A Revealing Lack Of Consistency

Why is it that the same people who claim to stand for diversity and the dignity of the individual manage to deride their political opponents in the most bigoted and degrading terms?

I understand that many people do not find Michelle Malkin to their taste. Michelle is fearless, passionate, and unrelenting when covering stories or writing columns. She writes in an aggressive and provocative style which attracts certain readers and repels others. I put myself foursquare in the former group, but others can and do fall into the latter, and that's fine. Michelle can take the criticism, just as we all do.

However, what we find is that Michelle's critics continuously reveal themselves as immature, chauvinistic, and sexually frustrated. Like clockwork, when she started v-blogging, a blogger had to make a reference to it as some sort of pornography, only this time the blogger is Alex Pareene, one of the new writers at the professional blog Wonkette. Rather than find something significant to criticize, rather than opposing one of Michelle's pieces with actual argument, Pareene instead decided to post this exchange:

wonkette: OMG I AM WATCHING MICHELLE MALKIN’S INTERNET VIDEOS FOR THE FIRST TIME operative: she has internet videos? operative: does she do the thing with the ping-pong balls?

Yeah, yeah, that's the highly original Wonkette for you. Alex can't even be bothered to come up with a new smear; instead, he just exhumes the tired cliche of referring to Michelle as a whore. The only humor comes by accident as Wonkette's commenters refer to Michelle as a hater.

What people who engage in these kind of tactics -- on either the right or the left, it's all the same -- is that the attacks reveal themselves as haters, not the object of their scorn. If they dislike what Michelle says, then they should counter her arguments with their own, or contradictory facts. Pareene shows what happens when the critics have neither. They engage in ad-hominem attacks designed to humiliate their opponents and to either get them to respond in kind or to withdraw from the debate althogether. It's a cowardly tactic besides being immature and (in this case) misogynistic.

None of this comes as any surprise, of course. The only part of this that amazes is that the pattern keeps repeating itself over and over.

This Bud's For Du

Germans thrilled at the prospect of hosting this year's World Cup have had their enthusiasm dimmed by the business deal made with Budweiser. In the nation that defines beer purity, the sponsorship of the American beer behemoth has set German teeth grinding:

IT IS brown-gold and alcoholic but, then, in the scathing verdict of German beer fans, so is paint thinner.

The Germans are furious that Budweiser will be the official tipple for the World Cup, which starts next month. The American lager has secured a near-monopoly of beer sales inside World Cup stadiums and within a 500m radius of the grounds, supplanting more than 1,270 domestic breweries.

And what most upsets the fans is that Budweiser — advertised as the “King of Beers” in the US — fails to meet the ancient German standards for purity, which stipulate that beer can be brewed only from malt, hops and water. Budweiser uses rice in its production process and therefore does not qualify as a beer in the German sense.

Wait ... it's Budricer?

I find it hard to disagree with the Germans on this score. The problem is that the World Cup sold the sponsorship rights to Buweiser before they decided to have Germany host the tournament. The exclusive contract means that the higher-quality German brews will not be easily found at the events. For that matter, higher-quality American brews won't be found their either. Sam Adams, which I believe is the only American beer that passes the purity tests of Germany, will be locked out.

That means they're stuck with the most corporate and uninteresting brew sold nationally in the US, and it provides an ironic twist on the world's pinnacle of soccer -- a sport that generates limited interest in the US anyway. How strange it will be to have a mediocre American product dominating the advertising for a tournament that will garner only small viewership in its home country. Budweiser should be commended for supporting the World Cup, but if it thinks it will make huge inroads in Germany, they have to be deluding themselves.

UPDATE: Am I a beer elitist? Well, perhaps. I'm no fan of the major breweries and not much inclined to lagers in general. I do like Sam Adams and Henry Weinhard's, the latter of which makes an excellent line of soft drinks as well. However, if I drink beer, I usually go for ales and stouts and tend to take my time with them.

I have a story about Henry Weinhard's lager, which may tend to discourage people from drinking it, but I preface this by saying it's one of my favorite American beers. Twenty years ago or so, my friend North Star Steve and I spent an afternoon changing the brake pads on our Datsun sedans. The work made our hands filthy with grease and grime, and we forgot to get the waterless hand cleaner. I still had most of my second bottle of Henry's, and while Steve went to look for some soap, I poured the beer over my hand -- and the grease flowed right off! I used the bottle to clean both hands and then explained what happened to Steve, who seemed rather less thirsty than he did before that.

And yes, we did work on our brakes while drinking beer, which didn't seem as stupid then as it does now. We never had a problem with our brakes, but we did always have a couple of parts left over when we were finished...

Congress Shocked To Discover Problems With Air Marshals

A report released to the AP last night will inform Congress of what readers of CQ and Michelle Malkin have known for eighteen months -- that the management of the Federal Air Marshal Service has repeatedly undermined the mission through robotic insistence on dress codes and travel policies that do everything except tape a "Kill Me First" sign on the backs of supposedly covert agents. The House Judiciary Committee has finally addressed the complaints of air marshals who have watched in utter frustration while FAMS places every obstacle they can find between the agents and their mission:

A report to be taken up by Congress next week is harshly critical of the Federal Air Marshal Service, concluding that more steps need to be taken to preserve the anonymity of the marshals.

The draft report by the
House Judiciary Committee, a copy of which was provided to The Associated Press on Friday night, identified several policies by the service that the report concluded undercut the goal of preserving the marshals' anonymity.

The report, entitled "Plane Clothes: Lack of Anonymity at the Federal Air Marshal Service Compromises Aviation and National Security," cites the service's dress code, which is supposed to prevent marshals from drawing attention to themselves.

"In practice, however, many federal air marshals indicate that the dress code actually draws more attention to the identity of the federal air marshals because of its rigid requirements that prevent federal air marshals from actually blending in with their surroundings," the report says.

The dress code for the air marshals require them to adhere to Director Thomas Quinn's directive issued over three years ago. The policy forces the agents to wear sport coats, forbids jeans, and requires dress footwear and dress socks. Most hilariously, FAMS denied that this directive constituted a dress code at all!

Next time you find yourself in an airport, take a look around to see how many people are wearing dress shoes, dress socks, and sport coats while traveling by air. The vast majority travel casually, and the size of most major airports -- you know, the ones with the big planes and the big fuel tanks that terrorists might prefer -- almost forces travelers to wear casual footwear. A minority may wear suits, ties, and wingtips, but it makes for a much smaller population for terrorists to single out during an attack.

Even worse, FAMS required its agents to stay in specific hotels while traveling and apparently paid directly for the lodging costs rather than just give its agents American Express cards and orders to travel incognito. This policy required air marhsals to show their credentials at check-in, hardly appropriate given the covert nature of their mission. This led to one hilarious consequence: the Sheraton in Fort Lauderdale, flush with the revenue that FAMS provided, named the air marshal service its Company of the Month. Publicly. Proudly.

Gee, do you think that the terrorists might have a plan to identify these agents now?

It's taken Congress almost two years to follow up on the complaints of the air marshals and the obviously self-defeating rules by which they must abide. Considering that the one successful terrorist attack on the US homeland came from terrorists capturing airplanes mid-flight from undefended flight crews, one might think that Congress would take their defense more seriously. The House has to make this a priority and assure the flying public that they will stop making air marshals the first obvious target for the next set of terrorists.

Iraqis Join The Club

Iraq officially launched its first popularly elected government this morning after its National Assembly swore in the ministers of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's Cabinet. Two key security posts remain unfilled while negotiations continue, but the governance of Iraq has now passed to a permanent set of democratic institutions for the first time:

Iraq's new government of national unity was sworn in before a special session of parliament on Saturday, three years after the fall of Saddam Hussein. The new ministers took the oath of office after parliament approved the Cabinet presented by incoming Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. ...

The session began more than two hours late because of last-minute haggling, finally opening with readings from the Quran.

The 37-member Cabinet is made up of members from all of Iraq's religious, sectarian and ethnic groups. It took months of negotiations to form after the Dec. 15 elections and is Iraq's first constitutional government since the U.S. invasion toppled Saddam.

"This is a historic day for Iraq and all its people," deputy parliament speaker Khalid al-Attiyah said in a nationally televised news conference before the session. "This government represents all Iraqis."

Left unresolved are the ministries of Defense and the Interior, the two groups that are tasked with security and policing in the new Iraq. This has held up the formation of the government for the last couple of weeks, but apparently all sides decided that waiting to take control of the country only made conditions worse and complicated the appointments of those positions even further. The factions may also want a longer time frame to discuss the nature of the positions and the composition of the forces each command. Earlier this month, the New York Times reported that the Iraqis had started a massive centralization for their armed services, putting everyone into one unform under one command to eliminate friction and possible clashes between different groups. That would also complicate the decision on the ministers for those functions.

Besides that and another series of attacks to darken the day -- bombings killed 19 people in the Shi'ite Sadr City section of Baghdad -- the founding of the permanent government demonstrates the commitment that all sides have for a unified Iraq. The Iraqis have received plenty of criticism from their detractors, some of them in our own Congress, for taking so long to pull this together. They don't appear to realize the paradigm shift that Iraqi politics had to make to reach this stage. Arab politics in general focus on strongman rule; these factions have not spent the last years preparing for self-determination but instead on the historical path to power: dictatorship. Only after the US-led coalition liberated them from the worst of that lot did democracy become a viable option.

Considering that and the religious and ethnic tensions that exist in Iraq, along with the bitterness of the past few decades under Saddam Hussein's brutal rule, the marvel is that it only took three years to get to this stage. After Washington beat Cornwallis at Yorktown, it took an ethnically and religiously monolithic populace over seven years to agree on a permanent form of government, during which they got it wrong once. In contrast, the Iraqi people marched to polling stations under dangerous conditions not once but three times within a year in order to create the temporary government that drew up their charter, to approve it, and then to elect representatives to form the permanent government.

From a historical perspective, that is quite impressive.

Now the question is whether they can hold it together. Skeptics will point to the violence as evidence that the Iraqi government will be a short-lived interlude on the path to civil war. That possibility cannot be discounted, but so far what we have seen in Iraq are the acts of provocateurs attempting to set populations against one another and not succeeding. The terrorists have tried this for months now, and the only reaction they provoke comes from militias, and even those have mostly obeyed Ayatollah Sistani's edict to stand down. The formation of the new and permanent government puts tremendous pressure on these terrorist elements. They can no longer pretend that the Iraqis have no desire for self-determination, and they have been exposed as the enemy of that cause.

The terrorists have seen the writing on the wall, even if they still refuse to read it. They lost Iraq, and we won, they know it, and now the world does as well.

Stepping Out With The Colonel (Updated)

Blogging will be light tonight as I will be attending a Veteran Appreciation Dinner sponsored by AM 1280 The Patriot, featuring Col. Oliver North as the guest speaker. Amendment X from The Savage Republican invited me as his guest, for which I'm grateful indeed. I will update you on the dinner when I return.

UPDATE: I just got back from the event, which was entertaining. Unlike some other events by the station, this one was more intimate; the price was higher and they deliberately kept the room small to ensure that everyone had a chance to talk with the guest of honor. I spoke with John Fund and a few of the attendees, and the feedback on the format was so positive that they may continue to use it in future events. I would assume that when they present Salem Radio hosts, they will stick with the bigger venues. (Hey, no one wants to get intimate with us, which is why we do radio and not TV!) Speaking of venues, this was my first visit to The Saint Paul, our local five-star hotel. Very impressive. They had a wedding reception in the main ballroom tonight, and I shudder to think what that cost.

Col. North surprised me with his sense of humor, which he used to great effect during his presentation. He gave his perspective on the media coverage of Iraq and noted that few journalists actually get outside of the Green Zone to cover it. He also talked about why that is; 64 Western journalists have died while reporting in Iraq. North said he doesn't mind, as he's getting paid a lot more to get shot at then when he performed that function for Uncle Sam, which drew a big laugh.

He will go back to Iraq in July for another series of reports for Fox. In the meantime, he's focusing on his Sunday night show on the network, "War Stories", which is also the name of his new book. It comes with a DVD, which I have not yet seen, but will watch shortly.

One other note: Amendment X brought Herb Suerth to the dinner along with me. Herb, as I wrote earlier this year, is the president of the E Company Association, the famed unit of paratroopers featured in the Stephen Ambrose book Band of Brothers. Herb got a wonderful introduction before Colonel North spoke and received a standing ovation from the crowd. I had a chance to sit and chat with Herb more than I did the first time we met, when we focused on the specifics of Major Dick Winters and the effort to get him the Medal of Honor he deserves. While I found Col. North entertaining and impressive, I think the best part of the evening was spent with this humble representative of the Greatest Generation.

Teheran To Reimpose The Nuremberg Laws? (Update: Unlikely)

Conflicting reports have clouded the story, but Canada's National Post reported in two different articles that Iran has passed legislation requiring non-Muslims to wear colored ribbons in order to identify infidels in their midst. The law, reminiscent of the notorious Nuremberg laws that forced Jews to wear a yellow Star of David (among other oppressive regulations), will allow Muslims to keep themselves pure by avoiding the touch of an infidel:

The law mandates the government to make sure that all Iranians wear "standard Islamic garments" designed to remove ethnic and class distinctions reflected in clothing, and to eliminate "the influence of the infidel" on the way Iranians, especially, the young dress. It also envisages separate dress codes for religious minorities, Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians, who will have to adopt distinct colour schemes to make them identifiable in public. The new codes would enable Muslims to easily recognize non-Muslims so that they can avoid shaking hands with them by mistake, and thus becoming najis (unclean).

The new law, drafted during the presidency of Muhammad Khatami in 2004, had been blocked within the Majlis. That blockage, however, has been removed under pressure from Khatami's successor, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

In an interesting twist, Canada.com has pulled the original story, although Amir Taheri's article is stil available. If true, this will send shock waves around the world -- and if not, Canada's National Post may never live down the damage.

Assuming this is true -- and given Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's volatile nature and his lunatic public statements on Israel, it certainly sounds plausible -- it should push the Iranian nuclear crisis into overdrive. Forcing religious minorities to wear public markers transforms them into targets for every zealot within eyesight of them. The Nazis knew what they were doing when they pioneered this particular form of brutality. They made it almost a requirement for Germans to shun the Jews, and the dehumanizing nature of this public branding made it much easier to accept the Nazi plan to ship them off to camps -- and much, much worse.

Earlier comparisons to Adolf Hitler seem almost presciently apt at the moment. Ahmadinejad has very cleverly copied Hitler's diplomatic style in dealing with the West, and unfortunately the West has mostly copied the feckless strategy of the 1930s. Ahmadinejad has continued to escalate his demands and the West has attempted to appease him in order to buy some peace. We have not yet experienced the Munich moment, but we can be sure it's coming, and it will likely focus on the existence of Israel. Ehud Olmert would do well to recall the history of Czechoslovakia, another democracy that the West gladly sacrificed to calm Hitler and avoid confrontation while it was still possible to make it brief.

Perhaps this will serve as a wake-up call, a reminder that history repeats itself and that lunacy runs in patterns. If Iran decides to impose these conditions on its religious minorities despite their long integration into Iranian society --Zoroastrianism precedes Islam in Persia, after all -- then we will have arrived at the same position as Europe in 1935. It took only three years for the Nazis to stage Krystallnacht as a ruse to excuse the roundup of Jews, the tactical tipping point for the industrialized atrocities that would follow. Ahmadinejad will not likely wait that long. For those who claim that the cosmopolitan nature and rich cultural history of the Iranians will never allow such actions to occur in the Islamic Republic, they should recall that the Germans were among the most cosmopolitan of Europeans -- until the Nazis took control.

Hopefully this turns out to be a false report. If not, history has warned us of the consequences. We will have no excuse if the Iranians attempt purification under more extreme procedures after this.

UPDATE: The National Post appears to be backtracking more intently, if not furiously, this evening:

Several experts are casting doubt on reports that Iran had passed a law requiring the country’s Jews and other religious minorities to wear coloured badges identifying them as non-Muslims.

The Iranian embassy in Otttawa also denied the Iranian government had passed such a law. ...

The Simon Wiesenthal Centre and Iranian expatriates living in Canada had confirmed that the order had been passed, although it still had to be approved by Iran’s “Supreme Guide” Ali Khamenehi before being put into effect.

Hormoz Ghahremani, a spokesman for the Iranian Embassy in Ottawa, said in an e-mail to the Post yesterday that, “We wish to categorically reject the news item.

“These kinds of slanderous accusations are part of a smear campaign against Iran by vested interests, which needs to be denounced at every step.”

Sam Kermanian, of the U.S.-based Iranian-American Jewish Federation, said in an interview from Los Angeles that he had contacted members of the Jewish community in Iran — including the lone Jewish member of the Iranian parliament — and they denied any such measure was in place.

It's not the National Post's finest moment, it seems ...

The Hammer Drops On Big Legal

A federal grand jury returned an indictment alleging fraud, corruption, and kickbacks at one of the most prominent legal firms in the class-action lawsuit industry. Milberg Weiss also has two of its partners under personal indictment for a criminal racketeering conspiracy, and the feds want over $200 million in restitution:

The future of one of the country's leading class-action law firms, Milberg Weiss, is in grave doubt after a federal grand jury returned a criminal indictment yesterday accusing the firm of engaging in a secret, 25-year-long conspiracy to kick back attorneys fees to investors who served as named plaintiffs in more than 150 lawsuits brought against publicly-traded American companies.

Two top Milberg Weiss Bershad & Schlman LLP partners, David Bershad and Steven Schulman, were charged personally with criminal racketeering conspiracy. In addition, prosecutors are demanding that the firm forfeit $216.1 million, the sum Milberg Weiss earned in cases allegedly tainted by illegal kickbacks. ...

Ms. Yang said the secret payments to plaintiffs in Milberg Weiss securities cases totaled at least $11.3 million. "Because of the secret kickback arrangement, Milberg Weiss had a stable of individuals ready and willing to serve as paid plaintiffs," she said. The prosecutor said the scheme gave the firm an unfair advantage over its competitors, at least until 1995, when a change in the law reduced the importance of being among the first to file a specific case.

CQ first posted about this case eleven months ago, when word first started to appear that Milberg Weiss had attracted the attention of federal prosecutors. At the time, I noted that the murkiness of the charges but also that the big money found in the abuse of the class-action process invites corruption and scandal. The emergence of trial attorneys as a political force equal to that of labor underscores the fortunes that these legal mechanisms have created for the lawyers, fortunes transferred from capital enterprises in enormous chunks of cash.

And it does have its benefits. I also noted two months later that Barbara Boxer received some of the profits from Milberg Weiss' activities, something first noted by the Independent Sources law blog. Boxer took over $74,000 in her two campaigns for the US Senate from the same firm now under RICO indictments. In the last three election cycles (including 2006), Milberg Weiss and its associates have donated $728,000 in 562 installments, almost all going to Democrats or Democratic PACs. Topping the list of the most generous donors at Milberg Weiss are its three top partners -- the two currently under indictment and Melvyn Weiss himself. Before that, as the Sun notes, it gave over a million dollars to the Democrats until they could no longer do so under the BCRA.

The explosion of Milberg Weiss may portend darker days for the ambulance chasers. Milberg Weiss conducted its lawsuits by knowingly filing fraudulent claims using plaintiffs that they kept on retainer in order to get suits filed quickly enough to occupy the primary position in the case. It's unlikely that other firms kept their hands entirely clean when they had to compete with Milberg Weiss for the big-money business of class-action suits. When prosecutors find the first and most egregious violators, the others usually follow as defendants attempt to trade information for leniency.

Perhaps this might convince people that we need to consider tort reform in order to take the lure of the monster paydays out of the legal process. The tort system exists to ensure that the wronged are made whole to the best extent possible, not to make attorneys richer than rock stars. Too often we see plaintiffs in these suits wind up with next to nothing even when the verdict goes their way, their reimbursement spread out over many people, while the attorneys take home millions of dollars paid by defendants with deep pockets. It's time to return our system of justice to the pursuit of justice, and not a slot machine exploited by shady lawyers.

Hamas Under Fire And Losing Money

Hamas took two hits today in its bid to spread its terrorism throughout the Middle East. The combined effects of losing almost a million dollars in cash and the provoked hostility of the Jordanian government threaten to put the terrorist group into a political death spiral. First, the Fatah police have relieved a Hamas envoy of his cash as he attempted to enter Gaza:

Palestinian border police have confiscated more than $800,000 (£427,000) from a Hamas official trying to enter the Gaza Strip from Egypt. The Hamas-led government says it is hard to transfer cash to Palestinian territory as banks fear US sanctions for dealing with the militant group. ...

A European Union observer at the crossing identified the Hamas official as spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri, a well known figure in the Arabic media.

"Sami Abu Zuhri did not declare the money. The Palestinian security and customs officials found it and confiscated it," the observer, Julio de la Guardia, said.

Travellers crossing through Rafah must declare all sums over $2,000 and explain the origin of the cash, Mr de la Guardia told reporters. The money was stashed inside Mr Abu Zuhri's belt and he has been detained for questioning, a Palestinian official was quoted saying by AFP news agency.

This sent Hamas terrorists hotfoot down to the Rafah terminal in an apparent attempt to salvage the cash, but it appears that the Fatah-dominated security apparatus has the money secured. After the clashes of the past twenty-four hours, one might guess that Hamas will attempt to retrieve it by force. After all, under the sanctions that Hamas' election and disavowal of previous agreements caused, they will not easily replace this much-needed resource. Now that Fatah knows how Hamas intends to fund their operations, they will find their interest in border security increased accordingly.

Nor did much good news come to Hamas from across the river in the Hashemite Kingdom. Jordan accused Hamas of participation in a conspiracy between Syria, Iran, and Lebanon to create an Islamist "crescent" designed to overthrow moderate Muslim states with friendly relations to the US. King Abdullah has unleashed its security forces against Hamas within its borders after the discovery of a significant arms cache last month:

Jordan said it arrested more than 20 Hamas members since the cache was uncovered April 18 and accused them of being in the "final phase" of plotting armed attacks on Jordanian institutions and officials. Hamas has denied the allegations.

Although Syria and Iran were not directly implicated in the Hamas plot, their names kept surfacing as the investigation unfolded.

Three Hamas activists said in televised confessions last week that they acted upon orders from exiled Hamas leaders in Syria, where they said the weapons had come from.

Government spokesman Nasser Judeh also accused Hamas of recruiting members in Jordan and the Palestinian territories and seeking to send them for training on militant tactics in Syria and Iran.

The situation has deteriorated so much that Teheran had to send a special envoy to smooth over the disruption in relations, a visit that Jordan claimed resulted in a "clear appreciation" for Jordanian security from Iran. Nevertheless, it underscores the divisive nature of Hamas even in the Arabic nations themselves. With Hamas covertly caching arms in neighboring countries, these nations have little reason to support the terrorist group and increasingly urgent reasons to join a Western freeze-out of the Palestinians as long as Hamas continues to govern them.

So now Hamas is not only broke, not only determined to provoke a civil war to grab all of the power within the proto-state, but also plotting to expand that war outside of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Even if they suddenly recognized Israel's right to exist, it would be hard to make any kind of deal with such a government. The Palestinians who voted them into office may have made an even worse choice than first thought.

Westphalia vs Utopia

Charles Krauthammer wonders why border security has been dismissed as a concern only to conservatives in the current debate over immigration reform. It's a question that organized labor might want answered as well:

Bush's enforcement provisions were advertised as an attempt to appease conservatives. This is odd. Are conservatives the only ones who think that unlimited, unregulated immigration is a detriment to the republic? Do liberals really believe in a de facto policy that depresses the wages of the poorest and most desperate Americans, African Americans most prominently among them? Do liberals believe that the number, social class, education level, background and country of origin of immigrants -- the kinds of decisions every democratic country makes for itself -- should be taken out of the hands of the American citizenry and left to the immigrants themselves and, in particular, to those most willing to break the very immigration regulations the American people have decided upon democratically?

And is it just conservatives who think the United States ought not be gratuitously squandering one of its greatest assets -- its magnetic attraction to would-be immigrants around the world? There are tens of millions of people who want to leave their homes and come to America. We essentially have an NFL draft in which the United States has the first, oh, million or so draft picks. Rather than exercising those picks, i.e., choosing by whatever criteria we want -- such as education, enterprise, technical skills and creativity -- we admit the tiniest fraction of the best and brightest and permit millions of the unskilled to pour in instead.

The immigration debate comprises many curious contradictions, and Krauthammer identifies the most curious of all. The business class wants unfettered immigration in order to access a large pool of low-cost labor, one of the most exploitive workplace relationships since sharecropping. The labor pool involved has no leverage to demand better working conditions, and their presence allows employers to shut out workers who do not have to fear ICE if they organize. Wages and working conditions do not suffer as a side effect of this relationship, but forms the entire purpose of it.

Unions understand this and have demanded some sort of action to reduce the competition for unskilled workers. However, their allied politicians do not grasp this and continue to press for open borders. For that matter, the business community loses its natural political allies on this issue, with normally pro-business politicians demanding an end to their low-cost talent pool. Obviously something more than economic concerns drive this argument with the philosophical leadership of both sides.

I would argue that the liberal and conservative positions on immigration differ on one concept, and understanding that makes all positions consistent. The immigration debate has come down to a referendum on national sovereignty, and whether people feel that the concept is worth defending.

Conservatives see illegal immigration as an affront to American sovereignty. Even Krauthammer uses the language of offense in this regard. He points out that illegal immigrants have taken it upon themselves to make decisions about our immigration policy and that the lack of response from the government unfairly negates the will of the American people. Not only do the illegals flagrantly and arrogantly disregard our borders, but then they march to openly demand that their choices supercede ours.

Liberals, on the other hand, do not worry about the concept of national sovereignty as much as they care about the plight of the immigrants themselves. They see the immigrants not as arrogant intruders but noble workers. It fits within their utopian vision of a world without borders at all. Many modern liberals base their political philosophy on the tenets of socialism, which teaches a Karl Marx-lite version of class warfare between labor and capital. It also plays on the guilt that some feel over the Mexican-American War; having grown up in the Southwest, I can tell you that the notion that we "stole" the region from Mexico has plenty of traction, and those inclined to worry about that a century and a half later will not be sympathetic to robust American claims to sovereignty and control over the territory.

We saw these dynamics played out in the recent immigration demonstrations, and they produced predictable reactions. For liberals, they saw an oppressed and robbed people finally rising to their feet to demand a sort of reparations. They agreed with those who claimed that they didn't cross the border, but that the border crossed them, and now support the notion that they deserve unfettered immigration and unquestioned amnesty. Conservatives saw this as an escalation in the arrogance they already perceive in the illegal immigrants who flood the border and use American resources in health care and education. They saw the demonstrations as diktats and a repudiation of American sovereignty over our own nation, and they grew much more hard line in their opposition to any kind of middle-ground reform.

The problem isn't really economics, at least not primarily. The problem has become the different world view that has Americans questioning just what it means to be American, and whether the nation deserves to control its borders. That basic dispute over national sovereignty as it applies specifically to America and more broadly to the post-Westphalia world in which we have lived for 360 years. Does the nation-state have the highest authority, and should it? We seem to have very divergent views, and until we agree that the nation-state should continue to exercise the highest authority, we will have this split between Westphalians and Utopians.

The Pattern On The Kyl Amendment

One of the interesting aspects of the immigration debate is how much of it gets influenced by electoral politics, even in subtle ways. Take, for instance, the defeat of the Kyl amendment that would have ensured that the temporary guest workers that came to the US remained ... temporary. The Senate tabled the amendment (in the US, this means defeating it) by a vote of 58-35.

A number of Republicans voted to kill the Kyl amendment, including Minnesota's Norm Coleman, a disappointing performance. Other notables are Chuck Hagel, Richard Lugar, Sam Brownback, and Ted Stevens. Practically the entire contingent of the GOP faction in the Gang of 14 voted to kill the amendment except for Lindsay Graham, who managed to miss this vote.

More interesting, however, are the Democrats who voted to support Kyl's amendment. They were Robert Byrd of West Virginia, Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, and Ben Nelson of Nebraska. All three hail from red states, and two of the three face re-election in states that went for George Bush in 2004. The only Senator of these three not facing elections in November is Byron Dorgan, whose partner voted against the measure. The other red-state seats at risk are Bill Nelson in Florida, where the Democrats want to court the Hispanic vote, and Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico, which has the same dynamic and where Bush only won by a single point.

If the Democrats in these states fear a conservative backlash, shouldn't the GOP start paying some attention to the same problem?

John Howard, America's Friend

Our friends in Canada the pleasure of hosting Australian PM John Howard, who spoke to a joint session of the Canadian Parliament and gave high praise to America and its role in world affairs. Parliamentarians gave Howard a rousing reception as he reminded his audience of the importance of an engaged US:

“Australia, as you know, is an unapologetic friend and ally of the United States,” Mr. Howard told a Commons chamber that's heard all-too-frequent criticism of Washington in recent years.

Fresh from a visit to the White House, Mr. Howard told a chamber packed with Tory MPs, staffers, lobbyists and party functionaries — but noticeably light on Liberal Opposition MPs — that the U.S. “has been a remarkable power for good in the world.

“And the decency and hope that the power and purpose that the United States represent in the world is something we should deeply appreciate,” Mr. Howard said to sustained applause. ...

Mr. Howard, picking up on the theme, told the Commons that “terrorism will not be defeated by nuancing our foreign policy. Terrorism will not be defeated by rolling ourselves into a small ball and going into a corner and imagining that somehow or other we will escape notice.”

He also cautioned U.S.-bashers. “For those around the world who would want to see a reduced American role in the affairs of our globe, I have some quiet advice. That is, be careful of what you wish for. Because a retreating America will leave a more vulnerable world.”

So much for that George Bush unilateralism! John Howard has remained a stalwart ally despite the difficulties of the war on terrorism, or perhaps because of it. After all, Australians have been the primary targets of two Islamist terror attacks, both in the popular vacation destination of Bali. If any other Western nation understands the stakes involved in the fight against the terrorists, it's the Land Down Under.

That didn't stop the usual suspects from protesting a visit from a head of state from a longtime ally and former dominion partner. Greenpeace, for instance, denounced both Howard and new Canadian PM Stephen Harper for their support of the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate, the American effort to address hydrocarbon emissions in a manner that will both engage China and India (which Kyoto exempts) and work towards economic expansion as well as reduced pollution. Dafydd ab Hugh wrote a guest post about this pact last year here at CQ. Why does Greenpeace object? Besides its bypass of Kyoto, it encourages non-hydrocarbon energy like nuclear power.

Unions also objected to the Howard visit. Organizers claim that the Australian PM dismantled the public-service unions, a claim that his supporters might find satisfactory. One presumes that the protestors found little to their taste in Howard's speech.

Americans, however, found plenty of reason for gratitude. The efforts of Howard to make his American alliance a point of pride help bolster our interests and provide us with much-appreciated public support.

Hamas Defies Abbas, Deploys Terrorist Army

Hamas made good on its threat to field its own armed force in Gaza, defying Mahmoud Abbas and his presidential veto of their militia. Abbas responded by sending his own Fatah forces into the streets, setting the stage for a gang war:

The Hamas-led Palestinian government on Wednesday deployed a new security force in the Gaza Strip, a direct challenge to the authority of President Mahmoud Abbas, who last month vetoed the creation of the force.

Mr. Abbas, who has been traveling in Europe this week, responded Wednesday night by ordering a large number of members of the security forces under his command to be placed on the streets in Gaza, Reuters reported.

In another sign of Palestinian infighting, a Hamas militant was killed in a drive-by shooting near Gaza City, the second such killing of a Hamas member in two days. No one claimed responsibility, though Hamas and Mr. Abbas's Fatah movement are waging an increasingly open power struggle.

With Mr. Abbas and the Hamas-led government jockeying for power, control over the security forces is a potentially explosive issue. In theory, the Palestinian president is to share responsibility for the security forces with the prime minister and his cabinet. But Mr. Abbas and Hamas have not been able to agree on their roles, and the developments on Wednesday reflected the mounting tensions.

Last week, Hamas and Fatah supposedly reached an agreement to cease armed hostilities in the Palestinian territories. Their word to each other apparently carries the same weight as their word to outsiders. The appearance of these armed gangs promises to unleash violence on the Palestinian people that may ironically surpass the violence they inflicted on Israelis during two intifadas.

This may wind up teaching the Palestinians the lesson that they have refused to acknowledge from their diplomatic isolation. Electing terrorists to govern only amplifies the violence, first externally and then eventually internally. Terrorists are not known for their democratic impulses, and they don't cotton to hearing "no". They tend to start shooting and bombing people until they hear "yes" or until someone else kills them. The Palestinians chose this as their government, and they will soon get exactly what they intended for others.

UPDATE: And it's already begun. Hamas gunmen have started battling Fatah-dominated Palestinian police forces today:

Palestinian police fought gunbattles in Gaza City on Friday with a new Hamas-led security force set up by the Islamist government in defiance of President Mahmoud Abbas.

At least four people were wounded in the first fighting since Hamas deployed the force on Wednesday. Two police, one Hamas member and a gunman from Abbas's Fatah movement were hurt.

Clashes sent terrified residents fleeing from the night-time streets of Gaza City, where tension has soared amid fears of civil war. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called the emergence of rival security forces a "dangerous situation."

Members of the Hamas force, mostly bearded young militants who fought Israel in an uprising for years, surrounded the main police station in Gaza City and traded fire with security men taking cover inside.

Hamas isn't looking to supplant the security forces of the Palestinian Authority; they're looking for war.

The Six Percent Non-Solution (Updates)

We conservatives have spent a lot of time talking about the disillusionment that we have experienced with the current Republican leadership, especially in Congress, but also with the administration on several issues including immigration. However, according to the NBC affiliate in San Diego, Border Patrol agents have experienced much more disillusionment than we can claim as the failure to prosecute illegal aliens has demoralized the force:

An internal document obtained by The Associated Press shows the vast majority of people caught smuggling immigrants across the border near San Diego are never prosecuted for the offense, demoralizing the Border Patrol agents making the arrests.

The report says, "It is very difficult to keep agents' morale up when the laws they were told to uphold are being watered-down or not prosecuted."

The report offers a stark assessment of the situation at a Border Patrol station responsible for guarding 13 miles of mountainous border east of the city. Federal officials said it reflects a reality along the entire 2,000 -mile border: Judges and federal attorneys are so swamped that only the most egregious smuggling cases are prosecuted.

The report said that only 6 percent of 289 suspected immigrant smugglers were prosecuted by the federal government for that offense in the year ending in September 2004. Some were instead prosecuted for another crime. Other cases were declined by federal prosecutors, or the suspect was released by the Border Patrol.

Rep. Darrell Issa's office released the internal report, which they indicate was written last summer. This shows the overwhelming pressure that illegal immigration causes and the futility of working within the current system. The federal government only prosecuted 6% of the 289 smugglers snagged by the BP in the 2003-4 fiscal year. That represents just 17 cases, and that is for the smugglers, not the illegals themselves. No wonder the agents are demoralized.

Obviously, the feds have not given the fight against illegal entry a very high priority up to now. They may have decided to prioritize for other security needs after 9/11, but anyone who thinks that a prosecution rate of 6% represents any kind of deterrent has to have a head examination. The message sent to the smugglers and the aliens they often exploited in deadly conditions by the US government was one of resigned apathy, and no one knows that more than the agents we left hanging out to dry.

This underscores the need for serious border control as the primary component of any "reform" effort. What obviously needs reform more than anything else is the ICE and the government's management of the southern border. We need to ensure that Congress allocates and the administration applies the proper level of funding for all aspects of enforcement, including prosecution and significant prison time before deportation. When we do that, we will present not only a reinforced border but also a reinforced will.

UPDATE: The Senate spent more time on amendments to its immigration bill, but none so ironically hilarious as the debate over a national language. Faced with two different proposals on how to promote the use of English, the Senate adopted both:

The Senate voted Thursday to make English the national language of the United States. Sort of.

Moments after the 63-34 vote, it decided to call the mother tongue a "common and unifying language."

"You can't have it both ways," warned Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., a fan of "national" but not "common and unifying." Two dozen senators disagreed and voted for both as the Senate lumbered toward an expected vote next week on a controversial immigration bill.

Does anyone else see the humor in the inability of the World's Greatest Deliberative Body^TM to agree on which phrase in English best suuports its desirability? In fact, the two phrases don't even contradict each other, so the dissonance between the two amendments is non-existent. The national language can also be considered common and unifying; the two are hardly mutually exclusive but rather almost axiomatically linked.

That didn't keep Harry Reid from declaring the amendments "racist". Apparently the Senator from Nevada has some information that proves an inability of certain ethnicities to learn English, a shortcoming that has never before occurred in anyone's experience. This proves that the Senate may want to brush up on its own English, since the Minority Leader (heh) has no clue as to the epithet he tossed out so casually -- and a sentiment with which a significant number of his own caucus obviously disagreed. Eleven Democrats supported the effort to make English the official national language.

More significantly, the Senate also voted to reverse a decision reached just yesterday that barred guest workers from seeking citizenship rather than returning to their home countries. Instead of leaving after four years, the temps will have the ability to seek citizenship if the government determines that no Americans or legal residents can be found to fill their positions. The reversal renders the entire notion of a guest-worker program moot, of course. As I noted yesterday, the cost to enforce the expiration of the visas would have been tremendous; now we don't have to worry about it at all. Why not just quit pretending to extend a temporary status to a subset of immigrants and treat them all equally from the beginning?

That would seem to be simple, straightforward, and much easier to comprehend. However, like its grasp on English, the Senate does not seem to understand the inherent contradiction that exists in this amendment.

UPDATE II: Six percent, not six cases; I misread it. Thanks to Burt in the comments.

UPDATE III: Oh, heck, let's just link a whole lot of stuff on this one post.

Newsbeat1 links to a report that first appeared in the Federal Times last March that discusses the demoralization of the Border Patrol. The article is an interview with T. J. Bonner, the president of the BP agent union, and it mentions a lot more reasons for their demoralization than just a lack of prosecutorial zeal:

Being a Border Patrol agent today is different in many ways from 1978, when T.J. Bonner was still learning the ropes in Campo, Calif., in San Diego County near the Mexican border. The job was exciting and challenging then, said Bonner, president of the National Border Patrol Council, a union that is part of the American Federation of Government Employees and represents about 12,000 agents. Border Patrol agents had a lot more freedom back then to track illegal immigrants — sometimes for days at a time.

Now, agents are ordered to stay put in one spot on the border to scare aliens away — a failed policy, Bonner said, because it doesn’t solve the illegal immigration problem and has essentially made agents targets of shootings and other violence.

Yikes! They tell these men and woment to stand in one spot -- and that's supposed to frighten illegal aliens? Who came up with that brilliant idea? It sounds like the same bureaucratic idiot that forced air marshals to dress business casual in order to present a professional image to the public ... in a job where they were supposed to be covert. Most definitely, read the entire article.

Jon Henke lends his libertarian voice to the immigration debate at QandO. He wonders why limited-government conservatives see an expansion of government as the proper solution for what may not really be that much of a problem. That is an interesting take on the issue; I disagree, however, because one of the true functions of federal government in our Constitutional system is to secure and enforce the national borders. Jon then does his best impersonation of the official Border Patrol policy by standing still while his co-bloggers toss rocks at him (but in a respectful manner).

Note to the adminstrators of group blogs: QandO shows how to conduct an internecine debate and remain coherent.

Meanwhile, in the barely-related topic of Republican disillusionment, Rick Moran tells us why he will drag his sorry behind to the polls on November 6th. Great to have you on board, Rick, but we'll have to work on the enthusiasm ....

The Night Of The Living Trackbacks!

For those of you who have shared my frustration on trackbacks at CQ for the past several months, I have some excellent news. Thanks to two volunteers, we have resolved the issues that have strangled trackback pings, at least for the time being.

Richard and Tim from Hyscience and FreedomsZone got as frustrated as the rest of us earlier this week and asked me if they could help me solve the problem. I gratefully accepted their assistance, and between the three of us and Hosting Matters, we found out that the problem was a sustained and pernicious series of spambots that had throttled the background process. Tim made some internal adjustments to shield the process from the spammers, and we saw the trackbacks start working almost immediately.

You should start seeing your trackbacks on my posts from now on, and if you do, be sure to thank Richard and Tim.

Murtha Leaping To Conclusions

Rep. John Murtha has decided to skip the investigation and leapt directly to conclusions regarding allegations that US Marines shot and tossed grenades at Iraqi civilians in revenge for an ambush suffered by their unit in Haditha:

Rep. John Murtha, an influential Pennsylvania lawmaker and outspoken critic of the war in Iraq, said today Marines had “killed innocent civilians in cold blood” after allegedly responding to a roadside bomb ambush that killed a Marine during a patrol in Haditha, Iraq, Nov. 19.

The incident is still under investigation by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service and Multi-National Forces Iraq.

The Marine Corps originally claimed that a convoy from the Camp Pendleton, Calif.-based Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines, hit a roadside bomb that killed Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas, 20, of El Paso, Texas, and the ensuing firefight killed 15 Iraqi civilians — casualties the Corps at first claimed were killed in the bomb blast — including seven women and three children.

A March 27 Time magazine report published claims by an Iraqi civil rights group that the Marines barged into houses near the bomb strike, throwing grenades and shooting civilians as they cowered in fear. The report prompted calls for a Pentagon probe.

“It’s much worse than was reported in Time magazine,” Murtha, a Democrat, former Marine colonel and Vietnam war veteran, told reporters on Capitol Hill.

“There was no firefight. There was no [bomb] that killed those innocent people,” Murtha explained, adding there were “about twice as many” Iraqis killed than Time had reported.

Murtha gained notoriety last year when he demanded an immediate and precipitate withdrawal of all troops from Iraq. He claimed that victory was impossible and that the US forces were sitting ducks for terrorists. Since them, with the exception of one month, US casualties have declined rapidly and the Iraqi forces have demonstrated increasing ability to operate independently.

Now it looks like Murtha once again has jumped the gun, seemingly anxious to paint US forces as murderous now that his earlier assertion of helplessness has been shown false. He has made this leap despite the investigation continuing into the incident, and in advance of any determination by the military. Not only has he convicted the Marines without benefit of a complete investigation, let alone a court-martial, he has also found them non compus mentis by reason of "combat stress". In other words, Murtha says they're war criminals, but it's the fault of the Bush administration.

Does this sound familiar?

Of course, the investigation might support Murtha's conclusions; just because he has tried to smear the Marines with this conclusion doesn't mean it may not later be proven correct. However, his knee-jerk reaction to assume their guilt and then to exploit it for his own political ends is shameful and egregious. Murtha might recall that these Marines also get the benefit of the doubt while the investigation continues, a concept that apparently he finds inconvenient for the troops in Iraq as long as he opposes their presence there.

Engaging The Private Sector In Border Security

After decades of incompetence on the Rio Grande, the Bush administration aims to expand the effort to secure the southern border by engaging the private sector for real solutions. The New York Times reports that the Department of Homeland Security has sent out RFPs to the three main defese prime contractors for the building of physical and "virtual" barriers to deploy on the Mexican border:

The quick fix may involve sending in the National Guard. But to really patch up the broken border, President Bush is preparing to turn to a familiar administration partner: the nation's giant military contractors.

Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman, three of the largest, are among the companies that said they would submit bids within two weeks for a multibillion-dollar federal contract to build what the administration calls a "virtual fence" along the nation's land borders.

Using some of the same high-priced, high-tech tools these companies have already put to work in Iraq and Afghanistan — like unmanned aerial vehicles, ground surveillance satellites and motion-detection video equipment — the military contractors are zeroing in on the rivers, deserts, mountains and settled areas that separate Mexico and Canada from the United States.

It is a humbling acknowledgment that despite more than a decade of initiatives with macho-sounding names, like Operation Hold the Line in El Paso or Operation Gate Keeper in San Diego, the federal government has repeatedly failed on its own to gain control of the land borders.

Not all of the reasons for failure have been execution; a lot of the failure stems from a lack of political will for success in closing off the influx of cheap labor. After 9/11, that much has changed, and the demand for a permanent solution to the lack of credible security has now made innovation much more politically palatable.

As Eric Lipton explains, the new Secure Borders initiative does not seek to simply buy technology from defense firms, but to create a brand-new philosophy of border security. The contract will ask the eventually winner to determine how best to integrate personnel, technology, and at least some significant amount of actual fencing to produce an efficient and effective barrier to illegal entry. This represents a long-overdue paradigm shift by the government. People have complained about how we sent a man to the moon but still cannot stop illegal immigration. The difference is that we allowed private innovation and for-profit efforts to fuel that seemingly impossible task, and now the Bush administration wants to harness that same proven energy for this daunting goal.

Will this please everyone? I highly doubt it. We shall hear an outcry over $600 toilet seats and $800 hammers all over again, and people will rightly be skeptical of any program that adopts the defense procurement regime. However, we have seen what happens when we shut out the private sector from large projects and allow the government to handle it as a monopoly. We spend decades and trillions of dollars, and we don't even wind up with a toilet seat and a hammer to show for it.

The border has had every other effort thrown at it in order to secure the US against illegal entry, and so far none of the expensive government programs have worked. It's long past time to use the leverage of the contract and profit motive to get the best minds involved in a complete rethinking of the approach to security.

Even The Gray Lady Gets The Message In PA

The New York Times recognized the Pennsylvania Earthquake which removed at least thirteen Republican incumbents in Tuesday's primaries from a state legislature that rejected conservative values. Jason DeParle reports that conservatives nationwide have taken heart from this victory, and even includes a mention of CQ:

A revolt among Pennsylvania conservatives gained national attention on Wednesday after challengers toppled at least 12 state lawmakers they deemed insufficiently committed to small government and fiscal restraint.

Among those losing their positions in a Republican primary on Tuesday were the two State Senate leaders, Robert C. Jubelirer and David J. Brightbill, who had 56 years of incumbency between them and vastly outspent their upstart rivals.

Facing a tire salesman with little political experience, Mr. Brightbill, the majority leader, outspent his opponent nearly 20 to 1 and still captured just 37 percent of the vote. ...

The results drew cheers from conservatives nationally, many of whom voice similar criticisms of Republican incumbents in Washington and have threatened their own revolts. The Fiscal Restraint Coalition, a network of organizations calling for smaller government, sent out an e-mail message saying the election showed "that the fiscal restraint message is a winner."

Captain's Quarters, a conservative blog, said the election would "serve notice on the G.O.P. that it cannot take conservative votes for granted."

This reminds me of the first shot in the conservative re-emergence: Proposition 13 in California. My home state had an out-of-control property tax regime that would simply re-appraise property whenever it needed to boost revenues. The instability in the tax rate made home ownership more risky, and it affected rents as well. When Howard Jarvis and Paul Gann put Proposition 13 on the ballot, the state's political intelligentsia fought it bitterly, spending millions of dollars to convince Californians that the state's problems involved a lack of revenue and not out-of-control spending. No one thought that California voters would pass the referendum -- but it turned out to be highly popular indeed, winning by a large margin and shocking the political establishment. That victory started a nationwide demand for tax reform that continues to this day, forcing Rockefeller Republicans out of the GOP leadership and paving the way for Ronald Reagan in 1980.

In Pennsylvania, we may have seen thirteen Proposition 13s. Keystone State conservatives would have sent a powerful message if they had only defeated Jubelirer, the Senate president pro tem. The demonstration of cohesion and focus that allowed them to defeat at least a dozen other incumbents in the primaries not only shows that Pennsylvania conservatism has more fire than previously thought, but that conservatives hold the key to GOP momentum nationwide. Conservatives across the nation will see this and fight with renewed vigor for limited governance and fiscal restraint.

Will current national GOP leadership see this and get the message? We shall soon find out, as various spending bills make their way through Congress. The conference committee reviewing the emergency spending bill may reconsider the pork that the Senate piled onto the appropriation, and hopefully Karl Rove will convince the President that a veto might be the appropriate answer to continued abuses of spending power in the upper chamber. After all, if the New York Times understands the message of the Pennsylvania Earthquake, then we can certainly expect the Republican leadership to comprehend it as well.

UPDATE: Mark Tapscott notes this story as well as its unsung hero -- Brad Bumsted, the Tribune-Review's reporter that helped break the story of corruption in the Pennsylvania state legislature.

What, Me Impeach?

Congressman John Conyers redefines disingenuity in today's Washington Post by proclaiming Republicans dishonest when they say that he wants to impeach the President. All he wants, he says, is some answers from the Bush administration:

As Republicans have become increasingly nervous about whether they will be able to maintain control of the House in the midterm elections, they have resorted to the straw-man strategy of identifying a parade of horrors to come if Democrats gain the majority. Among these is the assertion that I, as the new chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, would immediately begin impeachment proceedings against President Bush.

I will not do that. I readily admit that I have been quite vigorous, if not relentless, in questioning the administration. The allegations I have raised are grave, serious, well known, and based on reliable media reports and the accounts of former administration officials. ...

So, rather than seeking impeachment, I have chosen to propose comprehensive oversight of these alleged abuses. The oversight I have suggested would be performed by a select committee made up equally of Democrats and Republicans and chosen by the House speaker and the minority leader.

The committee's job would be to obtain answers -- finally. At the end of the process, if -- and only if -- the select committee, acting on a bipartisan basis, finds evidence of potentially impeachable offenses, it would forward that information to the Judiciary Committee. This threshold of bipartisanship is appropriate, I believe, when dealing with an issue of this magnitude.

Apparently Nancy Pelosi has tasked Conyers with the unenviable mission of unringing a bell, and Conyers has no compunction against painting Republicans as paranoid by telling people he really isn't out to get Bush. However, Conyers has a track record he can't hide -- although he's attempted to do so, as you'll see -- and that track record shows that Conyers lied in his article today.

For instance, eleven months ago Conyers chaired a committee hearing in the Capitol basement. This panel comprised House democrats who opposed the Bush administration and supposedly wanted to get some answers, too. However, as Dana Milbank noted at the time for the Washington Post -- the same paper in which we find Conyers' column today -- that the panel only heard witnesses espousing one particular point of view:

In the Capitol basement yesterday, long-suffering House Democrats took a trip to the land of make-believe.

They pretended a small conference room was the Judiciary Committee hearing room, draping white linens over folding tables to make them look like witness tables and bringing in cardboard name tags and extra flags to make the whole thing look official.

Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) banged a large wooden gavel and got the other lawmakers to call him "Mr. Chairman." He liked that so much that he started calling himself "the chairman" and spouted other chairmanly phrases, such as "unanimous consent" and "without objection so ordered." The dress-up game looked realistic enough on C-SPAN, so two dozen more Democrats came downstairs to play along.

The session was a mock impeachment inquiry over the Iraq war. As luck would have it, all four of the witnesses agreed that President Bush lied to the nation and was guilty of high crimes -- and that a British memo on "fixed" intelligence that surfaced last month was the smoking gun equivalent to the Watergate tapes. Conyers was having so much fun that he ignored aides' entreaties to end the session.

One witness at this debacle turned out to be Ray McGovern, who showed up and starting talking about Jewish conspiracies to hand control of the Middle East to Israel. This inspired the rally outside of the Capitol supporting Conyers' impeachment "hearing" to pass out flyers explaining how Israel had prior warning of 9/11 and warned Jews not to go to work that morning. They also outshone the SEC by revealing Jewish plots to short specific stocks on 9/11 to maximize their profit from the terrorist attacks. McGovern, you may recall, is the darling of the Left that harangued Rumsfeld about being a liar in a recent town-hall style meeting, but that's another story altogether.

Even with this through-the-looking-glass moment on his record, Conyers wants us to believe that he has no intention of pursuing impeachment and that the meanie Republicans are smearing him. However, up until last week Conyers' own web site encouraged visitors to demand investigations into the Bush administration and to "Make Recommendations Regarding Grounds for Possible Impeachment if Warranted". Since May 13th -- just five days ago -- this appears to have been altered. This page shows Conyers' current plea, which asks visitors to sign a pledge only for investigations into abuses of power. This Google cache, which I've copied to my own site to ensure its retention, shows Conyers' aim for impeachment.

Conyers is a liar, and not a very good liar at that. He has tried for at least a year to get Democrats to start impeachment proceedings, losing patience to the point where he just held them himself in frustration. As Milbank reported at the time, the only thing Conyers lacked was subpoena power. "'Tis the beginning of our work," he told the Democrats on his ersatz impeachment panel back then. Suddenly faced with accountability in the upcoming elections, Conyers wants to pull wool over the eyes of the electorate by erasing evidence and accusing Republicans of paranoia. Get used to this level of deceit and chutzpah if the Democrats take Congress this fall.

In Defense Of Mark Tapscott

Over the past couple of weeks, many conservative bloggers have debated the future of the conservative movement and the potential electoral strategies that we feel will most benefit the cause. Over the course of that time, the bloggers have appeared to separate us into two camps: Geraghtyites (from Jim Geraghty at TKS) and Tapscottians (from Mark Tapscott at the Washington Examiner and Tapscott's Copy Desk). While I fall rather squarely into the realist Geraghty camp, I must say a few words in Mark's defense.

First, I think people have misinterpreted Mark's position. What people call Tapscottian really follows more closely to the writings of Stephen Bainbridge. The professor has already announced his intention to withdraw his support from the GOP this fall and potentially in 2008 as a protest against their performance on a range of issues over the past few years. I don't agree with Stephen, but he's entitled to his opinion, and he has an argument to make.

Mark, on the other hand, has not totally given up hope on reforming Republican leadership from within the party. What he has done is to take the view that Stephen may wind up being correct and strategizing on the best method to work outside of the GOP if that becomes necessary. Mark has not advocated abstention, but instead wants to find the most effective method of activism, and has been doing some intriguing outside-the-box thinking.

Neither man deserves obloquy for these arguments, but Mark seems to have attracted it:

Well, this has certainly been interesting. Scanning the comments on this post to date, I see that I am a "religious nut" with no credentials as a journalist, the "Republican equivalent of Howard Dean and the Daily Kos" and a "chump." Just another day in the Blogosphere, I guess.

Oh yes, I am also accused of being a Nietzschian in conservative drag. All I can say about that is it's the first instance I can recall from 35 years of public policy advocacy of somebody reading something I've penned and concluded that I have anything at all in common with the failed German philologist. ...

Let me be clear on this point: I don't desire, yearn for or otherwise pine after a GOP disaster in November, nor do I believe such a turn of events guarantees a win in 08. I'm simply observing that, given current surveys and recent political history, it seems fairly certain that many GOP candidates are going to have a rather unpleasant time come election night and we need to understand why.

If you really want to get an idea of what Mark wants, I'd suggest listening to the interview I did with him on Monday. Mark has a very reasonable outlook, but he wants to keep all of his options open. He may or may not be mistaken, but he's an intelligent and experienced conservative voice with a lot of influence. We need him in the fight, not sidelined by his own team.

Immigration Center Advances

The Senate continued to follow George Bush in a relentless effort to the center on immigration today, passing amendments that fund a border fence, lock out illegals with one felony or three misdemeanor convictions, and provide for guest-worker and citizenship programs. The amendments make it more likely that the House will compromise in conference to deliver the comprehensive reform plan that Bush has demanded, although James Sensenbrenner has announced his opposition already:

The Senate agreed to give millions of illegal immigrants a shot at U.S. citizenship and backed construction of 370 miles of triple-layered fencing along the Mexican border Wednesday, but prospects of election-year legislation clearing Congress were clouded by a withering attack against President Bush by a prominent House Republican.

"Regardless of what the president says, what he is proposing is amnesty," said Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and the lawmaker who would lead House negotiators in any attempt to draft a compromise immigration bill later this year. ...

[Senator David] Vitter led the drive to strip from the bill a provision giving an eventual chance at citizenship to illegal immigrants who have been in the country more than two years. His attempt failed, 66-33, at the hands of a bipartisan coalition, and the provision survived. In all, 41 Democrats joined with 24 Republicans and one independent to turn back the proposal. Opponents included the leaders of both parties, Sens. Bill Frist, R-Tenn., and Harry Reid, D-Nev. Thirty-one Republicans and two Democrats supported Vitter's amendment.

The vote to build what supporters called a "real fence" as distinct from the virtual fence already incorporated in the legislation was 83-16. It marked the first significant victory for conservatives eager to leave their stamp on a measure that looks increasingly like it is headed toward Senate passage.

While the set of amendments that passed appear to provide better news for conservatives than we may have imagined, the loss on the Vitter amendment will rankle. It attempted to gut the Senate proposal for comprehensive reform by making any kind of normalization impossible. The president made clear his support for some kind of path to citizenship for those who have lived an otherwise unremarkable life in the US, and the leadership in both parties apparently want to support the White House on this provision. The no-amnesty caucus in the Senate turned out to be so low that they could not even support a filibuster.

This touched off a debate on the meaning of amnesty, a silly and distracting argument that inevitably has no real bearing on the issue at hand. After all, neither side has come to its position on normalization because of the definition of "amnesty" they found in Webster's. Yet today we had Vitter, Chuck Hagel, and John McCain issue bitter broadsides at each other over the definition of the word, and the media lapped it up.

Is the new plan amnesty? Since those who have broken the law by entering the country illegally will never have to face charges for their offense, amnesty would be the proper word. That, however, does not make the Hagel-Martinez bill a duplicate of Simpson-Mazzoli. It's not a simple waiving of all consequences. The plan for the illegals already in the US would call for payment of a fine and all back taxes, as well as a requirement to learn English and wait several years to complete their processing.

The question isn't whether the plan amounts to amnesty, as if that is some sort of magical label that makes everything it touches dirty. It's whether the punishment fits the crime and whether it serves as a deterrent to further crime. Rational people can disagree on the former, but nothing we have done thus far has served as any kind of deterrent. That's why we need a security fence -- because the only option we have left to significantly reduce the flow of illegals is a physical barrier and increased enforcement on the frontier.

Just as we cannot hope to beat terrorism by playing defense, waiting until we get attacked before attempting to stop the terrorists, we cannot sit back and play defense against the waves of illegal immigration. If we wait until they show up in Los Angeles, Phoenix, Denver, and Minneapolis, it's far too late. The only options for identifying and collecting the violators are the use of draconian measures for government control of marketplaces and identity papers that civil libertarians are correct to dread. In order to enjoy the open and free society that we desire, we have to control the borders of this nation to stop anyone from entering illegally.

However, we still must face the fact that we have utterly failed in this effort until now, and more importantly, we are a nation at war. For our own national security, we need to identify the people who have crossed illegally into our country as soon as possible. Waiting years for the numbers to decrease to a level where we can hope to perform effective investigations of illegal aliens isn't really an option. The US has to provide some incentive for the twelve million of illegal status to self-identify in a short period of time, accept identification papers while they work towards normalization, so that we can then focus on those who truly wish us harm.

If we were not at war, if terrorists did not target us for attack, this would not be necessary. However, we need to proceed realistically and figure out a method in which we can deliver some punishment for illegally entering the country while incentivizing the illegals to declare themselves -- and that is predicated on border security and much more robust enforcement.

Does the Senate plan achieve those purposes? The particulars could use some work, but the concepts suffice. I think the Senate should have kept the Isakson amendment that required a certification of border security before enacting the rest of the reform plan, but perhaps the conference committee will develop that. Whether or not one wants to label a program "amnesty" or "normalization" makes no ultimate difference. We need to determine whether the plan meets the strategic needs of the United States and can be implemented effectively. We also need to recognize political reality and get the best deal we can get while we still control Congress and the White House.

UPDATE: Tony Blankley at the Washington Times has a similar outlook. If trading in the de facto guest worker program we have now for a regulated guest worker program gets us the robust border security we need, then we should take that deal. I would add that we should jettison the temp-worker proposal altogether as an enforcement boondoggle -- what do we do when the workers won't leave, and how much will it cost to enforce those regulations? -- and simply settle for the path to citizenship instead.

UPDATE II: Gary Gross says that calling Hagel-Martinez an amnesty program isn't intellectually supportable.

UPDATE III: A correction: the border-first amendment was the Isakson amendment, not the Sessions amendment. I've corrected the text. (h/t: Dutch in Atlanta)

The Victory In Primaries For Conservatives

Over the past week, many of us have written on the frustration felt by conservatives (especially fiscal conservatives) over the past few years. Some believe that the only manner in which to serve notice on the GOP that it cannot take conservative votes for granted is a massive walkout, a boycott of the 2006 midterms and perhaps even the 2008 presidential elections. Others, such as myself, believe that conservatives will marginalize themselves by doing so and will prove themselves incapable of being reliable partners in any kind of ruling coalition.

Today we have an example of what can be accomplished through active engagement rather than disengagement. In Pennsylvania, primary voters have unseated the two Republican leaders in the state Senate that gave the body an unpopular pay raise, joining thirteen of their incumbent House colleagues in getting the boot:

Angry taxpayers on Tuesday tossed out the two Republican Senate leaders who helped engineer last year's legislative pay raise, an issue that apparently cost 13 House members their jobs, too.

Senate President Pro Tempore Robert Jubelirer of Altoona, and Senate Majority Leader David Brightbill of Lebanon County conceded to their challengers, becoming the first lawmakers in major leadership posts to lose a primary election in 42 years. The House defeats would be the most since 1980.

"We have had a dramatic earthquake in Pennsylvania," said Jubelirer, a 32-year legislator.

The defeats of Jubelirer and Brightbill "will send shock waves throughout he political establishment for years to come," said Mike Young, a retired Penn State University political science professor.

The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review calls this a political "earthquake", as long-entrenched GOP incumbents have lost or are losing races to political neophytes. Brightbill lost to a tire salesman with only a single term on a city council on his resume, but who espoused fiscal responsibility and an end to government handouts. Jubelirer lost to a county commissioner who champions free markets. Another representative, Tom Lawson, trails a 21-year-old college graduate running for his first office.

The existing Republican leadership in Pennsylvania outraged fiscal conservatives with their pay raises and spending habits. However, instead of declaring defeat and retreating to their homes, these conservatives organized and found candidates for primaries -- especially those for the leadership that betrayed them. They donated, raised more funds, campaigned, and ensured a strong turnout to counter the incumbent advantage.

And they succeeded.

Without a doubt, the Pennsylvania Republican Party got the message, along with the incumbents who now find themselves out of a job after the general election. It is entirely possible to turn the rascals out if conservatives remain committed to the cause. This can be replicated on a Congressional level with enough effort and organization. In fact, thanks to the reapportionment process, it actually carries less risk than one might fear. Solidly Republican districts will likely elect whichever GOP candidate wins the primary, so the argument that the incumbent somehow protects against the loss of a seat holds little water. That gives Republicans the ability to offer true choices in the primary elections, a strategy deftly employed by Pennsylvania conservatives.

And look how the press reacted! They have given fiscal conservatives a huge victory in the recognition they received for holding the line on spending. No one expected the conservatives to organize this well or this effectively, and it gives them momentum heading into the general election. The political story of this year in Pennsylvania will be the housecleaning performed on the state legislature, and it puts candidates of both parties on notice that conservatives have grabbed the momentum. Don't be surprised if that changes the entire tenor of the debate on Pennsylvania public policy,

Conservatives can achieve these victories across the nation, especially in Congress, by working within the GOP to effect change. It requires engagement and organization, which may be less immediately satisfactory than boycotts and protests, but carries much greater potential for actual gain.

Term Limits For Appropriators?

The New York Sun reports on a new initiative by tax activist Grover Norquist to rein in spending -- rule changes in both the House and Senate that limit the tenure on appropriations committees. Norquist wants to have more fresh faces each session in order to combat the descent of otherwise rational politicians into a spendthrift groupthink:

Grover Norquist, president of the advocacy group Americans for Tax Reform, is advancing a new approach to fighting government corruption: term limits for members of congressional appropriations committees.

Speaking to The New York Sun yesterday, Mr. Norquist claimed that members of appropriations committees developed a sort of groupthink over time, and regardless of their partisan affiliations, eventually began thinking like appropriators. ...

Mr. Norquist has recently traveled with Rep. Tom Feeney, a Republican of Florida, who supports the idea and will help introduce it into the House.

"We'll do it after the next election as a House rules change, which means you simply need a majority of the House caucus," Mr. Norquist explained. "It's a secret ballot."

When the Republicans took control of the House in 1994 and later the Senate, they enacted rules changes that required rotation of committee leadership spots. These rules, one should recall, created the controversy over the chairmanship of the Senate Judiciary Committee when it passed from Orrin Hatch to Arlen Specter. Some Republicans wanted to break the rule and keep Hatch as chairman, a proposal that had its attraction then and still does today, but in the end the Republicans chose to abide by their own rules.

This proposal intends to create a rule for Appropriations that once applied for the intelligence committees. Prior to 9/11, members could only serve a certain length on those panels due to a history of arguably excessive collegiality between the intelligence communities and their oversight committees. After 9/11, however, those rules were suspended when it clearly showed that the lack of experience in intelligence by members of these panels had kept significant issues from being recognized before disaster struck.

Will that same law of unintended consequences strike the appropriations process? Norman Ornstein of the conservative American Enterprise Institute thinks it will, as does the spokesman for House Appropriations chair Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA). It's difficult to see why, however. One can hardly equate budgeting with the complexities of intelligence work, and if there is one skill that appears to be universally possessed by members of Congress, it's the ability to spend money. Much of the actual skilled work in this process gets accomplished by staffers anyway, while the political decisions get made by the members.

Norquist's approach attempts to rectify the entrenched arrogation of power by those who sit on the most powerful panels in Congress. Lobbyist issues and bribery always seem to center on those who control the pursestrings, and for obvious reasons. The problems do not limit themselves to just the overt criminal activities that occasionally occur; giving a select group of people access to this spending control gives them power in other areas of Congress, increasing their influence to unhealthy levels. When someone has the power to cut off funding for a member's pet project, then that person can influence a whole range of legislation with the implicit threat to do so.

Will term limits on these committees address the entirety of the problem with spending and earmarks? No, but it will ensure that committee members understand that the kind of power games they play may one day get played back against them, a revelation that will encourage a bit more humility. It will also make it more difficult for leadership in both parties to keep reformers off the Appropriations commitees. The turnover will increase the odds that spending hawks get their representation and have a chance to reform a process that has spiraled out of control.

At the very least, the proposal will not hurt. If it shows no significant results, then it can be rescinded later. It doesn't replace more specific reforms on earmarks, such as the pork database or the line-item veto, but it doesn't conflict with those solutions, either. In the meantime, it will show creative thinking and a serious attempt to address at least some of the issues surrounding the sausage-making at the Capitol.

China Jails Dissident Blogger For Twelve Years

The repressive government of China continued its battle against on-line efforts at democratization and intellectual freedom yesterday by jailing a blogger for twelve years. Yang Tianshui provoked the regime's ire by posting essays to his website supporting free elections and calling for a velvet revolution:

CHINA sentenced a veteran dissident writer to 12 years in jail for subversion yesterday, after he posted essays on the internet supporting a movement by exiles to hold free elections.

The sentence on Yang Tianshui, 45, is one of the harshest to be handed down to a political dissident since the trials that came after the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown on students demanding greater democracy. It underscores the determination of the ruling Communist Party to brook no opposition and to maintain a tight grip on the internet.

Yang is one of several writers and dissidents to be tried over the content of internet postings. He has no plans to appeal because he regards his trial as illegal. Li Jianqiang, his lawyer, said: “He is most dissatisfied but he had expected such a sentence. He refused to answer questions because he does not recognise the legality of the court.”

Yang was detained after he posted essays on the internet in support of Velvet Action of China — a movement named after the Velvet Revolution that overthrew the Communist Government in the former Czechoslovakia. “He was freely expressing his opinion and posed no threat to state security. We argue that his actions were entirely within the Constitution,” Mr Li said.

China has a history of repression against dissenters, and it has attacked Internet accessibility in order to ensure that these voices of freedom get identified and silenced. American-based companies unfortunately have proved willing collaborators in these efforts; Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo have cooperated with Chinese censors to either block access to dissident writings or to identify the authors for prosecution. Chinese freedom advocates may well wonder at American collaboration with their oppressors; history will not judge that kindly, nor will the first generation of China's free rulers when their liberation comes.

Yang proves that their systems cannot withstand democratic impulses forever. He has already served ten years for his public opposition to Beijing's brand of communism, and has spent the past six years continuing that work. Prison has not deterred him from pursuing freedom, nor will the regime have the resources to jail everyone who accesses these writings or adds to them. Even with American ingenuity ironically turned against them, voices such as Yang's will continue to rise to the fore, and the Internet will bring those voices and their democratic activism to the oppressed people of China as the information age gradually dawns on the world's most populous nation.

In the meantime, we can show our solidarity by at least noting the muzzling of one of our own, and reminding everyone of the complicity of those firms that assist China to achieve the silence that will never come.

The Smoke Trail, Explained

The Pentagon authorized the release of video and stills taken from a security camera that captures the attack on 9/11 by the hijackers of American Airlines Flight 77, after a FOIA lawsuit by Judicial Watch. The released images do not show all that much more than what we saw on television in the aftermath of the attacks, which disappointed those who hoped the new footage would stamp out the various paranoid conspiracy theories about the attacks.

Two bloggers have posted screencaps of the video and noticed something odd. Both Allahpundit at Hot Air and Kevin at Wizbang! remark on the smoke trail evident in the right-hand side of the frame in the moments before the attack. A few commenters (not the bloggers themselves) say this is evidence that the attack was a missile and not a fully-loaded 767, and offer by way of further proof the long-standing assertion that the damage to the Pentagon was too light to have been caused by American 77.

Hot Air has the whole sequence, but here's one picture that shows the smoke trail just above the ground:

Above the ticket dispenser on the right foreground and trailing to the right edge of the frame, a smoke trail can clearly be seen behind a dark triangle that appears to be the tail of American 77. Looking at those two components, the smoke trail looks at first to be far too significant for a commercial airliner, even at high speed (530 knots).

However, people may not know exactly what happened to American 77 in its approach to the Pentagon's facade. One commenter at Wizbang! recalls hearing that the plane clipped a few light poles on its approach, but the plane actually impacted the ground just outside of the Pentagon. Last Independence Day, I toured the Pentagon, courtesy of a CQ reader posted there at the time, and he told me exactly what happened:

He started us off in the west wing, the portion of the building that terrorists attacked on 9/11. We could not take pictures of the outside, but remarkably, we had no trouble taking pictures of the interior. The Pentagon has a beautiful memorial at Ground Zero for the victims of 9/11. ...

Our friend also showed us the direction that the plane took in hitting the Pentagon, from the window just below the entry point. It came in just over the Sheraton hotel in the background, clipping a light pole, bounced off the freeway, killing a cab driver, and hit just short of the Pentagon. This time sequence explains why the Pentagon took less damage than one might expect; the bounce took off some of the momentum and fuel before the plane hit the building, meaning that the impact did not travel as deeply and the fire did not burn as hot.

The smoke trail resulted from this initial impact, as the unskilled pilot at the controls could not maintain a steady approach after his 330-degree turn and dive towards the Pentagon. The death of the cabdriver may have saved lives and kept the west wing from complete ruin. It may also explain why the plane disintegrated more quickly and completely on impact, as its structural integrity already had been compromised, although it's hard to imagine anything surviving a direct impact at that speed. As it was, the attack killed and injured many people that day inside the Pentagon and the damage was very extensive.

That should answer any questions about the nature of the smoke and the approach of American 77 to the Pentagon, and it's a sequence of which many people still have no awareness. Put in the proper context, the picture does not surprise at all.

Hatch: Courts Informed Of NSA Programs

Senator Orrin Hatch answered charges surrounding the NSA surveillance programs by revealing that at least two FISA judges have been kept informed of at least the NSA phone call database. The revelation answers critics of the Bush administration's efforts to use datamining to detect terrorist sleeper cells:

Two judges on the secretive court that approves warrants for intelligence surveillance were told of the broad monitoring programs that have raised recent controversy, a Republican senator said Tuesday, connecting a court to knowledge of the collecting of millions of phone records for the first time. ...

Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said that at least two of the chief judges on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court had been informed since 2001 of White House-approved National Security Agency monitoring operations.

"None raised any objections, as far as I know," said Hatch, a member of a special Intelligence Committee panel appointed to oversee the NSA's work.

Hatch made the comment in answering a question in an interview about recent reports of the government compiling lists of Americans' phone calls. When pressed later, Hatch suggested he was also speaking broadly of the administration's terror-related monitoring.

Asked if the judges somehow approved the operations, Hatch said, "That is not their position, but they were informed."

After all the concern that the Bush administration had hijacked the call data with no oversight, we now find out that the FISA court had known of the project the entire time. Will this stop the criticism of the program? Probably not, but it should reduce some of the hysteria we've seen about it.

I think that this is good news, and not just politically. The first NSA program revealed doesn't trouble me in the least; surveilling suspected terrorists in real time is nothing more than good wartime intelligence work. The phone database, however, has the potential for more damage to civil liberties if used improperly. I know that the administration does not require legal permission to compile this data and use it, but this effort should have more oversight to protect against abuses than a simple "Trust Me".

And now we see that the Bush administration agrees, involving FISA all along. Well, like Bush's centrism on immigration, don't expect it to change any minds, but at least we won't have to keep hearing about the datamining project for much longer.

Two Components Of Bush Border-Security Plan Seem ... Insecure

George Bush tried to reassure conservatives and others concerned about the lack of action on border security that the administration takes those concerns seriously. In his speech, he laid out specifics intended to bolster support for his comprehensive immigration reform policies that would reassure people that the border would get effective attention. The two chief proposals comprised the deployment of National Guard troops to support the Border Patrol and the establishment of a fence in high-traffic areas and a system of barriers and electronic surveillance in others.

However, within hours of the speech, holes began to appear in both elements. The New York Times reports that the governors of the border states that would have to authorize the deployment of the National Guard did not get consulted on the plan ahead of time:

Among the most important voices will be those of the governors of the four states abutting the southern border: Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and California. It falls to them to make the plan for deploying the guard work.

Administration officials said governors would have to ask for the Guard troops, and are free to decline them. And, officials said governors would often have to ask for National Guard troops from fellow governors in nonborder states, who could also say no.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California, a Republican, called the plan a "Band-Aid solution" in a statement Monday night and complained that he had not been fully consulted.

Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, a Democrat, said the plan fell short. "The president is putting the onus on border governors to work out the details and resolve the problems with this plan," Mr. Richardson said in a statement.

Gov. Janet Napolitano of Arizona, a Democrat, was generally supportive the plan. . Gov. Rick Perry of Texas also voiced support.

Napolitano had already talked about ordering a deployment of the Guard in a similar effort, and Perry has long asked for better enforcement along the Texas frontier. However, one would have expected that the Bush administration would have already worked with the states to agree on a coordinated plan for this proposal before announcing it. The lack of coordination makes the White House look like it grandstanded in yesterday's effort, hoping to pressure Schwarzenegger and Richardson into quiet acquiescence on the plan.

If that was their intent, it will backfire. And if they intended to send ICE head Julie Myers out to bolster confidence in the border fence as a serious proposition, they have even more difficulties on their hands. Radioblogger has the transcript of Myers' interview with Hugh Hewitt, and it isn't pretty. Myers dodged Hugh's efforts to get specifics on the fence, and it appears that she has no idea what Bush actually proposed:

HH: So I'm back to the fencing conversation. If fencing is the best way to stop them at the border, why don't we have a plan laid out for that?

JM: Well, you know, I don't think we think that fencing is the best way to stop them on the border. I think the President's called for...if you build a fence, they build a tunnel. We just saw that today. There was another tunnel destroyed, another, excuse me, another tunnel found over in the San Diego area. So you can't...given the kind of the layout of our land, I believe it's the President's view, it's the border patrol's view, that a fence alone is not enough. We need a layered approach that includes surveillance, personnel, technology. We are working with the military to make sure we have the best technology. And some places, a fence may be very effective, but some places, it's simply not.

HH: Assistant Secretary Myers, correct me if I'm wrong. I think you just walked the administration back from the fence.

JM: I...no, I said consistent with what the border patrol chief's been telling me all along, he's been telling me what he needs, the combination of all these things. You look at the particular location, the particular terrain, and you decide what's most effective. You don't want something people can scale in two minutes and then be in the desert, and then you just have put people on the other side of the fence.

Well, if you build a fence, then you force traffickers to build tunnels -- which are expensive to create and cause enough activity to arouse suspicion. No one has seriously proposed that we build a fence and then forget about patrolling, interdiction, and investigation. The fence allows for more efficient use of those resources and forces violators into extraordinary measures in any attempt to defeat it. It's like saying that you won't build a fence around your property because people can climb over it whenever they want. Of course they can --- but the fence makes it clear that you intend to protect your property from trespassers.

It really seems as if the White House wrote a speech to just pacify their critics instead of actually responding to their concerns. If this is how seriously the administration takes border security, then we need to bring a screeching halt to the immigration reform bill until that attitude changes.

Minnesota GOP Holds As Democrats Drop

In a surprising result from the Star-Tribune's Minnesota Poll, the GOP has surpassed the Democrats in party affiliation by standing firm while voters abandon the DFL. The Minnesota Poll shows that 29% of all Minnesota adults self-identify as Republicans, while the Democrats lost six points since last year, dropping to 25%:

A new Minnesota Poll shows that Minnesota's political landscape is almost equally divided between Republican and Democratic voters.

In the poll, conducted last week, 29 percent identified themselves as Republicans, exactly the same percentage as a year ago, despite President Bush's record-low approval ratings and the conventional wisdom that Republicans are likely to suffer net losses in this fall's election.

Those who identified themselves as Democrats stood at 25 percent, close enough to be considered even, given the margin of sampling error, but down from 31 percent a year ago.

Given that this poll does not have a reputation for a lack of institutional bias, this is surprising indeed. The Minnesota Poll samples the general population of adults, a technique that normally favors a more liberal response. The Strib notes that the DFL has enjoyed a narrowing lead in party identification for many years, usually five points or more. This is the first such poll that shows the GOP surpassing the DFL.

Two years ago, the DFL surprised the state by recapturing the state Senate and wiping out almost all of the Republican majority in the House. It now appears that despite the lack of support for the Bush administration and the war in Iraq, both of which should have eroded GOP support, it's the Democrats that have moved backwards.

The question is why the Democrats have seen such an erosion in support while the GOP have not picked up any of their defectors. Unfortunately, the links to Minnesota Poll internals all point to the survey done two years ago, which does no one any good but demonstrates the fecklessness of the editors at the Strib. On the plus side, we do get the breaking news that Bush has increased his support ... against John Kerry. However, given the tenor of this state, some of those that have left the DFL probably went to the Greens or opted for left-wing independent status -- neither of which brings much benefit to Republicans, except that the disarray will damage the Democrats and possibly pull them even further left in an attempt to woo them back.

The poll shows that when accounting for the "leaners", the GOP edges the DFL 37%-36%, which indicates an opportunity for the Republicans. The real test of this will come in the November elections, when Mark Kennedy will likely face off against Amy Klobuchar while the popular Tim Pawlenty runs for re-election as governor. If the Republicans win both races and make inroads in the state assembly, then the Minnesota Poll may have captured the moment in which Minnesota finally swung red.

Mfume Lashes Out At Democrats

Kweisi Mfume has trailed fellow Democratic candidate Benjamin Cardin for the nomination to replace Senator Paul Sarbanes in November's midterm election since both candidates declared for the race, and Mfume now believes that the party has deliberately favored Cardin. The former NAACP gave an angry interview to the Washington Times in which he hinted that the Democrats may wind up sacrificing his support if he loses:

Maryland U.S. Senate candidate Kweisi Mfume said yesterday that Democrats risk losing the senatorial election because "old-line party bosses" are undermining his campaign and alienating black voters.

Mr. Mfume also would not say whether he would endorse Rep. Benjamin L. Cardin, the front-runner for the Democratic Senate nomination, if he should lose to the lawmaker in the September primary. "I can say that there will be people who will feel disaffected [if I am not the nominee]," Mr. Mfume told editors and reporters at The Washington Times. ...

Calling Mr. Steele a "friend," Mr. Mfume said he shares similar goals and ideas with the Republican official as well as Mr. Cardin.

"I agree with both of them, maybe equally but on different things," said Mr. Mfume, a former chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus and former president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Mfume has fallen significantly behind Cardin in fundraising and in polling, and so far looks like he will not come close to beating the Congressman for the nomination. The lack of contributions surprises, given Mfume's prominence in the civil-rights movement and the high profile of Lt. Governor Steele's campaign as a black Republican candidate for national office. Analysts expected Mfume to do better and perhaps expected Democrats to favor him as a means of negating Steele's draw among Maryland's African-Americans.

Apparently, Mfume expected that as well, and has become frustrated when it did not materialize. His interview with Miller and Ward show hints that Mfume has become disaffected enough to defy the Democrats if he loses in the primary. He mentions his friendship with Steele, and the curious statement that he agrees equally with Cardin and Steele sounds like a clear warning that an endorsement of Steele has become a possibility. He appears to be building a case for that, or perhaps an excuse for refusing to endorse Cardin.

Mfume explicitly chides the state Democratic party for ignoring black candidates, especially after the last gubernatorial election. Robert Ehrlich teamed up with Steele to win the governor's mansion that year after the Democrats failed, in Mfume's "humble" opinion, to engage African-American voters. He points out that Cardin has started to follow this same flawed strategy; Cardin's team acknowledges that they will not have any special message for any component communities of the Democratic Party. The Democrats have not given blacks a reason to support them, according to Mfume's argument, and so they will concede their strongest demographic to the Republicans and Michael Steele.

If Mfume bolts the Democrats in the midterms, the seat which belongs to Paul Sarbanes will be a lock for the GOP. This interview with a well-known conservative newspaper amounts to a shot across the bow from Mfume to the Democrats. In a season when they harbor such ambitions for a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress, conceding Maryland's Senate race will be a disaster. As the highest office in the midterm elections, courting African-American disaffectation will reverberate through all of the Congressional races in Maryland as well, and may accelerate a process of rethinking their monolithic support of Democrats that has already begun.

Lorie Byrd Leaves Polipundit

Lorie Byrd has left Polipundit over a dispute in the editorial policy of the group blog:

The fact is that I believe this is the last time I will be blogging at Polipundit.

I received a lengthy email from Polipundit tonight alerting us to an editorial policy change that included the following: "From now on, every blogger at PoliPundit.com will either agree with me completely on the immigration issue, or not blog at PoliPundit.com." I would provide additional context, but Polipundit has asked that the contents of our emails not be disclosed publicly and I think that is a fair request. There has been plenty written in the posts over the past week alone to let readers figure out what happened. Polipundit ended a later email with this: "It's over. The group-blogging experiment was nice while it lasted, but we have different priorities now. It's time to go our own separate ways."

Anyone who has read Polipundit's blog over the last few days has understood that immigration had divided the writers. A group blog can have its own unique stresses under any circumstances, but when the lead blogger has as much invested in a single policy issue as Polipundit does, it must be very difficult to resolve equitably. Reverting back to a single voice probably makes the most sense in the long run for that blog.

Lorie will blog independently at Byrd Droppings for a while until she finds another group-blog situation. In the meantime, we'll look forward to her efforts on her own -- and maybe she'll decide that solo is the best way to go. Drop by and give her some encouragement.

Canadians Want Gun Registry Program Scrapped

A new poll by Ipsos-Reid delivers more bad news to the Liberals in Canada. One of their pet projects, the national gun registry, now has a clear majority across the nation declaring that the program doesn't work, is badly organized, and should be eliminated -- and they blame the Liberals for the mess:

A new Ipsos Reid survey for CanWest/Global News reports that most Canadians (54%) feel the “gun registry is badly organized, isn’t working properly, and should be scrapped” – a level of opinion essentially unchanged from what was recorded nearly four years, and two Prime Ministers ago (53% expressed this opinion in a December 2002 Ipsos Reid survey).

And, if the Auditor General of Canada produced a report that indicated that there had been widespread mismanagement and waste within the gun registry itself:

* 56% say they would most blame “the former Liberal Government and elected politicians who built the gun registry and oversaw it”, while

* 37% say they would most blame “the government workers who were put in charge of administering the gun registry on a day-to-day basis”.

A majority of Canadians still believe in a gun registry of some kind, and that support is strongest in predictable provinces: Ontario, Quebec, and Atlantic Canada. Alberta, Sasketchewan, and Manitoba have the most opposition to such a program, again hardly a surprise. Other internals of this poll are less predictable. Elimination of the program gets majority support in almost all provinces except Quebec and Atlantic Canada, the latter of which still rejects the current gun registry by a plurality (49%). Liberal blame gets majority support in all provinces, with only Quebec seeing employee incompetence rise over 40% support for the reason the registry has failed.

This news cannot provide much hope for the Liberals in their effort to quickly turn their fortunes around. They took a program that enjoys fair to good support throughout most of the nation and fumbled it so badly that a majority want it dumped. It demonstrates a lack of trust in Liberal competency that gives voter dissatisfaction a new dimension apart from the ethical debacle of Adscam. It suggests that getting rid of the crooks may not be enough, but that the Liberals have to show that new leadership must have a track record of success in policy implementation.

Right now, Harper and the Tories have begun to build that reputation after years of getting smeared by Liberals as radicals with hidden agendas. The new and professional government of Stephen Harper, with its modest demeanor and ambitious policy, provides a stark contrast thus far to the incompetency of the Gun Registry and the party that created it.

Reprehensible

Unfortunately, while Bush underwhelmed the conservative movement on immigration tonight, certain conservatives busied themselves by embarrassing us much more than Bush could ever have. Vox Day, whose provocative writing I normally enjoy, has lost all sense of perspective in his latest effort at World Net Daily. He suggests that we learn a lesson from the Nazis in dealing with illegal immigrants in our midst:

And he will be lying, again, just as he lied when he said: "Massive deportation of the people here is unrealistic – it's just not going to work."

Not only will it work, but one can easily estimate how long it would take. If it took the Germans less than four years to rid themselves of 6 million Jews, many of whom spoke German and were fully integrated into German society, it couldn't possibly take more than eight years to deport 12 million illegal aliens, many of whom don't speak English and are not integrated into American society.

George Bush could have asked for no better example why massive deportations are a political dead letter.

Vox likes to take controversial positions, but this is just reprehensible. The Germans "rid" themselves of six million Jews by annihilating them through industrialized mass murder. In fact, a great many of them weren't German at all and never spoke German or were assimilated into German society. A great deal of them were Poles, Russians, French, and so on, an inconvenient fact that renders his point moot. And how exactly did the Germans accomplish this feat that Vox finds so exemplary? They transformed Europe into a racist police state from the Pyrenees to the Caucasus.

Can we presume that Vox wants to offer that advice? Should Congress take up the Nuremberg Laws this session?

This column is so ill-advised that it is difficult to imagine that a responsible news organization would not have attempted to keep the writer from discrediting himself before publishing it. Vox owes us an apology, and so does World Net Daily.

Via The Anchoress and The Moderate Voice, both of whom have more links on this piece.

UPDATE: The TMV link actually points to David Schraub's original post at Debate Link.

Interview: Mark Tapscott On Immigration And The Conservative Rebellion

Earlier today I arranged to conduct a round-table discussion on George Bush's immigration speech as well as the conservative rebellion that threatens the Republican Party's dominance in Congress in the upcoming mid-term elections. Unfortunately, two of our potential conferees could not make it, Michelle Malkin because of her commitments to Fox News tonight, and Stephen Bainbridge because of technical difficulties that he tried mightily to overcome but could not.

Fortunately for me and for the CQ community, Mark Tapscott and I had a great one-on-one conversation instead. Besides being an outstanding blogger, Mark had spent years at the Heritage Foundation integrating bloggers into their efforts to great effect, and now serves as editorial page editor for the Washington Examiner. Mark has been fighting for the conservative movement for decades, and he has a unique perspective on the crossroads conservatives face, ironically because of their electoral successes.

We first talked about immigration, and Mark and I saw this very similarly. Neither of us think that Bush helped himself in the long term, although both of us predict that he will get a short-lived rise in the polls. We gave Bush high marks for consistency, but do not believe that the base will follow him on this effort. We also do not understand why Bush continues to push for a temporary worker program, and Mark has some good perspective based on his experience covering the German auto industry and their imported workforce.

Mark also clarified his position on the options for conservatives. He does not support the impulse for conservatives to disengage in the upcoming elections, or any other elections for that matter. Mark sees the potential for an effective and quick formation of a third party through the use of the Internet, and figures that such a project may be a rational option for disaffected conservatives. Until then, Mark wants to see the Right work through the GOP to elect the kind of leadership that will deliver on conservative policies.

This description barely skims the surface of our half-hour discussion. Be sure to download the MP3 at the link above for the entire interview.

Immigration Speech: Reaction

I apologize; circumstances kept me from live-blogging the speech, but I did hear the entire event along with having read the speech just before its delivery.

My initial reaction? President Bush tried reaching for the center -- a position he has occupied on this issue all along. He tried a one-from-column-A, two-from-column-B approach that probably will leave all sides more or less dissatisfied. His declaration that catch-and-release would end was the most welcome news in the entire speech. He delivered that well and sounded forceful and presidential, but most people will wonder why this practice didn't end on September 12, 2001. His tone remained measured and firm and he insisted that Congress pass a comprehensive plan that includes both tight security and normalization.

How will that sell? Predictably. Tom Tancredo and Peter King, both House Republicans, tore the speech apart. Immigration activists Raul Hinojosa and Cecilia Munoz, the latter with the National Council of La Raza, appeared cautiously optimistic. That doesn't surprise me; the news for them was that the President did not get diverted from his course by his fractious base.

Will that translate to increased support for this administration? I doubt it. Anyone paying attention to Bush's immigration policies already knew he was a centrist on this issue. He may get some grudging respect from centrists and liberals for not caving to his base, but that won't translate into support for a president they already consider the Second Coming of Richard Nixon. The only cause Bush helped tonight was the policy he has consistently put forth on immigration -- which once again shows Bush as a man who follows his own lights and beckons people to follow.

He's not Clinton. At one time, conservatives appreciated that. Will they still when his tenacity denies them the policies they seek? We shall see, but initially he's going to take a beating on the right.

UPDATE: Mark Tapscott has deja vu all over again.

UPDATE II: Professor Bainbridge agrees with the President on the need for comprehensive reform instead of phased approval, and liked the speech overall.

UPDATE III: Hot Air has a round-up, and so does NZ Bear. The most telling, and likely the most influential, reaction so far? Hugh Hewitt, who also occupies the center-right on this and many other issues. After initially giving the speech high marks, Hugh was stunned to hear Julie Myers of ICE act as though no one ever heard of a fence.

So much for border security.

Two possibilities exist. Either Bush doesn't care about border security, or the White House couldn't coordinate its policy spokespeople to stay on message, or perhaps both. None of these options build confidence in this administration.

Immigration Speech Media Alerts

I will have a busy evening tonight. First I plan to live-blog the immigration speech if possible this evening, depending on dialysis schedules. Afterwards, I will appear on The World Tonight with Rob Breckenridge on Calgary's CHQR talk radio station. If you're not in Calgary and can't tune in 770 AM, be sure to listen on the stream at CHQR's website.

After that, Mark Tapscott, Stephen Bainbridge, and I will conduct a round table on the immigration speech and conservative disaffectation in general, and what options conservatives have to re-energize the movement. I will podcast that later this evening -- and we're hoping that Michelle Malkin may join us, although she will undoubtedly be in high demand. I believe I may be outnumbered, and it should make for a lively round-table discussion!

Immigration Speech Preview (UPDATE: Full Speech Preview)

The White House has released excerpts from the speech which George Bush will give tonight, and it looks like Bush may try to play his cards as broadly as possible. For the optimists, his speech contains something for everyone -- border security, normalization, ID cards, prosecution of employers, and so on. For those who have adopted a more glass-half-empty approach -- understandable, given the lack of action thus far -- the attempt to find a consensus will look like more of a capitulation and will probably leave them unconvinced.

Bush will start out by reminding the nation of the steps he has already taken to secure the border, but admit that it has not been enough to do the job properly:

Since I became President, we have increased funding for border security by 66 percent, and expanded the Border Patrol from about 9,000 to 12,000 agents. . . .we have apprehended and sent home about six million people entering America illegally. Despite this progress, we do not yet have full control of the border, and I am determined to change that. Tonight I am calling on Congress to provide funding for dramatic improvements in manpower and technology at the border.

Bush has to hope that this admission will establish some credibility among border-security proponents, especially in the House. It certainly helps, and his solution also sounds like a good start, if not a comprehensive plan. Bush received criticism this weekend for his plan and for his conciliatory message to Vicente Fox regarding the non-military function of the National Guard at the border, but there is a good reason for his diplomacy. Nations that see rapid military deployments at their borders get understandably anxious about the intentions of their neighbors; usually the second nation will match the military deployment to preclude an invasion. Proper diplomatic manners call for Bush to inform Fox that the force will not have a military mission but instead a support mission for US Border Patrol.

Bush will also talk about his opposition to amnesty, but this is where he will have the most trouble convincing the skeptics. Hard-liners consider any program that does not prosecute or at least deport people who have entered the country illegally to be an amnesty program. Bush wants to argue for the notion of a broad middle ground between amnesty and full prosecution, a message that likely aims for the more moderate of the border-control crowd.

However, from the initial release, it does not appear that Bush will get into specifics about how the normalization program will work, which will cause even more skepticism. The president has tried to let Congress take the lead on this issue, especially in devising the specifics of the program, and he doesn't appear to be changing tactics tonight. If that is the case, he will be making a mistake, perhaps a very damaging one. Right now, with his polling dropping, he needs to look like a leader and not an ethereal visionary. Part of the reason this issue has split Congress and the GOP is precisely because Bush has been loathe to get more specific on his desires. This address gives him the opportunity to play to his strength -- leadership -- and if he doesn't grasp the reins and give a clear path to a compromise for consensus, this speech will leave his intended audience flat.

I will be live-blogging the speech if I can -- the FM is in dialysis and the timing may be difficult -- and will definitely have more analysis later.

UPDATE: I have now seen the full speech, and it has its high points as well as some clunkers. First, the high points:

* The fence: it looks like it will get constructed, at least in the high-traffic urban areas. The rural areas will get "barriers" and the deployment of high-tech surveillance and intercept equipment.

* Expansion of detention facilities to curtail the catch-and-release program.

* An open commitment to use Guard troops for support while the Border Patrol gets beefed up. The one-year commitment is for 6,000 troops, but they will only get released from the assignment as their need decreases.

Now for the big clunker: the temporary worker program. That will not make hardly anyone happy, with the possible exception of ConAgra. Immigration activists want unfettered immigration, hard-liners want strictly regulated immigration, but no one I know is arguing for the European model. Giving a "temporary" pass to immigrants only means we will have to spend billions in finding them when their visas expire.

As I predicted, Bush will stake out the middle ground, and insist that such a position exists. He may get enough consensus to move forward, and his speech has more specifics than the previews revealed. However, I suspect that the temporary worker program will not get much support from conservatives or liberals, and moderates will remain more focused on normalization for those already here. I predict a very mixed reaction to this speech.

Immigration Activists To Snatch Defeat From The Jaws Of Victory

One constant in the immigration protests this year has been the ability of the activists to sabotage their own position. With the White House and the Senate poised to deliver most of their agenda, they overreacted to the House proposal and staged a number of demonstrations that proved so provocative that it undermined their allies in both places. Many of these protests specifically targeted George Bush, although he opposed the House bill and had worked for normalization for years.

Now, with President Bush about to make a prime-time Oval Office speech intended to rescue his immigration reform plan, the same activists are about to do it again, planning a loud and angry response to tonight's speech:

As President Bush prepares to address the nation tonight about immigration, a newly formed network of groups that organized demonstrations for illegal immigrants is conference calling, brainstorming and consolidating its forces so that it can respond to the government with a unified voice.

The We Are America Alliance of 41 immigrant resource groups, unions, churches, day laborers and Spanish-language disc jockeys opposes House legislation that would criminalize illegal immigrants, but it will lobby Congress and compromise to realize its goal of obtaining legal residency for many of the 11 million people who live in the shadows. ...

Bush's plan to dispatch National Guard troops to the Mexican border was not greeted well by the immigrant coalition, which plans a day of civil action Wednesday, with demonstrations at the White House and on Capitol Hill, and the launch of a nationwide voter registration campaign at churches and nonprofit organizations that hopes to sign up a million new voters among legal residents.

"We expect a large turnout of people from all over the country," Juan Carlos Ruiz, general coordinator for the National Capital Immigration Coalition, said over the weekend. He presaged the message of the Spanish-radio address, saying, "Militarizing the border is not a solution to the problem. We believe that militarizing the border is a propaganda tool. We need comprehensive immigration reform."

Deepak Bhargava, executive director of the Center for Community Change, which helps fund and organize activities for immigrant groups, said the president has to make hard choices. "It's not going to be possible for Bush to thread the needle and create something that makes the right happy" while also pleasing moderates, he said. "We are absolutely prepared to try to bring this thing down if it heads in the wrong direction."

Thanks to the widespread demonstrations earlier this year, the immigration hardliners have re-energized and have pushed both the Senate and White House onto the defensive. This prime-time address won't aim at appeasing the immigration activists but the conservatives who have rebelled at the notion of granting amnesty to illegal aliens, especially without credible and effective border security. Bush knows that the normalization he wants will not pass through Congress without serious help, and this unprecedented speech on domestic policy shows how much he wants to rescue his vision.

Immigration activists, however, appear intent on killing that reform through their arrogant demands and their association with the rabid socialists of International ANSWER. Once content to work quietly to build sympathy for poor migrant workers looking for a better life, the immigration movement suddenly decided this year that they instead wanted to make themselves into a civil-rights movement for people whose very presence breaks the law they want as protection. They marched with Che Guevara posters and slogans borrowed from the reconquista movement, insinuating (and sometimes explicitly stating) that the US has no right to enforce its own borders or its national sovereignty in the Southwest. They squandered the well of sympathy that they had built since the collapse of Simpson-Mazzoli in an orgy of self-indulgent petulance.

Now they are on the brink of doing it again. Just when we can expect Bush to temper his common-sense proposal to help fund National Guard assistance at the border with more calls for normalization, the activists will remind everyone that they demand special treatment and absolution for little more than the fact that the broke the law in the first place, and accuse those who oppose them of racism and xenophobia .... again. Even some of their allies in the movement understand that they have eroded political support for their position due to the extreme nature of the protests this year, and now when their ally against the enforcement-only contingent tries to regain the momentum for reform, they will effectively kneecap his efforts.

Personally, I look forward to their response tonight and tomorrow. Not only will it prove entertaining, but it will undoubtedly remind the White House that the immigration activists do not support his administration or his party and never will, no matter how much he supports their agenda. That might wake up a few Republican leaders in the Senate as well.

Saddam Faces More Charges

The trial of Saddam Hussein resumes today, but before the proceedings started the court charged Saddam with even more crimes stemming from his efforts against the Iraqi Shi'a in Dujail. Saddam refused to enter a plea on charges that he tortured and killed hundreds of men, women, and children in punishment for the aborted Shi'ite uprising:

Saddam Hussein refused to enter a plea at his trial on Monday after he was formally charged with ordering the killing and torture of hundreds of Shi'ite villagers, telling the judge he was still Iraq's president.

The detailed charges read out by Judge Raouf Abdel Rahman stemmed from the killing of 148 Shi'ites after an attempt on Saddam's life in 1982 in the village of Dujail.

The ousted president was accused of ordering the killing and torture of hundreds in the village, including women and children, and that he sent helicopters and planes to pound Dujail, north of Baghdad.

Wearing a dark suit and white shirt, Saddam smiled as he listened to the charges, holding a Koran in his left hand.

"This statement cannot influence me or shake a hair of my head. What matters to me is the Iraqi people and myself," Saddam said. "I am president of Iraq by the will of the Iraqi people."

Replying the judge said: "You were, but not now."

Saddam starts his defense today, and observers expect his attorneys to indulge every conspiracy theory possible in an attempt to convince the Iraqi people, if not the court, that their former oppressor has been unfairly prosecuted. Rumors have it that the defense will try to subpoena prominent Americans to testify to their relationship with the Saddam regime, including Donald Rumsfeld. None of this will have any rational connection to the murders in Dujail, one of the reasons that the court limited itself to specific charges regarding specific incidents rather than a blanket indictment for war crimes, atrocities, and genocide.

It will prove a serious test for Saddam's defense team. The court will likely put severe restrictions on the speculation and distracting topics they want to raise. Somehow they will have to make themselves entertaining enough while providing some sort of rational connection to the specific charges to keep the court from simply shutting off their microphones. During the prosecution, Saddam and his team could just be disruptive. Now they have to say something substantive other than the already-tired mantra that Saddam remains Iraq's president, a moot point for everyone else but the erstwhile dictator.

If Saddam does pursue this strategy, it will likely increase the Western media interest in this case by an order of magnitude. Given the rare opportunity to watch a formerly oppressed people put their former dictator on trial in a fair and equitable legal proceeding, the Western media has mostly yawned. It has failed to report on the witnesses and documentary evidence that has damned Saddam for his role in murders, tortures, and genocide. However, if Saddam starts talking about Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney in derogatory terms, they will be there to record every syllable for posterity.

Behind The USA Today Poll

Two major polls attempted to take the temperature of the American electorate in the immediate aftermath of the revelation of NSA data-mining through billions of phone call records. The Washington Post reported that 63% of all Americans did not mind that the telephone carriers, excepting Qwest, had voluntarily given those records to the NSA. Almost in the same time frame, a USA Today/Gallup poll showed a bare majority against it -- but even that poll had contradictory internal information:

A majority of Americans disapprove of a massive Pentagon database containing the records of billions of phone calls made by ordinary citizens, according to a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll. About two-thirds are concerned that the program may signal other, not-yet-disclosed efforts to gather information on the general public.

The survey of 809 adults Friday and Saturday shows a nation wrestling with the balance between fighting terrorism and protecting civil liberties.

By 51%-43%, those polled disapprove of the program, disclosed Thursday in USA TODAY. The National Security Agency has been collecting phone records from three of the nation's largest telecommunication companies since soon after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

When looking at the raw data, the first item that causes a raised eyebrow is that over a third of the people polled either have not followed the issue closely or even at all. That eliminates almost 300 of the 809 people surveyed from the sample, and it also gives a pretty good indicator that the story may not be as explosive as people would like to think. A third of Americans don't even care about it. What does that tell us?

The next odd item is the polling on the Bush admnistration's effort to balance civil liberties with the pursuit of terrorists. A majority believe that either the Bush administration has balanced it properly -- or that it hasn't gone far enough in fighting the terrorists (34% and 19%, respectively). Forty-one percent feel that the White House has gone too far, up from 38% in January, but within the margin of error.

Then we have the strange split among the naysayers. While 51% of the sample disapprove of the program, 34% of those (17% overall) believe that the program would be acceptable under some circumstances. Only 31% overall believe that the creation of a phone database by the NSA would never be acceptable under any circumstances, which tends to agree with the Post polling. That trend continues with 64% expressing little or no concern about whether the federal government has their telephone records.

In other words, the public has a great deal of ambivalence in their initial reaction to this program, and while they don't necessarily like it, it isn't keeping them awake at night. From these results, it appears most Americans don't really have too much of a problem with data mining on telephone calls as long as the conditions are right; I suspect most of them would like to see more Congressional oversight on such a program (two-thirds support hearings on the subject), but the actual number of absolutists in opposition is about one-third.

The true polling will come in the next week or so, when people have had more opportunity to learn about the particulars of the program and its usefulness in national security. The polling taken thus far has not allowed enough time to pass, which can be clearly seen from the muddy and contradictory results, not only between the two polls but even within this one.

UPDATE: Dafydd at Big Lizardsnotes the key difference between the ABC/WaPo poll and the two conducted by Newsweek and USA Today -- the fact that the former explained the purpose of the data collection in the question. Here's the question asked by the ABC/WaPo poll:

It's been reported that the National Security Agency has been collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans. It then analyzes calling patterns in an effort to identify possible terrorism suspects, without listening to or recording the conversations. Would you consider this an acceptable or unacceptable way for the federal government to investigate terrorism? Do you feel that way strongly or somewhat?

USA Today asked this:

As you may know, as part of its efforts to investigate terrorism, a federal government agency obtained records from three of the largest U.S. telephone companies in order to create a database of billions of telephone numbers dialed by Americans. How closely have you been following the news about this?

Based on what you have heard or read about this program to collect phone records, would you say you approve or disapprove of this government program?

Especially when a third of the sample has not followed the story much or at all, giving a full explanation makes a great deal of difference.

Michael Yon Interview

I had the distinct pleasure of interviewing intrepid independent journalist Michael Yon, back in the US after another tour of Iraq and a short stint in Afghanistan. I had hoped to catch Michael a couple of weeks ago, but the timing never worked out quite right -- and we almost missed each other tonight by accident when we had some confusion due to time zone differences. Fortunately, we made our connection and we spoke for about a half-hour earlier this evening.

I've podcasted our interview in three parts. In section 1, Michael and I discuss his impressions of Afghanistan. Michael only spent about a fortnight in Afghanistan, operating completely on his own, without embedding among US or Western forces. He had little good news for us about his limited experience there. The nation still operates on a tribal basis, only now the poppy harvest has hit record numbers, which fuels a booming drug trade. Michael never got to talk to the central government, but from what he did see the Karzai government has a lot to chew. He also reports that the Western forces there are seriously undermanned but fighting magnificently, especially the Canadians at the moment.

Michael has a much more optimistic view about Iraq, which he discusses in section 2. He says that the Iraqi security forces have done a tremendous job in standing up, although he believes that the US will need to have some forces there for years. The death tolls are still very high among the Iraqis, but they appear much more cohesive as a nation than the Afghans. He feels that the nation has a chance to unify and establish a stable democracy in the Middle East, and that most of the remaining problem revolves around Baghdad and its environs.

However, Michael stands by his characterization of the situation as a civil war, which has led to problems with a few conservative media voices, a problem we discuss in section 3. He doesn't spend his time worrying about it, however, preferring to focus on telling the story as he sees it and letting the chips fall where they may. We discuss the impact that blogging has had on the mainstream media, and we also mention Howard Kurtz as one of the most insightful media critics regarding the blogosphere.

Michael will go to work on a book which he hopes to finish soon, and after that may go back to doing what he does best. I hope you enjoy the interview as much as I did conducting it.

The RSS feed for CQ podcasts can be found here.

One Sick Child Away From Being Fired

Ruth Marcus looks at an issue for mothers in the workplace that often gets little coverage from the media. With media conglomerates aiming for prized demographics, usually any discussion of workplace challenges for mothers revolve around high-powered executives hitting glass ceilings as they attempt to balance family and career concerns. For most working women, that dilemma would represent a slice of heaven, for more often they worry about keeping their jobs at all when family emergencies hit:

As the author, law professor Joan C. Williams, writes, "The media tend to cover work/family conflict as the story of professional mothers 'opting out' of fast-track careers" -- an "overly autobiographical approach" that, however unintentionally, misrepresents the full nature of the problem and skews the discussion of potential solutions.

Guilty as charged.

Williams studied almost 100 union arbitrations that, she writes, "provide a unique window into how work and family responsibilities clash in the lives of bus drivers, telephone workers, construction linemen, nurse's aides, carpenters, welders, janitors and others." Many are mothers, but this is not just a female problem. Divorced fathers, and families that patch together tag-team care, with parents working different shifts, are similarly vulnerable. Indeed, nearly everyone is a potential victim of child-care plans gone awry: Among working-class couples, only 16 percent have families in which one parent is the breadwinner and the other stays home.

The stories Williams relates are foreign to those of us lucky enough to have flexible jobs and understanding bosses -- for whom it's no big deal to step out in the middle of the day to go to the school play.

Marcus writes about the almost implacable tension between employee and employer when a child suddenly takes ill. ven when the issue doesn't involve potential death or serious injury, sick children need attention, and usually that falls to the mother (although Cohen recognizes this as a problem for working-class fathers as well). Ideally, businesses would have plenty of spare capacity with which to absorb an infrequent absence, late arrival, or early departure, but in today's business climate, it's impossible. Employees who have these issues on a frequent basis risk losing their jobs.

While this is a real problem for some employees and employers, Marcus' proposed solution will not resolve them. She wants the government to expand the Family and Medical Leave Act to cover spot absences and short shifts instead of the longer-range leaves it requires employers to give. That, unfortunately, will not work, primarily because it forces employers to abandon any reasonable expectation of attendance. For most companies, especially publicly-traded firms, each department has an approved head count with a budget for salaries. Employers calculate the salary budgets based on necessary labor and account for vacation, personal days, and sick leave, the latter by considering the attendance policy of the company.

Excessive absences either mean that work does not get peformed or more resources must be applied to meet production expectations. In the example she uses, a school bus driver who keeps showing up late for any reason will eventually force the school to hire an extra driver in order to make sure the children get to school on time for their classes (and that they're not forced to wait at bus stops for too long, a potential security risk). Flex scheduling can help mitigate this, but in the end the budgeted resources have to cover the production expectations -- and when more resources are required, then stock values drop and new management gets hired to address the root causes.

Another problem that arises from this approach is the fairness issue. It is forbidden to discriminate in the workplace based on family composition. How, then, does one create a two-tiered attendance policy, one for parents and one for non-parents, that works fairly for all employees? It's impossible. It creates an inequality that is just as unfair as if employers promoted people without children in order to avoid the complications they bring to the workforce. If a manager terminates an employee who has no children for having five unexcused absences while employees with children have significantly more missing days and receive no disciplinary action, that system is unfair to single employees with no children.

However, in practice, most employers and employees do reach accommodations on these issues. If an employee has an otherwise acceptable attendance record but has had a couple of spot issues, few employers would create problems for that employee. In today's labor market, hanging on to trained employees is enough of a challenge without creating artificial turnover. Employers spend a lot of money making their workplace more attractive and flexible to lower turnover rates; they do not look to chase them out the door.

In fact, one item about Cohen's article struck me as key. Ms. Williams relied on union arbitrations to develop her argument. In organized labor forces, this dynamic becomes much more understandable. Employers with union workforces do not have the luxury of treating individual employees uniquely based on personal situations. Their hiring and termination practices are fixed by contract. If an employer declines to pursue disciplinary action for absenteeism on one employee, regardless of mitigating circumstances, it will impact their ability to discipline all of their employees for attendance problems. The problem in the sample that Williams uses for her thesis is the inflexibility of the union structure, not necessarily the employer.

So what are parents to do? The simple answer would be to recast their expectations of work and salary. They should pursue opportunities for flex shifts or, where both spouses work, that their schedules allow for one parent to always be available for the children. Night shifts exist in many industries, and sometimes pay better as companies will often give a bonus for non-daytime hours. Outside intervention in the workplace only exacerbates the problem, as with union contracting, and leads to more inflexibility rather than relieving it.

UPDATE: I'm embarrassed; I got Ruth Marcus' name incorrect. I called her Ruth Cohen. Ruth sent me a kind note reminding me of what I should have gleaned from the article itself. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

Saddam Was Into RVs (Updated And Bumped)

Joseph Shahda has uncovered another document of interest from the files of intelligence captured by US forces during the fall of Saddam Hussein. This document addresses a still-controversial topic -- the mobile laboratories cited by Colin Powell as one of Saddam's WMD capabilities and discovered during the 2003 invasion. Later investigators determined these trailers to be hydrogen-gas production facilities although some experts still dispute that conclusion.

The document translated by Shahda does not provide many details itself, but does show that the project for which the labs were built attracted high-level interest for equipment supposedly only suitable for meteorological research:

Beginning of the translation of page 1

In the name of God the Most Merciful the Most Compassionate

Presidency of the Republic

Military Industrialization Commission

Ibn Rushd General Company

Number 10025611018

Date 11/11/2002

To: Military Industrialization Commission/Department of Projects

Subject: Investment Plan for the year 2003

In regards from the letter singed with you on 12/10/2002 regarding our company investment plan to the year mentioned above, included is the technical report according to the letter showing its details below:

1. Develop and enlarge existing laboratories, 178,000,000 Dinars

2. Prepare MOBILE LABORATORIES , In Iraqi Dinar 128,413,00 + 273,445 Euros with 10 Dinar/Euro, 27,344,500, 155,757,500 Dinars.

Total 333,757,500 Dinars

Remark: The cost of the vehicles related to the Mobile Laboratories is not determined yet.

Please review and do what is necessary… with regards

Attachements:

1.Table fof quantity+ The plan related of developing the Laboratories

2.

Signature…

Noor Al Din Abed Al Hadi

The General Director

11/11/2002

End of translation of page 1

Partial translation of page 2

Table of electrical equipments and devices of the Mobile Laboratory

Partial translation of page 3

Table of electrical equipments and devices of the Mobile Laboratory

Measurement device for the speed of vibration

Measurement device for the speed of rotation

Ultrasonic wave test device

Different pressure measurement devices

Mobile testing device for metals

X-Ray testing device

20 Kilovolt electric generator

End of partial translation of page 3

Nothing in this document says anything explicit about chemical or biological weapons. However, some disquieting indicators exist that tend to argue against the weather-balloon explanation we have so far heard about the trailers. First and foremost, the Military Industrialization Committee was not just an ordinary procurement board for the Saddam regime. It had primary responsibility for the Iraqi WMD program before the Gulf War, and presumably afterwards as well. Its director, Abdul Tawab el-Mullah Howeish held the position of Deputy Prime Minister, a Cabinet-level position.

Global Security explains:

Iraq Television reported on 4 May 2002 that Saddam Husseyn had chaired a meeting where he listened to briefings by "joint working teams" on unspecified scientific and technical questions. Iraqi TV broadcast the news in an unscheduled summary. Saddam was reported to have commended the efforts of the teams. He was quoted as saying: "My assessment of you is always 100 percent. My assessment of you as people, commanders, and fighters, is also 100 percent. Therefore we will defeat the enemy. This is our determination and confidence in our battle. Rely on God." The meeting was also attended by Saddam's second son, Qusay, described as member of the Iraq Command of the Arab Socialist Baath Party and supervisor of the Republican Guard. Others attending were: Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Military Industrialization Abdul-Tawwab Huwaish, Defense Minister Staff-General Sultan Hashim Ahmad, Minister of Industry and Minerals Muyassar Raja Salah, and director of the Atomic Energy Commission, Dr. Fadil al-Janabi. The commander of the air force, the commander of air defense, the dean of the Military Engineering College, the vice chairman of the Military Industrialization Organization, and "a large number of fighters, researchers, and technicians in various specialities were also there.

That meeting took place six months before this order for the manufacture and delivery of these laboratories, ordered by the ministry in charge of WMD and at the same time that the US had demanded action against Saddam Hussein for his defiance of sixteen previous resolutions for disarming and accounting for his previously-held WMD. The order itself seems out of place for a country preparing for a military invasion on the scale promised by the US. Why would the Iraqi military need to create hydrogen for weather balloons in the middle of an invasion?

If that looks strange, then the components of the labs look even more odd. Hydrogen production should not require precise measurements for rotation and vibration or an X-ray tester. It seems even more odd when the cost of these laboratories is considered. In the first place, this order actually refers to both mobile and fixed laboratories, demanding that 178 million Iraqi dinars get spent on enlarging the existing fixed facilities. It then orders the purchase of the mobile laboratories at a cost of 333 million dinars. At the exchange rate set by Saddam, that would have equaled about $1 billion in US dollars. However, the memo appears to acknowledge economic reality by showing an exchange rate of 10 dinar per Euro, which at the time traded close to the US dollar. That puts the mobile labs ordered by the agency responsible for WMD efforts at around $33 million dollars.

That seems like a lot of money for hydrogen production, especially for a nation preparing for a full-scale military invasion. Something is full of hot air, and it doesn't appear to be Iraqi weather balloons. (h/t: CQ reader Jeff R.)

UPDATE AND BUMP: The comments section has interesting input from CQ readers. Mike O has some practical experience in biological work:

I spent 8 years growing Bacillus subtilis in deep tank culture and can attest that those mobile systems could have been- and probably were- used to growl Bacillus anthraces, the anthrax oraganism. While most systems would use filtration and/or incinerators on the exhaust system, a compression system would have the advantage of eliminating near-site detection (no smell of fermentation).

Hydrogen is generally produced via anaerobic processes, so the oxygen tanks would be unnecessary. The nitrogen and the chiller both could be used to enhance final sporulation, since the spores are the stable form that can be weaponized.

Professor Dave has a perspective on the conventional explanation for these mobile systems:

Generating H2 on site can be done. It was the customary way to get the H2 for balloons for a century or so. However, I'd surprised if anyone does it that way today. Today it is much easier to just fill a pressure cylinder from a H2 plant and transport the cylinder. It strikes me as pretty lame to suggest that H2 isn't available in a country that has a substantial petroleum industry. H2 is used in refineries in huge quantities. The amount needed for weather balloons wouldn't even be as much as the leaks in a refinery.

The Iraqi oil industry still continued to operate under sanctions; in fact, Saddam used it to generate billions of dollars for his own use. If hydrogen is as plentiful a byproduct of refining as Professor Dave indicates, which this seems to support, then it is hard to imagine that Iraq needed on-site hydrogen generation with its associated expense and danger.

Perhaps these labs had some benign purpose, but hydrogen production doesn't make much sense. Nor does having your military spend $33 million on the purchase of civilian mobile laboratories while the world's remaining superpower is signaling that it will invade your country.

UPDATE II, 7/8/06: The $33 million combined the two line items. That is a questionable assumption, as the second line item specifically calls out the mobile labs, while the first appears to specify existing fixed labs. I'd feel more comfortable saying that the Iraqis allocated $15.5 million for the mobile labs. The question then becomes how many they expected to produce under this plan. We found two, which implies that each trailer cost over $7.5 million. Other documents released this week indicate that they may have planned for as many as seven, which would put the cost at well over $2 million -- still extremely expensive for mobile hydrogen generation.

Air Force Investigating Alternative Fuels

The New York Times has an interesting report on an effort by the US military to develop alternate fuel sources for the Air Force. The branch spends almost $5 billion a year on fuel and has the most vulnerability to price swings. Developing a safe and effective alternative could allow the military to decrease its dependence on crude oil, and one of the leading candidates for its replacement can be found in abundance in the US:

When an F-16 lights up its afterburners, it consumes nearly 28 gallons of fuel per minute. No wonder, then, that of all the fuel the United States government uses each year, the Air Force accounts for more than half. The Air Force may not be in any danger of suffering inconveniences from scarce or expensive fuel, but it has begun looking for a way to power its jets on something besides conventional fuel.

In a series of tests — first on engines mounted on blocks and then with B-52's in flight — the Air Force will try to prove that the American military can fly its aircraft by blending traditional crude-oil-based jet fuel with a synthetic liquid made first from natural gas and, eventually, from coal, which is plentiful and cheaper. ...

The United States is unlikely ever to become fully independent of foreign oil, Mr. Aimone said, but the intent of the Air Force project is "to develop enough independence to have assured domestic supplies for aviation purposes."

Part of the strategic importance of the Middle East comes from the fuel which powers our defense systems, especially the Navy and the Air Force. This concern goes all the way back to World War I, when Winston Churchill foresaw the critical nature of controlling Arabia after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Adolf Hitler invaded Russia in large part for the oil-rich regions of the Caucasus, and fought within sight of them at Stalingrad before his line collapsed and started moving slowly backward. The Nazi war machine fought the rest of the war on increasingly restricted fuel supplies, especially after Russia overran Romania. As more nations become industrialized, the demand for energy grows, and it puts pressure on the supply chain that keeps our ships and planes in operation.

It makes sense that the Pentagon would take the lead on developing new sources of energy to guarantee our long-range security. The military already has made extensive use of nuclear power for its warships, especially the submarine fleet, for both efficiency and stealth. Diesel engines made one hell of a racket under water, but nuclear generators make no noise at all, allowing our sub fleet (especially "boomers" or missile subs) to patrol in hostile waters without incident. Now the pressure of oil markets may well be the mother of invention for a reduction on the reliance of foreign supplies, a vulnerability that has gone unaddressed for too long.

Right now, the process being tested (pioneered by Syntroleum) uses natural gas. It takes 10,000 cubic feet to produce 42 gallons of synthetic fuel at a cost of $70 for the raw materials. That may be too expensive for a serious replacement on a large scale, and relies on domestic drilling for natural gas, which has its own political limitations. However, Syntroleum has a new process in mind for its fuel development which uses coal rather than natural gas -- and the cost of that process in raw materials drops to $10 for the same 42 gallons.

Syntroleum's president, John B. Holmes, notes that the US has a rich supply of coal and that mining costs are minimal compared to drilling and exploration needed for domestic production. However, one point not addressed by the Times or by Holmes in this article is the environmental impact of such mining and the difficulty in getting permission for it. Such activity would likely get the same hysterical reaction from the same environmental groups which have cut off domestic drilling for decades. Another consideration would be emissions from the new refineries needed to produce this coal-based fuel. The Times does not mention whether the new facilities would have similar problems that plagued older coal-based electrical production plants, or whether the new technology would eliminate pollution concerns.

That's a shame, because Syntroleum does address it on their website, at least in brief:

At Syntroleum, we are committed to producing ultra-clean fuels that provide a net benefit to the environment. Sulfur, sub-quality gas reserves and other pollutants that are known to damage the Earth’s atmosphere and environment are virtually absent in the Syntroleum process.

Instead, the ultra-clean fossil fuels that are produced by Syntroleum can be used in fuel cells and internal combustible engines for automobiles, buses and planes without creating damage to our environment. Studies have shown that Fischer-Tropsch (FT) diesel fuels with the attributes found in Syntroleum diesel fuel reduce emissions and help optimize diesel-engine performance. Syntroleum diesel is free of contaminants, including sulfur, aromatics and heavy metals and demonstrates high operating efficiency.

It appears that the Pentagon may lead the nation in working towards energy independence and cleaner technology. Future environmentalists may wind up thanking Donald Rumsfeld, who ordered research in this program during his tenure as Secretary of Defense. And to its credit, the Times mentions that directive in its story.

UPDATE: Casey from The Gantry sent me this correction via e-mail:

The reason the nuke subs are called "boomers" is that they are noisy. It's all the cooling systems needed for a nuclear power plant stuck into a big tube. You can't avoid the noise.

While older diesel subs may by noisy, the later generation diesel-electric subs are quite silent, as they can run on electric-only for respectable periods of time. In fact they're superior to nukes in littoral (near coastline) conditions. The Australian navy has managed to embarass our Yank boomers several times in war games while using modern diesel-electrics.

I'm glad to hear we're learning lessons from the Australians, as opposed to more hostile nations under less pleasant circumstances. I'm also thankful for Casey's correction.

UPDATE II: A number of my commenters are now remarking that I was correct about the subs in the first place and that Casey was incorrect. Be sure to read all the way through it. I had been fairly certain that the boomers operated with the highest degree of silence; I know that they wargame on stealth constantly.

Democrats To Attack Right Flank On Immigration

A short report by Dan Balz in today's Washington Post gives a warning to the Republicans about the likely battle over immigration should Congress fail to pass reform legislation in this session. Democratic centrists plan to argue that the Bush administration has failed to enforce existing immigration laws in an effort to peel hard-line immigration conservatives away from the GOP:

A new analysis by the centrist Democratic group Third Way concludes that the administration has failed to enforce existing laws and that the president should be held accountable for those failures in the political debate now raging in Washington.

"The report shows that the administration, despite their tough talk, is failing at border security and enforcing the employer sanctions provision," New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson said. "It makes them vulnerable in what is their biggest and strongest argument -- that they are enforcing the law against illegal workers and are effective on border security."

According to the report, federal data show that the number of agents more than doubled between 1995 and 2005, but that border apprehensions have fallen about 31 percent. From fiscal 1996 to fiscal 2000, apprehensions averaged 1.52 million a year. The number fell to an average of 1.05 million from fiscal 2001 to fiscal 2004.

Away from the border, a similar pattern has occurred, with apprehensions falling an estimated 36 percent. "This decline trend and low overall total suggests that illegal immigrants who escape beyond the border are more or less here to stay if they choose," according to the report.

The group also plans to highlight the poor track record of the White House in prosecuting offending businesses which hire illegal aliens. Balz gives no numbers, but ICE has a list of prosecutions it has conducted since the agency's inception. It discusses twelve cases spanning the three years of its operation, hardly a robust record in hiring enforcement.

It would appear that the Republicans have no small vulnerability in this regard, a point made repeatedly by conservative immigration critics over the past few years. However, it would appear even more ridiculous for the Democrats to insist that they would improve the situation. Their party leadership has fervently opposed border security reform, and most of them have argued for a complete general amnesty to match that of the notorious Simpson-Mazzoli bill that got us where we are today. Their last presidential candidate, John Kerry, argued for amnesty, and his partner from Massachussetts, Ted Kennedy, appeared at illegal-immigration rallies to support their opposition to border enforcement. While some Republicans have turned themselves into squishes on this topic, chiefly John McCain, the Democrats have actively courted illegal aliens.

Only the truly benighted would ever believe that the Democrats would crack down on border security and start massive roundups of illegal immigrants. The Third Way has a good point about immigration enforcement over the past five years, but their proposed solution amounts to total surrender rather than a renewed effort at enforcing the law.

Northern Ireland Slowly Returns To Home Rule

The Stormont will meet for the first time in four years Monday, restarting the bitterness-plagued home rule project in Northern Ireland. In what appears to be an unintentionally symbolic start, no business will be conducted for the first week. Instead, the assembly will spend its time trying to generate enough consensus to form an executive, a goal that the Stormont appears unlikely to achieve:

The Northern Ireland Assembly will sit on Monday for the first time since it was suspended in 2002 following allegations of a republican spy ring operating at the parliamentary buildings in Belfast.

The London and Dublin governments are hoping the province's Catholic and Protestant political parties can resolve their differences between now and November 24 to restore the power-sharing administration.

But the 108 members of what critics say is a "powerless" legislature will not be deluged in paperwork when they return to the Stormont debating chamber in Belfast's eastern outreaches. ... Instead, they will officially declare their allegiances in a register as either "unionist" -- for continued union with the United Kingdom -- "nationalist" -- pro-unification with the Irish Republic -- or "other". ...

But the first real political business does not come until May 22, when attempts will be made by both sides to form a power-sharing government. Yet that has been written-off as a non-starter already.

Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein and an acknowledged former commander in the IRA made a surprising and bold move to kick-start home rule. He proposed that Ian Paisley, his bitter enemy for decades, take the position of first minister in the new executive as a potential breakthrough. Paisley's DUP refuses to share power with Sinn Fein, and true to form, Paisley rejected the offer outright. It does not make for a propitious start to home rule.

In a way, the problem in Northern Ireland is similar to that of the Palestinian Authority. The people of the province seem determined to elect people with ties to terrorism, although not quite as baldly as the Palestinians did. It makes it difficult for anyone to have credibility in the new assembly and equally difficult for the two sides to negotiate in peace. The Good Friday agreement, much like the Oslo Accord, tried to give terrorists the respectability of true freedom fighters -- those who do not attack defenseless civilians for political gain, but instead either attack the government that oppresses them or their paramilitary enemies directly.

Is it any wonder that terrorism has gained such a foothold after well-intentioned efforts such as Oslo and Good Friday? We get more of what we reward, and in both cases we rewarded factions for having become the most successful terrorists over a period of decades. Again, with Oslo, terrorists received their rewards more directly, but no one can pretend that the political parties of the Stormont have not risen to power on the basis of terrorism.

When the people reject terrorists and elect statesmen, that is when peace will come. That applies to Ulster just as much as it does to the West Bank. The only difference between the two is the temperature of the electorate. Northern Ireland has a much better opportunity to look beyond the old choices and find new leadership without bloody hands -- leadership that can reach beyond factionalism to truly represent the Irish in Ulster, whatever vision they choose. Hopefully, the new Stormont assembly can stay together long enough for an election that will generate such leadership.

Mark Kennedy: No Pay For Campaigning

With Mark Kennedy polling within the margin of error against Amy Klobuchar for Mark Dayton's open Senate seat, the Congressman wants to start differentiating himself from the Hennepin County District Attorney. He got his wish yesterday when he pledged to refuse his Congressional salary while campaigning, a promise that Klobuchar's campaign scornfully refused to match:

U.S. Rep. Mark Kennedy said Friday that he would not accept his congressional pay on days he misses votes in Washington because of his U.S. Senate campaign.

Kennedy, the Republican candidate for the seat being vacated by Democrat Mark Dayton, was one of only nine U.S. House members not to miss any congressional votes in 2005. But Kennedy said the demands of the Senate race could force a few missed votes this year. ...

Klobuchar's campaign manager, Ben Goldfarb, criticized Kennedy's move as a "phony gimmick" and said the campaign wouldn't respond further. He did say Klobuchar continues to draw her full salary.

One of the (many) causes for political cynicism is the endless electoral cycle, especially for Congress, in which it takes two years of fundraising and electoral activities to get re-elected. It promotes a culture of disregard for the job to some extent, as the representatives make politicking a higher priority in some cases than attending Congress and casting votes. Only nine House members made themselves present for every vote in 2005 -- out of four hundred and thirty-five representatives. That puts Kennedy in the top two percent of those who took their job most seriously.

Klobuchar, who has not yet sewed up the nomination but should have little trouble dispatching veterinarian Ford Bell, does not seem to take the issue as seriously. While most politicians do not follow Kennedy's pledge during their political campaigns, it seems a refreshing idea, and one has to wonder why Klobuchar's campaign feels so strongly against it. It will not save the federal deficit or lead to further economic prosperity if Kennedy has to zero out a few days on his timesheet, of course; in the grand scheme of the federal budget, it will make no more than a butterfly-wing impact. However, it does address an attitude of entitlement from our political class, an attitude that members of both parties demonstrate when it comes to pork projects and their reaction to citizen oversight on their spending.

Kennedy wants to show that he has a different attitude towards public service. Thus far, Klobuchar has shown the attitude of entitlement, that she should get paid for taking time off to pursue another job. It's not illegal nor (under present rules) unethical. Members of both parties do it all the time. Kennedy, however, will not, giving Minnesotans an interesting read on the character of both candidates.