EU Dissolving Into Recriminations

With the collapse of the EU constitution, the leaders of Europe that put their personal and national prestige on the line in its support have suddenly found themselves looking for a way to lay blame off onto someone else for the EU failure. That has led to the eruption of recriminations across the Continent as the previously united leadership of the EU has dissolved into a finger-pointing club:

A bitter war of words has erupted among EU states after the failure to reach an agreement on the union's future budget.

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder blamed UK and Dutch obduracy for one of the EU's "gravest" crises.

UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw expressed sadness, but said the failure could prove a turning point.

The EU's current president Jean Claude Juncker said he was ashamed poorer countries had offered to cut their EU income to reach a deal.

The summit collapsed after Britain refused to accept a demand by France and some other countries to accept a reduction in its EU rebate.

The BBC's correspondent in Brussels, William Horsley, says the recriminations mark perhaps the deepest and most spectacular bust-up ever in the EU.

Instead of actually addressing the central problem of the failure, people like Jacques Chirac and Schroeder want to pick nits about peripheral economic issues to distract from their utter inability to understand why the pact failed. French voters rejected the pact because they didn't want to reform their socialist economy to meet the EU requirements, and yet Chirac attacked the British rebate in the budget summit as the problem. The Dutch worried about Turkish integration and the destructive manner in which the euro was imposed on their economy, but Germany disdainfully dismissed them as a case of attitude problem. The British offered to give up part or all of its euro rebate if the French would quit subsidizing their agriculture, and the France called the UK "arrogant".

All of this amounts to nothing more than a sleight-of-hand. The true issue for EU integration is that no country is willing to let go of its sovereignty to make it a reality. The French want French economics imposed on Europe, and Britain isn't willing to return to the Edward Heath days to do it. The Germans want rock-solid stabilization for their currency, but the other nations aren't willing to adhere to debt control to get there. None of them have shown the necessary desire to create a nation-state of Europe that supercedes their nationalistic and ethnic divisions.

Instead of addressing those issues, the European leaders have focused on the secondary and tertiary minutiae of EU politics. They have to keep the focus on the trees rather than address the forest -- otherwise, they would have to admit that their project of European integration has no hope of success. Ironically, their frustration has led to diplomatic ruptures that could render all these questions moot.

Prayers Needed For Fellow Blogger

For those CQ readers who have followed the blog for a while, you remember that Sean from Everything I Know Is Wrong is not just a fellow Minneapolis blogger -- and an excellent writer -- but also is my daughter-in-law's uncle as well as being a good friend of mine. Sean and his wife Karen have opened their home to us on many occasions, making us part of their family for holidays, special occasions -- really, any time.

Sean had a congenital heart defect that he had tolerated for his entire life, but recently it became necessary for him to have surgery to correct the problem. Sean's surgery went well and he seemed to be recovering quickly, but two days ago he had a serious setback. He's back in the hospital, and while it looks like the doctors have done a good job in catching the issue before it did its worst, he has some problems to overcome.

I'd ask CQ readers to include Sean and his wife, and his two children as well, in your prayers in the next few weeks. When he feels more himself, he plans on returning to his blog. If I can, I'll post this at EIKIW in order to let Sean's regular readers know what's happening. Sean and his family are among the most gracious people I know; let's show them that the blogosphere can recognize that quality amongst ourselves. Leave your wishes for them all here in these comments or in an e-mail to Sean.

Enjoy A Steaming Hot Cup o' Debt

Do you remember when fifty cents would get a thirsty man a cup of coffee, when hot java represented the common and inexpensive breakfast drink that united the various economic classes of America? Well, those days are gone, thanks to the marketing genius of places like Starbucks, which has turned that simple cup of coffee into a dizzying variety of blends, lattes, espressos, and the like -- and all of them more expensive than a typical drink at a bar. The power of the economic transformation made Seattle one of the most important business centers of the western US in the 1990s.

Now, in a bit of irony, the very success that Starbucks created for its home city of Seattle may wind up sinking the hopes and dreams of its next generation in java-flavored waves of debt. The high prices, easy credit, and addictive nature of Starbucks and other competitors have become an obstacle for students who wish to pursue higher eduction:

At a Starbucks across the street from Seattle University School of Law, Kirsten Daniels crams for the bar exam. She's armed with color-coded pens, a don't-mess-with-me crease in her brow and what she calls "my comfort latte."

She just graduated summa cum laude , after three years of legal training that left her $115,000 in debt. Part of that debt, which she will take a decade to repay with interest, was run up at Starbucks, where she buys her lattes.

The habit costs her nearly $3 a day, and it's one that her law school says she and legions like her cannot afford.

It borders on apostasy in this caffeine-driven town (home to more coffee shops per capita than any major U.S. city, as well as Starbucks corporate headquarters), but the law school is aggressively challenging the drinking habits of students such as Daniels.

This may sound rather inconsequential, especially to law schools, but they consider this to be a real threat to students and the law in the long run. Most students going to law school do so on student loans or other borrowed money that has to be repaid, with interest, after graduation. Tuition, books, and boarding cost enough as it is and already create post-graduate hurdles that impact career decisions afterwards. But if one adds a single three-dollar latte five days a week, the economic cost of repayment comes to over $4,000, according to Erika Lim, the law school's director of career services.

Even more troubling, she also calculates that simply drinking the cheaper, old-fashioned cup of coffee can save a person over $55,000 over a thirty-year period, with interest. That's a number that won't make the coffeehouses happy.

Why do law schools worry about the cost of a cup of coffee? They see many of their students adding unnecessary and significant amounts of debt to their post-graduate liabilities, and those liabilities impact the kind of law that its students will practice. Instead of pursuing careers as public defenders, whose salaries run in the $40-50K range, the economics of their debt will force them to focus on more lucrative areas such as corporate law. Eventually the extended competition for those positions will mean more will fail after graduation, and more loans will default. The decreased competition for the public-defender positions (and other lower-level positions) will create a need to pay more to compete for applicants -- and that cost will transfer to the communities which serve them, if they're willing to pay for them in the first place.

The basic problem, however, is the impulse to live like the rich while operating only on credit. It seems rather ironic that simple coffee should have become such a luxury that it creates this conundrum.

ADDENDUM: Good comments on this, and I should have made myself more clear. I'm not advocating for intervention, and I don't think the law school is arguing for it, either. What they want is for their students to understand the economic impact of their choices (smoking would be another bad and expensive habit). And I think the real point is the American bad habit of living like the rich while borrowing money like mad to keep up. Starbucks isn't the villain, but they could be just the latest enabler.

Durbin: I'm Sorry You Didn't Comprehend My Genius

Under fire for his remarks comparing humiliation techniques for interrogations at Gitmo to the atrocities of Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union's gulags, and the Khmer Rouge's killing fields, Senator Dick Durbin has finally attempted to calm the waters with a statement of "regret":

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said Friday that he regretted any misunderstandings caused by his comments earlier this week comparing American interrogators at Guantanamo Bay to Nazis. The White House, Senate Republicans and others had called for an apology after Durbin's comments Tuesday. ...

On Friday, Durbin tried to clarify the issue. "My statement in the Senate was critical of the policies of this Administration, which add to the risk our soldiers face," he said in a statement released Friday afternoon. "I have learned from my statement that historical parallels can be misused and misunderstood. I sincerely regret if what I said caused anyone to misunderstand my true feelings: Our soldiers around the world and their families at home deserve our respect, admiration and total support."

This, of course, is the classic example of the non-apology apology. Note that he doesn't retract a word of what he said. He says that he regrets if others misunderstood his "true feelings", not that what he said was wrong and historically inept. Basically, this is the translation one is meant to hear:

I'm sorry you were too stupid to understand me.

If this is the best that Durbin can do after comparing the men and women of our armed forces to Nazis and Stalin's goons, as well as comparing Islamofascist terrorists to Japanese-American victims of WWII detention centers, then he's a bigger idiot than I thought.

UPDATE: Hugh Hewitt notes that he specifically told a Chicago radio audience that he had "no regrets" this morning:

Q. No regrets on the statements you made?

Durbin: No, I don't, and I'll tell you why. I went to the floor and read a memo from the FBI. This isn't something I made up.

No, unfortunately the Democrats have been spouting the military=Nazis line for decades (and Bush=Hitler since 2001). Durbin didn't make it up.

NDP: Ethics Commissioner A Lapdog, Not A Watchdog

Despite their last-minute partnership on a budget amendment with the Liberal Party that allowed Paul Martin to hold onto power, the NDP has lost patience with Parliament's ethics commissioner for dragging his feet on investigating their Grit allies. NDP leadership has called for the resignation of Bernard Shapiro and the appointment of a more active ethics watchdog:

Parliament's independent ethics watchdog is an incompetent "wet noodle" who should be replaced, critics say.

Bernard Shapiro, named ethics czar by the Liberals last year, has been asked in recent months to look into at least two cases of alleged conflict in the Liberal cabinet.

He has not released final reports in either case, and has been cast by the opposition as a bumbling foot-dragger.

Now, the NDP says Shapiro has declined to expand an inquiry into the controversial Grewal tapes affair to include the prime minister.

They have demanded an explanation, and MP Ed Broadbent says he will formally call for Shapiro's resignation next week.

This development should shake the Martin coalition, and perhaps NDP leader Jack Layton as well. All political calculations have included NDP as a coalition partner in the Liberal minority government. If the NDP breaks away, having accomplished what they wanted on the budget already, the Liberals cannot withstand another confidence motion. Martin could prorogue Parliament, but he will have to reconvene it sometime next year -- and in the meantime, these ethics issues will continue to fester.

The NDP is not the only critical voice being reported about Shapiro and his lack of response. The Tories, through deputy leader Peter MacKay, referred to Shapiro with the "wet noodle" epithet, but their displeasure with Shapiro is understandable given the politics involved. The Tories also want the Grewal tapes investigation expanded into the Prime Minister's office, as his chief of staff played a central role in that scandal. However, much more troubling are the allegations and possibility of court action from Democracy Watch, a non-partisan group which has accused Shapiro of acting out of a conflict of interest with the Liberals:

Duff Conacher, spokesman for the public interest group Democracy Watch, is even more critical.

"I think it's generous to say incompetence when it amounts to bias."

The group plans to press Shapiro to step aside while his work over the last year is independently reviewed. If he refuses, Democracy Watch will ask a court to order such a probe by the end of July, Conacher said.

He has repeatedly assailed Shapiro for appointing Borden Ladner Gervais, a law firm with close Liberal ties, to investigate allegations that former Immigration Minister Judy Sgro was in conflicts of interest. She resigned in January to clear her name. But Shapiro, citing various delays and legal snags, has still not released his final report.

Conacher says Shapiro has shown a disturbing tendency to protect public officials rather than investigate legitimate complaints of rule-breaking.

Just when it looked like Martin had escaped vote-counting for the summer, it looks like he may have to gird up for battle again. If he can't convince the NDP to back off, deal-making alone appears highly unlikely to save the Liberal grip on power. Either Martin will have to endure an ethics probe that may well develop even more revelations of corruption and scandal, or he will have to prorogue Parliament and force the entire nation to wait it out until next year.

Salon, Rolling Stone Team Up To Promote Pseudoscience

ABC plans to broadcast an interview with Robert Kennedy, Jr on the supposed link between autism and thimerosal in children's vaccines. Salon and Rolling Stone paired up to run an article on this subject earlier called Deadly Immunity, which advocates the fear-mongering about the supposed dangers of life-saving vaccinations. The blog Respectful Insolence takes Salon, Rolling Stone, and Kennedy apart over the biased presentation and the scientific ignorance displayed in the article:

It's a one-sided account by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. of the supposed link between thimerosal in vaccines and autism that is being promoted by antivaccine activists as an indictment of the government and pharmaceutical companies. ...

The article repeats the usual canard about how autism was unknown before the 1940's, which, coincidentally was when thimerosal-containing vaccines were first used. The article even goes so far as to claim:

The disease was unknown until 1943, when it was identified and diagnosed among 11 children born in the months after thimerosal was first added to baby vaccines in 1931.

No, the reason the disease was "unknown" until 1943 was because it was not described as a specific condition by Dr. Leo Kanner until 1943, after which Dr. Hans Asperger described a similar condition that now bears his name in 1944. Before that, although Dr. Eugen Bleuler had coined the term "autism" in 1911, no specific diagnostic criteria existed for the disease. Even for decades after 1943 autism was not infrequently confused with mental retardation or schizophrenia, and over the last two decades the diagnostic criteria for autism and autism spectum disorders have been widened. In any case, if thimerosal in vaccines were the cause of autism, we would expect autism rates in Denmark and Canada to have plummeted recently, because Denmark eliminated thimerosal from its vaccines by 1995 and Canada removed them around the same time. No such decrease in autism rates has occurred in either country, even though there has been more than enough time for such a decrease to make itself apparent if there were truly a link between mercury exposure and autism. I would ask the mercury-autism activists: If this particular correlation does mean causation, if mercury in thimerosal is indeed a major cause or contributor to autism, why is it, then, that autism rates have not started to fall dramatically in Denmark and Canada by now? That there has been no such decrease is very strong epidemiological evidence that there is no link.

Orac, a surgeon and a scientist, has plenty more to say on this issue. Hopefully ABC will present a more balanced and less sensational look at the thimerosal issue than either Salon or Rolling Stone apparently delivered.

Ahh, Democrats ... They're So Cute When They Play Make-Believe

Dana Milbank, of all people, notes the folly of a handful of Congressional Democrats yesterday in pretending to hold a committee hearing on articles of impeachment for George Bush. Just like little girls having a tea party, the Democrats brought in realistic-looking props and played their parts just as if the meeting was real. It was so cute:

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

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

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

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

As Dana Milbank wryly points out, it's easy to be lucky with witnesses and to reach the conclusions you like when you play make-believe. John Conyers almost sounds like he's completely disconnected from reality in his insistence on formalities, but as little girls will tell you, you have to really play the role if you want to enjoy these tea parties.

Unfortunately, when you invite other children to play along, sometimes they want to change the tea into mud and start flinging it around. Conyers and the other little ladies had to clean up after their pal Ray McGovern, who spoiled the mood (and the crumpets) when he changed the game to Pin The Blame On The Jews:

The session took an awkward turn when witness Ray McGovern, a former intelligence analyst, declared that the United States went to war in Iraq for oil, Israel and military bases craved by administration "neocons" so "the United States and Israel could dominate that part of the world." He said that Israel should not be considered an ally and that Bush was doing the bidding of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

"Israel is not allowed to be brought up in polite conversation," McGovern said. "The last time I did this, the previous director of Central Intelligence called me anti-Semitic."

This delighted the other little girls in the neighborhood, who clapped with glee and told fairy tales of Secret Jewish Conspiracies:

At Democratic headquarters, where an overflow crowd watched the hearing on television, activists handed out documents repeating two accusations -- that an Israeli company had warning of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and that there was an "insider trading scam" on 9/11 -- that previously has been used to suggest Israel was behind the attacks.

Well, you know how little girls play these games. At first, they just want to feel grown up and important, but as they get more enthusiastic about their make-believe party, they'll do almost anything to keep the other children interested. It's cute because it's mostly harmless; it keeps the children occupied and out from underfoot so that the adults can get some work done.

We should just be grateful that the adults remain in charge in Washington these days. It also helps when the American electorate can see clearly which party deals with reality, and which party consists of make-believe and fairy tales.

UPDATE: While Milbank and the Washington Post had the sense not to fall for this foolishness, Scott Shane and the New York Times apparently didn't have a clue as to the nature of this "hearing". Notice that Shane never bothered to report the anti-Israeli comments of McGovern or the paranoid conspiracy theories of the activists involved in it.

VRWC Sighting At The Gray Lady

Mickey Kaus notes that the New York Times has discovered a Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy behind the publication and promotion of the smear-job biography of Hillary Clinton, written by Ed Klein. Raymond Hernandez ensures that all of the VRWC elements are included in his report, including Richard Mellon Scaife, talk radio, Swift Boat vets (really!), and the supposedly lock-step Internet sites of conservatives:

Republican and conservative activists are behind a vigorous campaign to promote a controversial new biography about Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, with some even suggesting that the book will help dash any presidential aspirations she might have. ...

The publisher, Sentinel, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) that focuses on conservative views, has added to the atmosphere surrounding the publication. In a catalog sent to bookstores, the publisher, part of Pearson Plc., compared the book with the campaign by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a group that attacked the Vietnam record of Senator John Kerry in the 2004 presidential race.

In addition, the financing for a conservative Web site that is promoting the book comes partly from Richard Mellon Scaife, a longtime foe of the Clintons who tapped his fortune in the 1990's to finance a project at The American Spectator magazine to dig up damaging information about the couple.

Among the other nuggets that Hernandez manages to find out -- other than that a website to which Scaife contributes funds likes the book, hardly a surprise -- is that NewsMax offers it as a free gift for subscribers and that the Conservative Book Club has it at the top of a page devoted to critical books on the Clintons. That's pretty thin gruel. After all, wouldn't such a book qualify, even if its criticisms amounted to little more than tawdry, unsusbtantiated gossip? I wouldn't spend a cent on it, but if I was asked to list such materials, it would probably go on top, being the newest of its ilk. It doesn't surprise me that NewsMax is giving it away, either; I suspect many others will follow suit when the book drops with a thud in the marketplace.

Conservatives who don't foam at the mouth have already expressed revulsion at the rape allegations that Sentinel leaked to generate prepublication interest in the biography. Hernandez, who probably could number all the conservatives he knows on one hand and still have enough fingers left to type this poorly-researched tripe, didn't bother to report that reaction on the Internet. Sites such as CQ, QandO, and others that Mickey points out recommended that conservatives give this Kitty Kelley-like trash a wide berth.

Hernandez also neglects to mention the pedigree of its author, Ed Klein. Klein's name doesn't come up, oddly, until the eleventh paragraph of the article. In fact, Hernandez quotes David Brock in criticizing the VRWC conspiracy to sell the book three paragraphs before his readers find out that the author used to be the editor for New York Times Magazine. Hernandez never gets around to mentioning that Klein also worked as the editor in chief for Newsweek, hardly a bastion of conservative thought, especially these days.

Hernandez' biased hack job paints a highly incomplete picture of conservative attitudes towards Ed Klein and his new gossip tome. Too bad that the NY Times has lost touch so thoroughly with the right side of the political spectrum that it can't even do the most basic research on it.

Iraqi Democracy Working As We Capture Another Zarqawi Lieutenant

In another sign that the Iraqis have started to get the hang of democracy, the new government announced that it had successfully completed negotiations with leading Sunni groups to involve them in the writing of the new Constitution:

Iraqi political leaders reached a compromise Thursday to include more Sunni Muslim Arabs on the committee responsible for writing the country's new constitution, ending weeks of stalemate and raising hopes that the document can be crafted before the panel's deadline expires in two months.

"The problem is solved and ended. The Sunnis will participate in the process of writing the constitution," said Tariq Hashimi, the secretary general of the Iraqi Islamic Party, a leading Sunni organization. ...

Under the compromise, the new panel will include members of the existing committee, 15 additional Sunni Arabs with full voting rights and 10 more Sunnis in an advisory, non-voting role. A member of Iraq's Sabean sect, an ancient religious group, will also be added and allowed to vote.

Everyone had to give up a little bit to make this compromise work. The Kurds, for example, had to allow the Sunnis to have more representation on the council, although the two groups are roughly equal in the general Iraqi population -- and the Kurds took part in the election. Those Shi'ites that tend to distrust secularism had to accept the fact that the inclusion of Sunnis will ensure that the new Iraqi system will not resemble the Iranian model. The Sunnis themselves won most of what they said they wanted, but by doing so they have accepted responsibility for whatever constitution comes out of the parliament. With their demands met, they have accountability for the result.

Despite the doom and gloom of reporting from Iraq -- and this Post dispatch provides no exception, as it interrupts the narrative to talk about two unrelated bombings -- this shows that democracy continues apace in Baghdad. Just as anywhere else, democracy creates slow, frustrating progress on political issues as many people get a chance to argue for their positions. Negotiations between factions necessarily take time as the opposite sides start discarding the desirable to hold onto the essential, whether liberal vs conservative, property owners vs renters, or Sunni vs Shi'a. It's amusing in a dark and cynical way that so many people in the world's oldest democracy see the slow give-and-take process as an indication of failure and gloom rather than recognize it for its similarities to our own politics.

The Post also reports on the capture of Mohammed Khalad, aka Abu Talha, another of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's lieutenants. Typically, it holds that off to the final two paragraphs of the report, making sure that the bombings get more coverage. In fact, the manner of Khalaf's capture provides the essence of the futility of Zarqawi's jihad:

Alston announced that multinational forces in the northern city of Mosul had apprehended a key member of al Qaeda in Iraq, the insurgent group led by Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian. Mohammed Khalaf, known as Abu Talha, was captured Tuesday without a fight, though he had vowed not to be taken alive and was known to wear an explosive vest at all times, Alston said.

The arrest was made possible by tips from local residents, Alston said. Since Zarqawi declared in May that it was permissible to kill civilians in attacks against security forces, Alston said, "we are getting reporting that cells, as part of his network, are concerned about the consequence of this behavior and the consequence of what they've done to the Iraqi people. The Iraqi people increasingly are exposing the insurgents."

The Iraqi people understand perfectly what's at stake. Even if some of them had sympathy and admiration for the so-called insurgency at first, they've long since realized that Zarqawi doesn't care about Iraqis at all. They're putting their money, and in some cases their lives, on democracy. Even Abu Talha couldn't bring himself to commit suicide rather than be captured. What kind of message do you think that sends to the rest of the jihadists in Iraq?

Congress Delivers Ultimatum To UN: Reform Or Starve

Henry Hyde has proposed a bill that would require thirty-nine separate reforms for the United Nations to complete by 2008, 32 of them by 2007, in order to avoid having half of its American dues withheld. It will compete against a bill by Tom Lantos that demands reform but doesn't require a cutoff of dues, leaving that question to the State Department. The two bills will come up for a vote today, sending a message to Turtle Bay of American exasperation with its corruption, graft, and lack of accountability:

"Over the years, as we listened to the counsels for patience, the U.N.'s failings have grown," said House International Relations Committee Chairman Henry Hyde, R-Ill., sponsor of the measure. "The time has finally come where we must in good conscience say 'enough.'"

Hyde was joined by lawmakers with a litany of complaints against what they said was the U.N.'s lavish spending, its coddling of rogue regimes, its anti-America, anti-Israel bias and recent scandals such as the mismanagement of the oil-for-food program in Iraq and the sexual misconduct of peacekeepers.

The Telegraph in the UK sounds a more desperate note about the response:

American diplomats tried to rescue the United Nations yesterday. They urged congressional leaders to reject legislation which would effectively bankrupt the world body.

A Republican-sponsored Bill which would cut the American contribution to the UN by half reached the House floor yesterday. As America contributes 22 per cent of the budget, such a reduction would cripple UN activities.

"Withholding US dues to the UN may sound like smart policy but would be counterproductive," the eight former ambassadors wrote. "It would create resentment, build animosity and actually strengthen opponents of (UN) reform."

The group included prominent former American representatives at the UN, including Madeleine Albright.

The Telegraph doesn't mention that the group also includes conservative stalwart Jeanne Kirkpatrick, who also apparently speaks for the Bush administration. While one can imagine that the Hyde version appeals to the White House's attitude towards the UN these days, officially Bush opposes cutting off UN funds. And as odd as it sounds, the Lantos approach actually makes more sense.

Looking at this problem of UN corruption rationally, it becomes rather obvious that we don't have that many options and only a couple of opportunities for any real leverage. No mechanism exists for expelling a corrupt and/or incompetent executive, and even if one did, the US would quickly find itself in the minority in both the Security Council and the General Assembly. The kleptocracies and tinpot dictatorships will want to keep Kofi right where he is; it's helpful for to have someone for sale in charge at the UN -- especially when they know his price. The rest of the countries will hang onto him just to keep the US from getting a pro-American Secretary General to replace him.

The only item we hold over the UN and Annan is the amount of dues we pay to keep the doors open. However, that's a gun that only fires once. After we cut off the funding, we can only keep it off; we have no effective follow-up option for leverage. Hyde addresses this in part by having us cut off funds in stages, but with a 50% drop as our starting point, the remainder becomes less relevant. In this case, the threat of suspending all or part of our payments probably provides more of an incentive than the actual suspension would do.

Let's try the Lantos approach. I don't think that Bush and Rice would hesitate to use that power if they saw it would create more benefit for the US to starve the failure rather than feed it. I like the idea of the decision to do so remaining with the executive, in this case. While Hyde is correct that Congress controls the purse, the Executive should control foreign policy, as they conduct diplomacy and remain closer to the problems and solutions than Congress. In 2007 and 2008, if reforms are not forthcoming and the Bush administration proves itself too timid to demand them --so far, not a problem -- then revisit the Hyde approach.

Durbin Oddly Silent About The Torture Closer To Home

Dick Durbin set himself apart in the Senate on Tuesday by proclaiming that one could not tell the difference between the behavior of detainees at Gitmo by American military person and that of Nazis, Stalin's gulag guards, or Pol Pot. Despite a national furor over his remarks, Durbin has refused to retract them, although he laughingly added yesterday that it was wrong to think that he had minimized the horrors of the Holocaust and the gulags by equating them with a lack of climate control and indoor plumbing in Gitmo interrogation rooms.

However, in his zeal to protect America from the Creeping New Fascism^TM of American servicemen, Durbin somehow missed an opportunity to find similar horrors much closer to home. John in Carolina notes that Durbin's political ally and fellow Democrat in Chicago, Cook County Sheriff Michael Sheahan, operates a jail that sounds like it has a lot more problems than Gitmo or anything else run by the American military.

Let's see if we can guess where the following abuses took place -- Gitmo or Cook County:

In one incident, an elite squad of 40 guards took over a maximum-security [unit] ... for the sole purpose of beating and terrorizing the prisoners. A jail investigator determined that the guards' misconduct was covered up by ... medical personnel, who filed false reports and refused or delayed treatment to the prisoners, and by the ... inspector general, who refused to cooperate with the investigation. In the other incident, five inmates in a special incarceration unit ... alleged that they were beaten by 20 or more ... as they lay cuffed and shackled on the floor.

Was that done in the sunny climes of our Cuban installation? No -- that happened in Sheahan's Chi-town jail, in 1999 and 2000. Durbin's pal promised that his jail would improve and that reports of torture and abuse would stop. And they did, mostly because unlike the whistleblowers at Abu Ghraib who were lauded for their efforts to end the isolated cases of abuse at that prison, Sheahan made sure he got rid of the squealers at the Cook County lockup.

Let's try this again. Gitmo or Cook County:

[A] prisoner ... said he was beaten unconscious by guards who had wrapped handcuffs around their fists to make the beating worse. ... Several days later, the whites of his eyes were nearly obscured by the red from blood vessels that had ruptured during the beating, and deep lacerations were held together by staples that had been applied to his scalp. Late last year ... another prisoner ... told of being dragged by several guards through a fire of burning paper and debris that had been raging in the cellblock. His account of this abuse was substantiated by blisters and deep burn marks on his leg.

Now that sounds like what Saddam did on off days when he wasn't feeling all that dastardly -- so this had to have happened at Gitmo, right? Wrong. That's still Durbin's pal Sheahan's Cook County lockup. Why hasn't Durbin taken to the floor of the Senate to decry this treatment? One would think that a man who wants to protect America from the taint of torture and abuse in order to ensure our purity might start in his own back yard.

We'll start taking Durbin seriously when he calls for the National Guard in Illinois to take over the Cook County Jail and demands a federal investigation of his political ally Michael Sheahan, for years of allegations involving abuses much more profound than anything contained in that silly e-mail Durbin read on the floor of the Senate on Tuesday. Until then, chalk up Durbin's feigned moral outrage to the worst kind of political opportunism.

Dick Durbin: The Ring Of Familiarity

Tuesday's rant from Dick Durbin has enraged members of the Senate and the military, as he equated military personnel at Gitmo with Nazis, Stalinists, and the Khmer Rouge while also drawing moral equivalence between the Japanese-American WWII detainees and the Islamofascist prisoners of Camp X-Ray. Today, Durbin refused to apologize or back down appreciably from his comments:

Defending himself, the Senate's No. 2 Democrat said Thursday it was "just plain wrong" to say he was diminishing past horrors. He said he was comparing interrogation techniques that the FBI report said were used at Guantanamo with those in foreign detainee camps.

"This is the type of thing you would expect from a repressive regime. This is not the type of thing you would expect from the United States," Durbin said.

This kind of obstinacy sounded familiar to me, as it did to long-time CQ reader and friend River Rat. Both he and I thought back to an earlier time and decided that Durbin's allegations echoed a bit of American history, another time when the forces of the Left gathered to undermine the American will to fight. First, let's review the hyperbolic, hysteric, and idiotic rant of Durbin:

"If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime -- Pol Pot or others -- that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners."

Mr. Durbin also likened the treatment of terror suspects at the prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's decision to authorize the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

"It took us almost 40 years for us to acknowledge that we were wrong, to admit that these people should never have been imprisoned. It was a shameful period in American history," Mr. Durbin said.

Both of us found the logical antecedent to Durbin's historically ignorant analogies -- in the history of the US Senate, ironically enough. Doesn't this sound just like an echo of Dick Durbin this week?

"They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, tape wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the country side of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country."

Now granted, John Kerry at least had the sense to compare American military personnel to ravaging Mongol hordes. All of their victims had perished centuries earlier, and no one took inconvenient pictures of the genocide nor built museums meant to remind everyone in perpetuity of Khan's atrocities. Durbin doesn't have the intelligence to understand the difference. Of course, Kerry tried out his Christmas in Cambodia fables about President Richard Nixon being on the radio denying his presence across the Viet Nam border in 1986 during the height of the Cold War, lying about the corruption of an executive who hadn't yet taken office to undermine efforts by the Reagan administration to thwart Soviet and Cuban influence in Central America.

But Durbin isn't just echoing Kerry in these statements. For instance, Congressman Parren Mitchell said much the same thing in 1971 about the armed forces of the US, in his opening statement for the Dellums Committe on War Crimes in Viet Nam:

We have begun hearings today to investigate the military policy used in Vietnam which appears to us to foster war crimes. We are concerned with such schemes as free-fire zones, search and destroy missions, mass resettlement of peasantry and the so-called "bodycount mania." Since the Dept of Defense [DOD] acknowledges the use of these tactics, we wish to illustrate graphically what happens when such tactics are translated into action. Vietnam has been called the ultimate model war of attrition where civilians die by the score for every combat soldier killed. Our interest here is in the suspect military policy, not in uncovering war tames, but it is likely that we shall hear testimony as repugnant to the nat'l conscience as My Lai.

Congressman Sieberling joined his colleague and upped the ante with a Nazi reference for good measure:

[One] of the most shocking and depressing aspects of the disclosures of the German atrocities after World War II was the fact that so few citizens in that great nation raised their voices in protest or even took pains to learn the truth. This is understandable in a people living under the grip of a totalitarian regime; it is unthinkable in a human and civilized democracy. We must know the truth before we can deal effectively with our nations problems.

It seems that the Democrats have, for the past four decades, ever been ready to smear the American military during a time of war -- particularly with analogies to Nazis -- to bolster their political fortunes at the nation's expense. This hysterical and self-righteous namecalling turned out to be almost completely false in Viet Nam, but we learned that well after we ran out on our erstwhile allies in the South. They are even more ludicrous today, when the Durbins, Kerrys, and others have gotten so desperate for political attention that they now feel the need to toss out genocidal equivalences three at a time for what amounts to nothing more than humiliation techniques, invoking Nazis, Stalinists, and most egregiously the Khmer Rouge that their propaganda allowed to take power in the 1970s.

Durbin doesn't appear to be deranged; he's just following a shameful tradition by radical Democrats of sapping American will to fight and win a war.

NOTE: Keep an eye on Michelle Malkin, who has been collecting the links on Durbin while leading the blogswarm, along with Hugh Hewitt.

Did Reuters Stage 'Insurgent' Photo?

Photos of street fighting in Iraq have become so common that we hardly notice them anymore. Reuters, AP, AFP, and major American media outlets routinely run them with updated stories on attacks and bombings to give readers a visual that should match the text of the story to some degree. Those that don't match up with breaking news or analysis get run from the wire service to their customers, with a short caption as its only description.

Such a photograph caught the eye of CQ reader HJ, who noticed something odd about the fighters. Here's the original caption that goes along with this photo:

Iraqi insurgents take up positions at a crossroads in the Iraqi town of Ramadi, west of Baghdad, June 16, 2005. Five U.S. marines were killed in Iraq when their vehicle struck a bomb near the violent western town of Ramadi, the U.S. military said on June 16. Its statement gave no details of Wednesday's attack but it was the second time in a week that insurgents have inflicted such a high death toll on marines in the same area in a single blast and strengthens the impression that guerrillas have developed more sophisticated bombing techniques. Photo by Stringer/Iraq/Reuters

Now here's the detail for the gunman on the right:

Here's what HJ noticed when he saw this picture:

What caught my eyes were the fact that the "insurgent" had his finger off the trigger and along the frame (excellent safety practice, but something not expected of an untrained insurgent, especially in a firefight). The second thing was that fact that he had his hand wrapped around the barrel, which would be very hot is he were actually firing it (especially during the summer in Iraq). The Machine gun in the picture is a Russian PK, which fires the powerful, long rimmed 7.62 cartridge, not the lighter intermediate round of the AK-47. Speaking as a "gun nut, firing such a machine gun in automatic while in that crouched position would put you on your rear end, with the barrel pointing towards the sky.

In short, this smells of a "staged" picture.

I'm no expert on guns, but it looks to me like HJ has a point. Reuters identifies the picture on its site as coming from a 'stringer'. At the very least, it calls into question the elaborate caption provided by Reuters with the picture. It could also mean that Reuters is paying al-Qaeda photographers for propaganda photos.

If any CQ readers with more expertise can provide insight on the question, please post your comments ...

Durbin: US Operates Death Camps (Without The Death)

The hysteria and historical illiteracy, not to mention irrational moral equivalency, continued on the floor of the Senate yesterday as Dick Durbin equated American military personnel at Gitmo to Nazis, Stalinist thugs, and the genocidal Pol Pot:

The Senate's No. 2 Democrat has compared the U.S. military's treatment of a suspected al Qaeda terrorist at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay with the regimes of Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin and Pol Pot, three of history's most heinous dictators, whose regimes killed millions.

In a speech on the Senate floor late Tuesday, Minority Whip Richard J. Durbin, Illinois Democrat, castigated the American military's actions by reading an e-mail from an FBI agent.

The agent complained to higher-ups that one al Qaeda suspect was chained to the floor, kept in an extremely cold air-conditioned cell and forced to hear loud rap music. The Justice Department is investigating. ...

After reading the e-mail, Mr. Durbin said, "If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime -- Pol Pot or others -- that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners."

Mr. Durbin also likened the treatment of terror suspects at the prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's decision to authorize the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

"It took us almost 40 years for us to acknowledge that we were wrong, to admit that these people should never have been imprisoned. It was a shameful period in American history," Mr. Durbin said. "I believe the torture techniques that have been used at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and other places fall into that same category."

If Durbin intended on embarrassing the Bush administration into changing its detention policy, all he wound up accomplishing was embarrassing the voters in Illinois who sent him to the Senate for that ill-educated harangue. The total number of prisoners who have died at Gitmo through neglect or murder comes to zero. Prisoners at Gitmo get there through capture on the battlefield or through intelligence work and go through an identification process to determine their involvement in terrorism against the US and the West. The purpose of Gitmo is to determine what they know about the structure of our enemy -- not a gang of street hoodlums, but a well-armed, well-financed terrorist structure that receives support from nations as well as private financiers. Their intent before capture was to kill us in our homes and businesses, preferably by the thousands if not greater. The same people who sent them succeeded in doing so on 9/11.

They are not criminals, and they do not have a right to access the American court system. Their status under the Geneva Convention is that of an unlawful combatant -- which technically means that the US could have them shot after a military tribunal. Instead, we have chosen to keep them alive and house them humanely while interrogating them thoroughly in order to save American lives. If that means they get cold, or hot, or have little accidents on the floor, then so be it. That isn't torture or even abuse.

And Durbin, who should know better, has the nerve to compare American soldiers to Nazis and Gitmo to the extermination camps they ran. If Durbin can't recall that the Nazis exterminated millions of people, deliberately, in those camps, I'm certain that Holocaust survivors in Illinois and elsewhere can remind him of that fact. If the Senator doesn't know about the estimated 2 million people who died in the gulag system, a system that was used primarily on internal political dissidents to suppress opposition to Stalin, then he should read his Solzhenitsyn. If he thinks that American soldiers operate on the same basis as Cambodia and the killing fields, he's out of his mind.

Finally, the analogy to the Japanese internment camps simply boggles the mind. The Japanese survivors of Manzanar and other camps must be shaking their heads this morning. On what basis does Durbin think that Islamofascist terrorists equate to American citizens detained on the basis of their ethnicity? That statement is so far off the mark as to call Durbin's mental health into question. Gitmo is not a camp of Muslims rounded up out of their American homes and detained for no reason other than their religion; the Gitmo detainees have plotted to kill Americans. They are the enemy. Durbin obviously has lost the capacity to understand that basic concept, a dangerous failing in a time of war.

In any case, Durbin owes the administration and the American servicemen in Gitmo and elsewhere an apology. Durbin's idiotic equating of the conditions he described from the e-mail he supposedly received to the genocide of the Jews, Cambodians, and gulag victims cheapens the horrors of those atrocities, and he owes the survivors an apology as well. His hysterical rants have damaged the war effort by providing propaganda for the Islamists with no rational basis whatsoever -- and for that, he owes everyone an apology.

The Traveling Circus Continues To Expand

The rock that Nancy Pelosi and Howard Dean picked up to throw at Tom DeLay continues to expose lots of worms instead, as the escapades of traveling Congressmen continues to expand. The Washington Post reports today that an analysis of the data now disclosed by representatives and their staffs show that some of them accept substantial travel from groups for which the Congressmen provide oversight through committee assignments:

Senior House committee Republicans and Democrats frequently travel at the expense of companies and associations in the industries they oversee, according to financial records released yesterday.

The trips are legal, as long as they are paid for by businesses and not by registered lobbyists. But the sheer volume of them -- along with the alluring destinations, not notably related to the business at hand -- could add impetus to calls for greater restrictions when the House ethics committee carries out a directive issued by Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) last month to "look at the whole travel issue."

Hastert's call for the ethics committee to provide members with clearer guidelines followed a spate of news reports about trips that lawmakers had taken in the company of lobbyists, often with a nonprofit group listed as paying the tab.

The number and extent of these junkets make the jaw drop. While there may be some argument for travel to ensure that representatives get a true picture of the issues before them, the repetition and the itineraries give the appearance that something less noble and more banal is happening with our public servants. Jim Oberstar (D), to use a Minnesota example, took four trips paid by industry and union groups with serious axes to grind before his Transportation Committee -- and that was just within 16 months. Joe Barton (R-TX) has taken several industry-financed trips since ascending to the chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee, bringing his wife along to such places as Boca Raton, Las Vegas, and Palm Springs -- all since late 2004.

Thanks to Pelosi and Dean, all of this has started to finally see the light of day. I'm sure their colleagues will thank them for picking up that rock to shed some sunlight on these legal but sleazy practices -- only next time, they'll wish the duo had stepped outside her glass house before throwing it.

Taking A Pass On The Freakers Ball

Oh, they're gonna have a Freakers Ball,
Tonight, at the Freakers Hall,
And you know you're invited, one and all ...

After weeks of waiting for an RSVP from the White House about its invitation to the UN's 60th anniversary bash in San Francisco, Turtle Bay got its answer yesterday. The United States will send a representative to the party -- Ambassador Sichan Siv:

Organizers of a celebration here to mark the 60th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations had expressed concern for weeks that the Bush administration would shun the event as a snub to the world body.

On Wednesday, organizers learned that big-name invitees - among them, President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice - would not attend.

In their place, said Nancy L. Peterson, president of the United Nations Association of San Francisco, the administration indicated that it would send Ambassador Sichan Siv, the United States representative to the United Nations Economic and Social Council.

"I am just reading into this that the administration is taking a very dubious stance symbolically toward the importance of the United Nations to the American people," she said.

Peterson misunderstands the White House response. It doesn't reflect a symbolic message about the UN's importance; it sends a direct message about its relevance and its moral stature. The Bush administration wisely decided that celebrating the anniversary of an organization that has created the largest embezzlement and corruption scheme in human history, where the graft now goes all the way to the top and whose members appear unwilling to do anything to hold its leadership accountable, sends a message that we condone its activities. Holding a gala ball with the President or any of his closest advisors in attendance, while UN peacekeepers continue to exploit the women and young girls it supposedly protects in refugee camps for sexual gratification while the same leadership wrings its hands but delays any meaningful action to stop the abuse, sends a message that we endorse that as well.

Frankly, I would have preferred that even Ambassador Siv had been given another assignment that night and the US went completely unrepresented at the Freakers Ball. With no offense intended to the ambassador, however, the level of representation shows exactly and directly how the administration feels about the unreformed United Nations, in the same manner that a nickel tip sends a server over no tip at all. While I'd like to think that the UN will get that message, it will likely cover itself in self-pity and bemoan the "unilateralism" of the Bush administration instead, and at least in San Francisco, they will find plenty of enablers and collaborators willing to excuse their corruption and obstinate incompetence to join them.

The Schiavo Finale, Lacking Finality

With the release of the autopsy results for Terri Schiavo, we now know much we didn't before, and much that we simply couldn't. Other questions went unanswered, and the coroner even created a new mystery that necessarily will go unsolved:

Although the meticulous postmortem examination could not determine the mental state of the Florida woman, who died March 31 after a judicial and legislative battle over her "right to die," it did establish the permanence of her physical condition.

Schiavo's brain damage "was irreversible . . . no amount of treatment or rehabilitation would have reversed" it, said Jon R. Thogmartin, the pathologist in Florida's sixth judicial district who performed the autopsy and announced his findings at a news conference in Largo, Fla.

Still unknown is what caused Schiavo, 41, to lose consciousness on a winter morning in 1990. Her heart beat ineffectively for nearly an hour, depriving her brain of blood flow and oxygen.

A study of her organs, fluids, bones and cells, as well as voluminous medical records, failed to support strangulation, beatings, a drug overdose, complications of an eating disorder or a rare molecular heart defect. All had been offered as theories over the past 15 years. Thogmartin said the cause will probably never be known.

The most hysterical charges involving Terri's husband were proven false, including the notion that he had injected Terri with insulin at some point to kill her. Some of the most well-publicized assertions about her activities also were shown to be wishful thinking, such as an ability to eat and drink without the feeding tube and Terri's following visual cues, which she seemingly did in the video released by her family. With her vision center destroyed, she had cortical blindness. In the opinion of the coroner after examining the brain, Terri's condition would never have improved.

However, other issues remain unresolved. An autopsy cannot determine the existence of PVS, as the coroner went out of his way to remind everyone. Dr. Thogmartin's careful analysis could find no evidence that Terri had been abused, relying on contemporaneous medical records as well as his autopsy, but could determine no cause for her collapse. That's unfortunate, as the lack of finality on that point will mean that speculation will endure forever.

What we have left are the issues that started the debate in the first place. Unlike today's New York Times editorial's assertion on the subject, this was not a "right to die" case. Terri had never requested to die, not with any transparency or formality. All we had for witnesses on her state of mind was a husband who waited until after he had won a substantial lawsuit to recall a conversation in which Terri made an offhand comment about not wanting to live on a respirator, and two of his relatives who corroborated him. The husband had a conflict of interest in the matter, having started a new relationship with another woman and fathering two children. On the other side, Terri's parents and siblings were willing to take over her medical care and the responsibility for its costs.

Amd most of all, as the coroner affirmed yesterday, Terri was not dying.

Despite all of this, Florida decided that it would deliberately kill Terri on the basis of her husband's wishes, without any living will or formal indication of her state of mind. As Rick Santorum said yesterday, such a ruling should have been allowed to receive a de novo hearing in federal court for a review, just as any death-penalty case would get. Without that, essentially Terri's fate rested on two men, Michael Schiavo and Judge George Greer, who refused to release the case to another court at any point in order to get a new hearing on the merits in front of another judge. And when the state decides to kill someone who isn't dying on their own -- as opposed to stopping artificial breathing/cardiac support for those who lack any ability to survive without it -- it should have more substantial oversight before doing so, and it should have more to rely on than an estranged husband's belated recollection of a superficial, general conversation as its basis.

CFACT Speech A Hit, I Think ...

I just returned from the University of Minnesota and my speech to CFACT. We had a great audience for the event; what we lacked in numbers was more than balanced by enthusiasm. CFACT is one of the few conservative student groups on the U of M campus. They're busy building themselves into a strong voice, and it's great to see students speaking out for their beliefs and their politics in an environment that has much more sympathy for the opposite end of the political spectrum.

Martin Andrade, a MOB member, also belongs to CFACT and live-blogged the speech (using my laptop!). I'm sure he's much too kind, but it gives me some great feedback for the next time out. Martin also has a pretty danged cool setup for audioblogging, which he did with an after-speech interview with me. He uses his cell phone to call into a voice-mail system, which records the call and automatically posts the MP3 file to his blog. Hmmm ... gotta get me one of those. The interview took place at the Big 10 pub just off the campus, where we coincidentally ran into Larry Colson of the Bush 2004 campaign in Minnesota. We had a great debate about state and local politics for an hour, and seeing Larry again was a blast.

Anyway, thanks to everyone involved, and big thanks to King, Mitch, and Chad for promoting the speech the last two days.

The Stephen Harper Road Show, Coming Soon

Yesterday morning I wrote that Stephen Harper needs to get out and engage the Canadian public personally in order to improve his image and the Conservative Party's accessibility to the electorate. Whether the issue of his declining polling numbers lies with a hostile media or himself, clearly Harper needs to actively work to improve the situation. Apparently, I get results (yes, I'm joking), as the Tory leader announced today that he will start making personal appearances around the country:

Get ready for the new and improved Stephen Harper.

The federal Conservative leader will criss-cross the country this summer to bolster his image and counter complaints from some Tories about a recent dramatic decline in party popularity.

People, for all kinds of reasons, have a misperception of Harper, says Tory deputy leader Peter MacKay. And, MacKay adds, Harper knows it.

"He's also come to understand that people have to like you," MacKay said outside the weekly Conservative caucus meeting on Parliament Hill.

Clearly, Harper needs to demonstrate that he can respond not just to his own caucus but also to the Canadian people. For those who blame the Canadian media filter for the problem, which may well be true, the solution cannot be for Harper to remain in Ottawa and ignore that. By getting out on the speaking circuit and pressing the flesh, Harper will bypass the media filter that Canadians mistrust and present himself in the best possible light.

Another conservative leader made a career out of doing exactly that. While significant differences exist between Harper and Ronald Reagan, the media filter affected them both in a similar manner. Reagan understood that he had to go over the heads of the reporters and editors (and Congress) and talk directly to the American voters to build his support base. People mistrusted Reagan and accused him of hidden agendas at every step of his political career, but his superior command of public speaking and his enthusiasm for reaching out directly to voters always undermined the conspiratorial blush his political opponents attempted to cast on him.

Expect the Tories to eschew confidence motions for a while, at least until Harper has had the chance to spend significant time working the ridings and re-introducing himself to Canada. If he truly has what it takes to lead the Tories back to power, the party will know it by that time.

Newspaper Circulation Scandal Turns Criminal

The scandal of fraudulent circulation numbers in the newspaper industry has expanded into a criminal conspiracy prosecution, Newsday reported earlier, with the arrest of three of its former employees for fraud:

Federal agents arrested three former Newsday [and Hoy] employees today for criminal fraud in connection with a scandal that inflated the circulation of both publications, the U.S. Department of Justice announced. ...

Newsday has disclosed that its reported circulation was inflated by about 100,000 copies on weekdays and Sundays in the 12 months ending September 2003. Last year, the Spanish language paper Hoy acknowledged that its reported daily circulation of 92,604 was inflated by about double for the same period.

Smith, who was a circulation manager at the paper, retired from Newsday in 2002. From May 2002 to May 2004 he worked as a consultant to both Newsday and Hoy, serving as their liaison to the Audit Bureau of Circulation.

Newsday reports that the scandal may be about to widen. First, several former employees of Newsday are close to reaching deals with prosecutors to testify to the conspiracies involved in inflating circulation numbers to artificially inflate ad rates. Also, the SEC has become involved due to the public nature of the companies and the potential for shareholder fraud. Both the SEC and DoJ have begun to look at the magazine industry's circulation claims as well.

Have CQ readers heard much about this scandal? The mainstream media has been relatively silent about this challenge to its credibility, at least on the financial front. Newsday has ironically provided much of the coverage for the developments on the story, but other outlets seem reluctant to pursue the topic with the same zeal that their investigative journalists chased after other corporate scandals -- say, Enron or WorldCom or Global Crossings.

In the month where the newspaper industry regaled us with endless pixels and reams of paper on self-congratulatory retrospectives on Watergate and their role in uncovering government corruption, they remain oddly mute about their own industry's fraud on advertisers and readers, even as the scandal expands. On the other hand, as the movie Broadcast News put it, it must not be news if they don't cover it -- or at least that's what they hope.

Who Are Bernard Goldberg's Top 10 Screw-ups?

Bernard Goldberg, the former CBS reporter who blew the lid off institutional media bias with his book Bias, will name the top 100 American screw-ups in his upcoming publication, 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America (and Al Franken Is #37). A press release sent to bloggers (such as Bill at INDC Journal, who also blogged about it this morning) has us guessing at the other denizens on Goldberg's list. Amazon has the following description posted:

Bernard Goldberg takes dead aim at the America Bashers (the cultural elites who look down their snobby noses at "ordinary" Americans) ... the Hollywood Blowhards (incredibly ditzy celebrities who think they're smart just because they're famous) ... the TV Schlockmeisters (including the one whose show has been compared to a churning mass of maggots devouring rotten meat) ... the Intellectual Thugs (bigwigs at some of our best colleges, whose views run the gamut from left wing to far left wing) ... and many more.

Goldberg names names, counting down the villains in his rogues' gallery from 100 all the way to 1 -- and, yes, you-know-who is number 37. Some supposedly "serious" journalists also made the list, including the journalist-diva who sold out her integrity and hosted one of the dumbest hours in the history of network television news. And there are those famous miscreants who have made America a nastier place than it ought to be -- a far more selfish, vulgar, and cynical place. ...

This is serious stuff for sure. But Goldberg will also make you laugh as he harpoons scoundrels like the congresswoman who thinks there aren't enough hurricanes named after black people, and the environmentalist to the stars who yells at total strangers driving SUVs -- even though she tools around the country in a gas-guzzling private jet.

The release gets more specific, naming Ludacris, Jerry Springer, and Michael Moore along with Franken as recipients of Goldberg's dubious honors. Having read his other works (Bias was one of my inspirations for this blog), I know that Goldberg will not spare the fringies on the Right, either. I suspect that Fred Phelps and Pat Robertson might inhabit a couple of slots, and perhaps more mainstream people like Sean Hannity might get a mention from the classically liberal Goldberg.

What I do know is that between now and the book's release on July 5th, we should have fun trying to predict the fools Goldberg names; the mystery will be good for a few laughs. So how about it? Who do CQ readers see as the Top 10 Screw-Ups In American Culture? Leave your list in the comments section, and let's have some laughs over the next few weeks.

LA Times Points Out Lynching-Apology Hypocrisy

The Los Angeles Times opinion pages runs a commentary by Andres Martinez pointing out the historical hypocrisy of the Senate in their lynching apology Monday. As I wrote yesterday, the Senate and the national news media -- including the LA Times -- studiously avoided more than a passing mention of the filibuster's central role in ensuring that the federal government could not intervene to save lynching's primarily African-American victims:

Astonishingly, Senate Resolution 39 makes no mention of the f-word, which denotes the mechanism that allows a minority of legislators to block votes. The resolution duly notes that at least 4,742 people, mostly African Americans, were lynched in the U.S. between 1882 and 1968; that nearly 200 anti-lynching bills, backed by seven presidents, were introduced in Congress during the first half of the 20th century; that the House of Representatives did pass three strong anti-lynching measures, but that the Senate never did, thus failing its "minimum and most basic of federal responsibilities" to those who were "deprived of life, human dignity, and the constitutional protections accorded all citizens of the United States." As Mary Landrieu, the Louisiana Democrat who sponsored the resolution, said, the Senate was "uniquely culpable" for Washington's failure to protect U.S. citizens from a type of domestic terrorism often orchestrated by local authorities.

What wasn't said is that the Senate was "uniquely culpable" because it cherished the filibuster — a procedural rule that enhances each member's individual power — over the Constitution. The Senate's failure to acknowledge the cause of its homicidal negligence robs its apology of much meaning or sincerity. ...

It's hardly shocking that Landrieu wanted to keep the f-word out of the resolution. She was one of those moderates who saved the filibuster from attempts by conservative Republicans to "nuke" it for judicial nominations — by allowing some of President Bush's stalled nominees to get a vote. During the Gang of 14 news conference, Landrieu exuberantly proclaimed: "I am so proud we were able to reach an agreement that truly reflects the best traditions of the Senate."

She went on to say that the deal "helps protect these cherished traditions by ensuring that the minority, even a lone individual, will continue to have the right to speak up and be heard." Her fellow sensible centrist, Republican Susan Collins of Maine, said the agreement "helps preserve the unique culture of this institution," a "culture in which legislative goals are reached with patience and perseverance."

It doesn't even mention Robert Byrd's contention that the Gang of 14 had "saved the Republic" by protecting the filibuster. This post-compromise rhetoric paired with this whitewashed apology truly insults our intelligence and perpetuates the historical fallacy of the filibuster as an instrument for Constitutional balance.

Read the whole thing. And if readers are keeping score, I have yet to see an example of the filibuster's use so profound and beneficial to the nation that it would balance out the lives it cost in lynching victims, reported and unreported.

Iraqis, Americans Free Aussie Hostage

Details are thin, but the AP reports that a joint Iraq-American security force has freed Australian hostage Douglas Wood in a military operation:

Iraqi troops, backed by U.S. forces, freed an Australian hostage after six weeks in captivity, officials said Wednesday. The release came as a suicide bomber dressed in an Iraqi army uniform blew himself up in a mess hall north of Baghdad, killing at least 25 Iraqi soldiers and injuring 27.

No details were available on the operation in Baghdad that led to the release of Douglas Wood, a 64-year-old engineer who lives in Alamo, Calif. He was abducted in late April by a militant group calling itself the Shura Council of the Mujahedeen of
Iraq.

The Australian government refused to bend to the kidnappers' demands that its 1,400 troops be withdrawn from Iraq. It sent diplomats, police and military personnel to Baghdad to seek his release.

"I am delighted to inform the House that the Australian hostage in Iraq, Mr. Douglas Wood, is safe," Prime Minister John Howard told Parliament in Canberra, Australia.

Congratulations to both of our allies for their steadfastness -- Iraq for their developing security forces, and Australia for their refusal to capitulate to terrorists. This operation sends a message to the lunatics who kidnap civilians for political purposes: you are not safe, and we will find and kill you wherever you are.

Iranian Election May Get Even More Ridiculous

No one expects the election in Iran to produce anything other than exactly what the ruling mullahs of the Supreme Council want: a pliant government that will impose the mullah's will on Iranians. To that end, the Guardian Council has weeded out any candidates who threaten to rock the boat by liberalizing the political climate in Iran, picking only those who will remain subservient to the council of mullahs. Now even that facade may be shorn away, as one of the few "reformers" in the election has warned that violence aimed at his supporters may force him to withdraw:

The leading reformist candidate in Iran's presidential election has threatened to pull out in protest at violent attacks on his supporters by religious extremists.

In an interview with the Guardian, Mostafa Moin also implied a possible link between the assaults and a spate of bombings that has killed 10 people in the run-up to Friday's poll. He said the violence was aimed at persuading people to vote for one of the hardline militarist candidates in the eight-man race. ...

On Sunday, four bombs exploded in government buildings in Ahvaz, in southern Khuzestan province, killing eight people and wounding 70 others, including children. Two people died later that day in further explosions in Tehran. Two other blasts took place in Zahedan on Monday.

On Saturday, hours before the Ahvaz bombings, Ebrahim Yazdi, a former foreign minister and leader of the Iran Freedom Movement, became the latest Moin supporter to be beaten up after arriving at the city's airport.

Iranian authorities say three little-known Arab separatist groups, aided by foreign intelligence agencies, have claimed responsibility for the Khuzestan bombings. The claim is disputed. No group has admitted the Tehran attacks, which the government says were not related to the Ahvaz incident.

Speaking aboard his campaign bus in Isfahan province, Mr Moin, the Islamic Iran Participation Front candidate, did not say who he thought was behind the blasts. Asked if he believed the attacks had official approval, he replied: "I do not consider it improbable. If they continue in this way, my supporters will hold an emergency meeting to study the situation and they will reconsider our participation in the election.

The mullahs know that their population has become increasingly restless. Twenty-six years after the Islamic Revolution, the people have tired of the slogans and the ascetic devotions demanded of them by the hard-line mullahs and want more freedom to live by their own conscience. Students especially express these frustrations -- the first generation of Iranians to grow up entirely under the auspices of deeply conservative Shi'ite Islam that the mullahs impose.

The imams see that time does not favor their movement. In an effort to retain some kind of popular support for their rule, the mullahs may be trying to scare Iranians into supporting hardliners. Alternately, they may also be trying to frighten voters into staying away from the balloting. Although the mullahs have lectured Iranians about their religious "duty" to vote, their preferred candidate, former police chief Mohammed Qalif, has said he would be satisfied of the election's legitimacy with a turnout of 40%, half of the last election.

Under these conditions, the Iranian elections reveal themselves more and more to be farcical. Moin appears to have reached the same conclusion, and his impulse to withdraw may wind up giving him more credibility in the long run than continued participation in an obvious fraud. Given that he now runs a close second to former president Akbar Rafsanjani, his withdrawal could also spark an outpouring of rage into the streets of Teheran that could end the mullahcracy for good.

UPDATE: Make sure to read the comments on this post. Longtime CQ reader Dafydd ab Hugh (and others) remind me that 'conservative' probably isn't the correct term to describe the mullahs; perhaps 'reactionary' would be better, as he suggests. Michael Ledeen, everyone's go-to-man on Iran, makes the point better than I did that Moin is the regime's idea of an acceptable Reformist candidate, which is to say that he won't reform a lot even if he does win -- which he won't. He's there for the window dressing. On the other hand, if he pulls out under duress, that might still be enough to energize the true opponents of the regime into concrete action.

Rude Protestors Ruin Commencement Ceremony

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger returned to his alma mater last night to deliver a commencement speech. Schwarzenegger did not intend on turning the graduation into a political event, but a number of protestors did just that anyway, jeering almost continuously through his speech at Santa Monica College:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's return to his alma mater turned into an exercise in perseverance when virtually his every word was accompanied by catcalls, howls and piercing whistles from the crowd.

Schwarzenegger's face appeared to redden during his 15-minute commencement address Tuesday to 600 graduates at Santa Monica College, but he ignored the shouting as he recalled his days as a student and, later, his work as a bodybuilder and actor. ... Inside the stadium, the drone from hundreds of rowdy protesters threatened to drown out the governor's voice at times. Many in the crowd erupted in boos when a police officer pulled down a banner criticizing the estimated $45 million cost of the Nov. 8 special election that Schwarzenegger proposed Monday.

The governor is backing three ballot initiatives that call for imposing a cap on state spending, stripping lawmakers of the power to draw their own districts and increasing the time it takes teachers to gain tenure.

It seems rather churlish to stage a political protest at a non-political event like this college graduation. It hijacks an evening that should have focused on the graduates, instead of some selfish and self-serving political opponents of the Governator. But if they wanted to protest, they should have observed enough decorum to allow Arnold to at least be heard by the audience in attendance. Actions like this point out a political narcissism and absolutism that reveal nothing but the immaturity of Arnold's opposition.

And what are they protesting? The fact that Arnold has called a special election for a direct democratic vote on issues that the legislature has refused to address, including the chronic reapportionment problem that has almost crippled California democracy for decades. While the costs of such an election should be considered and debated as to its necessity, calling for more democracy hardly qualifies as such a disaster that it excuses opponents from acting like idiots and ruining the evening for 600 college graduates.

The Left has no sense of proportion, especially in California, where they have behaved like the spoiled children most of them are for many years now. Last night's spectacle of disruption and rude behavior is just the latest example of the thoughtlessness and reflexive self-indulgence that typifies Leftist activities in the Golden State and elsewhere.

Canada Discovers AQ Information Trove

Canadian authorities impounded a computer and recordings from a woman whose family has ties to al-Qaeda as she entered the country, and discovered a wealth of information that may lead back to Afghanistan. The RCMP has held the laptop, DVDs, and tapes for three months, but now has to publicly give a reason for continuing to retain them to keep Zaynab Khadr from taking them back:

The RCMP and Canadian military believe they've discovered a vital cache of information on Al Qaeda that includes the whereabouts of wanted members and details of attacks on coalition forces in Afghanistan.

The information is allegedly contained in a laptop, dozens of DVDs, audiocassettes and the pages of diaries, seized by the RCMP officers who met Zaynab Khadr at Pearson airport with a search warrant as she arrived back in Canada in February, court documents state. ...

With the three-month time limit allotted to the federal police force to hold the items having now expired, the RCMP must go to a Toronto court this Friday to persuade a judge to allow them to continue doing a forensic evaluation of the seized materials. But Khadr's lawyer Dennis Edney says the Mounties are on nothing more than a "fishing expedition," and will argue that Khadr is entitled to her possessions.

Khadr, 25, said in an interview yesterday that anything found on the laptop, except personal pictures and a few "cartoons" that she downloaded, are not hers. She says she bought her laptop second-hand about seven months before coming to Canada. The audiocassettes, described in court documents as providing "significant information regarding `after-battle action reports' of Al Qaeda and Taliban insurgents" involved in attacking coalition forces in Afghanistan, were found among her father's possessions after he was killed in 2003, Khadr said.

"I think it's my right to bring what I want since I'm not breaking any laws, so I decided to bring them," she said. "Although I don't know what's on them, I still thought I'd bring them."With the three-month time limit allotted to the federal police force to hold the items having now expired, the RCMP must go to a Toronto court this Friday to persuade a judge to allow them to continue doing a forensic evaluation of the seized materials. But Khadr's lawyer Dennis Edney says the Mounties are on nothing more than a "fishing expedition," and will argue that Khadr is entitled to her possessions.

Khadr, 25, said in an interview yesterday that anything found on the laptop, except personal pictures and a few "cartoons" that she downloaded, are not hers. She says she bought her laptop second-hand about seven months before coming to Canada. The audiocassettes, described in court documents as providing "significant information regarding `after-battle action reports' of Al Qaeda and Taliban insurgents" involved in attacking coalition forces in Afghanistan, were found among her father's possessions after he was killed in 2003, Khadr said.

"I think it's my right to bring what I want since I'm not breaking any laws, so I decided to bring them," she said. "Although I don't know what's on them, I still thought I'd bring them."

The RCMP and Canadian government want more time to thoroughly investigate the tapes and determine exactly what the data means. They have already determined that the material gives information on the identity and whereabouts of AQ operatives with the Taliban and their missions. They also found songs about killing Americans and videos of an attack in Saudi Arabia on a housing area for Westerners in 2003. In other words, these aren't the normal family home videos.

Speaking of family, finding this material likely did not surprise the RCMP, as Khadr's father, Ahmed Said Khadr, was known to have been involved in radical Islamist activity by Canadian authorities. Former Prime Minister Jean Chretien had to rescue Ahmed when Pakistan charged him with bombing the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad, after the Khadrs stirred up enough public sympathy for the naturalized Canadian
citizen. After 9/11, Ahmed Khadr went to war for the Taliban against the US and died in Pakistan in 2003.

The RCMP does not mention whether they've interrogated Ms. Khadr about her good fortune in buying a laptop that just happens to coincide with the work her father has done. It's possible, after all, that she's telling the truth and she just got lucky, and that her travels and possessions tell nothing about any involvement with AQ on her part. However, she isn't the only family member to be caught red-handed. Her brother, as it turns out, is the guest of the US government in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. It looks like the entire family should be under scrutiny.

Second Cotecna OFF Memo Links Bid Win To Kofi Annan

The AP reported earlier tonight that a second Cotecna memo has surfaced, also written by Annan family friend and Cotecna VP Michael Wilson, which assured company executives that Cotecna would win the bid through "quiet but effective lobbying". The new memo appears to follow right after the previously-released memo describes the meeting Wilson had with the Secretary General where the UN executive told Wilson he could "count on his suppport":

The committee probing the U.N. oil-for-food program announced Tuesday it will again investigate Secretary-General Kofi Annan after two e-mails suggested he may have known more than he claimed about a multimillion-dollar U.N. contract awarded to the company that employed his son.

One e-mail described an encounter between Annan and officials from Cotecna Inspection S.A. in late 1998 during which the Swiss company's bid for the contract was raised. The second from the same Cotecna executive expressed his confidence that the company would get the bid because of "effective but quiet lobbying" in New York diplomatic circles.

If accurate, the new details would cast doubt on a major finding the U.N.-backed Independent Inquiry Committee made in March — that there wasn't enough evidence to show that Annan knew about efforts by Cotecna, which employed his son Kojo, to win the
Iraq oil-for-food contract. The Associated Press obtained the e-mails Tuesday.

Through his spokesman, Annan said he didn't remember the late 1998 meeting. He repeatedly has insisted that he didn't know Cotecna was pursuing a contract with the oil-for-food program.

According to British newspapers The Guardian and The Telegraph, the latest revelation has the OFF inquiry back on Annan's doorstep. The Guardian report clarifies the relationship between Wilson and the Annans and also shows the close proximity of the memos to the contract award:

The document is a memo from Michael Wilson, the vice-president of Cotecna Inspection SA, which employed Mr Annan's son Kojo. ... The Associated Press last night reported that a second memo from Mr Wilson had come to light expressing his confidence Cotecna would get the bid because of "effective but quiet lobbying" in New York diplomatic circles.

Mr Wilson is a childhood friend of Kojo Annan's and reportedly refers to Kofi Annan as "uncle". His memo was dated December 4 1998. A week later the company won the contract.

The two memos, buried until now within Cotecna's archives, have reinvigorated the investigation into the UN chief's role in OFF corruption. Even though Kojo Annan's relationship with Cotecna has been well documented, until now no overt act involving his father and Cotecna executives. Kofi himself swore that he had no dealings with either Cotecna in terms of the OFF program or any other vendors, claiming that Benon Sevan handled all program contacts.

Paul Volcker, who heads the UN inquiry which reports directly to Kofi Annan, accepted his statement as truth. Now with these memos floating to the surface, Annan's statement has been exposed as obviously false, and at least as far as Wilson was concerned at the time, his meeting with Cotecna was instrumental in landing them the OFF contract a week later. This not only exposes Kofi as an untruthful witness, but also makes Volcker look like a fool and a lackey of the Secretary-General.

The corruption now officially reaches the top of the organization. Kofi has no credibility to continue the investigation as an internal effort with Volcker as his deputy. Annan's involvement in the Cotecna memos and Volcker's rush to trust him despite the objections of two lead investigators have destroyed the Volcker probe. Nothing that Annan or his circle of advisors touches can be considered clean any more.

If Annan does not step down as a result of these revelations, it will fall to Congress to use its subpoena power to bypass Volcker and Annan and start issuing indictments for the corruption within OFF. Congress should also cut off all United Nations funding -- every last cent -- until Annan resigns his position. Our assets should not fund his crimes or coverups any longer.

Upcoming CQ Events, Today And Tomorrow

I will make an appearance tonight on The World Tonight, a Canadian radio talk show, discussing the latest developments on Kofi Annan and the Oil-for-Food investigation, the Downing Street memo, and perhaps even Guantanamo Bay. My appearance will be around 9:30 pm EDT. If you live in Calgary and southern Alberta, you should be able to hear me on the air on CHQR 770 AM. Others can pick up the Internet stream at their site.

Don't forget that I will also be appearing tomorrow night at Coffman Union at the University of Minneapolis as a guest of CFACT. I'll be speaking about the New Media and its impact on politics and information dissemination, as well as a number of my own experiences as a blogger. I hope to see you there!

UPDATE: Bill from CFACT has started his own blog after being inspired by my yet-undelivered talk. I guess we'd better check to see if he continues posting after that, or if my speech turns out to be a buzzkiller, eh?

Apologizing For The Filibuster

The Senate yesterday issued a historic apology to African-Americans for its refusal to act against the practice of lynching for decades, effectively sidelining the federal government while thousands of victims died at the hands of vigilantes. Unfortunately, that apology doesn't address the tool used by the Senate that allowed it to be hijacked by a handful of racists in the early 20th century, and the media coverage barely mentions how it happened:

The formal apology, adopted by voice vote, was issued decades after senators blocked antilynching bills by filibuster. The resolution is the first time that members of Congress, who have apologized to Japanese-Americans for their internment in World War II and to Hawaiians for the overthrow of their kingdom, have apologized to African-Americans for any reason, proponents of the measure said.

"The Senate failed you and your ancestors and our nation," Senator Mary L. Landrieu of Louisiana, chief Democratic sponsor of the resolution, said at a luncheon attended by 200 family members and descendants of victims. They included 100 relatives of Anthony Crawford, as well as a 91-year-old man believed to be the only known survivor of an attempted lynching. ...

There have been 4,742 recorded lynchings in American history, Ms. Landrieu said. Historians suspect that many more went undocumented. Although the House passed antilynching legislation three times in the first half of the 20th century, the Senate, controlled by Southern conservatives, repeatedly refused to do so.

That version conveniently rewrites the history of the Senate and of the efforts to end lynching through federal legislation. That effort had plenty of popular support; in fact, seven presidents demanded action from Congress to put an end to lynching between the 1880s and the start of World War II. Far from being "controlled" by Southern Democrats (not conservatives!), the Senate would easily have passed the legislation on all three occasions had it not been for the filibuster. Southern Senators had to resort to the filibuster not because they controlled the Senate, but because they didn't control the Senate.

The New York Times engages in this historical revisionism because its editorial policy supports the protection of the filibuster for its own ends, namely to keep conservatives off the appellate benches and the Supreme Court. It does its readers a disservice, and it undermines its own credibility as an objective news provider with this transparent effort to slant the history of the filibuster.

The Times cheered when Senator Byrd and his co-signers of the MOU proclaimed that the "Republic is saved" after the filibuster survived its challenge a few weeks ago. Perhaps an honest recounting of how the filibuster had been applied in American history would have been more appropriate, as it would have shown that rhetoric to have been shallow and self-serving, at the very least. No one has yet pointed out the greater good that the filibuster has ever provided this nation that can balance out the thousands of known victims of the lynchings its elimination could have prevented.

Addendum: Patterico finds much the same problem at the LA Times, although their editorial board took the unusual position of arguing for total elimination of the filibuster last month.

Europeans Surrender To Castro

Despite the exhortations of freedom fighters like former Czech president Vaclav Havel, European leaders have caved in to Fidel Castro and permanently restored diplomatic access denied in 2003, after Castro jailed 75 reporters and dissidents:

In the showdown between Old and New Europe over Cuba, Old Europe has won - and the communist dictator in Havana, Fidel Castro, has gotten a break for at least a year.

The European Union decided yesterday not to restore diplomatic sanctions it imposed on the island in 2003, affording Mr. Castro a year of "constructive dialogue" before next reconsidering whether to ban high-level diplomats' visits to Cuba, open embassies in Havana to Cuban dissidents, and take other measures that have greatly irked Cuba's strongman.

The decision was issued at yesterday's External Relations Council meeting, a gathering of the foreign ministers of the 25 E.U. member states, in Luxembourg. It was the most recent development in a diplomatic saga that began in March 2003, when Mr. Castro rounded up and jailed 75 independent academics, journalists, and librarians, among other opponents, in what is known on the island as the "primavera negra," or "black spring."

Europe has long criticized our embargo on Cuba, and perhaps with some justification; after all, we trade with China and other countries who also rule with an iron fist. Europeans, though, have always had a naive and romantic view of Castro, believing him to be a liberator of the oppressed Cubans (and not coincidental to their attitude, a gadfly to Yanqui hegemony in the Western Hemisphere). However, after the Black Spring, Europe managed to make the right choice and punish Castro for his human-rights abuses, withdrawing high-level diplomatic contacts and reaching out to the dissident groups who want freedom.

Castro retaliated by freezing economic contacts between Cuba and Europe. To Americans, this retaliation appeared ridiculous; we do quite well without Cuban interaction, and the only people that Castro's fit of pique was going to hurt was Castro and the Cubans. Unsurprisingly, however, Spain (under the Socialists) cracked last year and started opening up diplomatic channels with Cuba to restore its economic interests, leaving the rest of Europe in a quandry. Zapatero got the other Europeans to give Castro six months of diplomatic normalcy to improve his human rights record.

After the six months expired, the EU determined that "no satisfactory progress on human rights" had occurred in Cuba. Under the agreement that the Spaniards worked out, that should have led to a reinstatement of the sanctions. Cuban dissidents and Eastern European nations argued for that solution. In the end, however, the appeasers of Europe prevailed, led by Zapatero.

With no motivation to improve, human rights abuses in Cuba can now go on indefinitely without any fear of consequences from Europe. This provides a couple of object lessons for American policy:

1. Despite the calls for liberalization of our Cuban policy to create a climate for change in Cuba, we now see that such a policy would be futile at best and counterproductive at worst. History shows that economic engagement with tyrants only produce a stronger base for the tyranny to continue, thanks to greater resources available for cronyism.

2. Europe has not learned its lesson from the 1930s about the failure of appeasing dictators in hopes of transforming them into democrats. In fact, Zapatero appears most anxious to lead the Old Guard into a repeat of the League of Nations debacle with Mussolini, where the halfhearted and temporary application of sanctions only emboldened the Italian dictator into greater acts of defiance. This seemingly congenital defect in political thinking shows that Europe will never be a reliable partner in fighting tyranny anywhere, including and especially Islamofascist terror.

In this case, no European can claim that they weren't warned.

Cotecna E-Mail Memo Shows Connection To Kofi Annan

For months, Kofi Annan has denied any connection between the UN Oil-for-Food contractor and himself through his son Kojo. The Secretary-General has gone so far as to state that he never met with Cotecna on OFF business and only had the most general of information from his son. However, Cotecna has found an e-mail that indicates their executives did indeed meet with Kofi, making his earlier denials look more and more suspicious:

A memo written by someone who was then an executive of a major contractor in the United Nations oil-for-food program states that he briefly discussed the company's effort to win the contract in late 1998 with Secretary General Kofi Annan and his "entourage" and that the executive was told that "we could count on their support."

The secretary general's son, Kojo Annan, was employed by Cotecna Inspection Services, a Swiss contractor based in Geneva, and the nature of that relationship is among the issues being investigated by a panel appointed by the United Nations and several Congressional committees.

Kofi Annan has said several times that he did not discuss the contract with his son and was not involved in Cotecna's selection. A United Nations panel headed by Paul A. Volcker, a former chairman of the Federal Reserve, concluded in March that Mr. Annan had not influenced the awarding of the $10 million dollar-a-year contract to the company. ...

The memo, written on Dec. 4, 1998, by Michael R. Wilson, then a Cotecna vice president who was Kojo Annan's friend and a family friend of the secretary general, describes a meeting that took place during the 20th summit meeting of Francophone leaders in Paris in late November 1998.

"We had brief discussions with the SG and his entourage," the memo states. "Their collective advise was that we should respond as best as we could to the Q & A session of the 1-12-98 and that we could count on their support."

The "1-12-98" refers to a meeting Mr. Wilson and a delegation of Cotecna officials had in New York on Dec. 1, 1998, with senior United Nations officials who were considering which of three companies to select for the inspection contract that Cotecna won 10 days later.

The memo does not state that Kojo Annan was present at the discussion with the secretary general. But it continues with a description of "courtesy greetings" on behalf of Cotecna with presidents of several African countries held by a person identified as "KA" at the summit meeting. Asked for comment, a consultant for the company said it appeared that Mr. Wilson was referring to Kojo Annan in the memo.

The memo is attached to an e-mail message sent by Mr. Wilson to the company's owners and senior executives. It is dated Dec. 4, 1998, a week before Cotecna was informed that it had won the contract to inspect goods purchased by Iraq under the program, which allowed Iraq to sell some of its oil to meet needs of its civilian population despite United Nations sanctions.

So it appears that Kofi has not been honest with investigators to this point. No one with a brain believed his denials anyway, but this confirms that he has lied about his association with Cotecna and the role his son played in getting the Oil-For-Food contract. Kofi, Kojo, and Cotecna appear to have participated in a broad cover-up of the Secretary-General's role in ensuring his son's company controlled the Oil-for-Food program.

Now the question remains: why?

Since the SG and Cotecna took such pains to keep their meetings and arrangements hidden, it would follow that the relationship between Cotecna and the Annans had more than just coincidence as a product. My guess is that more money than just Kojo's $2500 per month is involved in this transaction and cover-up. Cotecna's records might show even more surprises in the coming weeks.

BUMP: To top. And welcome to Instapundit and Michelle Malkin readers.

Apres Collapse, France Lashes Out For Relevance

France's failure to support the EU constitution that its leadership had largely pushed and helped write has caused its government to push its failure onto others even as it concedes defeat. The Telegraph reports that France has finally given up on forcing other nations to continue the ratification process, effectively killing the proposed constitution:

France performed a historic about-turn yesterday and abandoned the European Union constitution to its fate, dropping demands that other nations ratify the treaty.

The unexpected move appeared to seal the constitution's doom, even if its most passionate supporters still refuse to accept its demise for several months more. Days before a crisis EU summit, Philippe Douste-Blazy, the French foreign minister, simply waived Paris's insistence that the treaty still be put to the vote, country by country. ...

Senior French officials quietly agreed with British predictions that an EU summit this week would leave individual member states to decide how, or whether, to vote on the constitution, with no deadline or timetable. Without these "the whole thing is being kicked into some very long grass indeed," said one EU official. "You could say it is effectively dead."

In one development, France and Germany have tried to shift blame onto Britain and its insistence on maintaining its lucrative tax rebate in the new constitution, an arcane and technical detail buried deep within the pact. Douste-Blazy blasted Britain for failing to pay the costs of EU expansion at the same time he conceded defeat on the EU pact. Tony Blair has fought back, offering to consider eliminating the rebate only if France considers ending its protectionist subsidies for French agriculture:

Tony Blair is set to meet Jacques Chirac, French president, in Paris for a showdown over the EU rebate.

He arrives with a warning ringing in his ears from Gerhard Schröder, Germany's chancellor, not to stymie the union's budget.

Mr Schröder said during talks with the Prime Minister last night that there was "no place for national egotism" in the debate over Britain's EU rebate and the future financing of Europe. ...

Mr Blair has signalled he is ready to compromise on Britain's multi-billion-euro annual EU rebate provided France also gives ground on the substantial farms subsidies it receives. Mr Chirac has refused, saying the agriculture budget was settled in 2002.

French subsidies are a keystone to their socialist economic model, and Blair well knows that Chirac can hardly afford to give them up. French farmers would revolt if price supports disappeared, possibly even strike, which would put Chirac's government in dire straits. On the other hand, even the French know that Blair won't cough up the rebates without getting some substantial market reform in return. For Chirac, getting Blair to bend is a secondary consideration at best anyway. What Chirac wants is someone else to take center stage in the Failure Sweepstakes, and for French domestic politics, nothing works better for that role than a British leader.

Running a close second, however, are the Turks, and Chirac has included them in his shotgun approach. As the Guardian notes, Chirac and France now publicly oppose Turkey's entry into the EU without a constitution to regulate the entry process:

Turkey was being set up as the main casualty of French and Dutch rejection of the EU constitution last night when France seemed to put the brakes on Ankara's 40-year dream of joining the union.

As European leaders prepared to kick the constitution into the long grass at their summit this week, the French foreign minister said it would be difficult to admit Turkey if the measure falls.

Philippe Douste-Blazy told the French daily Le Figaro: "Without the treaty, it seems to me difficult to add more countries when the rules of communal living between us are not clearly defined. It is one of the elements of the absorption capacity of the European Union. After the French referendum, we must reflect on this type of thing."

This is, in fact, another swipe at Britain and Tony Blair, who have championed Turkey's entry to the EU. Again, rather than a principled position, this looks more like a ploy on behalf of Chirac to play tit-for-tat with the British. The French distrusted the constitution in part because of the modest market reforms it would have imposed on France, and those reforms came at the insistence of Britain. Chirac and his government now play the politics of petulance to restore their domestic standing, but if they continue to pout in this manner, they will only convince the rest of Europe that hitching their collective wagons to a country this immature and self-centered will be in no one's long-term interest.

Frankly, it's a lesson I'm surprised they haven't already learned.

Cheney: Guantanamo Or Something Like It

Vice President Dick Cheney told the American public twice yesterday that Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo Bay would remain open despite calls for its closure for better public relations. The Washington Post reports on Cheney's appearance at the National Press Club, where he echoed similar remarks from his interview on Fox:

Vice President Cheney offered a vigorous defense yesterday of the secretive prison for suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and said the United States has no plans to shut it down.

Although President Bush kept open the possibility of closing the prison outpost in Cuba, Cheney said such a move would be unwise because the United States needs a special prison to hold and interrogate potential terrorists captured around the world. Cheney said prisoners there are treated "far better" than they would be by any other government and disagreed sharply with critics who charge the United States' image has been undermined by allegations of abuse at the facility.

"Now, does this hurt us from the standpoint of international opinion?" Cheney said at the National Press Club. "I frankly don't think so. And my own personal view of it is that those who are most urgently advocating that we shut down Guantanamo probably don't agree with our policies anyway."

And that is exactly the point. The only logical argument for shutting down X-Ray would be if the US changed its policy regarding high-value detainees. That's what critics of the American effort against terrorists really want; they want a return to the impotent approach of terrorism as a law-enforcement problem rather than an act of war. Instead of housing unlawful combatants at Guantanamo or a similar facility, they want all prisoners to have access to American courts and American lawyers in order to tie up their cases for years, and to make the soldiers and intelligence agents who capture them similarly sidelined.

In both venues, Cheney reminded people that these detainees have no Geneva protections, and yet they receive humane housing within the parameters of detention facilities. They face intense interrogation because they're terrorists, captured out of uniform either in the battlefield of Afghanistan or Iraq or through intelligence work in overseas venues. Even that interrogation hardly lives up (or down) to the hysterical allegations thrown around by Amnesty International, as Time Magazine inadvertently confirmed in its publication of the interrogation log of Gitmo's highest-valued prisoner. It's unpleasant but hardly abusive, and calling it torture insults the victims of Saddam Hussein, whose missing hands and tongues and scarred bodies give their own testimony to the true nature of torture.

If the US closes Gitmo, it will have to open another facility just like it to continue the work we're doing at Camp X-Ray. The waste of time, effort, and money just to play a shell game with detainees for nothing more than an empty PR gesture runs the costs too high for the momentary gratification it will give wobblies like Chuck Hagel and Mel Martinez. Both men and others in Congress should remember that we are at war, and if they want to avoid another 9/11, we need to get answers from the Mohammed al-Qahtanis we capture to stop terrorist plans before they come to fruition. If that causes angst among the people of Europe and/or the Muslim worldwide community, that's just too bad. Our leadership isn't elected to make the Muslim community happy at the expense of American lives by the thousands.

Tories Reportedly Unhappy With Harper

To no one's great surprise, the Tories blame Stephen Harper for booting their best chance in years to topple the Liberal grip on power in Ottawa this spring and may start looking for new leadership according to the Globe & Mail. Members deny that they have started that process as yet, but some organizers have started to grumble about the lost opportunities:

Political knives are out for Stephen Harper as his federal Conservatives sink deeper in the polls, and the sharpest weapons are being brandished by members of his own party.

"There is a lot of discontent with the turn of things. People are saying it's time to replace the leader," said one key Conservative organizer in Toronto who, like many others, asked not to be named because it could hurt his status in the party. ...

[B]ehind the scenes, party members from coast to coast are pointing fingers and asking why opinion surveys have the Tories battling for third place nationally when the Gomery inquiry into the sponsorship scandal should still be tarring the Liberals with the stigma of corruption.

Dissatisfaction with Mr. Harper's leadership "started expanding with the Belinda [Stronach] defection and then it continued to expand when we didn't get our [confidence] vote passed [on May 19] and a lot of people in the party are tired of waiting," said one organizer, who also asked to remain anonymous.

"This guy was supposed to be the answer, and, instead of being 20 points up in the polls which should be happening with the way things are in the Liberal Party, he's eight points down in the polls. Like, what the hell?"

Despite all of the Gomery revelations, Harper couldn't pull off enough votes in an almost evenly split Commons to force a vote. The failure to secure Chuck Cadman's vote certainly didn't help, but the worst blow was Stronach's defection. Stronach complained about Harper's treatment of her as part of her excuse to switch to the Liberals, although she had been in a personal relationship with Peter MacKay, deputy leader of the Tories, until hours before her defection. Stronach's track record clearly shows her as an opportunist, bouncing in one year from outsider, to failed contender for Tory leader, to MacKay's girlfriend, and finally to Liberal Cabinet minister, but the embarrassment and the timing still reflected an inability of Harper to close the deal.

Ironically, the Liberals will table a series of confidence motions tonight, starting with one of their most controversial bills, C-48. C-48 contains the budgetary payoff for Jack Layton and the NDP's alliance with the Liberals that kept PM Paul Martin in power. While the overall budget passed its previous reading in the Commons with the Speaker breaking the tie -- and keeping Martin in power -- C-48 had received open criticism from at least one of the independents that sided with the Liberals the last time. An even better opportunity will be C-38, the bill explicitly allowing gender-neutral marriage, as the Tories remain fairly united in opposition and a significant number of Liberals may not support it either. Liberal leaders have promised that C-38 would get tabled in the spring, but with the votes appearing doubtful, it may get pushed off to autumn.

But as I noted yesterday, even with these opportunities to push for new elections, the polling numbers have the Tories stymied. At the moment, the main problem with getting Canadians to support the Conservatives looks to be Harper himself. If Harper wants to retain his leadership position, he needs to get out and start doing some high-profile interviews, hit the stumps, and start really campaigning to make Canada feel comfortable with a Harper prime ministry. That might go quite a ways in dampening internal Tory dissatisfaction with the missed oppportunity in May.

Polygamist Cult Abandons Young Boys To Eliminate Competition (Updated)

The Guardian reports on a strange story coming out of the American Southwest that has not received much coverage in the US. (Update: Here's the Los Angeles Times link to tomorrow's story.) A cult of polygamists have apparently started to abandon their teenage sons on highways in Arizona and Utah, perhaps as many as 1,000 of them. The reason? To create an artificial shortage of mates for the teenage girls that the older men resolve through multiple marriages:

Many of these "Lost Boys", some as young as 13, have simply been dumped on the side of the road in Arizona and Utah, by the leaders of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS), and told they will never see their families again or go to heaven.

The 10,000-strong FLDS, which broke away from the Mormon church in 1890 when the mainstream faith disavowed polygamy, believes a man must marry at least three women to go to heaven. The sect appeared to be in turmoil yesterday, after its assets were frozen last week and a warrant was issued in Arizona on Friday for the arrest of its autocratic leader, Warren Jeffs, for arranging a wedding between an underage girl and a 28-year-old man who was already married.

Mr Jeffs is also being sued by lawyers for six of the Lost Boys for conspiracy to purge surplus males from the community, and by his nephew, Brent Jeffs, who accuses him of sexual abuse.

Warren Jeffs' whereabouts yesterday were uncertain, but Utah officials said they believed he may be hiding in an FLDS compound near Eldorado, Texas, and they have contacted the Texan authorities.

Some have voiced concern that an attempt to corner the sect leader could provoke a tragedy like the 1993 siege of the Branch Davidian sect in Waco, Texas.

Mainstream Mormons dread these stories, because although they long ago disavowed polygamy and excommunicated those who practice it, the cults that have formed in the century since then continue to claim membership in their church. As with any other group of people who have been cast out from their communities, they go underground to an extent and develop a sense of paranoia and of martyrdom that can easily create a volatile and violent situation. In the past, a few of these extended family groups have refused to go quietly when confronted by the law, and Jeffs apparently fits that mold.

Even though polygamy has been widely considered a fringe behavior, at least until lately, prosecutors and law enforcement have found it difficult to proceed against its practitioners. Some of the cults stockpile weapons, preparing for inevitable showdowns with police. In practice, polygamist communes and/or cults almost always involve some degree of coercion with progressively younger and interrelated girls, some as young as thirteen or fourteen who might wind up married to an uncle or cousin two or three times their age.

Now, of course, some have taken up their caue on a paleo-libertarian notion of free association. A&E ran a series of documentaries on the subject a few years ago, and noted that more people had asked whether government should involve itself in the living and sexual arrangements of consenting adults. The documentarians also showed that many of the girls who grow up in these polygamist communities get groomed for a life of sexual servitude starting at a very early age by fathers and uncles in order to make that consent much more forthcoming when the question arises.

Jeffs has run this particular FLDS sect, with chapters in Arizona, Utah, Texas, and even Canada for three years, since his father Rulon died and left him in charge. Jeffs rules by example; the 49-year-old leader has 56 known children by 40 wives. He has gone underground, last seen in Texas in January at his reclusive ranch. If he has holed himself up there, it might take a Waco-like siege to bring him out. Most of these leaders have an intense Messianic complex, very similar to David Koresh.

In this case, at least 400 and possibly 1,000 of the children and teens have been freed, although very traumatically. They wonder what they did to cause their community to shun them and keep them from heaven. They may find out soon that they have instead escaped from hell.

UPDATE: The LAT reports more from the point of view of the lost boys:

Abandoned by his family, faith and community, Gideon Barlow arrived here an orphan from another world. At first, he played the tough guy, aloof and hard. But when no one was watching, he would cry.

The freckle-faced 17-year-old said he was left to fend for himself last year after being forced out of Colorado City, Ariz., a town about 40 miles east of here, just over the state line.

"I couldn't see how my mom would let them do what they did to me," he said.

When he tried to visit her on Mother's Day, he said, she told him to stay away. When he begged to give her a present, she said she wanted nothing.

"I am dead to her now," he said. ...

His stated offenses: wearing short-sleeved shirts, listening to CDs and having a girlfriend. Other boys say they were booted out for going to movies, watching television and staying out past curfew. Some say they were sometimes given as little as two hours' notice before being driven to St. George or nearby Hurricane, Utah, and left like unwanted pets along the road.

Absolutely heartbreaking. Gideon has found a home with a generous mainstream Mormon couple who have opened their home to him, as have others, but the trauma continues nonetheless.

UPDATE II: David Tufte at Voluntary Xchange has been closely monitoring the FLDS and other polygamist cults for over a year. Check out his archives for much more detail on the phenomenon.

The Emily Litella Memo (Updated!)

David Sanger at the New York Times discovers another memo from British sources that completely undermines the central argument of the Downing Street Memo -- which is that the Bush administration had fixated on a military solution to Iraq and had started to twist the intelligence in July 2002 to justify the invasion. Instead, as Sanger reports, another memo dated the same week at the DSM reported to Tony Blair that Bush had not yet made up his mind what approach he wanted to take with Saddam Hussein:

A memorandum written by Prime Minister Tony Blair's cabinet office in late July 2002 explicitly states that the Bush administration had made "no political decisions" to invade Iraq, but that American military planning for the possibility was advanced. The memo also said American planning, in the eyes of Mr. Blair's aides, was "virtually silent" on the problems of a postwar occupation.

"A postwar occupation of Iraq could lead to a protracted and costly nation-building exercise," warned the memorandum, prepared July 21 for a meeting with Mr. Blair a few days later. It also appeared to take as a given the presence of illicit weapons in Iraq - an assumption that later proved almost entirely wrong - and warned that merely removing Saddam Hussein from power would not guarantee that those weapons could be secured.

A transcript of the memorandum was posted Sunday on the Web site of The Sunday Times of London, after The Washington Post, citing one of the British paper's own correspondents as a source, published excerpts. No image of the original was included, The Times said, to protect its source; a note on the Web site said the last page was missing.

Ironically, the same people arguing that the DSM contains some sort of smoking gun against the Bush administration also claim that this memo supports the same argument. However, when taken together, it becomes apparent that British intelligence could not make up its mind what Bush had in mind for Iraq; it prepared two different memos with mutually-exclusive analsyes. Tony Blair told the Times of London (which published both memos) that the only people who knew what Bush planned were George Bush and Tony Blair, and that the DSM had incorrectly analyzed the situation.

This latest revelation should be called the Emily Litella memo: Never mind.

UPDATE: The text of the Emily Litella Memo can be found here., with links to the other two pages at the bottom. Far from being a companion piece to the DSM, the memo -- as I noted above -- specifically contradicts the intelligence given by "C" in the minutes of a meeting of British cabinet ministers. For instance, the ELM states in Paragraph 2 that Britain had already told Bush it would support a military resolution in Iraq two months earlier:

2. When the Prime Minister discussed Iraq with President Bush at Crawford in April he said that the UK would support military action to bring about regime change, provided that certain conditions were met: efforts had been made to construct a coalition/shape public opinion, the Israel-Palestine Crisis was quiescent, and the options for action to eliminate Iraq's WMD through the UN weapons inspectors had been exhausted.

3. We need now to reinforce this message and to encourage the US Government to place its military planning within a political framework, partly to forestall the risk that military action is precipitated in an unplanned way by, for example, an incident in the No Fly Zones. This is particularly important for the UK because it is necessary to create the conditions in which we could legally support military action. Otherwise we face the real danger that the US will commit themselves to a course of action which we would find very difficult to support.

And yet, in paragraph 6, despite pre-existing British support for such a move, the intelligence analysis was that Bush had not yet reached a decision:

6. Although no political decisions have been taken, US military planners have drafted options for the US Government to undertake an invasion of Iraq.

Two days later, a separate analysis was presented to the same group of people by "C" in the DSM, indicating nothing about sources or what level of officials with whom this MI-6 agent spoke to reach the conclusions:

C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

And yet, in the end, despite C's analysis of the attitude at the NSC, Bush did go through the "UN route" -- twice. Both times, despite C's report to the British cabinet of a lack of enthusiasm for the task, the American government made detailed presentations on the Iraqi regime's record as well as the intelligence on hand, most of which predated the Bush administration, especially the humint which stopped with the 1998 suspension of weapons inspections. In fact, just about everything in C's analysis was proven incorrect by later events. The DSM isn't the minutes of a meeting between C and American officials; it is the minutes of a British cabinet meeting where he presented his analysis, which turned out to be thoroughly incorrect, and which conflicted with other intelligence analysis.

As far as the accusation that intelligence was twisted to meet the threshold for war, the rest of C's faulty analysis should be enough to discredit that assertion, if that's even what he meant by "fixed", which is arguable. The Senate investigated that rather thoroughly in 2004 and found no basis for such allegations, and Bush won re-election with the Democrats making that one of their central assertions in his campaign.

Once again, the Emily Litella Memo adds up to two words: Never mind.

Happy Blogiversary To Michelle Malkin!

It's hard to believe that a year has gone by already since Michelle Malkin joined the blogosphere. No one who read Michelle on a regular basis before June of last year should be surprised that in twelve short months, she has transformed her eponymous blog into the class of the genre.

Congratulations, Michelle, and thanks for all your hard work.

Disclosure Follies Continue

The measure of the Democratic desperation to "get" GOP whip Tom DeLay has come in the number of late disclosures on travel-related expenses made by recalcitrant House members of both political parties. The New York Times reports that almost exactly half of Congress, evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, have hurriedly filed travel expenses as required by House ethics rules -- some years late:

With scrutiny being heaped on Representative Tom DeLay of Texas and other lawmakers over privately financed trips, dozens of members of Congress are moving to set their travel disclosures in order.

Roughly 214 lawmakers - half Republicans and half Democrats - have filed reports late since July of last year, some waiting up to five years after taking a trip to properly disclose their travels, according to PoliticalMoneyLine, a nonpartisan group that tracks political spending. Travel records have been available for years but did not attract much attention or analysis until recently.

Political analysts say the disclosures are an effort to head off political and legal difficulties as the issue of Congressional travel draws increasing attention. The House Ethics Committee, which is not functioning while the two parties feud over staffing, is expected to decide whether to examine whether Mr. DeLay, the House majority leader, and other lawmakers violated restrictions on lobbying and travel.

Democrats, especially Nancy Pelosi and Howard Dean, have attacked Tom DeLay endlessly over his travel expenses and connections to lobbyists in an attempt to sideline the highly effective House leader. Unfortunately, the effort has backfired rather spectacularly as leading Democrats found themselves in the same circumstances as DeLay. First came the exposure of numerous cases of missing or incomplete travel filings such as this story, which Democrats said indicated ethics violations for DeLay but sang the "oversight" tune when tied to dozens in their own party. Even as that still unfolds, the ties between DeLay and lobbyist Jack Abramoff, which Democrats also claimed were either illegal or unethical, turned out to be spread out between both parties -- including Abramoff's hiring of Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid's fundraiser while he still worked for Reid.

In today's article, we find out that another Democrat put off filing travel reports for five years, trips which involved special-interest groups that actively lobby Congress, including the nation's largest government-employee union:

Representative Luis V. Gutierrez, an Illinois Democrat elected in 1992, filed reports last month detailing 23 trips he took since 2000, according to PoliticalMoneyLine.

Mr. Gutierrez reported a "fact-finding and educational" trip to Taiwan in 2001 that cost the Chinese National Association of Industry and Commerce about $8,600, records show. That same year, he went to Puerto Rico and Los Angeles to participate in an immigration rally and other events as the guest of the Service Employees International Union - a trip that cost about $3,700, records show. Mr. Gutierrez also made trips to Guadalajara and Acapulco in Mexico, to Amman in Jordan and Tel Aviv in Israel, as well as to less exotic destinations like Tampa, San Antonio and Phoenix.

No one says these trips are illegal, although voters who have now seen these figures for the first time could be forgiven that impression. Democratic claims that their use by DeLay amounts to an ethics violation when they have drunk deeply from the same well amply demonstrates that their issue with DeLay has nothing to do with upholding House ethics but in sidelining DeLay's political expertise. Pat Toomey, a former Congressman, explains that some of this travel does make officeholders more effective as legislators, but to be aware of itineraries when reviewing congressional travel:

Former Representative Pat Toomey, a Republican who now heads the conservative Club for Growth, said a trip to Israel and Jordan while in office was constructive.

"It was a very valuable crash course and education in the politics, the geography and some of the history," Mr. Toomey said. He also said there was the potential for abuse: "If you discover a trip to the Bahamas in January, it might be worth a look at the itinerary."

Funny he should mention that. Pelosi, who prompted the controversy with her attacks on Delay, still has yet to answer for the trip to Havana taken by Catlin O'Neill, her staffer and Tip O'Neill's granddaughter, in December 2004 for "religious education", as she described the "official duties" involved in the trip. Nor has Pelosi explained why this education had to take place in Havana on behalf of a church which issues instant on-line ordinations that require no instruction whatsoever.

If, like me, you've noticed that Tom DeLay's name does not come up in Democrats' speeches much these days, open questions such as these provide the reason why.

Not One Dime: The New Democratic Strategy

For those who thought that the filibuster had been rendered nearly extinct for executive appointments, the Washington Times reports that the Democrats have instead reworked their PR campaign to present another rationale for restarting them. Rather than argue about "extremism" -- an argument that they lost on the merits -- Democrats will now produce endless requests for more documentation in an effort to convince Senators that the Democratic filibusters support Senatorial privilege:

The new filibusters are not based publicly on ideologies -- as with several of the nominees to the federal bench -- but on demands for additional information from the administration.

Already stalled under that strategy is John R. Bolton, Mr. Bush's pick to be ambassador to the United Nations.

Also, Democrats led by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts stopped a federal appeals court nominee last week by demanding that more of his unpublished legal opinions be provided to them.

Mr. Bush nominated U.S. District Judge Terrence W. Boyle of North Carolina more than four years ago to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, based in Richmond. Judge Boyle had a hearing more than three months ago and has been scheduled numerous times for a Senate Judiciary Committee vote.

Last week, however, Democrats on the Judiciary Committee demanded that Judge Boyle's nomination wait another week and that the Bush administration produce more of his unpublished opinions. Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, Pennsylvania Republican, reluctantly agreed.

This is the hole in the compromise which allowed for filibusters under "extraordinary circumstances". The Democrats used this same strategy on Miguel Estrada, requesting his legal work product from the Clinton administration. Even though that request received loud criticism from the legal community as an unprecedented incursion on executive privilege -- from Democrats and Republicans alike -- the Senate Democrats continued to blockade Estrada with that excuse until he finally quit in disgust.

Now, instead of having to make arguments about the qualifications of nominees and complaints about their politics, which left Democrats open to charges about overly politicizing judicial confirmations, they will keep requesting more and more documents to stall nominations as long as possible. Once the White House draws the line on unnecessary disclosure, Senate Democrats will filibuster and claim that the action restores the balance between the executive and legislative branches. That argument will have more appeal to the centrists that formed the Gang of 14 to stop the GOP from ruling filibusters out of order on judicial nominations, or so the Democrats hope.

Unfortunately, they're probably correct. As the Bolton filibuster shows, the GOP haven't yet developed an effective response to this stall tactic, despite its earlier use on Estrada. It also shows the lack of good faith on behalf of the Democrats in embracing this supposed era of comity on nominations. The strategy should be to force the candidates out of committee by ignoring these frivolous requests, and then forcing the Democrats to use the filibuster in the open. Specter made a mistake giving in to Kennedy on Boyle's nomination; he should correct that as soon as possible and call for the committee vote immediately.

NOD logo update: I've received a number of outstanding designs for the campaign logo. As mentioned earlier, I'm accepting designs until the 15th, and then I'll start displaying them in a series of posts over the following few days. I'll put up a Pollhost poll for CQ readers to select the winners from five or so of the best, as selected by me. Thanks to everyone who contributed their creativity and talent!

Microsoft Helping China Censor The Internet?

Agence France-Presse reports in its Asian section that Microsoft has aided China's efforts to censor the Internet for millions of subjects of PRC's autocratic rule. MSN's China-based Internet Spaces has started blocking specific words tied to political liberation:

Users of Microsoft's new China-based Internet portal were blocked from using the words "democracy", "freedom" and "human rights" in an apparent move by the US software giant to appease Beijing.

Other words that could not be used on Microsoft's free online blog service MSN Spaces include "Taiwan independence" and "demonstration".

Bloggers who enter such words or other politically charged or pornographic content are prompted with a message that reads: "This item should not contain forbidden speech such as profanity. Please enter a different word for this item".

Officials at Microsoft's Beijing offices refused to comment Monday.

Many blogs, including mine, took Eason Jordan to task for deliberately enabling oppression in Iraq by misreporting the news, a charge Jordan admitted in an op-ed to the New York Times. It seems to me that Microsoft's actions here, if true, amount to a similar sin. Microsoft has touted its entry into the blog market in part as a way to expand free speech and personal expression. Instead, it looks like it has sold out the principles of freedom that allowed Microsoft to flourish in the first place in order to gain access to the Chinese market. Bill Gates has sold the oppressed Chinese people out in order to allow Beijing to extend its oppression -- and all this at the same time that the world noted the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre, where that same government that Gates supports slaughtered peaceful protestors looking for liberty.

Yahoo! and Google have also signed onto the official Chinese plan for keeping the peasants in line while the corporate officers take their money under false pretenses. All three companies should be ashamed of themselves. I'm normally not a Microsoft basher, but this smacks of nothing less than collaboration with an oppressor. If this is true, I'd encourage people to use any other paid service than those offered by these three companies. (hat tip: CQ reader Bruce K)

Liberals: Duceppe A 'Coward' For Not Pushing Secession

Despite the widespread corruption committed by the Liberals during their governance of Canada, at times their political brilliance requires some admiration, no matter how grudgingly given. The fact of their survival on May 19th took a blend of bald-faced vote-buying and hardball politics that took one's breath away in its audacity and its success. Their apparent recovery in the polls after hearing witness after witness attest to Liberal money-laundering and embezzlement for weeks is nothing short of astounding. Their ability to tar Tory leader Stephen Harper as a stooge of separatists and some malevolent, secretive force that will unravel Canadian federalism as a cover for that graft may stand as one of the great political comebacks in North American history.

Today, however, the Liberals may have pushed their luck a bit too far by attacking Bloc Quebecois leader Giles Duceppe for turning down a provincial post in favor of remaining the national BQ leader. Paul Martin's man in Quebec, Jean LaPierre, called Duceppe a 'coward' for not taking over the reins at Parti Quebecois, the separatist party affiliated with BQ within Quebec:

Paul Martin's Quebec lieutenant capitalized on Gilles Duceppe's expected decision to steer clear of the Parti Québécois leadership, calling the Bloc Leader a coward for avoiding the major battle over sovereignty.

The remarks by Jean Lapierre were the first salvo in what could become a Liberal effort to drive down the substantial popularity of Mr. Duceppe, who, it appears, the Liberals will now face in a federal election.

"He probably realizes that the PQ is not going to unroll the red carpet for him . . . so maybe he's decided that he'd rather be comfortable in Ottawa instead of fighting the real war," Mr. Lapierre told CTV's current affairs program, Question Period.

"If he doesn't go, it will show that he doesn't have it, to one day run anything. [He will be in] perpetual opposition and we'll be able to say he was a coward, frankly."

LaPierre's statement sounds strange and contradictory. If PQ wanted Duceppe as its leader, it would mean that Duceppe would press for the separatist cause. Since the Liberals oppose Quebec's separatist movement -- remember, that's what Adscam was supposed to prevent -- calling Duceppe a coward for not actively promoting that viewpoint is not only hyperbolic but undercuts their own argument. Will the Liberals campaign in Quebec by saying that the only courageous choice for Quebeckers to endorse is that of secession?

LaPierre told the talk show audience that the Liberals would not remain on the political defensive after the Gomery revelations, but would "be on the offensive". Questioning the honor and courage of a political opponent for choosing to remain engaged in national politics rather than regional separatism certainly qualifies as offensive. I doubt that LaPierre did the Grits any favors in Quebec with this illogical attack last night.

Quick Links For The Morning

I stayed up late last night to get the morning posts in, as my schedule will be erratic today. I hope to have new posts later on, but in the meantime be sure to catch up on a few stories that should get your attention.

Arthur Chrenkoff gives us the Step By Step on Iraq in Opinionjournal today. Chrenkoff reminds us that we can't expect to fix in six months something that has been broken for almost two generations. Find out why two-thirds of Iraqis now feel that their country is heading in the right direction.

Red State Rant has the first part of their interview with Newt Gingrich posted. They also had a terrific interview with Zell Miller earlier. In the next part, Lance will get to my question for Newt. RSR has made quite a splash for a new blog -- congratulate Lance for the splendid job he's done.

The outrage continues on Ed Klein's hack job on Hillary. See Q&O, Ankle-Biting Pundits, and The Anchoress. Hard Starboard, Cassandra, and Doc Rampage disagree with me at length.

Back later ...

UPDATE: Michelle Malkin gives us a comprehensive look at the testicular collapse involving Gitmo. When Brit Hume has more fortitude than Mel Martinez and Chuck Hagel on the war on terror, the GOP needs to sit down with its elected officials and remind them of the stakes involved in interrogating terrorists.

Hugh Hewitt -- thanks for the shout-out in today's post. CQ readers who have not already checked out Hugh's post for today should look at the linkfest, especially on the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe and how the Catholic Church has taken the lead to combat it. I'll try to post more on this later.

Some people are asking me for my position in the Great Quarter War between Colorado's Bill Owens and Minnesota's Tim Pawlenty, covered extensively by Fraters Libertas. While I fully support Minnesota and its glorious loon(ey) tradition, I'd rather see peace between two fine, outstanding GOP governors. I agree with Hugh's sentiment when he played "The Farmer And The Cowboy Should Be Friends" from Oklahoma!, and I would encourage both sides to take heed of the lyrics:

Oh, the farmer and the cowboy should be friends,
Yes, the farmer and the cowboy should be friends,
One man wants to import pills,
The other often falls down hills,
But that's no reason why they can't be friends.

Timeless words of wisdom from Rodgers and Hammerstein, my friends.

On Diplomatic Immunity

Last week, I wrote about Amnesty International's call for the arrest of George Bush by any country he visits, along with other American officials involved in the war on terror. Besides castigating AI-USA for its lack of proportion and perspective, I also noted that such an action would violate diplomatic immunity. In response, I received this note from an officer in the US Foreign Service who wishes to remain anonymous. He agreed with the post in general but wanted to be sure that readers understand who gets diplomatic immunity and when:

An excellent post, but one point on diplomatic immunity. According to Articles 29 and 32 of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations (VCDR), the only people entitled to full diplomatic immunity are fully accredited diplomats to a given country.

It's a common misconception that high-ranking officials, e.g. President Bush, Secretary Rumsfeld, and others, also have diplomatic immunity. They don't. Sometimes, people on temporary duty are given limited immunities (sometimes called "administrative and technical status," from Article 37.2 of the VCDR), but these immunities are not sought for visiting senior U.S. officials. In some case they are requested for temporary embassy staff or for U.S. soldiers in countries with which we have no Status of Forces Agreement.

That's why the State Department is pushing so-called "Article 98" Agreements with foreign governments. The terms of an Article 98 agreement, included within the Rome Statute itself, is essentially a promise by one country not to surrender another country's citizens to the International Criminal Court, or to a third country that would surrender that citizen to the ICC.

Exactly 100 countries have concluded Article 98 Agreements with the U.S. (By the way, the main proponent of these agreements has been - you guessed it - John Bolton.) For more information on Article 98's see here.

The bottom line is that countries which have not concluded an Article 98 agreement with the U.S. (and this includes all Western European countries) an activist judge could legally order the seizure of senior U.S. officials for surrender to the ICC. I doubt at this point that any foreign government would be foolish enough to comply with that judge's order, but there's alway s a first time, isn't there?

I believe it would be a first and last time, if anyone attempted it at all. Thanks to this Foreign Service officer for the clarification. It's another reminder why John Bolton needs confirmation, too.

Time Magazine Goes Inside A Gitmo Interrogation

Time Magazine has acquired a secret interrogation log from Guantanamo Bay's Camp X-ray, one that tracks the investigation of the suspected 20th 9/11 hijacker, Mohammed al-Qahtani. The diary shows the range of methods used in his interrogation, and Time Magazine certainly plays this angle to the hilt in its press release:

The log reads like a night watchman’s diary. It is a sometimes shocking and often mundane hour-by-hour, even minute-by-minute account of a campaign to extract information. The log records every time al-Qahtani eats, sleeps, exercises or goes to the bathroom and every time he complies with or refuses his interrogators’ requests. The detainee’s physical condition is frequently checked by medical corpsmen—sometimes as often as three times a day—which indicates either spectacular concern about al-Qahtani’s health or persistent worry about just how much stress he can take.

Or, more likely, Qahtani's self-declared hunger strikes and resultant dehydration created the need for frequent checks by the corpsmen. As the text continues to explain, Qahtani would refuse water in an attempt to discontinue his interrogations. The allegedly abusive Gitmo interrogators would respond by providing Qahtani immediate medical attention, including an IV on at least one occasion, to restore his hydration.

Of course, this was not the only effort made by Gitmo personnel. The Time report includes mention of the terrible, inhumane methods often alleged by the righteous at Amnesty International and other self-appointed watchdogs of the American military. Readers will be excited to learn of these horror-provoking techniques that Time reveals in its exclusive:

* Standing for prolonged periods (perhaps best referred to as the Disneyland treatment)

* Shaving of facial hair

* Solitary confinement

* Pouring water on his head

* Poking a finger into his chest

* Removal of some clothing

* Puppet shows -- no, I'm not kidding

* Being in the same room as attractive women

Worst of all, the one method on which Human Rights Watch could nail the US military, is the playing of music by Christina Aguilera as a punishment for non-cooperation. Other than Michael Bolton, which I believe would be an explicit Geneva Convention violation, it's hard to imagine a crueler torture.

Seriously, though, is this the worst Time could dig up? This treatment hardly qualifies as anything except mundane for intelligence work -- and this suspect has to have been potentially the highest-value detainee held at Gitmo. If the guards had been tempted to turn the screws on anyone, it would have been Qahtani. Instead, they harassed him and annoyed him, but other than the Aguilera music, no one could possibly claim that Qahtani had been tortured based on this oversensationalized report of his treatment.

Perhaps the final Time article has revelations not included in this press release. If this is all they've got, perhaps the get-Gitmo hysteria will finally go away. (via INDC Journal, who adds a worthy visual)

UPDATE: Oh, Time forgot to mention one more technique that CNN reports in its review of Time's material. In the interest of fair play to those who believe we're torturing people at Gitmo, here's the passage:

The interrogation techniques included refusing al-Qahtani a bathroom break and forcing him to urinate in his pants.

Here come the hysterics in the Senate to the rescue of terrorist detainees:

"It's not appropriate," said Sen. Chuck Hagel on CNN's "Late Edition." "It's not at all within the standards of who we are as a civilized people, what our laws are.

"If in fact we are treating prisoners this way, it's not only wrong, it's dangerous and very dumb and very shortsighted," the Nebraska Republican said.

"This is not how you win the people of the world over to our side, especially the Muslim world."

For one thing, that's why the report was classified SECRET ORCON; it wasn't meant to wind up in Time Magazine. For another, we're not interested in winning over the Muslim world if it means we don't interrogate terrorists in order to prevent the deaths of American civilians. What kind of stupid statement is that? Chuck Hagel needs to reassess his priorities, especially if he plans on running for President as rumored. If he hasn't got the stomach for protecting the country, then he shouldn't even fill his Senate seat, let alone become commander in chief of our military.

The Gitmo hysteria has gone on long enough. Someone throw cold water on Hagel and take him out to Lower Manhattan to remind him what we're trying to prevent.

UPDATE II: Now this would be torture.

Ed Klein Goes Too Far

I'm no fan of the Clintons, but the Right has had its problem reining in its vitriol regarding Bill and Hillary since 1992. The last five years have seen that mostly disappear (and reappear as Bush hysteria on the Left), but with Hillary running for re-election to the Senate in 2006 and probably for President in 2008, everyone expected it to return sometime. However, no one could have predicted that former Newsweek editor Ed Klein, of all people, would fan the flames of Clintonosis with a disgusting personal attack that purports to dissect Chelsea's conception (hat tip: Strata-Sphere):

"I'm going back to my cottage to rape my wife," Klein quotes Bill Clinton as saying during a Bermuda getaway in 1979.

In the morning, the Clintons' room "looked like World War III. There are pillows and busted-up furniture all over the place," an unnamed source tells Klein.

Klein source claims Bill later learned Hillary was pregnant reading about it in the ARKANSAS GAZETTE.

"The fact that his wife didn't tell him that she was pregnant before she told a reporter doesn't seem to phase him one bit, because he says, 'Do you know what night that happened?"

"'No,' I say. 'When?"

"'It was Bermuda,' he says, 'And you were there!'"

If Drudge has this quote and context correct, it's a mind-boggling anecdote to put into anyone's biography -- and a completely inexcusable and ridiculous claim. It's difficult to think of a more personal, disgusting, and indefensible accusation to toss at someone than to claim he raped his wife. Adding that they conceived their only child out of an act of violence adds another dimension of shamelessness to Klein's allegation.

Drudge reports that Hillary plans to sue Klein for libel, and it's hard to blame her. In the first place, Hillary may have put up with Bill's philandering for Chelsea's benefit and Bill's career, but she's hardly a woman who would have stuck around with someone that casually violent. On the other hand, it's one of those have-you-stopped-beating-your-wife allegations that put the Clintons in an impossible position. Now that the smear has been made public, how exactly are they supposed to prove otherwise? Who would think that an author would someday require them to prove how their child was conceived? It's a cowardly accusation -- and note that the former Newsweek foreign editor (and former NY Times Magazine editor-in-chief) uses an anonymous source for his authentication.

Someone needs to ask Ed Klein why he felt it necessary to include this accusation as part of his biography. It's hardly germane to her politics, or to her life in politics. It's the kind of tawdry Weekly World News gossip/hit piece that serves no purpose but character assassination. It also makes Hillary into a victim, this time almost certainly for real -- not of this purported rape, but of Klein's base attack.

If this is the level of professionalism we can expect from former Newsweek editors, small wonder we end up with Qu'ran-flushing frauds from the magazine now. Whether Ed Klein absorbed the Newsweek standards for sourcing and newsworthiness during his tenure or set those standards himself, the two are not unrelated. And regardless of whether Hillary or the Bush administration gets targeted by these reckless, irresponsible, and repulsive attacks, the public should respond by denying them their payday.

Crafty Drafty Democrats

One of the discredited accusations Democrats used as a scare technique during the presidential campaign last year was the notion that George Bush planned to restart the draft after winning a second term. Kerry and other Democrats campaigned on college campuses around the country to get students to vote, telling them that only Kerry would keep them from involuntary induction into the armed services. Now that we're eight months past the election, however, the Democrats now insist that the draft should be considered:

The United States will "have to face" a painful dilemma on restoring the military draft as rising casualties result in persistent shortfalls in US Army recruitment, a top US senator warned.

Joseph Biden, the top Democrat of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, made the prediction after new data released by the
Pentagon showed the US Army failing to meet its recruitment targets for four straight months.

"We're going to have to face that question," Biden said on NBC's "Meet the Press" television show when asked if it was realistic to expect restoration of the draft. ...

During the 2004 election campaign, Democratic presidential nominee
John Kerry repeatedly accused President George W. Bush of planning to re-instate "a back-door draft," charges the president vehemently denied.

But while admitting that restoring the draft would be politically "very difficult," Senator Patrick Leahy, the ranking Democrat of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said something will have to be done because the situation with recruitment was not likely to improve.

When this came up during the campaign, Charles Rangel and Fritz Hollings introduced legislation to start the draft as an anti-war measure to embarrass the Bush administration. It had no Republican sponsors and sat off the calendar for months. Once Kerry and the Democrats used the bill to supposedly show the Bush administration's intentions (a lie), the GOP suddenly rushed it through committee and scheduled a floor vote on it to demonstrate which party wanted a new draft. Rangel, furious at being showed up, wound up voting against his own legislation as it received only four votes in the House.

This appears to be another attempt to politicize military recruitment, in the same eat-cake-and-have-it-too school of thought. Neither Biden nor Leahy want a draft because it would strengthen the military; even the military doesn't believe that a draft would do anything except make them less efficient. They want a draft to make the war more unpopular and create a groundswell of protest on college campuses, the type they engineered out of whole cloth during 2004. They want to use the recruiting shortfall to argue for a rapid retreat from the Middle East and especially Iraq.

Still, college students should note that one party keeps talking about drafting them into involuntary service, and not even for the noble purpose of defending their country or making their families more secure. Only one party keeps using their freedom as a pawn for their political needs. Students should ask themselves if that party really represents their best interests after all.

Lipscomb: Boston Globe Stonewalling On SF-180

After the Boston Globe and reporter Michael Kranish reported that they had executed an SF-180 signed by John Kerry and received his full records, Thomas Lipscomb reminded us that the SF-180 had to be executed carefully in order to actually confirm that the records were complete. He went back to the Boston Globe to get a release of the form itself to determine how it was executed -- and the Globe, instead of operating with transparency for its readers, instead opted to stonewall for Kerry instead:

Michael Kranish, the Globe reporter who wrote the front page story about receiving Kerry’s “complete medical and military records,” was not happy at being pursued by my questions about how he had made that determination. Kranish finally sent me the following: “The story speaks for itself. Other media have been given access to the same records, and the Kerry office has said it is accepting requests. Your request should go to them. That is our statement.” It sounds more like a response from a lawyer than a reporter.

And The Boston Globe made several calls to editors at the Chicago Sun-Times, complaining that I was giving them the kind of unpleasant treatment reporters give sources who stonewall on questions about matters they think are of vital public interest. They were right. I was. And those questions got the Globe to admit they had the SF-180 two days later.

What happened to providing full and complete information to their readers? The Boston Globe (owned by the New York Times) appears to have recast their mission into one of advocacy for John Kerry rather than journalism. If so, then the Globe should explicitly state that rather than hide their efforts behind the rapidly-declining credibility of their News section. The SF-180 and the documents uncovered by the Globe should receive the same kind of release that Kerry gave his other military records in order to determine whether Kranish told the truth about it being a complete release, or whether he's hiding something. Failure to provide the evidence strongly suggests the latter.

Read all of Lipscomb's column in E&P.

Debunking The Downing Street Memo

I don't often agree with Michael Kinsley, but I enjoy reading his columns; he has fun with language and brings an insouciant tone to almost every article. Today, however, he scores on the ridiculous nature of the Downing Street Memo that has the Left all atwitter. After noting that Air America fans have accused him of personally covering up for the Bush White House -- a hilarious assertion for anyone who's read Kinsley -- by failing to comment on the DSM, Kinsley explains why it's not news:

It's a report on a meeting of British Prime Minister Tony Blair and some aides on July 23, 2002. The key passage summarizes "recent talks in Washington" by the head of British foreign intelligence (identified, John le Carre-style, as "C"). C reported that "military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy…. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action."

C's focus on the dog that didn't bark — the lack of discussion about the aftermath of war — was smart and prescient. But even on its face, the memo is not proof that Bush had decided on war. It states that war is "now seen as inevitable" by "Washington." That is, people other than Bush had concluded, based on observation, that he was determined to go to war. There is no claim of even fourth-hand knowledge that he had actually declared this intention. Even if "Washington" meant administration decision-makers, rather than the usual freelance chatterboxes, C was only saying that these people believed that war was how events would play out.

Of course, if "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy," rather than vice versa, that is pretty good evidence of Bush's intentions, as well as a scandal in its own right. And we know now that this was true. Fixing intelligence and facts to fit a desired policy is the Bush II governing style, especially concerning the Iraq war. But C offered no specifics, or none that made it into the memo. Nor does the memo assert that actual decision-makers told him they were fixing the facts. Although the prose is not exactly crystalline, it seems to be saying only that "Washington" had reached that conclusion.

I'd say that Kinsley has been proven wrong about "know[ing] now that this was true," as the Senate Intelligence Committee has already thoroughly investigated this and reported that it is false, in a bipartisan report. No analyst claimed to have reached or changed conclusions based on any political pressure. In fact, most of the analysis presented by the Bush administration had been performed during the previous administration, since the CIA lost all of its humint sources in 1998, as the report indicates.

The timing of the memo also reveals its irrelevancy. Supposedly the memo claimed that war was imminent. However, it took almost eight months after that, and two attempts at the UN to issue an ultimatum to Saddam, before we actually initiated military action. It had been Bush's position that military action was justified just by Saddam's firing on jets in the no-fly zone, an obvious and clear violation of the cease-fire that stopped the Coalition from marching on Baghdad in 1991. It was the British who wanted new legal justification for military action, not the US, and against the advice of both America and France, it was the British who wanted to go back for a second resolution in 2003 rather than just rely on 1441. In short, Washington didn't have much need to "fix" intelligence at all.

Beyond that, the memo itself says nothing at all. It mentions no names and provides no quotes. The supposed "smoking gun" of the memo, the "fixing" statement, isn't even attributed to another person. It actually reads like the opinion of the memo's author -- and as Kinsley points out, that opinion could hardly be considered unique, even at the time the memo was written. The analysis matches the Labour position at the time, which wanted to stick with sanctions on Iraq that supposedly kept Saddam in his box, a contention that we know now (through Oil-For-Food evidence seized after the invasion) had not been true for years.

Simply put, the DSM provides nothing new -- no evidence, no perspective, not even decent hearsay. It's the opinion of an anonymous analyst who traveled to Washington and spoke with unknown sources, and then came back and wrote a memo supporting what the analyst thought was the party line. It provides no support for what its fans claim to be its central assertion. The DSM is a development only Air America could love.

And yet, the Exempt Media has decided to twist itself into knots about their failure to cover the memo. One would think that disregarding it showed some improvement in editorial judgment, considering the lessons of Newsweek and the Killian-memo frauds. Thankfully, Kinsley is honest enough to point out to the moonbats that they have chosen their Holy Grail ... poorly.

Tennis And Gambling: A Love Match?

Most professional sports learned decades ago to keep professional gamblers at arm's length from the players in order to maintain the credibility of the sport. The most famous scandal of all sports, the Black Sox of 1919, taught the value of at least maintaining a plausible facade of integrity, although to baseball's credit, it put in place one of the most Draconian codes about gambling in sports. Point-shaving scandals have come and gone, but the sports involved know to act quickly and harshly with those involved to rebuild trust with fans.

Now, however, a new sport may come under scrutiny for widespread cheating, and combating it may prove much more difficult:

The squeaky-clean image of tennis is at risk as the sport braces itself for a court case which threatens to expose match-fixing by top players.

Irakli Labadze, a Georgian last year ranked 42nd in the world, will be accused at a court hearing in Austria this week of conspiring with a professional gambler to make money by 'throwing' a match.

Tennis authorities are watching the case nervously amid growing fears that some players and their associates may be profiting by using gambling websites to place bets on matches in which they know the result in advance.

Unlike in team sports, tennis players can control the entire match unilaterally -- and it's not difficult to lose while looking on the level. A missed volley here and there, a bit of extra power on a shot that puts the ball just outside the line, and it just appears that one has had an off day.

It appears that Labadze may have done just that against unknown local player Julian Knowle in Austria, much to the delight of his friend, gambler Martin Fuehrer. The unfortunately-named Fuehrer oddly bet 10,000 Euros against the 42nd-ranked Labadze in favor of Knowle and won 17,000 Euro when his "gamble" paid off. Only, in fact, it didn't pay off; the bookmaker, Cashpoint, got suspicious and checked into the situation. It claims it has evidence which will be revealed this week that Fuehrer and Labadze met before the bet was placed and Labadze threw the match.

If this shocks anyone considering the large purses available to the winners in tennis (it did me), the notion of corruption in tennis doesn't surprise those who play the game, nor those who gamble on it:

Justin Gimelstob, an American player, has warned that corruption may be going undetected and that tennis is an 'easy' sport to fix. 'It's 100 per cent possible and I have my suspicions,' he said.

Professional gambler Christian Plenz said: 'To put €10,000 on a single wager is very unusual. Match-fixing does happen in tennis.'

If proven in the Labadze case, it might devastate the sport. Unfortunately, unlike other team sports where game-fixing and point-shaving required conspiracies that usually unravelled quickly, match-fixing in tennis would consist mainly of free-agent gamblers and players coming together on only certain occasions and probably only involving one player and one gambler. Once the sport gets dirt on its shoes, and especially if Gimelstob is proven correct, it may never be able to demonstrate that it's clean again. Such a revelation won't stop tennis from continuing, but the big sponsors will walk away from the corruption -- and those big purses will start to dry up.

In this case, it may have to fall to the players rather than their association to demand transparency and a wall between the players and the gamblers. Tennis is too autonomous for a Kenesaw Mountain Landis to rescue it, and players "own" themselves anyway. The sport had better prepare some sort of response quickly, however, because if Fuehrer and Labadze are found to have thrown that match, sponsors and watchdog groups will start sending forensic accountants to scour the records they can check to see what else crawls out from under the baseline.

Kuwait Suffrage Accelerates

The Kuwaitis may take their time to bring modern justice and civil rights to their society, but they act quickly once they make up their minds. Barely a month after legalizing the vote for women, the Kuwaiti government has appointed its first woman to its Cabinet:

The Kuwaiti government has appointed its first female Cabinet minister, a month after lawmakers in this oil-rich nation granted women the right to vote and run for office, state-owned television reported Sunday.

Political science teacher Massouma al-Mubarak, a women's rights activist and columnist, was given the planning and administrative development portfolios, Prime Minister Sheik Sabah Al Ahmed Al Sabah was quoted as saying.

"I'm happy," al-Mubarak, 54, told The Associated Press. "This honor is not bestowed on my person but on every woman who fought to prove that Kuwaiti women are capable."

To give readers a sense of perspective, after achieving national suffrage in 1920 (some states allowed women to vote before that), it took 13 years for an American president to appoint a woman to his Cabinet. FDR selected Francis Perkins to be his Secretary of Labor shortly after taking office in 1933, in retrospect a rather gutsy move, considering the epidemic of unemployment at the height of the Depression. She remained in that position through the Truman administration, a very long tenure for any Cabinet official.

Some countries that have granted women the vote have done so grudgingly and mostly for public-relations purposes, while culturally discouraging them from exercising the franchise. Kuwait deserves some credit for not only finally coming to its senses about women's rights, but also for pursuing the issue with such enthusiasm.