Pejman Yousefzadeh has posted some analysis on the Joe Wilson/Valerie Plame affair, which seems to be losing its legs. I had actually seen some liberal bloggers referring to "the I word" as they put it (impeachment), hoping somehow President Bush could be linked to wrongdoing. Instead of jumping the gun so hysterically, the prudent course of action is as Yousefzadeh lays out:
Yes.All of these questions are perhaps preliminary ones, and I suspect that much more needs to be discovered.... At a minimum, I suspect this reinforces my belief that we should wait and see before making any specific allegations about wrongdoing.
(Update) Beldar has put together a link-heavy post on the topic, for those who are interested.
(Update 2) Tom Bevan at RealClearPolitics posts some thoughts also.
Ken Masugi posts some interesting thoughts on the latest op-ed by David Brooks for the NY Times, on the dearth of conservative thought at universities, particularly at the graduate level.
Here is Brooks's conclusion:
Last week the professors at Harvard's government department reviewed the placement records of last year's doctoral students. Two had not been able to find academic jobs, both of them Mansfield's students. "Well," Mansfield quipped, "I guess they'll have to go to Washington and run the country."Interestingly enough, I do think that many bright conservative students who are drawn to the study of political philosophy and the classics (often with those darn "Straussians" you hear so much about, but also with other scholars who take textual analysis seriously) do wind up disinterested in pursuing a career in academia, as much because of the current state of the discipline (at least in political science) as an inherent bias against conservatives in the academy.
So, one is left with the options of working at a think tank, working in industry, working for government, or working in some enterprise unrelated to one's training.
Shadia Drury imagines that various Straussians wind up in government because the late political philosophy professor taught them the secret to taking over the world. It's much more likely that people do wish to feed themselves, and to work in their general area of expertise, and so they make choices to that end. After graduate work in political philosophy and international politics, I work in industry, partially because I can (and enjoy it), and partially because my fields are not especially in demand in academia. On the flip side, perhaps the folks with sexy degrees who are in demand in academia (you know, the people with Ph.D.s in Gender Studies and the like) feel slighted because industry is not particularly interested in their skills. *shrug*
I had quite an unpleasant surprise just now while trying to post a book review from an older edition of the Spectator.
It seems that fine conservative publication has adopted a subscription model, and the old content that was available for free is now unavailable.
That's unfortunate, as it was a fine source of book reviews.
The LA Times has also recently closed off free access to its book reviews.
I can understand the desire to make money from costly (dynamic) web news operations. But I think differently of the books and arts sections of print publications. In general, the cost of those sections is the cost of people to write the articles, and those costs accumulate whether there is a web presence or not. On the other hand, the benefits to having a free web version of those sections are: 1) the publication advances its editorial view of culture and the arts and 2) the publication surely can charge more for advertising from book publishers and distributors.
I should point out that over the last few months, the Washington Times seems to have made an effort significantly to upgrade the quality of its book review section. The reviews are available for free, and the editors exercise very good judgment in terms of books reviewed and reviewers. While other operations cut back on the number and quality of free web offerings, it's refreshing to see the Washington Times moving in a different direction.
(Update) The book review I linked above seems to be working now. It was causing errors when I originally posted this. It still appears that the Spectator has adoped a subscriber model, or maybe that's just for this anniversary issue; it's not fully clear to me.
Good news from Iraq today:
That fragment I bolded is actually a little unclear, since it doesn't indicate from whom this "pressure" is coming. The pressure, it should be noted, is mainly coming from Iraqis themselves. Those on the Left, and of course some of the Kristolites, keep insisting the opposite: that more troops are necessary (the Left because it allows them to press the theme of U.S. failure, the Kristolites because, one starts to think, they may actually BE neo-imperialists). Meanwhile, American foreign policy seems headed in a different direction.The U.S. Army for the first time Saturday gave Iraq's provisional government responsibility for patrolling a stretch of the country's borders a sensitive, 210-mile region of forbidding desert frontier between Iraq and Iran.
The transfer was significant, because it comes as the U.S.-led coalition faces pressure to give Iraqis more control over their affairs.
If the Kristolites were't so blinded by, well, whatever it is that is blinding them, they might actually take some solace in the fact that the American military is having such an important behind-the-scenes impact, in Iraq and around the world.
I'm not trying to be critical here, but I have a question:
Why should I be all that interested in David Frum's views on terrorism?
Richard Perle, yes. He's a noted defense intellectual with past policy experience who is actively engaged in the current debate.
David Frum? Arguably a smart guy. Good speechwriter. Knows something about the workings of the White House. But does he have some national security background that I'm just not aware of?
Just asking.
This was getting ridiculous. First, we had a myopic judge who ruled that the Do-Not-Call list for telemarketers was illegal because Congress didn't specifically give the task to the FTC.
In response, Congress incredibly quickly passed the This Time We Really Mean It Act to fix that little complaint.
Now, just as we get ready to see Bush sign it into law, here comes another myopic judge.
From article:
But U.S. District Judge Edward Nottingham issued an opinion blocking the list based on telemarketers' free speech rights, which could be more difficult for advocates of the list to sidestep.
"... The court finds that the FTC's do-not-call registry does not materially advance its interest in protecting privacy or curbing abusive telemarketing practices. The registry creates a burden on one type of speech based solely on its content, without a logical, coherent privacy-based or prevention-of-abuse-based reason supporting the disparate treatment of different categories of speech," Nottingham wrote.
I fail to see the judge's point. It does rest on the content of the message -- a private person calling to say hi is inherently different from someone trying to SELL something. But the Supreme Court has always held that commercial speech is less protected than normal speech; you aren't allowed to make false advertising claims for example, or put certain material on billboards (e.g. naked human genitalia) to advertise your products. So, restricting the calls to NON-commercial speech when a person asks the government to enforce such a restriction falls into a grey area that way.
"The court finds that the FTC's do-not-call registry does not materially advance its interest in protecting privacy or curbing abusive telemarketing practices."
I don't see where he's coming from on this one. It stops the abusive calls of the telemarketers, no matter if they're members of the DMA or not. The problem I've always held with the DMA's proposed solution -- that the industry itself keep the list -- is that there will always be companies that aren't members of the DMA or any other organization, or don't follow the organization's rules, and people will still get called against their wishes.
Further, this judge is obviously an idiot, because he fails to have noticed how well national junk-fax laws killed junk faxing. Do-Not-Call systems and the like, when enforceable by consumer lawsuits, WORK.
Ah well, there's only one thing to do. The Judge said that it's protected first amendment speech for anyone to call him at home and talk to him about anything until he hangs up and/or asks them not to call back.
I suggest everyone look up his number -- it should be up at Slashdot somewhere in that thread by now, and take him up on that offer to call him at home. Offer to sell him your computer, or mow his lawn, or maybe shampoo his dog :)
Good post on the Houston Chronicle and light rail, Kevin, but there's something I'd like to add regarding their motivations for printing hate-filled editorials against rail opponents. Rob says that "the vitriolic hate that's coming out of some peoples' mouths is totally surprising to me." He then notes that "[w]e're talking about trains here. Not abortion or war or something where peoples' lives hang in the balance."
I agree with Rob that the rhetoric is revolting, but I'm not at all surprised by it.
The issue of light rail, as I have noted often on my own web log, does not exist separate from other policy debates. To the contrary -- virtually every major issue of municipal policy is interconnected with rail. This is because of the smart growth agenda of which the Houston Chronicle is a cheerleader. This agenda is all-encompassing; it involves fundemantally changing the way in which people live.
Smart growth involves compelling residents of a city to live in high-density development while discouraging the use of automobiles. The enemy, according to this view, is suburban growth. Since the 1960's this anti-suburban agenda has become increasingly influential in some circles, especially amongst journalists. They view the issue as environmental, social, and economic, with the suburbs mocking them as some blight on the landscape.
Accordingly, anybody who opposes rail becomes a pariah -- a creep who opposes progress and supports environmental degredation, social stagnation, and economic weakness. Now they can't argue their points very well, since it's more of an emotional issue for them than anything, but they keep as a tenet of faith than urban progress can only come through high-density development combined with massive transit projects.
From this you get hate-sicked minds like that of Gibbons.
Reductio Ad Absurdum contributor Rob Booth has posted on the topic of Representative John Culberson and recent attacks made against the Congressman.
The Congressman, you see, has had the audacity to demand full disclosure from the local regional transit authority (Metro) in its efforts to sell a rail plan to voters (and claim massive federal subsidies). As Rob points out, this is a position consistently held by the Congressman. And to some of us, it's a fairly welcome stand in light of recent backroom deals (or lunchroom deals, as the case may be) seemingly designed by rail proponents to obfuscate in an effort to win a majority for what we view as a rail boondoggle.
Now, it so happens that Mr. Culberson is a Republican. A conservative one as well. And, in the view of some of us, a principled conservative Republican.
And so he is attacked viciously by the Houston Chronicle editorial board's James Gibbons, in what must rank as one of the most embarrassing op-eds ever published by one of the worst big-city dailies in the nation. Gibbons disagrees with Culberson on rail, and that is certainly his right. But it gets personal, and nasty:
Culberson is just one of those big Republican meanies, who hurts the children, hates the poor, and doesn't believe in civil rights. Quite a smear job in just three paragraphs. And red meat for liberals to be sure. But embarrassing rhetoric coming from a newspaper that wants to be taken seriously. And on the topic of Jefferson -- are we seriously to believe that the Founders would endorse a multibillion dollar federal rail boondoggle? The same Founders who didn't even provide for direct taxation of the people?During his long career in the Texas Legislature, Culberson devoted himself to two propositions: 1. The Legislature should be free to specify an inadequate and grotesquely unequal system of public school finance; and 2. The courts should have no power to stop cruel and barbarous treatment of prisoners in Texas penitentiaries.
Fortunately, Culberson met with limited success. State courts commanded the Legislature to provide a school finance system that narrows the divide between rich and poor. Also, thanks to a federal court order, Texas prison wardens may no longer hand out clubs to some inmates to be used on others, who would then be denied medical attention.
Culberson, based on an imaginatively skewed reading of Thomas Jefferson's writings, apparently believes legislative sovereignty should trump constitutional protections. If Jefferson put much faith in that precept, he did not advertise it.
It gets worse:
More red meat. I would ask if this newspaper has editors, but the answer is -- this is one of them. Which says much about the largest major daily never to have won a Pulitzer, and has nothing to do with the issue of rail.Culberson recently told the Chronicle's Editorial Board that he accepted the findings of modern astronomy and biology, including the theory of evolution, but didn't want the more tiresome and backward branches of his constituency to know it. Imagine the state of the republic if Jefferson, who vigorously championed American science and discovery, had exhibited similarly slight courage of his convictions.
Gibbons does finally take up the topic at hand:
Representative Culberson may well have made some mistakes in his critique of Metro's numbers, but Representative Culberson is not the only person to question Metro's optimistic revenue/ridership projections. Harris County Tax Assessor Paul Bettencourt (another man hated by liberals) has challenged them. So has former Houston mayoral and current city council candidate (and conservative) Michael Berry. Even the local alternative press, not normally a bastion of conservative political thought, has questions for Metro. So what is wrong with answering these critics? Or more importantly, answering to the public?Katy's Renaissance man falsely accused the Metropolitan Transit Authority of using "Enron numbers" to justify its transit plan. But Culberson's calculations proved erroneous and misleading. Culberson wrongly compared Metro's 2025 projections with other cities' current ridership figures. He also failed to credit Metro's proposed rail lines with trackage in both directions, rendering his argument invalid.
As my fellow Virginian put it: "When principles are well understood, their application is less embarrassing."
If Jefferson -- scientist, architect, inventor, statesman -- had possessed Culberson's head for figures and logic, the dome on Monticello would have collapsed during construction or soon after, and the Declaration of Independence would have been predicated on the pursuit of misery.
Here's the conclusion from Mr. Gibbons:
That's what it always comes down to. We are conservatives and we are engaged in politics, therefore we are racists. And those of us who voted for Mr. Culberson (who once was my representative, but now is not) are also racist enablers.Culberson's suburban constituents bear part of the blame for their representative's deceptive means and destructive ends. They have given him a free pass out of sympathy or indifference. But not even they would publicly endorse Culberson's latest prejudice: his intolerance toward holding Metro's referendum in November, when minority voters might turn out in large numbers.
Sen. Trent Lott aside, few politicians combine such distaste for minority participation in civic life with such candor.
Slightly more subtle than that ad run by the NAACP against George Bush in 2000, but only slightly.
So is this the best that Texas liberals can do these days? Break out the race card on every single issue, whether it's redistricting or rail or anything else? Impugn the character of conservatives with whom they disagree, instead of trying to win the political argument on the merits?
I expect it from bloggers and ideologues; it goes with the territory. But it's pathetic when a major daily newspaper adopts the tactic. I don't have a problem with the Chronicle's pro-rail stance. But sell me on that position! Sell Representative Culberson on that position! Show us why this is not a boondoggle, and why Houston's experience will differ from Dallas's (whose light rail has underperformed and put the transit authority in a financial pinch).
But please, don't break out the race and character cards. Not on the Representative. And not on me.
Especially since your wife works for a law firm that stands to benefit immensely from any rail boondoggle. Oh yes, the Chronicle's chief op-ed proponent of rail engages in character assassination of a conservative Congressman, and neglects to mention his own intimate ties to pro-rail forces. Honestly, what would Jefferson think of that?
ABCNEWS.com: Father Defends Airman Charged With Spying
Al Halabi was a logistics officer based out of Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield, Calif. He had been acting as an Arabic language interpreter at the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay.On behalf of all military interpreters, present and former, I'd invite you to note this one important detail. Sr. Airman al-Halabi is not a "military interpreter" or a "military translator." He was performing in that capacity. He's normally a "logistics officer" (that probably should be "specialist").
We have had our share of spies in the crypto community, but this guy isn't one of ours. His invitation to Gitmo also points out a larger problem in our military readiness.
It takes forever to train a military linguist and get them into a productive job. Then it takes even more time to get them up to speed on the actual job. As an example, here's the beginning of my military timeline, with dates:
So, from the time the military learned who I was to the time I showed up for actual work was three years. LEFOX was an optional course, competitively awarded, and could be dropped from the timeline for most people. Also I spent a good deal of time on DEP. So, you could possibly get a guy or gal from civilian to wet-behind-the-ears newbie translator in two years. In a perfect world. If the stars align right.
So the problem for our military readiness can be summed up by this one question: What languages are we going to need military translators for in two/three years and how many translators do we need?
How in the heck can anyone answer that? Who would have predicted in 1989 that we needed Somali interpreters in 1992?
The answer to the question is that the military planners cannot predict accurately what the services' language needs are going to be. It's not their fault, the world moves pretty fast nowadays. The problem comes when there's an extremely unanticipated requirement, like the one we're facing in Gitmo. There's somwhere around 600 prisoners. How many interpreters do you suppose we have there? One for every six detainees? That's 100 unanticipated slots they need to fill.
Apparently what they've done to fill these slots is put out the call throughout the services for native speakers of the target language. This, as we see from the al-Halabi allegations (if proven), is dangerous. These folks in other fields have not had their interpreting skills properly checked and perhaps more importantly, their backgrounds are not known.
The other solution to filling this unanticipated need is to dramatically change the way the military mans the foreign language specialist positions. We also need to change the attitude of senior personnel towards language training and retention.
First, the military needs to overplan for all conceivable languages. If someone in the Bureau of Naval Personnel or the National Security Agency or whereever says "We won't need French (or German, or Lithuanian, or Tagalog) interpreters any more," they should be shown the door and never allowed to plan for manning in language fields ever again. Instead, there should be a cadre of interpreters in every language known to man. This cadre should have more people than we know what to do with. DLI should be teeming with people getting training in every language spoken in every nook and cranny of the globe. Start with every dialect of Arabic. There should be translators at duty stations who aren't needed today. They may be needed soon.
Second, like most Americans, senior military personnel who are not linguists tend to have a misunderstanding of the nature of language skills. Language skills are perishable. Please commit that fact to memory. Just because you've been to a school to learn a language doesn't mean that you know that language for life. In my experience, many senior US military personnel try to pretend that this reality doesn't exist. In the Army in particular, many seem to think that you can put a DLI graduate out washing trucks for 3 years and then when the need for their language skills skills arises, they'll be ready to go. Additionally, and most sadly, is the fact that many officers I saw seemed to resent military translators who brought up the perishability of language skills.
I should also mention that I worked with a good number of senior non-translators who "got it" and supported translators doing translating.
Now, if the Pentagon will listen to me, we'll hopefully have too many translators in the service. These guys and gals should not be allowed to sit around. Nothing draws the attention of empire-building bureaucrats more than servicemembers sitting around. The translators should be training, translating, interpreting, and translating again.
This is one of those rare times in my life where I am for increased federal spending. Even federal spending that could be, in the short term, wasteful and unnecessary. But in the long term, the stakes are too high. It's our national security at risk. We can't afford to have military translation requirements met on an ad hoc basis.
The personnel planners need to go back to the drawing board, after having talked to a few E-5 linguists who are getting out. They'll tell you what's really going on.
Friend Orrin Judd calls attention to this tidbit of news regarding the latest greatest Dem hope, General Wesley Clark:
I would say it's fairly rare that military officers will call out their own that way in public. Of course, General Clark himself didn't refrain from calling out the strategy of General Franks during the early stages of the Gulf War, which reportedly still has Secretary Powell steamed (and which turned out to be horribly wrong). This is not a man who is liked by his fellow officers.Retired General H. Hugh Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on 9/11, shared his recollection of that day and his views of the war against terrorism with the Foothill College Celebrity Forum audience at Flint Center, Sept. 11 and 12.
His review of that historic event and his 38 years in the military kept the audience's rapt attention throughout. But it was his answer to a question from the audience at the end that shocked his listeners.
"What do you think of General Wesley Clark and would you support him as a presidential candidate," was the question put to him by moderator Dick Henning, assuming that all military men stood in support of each other. General Shelton took a drink of water and Henning said, "I noticed you took a drink on that one!"
"That question makes me wish it were vodka," said Shelton. "I've known Wes for a long time. I will tell you the reason he came out of Europe early had to do with integrity and character issues, things that are very near and dear to my heart. I'm not going to say whether I'm a Republican or a Democrat. I'll just say Wes won't get my vote."
More evidence of his unpopularity among military men comes comes from Jed Babbin:
Yes, it does. Not a single soldier!A friend from across the Pond was on the telephone Friday reminding me of an event that was held at the Brit embassy here in Washington soon before he was transferred back to Merry Old. The party was to honor Gen. Wesley Clark's honorary knighthood. It was a big bash, and those in attendance were thoroughly immersed in fine champagne. As were the General and his guests.
Gen. Clark was invited to bring up to thirty personal guests, and he did. Madeleine the Short, warrior princess and Clark friend, was there along with other ranking Clintonoids. But among Clark's friends, there was not a single American soldier, sailor, airman or marine. Neither officer nor enlisted man could be counted as a friend of Clark. "A very rum situation" as my friend put it. Rum indeed. It speaks ill of General Clark in a way nothing else could.
And according to this Newsweek report, "None of Clark’s former comrades in arms showed up last week for his hastily scheduled announcement in Little Rock." Ouch!
Maybe he is the dream dem candidate after all -- a fired military man disliked by the very military that so many Dem primary voters dislike themselves, giving him instant cred? Throw in the foreign policy advice of the least impressive Secretary of State in modern times and the Clinton spin team, and he's starting to look like a winner all right!
For liberal primary voters, that is.
Hi everyone who reads this -- no idea how many that is, but hey! :) Kevin's very kindly invited me to blog here from time to time, as my friend Alex Whitlock does as well. I'm not sure when my first politically minded post will be, but this is both an introduction and a test post.
Me? I'm 23, work at a local university as a computer technician. Politically, I consider myself a moderate, but that's more a matter of being left on some things, right on others, than being middle of the road on every issue.
I try to think everything out though, before making up my mind, and even then my positions are changeable... mostly.
I also post to my own home blog from time to time, and the more humorous stuff every now and then wanders over to the No-Lyfe Blog instead of landing on my page.
President Bush's speech to the United Nations has (deservedly) generated plenty of attention.
Jacques Chirac's address, on the other hand, has gone relatively unnoticed. And it's very interesting. Here are some choice tidbits:
I'm not even sure what that means, but the language certainly is flowery.We are using force to combat terrorism, but that is not enough. It will return over and over if we allow extremism and fanaticism to flourish, if we fail to realise that it uses the world's unresolved conflicts and imbalances as its justification.
In the face of proliferating weapons of mass destruction, we reject all "faits accomplis".
*yawn* League of Nations redux.This reform should be accompanied by a strengthening of the Council's authority. It is the role of the Council to set the bounds to the use of force. No one is entitled to arrogate to himself the right to utilise it unilaterally and preventively.
Conversely, in the face of mounting threats, states must have an assurance that the Council has appropriate means of evaluation and collective action at its disposal, and that it has the will to act.
Unless, of course, it's the United States leading a coalition against a gross violator of human rights (Iraq). Then action must be blocked at all costs.Conversely, in the face of mounting threats, states must have an assurance that the Council has appropriate means of evaluation and collective action at its disposal, and that it has the will to act.
We all place a high premium on national sovereignty. But its scope can and must be limited in cases of gross violations of human rights and humanitarian law.
The Security Council is taking steps in that direction, and France supports this development.
That's just a small sample of the speech. It's really worth a read.
William Dryer of Beldarblog has come to the defense of Wesley Clark. Specifically, he contends that the recent uproar over a 1994 photograph of him trading hats with known war criminal Ratko Mladic is little more than a tempest in a teapot:
Normally I would agree with Dryer. It's all too easy to point to a photograph by itself as evidence of incompetence. He aptly notes, for example, that President Bush recently had his picture taken after dropping his dog Barney. It wasn't a flattering photograph, and so left-wing bloggers jumped on it to embarass Bush. This was obviously dirty pool.Whether Gen. Clark is more of an Eisenhower or a McClellan is still very much an open question, and one worthy of serious and thoughtful public debate. There are plenty of reasons not to take Gen. Clark terribly seriously as a presidential candidate, and even plenty of reasons to question Gen. Clark’s performance in the Balkins. But this photo isn’t one of them.
However, the photograph of Clark and Mladic isn't comparable to the Bush photo. Clark wasn't simply wrong to meet with Mlavic, he was wrong to appear in photographs looking chummy with the now and future war criminal. At the time, the photo was an enormous embarassment to the US, having been featured in numerous European papers. As the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists summarized in December 1994:
Clearly, Clark made a terrible decision by meeting with Mladic, a decision made worse by posing in a photograph trading hats with the man. This is why he was condemned by the State Department, and it doesn't speak well of his political qualifications when he embarassed the US abroad. So I have to part with Dryer on this -- the photograph is a perfectly valid issue.Critical as the military has been of President Clinton's sense of propriety, their own faces should have been a little red when the army's Lt. Gen. Wesley Clark-director of strategy for the Joint Chiefs of Staff-had one of those heart-warming military-to-military exchanges with Serbian Gen. Ratko Mladic. That's the same Mladic who was nominated in 1992 by then-Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger as a prime candidate for a war-crimes trial for his vigorous "ethnic cleansing."
According to State Department officials, Clark was asked twice to keep away from Mladic, but "he went anyway" according to the Washington Times (September 2, 1994). Clark's tête-à-tête with Mladic may be tame by Jane Fonda-visits-Hanoi standards, but, according to one U.S. official, "It's like cavorting with Hermann Goering." To further the embarrassment, a photo of Clark and Mladic, wearing each other's hats, appeared in several European newspapers (Washington Post, September 1, 1994).
Jim Hoagland's Sunday Washington Post column is interesting as much for its reporting as its analysis. Because the reporting suggests that the State Department has an institutional interest in winning passage of a new U.N. resolution that might constrain Paul Bremer:
Hoagland, like most journalists, can be expected to take Powell's "side" in this matter, but really this is nothing more than the traditional competition between State and Defense for foreign policy pre-eminence, which can be particularly acute in administrations that take foreign policy seriously (unlike the last one). It's even more acute when the stakes are so high, and when Defense seems to be trumping State at calling the shots in Iraq.The battle over a new Security Council resolution revolves around the desire of other nations to put Bremer -- not U.S. forces -- under U.N. control. That effort may provide the State Department with an opening to have more of a say in Bremer's operations as well.
State Department officials have chafed at their exclusion from decision-making on Iraq since Rumsfeld chose Bremer, a hawkish retired career diplomat, from a White House list of 15 or so candidates to head the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq.
The diplomats on Bremer's staff in Baghdad report directly to him, not to Washington. Secretary of State Colin Powell has told friends that he has to rely on newspapers and the diplomatic reporting of other nations that is shared with State to follow developments in Iraq.
Powell no doubt has a point: The lack of communication within the Pentagon itself is a well-known problem, and the fierce rivalries between the two departments rule out what might be described as meaningful contact. This has become a severe problem for Bush, who has tolerated an unacknowledged but visible war between Powell and Rumsfeld.
Hoagland is spot on with this:
Recall, of course, a few weeks ago, when Democrat nation-builders were lamenting that too few troops were in Iraq, and arguing we needed more more more (before President Bush asked for more funding, incidentally, after which that meme quickly died). Secretary Rumsfeld disagreed, suggesting that more troops weren't necessary, and that it was instead necessary to start handing over more responsibility to the Iraqis -- at which point, Secretary Powell announced that the United States must be cautious not to hand over power prematurely to the Iraqis. Apparently, Hoagland agrees with both Secretary Rumsfeld and Secretary Powell, however that is possible.The path out of Iraq runs through Bremer's maintaining the unity of command that working with the Pentagon offers, and his moving with greater speed to turn over responsibility to the Iraqis on the Governing Council and in its cabinet.
The money paragraph is the penultimate one:
Yes. Seemingly from State.Bremer should not mistake Iraqi prodding on a timetable as an attempt to sabotage him. In this administration, that is more likely to come in Washington.
Robert Novak gives a disturbing anecdote regarding Wesley Clark:
Clark's military career was not exactly illustrious. He retired in air of controversy over poor decisions made during the Bosnian conflict, lapses in judgment like the above meeting with Mladic, as well as his bizarre plan to attack Russian troops at Pristina. He's a failed general attempting to make his mark in politics -- just like George McClellan.The important Democrats eager to run retired Gen. Wesley Clark for president might exercise due diligence about a military career that was nearly terminated before he got his fourth star and then came to a premature end. The trouble with the general is pointed out by a bizarre incident in Bosnia nearly a decade ago.
Clark was a three-star (lieutenant general) who directed strategic plans and policy for the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington. On Aug. 26, 1994, in the northern Bosnian city of Banja Luka, he met and exchanged gifts with the notorious Bosnian Serb commander and indicted war criminal, Gen. Ratko Mladic. The meeting took place against the State Department's wishes and may have contributed to Clark's failure to be promoted until political pressure intervened. The shocking photo of Mladic and Clark wearing each other's military caps was distributed throughout Europe.
Democrats can endorse Clark if they like, but it's a huge mistake. He's not loyal to the Democratic party, having raised funds for the Pulaski County Republican Party just two years ago. He's also not a good decision-maker, as his record shows. He's smart, but he lacks common sense. It all adds up to poor political sense.
It's always difficult to know the veracity of stories like this:
General Clark has a reputation of being thin-skinned and petulant, so this story hardly surprises. Before he was running for President, he was, of course, the media's dream candidate. Now that he actually is running, the media will probably show less mercy. Indeed, we've already seen some of that at work over the past few days.Last January, at a conference in Switzerland, he happened to chat with two prominent Republicans, Colorado Gov. Bill Owens and Marc Holtzman, now president of the University of Denver. "I would have been a Republican," Clark told them, "if Karl Rove had returned my phone calls." Soon thereafter, in fact, Clark quit his day job and began seriously planning to enter the presidential race—as a Democrat. Messaging NEWSWEEK by BlackBerry, Clark late last week insisted the remark was a "humorous tweak." The two others said it was anything but. "He went into detail about his grievances," Holtzman said. "Clark wasn't joking. We were really shocked."
In any case, I've no idea why Clinton's General had any expectation that Karl Rove would try to recruit him as a Republican political candidate -- that in itself is yet another manifestation of what seems to be the general's inflated sense of self importance.
(09/22/03 Update) It appears that General Clark never called Karl Rove. The General certainly does seem to have some trouble with fibbing. He is Clinton's General in more ways than one, I guess.
Beldar, who has been posting some great stuff on Southwest Voter Registration Education Project v. Shelley, catches famously liberal judicial activist Harry Pregerson in a clear violation of protocol, what Beldar considers a fairly serious ethical breach.
Hardly surprising. Words on paper mean little to liberal judicial activists. It is nice, though, that bloggers are giving it the attention it deserves.
Ben Domenech has drafted a brilliant post on Wesley Clark's enterance into the battle for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination. His introduction (especially the quote) is quite instructive:
Read the rest; it's a very good analysis."Wesley Clark is George McClellan - proud, smart, by the book, untalented, incompetent. All stars, no battles."
-Rick Brookhiser
Let's start with the Big Question: Can Wesley Clark save the Democratic Party from itself?
The answer is probably No. But regardless, Clark may be the best chance the moderates have of holding on to the nomination (and the party) for another four years...
Yahoo News: Blix Attacks 'Spin and Hype' of Iraq Weapon Claims
Blix, who said this week he believed Iraq (news - web sites) had destroyed its weapons of mass destruction 10 years ago, told BBC radio that the United States and Britain "over-interpreted" intelligence about Baghdad's weapons programs.
Mr. Blix ought to read some UNSCOMM reports.
Letter dated 25 January 1999 from the Executive Chairman of the Special Commission established by the Secretary-General pursuant to paragraph 9 (b) (i) of Security Council resolution 687 (1991) addressed to the President of the Security Council:
550 Artillery shells filled with Mustard33. Iraq declared that 550 shells filled with mustard had been 'lost' shortly after the Gulf War. To date, no evidence of the missing munitions has been found. Iraq claimed that the chemical warfare agents filled into these weapons would be degraded a long time ago and, therefore, there would be no need for their accounting. However, a dozen mustard-filled shells were recovered at a former CW storage facility in the period 1997-1998. The chemical sampling of these munitions, in April 1998, revealed that the mustard was still of the highest quality. After seven years, the purity of mustard ranged between 94 and 97%. Thus, Iraq has to account for these munitions which would be ready for combat use. The resolution of this specific issue would also increase confidence in accepting Iraq’s other declarations on losses of chemical weapons which it has not been possible to verify.
That's quite a leap of faith to take. Mr. Blix, 2003 - 1998 = 5 years. So you're not only accusing President Bush, Prime Minister Blair, and the intelligence community of hyping, you're accusing your predecessor, Mr. Richard Butler, of lying in a report?
I'm going to be away for a couple of days, so my posting here will be light.
I wanted to take a second, though, to introduce our newest blog contributor, Owen Courrèges, who's been blogging up a storm the last few days. Owen's a conservative Rice grad who has an active blog of his own. It's a pleasure to have him group blogging with us.
Thomas Friedman puts into words what everyone's been thinking for the past few... decades. France is becoming America's enemy, and in so doing they are thwarting their own interests:
As Hank Hill would say: 'Yup.'What is so amazing to me about the French campaign -- "Operation America Must Fail" -- is that France seems to have given no thought as to how this would affect France. Let me spell it out in simple English: If America is defeated in Iraq by a coalition of Saddamists and Islamists, radical Muslim groups -- from Baghdad to the Muslim slums of Paris -- will all be energized, and the forces of modernism and tolerance within these Muslim communities will be on the run. To think that France, with its large Muslim minority, where radicals are already gaining strength, would not see its own social fabric affected by this is fanciful.
If France were serious, it would be using its influence within the European Union to assemble an army of 25,000 Eurotroops, and a $5 billion reconstruction package, and then saying to the Bush team: Here, we're sincere about helping to rebuild Iraq, but now we want a real seat at the management table. Instead, the French have put out an ill-conceived proposal, just to show that they can be different, without any promise that even if America said yes Paris would make a meaningful contribution.
Gover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform, is absolutely correct on this -- and it's a good thing:
The GOP needs to stake out a clear position that the government must shrink, and until it does, higher taxes are simply off the table. Furthermore, Republicans can never, ever raise taxes during poor economic times. That's adding insult to injury, and it's why Bush Sr. and Governor Riley paid such high political prices for championing tax increases.The lesson learned at the national level in 1990 and 1992 is now being painfully learned at the state level: A Republican cannot be elected and govern successfully -- that is, in such a way as to make possible re-election or higher office -- without staking out an unequivocal anti-tax-hike position.
Rice Grad, however, takes a much different view.
Billionaire speculator George Soros is reportedly preparing to spend millions to defeat President Bush.
Personally, I don't have a problem with the man engaging in political speech. But I will be eagerly awaiting a denunciation from those liberals who are always complaining about the role of money in politics.
UCLA law student Rory Miller (a.k.a. 'The Angry Clam') has written a truly excellent condemnation of the recent Ninth Circuit court decision that halted the California recall effort. Here's a choice excerpt.
You can understand why the Ninth Circuit is overruled by the US Supreme Court so often. Their disregard for the letter of the law is becoming the stuff of legend.There's ... a lot of language in there that do[es] not bode well for the state constitution.
First is that there is legally guaranteed no constitutional interest in having the election in the time specified on page 31:
"They [the State] have asserted the need to conduct the recall election within the dictates of the California Constitution, but this is more properly weighed in the manner courts normally weigh it- as a public interest argument against enjoining a specific election even in the face of an equal protection violation, rather than as an interest justifying the use of poor equipment as a general matter."
Translation: your right, as a citizen, to have the recall accord with your constitution, is not an affirmative constitutional interest.
There's also a wonderful part about how the time limits in the CA Constitution are essentially arbitrary, scarily similar to the reasoning used by the Supreme Court of Nevada in Guinn v. The Legislature of Nevada, which overturned the state's 2/3 vote requirement to raise taxes as "merely procedural." This discussion appears in the early 30s, and reaches its climax toward the bottom of page 32.
Also hilarious is the insistence that the recall is "only a month or so later, effectively," yet then arguing that the statutory violation of the timing of mailing voter guides 33 days prior to an election, rather than a full 40, is so crucial that the votes on the propositions must be postponed. That idiocy is on pages 61-62.
Well, well, liberal CNN reporter Christiane Amanpour thinks her network was intimidated by the White House and Fox News (!) into muzzling itself during the Iraq War.
Of course, her network was also "intimidated" by Mr. Saddam Hussein into not reporting anything useful about the nature of his regime either.
One wonders why the network exists at all, if it is so easily manipulated into not reporting the news.
(Update) The problem with reporting on Iraq went well beyond CNN. Maybe Amanpour should focus some of her energy on this scandal.
William Dyer has started to analyze the per curiam opinion in Southwest Voter Registration Education Project v. Shelley (the California recall case), and posts some preliminary thoughts:
This is some good stuff. I'm looking forward to the followup analysis he promises.The writing style is a bit too hip, though, for most circuit judges -- almost more appropriate to a blog or a campaign website than for inclusion in Federal Reporter, 3d Series. From this and from some quirks in the citation form, I'd bet dollars to donuts this is the work of a very smart, very liberal, very out-of-touch-with-reality law clerk who's just joined the staff of one of these judges after a law school education that included law review service (and possibly editorship).
I just love it when voters confound liberals by voting against something that liberals favor:
Darn those stupid voters! If they would just listen to liberal elites (and "good" Republicans who conspire to raise taxes)!Riley's plan passed the legislature in June. But that was only a first step. Alabama's tax code is written into the state constitution--an unwieldy document conceived in 1901 at the behest of the state's white supremacists and agricultural and timber interests--and the constitution can only be amended by statewide referendum. So today Riley put his plan to Alabama's voters for their approval. But as the final days of the referendum campaign revealed, the state's wealthy didn't heed Riley's moral message to help the poor. Even more tragically, the poor didn't trust the messenger enough to allow themselves to be helped.
[snip]
Although black Alabamians--who account for a quarter of the state's population but half of its poor--stood to benefit most from Riley's tax plan, polls showed not many supported it.
And since they didn't, it's the fault of the white supremacists who made the Alabama constitution hard to amend, thereby thwarting the liberals who know better than the people what's best for them.
Nice.
A recent meme in Democratic circles tries to tie impeachment 1998, Florida 2000, and Texas and Calirornia 2003 to demonstrate that the Republicans are, at root, anti-democratic. To paraphrase the argument of Slate's Tim Noah: An objective analysis obviously demonstrates that Republicans are cheating scumbuckets.
As time has progressed, I've been seeing this more and more from so-called "moderate" Democrats.
In the same pages of Slate, left-of-center William Saletan isn't going to let this slide:
In Florida, Al Gore originally asked for a recount only in counties in which he thought Democrats would gain votes. Moreover, to be precise, he wasn't for "counting" more ballots; he was for reinterpreting already-counted ballots until he came out ahead. Gore's lawyer, David Boies, argued that ballots should be interpreted as votes for Bush or Gore based on "the intent of the voter, not how the voter manifests his or her intent"—in other words, without rules. Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., a Gore surrogate, actually claimed, "The punch cards were wrong." Gore eventually moderated his position, but not until he had to.
In Texas, Republicans seeking to redraw congressional districts in the third year of the decade are violating custom but not law. On Friday, a panel of federal judges dismissed a lawsuit by Democrats claiming that the GOP's redistricting tactics violated the Voting Rights Act. As for the 11 Democratic state senators who fled to Oklahoma and then New Mexico to prevent the majority from gathering a quorum, I can only imagine the cries of outrage I'd be hearing from my liberal friends if those were Republicans thwarting a Democratic legislature.
He goes on and provides some perspective for all of the supposed Republican "transgressions."
Politics is bloodsport. I don't pretend that Republicans pull back their punches and utilize every tool that they can, but the notion that the Democrats just want to "play fair" is patently absurd. In Texas, Democrats are reduced to playing the race card where most skeptics would just see partisan opportunism.
Bush's poll numbers have been taking a hit lately. Part of me is worried about this, but the other part looks at the side of the aisle that is acting like losers and cementing their fate and I'm more than a bit relieved.
The WTO protestors who swarmed over a recent meeting in Cancun seemed to be of two minds. Some of them wanted to be pacifistic hippies, giving flowers to the riot police sent out to prevent any violence:
Others, however, wanted to play the role of the violent communist revolutionary, hurling LIQUID FECES at the riot police:
This seems to characterize most WTO protests, and I'm not sure there's much of a difference between the Che Guervera wanna-bes and the flower children. Both are simply play-acting to some generalized left-wing stereotype. I don't honestly believe that the protestor giving the flower saw any particular meaning in the act; it was simply what was expected. Same for the feces-throwing lunatic.
Now I'd certainly rather see more peaceful protestors, but that's not going to happen so long as youthful radicals trying to relive the 60's are staging these things. They aren't adjusting to the times, and that's why they protest to begin with.
John H. Bunzel worries that the Democrats have become the anti-God, anti-religious party, and concedes that maybe this is not a good development for his party.
The problem is, his party holds positions that are unpopular with many religious people: support for abortion, support for gay marriage, opposition to school prayer, and opposition to school vouchers (because religious schools would benefit, among other reasons).
So, it's all well and good that he suggests the Dems should reach out to religious people. Great idea! But how do you reconcile some of their core policy positions with that great idea?
This entire post from Paul Cella is well worth one's time, but let me call attention to this excerpt in particular:
Or a Party of Engineerists, for that matter, but I digress.The G.O.P. is a political party: today, the party of the Right. Conservatism, however diffuse, is a philosophy. The former is primarily about acquiring and wielding power; and only secondarily about implementing a philosophy. I wonder if it would even be admitted, in this partisan age, that a philosophy can never be the same as a party — anymore than a creed can be the same as a trade or vocation. Carpentry is a trade; it is not a creed. While there could conceivably be a Carpenters Party, it is merely absurd to imagine a creed of carpentry guiding and inspiring the lives of men.
RAA contributor Alex Whitlock made a related point recently:
Exactly.I once took a Constitutional Design class by Dr. Donald Lutz at the University of Houston, where we learned quite a bit about constitutional design, political parties, and how people generally align.
On the first or second class, he asked "There is only one function of a political party. What is it?"
Some people suggested to advance ideas, but they were shot down. Others suggested to provide a platform for candidates, and Dr. Lutz said that they were closer. The answer, he explained, was simply to win elections.
And then there is William F. Buckley's admission (advice, really) that he would be supporting the "rightward-most-viable" candidate for President.
With the California recall vote looming, and more important races just around the corner, it's probably worth pausing just a moment to think about the differences between political philosophy and party, and the question of candidate viability. Of course, sometimes viability is not the paramount concern. Going down with Goldwater was a short-term disaster, but a long-term exercise in remaking a party, not an insignificant matter. And maybe McClintock is viable. If not, is a vote for him a long-term exercise in rebuilding a California GOP? Is it worthwhile as simply a rejection of an inconsistent, not to mention liberal, Republican (Arnold)? Can Dems substitute Howard Dean in all of these questions?
Beats me. Just some food for thought.
I know the "reproductive rights" fanatics on the Left hate the phrase, "it's a child, not a choice."
And as technology advances, they may come to hate it even more.
When Howard Stern's show is categorized as a "news" program in order to avoid equal time rules, isn't it well past time to do away with the absurd equal time rule?
I don't think I've ever seen a response like this from our friend Orrin Judd, always the level-headed conservative:
That's the stupidest statement I've ever heard by a human being--no small feat in a world that has Gore Vidal in it. To compare your own country to Saddam is either a function of an ignorance so profound that it baffles the mind that you can type or a self-loathing so disturbing as to call into question your mental health.Found in the comments section for this post.
Mind you, we're not disagreeing with Orrin. Just a little surprised to see the comment that prompted the response. Maybe if such people keep reading the best daily civics lesson on the web, they'll post fewer silly comments. :)
Lee Harris has an interesting take on the debate over the existence of WMD, criticizing the descent into partisanship over the issue:
Our present peril arises not from the weapons of mass destruction themselves, but from the willingness to use such weapons against us. It is our enemy's eagerness to destroy us, and not the specific instrument by which such destruction is wrought, that should alarm us. As 9/11 should remind us, in the right hands, box-cutters can become weapons of mass destruction.That sounds right to me. Harris elaborates on the most important lesson from Iraq (whatever the final analysis of the existence of WMD):
This means that the paradigm shift that our collective mistake has nudged us toward, if we but recognize it, is a paradigm that acknowledges the profound and critical role that fantasy plays in determining the motivation of our enemy, and it indicates how badly we will go astray the moment we begin thinking that they think like us. They don't. And our failure to adjust to this fact is perhaps the greatest obstacle facing us today.During the Cold War, we referred to this tendency to assume our enemies thought like us as Mirror Imaging. Because we were horrified at the thought of nuclear war and targeted our nuclear arsenal at Soviet cities as a deterrent, we preferred to see in them the same approach (never mind that the Soviets did have a nuclear warfighting strategy that consisted of targeting military assets, not just cities, and a robust civil defense system, including the world's most comprehensive deep underground bunker system and the local missile defense of Moscow permitted under the ABM Treaty). At least with the Soviets, we made some errors in out assumptions, but not necessarily an error in assuming rational actors. In the case of our terrorist enemies, it may be a mistake to assume rational actors. Hence Harris's warning.
I would add that a second lesson to be learned from Iraq is the difficulty of arms control verification. It does seem clear to me that we didn't know nearly as much as we thought we did about Iraq and its programs, largely because of an ineffective (nay, neglected) disarmament regime. If intelligence was poor about Iraq -- a country that was defeated by the United States and had a disarmament regime imposed (which it violated, with no real response from the Clinton Administration) -- then what do we really know about North Korea? Iran? Syria?
We should know by now that arms control without the political will to insist on verification is useless.
For someone who has a Ph.D. and teaches at an institution of higher learning (in my fine state even), this professor of history seems to have great difficulty understanding a simple phrase:
To whom? Is it really that confusing?President Bush ended his Labor Day speech to a Richfield, Ohio, labor union crowd much as he finishes all his public speeches: "May God continue to bless America." Whether he intends that as a patriotic cliché or as a deeply anchored theological assertion, he needs to explain exactly what he means to say.
But Professor Constance Hilliard is perhaps more honest than most of the anti-religious/strict-separation American Left in this little screed, particularly in the conclusion:
So there you have it. Because the phrase "God bless America" (or, one suspects, any reference to Christianity) makes the good professor uneasy, the President shouldn't send American troops to conduct the war on terror. Nice logical leap there.For all his political adeptness, Bush sometimes seems to lack the capacity to perceive the world beyond his immediate cultural realm. The fact that he tags every speech with some variant of "God bless America" reinforces my unease. If our president is unable to acknowledge, or perhaps even understand, the divergence of religious traditions possessed by patriotic Americans, how can he then comprehend the complex world beyond our borders where he has now sent our sons and daughters to fight and die?
But honest. Unlike most of the strict separationists, Professor Hilliard admits that personal psychology is driving her political (mis)judgment (and not, say, serious study of the Founding). Because Christianity (and the religiosity of the Founding-era political class and the Founding era in general) makes most strict-separationists "uneasy," they go searching Founding-era writings and speeches for any snippet that will support their political preference of strict separation. That's a poor substitute for actually studying the Founding era.
Professor Hilliard is, of course, free to argue for an inclusive American society (religious and otherwise). But somehow, I don't think President Bush is advocating a non-inclusive society with his variants of "God bless America." Except maybe to members of the strict-separationist academic Left.
It's been nearly ten years since the publication of The Bell Curve, and it's still surprising to me how few of those who write about the book actually seem to have acquired any understanding of the book's argument (say, by reading it).
Apparently, there is a new study out that seems to deal with issues of intelligence, socioeconomic status, heritability of IQ, and the like. I say "seems to deal with" those issues because it's not really fair to expect a journalist to be able to evaluate a sophisticated study employing quantitative methods of social science, and this journalist is not the exception to my rule of fairness: I can't figure out much about their design, their findings, or their explained variance from what he's written.
But this line stands out:
Neither the first nor the second argument is one advanced by Charles Murray and the late Richard Herrnstein, authors of The Bell Curve. Murray and Herrnstein contended only that IQ was significantly heritable -- not that it explained "most" of the differences in IQ among individuals. From a heavily footnoted section of the book:As highlighted in the controversial 1994 book "The Bell Curve," studies have repeatedly found that people's genes -- and not their environment -- explain most of the differences in IQ among individuals. That has led a few scholars to advance the hotly disputed notion that minorities' lower scores are evidence of genetic inferiority.
In fact, IQ is substantially heritable. The state of knowledge does not permit a precise estimate, but half a century of work, now amounting to hundreds of empirical and theoretical studies, permits a broad conclusion that the genetic component of IQ is unlikely to be smaller than 40 percent or higher than 80 percent." (The Bell Curve, 105).Here, the authors are simply reporting the state of Herrnstein's discipline, but too many readers took this to be the heart of their argument (and then went on to read into the book some really ugly arguments). In reality, the important argument of The Bell Curve is that IQ correlates strongly with success and failure in society. One of the researchers of the study concedes as much to Mr. Weiss:
And although IQ remains a controversial measure, criticized by some as being racially biased in itself and a poor reflection of intelligence in the highest sense of the word, Gottesman and others noted that it remains the best predictor today of social and economic success in U.S. society.Of course, Weiss (well trained journalist that he is) can't resist the politically correct clause that precedes the bolded paragraph, but it's the bolded paragraph that's important -- and it's further confirmation of the Murray/Herrnstein thesis. And really, I wish journalists who have never studied the topic wouldn't use the phrase "intelligence in the highest sense of the word." There is g, or there is not g, but there is no "highest sense of g." Typical journalistic nonsense.
Back to Murray and Herrnstein -- since they concede that IQ is not completely heritable, then a logical corollary would (of course!) be that yes, environment does have an impact on IQ (and there might be further policy implications). In other words, the contradiction that Mr. Weiss thinks he has found in the first paragraph of his that we cite turns out really not to be a contradiction. Another logical corollary that Murray and Herrnstein explore is this: if IQ is significantly heritable, and we increasingly marry and associate with people of our own rough IQ (which social science studies suggest is true), then don't we run the risk of an increasingly stratified society? And shouldn't we think about the implications? Most of the critics of The Bell Curve never addressed that provocative issue. They were too busy addressing arguments that Murray and Herrnstein had not made. Robert Kaplan got at the issue of stratification in a roundabout way with his book Empire Wilderness (which of course was one of the few books he's written that didn't get much attention). So it goes.
The study that Weiss writes about does seem interesting and important, and I'd like to see the methodology and results. I have a bit of a perverse interest in this topic, because one of the requirements of my highly quantitative graduate program was a good dose of quantitative methods in political science (the efficacy of which I question, but forced to learn regardless). I spent quite a bit of time with various datasets that contained surrogate measures of intelligence, analyzing intelligence as one (interactive) variable in various models of political psychology. I found some weak relationships -- largely what I expected -- and I learned that you can't really trust most laymen to look at these sorts of studies and make any sense of them.
Credit Matthew Miller for learning something about spin during his stay in the Clinton Administration.
His Two Percent Solution sounds a lot better than promising to grow government by two percent of a staggering amount of money. It's catchy. Doesn't seem scary at all. Almost sounds like a diet plan.
Of course, once you dig into the book -- as Chris Lehmann does in this book review for the Washington Post -- you figure out that expanding the national government by 2% of GDP (because programs are NEVER cut, and Miller knows it) involves things like repealing the Bush tax cuts (let's call that a tax increase) and increasing the gasoline tax by 60 cents.
Lehmann notes:
It seems more wishful thinking on Miller's part than anything else. But it's more creative than anything the Nine Dwarves have come up with. Maybe one of them should bring him on board.It's a sadly open question whether actually existing leaders, and voting publics, would rally to activist government, a virtual byword for political heresy ever since Ronald Reagan famously announced that government was "the problem."
There's been a proliferation of blog verbiage on the topic of Cruz Bustamamante and MEChA, and it's largely been a yawner for me. As usual, friend Orrin Judd comes up with a succinct conclusion that fairly well puts the thing to rest for me:
That may be too much of a presumption in favor of Mr. Bustamante.Youthful membership in a racial separatist group should no more disqualify Mr. Bustamante from elective office than it does Senator Byrd, but he ought to be able, now that he's presumably a mature adult, to disavow its ideology.
Is there anything the administrative/redistributionist federal state does not want a hand in?
I ask because ESPN is reporting on important hearings from the House Judiciary committee.
There even seems to be rare bipartisan agreement:
and"I think you're throwing the baby out with the bath water by allowing this to continue," Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., said of the NCAA's Bowl Championship Series, which excludes many schools from automatic bids to compete in the lucrative bowl postseason.
Just lovely."This conglomeration of money and power is having a cascading impact far beyond major college football, as the de facto exclusion of non-BCS schools from major bowl games is resulting in those schools having lower athletic budgets, inferior athletic facilities, and rising deficits," said Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, the committee's top Democrat.
Surely there are more important matters for the committee to be considering. Here are a couple: 1) the dysfunctional nomination/confirmation process (yes, I realize this is a House, not a Senate, committee, but hearings couldn't hurt anything) and 2) the imperial judiciary in general.
Feel free to add your own.
The new and improved Brothers Judd blog is now powered by Movable Type.
Be sure and congratulate them on their stable new home, and update your blogrolls (which I need to do shortly).
Writing for the Seattle Times, Harry Korrell suggests that Dem intransigence on the confirmation of qualified judges is likely to be an issue in the 2004 election:
All of the president's appeals court nominees have received the American Bar Association's top ratings, "qualified" and "well qualified," yet only 53 percent have been confirmed, compared with 90 percent during the same period for the last three presidencies.In the final paragraph of this post, we suggested that the judiciary would likely be an issue in 2004, and it looks like the Dems are determined it will be. Given noises coming from the White House that the President doesn't want 2004 to be a meaningless personal victory like Reagan's in 1984, it's virtually a lock that the President will attempt to nationalize Congressional and Senate races to an extent. And this will almost surely be one of the issues he uses to do so.[snip]
The president's appointees have stellar qualifications and bipartisan support, and Democratic senators are alienating mainstream Americans, particularly minorities and religious groups they have counted on in the past. If senators, including our own, do not recognize this, they will feel the results on election night, and that will be some news indeed.
David Ignatius has penned what I find to be an interesting column for the Washington Post, though not for the reasons I suspect most people find it interesting.
First, it seems to me that Mr. Ignatius probably talked to officials from the first Bush Administration, whose preference for stability as the overarching principle of foreign policy was made amply clear by that despicable Chicken Kiev speech. Those folks don't like Rumsfeld, and they don't like this Administration's muscular foreign policy. I attribute comments like this to them:
Certainly not in the first Bush Administration."The interagency process is completely dysfunctional," says one Republican former Cabinet secretary with decades of foreign-policy expertise. "In my experience, I've never seen it played out this way."
But surely the former Cabinet secretary can remember the famous foreign policy quarrels between Al Haig and the rest of the merry Reagan crew (incidentally, when the policy shop at DoD was about as strong as it is under the current Administration). And that "process" probably appeared just as "dysfunctional" to some.
I put those terms in quotes because different decisionmaking structures are employed by different Presidents, and there's no consensus in political science that any one is "best." But people who have worked under a certain structure are indeed likely to believe theirs was/is best.
We won't really know much definitively about the decisionmaking structures in this Administration until well after it is out of power, biographies have been written, and historians and political scientists have had a chance to try and sort out reality. It does seem to be true that NSC is not the institution that focuses policy sharply for this President. And it is also true that Rumsfeld does seem to charge ahead on foreign policy, and that DoD's policy shop is structured like it was during the Reagan Administration.
But Ignatius is so devoted to trumpeting the organizational views of the Republican Cabinet secretary he talked to that he seems to go wildly off track on North Korea (after making some interesting observations on Iraq):
Not really.A similar lack of clarity has hobbled efforts to deal with the North Korean nuclear threat. For two years, hard-liners blocked continuation of the Clinton policy of engaging Pyongyang. When the Bush administration finally reversed itself and decided to hold direct talks, it had wasted crucial time and allowed North Korean to push toward deploying nuclear weapons.
Even on the eve of direct talks last month, the administration seemed to be going in two directions at once, with Undersecretary of State John Bolton blasting Kim Jong Il as a "tyrannical rogue" just as his colleagues were about to sit down at the negotiating table with him.
The Administration has been consistent in refusing to hold bilateral talks with North Korea, all along insisting on multilateral talks. We might add that it held this position while being criticized by liberals and even some Republican "moderates" for not immediately engaging North Korea. We would also note that the Administration got what it wanted -- multilateral talks -- which can only be seen as a defeat for North Korea. Ignatius here seems to be confusing a good-cop/bad-cop approach to North Korea with differences in policy (though if Bolton's bad-cop outburst came from State, who is playing good cop? Or maybe the Administration is consistently playing bad cop on this one? Hmm). But the policy hasn't changed. If anything, it's reminiscent of Colin Powell eventually delivering the damning condemnation of Iraq's behavior to the United Nations, even as "experts" were prattling on about the deep divisions within the Bush Administration on going to war with Iraq.
Like many intellectuals and journalists, Ignatius makes the mistake of thinking the structure of the policy apparatus is the end-all/be-all of policy. And if you think about it, there's a bit of the attitude that policy filters up to the clueless President, who simply signs off on what he is sent. Here, of course, we suggest rather frequently that this first MBA President might actually be forming and influencing policy in a different manner than his predecessors, that the structure of his administration (from the CEO vice-president on down to the assistant cabinet secretary level) might well be worth studying carefully, and that it might be informative to try to get beyond the notion of the clueless President, or the dueling Secretaries of State and Defense, or even the alternately vast and secret neoconservative conspiracies.
Finally, as a complete aside, why are hawks always hardliners, but doves never softliners?
Andrew Stuttaford has the details:
"The mathematics of this problem are terribly transparent. In order to meet their self-imposed targets from the Kyoto Protocol (search) on global warming, European nations already have taxed energy, but they have not done enough. Consequently, even more restrictions are being proposed, especially by the German government. Unaffordable air conditioning will become even more expensive, killing more and more Europeans the next time the temperature reaches what passes for a few degrees above what is normal in Dallas.
Europe has effectively imposed a continuous blackout on air conditioning, and now it is paying the price."
We've reached the point in the US that air conditioning is no longer a luxury. Houses have been built around the assumption that air conditioning will be there and when it goes out, the results are disastrous.
Not living there, I don't know to what extent that is the case in Europe. I can't say I would be remarkably surprised if they were built to account for air conditioning and that was just overlooked in the excitement of "doing something" for the environment.
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