in case you had far too much free time:

First Ozzy. Now Anna Nicole Smith.

The former stripper who married a millionaire and posed nude for Playboy magazine is about to get her own reality TV show.

The daily life of Smith, 33, will be televised on E! Entertainment Television's new "The Anna Nicole Smith Show," network officials said Wednesday. The show is scheduled to debut in August.

Its creators promise the half-hour program will provide an inside look at the woman who in March was awarded $88 million from the estate of her late husband.

Public defenders in Washington D.C. are challenging the city's virtually-complete ban on handguns on behalf of two of their clients who are charged with carrying guns without a license. This is the result of the Attorney General's recent pronouncement that he considered the Second Amendment to protect an individual right to keep and bear arms.

Of course, we get the obligatory whining from the anti-gun crowd:

Mathew Nosanchuk, litigation director for the Violence Policy Center, a gun-control advocacy group, said it was inevitable that criminal defendants would use Ashcroft's arguments to challenge gun laws.

"People have been thinking about this as an abstract legal theory when it's been clear that Ashcroft's interpretation would have real-world consequences," Nosanchuk said.

Still, you should expect slanting; what you shouldn't expect are blatant lies:

The Second Amendment -- "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed" -- was interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1939 to apply only to militias and not to individuals.

Given the Bush Administration's position, as well as the increasing acceptance in the legal community of the individual rights interpretation, the District's ban looks extremely vulnerable. That won't necessarily help the particular defendants involved in these cases, both of whom have criminal records which might justify restrictions of their second amendment rights. But it would be a major victory for the gun rights community. And if crime decreases in Washington as a result -- as John Lott's research suggests that it should -- it could turn out to be the gun control industry's Waterloo.

The New York Times is annoyed (what else is new?) at the Bush Administration.

An administration staffed with aggressive corporate executives might normally be expected to embrace cutting-edge solutions to the country's energy problems — especially when those solutions are accessible and affordable.

The Times is upset because the Bush Administration committed the unforgivable sin of proposing a mandatory 20% increase in fuel efficiency for central air conditioners. Why is that cause for alarm? Because one of Bill Clinton's eleventh hour decisions was to require a 30% increase. And thus, somehow, to the New York Times, a requirement that manufacturers increase efficiency by 20% reflects an "ideological suspicion of anything resembling top-down government." And ideology is always bad. Unless it's a liberal ideology.

And one of the main tenets of liberal ideology, incidentally, is that no cost is ever too high, as long as someone else is paying:

Most manufacturers have the ability to produce the more efficient units. But except for the second-largest maker, Goodman Manufacturing, none of the big companies wanted to proceed with the Clinton rule. They argued, and the Bush administration agreed, that the Clinton standard would make air-conditioners too expensive for low-income families and discourage others from replacing older systems. In actual fact, the up-front cost difference between the 20 and 30 percent standards is about $100 per unit — an amount that could be recovered through electricity savings in three to five years.

While everyone else is holding up FBI whistleblower Coleen Rowley as a hero for exposing the Bureau's incompetent failure to follow through in investigating Zacarias Moussaoui, law professor Jonathan Turley holds a different point of view:

What is astonishing is how little of her memo actually has been read or quoted beyond its most sensational suggestions, like the notion that Rowley and her colleagues might have been able to prevent one or more of the Sept. 11 attacks. Rowley's criticism of the FBI largely turns on disagreement over the meaning of probable cause. Rowley insists that there was probable cause to secure a search warrant for Moussaoui's computer and personal effects. The FBI headquarters disagreed, and it was right.

On Aug. 15, 2001, Moussaoui was arrested by the Immigration and Nationalization Service on a charge of overstaying his visa. At that time, the Minnesota office only had an "overstay" prisoner and a suspicion from an agent that he might be a terrorist because of his religious beliefs and flight training. If this hunch amounted to probable cause, it is hard to imagine what would not satisfy such a standard.

[...]

Rowley also places importance on a French report that "confirmed [Moussaoui's] radical fundamentalist Islamic" affiliations. This report was extremely vague and discounted by the FBI and other intelligence and foreign agencies.

Note: the memo in question, written by Rowley, is here.

I just wanted to give credit to Damian Penny for his important contribution to political theory:

Allow me to announce the discovery of Penny's Law: no matter how crazy a person may appear, there's always someone crazier.

Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes interviewed the fugitive accused planner of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, who is hiding in Iraq. According to the suspect, Abdul Rahman Yasin the World Trade Center wasn't the original target.

In an interview to be broadcast tomorrow on "60 Minutes," Mr. Yasin, 42, said that Mr. Yousef had told him, "I want to blow up Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn," but that after scouting Crown Heights and Williamsburg, Mr. Yousef had a new idea.

"Ramzi Yousef told us to go to the World Trade Center," Mr. Yasin said in the interview, recalling that Mr. Yousef had said: "I have an idea we should do one big explosion rather than do small ones in Jewish neighborhoods."

"The majority of the people who work in the World Trade Center are Jews," Mr. Yasin told Ms. Stahl.

I wonder how the apologists for terrorism, who claim that Islamofacists just hate Zionists, not Jews, will spin this one.

[Update: my father wanted me to point out that the word "hiding," above, should be in quotation marks, and noted that this is yet another good reason to oust Saddam Hussein.]

I think Max Power has it right about collaborative blogs. Even though blogging is s'posed to be just for fun, I feel guilty whenever I miss a day or two. And it would be nice if some of those who have something to say and who regularly email me offline could contribute to discussions.

Plus, someone else could assist in coming up with those witty titles for each entry.

Earlier this week, the New York Times portrayed George Bush's position on global warming as having undergone a "stark shift".

In the report, the administration for the first time mostly blames human actions for recent global warming. It says the main culprit is the burning of fossil fuels that send heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth's atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing global mean surface air temperature and subsurface ocean temperature to rise. While the changes observed over the last several decades are likely due mostly to human activities, we cannot rule out that some significant part is also a reflection of natural variability.

The first sentence states that human activities ARE causing greenhouse gases to accumulate with no qualifications. The very next sentence then states that (1) "it is LIKELY due" which clearly weakens the first sentence, and (2) "We CANNOT RULE OUT natural variability" which again weakens the first sentence.

Reducing the wide range of uncertainty inherent in current model predictions will require major advances in understanding and modeling of the factors that determine atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases and aerosols, and the feedback processes that deter-mine the sensitivity of the climate system.

This is exactly the point I have been making that we need "advances in understanding and modeling of the factors that determine atmospheric concentrations". What could be clearer than that statement that we currently lack the knowledge to make valid predictions?

Specifically, this will involve reducing uncertainty regarding:

• the future use of fossil fuels and future emissions of methane,
  
• the fraction of the future fossil fuel carbon that will remain in the atmosphere and provide radiative forcing versus exchange with the oceans or net exchange with the land biosphere,
  
• the feedbacks in the climate system that determine both the magnitude of the change and the rate of energy uptake by the oceans,
  
• the impacts of climate change on regional and local levels,
  
• the nature and causes of the natural variability of climate and its interactions with forced changes, and
  
• the direct and indirect effects of the changing distributions of aerosols.

The list states that we neither know the future amount of emissions nor the basic science on how these emissions affect the climate. Besides that we got the problem licked!

Knowledge of the climate system and of projections about the future climate is derived from fundamental physics, chemistry, and observations. Data are then incorporated in global circulation models. However, model projections are limited by the paucity of data available to evaluate the ability of coupled models to simulate important aspects of climate. To overcome these limitations, it is essential to ensure the existence of a long-term observing system and to make more comprehensive regional measurements of greenhouse gases.

And besides the lack of fundamental understanding of the science, we don't even have enough data for the models!

Evidence is also emerging that black carbon aerosols (soot), which are formed by incomplete combustion, may be a significant contributor to global warming, although their relative importance is difficult to quantify at this point. These aerosols have significant negative health impacts, particularly in developing countries.

Well, we are not sure of the effect of black carbon aerosols - "its relative importance is difficult to quantify" - i.e., we DO NOT KNOW how to model it, however it is bad for our health. I agree, breathing soot is bad for our health.

While current analyses are unable to predict with confidence the timing, magnitude, or regional distribution of climate change,

This sentence states that we currently are not able to make accurate predictions of when it will happen, where it will happen, and how much it will be. Do people really think we should take any action without this knowledge?

the best scientific information indicates that if greenhouse gas concentrations continue to increase, changes are likely to occur.

"changes are likely to occur. " - What a forceful statement. I don't think any one expects otherwise. However, it would be nice it we knew what these changes are, before we cripple our economy.

The U.S. National Research Council has cautioned, however, that "because there is considerable uncertainty in current understanding of how the climate system varies naturally and reacts to emissions of greenhouse gases and aerosols, current estimates of the magnitude of future warmings should be regarded as tentative and subject to future adjustments (either upward or downward)."

"The US National research Council has cautioned that the magnitude of future warmings should be regarded as tentative and subject to future adjustments (either upward or downward)!" That is exactly what I have been trying to explain. What about this statement can't people understand? We need to do more research. We do not currently have a fundamental understanding of the problem!

Moreover, there is perhaps even greater uncertainty regarding the social, environmental, and economic consequences of changes in climate.

And if the last statement was not bad enough, there is a GREATER uncertainty as to the "social, environmental, and economic consequences of changes in climate."

I agree 100% with this assessment. Now let's take the politics out of global warming and get back to doing the necessary research to understand the problem.

The administration knows no shame. Almost every other industrialized country is ratifying the Kyoto treaty, and yet the reactionary government simply refuses to go along with them.

The reason, according to reports? Well, the head of the country says, "For us to ratify the protocol would cost us jobs and damage our industry." And the "government has also opposed the protocol because it does not order developing countries to cut emissions of greenhouse gases blamed for global warming." And of course "industries that emit the gases will be forced out of business while similar producers will continue operating in developing nations."

What other decent nation would ever use these as excuses? How disgusting is George Bush?

Well, The Rest Of The Story (as Paul Harvey would say), is that this announcement was made, not by President Bush, but by Australian Prime Minister John Howard. Could it be that these arguments aren't just used by puppets of American corporate interests? Perhaps there's some merit to the position?

(The New York Times, incidentally, thought this was barely worth a mention. Gee, I'm shocked.)

Dave Itzkoff, a former editor at Maxim magazine, just discovered, after two and a half years working there, that its editorial standards aren't quite those of, say, the New Yorker. Hey Dave, to save you some time pondering, I'll let you in on another well-kept secret: pro wrestling ain't real.

The Beijing Evening News reported that Congress is threatening to move from Washington if they don't get a brand new Capitol building. Unfortunately, they copied the story from The Onion, which isn't known for its fact-checking. Or fact-reporting. Fortunately, despite the lack of a tradition of a free press, the Chinese have learned the American approach to media criticism, which is simply to deny that there's a problem:

Yu Bin, the editor in charge of international news, acknowledged Thursday that he had no idea where the writer, Huang Ke, originally got the story. Yu said he would tell Huang to "be more careful next time."

But he adamantly ruled out a correction and grew slightly obstreperous when pressed to comment on the article's total lack of truth.

"How do you know whether or not we checked the source before we published the story?" Yu demanded in a phone interview. "How can you prove it's not correct? Is it incorrect just because you say it is?"

A California judge fined R.J. Reynolds $20 million for advertising that he said targeted teens.

''Over time, one of two things is going to happen,'' Sugarman said. ''One, they're going to reach a reasonable standard around the country.'' Or, he said, there could be a ''splintering'' of opinion. ''It's not beyond the realm of possibility that as a practical matter you'll have different standards in different places,'' he said.

In case you were upset that Fox had cancelled it, The Nation is bringing it back, issuing an "urgent call" to "End the nuclear danger." How are we going to do it? Well, sign a petition, of course:

WE THEREFORE CALL ON THE UNITED STATES AND RUSSIA TO FULFILL THEIR COMMITMENTS UNDER THE NONPROLIFERATION TREATY TO MOVE TOGETHER WITH THE OTHER NUCLEAR POWERS, STEP BY CAREFULLY INSPECTED AND VERIFIED STEP, TO THE ABOLITION OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS. AS KEY STEPS TOWARD THIS GOAL, WE CALL ON THE UNITED STATES TO:

§  RENOUNCE the first use of nuclear weapons.

§  Permanently END the development, testing and production of nuclear warheads.

§  SEEK AGREEMENT with Russia on the mutual and verified destruction of nuclear weapons withdrawn under treaties, and increase the resources available here and in the former Soviet Union to secure nuclear warheads and material and to implement destruction.

§  STRENGTHEN nonproliferation efforts by ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, finalizing a missile ban in North Korea, supporting UN inspections in Iraq, locating and reducing fissile material worldwide and negotiating a ban on its production.

§  TAKE nuclear weapons off hairtrigger alert in concert with the other nuclear powers (the UK, France, Russia, China, India, Pakistan and Israel) in order to reduce the risk of accidental or unauthorized use.

§  INITIATE talks on further nuclear cuts, beginning with US and Russian reductions to 1,000 warheads each.

New York City agencies are helping to train landlords as to what to look for in identifying potential terrorists. Or at least, that's the theory.

Landlords should be suspicious of tenants who insist on first-floor apartments, have little furniture, use cash, prefer pay phones and try to hide their identities, New York Police Department officials said yesterday at a briefing on fighting terrorism.

Nobody is suggesting rounding up all Arabs and Arab-Americans into internment camps. But as long as the government continues to pretend that the single most important identifying characteristic isn't religion/ethnicity, we're going to be faced with the spectacle of 90-year old grandmothers and 5-year old kids being randomly screened at airports, while civil servants ignore Arab immigrants who talk about blowing up American cities.

When an appeals court ruled last month in Grutter v. Bollinger that the University of Michigan's affirmative action/quota policy was constitutional, a basic rationale was the need to promote diversity. But as the dissent noted, "diversity," as used by the university, simply meant that more black people were needed to fill a quota.

Unfortunately, if predictably, that's what the word "diversity" seems to have evolved to mean, in public as well as in legal contexts. In an otherwise bland story about my hometown, the Baltimore Sun provided this little gem:

Diversity is lacking at River Hill High School, where 78 percent of the students are white, 6 percent are black, 15 percent are Asian and 1 percent are Hispanic.

With all due respect to Max Power, his evidence that the death penalty is a deterrent seems awfully unconvincing to me.

In my mind, the proof that it does deter (at the margins) is the habeas litigation levels in the United States. The ratio of convicted murderers on death row who litigate like the dickens to have a death penalty commuted to a life sentence to the convicted murderers who give up appeals and accept their execution must be at least 100:1. Even if you include suicides and indirect suicides by murderers who get into shootouts with police rather than surrender (though if you include death row and jailhouse suicides, you should also include the thousands of life-without-parole prisoners who don't commit suicide in the ratio), and discount some to account for the costlessness of death sentence appeals thanks to tireless "pro bono" efforts by attorneys to nullify the death penalty through litigation, the ratio is sufficiently huge to suggest that the vast majority of murderers prefer life imprisonment to an execution.

That doesn't mean that I don't think that the death penalty can have a deterrent effect; I just don't think that the behavior of those already facing guaranteed punishment tells us much about the behavior of those who haven't committed a crime yet.

Having defeated terrorism, eliminated poverty, cured AIDS and cancer, and eliminated illegal narcotics, Congress is ready to tackle the pressing national issue of steroids and Major League Baseball.

Congress is going to look into steroid use in baseball, following the recent disclosure that two former most valuable players used the muscle-building drugs.

Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., said Monday he plans to hold a hearing that also will look at steroid use in the Olympics and among college athletes. Dorgan is chairman of the consumer affairs, foreign commerce and tourism subcommittee of the Senate Commerce Committee.

On balance, this will probably turn out to be harmless -- a politician trying to get his name in the headlines by jumping on a safe, noncontroversial issue which is already in the news. And yet, the mere fact that the government has the time and taxpayer money to waste on such hearings, and that nobody is upset about that, is extremely depressing.

A federal judge threw out one of the charges against the Alleged Shoe Bomber, Richard Reid, on the grounds that the judge is absolutely senile.

A judge threw out one of nine charges Tuesday against a man accused of trying to blow up a jetliner with explosives in his shoes, ruling that an airplane is not a vehicle under a new anti-terrorism law.

The charge — attempting to wreck a mass transportation vehicle — was filed under the USA Patriot Act, which was passed by Congress after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

U.S. District Judge William Young said that although an airplane was engaged in mass transportation it is not a vehicle as defined by the new law.

Either it's just getting more press coverage than it used to, or it's actually happening more frequently: North Koreans are seeking asylum in South Korea, by way of various western embassies in Beijing. Now, nine more North Koreans managed to evade the Chinese police and reach the South Korean embassy.

Because of economic policies and bad weather, North Korea has suffered a famine since 1995, during which as many as 2 million people, or 10 percent of its population, have died from hunger-related problems, according to Western aid organization estimates. Western countries, including North Korea's biggest donor, the United States, have provided thousands of tons of food. But much of the aid, distributed by the World Food Program, UNICEF and other agencies, is believed to go to members of the ruling Workers Party, soldiers, and workers and families deemed useful to the government.

Several Western aid agencies, including Doctors Without Borders and Medecins du Monde, have pulled out of North Korea because they said the North Korean government did not allow them to serve North Korea's most vulnerable citizens.

[...]

The North Korean government punishes illegal emigration harshly, sometimes with execution or incarceration in brutal labor camps. Refugees have described harsh conditions, beatings, starvation and hopelessness in the camps.

Apparently it's not quite as easy to win the drug war as some might have you believe:

Mexico's attorney general said today that the country's largest drug gang remained strong despite the arrests of more than 2,000 of its members, including its operations chief, and the death of its fearsome enforcer.

Speaking at the 12th annual National Attorney Generals meeting, which is attended by top state prosecutors, Attorney General Rafael Macedo de la Concha said the Arellano Félix organization's business holdings also appeared intact.

Colin Powell announced that the United States was considering the idea of supporting an interim Palestinian state. I've read the story three times, though, and I can't figure out how this differs in any substantial way from current U.S. policy. Perhaps the problem isn't my reading skills, but the fact that Powell doesn't really know what he's talking about.

He repeatedly said it was premature to talk about who would lead such a state, what its borders or capital would be, or whether it would be viable on land already under Palestinian control. All are questions that could lead to a breakdown in negotiations, as ultimately happened when the parties reached agreement on broad outlines for peace in the 1993 Oslo accords, then foundered on details

I shouldn't mock him too much; he does have some thoughts on the matter:

But he noted: "If it's going to be a state, it will have to have some structure. It will have to have something that looks like territory, even though it may not be perfectly defined forever. And it will have to have institutions within it to be a state."

Richard Cohen doesn't like John Ashcroft. At least he's open and honest about that. Still, it might be nice if he tried something resembling objectivity.

First, he explains that John Ashcroft is just like J. Edgar Hoover. (Which is, of course, one of the worst insults a liberal can throw.) How is John Ashcroft just like J. Edgar Hoover? Well, they both like publicity. This clearly sets these two apart from all other denizens of Washington, D.C. -- including, of course, Richard Cohen, who shuns publicity, keeping his name out of the paper as much as possible.

But the conspiracy theorizing is the best:

But Ashcroft's incessant grandstanding makes me wonder if sometimes some of what goes on is more about politics than national security. He personifies the suspicion that terrorism alerts, even arrests, are being timed and manipulated for the nightly news. It seems every revelation of some FBI or CIA screw-up is followed by yet another terrorism alert of one color or another.

It was supposedly sheer coincidence that the testimony of FBI agent Coleen Rowley was virtually obscured by the announcement that the new homeland security Cabinet post was being proposed. Maybe so, but the announcement was clearly rushed and made with insufficient consultation.

I wonder, too, why al Muhajir was busted at O'Hare International Airport and not followed to see what he did and whom he talked to. (He was a long way from getting a bomb of any kind.)

What exactly is Cohen's real complaint here? Oh yeah: nothing John Ashcroft does could possibly be correct. Hey, there are plenty of things to criticize the government over so far -- but arresting someone before he gets a bomb?

An airplane dispatcher who works for American Airlines is claiming that she was ordered not to report the Shoe Bomber.

The American Airlines dispatcher who was monitoring a trans-Atlantic flight when the captain reported that a passenger had a shoe bomb said today that her supervisor tried to prevent her from notifying the authorities.

The supervisor worried that law enforcement officials would delay the plane on the ground, the dispatcher said. In a complaint filed with the Federal Aviation Administration, the dispatcher said her supervisor "instructed me to hold off informing the authorities because the flight would be remotely parked, and `it would be forever before we could get the plane out of there.' "

The Senate voted down President Bush's proposal to make the estate tax repeal permanent. The vote was 54-44 in favor of repeal. Of course, the vote isn't very important right now, since it wouldn't have any effect until 2011, but the Republican plan is to lock in the repeal now, in case the Democrats are back in power then. And failing that, to be able to use this as a campaign weapon.

But what I want to know is, when did this sort of "virtual filibuster" come into existence? A bill, of course, needs 50 votes to pass, which this one had; it needed 60 votes only because that's the total needed to end a filibuster. But what happened to the Good Old Days, when a Senator who wanted to block a particular bill had to actually stand up on the Senate floor and read from a phone book for hours, until 60 Senators voted for cloture or until supporters of the bill gave up? Now, they don't even bother going through the motions; if the proponents can't get the 60 votes, they simply stop trying. What happened to accountability, where the public could see who was being obstructionist?

Can you imagine Mr. Smith Goes To Washington being shot today? Jimmy Stewart would just say, "Oh yeah? Where's your 60 percent?" and sit down. It might not have been quite as dramatic.

From a Letter to the Editor in the New York Times:

To the Editor:

Re "Global Warming Follies" (editorial, June 8):

The main reason President Bush rejects the Kyoto Protocol is based on faulty reasoning; he believes that it would hurt the American economy. In fact, the opposite is true.

What is bad for Exxon is not necessarily bad for the United States economy. Ratifying Kyoto would spur new technologies and create millions of new jobs. This is just what our economy needs.

From the Washington Post:

"Obviously, we cannot envisage circumstances under which the United States would need to resort to military action against the Netherlands or another ally," the statement said.

Hoping to cash in on the recent publicity, a jackassCalifornia state senator plans to introduce a bill which would mandate that Major League Baseball test its players for steroids.

"We will use the powers of the state to notify any professional sport -- we're not singling out baseball -- that they must have policy and they must show evidence that their athletes are tested once a year," Perata said.

Teams would be required to file a steroid-testing plan with the state Athletics Commission. Athletes would be tested for the presence of steroids, which are illegal without a doctor's prescription.

The Athletics Commission was founded in 1924 to look out for the welfare of boxers and has expanded to include martial arts but has no role over baseball.

The bill states that professional athletic associations could not hold events in the state without an approved steroid plan, but details on how that provision would be enforced are still be developed.

Aside from the sheer stupidity, it seems to me that there's a constitutional problem here; if the state can't drug test people without probable cause -- and in general, that's the case under the fourth amendment -- then can they mandate that it be done by a sports league? This is framed as a regulation of an industry, but I don't know that the state should be able to circumvent the constitution by so doing.

I don't generally go in for promoting specific action on this site, but in this case, I'll make an exception. Go to this moron's website and fill in his feedback form to tell him what you think of him and his idea (which you can track here).

And since I'm being critical, I suppose I ought to give kudos where they're appropriate:

Sen. Rico Oller, R-San Andreas, called the idea "clearly bad public policy."

"I would go for it if also all public officials -- including the Legislature, the attorney general and the governor -- were required to submit to drug testing," Oller said. "This is a tremendous overreach. These people are not even California citizens. There is a certain arrogance to not only regulate every aspect of California citizens' lives, but also to regulate those who are not citizens of the state."

The Rancho Bernardo High School vice principal who forcibly checked the underwear of students at a dance has been disciplined. They solved the problem by making her a teacher. That's what passes for accountability in the public school system. And why did the school district take two months to mete out this non-punishment?

The district had few options for disciplining Wilson because she is tenured, Phillips said. Removing her credential or firing her could open the district to the threat of a wrongful termination lawsuit and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Tenure guarantees Wilson a teaching position within the district until she retires.

I'll be out of town for a few days, and blogging will be very intermittent. (Yeah, yeah, I know: what else is new. Shaddup.)

I leave, come back, and The New York Times is still on its rabid anti-gun crusade. (Oops. I said "crusade." Maybe someone will get offended.) Sometimes I think Andrew Sullivan is a little paranoid when he discusses theextreme bias of the new New York Times regime. Then I read stories like this one, and the paper's agenda becomes too blindingly obvious to ignore: The Times doesn't like guns. The Times doesn't like John Ashcroft. John Ashcroft said that the Second Amendment protects the individual right to own a gun. The Times simply can't resist. They're going to milk that for all it's worth, regardless of whether there's any news to report.

The current "story" is that some criminal defendants ("scores," according to the Times, though the story manages to mention only one, and he in the twenty-third paragraph of the story) are citing Ashcroft's position as a defense to gun charges. Not a single person has succeeded by using this argument, but the Times gives space to their favorite group to rant hyperbolically:

"The Justice Department has created a very dangerous situation that is endangering public safety and forcing Justice Department prosecutors to litigate with one hand tied behind their backs," said Mathew S. Nosanchuk, litigation director of the Violence Policy Center, a gun control group in Washington. "Criminals are using the department's own Second Amendment language to challenge the gun laws."

And so the Times frames the debate as being between those who criticize John Ashcroft for saying that people have the right to bear arms, and those who criticize John Ashcroft for not following through after saying that people have the right to bear arms. Surely there was someone out there who would defend Ashcroft, or who would at least explain his department's "narrow and cryptic" views. But if so, the Times couldn't find him. Or didn't look. And thus, one-sidedly reported a non-story as if it were big news.

Andrew Sullivan links to the website of the San Francisco Rent Board Commission. The site contains a chart showing the makeup of the board. Take a look at the last column of the chart: each board member is identified -- the only information provided about the member -- by race. And if race isn't enough, the chart helpfully identifies the board's gay member.

It seems to me that James Watt was fired for just this sort of behavior. Worse, he was permanently branded as "insensitive."

Why is the government telling us the race of board members? How is this appropriate in any way? The College Board, which administers the SAT and other standardized tests, will no longer even tell colleges that disabled people are disabled, on the theory that ability is no longer relevant to college admissions. And yet San Francisco's government is telling us the ethnic backgrounds, and sexual habits, of board members? Are they trying to say that a person's Hispanic heritage is relevant to the issue of whether a rent increase is "excessive?"

Is this the best advertisement possible for Ward Connerly's Racial Privacy Initiative?

The Democrats and Republicans in the Senate are competing with each other to see how much of our money they can hand over to the elderly. Fortunately, so far, the two parties haven't been able to agree on an approach, and so nothing may get passed at all.

The Democratic proposal cost more than the Republican plan — $594 billion from 2005 to 2012, compared with $370 billion. But even the Republican plan would have been the biggest expansion of Medicare since the program was created in 1965, after the landslide election of Lyndon B. Johnson.

Democrats said they were exploring a possible compromise under which the government and private insurers would share the responsibility and the financial risks of providing drug benefits to the elderly. Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana, is promoting such a deal.

One of my maxims is that "Sloppy language leads to sloppy thinking." When we speak circuitously or use euphemisms, we start to forget what reality is. As such, one of my top ten pet peeves is when people talk about what "the government" will provide. The government doesn't have money; all the government has is the ability to take money from other people. There is no compromise under which the government and private insurers will do anything. The proposal is for taxpayers to provide drug benefits to the elderly. I wonder if such programs would have nearly so much support if they were phrased this way.

The Senate Republican leader, Trent Lott of Mississippi, said he was not optimistic about the chances for a hybrid blending the Democratic and Republican approaches.

Mr. Lott said he was eager to "help the elderly poor" who have no insurance for drug expenses. But, he said, $370 billion is "unequivocally the upper limit" on what most Republicans would be willing to spend.

Man: would you sleep with me for a million dollars?
Woman: Yes.
Man: Well, would you sleep with me for ten dollars?
Woman: What kind of woman do you think I am?
Man: We've already established that; we're just haggling over the price.

We've established what kind of politician Trent Lott is. We're just haggling now. Admittedly, this price tag is no worse than that of the obscene agriculture subsidy law Bush signed weeks ago. But does anybody think it will stay this "cheap"? The elderly population isn't going to shrink. Drugs aren't going to magically get cheaper. The list of ailments treatable with drugs is going to keep growing. If the line isn't drawn now -- and I'm not optimistic -- this will turn into yet another rapidly-growing entitlement line-item, a la Social Security and Medicare, untouchable in the federal budget.

San Francisco has officially proposed a ballot initiative that, if passed, could allow the city to grow its own marijuana. The proposal is an attempt to get around the federal government's strategy of subverting California's medical marijuana law by shutting marijuana clubs.

It's creative, anyway. And if Republicans really respected federalism, this would work. But it seems unlikely:

Federal authorities were not amused. "Unless Congress changes the law and makes marijuana a legal substance, then we have to do our job and enforce the law," said a spokesman for the regional office of the Drug Enforcement Administration.

California, and San Francisco specifically, may come up with plenty of wacky ideas, but on this one they're dead on.

The blogosphere is abuzz with the story of an American University student, Ben Wetmore, being persecuted by school officials because he was a "gadfly" (generally, a euphemism for "jerk"). He had been critical of the university's administration, and then when they found an excuse to punish him -- for videotaping a speech by Tipper Gore -- they jumped on the opportunity.

A ridiculous abuse of authority by the school, of course. But what caught my eye was this quote, from the university's director of Judicial Affairs and Mediation Services:

Kurita said she could not discuss the specifics of Wetmore's case due to confidentiality requirements.

But in a classic example of the law of unintended consequences, these laws are used every day, not to protect citizens, but rather to shield bureaucrats from accountability. Child Welfare does nothing to prevent an abused child from being killed. Child Welfare's excuse? None; they "can't discuss it" because of confidentiality rules. Accountability? None; we don't find out who was responsible and what actions they took. A school railroads a student? The student complains. The school's explanation? None. They "can't discuss it."

Does it sound as if Wetmore wants the details of his case to be private? He approached the media. He told the story publicly. Once he does that, the school shouldn't be able to hide behind "confidentiality." These laws are supposed to keep personal data private, not to keep government actions secret. If they're being used to avoid accountability, they need to be rewritten.

Jason Rylander is fat. So am I. Unfortunately, I can't claim that it's because of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention's new definition of "obesity," which ignores any distinction between muscle and flab. Mine really is all flab.

Still, it raises an important issue. The media is saturated with stories replete with numbers. Obesity is up X%. Teenage pregnancies are down Y%. Test scores are unchanged. Four out of five dentists recommend Trident sugarless gum for their patients who chew gum. Occasionally, we think about the implications of those statistics; more frequently, we let the pundits do it for us. But what we -- and the pundits -- virtually never do is ask what the numbers mean. What definitions were chosen? What methodology was used to gather the data?

Sometimes, the topic is trivial, as in this New York Times story which discusses the disputed methods of measuring movie box office data.

[W]eekend box-office figures released on Sunday and printed in many newspapers on Monday, including The New York Times, are based on actual box-office figures for Friday and Saturday plus each studio's guess about how its films will perform on Sunday. It is this wiggle room that has led many over the years to be overly optimistic about Sunday grosses in order to make their films No. 1 or to achieve some other goal.

[...]

Sunday guessing is not the only way that the system can be manipulated. Weekend box-office numbers also indicate the number of theaters in which a movie opens, but not the number of screens. A studio can release a movie on four or five screens at one multiplex and claim it as only one theater, raising the per-theater average for a film. Studios have often resisted, for this and other reasons, releasing the actual number of screens on which a movie opens.

Economic policy, or at least punditry, is based on the Consumer Confidence Index. And yet, as the New Republic pointed out last year, the CCI is seriously flawed.

Although it's routinely described as a survey of 5,000 households, only about 3,500 generally return the form. The form essentially asks for a positive, negative, or neutral response to five questions about current and future business conditions.

So it's a poll.

Polls have their place, of course, but simply reporting that "x" percent of Americans surveyed feel "positive" about business conditions doesn't really seem like the kind of news that should be dominating business coverage and roiling the stock market. After all, polls from Harris and Gallup also address basic consumer confidence issues, and they never make the same splash that the confidence indexes do. Which goes to show that when you're trying to numberize a slippery idea like sentiment, an "index" trumps a "poll" every time.

How does the Conference Board convert its poll into an index? By combining the responses to its five questions and converting the resulting figure into a composite number "relative" to a benchmark score of 100.0 for 1985. (Why does 1985 equal 100 on this scale? Because it was "a basic, noneventful year," explains Lynn Franco, director of the Conference Board's Consumer Research Center, offering some insight into the formal science of consumer confidence.)

And how about the all-important Consumer Price Index, which measures the crucial inflation rate? Well, some of its flaws have been recognized and corrected in recent years, but there are still significant problems with both the construction of the statistic and the collection of the data.

In theory, the calculation of the index is simple. It is based on a marketbasket of 211 goods and services — medicine, education, entertainment and so on — bought by the average family. The prices are tracked over time.

But the task of calculation is daunting. As the bureau chooses among millions of products, it is constrained by budget limitations and saddled with old technology. Bureau agents roam stores, looking at price tags and writing prices on pieces of paper. They interview store executives, visit homeowners to determine housing prices and ask consumers to keep daily diaries of purchases.

All kinds of variables, including new products, mean that the bureau has a tough time keeping up.

And yet journalists generally treats this sort of data as holy writ. There's no acknowledgement that maybe everyone in the country didn't suddenly get fat. instead, the media jumps right to the question of "What should be done to solve this crisis?"

The New York Times runs yet another story by David Cay Johnston on a method for reducing taxes. This one involves the purchase of high-priced life insurance to avoid the estate tax. Quick, without reading the article -- three guesses for Johnston's opinion on the method.

While you're pondering that, here's a question for those of you with a good memory, or enough (too much) free time on your hands to go through the Times' archives: has David Cay Johnston ever met a tax he didn't like? Because (in case you couldn't guess), Johnston sure doesn't like this one. And, as usual, he lets us know it, despite (ostensibly) writing a news story:

The technique is legal, blessed by the I.R.S. in 1996. But some leading tax lawyers, as well as some accountants and insurance agents, say it shouldn't be. They say it effectively disguises a gift to one's heirs that should be taxed like any other gift. They also say it is but one example of how a tax exemption on life insurance that was approved by Congress in 1913 to help widows and orphans has been stretched to benefit the very richest Americans.

[...]

Sanford J. Schlesinger of the law firm Kaye Scholer said he passed up a chance to collect a six-figure fee for advising on one of these deals because he thinks the deals should not pass muster with the I.R.S. "My mother taught me that if something seems too good to be true, it isn't true," he said.

Other leading estate tax lawyers, as well as some accountants and insurance agents, say Mr. Blattmachr's insurance technique should fail because it is wholly outside the intent of Congress in giving tax breaks for life insurance, the I.R.S. ruling on the plan notwithstanding.

"If the I.R.S. understood this they would say that it relies on a disguised gift — and if you have to pay gift taxes, then Jonathan's insurance deal does not work," said an estate partner at a tax firm in New York, who like others, said they could not be identified because they have signed confidentiality agreements that are part of all such insurance deals.

Another legal expert said paying 10 times too much for insurance in a plan like this reminds him of a matriarch selling the family business to her granddaughter for $10 million when it was actually worth 10 times that amount. "The I.R.S. wouldn't let a family get away with selling the business for a dime on the dollar," this lawyer said, "and they should not allow it to work in reverse through insurance."

My collaborator Partha notes that the Princeton-Yale hullabaloo wouldn't have made such a media splash if it had been Kansas-Kansas State instead of two Ivy League schools. I agree, and I think the reason is simple: reporters enjoy storytelling rather than reporting. The latter is boring; any third rate hack can compile a list of events in article form. But if you can write about the big picture, you're a Journalist, not just a reporter. And Kansas-Kansas State is just an amusing anecdote. It happened; it was strange; the end.

But Princeton-Yale? That combination allows for "insights" like these, from the New York Times:

"This report reflects the heightened craziness about admissions decisions," said James O. Freedman, a legal scholar and the former president of Dartmouth. "It probably wouldn't subvert the Constitution, but it is competitiveness taken to a dastardly length."

Robert Schaeffer, the public education officer for the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, who follows college admissions closely, said this case illustrated how the competition by selective colleges for a handful of top students had become "an arms race in which each side tries to one-up the other."

But education experts say the larger lesson may be that the fierce competition between elite Ivy League universities for top students has finally gone too far, sparking the kind of lapse in judgment that is certain to bring renewed scrutiny to the college admission process.

"In this game, the top colleges all want to land the same students right now -- they want to win," said Alvin Sanoff, former managing editor of U.S. News and World Report's annual guide to colleges. "It has never been more competitive on either end, for students competing to get in and schools trying to land the best students."

Nowhere is that competition more strenuous than at Yale and Princeton, two of the nation's wealthiest universities. For years, they have battled over many of the same high school seniors, using financial aid and admissions reforms to lure the most attractive applicants.

But if this is just a stupid, but essentially harmless, lapse in judgment, then there wouldn't be a story to tell. So both papers have to "put the events into context." Even if they have to invent the context.

Well, Thomas Friedman is consistent, anyway. If you're going to be wrong, be wrong in style. By that standard, today's bizarre column, In oversight we trust, is certainly stylish.

Friedman's argument is -- well, actually his argument is "George Bush is evil. Enron, Worldcom, Harken. At the New York Times, we try to say these words as many times as possible next to George Bush's name." But once you get past that, his theory is that bureaucrats are good. Or, rather, some bureaucrats are good. That's right: America is better than other countries because we have better bureaucrats. As Dave Barry says, I am not making this up.

Well, correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't we have an SEC -- not run by corporate crony George Bush and his sinister henchman Harvey Pitt, but by the saintly Bill Clinton and his trusty sidekick Arthur Levitt -- when these (alleged) frauds were actually being perpetrated? And correct me again if I'm wrong, but was it the crusading investigators of the SEC who uncovered the Enron fraud? That's just not quite how I remember it.

What Friedman doesn't understand, apparently, is that all the bureaucrats in the world don't prevent crimes from occurring. They can create new crimes by requiring lots of paperwork to be filled out in triplicate, but they can't prevent crimes from taking place. Certainly, vigorous prosecution of people who are caught committing fraud is necessary and desirable -- and should serve to deter future would-be con artists. But all the SEC reports, rules, and regulations in the world aren't going to do a thing to stop those already willing to break the law and cheat others.

I could go on, but I'd like to quote a different Friedman -- Milton -- in rebuttal. (From Jacob Sullum's column this week in Reason.) He was talking about the war on drugs, but his observations apply more generally:

Friedman said "the war on drugs and the harm which it does are simply manifestations of a much broader problem: the substitution of political mechanisms for market mechanisms in a wide variety of areas." He estimated that "the United States today is a little over fifty percent socialist," as measured by the resources the government commands through taxes and regulation.

Friedman emphasized that "the problem is not the kind of people who run our governmental institutions versus those who run our private institutions. The trouble, as the Marxists used to say, is in the system."

In particular, he explained, the ability to spend other people's money at will means that government programs do not face the discipline that private businesses do. "When a private enterprise fails, it is closed down," he noted. "When a government enterprise fails, it is expanded."

Friedman cautioned reformers against trying "to cure a problem created by socialism [with] some more socialism" by putting the government in charge of drug distribution. He urged them to "recognize that repealing drug prohibition is part of the broader problem of cutting down the scope and power of the government and restoring power to the people."

Imagine that Bill Clinton had appointed an extremely conservative Democrat to be Secretary of State, someone who didn't share many of Clinton's views. (Hey, use your imagination; I know Clinton "triangulated" so much that it was hard to find someone whose views he didn't claim to share.) Someone, say, who didn't believe in multilateralism, someone who felt the U.S. should act quickly and decisively, with force if necessary, whenever the country's interests were threatened, regardless of how others around the world felt. Further, imagine that this individual's disagreements with Clinton were made widely known in the media by his supporters. Sometimes he would go to a press conference and make a statement which directly contradicted Clinton's position on an issue.

Here's a quick quiz for you: How do you think the editorial board of the New York Times would feel about this hypothetical person? Would they celebrate his principled stands? Would they urge him to "throw a tantrum or two" in order to get his way? Would they argue that his job as Secretary of State was to conduct his own foreign policy, regardless of the wishes of the president?

I can't be certain, but I doubt it. I suspect they would be calling for this individual's resignation, at a minimum for failing to be a team player, and at worst for undermining the president. And yet, maybe I'm wrong. Because they see nothing wrong with suggesting that Colin Powell should be disloyal to the president of the United States:

If Mr. Powell were on a winning streak, his conciliatory style might look more appealing. The measure of success for secretaries of state is not whether they loyally follow the lead of the president, but whether they guide foreign policy in directions that advance American interests abroad. Mr. Powell has the convictions and seasoning to be a great secretary of state, but he will not achieve that stature if he fails to stand his ground.

I know the editors of the Times are upset that George Bush is president, and think that they could do a better job running the country. But at some point they need to get over it, and realize that they'll have to wait until 2004 if they want our foreign policy to resemble Belgium's.

Some have complained about the president's inclusion of Iran on Bush's list, saying that Iran is reforming. That it's moderate. Maybe they should read more about what's actually happening in Iran:

A court dissolved one of Iran's oldest opposition parties on Saturday, sentencing some members to jail and banning others from political activity for as long as 10 years.

The action was part of a new wave of repression that has included the closing of two newspapers and the interrogation of several Iranian intellectuals this month.

The dissidents were charged with a series of crimes, including seeking to topple the country's Islamic government, spreading rumors and lies by giving lectures and interviews, and having links with foreigners. Members said they would appeal the sentences.

When the New York Times makes it up. According to the Times' headline writers, "Wife Killings at Fort Reflect Growing Problem in Military". The article, of course, discusses the killings of four women at Fort Bragg by their military spouses over the last six weeks. It's certainly shocking, and worth reporting. So why do I criticize the Times? Because not one fact in the article substantiates in any way the Times' claim that the problem is "growing." Some data is cited, but that data is unrelated to the claim, and moreover, as even the Times admits:

The numbers have been sharply debated by experts and are difficult to calculate, because the military counts only married couples in incidents of domestic violence, not former spouses or girlfriends.

These are both examples of ideological bias, but they're also an example of a phenomenon I noted the other day: the Times' desperate need to "put events into context." Why write about four individual murders when you can write about a societal problem which is "reflected" by those four murders?

Okay, perhaps the editors haven't quite gone that far. Yet. But they're doing everything short of shipping weapons to Baghdad in an attempt to undermine the Bush administration's supposed intention to invade Iraq. (I think this would be Ann Coulter's cue to accuse them of treason and suggest they be deported to Guantanamo.)

First, they reported possible U.S. plans to invade Iraq from three sides simultaneously, describing the size of the U.S. force and the directions from which the attacks would come. Then they followed up by describing an alternative plan, in which the U.S. would seize Baghdad quickly and attack from the "inside out".

And to follow up on revealing Pentagon plans to Saddam Hussein, the Times is propagandizing against war, attempting to convince the American public that attacking Iraq isn't economically feasible. Except, once again, the Times writes a headline that their story can't back up: "Profound Effect on U.S. Economy Seen in a War on Iraq."

The article primarily focuses on the cost of the conflict, but without explaining what the "profound effects" of those costs might be. Moreover, it's all guesswork, as the Times admits:

Senior administration officials said Mr. Bush and his top advisers had not begun to consider the cost of a war because they had yet to decide what kind of military operation might be necessary. Whatever choice is made, experts say, the costs are likely to be significant and therefore may ultimately influence the size, scale and tactics of any military operation.

Last Nov. 13, a month after the United States began bombing Afghanistan to dislodge the Taliban and Al Qaeda, the president's advisers debated whether Iraq should be the focus of phase two of the campaign against terrorism. Mr. Bush directed Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham to add more than 100 million barrels to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

Since Jan. 1, oil shipments into the reserve have reached record levels, about 150,000 barrels a day. One oil strategist in London noted that United States government acquisitions for the reserve were accounting for more than half of the growth in demand for oil this year.

With a capacity of 700 million barrels, the reserve could be used to disperse 4.2 million barrels of oil a day to jittery markets — more than enough to make up for the 1 million barrels a day of Iraqi crude lost because of military operations.

From the Science section of The New York Times:

Changing physical education classes so that students spend more class time in motion can yield measurable improvements in fitness, a new study reports.

The FBI might not be able to figure out that people who train at flight schools and associate with known terrorists are worth watching, but they've come up with another way to "connect the dots." Okay, so they may not be useful dots, but Foxnews is reporting that the FBI has collected data from supermarkets as part of its intelligence-gathering process:

According to one privacy expert, at least one national grocery chain voluntarily handed over to the government records from its customer loyalty card database in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

American law, unlike European law, generally treats this information as property of the vendor rather than the consumer, which means that unless the company has contractually agreed not to divulge the information, it is free to do so. (And of course, law enforcement can subpoena the information, but that's a little more work than just asking for it.) While certain information -- travel or financial records, for instance -- could clearly be useful for law enforcement purposes, I can't even begin to conceive of what uses they would have for grocery records. Stopping Al Qaeda surely wouldn't be one of those uses.

The United Nations has figured out that there was no massacre in Jenin. The technical response is "Duh." The best part of the story, though?

The United Nations report, attributed to Secretary General Kofi Annan, was largely based on published accounts and descriptions by humanitarian groups and other organizations, because Israel blocked the United Nations from conducting a first-hand inquiry unanimously sought by the Security Council. Israeli officials said they had feared an investigation by the United Nations would be biased.

But don't hold your breath waiting for an apology or retraction from those who claimed that there was a massacre. Perhaps there's a lesson here about not jumping to conclusions (that's my job) based on rumors and unverified assertions. The real question is why people were so quick to believe the accusations against Israel. (Need I ask?)

Well, a sure sign that the war on terrorism is bogged down: people stop worrying about what needs to be done, and start worrying about what has already happened. It's bad news when people feel that they have the time for throwing blame around -- and the need to do so. The first step of that process: lay the groundwork for explaining why it wasn't your fault. Tell everyone how you foresaw the attacks on 9/11, and how you developed a plan that might have defeated Al Qaeda before 9/11, but how you were undermined by incompetent FBI officials, shortsighted State Department officials (okay, that part is plausible), bureaucratic infighting between the CIA and armed forces, and the awkwardness of the transition from Clinton to Bush.

I'm certainly not suggesting that something can't be learned from these circumstances. Certainly there needs to be a strong hand in charge of defense policy, to keep the various agencies from working at cross purposes. But the lesson Time wants to draw, apparently, is that people should listen to the guy who, in hindsight, turns out to have been right.

We're at war halfway around the world, and we're thinking of expanding that war to other countries. (And -- gasp -- Israel might benefit from that decision.) And now, the president has the authority to negotiate free trade agreements. Given the president's past pandering to protectionists, in industries like steel, lumber, and textiles, this is a welcome sign. The one good thing you could say about President Clinton was his commitment to free trade. Bush had been wobbly on the issue, as he had on so many others. Hopefully this signals a firming up of Bush's backbone, and we see some real progress.

No matter how one feels about how enemy combatants deserve to be treated -- summary execution is too good for them, as far as I'm concerned -- and no matter how one feels about what level of due process these people should receive, I would think there would be one thing that reasonable people on all sides could agree upon: we should be sure that they are enemy combatants before we do anything to them. Another point on which I would hope reasonable people could agree: the government saying "Trust us, we know what we're doing" isn't very comforting. Given the many revelations about law enforcement incompetence, not to mention outright malfeasance, there's no way they can ask us to take their word for it.

And yet, that's what happening: the Justice Department is taking the position that providing evidence to support the claim that someone is an enemy combatant is unnecessary:

"An inspection of the requested materials would all but amount to a [new] review of the military's enemy combatant determination, and thus exceed the limited standard of review governing the Executive determination at issue," the Justice Department said in a legal memo.

A week later, Doumar asked the government to explain why it was holding Hamdi, and on July 25, prosecutors submitted a two-page declaration by Michael H. Mobbs, a Defense Department special adviser on enemy combatants.

Mobbs wrote that Hamdi traveled to Afghanistan in July or August of last year, joined a Taliban military unit, received weapons training and remained with his unit after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Prosecutors believe that Mobbs's declaration should be sufficient for Doumar's needs. "Under the fundamental separation of powers principles recognized by the 4th Circuit . . . in justifying the detention of captured enemy combatants in wartime, the military should not need to supply a court with the raw notes from interviews with a captured enemy combatant . . . or the other types of information listed in the court's order," Leonard wrote.

This is not an argument that a detained individual is entitled to a full trial to determine his status -- but independent review of the evidence would be nice. It's not as if there are such overwhelmingly large numbers of people being detained that it would overwhelm the courts to allow judicial review. We're not talking about everyone at Guantanamo, after all; just American citizens. If there's evidence to support the claims, surely a judge can be trusted to interpret it.

Many of my liberal friends still hold to the idea that George Bush (and/or John Ashcroft) is the big threat to civil liberties in the United States. Well, I'm not a blind defender of the Bush administration, but as any good libertarian can tell you, neither party has a monopoly on authoritarian tendencies. Case in point: two Clinton-appointed judges just decided that political candidates can be censored by the state. The U.S Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit just upheld, 2-1, a Vermont law that restricts spending by candidates for various state offices, with a sliding scale depending on the office in question.

So we have a court deciding that the first amendment does not protect political speech. Why? Because politicians are telling the court that they'll be corrupt if they're allowed to spend more money. This apparently is a reason to censor people, rather than, say, prosecuting everyone currently in the legislature. The Supreme Court held in its Buckley decision that contribution limits were acceptable means of limiting corruption, but that expenditure limits were not. The Second Circuit simply glosses over the distinction after noting it.

And if there's any doubt that this is totally unconstitutional, the decision's explanation of where the compelling state interest comes in includes:

1) encouraging public debates and other forms of meaningful constituent contact in place of the growing reliance on 30- second commercials and (2) increasing the ability of non-wealthy Vermonters to run for state office in Vermont.

The first thought I had when I read the decision was Justice Brandeis's observation that "The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well- meaning but without understanding." It turns out that I'm not original; Judge Winter, who filed a long dissent in this case, began his opinion with the same quote. The only encouraging thought I can take from this is that the dissent is so much clearer and more convincing than the cursory majority opinion, that the Second Circuit sitting en banc will be embarrassed into reversing it.

Is your television set clear? Is the quality of the signal okay? Are your sitcoms funny enough, and are your made-for-TV movies based on true enough stories? Well, not to worry, because Washington is on the case! The F.C.C. is going to save America from the tragedy of low quality television! Never again will you have to worry that the plot of The District will be too formulaic, or that there might be too many commercials in NFL games.

Oh, sure, it could cost American households hundreds of dollars each. But doesn't that cost pale in comparison to the benefit of knowing that your government cares enough about you to mandate that your new television be digital, even if you're too dumb to know how much you really want it?

Digital television offers viewers a variety of options not possible under the analog system. Digital signals can carry high-definition television (HDTV) broadcasts, with vastly improved picture and sound. Several different "standard-definition" broadcasts can be carried on one digital channel.

In a test during the NCAA men's college basketball tournament last spring, CBS broadcast four games at the same time on one digital channel, allowing viewers to switch among them.

Digital broadcasts also support viewer interactivity. In one of the most frequently cited examples, viewers would be able to punch a button on their remote controls to buy products they see on TV.

The commission voted 3-0, with Commissioner Michael J. Copps concurring but not approving, to consider requiring that digital TV tuners support a copy-prevention standard backed by the entertainment industry.

Such a "broadcast flag" would be a code embedded in over-the-air digital broadcasts, containing instructions on how and where a show could be copied. Future video recorders would read these instructions and prevent users from making unauthorized copes of a program.

Electronics makers and consumer groups fear that technology would limit a consumer's ability to copy and use broadcasts as they wish. That, they say, would slow the transition to digital TV even further.

You've really got to love the limousine liberals at the New York Times. They just provide so much fodder, whenever they start getting generous with other people's money.

Long hidden by the puffed-up image of abundance, a crisis of hunger in New York City has been worsened by rising unemployment and underemployment since Sept. 11. According to the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, more than one million city residents depend on hard-pressed food pantries and soup kitchens for their basic needs. One-quarter of them are from households with one or more members who have jobs but not enough income to survive. They have turned to charity because all else has failed them.

Step two: cite an inflated statistic from a group whose funding is based upon the statistic being inflated.

Step three: insist that only a big government program can solve the "hidden problem."

And, of course, the obligatory step four: mislabel government redistribution of wealth as "charity."

In this picture, one major failure has been the city's handling of the food stamp program. More than 800,000 low-income New Yorkers get food stamp assistance, but there are at least that many, by conservative estimates, who do not get food stamps even though they could qualify.

The compassion gap had its roots in the administration of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, which never appreciated what an economic boon the program could be for the city. The federal government pays all food stamp benefits and half the cost of administering the program; the city and state pay the rest. But the benefit to the city, at an average $94 a month per recipient, far outweighs the expense. The Community Food Resource Center, a not-for-profit group that studies issues of poverty, estimates that the city is losing $1 billion a year by not trying to make sure that everyone who qualifies for food stamps receives them.

But the funnier part is the Times' portrayal of the food stamp program as a profitable enterprise. According to the Times, the city should take money from city taxpayers to give to city non-taxpayers because then the federal and state governments will take more money from other taxpayers and give that money to city non-taxpayers, and this will be good for the city. An economic boon! A few more "boons" like that, and the whole country could be as rich as North Korea.

The numbers of people receiving food stamp aid increased slightly during the first six months after Mayor Michael Bloomberg took office, but have again gone down in recent weeks, perhaps because of insufficient outreach efforts and unduly complicated procedures required to apply for benefits.

Verna Eggleston, commissioner of the city's Human Resources Administration, exacerbated the situation when she adopted the ideologically driven decision by her predecessor, Jason Turner, and rejected the opportunity to extend food stamp benefits for some 24,000 jobless and childless New Yorkers, who are now limited to three months' assistance in any three-year period. The waiver, offered by the federal government to help parts of the country with insufficient employment opportunities, was accepted by two dozen other regions of the state, including several with better employment outlooks than New York City's.

Ms. Eggleston's agency has withdrawn for now a proposal to drastically cut city funding for the Emergency Food Assistance Program, which helps food banks. But Mr. Bloomberg and his team should see hunger for what it is, a problem that threatens to become a millstone as the city tries to emerge from the fiscal depths. A well-administered food stamp program will not only lift the neediest New Yorkers to more self-sufficiency, it will provide much-needed revenues for the city. Most important, it will help end a heartless approach to a shameful situation.

But you really couldn't make this stuff up -- giving welfare to people "lifts" them to "more self-sufficiency." What exactly would less self-sufficiency consist of?

Here's a shocker: despite all the optimistic words from the Eurocrat crowd over the last few days, Iraq is not going to allow U.N. weapons inspections to proceed.

The Iraqi information minister said today the mission of U.N. weapons inspectors in Iraq is "finished," the strongest official suggestion to date that President Saddam Hussein has no intention of allowing the inspectors to return.

Even so, some refuse to believe Iraq, insisting that there's some chance that he might let inspectors back -- if the moon is in the right phase, and if they guess his favorite color, and if they say "pretty please." Which means that Saddam can keep stringing people along for months, if not years, as they think, "This time it will be different." Editorial boards across the New York Times will be filled with comments about how we need to "exhaust all diplomatic possibilities."

I don't know how long they want to wait, or when they'll finally admit that diplomatic possibilities have utterly failed. After Hussein uses weapons of mass destruction again?

The New York Times' editors keep trying to create opposition to an attack on Iraq, complaining repeatedly that nobody will explain to them why such an attack would be a good idea. (Though, as Jack Shafer explains in Slate, if they were really interested in learning more about the subject, they could just ask the people who keep leaking strategy stories to them.) Well, perhaps the Times' editors should read the editorial page of the Washington Post, which explains, clearly and succinctly, why Iraq needs to be dealt with:

Much of the recent debate about possible U.S. military action against Iraq has centered on the propriety of a "preemptive strike," as if more than a decade of history counted for nothing. In fact, the legal, moral and practical grounds for action against Saddam Hussein have their roots back in 1990, and they are not relevant to the United States alone. Saddam Hussein sent his army into the sovereign nation of Kuwait; a broad coalition, led by the United States, resolved that such lawlessness could not stand; Saddam Hussein refused to back down, fought a war and lost. As one condition for maintaining his power in defeat, the dictator promised the U.N. Security Council that he would rid Iraq of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons and the missiles that can deliver them. He promised also to allow the United Nations to see for itself that he had complied.

Today no one other than Saddam Hussein and his toady ministers would claim that he has fulfilled these promises. His refusal to disarm and his brazen flouting of U.N. resolutions are slaps not at the United States but at every nation that claims to value international law and the U.N. system. Yet month after month, year after year, those nations, along with U.N. leaders, have been willing to tolerate his lawlessness. U.S. allies in Europe, Asia and the Middle East that routinely oppose military action also routinely say they will insist on robust inspection. Well, yesterday they got an answer, the same one they've been receiving for a long time. Now what?

It's true that Saddam Hussein isn't the only evil tyrant in the world. He's not even the sole tyrant seeking or possessing weapons of mass destruction. Neither the United States nor the United Nations can or should contemplate military action against every such tyrant who might qualify for membership in the axis of evil. But Saddam Hussein is in a class of his own, and not only because he has hideously used chemical weapons against his own people and others. The world already has considered his case and formed a judgment. If nations prove incapable of enforcing that judgment, the harm will spread far beyond the Middle East.

What should be done about the sluggish economy? Here's an answer the New York Times would never put on the front page:

Those are the questions a dozen economists who were not invited to Waco said they would have tried to answer had they been at the conference. While their responses in interviews differed, most shared the view that the private sector, for all its frailty, still had enough momentum to carry the economy to full recovery with modest additional help from government.

Even that could be delayed, said the Nobel laureate Robert M. Solow, who served in the Kennedy administration, in an era when stepped-up government spending to support a weak economy was standard practice.

"I would recommend waiting until fall to see what happens," Mr. Solow said. If the Federal Reserve's sharp reduction in interest rates turns out to be insufficient, then he would accelerate the spending of already appropriated money, but, to avoid running up a budget deficit larger than necessary, would not appropriate more.

Virginia Postrel notes that, contrary to semi-popular belief, the poor aren't getting poorer.

"When I started looking at the numbers, I saw a lot of mistakes," says Xavier Sala-i-Martin, an economist at Columbia. Some were departures from standard economic procedures, like not correcting for price levels from country to country.

"Some agencies didn't adjust for the fact that Ethiopia is cheaper than the U.S.," he said. "Some of them were hiding numbers that we know exist." For instance, the report included data from only 19 of the 29 industrialized countries then in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

But the biggest problem was not so technical. It was hidden in plain sight. The United Nations report and others looked at gaps in income of the richest and poorest countries — not rich and poor individuals.

That means the formerly poor citizens of giant countries could become a lot richer and still barely show up in the data.

"Treating countries like China and Grenada as two data points with equal weight does not seem reasonable because there are about 12,000 Chinese citizens for each person living in Grenada," writes Professor Sala-i-Martin in "The World Distribution of Income (Estimated from Individual Country Distributions)." That is one of two related working papers for the National Bureau of Economic Research. (The papers are available on Professor Sala-i-Martin's Web site at http://www.columbia.edu/~xs23/home.html.)

The rich did get richer faster than the poor did. But for the most part the poor did not get poorer. They got richer, too. In exchange for significantly rising living standards, a little more internal inequality is not such a bad thing.

"One would like to think that it is unambiguously good that more than a third of the poorest citizens see their incomes grow and converge to the levels enjoyed by the richest people in the world," writes Professor Sala-i-Martin. "And if our indexes say that inequality rises, then rising inequality must be good, and we should not worry about it!"

This just in: The New York Times is opposed to war with Iraq. Sheesh, why don't they just change their name to Arab News and get it over with? Today's tasty morsel comes from the headline writers who claim that Top Republicans Break With Bush on Iraq Strategy. Wow. That could be really serious. Who is it -- Trent Lott, Denny Hastert, and Dick Cheney? Well, as Hertz would say, not exactly:

These senior Republicans include former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft, the first President Bush's national security adviser. All say they favor the eventual removal of Saddam Hussein, but some say they are concerned that Mr. Bush is proceeding in a way that risks alienating allies, creating greater instability in the Middle East, and harming long-term American interests. They add that the administration has not shown that Iraq poses an urgent threat to the United States.

A more significant question is this: how in the hell did the New York Times conclude the Kissinger's comments constituted a break with the president? Kissinger declared that eliminating Iraq's capacity to produce weapons of mass destruction is a necessary goal and rejected the strategy of containment. He also said that the restoration of the previous inspection system was inadequate. He also rejected the idea that the U.S. must solve the Israeli-Arab war before we take on Saddam Hussein. He suggested that the U.S. propose a much stricter inspection program, with a firm deadline, and that the U.S. deploy troops in advance to show that we're serious. If (when) Hussein refuses, then the U.S. should use force. Where did the reporters get the idea that this was not the Bush position?

And then a light dawns?:

At the same time, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who summoned Mr. Kissinger for a meeting on Tuesday, and his advisers have decided that they should focus international discussion on how Iraq would be governed after Mr. Hussein — not only in an effort to assure a democracy but as a way to outflank administration hawks and slow the rush to war, which many in the department oppose.

Apparently Florida isn't the only place on earth where elections get screwed up.

Termites have chewed up much of Nigeria's voter register, biting into efforts to organise the next election, the chief electoral officer said on Friday.

"We have no database for the electoral process," electoral commission chairman Abel Guobadia told AIT television.

I'm not the only one to wonder what on earth the New York Times thinks its doing in shaping its coverage of the upcoming war against Iraq. Now Charles Krauthammer points out that the Times has abandoned any pretense of objectivity in reporting on this issue:

Not since William Randolph Hearst famously cabled his correspondent in Cuba, "You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war," has a newspaper so blatantly devoted its front pages to editorializing about a coming American war as has Howell Raines's New York Times. Hearst was for the Spanish-American War. Raines (for those who have been incommunicado for the last year) opposes war with Iraq.

If the New York Times were a blog, they might be shamed into posting an entry which explained or corrected their disinformation, for fear of losing their credibility. But the Times is above criticism -- or so they think -- and no matter how often their asses get fact-checked, they're back the next day with more propaganda in the guise of reporting. Is it just a coincidence that the Times' rate of shoddy reporting has shot up drastically since SmarterTimes went into limbo?

...but he'd better not, because if he does, your grandkids will probably try to collect money from my grandkids. Or maybe, as the reparations movement would have it, your grandkids' cousins' friends will try to collect from a stranger whose astrological sign is close to that of my grandkids. The reparations movement had a rally in Washington yesterday, the so-called Millions for Reparations march. The New York Times conveniently omits the detail of how many people showed up, which means you can be certain it wasn't "millions." (If they're going to make up numbers anyway, why not just call it Zillions For Reparations?) The Washington Post reports that "thousands" of people attended -- which, given the size of the black population of the D.C. area, should probably be seen as an overwhelming rejection of the movement.

But that doesn't stop both papers (though the Post is more skeptical) of giving the rally a respectful hearing, including ludicrous comments from supporters:

With the U.S. Capitol as his backdrop, Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), who has introduced legislation in Congress for 13 years to create a commission to study reparations, urged people to contact their congressional representatives as soon as they arrived home.

"We will get [reparations] by contacting every single member of the House of Representatives, every single member of the Senate," he said, adding that blacks have been dealt a "historical injustice that can only be corrected" in Congress.

Manotti Jenkins of Chicago heard about the march on the Internet and flew to Washington with his wife and two daughters, ages 6 years and 6 months.

"Regardless of how much money I make as a corporate attorney, the impact of slavery is still here," he said. "We don't have the dignity and the respect we deserve as humans."

This must be why they hate us. Apparently mean ol' Americans -- the ones accused of being only interested in oil, and killing foreigners -- are teaching Afghan kids to play baseball. It's a touchy-feely, heartwarming story, and it's great:

"Baseball is here to show them the American way, to show them that we're not here for any other reason than to help out," says Sgt. Jay Smith, of the US special forces. "We're not against [Afghans], we're not against Islam. We can be here together, Afghans and Americans."

...

For lack of a chest protector, the catcher wears a bulletproof vest. The pitcher's mound is a sandbag. A spent antitank shell strapped to a wheeled machinegun carriage has been used to lay down chalk boundary lines.

"That's our version of beating swords into plowshares," says Sergeant Smith, who solicited donations of sporting goods from friends and church groups in the United States for the country's first-ever Little League.

However, Monty admits that the Americans are guilty of at least a degree of cultural imperialism.

"If we have a load of humanitarian aid, and they don't have a school for girls, we'll say, 'You won't get anything until you get the girls in school.' " Monty says.

Hatira, 7 years old, is conspicuous as the only girl on the ballfield. She has a mitt that was given to her by Smith, whose sister wanted to make sure that at least one donated glove went to a girl. According to Adam Khan Massoudi, the district minister of education, there are plans to form a girls' league in Orgun-e.

"Everyone likes baseball," says Mr. Massoudi, swathed in a white turban. "It's a gift from the United States."

Enthusiasm doesn't make for a perfect swing though. Afghanistan's fledgling Little Leaguers, most of them between the ages of 10 and 16, tend to confound the mechanics of baseball with cricket, which is popular in neighboring Pakistan. Batters in Orgun-e tend to take underhanded golf swings at pitches, and often bring the bat with them as they round the bases, itself far from a straightforward affair.

"Initially, they wanted to run to the pitcher's mound after a hit," says Smith. "Some would round the bases to home plate, then turn around and race in the wrong direction all the way back to first."

CNN has obtained a cache of Al Qaeda's training tapes, which appears to show members how to make and use explosives and other terrorist weapons. But the scariest part is that the tapes apparently demonstrate Al Qaeda's readiness and ability to use chemical weapons:

In one tape's early frames, a white Laborador-like dog, wearing a green ribbon, is sleeping in a small room. A man wearing typical Afghan clothing, and without protective gear, drops something on the concrete floor and leaves quickly.

As a white liquid oozes across the floor and a vapor fills the lower part of the room, the dog sits up, alert, apparently sensing danger. In the next frames, the dog begins licking its mouth, salivates and sneezes.

The dog then tries standing; its head shakes violently, and its breathing quickens. Its hind legs appear to collapse. Seconds later, the dog falls and struggles to stand. Unable to control its front legs, it wimpers and moans. Then the dog appears to vomit. Its moan becomes a piercing wail.

The dog then seems to have trouble breathing. Its tail is all that moves as the screen goes blank.

A second later, the video replayed the first scene, of the dog's exposure to the gas, then jumped ahead, documenting the subsiding of its cries.

Finally, one of the dog's hind legs shoots up in the air, as its head goes down. It then lies motionless.

David A. Kay, senior vice president of the Science Applications International Corporation, a company that works for the government and commercial clients, said the tape of the dog gassing demonstrates that Al Qaeda succeeded in obtaining crude weapons of mass destruction.

And score another point for the private sector:

Asked why the C.I.A. failed to obtain the archive before CNN, Bill Harlow, the agency's spokesman, replied, "There are more of them in Afghanistan than there are of us, and they are paid better."

Israel and the PLO reached agreement on Sunday to begin an Israeli pullout of troops from Gaza and Bethlehem. Unfortunately, someone forgot to consult with Hamas first:

But Palestinian militant groups including Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine said they rejected even a limited cessation of their 22-month-old uprising against Israeli occupation and would continue to mount attacks.

"The resistance will find ways to pursue the fight without clashing with the Palestinian Authority," senior Hamas official Abdel-Aziz al-Rantissi told Reuters. "Our rifles will remain directed against the Zionist enemy and only against the Zionist enemy."

And speaking of past performance, doesn't this virtually guarantee that there will be homicide bombings in Israel? One bombing would serve to kill two birds with one stone for Hamas -- or, rather, several Israelis and Yasser Arafat's "credibility." (And yes, I find it hard to say that without laughing out loud.) Haven't we seen this exactly pattern before? The PLO pledges to crack down on militants. Israel exchanges land for those promises. And then those promises are ignored. And then the world blames Israel for making unreasonable demands, claiming that poor little ol' Arafat is doing the best he can.

The president of Montenegro is arguing that the European Union is trying to sabotage democracy in his region:

A destabilizing, anti-reform coalition supported by certain bureaucracies of the European Union is threatening to set back the progress of democracy in Montenegro.

Since the signing in March of the Belgrade agreement on a new Serb-Montenegrin union, a combination of forces within Yugoslavia has tried to hijack the negotiation process and force Montenegro into a tighter Serbian orbit. Among these forces are loyalists of former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic, militants supporting the Bosnian Serb wartime leader, Radovan Karadzic, Liberal Party leaders and various members of Yugoslav security services.

Now this anti-democratic axis has managed to gain the ear of some political circles in Brussels and in some Western European countries. These policymakers naively believe that pushing out the current pro-Western government in Montenegro will ensure stability by preventing Montenegro from gaining self-determination and national independence -- an option that the two republics can, under the Belgrade agreement, exercise after three years.

For several months the EU bureaucracy in Brussels has in effect tried to rewrite the agreement. Its ostensible goal is to establish uniformity within the Serb-Montenegrin union, but in practice this has meant pushing for Montenegro's economic subordination to Belgrade, even though the aspiring state has a much more liberal economy than Serbia, is increasingly well prepared for free trade with the outside world and has adopted the euro as its currency.

The EU is terrified of actually doing anything -- besides, perhaps, regulating ketchup. They're good at such things. As long as there's "stability," the most they'll ever have to do is write a check. So who cares if a bunch of Israelis get blown up, or Kurds get gassed, or Bosnians get shot? As long as there's a big foreign bureaucracy for the Brussels crowd to deal with, they're happy. As I've pointed out before, the EU itself is fundamentally anti-democratic, with the real power lying with unelected bureaucrats who want to centrally plan everything. So why should we be surprised if these charges turn out to be true?

A newspaper columnist is free to write whatever he wants, and you expect him to have a bias. And you expect him to have a favorite topic. But it gets awfully tiresome when he writes the same column every week. One wonders if Paul Krugman even shows up to work anymore at the New York Times, or if he just cuts-and-pastes from old columns. Today's column: Bush is bad. Tax cuts are bad. Bush is bad. Rich people -- except those who get money from Enron without disclosing it -- are bad. Government is good. Bush is bad.

Mr. Bush is a master of photo-op populism; his handlers seek out opportunities to show him mingling with blue-collar workers. But the reality is that this administration loves 'em while the TV crews are around, then leaves 'em when it comes to actual policy. And that reality is becoming ever harder to conceal.

The federal budget is now deep in deficit, and everyone except the administration thinks it will remain there — not because of runaway spending, but because most of last year's tax cut has yet to take effect. And as my colleague Frank Rich points out, to offset the revenue losses from his tax cut, Mr. Bush would have to veto a $5 billion spending proposal every working day for the next year. Mr. Bush can no longer pretend, as he did during the 2000 campaign, that there is enough money for everything. Now, to justify that tax cut, he must hack steadily away at programs that matter to ordinary people.

....

Yet conservatives enthusiastically rely on populism — fake populism, based on staged shmoozing with ordinary Americans and attacks on the imagined cultural elitism of the liberal media. Why shouldn't liberals, who actually have the facts on their side, try engaging in the real thing?

You may not have heard about this amazing medical breakthrough -- I certainly missed the announcement. But it must be true, because our nation's doctors have plenty of free time. The American Medical Association issued a press release criticizing the Princeton Review for ranking "party schools."

The college admissions and test-preparation company "should be ashamed to publish something for students and parents that fuels the false notion that alcohol is central to the college experience," said Richard Yoast, director of the AMA's Office of Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse.

...

Yoast said it amounts to a careless exercise that legitimizes student drinking.

"Students who are looking for little more than a good time may be influenced by this ranking, and the 'party school' designation becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy," Yoast said.

Our nation's nannies are getting more and more ridiculous. If college students getting drunk is the biggest problem they have to deal with, they really need to find new jobs. Some humorist once defined being a puritan as the fear that someone, somewhere, is having fun. These people make the puritans look like party animals. If there's a danger of a toe getting stubbed, these people are there to campaign against it.

Georgia held primaries on Tuesday. And Cynthia McKinney lost. Big Time. 58 percent to 42 percent, with almost all of the ballots counted. McKinney most recently disgraced herself by accusing George Bush of being behind the 9/11 attacks, but the real reason I'm happy:

On Monday, state Rep. Billy McKinney (D-Atlanta) dismissed Majette's candidacy and spelled out the reason for his daughter's tough fight: "J-E-W-S," he said on television.

The only member of the New York Times' editorial board not on Saddam Hussein's payroll reiterates his contention that Saddam is a supporter of terrorism, describing intelligence gathered from captured Iraqi agents:

However, the terrorist mission to set up facilities to weaponize poisons in Iraqi Kurdistan's mountainous equivalent of Afghanistan's Tora Bora has been more successful. One produces a form of cyanide cream that kills on contact. A shipment of this rudimentary panic-spreader, produced by what interrogators say is a Qaeda-Saddam joint venture, was recently intercepted in Turkey on its way to terror cells in the West. The chemicals are not weapons of mass destruction, but for individuals who touch it — 'tis enough, 'twill do.

Such verification of data obtained from the captured terrorists awakened C.I.A. bureaucrats who for nearly a year waved reporters away from evidence of Qaeda-Iraqi links lest it justify U.S. action. Belatedly, a C.I.A. team interrogated some of the terrorists held in northern Iraq — comparing what they found with information gleaned from Al Qaeda prisoners at Guantánamo and elsewhere.

Even religiously motivated terrorists crack in dismay at how much the interrogator already knows. When added to prisoners' family details provided by Kurdish sources, the scope of our knowledge led captives in Kurdistan to talk about poison production and Iraqi links because they figured there was little left to hide.

The new information has changed much intelligence analysis. The C.I.A. has even stopped discrediting reports from Czech intelligence about a different point of Qaeda-Saddam contact: the meeting between the Sept. 11 hijackers' leader, Mohamed Atta, and a top Saddam spymaster in Prague.

The idea that ousting Saddam Hussein could "hurt the war on terror," as some have argued, is insane. Ousting Saddam Hussein is the single most important step the U.S. can take in the war on terror.

Headline in the Washington Post: Poll: Most Oppose School Vouchers. That's bad news for those of us who support the concept. Or is it?

Most Americans oppose the use of public funds to help parents send their children to private or church-sponsored schools, a study released yesterday shows.

The 34th annual poll of 1,000 adults, conducted by the Gallup Organization for the educational group Phi Delta Kappa, found that 52 percent of those surveyed opposed the use of state vouchers to expand access to private education.

Still, 46 percent support the voucher program, up from 34 percent a year ago.

The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.

Moreover, note that the actual poll asked voucher questions in more than one way; phrasing it as "A proposal has been made that would allow parents to send their school-age children to any public, private, or church-related school they choose. For those parents choosing nonpublic schools, the government would pay all or part of the tuition. Would you favor or oppose this proposal in your state?" gave different results. To that question, 52% said they favored vouchers, and 46% said they did not. (Moreover, 63% of minority respondents favored vouchers.)

The real lesson? Reporters write what they want to write, regardless of what the whole story is. (I don't know who's to blame, here. It's a Reuters story in the Washington Post.)

On Tuesday, the New York Times, in an otherwise sensible (if banal) editorial about necessary reforms in the management structure and processes of the New York Fire Department, couldn't resist pandering to their baser liberal instincts:

This turnover in the ranks will also allow the department to take on a critical problem not emphasized in the report: diversity. White men still make up a staggering 93 percent of the Fire Department's 11,112-member force, according to figures released last year. As long as a reform effort is under way, the city should do its utmost to ensure that the Fire Department not only protects, but reflects, the people of New York.

That might have been an aberration, slipped in as space filler, except that the Times decided to print this letter to the editor in response, from an expert on fire safety:

To the editor:

"Fixing the Fire Department" (editorial, Aug. 20) raises an important point about diversity. The New York Fire Department record on women is particularly troubling when compared with other urban fire departments.

Women make up 16 percent of the firefighters in Minneapolis, 15 percent in San Francisco and 13 percent in Miami. In New York, that figure is an abysmal 0.2 percent.

Facing a staggering number of retirements, the Fire Department needs to recruit from as wide a pool as possible to find the best candidates. The early indicators are profoundly disappointing: since Sept. 11, more than 1,000 people have been hired, yet only one was female.

There are thousands of women who want to join New York's bravest and can do the work. It's past time for the department to overcome its history of exclusion.  
KATHY RODGERS
President, NOW Legal Defense
and Education Fund

A horrifying story from California, where education bureaucrats are trying to eliminate home-schooling. Parents must have teaching credentials, according to the state's Department of Education, in order to home-school their own children.

''A child who is not properly exempt is truant, and the parent is subject to an infraction by the district attorney,'' state Department of Education Deputy General Counsel Roger Wolfertz said. ''Buying instructional materials and doing a good job of teaching is not the issue with us.''

Passenger vans are dangerous. Well, actually, passenger vans aren't dangerous, but some people (you know who you are) are incompetent drivers, and have accidents while driving vans.

But the officials, from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, concluded that the vans, which are also commonly used by airport shuttle services and day care centers, were not inherently dangerous. Many of the problems, it said, are attributable to inexperienced drivers piloting fully loaded vehicles.

It also stressed the use of seat belts. In another report on the vans, the agency said the overwhelming majority of the people who died in 15-passenger van crashes were not wearing seat belts.

The 15-passenger vans are popular in public school fleets because of their ample capacity and modest price — usually less than $30,000 compared with $35,000 or more for a bus of similar size. Congress moved to ban them for public school use in 1974 because they were regarded as far less safe than standard school buses. But it left several loopholes that Representative Mark Udall, Democrat of Colorado, is trying to close with new legislation. His bill would also prohibit colleges and universities from using the vans.

I was struck by the contrast between the typical Big Government Democratic approach to every problem, and free market solutions to the problem of unsafe driving, when reading about this new gizmo, being released to the general public shortly: a black box for cars. The device plugs into the diagnostic equipment of cars, and trains drivers to drive better by beeping when they don't. It also allows supervisors (in the case of professional drivers) or parents (in the case of teenage drivers) to monitor the driving habits of the drivers.

The software compiles the data to give drivers a single score for their skills, from Level 1, the lowest, to Level 10. Emergency service agencies ask drivers to reach Level 5, which equates with driving eight miles without a beep. From paramedics and police officers to teenagers, drivers start at Level 1. Ms. Gibeaut started there too.

"My turning and my stopping, I thought they were perfectly good, but I guess they're not," she said. But her record started improving quickly, and she said she now feels guilty if she drives the way she used to.

Ambulance drivers have had the same experience. American Medical Response, a company in Aurora, Colo., that provides ambulance service in 35 states, has installed the systems in 20 percent of its 4,000 vehicles during the last five years.

The results in San Antonio were striking, said Ron Thackery, vice president for safety, risk management and fleet administration. The entire group went from Level 1 to Level 5 in less than 90 days, he said.

"It's almost like Pavlov's dog in terms of conditioned response," he said. "That immediate feedback and conditioning helps to improve the safety of the driving."

The company has also seen a drop in maintenance costs and a decrease in collisions, he said. And when members of the public call to complain about ambulance drivers, the data can reveal whether the complaint is legitimate.

Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, takes another swipe at environmentalists and their silly Sustainable Development Summit, pointing out that the world needs more development, not less.

The focus should be on development, not sustainability. Development is not simply valuable in itself, but in the long run it will lead the third world to become more concerned about the environment. Only when people are rich enough to feed themselves do they begin to think about the effect of their actions on the world around them and on future generations. With its focus on sustainability, the developed world ends up prioritizing the future at the expense of the present. This is backward. In contrast, a focus on development helps people today while creating the foundation for an even better tomorrow.

The statement being, of course, "We're nuts."

Steven Den Beste dissects a Harvard study on merit scholarships which concludes, shockingly, that they were awarded based on merit rather than need. (For "need," read "race.") As Steven writes:

Harvard's researchers are cheating. They're using the patina of a scientific study to deliver political commentary. What Harvard's researchers discovered was that the administrators responsible for these programs were administering them honestly, and awarding the scholarships without regard to race or financial means, based on academic performance and test scores. That's what the Legislators said they wanted when the programs were set up, and that's apparently what the administrators have actually been doing.

Harvard says this is broken, but it sounds to me as if it's working as designed. And that's the point: it's not that these programs are broken, but rather that Harvard's researchers disagree with the goals of the programs.

I happened to catch an old episode of the Chris Rock show on HBO yesterday. He had Jesse Jackson Jr. on as a guest. The topic turned to problems in the black community. Chris Rock isn't a politician, so he was free to point out that a big part of the problem comes from black attitudes towards education. He said, "I attended a black school and a white school. We had the same books at both schools. Maybe the white school's books were a little cleaner, but we had the same books. The difference is that at the white school, kids were reading the books." Jackson, on the other hand, being a politician, kept insisting that the solution was for the government to spend more of the surplus (Hey, I told you it was an old episode) on the black community. He just ignored Rock's point, because it wasn't convenient.

Few would argue that there is never any discrimination anymore in the United States; nobody would argue that blacks have not suffered in the past. But by continuing to identify people by their group identity, by rewarding them for who they are rather than what they do, the concurrent problems are perpetuated, not solved. Of course, private groups are, or should be, free to hand out scholarships based on race if they feel it will help those groups. But to enshrine as public policy the idea that need -- defined as membership in a group that has suffered -- is the measure of desert is perverse. It tells those who don't belong to these groups that their effort isn't really important to anybody, that the only people who count are those who fall short in achievement.

The Saudi government is spending large sums of money to try to improve their public image with Americans. They've been hiring lobbyists and public relations firms by the truckload.

One of the government's American lobbyists, who spoke on condition that he not be named, said Saudi officials were deeply troubled by a perception in the United States that they were somehow complicit in the attacks.

"The fundamental problem the Saudis have in this country is the idea that they are not an ally," the lobbyist said. "For a country that has been an ally for 60 years, that's frustrating."

It's better advice than this ridiculous idea:

A striking sign of the Saudis' eagerness to reach out to the United States has been an 11th-hour scramble within the royal family to find a gesture of solidarity with the American people on the anniversary of the attacks.

The royal family has considered presenting the racehorse that won the Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes this year as a gift to the victims' families, according to one adviser to the family. The horse, War Emblem, which was owned by Prince Ahmed bin Salman, who died in July, would be part of the commemoration at Ground Zero.

Fortunately, we're not as gullible as the Saudis seem to think we are:

So far, the publicity effort has failed to improve Saudi standing among Americans. A poll by Fabrizio, McLaughlin and Associates, a predominantly Republican firm, last week found that Americans' negative opinion of Saudi Arabia had surged to 63 percent, from 50 percent in May.

"It definitely went the wrong way for the Saudis," said Michael D. Cohen, the polling firm's vice president. "If I were them, I would say this has been a complete failure."

When is a strictly ideological Republican who refuses to compromise a good thing? When he's a liberal.

The New York Times endorses incumbent Sherwood Boehlert for Congress in the Republican primary. (Aside: isn't there something a little presumptuous about the Times presuming to endorse candidates in Republican primaries? Why would the Times' editors think that any self-respecting Republican would want their opinion?)

Of course, one would expect the Times to endorse liberals; that's not the point. The point is the reasons they cite for their analysis:

Occasionally a politician comes along who follows his own principles instead of harkening to the pollsters or the party hacks.

It's hard to know what to make of this New York Times portrayal of Palestinian "justice." It's a seemingly sympathetic portrait of Palestinians who murder collaborators, with none of the Times' typical use of "allegedly" to describe the victims' "crimes," and an elaborate description of those supposed "crimes." And it takes at face value terrorist arguments that blame Israel for these killings, not even attempting to provide another side to the story.

On the other hand, just by printing the words of the murderers and their cheering supporters, the article exposes their horrifying nature, and it does point out -- eventually -- that the witnesses against the victims were tortured.

One striking element of the story, passing without comment:

The band of neighborhood boys happily led reporters to show them Ms. Khouli's similarly meager home a block away — or at least its remains. After she was killed, the family moved in with her daughter's husband in a village a few miles away, and two days later the home was burned down. Now a broken door and a few charred mattresses litter the darkened rooms.

"We don't want them to come back," explained an 18-year-old who gave his name as Mahmoud.

I have liberal friends who can't understand why some of us are so opposed to government regulation. Of course, they say, government needs to protect the public from harm by unscrupulous businesses. The problem is that they have an idealized view of regulation -- government sees a problem, government creates a set of rules, and the problem goes away.

Only, of course, that's not what regulation really is:

Just about anything that attaches to the exterior of a building requires permits from the Buildings Department. And most sign jobs must be supervised on site by someone with a sign hanger's license, which can take several years to earn. But it is much cheaper for contractors to skip the permit process and put up the signs using unlicensed workers, and they know that city inspectors are too busy to enforce the law.

Nor, I suppose, could they explain how one can get a driver's license in a few hours, but getting a sign hanger's license can take a few years. Except, of course, for the obvious: that the rules are not designed to protect the public. They're designed to protect the union. If it's too hard to get a license, then most people won't. And if they won't, then the union becomes the only legal source of labor.

And of course the city benefits, as petty bureaucrats get to throw their weight around and the city gets to raise money:

Ms. Fink said the company received a summons in June 2001 for putting up the awning without a permit.

Valley Management's president, Tulio Camino, said that the company, which helps property owners solve problems with the Buildings Department, received a permit for the awning yesterday.

Ms. Fink said that what the company received yesterday was an approval, which is needed to apply for a permit.

"This is not enough to satisfy the violation," she said. "They have to obtain the permit, and they don't have that yet."

Damien Penny points out this hysterical ranting from Francis Boyle, the idiotarian law professor who thinks the World Court is going to force the United States to "free" Hawaii from its century of U.S. military occupation. (That wasn't actually the topic of this essay, but it's true and it was fun to write.) In the comments section in response to his rant, Boyle screeches about the idea of special courts and/or procedures for handling enemy combatants:

As a licensed attorney for 25 years, a law professor for 23 years and someone who has done a good deal of criminal defense work in U.S. Federal Courts, I am appalled by the insinuation of these Federalist Society Lawyers that America's Federal Courts established by Article III of the U.S. Constitution cannot hold accountable those responsible for the crimes of 11 September 2001. This is an insult to all Federal Judges, Federal Prosecutors, Federal Public Defenders and all the Lawyers who are Officers of these Courts.

In one fell stroke these Federalist Society lawyers have besmirched and undermined the integrity of two Branches of the United States Federal Government established by the Constitution - the Presidency and the Judiciary.

George W. Bush was never elected President by the People of the United States of America. Instead, he was anointed for that Office by five Justices of the United States Supreme Court who themselves had been appointed by Republican Presidents. Bush Jr.'s installation was an act of judicial usurpation of the American Constitution that was unprecedented in the history of the American Republic. Had it occurred in a developing country, such a subversion of democratic process would have been greeted with knowing derision throughout the West. What happened in America could only be likened to a judicial coup d'état inflicted upon the American People, Constitution, and Republic. There should now be no doubt that the United States Supreme Court is governed by raw, naked, brutal, power politics. Justice has nothing at all to do with it. This Supreme Court's constitutional sophistry proved a harbinger of the new administration's disrespect for the Rule of Law, whether domestic or international.

The federal government may be incapable of providing security for chemical weapons depots, but that doesn't mean that they're not doing anything. John Ashcroft is ensuring that people in California don't get relief when suffering from various illnesses:

Federal agents arrested two prominent advocates of using marijuana for medicinal purposes in an early morning raid at their farm in Davenport, near Santa Cruz. The owners, Michael and Valerie Corral, were arrested on charges of conspiracy and suspicion of intent to distribute marijuana, Richard Meyer, a special agent with the Drug Enforcement Agency in San Francisco, said. Agents seized three rifles, a shotgun and more than 150 marijuana plants. The raid was a surprise to local authorities, who said the Corrals' farm complied with the state's medical marijuana law.

'Nuff said.

I'm always jealous of bloggers who get strange search engine hits. Like, say, the one I found today:Girls in prison wearing used underwear. Uh, okay.

Last week, NAACP head Julian Bond denounced those who argued that Washington D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams "isn't black enough."

Silly charges about adherence to an imaginary black aesthetic based on college choices, speech patterns, clothing styles and leisure activities cheapen the political process. They reflect an unhealthy insecurity in those who make them -- and in those who reject them, a healthy respect for democracy.

African Americans properly reject as racist allegations from others that we all think, look and act alike. Why should we impose these reactionary notions on one another?

Now, I may have some unhealthy insecurities as to whether Mayor Williams is black enough, but they are not based so much on how he talks as what he says. To be black enough simply means being able to connect with black people, to speak to their needs, hopes and fears -- especially when other, more powerful constituencies are competing for attention.

Now a new day is dawning, and it is not at all clear whether the concerns of ordinary blacks will even be heard, let alone acted on.

At the luncheon, Wilson, who is a long-shot contender for Williams's job in the Democratic primary, criticized the mayor for not doing something about the long lines at some Department of Motor Vehicles stations.

Williams responded by explaining that the long lines were the result of the DMV "screening people who haven't settled their accounts."

In other words, forget the inconvenience. What makes Williams proud is the coldly efficient way that his network of computers goes about snaring residents who owe the city. Anyone with, say, $1,500 in outstanding taxes cannot get a driver's license renewed until the bill is paid.

For the District's new well-to-do, that may be chump change. But for many others, that's more than a month's pay.

The inability to anticipate the pain of such actions, and to come up with more reasonable ways for struggling residents to pay, shows a particular kind of insensitivity. It wouldn't matter whether the politician who reveled in such a moneymaking scheme wore a dashiki; he still wouldn't be black enough.

Wilson also characterized the mayor's leadership as "dishonest" and "untrustworthy." Now, most black people I know, when called a liar to their face, would offer a quick retort -- or at least an evil eye.

But Williams reacted the way most Ivy League white men would do in a similar situation: He was oblivious. And when Deputy Editorial Page Editor Colby King, who is black, asked him to explain that nonreaction, the mayor first dismissed Wilson's remarks as unworthy of comment. But then he stared meekly at his plate and began talking about how much tourism had increased and how many people had showed up for the Cherry Blossom Festival.

Definitely not black enough.

John Rocker never said anything which approached the outrageous bigotry of this column -- and he was merely a baseball player. Courtland Milloy works for one of the preeminent newspapers in the United States, and is paid specifically to express his opinion. And yet Rocker was punished for his remarks, while Milloy's escaped notice.

Reuters reports on European positions with regard to Iraq, in that wacky Reuters way:

French President Jacques Chirac said on Saturday Paris was keeping its options open over possible military action against Iraq, but had full understanding for Germany's outright rejection of any involvement.

Speaking after an informal meeting with Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder in the German leader's private home in Hanover, Chirac said Germany and France agreed they were opposed to unilateral military action

On the other hand, perhaps "unilateral" is just a faulty buzzword, and what these Eurocrats really means is that even a group of countries shouldn't act, that action should only be taken if the United Nations agrees. Well, in that case, what they're actually saying is that even a united U.S. and Europe should not act unless Russia, China, and others agree. They're saying that a group of countries that includes Syria, Bulgaria, and Singapore should have veto power over U.S. actions. If anybody can explain to me why that's a good idea, I'm all ears.

and reiterated their call to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to allow arms inspectors to return unconditionally.

In any case, Reuters explains the problem:

Bush views Iraq as part of a so-called axis of evil, and says he wants to topple the Baghdad government of President Saddam Hussein and destroy his alleged weapons of mass destruction. Iraq says it no longer has prohibited arms.

I'm Doug Llewellyn. What you are witnessing is real. The participants are not actors. They are actual litigants with a case pending in an international court. Both parties have agreed to dismiss their court cases and have their dispute settled here in our forum -- The People's Court.

We'll return for "The Case of the Dangerous Dictator" after these messages.

I mean, it's all just he-said, she-said to Reuters. Except, of course, when Iraq says something, in which case Reuters reports it credulously:

Baghdad has called for a comprehensive solution to the crisis, including an end to sanctions imposed for its 1990 invasion of Kuwait and which have caused widespread suffering.

I know bashing Reuters coverage is so easy, but there's good reason so many people do it.

John Sununu the younger easily defeated incumbent Bob Smith in the Republican senatorial primary in New Hampshire. After 9/11, President Bush quickly urged everyone not to take out their anger on Arabs, while some on the left rushed to denounce the U.S. as racist, just in case. And yet Sununu, a Lebanese-American of Palestinian ancestry, won 54-44 over Smith. A desperate Smith stooped to implying that Sununu was soft on terrorism, but that tactic failed miserably. That an Arab-American won nomination in a conservative state was so unremarkable that neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post thought it was worthy of mention. Meanwhile, Christians and Jews aren't even allowed to visit Mecca, and American troops stationed in Saudi Arabia to protect the country are not allowed to practice their religions openly.

Advantage: United States. Despite what the National Educational Association may think, tolerance is not a problem, at least on our end.

"Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion--that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth."

On September 11, we can and should remember the victims of terrorism. But on September 12, we need to get on with the business of destroying terrorists and their supporters.

The New York Lottery picks its winning numbers for September 11: 9-1-1.

The New York Times reports that the Argentine legislature is considering a law setting new requirements for political candidates:

Argentine politicians, blamed by voters for leading the country to its worst economic crisis, would have to undergo psychiatric tests to ensure they are mentally fit to hold office under the terms of a bill before the legislature.

I don't know who thought it would be a good idea for Reno to run in the first place; an uncharismatic, highly partisan figure with little electoral experience (she had been a long-time state's attorney, an elected but low-profile position) is not what one would call a strong candidate. And now she has lost -- or almost lost, if you believe her -- to someone totally unknown, and she can't take a hint? Hey, Janet: nobody likes you.

Friday's Florida "Alligator Alley" incident may be out-and-out racism, as Partha seems to believe. Or, it could be an honest mistake, with the witness, Eunice Stone, mishearing something and jumping to a hasty conclusion. Or,it could have been a cruel joke by the three detained men. Right now, there's no way to know. And there may never be.

We can go back and forth trying to puzzle it out. On the one hand, why would the woman lie about it? She could be a racist -- but her actions, which included writing down a license plate and calling the police, seem pretty elaborate just to get some travellers who were passing through -- or a publicity seeker -- but she seemed pretty uncomfortable with the media frenzy. On the other hand, why would the men say these things? If they were really terrorists, they were incredibly careless. If they were joking, they were incredibly thoughtless. But, in the end, trying to deduce the truth without having the facts is silly.

Also silly was all the media hype. Given that a major road was closed for such a long time, it would be absurd not to report the story. But the media didn't have many facts, and they kept repeating them over and over. Ah, the wonders of all-news cable channels.

But if that's not very helpful, neither is exaggeration on the other side. Partha says that this is "racial profiling taken to its extreme." And family members complained:

"Just because of the way we look or the way we choose to live our lives, we're persecuted," said Hana Gheith, a sister of one of the men.

One final note: I interpreted Stone's comments about the accents of the men differently than Partha did; I read them to say that given what the people were saying, she was surprised to hear them speaking without accents. Assuming that's what she meant, it seems reasonable. (Of course, I don't know where people from Georgia get off talking about American accents.)

Gary Copeland, the Libertarian candidate for governor of California took that theory to extremes last week, spitting on a radio talk show host because the host "deserved to be spat upon." While possibly locking up Roberto Alomar's endorsement, this probably won't do much for his overall chances. Not that the Libertarian candidate was going to win anyway, of course.

Yet another example of why I'm libertarian-with-a-small-l, rather than a member of the Libertarian Party. I may agree with the philosophy of the party, but the members are mostly loons.

Saddam Hussein has unconditionally agreed to the return of weapons inspectors. At least, if you listen to what Iraq says they said, rather than what they actually said:

This decision is also based on your statement to the General Assembly on 12 September 2002 that the decision by the Government of the Republic of Iraq is the indispensable first step towards an assurance that Iraq no longer possesses weapons of mass destruction and, equally importantly, towards a comprehensive solution that includes the lifting of the sanctions imposed on Iraq and the timely implementation of the other provisions of the relevant Security Council resolutions, including Resolution 687 (1991).

To this end, the Government of the Republic of Iraq is ready to discuss the practical arrangements necessary for the immediate resumption of inspections.

The French don't get this:

Mr. Hussein's move seemed likely to deepen the dispute over tactics between the United States and France. Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, forcefully arguing France's position at a midday news conference, outlined a plan for an initial Council resolution that would only require Iraq to allow the weapons inspections without spelling out any consequences if Baghdad does not comply.

France, one of the five permanent, veto-bearing members of the Council, wants to hold off until later a resolution to authorize the use of military force, depending on how the weapons inspections proceed.

Which means that -- if Bush were dumb enough to believe Hussein and the French -- Iraq could diddle around, finally let inspectors in, eventually, and then interfere with their work. Then the UN would bluster about how Hussein needs to stop hindering the inspectors. Then Iraq would agree to back down, they'd negotiate some more conditions, some less Ineffective inspections would continue, and Iraq would continue to make life difficult. Eventually, inspectors would issue a partial report of findings, Iraq would demand that sanctions end, and the U.N. would pat itself on the back for averting a crisis. Of course, Iraq would still retain its weapons. And Saddam would still be in power. And would be free to restart his attempts to develop these weapons. And the message would be sent to other third world thugs: if the whole world is against you, just stall for a decade until people get tired of the issue, and you'll get away with it.

Fortunately, Bush isn't that gullible.
 
 

I note that Stephen Den Beste had substantially the same reaction as I did:

Which, in fact, is exactly the position they held last Saturday. The only thing they've done is to say that they unconditionally accept negotiations to determine the conditions under which inspections would take place and what else would be done at the same time for Iraq to pay it for this indignity.

They haven't change anything. There was no concession here, no alteration of policy in the slightest. They're still trying to get paid to do something they already promised to do, and they're still trying to delay and play for time.

The big question is going to be how many people fall for it, and part of that will be whether they want to. Those who are looking for a reason to believe that this actually represented a major step will start screaming when the US rightfully declares this as being totally phony. What will be needed is some sort of clear statement, by someone, that explains exactly what the word "unconditional" means, to try to make clear that it doesn't include negotiations or lifting of the sanctions or any kind of deal.

Eugene Volokh has spent a lot of time debunking surveys that purport to be meaningful but aren't. (See also here, here, and here, among others.) Eugene has identified many cases where a self-selected, nonrandom sample is used -- but I'll bet he's never come across a poll which uses Tom Friedman's trick: simply making up stuff. It's breathtaking in its brazenness:

Recently, I've had the chance to travel around the country and do some call-in radio shows, during which the question of Iraq has come up often. And here's what I can report from a totally unscientific sample: Don't believe the polls that a majority of Americans favor a military strike against Iraq. It's just not true.

That's one thing I love about the New York Times -- they take their role as "opinionmakers" seriously. Not only do they tell us what we should think, but they tell us what we do think.

The New York Times is happy with the Bush administration's decision to apply the Clean Air Act to off-road vehicles such as snowmobiles. They just can't quite bring themselves to say so:

Christie Whitman is to be commended for bringing the nation's growing army of off-road vehicles under the regulatory umbrella of the Clean Air Act.

When the Times is annoyed, though, suddenly Bush's name pops up:

Numbers like these persuaded the Clinton administration to order a three-year phaseout of all snowmobiles in Yellowstone and Grand Teton. But the Bush administration quickly caved in to industry and property rights advocates who see any limitation on their ability to abuse the public lands as an abridgment of individual freedoms.

But note that after the Times attempts to minimize the infringement that's going on, they then say:

One of Ms. Norton's main arguments for reversing the ban is that snowmobiles in the future will be much cleaner. Indeed, under the new rules, the snowmobiles that today churn up 100,000 cars' worth of pollution will, by 2012, produce only 50,000 cars' worth. That's still 50,000 too many.

I don't have a good sense as to whether snowmobiles belong in national parks -- though I suspect opposition arises primarily from ideological, rather than practical, considerations -- but it always raises a red flag for me when activists demand a total ban while pretending they're only proposing modest restrictions.

Speaking of the Senate debate over the Homeland Security Department reorganization bill, the New York Times explains what the holdup is in getting the law passed:

President Bush's demand for unusual latitude in managing the department has shattered any hopes for a consensus on its creation, which was once hailed by members of both parties. Questions of union rights tend to reduce each party to its most elemental positions, and members of each side will now consider themselves lucky to get the 51 votes necessary to move the bill off the floor.

There's an old joke about the guy who defends himself against the charges of breaking and entering by citing his alibi: he was robbing a bank at the time. That comes to mind when reading the Washington Post's report about disputed evidence that Iraq is building nuclear weapons:

Since then, U.S. officials have acknowledged differing opinions within the U.S. intelligence community about possible uses for the tubes -- with some experts contending that a more plausible explanation was that the aluminum was meant to build launch tubes for Iraq's artillery rockets.

More importantly, citing the uncertainty over the use of the aluminum tubes is beside the point. We don't demand certainty because we can't achieve certainty. Given the position of Iraq, given the events of the last decade, there's no presumption of innocence here. If skeptics can show that these tubes couldn't be used in the development of nuclear weapons, that's one thing. But we can't afford to give Saddam Hussein the benefit of the doubt, to interpret ambiguous evidence in his favor. Ambiguity is not a reasonable argument here.

A day after a Palestinian homicide bomber killed an Israeli police officer, another Palestinian homicide bomber struck a daring blow against the tyranny of mass transit, blowing up a bus in Tel Aviv, killing five people. Hamas expressed sympathy for the victims, calling the attack barbaric -- no, wait, I'm sorry, that was the Israeli reaction to the bombing at the Palestinian school. Hamas celebrated this latest atrocity:

A spokesman for the Islamic militant group Hamas, Abdel Aziz Rantisi, said he did not know who was behind the attack but welcomed it. "The Zionists are paying for the crimes and terrorism of their leaders and they should know that we are the real owners of this land and we would never give it up," he said.

Perhaps I'm just a cynic, but I find the timing of these latest atrocities very suspicious. Just as George Bush is building a case to attack Iraq, six weeks of relative quiet are broken by several Palestinian terrorist attacks. We saw this happen earlier in the year, when President Bush first began hinting that Saddam Hussein was at the top of Bush's hit list. Suddenly, a wave of bombings hit Israel, resulting in an Israeli crackdown which drove a wedge between the U.S. and, well, everyone else. And now it's happening again. Somehow I suspect that we'll soon hear of Iraqi agents handing out checks to the families of the latest series of murderers.

In case you were wondering, Some Bay Area Democrats may oppose Iraq attack. I know -- this is about as shocking as finding Michigan lawmakers coming out in favor of automobiles.

Rep. Barbara Lee of Oakland stood alone last September, casting the only "no" vote when the House gave President Bush backing for the war against terrorists. But now several of her Bay Area Democratic colleagues say they'll join her stance if Bush seeks a resolution authorizing military action against Iraq.

"Barbara Lee had it right," said Rep. Pete Stark, D-Fremont, a 15-term congressman who voted with the president last September. "I'm sorry I voted for the resolution."

To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection. -- Henri Poincare

A couple of corrections from the New York Times in the last two days that caught my eye. Have the Times' quality control standards slipped drastically, or have I just started noticing them more?

From Friday, September 20:

Because of an editing error, an Op-Ed article yesterday by Jessica T. Mathews and Charles G. Boyd about the need for coercive inspections in Iraq contained added language that does not represent the authors' views. They would strongly oppose the use of United Nations weapons inspectors as spies.

And Saturday, September 21:

Because of an editing error, a front-page article yesterday about the Bush administration's adoption of a doctrine of pre-emptive action against hostile countries placed a passage in quotation marks erroneously in a description of the 33-page document prepared for Congress. The comment — that the president has no intention of allowing any foreign power to catch up with the huge lead the United States has opened since the fall of the Soviet Union more than a decade ago — was the writer's summation of interviews with senior administration officials.

There's an oppressed ethnic minority in the Middle East. Thousands of members of this minority have been murdered. Its land is occupied, and the very right of this minority to form a state is denied by the occupiers. The Islamic nations of the world are horrified by this situation, and demand that something be done. Ha, ha. See, as the Iranian foreign minister explains, the primary goal of the Islamic countries is to make sure that nothing is done:

Q: So the consultations on northern Iraq have started between your country and Turkey?

A: That has always been on the agenda for us, the Turks, as well as the Syrians.

Q: You mean what to do if there is a vacuum in northern Iraq, for instance?

A: That is a legitimate concern for all three neighboring countries. We are against any disintegration of Iraq into different parts.

Q: Aren't you concerned that if there is a war, no matter what the United States promises, there will be an independent Kurdish entity?

A: That is what we cannot accept.

A cynic would argue that perhaps the silence of the so-called world community, when compared to their vociferous denunications of Israel, demonstrates anti-semitism. But as a realist, I'd disagree. It's really anti-Westernism, and in particular anti-Americanism. After all, we do occasionally hear about Turkey's treatment of the Kurds. It's only Iraq and Iran who get to persecute the Kurds with impunity. Why? Because the U.S. doesn't support Iraq or Iran, so their behavior simply doesn't count.

The Washington Post reports that, in the event of a war with Iraq, many Arab countries will be supporting the United States.

A few weeks ago, the secretary general of the 22-member Arab League, Amr Moussa, declared that war with Iraq "will open the gates of Hell in the Middle East." But the reality is that some Arab nations are cooperating with preparations for a U.S. military campaign, while others remain on the sidelines.

Interviews with officials and observers from Qatar, Jordan and Saudi Arabia reveal a common basis for Arab calculations. It boils down to a wish to maintain good relations with Washington, even at the expense of criticism and possible unrest within their borders.

[...]

Jordan's foreign minister, Marwan Muasher, said in an interview in Washington that despite strong misgivings about war, "Jordan has a strategic, political and economic relationship with the United States, and certainly, Jordan will not jeopardize this relationship." That is a contrast from a decade ago, when King Hussein came out against international intervention after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait.

Once again, Bush is showing himself to be far more sophisticated strategically than his critics let on.

"Why do they hate us?" That's the question posed by the Blame America First crowd. But Tim Blair points out that they don't.

ACCORDING TO the conventional unwisdom of the anti-Americanistas, the US must examine why it is so hated by Islamic extremists. After all, they point out, the extremists don't hate anyone else.

Except they do. They hate Italians, for example, as this LA Times piece – quoting wiretaps of Milan-based al Qaeda goons – indicates:

"I want to eliminate these pigs, these swine," Ben Soltane said. He told Es Sayed that he despised everything about Italy: "I hate the people, I hate the documents .... I want to go anywhere else."

And they're not so keen on Russians, either.

Attorney General John Ashcroft often gets criticism he doesn't deserve, mostly coming from people who would object if he put cream in his coffee. But sometimes, he's just a total idiot. At a time when we're fighting Middle Eastern terrorists, when there are sleeper cells being discovered in Buffalo, when there are more and more revelations about the failures of the FBI and CIA before 9/11, when our airports can't actually screen luggage for weapons, our Attorney General is spending time and money on other things:

The Bush administration asked a federal appeals court Monday to strike down Oregon's assisted-suicide law as counter to U.S. drug law.

Attorney General John Ashcroft is seeking to sanction and perhaps hold Oregon doctors criminally liable if they prescribe lethal doses of medication under the Oregon measure, the only such law in the nation.

Philosphically, this is an issue of personal freedom. Legally, this is an issue of federalism. But the legalities are beside the point; even if Ashcroft has the law on his side, it should be an issue of priorities. Every prosecutor has to use his discretion as to where to focus his attention. Is terminally ill people taking their own lives really one of the top ten problems in the United States? It is one of the top 50 problems?

My Senator, Bob Torricelli, has serious character problems, turning what should be a slam dunk re-election campaign into a too-close-to-call race. Despite Torricelli's vigorous denials, nobody believes him. So what do you do if you're campaigning for him? Change the subject:

Mr. Daschle urged New Jerseyans today to look beyond Mr. Torricelli's ethical problems, however, because he said the stakes of the election were so steep.

Another example of New York Times bias: there's a dispute between the president and Congressional Democrats over the Homeland Security bill. Bush wants more flexibility in his ability to fire employees in the new department. Democrats want more restrictive rules. Republicans characterize this as a fight over national security. Democrats characterize this as a fight for workers' rights. The Times' take on the matter? Bush Is Thwarted on Worker Rights in Security Dept. Measure. While the article does present Bush's side of the argument, it portrays his viewpoint as merely his viewpoint:

...an administration that sees such a transformation of federal work rules as vital to national security.

The White House said the Senate agreement would erode the president's authority and was unacceptable.

Today's breakthrough on the worker rights issue may finally get the department approved by the Senate in the next few days, but it could make it more difficult to forge an eventual agreement with the White House, assuming that the president follows through on his veto threat.

This is why discussions of media bias are so fruitless. The bias (usually) does not come in the form of false reporting or outright editorializing. It arises in the way issues are framed. That's not going to show up in Nexis searches which catalogue the use of labels like "liberal" or "conservative." But it's clear when you read the stories.

Hezbollah marked the second anniversary of the so-called Al Aqsa intifada today. With a hearty round of "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow" and a few "Death to Israel, Death to America" chants. You know -- good, old fashioned fun.

Oh, and for those people who still want to talk peace, they had a nice message:

"Our path is the uprising and the resistance," said a Hizbollah speaker. "No to concessions, no to negotiations, no to humiliation."

Some protesters dressed up as suicide bombers in Lebanon's Palestinian refugee camps, strapping mock explosives around their waists and pledging loyalty to Islamist movement Hamas, behind a wave of suicide attacks against Israelis.

 
By the way, the unbiased journalists at Reuters refer to the event being commemorated as the "Palestinian revolt against Israeli occupation." With no scare quotes. But how do they describe Hezbollah?

In a show of force by Lebanon's Shi'ite Muslim guerrilla group, included on Washington's list of "terrorist" organizations, Hizbollah staged a massive gathering to honor those killed in the two-year-old uprising.

If you thought that Amiri Baraka was a moron after reading about his anti-semitic poetry, then you don't subscribe to The New Republic, which discussed his idiocies last April:

In 1990, Amiri Baraka was denied tenure by the English department of Rutgers University. An aging polemicist unable to find a publisher for his recent work, Baraka was hardly a promising academic with a bright future ahead of him. But instead of taking the rejection in stride, he characteristically decided to fight the decision, and spewed vitriol at the tenure committee. "The power of these Ivy League Goebbels can flaunt, dismiss, intimidate and defraud the popular will," Baraka charged. "We must unmask these powerful Klansmen. These enemies of academic freedom, people's democracy and Pan American culture must not be allowed to prevail. Their intellectual presence makes a stink across the campus like the corpses of rotting Nazis." This occasion was not Baraka's first--or most intense--foray into the world of inflammatory rhetoric. Indeed, this hyperbolic attack was a sign of progress for Baraka, as he cast Nazis, rather than Jews, as the villains.

...

More than for any single work or movement, though, Baraka is remembered for his inexhaustible and unmatched passion for berating Whitey. When Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were killed along with James Chaney in Mississippi, Jones remarked that "those white boys were only seeking to assuage their own leaking consciences." By contrast, Malcolm X--not exactly a racial moderate--observed about the murders that "I've come to the conclusion that anyone who will fight not for us but with us is my brother." When a white college student tracked Malcolm down in Harlem and asked what she could do to help blacks, he answered, "Nothing"; but this harsh (and wildly untrue) comment pales in contrast to Baraka's suggestion: "A woman asked me in all earnestness, couldn't any whites help? I said, 'You can help by dying. You are a cancer. You can help the world's people with your death.'"

Never one to allow logic to get in the way of demagoguery, Baraka declared in 1967 that blacks who listen to European classical music are traitors to the cause. Some self-styled black nationalists, Baraka said, were "schizophrenic" and too "connected up with white culture. They will be digging Mozart more than James Brown. If all of that shit--Mozart, Beethoven, all of it--if it has to be burned now for the liberation of our people, it should be burned up the next minute." And he did not limit his outbursts to public appearances. Hysteria tricked out as analysis has long been a central element of his written work.

...

Watts dates the beginning of Baraka's decline around 1970, with It's Nation Time and In Our Terribleness. Those books, to be sure, are dreadful. Yet Baraka's story is not one of artistic decline. He began low. His literary career is one of constantly accelerating race-baiting. While he demonstrated a penchant for attracting media attention, Baraka was never the virtuoso that Watts portrays. In the roiling racial dynamics of the late 1960s and the early 1970s, critics mistook Baraka's anger for eloquence; but the main reason to read Baraka is not to see how much the artist has changed, but to see how much the times have changed.

This raises just one question: who in hell thought it was a good idea to appoint Baraka as New Jersey's Poet Laureate? Well, we have the answer to that, from the New York Times:

Mr. Baraka was selected by a committee convened by the New Jersey Council for the Humanities and the State Council on the Arts. His name was forwarded to the governor, who signed a proclamation on Aug. 28 giving him a two-year, $10,000 appointment "to promote and encourage poetry."

Gerald Stern, the state's first laureate and a member of the selection committee, said he pushed for Mr. Baraka partly because "I thought it was important for the black community to get recognition."

Okay, I lied. It raises another question: if a white poet laureate had used racial slurs in the course of his duties, how long would it take the state to figure out a way to replace him? A few hours, max?

When considering what to do about Iraq, there are a few important facts to keep in mind. The first is that nobody in the Middle East supports the United States. Not only would the United States be totally alone if it acted against Iraq, but the "Arab street" would rise up in anger against America. Well, except maybe for these people:

Kuwait is bracing for the possibility it will be attacked by Iraq if the United States strikes Saddam Hussein — and some here said they'd be willing to pay that price to see Saddam gone forever.

...

Others, though, believe war is coming and that Kuwait could be targeted. Bader al-Otaibi, a civil servant, said he was willing to make the sacrifice to see Saddam toppled.

"It is the dream of every person in this country to be rid of Saddam," al-Otaibi said. "We have to get rid of him no matter what the losses are, even if he sends chemical weapons our way."

The 36-year-old was taken prisoner to Baghdad when Iraqi tanks rolled into Kuwait on August 2, 1990. He was held there until the end of the U.S.-led Gulf War seven months later.

"We are prepared to sacrifice so that the situation in Iraq changes, the borders open and the two peoples come closer," said Abdullah al-Mutairi, a 28-year-old secretary at the Ministry of Social Affairs who was spending the evening at a Starbucks' cafe. "We trust in God and in the American power to deter any chemical attack."

Some Kuwaitis weren't so confident. Arif Masood, regional sales manager of Boodai Trading Co., said that in the last two weeks, his company sold 25 Finnish-made tents designed to protect 10 people against chemical or biological weapons — at a cost of about $13,200 each.

"We can't cope with the demand, we are ordering more," Masood said.

Bob Torricelli is out of the New Jersey Senate race, though he declined to resign his office before the election. In one of the whiniest press conferences in history, Torricelli pretended he was the wronged party in this whole debacle, acting upset at the idea that whether he took bribes should matter more than where Republican candidate Doug Forrester stood on crucial New Jersey issues like abortions for women in Afghanistan.

The big mess now is over the November ballot; it's too late for Torricelli to be replaced by someone else, which means there will be a court fight over the attempt to do so.

Look! It's a Paul Krugman column that doesn't mention Enron!

Oh, wait. I mean, until the ninth paragraph.

(Then Krugman makes up for the oversight by accusing President Bush of promoting war just to distract the public from the economy. Does he even write these pieces, or does he just cut-and-paste from last week's column?)

In 2000, there was a battle over election rules. Boiling down the positions of the two parties to their essences, Republicans argued that voters should have to follow instructions in order to have their votes counted, while Democrats argued that the rules were less important than making sure all voices were heard.

Now what do we have in New Jersey? Republicans arguing that the law should be followed, and Democrats arguing that the law doesn't really matter if another principle -- electing Democrats -- is involved. Of course, the New York Times comes down on the side of law-breaking:

In his emotional announcement, Mr. Torricelli said he would file a court petition to remove his name from the ballot and clear the way for another candidate, to be named in coming days from a short list being considered by Governor McGreevey. The Republicans are likely to argue that under New Jersey election law, it is too late to put another name on the ballot. But legal wrangling over ballot access cannot be allowed to obscure the central issue, which is one of democracy. The guiding principle should be the voters' basic right to a genuine election. With a month to go before Election Day, there is still time for a spirited campaign.

But get past that partisanship, and think about the practical issues here. The New York Times wants a judge to rewrite the laws, after the fact, so that a Democrat can get elected. Sure; I don't see any potential controversy there. Certainly there won't be an appeal. And then another appeal, perhaps to federal court. Definitely we won't end up with federal judges deciding on which party controls the Senate. And it won't all be happening when we're under time pressure to determine the election winner. Didn't we do this before?

Contrast the New York Times' view with that of the Washington Post, which pointed out that voters did have a choice:

Still, it's reassuring that in one sense, at least, the process worked well. The ethics committee acted unequivocally and in time for its findings to be absorbed by New Jersey voters, and they -- to the evident and cynical surprise of Mr. Torricelli and the Democratic Party -- in turn registered their displeasure without even having to cast their votes.

A couple of people have asked me about New Jersey's election law, so I thought I'd look at it more specifically. First, the current situation. 19:13-20 of New Jersey's election law -- entitled "Vacancy Procedure" -- says this, in relevant part, with some emphasis added:

19:13-20. In the event of a vacancy, howsoever caused, among candidates nominated at primaries, which vacancy shall occur not later than the 51st day before the general election, or in the event of inability to select a candidate because of a tie vote at such primary, a candidate shall be selected in the following manner:

a. (1) In the case of an office to be filled by the voters of the entire State, the candidate shall be selected by the State committee of the political
party wherein such vacancy has occurred.

The problem is that this is a creative, but tortured reading of the statute. A standard rule of interpretation is Expressio unius est exclusio alterius. That is, the inclusion of one implies the exclusion of others. If the statute says that you can fill a vacancy with more than 51 days, that implies that you can't do it in other circumstances. Indeed, the Democratic approach would render the deadline explicitly mentioned in the statute to be meaningless. That's generally a no-no. 

Moreover, a related statute, 19:13-20.1, contemplates the possibility that a party will not have a nominee in the general election:

If there is no candidate on the primary election ballot of a political party for nomination for election to a public office in the general election and no write-in candidate for nomination for that office receives the minimum number of write-in votes necessary for nomination at a primary election pursuant to section 1 of P.L.1981, c.264 (C.19:14-2.1) and R.S.19:23-8, a vacancy shall not be deemed to exist and the provisions of R.S.19:13-20 shall not be applicable.

There is, however, another possibility being raised, which would involve Torricelli's resignation from the Senate. 19:3-26 provides:

If a vacancy shall happen in the representation of this state in the United  States senate, it shall be filled at the general election next succeeding the  happening thereof, unless such vacancy shall happen within thirty days next  preceding such election, in which case it shall be filled by election at the  second succeeding general election, unless the governor of this state shall  deem it advisable to call a special election therefor, which he is authorized  hereby to do.

    The governor of this state may make a temporary appointment of a senator of  the United States from this state whenever a vacancy shall occur by reason of  any cause other than the expiration of the term;  and such appointee shall serve as such senator until a special election or general election shall have been held pursuant to law and the board of state canvassers can deliver to his successor a certificate of election.

There are two problems with this approach. First, it's sleazy, even by the standards of New Jersey politics. Second, it goes against the spirit, if not the letter, of the law. It would allow the governor to effectively extend a senator's term by two years. Moreover, the statute specifically excludes vacancies caused by the "expiration of the term." As Torricelli's term expires this year, it's not clear that this gubernatorial power even exists. This provision of the statute is intended for off-year vacancies, not for Senators quitting just before their terms are up.

The final Democratic option would be the Missouri model: let Torricelli remain on the ballot as a placeholder, with the understanding of all concerned that if he wins, he'll resign his seat and be replaced by a gubernatorial appointment who would be specified in advance. This appointed senator would serve until 2004, when there would be a special election. This would certainly be legal, but it seems rather untoward. Elections are supposed to involve the candidates on the ballot, not other people who didn't bother to get nominated. Moreover, nothing could compel Torricelli to resign in such a situation; he would be a legally elected Senator. This wrinkle didn't apply in Missouri, since Mel Carnahan had the personal disadvantage of being dead. (Speaking of which, this hints at another approach the Democratic party could take. Torricelli could find himself as Jimmy Hoffa's roommate. Which would be a real shame.)

The New York Times reports that some Jewish groups are going to run pro-Israel television advertising campaigns to improve Israel's public image in the United States.

The two commercials they created, which differ only slightly, include images of everyday life in Israel, while a voiceover says that Israel gives all its citizens American-style freedoms, including freedom of religion and expression, and the right to vote. One spot begins by saying, "Israel is America's only real ally in the Middle East."

One critic, James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute in Washington, said the spots did not address the real problems facing Israel and the Middle East.

"The issue people have is not on that level," Mr. Zogby said. "Even though Americans never identified with Palestinians, they are not happy with Israeli policy."

Moreover, he said, the ads set back peace efforts by emphasizing the differences between Israel and its neighbors. By arguing that Israel and the United States share a love of freedom and respect for individuals, the commercials imply that those values are exclusive to the United States and Israel, he said. "That is a set of assumptions that play into a kind of ethnocentrism and a not so subtle form of racism."

Note to self: don't go into business with Rosie O'Donnell.

Chuck Todd suggests a new strategy for New Jersey Republicans: instead of fighting the Democrats' attempt to rewrite election law and appoint a new Senate candidate just because they feel like it, the Republicans should go to plan B:

Which brings us to the Republicans' next option -- if Democrats can dump their nominee for a more electable candidate, then why can't the GOP?

The ambassadorship to New Zealand has a recent history of accidental senators (Carol Moseley-Braun) holding the post. Why couldn't the White House ask Forrester to follow in those footsteps? Granted, current ambassador Charles J. Swindells might not be ready to leave just yet, but there are lots of countries out there.

So if Forrester can politely be bought off or convinced to take one for the team, the best thing would be for him to vacate his nomination in favor of one of the two Republicans who could win in this Democratic-leaning state: former Govs. Christie Whitman or Tom Kean.

This all may sound ludicrous, but if the Democrats can call "do over" with their election chances in the state, why can't the GOP?

The GOP could argue that the circumstances of the race have changed -- that had the seat been open, other more prominent and electable Republicans would have signed up.

"That's silly," you say. "There has to be a stopping point." Well, there is: the 51-day deadline established in the law. The legislature decided -- as is their prerogative -- that 51 days provided the optimum balance between voter choice and electoral efficiency. Ballots need to be printed. Ballots need to be mailed. That takes time, and that means that there needs to be some finality to the candidate nomination process.

And these, despite the Democratic claims, are not unusual circumstances. This is simply a candidate trailing in the polls. Torricelli didn't die. He didn't become medically incapacitated. He just realized nobody liked him. (For Torricelli, that's not an unusual circumstance at all.) A survey of nationwide elections right now would show hundreds of candidates in that situation.

As I suspected, the New Jersey Supreme Court has just taken upon itself to rewrite the law. In a 7-0 decision, the court held that the Democrats could replace Bob Torricelli with Frank Lautenberg on November's ballot.

And the Court having concluded that the central question before it is whether the dual interests of full voter choice and the orderly administration of an election can be effectuated if the relief requested by plaintiffs were to be granted;

And the Court being of the view that

[it] is in the public interest and the general intent of the election laws to preserve the two-party system and to submit to the electorate a ballot bearing the names of candidates of both major political parties as well as of all other qualifying parties and groups.

Kilmurray v. Gilfert, 10 N.J. 435, 441 (1952);

And the Court remaining of the view that the election statutes should be liberally construed

to allow the greatest scope for public participation in the electoral process, to allow candidates to get on the ballot, to allow parties to put their candidates on the ballot, and most importantly, to allow the voters a choice on Election Day.

Catania v. Haberle, 123 N.J. 438, 448;

And the Court having determined that N.J.S.A. 19:13-20 does not preclude the possibility of a vacancy occurring within fifty-one days of the general election;

And the Court having concluded that the equitable relief sought herein is not inconsistent with the precedent of this Court and the terms of the statute and that the Court should invoke its equitable powers in favor of a full and fair ballot choice for the voters of New Jersey;

Andrew Fastow, erstwhile Enron CFO, was charged with fraud for his financial shenanigans at Enron, designed to conceal the company's huge losses.

The spectacular cascade of corporate collapses over the last year began with Enron, and Mr. Fastow became the most senior former Enron official to join executives of Tyco International, Adelphia Communications, WorldCom and ImClone Systems in facing criminal charges.

It's difficult to find someone who isn't an extreme Democratic partisan who believes that Wednesday's New Jersey Supreme Court ruling was correct. So it's hardly a shock to read that the New York Times editors think that the decision was fine and dandy. In fact, they title their editorial, arrogantly, "New Jersey Gets a Senate Race" -- as if a race isn't a race without a Democratic candidate. Or, rather, a likeable Democratic candidate, since the ballots in question had a Democratic candidate on them.

Meanwhile, the Republicans seem ready to continue their legal efforts to provide their own candidate, Douglas Forrester, with what would amount to a free pass. But it's hard to see how they can build the basis for a successful federal court challenge to the state court's decision. Their obstructionism could also alienate voters.

The court gave these arguments a respectful hearing. But in the end it ruled, rightly, that the greater need was to ensure "full and fair ballot choice for the voters of New Jersey." The decision came not a moment too soon. There are only 33 days left until Election Day. But this is time enough to make the necessary arrangements — printing new ballots, for example — and for the two major party candidates to engage in a vigorous debate on the issues.

But the best part of this is the Times' juxtaposition of the claim that voters deserve "full and fair ballot choice" with the assertion that only "the two major party candidates" need debate the issues.

Bob Torricelli needs a new job. Maybe he should call fellow corrupt Democrat Carl McCall, who tried his use his influence as New York comptroller to get jobs for friends and relatives. McCall wrote letters on official state stationary to various corporate executives, passing along resumes to them.

And like Torricelli, he arrogantly refuses to admit he did anything wrong, while at the same time "apologizing" for it.

Speaking at a news conference at his headquarters on Park Avenue South, Mr. McCall defended his conduct as normal for politicians and hinted that he considered the whole affair overblown. "There was never any pressure or influence, nor is there anyone who says there was," he said.

"While I never sought to leverage my public position nor mix my government role with my personal and professional relationships, in these or any letter, my use of government stationery has unfortunately given this impression, and I sincerely apologize for this," he continued.

Mr. McCall has repeatedly said that there was nothing wrong with having written the letters and that he would do so again.

But yesterday, he said that if he became governor he would not write such letters on official stationery.

The punchline:

To some, the incident did nothing more than point to a lack of political savvy. One Democratic strategist put it this way: "He's either got to be a lot more ethical or a lot smarter."

Chutzpah is often illustrated by the anecdote of the defendant who kills his parents and then argues for mercy on the grounds that he is an orphan. Another possibility would be to display a picture of our past president. One of the points that the Bush administration (and everyone else) has been making is that the current U.N. inspections resolutions are far too weak. These resolutions, written in 1998, were an attempt by Kofi Annan and Bill Clinton to restart the inspections process. But by making so many concessions to Saddam Hussein, they vitiated the entire process. This was a serious failing of the Clinton Administration. Guess who suddenly realizes this?

Addressing the British Labor Party annual conference, which gave him a rapturous welcome, Mr. Clinton said: "We need a strong resolution calling for unrestricted inspections. The restrictions imposed in 1998 are unacceptable and won't do the job." Any new one, he said, should have a strict deadline and "no lack of clarity about what Iraq must do."

Here's breaking news: the Democrats have no coherent stance on Iraq. Aren't you glad the New York Times cleared that up for you? They cover the travails of poor Tom Daschle, who can't quite seem to figure out how to come up with a policy, let alone what that policy should be.

Didn't Mark Steyn explain this the other day?

War is hell for left-of-centre parties. The British Labor Party is bitterly divided between those in favour of war with Iraq and those opposed to it. In the U.S. Democratic Party, meanwhile, it's even more complicated:

Faction A (the David Bonior option) is openly anti-war despite the party's best efforts to turn off their microphones. (Congressman Bonior appeared on TV live from Baghdad yesterday.)

Faction B (the Paul Wellstone option) is also anti-war but trying hard not to have to say so between now and election day in November.

Faction C (the Al Gore option) was pro-war when it was Bill Clinton in charge but anti-war now there's a Republican rallying the troops.

Faction D (the Hillary Rodham option) can go either way but remains huffily insistent that to ask them to express an opinion would be to "politicize" the war.

Faction E (the John Kerry option) can't quite figure which position alienates least of their supporters and so articulates a whole all-you-can-eat salad bar of conflicting positions and then, in a weird post-modern touch, ostentatiously agonizes over the "inherent risks" in each of them.

Faction F (the Jay Rockefeller option) thinks the priority right now should be to sit around holding inquiries into why the government ignored what it knew about al-Qaeda until they killed thousands of Americans. To Senator Rockefeller, it's vital that we now ignore what we know about Saddam so that we can get on with the important work of investigating the stuff we ignored last time round.

I may have missed a couple of dozen other factions.

It's fashionable among the left to talk about the racism of the U.S., how our approach to Iraq is fueled by our hate for Arabs. So it's interesting to read this profile of John P. Abizaid.

At a time when all eyes in the U.S. military are focused on Iraq, Lt. Gen. John P. Abizaid is the right man in the right place at the right time.

As director of the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the veteran infantryman coordinates the daily activities of the top level of the U.S. military, making sure that the regional commanders (or "CinCs"), the military services, senior Defense Department civilians and the Joint Staff are all working toward the same goals.

He also is probably the highest-ranking officer in the U.S. military who is an expert in Arab affairs. Of Lebanese descent himself, Abizaid speaks Arabic, has a master's degree in Middle Eastern studies from Harvard and lived in the region while studying at the University of Jordan. He traveled in Iraq back then and was there again in 1991, when he commanded an infantry battalion in Operation Provide Comfort, the post-Gulf War relief operation in northern Iraq.

Already, other generals talk about Abizaid as a likely future head of the U.S. Central Command, or as an Army chief, or perhaps as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the top slot in the U.S. military. "If the defense secretary doesn't make him a CinC and then chief of staff of the Army or chairman of the Joint Chiefs, then we will have missed the boat," said retired Army Gen. John Shalikashvili, himself a former chairman.

Law professors Akhil Reed Amar and Vikram David Amar break down some of the Torricelli legal issues. Not much new here, but they do note a contradiction in the court's thinking:

Here's another way to put our point. New ballots will cost around 800 thousand dollars. The court ordered the Democratic Party to pay this expense. But suppose a party didn't have the money–would it then not be entitled to new ballots in a similar circumstance?

Ordinarily, government pays for ballots, not private parties. (This was one of the major reforms introduced into America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.) In a plane crash, or other death situation, would the court impose the costs on one political party? If there is genuinely a public interest in new ballots, why shouldn't the public pay?

Conversely, if this request for a new ballot is really the "fault" of the Democrats–enough so that they and only they should in fairness pay for the new ballots–then isn't this payment order itself an implicit admission that this is, to some extent at least, a partisan request for partisan advantage?

A letter to the editor from Ted Sorensen (fourth one down):

To the Editor:

President Bush has not yet openly reprimanded his press secretary, Ari Fleischer, for suggesting that "a bullet" is the cheapest way of accomplishing his goal of regime change in Iraq. Is it possible that the United States now endorses for other countries a policy of presidential assassination, the very epitome of terrorism, after our own tragic experience with that despicable act?

(A) Saddam Hussein is the democratically elected leader of a free country
(B) JFK was a genocidal military dictator
(C) Overthrowing a tyrant is similar to hijacking a plane and crashing it into an office building
(D) Trick question. He doesn't think.

Terrorist attack on a French oil tanker off the coast of Yemen. Initially they were reluctant to call it terrorism, but now they're comparing it to the attack on the USS Cole. Apparently opposing the United States doesn't create goodwill among Islamofascists. Maybe the French might want to rethink the idea that they can win middle eastern friends just by being obstructionist.

At the same time, police have definitively linked the Fredericksburg shooting to the Maryland and D.C. shootings, making a total of seven apparently random shootings so far, with the shooter possibly moving south. I certainly don't want to jump to any unwarranted conclusions here, but isn't one of the hallmarks of Al Qaeda simultaneous attacks in well-separated locations? We don't have nearly enough information here, but it's something to keep in mind.

You know that insane $28 billion verdict against Phillip Morris? Well, Max Power explains what's wrong with the logic behind such a huge punitive award -- besides the fact that it was based on the fiction that a smoker didn't know of the risks of smoking, I mean. It's punishing bigness, not wrongdoing. Max adds:

I don't smoke, I get annoyed at people who smoke in front of me on a moving escalator, but I still recognize this as a dangerous dangerous case. If the government has the power to randomly swoop in and take a third of your revenues for the year, well, that's a huge disincentive to doing business or investing in a business that can face such confiscatory policies. The same is true when the government's power is backed by a random assortment of twelve underemployed people and a judge who hates corporations. This isn't just cigarettes, it's hospitals, auto manufacturers, food sellers, retail stores, banks, etc. Jury verdicts like this do more damage to the economy than a hundred Ken Lays.

Along those lines, the New York times reported on the progress of a lawsuit against the gun industry. After laughably describing Americans for Gun Safety as a gun rights group, it describes the NAACP's (current) attempt to sue gun manufacturers for crimes committed with guns.

Anthony J. Sebok, a professor at Brooklyn Law School who has written about the gun cases, said the new information could build a devastating case against the gun industry. But he also said that if the plaintiffs fail in the Brooklyn case, that could be a setback for all the lawsuits across the country. "It could end the campaign to use litigation as a method of achieving gun control," he said.

Elisa Barnes, the chief lawyer for the N.A.A.C.P. in the Brooklyn case, said the 11 years of gun-sales data she obtained from the federal government is being analyzed by experts on marketing, the gun industry and statistics who are working with her on the case. In filing the suit in 1999, the N.A.A.C.P. said its goal was "to protect the well-being and security of its membership, which has been disproportionately injured" by illegal handguns.

[...]

Ms. Barnes made several strategic decisions that make the current case different from her 1999 case. Instead of seeking damages for the families of gun victims, for example, the current case seeks an injunction that would establish new restrictions on the marketing and distribution of handguns.

As I suspected would happen, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to get involved in the New Jersey Senate race ballot dispute, as did a federal district court. The Republicans had a couple of reasonable arguments, but I think the Democrats had the stronger position on this one point, from their Supreme Court brief:

The Applicant has failed to meet his burden of proving irreparable harm in every way. He alleges no harm of his own, and he shows no real potential of harm to others – except Senator Lautenberg and the Democrats of New Jersey. Given that there is currently no voter from the State of New Jersey whose ballot condition will not or cannot be fixed over the next month, there is no need for this Court to intervene.

When the legislature wrote the law in question, they didn't know whether a Democrat or Republican would benefit. They didn't know whether the Senate would be closely divided. Their choice of a deadline, while arbitrary, was unbiased. When the New Jersey Supreme Court rewrote the law in question, they knew they were benefiting the Democratic Party. There's just too much temptation for abuse. There's the appearance of impropriety, even if the judges are trying to be fair. All we have to do is look at Bush v. Gore to see this problem. Republicans were convinced the Florida Supreme Court was biased. Democrats were convinced that the U.S. Supreme Court was biased. And it was all because people were ignoring the law in favor of ad hoc decisionmaking.

Aside from that, when exceptions are made, its inevitable that they'll be made to benefit the powerful, not the weak. Does anybody believe that the court would have extended the deadline for the Socialist Party, or the Libertarian Party, or the Greens? (In this case, the New Jersey Supreme Court even admitted it: this decision was made in part as part of a policy "to preserve the two party system.")

Pre-established rules, no matter how arbitrary, treat everyone equally. Exceptions don't. Exceptions can't.

I didn't hear this reported elsewhere, but the Washington Post reports that the Maryland sniper left a taunting note at the site of his last shooting.

The sniper linked to nine area shootings left what appeared to be a taunting message for authorities outside the Bowie school where a 13-year-old boy was shot Monday morning, police sources confirmed last night.

"Dear policeman, I am God," the message said. Police said it was found on a Tarot card known as the Death card, part of a deck used in fortunetelling. Sources close to the investigation said it was spotted in a wooded area about 150 yards from the school entrance, where police also found a spent shell casing and a matted area of grass that suggested that the gunman had lain in wait.

The message, first reported last night on WUSA-TV (Channel 9), was the first known communication from the sniper, police sources said last night.

The CIA wrote an open letter to Congress disclosing portions of its assessments of Iraq. So what does the news media choose to focus on? The New York Times headline is typical: "C.I.A. Warns That a U.S. Attack May Ignite Terror":

The letter said "Baghdad for now appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks" with conventional or chemical or biological weapons against the United States.

"Should Saddam conclude that a U.S.-led attack could no longer be deterred, he probably would become much less constrained in adopting terrorist action," it continued. It noted that Mr. Hussein could use either conventional terrorism or a weapon of mass destruction as "his last chance to exact vengeance by taking a large number of victims with him."

The letter dated Oct. 7 also declassified an exchange from a closed Congressional hearing on Oct. 2 in which a senior intelligence official judged the likelihood of Mr. Hussein's initiating an attack in the foreseeable future as "low."

Mr. Tenet said tonight that "there is no inconsistency" between the C.I.A. views in the letter and those of the president. He emphasized the Iraqi leader's use of such weapons against his own citizens.

Senior administration officials insisted that the letter did not contradict President Bush's assertions on the imminent threat posed by Mr. Hussein. They pointed to another section of the letter that noted that the likelihood of Mr. Hussein's using weapons of mass destruction "for blackmail, deterrence, or otherwise, grows as his arsenal builds."

So after leading with a headline de-emphasizing the threat from Iraq, and quoting from the portion of the letter that supported this view, and denigrating the opposing view, what does the Times slip by in a single sentence? The argument that the Times has been sneering at since it was raised by the Bush administration: that Iraq and Al Qaeda are connected.

The letter also cited credible reporting that Al Qaeda leaders sought contacts in Iraq who could help them acquire weapons of mass destruction and that Iraq has provided members of the terrorist group with training in the areas of poisons, gases and bomb making.

¶Our understanding of the relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda is evolving and is based on sources of varying reliability. Some of the information we have received comes from detainees, including some of high rank.

¶We have solid reporting of senior level contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda going back a decade.

¶Credible information indicates that Iraq and Al Qaeda have discussed safe haven and reciprocal nonaggression.

¶Since Operation Enduring Freedom, we have solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of Al Qaeda members, including some that have been in Baghdad.

¶We have credible reporting that Al Qaeda leaders sought contacts in Iraq who could help them acquire W.M.D. capabilities. The reporting also stated that Iraq has provided training to Al Qaeda members in the areas of poisons and gases and making conventional bombs.

¶Iraq's increasing support to extremist Palestinians coupled with growing indications of relationship with Al Qaeda. suggest that Baghdad's links to terrorists will increase, even absent U.S. military action.

Amusing New York Times correction:

A picture caption on Sept. 23 with an article about Afghan women who were learning to read and write referred incorrectly to the lesson written on a blackboard in a class in northern Afghanistan. The chalked characters were numbers, not letters.

As James Taranto continually points out, Yasser Arafat won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1994. So it's hard to work up too much outrage about any prize, even one given to professional candidate Jimmy Carter, even if he has spent the last couple of decades sucking up to dictatorships like North Korea.

Still, the Nobel Committee managed to top even that outrage, by coming out and saying that Carter was given the award as a rebuke to President Bush:

At a news conference, Nobel Committee Chairman Gunnar Berge said that, in addition to honoring Carter, the 2002 prize "should be interpreted as a criticism of the line that the current [U.S.] administration has taken." 

"It's a kick in the leg to all that follow the same line as the United States," he added.

Funny, but when the stock market jumps 300 points in one day, we don't hear the people who criticized President Bush for the declines giving him praise for the rise. So that's 564 points in two days.

Abba Eban famously said of Yasser Arafat that he never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Apparently Saddam Hussein studied at the same school as Arafat; a day after Congress voted overwhelmingly to give President Bush the authority to use military force against Iraq, Hussein decided to make a special effort to emphasize how uncooperative he would be.

The Iraqi government erected new hurdles today to unrestricted U.N. weapons inspections in Iraq, saying it could not provide security guarantees to U.N. aircraft in northern and southern Iraq and warning that new inspections could be impeded if the United Nations fails to pay for services that had previously been free.

A senior Iraqi official, Gen. Amir H. al-Saadi, told Hans Blix, the U.N.'s chief weapons inspector, in a letter that "the aggressive military acts by the U.S. and British air forces" enforcing "no-fly" zones in northern and southern Iraq would "hamper" Iraq's capacity to guarantee the safety of weapons inspectors. U.N. officials maintain that the inability to fly their aircraft to U.N. offices scheduled to be set up in the regional capitals of Mosul and Basra in northern and southern Iraq could add several hours to the time it would take them to conduct inspections, eliminating the element of surprise.

Blix had appealed to Saadi in an Oct. 8 letter to confirm Iraq's commitment to abide by a series of U.N. terms for inspections of national security sites, interviews of scientists, surveillance operations and travel to suspected weapons facilities.

But Saadi ignored Blix's request, proposing instead a resumption of negotiations to resolve "any difficulties which may confront our work." He also dismissed Blix's insistence that Iraq, which operates daily flights from Baghdad to Basra, has the ability to ensure the safety of U.N. aircraft along the same route.

Doesn't this argue against the theory that Saddam Hussein isn't really a threat even if he gets weapons of mass destruction because he can be deterred? The strategy of deterrence is based on the hope that Hussein will act rationally. But we see that even as the threat from the U.S. becomes more imminent, he's stonewalling inspections even more. Either his weapons programs are much farther along than we think, and he's desperate to hide the progress that Iraq has made, or he's irrational. Either way, it doesn't make one sanguine about avoiding war.

I've argued that the Democratic opposition to Bush is incoherent, and has no real answers of its own. You'd expect me to argue that. But when ardent and loyal Democrats like Frank Rich are saying the same thing, then Democrats should really note their electoral peril.

As soon as President Bush rolled out his new war on Iraq, the Democrats in Washington demanded a debate, and debates they got, all right. There was the debate between Matt Drudge and Barbra Streisand about the provenance of an antiwar quote she recited at a party fund-raiser. There was the debate about whether Jim McDermott, Democratic Congressman from Washington, should have come home from Baghdad before announcing on TV that we can take Saddam Hussein's promises at "face value." There were the debates about why Al Gore took off his wedding ring, why Robert Torricelli took a Rolex, and why Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson took noisy offense at so benign and popular a Hollywood comedy as "Barbershop."

But as for the promised debate about Iraq, it became heated only after Congressional approval of the president's mission was a foregone conclusion. Though the party's leaders finally stepped up, starting with Mr. Gore, most of them seemed less concerned with the direction of the nation in 2002 than with positioning themselves for the White House in 2004 (or '08). They challenged the administration's arrogant and factually disingenuous way of pursuing its goal, then beat a hasty retreat to sign on to whatever fig-leaf language they could get into the final resolution. (Mr. Gore, after his Sept. 23 Iraq speech, dropped the subject altogether.)

This is scary. The death toll in Indonesia is now up to 118, with a hundred or more injured. I guess I shouldn't be so hasty as to automatically assume that the attacks in Indonesia are Islamic terrorism, but it certainly seems like a plausible explanation.

Combined with a mall explosion in Finland, and the sniper murders in Maryland -- neither of which are necessarily related to Islamic terrorists at all -- and the attack on the French tanker in Yemen, and I really start to get worried about the state of the world now. I wonder if this will convince anybody in the UN, or the Norwegian Nobel committee, that you can't solve every problem by talking about it. Nah.

[Update: the death toll is now up to 182, and given the nature of this attack, I expect it will climb higher; there are hundreds more wounded. Not to be macabre, but with the exception of 9/11, has there been a single terrorist attack of this magnitude before? Oh -- I guess the U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon. And the Pan Am 103 bombing.]

After two days of suspense, and announcements of a mysterious "visual aid" to help in the Maryland sniper investigation, the police have now confirmed that a white truck looks pretty much like a white truck.

I don't mean to criticize the investigation itself; I'm sure it must be unbelievably difficult and stressful, given the nature of these attacks. And since I have family in the area, I'm rooting for them to catch this scum as quickly as possible. But how desperate must the investigators be to make a big deal of the fact that they put effort into drawing pictures of trucks? What's next, putting up wanted posters of people with ski masks over their faces after bank robberies?

What's worse is that we also have heard rumors of a white Chevy Astro van with ladders on it, and police haven't ruled out the possibility that it is related to the killings in some way. This doesn't give me much confidence that they know what they're looking for.

Marcia Angell, the former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine thinks that we're in a health care crisis. (Of course, Marcia Angell, the former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, has been singing this song for a while, which begs the question of what a "crisis" is.) She thinks private competition is wasteful, that wealth should not determine treatment, that government should pay for everyone's health care. But this, to Angell, "is not socialized medicine."

Out of curiosity, I wonder what Angell plans to do with the millions of people currently employed in the insurance industry.

I'm going to go out on a limb here, and guess that Tim Blair doesn't like Robert Fisk, the man who makes moral equivalence his middle name.

The New York Times has a revealing little anecdote about some professional protesters in New York:

WE shouldn't picket until 6 o'clock," Toby Heilbrunn said Thursday afternoon, cutting short the daily demonstration at the locally loathed CVS drugstore. "We should conserve our energy for tonight."

That night would bring a rally in nearby Kingston against an invasion of Iraq. The threat of war is creating cause congestion for the truly committed. "You don't know which way you're going," Ms. Heilbrunn said. "You run from picketing CVS to the antiwar rally."

Local activists' recent success at stopping a proposed town garage on park property pales against the antiwar task. And who has time to fight the proposed expansion of the local Tibetan monastery? "It's the bigness," one activist explained. Certainly not the Buddhismness.

Opposition to CVS grew here, as elsewhere in the region, because the drugstore chain bought the lease of a Grand Union that closed when the chain went bankrupt. It was the only supermarket in a town that already had a chain drugstore. There have been daily protests since CVS opened its store two weeks ago.

OTHERS see a larger issue. A Bard College social studies professor, Joel Kovel, said the building looked much better than it did when Grand Union was there, but he called the CVS a local metastasis of the cancer of "relentless expansion of capitalism."

Looking at the CVS on Thursday, he said, derisively, "All this plastic." He hit on a connection between the Iraq invasion (driven by the thirst for oil, he said) and CVS. "If you did a survey of all the products in CVS," he said, "I bet 98 percent of them are petroleum derivatives." Yuck. Even the toothpaste?

John Wonderling, a music producer, headed home in frustration. The CVS was open, the war looking ever more certain. Not a winning season for activists. "The powers that be are the ones pulling all the strings," he said. "You've got to keep going, and eventually us gentler people maybe will be heard."

It's the Life Cereal school of modern politics: like Mikey, they hate everything. Hey -- maybe if we told these 60s era-wannabes that Wal-Mart was based in Baghdad, they'd eagerly embrace a bombing campaign.

Next time you read a proposal from the Socialist PartyMarcia Angell whining about the "crisis" of the uninsured and the efficiency of the government in solving these problems, be sure to remember this story.

Phillip Howard explains why the civil service system is incompatible with homeland security.

For personnel decisions, the civil service rules operate as a kind of legal air bag, allowing a disgruntled worker to force the supervisor to prove the wisdom of an adverse decision, even a negative comment on an evaluation form. The process of dismissing a worker who is incompetent or worse can take years. (The minimum generally is 18 months.) Getting rid of someone who has bad judgment is basically impossible: How would a supervisor prove bad judgment? Last year, according to the Office of Personnel Management, out of an estimated 64,000 federal employees who were designated "poor performers," only 434 were dismissed through these legal hearings: That's seven out of 1,000.

Assigning the best person to a new job is impossible unless you're prepared to prove in a hearing that more-senior personnel aren't up to the task. After Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S. Customs Service immediately reassigned its best inspectors to better secure our northern border. The union filed a legal proceeding claiming that the reassignments required a nationwide survey of interested civil servants, from which choices should be made on the basis of seniority.

No decision, no matter how important or how trivial, is immune from a legal proceeding alleging that it violates the rights of federal workers. In August, following a directive outlining standard protective measures under each of the homeland security threat levels, the union filed a proceeding to overturn it because it was issued "without first notifying and affording [the union] the opportunity to negotiate." Several years ago a decision that U.S. Border Patrol officers should carry a side-handled club was rejected as not being within their job description.

Imagine being a supervisor in this environment. Do you go through the day thinking about how to stop terrorists, or are you preoccupied with how to negotiate the legal minefield of civil service?

The New York Times editorial board is annoyed because candidates George Pataki and Frank Lautenberg are insisting that debates for the upcoming election include all the candidates on the ballot.

Mr. Pataki and Mr. Lautenberg should get real, and do the voters the courtesy of allowing at least one meaningful face-off between the two major party candidates.

But given the Times' holier-than-thou attitude towards "voter choice" and "democracy," for them to take the stance that the voters should be denied the opportunity to hear from the majority of the candidates on the ballot raises hypocrisy to unprecedented levels. Obviously it is unlikely that any of these candidates will win anything -- but such an upset victory becomes a lot more likely if the Times doesn't treat all the extra candidates like jokes who shouldn't be wasting everyone's time by running. Certainly at least one of the third party candidates in these races, Tom Golisano, has the resources needed to run a competitive election, so there's no excuse for keeping him out of the debate.

Besides, let's get real: these "debates," whether with two or six candidates, are not sacred rites. They're not even debates at all. They're joint press conferences. (And yes, I know they said this on The West Wing last week. But I've been saying it for years.) Each participant gets a minuscule amount of time to respond to a vague question from a media member, and gives a canned reply which doesn't actually address the issues raised. Then the other candidate gives an even shorter pre-crafted "rebuttal" which doesn't address the first candidate's statements. Rinse, lather, repeat. With scripted "spontaneous" jokes thrown in for good measure.

If the Times wants to be constructive, it ought to promote more debates, in a format which demands long, thoughtful answers, in a format in which the moderators can force the participants to actually answer the questions posed. Otherwise, what's the point?

Can anybody explain to me why Maureen Dowd has a job? Has anybody ever used more words to say so little? If a picture is worth a thousand words, can't the Times just publish a picture of Dowd sneering? They can recycle it weekly.

Here's a shocker: authoritarian states can't be trusted. North Korea has acknowledged that it still has a nuclear program, in violation of a 1994 agreement it had reached with the United States.

North Korea's surprise revelation came 12 days ago in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, after a senior American diplomat confronted his North Korean counterparts with American intelligence data suggesting a secret project was under way. At first, the North Korean officials denied the allegation, according to an American official who was present.

The next day they acknowledged the nuclear program and according to one American official, said ``they have more powerful things as well.'' American officials have interpreted that cryptic comment as an acknowledgment that North Korea possesses other weapons of mass destruction.

American officials used the past dozen days to formulate a common response. At a press conference in South Korea on Thursday morning, local time, Lee Tae Sik, deputy minister for foreign affairs, urged North Korea to abide by a series of agreements it now clearly violates: the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the 1994 agreement, and a ``joint declaration'' signed with South Korea to keep the Korean Peninsula nuclear-free.

The United States confronted North Korea in the early 1990s, and some thought that we were close to war over the issue. Guess which recent Nobel Prize winner got credit for "solving" this problem? Hint: he grew peanuts. I wonder whether his bio will be revised to reflect these new developments.

Glenn Reynolds discusses the issue of genocide in the post World War Two world, noting that Cambodia, the Congo, and Rwanda have all experienced the phenomenon we supposedly abolished after the Holocaust, despite their signatures on international agreements. The so-called "international community" failed to intervene when the crimes were happening, and was ineffective in punishing those responsible after the fact.

Glenn suggests an alternate theory for preventing genocide: arm the public.

The result, conclude law professor Daniel Polsby and criminologist Don Kates, is that "a connection exists between the restrictiveness of a country's civilian weapons policy and its liability to commit genocide."

Armed citizens, they argue, are far less likely to be massacred than defenseless ones, and armed resistance to genocide is more likely to receive outside aid. It is probably no accident that the better-armed resistance to genocide in Bosnia and Kosovo drew international intervention, while the hapless Rwandans and Cambodians did not. When victims resist, what is merely cause for horror becomes cause for alarm, and those who are afraid of the conflict’s spread will support (as Europe did) intervention out of self-interest when they could not be bothered to intervene out of compassion.

It is no wonder that genocide is so often preceded by efforts to disarm the people.

This approach is nothing new; as Britain pulled out of Palestine and Israel prepared to declare independence, as Arab countries prepared to attack Israel, the United States and Britain responded by imposing an arms embargo on the region. The Arabs were backed by armed Arab states, while Jews had only what they could smuggle.

It should come as no surprise to anyone; the "international community" is made up of governments, not people. And governments protect other governments; they don't protect individuals. Individuals who defend themselves are just so... inconvenient.

The New York Times is really desperate to squelch the story of 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta's meeting with Iraqi intelligence officials in Prague. (So much so that they provide two stories about the topic, including one discussing the oh-so-fascinating world of bureaucratic infighting in the Czech government, along with stories of gay British spies.) Still, in neither article does the Times say anything substantive about the actual issue, of the meeting involving Atta.

The Czech president, Vaclav Havel, has quietly told the White House he has concluded that there is no evidence to confirm earlier reports that Mohamed Atta, the leader in the Sept. 11 attacks, met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague just months before the attacks on New York and Washington, according to Czech officials.

I wonder what Times columnist William Safire is going to say about this article, given his insistence that the story of the meeting is true. (He has an unrelated column in today's paper, so I guess we'll have to wait until Thursday to find out.) The article itself quietly avoids naming Safire, saying only that "the Prague meeting has remained a live issue with other proponents of military action against Iraq, both in and out of the government."

As we all know by now, beating Robert Fisk over the head is perfectly acceptable to him, as long as the attackers are Muslim. (Well, that's his prerogative -- but he also endorses the beating of "any other Westerner" by Muslims, which seems slightly presumptuous.) From that, you'd think he had a thick skin to go along with his thick skull. But apparently not, because criticizing Fisk and his ilk is completely intolerable:

The all-purpose slander of "anti-Semitism" is now used with ever-increasing promiscuity against anyone – people who condemn the wickedness of Palestinian suicide bombings every bit as much as they do the cruelty of Israel's repeated killing of children – in an attempt to shut them up.

Daniel Pipes and Martin Kramer of the Middle East Forum now run a website in the United States to denounce academics who are deemed to have shown "hatred of Israel". One of the eight professors already on this contemptible McCarthyite list – it is grotesquely called "Campus Watch" – committed the unpardonable sin of signing a petition in support of the Palestinian scholar Edward Said. Pipes wants students to inform on professors who are guilty of "campus anti-Semitism".

Mr Said himself has already described all this as a campaign "to ask students and faculty to inform against pro-Palestinian colleagues, intimidating the right of free speech and seriously curtailing academic freedom".

On the other hand, hitting them with rocks is fine.

Maybe I shouldn't be so paranoid about Reuters' refusal to properly label Islamic homicide bombers as terrorists. Maybe it really isn't personal:

A dozen animal rights activists have been indicted for stalking an insurance company executive, calling him a "puppy killer" and threatening to burn down his house, prosecutors said today.

Not intending this to be a shot at Paul Wellstone, I note this example of the mindset of the media, from a Washington Post editorial eulogizing the senator:

Held up as the very model of a liberal Democrat, he nonetheless worked across the aisle on issues he believed in. He formed a lasting alliance with Republican Sen. Pete V. Domenici of New Mexico to battle for expanded insurance coverage for mental illnesses. With Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) he championed an important piece of human rights legislation, trying to curb international trafficking of women.

I'm reminded of the aftermath of the 2000 election, when various editorial boards urged newly-elected President Bush to "prove" his rhetoric about being a "uniter, not a divider" by not fighting for any of his campaign proposals. For some reason, the media defines "bipartisan compromise" as "Everybody agreeing to settle on the Democratic position."

How well do you think it would go over if a Republican candidate publicly told his supporters that the death of Senator Wellstone opened up new opportunities for the Republican party? I think there'd be a huge uproar, no?

So how come senate candidate Frank Lautenberg can get away with this:

A day after United States Senator Paul Wellstone died in a plane crash, Frank R. Lautenberg, New Jersey's Democratic candidate, said that the best way for Mr. Wellstone's political admirers to honor his memory was to ensure that the Democrats retain control of the Senate.

[...]

But with the Democrats holding a single-seat margin in the Senate, and Mr. Wellstone's seat now in serious jeopardy, Mr. Lautenberg said the tragedy made it even more important for Democrats across the country to support candidates like himself, who share Mr. Wellstone's political beliefs.

"This certainly poses a burden on us," said Mr. Lautenberg, who is leading Douglas R. Forrester, the Republican, in most public opinion polls. "All of the seats under contest have to go Democratic to protect the interests he had. I hope to be part of that group."

The good news for Lautenberg is that, with Walter Mondale looking like the likely Democratic substitute candidate in Minnesota, Lautenberg will no longer be the most washed-up-hasn't-had-a-good-idea-in-two-decades Senate candidate in the country. (Though Lautenberg, believe it or not, is several years older than Mondale, who last was in office twenty-two years ago.)

So now the hatemongers over at Media Whores Online are targetting President Bush for not attending Senator Wellstone's funeral? Isn't the fact that the Wellstones already snubbed Dick Cheney when he was going to attend just a little inconvenient for this argument?

A Democrat involved with planning the service at the University of Minnesota's Williams Arena here said the family did not want the event overwhelmed by the additional security, logistical challenges and potential protesters that would accompany the vice president.

Besides, somehow I don't think the Bush-haters really wanted the president at the funeral, anyway. If he appeared, they'd attack him for drawing attention to himself at a somber event.

Speaking of Senator Wellstone, I happened to run across an article on Mickey Kaus' blog which discussed an ad campaign being planned in Minnesota. Of course, with the tragedy that took Senator Wellstone's life, the specifics are no longer relevant, but the Wellstone mindset is still important to understand.

Americans for Job Security, a Virginia-based interest group that opposes the reelection of Democratic U.S. Sen. Paul Wellstone, has made an unprecedented $1 million ad buy that will fill the airwaves in the last two weeks before the election, according to Wellstone campaign officials.

Campaign manager Jeff Blodgett said the buy is so large that it may equal what Wellstone and Republican rival Norm Coleman and the two state parties each are expected to spend on media in the closing weeks.
Blodgett said his biggest concern is that no one knows who funds the mysterious group, which has found a legal loophole that apparently allows it to keep its donors secret.

"In a state with a reputation for clean, transparent campaigns, this is an outrage, that a group can come in and spend this kind of money and no one knows who their donors are," Blodgett said at a Tuesday morning news conference. "We demand to know. We ask Norm Coleman to join us in this."

With all the talk of the glorious liberal Paul Wellstone standing up for people's rights, his final legacy was censorship.

I've been away for a little while, first because of a trip and more recently because of DSL annoynances, not to mention being a little busy. Hopefully I'll be back regularly now.

I'm a sucker for those TV movies about innocent men wrongly convicted of crimes they didn't commit -- a promotional slogan I love, by the way. Are there innocent men rightly convicted?

Anyway, because of that, and because of my general libertarian distrust of government, I love the stories of DNA evidence being used to free innocent people from prison. The New York Times carried a story of this happening in Minnesota recently. A convicted rapist was exonerated after DNA evidence proved another had committed the crime. Reading further, though, tempered my excitement just a bit:

The man convicted of the rape, David Brian Sutherlin, is serving a life sentence for a double murder committed while he was out on bail on the rape charge. Prosecutors expect the lifting of the rape conviction to ease his path to parole, for which he became eligible this year.

Al Gore came come out of hiding the other day to begin laying the framework for a 2004 presidential campaign. He had to start, of course, by whining about the last election.

In his first interviews since conceding the presidency to George W. Bush almost two years ago, former vice president Al Gore calls the outcome of the 2000 election "a crushing disappointment" and criticizes the 5-4 Supreme Court decision that put Bush in the White House as "completely inconsistent" with the court's conservative philosophy.

Of course he does. So if his assessment of the decision was valid, where does that leave his argument, exactly? "The Supreme Court should make activist/liberal decisions, except if these decisions keep me out of office, in which case they should be consistently conservative." Or something like that. Is there any wonder that he lost an election he should have won by ten million votes?

If you twisted my arm when you asked me, I'd agree with Glenn Reynolds' point about double standards for the right and left. He argues that the left can get away with a form of political statement that the right would be crucified for; if they do get called on it, labelling it "satire" seems to be sufficient to exonerate them.

And yet, his argument troubles me greatly. (Which doesn't mean I've never engaged in a similar one, of course.) Why? Because these sorts of hypotheticals can be twisted as far as one wants to take them. Republicans shouldn't criticize Gore over his Florida recount antics, because Bush would have done the same if he had lost. The left shouldn't insult the right, because the right "would" be criticized if it insulted the right. The GOP shouldn't investigate the president, because Democrats would be criticized if they did the same. Etc. Etc. Or the most extreme case I ever saw: you shouldn't condemn the South for their defense of slavery, because if Northerners had owned slaves, they would have acted the same way. Huh?

These sorts of arguments aren't falsifiable; anybody can claim anything about what "would" happen, without fear of contradiction. Nobody can prove how Bush would have handled Florida had the situations been reversed. Not only are these arguments unprovable, but they don't really advance the debate. We should stick to arguments about whether behavior is right or wrong, not on whether one side could get away with it. Gore was wrong about Florida because he tried to get the law changed, not because Bush would have been savaged by the media (though he would have been) had the situations been reversed. Generally, we should be less interested in discussing hypothetical hypocrisy than in discussing who's right.

Well, that took a long time. Less than two weeks after the interminable 2002 election season ended, the media has started polling for 2004 elections. They have so little news to cover that they have time to cover the horse race aspects of an election for which the horses are still unknown?

BTW, what did they find out?

A CNN/Time poll conducted November 13-14 shows that two-thirds of the public thinks Gore will be the likely Democratic nominee in 2004, but half surveyed said the former vice president won't win the White House. Only 41 percent said they would vote for him if the election were held today.

But then CNN adds the caveat, buried at the bottom of the article:

Despite the numbers, Gore is not out for the count. Polls taken this far from an election aren't always a good indicator of what may happen in the future.

Paul Krugman could just write that every week. Then he wouldn't have to bother phoning it in like this, and it would be slightly less embarrassing.

Rule No. 1: Always have a cover story. The ostensible purpose of the Bush administration's plan to open up 850,000 federal jobs to private competition is to promote efficiency. Competitive vigor, we're told, will end bureaucratic sloth; costs will go down, and everyone — except for a handful of overpaid union members — will be better off.

And who knows? Here and there the reform may actually save a few dollars. But I doubt that there's a single politician or journalist in Washington who believes that privatizing much of the federal government — a step that the administration says it can take without any new legislation — is really motivated by a desire to reduce costs.

Note also the Krugman tactic of the "virtual poll." Don't bother to find out what people think; just announce that everyone agrees with you, or at least probably so.

Rule No. 2: Always assume the worst case scenario for the proposal:

After all, there's a lot of experience with privatization by governments at all levels — state, federal, and local; that record doesn't support extravagant claims about improved efficiency. Sometimes there are significant cost reductions, but all too often the promised savings turn out to be a mirage. In particular, it's common for private contractors to bid low to get the business, then push their prices up once the government work force has been disbanded. Projections of a 20 or 30 percent cost saving across the board are silly — and one suspects that the officials making those projections know that.

Rule No. 3: Get past the innuendo and explain the real truth behind the proposal:

First, it's about providing political cover. In the face of budget deficits as far as the eye can see, the administration — determined to expand, not reconsider the program of tax cuts it initially justified with projections of huge surpluses — must make a show of cutting spending. Yet what can it cut? The great bulk of public spending is either for essential services like defense and the justice system, or for middle-class entitlements like Social Security and Medicare that the administration doesn't dare attack openly.

Privatizing federal jobs is a perfect answer to this dilemma. It's not a real answer — the pay of those threatened employees is only about 2 percent of the federal budget, so efficiency gains from privatization, even if they happen, will make almost no dent in overall spending. For a few years, however, talk of privatization will give the impression that the administration is doing something about the deficit.

But distracting the public from the reality of deficits is, we can be sure, just an incidental payoff. So, too, is the fact that privatization is a way to break one of the last remaining strongholds of union power. Karl Rove is after much bigger game.

Paul C. Light, an expert on the federal bureaucracy at New York University and the Brookings Institution, the liberal-leaning research group, called the administration's policy "an aggressive and a dramatic extension" of the effort by both parties at all levels of government to save money and improve the quality of public services.

Mr. Light said the Clinton administration had shifted many federal government jobs to private contractors in an effort to show it was reducing the size of government.

Not bothered by these facts, though, Krugman goes on to assert that this is all a plot to get campaign contributions for the Republican Party. (The possibility that the status quo is an attempt to buy votes for the Democratic Party doesn't even enter his one-track Bush-hating mind.)

To paraphrase a famous American, "Paul Krugman, have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"

Joshua Micah Marshall questions some Republican rhetoric:

More on Pelosi. For all the conservative chattering and outrage about alleged Democratic gay-baiting in Montana and South Carolina this Fall, don't we all know the subtext of Republican efforts to tag Pelosi as a "San Francisco Democrat"? Is this something we're not allowed to discuss? And why not?

(And what's with the claim of "alleged" Democratic gay-baiting? It was explicit, at least in the South Carolina situation.)

Still, if that perfectly descriptive phrase has become off-limits thanks to the Sensitivity Police, how about if we just go with "Berkeley Democrat?" It's not quite as geographically precise, but it captures the political image quite nicely.

Isn't there something a little unseemly about the New York Times gloating about media bias? It's one thing to write a story about Roger Ailes, the head of Fox News Channel, providing advice to the president, and pointing out that this creates the appearance of impropriety. (Of course, the Times did that also.) But to add a second piece saying "Gotcha"?

The revelation that Roger Ailes, the chairman of Fox News, the self-proclaimed fair and balanced news channel, secretly gave advice to the White House after the Sept. 11 attacks was less shocking than it was liberating — a little like the moment in 1985 when an ailing Rock Hudson finally explained that he had AIDS.

Ever since Mr. Ailes changed jobs from Republican strategist to news executive, he has demanded to be treated as an unbiased journalist, not a conservative spokesman. But the cable channel he controls has an undisguised ideological agenda, which has made his protestations a bit puzzling.

Case in point:

Even the most doctrinaire Democrats would concede that there is room in the United States news media for a conservative cable news network. What galled even some right wingers was Mr. Ailes's refusal to accept the label.

And, the icing on the ironic cake is that the editorial was (as usual for the new New York Times) stuck into the news section. (This time, with the odd label "An Appraisal," instead of the more typical "News Analysis.") If Howell Raines wants to express an opinion, can't he do it on the Op/Ed page?

Last week, Al Qaeda sent a letter to Al Jazeera making more threats. The news got less attention because it happened at the same time that the alleged Osama Bin Laden tape surfaced. Or, at least, I paid it less attention for that reason. But perhaps it would have been useful to focus on Al Qaeda's specific demands:

[A statement attributed to Al Qaeda threatened more attacks in New York and Washington unless the United States stops supporting Israel and converts to Islam, according to a reporter for Al Jazeera television news who said he received the unsigned letter.

[The reporter, Yosri Fouda, told The Associated Press that he received the six-page letter on Wednesday, a day after Al Jazeera broadcast an audiotape purportedly made by Osama bin Laden. He said the statement called on Americans to stop supporting Israel and other governments that "oppress" Muslims or face more attacks. It also called on all Americans to convert to Islam, he said.

[The statement also demanded that American troops leave the Arabian Peninsula, and justified the killings of American civilians because they pay taxes that finance the military, Mr. Fouda said.]

A bunch of teenagers getting drunk is hardly something to make a federal case out of. But apparently New York Senator Charles Schumer wants to do so -- literally.

Sen. Charles Schumer is asking the Justice Department to look into the underage drinking problem in Westchester County, which has seen several startling episodes of teen drunkenness _ and one death at a party _ in the past year.

At a news conference with County Executive Andrew Spano, Schumer called on the department's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention to study why alcohol is so readily available to minors and why there is excessive drinking among minors in Westchester.

"When teenagers are literally dying for a drink, we need to do everything in our power to fix the situation," Schumer said. "Teenagers have always tried to drink and can access alcohol too easily. This is nothing new and it's certainly not just a local problem. But we still don't know exactly how to deal with it."

The problem has recently won wide attention in Westchester. From the Chappaqua football team's beer-and-a-stripper party to Scarsdale's chaotic homecoming dance, where as many as 200 students arrived drunk, inebriated teens have raised the concerns of parents, teachers and law enforcement.

I know that Democrats don't believe in federalism, but I still can't begin to fathom how Schumer thinks this is a reasonable idea. Oh, I know -- it's For The Children ™. But what really galls me is the ideologues like Paul Krugman who insist that tax cuts are such a dangerous idea. If the federal government has enough resources to look into high school parties, it's too damn big. That would seem obvious and indisputable to me. I don't know why the government at any level is worried about such a trivial matter -- but certainly there's no reason for the federal government to be.

Chuck Schumer wants to know why kids drink? People like drinking. There. I just saved millions of taxpayer dollars. The only remaining question? Oh: why didn't I ever get invited to the beer-and-stripper parties? Maybe we can do a federal study of that.

Remember all that angst on the left over George Bush's arrogant unilateralism pertaining to the International Criminal Court? How come we don't hear similar complaints with regard to obstructionism by a country that actually needs such war crimes trials?

After nine months, the United Nations revived plans yesterday for an international trial for the surviving leaders of the Khmer Rouge. They are charged with genocide and gross human rights violations in the deaths of more than one million Cambodians in the 1970's.

But the resolution that ultimately passed in a key committee had been watered down to meet Cambodia's approval.

[...]

The measure also notes with approval a new Cambodian law that insists that Cambodia's ill-trained and corrupt courts have the final say in the proceedings, rather than the United Nations.

This is why President Bush is right to oppose American participation in the I.C.C. There will always be a double standard, with Americans being expected to go along with whatever international bureaucrats come up with. Meanwhile, countries with no real respect for human rights, the ones actually breaking the rules, will get a free pass, because after all, you can't demand too much of them.