State Bar Lowers The Boom On Nifong

Mike Nifong's legal career came crashing to an end today. After finding Nifong guilty on a number of counts of unethical behavior for his actions in the Duke lacrosse non-rape case, the North Carolina State Bar disbarred Nifong, who had resigned as Durham County DA yesterday:

Durham County District Attorney Mike Nifong has been disbarred after being found guilty of a battery of ethics violations for his handling of the Duke lacrosse investigation, a North Carolina Bar disciplinary committee announced Saturday evening. ...

"We are in unanimous agreement that there is no discipline short of disbarment that would be appropiate in this case," said F. Lane Williamson, the committee's chairman.

Before the panel announced its punishment, Nifong said he believed disbarment would be appropriate and that he planned to waive all rights to appeal the findings of the bar panel, his attorney David Freedman said in court Saturday afternoon.

The Bar had some damning things to say about Nifong before disbarring him. They found that Nifong deliberately acted with malice in order to boost his political career, a conclusion most reached after the results of DNA testing became fully known. They also found that he lied to the court and to Bar investigators.

That may continue to complicate his life. The victims of Nifong's attacks have announced that they will seek criminal contempt charges against Nifong on the basis of deliberate misrepresentations to the Durham court. The Bar's findings of multiple counts of deliberate deception will have a strong influence on that case. Nifong could find himself in jail.

Nifong has already announced that he will not appeal the disbarment, although he has the option to do so. His resignation and acceptance of the Bar's punishment might convince a court to keep from sentencing him to prison for his actions, and that has to be what Nifong hopes to accomplish. However, the court should take into account the destruction of trust in the criminal justice system that Nifong has wrought. The impact of his actions under color of authority at least equal that of which Scooter Libby is accused, and the remedy should be similar.

UPDATE: I should have included a link to the one blogger who has owned this story -- KC Johnson. Start at the top and keep scrolling down for the full coverage at Durham in Wonderland.

Iran Nearing The Tipping Point?

The mullahcracy in Iran has apparently unleashed its latent paranoia, resulting in a crackdown on dissent not seen since the 1979 Revolution. The Iranian government has moved to quell academic debate, silence citizen groups, purge their internal security systems, and generally tighten the screws on the Iranian people:

Iran is in the midst of a sweeping crackdown that both Iranians and U.S. analysts compare to a cultural revolution in its attempt to steer the oil-rich theocracy back to the rigid strictures of the 1979 revolution.

The recent detentions of Iranian American dual nationals are only a small part of a campaign that includes arrests, interrogations, intimidation and harassment of thousands of Iranians as well as purges of academics and new censorship codes for the media. Hundreds of Iranians have been detained and interrogated, including a top Iranian official, according to Iranian and international human rights groups. ...

The widespread purges and arrests are expected to have an impact on parliamentary elections next year and the presidential contest in 2009, either discouraging or preventing reformers from running against the current crop of hard-liners who dominate all branches of government, Iranian and U.S. analysts say. The elections are one of several motives behind the crackdowns, they add.

Public signs of discontent -- such as students booing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on a campus last December, teacher protests in March over low wages and workers demonstrating on May Day -- are also behind the detentions, according to Iranian sources.

"The current crackdown is a way to instill fear in the population in order to discourage them from future political agitation as the economic situation begins to deteriorate," said Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "You're going to think twice about taking to the streets to protest the hike in gasoline prices if you know the regime's paramilitary forces have been on a head-cracking spree the last few weeks."

If the mullahs think this will work to end internal dissatisfaction with the governing elite, they're going to find themselves very surprised, and probably sooner than later. The Iranian people as a whole are a lot more cosmopolitan than the provincial clerics that act as dictators over them. Until recently, the creation of an Islamist state has kept Muslims from reacting to the oppression, especially as the mullahs acted to give limited expression of popular dissent after the death of the revered Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, as a safety valve against an explosion of resentment.

Now that they have acted to close off those safety valves, they had better watch out for the reaction. It may not happen overnight, but the Iranians will not sit quietly for long, as Khomeini proved in 1979. If they refuse to allow even modest reformers to run for office and toss into jail anyone who complains, it will not shut off the misery but force it into new and destabilizing channels.

The Iranians have accused the US of fomenting revolution, and the US has not exactly denied it. In fact, an ABC report unveiled a purported presidential directive to the CIA demanding that the agency take action to undermine the mullahcracy -- which undoubtedly hastened the paranoid reaction we see now. It may have been a calculated bluff to push the Iranians to a tipping point -- and it may have worked even more quickly than the Bush administration hoped.

NARN, The All-State 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, all three NARN shows have great guests. Volume I has the Washington Post's film critic Stephen Hunter talking about the summer offerings. Mitch and I have Eric Black, the longtime Star-Tribune editor who took their buyout and moved to the more openly partisan Minnesota Monitor. My NARN colleagues and I considered Eric one of the best people at the Strib and were stunned to hear of his departure, so expect lots of questions regarding the ongoing turmoil at the Strib.

However, King and Michael have topped us all in The Final Word, as they will have Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty on at 3:30 pm CT today. Pawlenty's name keeps appearing on lists of potential VP candidates for the Republican ticket, and he has spent the last session making an even better case for that than before. Listen while King and Michael talk with him about his efforts to hold the line on spending and taxes with a DFL-controlled legislature.

Be sure to call 651-289-4488 to join the conversation!

North Korea Invites Inspectors To Yongbyon

North Korea has invited inspectors to Pyongyang to start talks on the shutdown of the Yongbyon nuclear breeder plant that fuels their nuclear-weapons efforts. The move indicates that the Kim Jong-Il regime has been satisfied that their sequestered $25 million will soon be returned, and it could mark the start of a denuclearization program that will leave Iran more isolated than ever:

North Korea announced Saturday that it has invited U.N. inspectors to return for discussions on closing down its main nuclear reactor, suggesting the end of a long stalemate.

The announcement, on the official Korean Central News Agency, indicated that the tangle over $25 million in frozen North Korean funds is nearing an end and held out promise that international efforts to dismantle North Korea's nuclear weapons program may be revived in the weeks ahead.

The chief U.S. nuclear negotiator, Assistant Secretary of State Christopher R. Hill, expressed hope the Chinese-sponsored denuclearization talks could start up again in July. He told reporters in Ulan Bator, where he attended a conference, that he will be visiting Beijing and other Asian capitals next week to discuss a new round of negotiations.

Transfer of the blocked funds to North Korea "has reached its final phase," the North Korean agency said, and this opens the way for arrival of International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors to supervise "suspension of the operation of nuclear facilities" at Yongbyon. In a letter to its director, Mohamed El Baradei, the IAEA was invited to send in a working-level team to make the arrangements, the agency added. It did not specify when they would be expected to travel to North Korea.

This announcement comes on the heels of another snag involving the money. The release of the funds turned into a complicated process in order to avoid money-laundering charges. Macau transferred the funds to Russia instead of directly to North Korea, with the blessing of the US. Russia, however, held the funds pending explicit guarantees that the US would not retaliate against Russia for transferring the funds to North Korea. At least so far, they have not transferred the money to the Russian commercial bank that services the Kim regime.

Apparently, though, the move from Macau to Russia has given Kim enough assurance to proceed with the agreement reached in February. Once the money hits the account and the other five parties to the talks give North Korea 50,000 tons of fuel oil, Kim will start shutting down Yongbyon. This may start as soon as next month, when the nations involved start final negotiations on the inspection team and the scuttling process for Yongbyon.

Granted, events could overtake this step -- that's been the entire experience of the North Korean engagement. However, this is as close as we have come to a verifiable shutdown of Kim's main nuclear resource. If it succeeds, we will have only Iran left as a rogue nation pursuing nuclear weapons, and the Iranians will have one less resource to use for their progress.

Nifong: Gimme Three Steps

Durham County District Attorney Mike Nifong resigned suddenly yesterday, in a tearful press conference. He had just completed his testimony to the North Carolina State Bar, where he faces almost certain disbarment for his reckless actions in the Duke rape case that wasn't:

Michael B. Nifong, the Durham County district attorney, announced Friday that he would resign, as he faces disciplinary charges for his handling of a sexual assault prosecution against three former Duke University lacrosse players who were later declared innocent.

Speaking in a barely audible voice in testimony before a disciplinary hearing panel, Mr. Nifong apologized to the players, their families and the North Carolina justice system.

His resignation came as a surprise on the fourth day of a hearing by the North Carolina State Bar, which has charged him with “systematic abuse of prosecutorial discretion” for withholding evidence and making improper pretrial statements.

Undoubtedly, Nifong spent the previous four days testing the winds at his hearing -- and he knows they are not inclined towards mercy. Resigning now gives the state Bar the option to declare the matter closed, which would allow Nifong to practice law. Otherwise, the disciplinary panel could have, and most likely would have, stripped him of both his job and his license.

Will that strategy work? It seems like a long shot. This case has generated national attention, due mainly to the machinations of Nifong himself to smear the defendants in the press. The state Bar has to act in some fashion to punish Nifong beyond whatever punishment he inflicts on himself. Quite clearly, Nifong kept exculpatory evidence from the defense attorneys, an act that transformed Nifong from prosecutor to persecutor -- and calls into question all of the cases which Nifong has tried in Durham. After all, what makes anyone think he only did this once, in a case involving rich kids who could afford to defend themselves?

That's why the Bar has to act in some emphatic manner. Nifong didn't just railroad innocent college students on a trumped-up rape charge. Nifong, through his actions, undermined the trust and confidence in the justice system for the community of Durham and the state of North Carolina. The Bar has to restore some sense of trust and confidence in their action, and they cannot do that by simply allowing Nifong to game them by giving a dramatic resignation at the height of the publicity on his hearing.

I expect a disbarment by Monday afternoon. If they do not do so, North Carolinians have every right to demand investigations into the state Bar itself, and whether it acts for justice or for lawyers.

Why Keep The Database Secret?

The debate in one thread of the immigration topic here at CQ -- and we have many of them, I know -- offered up an interesting fact about the current bill. RBMN, a longtime commenter and voice of reason here at CQ, made this comment yesterday:

I'd be very surprised if most of the public, who've been answering pollsters on this, have any clue about 21st-century database search technology, or the law enforcement value of just having this large database full of new names, faces, fingerprints, addresses, and vital record information for millions of resident aliens in the country now, that we don't know anything about. The law enforcement value of that is tremendous. When you're looking for an anonymous needle in an anonymous haystack, for a Mohammed Atta type, it helps a lot to cut the size of the haystack by 3/4. Z-Visas will make the haystack a lot smaller. For terrorism, that's the real security part of the compromise. For preventing terrorism, it sure as hell isn't how many fences we have on the Mexican border.

Jabba the Tutt, another longtime and reasonable CQ commenter, replied:

Precisely for this reason, the bill forbids ICE from sharing the database with law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Does this fact change your opinion on the bill?

I decided to look into this question, as it seems rather fascinating that the federal government would forbid other federal agencies from using a federal immigration database -- especially since part of the argument for normalization is to have that information available. In section 302 of the bill, one of the subsections includes this language:

(10) Limitation on use of the Employment Eligibility Verification System.

Notwithstanding any other provision of law, nothing in this subsection shall be construed to permit or allow any department, bureau, or other agency of the United States Government to utilize any information, database, or other records assembled under this subsection for any purpose other than for the enforcement and administration of the immigration laws, anti-terrorism laws, or for enforcement of Federal criminal law related to the functions of the EEVS, including prohibitions on forgery, fraud and identity theft."

(11) Unauthorized Use or Disclosure of Information.

Any employee of the Department of Homeland Security or another Federal or State agency who knowingly uses or discloses the information assembled under this subsection for a purpose other than one authorized under this section shall pay a civil penalty of $5,000-$50,000 for each violation.

The truth lies somewhere between RBMN and Jabba. The database is available for counterterrorism investigations -- but that's it, outside of immigration and employment verification enforcement. Why would the data in this database be kept secret from other law-enforcement agencies working on criminal investigations? Is this a normal provision in federal databases?

Right now, this looks like a Gorelick Wall for criminal prosecutions to me.

Mashaal Dictates Terms

Khaled Mashaal, the international head of Hamas, has made clear that he has directed the group's actions in Gaza, including the rebellion that has split the Palestinian Authority. While he announced yesterday that he recognized Mahmoud Abbas as the head of the PA, he also said that he refused to recognize Abbas' actions as the leader -- and dictated to Abbas that Ismail Haniyeh and the Hamas leadership must be retained:

Hamas leader-in-exile Khaled Mashaal said Friday evening that Hamas recognizes Mahmoud Abbas as the head of the Palestinian Authority, and that his group wants to cooperate with him for the sake of the Palestinian people.

Mashaal also said that Hamas did not want to take over the Gaza Strip, but was "forced" to, Israel Radio reported.

Referring to Abbas's proposed emergency government, Mashaal said that it had no legal standing and that Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh would remain the Palestinian premier. According to Haniyeh, the Palestinians voted for Hamas so the group would ensure security and end bloodshed in Gaza.

What's Palestinian for chutzpah? He wants people to believe that a vote for Hamas -- the more radical of the two terrorist groups in the territories -- was a vote for peace. Mashaal says this in the same week in which his forces started a civil war and executed captured prisoners.

And it's not just this week. Hamas has tried to provoke Israel into a war in Gaza by firing rockets across the border ever since Israel withdrew from the Strip. They kidnapped an IsraeliI soldier, Gilad Shalit, whom they still hold somewhere in Gaza. Is that Mashaal's idea of ending the bloodshed in Gaza?

Mashaal made a number of demands in his statement. He warned Arab nations that Hamas would not accept any Arab peacekeeping troops in Gaza, probably referencing Egypt more than anyone else. Mashaal also warned Abbas not to take any retaliatory action against Hamas in the West Bank, even though his group had murdered Fatah militants for days in Gaza.

Abbas and his staff made it clear that Mashaal's writ no longer runs in what's left of the PA. They've already nominated Haniyeh's replacement, and they're busy rounding up Hamas members and sympathizers in the West Bank. Since the Israelis still occupy the West Bank, they will have little reason to stop Abbas from conducting his purge, but may have plenty of motivation to strike if Hamas resists.

Hamas has a big problem, if Abbas succeeds. The West Bank has an international border with a sympathetic nation, Jordan. Abbas can start cutting deals with the Israelis if he can prove that his rump PA controls the situation there. Gaza has one small border with Egypt, a nation not likely to view Hamas with much affection, and otherwise is cut off from the world. They have their Mediterranean ports, but Israel can easily blockade them, and probably already have. No one in the Mediterranean would trade with Hamas anyway except perhaps Libya, and Moammar Ghaddafi has bigger fish to fry with the US and Europe.

Hamas may have just turned Gaza into Escape from New York -- basically a penal colony from which no one escapes, and in which everyone will slowly starve to death. Given their insistence on conducting terrorist attacks, no Western nation will engage with them, and given their coup against Abbas, the moderate Arabs won't either. Iran and Syria might, but they have no lines of communication to Gaza.

Gaza residents are in a very bad position. Their only hope for survival may be to conduct an uprising against Hamas, because their only other option might be starvation.

UPDATE: Grumpy Old Man asks me in the comments, "have you heard yourself condemning 1.5 million sous to slow starvation?" That's not what I'm doing. They chose Hamas; they need to get rid of them. It isn't our job to rescue them from themselves again. If they choose starvation over acknowledging the evil they supported, that's entirely the choice of the Palestinians in Gaza.

Conservative Blogger E-mails Tell The Story

Peter Hamby of CNN talked with a number of conservative bloggers about the immigration bill pending on the Senate table, and all agreed on one thing: our e-mail has almost unanimously declared the bill a disaster. It has provided a unity among conservative bloggers against the White House that has not been seen since Harriet Miers, if even then:

Different conservative blogs have different pet issues -- government transparency, federal judges, Fred Thompson, to name a few.

But no issue in recent memory has united conservative bloggers like the debate over immigration. Their frustration has culminated in a full-scale revolt against the Bush administration and a Senate bill that activists say does little to solve the country's border security problems. ...

It's increasingly clear from Web postings and interviews with top conservative bloggers that the immigration bill has done serious damage to the president's credibility among the conservative netroots, the grassroots bloggers on the Web.

Hamby talked with me for close to an hour, and also with Erick Erickson of Redstate. He gives a pretty good look at the debate on the bill on the conservative blog sites, including the comments sections, and it's clear that the reaction has been almost unanimously opposing the bill. Apparently, as Kathryn Jean Lopez wrote at The Corner, the White House has not paid much attention to it.

If the Bush administration wants to call on conservatives for any more of its agenda in the final two years of his term, the White House may want to tend to the revolt in the ranks on immigration now.

Is There An Immigration Deal?

On today's CQ Radio show, I interviewed Senator John Ensign, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), and asked him about the immigration bill. Ensign -- who voted twice against cloture on June 7th to kill the bill -- said that he believes a comprehensive approach is necessary to solve the problem. He also emphasized that America has to do something about the status quo, because it is simply so bad that we should not tolerate it any further.

However, he disputed the notion that an agreement has been reached to resurrect the bill. Ensign said that rumors of agreements keep swirling on Capitol Hill, but that the terms change every time they get close to a deal. He also pledged to torpedo any bill that did not have actual funds for border security and that allowed illegal aliens to receive Social Security benefits that they fraudulently acquired.

I'll have a transcript up of the relevant portions soon. Keep checking back, and be sure to download the show for your own perusal.

UPDATE: Here's the transcript for the relevant portion, which comes at 39 minutes into the show:

EM: Now we've heard that there's a deal, it was in the papers this morning, that there's a deal on the immigration bill to revive it next week, and that each side is going to get eleven amendments. I think there's going to be a couple of weeks worth of debate, maybe a final vote -- if it gets cloture -- a final vote before the Fourth of July. Is that, is that -- do I have that about right?

JE: That is what people are talking about. We're a long way away from that deal getting done, because every time you hear that a deal's being done, it blows up, so ... We have to make sure we see the list of amendments first that are approved. You know, they can't just be phony amendments. I talked with Lindsey Graham, one of the big supporters of the bill yesterday, and he told me that he is not going to -- that he will withdraw his support of the bill unless we have the money for interior enforcement ...

There's more in the interview. The news of the resurrection of the immigration bill may have been a little premature. Be sure to listen to the show by downloading the podcast here.

UPDATE II: Private Joe says I'm supportive of this compromise. Uh, no, I'm not. I don't have a problem with a theoretical comprehensive strategy to resolve all of the problems with immigration, and conceptually, a bill that guaranteed border security and visa reform before enacting any kind of normalization or guest-worker program would seem like a fair trade. The reason why I asked the questions I did was to get the answers I did -- which had Ensign confirming that this bill doesn't do the above.

I also asked why Congress can't just do border security and visa reform first, and then once complete, come back to normalization and guest worker programs. Ensign didn't quite answer that one, and as in my other interviews, no one really has an answer for it. That's made me more insistent on this approach first rather than the comprehensive approach.

CQ Radio: Rep. Tim Walberg, Senator John Ensign

Today on CQ Radio (2 pm CT), I'll have two excellent guests. U.S. Congressman Tim Walberg joins me in the first half of the show to talk about his new tax hike prevention bill, which already has 80 co-sponsors, as well as his impressions about being a freshman Republican in a Democratic majority. In the second half, Senator John Ensign joins me to talk about the NRSC and its efforts to win back the majority -- and we'll be sure to ask him about his Nevada colleague Harry Reid and the immigration bill.

If you want a chance to talk directly to the Senate about this bill, you'll have your chance! Call 646-652-4889 to talk wth Senator Ensign.

Next Thursday evening, I will debate James Boyce of the Huffington Post at BlogTalkRadio's Debate Central at 7:30 pm ET. The topics: Fred Thompson's impact on the Republican race, and Bill Richardson's policy on Iraq. Don't miss it!

The live player will start automatically if you click on the link to the extended entry. You can also listen from the player on the sidebar.

Iraq Improving: Lieberman

Joe Lieberman has struggled mightily to maintain American backing for the war in Iraq, amd today he writes what amounts to a rebuttal of yesterday's Washington Post analysis for the Wall Street Journal. The Senator just returned from a trip to Iraq and other Middle East nations, and claims that he sees major improvements since his last visit in December:

I recently returned from Iraq and four other countries in the Middle East, my first trip to the region since December. In the intervening five months, almost everything about the American war effort in Baghdad has changed, with a new coalition military commander, Gen. David Petraeus; a new U.S. ambassador, Ryan Crocker; the introduction, at last, of new troops; and most important of all, a bold, new counterinsurgency strategy.

The question of course is--is it working? Here in Washington, advocates of retreat insist with absolute certainty that it is not, seizing upon every suicide bombing and American casualty as proof positive that the U.S. has failed in Iraq, and that it is time to get out.

In Baghdad, however, discussions with the talented Americans responsible for leading this fight are more balanced, more hopeful and, above all, more strategic in their focus--fixated not just on the headline or loss of the day, but on the larger stakes in this struggle, beginning with who our enemies are in Iraq. The officials I met in Baghdad said that 90% of suicide bombings in Iraq today are the work of non-Iraqi, al Qaeda terrorists. In fact, al Qaeda's leaders have repeatedly said that Iraq is the central front of their global war against us. That is why it is nonsensical for anyone to claim that the war in Iraq can be separated from the war against al Qaeda--and why a U.S. pullout, under fire, would represent an epic victory for al Qaeda, as significant as their attacks on 9/11.

Lieberman makes the points that advocates of the Iraq strategy repeat. A withdrawal will encourage al-Qaeda and Iran to continue and expand their operations in Iraq. The resultant collapse of security will force neighboring nations to send their own troops into Iraq, making it into a shifting, chaotic mess of cross-purpose actions for several nations. That will create the kind of failed state we see in Somalia and Sudan, and it will eventually force the US to re-invade Iraq when terrorists based their begin attacking American assets around the world -- including here.

However, Lieberman doesn't just argue the consequences of withdrawal. He also says that conditions have improved significantly over the last few months:

When I returned to Anbar on this trip, however, the security environment had undergone a dramatic reversal. Attacks on U.S. troops there have dropped from an average of 30 to 35 a day a few months ago to less than one a day now, according to Col. John Charlton, commander of the 1st Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division, headquartered in Ramadi. Whereas six months ago only half of Ramadi's 23 tribes were cooperating with the coalition, all have now been persuaded to join an anti-al Qaeda alliance. One of Ramadi's leading sheikhs told me: "A rifle pointed at an American soldier is a rifle pointed at an Iraqi." ...

In Baghdad, U.S. forces have cut in half the number of Iraqi deaths from sectarian violence since the surge began in February. They have also been making critical improvements in governance, basic services and commercial activity at the grassroots level.

This doesn't disagree with the report cited by the Washington Post. The article pointed out that the places where American surge strategy has the most application -- Anbar and Baghdad -- it has already succeeded in reducing violence. Anbar, according to that report, has seen violence drop by a third, and the violence now takes the form of battles against terrorists.

The game of whack-a-mole described yesterday by the Post, where violence shifted into Ninewah, demonstrates the efficacy of the new strategies, Lieberman argues. As American and Iraqi forces drive terrorists out of Anbar and Baghdad, they move outward to places like Diyala and Ninewah. The act of retreat makes them more vulnerable and less effective, but also more desperate to conduct attacks. And as in any military engagement, a shift in tactics and aggressiveness by one side will prompt a reaction in the other.

Lieberman makes a strong case for tenacity here. He reminds us that the purpose of our effort in Iraq isn't to win a revenue-sharing deal or the return of Ba'athists to public service. It's to help form a representative democracy in the region that can serve as an example of freedom in a region too long blighted by oppression.

Whither The Republicans?

Republicans face a daunting task of determining their identity in the next sixteen months before the 2008 elections. With the immigration bill infuriating the base, the war in Iraq frustrating the nation, and the lack of enthusiasm shown thus far in a wide-open field of presidential contenders, that process looks to be painful as well as daunting. E.J. Dionne wonders in his column today whether the Republicans can recapture the optimism of the Reagan years, even with a new candidate entering the race as the Reagan banner-carrier.

Dionne, as always, writes a thought-provoking column, but I think he's misdiagnosed the problem. Republicans don't have an identity crisis as much as a competency crisis. At Heading Right, I explain why the "national security imprint" is not a Bush-era change, and how Republicans can get their groove back.

Hamas To Grant Amnesty To Fatah Leaders

The transcendent Hamas leadership in Gaza has decided not to execute captured Fatah leaders, and will release them soon as a gesture of goodwill. Hamas continues to consolidate its power in Gaza, however, and the government in the West Bank has started to shed itself of Hamas as a result:

Victorious Hamas gunmen rounded up senior military leaders of the Fatah movement in the Gaza Strip early Friday, then announced a general amnesty in a sign the Islamic movement is seeking to reconcile with its secular rivals after five days of fierce fighting.

The announcement defused worries that Hamas, which completed its swift military seizure of Gaza hours earlier, would begin dispensing victor's justice in the strip. In announcing the arrest of the commanders of the vanquished Fatah-controlled security services, Hamas officials called them "collaborators," a label indicating they work on behalf of Israel and can often mean a death sentence in the Palestinian territories.

But a few hours later, as Gaza residents emerged from their homes to walk in streets quiet for the first time in days, Hamas officials said the commanders, including the head of the Fatah-controlled Presidential Guard and the Palestinian National Forces, would not be harmed.

Abbas fired Ismail Haniyeh yesterday, and the rest of the Hamas cabinet ministers have been shown the door. Haniyeh called this a "mistake" and assured his Fatah "brothers" that he wanted to continue working with them. After the insurrection committed by Haniyeh's party, however, he should consider himself fortunate not to be in prison or worse.

In order to clarify the new situation, Abbas says he wants to hold new elections. Given that the PA's writ no longer extends to Gaza, that means an all-West Bank election, which Fatah will surely win overwhelmingly, especially in this political climate. Abbas wants to rebuild his power base quickly and show that he has control over the more prosperous area -- and that he can deliver a deal to the Israelis if necessary, who have to see Abbas as a rather weak sister at the moment.

The Washington Post sees this collapse as Bush's fault, naturally:

Five years ago this month, President Bush stood in the Rose Garden and laid out a vision for the Middle East that included Israel and a state called Palestine living together in peace. "I call on the Palestinian people to elect new leaders, leaders not compromised by terror," the president declared.

The takeover this week of the Gaza Strip by the Hamas militant group dedicated to the elimination of Israel demonstrates how much that vision has failed to materialize, in part because of actions taken by the administration. The United States championed Israel's departure from the Gaza Strip as a first step toward peace and then pressed both Israelis and Palestinians to schedule legislative elections, which Hamas unexpectedly won. Now Hamas is the unchallenged power in Gaza.

After his reelection in 2004, Bush said he would use his "political capital" to help create a Palestinian state by the end of his second term. In his final 18 months as president, he faces the prospect of a shattered Palestinian Authority, a radical Islamic state on Israel's border and increasingly dwindling options to turn the tide against Hamas and create a functioning Palestinian state.

We've seen some of the same nonsense in comments here, and that's exactly what it is -- nonsense. People have been pushing for a two-state solution since at least Oslo, but no one wanted to confront the reality of the Palestinian condition. Holding elections and withdrawing from Gaza proved what many had tried to tell the world: that the Palestinians weren't interested in two-state solutions.

In a free and fair election, the people get the government they choose. The Palestinians chose the worst of two terrorist groups to govern them. That finally forced the US and the EU to quit pretending that the Palestinians as a whole were a peace-loving people who just wanted their own piece of land. The Palestinians want to destroy Israel, and they voted for the faction that most clearly expressed that desire as policy.

When Sharon withdrew from Gaza, it gave the Palestinians the opportunity to govern themselves. Did they take advantage of it? No. Instead, they immediately set up rocket-launching sites in northern Gaza to attack the Israelis in Sderot, and started killing each other in gangster-like power plays. The PA proved itself completely impotent once given a taste of sovereignty, and instead the radical Islamists have taken over Gaza in that power vacuum.

The Bush administration didn't fail in delivering a two-state solution, because that solution has never existed in reality. The Palestinians don't want it, and the elections made them take responsibility for that position publicly. The elections and Gaza withdrawal just made everyone take off the blinders -- a move that Saeb Erekat rightly said has set back Palestinians more than 50 years.

Immigration Bill Resurrected

It's baaaa-aaaaack. The immigration bill will return to the Senate floor next week after a a flurry of deals between Harry Reid, Mitch McConnell, and the White House reinvigorated the compromise. Each party will get eleven amendments, and the White House has agreed to spend over $4 billion immediately to secure the border:

Senate leaders agreed Thursday to a list of amendments to be considered, clearing the way for debate to resume. The decision followed President Bush's announcement that he supports a move to immediately set aside more than $4 billion to beef up enforcement of immigration laws.

The two actions significantly improve the chances that the Senate will pass the comprehensive bill, which would provide a path to citizenship for many of the nation's estimated 12 million illegal immigrants. "We believe that there are enough votes," White House spokesman Tony Snow said Thursday.

A senior Democratic aide said that Senate leaders agreed to specific amendments, with 11 for each side, but did not describe them.

One will certainly be the amendment drafted by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) to guarantee that the federal government spends billions of dollars to improve border security and crack down on businesses that hire illegal workers. The measure is intended as an answer to conservatives who doubt the administration's commitment to enforcement. ...

Snow suggested that the president and other backers of the bill wanted the funding to be a part of the immigration package, not a separate measure. "All the pieces have to work together," he said. "If you disaggregate, things fall apart."

Excuse me, but that's simply not true. Border security should have already been addressed, as well as significant improvements in the visa management system. In fact, Congress has already passed mandates on both subjects. Last year, legislation authorized 854 miles of double-fence barriers on the southern border, and Congress had earlier demanded that the visa system get replaced or fixed by 2005 so that visa holders could be tracked and found if they overstayed.

Why should anyone trust this bill to address those issues when neither Congress nor the executive branch has complied with the earlier legislation? Both of these became law, with the President's signature, and yet neither has had much progress at all. Given that track record, the people have the right to demand that the government complete the tasks already assigned to it before creating vast new bureaucracies to solve other related problems.

Bush says, "[I]f you're worried about border security, you ought to be supporting this bill." The problem is that Bush and Congress have not been worried about border security, and have refused to act on it even when they have passed laws requiring them to do so. It makes their credibility on the issue so low that their lectures on the subject, like this one, sound more like bitter satire than political truth.

Bush and Congress could have built the fence authorized last year. They could have worked to revamp the visa system by the 2005 deadline demanded by Congress -- the same visa system that allowed 19 hijackers to fly planes into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. Instead, they've used them as bargaining chips for guest-worker programs and normalization.

It's probably going to pass this time, though, if this deal holds. Even John Cornyn, who had been staunchly opposed to it, called this a "welcome development". If the guest-worker program gets restored -- in other words, if they have agreed to remove the Dorgan amendment -- the Republicans might provide the 22 votes necessary to get to cloture on the bill. With the procedural arrogance removed from the compromise, people like Jeff Sessions and Jim DeMint will have a tough time slowing this runaway train.

With 22 amendments in the agreement and the bill coming up next week, I'd expect two weeks of debate, nestling a final vote right next to the July 4th break. Expect a cloture vote on the 25th or 26th, and a July 1 or 2 final vote if they get it.

Russia Retreats On Threats Over Missile Shield

Vladimir Putin has tried his best to fight the missile shield the US wants to create for Europe against the threat of Iranian attack. The Russian president has both fallen back on Cold War threats against Europe and the US, and also tried to divert the effort by offering Azerbaijan as a base -- but under Russian control. Neither have worked to intimidate the US or its European allies, and now Russia appears to have shifted into a less-antagonistic tone:

Russia dropped its threat to aim nuclear weapons at European cities yesterday in an abrupt change of tactics after weeks of Cold War-style brinkmanship.

Sergei Ivanov, the hawkish deputy prime minister who is seen as a possible successor to President Vladimir Putin, said that only the sites in Poland and the Czech Republic where the United States wanted to erect an anti-missile system would be targeted.

Commentators suggested that the Kremlin was trying to lower the rhetoric ahead of a crucial meeting between Mr Putin and President George W Bush in Maine early next month.

The Russians have fallen back on an old Soviet habit: rewriting history. Eleven days ago, Putin very clearly stated that Russia would "of course" return to Cold War times of targeting major European cities, if the US, Poland, and the Czech Republic built the missile shield. Now the Russians say that they never meant to threaten all of Europe -- but they did nothing over the last eleven days to clarify that until now.

What changed? NATO met this week to discuss the new threat. Apparently the Russians didn't care for the consequences of a NATO response and decided to back down somewhat from their blustering. The Russians have a first-class missile system, but otherwise their military has serious infrastructure problems and they don't have the economy to fix it in a hurry. The Russians can't afford another 1980s-style arms race.

The shield presents no credible defense against the Russian missile system, and everyone knows it. It's not intended to defend against Russian attack -- and Putin knows this, too. Putin wants people to fear Russia like they did during his days in the KGB, but the West has less fear and more irritation over Putin's increasingly authoritarian rule and his aggressive and irrational foreign policy.

If Russia doesn't like the idea of a missile shield in Europe, then let him prevail upon his Iranian partners to end their nuclear program and dismantle the Shahab-3s, which have the range to hit half of Europe. Putin could quit protecting Iran on the Security Council and apply sanctions that really hurt, rather than watering down the response to Iranian intransigence. If Putin wants us to seriously reconsider the missile shield, he has options that would actually do something to reduce the security risks, rather than add to them.

CQ On CBS In Today's New York Post

On Wednesday, I wrote about comments made by Les Moonves to explain the failure thus far of their new anchor, Katie Couric, to attract viewers. Did he blame himself for hiring Couric? No. Did he blame CBS for producing a lousy news broadcast that sent viewers scrambling for their remotes? No. He blamed the viewers for their sexist attitudes.

Today, the New York Post prints my column blasting Moonves for ducking responsibility for the low ratings and shifting blame to the CBS audience:

"I'm sort of surprised by the vitriol against her. The number of people who don't want news from a woman was startling," Moonves told his audience.

Got that, America? It's not Katie's fault, and it's not that CBS stinks at putting together a compelling news show. It's that you're all a bunch of misogynistic bigots.

CBS has a problem, all right - but it isn't audience chauvinism, it's management cluelessness.

I've watched the show a few times, shortly after the switch, mostly out of curiosity. Couric isn't awful, but she's not very good either. The big problem with the show was the lack of news, or at least it was at the time. CBS dumbed the show down, apparently hoping that would attract Couric's former audience -- but just because people want to start their day out with lighter fare like "Today" doesn't mean they want the same from their evening news.

Had CBS just retooled the show and kept their collective mouths shut, Couric may have found an audience. One or two blockbuster interviews could have turned the ratings around; look at what the Hugh Grant interview did for Jay Leno, after he finally fired his out-of-control manager and found his footing on the Tonight Show. Jay, however, didn't go out on the circuit and blame his initial poor performance against David Letterman on some supposed anti-Italian bigotry of NBC's late-night audience. He and NBC fixed the problems, and the audience rediscovered him.

It may be too late now for Couric and Moonves to do that. They have created a lot of antagonism in the people they supposedly want to attract. Viacom may want to send Moonves to a public-relations skills course or two in the immediate future.

Literary Bleg

I've been asked over the last couple of years by CQ readers why I haven't written a book. I usually tell them because I haven't had the time, but with the recent changes in CQ-land these days, I've begun to reconsider my long-term goals. I'd be interested in talking with a reputable, legitimate literary agency about a couple of projects I have in mind. Please send me an e-mail at my address on the sidebar with the subject heading "Representation" if anyone has an interest.

Boehner Beats Pelosi On Earmarks CRAPs

John Boehner and the House Republican Caucus have won their battle against Nancy Pelosi and David Obey on earmarks. Boehner sent the following memo to House Republicans:

I’m writing to update you on the status of our united Republican effort to compel the Democratic majority to abandon its plan for slush funds for secret earmarks.

A tentative agreement has been reached between Republican and Democratic leaders – an agreement that represents a victory for House Republicans. The terms of the agreement are as follows:

* Democrats will abandon their plans to pass appropriations bills with slush funds for secret earmarks. The plan announced last month by Chairman Obey to keep all earmarks secret until “air-dropping” them into conference reports will be dropped, effective immediately. Two appropriations bills (Homeland Security, Military Quality) that include little or no earmarks will move forward. Following consideration of these two bills, all 10 remaining appropriations bills will come to the floor with their earmarks fully disclosed and subject to challenge by any Member. In the unique case of the Energy & Water bill, the earmarks will move to the floor in a package separate from the non-earmark portion of the bill, but (again) the earmarks will be fully disclosed and subject to challenge by any Member. In short: the Democrats’ slush funds for secret earmarks are dead.

* Democrats will restore the 2006 House Republican earmark reforms for appropriations bills. This rules change will go into effect immediately after the House completes action on the Homeland Security and Military Quality appropriations bills, which include little or no earmarks. This aspect of the agreement will restore a key element of the 2006 GOP reforms repealed by the Democratic leadership in 2007.

The agreement does NOT include specific time limits on debate for any appropriations bills. Democrats earlier today demanded that Republicans accept unprecedented time limits that would arbitrarily minimize debate on spending bills involving hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer funds. House Republican leaders refused this demand. Instead, we indicated to Democratic leaders that if the earmark reforms outlined above are complied with both letter and spirit, and adequate time is provided to debate substantive issues, Republicans do not anticipate that we will need to engage in extraordinary parliamentary tactics that will again bring the appropriations process to a halt.

We’ll let you know more as we know it. In the meantime, please know how proud I am of our House Republican team. We've taken a principled stand together on behalf of the American people. And if we continue to stand together, we will succeed in bringing meaningful change to the way in which Washington spends the taxpayers' money. Thank you for the role you’ve played in making this victory happen.

I concur. Congratulations, Rep. Boehner and the entire House caucus.

UPDATE: Boehner has an op-ed in the Examiner here:

Then came a decision by Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey, D-WI, to not only make all earmarks secret, but to replace them in Democratic spending bills with multi-billion dollar slush funds – blank spots to be filled in at a later date, all hidden from serious public scrutiny.

Obey planned to keep the earmark requests secret to allow himself more time to review them all personally – a bizarre process for the most "open" and "honest" Congress. Obey said he would eventually print each earmark request in the Congressional Record – but only after the House voted on its appropriations bills. Obey said lawmakers could write to him individually about specific projects and express their concerns… but that's not accountability; that's a complaints department.

Well, the Democrats certainly got the complaints ... Be sure to read the whole thing.

Harry Reid Calls Military Commanders Incompetent (Updated and Bumped: Reid Confirms It Himself)

Be sure to read the updates.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid showed his support for the American military by calling two of its top leaders "incompetent". Pandering to liberal bloggers, Reid made the comments in explaining his strategy to make Republican Senators sick of voting on the Iraq war and bludgeoning them into declaring defeat:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid called Marine Gen. Peter Pace, the outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, "incompetent" during an interview Tuesday with a group of liberal bloggers, a comment that was never reported.

Reid made similar disparaging remarks about Army Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said several sources familiar with the interview.

This is but the latest example of how Reid, under pressure from liberal activists to do more to stop the war, is going on the attack against President Bush and his military leaders in anticipation of a September showdown to end U.S. involvement in Iraq, according to Democratic senators and aides.

Reid, who was bashed by Republicans for suggesting earlier this year that the Iraq war was "lost," is lashing out at top commanders while putting the finishing touches on a plan to force a series of votes on Iraq designed exclusively to make Republicans up for reelection in 2008 go on record in favor of continuing an unpopular war.

So Harry Reid, the man who couldn't get a supplemental spending bill completed in less than 108 days, is calling Pace and Petraeus incompetent.

That's the same Harry Reid who couldn't get the Democrats' "100 Hours" pledges to fruition in over 120 days and counting. In fact, this is the same Majority Leader that has led the least-accomplished session of Congress in a generation.

And just for the record, it's the same Harry Reid who insisted that he would never bring back the immigration bill if it failed its cloture test -- and then tried for a second cloture, declaring that also a "final" action -- and lost again.

That's the man calling Pace and Petraeus incompetent.

Got it.

UPDATE: I almost forgot -- the same Harry Reid who voted to confirm Petraeus in January! (h/t: CQ commenter brainy435)

UPDATE II and BUMP: John McCain takes Reid to the woodshed:

It's incredibly disappointing that Harry Reid would make such disparaging remarks about both the highest ranking officer in the U.S military and the commander of our troops in Iraq. Generals Pace and Petraeus are two leaders who have spent their entire lives in service to their country and Senator Reid needs to clarify his criticisms, which can only be described as highly inappropriate and regrettable.

Besides, if the Senate Majority Leader thinks that two top military officials and Presidential appointments have shown incompetence, shouldn't he initiate impeachment proceedings? Or does Harry believe that he should leave American troops in the command of incompetent commanders?

UPDATE III: Greg Sargent says The Politico got this one out of thin air:

The story has already sparked an uproar, and the conservatives have jumped all over it. It was linked on Drudge, and John McCain sent out a press release attacking Reid over it. And White House press secretary Tony Snow use it to hammer Reid as anti-military in today's White House briefing. Snow brought up the Politico story himself, saying that it was "outrageous" for Reid to be "issuing slanders" toward commanders "in a time of war."

But we've just spoken with three of the prominent liberal bloggers who say they were on the call, and they all say they don't remember Reid saying anything like this. One flatly denies that he said it.

We'll see. I'm thinking that John Bresnahan wound up with a recording of the call, but if not, he'll have to establish some credibility on this.

UPDATE IV: I contacted John Bresnahan directly. He said that The Politico would not have any further statement on this story. He told me that he and The Politico stand behind the original reporting on the subject.

UPDATE V: Hot Air notes the genesis of this story. Bob Geiger was on the call, and had this quote:

Here’s exactly what Reid said:

“I guess the president, uh, he’s gotten rid of Pace because he could not get him confirmed here in the Senate… Pace is also a yes-man for the president and I told him to his face, I laid it out to him last time he came to see me, I told him what an incompetent man I thought he was.”…

Sounds like Bresnahan had it right. One could also interpret that as Reid told Bush he was incompetent, but it doesn't flow with the quote. I'd say Sargent owes Bresnahan an apology.

UPDATE VI and BUMP: "Three or four" of Sargent's sources couldn't confirm Bresnahan's story, and so it was supposedly false. How about if Harry Reid confirms it?

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid confirmed Thursday that he told liberal bloggers last week that he thinks outgoing Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Peter Pace is "incompetent."

Reid acknowledged similarly disparaging Army Gen. David Petraeus, head of Multinational Forces in Iraq.

But Reid, whose comments to bloggers first appeared in The Politico, also told reporters: "I think we should just drop it."

I'll bet he does. I'll bet Greg Sargent thinks so as well. How could all of the bloggers who sat on this call miss this quote, and then so vociferously deny Reid said it? I'd say they all owe Bresnahan an apology. (h/t: CQ readers Del Dolemonte and Steven Den Beste)

Abbas Fires Hamas Instead Of Firing On Hamas

Mahmoud Abbas has dismissed the Hamas-led government of the Palestinian Authority and declared a state of emergency after Hamas took control of Gaza today. The moves comes after many in his own Fatah faction demanded his resignation for his lack of action over the last five days:

President Mahmoud Abbas dismissed the Hamas-led unity government and declared a state of emergency Thursday after four days of fighting that has left Hamas in control of much of Gaza.

Hamas has seized control of all Palestinian Authority security installations in the territory.

Shortly before midnight (5 p.m. ET), Hamas sources told CNN, the presidential compound also fell.

If confirmed it would mean all Abbas-controlled security installations are under Hamas control.

CNN is reporting now that the ruling factions in both areas have started political cleansing. Hamas has rounded up Fatah members in Gaza, executing some openly on the streets and taking others to an uncertain fate. Fatah, firmly entrenched in the West Bank, has started arresting and capturing Hamas members. Fratricide appears to be the order of the day in both territories.

The Palestinian Authority has also washed its hands of Gaza, for the moment. Spokesman Saeb Erekat announced that Gaza has no government at all, and is officially no longer part of the PA. He told CNN that the violence had set back the Palestinian cause "50 years," and that may be an optimistic estimate.

The EU has cut off aid to Gaza. Israel will almost certainly close all of the entry points into Gaza, and Egypt might do the same. Hamas will plunge Gaza into total isolation. Within weeks, there will be massive starvation and disease, but no one will trust Hamas to act peacefully after this massive betrayal -- and no one will bother liberating Gaza again.

The best chance for the Palestinians in Gaza is to have Egypt annex it once again. Clearly it cannot be ruled by the Palestinians, and the Israelis will not want another 40-year occupation. If Egypt refuses, the only option will be a massive military effort to drive out Hamas, or to simply seal off Gaza and have the Palestinians rise up against them. I'm betting Israel opts for the latter.

The Kelo Antidote

Many conservatives took affront to the Supreme Court ruling in the Kelo case, in which the court upheld the right of a city to use eminent domain to force property from one private owner to another. The decision was seen as yet another judicial overreach, an expansion of the notion of "public use" that left private-property owners vulnerable to the whims of state and local politicians looking for favors from developers and monied interests. It started a legislative reaction to curb the use of eminent domain around the nation.

Today the New York Times reports that some courts have heard the message. New Jersey's state Supreme Court slapped down a similar use of eminent domain, upholding the appeal of a property owner whose use displeased the town's leadership:

In a decision that could affect redevelopment battles across New Jersey, the State Supreme Court ruled unanimously yesterday that a town had overstepped the State Constitution’s definition of “blight” when it tried to take private property for development.

“Although community redevelopment is an important municipal power, that authority is not unfettered,” Chief Justice James R. Zazzali wrote in the court’s opinion. In the case, the town, Paulsboro, had argued that property owned by the Gallenthin family was “not fully productive,” and thus was in need of redevelopment, a designation that opened a 63-acre parcel to takeover using eminent domain.

The court disagreed. “The New Jersey Constitution does not permit government redevelopment of private property solely because the property is not used in an optimal manner,” Justice Zazzali wrote. He said that areas could be designated in need of redevelopment only if they, “as a whole, are stagnant and unproductive because of issues of title, diversity of ownership or other similar conditions.”

His opinion was at once a full-bodied discussion of what constitutes blight and a marker of the churning debate over eminent domain taking place in New Jersey and across the country since a United States Supreme Court ruling in 2005 that established the rights of localities to take over land for economic development.

The family whose land was at risk of takeover has owned it for 56 years. Paulsboro wanted it for community redevelopment, which usually means selling it cheap to someone who will raise the tax base of the city. The Gallenthin family objected to the exercise of eminent domain, but had lost repeatedly in the courts -- until now.

This could be an important victory for land-rights activism in the US. It's a state decision, so the legal impact is completely within New Jersey. However, the setback to government power over private property will hearten those enraged by the Kelo decision as at least a small victory. (h/t: CQ reader Keith R)

CQ Radio: Mark Tapscott, NZ Bear, And Contest Winner!

Today on CQ Radio (2 pm CT), Mark Tapscott joins us for the first half of the show. Mark and I will discuss the LA Times' poll as it regards party identification, and we'll also talk about porkbusting and earmark news on the Hill today. Mark will join me in naming the winner of our Rename Earmarks contest as well.

NZ Bear will join me afterwards to continue the review of David Obey's machinations on earmarks, the pork-laden energy bill, the Sopranos finale, Paris Hilton's jail sentence, and anything else that crosses our minds! You can join the conversation by calling 646-652-4889.

Tomorrow, I'll have two excellent guests. U.S. Congressman Tim Walberg joins me in the first half of the show to talk about his new tax hike prevention bill, which already has 80 co-sponsors, as well as his impressions about being a freshman Republican in a Democratic majority. In the second half, Senator John Ensign joins me to talk about the NRSC and its efforts to win back the majority -- and we'll be sure to ask him about his Nevada colleague Harry Reid and the immigration bill. If you want a chance to talk directly to the Senate about this bill, you'll have your chance tomorrow!

Next Thursday evening, I will debate James Boyce of the Huffington Post at BlogTalkRadio's Debate Central at 7:30 pm ET. The topics: Fred Thompson's impact on the Republican race, and Bill Richardson's policy on Iraq. Don't miss it!

The live player will start automatically if you click on the link to the extended entry. You can also listen from the player on the sidebar.

If You Thought The Sopranos Finale Was Brilliant ...

... then you'll also think that this suggested ending for the Harry Potter series shows artistic flair as well:

Each time the bell rang and another wizard walked into the pub, Harry looked up warily. Voldemort may have been dead, but there were still plenty of people who'd be thrilled if Harry was the victim of a Bat-Bogey Hex, or worse. Was that man in the corner booth, stirring sugar into his tea, from the Ministry of Magic? Or a Death Eater, burning for revenge? Or was he just some bystander who couldn't help noticing the famous scar on Harry's forehead?

Ron, his red hair cut short and a thin beard running along his jaw, came through the door and sat down. Harry took his hand for a second, a little overwhelmed. After the depression, and the suicide attempt in the fifth-floor prefects' bathroom, it was good to see Ron happy again; his new office job with the Chudley Cannons quidditch club—and the German-made sports broom Harry had bought him—seemed to be improving his spirits.

Someone approached the table. Harry looked up, hoping it might be Hermione, but instead it was a pale, sneering young man who for a moment reminded Harry of Draco Malfoy. The man walked past Harry's booth and entered the bathroom. Across the pub, a man with dark eyes laughed with a woman who reminded Harry of Bellatrix Lestrange.

Outside, a frustrated Hermione tried to tether Buckbeak the hippogriff to a street lamp, but Buckbeak was having none of it. He shook his eagle head angrily and pawed at the ground. Hermione sighed; she'd have to start with the bowing all over again.

Dan Kois does a good job of skewering David Chase in this satire. He even captures the one thing we know about the ending of the final Harry Potter book: the last word is scar, although in this instance, it means a lot less than one might have presumed.

This shows clearly why the ending to the Sopranos finale was so unsatisfying. When telling a story, people expect a fairly clear conclusion. Giving them a series of teases, and very obvious teases, without supplying any kind of payoff at all not only wastes the time of the reader/viewer, it also insults them for caring about what happens.

People have defended Chase's decision by claiming that "real life has no endings". True, but the Sopranos wasn't about real life. It was a brilliant and maddening fiction, and since Chase was given the opportunity to actually conclude the series -- most get cancelled without such an chance -- the teases and the abrupt cut to black was a waste of that opportunity.

I still love The Sopranos, and still think Chase is brilliant. He's not perfect, though, and he's made some strange choices in the series. It's unfortunate that his last stumble comes at the end of perhaps the best television series ever.

FBI: Over A Thousand Violations On Comm Intercepts

A spot audit conducted by the FBI found more than a thousand violations of the laws and procedures governing the intercept of communications. These results point to a much bigger problem than initially reported last March, and the audit undermines the credibility of the nation's premiere law-enforcement agency at a time when national security remains the primary concern of many Americans:

An internal FBI audit has found that the bureau potentially violated the law or agency rules more than 1,000 times while collecting data about domestic phone calls, e-mails and financial transactions in recent years, far more than was documented in a Justice Department report in March that ignited bipartisan congressional criticism.

The new audit covers just 10 percent of the bureau's national security investigations since 2002, and so the mistakes in the FBI's domestic surveillance efforts probably number several thousand, bureau officials said in interviews. The earlier report found 22 violations in a much smaller sampling.

The vast majority of the new violations were instances in which telephone companies and Internet providers gave agents phone and e-mail records the agents did not request and were not authorized to collect. The agents retained the information anyway in their files, which mostly concerned suspected terrorist or espionage activities.

But two dozen of the newly-discovered violations involved agents' requests for information that U.S. law did not allow them to have, according to the audit results provided to The Washington Post. Only two such examples were identified earlier in the smaller sample.

The violations came from the use of National Security Letters, the administrative search warrants that the FBI issues on its own behalf. The NSLs have been the center of almost constant debate ever since Congress first relaxed the rules that govern their use. The FBI and the Bush administration have insisted that they can work within the guidelines provided by Congress in order to protect both national security and civil rights. Opponents charge that the NSL program amounts to a Trojan horse for a Big Brother-style government apparatus that will attack the basic privacy rights of Americans.

The critics sound hysterical, but the FBI and the administration have not proven their suspicions unfounded. So far, the violations appear to mostly come from carelessness; most of them occurred when telecom providers included information that the FBI did not request, but kept anyway rather than returning or destroying. Fourteen appear to be more deliberate -- and since this was a 10% spot audit, one could extrapolate these figures into dozens more besides. In these cases, the FBI got full credit histories on targets, something forbidden by the rules governing counterterrorism investigations.

The audit did produce some good news. The FBI has improved its performance to complete compliance on Exigent Circumstance Letters. Earlier, the Justice Department had found hundreds of cases where the FBI abused this emergency process. They have advised the agents involved of their rights and are determining whether to bring charges against them for that abuse -- and this has had the salutary effect on the process that this audit confirms.

We need a strong FBI to help protect national security, but we also need them to follow the law and protect our civil rights. These audits show that the administration has the right idea, but the scale of the violations show that they need to do a lot more work before we can feel comfortable that they are fulfilling both missions. If they cannot keep from committing these violations, that performance will lead to Congress taking action that could hurt our ability to smoke out terrorists -- so they need to fix the rest of the problems in a hurry.

Rename Earmarks - The Top Ten Run-Off (Update & Bump)

The winner is ToddG! We'll send him the book, and thanks to everyone who participated!

Yesterday, I asked CQ readers to help Nancy Pelosi with her strategy to fight the "culture of corruption," which consists of forgetting the term "earmarks" rather than getting rid of them altogether. We have to call them something, though, and I offered a free copy of The Reagan Diaries to the CQ reader who submitted the replacement that most captured the spirit of earmarking.

And we got a terrific response! In fact, it was so good that I had a tough time selecting the top ten responses. Many of you like acronyms, and several of the best made the list. I took into consideration endorsements of nominations in the comments, too. If your entry didn't make the Top Ten, it's only because we had so many excellent suggestions.

Cast your vote for the best of the Top Ten in the poll below. We will accept votes right up to the moment we announce the winner, which will be during today's CQ Radio show at 2 pm CT. Mark Tapscott, one of the original Porkbusters, will join me in making the announcement during the show. Don't miss the announcement!

UPDATE & BUMP: As of 10:45 am CT, we've received 760 votes -- and CRAPs (Congressional Resource Allocation Protection) has the lead. I actually liked STDs, but then again, I liked them all. Make sure to get your votes in as soon as possible ...

The Wrong Direction

Yesterday I explained at Heading Right that primary campaigns should chiefly focus on positive promotion of their own candidates rather than spend much of their time attacking their colleagues in the primaries. According to The Politico, John McCain's campaign has not taken that advice. Instead, they have decided to focus their guns on another Republican presidential hopeful -- and it's not even one that's ahead of them:

In another sign of John McCain's plan to assault former Mitt Romney over his alleged flip-flops, the Arizona senator's campaign has purchased the website "www.mittvsfact.com" and will launch it in the coming weeks as a compendium of what they say are the former governor's differing stances.

The McCain camp yesterday attacked Romney on abortion under a "Mitt vs Fact" letterhead that aped their rival's campaign logo. Late in the day, a tipster pointed out that a URL of the same had been purchased and privately registered. A McCain aide confirmed today that they secured the site last month and indicated that they would use it as a sort of one-stop-shop "to brand" Romney.

This move is almost unfathomable. In the first place, McCain should be spending his efforts explaining his stance on immigration. He has said that it takes longer to articulate his position than the opposition, but he doesn't appear to be putting his emphasis there.

An attack strategy might work to distract people from the immigration issue, but if so, then McCain's attacking in the wrong direction. He has two candidates in front of him, Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson. Except in Iowa and perhaps New Hampshire, Romney trails McCain in the polling. Why go after the person on your tail, rather than fight forward?

All McCain can accomplish is to lift Romney's profile. Romney, if he's smart, will simply parry the thrusts and talk about his admiration for McCain while keeping his eyes focused on the frontrunners. Third-place candidates do not win by attacking fourth-place candidates, and fourth-place candidates don't win in the reverse, either.

Do As I Say, Hollywood Style

Angelina Jolie has begun promoting her new film, A Mighty Heart, which tells the story of murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Last night's premiere benefitted the anti-censorship organization Reporters Without Borders, but Jolie's approach to interviews on behalf of the film seems more reminiscent of the tinpot dictators that the organization fights (via Memeorandum):

Reporters from most major media outlets balked Wednesday when they were presented with an agreement drawn up by Jolie's Hollywood lawyer Robert Offer. The contract closely dictated the terms of all interviews.

Reporters were asked to agree to "not ask Ms. Jolie any questions regarding her personal relationships. In the event Interviewer does ask Ms. Jolie any questions regarding her personal relationships, Ms. Jolie will have the right to immediately terminate the interview and leave."

The agreement also required that "the interview may only be used to promote the Picture. In no event may Interviewer or Media Outlet be entitled to run all or any portion of the interview in connection with any other story. ... The interview will not be used in a manner that is disparaging, demeaning, or derogatory to Ms. Jolie."

If that wasn't enough, Jolie also requires that if any of these things happen, "the tape of the interview will not be released to Interviewer." Such a violation, the signatory thus agrees, would "cause Jolie irreparable harm" and make it possible for her to sue the interviewer and seek a restraining order.

I actually have some sympathy for celebrities and their issues with the media. Jolie and others put up with a lot of hounding and stalking from the tabloids, and exercising some controls over the boundaries of the interview doesn't seem unreasonable. Jolie doesn't have to answer any questions she deems out of bounds, and her criteria is entirely her business.

However, demanding that her answers never get used in any other context, and threatening reporters with restraining orders is not just unreasonable, but outright intimidation. It goes against the entire mission of Reporters Without Borders, and indeed against the notion of freedom of the press. I wonder if Jolie or her Hollywood friends would be as sanguine about these demands had they come from George Bush or Rudy Giuliani. Somehow, I think they'd be the first to demand a rush to the barricades.

In the event, the reporters refused to sign away their dignity, and Jolie refused to grant any interviews at all. It's not an auspicious start to a film that attempts to honor the great sacrifice that Pearl gave for independent journalism, and his fate -- having his head cut off by radical Islamist terrorists -- seems just a tad more dire than the potential risk that Jolie would have taken by conducting a few interviews for the film. Kudos to the reporters that told Jolie where to stick the agreement, and raspberries to Jolie's self-important snit.

News From Iraq Not Good, Not Final Either

The Washington Post reports that a Pentagon statistical and operational analysis of the Iraq war delivers mostly bad news. Civilian deaths have begun to rise again, the Iraqi government has yet to engage on political reform, and violence has risen in some areas. This report will certainly fuel the pessimism that has overtaken the majority of Americans on Iraq.

However, at Heading Right, we look at some of the points that many will miss in the commentary over the report. Specifically, the new strategy has had a positive effect in the areas of focus, and the report itself warns against jumping to conclusions too quickly.

Welcome To Hamastan (Update: Fatah Wants A Dunkirk)

Hamas has overrun a critical and strategic security center in Gaza today, bringing them closer to their goal of controlling the entire region. Mahmoud Abbas has finally ordered retaliatory strikes, but he may not have many to respond to the call, as Hamas has begun executing Fatah militants in front of their wives and children:

Hamas fighters overran one of the rival Fatah movement's most important security installations in the Gaza Strip on Thursday, and witnesses said the victors dragged vanquished gunmen from the building and killed them in the street.

The capture of the Preventive Security headquarters was a major step forward in Hamas' attempts to complete its takeover of all of Gaza. Hamas later called on Fatah fighters to surrender the National Security compound within the hour.

The moderate President Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah, for the first time in five days of fierce fighting, ordered his elite presidential guard to strike back. But his forces were crumbling fast under the onslaught by the better-armed and better-disciplined Islamic fighters.

Fatah officials said seven of their fighters were shot to death in the street outside Preventive Security. A witness, Jihad Abu Ayad, said the men were being killed in front of their wives and children.

Hamas certainly feels that it has the upper hand. They don't fear any retribution for these executions, and certainly have no qualms about killing their fellow Palestinians without any sort of due process or any thought of reconciliation. Hamas Radio announced that "the past era has ended and will not return ... The era of justice and Islamic rule have arrived."

Still, the Palestinians have not taken responsibility for their own depravity. After decades of terrorism and mayhem, they still want to blame everyone else but themselves for their own misery. The AP quotes one Palestinian blaming the rest of the world for not interceding to stop the fighting. "The world is watching us dying and doing nothing to help," he complains. Isn't this the same people who demanded an end to "foreign" occupation? Isn't that what Ariel Sharon gave them? And look what they have done with the opportunity.

Abbas, meanwhile, seems to be moving in slow motion. He reportedly has started talking about ending the partnership with Hamas -- five days after his partners started killing his own people. Abbas has asked Israel to allow transfer of arms and materiel from the West Bank to Gaza in order to bolster Fatah security forces, but Israel knows that the weapons will fall into the hands of Hamas, and has refused. He finally gave orders for his men to go on the offensive, but the momentum has passed to Hamas and isn't likely to reverse itself.

Ban Ki-moon has gone to the Security Council to test the waters for an international peacekeeping force deployment to Gaza. It's not likely to get much traction, and for good reason. UN forces have a bad habit of running away from gunfire, and with radical Islamists like Hamas involved, they will get put to flight within days of their arrival. The only possible way to defeat Hamas on the ground is to conduct an all-out war on Gaza -- for which the UN has absolutely no stomach. For that strategy to work, it would take either Egypt or Israel to roll tanks and thousands of troops across Gaza and commit to an occupation.

If the UN wants to endorse that, then we can take their interventionist notions seriously. Until then, the Palestinians have to deal with the terror they have seen fit to visit upon themselves now, and the terrorism that they have seen fit to visit upon others for the last 40 years.

UPDATE: Via Power Line, the Telegraph captures the moment perfectly:

Among yesterday's dead was a 14-year-old boy and three women, all killed in a Hamas attack on a Fatah security officer's home.

"They're firing at us, firing RPGs, firing mortars. We're not Jews," the brother of Jamal Abu Jediyan, a Fatah commander, pleaded during a live telephone conversation with a Palestinian radio station.

Minutes later both men were dragged into the streets and riddled with bullets.

Do you think that irony finally occurred to Abu Jediyan's brother in the moment before the bullets ended his life? Neither do I. That's the final irony.

UPDATE II: Fatah wants Israel to execute a Dunkirk to allow Fatah fighters to escape Hamastan:

Meanwhile, hundreds of Fatah men asked Israel to help them flee the Gaza Strip through Gaza seaport, one of the last locations in the Strip still held by Fatah Thursday morning, for fear they would be executed by Hamas gunmen if they remained in Gaza.

The Israelis might decide to do it. They have begun to view Gaza as a "separate enemy state," according to the Jerusalem Post. This could make dealing with Gaza even easier than before. If Hamas completely controls Gaza, they can attack security installations with impunity, rather than to take care not to undermine Fatah. It also could simplify matters in the West Bank:

Now, Hamas's disregard for the PA constitution in carrying out a military coup could work in Israel's favor. With a clear Fatah majority in the PLO, Abbas could use the fighting as an opportunity to break the constitutional Gordian knot tying Palestinian hands and annul the Basic Law, thus centralizing power in the West Bank under his leadership.

This new scenario would, in effect, create two separate political-territorial units alongside Israel - a Gaza Hamastan and a West Bank Fatah-land.

That would allow Israel to boost Abbas in the West Bank, releasing tax funds and alleviating the effects of the international boycott there. It could lead to a lessening of tension between the PA and Israel. It would also make the Gazans see what misery Hamas provides in contrast.

Pentagon Pushes Back On Pelosi's Perks

For a woman who promised an end to the free ride for politicians in Washington DC, Nancy Pelosi seems awfully intent on providing -- free rides. Pelosi wants the Pentagon to provide air travel to the adult children of House members without reimbursement when the spouses cannot accompany them on trips. The Pentagon says that request is against longstanding policy:

“It has been longstanding policy that, in the absence of a congressional spouse, the adult child of a member of Congress may accompany the member on official U.S. government travel abroad for protocol reasons and without reimbursing the U.S. Treasury,” Pelosi spokesman Nadeam Elshami said. “Speaker Pelosi believes that a modern policy must reflect the professional responsibilities or health realities that might prevent a spouse from participating, and instead permit an adult child to fulfill the protocol needs of the official trip.”

Pentagon officials say the policy is that the Treasury must be reimbursed at commercial rates for children who accompany members on such trips, often called codels.

Pelosi’s office inquired about such travel on June 1, according to a Department of Defense memo obtained by The Hill. In a June 8 memo, the head of legislative affairs for the Pentagon, Robert L. Wilkie, told Defense Secretary Robert Gates that he sees Pelosi’s question as a first step toward challenging the policy.

“We were told that the Speaker would expect that members’ children (of married and unmarried [members of Congress]) would not have to reimburse the Treasury,” Wilkie wrote. “We expect future challenges from the House leadership on this policy.”

Pelosi has an odd fixation about air travel. In the first five months, she has demanded two changes to air travel policy that expands the cost to the American taxpayer. The first expanded the already-dubious service offered to her predecessor, Denny Hastert, who justified a private military air service for himself on the basis of being third in succession to the Presidency. Pelosi demanded that the Pentagon also include her staff, relatives, and other members of the California House delegation.

Now she wants to give her colleagues another perk, and it's nonsense. As Dan Stanley, a former assistant secretary for legislative affairs at the Pentagon, tells the Hill, lawmakers to this point only rarely travel with children of any age, and always as an exception that requires an invitation from the Secretary of Defense. Other than George Bush's daughters, who cannot travel commercial for security reasons, all executive-branch family travel on military flights gets reimbursed. Why should the legislative branch have an exception?

Public Citizen, a watchdog group on government behavior, already has a complaint with the IRS regarding free family travel for politicians. That complaint focuses on lobbyist-provided travel, which PC believes should be taxable income for those with no official capacity on such trips. Craig Holman of PC sees no difference between privately-funded and publicly-funded air travel, and proclaims himself "disappointed" that Pelosi has acted to expand legislative perks rather than restrict them.

Why does Nancy Pelosi think you and I should pay for their travel? For a woman who talked about a "culture of corruption" for months in the run-up to the midterms, the Pelosi culture indulges in a rather imperial view of perks and freebies.

Blogs Cure Macaca

After George Allen's macaca blunder, his campaign took too long to address the controversy and attempt to defuse it. They seemed stunned and unprepared for political campaigning in the YouTube era, and they paid a high price for their education. Now the Republican Party has distilled that experience into a set of guidelines for future damage control:

The Macaca moment has morphed into an official learning tool for the Republican establishment.

It's right there, on pages 18 and 22 of an Internet guide from the National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee that its chairman, Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.), hopes will become scripture for the 2008 candidates.

Always assume you're being recorded, and always record your opponent. The blogs -- oh, scratch that -- the Republican blogs are your friends, so use them for rapid response in good times and bad.

"The paradigmatic example of failure to do so is the 'macaca' moment," reads the guidebook, referring to a remark last year by former Sen. George Allen (R-Va.) that was captured on video and sunk his reelection campaign.

And btw, the mainstream media are so, uh, 2006. The first stop for press secretaries, according to the guidebook, should be bloggers who can create "buzz" and inevitably trigger stories in the drippy MSM.

Not only does the NRSC advise campaigners to engage the blogosphere, they get specific about where to go:

Remember the top blog dogs. Speaking of which, get in good with five of the best-read national conservative bloggers. The guide names names: Instapundit, Michelle Malkin, Captain's Quarters, Power Line and Hugh Hewitt. Do the same locally. Do an interview with "one friendly blogger," and interest from other local bloggers should follow.

Heady company, to be sure. It's nice to get that kind of attention, and I'm always happy to interview Republican candidates. In fact, I wouldn't mind interviewing Democrats, either, although I'm sure they wouldn't necessarily be excited about the prospect. The NRSC warns candidates not to engage hostile bloggers for fear of "legitimizing" them, and I am sure the DSCC offers the same advice to Democratic candidates.

It's a smart strategy. Bloggers can provide a more sympathetic ear to candidates looking to offer an explanation for a misstep, and the word will spread throughout the blogosphere quickly. It gives an advantage over going directly to the press, which the NRSC has demoted to step 8 in this new procedure.

This provides a caution for bloggers, too. We have to understand the world in which we operate. The campaigns act to protect and promote their candidate, and we are part of their overall communication strategy. We have achieved some parity with our counterparts in the press, which is an excellent development, but we should also remember that we can be exploited as well if we don't watch carefully. Some campaigns have attempted in the past to float personal attacks through the blogosphere, and bloggers have to decide where they draw the line in engaging in that kind of activity.

Overall, though, this policy of engagement is a very good idea, both for campaigns and for political bloggers. The efforts of the NRSC may save a candidate or two for national office in this election cycle. Hopefully the campaigns are listening.

Senator Tom Coburn's Out Of Commission Temporarily

I just received an e-mail from the staff of Senator Tom Coburn, one of the best in the Republican caucus and a strong fighter on behalf of clean government. The Senator had to have surgery to remove a tumor on his pituitary gland:

Dr. Coburn underwent successful surgery this morning for the removal of a benign pituitary tumor. The procedure involved no complications and he is expected to make a full and speedy recovery. We don’t have a date certain for his return, but we do expect him to be able to resume his Senate duties full-time by the end of the month.

I found information on pituitary tumors here. The traditional pituitary surgery will leave no external scar, and from what I gather in the release, nothing more was necessary. That's why the staff expects him back to work so soon -- great news indeed.

Our prayers go out to Senator Coburn for a speedy recovery, and to his family for strength in the next few days.

The Problem With Primary Oppo (Updated)

Fred Thompson’s entry into the presidential race will raise the flag on another feature of the campaign: opposition research and attack. The Politico reports that other campaigns have prepared for Fred’s entry, and they are poised to dent his momentum by focusing on his professional career and his track record, certainly legitimate targets. Some of the selected topics appear overblown, however, and veer more into the nature of personal attack -- such as Thompson's status as a trial attorney and his limited lobbying career.

However, the nature of these pushbacks may backfire on the other campaigns, and calls into question whether they have forgotten the long-term goal of the primaries. At Heading Right, I ask whether this will help the party elect a Republican to the White House, and also talk through some of the points that the other campaigns hope to use as traction against Fred. In short, they may find themselves more on defense than offense if they want to use innuendo and half-truths to undermine Fred.

UPDATE and BUMP: Fred Thompson has a new blog for his campaign, The Fred File. It has CQ on the blogroll, and it looks like it will be a group blog from the campaign team as well as the candidate. Fred posted this introduction, complete with a YouTube link. It even has an RSS feed, for those who want to keep up with Fred on a constant basis, as well as one exclusively for Fred's posts. It's a basic blog, nothing fancy, but very functional. We'll see how they do on providing the kind of constant content that blogs need to survive.

CQ Radio: Robert Bluey, Brian Darling

Today on CQ Radio (2 pm CT), we'll have Robert Bluey and Brian Darling from the Heritage Foundation talking about the latest on immigration, pork-barrel shenanigans, and much more. Be sure to join the conversation by calling 646-652-4889!

Tomorrow, we will have Mark Tapscott to talk about polling, party affiliations -- and to announce the winner of the Rename Earmarks contest here at CQ. Don't miss it!

The live player will start automatically if you click on the link to the extended entry. You can also listen from the player on the sidebar.

Naming Contest: What To Call Earmarks?

Nancy Pelosi, who campaigned on a platform of ending lobbyist influence and the "culture of corruption" in Congress, has unveiled a new strategy to do both. She wants people to call pork-barrel line items something other than "earmarks" so that Congress can get back to stuffing legislation full of pet projects and keep their leverage with the lobbyists:

The congressional spending season began with a blowup over earmarks in the House yesterday, as the first bill to reach a vote prompted a White House veto threat and scores of amendments from Republicans furious with Democrats' handling of pet-project spending in the measures.

Debate on the $36 billion homeland security bill, which would fund the Federal Emergency Management Agency, border security and counterterrorism measures, bogged down last night as Republicans pushed scores of amendments aimed at banning the use of counterterrorism money for designer handbags, puppet shows and other programs included in the legislation. Democrats, intent on passing 11 of the 12 appropriations measures before the July 4 recess, responded by vowing to stay through the weekend if needed to break the deadlock. ...

"Why don't we just leave this room today forgetting the word 'earmark'?" suggested Pelosi. "This is a way for . . . members to come together, sometimes in a bipartisan way, to have the Congress of the United States determine some of what is in the appropriations bills instead of just leaving it up to the White House."

Bipartisanship was in short supply yesterday. In speech after speech, Republicans attacked a plan by House Appropriations Committee Chairman David R. Obey (D-Wis.) to keep hundreds of earmark requests out of the bills until later in the process. Though Obey estimates that such spending accounts for less than 2 percent of the bills' combined tab of $955 billion, he said he has been snowed under by more than 30,000 lawmaker "boodle" requests. To give himself and committee staff members more time to screen them, he plans to drop the earmarks into the bills when they move to the House-Senate conference committees before the August break, giving members and the public a month to review and question them. Any changes could be made when the House bills are reconciled with Senate versions, he said.

What a great strategy for cleaning up government! We just simply rename pork-barrel projects to something more melodious to the ear, and then stick them into bills so late in the process that they cannot be removed. The Wall Street Journal explains:

At least Republicans allowed earmark votes on the floor. Under Mr. Obey, earmarks won't be vetted in an Appropriations subcommittee, or at the Rules Committee, or on the floor. They will be kept secret before the House votes on spending bills, to be unveiled only later when it is time to prepare a final House-Senate conference report. Only then will backbenchers be able to raise questions about individual earmarks -- in writing, to Mr. Obey's "staff," which will then get to decide whether the earmarks survive or not. Guess what "the staff" decision will be on an earmark requested by, say, Powerhouse Democrat Jack Murtha and a challenge raised by some first-term Republican from Amarillo?

In other words, the Democrats have not acted on behalf of open government. They have deliberately acted to keep earmarks concealed, and also make it more difficult to root them out. As Jack Murtha demonstrated in his tirade, the Democrats have every intention of using earmarks for arm-twisting and backroom deals that encourage the kind of corruption that existed at the heart of the Duke Cunningham and William "Dollar Bill" Jefferson cases.

Earmarks give legislators too much individual power, and usually result in a waste of federal monies. They allow incumbents to create an entrenched interest in their districts and states that have less to do with good policy and more to do with inordinate spending. They reward lobbyists who shower legislators with contributions and fundraisers, which then incentivizes Congress to demand more and more money from taxpayers to fund these pet projects.

And Nancy Pelosi's plan to fight this corruption of the legislative process is to call earmarks something else. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, as the saying goes -- and pig manure as well.

But let's get in the spirit of this thing. Let's get some suggestions for new names. We'll collect them in the comments today, and tomorrow we'll hold a run-off poll to select the new nomenclature for pork-barrel spending. If that's how Nancy Pelosi intends to clean up Washington, we can provide some needed assistance.

UPDATE: Please make sure you leave your entry in the comments section. The winning entry from the run-off will get a free copy of The Reagan Diaries, as an antidote to the inanity that Pelosi's leadership has provided. In the meantime, check out Mark Tapscott's review of the media reaction to David Obey, which is a lot more negative than you'd imagine.

The Palestinian Authority's Two-State Solution

The civil war in Gaza has apparently imposed a two-state solution on the Palestinian Authority, at least for the moment. Hamas has taken over security installations in Gaza and has pushed Fatah out, attempting to create a protostate under its total control on the Mediterranean:

Jamal Abu Jadian, a top Fatah commander, fled his home in the northern Gaza Strip Tuesday evening dressed as a woman to avoid dozens of Hamas militiamen who had attacked it. He and several members of his family and bodyguards were lightly wounded.

But when Abu Jadian arrived at a hospital a few hundred meters away from his house, he was discovered by a group of Hamas gunmen, who took turns shooting him in the head with automatic rifles.

"They literally blew his head off with more than 40 bullets," said a doctor at Kamal Udwan Hospital.

In fact, Hamas has tried over the last 48 hours to re-enact the final scenes of The Godfather. They have targeted all of the senior security commanders for assassination, and succeeded in at least some of those attempts. Fatah officials acknowledge that Hamas now has a solid grip on northern Gaza and have started to work towards conquering the entire area -- and that they have a good chance of success.

Fatah has been put to flight. The only obstacles in the way of total Hamas control are the residents of Gaza, who have hidden themselves away from the fighting. Israel has decided to refrain from taking sides, but acting to target terrorists when they can find them, mostly of Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

Not surprisingly, Mahmoud Abbas wants the fighting to stop:

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has warned that continuing violence in Gaza risks taking the region to the point of collapse. ...

"Without a ceasefire and stopping of the fighting I think the situation will collapse in Gaza," he warned from Ramallah in the West Bank. ...

Arab League head Amr Moussa said the factional fighting was destroying the Palestinian cause.

The Palestinian cause has been a dead letter ever since the Palestinians elected Hamas to power seventeen months ago. The Arab League has just gotten around to discovering this, but the West will not put money in the hands of terrorists, especially Islamists like Hamas. When Fatah at least talked about peace, without doing much about it, the West only grudgingly supported the PA. This shows why we don't invest in terrorism, and more importantly, why subsidies to the Palestinians pay off only in blood.

Without outside intervention, we can expect the PA to wind up as its own two-state solution. Fatah will wind up with the West Bank, and Hamas with Gaza. That will make Gaza a tempting target for another Israeli invasion, as Hamas will certainly use it as a launching pad for more terrorist attacks against Israel. If Fatah holds the West Bank, it would make it much simpler for Israel to roll over Gaza. An even better solution would be to have Egypt do it, and to take back Gaza under its own sovereignty, but Israel would have an impossible task in convincing the Egyptians to do it.

Hamas should have the civil war in Gaza won within days. When the dust clears, we will see the first terrorist protostate on the Mediterranean since Moammar Ghaddafi got a bomb dropped down his chimney from Ronald Reagan. That's been the end game of all the two-state solutions proposed while we have engaged terrorists and helped legitimize them.

Post Scolds Hillary On Trade

Hillary Clinton announced her opposition to a free-trade deal with South Korea this weekend, citing concerns over reciprocity and an imbalance in existing trade. Today, the Washington Post editorial board scolds her for short-sightedness, and wonders what kind of pandering to both labor and manufacturing we can expect from her as President:

THERE ARE pluses and minuses, it's often said, to having a former first lady running for president. On the debit side, for example, is the oligarchical aura of two families passing the presidency back and forth for 24 or possibly 28 consecutive years. On the positive side is the experience Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) gained during eight years in the White House, experience that ought to translate into a broader national perspective than a senator or governor can attain.

But has it? That's the question raised by Ms. Clinton's announcement over the weekend that she will oppose the free-trade agreement with South Korea -- and for the narrowest of special-interest reasons. It's hard to imagine an issue where the national and international benefits weigh so clearly and heavily on one side. Yet Ms. Clinton, sounding more auto salesman than statesman, has joined many of her Democratic colleagues in Congress in opting to jettison those benefits.

The United States and South Korea in April concluded 10 months of negotiations to sign what would be, if ratified, the most far-reaching trade agreement since the pact with Mexico and Canada that President Bill Clinton championed in 1993. It's a pact between the world's largest and 11th-largest economies that would benefit workers, farmers and companies on both sides. As a democracy with a strong trade union movement, South Korea doesn't pose the workers' rights challenges that vex unionists in agreements with poorer countries. This deal would open the Korean market to a wide array of U.S. agricultural, industrial and cultural products and services; in fact, the political risks in South Korea are far higher than here. And it would demonstrate U.S. commitment to a vital region at a time when China is steadily gaining ground.

Why does Clinton object to the deal? She objects to the fact that Koreans sell more cars in the US than the US does in Korea. Specifically, she says that the deal doesn't eliminate the "multitude of informal barriers" that keep American cars from selling widely in South Korea:

"Unless those barriers fall, American carmakers will face increased competition at home and won't get greater access to South Korea's market," she said. ...

"While I value the strong relationship the United States enjoys with South Korea, I believe that this agreement is inherently unfair," Clinton said at an event hosted by the AFL-CIO labor confederation in Detroit, home of the U.S. car industry.

What informal barriers? The trade agreement forces Seoul to remove discriminatory tariffs and taxes on cars. As the Post points out, it gives us the right to end the deal if they don't keep their word. Is she complaining because South Koreans have a cultural tendency to buy vehicles made in South Korea -- sort of like the American labor movement's old Al Gore lullaby, "Look for the Union Label"? (Yes, I know Gore was joking, and so am I.)

This is what we can expect from a Democratic administration: protectionism and trade battles. John Edwards has already announced his opposition, and Barack Obama says he will study the agreement for a while before announcing a decision. The economic expansion that globalization has brought to the US and the world will founder on the shoals of a Democratic executive, especially if supported by a Democratic Congress. No trade will be free or fair enough, and we will fall back on inflationary and destructive applications of tariffs to fight trade wars with nations who should be our partners.

Worse, this insistence on imposing American labor restrictions on other nations will keep them from competing and developing their own industrial base. Besides the cultural arrogance that demands an American-style relationship between labor and management, that policy would price developing nations out of the manufacturing market -- which is what the unions want. That would leave other nations in poverty, without much hope of capital infusions necessary to lift their standards of living.

We need to ensure fairness in trade, but we need to ensure that trade continues to exist in a free-market environment. We cannot demand that South Koreans buy American; we can only present our goods without interference and let the consumers decide. The South Korean government has agreed to change what's in their control, and it's a good deal for everyone. If Hillary can't see that, then perhaps she needs to stay in the Senate.

Coleman To Face Primary Challenge?

Norm Coleman will face his first re-election campaign to the US Senate next year, and so far, he's looking like a lock. Polls show him consistently ahead of his presumptive Democratic challengers, Al Franken and Michael Cerisi, by twenty points in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans. He has maintained a remarkable cushion of support by steering a moderate course in Washington, sometimes frustrating his supporters but normally reliable on key issues.

Now, however, that moderate position may inspire a primary challenge, and from a former Coleman supporter and advisor. Colonel Joe Repya, a friend of mine and a formidable force in state GOP circles, told The Hill that he will decide within the next two months whether to launch his bid to unseat Norm Coleman:

An Iraq war veteran and former adviser to Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.) yesterday said he is considering a primary challenge against the lawmaker in 2008.

Retired Lt. Col. Joe Repya (R) lost a race for the state Republican Party chairmanship last week, after which speculation began to percolate that he would challenge Coleman.

Yesterday, in a statement, Repya confirmed that he is mulling a run. He said he will travel around the state and talk to people about the viability of a bid during the next two months.

“I’ve received numerous calls and have been approached by a number of people who have asked me to consider running against Norm Coleman for U.S. Senate,” Repya said. “I am making no decisions at this time. I am going take 30 to 60 days to decide what my political future is going to be.”

CQ readers should recall Repya; I've featured him a few times on the blog, notably in an interview from the 2004 Republican National Convention. He has a long and distinguished career in the Army, having served in the first Gulf War and volunteering for tours of duty in Iraq at an age when most men have started putting their retirement plans in place. He returned from Iraq last year, and he and I had lunch to chat about his plans and to catch up with each other. I can tell you that there are very few men I admire as much as Joe, and few men I respect as much, either.

I'm a bit conflicted about this development. Joe Repya would make a fine Senator for Minnesota, but I'm not sure that Minnesota would recognize that. We nominated a fine, accomplished conservative in Mark Kennedy last year to run for Mark Dayton's open seat -- and Amy Klobuchar, a district attorney of less accomplishment, creamed him in the race by 20 points. Granted, 2006 was a bad year for Republicans anyway, but it points out a problem in our state, which is that true conservatives do not win statewide office, at least not yet.

Coleman has done a good job in the Senate for Minnesota, but he has provided his share of frustrations. He has dabbled with supporting the comprehensive immigration reform bill, although he voted against cloture and did try to add an amendment to end the sanctuary-city movement (which got defeated). He opposed the surge in Baghdad, although he supports the war effort in Iraq. As he said in his speech at the University of Minnesota last month, he looks for compromises and solutions, but the good of that gets measured not only by what is won but also by what is lost.

Conservatives mistrust him. And the proper place to challenge Coleman is in the primary, where Republicans can debate the issues and determine which candidate best represents the policies of Minnesotans. Repya has the resumé to get serious consideration, and I don't doubt for a moment that he could present a tough challenge to Coleman. However, I'm not sure that in 2008, the conditions will have improved enough here to see Repya prevail over the Democrats -- and I know I don't want to see Senator Michael Cerisi.

The primary might do the state GOP some good, though. It could allow for a general airing of policy conflicts and help rebuild some enthusiasm that was lost in last year's elections. Even if I'm conflicted on who to support in this particular instance, I feel good about the fact that we would have two candidates of high caliber, both of whom would have the class to run clean and positive campaigns.

CBS: Couric's Failure Due To Sexist Americans

Katie Couric continues as America's Victim at CBS. Last month, CBS VP Linda Mason told its Public Eye blog that Couric's lack of success came from an innate sexism in the America, which she said preferred to get its news "from white guys". Yesterday, CBS made that their official stance when CEO Les Moonves told a Newhouse School of Communications group that people don't want their news from a woman (via Memeorandum):

Leslie Moonves, CBS chief executive, on Tuesday suggested that sexist attitudes were partly to blame for the faltering performance of Katie Couric, the news anchor he recruited to the network with a $15m annual pay package.

“I’m sort of surprised by the vitriol against her. The number of people who don’t want news from a woman was startling,” Mr Moonves said of the audience’s reaction to Ms Couric, who this month brought ratings for the CBS Evening News to a 20-year low.

He reiterated, however, that he was committed to Ms Couric and that he believed her programme would succeed in spite of its last place standing behind rivals ABC and NBC. ...

Ms Couric has managed a 2 per cent increase in women age 18 to 49 since her September debut. However, that has been more than offset by an 11 per cent decline among men over 55, who still constitute the bulk of the evening news’ audience.

Apparently, the decline in that last demographic has fueled the bunker mentality at CBS that paints Couric as the victim of a Neanderthal reaction. However, Moonves in the same speech acknowledged that CBS moved away from "hard news" when they replaced Bob Schieffer with Couric in favor of an emphasis on human-interest stories. Not only did that not attract a large following among younger viewers, but it turned off people who watch news to see ... news. Given CBS' poor demos on younger viewers anyway, even the 2% increase comes as a result of having almost nowhere to go but up.

However, admitting that CBS blew it when they screwed up the formula for the show would put the blame on Moonves for the failure. Admitting that they overpaid for Couric, who apparently brought very little of her Today audience with her to CBS, would also make Moonves look like an idiot. Therefore, Moonves and his team at CBS want to shift blame to the people they supposedly serve -- the audience. It's a strange strategy. Does Moonves really think that he can attract new viewers by accusing them of being chauvinist pigs?

It makes no sense, in any case. Plenty of women successfully anchor local news shows in big-market cities. They don't appear to have problems with women reporting in any corner of the nation. CBS had Connie Chung co-anchoring with Dan Rather for a while (1993-95). They didn't can her because the audience abandoned them -- she got canned because Rather got jealous over her assignments, and also because Chung acted insensitively towards the Oklahoma City Fire Department in the wake of the 1995 bombing of the Murrah building. ABC has had Barbara Walters anchor the news for a brief period, and many women have featured roles on prominent news magazines, such as CBS' Leslie Stahl and ABC's Diane Sawyer.

Even if it were true -- which it isn't -- then Moonves is still an idiot. Does he mean to inform Viacom shareholders that he gave Couric a $15 million salary without testing to see whether her gender would be a factor? I call BS. Somewhere, CBS has an entire file cabinet of focus group responses to Couric and/or a generic woman anchoring the nightly news. It would have either shown that the CBS Evening News would tank, if Moonves is correct about the high level of sexism, or it would show that it makes no difference.

If the former, then Moonves is a poor executive for making that kind of investment in a losing proposition. If the latter -- which is a certainty -- then the fault lies not with the audience, but with CBS for airing a stinker of a news broadcast. Moonves should stop spending so much time blaming his audience for their taste, and spend more time fixing his organization and the show.

Blair: The Internet's Too Mean For Me

British Prime Minister Tony Blair will leave office soon -- and in one respect, perhaps not soon enough. Blair's valediction to the press revealed a bitterness that his ten years in power hid behind politically-correct comity, and an endorsement for speech policing that will shock some of his ardent admirers:

Tony Blair hinted today at new restrictions on internet journalism, saying online news coverage had become "more pernicious and less balanced" than traditional political reporting.

In a farewell lecture on public life, he said that much of the British media behaved like a "feral beast, just tearing people and reputations to bits".

But he had particularly harsh words for non-traditional media outlets, particularly the internet. ... "In fact, the new forms can be even more pernicious, less balanced, more intent on the latest conspiracy theory multiplied by five."

British journalism has more bite to it than its American counterpart. For the most part, American journalists at least act as though they want to cover a story rather than become a part of it. In Britain, thanks to the refreshingly honest manner in which publications approach their biases, reporters feel more free to use acerbic commentary and to act with less politesse when interacting with public officials.

Think of a press conference with three dozen David Gregorys and Keith Olbermanns, and you get the picture.

Blair has a point when he complains about the sometimes-savage nature of media coverage. The "feral beast" quote will live for a very long time, not just because of Blair's delicious enunciation but also because it's quite apt. As bad as it gets for politicians, it's exponentially worse for celebrities. However, because both court the coverage, complaining about the "feral beast" becoming unleashed seems just a tad ... whiney.

And if complaining is whiney, then imposing a "regulatory system" to intimidate journalists is very worrisome. Here is the part of the speech in which he talks about expanding regulatory activity:

It used to be thought - and I include myself in this - that help was on the horizon. New forms of communication would provide new outlets to by-pass the increasingly shrill tenor of the traditional media. In fact, the new forms can be even more pernicious, less balanced, more intent on the latest conspiracy theory multiplied by five. But here is also the opportunity. At present, we are all being dragged down by the way media and public life interact.

Trust in journalists is not much above that in politicians. There is a market in providing serious, balanced news. There is a desire for impartiality. The way that people get their news may be changing; but the thirst for the news being real news is not. The media will fear any retreat from impact will mean diminishing sales. But the opposite is the case. They need to re-assert their own selling point: the distinction between news and comment. And there is inevitably change on its way. The regulatory framework at some point will need revision.

The PCC is for traditional newspaper publishing. OFCOM regulate broadcasting, except for the BBC, which has its own system of regulation. But under the new European regulations all television streamed over the internet may be covered by OFCOM. As the technology blurs the distinction between papers and television, it becomes increasingly irrational to have different systems of accountability based on technology that no longer can be differentiated in the old way.

Perhaps the first step could be to end the state-run media in Britain, and end the tax that Briton pay for the privilege of one-sided BBC reporting. If the public hungers for unbiased reporting, then the government should quit distorting the market and allow entrepeneurs to compete openly with that kind of product. If the BBC is part of the problem -- and Blair doesn't differentiate -- then ending its subsidy would force it to respond to those market conditions.

But here's the rub. Everyone knows about the bias of the Independent, which Blair named specifically in his complaint. The same can be said about the Guardian and the Telegraph. As Americans can explain to Blair in great detail, the problem is that it's much more difficult to tell when media organizations attempt objectivity -- and especially when they make a pretense of it.

Here in the US, we just learn to be discerning consumers of the news. Too bad Blair can't trust Britons to do the same. I'm sorry to see a staunch ally of the US like Blair retiring, but it's disappointing that he doesn't grasp the fundamental role that free speech plays in human liberty.

Bill Frist Follow-Up

Yesterday, I interviewed former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist about his new project with ONE Vote '08 -- the effort to push aid for poverty relief into the presidential campaign. Senator Frist spent a half-hour discussing the topic for the benefit of CQ Radio listeners, and I asked him a number of questions about how to avoid yet another Band-Aid application of aid. Based on these questions and similar ones from other interviews, he responded on his blog this afternoon:

Governments must now be accountable for the assistance they receive . . . and when they fail to meet those accountability standards, America shifts resources to the private sector and non-governmental organizations to meet local needs. But those governments that demonstrate the effective use of funds are more likely to receive future assistance – a good incentive to use funding wisely.

And debt forgiveness can enable governments to spend billions of dollars each year on solving problems that would otherwise attract U.S. foreign aid for years to come. In other words, a small investment in debt forgiveness or financial assistance up front can save huge investments down the road.

On the other hand, as David reminded us during the same show, calling literally from the Gambian jungle, what Africa needs is basic infrastructure. They need sewage systems, clean water, and electricity. Aid can provide that, but it has to be a massive, focused program that gives Africa the building blocks of modernity it utterly lacks throughout most of the continent.

Be sure to read all of Senator Frist's response.

CQ Radio: Duane Patterson

Today on CQ Radio (2 pm CT), Duane "Generalissimo" Patterson joins us from the Hugh Hewitt show. We're going to talk about immigration, the presidential race, Hillary's choice for national co-chair for her campaign, and much more.

Be sure to join the conversation by calling 646-652-4889! Tomorrow, we'll have Robert Bluey and Brian Darling from the Heritage Foundation (Fausta's got them today!). Thursday, I'll talk with Mark Tapscott on the polling and whether it indicates a need for a new political party.

The live player will start automatically if you click on the link to the extended entry. You can also listen from the player on the sidebar.

Immigration Post-Mortem: CQ Nailed It

In the aftermath of the failure to get cloture on the immigration bill, many pundits suggested that the Republican caucus got cold feet after hearing from their constituents. Instead, I wrote that the compromise doomed itself to failure through a process that cheated legislators of access to crafting changes and generally arrogated power to a selected few Senators. (I went into greater detail on my CQ Radio show the previous day.)

Now, as The Corner reports, a memo circulating on Capitol Hill has confirmed my analysis:

There are three primary reasons the bill failed:

* The complicated legislation, constantly being tweaked by the White House and Deal-Makers, is full of loopholes and problems that deserved amendment and full consideration -- consideration denied by the Democrats.

* The White House, certain Democrats and the Deal-Makers blatantly disregarded the legislative process -- drafting the bill behind closed doors, skipping the committee process, jamming the bill through the system, limiting the number and type of amendments that could be offered and trying to close down debate on the bill long before appropriate concerns with the bill had been addressed fully.

* The American people rightly refuse to buy what the Deal-Makers are selling -- the rewarding of legal status in our country to millions who ignored our laws in exchange for yet another promise to fix our broken immigration system.

The circular goes into detail about the specific complaints of the bill's opponents. None of them have as much to do with substance as with process. In fact, the two subject headings that detail the underlying complaints of the summary are "Important Republican Amendments Rejected, Ignored, or Undermined" and "A Failed, Anti-Democratic Process." As I warned last week:

The handful of Senators in the coalition never showed the bill to anyone prior to dumping it on the Senate and demanding that the committee process be bypassed and the debate schedule truncated. Even Harry Reid could not abide that kind of arrogance and extended the debate so that people could actually read the bill. The Senate then took on the role of Committee Of The Whole, but on such an accelerated rate that Reid had to ration the number of amendments. In the end, he didn't leave enough time for the bill to have its proper review, and it failed -- and quite properly.

Regardless of the merits and demerits of the bill, this process was atrocious and arrogant. Had the bill come through committee as was proper, we wouldn't have had the parliamentary free-for-all we saw these last two weeks. It would have allowed for interested parties to carefully peruse the legislation, fix its myriad problems, and have an intelligent debate over amendments. Instead, we had the ridiculous fire drill of a nine-day scrum to determine the overhaul of our entire immigration and border security systems, starting in ignorance and ending in ignominy.

This is why the current bill will never make it back off the table. In order to get any more support from Republicans -- and they need 15 more votes -- the entire mess has to go through the normal legislative process. That will take weeks, perhaps even months, but it's the process that should have been used all along. That would have avoided the need for extensive debate and amendments in the last two weeks, and it would have removed the arrogance from the process.

In a development that underscores the death of the current bill, Saxby Chambliss and Johnny Isaacson appear to have defected from the Grand Coalition, and now want a supplemental spending bill that focuses on border security:

We believe the way to build greater support for immigration reform in the United States Senate and among the American public is to regain the trust in the ability of the federal government to responsibly administer immigration programs and enforce immigration laws. There is bipartisan agreement that we need to secure our borders first, and we believe this approach will serve as a platform towards addressing the other issues surrounding immigration reform.

To that end, we believe that you and your administration could alleviate many of the fears of our constituents by calling for an emergency supplemental bill to fully fund the border and interior security initiatives contained in legislation currently pending in the Senate, as well as any outstanding existing authorizations. Such a move would show your commitment to securing the border first and to stopping the flow of illegal immigrants and drugs into our nation. It will also work towards restoring the credibility of the federal government on this critical issue.

"Outstanding existing authorizations" means the 854 miles of border barriers authorized and funded by the last Congress. Build that, and we'll get back to you, Chambliss and Isaacson told the President in this statement.

UPDATE: I'm not saying that the grassroots efforts had no effect, and I would certainly encourage people to continue contacting their Senators to explain (politely) their opposition to the bill. Gary Gross even got a nice response from Norm Coleman by doing so. What I'm saying is that this bill had almost no chance of passing from the very beginning.

Hamas Overruns Northern Gaza, PA Near Collapse

In what appears to be a fatal blow to the Palestinian Authority, Hamas launched a large-scale attack on northern Gaza today. They claim to have captured key security positions from the PA and Fatah, and in response, Fatah has threatened to withdraw from the PA altogether:

Hamas launched a full-scale attack Tuesday afternoon against Fatah security bases and positions in Gaza, and succeeded in taking over a number of them, Israel Radio reported.

Hamas-affiliated television said that the organization overtook the entire northern section of the Gaza Strip. After airing the report, the station was attacked by PA security forces and forced to play pro-Fatah songs. ...

Also on Tuesday afternoon, Fatah announced that within several hours, the faction would decide whether to stay in the unity government with Hamas, or leave the Palestinian Authority government altogether, Israel Radio reported.

The announcement coincided with a Hamas attack on the National Security headquarters in Gaza, an incident which followed a recent threat of such action by the extremist Islamic faction. National Security is one of the armed forces affiliated with Fatah.

As I wrote earlier this morning, no one can now deny that the Palestinians have begun their long-delayed civil war in earnest. The two political parties, each offshoots of terrorist organizations, have reverted back to form and now openly operate as terrorist militias. Gaza, which had a history as a resort center on the Mediterranean under Egyptian sovereignty, will become this generation's Lebanon.

Mahmoud Abbas still hasn't gotten the memo. He called for yet another cease-fire, apparently to replace the cease-fire that failed last night. Abbas has a lot more to lose than Gaza, of course; if the PA falls apart, then the West Bank loses its autonomy, too. Israel will have to take control of both areas, which means that Abbas' political career would be over.

Unfortunately, I suspect Hamas will win this civil war. They appear more prepared and more willing to fight, at least at the moment. They will also attract support from other Islamist groups, as well as Syria and Iran. They want the West Bank and Gaza as launching pads for their eventual assault on Israel, and they will not pass on this opportunity to gain control of the territories through their proxies.

Perhaps the Palestinians will grow a spine and force an end to the terrorism. We've been waiting for over 40 years for that to happen. Maybe now that they have found themselves in a civil war, they may finally act.

LA Times Poll Spells Trouble For Democrats

The new Los Angeles Times poll shows Democrats in trouble in both Congress and the presidential race. Support for Congress has dropped to historic lows, and the luster has worn from Nancy Pelosi's historic win as House Speaker. Hillary Clinton looks stronger than ever for the nomination -- but that may be bad news as well.

At Heading Right, I dissect the poll, check the sample, and determine that it looks better for Republicans than one might think. One Republican will certainly delight in the survey -- and may light up a cigar to celebrate.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, Rasmussen has even better numbers for Fred (via Hot Air):

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani has to share his spot atop the field of Republican Presidential hopefuls this week. The newest face in the race, former Tennessee Senator Fred Thompson, is now tied with Giuliani. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds each man earning support from 24% of likely Republican Primary voters. A week ago, Giuliani had a six percentage point lead over Thompson, 23% to 17%.

It is not unusual for a candidate to gain ground in the polls when they first announce their intentions. However, Thompson’s rise has been meteoric. It remains to be seen whether the reality of his candidacy can measure up to its allure as an alternative for those dissatisfied with the other candidates in the field. At the moment, 59% of Republicans have a favorable opinion of their newest candidate. Just 14% hold an unfavorable opinion of Thompson while 27% are not sure.

Rasmussen calls Fred's rise "meteoric", but that may have to do with the perceived vacuum of conservative options in the race thus far. John McCain, for instance, has dropped quickly in the Rasmussen poll after the introduction of his immigration reform bill in Congress two weeks ago. His support in the Rasmussen poll dropped to half of what he had in January, and six points in the last month.

Gaza Collapsing

The latest cease-fire between Palestinian factions has collapsed almost before it got announced as Gaza slides into an all-out civil war. Refugees have begun to flee to Egypt, and Hamas-controlled mosques now serve as broadcast stations for war announcements:

Palestinian infighting, almost daily Israeli air strikes, and a steadily worsening economic situation triggered by an international aid boycott has made life unbearable for many Palestinians. Those who can are leaving.

European Union monitors at the Rafah border crossing from the Gaza Strip to Egypt say that more than 14,000 Palestinians have fled Gaza since Israel withdrew soldiers and settlers in 2005 and the rise to power of the Islamist Hamas five months later. In the past year alone, the average number of people leaving Gaza per day has doubled from 15 to 30.

The rising number of Palestinians seeking to emigrate has prompted Jerusalem's Mufti, Mohammad Ahmed Hussein, to issue a fatwa prohibiting Palestinians from leaving Palestinian territories.

"Immigration from this blessed land is not permissible according to Islamic law," said the religious edict. "People who live in this land should not leave it for the invaders and occupiers."

That's a sure sign of desperation. Imams now forbid movement of Palestinians even to other "blessed" lands, such as Muslim Egypt. Why? They know that if the Palestinians leave Gaza in droves, it will leave terrorist groups like Hamas, Fatah, and Islamic Jihad much more exposed to Israeli strikes.

The imams want their congregations to continue their roles as human shields so that terrorists can conduct holy wars. Isn't that special? No wonder they call Islam the Religion of Peace.

It won't matter. Palestinians in Gaza have seen their one opportunity to create a protostate, free from occupation, utterly collapse. They won't stick around to starve or to get killed in the crossfire. Those with means will leave, to Egypt first and perhaps later to Jordan.

And if the imams haven't covered themselves in enough blood already, now they're announcing attacks from the minarets:

Militants from the armed wing of Hamas have threatened attacks on security positions in Gaza belonging to Palestinian rivals Fatah, reports say.

Hamas-run mosques in Gaza City gave Fatah fighters two hours to leave their positions.

The civil war is already on. Both sides have attacked each other's leadership. Every round of diplomacy creates another cease-fire, which lasts as long as it takes to restock the ammunition. Ordinary Palestinians, who created this situation by supporting Hamas in their last elections, have no way to put an end to the fighting themselves, and the Israelis have learned not to do anything other than target terrorists who target Israel.

Let Gaza collapse. We can't stop it anyway, and our efforts to intercede will by definition leave terrorists stronger in the region. Only when Palestinians tire of bloodshed will it end.

No Military Detention For Legal Residents Of US

The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled yesterday that the military cannot detain people who have legal residence in the US for crimes committed here, even if those crimes include acting as a foreign agent in service to an enemy at war. Instead, the divided ruling instructs, the government must transfer custody of Ali al-Marri to civilian authority and provide the normal due process of criminal prosecution for his alleged crimes (via Memeorandum):

The federal appeals court in Richmond, Va., ruled yesterday that the president may not declare civilians in this country to be “enemy combatants” and have the military hold them indefinitely. The ruling was a stinging rejection of one of the Bush administration’s central assertions about the scope of executive authority to combat terrorism.

The ruling came in the case of Ali al-Marri, a citizen of Qatar now in military custody in Charleston, S.C., who is the only person on the American mainland known to be held as an enemy combatant. The court said the administration may charge Mr. Marri with a crime, deport him or hold him as a material witness in connection with a grand jury investigation. ...

The court, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, said a fundamental principle is at stake: military detention of someone who had lawfully entered the United States and established connections here, it said, violates the Constitution.

“To sanction such presidential authority to order the military to seize and indefinitely detain civilians,” Judge Motz wrote, “even if the president calls them ‘enemy combatants,’ would have disastrous consequences for the Constitution — and the country.”

The case presented the courts with dire consequences on both sides. If executive power remained completely unchecked, any non-citizen could have been held without trial indefinitely simply by designating him an enemy combatant. However, if the ability to hold foreign sleeper agents gets removed, it would force the government to hold open trials in criminal courts to keep these agents from returning to their efforts to commit acts of terrorism and sabotage against us all.

In this case, the government created its own complicating factors. In four years of detention, the military never bothered to conduct a tribunal to determine al-Marri's status. Even if the panel had any sympathy towards the government's position, the lack of even this process would likely have convinced them of bad faith on behalf of the administration. And really, is there any excuse for a four-year delay in that determination?

However, the panel overreached in their decision yesterday, even if they had some rational reasons for doing so. Congress specifically took jurisdiction on these cases away from the federal court system and gave it to the military court system in its place. The Department of Justice has asked for an en banc review of this decision, and without doubt the Supreme Court will hear an appeal from whichever side loses at that stage. At issue will be whether the will of Congress violated the Constitution -- and it did not.

As often remarked, the Constitution is not a suicide pact. It does not require us to allow foreign terrorists in wartime access to the criminal court system. That sense of habeas corpus has never been a feature of any wartime American security effort. Foreign agents and spies have been held without recourse to the federal courts throughout our history, and the Republic still stands.

Pakistani Military To End Musharraf's Rule?

Analysts have begun warning that Pervez Musharraf may not remain in power much longer, and that the American effort against Islamist terror groups may suffer as a result. The Pakistani strongman looks decidedly less strong at this point, and some question whether the Pakistani Army remains loyal at the moment, let alone in the future:

As a political crisis boils in Pakistan, American analysts both inside and outside the government are expressing new doubts that President Musharraf will be able to hold onto power through the summer.

Over the past month, the military regime in Islamabad has faced a rising threat of violent jihadis in its capital, as well as the struggle between the president and the suspended chief justice of the country, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry. The twin challenges have led some analysts in the American intelligence community to begin questioning whether Pakistan's military, traditionally General Musharraf's most reliable ally, will support the current regime for much longer.

A Musharraf exit could deal a stinging blow to America in the war on terrorism. President Bush has lavished the Pakistani leader with arms sales and low-interest loans while keeping mum on his spotty human rights record. The logic has been that the former general, who himself came to power in a 1999 military coup, had dismantled his pre-September 11, 2001, policy of supporting the Taliban and would be the best possible option for American interests in Pakistan.

But the strongman's grip on power appears to be loosening, with a number of analysts citing as evidence last month's showdown inside Islamabad's Red Mosque, also known as Lal Masjid. On May 22, thousands of Pakistani police amassed on the outskirts of the mosque after a pro-Taliban group took four police officers hostage inside.

The hostage crisis was eventually resolved, but only after General Musharraf tried and failed to launch a military strike on the building.

Word has it that Musharraf's orders got countermanded by Army brass, which did not want to conduct the operation at all. They've made it clear that they do not want to fight the border tribes of Waziristan in the efforts to defeat the Taliban and al-Qaeda. The refusal to engage at Lal Masjid -- if it was that -- sends a big message to Musharraf: Get out.

That will be a problem for the US. Pakistan has a natural affiliation with al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The nation was founded by Muslim separatists and has usually had sympathies for like-minded groups. Musharraf himself allied with Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar before the 9/11 attacks, a very popular position in Pakistan, and only moved away from that alliance under threat of American attack.

A return to that policy under new leadership would be disastrous to the war effort. In the first place, it would leave the Taliban and AQ as a permanent threat to Afghanistan. Much more worrisome, however, is that it leaves at least a theoretical path for terrorists to get nuclear weapons for their efforts. A sympathetic military regime may not have qualms about helping Omar off the floor by giving him weapons that have no real defense, especially if they felt they could hide the provenance of the nukes.

So 19% Says To 38%, Show Me That Popularity

Harry Reid has insisted that George Bush has to put his higher popularity ratings on the line and guarantee more votes from the Senate Republican Caucus on the line before Reid will resurrect the comprehensive immigration reform bill from the table. Bush takes that so seriously, he's going to do something he hasn't done in five years -- eat lunch with the Senate Republicans:

The top Senate Democrat said yesterday that President Bush must prove he can deliver more Republican votes before Democrats will put the immigration bill, which collapsed last week, back on the Senate schedule.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told Mr. Bush that the only hope for the bill is if he delivers the votes of more than 20 Republican senators to break a filibuster and pass the measure.

The Nevada Democrat had a frank assessment of the bill's prospects, saying the 51-member Democratic caucus was "about maxed out" at the 38 votes they delivered on a test vote on the bill last week 22 short of breaking a filibuster. They were joined by just seven Republicans one-third of the number Mr. Reid says the president must deliver.

Reid has emerged as one of the roadblocks to the bill, and for good reason. Reid first agreed with the bill's backers and scheduled only four days of debate for the bill, attempting to limit the Senate's ability to amend the compromise. When Republicans made it clear that Reid would never get cloture under those circumstances, he extended the debate for another four days, but in the end the amendments -- and the arrogance of the scheduling -- doomed the bill. And since Reid has not taken a public position on the bill, some believe he wanted it to fail, although in fairness he did almost everything that the bill's backers wanted him to do.

Bush's position in support of the bill is crystal clear, however, and Reid knows that Bush wants this very badly as a show of presidential strength in the final two years of office. Having taking a beating, and with his popularity at an all-time low of 19%, Reid wants to push the debacle of the last two weeks onto the White House rather than himself. Bush apparently still doesn't mind that, and now will address a Senate Republican policy luncheon for the first time in five years to attempt to give CPR to the mostly-dead immigration bill:

For the first time in five years, President Bush will attend the Senate Republicans' weekly policy lunch today as he pushes to revive his moribund overhaul of the nation's immigration laws.

But even before he set foot in the Capitol, several Republican senators issued a terse warning yesterday: Don't expect much.

In the days after the broad compromise on immigration collapsed on Thursday, opposition, if anything, appears to have hardened among some senators who had once been willing to consider the deal. The bill's vociferous critics have also had a long weekend to throw dirt on its grave.

I find it rather amazing that George Bush, as leader of the party, has not bothered to appear at this weekly event for five years, even just as a courtesy to keep lines of communication open. Perhaps part of the reason for the wide gulf on immigration stems from his lack of interest in the policy debate in the upper chamber of Congress. His sudden appearance today almost seems a bit late in the game to start engaging the caucus now, especially since they lost their majority in January.

Lindsey Graham said yesterday that "Republicans can never successfully distance themselves from the leader of their party," but in this case, it's very clearly the President who has distanced himself from the party's base. He called the opposition to the bill "too cute by half," an interesting phrase for a man who called the party base "bigots" for opposing him and the President, and who threw a temper tantrum at Barack Obama on and off the Senate floor for offering a sunset amendment to the points system. Graham ceased being cute quite some time ago, and has provided an example of the ugly namecalling that has emanated from the bill's supporters.

The only way this bill gets off the slab is if Reid can get 60 votes for cloture right from the beginning. He needs 22 Republicans to support the bill in order to achieve that. Right now, he cannot even count on half that number, and the way that Bush and the GOP backers of this bill have handled themselves, one lunch of schmoozing won't be enough to close the gap. Bush has almost no gas left in his tank, and not only does he have little to offer for allies, he has little to frighten his foes.

This ... is ... an ex-parrot.

It's Fun Being The Villain

As many CQ readers already know, the First Mate and I volunteer our time at Twin Cities Marriage Encounter. We are the current president couple for the TCME board, which really means that we get to meet a lot of very dedicated couples who deliver retreat weekends for husbands and wives looking to give their marriage some attention. We have made many friends in the organization, and two of them have donated kidneys to the FM in the last three years.

Every year we have a fundraising banquet where we hold silent auctions for items donated by a number of local businesses. One of the more unique items for bid comes from one of our friends in the Marriage Encounter community. William Kent Krueger is a well-known mystery writer and one of the nicest people you'd ever want to meet, and he has offered to name one of the characters in his novels after the highest bidder -- and a year and a half ago, that was me.

He called me shortly after the banquet and asked me whether I'd want my character to be a good guy or a bad guy. "Oh, a bad guy," I assured him with a laugh.

"Run of the mill bad guy, or truly evil?"

"Really evil," I replied, and the both of us laughed.

"I hoped you'd say that," Kent told me. "I have something in mind -- and say, could you sign a release from my publisher?"

Now that sounded like it would be interesting!

I didn't ask Kent about it afterwards, but a few months back he let me know that he had wrapped up his draft of the new novel, and that I should see a copy soon. The book, Thunder Bay, arrived on Saturday -- and I finished it today. It's excellent, and yes, I'm really rotten in this novel. In fact, I'm so rotten that I --

Well, I can't tell you that. The book hasn't been released yet; Kent was kind enough to send me an advance proof of the book. However, you can pre-order the book now, and Amazon will have it at your door as it hits the bookstores. You can click on the second link to order the audio version on CD. You won't be able to put it down. Trust me ... it's not like I'm eeeeeeevil, after all.

Addendum: I'll be interviewing Kent on this book, his Cork O'Connor series, and the path he took to becoming a full-time writer (an excellent story) when the book is ready for release in late July.

Democratic Overreach, Part II

Democrats once more failed to deliver on a promised blow to the Bush administration. Earlier this evening, they followed their failure to block Iraq war funding with a failure to press ahead on a no-confidence vote against Alberto Gonzales:

Senate Democrats fell short this afternoon in their effort to hold a vote of no confidence in Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales but still registered a strong, if symbolic, rebuke of the nation’s chief law enforcement officer.

The Senate voted 53 to 38 to end debate and allow a vote on the no-confidence motion itself. Since 60 votes were required to shut off the debate, or invoke cloture, supporters of the motion were lacking seven votes. But Mr. Gonzales’s critics could console themselves with the knowledge that they mustered a majority, and that several Republicans sided with them .

The outcome left the attorney general’s critics in Congress uncertain about what to do next in their campaign to dislodge him from office. Congress cannot remove a Cabinet member except by impeachment, so the no-confidence motion would have been non-binding.

It's an exceedingly silly maneuver; no-confidence motions, as Trent Lott explained, have no meaning outside of the Parliamentary model. Democrats would have done better by simply pushing a non-binding resolution expressing disapproval of Gonzales' performance. They may have won half of the Republican caucus with that kind of action, as Gonzales has few backers outside of the White House now. Instead, the Democrats overreached -- and now look more impotent than ever.

They promised that they would investigate Gonzales and the DoJ and expose criminal wrongdoing. Instead, their investigations have turned up nothing but bad management and incompetence, neither very recommendable but not criminal either. The momentum for the hearings died when Monica Goodling's Fifth Amendment insistence turned out to really be all about self-incrimination rather than hiding any wrongdoing upstairs.

This is the second time the Democrats have overshot the mark. They promised to bring the Iraq war to a close when they won control of Congress. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid called George Bush "arrogant" when he refused to acceded to their demands for withdrawal, but they soon found out that their arrogance surpassed his, and the Constitution. The pair spent 108 days trying to craft a funding supplemental that would force Bush to take responsibility for a withdrawal -- and finally caved when they realized he would not budge.

As Jules Crittenden notes, it's small wonder that Harry Reid's approval rating is half that of the anemic ratings for George Bush. Not only have they failed to end the war, not only have they failed to dislodge an Attorney General who really should resign, they have failed to do anything else -- after five months in power. They not only have become a Do-Nothing Congress, but it seems that they have become an Incapable-Of-Doing-Anything Congress.

The Hot Rock

An interesting, (mostly) non-political debate has arisen between Meghan O'Rourke at Slate and Jonah Goldberg at The Corner today on a ubiquitous American cultural imperative: the diamond engagement ring. Interestingly, it is O'Rourke challenging the customary decimation of a young suitor's finances, and Goldberg submitting to the inevitability of the custom. O'Rourke starts by asking what this one-sided exchange really means:

The retail fantasy known as a "traditional" American wedding comprises many delicious absurdities, ranging from personalized wedding stamps to ring pillows designed for dogs to favors like "Love Mints." Of all these baubles, though, perhaps the most insidious is the engagement ring. Most Americans can say no to the "celebrity garter belt" on offer for a mere $18.95 from Weddings With Class. But more than 80 percent of American brides receive a diamond engagement ring (at an average cost of around $3,200) before they get married. Few stop to think about what, beyond the misty promise of endless love, the ring might actually signify. Why would you, after all? A wedding is supposed to be a celebration. Only the uncharitable would look a sparkly diamond in the eye—never mind a man on his knee—and ask what it means.

But there's a powerful case to be made that in an age of equitable marriage the engagement ring is an outmoded commodity—starting with the obvious fact that only the woman gets one. The diamond ring is the site of retrograde fantasies about gender roles. What makes it pernicious—as opposed to tackily fun—is its cost (these days you don't need just a diamond; you need a good diamond), its dubious origins, and the cynical blandishments of TV and print ads designed to suggest a ring's allure through the crassest of stereotypes.

Case in point: An American couple stands in a plaza in Europe. The man shouts, "I love this woman!" The woman appears mortified. He then pulls out a diamond ring and offers it to her. She says, in heartfelt tones, "I love this man." And you've probably noticed that these days diamonds really are forever: Men are informed that their beautiful wife needs a "Twenty-Fifth Anniversary" ring (note this ad's reduction of a life to copulation and child-rearing), and single women are told not to wait around for guys but to go ahead and get themselves a "right-finger ring." Live to be 100 and a woman of a certain class might find her entire hand crusted over with diamonds. A diamond company, you see, is unrelenting. In their parlance, "the desire is there; we just want to breathe more life into it."

Goldberg acknowledges the crass commercialization of this rite of passage, but says the ship has sailed on ending it:

It's just absurd to lock up precious resources in something you'll never sell — hence the genius of the diamond business. But, at the end of the day, no one will believe you that you didn't get the rock on principle. Her friends won't. Your friends won't. Her family won't. No one. In the spirit of misery loves company, your guy friends — who are deeply invested in defending their decision to get the rock for their wives — will give you a brutal time about how cheap you are. Her friends are similarly invested. Everyone is.

A few people will refuse to do it on principle, but their heresy will only reinforce the custom. A few men will decline because they simply can't afford it. But if they ever find themselves living more prosperous lives they'll atone at the jewelry store eventually.

The diamond is the modern updating of the mastodon hide and the shiny rock.

Perhaps, although as O'Rourke points out, this particular tradition only goes back a few decades. Until the late 19th century, such a tradition would have been impossible for all but the most wealthy of the world. Diamonds did not become a common commodity until the DeBeers company found vast deposits of diamonds in Africa. In fact, the deposits are so vast that it threatened to collapse the price of diamonds entirely, and DeBeers has acted ever since to suppress supply and increase demand.

The marketing of engagement rings is relentless. Jewelers insist that a proper young gent should spend around three month's salary for this "investment". Men know many women compare notes (and rings) to see whether they have selected a cheapskate or a spendthrift, and feel enormous pressure to abide by the advice offered. As Goldberg notes, not too many want to embarrass themselves or their brides-to-be unless specifically directed to buy something else.

I disagree with Jonah on one point. He said that the custom has no chance of being rejected, unlike the tradition of giving fur coats, which animal-rights activists have turned into a social faux pas. Something similar may indeed happen with diamonds, and the reason is more significant than the fate of chinchillas. Diamonds have fueled vicious and long-lasted conflicts all throughout Africa, as armies and militias of all stripes have sold them in black-market circles to legitimate dealers around the world. These so-called blood diamonds or conflict diamonds have funded terrorism and genocides in places like Sierra Leone, Liberia, Congo, the Ivory Coast, and more.

Diamond producing countries and diamond merchants, under heavy political pressure, finally came up with a certification process for the raw material. Called the Kimberley Process, it attempts to limit the export and sale of diamonds to those mined through legitimate operations which do not fund armed bands of thugs. However, the system is not foolproof, and many suspect that a significant criminal trade in blood diamonds still exists.

If this rises to the level of national consciousness in wealthy nations such as the US, UK, and the European nations, perhaps the diamond may become the pariah of gems. It's a very expensive NO TRESPASSING sign, as O'Rourke calls it, both in finances and in human lives. However, if the Kimberley Process can close the market on the criminal gangsters in Africa who use the money to bring murder and misery to Africans, the trade could help the continent generate an economic infrastructure that might lift millions out of poverty. That, at least, would be worth a couple of month's salary.

UPDATE: Kimberley Process, not Kimberly, as Kim at Musing Minds corrects me, and also supplies the link.

CAIR Lost 90% Of Its Membership

The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) refers to itself as America's largest Islamic civil-rights organization. Perhaps they still are, although that may say more about the state of Islamic groups than it does about CAIR. According to tax records gleaned by the Washington Times from a Freedom of Information Act request, CAIR has lost 90% of its membership since 2001:

According to tax documents obtained by The Times, the number of reported members spiraled down from more than 29,000 in 2000 to less than 1,700 in 2006, a loss of membership that caused the Muslim rights group's annual income from dues to drop from $732,765 in 2000, when yearly dues cost $25, to $58,750 last year, when the group charged $35.

The organization instead is relying on about two dozen individual donors a year to contribute the majority of the money for CAIR's budget, which reached nearly $3 million last year. ...

Critics of the organization say they are not surprised membership is sagging, and that a recent decision by the Justice Department to name CAIR as "unindicted co-conspirators" in a federal case against another foundation charged with providing funds to a terrorist group could discourage new members.

M. Zuhdi Jasser, director of the American-Islamic Forum for Democracy, says the sharp decline in membership calls into question whether the organization speaks for 7 million American Muslims, as the group has claimed.

For a group that only has 1,700 members, it has an inordinate amount of political clout. The fact that roughly 25 people paid $3 million and represented the majority of its financing should raise some eyebrows. It comes to an average contribution of $120,000 each for last year alone.

Who are these fundraisers and what do they want? The organization just got named an unindicted co-conspirator in support of the terrorist group Hamas. They pressed hard for Keith Ellison's election here in Minnesota; it would be helpful to know who these donors are to understand the motivation behind using CAIR's rapidly-diminishing resources for the election.

Tomorrow, the Washington Times will have more detail from the records released under the FOIA demand.

CQ Radio: Senator Bill Frist And ONE Vote '08

Today on CQ Radio (2 pm CT), former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist joins us at the top of the hour. Senator Frist launched his effort on behalf of ONE Vote '08 today, complete with a guest post here at Captain's Quarters, and we'll talk about his plans for African aid and his post-retirement plans as well. At 2:30, we'll welcome Matt Lewis of Townhall, who attended the event today in Washington DC, for his perspective on the event and the project.

Be sure to join the conversation by calling 646-652-4889! Tomorrow, Duane Patterson -- the Generalissimo from the Hugh Hewitt show -- joins me again to talk about the immigration controversy, the state of the presidential race, Hillary's choice for national co-chair for her campaign, and much more.

UPDATE: CQ Radio reaches around the world! We took a call today from Gambia -- in fact, from the bush. David from Reduce the Use called us to warn about the approaches to African aid.

UPDATE II: Glenn and Helen Reynolds interview Senator Frist as well. He talks about the Thompson campaign, too.

The live player will start automatically if you click on the link to the extended entry. You can also listen from the player on the sidebar.

Will Swings And Misses

George Will attempts to pop the Fred Thompson boomlet in his latest Newsweek column. Unfortunately for Will, Fred Thompson is not the lightweight cipher he dismisses so casually, and the normally excellent Will winds up looking a little bit of a lightweight himself:

Some say he is the Republicans' Rorschach test: They all see in him what they crave. Or he might be the Republicans' dot-com bubble, the result of restless political investors seeking value that the untutored eye might not discern and that might be difficult to quantify but which the investors are sure must be there, somewhere, somehow.

One does not want to be unfair to Thompson, who may have hidden depths. But ask yourself this: If he did not look like a basset hound who had just read a sad story—say, "Old Yeller"—and if he did not talk like central casting's idea of the god Sincerity, would anyone think he ought to be entrusted with the nation's nuclear arsenal? He is an actor, and, as a Hollywood axiom says, the key to acting is sincerity—if you can fake that, you've got it made.

This is, of course, all about another actor. Republicans have scrutinized the current crop of presidential candidates and succumbed to the psychosomatic disease Reagan Deprivation. It is, however, odd that many Republicans who advertise their admiration for Reagan are so ready to describe Thompson as Reaganesque because he ... what?

First and foremost, Will has both Reagan and Thompson wrong in the same manner that people dismissed Reagan in his political career. Thompson has a long career as more than just an actor. Thompson's acting career was accidental; his political career was much more deliberate. He made his name as a reforming activist lawyer, first with Watergate, and second in exposing corruption in the Tennessee governor's office. And like Reagan but in a much shorter time frame, he has spent the last several months delivering speeches and papers on issues.

Thompson first came to national attention by working with Senator Howard Baker on the Watergate committee. It was Thompson who brought out the Oval Office taping system that captured all of Richard Nixon's incriminating conversations. Thompson also asked the critical question: "What did the President know, and when did he know it?"

Afterwards, Thompson pursued a case of pardons-for-bribes corruption in Tennessee. He represented Marie Ragghianti, a whistleblower who uncovered the corruption. With Thompson's help, a number of Tennessee state officials went to prison, and while Governor Ray Blanton managed to remain free, his political career was finished. The film Marie tells the story based on the Peter Maas book, and Thompson played himself. That started his improbable Hollywood career; he did not train to be an actor, but a lawyer and a clean-government activist.

Will's description of Thompson manages to miss all that, as well as the eight years he served in the Senate. That isn't an extraordinarily long time, but it's the same amount of experience Ronald Reagan had as a public officeholder when he ran for President in 1976 and 1980, although Reagan's experience was as an executive. Reagan had ten years on the lecture circuit talking politics before he won election as California's governor, but Thompson has had plenty of real-life experience in politics before he became, in Will's dismissive tone, "an actor".

Thompson is a lot more than 99 percent charm. His speeches and writings have very clearly defined his driving philosophy as a federalist, and his track record as a reformer needs no apologetics to anyone except Will. He has to answer for his record on campaign-finance reform as well as the rest of his votes and actions, of course, but that's what all candidates have to do when they run for President.

George Will mostly hits home runs with his columns, whether on politics or baseball. In this case, he whiffed.

The Unhappiest Place On Earth

Robert Novak paints a depressing vision of the George Bush White House in today's column. The administration doesn't fight for the friends it should, and fights for those who bring nothing but misery and disappointment instead:

The Gonzales-Libby equation is symbolic of Republican discontent with the president. He failed utterly to narrow the divide within the party over his immigration reform. Time is running out -- to less than three months -- on GOP forbearance on Iraq. In the closing months of the administration, key posts are unfilled and what old hands call "children" fill others. Facing multiple investigations, Bush aides without personal fortunes are threatened by daunting legal fees.

The treatment of Lewis Libby, once Vice President Cheney's influential chief of staff, enrages Republicans far more than their public utterances suggest. The president's studied distance from the CIA leak case led to the appointment of a special prosecutor by then-Deputy Attorney General James Comey at a time when Comey already knew the leaker's identity. That distance has continued with Bush's response from Europe to Libby's conviction; it was filtered through a deputy press secretary, emphasizing that he had no intention of issuing a pardon.

One Republican who did not watch her words last week was Washington lawyer Victoria Toensing: "If the president can pardon 12 million illegal immigrants, he can pardon Scooter Libby." Toensing is joining the procession supporting the still-unannounced run for president by Fred Thompson, who is unequivocal in his outrage over Libby's fate and asserts that he would pardon him.

In contrast, Republican insiders are enraged by Bush's retention of Gonzales, whom they consider a political and governmental disaster. Beyond his affection for Gonzales, the president is reported to fear that a new attorney general could not be confirmed without pledging to name a special prosecutor to investigate the firing of U.S. attorneys. That explanation suggests a lame-duck regime, preferring to stay with a crippled, leaderless Justice Department.

No one ever said that the White House would be Disneyland, but it shouldn't resemble a dungeon, either. Regardless of whether one supports or opposes George Bush, the executive branch has to maintain leadership for the federal government to work properly, especially in the areas where they have the deepest interests: the Pentagon and the Department of Justice. It is precisely these two areas where Bush and his team have shown the most vacillation.

Take, for example, the aborted renomination of General Peter Pace as the head of the Joint Chiefs. His term in that role ends this year, and clearly he wanted to be renominated. Almost as clearly, the White House wanted him back in that role; Pace and Bush share the same vision for the future of the American military as well as similar opinions on war strategy. However, the White House didn't want a confirmation fight, and so they went in a different direction -- not exactly a profile in courage, but probably the pragmatically correct decision.

That's a lot more defensible than his decision to protect Alberto Gonzales to the bitter end. Gonzales has proven himself an incompetent manager of the DoJ, regardless of his involvement in the non-crime of terminating federal prosecutors. Rather than recognize that, as everyone else in the party and his administration has, Bush sticks with Gonzales. In the meantime, as Novak notes, almost 200 other appointees remain in limbo, unable to get their confirmation hearings, and the White House has barely gone to bat for them.

Is this leadership? It looks more like a bunker mentality, where the White House seems cowering in fear of confirmation hearings on any level, except the judiciary, where they have made at least some public demands for progress. Even there, most of the protest has come from the GOP's Senate caucus.

Novak's proposed solution -- to fire Gonzales and pardon Libby -- is only half right (the first half) and even then insufficient. The White House needs to garner some courage and fight for the confirmations of the people they want, and to ensure that they do a better job of nominating qualified candidates for those positions in the first place. If they can do that, then the White House will not appear to be the antithesis of Disneyland for prospective employees, and appointees will not have to worry so much about purchasing legal insurance.

Is Deterrence The Only Question?

I have been one of the few conservatives who have expressed opposition to the death penalty, on several bases. While I have not specifically tied my opposition to the lack of deterrent value in executions, a number of pro- and anti-capital punishment advocates have argued over that precise point for decades. Now the AP reports that several new studies show a deterrent effect of between 3 and 18 uncommitted murders for every execution.

Does this change the debate over the death penalty? At Heading Right, I examine Cass Sunstein's suggestion that this may create a moral imperative to execute murderers, and ask whether deterrence is the only question, or even the main question, in this debate.

Why Buy The Cow?

A major media segment has indicated that the Internet has pulled down a significant portion of their profits through the proliferation of free content. The net effect of amateurs supplying content where the professionals had a near-monopoly has the industry contemplating pay-for-play Web presences, focusing on Web-exclusive content. The long-term outlook for this segment looks bleak, as its players try to revamp their infrastructure to meet tougher profitability conditions than they have faced in their entire history.

Is this the newspaper industry? Weekly news magazines? Not exactly:

"Free porn" just might be the two most exciting or frightening words in the English language, depending on your point of view.

And they're especially threatening to the adult film industry, which has made billions through the sales of DVDs, videos, and sex products.

After two decades of phenomenal growth in profits, the porn industry is facing some major challenges as its X-rated DVDs and Internet content lose out to free videos and photos distributed by amateurs on the Web.

Sales and rentals of adult DVDs fell 30 percent in the last two years and sales of Internet-based porn, while still growing, have started to plateau, according to industry estimates.

"The DVD market is a battle that we're losing," says Drew Rosenfeld, the creative director of Hustler Video Group. "Looking back historically, we're at less than half in numbers. Even a line like Barely Legal, which is our hero brand, used to be off the charts and it's gone down to a third of what it used to be a few years ago."

The porn industry has discovered an old truth passed down from mothers to daughters since time immemorial. They warned that no one buys a cow while they get the milk for free. Pornographers who helped transform the Internet into a cornucopia of pornography and leapt towards broadband as the industry's biggest distribution channel found out that the new technology is a double-edged sword.

In many ways, this mirrors the problems of the traditional media. When everyone can become their own publisher, then content explodes -- and potential customers suddenly have a lot of choices, much of it free. Newspapers and other traditional media have an advantge in that they create content outside of the reach of almost all of the New Media pioneers, hiring reporters around the nation and around the world. That creates a bright-line separation between them and the bloggers and independent journalists, even if the quality and the bias leave the product open for well-deserved criticism.

Quality counts, of course, in the blogosphere and on places like YouTube, but production values have never been exactly the porn industry's forte. They have spent decades turning out dull, repetitive crap in bright packages. It should come as no surprise that their customers can turn out equally dull, repetitive crap, and for free.

This puts the porn industry in a tough position. Having created the demand for prurience on the Web, they have undermined their position in other distribution channels, such as adult book stores and mail-order. None of the other channels have the impulse access that the Web does, and they have too much overhead to compete with the freebies and the small-business model operations that have kneecapped them. They may have helped their own industry into the grave, thanks to their former customers who feel empowered to give the milk away for free.

Bill Frist: ONE Vote '08 Can Make A Difference

I am pleased to invite former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist to write a guest post at Captain's Quarters, as he kicks off the ONE Vote '08 campaign to help save the poor in Africa. Senator Frist has dedicated himself to humanitarian projects after retiring from the Senate, and he will appear on CQ Radio later today to talk about the ONE Vote '08 project and how he sees it as part of the solution to the complicated problems in Africa.

More than a decade ago I began traveling to Africa each year to complete medical mission trips in countries such as Sudan and Rwanda. I’ve witnessed the devastating effects of extreme poverty and disease, which is why today I helped kick off the ONE Vote ’08 campaign.

ONE Vote ‘08 is an unprecedented campaign to energize presidential candidates – and voters – concerning issues of extreme poverty and global health. We aim to raise awareness of these issues in the political arena to help deliver meaningful change.

Fighting poverty and improving global health is unquestionably in the strategic interest of our nation. A lack of economic opportunity and poor health conditions promote instability, which opens doors for those who seek to harm America. Helping reverse this course strengthens our image throughout the world and builds goodwill in those places where it’s desperately needed.

The ONE Vote ’08 platform has five central planks:

* provide universal access to primary education for 77 million out-of-school children;

* provide access to clean water to an additional 600 million people in need and basic sanitation to roughly 1.3 million additional people around the globe;

* prevent more than 6 million young children from dying unnecessarily each year from poverty-related illnesses and 400,000 mothers who die in pregnancy-related illnesses each year;

* reduce by half the number of people in the world who suffer from hunger by equipping them with technology and resources to feed their families; and

* save 16,000 lives a day by fighting HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria.

ONE Vote ’08 is focusing on the four early primary states – Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire and South Carolina – where we’ll run aggressive operations to fully engage each candidate.

Working with more than 100 non-profit and charitable groups and millions of grassroots activists, we’re asking the candidates to support our platform throughout their campaigns. One-on-one briefings have already occurred with many candidates and staff members, and those conversations will remain ongoing.

Africa and other poor nations are an opportunity, not a burden. Simple solutions to these complex problems exist, and technology has made them even more affordable. If we work together to employ them, we can save millions of lives throughout the world.

To learn more about ONE Vote '08 please click here.

The Caution Approach To Sex Offenders

British courts have trouble taking sex offenders seriously, the London Telegraph reports this morning. Over 1600 cases of pedophilia and 230 cases of rape have resulting in nothing stronger than a warning, rather than formal charges and jail time:

Thousands of sex offenders including paedophiles and rapists have escaped with cautions rather than being jailed over the past five years.

A nationwide survey of police forces conducted by the BBC found that 1,600 sex offences involving children and 230 cases of rape were dealt with by the use of cautions instead of formal charges, which could lead to a fine or a prison sentence.

Another 350 cautions were given for sex crimes involving victims under the age of 13, while cautions were also handed out for offences of bigamy, exploitation of prostitution, indecent exposure, sex with animals, incest and sexual grooming. ....

But police forces and Government agencies insisted that the use of cautions did not mean that sex offenders were being “let off” rather than facing trial. They insisted that the cautions would still be noted on a criminal record and that those cautioned would be placed on the sex offenders register.

British police have used cautions where the laws enter a gray zone. For instance, when two teens have sexual relations and one is slightly under the age of consent, they feel that a caution is more effective than a prosecution for a sex offense, That would certainly have been the better option for 17-year-old Genarlow Wilson of Georgia, sentenced to 10 years not for sexual intercourse with his 15-year-old girlfriend but for oral sex -- which Georgia uses as a tripwire offense for pedophiliacs.

The approach has its theoretical merits. The caution forces people suspected of sex offenses to comply with notification provisions usually imposed on offenders when released. It provides a measure of oversight when people refuse to press charges for various reasons against their attacker.

However, this won't work in the US. The state has to convict someone before forcing them into a notification program, which requires a trial and the presentation of evidence. In fact, it's not even clear whether this program actually protects anyone from pedophiles, but rather lets people off the hook from prosecuting them. The existence of the caution certainly could motivate victims to keep from going to court, a way out of testifying and reliving their experience. False accusations could become easier to make and also easier to make stick, since theoretically the accusers could avoid trial.

For those who really have been let off from serious crimes, as the shadow Home Secretary told the BBC, it will be interesting to see how much recidivism Britain sees from the cautions. I suspect it will be near 100%. If so, the British people will eventually force an end to it and demand trials and convictions for sexual offenders. Let's hope that they don't wait until an avalanche of new victims has to stand up and demand change first.

Is Colin Powell An Obama Advisor?

See Eli Lake's response below.

The New York Sun offers a tantalizing headline that makes it appear that Colin Powell has changed his political affiliation from Republican to Democrat. In an Eli Lake article titled "GOP's Powell Is Now Advising Obama", the Sun appears to report that Powell has joined Obama's team:

Colin Powell, who only a decade ago was being discussed as a possible Republican presidential nominee and who more recently served as President Bush's first secretary of state, is advising a Democratic presidential candidate, Senator Obama of Illinois.

Appearing on NBC's "Meet the Press" yesterday, Mr. Powell said it was "too soon" to say whether he would endorse the Republican nominee for president, and he added that he is reserving judgment for now.

Lake doesn't clarify what this means until the third paragraph:

"I've been around this town a long time, and I know everybody who is running for office," Mr. Powell said. "And I make myself available to talk about foreign policy matters and military matters with whoever wishes to chat with me."

In other words, this means very little. Many former officials decline to limit their advice to members of their own party, but they do not become advisors. For instance, Richard Nixon made himself available to all of the presidents that followed him, although I believe Jimmy Carter declined to meet with him. Before Ronald Reagan entered his dark twilight, he publicly consulted with Bill Clinton, which as I recall annoyed more than a few Republicans.

Yet the headline and the lead to the Sun story implies something else, especially with the breathless introduction of Powell as a one-time potential draftee for a Republican nomination. It turns out that Powell merely has made himself available as a resource. Powell told anyone who'd listen that he had no interest in electoral politics, but instead had a deep interest in policy. This position is entirely consistent with his statements.

There is truly nothing to see here, even though the normally-solid Sun seems to want to make everyone think this is a significant defection.

UPDATE: Eli Lake graciously responded to this post:

While it is true that former high officials of both parties advise candidates from time to time, this is usually done discreetly. Powell announced this on Meet the Press and also said it was "too soon" to say whether he would endorse the Republican. I covered the man for four years at the State Department, and I argue this is all quite deliberate.

I quote Eli often on the blog, because he's a damned good reporter working for a damned good newspaper. The Sun is almost always the first paper I read in the mornings. Otherwise, I'll let Eli have the last word here.

Sopranos Finale

In the end, all of the predictions failed.

** Spoilers -- click on the link below to read more.

Does anyone find this ending just a little maddening? Just a little provocative? David Chase built the final five minutes to tension point, giving us every indication that something bad was about to happen to Tony and the family in the diner, with Journey's "Don't Stop Believing" in the background. It went to black just as we expected the final climax -- leaving us wondering what the hell we just saw.

I'll say this; I never expected that.

Up to that moment, it had been an intriguing episode. The war got called on account of Phil's men backstabbing him, and Tony prevailed -- with the help of Agent Harris. Harris decided to play sides in what may be one of the most shocking events this season. AJ finally snapped out of his depression, and Tony finally came to terms with his Uncle Junior, after a fashion.

And Phil got whacked, then squashed.

But that last scene bothers me. It's almost as if Chase couldn't bring himself to write the final 60 seconds of the show. We clearly saw at least one man in the diner taking too much of an interest in the Sopranos, and he headed off to the bathroom, a la The Godfather. Meadow's parallel-parking problems got resolved just afterwards, and the entire family was poised to have something terrible happen.

The screen then went blank. The show was over, and that will never get resolved. It feels like a cop-out from a show that had never copped out before. It's a disappointment, a small blemish on a Mona Lisa that unfortunately will be our last impression of a great television series, perhaps the greatest.

But what did you all think?

Movie Review: Knocked Up

Some movies lose the audience in the first ten minutes, with unrealistic characterization and uncomfortable plot points. Knocked Up comes close to doing that by presenting us with perhaps the most ineligible bachelors seen yet on screen. However, if people wait out the first half-hour of the movie, it develops into something rather touching, in its own way.

** Spoilers -- be warned! **

Knocked Up tells a story about the consequences of one's actions and poor decisions. Katherine Heigl ("Gray's Anatomy") plays Alison Scott, a young woman with a future in television. She finds out that E! wants to make her an on-camera talent, and she goes out to a hot nightclub with her sister Debbie, a frustrated thirtysomething wife and mother played by Leslie Mann. She hooks up with Ben Stone at the club (played by 40 Year Old Virgin supporting actor Seth Rogan) and celebrates a little too heartily. Both drunk, Ben foregoes a condom, and Alison winds up pregnant.

When Alison decides she wants to get Ben involved in the process, she discovers that Ben is about as far from father material -- or boyfriend material -- as possible. He has no job, he has no money, he has no car, and the only prospect he has for the future is his work on a website that tells visitors where to find the nude scenes in popular movies. The only regular work Ben does is smoking marijuana all day long with his buddies, only one of whom normal people would not feel embarassed engaging in public conversation.

That's the low point of the film. In the beginning of the relationship, it's hard to understand why a woman with so much on the ball as Alison would tolerate Ben, let alone allow him to become her boyfriend. Both Ben and Alison's brother-in-law Pete have trouble balancing their male-bonding time, and in Ben's case, it seems terminal.

Alison perseveres -- for a while. She even begins to love Ben, because Ben finally starts to show some signs that he has progressed past the emotional age of 12. He seems to realize that he's stuck in a case of arrested development, but can't move forward towards adulthood, until Alison finally blows her stack. Ben then has to make some hard decisions about his life -- and has to talk Alison into allowing him to have a second chance to prove himself as a man.

In the end, it's a sweet movie about maturity and sacrifice. Heigl is luminous and vulnerable as Alison, especially when she sees Ben's potential. Seth Rogan has great comic timing as Ben, and completely sells the fact that Ben is clueless about social graces, saying whatever comes to mind -- and not in a good way. Paul Rudd's Pete really captures the disconnect that some men feel in their thirties when the beer buddies have disappeared from your life.

Two other well-known actors make brief but important appearances in the film. Joanne Kerns ("Growing Pains") plays the mother of Alison and Debbie, and she tells Alison to get rid of the baby when she finds out about the pregnancy. Harold Ramis plays Ben's father, who delivers a nugget of wisdom that I didn't expect to hear from a Hollywood movie. "An earthquake is a catastrophe," he tells Ben. "This is a blessing." As someone who found himself in that position, I wanted to hug Harold Ramis, and the two lead characters, for understanding that.

The film is uneven but eventually satisfying. It also has plenty of laughs along the way, and they outweigh the cringe-inducing things Ben says at times, especially in the first part of the movie. It should be a definite addition to the summer movie list, but be warned -- there are plenty of drug references and sexually explicit talk in the movie. If that bothers you, even if showing how damaging drugs can be to the maturation process, then perhaps you may want to avoid getting Knocked Up.

The Sopranos Ends -- British Tourists Suffer Most

How powerful a force has The Sopranos become in American culture? Our friends across the pond have even written articles today about its valedictory episode tonight. Both the left-wing Guardian and the conservative Telegraph note the passing of the series (HBO, 9 pm ET). Somewhat fittingly, both focus on the impact the final episode will have on Sopranos tourism in New Jersey.

First, the Guardian:

Marc Baron was putting a brave face on his future employment prospects last week. Baron is the lead guide for one of New York's most successful tourist enterprises - The Sopranos Tour - in which visitors are taken round 45 locations used in filming the TV series The Sopranos

Now, after 86 episodes, 18 Emmy awards and some of the most lavish critical approval in TV history, The Sopranos - an everyday story of Mafia folk - ends today. An expected audience of 10 million will watch the final episode and find out if Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini), the psychologically tortured mob boss, ends up sleeping with the fishes.

The Telegraph, interviewing the same man:

Although The Sopranos is about to reach its on-screen climax, sightseeing fans are expected to continue their pilgrimages with the specialist On Location Tours company for a long time. British enthusiasts are already the largest national contingent on the bus tours and the company expects another burst of interest when the final season is screened later in Britain.

"I'm sure we'll be doing this for another five years," said the tour guide, Marc Baron, an actor who appeared as an extra in several episodes. "I don't believe the final episode will cut off all their options for the future."

Both articles are fun reads, and both engage in some speculation as to what the final episiode has in store for viewers. The Telegraph suggests that Tony sings like a soprano in order to save himself from Phil Leotardo. The Guardian reviews the odds at London bookmakers on Tony's survival (1-3 for survival, 2-1 against getting whacked). David Chase, the series' creator, has filmed three separate endings -- which will generate plenty of controversy when this last season goes out on DVD, and would presumably include all three.

All I know is that this has been great television. I have watched it since the beginning, and it has consistently provided surprises. It has used sex and violence to show the banality of evil in a way that no series has ever done, and purposefully challenged its viewers' sympathy for the main characters at almost every turn. Chase has always taken the difficult road in plot development, and I expect no less tonight.

Even though predictions have died quicker than Ralphie Ciferetto on kitchen tile during the run of this series, I'l make a couple of predictions anyway:

1. Tony lives. Having Tony die will make it too easy on him.

2. A member of Tony's family gets killed. I'm going to lean towards AJ, as I don't think Chase will want to emulate Godfather III and kill Meadow -- but it's worth noting that she's spending a lot of time with Patsy Parisi's son, which could put her inadvertently in harm's way. That will put Tony in a special kind of hell, making his survival a torment to him

2a. However, it's worth noting that Tony's current predicament comes from his overreaction to Coco's crude threat to Meadow ...

3. If Tony gets killed, though, it will be Paulie who carries out the hit. Paulie had to know he came within an ace of not returning from the boat ride in Florida.

4. Phil Leotardo gets killed, possibly by another New York family unhappy with Phil's declaration of war against the Sopranos.

5. Agent Harris will figure significantly into the plot, either to arrest Tony or to protect him in some way, or maybe both at the same time.

How accurate will these predictions be? Probably not at all, but half the fun of the show will be the anticipation. I'll write more tonight after the show airs.

UPDATE: The cast shares some reminiscences in the New York Times, for another fun read.

UPDATE II: Joe Gandelman has a great roundup at The Moderate Voice.

Going Long

Earlier this year, the disputes over the strategy for Iraq could get boiled down to three directions: go big, go home, or go long. Today's Washington Post reports that the third option has begun to get the most traction in both DC and Baghdad, as the two governments look for the best way to fight terror while ending the appearance of an occupation:

U.S. military officials here are increasingly envisioning a "post-occupation" troop presence in Iraq that neither maintains current levels nor leads to a complete pullout, but aims for a smaller, longer-term force that would remain in the country for years.

This goal, drawn from recent interviews with more than 20 U.S. military officers and other officials here, including senior commanders, strategists and analysts, remains in the early planning stages. It is based on officials' assessment that a sharp drawdown of troops is likely to begin by the middle of next year, with roughly two-thirds of the current force of 150,000 moving out by late 2008 or early 2009. The questions officials are grappling with are not whether the U.S. presence will be cut, but how quickly, to what level and to what purpose.

One of the guiding principles, according to two officials here, is that the United States should leave Iraq more intelligently than it entered. Military officials, many of whom would be interviewed only on the condition of anonymity, say they are now assessing conditions more realistically, rejecting the "steady progress" mantra of their predecessors and recognizing that short-term political reconciliation in Iraq is unlikely. A reduction of troops, some officials argue, would demonstrate to anti-American factions that the occupation will not last forever while reassuring Iraqi allies that the United States does not intend to abandon the country.

The planning is shaped in part by logistical realities in Iraq. The immediate all-or-nothing debate in Washington over troop levels represents a false dilemma, some military officials said. Even if a total pullout is the goal, it could take a year to execute a full withdrawal. One official estimated that with only one major route from the country -- through southern Iraq to Kuwait -- it would take at least 3,000 large convoys some 10 months to remove U.S. military gear and personnel alone, not including the several thousand combat vehicles that would be needed to protect such an operation.

The timing makes it clear that the debate over the supplemental has changed the strategy in both capitals. Using the time frame as described above, a drawdown of two-thirds of the US military in Iraq would have to start in December to finish by late 2008, presumably before the election. It would take that long to set the ground conditions for the lines of communication to get men and materiel out to the Persian Gulf, and it would take a large naval effort to provide the convoys for the transport back home or to Europe. It would have to start about the time Petraeus told Congress when he'd know whether the surge strategy had worked.

Both capitals understand that the US cannot entirely leave Iraq while al-Qaeda continues to operate there. Even most Democrats acknowledge that; only Bill Richardson among the serious presidential candidates has committed to total and immediate withdrawal. Norm Coleman explained reality to a University of Minnesota audience last month by saying a smaller deployment would have to remain in Iraq for "years" to fight against the terrorists who want to target America and its assets abroad.

This plan anticipates some rather striking developments. Chief among them: the willingness of Moqtada al-Sadr to engage in diplomacy rather than warfare. The Maliki government indicates that Sadr will negotiate for an end to his insurgency once he sees the US willing to significantly reduce its forces in Iraq. Sadr will have little objection to American forces remaining behind to target al-Qaeda and other Sunni insurgencies, most believe, but wants to see an end to American troops in the capital first.

It also relies on the Iraqi Army to maintain its strength after our departure. If the Iraqi Army can succeed in holding the areas we clear as part of the surge strategy, then the central government can gain credibility and encourage an amnesty for native insurgents, allowing them to re-enter Iraqi politics legitimately. This amnesty got scotched after Congress objected last year, but it will eventually have to happen if the Iraqis expect to return to a civil society.

That's a lot of assumptions, and any failure among them would doom Iraq to a bloody collapse. In that event, we would find our 10,000-man force -- the size anticipated in this strategy -- beleaguered on all sides and probably unable to extricate themselves quickly. It presents a huge risk not just to them, but to the stability of the states surrounding Iraq.

In the end, though, it's probably all we have left. We have lost the support necessary here at home to continue fighting the insurgencies and terrorists in Iraq with the kind of commitment necessary for victory. We have a short window in which to make these assumptions a reality so that we can maintain the Iraqi central government with a tenth of the forces that we have now -- and still convince many Americans that we have to continue fighting al-Qaeda where they present themselves, including Iraq. If that's going long, it looks more like a Hail Mary.

Continuing The Bigotry

Sally Denton uses today's Los Angeles Times op-ed page as a launching pad for the movie based on her book, "American Massacre: The Tragedy at Mountain Meadows, September 1857," and as a means to propagate more anti-Mormon bigotry at the expense of Mitt Romney. Denton insists that Romney has to respond about the nature of his faith if he expects to win the nomination for the Presidency -- and uses a lot of 19th-century examples to "prove" her case:

MITT ROMNEY'S Mormonism threatens his presidential candidacy in the same way that John F. Kennedy's Catholicism did when he ran for president in 1960. Overt and covert references to Romney's religion — subtle whispering as well as unabashed inquiries about the controversial sect he belongs to — plague his campaign. None of his responses so far have silenced the skeptics.

Recent polls indicate that from 25% to 35% of registered voters have said they would not consider voting for a Mormon for president, and conventional wisdom from the pundits suggests that Romney's biggest hurdle is his faith. Everyone seems eager to make his Mormonism an issue, from blue state secularists to red state evangelicals who view the religion as a non-Christian cult.

All of which raises the question: Are we religious bigots if we refuse to vote for a believing Mormon? Or is it perfectly sensible and responsible to be suspicious of a candidate whose creed seems outside the mainstream or tinged with fanaticism?

Ironically, Romney is the only candidate in the race (from either party) who has expressed discomfort with the idea of religion infecting the national dialogue. While his GOP rivals have been pandering to the evangelical arm of the party, Romney actually committed himself (during the first Republican debate) to the inviolable separation of church and state.

First, Denton is hardly an unbiased pundit in this regard. She's flogging a book and a movie about an atrocity committed by Mormons 150 years ago. For Denton, 1857 is relevant to 2007, but for most Americans. The suggestion that Romney needs to answer for Brigham Young would be as silly as saying that Democrats have to answer for Stephen Douglas or that Lutherans today have to answer for the anti-Semitic rants of Martin Luther.

Denton first off would have people believe that all Mormons are "tinged with fanaticism," but does nothing to advance that case. She discusses the beginnings of their church in great detail, but her history lessons appear to end at 1857. In the only mentions of any connection to the present, she uses the HBO series Big Love and Warren Jeffs, neither of which has any connection to the modern Mormon church or to Romney's faith. Both the fictional account in Big Love and the unfortunately non-fiction and despicable Jeffs involve polygamist cults -- and in the TV series, are showed as in mortal opposition to the Mormons.

Denton includes this helpful instruction at the half-way point:

It's not a church's eccentric past that makes a candidate's religion relevant today, but its contemporary doctrines. (And it's worth noting that polygamy and blood atonement, among other practices, are no longer condoned by the official Mormon church hierarchy.)

So what contemporary doctrines does Romney need to explain? Denton never says. Instead, she spends her time writing about how Joseph Smith once declared his intention to run for President -- in 1844. She discusses how John C. Fremont's candidacy died on the rumor that he was Catholic -- in 1856. She mentions 1960, in which John Kennedy dealt with anti-Catholic bigotry, but only barely notes that he prevailed over it -- and that was almost 50 years ago.

Denton then frames the question that she feels Romney has to answer:

Do you, like the prophet you follow, believe in a theocratic nation state? All the rest is pyrotechnics.

Unfortunately for Denton, Romney has answered this question every time it gets asked. And somewhat incoherently, Denton appears to forget that she herself acknowledges this near the beginning of the column:

While his GOP rivals have been pandering to the evangelical arm of the party, Romney actually committed himself (during the first Republican debate) to the inviolable separation of church and state.

Romney has no need to enter into the field of religious apologetics in his campaign for the presidency, no more than does Harry Reid in order to run the Senate. He certainly has no guilt to expiate on behalf of a massacre committed almost a century before his birth, and for people like Warren Jeffs who do not have any connection to the Mormon church. In other words, Denton has taken up space at the LA Times to exercise her bigotry and to not-so-coincidentally sell a few books and movie tickets. She and the LA Times should be ashamed.

UPDATE: One commenter suggests that people opposed Keith Ellison on the basis of his religion. Er, not quite. We opposed him on the basis of his association with the notoriously anti-Semitic group Nation of Islam and its leader, Louis Farrakhan, and his association with CAIR, which has supported terrorist groups like Hamas. If Romney had spoken at Warren Jeffs' compound for political donations, then the analogy would be apt. Ellison's problem isn't his religion but the company he keeps, politically, a fact that he and his apologists like to wrap in a false cloak of religious antagonism.

SALLY DENTON RESPONDS: In the comments section:

The movie, September Dawn, is not based on my book, American Massacre--at least not according to its producers who never consulted with me nor compensated me.

If they did not base the movie on her book, I apologize for the error. If they did, the producers owe Denton some compensation. That sounds like an interesting debate. And thanks to Ms. Denton for responding to the post.

The Fred Movement Started Early

Stephen Hayes reviews the Draft Fred movement, which most believe started last March, but in reality began just after the midterm elections. In one sense, the narrative Hayes gives Weekly Standard readers shows that the notion of a draft is somewhat fanciful, but it also shows that the grassroots response to the Fred Thompson candidacy has exceeded everyone's expectations:

On November 29, 2006, Tennessee senator Bill Frist said that he would not be running for president. The same day, the Wall Street Journal noted that the announcement "leaves a Republican void in the South, and underscores the absence of any major center-to-right Southern figure in the Republican Party's presidential field thus far."

Others saw the same void. Thompson fielded calls from several friends and former colleagues in the following days. Spencer Abraham, who had resigned as George W. Bush's secretary of energy shortly after the 2004 election, knew Thompson from their days in the Senate. He urged his old friend to consider running. Tennessee congressman Zach Wamp called to say much the same thing. In public, there was very little discussion of a possible Thompson candidacy, though he was mentioned as a possible replacement for U.N. ambassador John Bolton.

Thompson's wife Jeri, a savvy Republican strategist with Capitol Hill experience, asked Mark Corallo, an old friend and public relations guru, to see what he might do to raise her husband's profile in Washington. Thompson had not altogether retired from politics when he left the Senate in January 2003: He was serving as chairman of the State Department's International Security Advisory Board. He was a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a member of the U.S.-China Economic Security Review Commission, and a commentator for ABC Radio.

Corallo had left his job as spokesman at the Justice Department to open a media consulting firm and agreed to take on the low-intensity work as a favor and without pay. He quietly began to highlight Thompson's activities, in particular calling attention to Thompson's radio work. When the provocative radio commentaries were published on National Review's popular website beginning in January 2007, other conservative websites began to link to them with some regularity--viral marketing, as they say in the online world, and arguably the informal beginning of Thompson's campaign.

No one had to draft Fred into the campaign, in other words. He had decided to at least test the waters in the days after Bill Frist retired from electoral politics. Fred and his team have carefully planned his entry into the race, while leaving him the opening to never enter it at all, if he changed his mind. Unlike the other candidates in this cycle's primaries, he didn't feel the need to start early and go to top speed.

That's what makes Hayes' headline, "The Zero to 60 Thompson Run," more than a little ironic. In fact, Thompson may be the only primary candidate in both parties who has not tried to burn rubber at the line. He has taken his time, watched the field carefully, and used the viral-marketing approach not to raise funds but to lay out his perspective on issues and events. Earlier, I called this a "philosopher's campaign," and I suspect that Fred and his team wanted that kind of dynamic. They wanted to frame Fred as a man who takes his time and builds a strong philosophical base for a broad vision -- a Reaganesque run, in other words.

Hayes mentions the collapse of other "draft" movements, most notably Wes Clark in 2004. Clark did not take the time to build this kind of movement on a broad vision, but instead focused on a narrow issue -- Iraq -- and contributed nothing new. Other Democrats had already adopted his point of view on the war, including John Kerry, which made him superfluous as a presidential candidate. Fred has avoided that fate by casting a much broader policy vision and, unlike Clark, eloquently and clearly delineating it.

And the response has to be gratifying. The Fred team succeeded far beyond the success for which they could have hoped. They began rolling up endorsements just from his consideration of a run in March. Politicians do not usually endorse non-candidates, as those endorsements can limit their power later. Thompson began getting volunteers for fundraising long before he needed to find them. Voters also have responded with enthusiasm, and in some polls, Fred comes in second behind Rudy Giuliani.

Fred has made himself a conservative alternative almost overnight -- except that it took him seven months to do so. And as Hayes notes at the end of the piece, he hasn't had to spend a dime to do it.

Democrats And The NRA -- Partners?

Democrats and the NRA have opposed each other for decades. Democratic activists have long railed at the power of the NRA lobby, while the NRA has long accused Democrats of wanting to disarm law-abiding Americans and violating the Second Amendment. However, the Washington Post reports that the two sides have come together to create legislation that promotes security while reinforcing the right to purchase firearms:

Senior Democrats have reached agreement with the National Rifle Association on what could be the first federal gun-control legislation since 1994, a measure to significantly strengthen the national system that checks the backgrounds of gun buyers.

The sensitive talks began in April, days after a mentally ill gunman killed 32 students and teachers at Virginia Tech University. The shooter, Seung Hui Cho, had been judicially ordered to submit to a psychiatric evaluation, which should have disqualified him from buying handguns. But the state of Virginia never forwarded that information to the federal National Instant Check System (NICS), and the massacre exposed a loophole in the 13-year-old background-check program.

Under the agreement, participating states would be given monetary enticements for the first time to keep the federal background database up to date, as well as penalties for failing to comply.

To sign on to the deal, the powerful gun lobby won significant concessions from Democratic negotiators in weeks of painstaking talks. Individuals with minor infractions in their pasts could petition their states to have their names removed from the federal database, and about 83,000 military veterans, put into the system by the Department of Veterans Affairs in 2000 for alleged mental health reasons, would have a chance to clean their records. The federal government would be permanently barred from charging gun buyers or sellers a fee for their background checks. In addition, faulty records such as duplicative names or expunged convictions would have to be scrubbed from the database.

This addresses two problems with the current systems in place to keep the mentally adjudicated from purchasing firearms. First, it requires participating states to conduct audits to ensure that they have reported all cases of mental commitment to the federal database. Once complete, it addresses the cost burden by picking up 90% of the bill for getting the databases updated.

In fact, one point conservatives will love is the elimination of the specific unfunded mandate. The federal government will carry the cost of keeping the database current. It will give block grants of $250 million per year to each state that participates after their audits have completed to help maintain the database. Those who fall out of compliance could not only lose that money, but also could see their law-enforcement grants reduced or eliminated until they fix their problems.

Given the problem in the system that led to Seung Hui Cho's massacre at Virginia Tech, this compromise looks like an effective bolstering of the instant-check system. Everyone, including those who oppose gun control, wants weapons kept out of the hands of the mentally disturbed. The NRA said at the time that they would support efforts to make the instant-check system work more effectively, and in return, they won a more efficient system for the wrongly-included to be removed from the database.

Everyone wins in this compromise. It shows what happens when differing groups look outside of their rhetoric to find points of agreement. Instead of fighting the whole battle all the time, opposing interests can find ways to make improvements where those interests overlap.

Silly Memes #147: Bush Disrespects The Pope

It's a measure of George Bush's impact and visibility that every little action gets wide exposure and viewed outside of context. It's also a measure of his low popularity that some of these get used to paint him in the worst possible light. That appears to be the case with Bush's latest so-called gaffe -- responding to Pope Benedict with a "sir":

US President George W Bush drew gasps at the Vatican on Saturday by referring to Pope Benedict XVI as "sir" instead of the expected "His Holiness", pool reporters said.

They could clearly hear the US leader say "Yes, sir" when the pope asked him if he was going to meet with officials of the lay Catholic Sant'Egidio community at the US embassy later during his visit.

James Joyner makes the point that Bush is not Catholic, while Michael van der Galien claims that anyone addressing the Pope should use the response "Your Holiness" (not "His Holiness", as the grammar-challenged reporters of News24 would have it) out of etiquette. Both miss the point.

In reading the article, Bush responded to one question with "Yes, sir." Nowhere in this article does it say that Bush did not address Pope Benedict as "Your Holiness". In fact, he probably did it several times. Read the second paragraph carefully, and it becomes clear that Bush gave a short and respectful answer to a single direct question with the suddenly-rude "Yes, sir".

As a Catholic, I find nothing at all offensive about that. People are not required to respond to every question the Pope asks by appending "Your Holiness" to the end of the reply, as if they were recruits in an Army boot camp. "Yes, sir" shows respect for the Pope, and yes, good manners as well.