May 12, 2007
Should Candidates Release Their Tax Returns?
Ever since Watergate, presidential candidates have released their tax records in order to show that they have nothing to hide. Only one major candidate refused to do so in the last twenty years, and Bill Clinton changed his mind for his re-election bid in 1996. This year, however, it looks like anyone releasing that information will be the exception rather than the rule (via Instapundit):
In a break with the tradition of recent presidential campaigns, most of the major presidential candidates aren't releasing their income-tax filings.Edwards has indicated that he will keep his tax returns private, and while Romney is still considering his options, he has never released his returns in previous runs for office.
Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., aren't saying whether they will or not, but neither has released income tax forms filed this year.
That means voters are likely to know less about the income sources, personal wealth and charitable inclinations of the presidential candidates than in any election in the past generation.
"When you run for president, you really have to open yourself up to the American people," said Mary Boyle, a spokeswoman for Common Cause, a government watchdog group. "If you're asking voters of this country to elect you as president, it's reasonable and rational that your tax returns are made public."
It almost sounds as though the campaigns may be colluding to end this recent tradition of openness. One might expect one or two candidates to take this position, but in a 20-candidate field comprising both parties, the sudden shift towards privacy seems rather suspicious. Just the competitive nature of the contest by itself would tend to incentivize a few of the candidates to disclose in order to claim an advantage over the others.
Beyond that, though, no one has made a compelling case for these releases. Common Cause may claim that releasing the returns are "reasonable" for presidential candidates, but what do they really tell us? They may give some insight into charitable contributions and a voyeuristic look into the income streams of the rich and famous, but they tell us little about the policies favored by the candidates. Offhand, I cannot think of a single major revelation about a candidate that came from the released tax returns that had an impact on an election.
Personal income had been considered a private affair before Watergate. After that scandal, which had nothing to do with tax evasion, candidates seized on the release of their 1040s as some sort of honesty test. It might be time to recognize that private income should remain private, and that tax returns give us little germane data about the candidates.
Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes
Quite a few people have noticed that some changes have been made behind the scenes today at Captain's Quarters. It's been a long couple of weeks, and it resulted in a change in hosting services that supports CQ. Most of this has been transparent, but as some noticed today, it resulted in difficulties in commenting on the threads I posted.
I have been with the same hosting service for over three years, and I didn't really want to move. However, I had a number of problems posting over the last two weeks, and when I asked for assistance, I was told that they considered me a problem for their other customers. I asked several times for assistance in helping to solve problems with runaway processes, but was told that they had other customers to service. Over the years they had been supportive and generous with me, but this kind of attitude began creeping into their support a few months back -- when they told me they had no intention of fixing their server-side statistics program, which hasn't consistently produced any stats for over a year -- and got much worse with the latest problems.
Yesterday I began the long and laborious process of moving the blog lock, stock, and barrel to Pair Networks. It took hours just to get the data from almost four years of blogging and more hours after that to get it uploaded to my new hosts. My old hosting service courteously processed my request to redirect my domains to the new nameservers; in fact, halfway through the process, they had informed me that they wanted to move account to a new server for better performance. I had already made my decision, but if they had offered that a week earlier -- or even just treated me as a customer rather than a problem -- I would have been happy to stay.
During that time, every post I wrote had to be posted at both sites. That means any comments entered in the system between yesterday evening and this afternoon have probably been lost, but there was no way around that. Even while I did the NARN show this afternoon, the new nameserver had not yet propagated to most DNS servers. Now it appears that it has, and both my e-mail and your commenting should be back to normal.
Thank you for your patience, and hopefully this will ensure a smoother ride in the future.
When Sports Analogies Attack!
If politicians insist on using sports analogies, they should at least tailor them for the audience they intend to impress. Unfortunately, Sam Brownback may have learned that lesson the hard way today. The presidential aspirant from Kansas called an Indiana quarterback the best ever in front of a Wisconsin crowd, and got booed as a result:
Note to Sen. Sam Brownback: When in Packerland, don’t diss Brett Favre.The Kansas Republican drew boos and groans from the audience at the state Republican Party convention Friday evening when he used a football analogy to talk about the need to rebuild the family.
“This is fundamental blocking and tackling,” he said. “This is your line in football. If you don’t have a line, how many passes can Peyton Manning complete? Greatest quarterback, maybe, in NFL history.”
How did Brownback manage to get this one wrong? I'd bet that at least 10% of his audience showed up in green and yellow. If this is a written bit, it might be a good idea if his staff took regional considerations into the punchlines.
When he tried to recover, he showed his age by reaching back to Bart Starr instead of immediately thinking of Brett Favre. Even Starr didn't go over well with the crowd -- and probably most of them never saw Starr play. He finally did the wise thing and gave up on the analogy, with some charming self-deprecation and an apology as an escape.
Sports analogies are at best tolerable. Men consider them cliched, and women just roll their eyes. They don't tend to illuminate the point, and in this case -- equating the offensive line in football to the family -- was a pretty large stretch. When the person using the analogy then decides to start talking about the best player at a position, the focus quickly slips from policy to a tiresome argument over the merits of statistics, championships, and so on.
Stay away from the sports analogies. It's like sending your fastest receiver streaking into Cover-2 and not picking up the ... well, you see how seductive it can be.
It Didn't Stop With Lileks
When nationally-known columnist and blogger James Lileks revealed that the Star Tribune had axed his column and assigned him to local news, we wondered what the Strib could be thinking. After all, the new management has a failing newspaper on its hands, and instead of using one of its most valuable assets to improve their situation, they buried Lileks in an assignment which makes no use of his national standing.
At the time, we thought that the Strib might be pushing Lileks out because of his connections to the conservative blogosphere. Now, though, it looks much more like a case of complete managerial incompetence, because the new editors have most of the Strib's reporters playing musical chairs:
As many as 100 newsroom staffers at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis may be taken off their current beats and forced to apply for new assignments when a week-long shake-up is finished, according to a guild official who called the overhaul "the worst ever" situation for employees in her 19 years there."I've never seen anything as sad as this," said Pam Miller, secretary of the local Newspaper Guild, and the paper's religion writer. "It is being handled without attention to individuals or their talents. People are coming out sobbing."
Editors have been calling in those affected to inform them since Tuesday, Miller said. "They are being told 'what you do now, you won't be able to do anymore'," Miller said. "Either the beat is going away, or they won't be doing it." ...
"It is quite unbelievable," said Doug Smith, a 20-year Star Tribune employee who has been an outdoor writer for 11 years, but was told his beat had been dropped. "The job was basically eliminated. I will have the chance to apply for other reporting or editing jobs, but it is not real pleasant."
At least James wasn't crying, but in all fairness, James has more options than most of the staff.
The wholesale reassignment sounds as foolish as one can get. It sounds like someone read a book that talked about how good cross-training can be for an organization, but that overlooks the fact that the paper has to get the news published. The best people to cover stories for the paper are people who have built expertise in the topics involved. The Strib will not improve by eliminating beats like Outdoors -- in a state where people love outdoor activities -- or by transferring them to less-knowledgeable but cheaper reporters.
We are seeing the last throes of a major metropolitan newspaper. This plan will almost guarantee that the quality of news reporting will follow the same trajectory as its editorial writing.
Another University Exception To Free Speech
If Hamline University used the Soviet method to silence conservative Troy Scheffler last month, Tufts University must have decided to use a softer means to squelch dissent on its campus. Instead of declaring the editors of a conservative newspaper insane, they declared their criticism of Islam "harassment" and treated them like criminals. And as in the Scheffler case, the university apparently didn't like criticism of diversity programs, either:
Showing profound disregard for free speech and freedom of the press, Tufts University has found a conservative student publication guilty of harassment and creating a hostile environment for publishing political satire. Despite explicitly promising to protect controversial and offensive expression in its policies, the Tufts Committee on Student Life decided yesterday to punish the student publication The Primary Source (TPS) for printing two articles that offended African-American and Muslim students on campus. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which has spearheaded the defense of TPS, is now launching a public campaign to oppose Tufts’ outrageous actions.“We now know that Tufts’ promises of free expression are hollow,” FIRE President Greg Lukianoff said. “By punishing political expression—the type of expression at the very core of the right to free speech—Tufts has shown that, in spite of its promises, it has no regard for its students’ fundamental rights. Such hypocrisy must not go unchallenged.”
Last December, TPS published a satirical Christmas carol entitled “Oh Come All Ye Black Folk.” Although TPS runs a Christmas carol parody every year, December’s carol sparked controversy on campus because it harshly lampooned race-based admissions. Realizing that the carol offended large portions of the Tufts community, TPS published an apology on December 6, 2006. Four months later, however, a student filed charges alleging that the carol constituted “harassment” and created a “hostile environment.” Other students filed similar charges in response to TPS’ April 11, 2007 piece entitled “Islam—Arabic Translation: Submission,” a satirical advertisement that ridiculed Tufts’ “Islamic Awareness Week” by highlighting militant Islamic terrorism.
The two complaints were consolidated for a hearing before the university’s Committee on Student Life on April 30, 2007. Yesterday, the Committee issued a decision holding that TPS had violated the university’s harassment policy by publishing the two pieces. The Committee found that the carol “targeted [black students] on the basis of their race, subjected them to ridicule and embarrassment, intimidated them, and had a deleterious impact on their growth and well-being on campus.” The Committee also held that the parody of Islamic Awareness Week “targeted members of the Tufts Muslim community for harassment and embarrassment, and that Muslim students felt psychologically intimidated by the piece.”
What the two universities have discovered is a couple of handy strategies for dealing with dissent on campus. Instead of encouraging debate and free speech, they now can stick any speech which offends their sensibilities in two categories: psychosis or harassment. Neither leaves dissenters and critics with any good defense, since in both cases, the determination is necessarily subjective -- and the universities are the final judge on both.
It's almost passé to remind people that universities exist for the purpose of considering different points of view in order to challenge assumptions and expand human knowledge. Cracking down on dissent harms that process. It tells students that they cannot question authority nor challenge any assumptions without fear of reprisal. Even in a newspaper, editorial opinions had better adhere to the administration's wisdom, or else.
Tufts' case is even more ludicrous than Hamline's. Tufts staged an "Islamic Awareness Week", the purpose of which one might suppose would be to educate people about Islam. The newspaper responded to what sounds like an administration-sponsored PR blitz on behalf of Islam, and it pointed out factual, historical data which expanded the awareness of Islam. The reaction of Tufts to this shows that they had no interest in making students aware of Islam, but to force students to support Islam.
By the way, when was the last time Tufts had a Catholic Awareness Week, or a Methodist Awareness Week? How about a Mormon Awareness Week?
I've reprinted the actual ad text in the extended entry below. You can see that, with the possible exception of the last entry about one particular Muslim, the ad made Tufts students "aware" of historical Islam. Tufts, however, does not want to educate its students, but indoctrinate them.
Lobbying Reform -- The New Argyle
Remember when lobbying reform was all the rage in Washington, and how all the best people demanded it? Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid talked about the "culture of corruption" and how they would clean up this here one-horse town, if the American people would just put them in charge of it. Now it appears that lobbying reform has the same fashion sense as grunge bands and Miami Vice pastels:
House Democrats are suddenly balking at the tough lobbying reforms they touted to voters last fall as a reason for putting them in charge of Congress.Now that they are running things, many Democrats want to keep the big campaign donations and lavish parties that lobbyists put together for them. They're also having second thoughts about having to wait an extra year before they can become high-paid lobbyists themselves should they retire or be defeated at the polls.
The growing resistance to several proposed reforms now threatens passage of a bill that once seemed on track to fulfill Democrats' campaign promise of cleaner fundraising and lobbying practices.
"The longer we wait, the weaker the bill seems to get," said Craig Holman of Public Citizen, which has pushed for the changes. "The sense of urgency is fading," he said, in part because scandals such as those involving disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff and former Rep. Duke Cunningham, R-Calif., have given way to other news.
But wait -- Nancy and Harry promised us that they would end the grip of those eeeeeevil lobbyists on Capitol Hill! How could they allow that battle to go unfought -- or worse, take up with the eeeeevil enemy?
It's simple: they like lobbyist money. All that blathering about Jack Abramoff was a smoke screen, and considering how Reid and other Democrats like Tom Harkin and Robert Kennedy were knee-deep in cash from Abramoff clients, a rather obnoxious smoke screen at that. The Democrats have just as much culpability in pork and lobbyist love as the Republicans -- and to the extent that they are big-government expansionists, even more. Federal spending is what drives lobbyist cash to politicians, and the more government spending there is to exploit, the more money the lobbyists toss around.
The party that acts to reduce government and limit its powers will be the party of true lobbyist reform. Everything else amounts to snake oil. Unfortunately, snake oil has remained in style in Washington for decades.
NARN, The Psychotic Edition
The Northern Alliance Radio Network will be on the air today, with our six-hour-long broadcast schedule starting at 11 am CT. The first two hours features Power Line's John Hinderaker and Chad and Brian from Fraters Libertas. Mitch and I hit the airwaves for the second shift from 1-3 pm CT, and King Banaian and Michael Broadkorb have The Final Word from 3-5. If you're in the Twin Cities, you can hear us on AM 1280 The Patriot, or on the station's Internet stream if you're outside of the broadcast area.
Today, Mitch and I have a couple of very interesting guests. First, we'll have Troy Scheffler in studio with us at 1:30 to discuss his sudden suspension from Hamline University for his dissident views on concealed carry and diversity programs. After that, we'll talk with Roger Rapoport, author of the book Citizen Moore. We will go over the other stories of the day as we can squeeze them into this edition, perhaps reviewing again the Democratic Party's demagoguery over oil prices or how all of us are to blame for Katie Couric's failure at CBS.
Be sure to call and join the conversation today at 651-289-4488. Just remember that we will demand psychiatric counseling and an interview prior to getting on the air if you go crazy and demand a windfall-profits tax on Hamlin University.
May 11, 2007
Light Posting On CQ
For various technical reasons, I'm unable to receive e-mail on most of my accounts at the moment, and my ability to post here will be limited for the next few hours. I'll post at Heading Right while we work out some bugs here, so be sure to check in there from time to time. I will post an update when we're back up and running.
Imminent Terrorist Attack In Germany?
ABC News reports today that American and German security agencies have gone on high alert for a terrorist attack. The target -- US military personnel or the German tourist industry:
U.S. and German officials fear terrorists are in the advanced planning stages of an attack on U.S. military personnel or tourists in Germany.Law enforcement officials tell the Blotter on ABCNews.com that U.S. air marshals have been diverted to provide expanded protection of flights between Germany and the United States.
"The information behind the threat is very real," a senior U.S. official told ABC News.
German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schauble told reporters, "The danger level is high. We are part of the global threat by Islamist terrorism."
Of particular concern, according to U.S. and German law enforcement officials, is Patch Barracks, the headquarters for U.S. European Command, near Stuttgart.
This is an unusual warning, both in its existence and its specificity. Alert levels go up occasionally, depending on the intel received, but it's rare to hear about the potential targets. This sounds like the Americans and Germans have very specific and reliable intel about a particular cell, and that they have begun to close it down. That kind of action can prompt terrorists to immediately attack when they lose up-channel communication, which may be what prompted this warning.
It could also be a false positive, a way in which terrorists can check their networks. They may be conducting a mole hunt, and the reaction could assist them in clearing their six.
Intel is a tough business, and the fact that terrorists have not been able to stage an attack on American interests outside of Iraq shows that our side has done a pretty good job. They only need to be good once, though, and hopefully this isn't the time.
UPDATE: Allahpundit notes that this is probably Ansar al-Sunna, an al-Qaeda affiliated group -- and that this warning first went out a few days ago. Not sure why ABC is repeating it now, unless it suddenly got hotter.
CQ Radio: Matt Margolis And The Caucus Of Corruption
Today on CQ Radio (2 pm CT), we'll be speaking with Matt Margolis of GOP Bloggers to discuss his newly-released look at the new Democratic Congressional majority, titled Caucus of Corruption, which I have already begun to read. It's partisan, snarky, and a lot of fun.
Be sure to join the conversation by calling 646-652-4889!
On Tuesday, May 15th, CQ Radio will welcome Major John Heil, currently serving in Iraq in the 3rd MEDCOM as Public Affairs Officer. Major Heil joins us through a partnership with DVIDS, which assists in getting the front-line information out to Americans and people all over the world. We'll have plenty more guests coming your way through DVIDS, so keep an eye on our programming.
One more note: Nader Elguindi has authored a book that details his experience in overcoming adversity and devastating physical injuries to requalify as a US Navy submariner. Titled My Decision to Live, Elguindi has directed all proceeds to benefit the Walter Reed Medical Center, where he now works as a peer counselor. I'm hoping to set up an interview with Elguindi next week, so make sure you buy the book in the meantime, and get ready to join in the conversation.
US Health Care Saves More Lives Than Socialized Medicine
A new study by the Karolinska Institute in Sweden shows that the American health care system outperforms the socialized systems in Europe in getting new medicines to cancer patients. The difference saves lives, and the existing Western European systems force people to die at higher rates from the same cancers, although the Telegraph buries that lede (via QandO):
The researchers studied Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Japan, South Africa and the US, as well as 19 European countries, with a total population of 984 million, and looked at access to 67 newer cancer drugs.They found that the proportions of female cancer patients surviving five years beyond diagnosis in France, Spain, Germany, Italy were 71 per cent, 64 per cent, 63 per cent and 63 per cent respectively. In the UK it was 53 per cent.
Among men the proportions still alive at five years in the same countries were 53 per cent, 50 per cent, 53 per cent and 48 per cent. Again in the UK it was lower at 43 per cent.
The Telegraph rightly focuses on the British system and its deficiencies. However, when one looks further into the article, the point about the American system finally surfaces:
Dr Nils Wilking, a clinical oncologist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, said: "Our report highlights that in many countries new drugs are not reaching patients quickly enough and that this is having an adverse impact on patient survival. Where you live can determine whether you receive the best available treatment or not."To some extent this is determined by economic factors, but much of the variation between countries remains unexplained. In the US we have found that the survival of cancer patients is significantly related to the introduction of new oncology drugs." ...
The proportion of colorectal cancer patients with access to the drug Avastin was 10 times higher in the US than it was in Europe, with the UK having a lower uptake than the European average.
It's funny how the supposedly equalized treatment of people under Western socialized-medicine models holds people back from new therapies and new medicines, while the American model of market-based medicine (with significant regulation) outperforms in this regard by a factor of 10. That response allows patients to start treating their cancers earlier, but what this report misses is that the American model also allows for earlier detection, thanks to the long waits for procedures like CAT scans and the like in Britain and other socialized systems.
And yet, the Democrats this year have already begun discussing how they will bring the American system closer to nationalization. Perhaps their presidential candidates should read this report first. Certainly American voters should familiarize themselves with it.
A Rare Bipartisan Success
Congress and the White House appear to have two years of bloody brawling ahead of them, a fruit of the Democratic takeover in last year's midterm elections. No one expects too many opportunities for bipartisan solutions, especially those which continue allocated executive power in significant strength. However, yesterday proved an exception to the partisan turf wars:
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), joined by congressional leaders and two Bush administration officials, announced a new bipartisan trade policy Thursday that will ease passage of pending trade agreements with Panama and Peru and could pave the way for renewal of the president's authority to "fast-track" trade agreements through Congress."Today marks a new day in trade policy," Pelosi told a news conference, standing between Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. and U.S. Trade Representative Susan C. Schwab. The new framework, she said, incorporates labor and environmental standards into trade agreements, a change that labor unions and environmental groups have demanded for years.
"Last November, Americans voted on a new direction, and that includes a new direction on trade," Pelosi said, urging open markets but also warning: "We can have a bipartisan consensus on trade, but only with a recognition of labor and environmental principles." ...
In a statement late Thursday, President Bush said he was pleased with the new policy and looked forward to a renewal of his trade promotion authority, popularly known as "fast track," which expires next month. "Fast track" gives a president the authority to speed trade agreements through Congress without amendments, only a yes or no vote.
This is not a bad compromise for either party. Fast-track treaty power is a tool that Congress allows the executive for trade negotiations, and the terms under which Congress surrenders its powers should reflect the sense of each Congress. Congress surrenders some significant tools in order for the President to have credibility in negotiations abroad, and this Congress has the right to adjust its demands accordingly.
And it does appear that actual compromise worked in this situation. The White House seemed pleased enough by the development that it issued its own celebratory press release. The US Chamber of Commerce also announced its pleasure with the deal that allows fast-track authority to remain in place. Republicans in Congress also expressed relief that a deal finally came to fruition.
This will see its first application to four pending trade agreements. Peru and Panama will likely see an immediate passage of their agreements, although Charles Rangel intimated that Democrats would likely split on both. Pending trade agreements with South Korea and Colombia will have to get reworked in all likelihood, especially the latter, as Alvaro Uribe discovered when the Democrats snubbed him during his state visit to the US.
Even so, it is cheering and even uplifting to see government work as it should. Perhaps this might lead to less vitriol and more honest debate in the coming two years.
It Must Be Spring
If one sees Democratic politicians gathered for photo ops around gas pumps, then spring has finally arrived. Gas prices have risen above $3 per gallon again, and the new Democratic majority wants to do something about it. Unfortunately, the policies they promise have little to do with the actual problem, and the solutions that would work are ones they will never consider. It demonstrates that the Democrats have little understanding of business practice, supply and demand, or commodities markets.
I explain the problem at Heading Right, and lay out the solutions.
The Insanity Offense
In the wake of the Virginia Tech massacre, many people have questioned the state's decision to make the university a "gun-free" zone, especially when it did nothing to prevent the attacker from bringing the weapons on campus. Noting the impossibility of securing a 2600-acre campus, the forced disarming of the student body and faculty has created a debate about the Second Amendment and the ability of law-abiding citizens to defend themselves. The debate has highlighted the differences between assuming roles as activists and victims.
Locally, the well-regarded Hamline University took the latter approach. After the shooting, the university offered counseling and coping assistance, even though the shooting had taken place 1500 miles away. Grad student Tony Scheffler took exception to that, and replied to the e-mail that perhaps a better solution would be to allow Hamline students the ability to defend themselves. As Mitch Berg notes, that's when Hamline decided that Scheffler required psychiatric treatment:
In the aftermath, officials at Hamline University sought to comfort their 4,000 students. David Stern, the vice president for academic and student affairs, sent a campus-wide email offering extra counseling sessions for those who needed help coping.Scheffler had a different opinion of how the university should react. Using the email handle "Tough Guy Scheffler," Troy fired off his response: Counseling wouldn't make students feel safer, he argued. They needed protection. And the best way to provide it would be for the university to lift its recently implemented prohibition against concealed weapons.
"Ironically, according to a few VA Tech forums, there are plenty of students complaining that this wouldn't have happened if the school wouldn't have banned their permits a few months ago," Scheffler wrote. "I just don't understand why leftists don't understand that criminals don't care about laws; that is why they're criminals. Maybe this school will reconsider its repression of law-abiding citizens' rights."
After stewing over the issue for two days, Scheffler sent a second email to University President Linda Hanson, reiterating his condemnation of the concealed carry ban and launching into a flood of complaints about campus diversity initiatives, which he considered reverse discrimination.
So what happened at Hamline? A debate over the nature of personal security? A healthy exchange of views on gun control? A forum on diversity initiatives?
Not exactly, no. David Stern, reaching back to the grand tradition of the Soviet Union, decided that dissent had to involve some sort of psychological disturbance and bounced Scheffler out of Hamline. Rather than wait to the end of the semester and then invite Scheffler to continue his education elsewhere, though, Hamline treated him like a psychotic and barred him immediately from campus until he got psychological help:
So Hamline officials took swift action. On April 23, Scheffler received a letter informing him he'd been placed on interim suspension. To be considered for readmittance, he'd have to pay for a psychological evaluation and undergo any treatment deemed necessary, then meet with the dean of students, who would ultimately decide whether Scheffler was fit to return to the university.The consequences were severe. Scheffler wasn't allowed to participate in a final group project in his course on Human Resources Management, which will have a big impact on his final grade. Even if he's reinstated, the suspension will go on his permanent record, which could hurt the aspiring law student.
"'Oh, he's the crazy guy that they called the cops on.' How am I supposed to explain that to the Bar Association?" Scheffler asks.
He has also suffered embarrassment. Scheffler obeyed the campus ban and didn't go to class, but his classmate, Kenny Bucholz, told him a police officer was stationed outside the classroom. "He had a gun and everything," Bucholz says. Dean Julian Schuster appeared at the beginning of class to explain the presence of the cop, citing discipline problems with a student. Although Schuster never mentioned Scheffler by name, it didn't take a scholar to see whose desk was empty.
What happened to all of that caring and coping? Hamline stood ready to treat its entire student body as victims, offering all sorts of free and presumably anonymous counseling and "coping" assistance. When one of them challenged that status, they use the same mechanism to humiliate and punish him. Either Stern has never read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, or he has only done so as a do-it-yourself guide to political correctness and punishment for its violators.
And let's also point out that they only hired an armed guard after Scheffler pointed out that they had left students with no defense whatsoever against attackers -- and only to ensure that the man who pointed it out could not return to campus.
Hamline is a private university and can set its own standards for admission and retention. However, it should be made clear to its students and its potential students that Hamline has no room for intellectual dissent from its attendees. Students have to accept the victimology dogma of the administration in silence, and in return Hamline will help them cope with their powerlessness. If by chance one of the students challenges the university directly on its philosophy, they will treat him or her like a psychotic and hire the guards they should have hired when they decided to keep their students disarmed.
Mitch and I will absolutely be discussing this on tomorrow's edition of the Northern Alliance Radio Network.
UPDATE: The lovely and talented Dr. Helen takes note of this, and adds:
I have an idea of how to get potential psychotic school shooters off campus: Just goad them into saying something conservative. Next thing you know, they'll be whisked off the campus in handcuffs and psychological treatment will be a must--at their expense! Problem solved.
All too true, especially since Hamline apparently sees conservatism as a mental disorder.
Edwards To Grow The Federal Government By 36%
For those who believe the federal government has grown too large and its budget a threat to the nation's economic health. neither party has offered much in the way of good news over the last few years. The Republicans offered tax cuts while increasing spending at an astonishing rate for supposed small-government conservatives. The Democrats have been worse, wanting to rescind the tax cuts so they can spend the extra money they believe the new taxes will raise.
However, as bad as both parties have been, John Edwards promises something new and different. He promises to make it worse by adding so much new spending that it would create a budget 36% larger than FY2007, within just eight years:
Presidential candidate John Edwards is offering more policy proposals than any other candidate in the primary and his ideas are winning loud applause from Democratic audiences.The question is whether other voters will cheer when they see the price tag — more than $125 billion a year.
Edwards is quick to acknowledge his spending on health care, energy and poverty reduction comes at a cost, with more plans to come. All told, his proposals would equal more than $1 trillion if he could get them enacted into law and operational during two White House terms.
To put the number in perspective, President Bush has dedicated more than $1.8 trillion to tax cuts. The cost of the
Iraq war is nearing $450 billion. And this year's federal budget is about $2.8 trillion.
Just to give a sense of perspective to Edwards' proposals, let's take a look at the recent history of the federal budget. Brian Riedl of the Heritage Foundation has updated his numbers from last year, and we can get a sense of the enormity of Edwards' spending increases. It has taken the US more than 16 years to add one trillion dollars to its federal budget; we spent $1,88 trillion in 1990, and we'll spend $2.8 trillion this year.
How long did it take us to grow the budget by 36% since 1990? Fifteen years, half the rate of the Edwards' proposals. We hit that mark in 2005, when the budget went to $2.56 trilion.
What about those Bush tax cuts, which have starved the federal government of revenue needed to solve all of the problems Edwards addresses? They haven't starved anyone. The rate of revenue has increased 22% in the three years following their enactment; in FY 2006, the federal government took in more revenue than ever before at $2.41 trillion, up from $1.97 trillion in 2003 when the cuts went into force. The tax cuts sparked economic growth that has added half a billion dollars more to Washington's coffers last year, and over $800 billion extra for the three-year period.
Anyone want to guess what the economy will do when the feds take back the cuts and pull all of that capital out of the market? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?
In the meantime, while Edwards adds on more and more spending on more and more federal programs, he still leaves unaddressed the entitlement debacle that approaches closer and closer. Instead of marshaling resources to resolve the inherent economic dichotomies in those Ponzi schemes, he wants to make the problem exponentially worse by adding even more entitlement programs. Like most populists, he buys votes by promising to make things easy in the short run without even considering the long-term costs and fiscal health of the nation. After all, eight years later, it won't be his problem any more.
Edwards can't be considered naive -- he's dangerous to our financial stability. This is one class action that America can't afford.
The UN's New Career In Comedy
The UN has a habit of giving the worst offenders in a particular issue a leadership position in overseeing it. One look at the Human Rights Council shows Turtle Bay's odd sense of humor in this regard, as it features some of the worst human-rights offenders in the world, such as Cuba and China -- and this is the reformed human-rights panel at the UN. Now it looks like the organization will expand its commitment to comedy into its efforts to protect the environment by placing one of the worst offenders in Africa in charge of the Commission on Sustainable Development:
African countries sparked outrage yesterday after they nominated President Robert Mugabe's regime for the leadership of a United Nations body charged with protecting the environment and promoting development.Zimbabwe, which is enduring economic collapse and environmental degradation, could become chairman of the UN's Commission on Sustainable Development when a formal vote of its 53 members takes place today. ...
Zimbabwe's economy is collapsing, with inflation of 2,200 per cent - the highest in the world. Households can expect just four hours of electricity a day. This has encouraged deforestation, with large areas being stripped of wood for light and heating. Mr Nhema, 48, benefited from Mr Mugabe's wholesale seizure of white-owned land. The minister, who was educated at Strathclyde University, was handed Nyamanda farm near Karoi, a once thriving enterprise producing tobacco and maize. Most of its 2,500 acres are now lying idle.
Mr Nhema is also in charge of Zimbabwe's national parks, where wildlife has been decimated by poaching.
This makes sense only at the UN. The nation that has taken a rich agricultural tradition and destroyed it within one generation will lead the world in determining how to sustain human populations. Robert Mugabe, whose regime has stripped Zimbabwe of its resources will now lead the lecture series from the halls of the UN.
John McCain called for a move to "League of Democracies" as a means to marginalize the UN, a proposal with which I agreed in theory but felt worthless in practice. Perhaps that was too hasty. Such an organization would have little effect on our ability to solve problems like the Iranian nuclear program, as McCain argued, but it might just embarrass Turtle Bay enough to undergo some serious reform.
There is nothing that makes a moribund and corrupt bureaucracy jealous and motivated to change than the formation of a competing useless bureaucracy. If nothing else, it would spell an end to the lionization of brutal thugs like Robert Mugabe and the hilarity of selecting the author of Africa's starkest collapse as the spokesman for intelligent growth.
May 10, 2007
Katie Couric, America's Sweetest Victim
CBS News hired morning-show star Katie Couric as their nightly news anchor in the hope that a fresh face and a lighter touch on hard news would rejuvenate the Tiffany Network's dime-store ratings. So far, she has made quite an impact -- by driving the numbers to lows not seen in twenty years. Now Couric faces criticism and the network a lot of questions over their choice, and one CBS executive thinks she knows where the problem lies:
Brian Montopoli: You told me, a little while back, that you were "the first woman at every job I had at CBS News." And that includes in 1971, when you were the first female field producer for The CBS Evening News With Walter Cronkite. I'm curious your take on Katie Couric's experience as the first solo female nightly news anchor.Linda Mason: I'm just surprised at how, almost 30 years after I worked on the "Evening News" as the first woman producer, that Katie is having such a tough time being accepted by the public, which seems to prefer the news from white guys, and now that Charlie's doing so well, from older white guys. I guess they want the reassurance of a Walter Cronkite.
I had no idea that a woman delivering the news would be a handicap. And I'm afraid that Katie's paying a price for being the first woman. But I think it's a great trail that she's blazing, and I think if the broadcast continues to be as good as it has been, if we continue to break news, if we continue to tell interesting stories, people will start to watch. It takes time, I think. But I was surprised that there was an obvious connection between a woman giving the news, and the audience wanting to watch it.
Got that, America? Its not Katie's fault, and it's not that CBS stinks at putting together a compelling news show. We're all a bunch of misogynistic bigots.
Of course, the career of this gentleman might address the race card that Mason blithely tosses to protect her network's incompetence. Bernard Shaw spent twenty years at CNN, taking the news network from a blip to the point where it eclipsed news organizations like CBS. During that time, plenty of women had handled anchor desk duties at other times of their 24-hour news programming, and it didn't seem to slow down CNN's progress one whit.
In truth, Couric has had to pay for CBS' poor editorial sense over the past several years. The nadir came in September 2004, when CBS allowed Mary Mapes and Dan Rather to first air a hit piece on George Bush during the presidential campaign based on laughably false documents, and then defending them while their story fell apart. Their integrity smashed, CBS limped along for the next two years while Rather continued to repel viewers and Bob Schieffer could not entice them back.
When they hired Couric, CBS obviously hoped to score some points by making her gender relevant. Les Moonves compared Couric to Jackie Robinson, which initiated gag reflexes around the nation. When she took over the news, CBS softened it to make it fit their new anchor -- and in a way patronizing her and their audience, which responded in an utterly predictable manner. They started watching other news programs for the better production and journalistic values.
CBS now wants to blame its audience for the network's failures. Edward R Murrow must be rolling in his grave.
Day 94 And Not Much Has Changed
House Democrats passed another version of the Iraq war supplemental this evening, voting to supply funds for only 60 days of operations in the theater. The vote split along party lines, meaning that the Senate will have to find another formula if the funds are to get to the troops in time:
The Democratic-controlled House voted Thursday night to pay for military operations in Iraq on an installment plan, defying President Bush's threat of a second straight veto in a fierce test of wills over the unpopular war.The 221-205 vote, largely along party lines, sent the measure to a cool reception in the Senate, where Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., is seeking compromise with the White House and Republicans on a funding bill.
Under increasing political pressure from Republicans, Bush also signalled flexibility, offering to accept a spending bill that sets out standards for the Iraqi government to meet.
"Time's running out, because the longer we wait the more strain we're going to put on the military," said the president, who previously had insisted on what he termed a "clean" war funding bill.
There is no possibility this will become law. In the first place, the Democrats got almost no Republican support for this approach. Minority Whip Roy Blunt caustically noted that "the second act is more disturbing and dangerous than the first." Even if the Senate decided to follow suit, the bill would not survive a veto, and Congress would have to start over again -- and they've taken 94 days to get this far.
But the Senate won't follow suit. With George Bush backing down on benchmarks, Harry Reid wants to move past the supplemental and start working on other priorities. And now that the Iraqis have begun to press for timelines, the Democrats probably can let events take their natural course. Senate Democrats will likely work with the GOP and the White House to wring concessions on benchmarks and push for complete funding in conference, and the House will likely acquiesce.
The Senate should have their approach ready next week. We can expect that an acceptable supplemental will pass out of conference, and that the Democrats will keep the pressure on for a September showdown.
Did The White House Withhold More Information On DoJ Firings?
Murray Waas has another scoop today on the continuing saga of Alberto Gonzales, eight federal prosecutors, and a carnival of incompetence. However, it looks like this news is at least two months old, and a secondary revelation of other withheld documents involves Gonzales and Justice rather than the White House:
The Bush administration has withheld a series of e-mails from Congress showing that senior White House and Justice Department officials worked together to conceal the role of Karl Rove in installing Timothy Griffin, a protégé of Rove's, as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas.The withheld records show that D. Kyle Sampson, who was then-chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, consulted with White House officials in drafting two letters to Congress that appear to have misrepresented the circumstances of Griffin's appointment as U.S. attorney and of Rove's role in supporting Griffin.
In one of the letters that Sampson drafted, dated February 23, 2007, the Justice Department told four Senate Democrats it was not aware of any role played by senior White House adviser Rove in attempting to name Griffin to the U.S. attorney post. A month later, the Justice Department apologized in writing to the Senate Democrats for the earlier letter, saying it had been inaccurate in denying that Rove had played a role.
In other words, during a period when Justice couldn't get its act together despite all of the preparation they made for the terminations, they misrepresented the role of Karl Rove in getting Griffin his job. One month later -- that would be in March -- Justice reversed itself and acknowledged Rove's efforts in getting Griffin an appointment as the US Attorney in Arkansas.
Well, we already knew that. It's been the one firing that the White House and Justice have acknowledged was done to make room for a staffer of Rove. Tim Griffin had the qualifications for the job, even if they cleared the position in a rather stupid and messy manner. Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is pretty old news. The changing story on this and other details of the controversy is why some of us think that Gonzales should have resigned back in March.
Waas buries the lede somewhat in his report, however, because he does report on another interesting aspect of the story. We know that some documents have not been provided to Congress on the basis of executive privilege, but today we find out that Justice is blocking the documents and not the White House:
The senior official said that Gonzales, in preparing for testimony before Congress, has personally reviewed the withheld records and has a responsibility to make public any information he has about efforts by his former chief of staff, other department aides, and White House officials to conceal Rove's role."If [Gonzales] didn't know everything that was going on when it went down, that is one thing," this official said. "But he knows and understands chapter and verse. If there was an effort within Justice and the White House to mislead Congress, it is his duty to disclose that to Congress. As the country's chief law enforcement official, he has a higher duty to disclose than to protect himself or the administration."
White House spokesman Tony Fratto denied that the White House was withholding records in the Justice Department's possession, and he said that Gonzales could make many of them public at any time. "The White House is neither guiding nor directing the Justice Department's decisions on privileged documents," Fratto said. "They make those decisions on their own."
Again, though, this is old news to a large extent. We know that Justice and Congress have a dispute on what Gonzales should release. We already know that Justice initially misrepresented Rove's involvement in the process that put Griffin in Arkansas. We already have an acknowledgement that Justice misrepresented Rove's role.
What we still do not have is any indication that Rove acted illegally. Again, these are political appointments, and the White House has the authority to dismiss appointees, even when it's a stupid thing to do. Rove works for the President and can make all the suggestions he wants, and the President can appoint people based on his recommendations. In this case, it was bad for the notion of political independence for US Attorneys, and that's an important point in evaluating the performance of Gonzales and the administration -- but it's not illegal.
This is old news dressed up for fresh headlines. It doesn't move the story one whit. It underscores why Gonzales should hit the road, but only by repeating his fumbles and obfuscations and those of his staff.
Will Opie And Anthony Get The Imus Treatment?
Opie and Anthony are two shock jocks with a long history of controversy. In 2002, they lost their jobs in New York after staging a sex contest, complete with live coverage of a couple, er, coupling in Saint Patrick's Cathedral. After outraged Catholics protested against the desecration of their church, the duo went looking for other employment.
They wound up at XM Radio, the satellite subscription radio service that has millions of listeners -- including me. I've never bothered to listen to them, and today, they proved me right. In a completely tasteless and offensive bit, the pair joked with an in-studio guest about raping Condoleezza Rice:
Warning: Extremely Vulgar Language. XM Shock Jocks Opie and Anthony engage in discussion about forced sex with the Secretary of State. A studio guest, Homeless Charlie, begins describing the scenario as the hosts laugh and encourage him. Anthony talks about the horror for Rice as the guest is "holding her down" and assaulting her. They invite Charlie to be a regular guest.
It's actually worse than the description:
Voice 1 (Charlie): I tell you what -- what that George Bush b***h, Rice? Condoleezza Rice?Voice 2 (Host): Condoleezza Rice.
V1: I'd love to f**k that b***h, man. (Laughter) She needs to f**k a man. I'd f**k her.
V2: I can just imagine the horror on Condoleezza Rice's face when she realized what was going on. (Laughter)
V3 (Host 2): You were all just holdin' her down and, you know, f**kin' her. (Laughter)
V1: Punch her all in the f**kin' face, saying, "Shut up, b***h." (Laughter)
V3: That's exactly what I meant. (Laughter)
Compared to these three cases of arrested development, Don Imus was a model of propriety. What kind of men think that raping a woman and punching her in the face makes for humor? It doesn't matter whether they were talking about the Secretary of State or the secretary working at XM Radio, it's disgusting and repellent. It shows once again that the two hosts of this show have few redeeming qualities, if any.
Does XM Radio think this is funny? Do their subscribers? I don't think that Don Imus needed to be chased off the air for his offensive and tasteless remark, but if he went out the door for that, then Opie and Anthony should follow right behind him. However, what do you think the odds will be that Al Sharpton and the media will hold these two creeps responsible for this? About the same odds as having Rice appear on their show next week, is my guess. (via Ian at Hot Air)
UPDATE: Breitbart got the date wrong -- this aired yesterday. It was apparently a spontaneous exchange, which makes it only slightly less egregious; if someone had written this as a script, I'd have suggested some free pepper spray kits for the women who work in their studios. As it is, it still remains a repugnant attempt at humor. Anyone with a maturity level above age 12 would have shut down Charlie as soon as he started talking about beating her in the face, not egging him onto that statementr by adding in the part about holding her down and saying, "That's exactly what I meant" afterwards.
CQ Radio: Professor Bainbridge
Today on CQ Radio (2 pm CT), we'll be speaking with Dr. Steven Bainbridge -- author, blogger, and wine connoisseur extraordinaire -- about the release of his new book on Sarbanes-Oxley requirements, The Complete Guide To Sarbanes-Oxley. Having just escaped from corporate America, I have my own horror stories (well, more like annoyance stories) about SOX compliance and the burden it places on publicly-owned companies. I have not yet had a chance to read the book, but it sounds terrific, and we can pick the Professor's brain on how to make SOX compliance a less unpleasant affair -- if that's possible.
We'll start with a short visit from Kit Jarrell of Euphoric Reality and the BTR show The Front Line. Kit found an interesting item about the entry point for some of the Fort Dix Six, and we'll talk about that as well as what we can expect from Kit on her next show.
Be sure to join the conversation by calling 646-652-4889!
Also, tomorrow we will have Matt Margolis of GOP Bloggers to discuss his newly-released look at the new Democratic Congressional majority, titled Caucus of Corruption, which I have already begun to read. It's partisan, snarky, and a lot of fun.
On Tuesday, May 15th, CQ Radio will welcome Major John Heil, currently serving in Iraq in the 3rd MEDCOM as Public Affairs Officer. Major Heil joins us through a partnership with DVIDS, which assists in getting the front-line information out to Americans and people all over the world. We'll have plenty more guests coming your way through DVIDS, so keep an eye on our programming.
The Obligatory Michael Moore Post
It's difficult to imagine that anyone takes Michael Moore seriously any more, but the Department of the Treasury does consider the economic embargo on Cuba worthy of enforcement. The DoT has opened an investigation of Moore after they discovered that he took ailing 9/11 rescue workers to Cuba for treatment of their symptoms. Moore made the trip as part of a new movie called Sicko which will apparently expose Moore's ignorance of the health care industry in two nations:
Academy Award-winning filmmaker Michael Moore is under investigation by the U.S. Treasury Department for taking ailing Sept. 11 rescue workers to Cuba for a segment in his upcoming health-care documentary "Sicko," The Associated Press has learned. ...In February, Moore took about 10 ailing workers from the Ground Zero rescue effort in Manhattan for treatment in Cuba, said a person working with the filmmaker on the release of "Sicko." The person requested anonymity because Moore's attorneys had not yet determined how to respond. ...
"Sicko" promises to take the health-care industry to task the way Moore confronted America's passion for guns in "Bowling for Columbine" and skewered Bush over his handling of Sept. 11 in "Fahrenheit 9/11."
This movie seems to be a paranoia-fest beyond Moore's previous accomplishments. Does he wants to prove that the American health-care system is somehow in cahoots with the Bush administration over the 9/11 attack, or does he just want to show that American health care is incompetent? Certainly, he's looking to boost the tired leftist propaganda that Cuba's free health-care system is a model for America to follow. One might think that Moore's argument here would have been undermined by Fidel Castro himself, who had to import Spanish physicians to treat him in his extremity earlier this year.
Perhaps Moore will highlight these images from one of Cuba's premiere medical facilities, Clinico Quirurgico in the Cuban capital of Havana. Here's just a couple of shots of the emergency room facilities:
Fausta and Val Prieto address another film that salutes the Cuban medical system. The Princeton Public Library has hosted a Human Rights Film Festival, and rather than focus on Cuban violations of human rights, they have featured films which follow the Leni Riefenstahl method of collaboration. Moore would probably feel right at home there.
However, don't look to the Treasury to do much about Moore. They'll probably fine him an amount which will get covered in a single showing of Sicko in Berkeley. The less we get of Moore, the better off everyone will be.
Democrats Snub Latin American Ally
Robert Novak reports that the Democrats, who have squealed loudly over the supposedly unilateral foreign policy of George Bush, snubbed one of the few allies we have left in Latin America. Colombian president Alvaro Uribe returned to Bogota in shock as Democrats blocked trade agreements over old human-rights issues, while Hugo Chavez rallies the other nations to opposition against the US:
Colombia's president, Alvaro Uribe, returned to Bogota this week in a state of shock. His three-day visit to Capitol Hill to win over Democrats in Congress was described by one American supporter as "catastrophic." Colombian sources said Uribe was stunned by the ferocity of his Democratic opponents, and Vice President Francisco Santos publicly talked about cutting U.S.-Colombian ties.Uribe got nothing from his meeting with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democratic leaders. Military aid remains stalled, overall assistance is reduced, and the vital U.S.-Colombian trade bill looks dead. Uribe is the first Colombian president to crack down on his country's corrupt army officer hierarchy and to assault both right-wing paramilitaries and left-wing guerrillas, but last week he confronted Democrats wedded to outdated claims of civil rights abuses and rigidly protectionist dogma.
This is remarkable U.S. treatment for a rare friend in South America, where Venezuela's leftist dictator, Hugo Chavez, can only exult in Uribe's embarrassment as he builds an anti-American bloc of nations. A former congressional staffer, who in 1999 helped write Plan Colombia to combat narco-guerrillas, told me: "President Uribe may be the odd man out, and that's no way to treat our best ally in South America."
This recalls the foreign policy of Jimmy Carter, who famously threw the Shah under the bus and enabled the radical Islamist takeover of Iran. We have a real problem with Chavez in South America, and we should look for allies there to promote our interests. Colombia also has strategic importance in America's efforts to stamp out narco-trafficking, and Uribe has risked much in assisting in that fight. One might believe that American politicians would at least treat such an ally with respect, but according to Novak, he received contempt.
How so? Al Gore had been scheduled to meet with Uribe at an environmental event in Miami on April 20th. Apparently, this was an event tied to Earthfest, a conference that Gore would normally run over his grandmother in a Prius to attend. Instead, Gore cancelled, claiming that Uribe had involvement with paramilitary forces over a decade ago, which Uribe denied. That apparently signalled the rest of the Democrats to dismiss Uribe and the strategic importance of Colombia to US policy in Latin America.
How bad was the damage? On Uribe's return, his Vice President remarked that the failure to extend trade agreements showed Latin America how the US treats its allies, and that Colombia would probably have to re-evaluate its relationship to the US. Given that the US has enough pressure from a rising tide of Castro-style socialism in this hemisphere already, that would be a dangerous disaffection at a time we can least afford it.
Besides, everyone knows why the Democrats don't want to extend trade agreements with the Colombians. The unions oppose free trade in this hemisphere and want to roll back NAFTA and CAFTA. For that matter, so does Duncan Hunter, but the Republican Congressman would know better than to deliberately antagonize a significant ally in a region where we have few enough as it is. If this demonstrates the kind of diplomacy we can expect in a Democratic administration, then Republicans have more reason than ever to look optimistically towards 2008.
Iraqis Appear Poised To Close The Door
A letter circulated by Moqtada al-Sadr and signed by more than half of the Iraqi National Assembly demands a timetable for American withdrawal from Iraq and a cap on the number of troops allowed into the country. If the Assembly passes this as a resolution, it could have devastating consequences on American policy for Iraq. I look at the implications at Heading Right this morning, especially in light of growing discontent among war supporters of the Iraqi commitment to reform.
UPDATE: John Aravosis is angry that Democrats will back away from the games they have been playing on the Iraq war supplementals, but he's missing the bigger picture:
It's time to replace some conservative Democrats in Washington, DC. I just heard from an impeccable source that there is serious concern on the Hill that conservative Democrats in the House will vote with the Republicans to strip any and all restrictions from the Iraq supplemental tomorrow, effectively giving Bush all the money he wants with no restrictions and no effort to hold either him or the Iraq government accountable for anything. I.e., they will vote to continue this war along the same disastrous course because they're too afraid to challenge George Bush and his failed leadership.Let me reiterate: This isn't some idle rumor. The concerns are coming from Hill sources themselves.
No, this is a smart move by the Democrats. If the Iraqis take the summer off, the Democrats know it will undermine support for the surge. Republicans are already warning the President that September will be the end of the line if the Iraqis haven't solidified the necessary political reforms for normalization, especially if it's so unimportant that they can postpone it until after summer recess. With this development today, the Assembly will have made it clear they don't want us there for much longer, either.
Why should the Democrats force the issue under those circumstances? Better to play it straight for the next few months. If the war collapses, it won't have their fingerprints. If the situation stabilizes and the Iraqis quell the violence, then the Democrats helped push them to do so. There's no upside now in excessive confrontation.
CQ Media Alert: The Laura Ingraham Show
I will appear on the Laura Ingraham show at 9:30 CT, roughly an hour from now, to talk with substitute host Tammy Bruce about my post yesterday on the alliance between radical Islam and the far Left. It should make for great morning conversation, so be sure to tune in on your radios or through Laura Ingraham's website.
War Support Starting To Crumble
The lack of energy from the Iraqi government of Nouri al-Maliki has added what might be a final straw to Republican discontent about the progress of the war. A delegation of Congressional Republicans met with President Bush last night at the White House, and they delivered the message that GOP support had its limits, and those limits are approaching quickly:
House Republican moderates, in a remarkably blunt White House meeting, warned President Bush this week that his pursuit of the war in Iraq is risking the future of the Republican Party and that he cannot count on GOP support for many more months.The meeting, which ran for an hour and a half Tuesday afternoon, was disclosed by participants yesterday as the House prepared to vote this evening on a spending bill that could cut funding for the Iraq war as early as July. GOP moderates told Bush they would stay united against the latest effort by House Democrats to end U.S. involvement in the war. Even Senate Democrats called the House measure unrealistic.
But the meeting between 11 House Republicans, Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, White House political adviser Karl Rove and presidential press secretary Tony Snow was perhaps the clearest sign yet that patience in the party is running out. The meeting, organized by Rep. Charlie Dent (Pa.), one of the co-chairs of the moderate "Tuesday Group," included Reps. Thomas M. Davis III (Va.), Michael N. Castle (Del.), Todd R. Platts (Pa.), Jim Ramstad (Minn.) and Jo Ann Emerson (Mo.).
"It was a very remarkable, candid conversation," Davis said. "People are always saying President Bush is in a bubble. Well, this was our chance, and we took it."
The heart of this latest discontent springs from the Iraqi National Assembly's deliberation over whether to take a two-month summer break. Everyone has criticized that proposal, whether it be supporters or critics of the war. The surge intends to give the Iraqis a small window of opportunity in which to normalize relations between the sects, finalize plans for oil revenue distribution, settle political disputes, and hold local elections to shore up the democratic process in the provinces.
If the Iraqis walk away from the Assembly without any of that getting accomplished, and then spend two months without making any effort at all, the war effort is over. The surge will be a dead letter in Congress, and almost certainly Republicans will start to consider defunding as an option as well as Democrats. Dick Cheney understands this, which is why he made a surprise visit to Maliki to explain the situation in small words.
A two-month vacation by the Assembly will leave the US with one of two options. Either we continue to fight al-Qaeda in Anbar and Diyala and move out of Baghdad to secure the Iraqi-Iranian border, or we dump the whole project into the laps of the Saudis and Egyptians and wish them the best of luck. If those were the only two choices, I would argue that we should adopt the former. We need to keep engaged with AQ where we find them, and a retreat from Baghdad will prove mobilizing enough to the jihadists. A retreat from Anbar, just when we have the local tribes switching to our side, will be exponentially worse for our prestige in the region, and will embolden AQ.
So far, the Republicans pledge to hang tough on the supplemental and not allow a 60-day funding scheme to pass, and even the Senate Democrats don't much care for that strategy. However, that agreement holds danger for the Bush administration. The Democrats would cheerfully give two more months of funding to get to the beginning of the fiscal year in order to get Republicans behind them for a September showdown on the continuance of the war. If Maliki and the Assembly take two months of vacation in the middle of it, they'll probably return just in time to wave good-bye to the American troops in Baghdad.
Rudy To Embrace Pro-Choice
Rudy Giuliani has had a tough four weeks on one particular issue. In trying to make his pro-choice positions more palatable, he has damaged the image of consistency and toughness that makes his candidacy compelling in the first place. During the last debate, he fumbled on a question about whether a repeal of Roe v Wade would be beneficial, which made him look confused.
Apparently, Rudy has had enough of ducking and weaving, and has decided to hit the abortion issue head-on in an attempt to get it behind him:
After months of conflicting signals on abortion, Rudolph W. Giuliani is planning to offer a forthright affirmation of his support for abortion rights in public forums, television appearances and interviews in the coming days, despite the potential for bad consequences among some conservative voters already wary of his views, aides said yesterday.At the same time, Mr. Giuliani’s campaign — seeking to accomplish the unusual task of persuading Republicans to nominate an abortion rights supporter — is eyeing a path to the nomination that would try to de-emphasize the early states in which abortion opponents wield a great deal of influence. Instead they would focus on the so-called mega-primary of Feb. 5, in which voters in states like California, New York and New Jersey are likely to be more receptive to Mr. Giuliani’s social views than voters in Iowa and South Carolina.
That approach, they said, became more appealing after the Legislature in Florida, another state they said would be receptive to Mr. Giuliani, voted last week to move the primary forward to the end of January.
The electoral strategy seems sound. California Republicans have a dwindling influence in the state, and they have tended to skew moderate. Florida has a stronger vein of conservatism, but still trends more moderate. New York and New Jersey Republicans tend to reflect Giuliani in any case. With the leapfrogging of the high-population states to the front of the primaries, the abortion issue could have much less impact in the primaries than before.
Even without that, Giuliani would have had to choose this strategy. His attempt to dance around Roe in the debate was painful and unnecessary. Everyone already knows that Rudy is pro-choice; he's said it from the beginning of the race. The media has made a big splash about his donations to Planned Parenthood because of his statements about his personal abhorrence of abortion, which will plague him as long as he continues to insist that he hates abortion but wants to defend it.
Giuliani has also told Republican voters that he believes in strict constructionism on the federal bench. Those views are not incompatible with a pro-choice stand. Even pro-choice voters understand the consequences of the judicial overreach of Roe and understand a reversal wouldn't make abortion illegal but force legislatures to deal with the issue instead.
Will this derail his candidacy? Not really. Anyone paying attention already knew Rudy's position on abortion, despite the tapdancing of the last several weeks. Those who vote on abortion only weren't going to support Rudy, at least not in the primaries. Rudy draws support for two reasons: toughness and leadership. Giving up the rhetorical gymnastics and talking frankly about his position on abortion serve to underscore those qualities, not undermine them. In an age of terror, a pro-choice candidate with a proven track record in those two areas has as good a chance as any to win the Republican nomination.
Of course, if another candidate with those qualities and with a pro-life record runs against him, Rudy might find his lead evaporating quickly. One could argue that John McCain has both of those qualities, but he has other issues with the GOP base that will probably prevent him from winning the nomination no matter what order the primaries come. Is Fred Thompson that candidate? Perhaps.
May 9, 2007
Boyd: Strib Too Conservative Under McClatchy
Jim Boyd, the deputy editorial director of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, will take a buyout and leave the paper after 27 years. Is he leaving because the new ownership wants to move the paper at least a little towards the center after Boyd's relentless leftward drift? Not at all -- in fact, Boyd says that the outgoing McClatchy management forced him to accept conservative columnists against his will:
If you've ever heard the Star Tribune called the Red Star, you can probably blame Jim Boyd, at least in part. As deputy editor of the paper's editorial page, he's one of a handful of editorial writers who plots out its official stance on issues from Iraq to a statewide smoking ban to political endorsements. This morning, Minnesota Monitor confirmed that Boyd will be taking a voluntary buyout and leaving the paper after nearly 27 years of service, and that the editorial page staff of 12.5 full-time positions will be trimmed by five.But, the Star & Sickle crowd must be asking, will that affect the paper's editorial stance?
"You'll be pleasantly surprised that it won’t change a hell of a lot," he said.
Avista Capital Partners, the Star Tribune's new owner, seems driven by financial goals and not ideology, so he expects a minimum of meddling -- unlike with the paper's previous owner. McClatchy didn't approve of the Star Tribune's outspoken editorials, he said, mainly because they "hated any kind of nail sticking up" and felt the editorials were harming the company financially. So they instituted what editorial page staffers jokingly call the "codpiece" — the "conservative of the day."
"They ordained that we would have a conservative of the day. I’ve got to tell you, you run out of good ones real quick," he said. "You’ve got Steve Chapman, whom I really like, who’s a libertarian and a good guy. So you didn’t mind running him, but you kind of held your nose when you ran Mona Charon or Debra Saunders. I mean, good grief. Jonah Goldberg? Finally, we were able to get rid of that bugger. That’s my point: Avista is much less of a micromanaging outfit than McClatchy was."
If Boyd has to hold his nose to read excellent, well-known columnists like Mona Charon, Debra Saunders, and Jonah Goldberg, then it explains why the Strib has been tanking for the last several years. The dearth of challenges to the house positions -- really, Boyd's positions -- made it clear that the Strib under his direction would never allow dissent to creep into the opinion pages. McClatchy forced him to add other voices for a semblance of balance, in essence telling Boyd to grow a pair. The fact that he calls these fine columnists "codpieces" only highlights what a horse's rectum he is.
Boyd essentially proves once again that he has no real courage. In a tussle with my friends at Power Line, in which he used his position at the Strib to falsely call them liars, he was forced Boyd to allow Scott Johnson and John Hinderaker an opportunity to rebut him on the Strib's opinion page. When he made essentially the same allegations in response, we repeatedly invited Boyd to appear on the Northern Alliance Radio show to debate the issue with either Scott or John on the air. We also extended him an invitation to appear with us live at the Minnesota State Fair to debate any of us. Not only did he not accept the challenge, he never had the guts to respond to us.
Later in the interview, Boyd talks about how he wants to see the Strib turned into a community-owned non-profit. Some would say that Boyd accounts for the current de facto non-profit status of the Strib, and his departure may actually improve the paper's performance. Had he really wanted to make the paper decline in value to the point where it could become community owned, Boyd should have remained on board to chase out the remaining subscribers of the worst major metropolitan newspaper in America.
CQ Radio: The Generalissimo
Today on CQ Radio (2 pm CT), we'll be talking with a friend and a colleague of mine in the world of syndicated radio, Duane Patterson -- known as the Generalissimo on the Hugh Hewitt show. Duane and I will talk about the talk industry and the attempts by Democrats to kill it with the Fairness Doctrine, his views on the direction of political talk, as well as the Al Sharpton comments about Mormons, the Fort Dix terrorist plot, and other topics as well.
Be sure to call 646-652-4889 to talk to Duane and me!
UPDATE: We've got great guests for the rest of the week already lined up, too. Tomorrow Dr. Steven Bainbridge joins me to talk about his new book, a guide to Sarbanes-Oxley called, prosaically enough, The Complete Guide To Sarbanes-Oxley. On Friday, Matt Margolis of GOP Bloggers will talk about his newly-released look at the new Democratic Congressional majority, titled Caucus of Corruption, which I have already begun to read.
New Veto Threat From Bush
George Bush does not appear to have bought into the idea of a sixty-day revolving credit line on funding the troops in Iraq. Today, Bush warned Congress that he would veto any bill that provided funding on such a short time line, and Gates joined him in underscoring the disruptive nature of these machinations on the supplemental:
President Bush would veto any bill drafted by House Democratic leaders that would fund the Iraq war only into the summer months, his spokesman said Wednesday.And Defense Secretary Robert Gates told a Senate committee that such short-term funding would be very disruptive and "have a huge impact" on contracts to repair and replace equipment. The Defense Department, he said, just doesn't "have the agility to manage a two month appropriation."
Gates also told the Senate Defense Appropriations panel that if the military begins to see progress in Iraq later this fall, including political reconciliation within the Iraqi government, the U.S. could begin withdrawing troops.
Bush isn't the only leader in Washington that thinks short-term supplementals would create more problems than they solve. For instance, here's one Congressional leader last week on this very topic:
[Senate Majority Leader Harry] Reid and other Democratic leaders are engaged in closed-door negotiations with White House chief of staff Josh Bolten and other senior Bush aides on how to agree on the funding bill given Bush's refusal to accept a pullout timetable and Democrats' desire to see an end to the war.Asked if he would back a proposal floating around the House of Representatives to fund the war for just three months as a compromise to the war funding dispute, Reid said, "I personally don't support that."
That echoed the statement of the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Carl Levin voiced his objections last month to short-term funding efforts:
Even if House Democrats seek to pass a short-term bill, the Senate isn’t yet on board.“I don’t think that’s the best approach,” Senate Armed Services Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich) said Friday. “I think it’s too close to the end of the fiscal year for that.”
Senate Democratic aides also downplayed the chances that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) would agree to try to pass short-term funding bills for the war, noting that it likely would tie the Senate floor in knots and prevent Reid from bringing up other Democratic legislative priorities...
Of course, this latest effort to gimmick the supplemental comes from the House, not from the Senate. In that vein, we can look back to the #2 Democrat in the House, who said this two weeks ago:
Many senators, as well as House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), say they’re not inclined to support a two-month supplemental.“There are a lot of ideas being discussed, and Mr. Hoyer personally feels that at this time he doesn't see that particular option moving forward,” said Hoyer spokeswoman Stacey Farnen Bernards.
I don't see this option gaining too much traction, not without these Democrats having to publicly reverse themselves within a few weeks of these statements. The sure way to look weak and vacillating is to start flip-flopping all over the place while our troops run out of money on the front lines, and they certainly can't afford to do that while making Bush look even stronger through another veto.
The only impetus for this 60-day window is the anti-war fringe of the Democratic party, primarily the netroots and the activists like MoveOn. With Gates warning Congress of the dangers inherent in this approach, the Democrats will have to explain why they want to create more risk for the troops in an effort to appease their activists.
UPDATE: It appears that the 51st vote for the last supplemental will not support this approach:
Sen. Ben Nelson, "who provided the crucial 51st vote on the original war supplemental and is likely to be a conferee on the second version, poured cold water all over the House proposal, saying he sensed that it 'would be dead on arrival over here.'" In fact, according to Roll Call, "House Democratic sources" say Pelosi "is teeing up the short-term measure in order to mollify Democratic liberals, even though she expects to have to ask those Members to vote for a conference report less to their liking."
A Further Response On Prostitution
Rick Moran of Right Wing Nut House has posted a rebuttal to my post about prostitution at Heading Right. Rick argues that my argument about "commodification" doesn't convince him:
Libertarians can reduce all human interaction to either individual choice or the choice made by two or more individuals in compact. Yes a single, unattached man isn’t hurting anyone by going to a prostitute nor is a single drug addict with no children. But is that how you promulgate law? I think not.And Ed’s human worth argument has a few holes too. People may not be “commodities” but we all have jobs where we are paid money for the skills we possess. Is there really a difference between being a good programmer and a talented prostitute? Each is paid according to their “worth” or whatever the market will bear. I agree with Ed that you can’t qualify sex and put a price on it nor can you do the same with a woman’s body part. But stripped to its essentials, we are either all of us whores for taking money for something we do well or whores actually have less worth than the rest of us.
Actually, I believe there is a difference between getting paid to produce material and services and renting out one's body part for individual gratification. I'll post an update at Heading Right later today explaining that, and address one particular analogy in rebuttal to my point that I believe is more on point. However, be sure to read Rick's thoughts, as it echoes many of the sentiments in the comments both here and at HR.
Hitler-Stalin For The Terror Age
Steven Stalinsky notices a strange trend in international relations in today's New York Sun. A marriage of convenience has begun to grow between two factions that seem entirely incompatible in all respects but one:
Over the past year, multiple international conferences have featured leaders of the anti-global left and Islamist groups working together. Go to any anti-war or anti-globalization demonstration in the West and chances are you will see the flags of Hezbollah and Hamas waved by people wearing Che Guevara T-shirts. And at some of these meetings, members of such radical Islamist groups as the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, and Hezbollah have enjoyed starring roles.The roster of Islamist-left alliances quietly grows every day: Massachusetts Institute of Technology linguistics professor Noam Chomsky praises Hamas and denounces America on Hezbollah's Al-Manar television. London Mayor Ken Livingstone invites a leading Islamist, Sheikh Yosef Al-Qaradawi, who is known for supporting suicide attacks, to visit his city. Iranian President Ahmadinejad calls for a world without America even as he plays host to a Tehran peace conference attended by American Mennonites, Quakers, Episcopalians, Methodists, and leaders of the National Council of Churches.
The key forum at this year's annual Cairo Anti-War Conference was titled "Bridge-building Between the Left and Islam," and focused on practical ways to increase cooperation. The aim of the conference sessions were described in one piece of literature as tackling "the challenges and prospects facing the international anti-war and pro-intifada movements" and planning "strategy and tactics for bridging the gap and uniting Islamist and leftist ranks in the face of U.S. imperialism and Zionism."
It's the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact for our age. The Left, with its insistence on multiculturalism and the end of religion in public discourse, has begun to ally itself with the most xenophobic religion on the planet, one which insists on transcendence in temporal matters above all other law. Its leaders now praise the same groups that target and kill civilians, oppress the media, openly practice anti-Semitism, and routinely stone those who have the audacity to date without permission from their families.
In the case of Noam Chomsky, this seems particularly egregious, but not terribly surprising. Chomsky can talk about Enlightenment ideals out of one side of his mouth, as he did in Imperial Ambitions, and then warmly support Hamas, which completely rejects those ideals of freedom, liberty, and individual conscience. In that book, he told David Barsamanian that "No other industrialized country has anything like the degree of extremist religious beliefs and irrational commitments like you see in the United States," and yet he has aligned himself with violent religious extremists like Hamas, and does so on the television network of the equally violent and extreme Hezbollah.
People like Chomsky love Hamas and Hezbollah not for their supposed "Enlightenment ideals," but for their hatred of America. That's the one thread that follows through all of these alliances between the Western Left and the Islamist nutcases who, on a philosophical basis, should be their ultimate nightmare. The people who drop brick walls on homosexuals get praise and support from the Chomskys of the world because the US cannot decide between allowing civil unions or gay marriage. Chomsky frets over the fact that "Large majorities are convinced of miracles, the existence of the devil, and so on," but then praises those who believe that infidels are agents of Satan and must be destroyed in jihad.
What we see is a class of people who hate America and who now grope for an intellectual basis to align themselves with America's opponents and enemies. A linguist like Chomsky can talk all he wants, but he cannot hide the inherent contradiction in his basis for supporting Hamas and Hezbollah while castigating the US for its cultural imperialism and religious extremism, and neither can the rest of the Left that insists on enabling the Hassan Nasrallahs of our age. They are the collaborators in this new era, the ones who give intellectual comfort to terrorists around the world. The Left has just about fully discredited itself, and it will be people like Chomsky who push it over the edge.
Democrats Move Closer To De-Funding
The Democrats have moved closer to using their actual Constitutional power to defund the Iraq war in a compromise bill being floated in the House. In the new supplemental, funding for the troops in Iraq would only be unconditional for two months. After that, it would cease entirely unless the Iraqis passed an oil revenue sharing plan and other restructuring bills that have not progressed as planned:
A House Democratic proposal introduced yesterday that would give President Bush half of the money he has requested for the war effort, with a vote in July on whether to approve the rest, hinges on progress in meeting political benchmarks that Iraq has thus far found difficult to achieve.The House measure, which could come to a vote as early as tomorrow, would substantially raise the pressure on Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government to meet lagging commitments -- including new laws on oil revenue and de-Baathification, constitutional revisions, provincial elections and the demobilization of militias -- that Bush has said are crucial to the success of the U.S. military strategy.
The plan would make about $43 billion of the administration's requested $95.5 billion immediately available to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, train troops from both nations and pay for other military needs. Congress's approval of the rest, intended to last through September, would await Iraqi passage of restructuring laws, or Bush's ability to prove that significant progress had been made. The July vote would mark the first time a mandatory funding cutoff would come before Congress.
Most of the anticipated Iraqi changes are locked in disputes among and within regional and sectarian groups, and some have moved further from agreement in recent weeks. A deadline of next Tuesday for presenting a constitutional revision package to the Iraqi Parliament is likely to be only partially met, Bush administration officials said. A group of oil and gas laws due by the end of the month remains mired in debate.
One concession has to be made, which is that the Democrats have finally started to work within their Constitutional authority. Prior plans used elaborate ruses to force the President to end the war by juggling troop requirements and the like, all of which infringed on his authority as commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Hillary Clinton has begun to pursue an equally noxious violation of the Constitution by attempting to revoke the original authorization for the war, which she and other Democrats claim the President could not veto. It would amount to a diktat by the legislative branch, one about which the Supreme Court would have to squelch its laughter before throwing it out with great force.
Now they have decided to pursue defunding, the only real option available, and one that has been available all along. It's still a very bad idea. One cannot fight war on an installment plan. If the Democrats want to defund the war, then do it, but putting General Petraeus on a 60-day revolving credit account is ludicrous. It takes a tremendous amount of staging and planning to conduct a war, and that applies even more to a counterinsurgency strategy. One simply cannot roll this out, back in, and then back out again without incurring tremendous costs in both people and money.
I agree that pressure has to be brought on the Maliki government, and so we must signal that we have limited patience with Iraqi brinksmanship. However, we also have to make sure that the signal we send Maliki doesn't get confused with the signals we send to ordinary Iraqis, who have trusted us to this point to be working on their behalf. If we continue to signal that we are looking for an excuse to bug out, they will start looking for the strongest warlords in the vicinity to protect them from the coming collapse. We already see this in the south, where the British withdrawal has prompted a power struggle between Shi'ite factions to see which will prevail.
We need to remain steadfast if Iraq has any hope of becoming a stable, unified nation. Given that a failure in that regard will give terrorist groups a haven from which they can stage attacks around the world, it is in our national interest to see that the Iraqis succeed and to stay until the job is finished. The potential for destruction otherwise is too great to allow a collapse to happen simply because we wanted a faster timetable for re-Baathification.
Desperation Of The Left
Yesterday I linked to an EJ Dionne column which analyzed the loss of Segolene Royal in France as an indicator of an overall problem with the Left among Western nations. Dionne correctly linked the rightward move in France with similar shifts in eastern Europe, Sweden, Germany, and even Britain, where the Tories won in local elections. He advised the international Left that the movement needed to recast its vision rather than just rely on tactical changes in the future.
The Left isn't listening to Dionne -- in fact, they don't even acknowledge a problem exists. In today's Guardian, Jonathan Freedland tells readers to disregard the Royal debacle, because the Left is experiencing a "global awakening":
Europeans speak of the Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-American model as a synonym for turbo-charged, take-no-prisoners capitalism. Yet there are some signs, tentative for now but noticeable all the same, that movement is under way even in the US, inside the belly of the capitalist beast. They come partly in reaction to the ever worsening state of inequality in that country. You can pick your stat, ranging from the claim that just two men - Bill Gates and Warren Buffett - have as much money between them as 30% of the entire American people, to the findings by a federal reserve study that the top 10% of Americans now own 70% of the country's wealth, while the top 5% own more than everyone else put together. ...America's politicians have begun to notice. The Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards speaks of the "two Americas". Barack Obama tells audiences that not only is caring for the poor an American tradition, but that "those with money, those with influence, those with control over how resources are allocated in our society, are very protective of their interests, and they can rationalise infinitely the reasons why they should have more money and power than anyone else". Most striking was the Democrats' response to Bush's last state of the union address, given by Senator Jim Webb. He invoked the early years of the last century. "America was then, as now, drifting apart along class lines," he said, deploying the c-word that is now all but barred from British political discourse. Recalling the robber barons who were "unapologetically raking in a huge percentage of the national wealth", Webb gave this charged warning from history: "The dispossessed workers at the bottom were threatening revolt."
I hate to break it to Freedland, but the Democrats have used class warfare for decades -- at least since Lyndon Johnson, and more accurately back to FDR. They have long championed the reallocation of wealth by force of government in the guise of entitlement programs. That strategy stopped working for them at the end of the Carter administration, and played a large part of why they lost the Congressional majority in 1994. They didn't win it back on the promise of more entitlement programs, but on the Iraq war and the fact that Republicans couldn't restrain themselves from being just as avaricious as Democrats.
The only Democratic president since Carter made the mistake in his first term of taking this nonsense from Freedland seriously. Bill Clinton, with the campaign song "Dont Stop Thinking About Tomorrow" still ringing in his ears, decided to nationalize health care and put Hillary in charge of it. That lost the Democrats control of Congress, and that lesson still resonates today.
Freedland makes a number of dubious assumptions in this article. First off, he give John Edwards far more weight than he deserves. The Two Americas talk didn't do him any good in 2004, and it's not getting him much farther in 2008, especially after he built the huge mansion in between campaigns. Barack Obama has given some lip service to Edwards' class warfare ideals, but has mostly tried to remain focused on traditional liberal themes rather than the kind of Leftist populism Freedland describes. In one passage, he describes Zbigniew Brzezinski as a "cold war hawk" who is "no leftist", both of which would come as a huge surprise to anyone who recalls the feckless foreign policy of the Carter administration, which Brzezinksi helped author.
It's a classic case of spin, or perhaps an even better example of self-delusion. Socialism and the Left have run Europe for decades, and the Europeans have finally discovered that societies which build nanny states and obsess over multiculturalism wind up like -- well, like France. Balkanization and economic stagnation are the inevitable result of Leftist policies, which is why the Left is in retreat, even as its apologists claim victory from defeat.
The Rest Were Pledged
When evaluating leadership, people usually value two traits the most -- getting the facts straight and remaining calm enough to absorb them. Barack Obama failed in both yesterday, as he used the Kansas tornadoes as a talking point on the campaign trail and informed the audience that 10,000 people had died in them( via QandO):
Barack Obama, caught up in the fervor of a campaign speech Tuesday, drastically overstated the Kansas tornadoes death toll, saying 10,000 had died. The death toll was 12."In case you missed it, this week, there was a tragedy in Kansas. Ten thousand people died - an entire town destroyed," the Democratic presidential candidate said in a speech to 500 people packed into a sweltering Richmond art studio for a fundraiser.
His campaign manager later said that Obama had meant "at least ten". Well, why not just get the facts straight and say twelve? That was the correct answer, and it's certainly on a far smaller scale than ten thousand people. The latter would have been more than three times the losses on 9/11.
Obama then proceeded to gaffe #2, although in his defense, he got help on this one from Kansas Governor Kathleen Sibelius:
"Turns out that the National Guard in Kansas only had 40 percent of its equipment and they are having to slow down the recovery process in Kansas," Obama said, his shirt sleeves rolled up and his head glistening with sweat.
That's also wrong. Kansas had 88 percent of its National Guard forces available, and over 60 percent of its Army Guard equipment, and 85 percent of its Air Guard equipment. By yesterday, Sibelius had already backpedaled, saying that the Guard had responded adequately to the disaster and that recovery had not slowed down. It turns out that she wanted to make a point about the Iraq War and how it takes resources away from the states.
In other words, she wanted to play politics with the Kansas tornado disaster. Obama played along with her, and both of them look like hysterics today. Neither one shows those two important qualities of leadership. Kansas can't do much about Sibelius today, but American voters can do something about Barack Obama. They can give him about 12 votes, and he can go home thinking he received 10,000.
An Eruption Of Shi'ite Disunity
We have heard plenty about the sectarian fighting in Iraq, as ethnic and religious differences have inspired militia attacks that focus primarily on Baghdad and its environs. To the south, the Shi'ites comprise the vast majority of the population, and the concern there has not so much been sectarian violence as it has been about Iranian influence on a monolithic block of Shi'a. Yesterday's bombing in Kufa, however, indicates that the Shi'ites have significant fractures as well:
A suicide car bomber attacked a crowded market in this holy Shiite city Tuesday, killing at least 16 people, injuring more than 70 others and further stoking tensions between rival Shiite militias.The bomb was detonated in a gray sedan beside a restaurant and across the street from a girls primary school. ...
The incident was a continuation of a series of showdowns in recent days between the two groups in far-reaching sections of the country, including east Baghdad, Diwaniya, Basra and Najaf, which neighbors Kufa 100 miles south of the capital. Both militias are tied to political groups that are vying for dominance among Iraq's Shiite majority.
Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Saeed Hakim sought to tamp down the intra-sect dispute and blamed the bombing on "the terrorists and the Saddamists who continue their criminal show that started when the Saddam regime fell."
This follows on the heels of reports that the British sector has destabilized in the wake of the announcement of the withdrawal of the UK. After making that announcement, the two factions have begun to fight each other for power in what had been a fairly stable area in the country. It has become bad enough that the Coalition troops in the area now come under continuous fire, and the Danes -- who also announced their withdrawal date -- had to send almost 500 more troops into the area for force protection.
Once again, we see the problem of withdrawal without having secured the objective of the mission. The one Shi'ite faction has engaged with the government, which is why so many of the police belong to the Badr organization. Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army has not engaged with the government, preferring its status as a stand-alone militia, and now they see an opportunity to seize the advantage in the power vacuum left by the departing British and Danish troops. The escalating violence in the An-Najaf region (Kufa is nearby) is a result of Sadr's ambitions for post-occupation control of Iraq.
At the moment, it suits Sadr's purposes to blame the US and the police, while the Badr organization blames it on "Saddamists". Nouri al-Maliki, who relied on Sadr for the political support that put him into office, faces a real dilemma in the south. Either he has to crush the Sadr revolt against the forces that represent the Iraqi government, or he will need to leave his post and throw in with Sadr instead.
May 8, 2007
Answering Cathy Young
Glenn Reynolds points out a provocative Cathy Young article in Reason magazine, an excellent libertarian publication that should be on everyone's reading list. Cathy asks what I think is the ultimate libertarian question: why is prostitution illegal?
Yet prostitution is perhaps the ultimate victimless crime: a consensual transaction in which both parties are supposedly committing a crime, and the person most likely to be charged—the one selling sex—is also the one most likely to be viewed as the victim. (A bizarre inversion of this situation occurs in Sweden, where, as a result of feminist pressure to treat prostitutes as victims, it is now a crime to pay for sex but not to offer it for sale.) It is sometimes claimed that the true victims of prostitution are the johns' wives. But surely women whose husbands are involved in noncommercial—and sometimes quite expensive—extramarital affairs are no less victimized.
Young addresses the normal objections about STDs and crime, and asks for a more substantive answer that responds to her argument, which is essentially the Lawrence v Texas issue. Why should society criminalize a transaction between two consenting adults for an action that is in itself not illegal?
I thought about this at length, and have answered Cathy at Heading Right. It's a good question for conservatives to consider, and I'm interested in what the CQ community thinks about the answer.
Glass Houses, Sheet-Covered Stones, Etc
The Carpetbagger Report linked to me earlier today and has sent a fair amount of traffic to an old post I wrote about the Ten Worst Americans in history. I enjoyed that challenge and spent quite a bit of time on it, but found it curious that someone would link to it today. It turns out that the blog linked to a Roll Call article that reported a reference by a Republican Congressman to the military wisdom of Nathan Bedford Forrest, the founder of the Ku Klux Klan:
On Monday, Rep. Ted Poe took to the House floor to discuss foreign policy matters. To make a point, the Texas Republican invoked the words of Civil War Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest: “Git thar fustest with the mostest.”The quotation got some floor watchers’ attention pretty quickly. Forrest is a controversial figure who was one of the Klan’s first grand wizards. Although the Civil War hero (if you were a Confederate, that is) ultimately abandoned the Klan for its violent tactics, he continues to kick up dust.
Well, first of all, the "fustest with the mostest" is an urban legend, or at least as urban as the 1860s got. As the Carpetbagger Report notes, Forrest did not say it in that way. Tom Burnham listed this as an urban legend in his excellent Dictionary of Misinformation, and no less a Civil War scholar than Bruce Catton repudiated it. The New York Times first wrote it more than 50 years after the end of the war. Besides, the idea about getting to the battle first with the most men isn't exactly advanced strategic thinking. It doesn't take a Clausewitz or a Sun Tzu to figure that much out about military strategy.
It's more than a little ridiculous to say that using this quote indicates some kind of support for the KKK. It's an anecdote used by people to talk about military strategy, as Poe clearly did, instead of some invocation of racism. It's not particularly bright of Poe to quote Forrest -- especially since the quote is essentially meaningless as well as fabricated -- but discussing Forrest's military acumen (which was considerable) doesn't mean people support the Klan, a point that is rather obvious when considering authors such as Catton who catalogued Forrest's strategic thinking.
For instance, do lawyers who reference Hugo Black support the Klan as well? If not, why not? Poe referenced Forrest's military strategy, not his views on race. Referencing Black's viewpoint on law should also then connect to his activities in the Klan ... right? That's the Carpetbagger standard.
Besides, if Carpetbagger wants to note latent Klan support, why doesn't he mention Robert Byrd? Byrd has been in the Senate for almost fifty years now, and he filibustered the Civil Rights Act when it first came to the chamber in the early 60s. He worked as an organizer for the Klan as a young man. Here's a direct link to Forrest's organization ... but Carpetbagger seems less interested in actual connections between the Klan and a Democrat than using silly quotes as some sort of revelation about a Republican.
Just a reminder -- glass houses, stones, etc. If the Democrats want to start accusing people of Klan sympathies, they need to start with their ex-Klansman -- or give it up entirely.
McQ of QandO has more thoughts. So does Allahpundit.
UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! And Carpetbagger is Steve Benen, as Crooks & Liars notes, so I've removed the question regarding gender. I see John Amato also wants to join in making one of the silliest stinks in a very long time -- or, as Glenn notes, maybe not so long.
The Gateway Saga Continues
This morning, I received the replacement Gateway laptop from the Corporate team -- who, by the way, has been very responsive -- and after lunch, I began to test it. As we had planned, I took the hard drive from the original laptop and swapped it into the new laptop, which had received a full day of testing by the Corporate team. Since the two systems were identical, the hard-drive swap made no difference at all to the system, and it immediately connected me to the wireless network.
And, 30 minutes later, it failed again in the exact same way.
I decided to take advantage of having both systems on hand, and I powered up my original Gateway with the other hard drive. After wading through the pop-up screens for the newly-imaged drive, I loaded my network key and connected into the wireless system.
And it's still working.
This is not necessarily dispositive; I've had entire days where the wireless adapter did not fail, but usually I get a failure within the first half-hour or so. This seems to indicate that the problem resides not in the hardware, but in the driver for the adapter. I had reloaded the Gateway drivers repeatedly through the Recovery system and it never fixed the problem, and even once downloaded a 2006 driver from Realtek's website, but that hadn't made a difference. Today, I used the driver interface to download the latest files, and this one is a March 2007 driver set. So far, it seems to be working.
I just got off the phone with my contact at Gateway, and they're happy to let me test both systems for a couple of days. If both stay up, I'm going to send back the new laptop and keep my original system. They are going to alert tech support of the potential driver problem if all my tests are successful. We'll see.
UNRELATED BLEG: Can anyone tell me if they've used Pair Networks as a hosting service, and if so, how they performed?
CQ Radio: Fausta And BabaluBlog
UPDATE: If you didn't get a chance to listen to this show live, you definitely want to hear the podcast. Fausta and Val gave plenty of information about Castro's Cuba, and I had a great time just listening to the two of them talk passionately about the subject. This may be one of the most fun shows I've had.
Today on CQ Radio (2 PM CT), we will be talking with Fausta of Fausta's Blog and Val Prieto of Babalublog. Today's topic -- the Cuban propaganda films that Princeton has decided to show at its Human Rights Film Festival. The first, The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil, argues that Cuba has somehow managed to successfully shift its economy from a petroleum-based energy solution. That seems to fly in the face of recent attempts by Cuba to expand its drilling in the Caribbean, which we noted here almost exactly a year ago when Cuba sold concessions to China and India in order to receive some of the output.
The other film, Salud!, lionizes the Cuban health-care system. Both Val and Fausta have plenty to say on that score, and I linked to Val two years ago when he exposed the conditions at one of Cuba's premier medical facilities -- "premiere" being a very relative term.
Be sure to join the conversation by dialing 646-652-4889!
Justice: Islamist Plot To Attack Fort Dix (Updated)
The US Attorney's office in New Jersey says that a raid yesterday netted six radical Islamists in the Garden State before they had a chance to conduct a terrorist attack. Their target -- Fort Dix (via Hot Air):
Six people were arrested on Monday in connection with an alleged plot to murder soldiers at Fort Dix, the U.S. attorney's office said.Michael Drewniak, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's Office in New Jersey, said the men are from the former Yugoslavia and were planning to "kill as many soldiers as possible." Five of them lived in Cherry Hill, he said.
Drewniak said the six were scheduled to appear in federal court in Camden later Tuesday to face charges of conspiracy to kill U.S. servicemen.
During a secret meeting, the men allegedly attempted to purchase AK-47s from an arms dealer working with the FBI and were arrested in New Jersey after officials learned of the plans, a law enforcement source said.
The FBI has apparently done a good job of tracking this cell. They not only infiltrated their supply system, but they also managed to get video of them planning the attack. The feds and state law enforcement also tracked them to the Poconos, where they went target shooting in preparation for their attack.
Why Fort Dix? It seems a strange target, except for the opportunity in New Jersey. It has been scaled down over the last several years as basic training has moved elsewhere in the base system. It supports the Army Reserve training now, and it is also the home of the largest federal prison in the US -- but it's a low-security prison, and wouldn't hold any terrorists for this cell to free. Besides, attacking an armed fort bristling with military personnel would be the surest way to die quickly in jihad, which may have been the idea.
Obviously, this will be the story to follow today, but it may be a while before more data will be available. The Department of Justice will hold a news conference today at 2:30 pm ET, just before the CQ Radio show for today.
UPDATE: The local Newark paper has more:
Federal investigators last night arrested six men who were planning a heavily-armed armed attack against soldiers at Fort Dix as part of a jihad against America, according to two law enforcement sources. ...The would-be attackers, ethnic Albanians who had been under surveillance by the FBI for months, practiced by shooting paintball guns and real weapons in a rural area of the Poconos, one source said. They also allegedly watched jihadist videos in which Osama bin Laden urged them toward martyrdom.
"They were prepared to die," said the law enforcement source. "We became increasingly convinced this was for real and these guys were ready to roll."
The video came from the terrorists. In what seems a familiar move among al-Qaeda jihadis, they had videotaped their training as well as angry statements denouncing America. And, in what seems like familiar stupidity among tri-state jihadis, they brought the film to a retail store to get it made into DVDs. This recalls the idiot who tried to get his deposit back on the Ryder rental truck used to blow up the World Trade Center garage in 1993. That allowed the FBI to track down the terrorist cell that executed the attack.
Is this al-Qaeda? It could be, but I'm not sure that true AQ jihadis would be that dumb, at least not twice. I'm also thinking that AQ would not have chosen Fort Dix as a target. It could just be AQ-inspired fanatics who managed to screw up just enough to get caught.
UPDATE II: The White House says that the men had no direct connections to any international terrorist organizations, which makes the suggestion that they were amateurs more credible:
"At least at this point there is no evidence that they received direction from international terror organizations," said White House spokesman Tony Snow. "However their involvement in weapons training, operational surveillance and discussions about killing American military personnel warranted a strong law enforcement response."The suspects had acquired semi-automatic assault rifles, shotguns and hand guns and performed surveillance on Fort Dix and other U.S. military installations in New Jersey, Delaware and Pennsylvania, the complaint said.
Shawn Mullen notes the similarity to the Miami cell of wannabes. This looks more serious in that they apparently had acquired some of the weapons for the attack and had performed more surveillance, but they showed the same lack of sophistication as the Miami cell when they gave a retail store their jihadist video in January 2006. Still, one should remember that the difference between wannabes and real terrorists is the attack itself -- and the FBI did a good job in both cases to take the cells down before they could make the transition.
Cheering For The Other Side (Update: A Hoax)
Please read update below.
Usually I address silly or misleading comments within the thread itself, or an update to the original post. However, in reference to the foiled plot against Fort Dix by a cell of jihadists captured yesterday by the FBI, I found one comment so asinine that it deserves its own thread. Commenter iraqwarwrong wrote:
Ok so, let, me get this straight. Were allowed to go over there and kill like a whole hunk of them every day, but they're not even allowed to come here and try to kill are soldiers?Newsflash- soldiers is waht are for killing in war's. That's legimate targets.
Well, duh. So was the Pentagon on 9/11 but that didn't give al-Qaeda the right to attack it (and the use of civilian aircraft violated the rules of war, too). The military is a legitimate target during wartime ... by an opposing military in uniform and representing a nation-state. Terrorists don't conduct legitimate attacks when then operate outside the rules of war, regardless of their target.
And even if it is a "legitimate" target because of its military nature, why would someone defend the terrorists attacking our own soldiers? Of course they're not "allowed" to come over here to kill our men and women in the armed forces. Why would we "allow" it?
Most people who oppose the war in Iraq do so from sincere concern for the well-being of our nation. A small percentage, like iraqwarwrong, have revealed themselves to be on the other side. And yes, that means I question his patriotism.
UPDATE: Steven Den Beste writes to say that the Iraqwarwrong blog, which this commenter uses as his home page, is an elaborate hoax. This commenter has been showing up here for at least the last month with that ID, objecting to several posts, but this is the first time I've responded. I should have checked the website first.
I'll say this right now -- if someone thinks that this is the way to convince people to support the war, they are very much mistaken. This is puerile, as is most of the website in question, with its made-up testimonials from people who have sincere opposition to the war, such as my friend The Commissar from the Politburo Diktat (not made up, see next update).
Needless to say, this commenter has been banned.
UPDATE II: Why don't I delete the post? My philosophy is to let it all hang out -- my mistakes as well as my triumphs. I'm hoping that the latter will far outweigh the former at the end of the calculation, but I'm not going to cheat the scorecard in the meantime.
UPDATE III: The Commissar says the quote was not made up ... so is this a hoax or not? It's not on the level, which is the safest way to put it. At any rate, I was wrong about that point.
An Lá Nua i mBéal Feirste?
Has a new day dawned in Belfast? The Stormont opens today after years of closure following the temporary collapse of the Good Friday agreements. Northern Ireland's experiment with home rule begins once more, and this time, the antagonists appear ready to accept the disarmament and good faith of both sides:
Protestant firebrand Ian Paisley and IRA veteran Martin McGuinness formed a long-unthinkable alliance Tuesday as Northern Ireland power-sharing went from dream to reality — and all sides expressed hope that bloodshed over this British territory would never return.Paisley, who spent decades refusing to cooperate with Northern Ireland's Catholic minority, conceded he had often refused to budge in years past but was ready now. He lauded the Irish Republican Army's moves to renounce violence and disarm, and Sinn Fein's decision to cooperate with the province's mostly Protestant police as genuine. ...
Sinn Fein deputy leader McGuinness, 56, accepted the post of deputy first minister, which despite its title carries the same power as Paisley's post of first minister.
As part of the same oath of office, McGuinness pledged to support the police and British courts — a position Sinn Fein refused for decades to accept.
I hope that everyone means what they say. For centuries, Ulster has suffered violent paroxysms over the sovereignty of the enclave, and the only real method to solve the problem is self-determination. Both the UK and the Republic of Ireland want this problem off of their hands, having come to the same conclusion years ago. The only people who needed convincing were the main antagonists, who kept declaring each other invalid in the political process.
Now that 98% of the armed militias have apparently disarmed verifiably, the heat has almost disappeared. That's what allows Ian Paisley to appear on the same dais as Martin McGuiness and Gerry Adams. Even if they can't look each other in the eye, they now feel they can work together peacefully to run Northern Ireland in the spirit of self-determination. Paisley actually felt so good about the reopening of Stormont that he couldn't stop making self-deprecating jokes throughout the ceremony, a particularly Irish thing to do.
I'm hopeful, inasmuch as the past 37 years should have taught anyone that terrorism would never settle the essential question of Northern Ireland's identity. I remain somewhat skeptical because that lesson could have been learned in 36 of those 37 years, and they've thrown away the opportunity once before. My wish is for hope to transcend skepticism, and that the people of Northern Ireland can live in peace by creating their own identity and nationality. Go n-éirí an-tadh libh.
Dionne: The Left Has Its Work Cut Out For It
EJ Dionne takes a clear-eyed view from the center-left at the French presidential election, and what it means in the context of political change in Europe. He notes that with the center-right strengthening in Germany, Sweden, eastern Europe, and now France, the socialist-leaning Left has lost the thread of political change in the West. It has become a reactionary movement, as the campaign and defeat of Segolene Royal shows.
How so? I examine that at Heading Right, and show how Royal's campaign fits within Socialism as a whole -- and why both took a beating.
The Flight To Flyover Country
Political analysts sometimes refer to the space between the two coasts as "flyover country," a space so uninteresting and unimportant that it bears little consideration until someone needs votes. The Midwest, with the exceptions of Chicago and perhaps the Twin Cities, get little credit for sophistication or intellectual interest. For the most part, people make jokes about cows and corn and consider the coastal megalopolises the center of American thought.
Michael Barone, writing in today's OpinionJournal, says that has changed in practice, if not yet in thought. More native-born Americans have left the coastal megalopolises for flyover country, stratifying the big American cities on the coasts and in effect abandoning them to immigrants:
Start with the Coastal Megalopolises: New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, Chicago (on the coast of Lake Michigan), Miami, Washington and Boston. Here is a pattern you don't find in other big cities: Americans moving out and immigrants moving in, in very large numbers, with low overall population growth. Los Angeles, defined by the Census Bureau as Los Angeles and Orange Counties, had a domestic outflow of 6% of 2000 population in six years--balanced by an immigrant inflow of 6%. The numbers are the same for these eight metro areas as a whole.There are some variations. New York had a domestic outflow of 8% and an immigrant inflow of 6%; San Francisco a whopping domestic outflow of 10% (the bursting of the tech bubble hurt) and an immigrant inflow of 7%. Miami and Washington had domestic outflows of only 2%, overshadowed by immigrant inflows of 8% and 5%, respectively.
This is something few would have predicted 20 years ago. Americans are now moving out of, not into, coastal California and South Florida, and in very large numbers they're moving out of our largest metro areas. They're fleeing hip Boston and San Francisco, and after eight decades of moving to Washington they're moving out. The domestic outflow from these metro areas is 3.9 million people, 650,000 a year. High housing costs, high taxes, a distaste in some cases for the burgeoning immigrant populations--these are driving many Americans elsewhere.
The result is that these Coastal Megalopolises are increasingly a two-tiered society, with large affluent populations happily contemplating (at least until recently) their rapidly rising housing values, and a large, mostly immigrant working class working at low wages and struggling to move up the economic ladder. The economic divide in New York and Los Angeles is starting to look like the economic divide in Mexico City and São Paulo.
What does this mean for these cities? According to Barone, the flight comes mainly from the middle class. Those leaving have mainly been replaced by low-wage-earning immigrants, creating models for John Edwards' Two Americas. The wealthy can afford to live in increasingly isolated enclaves while the rest of each city loses ground economically.
Meanwhile, those fleeing the coastal cities (with some exceptions) wind up in the larger interior cities, and the shift has political implications. Fifty years ago, Arizona had four electoral votes, Florida ten, while Michigan and New York had 20 and 45, respectively. Now Arizona has 12 and Florida 29, while Michigan has 16 and New York the same as Florida. The flight to flyover country has changed national politics and has created Red America bound by the Blue American coasts, and the trend may be accelerating.
San Francisco now has less people than Dallas, Houston is larger than Detroit, and Charlotte has outstripped Milwaukee. Those cities will have to contemplate their reduced influence on national affairs as their populations disperse to the interior. They may need to start asking themselves why their middle classes have found flyover country a destination.
Ehoudini Olmert
After the stalemate in the sub-Litani war against Hezbollah and the failure to win the release of the IDF soldiers taken hostage, the Israelis blamed Ehud Olmert for the result. People rallied to demand his resignation, and a report sharply criticized both his decision to go to war and the manner in which he conducted it. No one expected his government to survive.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has survived three no-confidence motions in parliament, in the latest backlash over his handling of the 2006 Lebanon war.The Knesset voted against the motions with wide margins - with votes against totalling 60-62 compared to 26-28 for.
A majority of 61 of the 120 members in the Knesset is needed to force the government to resign.
Last week tens of thousands of Israelis rallied in Tel Aviv calling for Mr Olmert to resign.
This will shock Israelis and people around the world. Not only did Olmert survive three no-confidence votes, he managed to defeat them by wide margins. For a man whose approval ratings make George Bush look like Ronald Reagan, that's no mean feat.
Where does Olmert go from here? He obviously will survive, at least until the other shoe drops and the full Winograd report gets released this summer. It gives him a window of opportunity to make amends and to show progress on either war or peace. If he can show that he has learned from the missteps of last summer, he may survive even the second blow from Winograd.
Olmert has managed to pull a political escape that Houdini himself might admire. Most politicians only get one opportunity for that kind of trick, but none of them get two. Olmert had better show some results -- fast.
The Rich Get Families
Much has been written about China's one-child policy that punishes married couples who commit the crime of multiple procreation. Forced abortions and jail time face most of China's poor population who conceive a second or subsequent child. However, the nouveau riche have discovered that even in China's supposedly classless society, money can buy them love, or at least its byproduct:
China's new rich are sparking a population crisis by disregarding the nation's one-child rule.Under the controversial policy introduced in 1979, families face fines if they have two or more children. But rising incomes, especially in the affluent eastern and coastal regions, mean that more people can afford to pay to have as many offspring as they like.
According to a recent survey by China's National Population and Family Planning Commission, the number of wealthy people and celebrities deciding to have more than one child has increased rapidly, despite fines that can be as high as 200,000 yuan (£13,000) for each extra child.
Almost 10 per cent of high earners are now choosing to have three children because large families are associated with wealth, status and happiness in China.
It's a rather interesting change. In agrarian societies, children act as assets for the family business of farming, and the economics provide incentives for large families. In China, where the land workers do not own their farms, the need for children for economic purposes abates, with only the considerations of old age remaining for the couple, at least in economic terms.
Now the rich, who have no particular economic need for offspring, have turned babies into status symbols. As the Chinese government keeps flirting with market economics, they will find that their market distortions will create bizarre reactions like Pet Rock children. In this case, they have basically attached a price tag on multiple children, and some now can afford to pay it. Now a large family becomes a Rolls Royce in Chinese society, and the have-nots that find themselves unable to compete face sterilization and forced abortions instead of smiling children at home.
Authorities have now started to add costs to the status symbols. Along with the taxation that the rich can now afford, Chinese officials will start a shaming campaign. They will face sanctions at work if employed in civil service, and others will have their names publicized and declared ineligible for awards and honors. Those prices may not mean much for a society that clearly sees the ability to keep children as a status symbol and as a hypocritical dividing line between the classes in the Communist classless structure.
In the end, the Chinese have approached this problem from the wrong angle. The problem isn't so much population as it is production. The artificial rationing of children is a response to an inability to produce in the Communist system. Up until they began to liberalize the economy, they could not produce enough to feed an expanding workforce. Had they given the people the opportunity to own their own land and control their own production, they would have never had a problem in feeding the offspring of their populace, and the Chinese would eventually have limited their own growth, just as the Western nations did during and after industrialization.
Instead, they implemented a top-down solution that has eventually exacerbated the difference between the rich and the poor, in the most personal manner possible. If the Chinese think they can solve that problem with even more top-down policymaking, they will find themselves very frustrated indeed.
May 7, 2007
Golden Gordon
My friend Scott at Power Line, who writes beautifully and with such depth about music and musicians, tonight talks about Canadian folk singer Gordon Lightfoot. In his post, "For Lightheads Only," he discusses the phenomenon of Lightfoot's popularity on tour maybe 20 years after he stopped charting songs:
I identify completely. I've been a fan of Lightfoot's since I was a teenager. I saw him perform at Dartmouth, if I'm not mistaken, in the winter of 1970 right after "Sit Down Young Stranger" (as it was originally called) had been issued. I saw him again a few years back when he came through Minneapolis after the four-disc box set recapping his career was released in 1999. As I approached the cash register to fork over the $50 or so necessary to purchase the box set in 1999, the store clerk mockingly struck up an exaggerated version of "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald." Fool!Llightfoot has written many outstanding songs in the course of his career, although the muse seems to have deserted him some time in the early 1980's. I'd love to continue the discussion with readers weighing in on their favorite Lightfoot songs in the thread on this post over in the Forum. Are there any takers?
I hope Scott forgives me not posting this in the Power Line forum, but I've meant to write something about Lightfoot for a long time. Longtime CQ readers will recall that Jim Croce is my favorite singer, and Lightfoot reminds me of Croce in a number of ways. He has a unique voice, built for folk music but also for lush ballads, which can evoke so many different emotions. Lightfoot, like Croce, can take listeners from nostalgia to despair and back again through love, all in a vocal setting so intimate even on CDs that it feels as though he's sitting in the room with you.
I've always liked Lightfoot, but I don't think I really appreciated him until John McDonald at Newsbeat1 gave me a gift of Lightfoot's music on a trip to Canada. I took the opportunity to listen to his most well-known songs, and not just the biggest charters. Songs like Canadian Railroad Trilogy and Steel Rail Blues reminded me most of Croce, with his evocative lyrics and wistful guitar perfectly complementing his voice, reminding us of days gone by. Had Croce lived and Lightfoot had not already written the perfect sea-chanty memorial The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, I imagine Croce would have filled the void.
My favorite Lightfoot songs, though, are the ones I have known for decades: Carefree Highway, If You Could Read My MInd, and Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. They all explore loss in one way or another; the last in obvious and compelling grief for real-life victims, and the first two for the end of love. Carefree Highway looks back at a relationship that failed, and the bitter lessons of not knowing what you have when you have it:
Turnin back the pages to the times I love best
I wonder if she'll ever do the same
Now the thing that I call livin is just bein satisfied
With knowin I got no one left to blame ...
Searchin through the fragments of my dream-shattered sleep
I wonder if the years have closed her mind
I guess it must be wanderlust or tryin to get free
From the good old faithful feelin we once knew
In If You Could Read My Mind, Lightfoot explores a relationship as it dies from neglect:
And if you read between the lines
Youll know that Im just tryin to understand
The feelins that you lack
I never thought I could feel this way
And Ive got to say that I just don't get it
I dont know where we went wrong
But the feelins gone
And I just cant get it back
And, as a bonus, one can always recall Sundown, in which Lightfoot sings about a woman who defies categorization and both frustrates and compels him with her unpredictability. Like all of Lightfoot's music,it's complex and layered, and also defies easy categorization. He eschewed moon-June-spoon laziness and wrote lyrics that meant something and told real stories.
So I understand why people flock to Lightfoot's concerts, even if he hasn't ridden the charts for years. When you have a treasure like Lightfoot, you make sure you take every chance to experience him. It's a shame that we have never had the opportunity to do that with Jim Croce.
CORRECTION: I didn't check the lyrics close enough from Lyricsfreak. It should be "I just don't get it" for If You Could Read My Mind. Thanks to Adjoran for the correction. Also, be sure to check out Gaius Arbo's post on Lightfoot, too.
French Riots, Right On Cue
After the election of Nicolas Sarkozy, many analysts expected unrest in the banlieus, the Muslim ghettoes that have percolated with unrest for the last several years. Overnight, the French have seen hundreds of cars burnt and hundreds of rioters arrested (via Memeorandum):
French police have arrested a total of 592 people across the country as bands of rioters protested conservative Nicolas Sarkozy's presidential election victory Sunday, French media reported.The police said a total of 730 vehicles were torched and 28 police officers were injured in violent incidents from Sunday night to Monday morning. Police fought stone-throwing rioters with tear gas, but it was not clear how many rioters were injured, according to Radio France.
Segolene Royal deserves some blame for this. She tried playing the fear card in the week before the runoff that made Sarkozy the new president, and signalled the would-be rioters that the expected response would be chaos and destruction. The French do not need much of a push to demonstrate in passionate terms, and the warning of Royal that Sarkozy's election would lead to riots could also be seen as expert analysis -- but one might think that a person vying for national leadership would have shown more discretion.
The last time these riots got started, they went on for weeks. That was partly because the initial response of the police was to hold back and let the riots burn themselves out. Sarkozy wound up having to take tougher action to get them under control. The arrests show that the French police have learned the lesson. We'll see if the rioters have learned theirs.
UPDATE: Charles Johnson notes that AP apparently bought an attempt to downplay the violence, an effort that French authorities attempted to keep the foreign press from broadcasting the extensive nature of the riots.
Not Even The Sunnis Want Partition
We have heard plenty of people talk about the idea of splitting Iraq into three autonomous cantons in order to allow each of the three main demographics groups to run a portion of the country. Senator Joe Biden has pushed this idea for months, claiming it to be the only way out of Iraq. Recently, Sam Brownback endorsed that plan and wants to team up with Biden to present it to the Senate. According to the plan's advocates, a partition will provide the only framework for enabling the Sunnis, which has a lower level of population than the majority Shi'a or the already-transitioned Kurds.
However, the leader of the Sunnis in the Iraqi National Assembly has threatened to walk out and take his coalition with him until the Iraqi government rejects this notion completely:
Iraq's top Sunni official has set a deadline of next week for pulling his entire bloc out of the government -- a potentially devastating blow to reconciliation efforts within Iraq. He also said he turned down an offer by President Bush to visit Washington until he can count more fully on U.S. help.
Iraqi Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi made his comments in an interview with CNN. He said if key amendments to the Iraq Constitution are not made by May 15, he will step down and pull his 44 Sunni politicians out of the 275-member Iraqi parliament."If the constitution is not subject to major changes, definitely, I will tell my constituency frankly that I have made the mistake of my life when I put my endorsement to that national accord," he said.
Specifically, he wants guarantees in the constitution that the country won't be split into Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish federal states that he says will disadvantage Sunnis.
As I have said for months, partition would be a disaster for the Sunnis. They have a chance to participate in a meaningful manner in a united Iraq, but a partition would trade a small interest in a large profit pool for a whole interest in nothing at all. They would find themselves locked out of any meaningful control over the natural resources of Iraq, and they know full well that a Swiss style of federalism will mean that the Kurds and Shi'a could walk away with all of the oil revenue at any time.
We need to stop encouraging this proposal. The Sunnis will not agree to it, no matter how many guarantees we and the Maliki government make about the security of the oil revenue. They want to see an integrated Iraq, not a canton system that will allow the country to spin apart into three pieces. The Sunnis also mistrust Iran and their influence on the Shi'ites -- as should we.
The next time Biden insists on this answer, ask him which Iraqis want to see their country undergo the Munich treatment.
CQ Media Alert: The Hugh Hewitt Show (Update: Strib Announces Staff Reductions)
I'll be appearing on the Hugh Hewitt show tonight at 5:30 pm. We'll be talking about the Lileks story, which should come as no surprise, since James has been a contributor to Hugh's show for years. Be sure to tune in, and you can also catch the live stream at AM 1280 The Patriot!
UPDATE: The Strib announced what we knew was coming -- 145 positions will be cut:
The Star Tribune announced plans Monday to reduce its workforce by about 145 employees across the company, primarily through voluntary buyouts. ...“Revenue has been declining since 2004 and we need to respond to that reality.” Ridder said in a prepared statement. “The newspaper business model has changed and this restructuring will allow us to align more resources with what readers and advertisers are demanding from us. Through this process we will be increasing resources focused on local content and advertising products, in both print and online. ...
“This is difficult, but we join many newsrooms in having to restructure for changing times,” Barnes said in a statement. “We will continue to deliver a deep, rich state and local news report every day, whether readers want to get that online or in print. In fact, in the restructuring, we'll be shifting more reporters to local news, in-depth news, and online information gathering than we had before these staff reductions. And we will still have by far the largest news gathering operation in the Upper Midwest region."
They've already started shifting those reporters to local news, which is what they offered Lileks. Many people assume that they want to force James to quit, which may be true, but it won't help in gathering news. And if the Strib thinks it can convince us that they'll produce a better newspaper and more in-depth reporting with fewer reporters, then Barnes has been reading her own editorial section for too long.
I wonder if Barack Obama will chastise Barnes and Ridder for the violence they have inflicted on their staff?
CQ Radio: Rick Moran
Today on CQ Radio, we'll be talking with Rick Moran of Right Wing Nut House. He and I both posted about the relocation of presidential primaries, and where that process will lead us. We'll also talk about the Fred factor and the latest polling in the race, including the laughable Newsweek survey. Rick has his own BlogTalkRadio show, and Rick will update us on his upcoming show.
Be sure to join the conversation at 646-652-4889 and keep the debate going!
BUMP: To top, and be sure to read the post about Richardson. I'm hoping to play the clip for the show.
Richardson: Strength Through Surrender
Bill Richardson made his appearance on BlogTalkRadio's Heading Left show this afternoon, and he spoke about his position on the Iraq war. Not surprisingly, he favors a complete deauthorization of the war, along the lines proposed by Hillary Clinton and Robert Byrd. However, Richardson would go even farther than most Democrats. He would pull American troops out of Baghdad, but also from Anbar and Diyala, where they face al-Qaeda terrorists and where we have made a lot of progress in engaging the local tribes.
Here's Richardson on his vision for Iraq:
What I would do is call for a deauthorization on the war, on the basis of the authorization is now, I believe invalid, because there were no weapons of mass destruction, as that language indicated, in the initial war authorization. So I would deauthorize the war, I would set a timetable of all troops out by the end of the year. And here is where I'm different from other candidates -- I would have no residual forces. No American troops, except for an embassy detail [in Baghdad] of Marines, which is traditional in our diplomatic representation ...
Richardson, who served in Congress for years before working in the Clinton administration, believes that a deauthorization bill does not require a Presidential signature, and is therefore immune to a veto:
I believe that deauthorization, on the basis of Article I of the Constitution, also would have a Congressional reaffirmation of its power to declare war, which it has, but which it has not exercised. The President can't veto this. The issue probably would go to the courts.... But it's decisive, it's strong, it's direct, it's specific, it's easy to understand by the public, and that's the course I believe it should take.
There's so much to criticize that I'm not sure where to begin. Let's start with the Constitutional issue of a deauthorization bill not requiring a Presidential signature and therefore not subject to a veto. The Constitution does not allow Congress to pass anything into law without executive branch oversight. That's especially significant where the command of the military is concerned. It would probably go to the Supreme Court, which would promptly laugh its collective rear off at a Congress that thinks it can make itself Commander in Chief by diktat.
Also, I'm particularly amused at Richardson's description of a complete withdrawal as "decisive", and especially as "strong". Does he really think that al-Qaeda and the host of radical Islamist terrorist groups will consider America strong because it retreated from the fight in Anbar and Diyala, let alone Baghdad? If so, and if his fellow Democrats agree with him, then he has made the best possible argument for putting a Republican in the White House in 2008 -- and in control of Congress.
"Strength through surrender" will hardly make a compelling campaign slogan except for the Orwellians at International ANSWER and MoveOn. I thought Richardson was smarter than this.
Bill Richardson On BlogTalkRadio
Bill Richardson, the Democrat whom the Republicans should fear most, will appear on BlogTalkRadio today at 1 pm ET. The hosts will take calls live for Governor Richardson at 646-652-4803.
I've written about Richardson before. He has the best resumé of all the Democrats and most of the Republicans, and his extensive experience runs through both the legislative and executive branches. If the Democrats have a Bill Clinton in the wings, it's probably him.
That doesn't mean Richardson is someone I would support; far from it. Richardson has run to the left so far with his campaign, but even his previous brand of moderation relies far too heavily on government solutions. However, he has generally avoided being a polarizing figure, and his ability to attract moderates and independents has been proven in New Mexico. If the Democrats are smart enough to nominate him, it would probably force the GOP to find a centrist candidate to oppose him, like Rudy Giuliani.
He's a very intriguing candidate, and someone Republicans should watch with caution.
Exploding Backpack In Las Vegas
UPDATE: Not a terrorist attack. See below.
State and federal authorities have swarmed over the Luxor Hotel after an explosion in its parking ramp this morning. A man carried a backpack into the second level of the parking garage and it exploded, killing the man carrying it and injuring another:
A backpack exploded in a parking garage attached to a Las Vegas hotel early Monday, killing a man who had picked it up and injuring another person, authorities said.The man had removed the backpack from atop his car when it exploded shortly after 4 a.m. on the second floor of a parking behind the Luxor hotel-casino, said Officer Bill Cassell, a police spokesman.
The second person was taken to an area hospital.
Aerial video showed no apparent damage to the parking structure, where entrances were blocked while police, firefighters and federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agents investigated. No further information was immediately available.
Terrorists used exploding backpacks in the 7/7 London bombings, and of course, today is the seventh of May, so there could be some connection between the two. No news agency has posted any further details as of yet, but I will be keeping tabs on the news channels today to see if anything else develops.
I would say that this appears botched, and unlikely to have been part of a terrorist attack, unless we see other explosions. A backpack explosive is designed to kill people, not damage structures, and I suspect the man wanted to get it into the casino first before touching it off, if he was part of a terrorist network. If so, we will see more casino attacks in rapid succession. If not, this may be just a lunatic operating on his own.
UPDATE: Michelle Malkin reports that the person who died worked at the hotel, and retrieved the backpack from a car, where it was left:
The explosion happened around 4 a.m. Reports were that the device was inside a backpack, which was on the vehicle. When the employee went to remove the object, the explosive went off. The employee was taken to the hospital where he died.Officials say the victim appears to have been the intended target.
Someone apparently targeted the employee, leaving the backpack where the killer knew the employee would retrieve it. That's what the news reports in Las Vegas say at the moment. It seems like a strange way to kill one specific person, and I expect this to get more clarification or to change as the day rolls along.
Michelle also reminds us that al-Qaeda has scoped out the Luxor in the past, as well as Las Vegas in general. The 9/11 plotters made several trips to Vegas in the months before the attack, too.
UPDATE III: As I noted earlier, it was not likely a terrorist attack, despite one blogger who apparently couldn't read that far into the post. Terrorists would have wanted to blow the bomb up inside the casino, not in the parking garage. Unfortunately, one man still died in the attack.
I don't consider it irresponsible to discuss all of the different possibilities when news reports come through talking about backpack bombs. The early reports in that sense were apparently incorrect, but it's still pretty unusual to leave a bomb waiting in a parking garage in the hope that the victim will pick it up. It should be an interesting case to follow.
Playing Leapfrog With The Primaries
The New York Times reports that California has reaped benefits from its decision to move its primary from June to February. The candidates have to address issues near and dear to California hearts, such as Net neutrality, redistricting, use of public lands, and much more. As other states see their influence suffer as a result, what keeps them from leapfrogging California, and California from leapfrogging again? At Heading Right, I argue that Congress has a role in setting elections for federal offices -- and that the time may have come for a more orderly and fair primary process that allows all states to have a significant say in nominating presidential candidates.
Also, be sure to read Rick Moran on what we can learn from the French presidential election process -- and not just in terms of turnout.
EuroShock: France Moves Right
Europe appears in shock today as the center of European socialism has rejected the Socialists and moved to the right. The victory of Nicolas Sarkozy in the French presidential election has the continent abuzz, trying to discern its meaning and its impact for the rest of Europe. Der Spiegel reports that France "lurched" to the Right, and warns of social conflict as a result:
Perhaps it wasn't exactly a landslide, but it was certainly an unambiguous result: France's 44 million voters have chosen Nicolas Sarkozy, the strong man of the governing UMP, with a resounding majority and a record turnout. They have chosen his vision of a radical revitalization of the Republic and a return to the nation's patriotic foundations. Sarkozy's convincing win is the triumph of political individualism over the rival worldview of the Socialist candidate Ségòlene Royal and her vision of a "participatory democracy" -- which too often got lost in vague affirmations.What's clear about Sunday's vote is that it marks a turning point for France. After the gray era of 12 years of "Chiraquie," the citizens of France have backed the candidate who spoke of change and even a "break" with established tradition. With an eye to chronic unemployment, spiraling state debt, globalization and the disappearance of entire industry sectors to lower-wage countries, the French have put their money on a politician who has always vowed to radically and swiftly liquidate France's historic mortgage -- the civil servant apparatus, the privileges of teachers and social workers, the influence of the unions.
Stefan Simons doesn't make this sound like a beneficial move on the part of the French. He denigrates the notion that Sarkozy will make any changes to France's direction, noting that Sarkozy helped Jacques Chirac run France for the past five years. He's hardly an outsider, Simons complains, even if he almost ran as an opposition candidate. That's about what a non-Socialist is in Europe these days, though, something Simons doesn't address.
He also sneers that Sarkozy ran a campaign based on fear. Sarkozy "dipp[ed] his hand into the toolbox of America's neoconservatives," Simons accuses. However, it was Segolene Royal who tried to scare the French away from Sarkozy by talking about riots in the streets if he won; Simons doesn't bother to mention that, nor does he give any thought at all to the fact that Socialism is founded on fear. Socialism addresses the fear of failure by never giving individuals the opportunity to risk and gain in proportion to that risk.
Simons deplores the thought of Sarkozy at the helm of the presidency, and doesn't bother to mask it. He fears that Sarkozy will be "seduced" by the power of his office. Farther on, he dreads Sarkozy's "brutish approach" and warns that he will pay no regard to "civil society". The problem the French perceive is that civil society is under threat from riotous Muslims, unemployment, and a sense of failure.
In fact, Americans might recall this kind of hysteria. It happened in late 1980, when Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter, and the liberals screeched that the end was nigh for American democracy.
The Times of London takes a more balanced approach:
Setting the tone for a revolution after 12 years in which President Chirac often seemed to be disconnected from events, Mr Sarkozy has promised that after he takes office on May 17: “I will not be a referee, a monarch sheltering in the Elysée Palace. I will govern and take responsibility.”His first task, after several days’ reflection, is to appoint a Prime Minister and what he says will be a tight Cabinet of only 15 full ministers. ...
Mr Sarkozy, who calls himself the “champion of the France that gets up early in the morning”, expects to face strong resistance from trade unions, public-service workers and the Left to his radical measures to encourage people to work longer hours and to cut benefits for the unemployed. He believes that his mandate from the majority of France will give him the authority to face down protesters, as Margaret Thatcher did in Britain after 1979. “I’m sorry if they don’t like change, but they are not the ones being elected,” Mr Sarkozy said of the powerful, Communist-led CGT union.
If Sarkozy can get the kind of reaction from the Left as he has from Der Spiegel based on his moderate panel of reforms, then France has elected the right man for the job, as well as the man from the Right.
UPDATE: Financial Times predicts that Socialism will have to mutate to a capital-friendly form if it expects to survive:
Let the finger-pointing begin. Ségolène Royal’s defeat on Sunday night left the French Socialist party in disarray and searching for someone to blame. There is hardly a shortage of scapegoats.It is the party’s third consecutive presidential defeat. The Socialists now face the question of whether they can ever regain power without ditching their anti-capitalist rhetoric, as the mainstream left has done across almost all of Europe.
Ms Royal can argue that she did better than Lionel Jospin, who in 2002 led the Socialists to a humiliating third place behind Jacques Chirac and far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen. But France’s main opposition party still faces a wrenching crisis.
”The left is not credible on so many issues, from the 35-hour working week to immigration and law and order,” says Dominique Reynié, professor at Sciences Po university.
Michael van der Galien puts it rather succinctly:
Socialism has had its day; socialism has brought moral decline, high unemployment rates, weak, unstable economies, huge governments, regulation in just about every area of one’s life; it has caused something called personal responsibility to disappear; it has brought moral relativism; it has learned us that we cannot be proud of our respective country; it has made large groups of people unnecessarily dependent on the government; it has forced us to accept the failed concept of multiculturalism; it has taught us (I mean Europeans in general with that) that whatever you do, you have to be politically correct; it has created an environment in which one is not allowed to name problems, let alone deal with them; it has taught us that criminals are not to blame for their crimes, society as a whole is and that they, therefore, should be coddled instead of punished… oef, the list goes on and on.Socialism has weakened France, and Europe as a whole; it is time to get rid of it.
Perhaps it has put Western civilization back on its historical path -- the reliance on and the rights of the individual, not the collective.
Strib Manages To Make It Worse
I don't subscribe to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, mostly because I no longer feel the need to get dead trees dropped on my driveway each morning to remain informed. I also don't feel that the Strib does a particularly good job of informing anyone outside the natural audience for their bias, but that's a complaint for another day. The paper no longer provides much even in entertainment, but what they had in that respect came almost entirely from the efforts of James Lileks.
Now the Strib, in the midst of post-acquisition downsizing, has apparently decided that they can sell even more newspapers by becoming even less entertaining -- a decision that would shock anyone who hasn't had to endure the repeated stupidities of the Strib:
In short, it’s everything I’ve been looking for. All these worlds are mine, except Europa! There are union rules about that, I gather.Hah! Just kidding.
That didn't happen.
As it happens, they've killed my column, and assigned me to write straight local news stories.
Really.
And do you think they've assigned him a beat which matches his skills, experience, and reputation? One might assume, given his large Internet following at The Bleat, that he might focus on Internet developments, covering the blogosphere and the New Media efforts of the various political campaigns. Had one assumed that, one would have chosen ... poorly.
The Strib's going to send him out to report on dogcatcher elections, busted fire hydrants, the cost of pothole maintenance, and every other yawner of a local story they can find for him.
One indicator of bad management is the underuse of assets and the inability to recognize opportunity to use the talent of the employees to their fullest. In this case, management knows what it has in James, and they're tossing it away anyway. That's not just bad management; they should keep sharp objects away from these managers and only allow them to use crayons. Please tell me that the men and women who made this decision do not drive to work unsupervised.
Just to be clear, James is a friend of mine, and I've enjoyed his hospitality at Jasperwood more than once. He and I have shared the mike for NARN broadcasts and the occasional fill-in for Hugh Hewitt. I'm not a disinterested third party -- but then, neither are the tens of thousands who enjoy his print column, or the millions who enjoy The Bleat. He's a class act and a brilliant writer, and anyone except the Strib's management team would recognize that in a heartbeat.
Also banging their heads on the keyboard this morning:
Tinkering With Comments (Update & Bump)
Here at CQ, we're always looking for ways to tinker with the system in order to improve performance. I'm testing a new comment interface that works outside of the Typekey login. Typekey still works with the comments section, but at least for a test period, it will not be required. I'm using another form of spam blocking, and hopefully this will work well enough to eliminate the Typekey requirement, which has never worked particularly well with this blog.
Let me know what you think. I'll update everyone on the performance of the system to keep spam out of the comments sections.
UPDATE, BUMP: Still doing some tinkering. I'm trying to find solutions that won't require Typekey but will not create a lot of work for me to clear comments from spam filters. This may take some time and could create delays in comments posting on threads. I'm also trying to fix some server-side problems with runaway scripting, and it's all related. I've been at this for two hours this morning, and it may take a while longer.
May 6, 2007
Palestinians: Al-Qaeda Attacked School
Palestinian Authority officials have blamed al-Qaeda for an attack on a school celebration, in part because the terrorists believed that girls and boys would dance together at the event. They allege that AQ has established a foothold in Gaza, and more attacks will follow:
Palestinian Authority security officials accused supporters of al-Qaida in the Gaza Strip of carrying out Sunday's attack on a UNRWA-run school in Rafah in which one person was killed and six others were wounded."There is no doubt that al-Qaida is operating in the Gaza Strip," a senior PA security official said. "Today's attack carries the fingerprints of al-Qaida."
Witnesses told The Jerusalem Post that at least 70 Muslim fundamentalists participated in the attack on the Omariya School, where UNRWA and PA officials were attending a celebration.
The director of UNRWA operations in the Gaza Strip, John Ging, was inside the school at the time. He was not hurt, as PA policemen whisked him away to a safe location.
Despite lobbing grenades and opening fire with automatic weapons, the attackers only managed to kill one person. They had organized the attack, according to witnesses, in significant numbers. Perhaps as many as 70 terrorists took part in the operation, and they continued to attack the vehicles fleeing the school.
Analysts believe that the terrorists belong to an AQ-affiliated Salafist group, rather than Hamas. They have conducted an increasing level of attacks on Gaza targets over the last two years. They typically target schools, Internet cafés, hair salons, and the like, and this school fits the profile.
While they share an Islamist philosophy, they apparently also share a lunatic desire to kill everyone who doesn't agree with them on all points. The Salafists or Wahhabis want rule by imams and shari'a law, and violently disagree with the political involvement of Hamas and the PA altogether. The AQ groups have assassinated Hamas figures, and Hamas has returned the favor.
Attacking schools is what the radical Islamists did in Beslan. This time they failed to do much damage, but the situation in Gaza since the exit of the Israelis has seriously deteriorated, and the West cannot pretend much longer that they have a nascent staging ground for AQ attacks. Even the Palestinians have begun to figure that much out.
Is It Sarkozy? (Update: Yes, It Is)
It appears Nicolas Sarkozy has won the French presidential election today, as results have leaked to various media groups and to the gathered supporters of the French center-right candidate. Meanwhile, the mood at his opponent's headquarters has turned grim, which indicates that the results have leaked to both sides:
Supporters of Nicolas Sarkozy erupted in cheers Sunday, celebrating unconfirmed reports of a resounding victory for the rightwinger over Socialist Segolene Royal in France's presidential election.After a day which saw a huge voter turnout at the climax of the hardfought campaign, supporters chanted "we won!" at a Paris concert hall where Sarkozy was to deliver a speech after the official results were given.
The mood was grim at the Socialist Party headquarters where about 300 Royal supporters waited.
French law forbids the publication of projections until the last polling stations close at 1800 GMT although the figures are distributed to media and party headquarters up to 90 minutes in advance.
Royal's followers sensed defeat in the final days of the campaign. Polling showed Sarkozy well ahead of Royal for the runoff election, with independents leaning towards the Socialist but not in numbers large enough to win. Her allies began to warn of massive riots from the banlieus if Sarkozy defeated Royal, and the threat has French police on alert in the Muslim immigrant neighborhoods.
Of course, part of the reason Sarkozy won -- assuming he did -- is because of the continuous violence occurring in the Muslim ghettoes. Cars burn on most nights, and it no longer makes headlines unless the count gets above 200 or so. The obvious cultural disconnect, along with the moribund French economy under Socialist policies, has created a shift in mood for the French. Sarkozy campaigned on the need to ditch the 32-hour work week and to make the business climate more friendly to investment and entrepeneurs, and he has apparently struck a chord with fed-up French voters.
Fausta has links to more coverage of Sarkozy's apparent victory.
UPDATE: Oui - c'est Sarkozy. He beat Royal convincingly, 53%-47%, in an election that had an 85% turnout. He takes office from Jacques Chirac in ten days, and then starts working on his slate of reforms:
After legislative elections in June -- in which he is banking on a clear majority for the UMP and its allies -- he plans a special session of the National Assembly to push through the first stage of his reforms.These include the abolition of tax on overtime, swingeing cuts in inheritance tax, a law guaranteeing minimum service in transport strikes, and rules to oblige the unemployed to take up offered work.
On the social front he has pledged minumum jail terms for serial offenders and tougher rules to make it harder for immigrants to bring extended families to France.
The unemployed will have to take jobs if offered them? Sacre bleu!
Newsweek Practicing Early For Poll Follies
Newsweek publishes a breathless account of how George Bush's approval rating has dropped to 28%, and how leading Democrat contenders now outpoll the Republicans across the board for the 2008 presidential race. Coincidence, Newsweek asks? They should have asked that question of their pollsters:
It’s hard to say which is worse news for Republicans: that George W. Bush now has the worst approval rating of an American president in a generation, or that he seems to be dragging every ’08 Republican presidential candidate down with him. But According to the new NEWSWEEK Poll, the public’s approval of Bush has sunk to 28 percent, an all-time low for this president in our poll, and a point lower than Gallup recorded for his father at Bush Sr.’s nadir. The last president to be this unpopular was Jimmy Carter who also scored a 28 percent approval in 1979. This remarkably low rating seems to be casting a dark shadow over the GOP’s chances for victory in ’08. The NEWSWEEK Poll finds each of the leading Democratic contenders beating the Republican frontrunners in head-to-head matchups. ...Like Obama, Edwards defeats the Republicans by larger margins than Clinton does: the former Democratic vice-presidential nominee outdistances Giuliani by six points, McCain by 10 and Romney by 37, the largest lead in any of the head-to-head matchups. Meanwhile, Sen. Clinton wins 49 percent to 46 percent against Giuliani, well within the poll’s margin of error; 50 to 44 against McCain; and 57 to 35 against Romney.
Yes, this would be a devastating poll, if one could rely on it. It contradicts nearly every other poll, which has consistently shown Giuliani beating Obama, Clinton, and Edwards. How could Newsweek get the results they have published?
Well, for one thing, it helps when you poll 50% more Democrats than Republicans. If one reads the actual poll results all the way to the end, the penultimate question shows that the sample has 24% Republicans to 36% Democrats. Compare that to the information given by Newsweek's NBC partners in February, which showed that party affiliation had shifted from a difference of less than a percentage point to a gap of 3.9 points -- 34.3% to 30.4%, with 33.9% independents.
Does it really surprise Newsweek that a sample where half again as many Democrats as Republicans were polled tend to prefer Democrats for President? Do they find it all that surprising that George Bush isn't terribly popular when surveys oversample Democrats? They knew that the poll had to have some problems; the margins of error for the poll were 7% for the Democrats and 8% for the Republicans, quite high for these kinds of polls.
Newsweek apparently doesn't employ people like editors and fact checkers before rushing their analyses to print. Thankfully, the blogosphere can take the time and effort to have these layers of correction so that we can provide the best possible information to our readership.
Fred And John
Readers can tell that the media has begun to take Fred Thompson seriously as a candidate, because the profiles on him have become more sharp and land on the front pages. Today, the Washington Post takes a turn at Fred, noting the similarities between his positions and that of his friend and colleague, John McCain -- and wonders why the base pines for Fred and mostly eschews McCain:
Fred Thompson fervently backed the Iraq war, railed against an expanding federal government, took stands that occasionally annoyed his party and rarely spoke about his views on social issues during his tenure as a senator from Tennessee or in his writings and speeches since leaving office.In short, the man some in the GOP are touting as a dream candidate has often sounded like the presidential hopeful many of them seem ready to dismiss: Sen. John McCain (Ariz.).
With some in the party clamoring for an alternative to their current field of presidential contenders and Thompson's allies hinting strongly that he will run, 400 conservatives flocked to Newport Beach, Calif., on Friday night to hear the actor-turned-politician-turned-actor address the annual dinner of the Lincoln Club of Orange County, a group that credits itself with pushing Ronald Reagan to run for governor of California in the 1960s. Thompson delivered a vision of cutting taxes, reducing the size of government, overhauling Social Security and staying in Iraq until "there is some semblance of stability."
He also called for "reform-minded, change-minded leaders," a profile that McCain -- whom Thompson described as "a man of the highest integrity and courage" in 1999 when he co-chaired the Arizonan's presidential run -- has worked hard to lay claim to over the past decade. Thompson was one of only four GOP senators to back McCain's bid in 2000, and a former aide to the Tennessean said McCain "was far and away his best friend in the Senate."
The Post almost appears ready to trot out the old nickname "Maverick" for Thompson. Perry Bacon notes the more centrist positions that Fred has staked out on issues such as abortion, where he wants the GOP to avoid litmus tests. He also recalls that Thompson voted against the perjury count in the Clinton impeachment, but fails to mention that he voted for conviction on the obstruction of justice charge that would have removed Clinton from the White House had it garnered two-thirds of the Senate. His former advisor calls him "unpredictable", a quality that has infuriated Republicans in John McCain.
However, Bacon also points out that Thompson has voted with the party on most occasions. While he doesn't support banning abortions, he clearly doesn't support a Roe notion of Constitutional protection for them, either. He has almost been alone in pursuing a return to real federalism, while garnering an 86 rating from the American Conservative Union. He has the support of abortion opponents, who apparently do not see him as a problem on that issue.
Thompson also had some significant issues with McCain's policies. He supported the BCRA, but now says that campaign finance reform has done nothing to solve the problems it intended to address, and that a new approach is needed. Thompson supported the Bush tax cuts from the beginning. He also pushed back against some of McCain's bipartisan efforts, such as on the "patients bill of rights", on federalist grounds.
In the end, though, the biggest difference is trust. The base simply does not trust John McCain, not after the BCRA, the McCain-Kennedy immigration reform bill, and especially not after the Gang of 14. No amount of banging on podiums about the war will repair that damage in the primaries. With Thompson, the base gets the best parts of the McCain platform, with a healthy dose of federalism and lower taxes, and some measure of reliability. As much as the Post wants to tie them together, Fred and John are quite different -- and the GOP base understands that.
How To Freak Out Your Family When You're An Obsessive
It's been a slow morning today, as I spent most of last night fighting insomnia and decided to sleep later than usual when I finally got my 40 winks. I dragged myself out of bed and had just began to eat when I heard my cell phone alert me to a new message. My father, the Admiral Emeritus, had left me a terse "call me back when you get this" voicemail, so I immediately called him back. This was the conversation:
AE: What's going on?
Me: Huh?
AE: Is there a problem? Is everyone OK?
Me: I'm tired, I didn't sleep well, but that's it.
AE: Oh, OK. I thought something was wrong.
Me: Why?
AE: Because by this time in the morning, you usually have a half a dozen posts up on your blog.
I guess I usually do ... so it's difficult to blame him for being worried. I'm just feeling lazy today, but it's good to know he's keeping an eye on me.
Nifong And Durham: Worse Than You Think
Mike Nifong faces disbarment and almost certainly a flurry of lawsuits over his negligent and malicious handling of the Duke lacrosse players accused of rape by a mentally unstable woman. He may not be the only one on the hot seat, however, as the Durham police department apparently also failed to follow its own procedures and imcompetently investigated the charges. Police chief Steve Chalmers will finally issue a report on how his department investigated the woman's allegations, and it appears he has much to defend:
The allegations of misconduct against District Attorney Mike Nifong have taken center stage, but an examination of police and prosecutorial records raises questions about whether the police ceded control of the investigation, violated their own policies, created false records and failed to pursue basic investigative leads. ...
On March 31, Nifong directed Gottlieb and Investigator Benjamin Himan to show Mangum pictures of all 46 white lacrosse players (Mangum had said her attackers were white, so the team's lone black player was not named as a suspect). Mangum had earlier looked at photographs of 36 lacrosse players and failed to identify an assailant.Nifong's directive violated Durham Police guidelines, which says that identification procedures should include five fillers -- photographs of people unrelated to the case -- for every photograph of a suspect. Gottlieb did not include any fillers when he showed the photos to Mangum, who picked out four players as her assailants, three of whom were charged. ...
In July, Gottlieb produced his written report that seemed to shore up Nifong's identification procedure. Gottlieb reported that on March 16, Magnum had precisely described the three men who were later indicted, including this description of Finnerty: "W/M, young, blonde hair, baby faced, tall and lean." This description, however, contradicted handwritten notes taken by Himan during the interview, which described the three men as heavyset, dark, chubby or short.
That's a serious charge of misconduct by the police sergeant, Mark Gottlieb. He falsified records in order to press forward a case against these three young men. So far, the public has believed that the unethical and potentially illegal behavior was confined to Nifong's office -- but this indicates that the police investigators were heavily involved in deception as well.
Unfortunately for Durham residents, it's not the only instance of malfeasance:
The police department's conduct involves not just what investigators did, but what they didn't do. The rape charges rested on the uncorroborated words of Mangum, who gave multiple, conflicting versions of the alleged assault. Police never pressed her to resolve the contradictions. They waited seven months to interview her colleagues and boss at the Platinum Club, a strip club in Hillsborough where Mangum danced.According to Nifong's files, police waited six months to pull the report on Mangum's 2002 arrest on charges of stealing a taxicab from a Durham strip club. Mangum's behavior that night echoed her behavior after the lacrosse party and could have raised cautions about her reliability.
This is indefensible. The police want to investigate a serious crime, and they wait seven months to interview witnesses when the accuser can't get her story straight. Recall that it took only days for Nifong to start talking about the three defendants in highly prejudicial terms to the media. Only after half a year had passed from that point did the police -- under the direction of Nifong -- get around to interviewing witnesses to Mangum's background and behavior.
Eyewitness testimony does not improve with age. Details get lost and information gets more confused, as a rule. The delay would be inexcusable under any circumstances, but when the accuser's story contradicts itself in substantial ways, police should be interviewing witnesses immediately before arresting people. Instead, they lollygagged for months -- and even when the DNA results came back, they didn't act with any alacrity.
And some of this just shows a great deal of incompetence among the so-called professionals of Durham:
For example, when police first searched the party house at 610 N. Buchanan Blvd. on March 16, two lacrosse team captains told police that Kevin Coleman, a lacrosse player, had taken photographs of the party. Police never subpoenaed Coleman's camera or the time-stamped photographs, even after some of the images appeared on national television and the Internet. Police never obtained cell phones belonging to Seligmann or Finnerty, or their computers, or instant messages or e-mail.
That's because Nifong and the police weren't interested in justice. They just wanted a few Duke scalps to make themselves popular with the locals.
What an abject embarrassment the Durham justice system is. The state should take jurisdiction over the DA's office and the local police and start firing people until the message gets through to the rest.
CORRECTION: The witnesses they waited months to interview were not partygoers but Mangum's colleagues.
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