CU Escapes The Peter Principle

After generating months of controversy from his remarks about 9/11 victims being "little Eichmanns" to disputes over his alleged Native American heritage and claims that he falsified key parts of his curriculum vitae, Ward Churchill has embarrassed University of Colorado innumerable times. However, it hasn't kept CU from giving Churchill a merit increase for his performance (via LGF):

University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill was awarded a 2.28 percent merit pay increase this week for work performed in 2004, a little less than his department's average recommended salary increase for professors.

A statement released by CU said pay increases for Boulder campus faculty are approved by interim Chancellor Phil DiStefano and based on reviews and recommendations by committees at the department, school or college, and administrative levels.

Churchill's increase was finalized Thursday. The average recommended increase for ethnic studies department faculty was 3.21 percent, according to the CU statement.

"In 2004, Professor Churchill taught a higher number of courses than required, received A's and A-pluses on his student evaluations, completed numerous publications and served as administrative chair of the department," the statement said.

Let me get this straight. An employee of CU currently under investigation for employment fraud, plagiarism, and fabrication still remains eligible for annual merit increases? In the private sector, one would have to wait for the end of the investigation before anyone would dare put that request through to Human Resources. Since CU runs on state money, that means that Colorado taxpayers not only continue to fund Churchill's lunacies -- but now they have to pay more for them as well.

Obviously tenure doesn't explain the entire problem with Churchill's continued employment in academia.

UPDATE: Okay, okay, University of Colorado. I got ya, Momo.

Living It Up In The Nation's Capital

So this is what the Center of Democracy looks like!

The First Mate and I landed in DC this afternoon, arriving at Ronald Reagan Airport around 4:30 pm. After the normal confusion of deplaning, we quickly collected our luggage and got our rental car, a Mazda compact that surprisingly handled all of our baggage. Due to a fundamental misjudgment of local geography, I booked our room in Gaithersburg, about 40 minutes outside of the sites we want to see, but the hotel is comfortable and affordable. The drive took so long that I had almost convinced myself that I had gotten lost, but the correct off-ramp appeared and we found ourselves checked in, exhausted.

We ate at a lovely steak place called Sir Walter Raleigh's in Gaithersburg. It featured a generous salad bar and a casual atmosphere, and the 12-ounce sirloin I ordered came cooked to perfection. The only flaw in the entire dinner was when we found out that this establishment will close down at the end of the month. I didn't ask why, but it can't be the food or the service. In fact, due to their impending shutdown, the waiter gave us a 25% discount on the meal -- fortunately after I collected cash from my mother and my sister to put the entire meal on my credit card. (Trust me, they'll get it back this week.)

I see that Dafydd has already written a few excellent posts, and I know you will see even more from him this week. I will also post updates on my travels here in DC as well as keep up with the breaking news, mostly in the early mornings and later evenings. Tuesday will bring a special book review and an interview with the author, so keep an eye out that morning for what I think will be a fascinating series of posts.

Keep checking in for more updates!

Dafydd: If It's Rove...

...Then he's off the hook legally.

Again, a caution: I'm neither a lawyer, nor a law-school grad, nor a law-school admittee, nor even a wanna-be lawyer. (I was in the Navy once, so you can call me a sea lawyer.) I am, however, reasonably literate; so I will presume to give legal advice, secure in the knowledge that I have, in fact, nothing to lose!

As Himself noted in Creepy Liar Strikes Again, Lawrence "Creepy Liar" O'Donnell now implies (without much credibility, and without explicitly making the claim) that the original leaker of Valerie Plame's name to Robert Novak was Karl Rove. O'Donnell says that e-mails from Time, Inc. between reporter Matthew Cooper and his editors at Time Magazine will prove this, though he does not claim to have actually seen the e-mail himself.

So far as I can tell, O'Donnell, who is a producer of the NBC series the West Wing and also MSNBC's "senior political analyst" -- though I'm not sure why, as his political credentials are rather scant -- has never had any association with Time Magazine, nor does it appear that he is on the e-mail list now. So I can only assume he got his information from the Newsweek article "the Rove Factor?" by Michael Isikoff.

Isikoff claims that two attorneys "who asked not to be identified because they are representing witnesses sympathetic to the White House" claim that Karl Rove is "one of Cooper's sources." What this means isn't clear: if Cooper called Rove to ask him whether Bush wants to find out who leaked the name, and if Rove said yes, then Rove would be one of his sources.

In fact, even Isikoff himself admits he has no idea what Rove did or did not say to Matthew Cooper:

Cooper and a Time spokeswoman declined to comment. But in an interview with NEWSWEEK, Rove's lawyer, Robert Luskin, confirmed that Rove had been interviewed by Cooper for the article. It is unclear, however, what passed between Cooper and Rove....

But according to Luskin, Rove's lawyer, Rove spoke to Cooper three or four days before Novak's column appeared. Luskin told NEWSWEEK that Rove "never knowingly disclosed classified information" and that "he did not tell any reporter that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA." Luskin declined, however, to discuss any other details. He did say that Rove himself had testified before the grand jury "two or three times" and signed a waiver authorizing reporters to testify about their conversations with him. "He has answered every question that has been put to him about his conversations with Cooper and anybody else," Luskin said.

So it certainly is by no means clear that Rove was actually the leaker who told Novak (or Cooper) that Plame was the CIA agent who sent her hubby on the little trip to Niger. If he were, then Cooper would have been free (due to the waiver) to tell the world.

It is noteworthy that not even Lawrence O'Donnell claims that Rove was the one who outed Plame: even he says only that "Karl Rove was Matt Cooper's source" but doesn't elaborate -- source for what? We already knew Rove spoke to Cooper, which means we already knew he was one of Cooper's sources.

But let's play a little thoughtgame: suppose it turned out that Karl Rove was actually the person who outed Ms. Plame. Would Rove be "prosecuted," as a couple of people on the right and a few million people on the left insist? Well... not likely. The reason is the way the law itself is written.

The applicable section of the U.S. Code is "Section 421. Protection of identities of certain United States undercover intelligence officers, agents, informants, and sources." There are three classes of leaker covered by this law.

Section (c) refers to persons engaged in "a pattern of activities intended to identify and expose covert agents." Consider this the "Philip Agee" subsection, and it clearly does not apply to Rove.

Sections (a) and (b) differ slightly. The first applies to "whoever, having or having had authorized access to classified information that identifies a covert agent," while the second applies to "whoever, as a result of having authorized access to classified information, learns the identify of a covert agent."

Note that bit about having "authorized access to classified information" that discloses the name of a covert agent. Here is the rub: the disclosure occurred in or before July 2003... and at that time, Karl Rove was the Special Advisor to the President. This was a political position; he was Bush's chief political advisor. But in this position, it is extremely unlikely that Rove had any authorized access to CIA personnel files whatsoever, since those are extremely highly restricted (for reasons that should be obvious), and Rove did not have any kind of a national-security or defense position.

Which means that even if it were to eventuate that Rove was the guy who leaked the Plame name, he would almost certainly not be a "covered person" as far as Section 421 is concerned: however he might have found out about her CIA employment, it would have to have been by means other than "authorized access to classified information that identifies a covert agent."

This would not stop Bush from firing Rove, if he so chose; but it would stop any sort of prosecution -- whether the leaker was Rove or someone else who likewise had no authorized access. Which is probably why nobody has been indicted: likely, the leaker, whoever he was, learned about Plame on the D.C. cocktail circuit, where evidently it was common knowledge.

So however desperately much the Left wants to see Rove "frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs," as Joseph Wilson, ambassador and yet another creepy liar, put it, it simply is not going to happen.

Creepy Liar Strikes Again

MS-NBC analyst Lawrence O'Donnell announced on last night's McLaughlin Group that the person who outed Valerie Plame to Robert Novak was none other than Democratic bete noir, Karl Rove:

Now that Time Inc. has turned over documents to federal court, presumably revealing who its reporter, Matt Cooper, identified as his source in the Valerie Plame/CIA case, speculation runs rampant on the name of that source, and what might happen to him or her. Tonight, on the syndicated McLaughlin Group political talk show, Lawrence O'Donnell, senior MSNBC political analyst, claimed to know that name--and it is, according to him, top White House mastermind Karl Rove.

Here is the transcript of O'Donnell's remarks:

"What we're going to go to now in the next stage, when Matt Cooper's e-mails, within Time Magazine, are handed over to the grand jury, the ultimate revelation, probably within the week of who his source is.

"And I know I'm going to get pulled into the grand jury for saying this but the source of...for Matt Cooper was Karl Rove, and that will be revealed in this document dump that Time magazine's going to do with the grand jury."

Lawrence O'Donnell hardly qualifies as the most stable or reliable source for this kind of information. CQ readers will recall O'Donnell's meltdown on the Joe Scarborough show during the final lap of the election. Paired up with John O'Neill of the Swiftvets, he couldn't even allow O'Neill to talk, calling him names like "creepy liar" every time O'Neill tried to respond. (You can listen to it here.)

O'Donnell later explained that his close personal friendship with John Kerry wouldn't allow him to extend any courtesy to O'Neill. I'd say that bias makes him a lousy source for this revelation as well, considering the animosity that Rove generated among Kerry's inner circle during the last election. If it turns out to be Rove, we'll know soon enough when Time makes the documents public. However, I doubt that O'Donnell has a clue as to what those documents really say and what they can prove.

Basically, when Lawrence O'Donnell says Good morning, I'd still check the windows for the current weather.

Brother, Can You Spare Your Personal Carbon Allowance?

The British government has started to research ways to ration energy use, not just for commercial ventures and government facilities but for each and every person in the UK. The Telegraph reports that Tony Blair's ministers have started thinking about imposing a system of "personal carbon allowances" that residents can barter or trade as they see fit, but which would restrict access to all forms of energy for consumers:

Every individual in Britain could be issued with a "personal carbon allowance" - a form of energy rationing - within a decade, under proposals being considered seriously by the Government.

Ministers say that increasingly clear evidence that climate change is happening more quickly than expected has made it necessary to "think the unthinkable". ...

Under the scheme for "domestic tradeable quotas" (DTQs), or personal carbon allowances, presented to the Treasury this week, everyone - from the Queen to the poorest people living on state benefits - would have the same annual carbon allocation.

This would be contained electronically on a "ration card", which could be the proposed ID card or a "carbon card" based on supermarket loyalty cards.

It would have to be handed over every time a form of non-renewable energy was purchased - at the filling station, or when buying tickets for a flight - for points to be deducted.

High users of energy would have to purchase points from low users, or from a central "carbon bank", if they wanted to use more energy.

Rationing has never led to efficient use of resources, and imposing such a system will lead to massive amounts of cheating, black-market trades, and a further growth in crime that can only be addressed by expansion of police powers. Rather than creating competitive pressure in the open market by subsidizing renewable energy resources -- an approach which has its own problems -- Britain wants to choose an even dumber approach to solve a problem that hasn't yet been proven to exist.

This is yet another example of the kinds of solutions developed when nanny-staters get put in charge. Imposing top-down rationing requires the abrogation of free-market principles, chiefly the suddenly-endangered notion of private property. High energy users already pay more for their energy, because they have to buy more of it from the private producers who sell it. This new system will create a high-level tax that will only put more of a drag on the British economy. That also will contribute to higher unemployment, which means more crime, more police needed, and so on.

Don't be surprised when someone proposes a similar system for the Unites States. Let's hope that American lawmakers have better sense than some of their British counterparts.

Live 8 Starts Slow, Picks Up Speed

The grassroots effort to convince the G-8 nations to rescue Africa got off to a shaky start this morning in Tokyo, the launching pad for the concert series designed to produce political pressure on the richest nations act now. Only 10,000 showed up for the debut concert in Tokyo:

he Live 8 global music marathon to raise awareness of African poverty began in Japan on Saturday, as Bjork and Good Charlotte joined local bands in a concert that failed to generate much interest in Asia's only G-8 nation.

Added to the Live 8 list at the last minute, the concert in Japan drew only about 10,000 people, all of whom were selected in a lottery. The venue in this Tokyo suburb normally holds about 20,000.

Even so, organizers said that considering they had less than a month to prepare, it was a good showing.

The Tokyo venue came as a surprise; last night, I and several other bloggers participated in a conference call with Live 8 organizers that featured Dr. Benjamin Chavis, who now heads up the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network and represents the genre in Live 8 leadership. Tokyo, as far as I can recall, did not receive any mention. London was mentioned several times as the kickoff for the tour.

As impressed as I was by Bob Geldof, and there is no doubting that he and Bono make impressive cases for Live 8, yesterday's call left me with some doubts as to the depth of the team at the second level. Dr. Chavis makes a good spokesmen for the effort, but he doesn't have the grasp of detail and of the politics involved in creating the across-the-board support required to get African aid levels to where they want. Omitting Tokyo is only one of the details we didn't hear. When Geldof spoke to bloggers, he presented Live 8 in very practical terms, both politically and economically. Dr. Chavis' talk sounded much more facile, more slogans and gimmicks than red meat.

Still, I believe that we need to find a way to stabilize the African continent, if for no other reason than to eliminate the influence that Islamists have exercised through gang warfare in places like Somalia. That requires political reform on Africa's part, because no one, including me, wants to see another $400 billion sinkhole for Western aid like Nigeria again. In the end, if we want to see a self-sufficient and democratic Africa, which is in everyone's best interest, we need to find an effective manner to assist them to get there. Sir Bob Geldof, I think, has the right concepts. But the Devil is in the details, and we're hearing less of them, not more, as we go along.

Visit the Live 8 website for more updates. If you watch the concerts live, they have an arrangement for text messages from cell phones to display over the stages at the various events. The web site will give directions on how callers can show their support, live for all to see, while the concerts go on.

Democrats Go On Offensive, In All Senses Of The Word

The Democrats wasted no time coming out on the offensive against George Bush and the upcoming Supreme Court nomination. Senators from the minority caucus isseud warnings yesterday that they fully intend to continue their obstructionist tactics unless Bush meets with them in person to get their prior approval on any candidate:

Capitol Hill braced yesterday for the first Supreme Court confirmation fight in nearly 11 years, and Democrats warned President Bush to consult them "face-to-face" before offering a replacement for Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. ...

Sen. Charles E. Schumer, New York Democrat and a member of the committee, told reporters it would be "a shame" if Mr. Bush makes his nomination "without real face-to-face, back-and-forth consultation." Democrats argue that this is the correct meaning of the Senate's constitutional "advice and consent" role.

No it isn't, and no Senate has ever demanded such a process from a President in American history. The Democrats have continued twisting the words of the Constitution and the precedent of over 200 years in an effort to simulate power that the electorate has denied them. In our history, advice and consent came out of the confirmation process within the Senate, not from some pre-approval standard that Schumer and the rest of the Democratic caucus now demands. These demands just provide the latest excuse that the Democrats will offer to claim any nominee as an "extraordinary circumstance" and attempt a filibuster.

In order to be successful in that endeavor, the Democrats have to properly set the stage. Yesterday, they launched their masters of hyperbole to do just that. Ted Kennedy and the abortion-rights lobby didn't even wait for the ink to dry on Justice O'Connor's resignation:

"If the president abuses his power and nominates someone who threatens to roll back the rights and freedoms of the American people, then the American people will insist that we oppose that nominee -- and we intend to do so," Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrat and member of the Judiciary Committee, said.

Excuse me, but how does nominating a justice equal an "abuse of power"? While the Constitution explicitly gives restrictions on those who seek elective office -- mostly age restrictions -- it gives no such prerequisites for a Supreme Court justice. In fact, one does not even have to be a lawyer to be nominated and confirmed to SCOTUS, although no one in this age would dream of trying to nominate a layman. (Captain Ed for SCOTUS!) Kennedy uses the phrase "abuse of power" to deliberately make it sound as if Bush will try something illegal in nominating someone to fill the opening.

However, if Kennedy gets hyperbolic, then the abortion-rights groups sound positively insane:

A group of liberal activists reserved a room across the hall from the Senate chamber yesterday to add their warnings, calling the abortion rights as upheld by Justice O'Connor the most fundamental American freedom.

"On Independence Day weekend -- as we all celebrate the freedoms that make America so special -- there is no freedom more fundamental to our rights than the ability for women to decide whether and when to parent," said Karen Pearl, interim president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

So that's why our Founding Fathers created the first representative, democratic republic -- so that women could get abortions! Now I recall that every Fourth of July, we set off those fireworks and gave thanks that we escaped the evil tyranny of England, who had outlawed Planned Parenthood. Meanwhile, the FEC restricts political speech and New London confiscates private property to give it away to rich developers, but thank God some generic Higher Power that we can celebrate our most fundamental freedom, one that is so fundamental that one cannot even find a mention of it in our Constitution.

Why would George Bush take advice from this gang of idiots? In fact, why does anyone?

Gitmo Papers Show Inmates Initiating Violence

AP reports that it has reports showing that inmates at Gitmo initiate violence against the guards at Camp X-Ray, and incidents of retaliation result in disciplinary action. Rather than the unfortunate victims of American oppression that Amnesty International has painted, the detainees actively attempt to provoke guards into confrontations, showing the dangerous nature of Gitmo's inmates:

Military authorities have previously disclosed some incidents of guard retaliation at Guantanamo Bay, which resulted in mostly minor disciplinary proceedings. What emerges from 278 pages of documents obtained by The Associated Press is the degree of defiance by the terrorism suspects at Guantanamo.

The prisoners banged on their cells to protest the heat. They doused guards with whatever liquid was handy from spit to urine. Sometimes they struck their jailers, one swinging a steel chair at a military police officer.

And the American MPs at times retaliated with force punches, pepper spray and a splash of cleaning fluid in the face, according to the newly released documents that detail military investigations and eyewitness accounts of alleged abuse.

This report confirms that abuse occurs at Gitmo, all right. It's just that the abuse comes from the Islamist terrorists detained there who have nothing much to lose from lashing out. American servicemen make good targets for these detainees, since they have to act within military regulations regardless of how their prisoners behave. For instance, this incident resulted in a non-commissioned officer losing his stripes for coming to the aid of his fellow soldiers:

Some prisoners at the U.S. base in eastern Cuba have gone on the attack, as in April 2003 when a detainee got out of his cell during a search for contraband food and knocked out a guard's tooth with a punch to the mouth and bit him before he was subdued by MPs. One soldier delivered two blows to the inmate's head with a handheld radio, the documents show.

"Several guards were trying to hold down the detainee who was putting up heavy resistance," recounted a translator who saw the incident. "The detainee was covered in blood as were some of the guards."

The soldier who struck the inmate, and was dropped in rank to private first class as a result, described it as a close call. "The detainee was fighting as if he really wanted to hurt us. ... We all saved each other's lives in my opinion," he wrote.

Of course, these servicemen know the rules that govern their actions and should be held accountable when they break the rules. If that report represents the incident fairly, however, it doesn't sound very reasonable to expect the Americans to play by the Marquess de Queensbury rules, especially when a prisoner gets loose and tries to attack others. I find it hard to blame the guard who tried to knock out a terrorist bent on biting and punching his way out of the cellblock.

More seriously, a guard threw Pine-Sol into a detainee's eyes after the Islamist threw spit at him. That certainly has no excuse, and the investigation recommended disciplinary action against him. The report does not give the final resolution of that case. In case after case, the AP found similar reaction. Whenever complaints of abuse have come to investigators, disciplinary action gets initiated when those allegations are found credible, such as the Pine-Sol incident that another MP reported to authorities.

Once again, while we see that American soldiers are indeed human and occasionally allow circumstances to get the best of them, Gitmo has maintained a remarkable sense of discipline and professionalism. When violations occur, the camp's leadership takes action to punish those who commit them and keep others from repeating them. It sounds as if Camp X-Ray has a remarkable record in detention, one that many state and federal civil detention institutions in the US might envy. It completely belies the notion of Gitmo as an "American gulag," and exposes those who make those allegations as ill-informed tools of Islamist propaganda.

Dafydd: Why I Don't Write "Islamofascist"

First, why is this even important? Because language frames thought. I won't go as far as George Orwell in the "Newspeak" chapter of Nineteen Eighty-Four; I don't believe that absent a word for a concept, the concept itself becomes literally unthinkable. But I do believe language structures thought, changing how we think about an idea.

So creating a new word for Islamic terrorism changes how we perceive it, which affects how we fight it. This is especially true when the new word is actually a contraction of two other words, Islamic and fascism, into Islamofascism. The shortening restricts the ability to think critically about the alleged connection, short-circuiting rational thought and heading straight for the emotional centers.

Or as Orwell put it, "Comintern is a word that can be uttered almost without taking thought, whereas Communist International is a phrase over which one is obliged to linger at least momentarily."

The point here is twofold: first, somewhat trivially, the Islamists who commit acts of terror are not typically Fascists, or even lower-case-f "fascists." The Muslim Brotherhood allied with Adolf Hitler in the 1930s, but that was primarily because Hitler was such a strident Jew hater.

Most of the militant Islamist groups around today simply have no economic ideas, plans, or principles. Yet the distinguishing characteristic of fascism -- what differentiates it from garden-variety socialism, racism, and antisemitism -- is intensely economic: fascism is totalitarianism that operates through corporatism. As my pal and co-writer Brad Linaweaver explains it:

The Communists gathered up all the corporate heads and took them out to be shot; the fascists gathered up all the corporate heads and took them out to lunch -- where they were told to obey orders or be shot.

Precisely none of the Islamic countries or terrorist organizations who want to destroy us is a corporatist state; none is fascist.

The word "Islamofascist" is just an example of using Nazi or fascist as an all-purpose intensifier to mean anything bad. It cheapens the historicity of the real fascists. What's next, discussing the Communofascism of North Korea?

But the more important point is that the word "fascism" has a magical power: it overwhelms every other word you connect it to. In the real world, "Islamofascism" transsubstantiates into (islamo)-FASCISM! Kaboom!

The danger we face is Islamism and the willingness to murder hundreds of thousands in the name of jihad. What matters is the religion itself and the militancy by which it's spread -- not some putative connection to Mussolini or Hitler. To understand the jihadi, we need to confront the true source of the danger: the death cult that animates the slayer-of-thousands.

What we don't need is to hide it behind the big, black shadow of a different boogieman, and one that -- unlike Islamism -- doesn't even exist in any signficance anymore. Rather than intensifying our perception of what actually assails us, tacking that silly predicate on the end actually diminishes the intensity, fuzzing up the picture. If we lose focus and forget the real danger, as 9/11 recedes into the past, we will be tempted to just shrug it off and go back to the Clintonian "situation normal, all f---ed up" response.

And a word like Islamofascist pushes us in just that direction. In fact, it sounds exactly like something the Comintern might come up with to attack pro-democracy Moslems, like the brothers who run Iraq the Model.

The proper word that truly describes the enemy to his poisoned core is militant Islamist; and that is the word I will use.

Dafydd: The Garza Trip

(I could actually have picked all of the categories for this post, as the Supreme Court now encompasses the entirety of human endeavor.)

Over at Patterico's Pontifications, Patterico suggests, in an update to a guest post by Angry Clam that is both angry and potty-mouthed, that a good choice to replace Sandra Day O'Connor on the Supremes would be Emilio Garza. I agree; but as always, I have my idiosyncratic reasons for doing so.

UPDATE: Patterico notes in the comments here and on his own blog that he is not suggesting Judge Garza for the Supreme Court; he is predicting that Garza will get the nod. Patterico's actual fave for the seat is Judge J. Michael Luttig, who has sat on the 4th Circus for fourteen years. Apologies, Patterico!

O'Connor was the first woman appointed to the Court. She was appointed by Ronald Reagan, but she turned out not to be reliable as a "strict constructionist." In fact, she issued many rulings that conservatives and libertarian-conservatives found very troubling, including support for a virtually unfettered "right" to abortion and recent rulings -- one in the majority, the other in the minority -- to bar the display of the Ten Commandments on public property.

If you believe in limiting the ability of unelected federal judges to decide the great issues of the day; if you prefer that such issues be decided by the people themselves, either directly through referenda or indirectly via the legislatures; or if you just want to see the ultraliberals in the Senate spasm like monkeys undergoing electroshock therapy, then you will want to see the president name a strict constructionist to replace her. (See the Wikipedia for a thumbnail discussion of what the heck that means.)

But if Bush were to replace O'Connor by some conservative male, a hue and a holler would erupt from the Democrats that the O'Connor seat is supposed to be a "female" seat. Bizarre as this sounds, it would give the Democrats a ready-made excuse to filibuster -- and it would give moderate-to-liberal Republicans (Lincoln Chafee, Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins) reason to vote against him.

But, while it's true that there are only two women on the Court, it's also true that there are exactly zero Hispanics. And as cynical as it may sound, the political damage of a "female" seat shifting to a "male" seat can be ameliorated by it also being a shift of a "white" seat to a "Hispanic" seat.

In other words, if Bush were to nominate a Hispanic, even a Hispanic male, to replace O'Connor, the opposition of feminists would be met by the support of Hispanics. Many otherwise reliably liberal Democratic senators from states with large Hispanic populations (Diane Feinstein and Barbara Boxer from California, Bill Nelson from Florida, Jeff Bingaman from New Mexico, and Harry Reid from Nevada) -- and even a notoriously unreliable Republican, John McCain of Arizona -- would come under intense pressure from their constituents to support the appointment of the first Hispanic to the Supreme Court. Even many liberal senators from states with no significant Hispanic population might conclude that it was more important to break that racial barrier than to keep a somewhat conservative XX seat from going reliably XY conservative.

But which Hispanic should Bush name? The three names that come bubbling up (probably because most people, including moi, don't know more than three Hispanics who have been talked about for Court material) are Miguel Estrada, Alberto Gonzales, and Emilio Garza.

The first two bring problems: Estrada was originally nominated to the powerful D.C. Circus Court; but he was filibustered, and he eventually got fed up with the whole affair and withdrew his name. To the Democrats, renominating Estrada would be like giving them dessert after a wonderful entré: it was T-bone steak to drive him away the first time; and now that he has demonstrated spinelessness in the face of battle, it would be key lime pie to run him off a second time.

About Gonzales, there are two more substantial objections: first, he is far from being reliably strict-constructionist; in fact, many think he would be even worse than O'Connor. As some Republican senatorial staffer quipped, "Gonzales is Spanish for Souter," referring to Bush-41 appointee David Souter: thought to be conservative, Souter was nominated by GHWB to the Supreme Court after less than three months on the Circuit Court; he subsequently "grew in office" to become one of the most liberal justices in the joint.

But even worse than that, Ramesh Ponnuru pointed out in National Review Online that because Gonzales was White House Counsel for four years (arguing on behalf of President Bush) and is now Attorney General, he would have to recuse himself from half the cases that come before the Court... and especially from any case involving partial-birth aboriton, affirmative action, turning over classified documents to Congress or to news agencies, or any case involving the war on terrorism -- military tribunals, the treatment of detainees at Gitmo, the War Powers Act, and so forth, all cases where Gonzales himself argued on behalf of the Bush administration. That's pretty much every case of moment for the next several years!

So that leaves Emilio Garza: a solid strict constructionist with fourteen years on the 5th Circuit (appellate) Court and well known to the Bush family, since it was Bush-41 who appointed him to the Circus Court in 1991.

So that's my story, and I'm sticking to it: Garza for the Supremes!

Reuters' Anti-American Bias Shows Again

Reuters went out of its way to take a potshot at America today in a completely unrelated story about a 115-year-old Dutch woman and her predilection for herring:

A Dutch woman who swears by a daily helping of herring for a healthy life celebrated her 115th birthday on Wednesday as the oldest living person on record.

Hendrikje van Andel-Schipper, a former needlework teacher, was born in 1890, the year Sioux Indians were massacred by the U.S. military at the Battle of Wounded Knee.

So is Ms. Andel-Schipper a Sioux Indian? Did she marry a Sioux Indian? Is her middle name Sue? Apparently, the answer to all these questions is No. For some reason, however, Reuters chooses to use the Wounded Knee massacre as a benchmark for the life of a Dutch woman.

Was Wounded Knee the only historical event of 1890 that Reuters could discover? Given that the article mentions the German occupation during World War II and the fact that Andel-Schipper had to sell her jewelry to eat, perhaps Reuters could have mentioned that Kaiser Wilhelm fired Bismarck that year, aggregating absolute power to himself and setting the stage for two World Wars. At least that would have some tangential relationship to Andel-Schipper.

Whoever wrote this for Reuters should be fired, along with the editor who green-lighted it. (via The Corner)

Saudi Columnist: We Owe America For Our Development

MEMRI provides a translation of a column that ran earlier this month in the influential Saudi newspaper, Al-Jazirah. In an interesting departure from normal Arab anti-American rhetoric, the state-approved daily published this reflection on the historical benefits that the Saudi-American association has provided the oil-rich kingdom. It also argues against the pan-Arabist impulse that has destabilized the entire region of Southwest Asia:

What have the Arabs given us Saudis in comparison to what we have gained from our relations with America? I know very well that this is an extremely sensitive issue that many would hesitate to address; they are restrained by a culture of fear that prevents them from confronting controversial and sensitive issues head-on.

The late King Abdul Aziz, the founder of modern Saudi Arabia, was a resourceful and far-sighted statesman when he chose the Americans rather than the British to come and search for oil in the Kingdom. He did so despite Britain at the time being an important force in the region, with its colonies and dependencies surrounding the infant kingdom. The politics of the time plus the colonial legacies of both Britain and France made King Abdul Aziz distance himself from them and look to the New World.

Not long after the Americans and their expertise arrived, oil was gushing from beneath the desert sands and the development of the modern Saudi state began.

Muhammed al-Sheikh argues that the commercial relationships espoused by the Americans, as opposed to the colonial impulse of the British in the period prior to World War II, allowed the two countries to work as partners to develop the oil fields that created the vast wealth enjoyed by the Saudis. That argument cuts both ways, of course. That development put billions of dollars into the bloated and contradictory House of Saud, keeping a Wahhabist tyranny in place over the Arab nation most central to Arabist thought, thanks to its stewardship of Mecca and Medina. While some of the leaders of the Sauds appreciate American and Western modernity, undoubtedly others find that Western influence dangerous -- and have funded innumerable madrassas to combat it. They have generated the Islamofascist strain of Muslims that strap on bombs to kill civilians by the dozens, hundreds, and as we saw on 9/11, thousands.

American interest in stability over democracy has contributed to this result. During the Cold War, America understandably had its sights on the more dangerous enemy of the Soviet Union and its satellites. Our energy needs dictated that we not only ensured stable access to Persian Gulf oil, but in that binary world, that we kept the Soviets from establishing a hegemony in that area. We succeeded in Saudi Arabia and Iran, until 1979, but failed in Iraq, which aligned itself with the Soviets shortly after the Ba'athists took over in the 1970s.

Now we need to focus on democracy, especially in Saudi Arabia, where the radical Wahhabist autocracy and the suppression of almost all political activity has generated a clear impetus for the Islamofascists worldwide; the majority of the 9/11 attackers came from Saudi Arabia, after all. The Saudis appear to understand this. They have started municipal elections to replace royal appointments as a halting first step for reform. This passage from the al-Sheikh column signals that they recognize the destructive nature of the message they had a large part in communicating and want to combat as another step:

We must admit that our relations with America were the cornerstone for our development and progress. In return, we must ask what we have gained from our relations with the Arab world. Speaking frankly and unequivocally, all we got from them was trouble. Our brothers, as they call themselves, conspired against us, attacked us, and used all the means at their disposal to derail our plans for unity.

History has proven that Arab nationalism is a destructive ideology. We, the Saudis, must set our priorities and carefully read history to extract its lessons while at the same time endeavoring to build something new that does not take anything for granted — as has been the case in the past — but that thoroughly debates and analyzes everything. We must rely on an ideology that treats the national interests of this country as the top priority.

That statement powerfully separates the Saudis from the Islamist/Arabist impulse. It also discounts the value of building further relationships with neighboring nations that buy into that philosophy. Such a breach puts pressure on nations like Syria, which still holds out hope of Saddam's pan-Arab dream, only with Assad at its head, as a rallying point for Stalinists and Islamofascists alike. Hopefully, this column expresses the clear direction for the next generation of the House of Saud.

Palestinian Security Forces Inadequate And Mostly AWOL

Glenn Kessler reports on the status of Palestinian efforts to secure their territories for more far-reaching peace initiatives in today's Washington Post, and finds that the Palestinian Authority has fallen far short in even forming a unified security force under civilian control. The Palestinians still refuse to confront and disarm militants, perhaps because a majority of their official state security forces don't really exist:

Though Israel is scheduled to depart the Gaza Strip in six weeks, the badly fractured Palestinian security forces are still struggling to consolidate into a body capable of maintaining control, a top U.S. general told Congress yesterday.

Lt. Gen. William E. Ward, who four months ago was assigned to assist the Palestinians with their security services, described a difficult and at times frustrating experience of trying to reorganize a "dysfunctional" system of individual fiefdoms and an almost nonexistent chain of command. The Palestinian police also have little infrastructure or communications equipment, much of it having been destroyed by the Israelis in the past four years. ...

Ward testified that about 20,000 of the 58,000 Palestinians with security jobs show up for work. Over time, he said, the security services had turned into a "social welfare net," with payments being made to people even if they did not contribute to the day-to-day security on the streets.

Kessler doesn't ask how many of the 38,000 official security personnel avoid work due to other commitments, such as operations for Islamic Jihad, Hamas, or Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. Somehow I doubt that all 38,000 AWOL security forces use their stipends as nothing more than a welfare check. Later in the piece, Kessler quotes General Ward as skeptical about Palestinian efforts to co-opt militant groups rather than confront and disarm them, but that large percentage of unaccountable "police" officers -- almost two-thirds -- suggests that the militants have co-opted Palestinian security, not the other way around.

Until the Palestinians get serious about putting their security forces under clear civilian control and eliminating the militias, they cannot handle the responsibilities of sovereignty and statehood. As it stands, the Palestinian territories resemble Somalia, a recognized failed state, more than they resemble even Egypt or Syria, let alone Jordan or Kuwait. The Israelis had better build a big wall to keep the chaos out when the UN forces them to transfer official sovereignty to Abbas and the gang at Ramallah.

The Next Generation Of Republican Leaders

The New York Times reports on the burgeoning effort by the GOP to extend its reach into a crucial Democratic demographic. Black Republicans have started to run for offices across the country, a phenomenon that threatens the last bastion of lock-step Democratic voting, and their last hope of recapturing majority status in national elections:

In Maryland, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania, black Republicans - all of whom have been groomed by the national party - are expected to run for governor or the United States Senate next year. Several other up-and-coming black Republicans are expected to run for lower statewide offices in Missouri, Ohio, Texas and Vermont in 2006.

It is not clear that local Republican organizations will embrace all of those candidates, and several face primaries. But national Republican leaders have been enthusiastically showcasing those blacks' campaigns, saying that whether those candidates win or lose, the party can still gain if blacks believe that Republicans are seriously courting their votes.

"You've got a Democratic Party which I think has repeatedly demonstrated that it assumes it will win the African-American vote, but doesn't work for that vote," Ken Mehlman, chairman of the Republican National Committee, said. "It takes African-Americans for granted. And I think folks in the African-American community see that. There is a real opportunity here for the Republican Party."

Mr. Mehlman has been traveling the country raising money for black candidates, speaking at historically black colleges and promoting religion-based programs with black churches. He has created an African-American advisory panel that includes virtually all the statewide black candidates. And he recruited blacks to campaign with President Bush last year, including Mr. Swann, who was co-chairman of African-Americans for Bush National Steering Committee.

Mehlman has worked hard this year to spread the Republican agenda into areas that have traditionally been the most hostile to it. However, after decades of promises from Democrats about Great Society handouts and trillions of dollars spent on welfare, urban renewal, and quotas, the African-American community still finds itself economically and politically isolated from the American mainstream to a large extent. With the GOP holding majorities across the board after their explicit and monolithic opposition, that political isolation is as complete as it has been since the Civil Rights movement. Unfortunately, as their leaders have discovered, their bloc support for Democrats put themselves in that position.

Mehlman and the GOP could have easily discounted the African-American community as a result of their lock-step opposition, but instead opted for a long-range strategy of inclusiveness. Republicans have offered what the Democrats cannot -- real positions of power within the party, school vouchers for those trapped within the inner-city public school monopoly, and so on. A new generation of black politicians that preach self-reliance and center-right economics have suddenly arisen to counter the handout philosophy of Democrats that have trapped two generations of the poor (not just African-Americans) in the ghettoes.

Given the choice between the same tired agenda that Democrats have used on African-Americans for forty years or a new chance to rise to positions of real power on a national basis, significant numbers of the black community have opened their ears to the GOP. Until the Democrats start rethinking their entire special-interest strategy, where the needs of African-American parents in those inner cities compete against the interests of the teachers, lawyers, and labor unions that feed Democratic troughs, they risk losing their last undisputed base of electoral support.

Sandra Day O'Connor Says Goodbye

As Sherlock Holmes would often say, the game's afoot -- Sandra Day O'Connor has resigned from the Supreme Court:

Supreme Court Justrice Sandra Day O'Connor submitted her retirement notice to President Bush on Friday, setting the stage for a contentious battle over her replacement. ...

One of the court's two swing votes, O'Connor often sides with more conservative justices as she did in the Bush v. Gore ruling in 2000.

O'Connor's retirement puts more pressure on the Senate than a Rehnquist retirement would have done. Rehnquist has consistenly provided a conservative voice on the court, and replacing him with another conservative would probably not have concerned moderate Democrats, who want to keep their powder dry for selected battles. O'Connor, however, has voted more from the center, and replacing her with a staunch conservative might get some of those moderate Democrats to the firing lines in the political battle to come.

Many names have been bandied about over the past several weeks. I don't have a specific prediction on the nomination, but I wouldn't be surprised to see Bush nominate someone like Alberto Gonzales for a couple of reasons. First, his nomination would likely get a better reception as a replacement for O'Connor among his base than if he replaced Rehnquist. Bush has intense loyalty towards his friends and he wants to leave a legacy on SCOTUS in some form. Appointing the first Hispanic to SCOTUS has its appeal for the President with the most ethnically diverse inner circle in history.

Of course, it wouldn't surprise me if Bush nominated a staunch conservative and judicial constructionist like Michael McConnell, either. It's Bush's nature to challenge his opponents, and he isn't likely to allow the Democrats to dictate the terms of his executive appointments. This might be the opportunity he seeks to force the Democrats to extend their obstructionism to the highest levels of government, to truly smoke them out for the nation to see. If a substantial portion of the population didn't care about appellate confirmations, they certainly will take notice of a SCOTUS confirmation.

All I know is that O'Connor's resignation finally unleashes the political forces that both sides have stoked since the election. We'll see how the Senate MOU and the Gang of 14 have affected the process in short order now. Pass the popcorn, folks ... it should be a hell of a show.

The Poll That No One Reported (Updated)

Gallup announced yesterday that it had taken a snap poll after the speech given by George Bush on the war in Iraq from Fort Bragg. The poll showed some movement bolstering support for the war. In fact, it showed Bush picking up ten points on whether we are winning in Iraq (up to 54%), twelve points on keeping troops in Iraq until the situation improves as opposed to setting an exit date for their evacuation (now at 70%/25%), and seven points on whether Bush has a clear plan for handling the war in Iraq (up to 63%/35%).

All of these gains were made, Gallup points out, despite the fact that the speech had the lowest ratings of any prime-time presidential address in Bush's terms of office. Only 23 million people watched the speech, and Gallup notes that most of them consisted of Bush supporters. CNN also reported on the low turnout for the speech:

President Bush's latest address to the nation, urging Americans to stand firm in Iraq, drew the smallest TV audience of his tenure, Nielsen Media Research reported Wednesday.

Live coverage of Bush's half-hour speech Tuesday night from the Ft. Bragg military base in North Carolina averaged 23 million viewers combined on four major U.S. broadcast networks and three leading cable news channels, Nielsen said.

Designed largely to bolster sagging public support for the persistently bloody conflict in Iraq, the speech fell 8.6 million viewers shy of Bush's previous low as president, his August 9, 2001 address on stem cell research, which was carried on six networks.

Oddly enough, however, CNN did not report on the Gallup flash poll in its article on the speech. Neither did USA Today, which instead regurgitated the results of its previous polling while headlining its report thus -- "Speech fails to quell some viewers' unease":

LaMagna and Tomanio were among those surveyed in a USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll taken Friday through Sunday. They were called again after Bush's address. In the poll, 53% said the United States made a mistake in sending troops to Iraq. That reflects significant movement since the Iraqi elections five months ago, when only 45% said it was a mistake.

The erosion of support for the president's policy was especially evident among groups Bush could once claim, according to a USA TODAY analysis of four surveys, combined to provide a larger and more reliable sample. Eight of 10 Republicans remain supportive of the war; eight of 10 Democrats already were opposed to it.

That gives the strong impression that the speech had no effect on polling, one that the Gallup poll refutes, at least in its small sample and short period for polling, both hallmarks of flash polling in general. One could argue that neither CNN nor USA Today were made aware of the Gallup poll, but that might be difficult, given Gallup's description of it in their report as a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll:

A CNN/USA Today/Gallup instant-reaction poll shows that President Bush apparently persuaded many viewers of his speech Tuesday night to be more optimistic about the war in Iraq. Compared with their responses before the speech, people who tuned in are now more likely to say the United States is winning the Iraq war, that Bush has a clear plan for handling the war, and that the United States should keep troops in Iraq until the situation there gets better.

So why didn't either of Gallup's partners report these results?

UPDATE: CQ reader DG Bellak notes that CNN did report this, although it did not come up when I searched the CNN site. Good catch; my bad.

I'm On Vacation

As CQ readers know, I will be leaving for Washington DC for a week-long vacation in our nation's capital. We've turned this into a family trip, with the First Mate joining me and my mother (Vayapaso) and my sister meeting us for parts of the week. None of us have been to DC before, and we're all looking forward to the trip.

My vacation started last night, as I'm taking today off to finalize some arrangements for the dogs and the house ad, of course, start packing. Vacation for a blogger doesn't mean that blogging will stop; I plan to continue posting throughout my trip, hopefully with photos of a few of the sights of DC. However, it does mean that my pace will slow down a bit. For that reason, I have invited commenter extraordinaire and long-time correspondent Dafydd ab Hugh aboard as a guest blogger. His first post, just below this one, delivers a blockbuster revelation about Iranian president-elect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Knowing Dafydd, he will deliver many such revelations and generate plenty of controversy, and I know you'll enjoy his writing.

Much more to come later this morning. I decided to sleep in on the first day, flush with my winnings at the poker championship ... but that's another story entirely, as Dafydd will tell you.

Dafydd: That Ain't the Half of It

In a blogpost that the Captain slapped up a few days ago --

Oh. Wait, let me introduce myself: this is Dafydd ab Hugh, guest-blogging for Captain Ed while he recuperates from winning $2.8 million in the World Series of Poker finale, playing (as is his wont for FEC reasons) under the name Tuan Le. If someone posts here under the name "Captain Ed" (including the quotation marks) in the next few weeks, it's actually the nom de plume du jour of well-known labor leader and founder of the Socialist Party of America, Eugene Debs.

I may be the most well-known blogger in the blogosphere who doesn't actually have a blog (yet; shortly). You may remember me from my high-school filmstrip series "It's All About Adhesives."

Getting back to the point at hand, in this post, Captain Ed (the original) noted that evidence is mounting that the recently elected president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was in fact one of the ringleaders of the 1979 seizure of the U.S. embassy in Teheran, where embassy personnel and Marines were held captive for 444 days.

But it turns out, that's just the tip of the sandberg.

Last night (30 June 2005) on Special Report With Brit Hume, Brit's guest was Rob Sobhani, adjunct professor at Georgetown University and frequent contributor to National Review and the Wall Street Journal; Sobhani discussed several questions related to Iran, including the elfin Mr. President Ahmadinejad.

Sobhani did not personally know whether Ahmadinejad was one of the hostage takers; but he did know something about his background. After university, Ahmadinejad joined the Revolutionary Guard and was assigned to a special unit whose mission was to hunt down and assassinate Iranian dissidents and defectors. He was sent on a number of such missions.

If this has gotten any other recent airplay, I've missed it. GlobalSecurity.org has had this information up on its website for several days now:

Ahmadinejad was a senior officer in the Special Brigade of the Revolutionary Guards, stationed at Ramazan Garrison near Kermanshah in western Iran. This was the headquarters of the Revolutionary Guards’ "Extra-territorial Operations" -- mounting attacks beyond Iran’s borders. His work in the Revolutionary Guards was related to suppression of dissidents in Iran and abroad. He personally participated in covert operations around the Iraqi city of Kirkuk.

With the formation of the elite Qods (Jerusalem) Force of the IRGC, Ahmadinejad became one of its senior commanders. He directed assassinations in the Middle East and Europe, including the assassination of Iranian Kurdish leader Abdorrahman Qassemlou, who was shot dead by senior officers of the Revolutionary Guards in a Vienna flat in July 1989. Ahmadinejad was a key planner of the attack. He was reported to have been involved in planning an attempt on the life of Salman Rushdie....

Ahmadinejad, an unabashed conservative, resurrected the fervor of the 1979 Islamic Revolution during the campaign by saying Iran "did not have a revolution in order to have democracy, but to have an Islamic government." Ahmadinejad had a bloody background. He was responsible for the execution of hundreds of dissidents after the war.

[Emphasis added because my jaw is dropping]

Considering the help Ahmadinejad received from the Guardians Council in this election (vote rigging, ballot stuffing, candidate intimidation, dissident assassination), one wonders whether his job is actually to order the Iranian nuclear attacks on Israel, America, Iraq, the UK, and France (well, probably not France) that the Mullahs see getting less hazy all the time in their Magic 8-Balls.

Perhaps they worried that Rafsanjani, that unreliable fellow, might balk at obliterating half the world in the name of Allah. Considering how many heads Ahmadinejad already has hanging from his belt, he likely wouldn't hesitate any longer than it takes to say "Rumplestiltskin."

Pelosi Buries Property Rights Under A Mountain Of Ignorance

Nancy Pelosi held a press conference this afternoon, during which reporters asked her about her position on the Kelo decision. The SCOTUS ruling, CQ readers will recall, allows legislative bodies to exercise eminent domain to seize private land and transfer it to other private ownership, as long as it considers the transfer beneficial to the public good. It does, however, specifically leave those decisions to the legislature, a nuance that Pelosi appears to have missed.

Senator Jon Cornyn will shortly introduce legislation to restrict the use of federal funds for projects such as those involved in the Kelo case that simply trade one private owner for another. When reporters asked Pelosi about Cornyn's effort, she revealed that she knows nothing about Constitutional law, the Kelo decision, or even the power invested in the Congress that she supposedly leads:

Q Later this morning, many Members of the House Republican leadership, along with John Cornyn from the Senate, are holding a news conference on eminent domain, the decision of the Supreme Court the other day, and they are going to offer legislation that would restrict it, prohibiting federal funds from being used in such a manner.

Two questions: What was your reaction to the Supreme Court decision on this topic, and what do you think about legislation to, in the minds of opponents at least, remedy or changing it?

Ms. Pelosi. As a Member of Congress, and actually all of us and anyone who holds a public office in our country, we take an oath of office to uphold the Constitution of the United States. Very central to that in that Constitution is the separation of powers. I believe that whatever you think about a particular decision of the Supreme Court, and I certainly have been in disagreement with them on many occasions, it is not appropriate for the Congress to say we're going to withhold funds for the Court because we don't like a decision.

Q Not on the Court, withhold funds from the eminent domain purchases that wouldn't involve public use. I apologize if I framed the question poorly. It wouldn't be withholding federal funds from the Court, but withhold Federal funds from eminent domain type purchases that are not just involved in public good.

Ms. Pelosi. Again, without focusing on the actual decision, just to say that when you withhold funds from enforcing a decision of the Supreme Court you are, in fact, nullifying a decision of the Supreme Court. This is in violation of the respect for separation of church -- powers in our Constitution, church and state as well. Sometimes the Republicans have a problem with that as well. But forgive my digression.

So the answer to your question is, I would oppose any legislation that says we would withhold funds for the enforcement of any decision of the Supreme Court no matter how opposed I am to that decision. And I'm not saying that I'm opposed to this decision, I'm just saying in general.

First Pelosi reveals that she has no knowledge of Cornyn's well-publicized effort, despite her position as House Minority Leader. Second, she appears completely incapable of understanding the question, somehow getting the notion that Cornyn's proposal would defund the Supreme Court. When the reporter patiently explains to her what the proposal actually says, she still doesn't understand the issue, and talks about defunding enforcement of the decision.

Let's be clear on this point. Congress doesn't have to "enforce" anything on this decision. What it can do is to set conditions for the use of federal funds for supposed urban-renewal projects, and it can restrict funds to projects that use eminent domain to seize lands for the benefit of another private owner. Nothing in Kelo prevents this, and in fact the majority opinion states that SCOTUS wants the legislature at each level to take responsibility for use of ED. Cornyn wants to use the legitimate power of the legislature to ensure that federal funds do not get used to diminish private-property rights -- which doesn't conflict with Kelo at all, but shouldn't be necessary had SCOTUS followed the Constitution in its decision.

Pelosi, however, can't stop herself from looking even more foolish as the reporter follows up, trying to allow her to express some sort of opposition in principle to the decision. After all, politicians on both sides of the aisle found reasons to criticize SCOTUS on this case. Pelosi instead digs the hole as deep as she can, throwing in a reference to the Almighty moments after she castigates Republicans for not respecting the separation between church and state:

Q Could you talk about this decision? What you think of it?

Ms. Pelosi. It is a decision of the Supreme Court. If Congress wants to change it, it will require legislation of a level of a constitutional amendment. So this is almost as if God has spoken. It's an elementary discussion now. They have made the decision.

Q Do you think it is appropriate for municipalities to be able to use eminent domain to take land for economic development?

Ms. Pelosi. The Supreme Court has decided, knowing the particulars of this case, that that was appropriate, and so I would support that.

This is almost as if God had spoken. But if He did, it wouldn't matter anyway, since church and state must be kept separate, right? Besides, the Supreme Court is not God in our system. The judiciary is a co-equal branch to the Legislature and the Executive. Congress does not exist to bow before the nine robed members of SCOTUS, and neither does the President. One would think that any high-school graduate would understand that, let alone the House Democratic leader.

What an embarrassment Democratic leadership has become. We may yet see a collection of more ignorant, petulant, self-important incompetents at one time as Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Howard Dean, but I wouldn't bet on it. (via The Corner)

NBC: Founding Fathers Could Have Been Terrorists

NBC's Brian Williams extended the concept of moral equivalence into the territory of the absurd in tonight's installment of the NBC Evening News. The new anchor discussed the story about Iranian president-elect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's possible involvement in the 1979 American embassy takeover in Teheran and subsequent hostaging of its staff. As I argued earlier, Williams noted that even if true, it wouldn't make much difference in how we interact with the Iranian government, which supported the takeover and quickly co-opted it themselves.

However, as Dread Pundit Bluto noted, Williams instead argued that the British likely faced the same dilemma after the creation of the United States. After all, Williams says, one can easily confuse people like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi with George Washington:

The White House and most official branches of government are ducking any substantive comment on this story, and photo analysis is going on at this and other news organizations. It is a story that will be at or near the top of our broadcast and certainly made for a robust debate in our afternoon editorial meeting, when several of us raised the point (I'll leave it to others to decide germaneness) that several U.S. presidents were at minimum revolutionaries, and probably were considered terrorists of their time by the Crown in England.

Did Washington bomb women and children indiscriminately in order to chase the British out of North America? Did John Hancock send teenagers with bomb belts into marketplaces to kill as many people as possible to destabilize colonial society? This comparison insults the intelligence and the memory of those who fought on both sides of the Revolutionary War, which (despite what's commonly thought) mostly saw European-style, set-piece combat between uniformed forces.

Williams indulges in the same, tired moral equivalency that led Michael Moore to declare Zarqawi as the Iraqi version of the Minutemen from our war of independence. This minimizes the cruelty and inhumanity of the enemies of freedom that use civilians as their targets while trying to impose tyrannies far worse than anything George III could ever have dreamed in his most feverish illusions. It also continues the generation-long effort to rewrite American history to eliminate the idea of American exceptionalism, where all forms of government are relatively equal and democracy is simply another choice with no special moral value over monarchies or autocracies.

Shame on Brian Williams, and shame on NBC.

This Is A Blog. This Will Remain A Blog.

Following the depressing nature of the questions at the latest FEC hearing on regulating the Internet, it appears that some bloggers are ready to jump ship, so to speak. Jeralynn Merritt has declared yesterday as the Day the Blogs Died, and now says that TalkLeft is no longer a blog, but an "online magazine." Joining her are Americablog (which might therefore require a name change), The Talent Show, Crooks and Liars, and even Instapundit, although I suspect that Professor Reynolds has tongue firmly in cheek.

Not Captain's Quarters. I may describe myself in a variety of ways, including citizen journalist, free-lance writer, pundit at large -- but foremost in this community, I am a blogger. CQ is a blog, and it will remain a blog. It will undoubtedly evolve over time, offer new concepts to the CQ community, change its look, but at its heart, Captain's Quarters will be a blog.

Why do I insist on that distinction? Because I will not allow the FEC to chase me from my rights as an independent voice in politics to write what I please and to post what I want based on a silly bit of nomenclature. I understand what Jeralyn and other members of the, er, "online magazine community" mean to say with these statements, but I won't surrender to the bureaucrats an inch when it comes to my right to speak my mind. I don't plan on playing silly name games with those who plan on regulating speech for our own good. All that does is play into their strategy of twisting words and meanings until nothing means what it says any more.

I won't do it. I won't play along. I won't even do it as a protest, as these bloggers obviously mean it to be.

I wish my friends the best of luck as they transform themselves into the online magazine community, or 'zines, as they used to be called in the early days. I'm glad to serve instead as the canary in the coal mine, in a manner of speaking. But when the FEC continues playing its word games to avoid exempting the online magazines, don't be too terribly surprised. Eventually, we will all learn that the nannies who want to control political speech will not be stopped by shifting nomenclatures, and as long as we allow them at the levers of power, they will continue to issue ever-encroaching regulations to shut down the inconvenient voices that threaten them.

What will we do then, when we have no more names to hide us?

Noah: Spread The Smears Around

I wrote Tuesday about the idiocy of House Republicans who made an issue of George Soros' participation in am ownership group for the Washington Nationals, the transplanted Montreal Expos major-league baseball team which brought the American pastime back to the American capital. The silly objections of Reps. John Sweeney and Tom Davis have created a controversy over the role of politics in the team's bidding process, which NY Times reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg covers in a front-page article:

Some Republicans went so far as to suggest that Major League Baseball, which owns the team, could lose its antitrust exemption if it permits Mr. Soros, who would be a part-owner with a group of investors headed by a local entrepreneur, to buy it - a threat that drew immediate ridicule in the sports pages and outrage from Democrats.

By Wednesday, one Republican, Representative Tom Davis of Virginia, backed away from that suggestion, saying he never intended any threat. But Mr. Davis and other Republicans did not back down from their criticism of Mr. Soros, who, they took pains to note, has been convicted of insider trading in France - a ruling he is appealing - and has supported ballot initiatives to legalize medical marijuana.

"We finally got a winning team," Representative Davis said. "Now they're going to hand it over to a convicted felon who wants to legalize drugs and who lives in New York and spent $5 million trying to defeat the president? How's he going to get him out to the opening game?"

Davis apparently couldn't be convinced to leave well enough alone. Frankly, no one cares whether Soros has a French conviction for insider trading. George Steinbrenner is a principal owner despite his felony conviction for campaign fraud on behalf of Richard Nixon. Steinbrenner is a lousy owner, but that's not the reason why, and his support of Richard Nixon shouldn't keep him from being an owner. Soros' support of MoveOn, Democrats, and fringe causes shouldn't disqualify him either, for the same reasons. No one should have to pass a political test to purchase part of a sports team, and anyone suggesting they do so doesn't represent freedom.

Why can't Davis just ... shut up?

However, even worse than Davis is the reaction from Timothy Noah at Slate. Instead of just pounding Davis for his stupidity -- a rather wide target -- Noah just decides to play the same smear game as Davis by bringing up another bidder's supposed anti-Semitism:

What stunned me was that the Times repeated the chief moral objection to Soros (apparently he was convicted of insider trading in France; Soros is appealing the decision) while balancing against that the shocking revelation that Fred Malek—who leads the Washington Baseball Club, the group Davis clearly wants to prevail—is … "a major Republican donor" and "a former aide to President Richard M. Nixon."

Faithful readers of this column may recall that Fred Malek's moral stain is a bit more conspicuous than that. It's true that nobody I'm aware of besides myself has brought this up lately—with the notable exception, yesterday, of the Washington Post's sports columnist Sally Jenkins ("Taking Aim At Soros Is Hardly Politic")—but … well, I'll let Jenkins tell it:

You want a wart? Malek has a big one. Malek is a former Richard Nixon aide. When he was White House personnel chief, he was summoned by Nixon to discuss a "Jewish cabal" in the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Nixon believed Jews in the bureau were tilting stats to make his policies look bad. He wanted to know how many Jews there were in the bureau, and he wanted Malek to count them. Malek eventually complied and produced a list. Some of them were later demoted or transferred. Malek, who insists he is not anti-Semitic, has said that he resisted the order at first and argued with Nixon that there was no "cabal."

According to the Nexis database, Jenkins now joins me as the only journalist or public figure to bring up this far-from-ancient history during the past two years. Back in January 2002, Post columnist Marc Fisher wrote a fine column observing that because Malek bowed to Nixon's bigoted request, he "has no business representing this city in any capacity." Fisher repeated this in a (non-Nexis-able) 2004 online discussion, while suggesting that he didn't think Malek's group had much of a chance. Time to reassess, Marc! The American Prospect's "Tapped" Web log had something on this earlier this week, I'm pleased to see. But in general, the major political blogs seem as clueless as the Old Media. Yo Josh Marshall! Wake up and smell the coffee!

Perhaps it's because the political blogs have more taste than Noah. Noah claims that this episode is far from "ancient history", but it happened over 32 years ago! Not to excuse Malek -- had it been me, I would have resigned rather than execute that order, regardless of who gave it -- but unless Malek still makes counting Jews in government one of his pastimes, it is a very old story. He paid for this with his dismissal from Republican leadership, which demonstrates again that the GOP does a much better job cleaning its own house than do its opponents. (Dick Durbin springs to mind here, as he's still the #2 Democrat in the Senate.)

Former peccadilloes and present politics shouldn't impact private ownership of sports clubs. Davis owes Soros an apology; at the very least, he needs to quit while he's behind. Any Republican should know better than to demand a political approval of private ownership. If MLB wants to sell its club to the Soros team, I plan on rooting against the Nats at every turn -- and it will make it that much more fun to do so. Of course, I'm a Dodger fan anyway, so that would have been a foregone conclusion.

In this case, I'd say that Stolberg took the proper action in reporting the controversy, rather than injecting herself into the story and causing it to expand. Obviously, Timothy Noah can't restrain himself from doing that. Taking cheap shots from the cheap seats demeans himself and Slate, and begging bloggers for some literary cover diminishes him even further.

The French Fascination With Terrorism

When the Left bemoans the "loss of sympathy" that followed the devastating terrorist attacks of 9/11, they generally point to the French reaction, as typified by Le Monde, which proclaimed all the world to be Americans on that day. Shortly afterwards, when we determined to discard the obviously-insufficient previous counterterrorism approach of criminal investigation in favor of a military response, that sympathy quickly evaporated into a fear of American overreaction. The French went even farther, using the war on terror in a pathetic attempt to position itself into a diplomatic "hyperpower" in opposition to the US, bullying other nations into opposing our efforts to force the UN to confront Saddam Hussein.

Now, of course, we know all about the corruption of the Oil-For-Food program at the UN which lined French, German, and Russian pockets as one proximate cause for the loss of this "sympathy" that the American Left mourns so loudly. However, the London Telegraph reports that those French sympathies may have been misplaced all along. A new controversy has erupted in France over a memorial to a band of terrorists that attempted to assassinate Charles de Gaulle forty years ago:

A memorial honouring members of the OAS, the terrorist group that tried to assassinate Gen Charles de Gaulle, is to be erected in a French cemetery despite furious opposition. ...

France remains fascinated by the events of the early 1960s when the OAS (l'Organisation de l'Armée Secretè) launched a terror campaign in response to Gen de Gaulle's decision to push for a referendum on Algerian independence.

Echoes of the attempts to murder the president were found in Frederick Forsyth's novel, The Day of the Jackal, later a Hollywood film starring Edward Fox as an OAS hitman hired to kill Gen de Gaulle. At one point in 1962, 100 OAS bombs a day were detonated in Algeria. Thousands of innocent people were killed as the group targeted civilians in an attempt to wreck a ceasefire.

Although the OAS is often described as a fascist group, sympathisers were drawn from many walks of French life and members included Jews and Arabs. The date of the memorial's inauguration was chosen to mark the 43rd anniversary of the execution of Roger Degueldre, chief of the OAS's sinister Delta commando.

The French government executed four men for their part in the failed assassination attempt, but apparently have never killed off the fascination and admiration for the men who used terrorism in an attempt to extend French colonialism. It seems that French opposition to terrorism and sympathy for its victims depends on the identity of the dead and the politics of the bombers.

Ardaiz Considered For Federal Appellate Bench (Updated)

One of CQ's sources within the legal community informs me that the Bush administration is considering James Ardaiz, the presiding justice of California's Fifth District Court of Appeal, for a nomination to an opening on the notoriously far-left Ninth Circuit, which covers most of the western United States. Ardaiz has served in his present role for eleven years, an appointee of Governor Pete Wilson, after six years as an associate justice on the same circuit as an appointee of George Deukmejian. He has a total of twenty-four years of experience as a jurist, and prior to that spent six years as a prosecutor for the County of Fresno, specializing in homicide cases.

Justice Ardaiz has strongly supported California's three-strikes law, and has authored a book on its use and effect. He has a long track record of working with legislatures and other jurists in the California system as spokesman for various vocational organizations, building confidence in his ability to work with elected representatives on both sides of the aisle. Ardaiz has also won numerous awards from his colleagues for his judicial temperament and skill, including a 1999 California Jurist of the Year from the state's Judicial Council.

Justice Ardaiz appears to be the kind of jurist that the Ninth Circuit so badly needs: professional, thoughtful, with the proper approach to law that the oft-reversed Ninth obviously lacks on many occasions. Hopefully, the White House will nominate Ardaiz and the Senate will expedite his confirmation.

UPDATE: I initially understood this decision to already have been made by the White House, but my source tells me I misunderstood -- which I did. Ardaiz is under serious consideration for this opening.

Likely Voters Running Away From Democrats

A new poll by Democracy Corps on behalf of the Democratic Party shows a significant erosion of support for the Democrats among likely voters:

[T]he poll indicated 43 percent of voters favored the Republican Party, while 38 percent had positive feelings about Democrats.

"Republicans weakened in this poll ... but it shows Democrats weakening more," said Stanley Greenberg, who served as President Clinton's pollster.

Greenberg told the Christian Science Monitor he attributes the slippage to voters' perceptions that Democrats have "no core set of convictions or point of view."

Obstructionism and a monopoly of gainsay has undermined the Democrats during wartime, and they cannot see it. The Democrats have vaulted their radicals to the leadership positions, people like Howard Dean, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi, all of whom think that saying "No!" amounts to responsible opposition. In all three cases, the leaders spend more time calling the GOP names and engaging in personal attacks than in highlighting alternate approaches to issues.

Social Security provides a great example. After years of complaining that the program was at serious risk -- Al Gore ran for President practically standing on a "lockbox" in 2000 -- suddenly the official party line has transformed into denial that any problems exist at all. What changed? The Republicans put together a plan to address the long-term economic catastrophe that everyone knows is coming. Instead of proposing an alternate plan, Democrats sat on their butts and simply refused to engage.

The Democrats consider this their Newt Gingrich strategy. Gingrich torpedoed Hillarycare in 1993 without ever proposing an alternative, and won a majority in 1994 for his work. But Hillarycare would have created a huge government expansion and nationalized a private industry. Social Security already is a huge government program, and Congress has the responsibility to see to its maintenance. That difference hasn't yet occurred to the Democratic cogniscenti, but the American electorate appears a bit smarter than Reid, Pelosi, and Dean.

Democrats need to decide whether they intend to stand for something other than Bush-hatred. Bush will only have an impact on one more election, the 2006 midterm cycle, in which he will only play a moderate role. If the Democrats plan on achieving a majority in their lifetime, they need to start demonstrating that they deserve to lead. That involves providing solutions, not the steady diet of petulant footstamping that has been their trademark the last two sessions of Congress. (via Michelle Malkin)

UPDATE: As always, Gerry has more in-depth analysis of the polling.

Canadian Prescription Drug Channel May Close

After a number of states have demanded access to the Canadian pharmaceutical market, where the nationalized health-care system keeps drug prices lower than in ithe US, Canadians may take action to protect their pricing and supply needs. Paul Martin's government announced that it will draft legislation limiting such sales to prevent domestic shortages, which will probably put a halt to end-arounds such as those proposed by Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty:

The government announced Wednesday that it was drafting legislation to limit bulk exports of essential Canadian drugs in an effort to ensure that online pharmacy sales to the United States do not cause domestic shortages. But the proposal fell far short of what the online pharmacy industry feared might have forced it to leave Canada.

It is unlikely that the two million uninsured and underinsured Americans who depend on cheaper Canadian drugs to treat chronic conditions will be immediately affected. It is possible, however, that tighter regulations in Canada may give other foreign online suppliers a new competitive edge and encourage Canadian companies to warehouse more of their inventories in other countries.

"Canada cannot be the drugstore of the United States of America," Health Minister Ujjal Dosanjh told reporters as he announced the legislation and several vaguely defined proposed regulatory changes, including one that could limit some Canadian doctors' practice of co-signing online prescriptions for American patients without examining them.

The incursion of Americans into the previously-closed Canadian pharmaceutical market has seriously distorted pricing and supply on both sides of the border, a predictable outcome especially when dealing with state-controlled markets. As the Americans bought more of their drugs north of the border, margins for the manufacturers decreased here in the US and overall. That put pressure on the distributors to withhold or limit the amount of drugs sold to Canadians. The intent was to either limit the loss of margin to a smaller percentage of production, and/or to force the Canadians to limit access to their privileged pricing in order to protect their supply.

None of this should have surprised anyone who has studied entry-level economics or even had responsibility for a profit/loss statement. However, these basic principles of supply, demand, production, and profit escaped Americans who thought they could get a discount without the necessary sacrifices to create the organized buying power necessary. It also escaped the short-sighted Canadian retail pharmacies, who only saw large-scale American dollar signs.

Dosanjh, who has his own problems surrounding Gomery and the Grewal tapes, cannot afford to let the supply of pharmaceuticals get choked by having Americans poach their distribution channels and pricing agreements. His Liberal Party also cannot afford to drive off the retail pharmacies that have benefitted from American encroachment. Look for Dosnajh to either push for the middle ground, limiting American sales to small levels intended for individual consumers, or to throw the entire mess at Parliament for a legislative-sourced solution.

Army Meets Recruiting Goal For June

The Army has come under considerable criticism for failing to meet its recruiting goals the past four months. Critics blame the war in Iraq for the shortfall, which has put the Army behind in its overall recruiting for the fiscal year. However, the Army has managed to meet its goal for June, according to the New York Times, which points out a different reason for lower recruitment:

For the first time since January, the Army met its monthly recruiting goal in June, but it still faces what some senior Army officials say is a nearly insurmountable shortfall to meet the service's annual quota.

Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a public forum at the Pentagon on Wednesday that the Army exceeded its June quota, but he gave no details. Senior Army officials said in interviews earlier in the day that the Army exceeded the goal of 5,650 recruits by about 500 people. The Army Reserve also made its first monthly quota since last December, the officials said.

That still leaves the active-duty Army about 7,800 recruits behind schedule to send 80,000 enlistees to boot camp with only three months to go in the recruiting year that ends on Sept. 30. The Army has not missed its annual enlistment quota since 1999, when a strong economy made recruiters' lives miserable.

The Army has been the only branch of the service to miss its overall goal, or more accurately find itself in danger of missing its annual goal. The other branches of the service appear to be meeting their goals, and all branches have met or exceeded their re-enlistment objectives. Re-enlistment appears especially popular among those who serve in Iraq.

Interestingly, Eric Schmitt brings up a diagnosis that has not yet been raised in regards to this issue. The last time the Army faced a recruitment goal failure was six years ago, when the hot economy made it difficult to attract new recruits. So why doesn't that get much mention now? After all, our economy has grown tremendously over the past three years, and now sports an impressive 3.8% growth rate for the first quarter of 2005. In fact, the Federal Reserve might announce a ninth straight interest-rate hike today to temper the growth.

It doesn't appear that the Army's missed goal is the crisis of confidence that the media has ginned up. Military recruitment gets affected by a number of factors, and deployment is an important but not exclusive issue for potential volunteers. Market competition also plays a role, as the Times reminds us, and right now the market is as tough as it has been since that last recruitment shortfall. Before the Chicken Littles of the media and the Left start screeching about falling skies, perhaps they should take a look at the big picture.

The Dumbest Controversy Ever

The New York Times eats up several column inches on what has to be the pettiest controversy of recent memory -- The Case Of The Missing Applause. As I remarked during my live blog, the lack of reaction to George Bush's speech appeared planned, as Bush spoke at a more rapid pace than normal, without the usual politician pauses that these addresses have. Carl Cameron confirmed immediately afterwards that the audience had been told to hold off on any reaction.

Apparently no one else thought to check that out, at least at the NY Times, which results in this David Sanger report:

So what happened to the applause?

When President Bush visits military bases, he invariably receives a foot-stomping, loud ovation at every applause line. At bases like Fort Bragg - the backdrop for his Tuesday night speech on Iraq - the clapping is often interspersed with calls of "Hoo-ah," the military's all-purpose, spirited response to, well, almost anything.

So the silence during his speech was more than a little noticeable, both on television and in the hall. On Wednesday, as Mr. Bush's repeated use of the imagery of the Sept. 11 attacks drew bitter criticism from Congressional Democrats, there was a parallel debate under way about whether the troops sat on their hands because they were not impressed, or because they thought that was their orders.

Not only was that apparent from the moment that Bush walked into the auditorium -- the troops stood at attention, and didn't utter a peep when Bush had them sit -- but as I noted, his delivery made it obvious that he planned on no interruptions. The Fort Bragg soldiers maintained the discipline requested by their officers and the White House. Yet somehow this has become an embarrassment for the Bush administration:

Republicans moved quickly to respond to what was becoming a significant embarrassment.

Capt. Tom Earnhardt, a public affairs officer at Fort Bragg who participated in the planning for the president's trip, said that from the first meetings with White House officials there was agreement that a hall full of wildly cheering troops would not create the right atmosphere for a speech devoted to policy and strategy.

"The guy from White House advance, during the initial meetings, said, 'Be careful not to let this become a pep rally,' " Captain Earnhardt recalled in a telephone interview. Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, confirmed that account.

If the same soldiers had greeted Bush with wild cheers and hoo-ahs, or had repeatedly interrupted the speech with cheers, we'd be hearing that the White House had secretly arranged that reception. Instead, we now have Clapgate, which doesn't have nearly the fun that such a monicker might suggest, where the big question is who initiated the applause that followed the one line where Bush told the nation that we would stay in the fight to the finish.

Well, this certainly qualifies as a national emergency. Can we say, "Slow News Day"?

If any of the soldiers at Fort Bragg has information on what happened, please e-mail me from your military e-mail accounts before the conspiracy theorists spin this into a passive mutiny against the current Commander-In-Chief. I guarantee readers that within 24 hours, that's exactly how this meme will be spun in the more radical corners of the political arena.

I'd Like To Teach The World To Live-Blog ...

Trey Jackson has a video clip of today's installment of Inside The Blogs, part of CNN's Inside Politics. The team of Abbi Tatton and Jacki Schechner highlighted CQ today for the live-blog of the President's speech last night, and they gave me a very fair presentation. As always, I'm glad they're reading CQ, and I'm glad that Trey has the video. Check it out for other blogger highlights.

NOTE: It's a bit off topic, but I wanted to thank those of you who have donated to CQ using the PayPal link on the left sidebar. It used to title the donation "RNC", which stood for Republican National Convention, when I put it on the blog to help fund my trip there. I've changed it to "Captain's Quarters Donations" for clarity.

New Iranian President Old Iranian Hostage-Taker

Gateway Pundit, My Pet Jawa, and LGF all have highly interesting documentation -- including a number of photographs -- that appear to indict newly-elected Iranian President as one of the radicals who seized the American embassy in 1979. The photographic evidence is bolstered by a number of sources on the background of president-elect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that put him in the center of the organizations involved in the hostage crisis that destroyed Jimmy Carter's re-election hopes and made the US look weak and toothless. If so, and the evidence looks damning, then one could make the argument that Ahmadinejad helped start the Islamofascist offensive against the United States.

These three and others have done excellent blog work in fleshing this story out. However, its impact is really more historic and academic than practical. After all, the government in Teheran now is the same as that which co-opted the hostaging, even if one accepts that the embassy takeover was an impulsive grass-roots movement by student radicals. We have dealt both openly and covertly with that government in the 26 years since that act of war against the US. We also know that Iran has provided financing and shelter for terrorist groups worldwide, including Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, and probably al-Qaeda.

With all of this already out in the open, having the mullahcracy twist the recent election to put an experienced terror operative as their head of state really doesn't amount to a big surprise. And given Hashemi Rafsanjani's track record, that result was inevitable anyway.

UPDATE: On the other hand, one of Rusty's commenters brings up an excellent point. Will Jimmy Carter rush to Teheran now as an independent observer to verify Ahmadinejad's election?

Passport Fraud On The Rise

One of the major areas of concern during this global war on terrorism is border security -- keeping out those who don't belong here while keeping the borders flexible enough for normal trade and tourism. Passports should be the primary tool for ensuring security, but as the New York Times reports, passports routinely get issued to people whose applications should raise red flags:

The names of more than 30 fugitives, including 9 murder suspects and one person on the Federal Bureau of Investigation's most-wanted list, did not trigger any warnings in a test of the nation's passport processing system, federal auditors have found.

Insufficient oversight by the State Department allows criminals, illegal immigrants and suspected terrorists to fraudulently obtain a United States passport far too easily, according to a report on the test by the Government Accountability Office to be released Wednesday.

The lapses occurred because passport applications are not routinely checked against comprehensive lists of wanted criminals and suspected terrorists, according to the report, which was provided to The New York Times by an official critical of the State Department who had access to it in advance. For example, one of the 67 suspects included in the test managed to get a passport 17 months after he was first placed on an F.B.I. wanted list, the report said.

The problem isn't just the issuance of legitimate passports to illegitimate people, but counterfeit rings that have not been adequately addressed, despite leads that could be exploited. All of this points to a system that has a dual danger for the US: it not only leaves us unsecured, but it leaves us with the illusion of security. That illusion has kept us from demanding reform or corrective action up to now.

Passports are critical to border security, but they also unlock all sorts of other doors once inside the United States. Passports allow holders to get driver's licenses and other forms of identification, along with access to financial systems, and so on. They also allows fugitives or suspects in major crimes or involvement in terrorism to flee the country quickly, if desired. An officially issued US passport is one of the most valuable assets a terrorist could have in his arsenal.

If we want to create not just an illusion of security but start ensuring the safety of our nation, we need to demand more action on investigating and prosecuting passport fraud.

Note: Ironically, this comes up just as I'm applying for a passport myself, to work on a story with some international implications. The story will be some weeks off, but I hope to get the passport secured well before then -- and I hope that it comes after a thorough and timely investigation.

Muslims For America?

MS-NBC reports that an Islamic community in California has fired its imam for speaking out in support of Osama bin Laden, perhaps the first time an American Muslim cleric has been publicly disciplined for anti-American rhetoric. However, it took a federal arrest for the mosque's directors to make a stand on behalf of their country:

A mosque has fired a religious leader accused of speaking out against the United States and supporting Osama bin Laden in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks.

Shabbir Ahmed, 39, is one of two imams detained on immigration charges as part of an FBI investigation into alleged terror activities in the Islamic community in Lodi, a wine-growing region about 30 miles south of Sacramento.

The mosque’s board of directors unanimously voted to fire Ahmed in a special session Sunday night, said Mohammed Shoaib, president of Lodi Muslim Mosque.

The Lodi Muslim Mosque deserves some credit for taking appropriate action against Ahmed. After all, the Muslim activist group CAIR routinely defends Muslims for speaking out in support of Islamist goals, and we have heard precious little from mainstream Muslims in this fight against the religious extremists from their brethren in Southwest Asia and North Africa. That credit needs to be tempered with the suspicion that absent the well-publicized arrest of the imam and four others for connections to terrorists in Pakistan, Ahmed would still be preaching his hate of the United States during Friday prayers.

A few brave American Muslims have taken to the street over the past three years to defend their country against Islamist extremism and to express their support for freedom and liberty. Now that the Lodi Muslims have fired a man who wasn't coming back to work anyway, perhaps we could get more of that kind of support from that community. We should watch who the mosque's directors hire for their next imam to see just how sincere Mr. Shoaib is when he says that “[w]e don’t want that kind of person who has spoken against the United States." They certainly seemed satisfied with him until the FBI showed up.

Thank You, Mark Steyn (And John Hawkins)

John Hawkins has posted his second interview with one of the most lucid and erudite columnists currently writing, Mark Steyn. John's been doing a great job getting major media figures for interviews, and his interview with Steyn shows why. It's an excellent read. (The first interview can be found here.)

Like my friends at Power Line, however, I have to take a bit of special pride in this passage at the end:

John Hawkins: So what blogs are you reading regularly these days?

Mark Steyn: I read a wide range. They come and go, but I’m still reading many of those I mentioned to you last time round, like Natalie Solent in Britain and Tim Blair down under. Going back to my earlier point about the dullness of many newspaper comment pages, look at, say, Saskatchewan: it’s got a yawnsville newspaper - The Saskatoon Star-Phoenix – and one of the sharpest bloggers on the planet, Kate McMillan. I don't know Miss McMillan, never met her, doubt I ever will, but she's a thousand times pithier and more insightful than the fellows holding down the columnar real estate at the Star-Phoenix. Someone should snap her up just for the sharpness of her headlines, one-line squibs, and nifty asides. It's the same with the Power Line guys vs. the Star-Tribune in Minnesota.

One of the great lessons of the last few years is that journalism schools build their guild mentality at the expense of everything else - the ability to write, the ability to make an argument, an eye for a story, or even basic curiosity about the world we live in. It’s the pomposity of the mainstream press that will do for them: They're simply not as nimble as a fellow like Captain Ed. I should add in fairness that there are those with a foot in both camps - like the great Michelle Malkin - who understand the new world very well.

Considering the source, whose writing I have long admired, that is high praise indeed and a highlight for my blogging career. My thanks to Mr. Steyn, and also to John for his excellent work.

Got Milk?

Today's Los Angeles Times runs a scare story on the security holes in the nation's food supply, focusing on milk production and delivery. In a report that the Department of Health and Human Services wanted to keep quiet, Stanford researchers determined that a third of an ounce of botulinum toxin poured into a milk tanker could kill hundreds of thousands of people and potentially destabilize the food industry:

About a third of an ounce of botulinum toxin poured into a milk truck en route from a dairy farm to a processing plant could cause hundreds of thousands of deaths and billions of dollars in economic losses, according to a scientific analysis published Tuesday despite efforts by federal officials to keep the details secret.

The study by Lawrence M. Wein and Yifan Liu of Stanford University discusses such questions as how terrorists could release the toxin and what effective amounts might be.

Bruce Alberts, president of the National Academy of Sciences, said in an accompanying editorial that a terrorist would not learn anything useful from the article about the minimum amount of toxin to use. "And we can detect no other information in this article important for a terrorist that is not already immediately available to anyone who has access to information from the World Wide Web."

In fact, he said, publication of the article by the academy could be valuable for biodefense.

The analysis, posted Tuesday on the website of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, seeks to quantify security weaknesses in the nation's milk supply chain and makes recommendations for closing those gaps.

Only after those five sensational paragraphs does a reader learn that the federal government has already begun implementing tighter security on the food supply, including milk production. HHS opposed its release despite the report's non-classified status because, obviously, it didn't want to give terrorists any new ideas before the safeguards were completely in place. NAS decided that disclosure was a higher priority than security in this case. And the Los Angeles Times decided that writing this to hype the danger while de-emphasizing the fact that action had already begun to address this added to the comprehension of the issue instead of distracting the reader with fear.

Putting aside the NAS and LAT editorial decisions, this demonstrates that fighting terrorism by waiting around for something to happen and issuing indictments won't suffice. We can't afford to wait until terrorists commit a 'crime' and then call the FBI to perform an investigation -- not unless we don't mind if a few hundred thousand Americans die before we do anything to stop the Islamofascists. This was one of the lessons of 9/11 that groups like MoveOn didn't understand in its aftermath. It shows the need to have a forward military strategy in fighting terrorists before they can gather enough strength and resources to pull off a milk run like this.

Editorial Response To Bush Speech: Predictable

A read through the editorial pages of the three largest and most influential newspapers in the US shows nothing terribly surprising in terms of their response to George Bush's speech last night. The Washington Post offers limited and qualified support, while the Los Angeles Times takes the glass-half-empty approach and the New York Times ... well, the NYT just takes the MoveOn position of screaming every time 9/11 gets mentioned in connection with fighting terrorists.

The Post acknowledges that the connections between the fight in Iraq are legitimate, something that neither of the other two papers will admit, but claims that Bush erred by giving nothing but the sunny side of the situation in Iraq. They also fault Bush for not explaining how the strategic position changed:

PRESIDENT BUSH sought last night to bolster slipping public support for the war in Iraq by connecting it, once again, to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and to the war against terrorism. That connection is not spurious, even if Saddam Hussein was not a collaborator of al Qaeda: Clearly Iraq is now a prime battlefield for Islamic extremists, and success or failure there will do much to determine the outcome of the larger struggle against them. But Mr. Bush didn't explain how a war meant to remove a tyrant believed to wield weapons of mass destruction turned into a fight against Muslim militants, a transformation caused in part by his administration's many errors since Saddam Hussein's defeat more than two years ago. The president also didn't speak candidly enough about the primary mission the United States now has in Iraq, which is not "hunting down the terrorists" but constructing a stable government in spite of Iraq's sectarian divisions and violent resistance from the former ruling elite. It's harder to explain why Americans should die in such a complex and ambitious enterprise than in a fight with international terrorists, but that is the case Mr. Bush most needs to make.

The Post makes two errors in its basic presumptions. First, Saddam did partner with al-Qaeda, long before the war, as the Jordanian government confirmed earlier this year and as intelligence reports have demonstrated. He hosted a conference of Islamist terrorists in 1999 that included both Ayman al-Zawahiri and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and sheltered the latter well before the 2003 invasion. In fact, Jordan asked for the extradition of Zarqawi in 2002, a request Saddam refused, not because he couldn't be found but because the Ba'athists didn't want him arrested.

Second, the Post makes the mistake in its second assumption -- one that critics make constantly -- that the fight has to be about one particular strategy. The fight in Iraq is to establish a stable democratic government, to be sure. It also is about fighting and killing terrorists. Whether one is "primary" over the other is mere academics; the truth is that both are vital to the overall success of the war on terror.

For a media that often derides the intelligence of George Bush, it would often appear that it's the critics who lack the capability of walking and chewing gum at the same time.

At least the Post remains somewhat supportive of Bush, even if they can't get past their faulty assumptions. The LAT continues to speak of the "presidential disconnect", and faults Bush for speaking about 9/11 when talking about Iraq:

President Bush's pep talk to the nation Tuesday night was a major disappointment. He again rewrote history by lumping together the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the need for war in Iraq, when, in fact, Saddam Hussein's Iraq had no connection to Al Qaeda. Bush spoke of "difficult and dangerous" work in Iraq that produces "images of violence and bloodshed," but he glossed over the reality of how bad the situation is. He offered no benchmarks to measure the war's progress, falling back on exhortations to "complete the mission" with a goal of withdrawing troops "as soon as possible."

Nowhere in the speech does Bush say that Saddam was responsible for 9/11. He mentioned 9/11 five times, in these contexts: Islamofascists declared war on the US, and it reached our shores on 9/11. After 9/11, Bush told Americans we would not wait to be attacked again. The only way for America to lose to the terrorists is to forget the lessons of 9/11. The terrorists want to shake our will in Iraq, just as they tried on 9/11. And after 9/11, Bush warned us that the road ahead would be long and difficult, and that we would need the stamina to see it all the way through to the end.

Now what in the world did the LAT hear? None of those references laid blame for 9/11 on Saddam. However, they do explain why we decided to change course and eliminate the largest and most hostile military threat in Southwest Asia, one that had openly attacked its neighbors twice in a decade and one that had refused to comply with the terms of the cease-fire and sixteen UNSC resolutions. Before 9/11, we thought we could afford to ignore Saddam. After 9/11, whether he had any involvement or not in that particular act, his involvement and association with terrorists simply could no longer be tolerated.

The Gray Lady takes this latest MoveOn meme and moves it even further downfield, as expected:

We did not expect Mr. Bush would apologize for the misinformation that helped lead us into this war, or for the catastrophic mistakes his team made in running the military operation. But we had hoped he would resist the temptation to raise the bloody flag of 9/11 over and over again to justify a war in a country that had nothing whatsoever to do with the terrorist attacks. We had hoped that he would seize the moment to tell the nation how he will define victory, and to give Americans a specific sense of how he intends to reach that goal - beyond repeating the same wishful scenario that he has been describing since the invasion.

Sadly, Mr. Bush wasted his opportunity last night, giving a speech that only answered questions no one was asking. He told the nation, again and again, that a stable and democratic Iraq would be worth American sacrifices, while the nation was wondering whether American sacrifices could actually produce a stable and democratic Iraq.

Really? In one year after the transfer of sovereignty, we've watched the Iraqis create an interim government, hold elections, form an elected representative government, negotiate with their old enemies to push them into the political process, and begin work on a new Iraqi constitution for a permanent democratic government. The Iraqis did all that in less time than we've taken to fix a welfare program heading for bankruptcy. In fact, they've done all of that in less time than it's taken Minnesota to come up with a state budget -- and we still don't have one! Should we send in the 82nd Airborne to rescue Minnesotans from the obviously failed experiment in democracy we have here in Saint Paul?

The dominant theme today will be the complaints that Bush exploited 9/11 -- complaints that will once again reveal how critics can't remember what 9/11 actually meant. It showed that we cannot afford to wait for terrorists to wave their flags and tell us where they are, because the only time they'll do that is when they're raising those flags over the ruins of American cities. That day taught us that we can no longer ignore serious threats like Saddam Hussein, especially in the Middle East. It showed us the folly of appeasement in exchange for the illusion of stability, which really meant the consignment of tens of millions of people to brutal tyrannies that produce radicals willing to die for no other reason than to kill innocents to promote their ideology.

It showed us that we are at war. We can choose to fight that war here, in the US, or we can choose to fight that war where the terrorists and their state supporters live. I'd rather we opted for the latter, and beat them there before they come over here. Building democracies in their midst creates powerful allies for us in that fight against radicalism, and Iraq's population and geography provides a strategic key to that success. Too bad that the nation's newspapers and the critics can't see past the bloody flag.

UPDATE: Corrected a coding problem. Welcome to Instapundit readers, too!

UPDATE II: The Democratic leadership obviously has the same talking points.

CQ In DC Next Week!

As many of you already know, I will appear at the Heritage Foundation on July 8th to speak at a symposium on bloggers, journalism, and the convergence of the old and new media. Mark Tapscott, the Director for Heritage's Center for Media and Public Policy, has titled the presentation as "Are Bloggers and Journalists Friends Or Enemies"? Originally, Mark had lined up Jim Hill, the managing editor for the Washington Post Writers Group, as my counterbalance for the presentation. Mark has now added Daniel Glover, the managing editor for National Journal's Technology Daily. Daniel also runs the NJ's Beltway Blogroll blog.

Here's the description from the Heritage Foundation invitation:

American blogger Ed Morrissey has broken story after sordid story on Canada's multi-million dollar Adscam scandal. But are bloggers "real" journalists? Are bloggers and journalists natural enemies or allies in reporting the news? Or are bloggers a completely new kind of media force that defies all traditional classification?

Morrissey has built a blog with enormous public policy influence in less than two years. Hill's career spans The Arizona Republic, The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post. Glover is an editorial leader of one of America's most venerated publications. Come hear how three savvy voices of the Old and New Media answer these and many related issues.

The forum will start at 10:30 AM EDT on Friday, July 8th. If you can't watch it in person, the event will be televised through Heritage's web site. I'm looking forward to not just speaking at such a prestigious venue, but meeting Jim and Daniel and the people who will attend both the symposium and the lunch afterwards. (Fortunately for bloggers everywhere, I don't believe they'll be televising me eating lunch.) If you catch the speech, I hope to hear from you to get your feedback.

And if you're in DC, I'd like to plan a get-together, probably Thursday night, as a blogger get-together in the area somewhere. I have already received several e-mails from area bloggers; in the next few days, we'll finalize something fun.

Bush Speech: Live Blog

7:00 - The audience is coming to attention as Bush walks across the stage. He looks a bit nervous but as soon as he got to the podium, he looks happy to face this audience.

7:03 - He underscores Iraq as one phase of the overall war on terror, vowing that terrorists will not chase us from the battle with a couple of blows.

7:06 - It appears to me that the soldiers at Fort Bragg have orders not to react. Bush has not paused much in his delivery, as he normally would if he expected applause or cheers, such as a stump speech. His pace, therefore, is better than normal.

7:10 - He will not allow defeat on his watch -- nice touch.

7:11 - Notes that only a year ago, Iraqi sovereignty was restored. Notes that progress has been uneven but has kept moving forward. Int'l orgs and nations have pledged $34 billion for reconstruction. Security forces has 160,000 men trained and equipped, and have led a major operation to clear out terrorists from Baghdad. Eight million people voted in the elections. None of this should be news to Americans, but the reminder is what is needed.

7:14 - The strategy has a political track and a military track. Broad outlines of the plan as it has existed all along.

7:16 - Bush stresses the international components of the coalition, underscoring the dozens of nations participating in the war.

7:17 - Three new tactics: partnering coalition units with Iraqi units, working with new Iraqi intelligence service, working closely with the Iraqi ministries on stabilization.

7:18 - "We've learned that Iraqis are courageous."

7:20 - Good explanation, again in broad strokes, why timelines and exit strategies only work for retreats. "It sends the wrong message to the Iraqi people" -- well, yeah. It reminds them of 1991, primarily.

7:21 - Also a good point about sending more troops. If we continue to escalate our numbers, it starts looking like a permanent occupation -- and it will discourage the Iraqis from standing up for themselves.

7:23 - Eliminate the environments that create the "ideology of murder", a good way to avoid the mention of Islam in any negative connotation, yet still remain accurate.

7:24 - "The terrorists do not understand America" ... They understand some Americans, however.

7:25 - "We fight in Iraq because the terrorists want to kill Americans, and Iraq is where they have made their stand."

7:27 - Find a way to thank the military - check this site.

7:30 - A good finish to the speech; it looks like he started to choke up when he talked about the high calling of a military career. He spoke for almost exactly 30 minutes, giving a good presentation.

I wish he had given more specifics about the reconstruction -- as Beam suggests in the comments, how many schools we've rebuilt, how much electricity restored, and so on. He had an opportunity to talk above the heads of the media filters here, and it's a shame he missed it. Nevertheless, he didn't sugar coat the issues on the ground and he talked about the necessity of seeing it through.

7:35 - Mort Kondracke on Fox thinks it's one of the best speeches on the war that Bush has given. He calls it rich in content; I agree.

7:37 - Mara Liasson (NPR) also gives it good marks, and points out that this isn't a make-or-break moment for Bush, but simply time for him to address the nation on this issue.

7:39 - Brit Hume asks John Warner about the so-called flypaper strategy, and Warner lashes out at quagmire talk.

7:43 - Added link above to MoveOnPAC's astroturfing site for people who can't write their own letters to newspaper editors.

7:46 - General Wesley Clark now on Fox ... He gives Bush credit for addressing the strategic issues, but faults him for not addressing some of the specifics of bombing rates. He worries that we're creating terrorists -- if we weren't in Iraq, we wouldn't have the number of terrorists we have now. In one breath, he says that terrorists can't get to the Americans in Afghanistan because we're hard to get to, and then he says we should send more troops to Afghanistan. As always, Clark is mostly incoherent on this point.

7:52 - At least Clark refuses to drink the "exit strategy" Kool-Aid, but he wants the Bush administration to give Americans the statistics on bombings and attacks in the future. Don't we get plenty of that from the media already? Has anyone missed that data?

7:58 - Carl Cameron says the 82nd Airborne left the auditorium "very enthusiastic". The Fox gang emphasizes that more engagement from the President on the war with the nation is needed -- and I agree. Glenn Reynolds thinks that this speech indicates more will follow, and I hope he's correct. And thanks for the link, Glenn.

8:02 - John McCain - "Bush laid out a clear exit strategy - when the Iraqis can take over, we will leave."

8:05 - McCain on the rhetoric coming from Senator Kennedy, et al: "It's a free country." Okay ... On Durbin: "He hurt his own party ... He apologized ... I'm a great believer in redemption." Okay ... I guess comity is the highest value.

8:07 - McCain defends the MOU: "I don't think you will see a filibuster on a Supreme Court nominee."

8:14 - Oh, goody. Charles Rangel is on the tube now. Time to get a beer.

8:15 - Damn. No beer. And now Rangel claims that Bush planned to kill Saddam before 9/11. If so, he didn't do much about it -- his national-security plan only mentioned tightening the sanctions in place. Rangel says that Bush should go to Europe to get them to take over -- when they haven't even done that in Europe, in Kosovo, which has Truck fascinated at the moment.

8:22 - Newt Gingrich: This was a rational, fact-based speech. He thinks that people will see a "calm, steady purposefulness."

8:27 - Great point by Gingrich on the idea of this being Bush's war -- that undermines the entire American system. Congress authorized the war, it authorized the funding; this is an American war against a deadly enemy. He also rips Durbin's remarks as "destructive as any I've heard".

I think that just about closes out the reaction for the speech. Again, I think Bush did a very good job, with just a few missed opportunities. Check my trackbacks for further reactions, and thank you for hanging in there with me tonight.

UPDATE: Get more reaction at PoliPundit and PrairiePundit.

The Mark Twain Option

When I wrote about my reaction to the Kelo decision, I included a portion of a letter written by Mark Twain over 120 years ago that I felt spoke directly to the issue. After losing a copyright case that he clearly should have won, Twain wrote the following in a letter to a Massachusetts group seeking to honor him with an award:

It does look as if Massachusetts were in a fair way to embarrass me with kindnesses this year. In the first place, a Massachusetts judge has just decided in open court that a Boston publisher may sell, not only his own property in a free and unfettered way, but also may as freely sell property which does not belong to him but to me; property which he has not bought and which I have not sold. Under this ruling I am now advertising that judge's homestead for sale, and, if I make a good a sum out of it as I expect, I shall go on and sell out the rest of his property.

It now looks as if activists have taken Twain to heart. An investment group now seeks to build a hotel with a museum dedicated to documenting the decline of property rights in Weare, New Hampshire, the home of Supreme Court Justice David Souter. Actually, they want to build the hotel in place of the home of Supreme Court Justice David Souter:

Clements, CEO of Freestar Media, LLC, points out that the City of Weare will certainly gain greater tax revenue and economic benefits with a hotel [address redacted -- CE] than allowing Mr. Souter to own the land.

The proposed development, called "The Lost Liberty Hotel" will feature the "Just Desserts Café" and include a museum, open to the public, featuring a permanent exhibit on the loss of freedom in America. Instead of a Gideon's Bible each guest will receive a free copy of Ayn Rand's novel "Atlas Shrugged."

Clements indicated that the hotel must be built on this particular piece of land because it is a unique site being the home of someone largely responsible for destroying property rights for all Americans.

"This is not a prank" said Clements, "The Towne of Weare has five people on the Board of Selectmen. If three of them vote to use the power of eminent domain to take this land from Mr. Souter we can begin our hotel development."

People who want to see Justice Souter's land put to better use than single-family ownership can e-mail the city at this link. Tell them that you'd plan on spending a week in the town as tourists at the new hotel and museum complex. That should get them to give serious consideration to the Mark Twain option.

And, if we're successful, we can move on to Justice Kennedy's house next, as Twain himself might have suggested.

The Clairvoyant New Media

Don't mess with the AP's Jennifer Loven -- she apparently is the wire service's resident fortune-teller. More than three hours before George Bush wil speak at Fort Bragg to review progress on Iraq and the war on terror, Loven has already heard him speak and delivers her analysis (via Michelle Malkin):

President Bush on Tuesday appealed for the nation's patience for "difficult and dangerous" work ahead in Iraq, hoping a backdrop of U.S. troops and a reminder of Iraq's revived sovereignty would help him reclaim control of an issue that has eroded his popularity.

In an evening address at an Army base that has 9,300 troops in Iraq, Bush was acknowledging the toll of the 27-month-old war. At the same time, he aimed to persuade skeptical Americans that his strategy for victory needed only time — not any changes — to be successful.

Wow! Here I am, thinking that I need to actually watch the speech in order to live-blog it later on. This crack efficiency must be due to the layers of editorial control that the Exempt Media keeps claiming as their advantage over bloggers as journalists.

In the fourth paragraph, Loven gives the game away a bit. One would expect the tortured tenses to have attracted an editor's eye at some point as it went through those filters (emphases mine):

"Like most Americans, I see the images of violence and bloodshed. Every picture is horrifying and the suffering is real," Bush said, according to excerpts released ahead of time by the White House. "It is worth it."

It was a tricky balancing act, believed necessary by White House advisers who have seen persistent insurgent attacks eat into Americans' support for the war — and for the president — and increase discomfort among even Republicans on Capitol Hill.

I believe I'll still live-blog this, considering Loven's track record of covering anything with George Bush. I plan on watching the speech on C-SPAN and then reviewing it on Fox, if Brit Hume has his normal post-speech panel in place. I'll leave the crystal ball to the AP and the Exempt Media.

Lords Of The Bling

When New Line Cinema announced that it had committed to a three-picture deal with a relatively unknown director from New Zealand to bring the epic Lord Of The Rings to the screen, people wondered whether New Line management had lost its mind. Estimates of the budget ran to $450 million, a huge investment for any film project, especially for a genre series -- a genre which had disappointed Hollywood and the box office on many previous occasions. Peter Jackson and New Line wound up winning the gamble, making three of the most successful films ever, commercially and artistically, and generating billions in revenue.

Now success appears to have brought out the worst in everyone, as so often happens in Hollywood. Jackson filed suit against New Line for cooking its books to keep millions of dollars it owes to Jackson under the terms of its deal:

What if Frodo Baggins, instead of confronting the evil empire in "The Lord of the Rings," just got himself a lawyer and sued? ...

The suit does not specify a damage award. But in an interview last week, his lawyers said that, after New Line applied its contract interpretation from "Fellowship" to the other two movies, Mr. Jackson was underpaid by as much as $100 million for the trilogy.

Lawsuits in Hollywood are as common as hobbits in Middle Earth. What makes Mr. Jackson's suit draw such widespread interest here, other than his clout in the industry and the amount at stake, is one specific allegation about New Line's behavior. The suit charges that the company used pre-emptive bidding (meaning a process closed to external parties) rather than open bidding for subsidiary rights to such things as "Lord of the Rings" books, DVD's and merchandise. Therefore, New Line received far less than market value for these rights, the suit says.

Most of those rights went to other companies in the New Line family or under the Time Warner corporate umbrella, like Warner Brothers International, Warner Records and Warner Books. So while the deals would not hurt Time Warner's bottom line, they would lower the overall gross revenues related to the film, which is the figure Mr. Jackson's percentage is based on.

This looks bad, and to a certain extent, it is bad. However, New Line needed to gather investors willing to risk a hell of a lot of capitol in order to get Jackson's production financed. To get that capital, it had to structure the deal so that the investors could get a decent return even if the performance didn't gather the audience it later did. Corporations like Time Warner and others had the deep pockets to cough up the half-billion bucks required, but they didn't do that out of a love for J.R.R. Tolkien; they wanted to make a profit, and so they insisted on the best possible terms in exchange for a lot of risk.

That doesn't mean that Jackson doesn't have a case, but it does mean that "pre-emptive bidding" isn't the fraud that the New York Times seems to paint in Ross Johnson's article. Johnson unfortunately tries to balance out the picture by anonymously quoting an attorney for New Line that goes out of his way to insult Jackson:

A litigator for New Line, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he is working on this lawsuit, said the money paid to Mr. Jackson so far is in line with the contract he signed.

"Peter Jackson is an incredible filmmaker who did the impossible on 'Lord of the Rings,' " this lawyer said. "But there's a certain piggishness involved here. New Line already gave him enough money to rebuild Baghdad, but it's still not enough for him."

If Jackson wasn't informed of the manner in which New Line structured the back end, then it's not piggishness on his part to expect to be compensated properly according to the explicit terms of his contract. That sounds like a communication issue between Jackson and New Line. However, given all the trouble that Jackson had selling this project -- most studios wouldn't touch it because of the cost -- it seems that Jackson had to be singularly naive to have expected New Line to have avoided vertical integration with its investment group.

And why is the New York Times allowing an attorney involved in the case to comment anonymously, especially to insult the plaintiff in the case? Since when does the Paper of Record allow itself to provide cover for corporate attorneys without the courage to speak on the record? Jack Shafer would also like to know how that got past the Times' editors, given that it appears to violate its editorial standards:

Whoa! That's great dish, but shouldn't there be a Times policy against giving a partisan source, in this case a defense attorney, the cover of anonymity to call the plaintiff in a case against his client piggish? As a matter of fact, there is such a published policy limiting what anonymous sources can say in Times articles. In "Confidential News Sources," on the paper's corporate Web site, the policy reads in part:

We do not grant anonymity to people who use it as cover for a personal or partisan attack. If pejorative opinions are worth reporting and cannot be specifically attributed, they may be paraphrased or described after thorough discussion between writer and editor. The vivid language of direct quotation confers an unfair advantage on a speaker or writer who hides behind the newspaper, and turns of phrase are valueless to a reader who cannot assess the source.

The cheap shot mars what is an otherwise good piece. Johnson reports that in similar "vertical integration" suits, Hollywood has negotiated settlements rather than allowing its top executives to be deposed and reveal their accounting secrets.

Shafer's right; the quote does nothing for the story except to turn the lawsuit into some sort of personal vendetta. It detracts from the fact that this problem will increasingly become a hurdle for major projects in Hollywood, where astronomical star salaries and expensive special effects require more lucrative back-end deals to get greenlighted.

Addendum: Not to expose myself as a Tolkien geek -- as if my 12-hour marathon viewing of the entire trilogy hasn't already done that -- but Johnson also betrays his lack of knowledge on Rings with this glib metaphor:

Lawsuits in Hollywood are as common as hobbits in Middle Earth.

One of the plot points encountered over and over again in The Hobbit and LotR was that hobbits weren't common at all; in fact, most of the other characters had never encountered one, except for Gandalf and a handful of the Elves. It's not a big deal, but if Ross Johnson wants to use cute little statements like that, it would be nice if he had his information correct.

Balk!

I saw this report about Republican reaction to a bid by an investment team that includes George Soros to buy the Washington Nationals, the new DC major-league franchise -- and I hoped that Roll Call had it wrong. The Washington Post also covered it in their sports section (link via Michelle Malkin), but unfortunately the story hardly improved in the retelling. GOP Congressmen John Sweeney and Tom Davis issued veiled threats to Major League Baseball if the latter allowed Soros to buy into the national pastime:

Major League Baseball hasn't narrowed the list of the eight bidders seeking to buy the Washington Nationals and some Republicans on Capitol Hill already are hinting at revoking the league's antitrust exemption if billionaire financier George Soros , an ardent critic of President Bush and supporter of liberal causes, buys the team.

"It's not necessarily smart business sense to have anybody who is so polarizing in the political world," Rep. John E. Sweeney (R-N.Y.) said. "That goes for anybody, but especially as it relates to Major League Baseball because it's one of the few businesses that get incredibly special treatment from Congress and the federal government."

Rep. Tom M. Davis III (R-Va.), who was a strong supporter of bringing a baseball team to Virginia, told Roll Call yesterday that "Major League Baseball understands the stakes" if Soros buys the team. "I don't think they want to get involved in a political fight."

What the hell?

This is what concerns our GOP caucus at the moment? What happened to Social Security reform, trimming pork from the budget, and supporting the war effort? Why do two Republicans in the House have anything to say about the ownership of the Nats?

Life must truly be perfect if this is what gets Sweeney and Davis perturbed.

Davis, after being challenged on his priorities, came up with the dumbest rationalization possible, under the circumstances:

Davis didn't return calls to his office, but spokesman Robert White said, "The point [Davis] was making was how it would look if Major League Baseball sells the hottest team in the market to a guy who spent more money than the gross domestic product of Colombia to legitimize drugs."

Oh, my. So Congress wants to dictate what kind of politics people should have as a prerequisite to owning a baseball team? Granted, baseball has an obnoxious antitrust exemption granted to them by Congress, so the concept of oversight shouldn't be rejected out of hand. If Davis wants to exercise oversight, though, he should start by eliminating the financial incentives that baseball uses to extort public financing for its palacial private stadiums. Perhaps after that, he could then address the labor issues that the exemption has created and exacerbated over the past four decades.

But what Congress should not do is to demand political philosophy thresholds for ownership, either for the obviously partisan motives that Sweeney and Davis have or for the ostensible war-on-drugs opposition that Davis references. This is nothing but stupid, petty, and self-destructive posturing that makes politicians look foolish in the extreme. The GOP needs to reject it outright, and immediately.

UPDATE: Gerry at Daly Thoughts adds his voice to the criticism.

Speaking To The Choir?

President Bush will give a speech tonight from Fort Bragg to revive American support for the extended effort needed to secure Iraq and establish a major base for the expansion of democracy in the Middle East. With unrelenting negative coverage coming from Baghdad, Bush hopes to use his prime-time address with a presumably enthusiastic Fort Bragg audience to highlight the mission's successes and the progress made towards democracy. Bush hopes to bolster the national morale and secure a mandate for our continued work in that effort.

According to a Washington Post-ABC News poll, that may not be as tough a sale as first predicted. Despite some skepticism about our efforts to reduce the insurgency so far, a majority of Americans already reject the cut-and-run option:

As President Bush prepares to address the nation about Iraq tonight, a new Washington Post-ABC News poll finds that most Americans do not believe the administration's claims that impressive gains are being made against the insurgency, but a clear majority is willing to keep U.S. forces there for an extended time to stabilize the country.

The survey found that only one in eight Americans currently favors an immediate pullout of U.S. forces, while a solid majority continues to agree with Bush that the United States must remain in Iraq until civil order is restored -- a goal that most of those surveyed acknowledge is, at best, several years away.

Amid broad skepticism about Bush's credibility and whether the war was worth the cost, there were some encouraging signs for the president. A narrow majority -- 52 percent -- believes that the war has contributed to the long-term security of the United States, a five-point increase from earlier this month.

I had suspected that the supposedly plummeting numbers supporting the war effort and establishment of democracy in Iraq had been overstated, and this appears to confirm those suspicions. The numbers are even more striking when considering the sample, a pool of adults rather than registered voters, which usually tilts such surveys away from Bush and the GOP. In fact, despite the media coverage that focuses almost exclusively on terrorist attacks in Iraq, optimism about Iraq's future has increased nine points since December, showing that the elections gave Americans a clear idea of the commitment Iraqis have to a democratic future.

Not all of the numbers give Bush much reason to cheer. Majorities fault him for misleading the country into war, his administration of the Iraq phase of the war on terror, and feel that the US has become "bogged down" in Iraq and that we cannot effectively fight elsewhere as a result. Bush has to address those perceptions in his speech tonight to succeed. He has to show that far from being bogged down, American and Coalition troops have accelerated training for Iraqi security forces, that the latter have taken on a larger role in providing security, and that we retain enough global flexibility to address other security risks, such as Syria, Iran, or North Korea.

For his primary goal -- extending support for the immediate mission of securing Iraq as a democratic state -- the President has a nation waiting to be affirmed in that desire. All he needs to do is to present his case about our many successes in specifics, and he can rally the nation behind him again.

NOTE: I will live blog the speech tonight, which begins at 7 PM CDT.

Sistani Blesses Major Concession To Sunnis

In another sign that the Iraqis continue to adapt quickly to democratic politics, the spiritual leader of the Shi'a in Iraq gave his blessing to a major concession to his rival Sunnis that could result in greater representation for the former ruling minority in Parliament. That promises to create less tension over the development of the new Iraqi constitution and create serious momentum for the scheduled December elections:

Iraq's most powerful Shiite cleric appeared to offer a major concession to the Sunni Arab minority on Monday when he indicated that he would support changes in the voting system that would probably give Sunnis more seats in the future parliament.

In a meeting with a group of Sunni and Shiite leaders, the cleric, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, outlined a proposal that would scrap the system used in the January election, according to a secular Shiite political leader, Abdul Aziz al-Yasiri, who was at the meeting. The election had a huge turnout by Shiites and Kurds but was mostly boycotted by Sunni Arabs. ...

Under the proposal, voters in national elections would select leaders from each of the 19 provinces instead of choosing from a single country-wide list, as they did in January. The new system would essentially set aside a number of seats for Sunnis roughly proportionate to their numbers in the population, ensuring that no matter how low the Sunni turnout, they would be guaranteed seats.

The change creates a more federalized system, one that benefits not just the Sunnis but also the Kurds, depending on where the boundaries are drawn. The numbers won't be proportionate to population as such, but more to the provinces that each have as majorities. Once the federal government has established its constitution and electoral procedures, the provinces will create their own electoral governments, giving the ethnic and religious factions even more stability and incentive to work within the system.

This continues the careful politics of Ayatollah Sistani, the Najaf-educated cleric who professes the "quietism" of that school of Shi'ite Islam. His vision of Islam focuses on the spiritual rather than the temporal; his vision of government is one guided by the precepts of Islam but not run by clerics. In that regard, and given the history of religious repression by the Ba'athists, Sistani wants to ensure that the Shi'ite majority get its chance to run Iraq but that the Sunnis and Kurds have enough power to keep the country from falling into chaos.

In fact, while Sistani objected to the previous system of nationwide candidate lists, he allowed them to go forward when the United Nations insisted that any other system could not be implemented quickly enough for the January elections. That system effectively cut out the Sunnis, who boycotted in large numbers but would have won more seats in the central provinces had a federal system been in place. That decision has led to some of the resentment even among those Sunni who did participate. However, the more important objective -- that Iraq will convert to democracy despite minority obstructionism and violence -- has been made.

The progress in negotiations should energize the Sunni moderates into committing completely to the political process, putting even more pressure on their more radical brethren to admit defeat and lay down their arms. It shows the progress being made in Iraq and that the momentum still rolls towards democratization and freedom -- as long as we give the brave Iraqis the support they need to realize their goals.

Woe, Canada: CEOs

Canadian business leaders have begun to sound the alarm over what they perceive as a threat to the Canadian economy from minority government rule. The Canadian Council of Chief Executives warn that the excessive political game-playing will undermine the basic economic structure of the nation as politicians play with taxpayer money to protect their jobs:

Canada's top CEOs are warning that a failure of leadership by Ottawa on the economy has left the country without a long-term strategy to survive increasingly brutal global competition.

In a declaration being released today, the Canadian Council of Chief Executives said the minority-government situation has left federal leaders preoccupied with short-term politicking -- and prone to excessive spending.

"As a political entity, Canada is a nation adrift," said the business group representing 150 leading CEOs.

Prone to excessive spending? No kidding. Paul Martin in the past month alone has given out billions of dollars in new tax revenues to convince the NDP to formally align itself with the Liberals. This comes on top of the hundreds of millions spent on the Sponsorship Program, a good chunk of which wound up in Liberal pockets. Martin has opened up the Canadian treasury to protect his position as Prime Minister, and the bills will come due very soon.

What does all this excessive politicking and big giveaways mean for Canada in the long run? First, just from a mechanical point of view, the Commons has for the last several weeks done little more than play strategy games to see whether the government could survive after the revelations of widespread corruption in the ruling Liberal Party. Despite deserving to get the boot, the Liberals have outboxed the Conservatives since April, but during that time did little to address the overall agenda. The only significant bills that have moved through the Commons have been budgets and the gender-neutral marriage issue, and only for their status as potential confidence motions, or in the case of C-48 to buy off Jack Layton and the NDP.

As the CEOs state, this sells Canada's future short, especially in a time when the nation should be focusing on efficiency, productivity, and capital investment in the future:

The CCCE plans to unveil its own "Canada First" strategy for the country before the next election, expected by early 2006.

The CEOs want the national debate to switch to strategies for cutting excessive spending, taxation and regulations -- and away from endless partisan wrangling in Parliament.

"In the political arena, the very idea of strategic policymaking is drowning in the swirling search for momentary tactical advantage," they said.

The Tories have an excellent opportunity to take the CEOs' challenge and make economic streamlining their platform, as well as a credible program to remove the kind of corruption uncovered by the Gomery Commission from Canadian government. This program fits almost perfectly in a Conservative movement, and puts a competent, consistent, and forward-looking face on the Tories that the past six weeks have failed to achieve.

And On The Seventh Day, We Prosecuted 'Em

The Washington Post posts an AP report this afternoon about boot-camp abuse that carries the breathless headline, "Army Recruits Quickly Abused in Training". The opening paragraphs describe the abuse given to recruits at Fort Knox, right from the time they climbed down off the bus -- or in this case, thrown off of it:

The recruits of Echo Company stumbled off the bus for basic training at Fort Knox to the screams of red-faced drill instructors. That much was expected. But it got worse from there.

Echo Company's top drill instructor seized a recruit by the back of the neck and threw him to the ground. Other soldiers were poked, grabbed or cursed.

Once inside the barracks, Pvt. Jason Steenberger says, he was struck in the chest by the top D.I. and kicked "like a football." Andrew Soper, who has since left the Army, says he was slapped and punched in the chest by another drill instructor. Pvt. Adam Roster says he was hit in the back and slammed into a wall locker.

Eventually, four Army drill instructors and the company commander would be brought up on charges. Four have been convicted so far.

Twenty years ago, the armed services decided that the old-school physical abuse and verbal duress that had trained American conscripts for decades was no longer desirable -- and for good reason. The new American military consisted of willing recruits, for one thing, who did not need to have authority established as oppressively as earlier generations of draftees. Even more to the point, numerous studies both within the services and in comparable outside agencies had proven the superiority of lower-stress, more professional basic training. The Pentagon barred physical violence and harassing language not only due to increased sensitivity and co-ed training, but just because it interfered with the best possible training environment.

This account sounds as if the problem has suddenly arisen and represents a growing problem with the American military. It dovetails nicely with the picture being painted by Amnesty International about how the same military treats its prisoners, and with comments from elected officials about detention facilities being transformed into "hellholes" by the Pentagon. What readers don't find out until after the jump -- ten paragraphs into the story -- is when this case took place:

The abuse took place in early February. An Army investigation began the next week, as the company's leaders were removed and the 25 recruits were sent to another command. Six of the trainees have since left the Army, including two who went AWOL.

This story has been known for four months. Within days of the incident, other soldiers reported the abuse, and those involved were relieved of duty. The Army has successfully court-martialed four of the people involved, including the company commander, Captain William Fulton, who got six months of confinement. The recruits were transferred to a different command to complete their training. If the reader gets all the way through the article, he finds out that there were 120 allegations of abuse in all of 2004, resulting in 16 DIs got relieved as a result -- and the rate for 2005 is half of that for last year.

In other words, the Army had the right processes in place to catch this abuse when it occurred and prosecuted the people responsible. That sounds to me as though the Army doesn't tolerate abuse and is willing to punish those who break the rules, in this case with serious jail time.

One has to wonder why the AP decided to run this story now, and why the Washington Post thought it newsworthy more than four months after the fact, and why both pushed the Army's quick reaction to the bottom of the story. It just provides another example of a hostility to the military that appears to run through the Exempt Media.

UPDATE: People have begun to notice this hostility, if this Pew poll gives any indication, as NRO's Media Blog points out:

Beyond the rising criticism of press performance and patriotism, there also has been significant erosion in support for the news media's watchdog role over the military. Nearly half (47%) say that by criticizing the military, news organizations are weakening the nation's defenses; 44% say such criticism keeps the nation militarily prepared. The percentage saying press criticism weakens American defenses has been increasing in recent years and now stands at its highest point in surveys dating to 1985.

Slanted articles like this create the complaints that Pew found in its survey.

The Further Education Of Dick Durbin, Amnesty Int'l, Et Al

Today's Independent (UK) reports on the experience of a Tibetan nun who had the misfortune of once declaring her loyalty to the Dalai Lama and a free Tibet. When she was thirteen years old, Chinese authorities arrested Ngawang Sangdrol for taking part in a peaceful demonstration for Tibetan freedom. Once behind bars, her jailers made no distinction for her age or gender in tormenting the teen almost to her death:

Ngawang Sangdrol was just 13 when she was first imprisoned by China in Tibet. She was so small her prison guards found it easy to pick her up by the legs and drop her, head first, on to the stone floor of her cell.

They beat her with iron rods, placed electric shock batons in her mouth and left her standing in the baking heat until she collapsed of exhaustion. They called her the "ballerina", because when the pain became too much for her, she would stand on the tips of her toes like a dancer. "The more we cried out in pain," she said, "the more they laughed."

"They would put a rope around your neck, tie both your hands and hang you down from the ceiling. They used iron bars to beat you systematically," she says. "And once you are imprisoned there is no difference between a child and an adult and an elderly person, or between a man and a woman. All punishments and torture methods are equal for everyone."

Sangrol spent ten years imprisoned in Chinese torture chambers. The Chinese thought that she would soon die, regardless of whether she stayed in prison or was discharged. They released her only when she signed an agreement never to disclose what happened to her in prison. She made her way to the US after her release and now campaigns actively to raise awareness of the brutal methods used by the Chinese to oppress the primarily nonviolent Tibetan separatist movement.

I point this out just in case anyone still doesn't understand the difference between systemic torture as policy and genocide as a state goal on one hand, and isolated cases of abuse by rogue personnel who get prosecuted for their actions on the other.

UPDATE: Don't miss this report from a high-ranking military officer about the abuse occurring at Gitmo ... the real abuse.

Britain Acknowledges Contacts With Insurgents

In a press conference this afternoon, British PM Tony Blair confirmed that the UK had made contacts with the native Iraqi insurgency in an attempt to push them into the legitimate political process. This comes after the Times of London revealed this weekend that the Americans had held two or more meetings with the primarily Sunni bombers, hoping to leverage tribal and family connections to convince the Iraqi component that further fighting was senseless:

Britain has been involved in political negotiations with some Iraqi insurgents, Tony Blair revealed today, as he predicted the next year would be "decisive" in determining the country's future.

After a weekend which saw the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, admit that American officers had been meeting insurgents in a bid to split the resistance, the prime minister told reporters Britain was also "engaged" in behind the scenes talks.

Mr Blair refused to speculate on when the insurgency might end - Iraqi deaths have escalated since the government's installation in April - but the prime minister repeated that Britain would stay "until the job is properly done".

Blair and Bush have decided to take on a more public advocacy for their position on Iraq, after playing low key for the past several months. Bush will give a prime-time speech tomorrow, which will be live-blogged here at CQ, to remind Americans about the stakes for success and failure in Iraq for the overall war strategy. Blair works best with the press corps, while Bush does better giving prepared speeches. Thankfully, it appears that both men now realize that they have to remain in front of the press corps and their political opposition in order to maintain political support for this long-term effort. Unfortunately, especially here in the US, people have shortened attention spans and a predilection for instant gratification that does not lend itself to long-term strategic thinking.

We're Delighted You Take This Seriously

Celebrities, for some reason, continually get drawn to political issues on which they know next to nothing. Most of the time, this makes for meaningless and harmless political comedy; this week, we had Tom Cruise lecture Matt Lauer on psychopharmacology, in what had to be one of the more evenly-matched battle of lightweights since Peter Kane squared off against Benny Lynch in Glasgow, Scotland. Sometimes it leads to silly scares with serious consequences, such as Meryl Streep's Alar scare in the 1980s.

And at times, the idiocy of the celebrity class actually promises to do real damage. For an example, various Canadian celebrities have banded together to spring a terror suspect from prison in Canada, as the Globe & Mail reports today:

A suspected terrorist is getting some high-profile support in Federal Court.

Syrian national Hassan Almrei has been held in solitary confinement since October, 2001, and wants to be released while Ottawa assesses whether he poses a security threat.

Among his supporters are Alexandre (Sacha) Trudeau, who has offered a $5,000 bond.

In an affidavit presented to the court, Mr. Trudeau said he is concerned about Mr. Almrei's lengthy detention in solitary confinement.

The son of the former Prime Minister of Canada wants this man released on a $5,000 bond, and gives his assurances to the court that Almrei will comply with all conditions of his release. Two Canadian writers, Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis, and a journalist, Heather Mallick, are tossing another $300 into the pot.

Why are Canadian glitterati so intent on springing Almrei? Deep personal friendship? Some insight into terrorism that the Canadian authorities have missed? Respected sources that exonerate Almrei? Not really -- they just attended really cool parties in support of terror suspects being held by Canada. No, seriously:

Mr. Lewis and Ms. Klein say they do not know Mr. Almrei, but they attended a fundraiser earlier this year with other prominent Canadian writers such as Stuart McLean and Linda McQuaig.

The fundraiser was meant to help people being held under national security certificates.

The definition of celebrity has begun to transform into "celebration of stupidity".

Alone Again, Unnaturally

Howard Kurtz recaps the Dick Durbin and Karl Rove brouhahas in today's Media Notes, detailing the differing responses that the mainstream media gave each speech. Kurtz points out the lack of attention given by the Exempt Media to Senator Durbin's equation of Camp X-Ray to Nazi concentration camps, Soviet gulags, and the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge, crediting the New Media for forcing the issue to the forefront of debate:

When Senate Democratic whip Dick Durbin used a Nazi analogy to describe incidents of prisoner abuse at Guantanamo Bay, it wasn't much of a story at first.

Even when White House spokesman Scott McClellan called Durbin's remarks "reprehensible," "NBC Nightly News" gave the matter three sentences and the other network newscasts ignored it. The NBC and ABC newscasts covered Durbin's tearful apology last week, but the "CBS Evening News" took a pass. ...

The Durbin controversy has been fueled by a chorus of outrage from conservative columnists, bloggers and radio hosts, turning widely overlooked remarks into a full-scale furor for a lawmaker who initially refused to apologize. In that sense, it is the mirror image of the Downing Street memo, the British document questioning the Bush administration's march to war in Iraq, which drew even less media attention until liberal advocacy groups and bloggers spent six weeks berating journalists for burying the story.

For decades, the establishment media were like a walled village, largely insulated from the outside world. But technology has produced so many cracks in the wall that previously ignored stories can seep in -- sometimes in a trickle, sometimes a flood -- when partisans and pressure groups make enough waves.

Kurtz' pairing of the DSM and the Durbin speech is apt, at least (and probably also at most) as a demonstration of the effectiveness of the New Media. While we only attract a fraction of the audience that the Exempt Media enjoys, our readers tend to be more participative than normal media consumers, and in many cases work within the Exempt Media itself. Right now, blogs may wield an outsized influence based on readership, but talk radio helps to amplify our message and we tend to broaden talk radio's reach, which explains how we can affect the course of coverage. These dynamics were in play for both stories, regardless of what one thinks of either controversy.

Kurtz goes one step further to note the immediate national coverage given Karl Rove's speech in New York to the Conservative Party:

There was no such media reticence when Karl Rove said Wednesday that liberals wanted to offer the attackers of Sept. 11 "therapy and understanding." With Democrats castigating the White House adviser, major newspapers (including The Post) and the NBC and ABC newscasts jumped on the story.

Kurtz doesn't make the next leap in analysis, which is too bad, since he comes so close to the right conclusion. Why would the press ignore (for several days) a speech by an elected US Senator comparing American detention facilities to Nazi concentration camps on the Senate floor, while a minor speech by a White House staffer to a state-level political action group drew immediate national attention? For a media analyst, one would think that question should not go unanswered, or even unasked, as it does by Kurtz. It would appear to most people that highlighting controversial statements by senior Democrats in leadership has a low priority for the media, while any kind of controversy involving the Bush administration gets the highest visibility possible.

In that vein, Kurtz' choice of blogs to represent the two sides of the Rove controversy suggests that Kurtz may be a bit too close to the problem to see it. In his review of the blogosphere on this topic, Kurtz highlights Andrew Sullivan, Kevin Drum, Mahablog, Blondsense, Josh Marshall, and Peter Daou in opposition to Rove. In support of Rove -- more accurately, in opposition to his critics -- Kurtz cites ... Captain's Quarters.

Six against one? Was that really representative of the blogospheric response? Or do I just have really broad shoulders on this topic? Don't get me wrong; I enjoy having my work cited by Howard Kurtz, whom I read religiously and recommend to everyone who wants to read serious media criticism. However, just as with the coverage differential between Durbin and Rove, the subtleties communicate a message that one side has substantially more import than the other. It would be better if that argument was made openly, if that's what Kurtz intends. If not -- and I'm sure that's the case here -- then Kurtz, just like the Exempt Media as a whole, needs to exercise more care in their coverage.

SCOTUS: Decalogue For We But Not For Thee

The Supreme Court released its long-awaited decision on the display of the Ten Commandments this morning, deciding on a narrow 5-4 majority to ignore the frieze behind themselves and rule such displays unconstitutional without diluting them with multicultural trappings. The dissent authored by Justice Scalia scorched the "dictatorship of a shifting Supreme Court majority" as a governing principle:

In a narrowly drawn ruling, the Supreme Court struck down Ten Commandments displays in courthouses Monday, holding that two exhibits in Kentucky crossed the line between separation of church and state because they promoted a religious message. ...

The justices voting on the prevailing side Monday left themselves legal wiggle room on this issue, however, saying that some displays — like their own courtroom frieze — would be permissible if they're portrayed neutrally in order to honor the nation's legal history.

But framed copies in two Kentucky courthouses went too far in endorsing religion, the court held. ...

In his dissent, Scalia blasted the majority for ignoring the rule of law to push their own personal policy preferences.

"What distinguishes the rule of law from the dictatorship of a shifting Supreme Court majority is the absolutely indispensable requirement that judicial opinions be grounded in consistently applied principle," Scalia wrote.

Unfortunately, this continues to demonstrate the problems with the entire notion of the "living Constitution", as each succeeding SCOTUS tries to wring new definitions of law in each generation. Each effort creates precedents which lead to even more radical readings, until the original intent of the text gets completely lost.

In this case, we now have the majority arguing that displays of the same text can either be constitutional or unconstitutional depending on the context of how they're arranged on the wall, one of the dippiest notions of legality that has yet come from the Court. The Ten Commandments do not change their characteristics when placed openly on display by themselves, or with Hammurabai's Code and The Prince by Machiavelli, all of which could have been said to have an effect on American jurisprudence to some degree. They're still the Ten Commandments, the same ones that sit behind SCOTUS justices whenever they hear their cases.

Despite the prevailing mood about faith, the First Amendment did not establish an absolute right for Americans to never have to encounter religion in the public square. Such an argument would have been laughed at by the founders of the Republic. All it meant was that the federal government could not establish an official religion, but instead had to ensure the rights of all to worship freely. That amendment had its basis on the brutal Catholic/Protestant wars fought by England that had torn the country to pieces over the previous two centuries. It never mandated that government could not use religious symbols in displays or even in its language, and such interpretations have numerous examples of their folly in the language of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution itself.

Nevertheless, the SCOTUS decision to split the baby follows the recent precedents based on personal whim and lazy thought on which previous courts have relied. The only moderately amusing aspect of this decision is the exception the justices apparently have carved out for themselves.

UPDATE: The always-terrific John Podhoretz has this reaction to the 10 Commandments decision at The Corner:

Why didn't the Supremes just say you could display the 10 Cs on Monday, Wed, and alternate Fridays, but not on Tuesdays and Thursdays? Or that they could be viewed inside government buildings, but only on the walls of bathrooms and in janitors' closets? Has anybody ever advanced this radical opinion -- that the five justices in question may be intelligent and thoughtful people individually, but that together they form one blithering idiot?

The also-always-terrific Michelle Malkin has an excellent roundup of reactions. And The Duke has his take on it posted already at Pekin's Prattles.

The Friends Of Our Enemies

The Bush administration may promulgate new sanctions against entities that do business with sanctioned firms suspected of trading in WMD or assisting terrorist groups around the world. Existing sanctions target the firms or entities themselves, but the new concept is to expand that ring one level outward to encompass anyone doing business with those firms:

The Bush administration is planning new measures that would target the U.S. assets of anyone conducting business with a handful of Iranian, North Korean and Syrian companies believed by Washington to be involved in weapons programs, administration officials said yesterday. ...

But the draft executive order goes far beyond previous measures by threatening the U.S. assets of individuals or companies, including foreign banks, that do business with those on the list.

"If there is a bank in some European capital that is participating in working with one of the entities and that bank has some assets in the U.S., it is conceivable that some action could be taken to the bank's assets here," said one senior official with knowledge of the order's details. Russian and Chinese companies in particular, which do enormous business with Iran and North Korea, could be more affected than others by the new strategy, officials said.

This move would eliminate the dodge used by traffickers in leveraging their relationships with legitimate financial institutions to launder cash and assets. It intends to take out a portion of the dual-use excuse as well, simply by declaring any work with these companies violates our anti-terror sanctions and risks a freeze on American assets. This order provides a strong economic incentive for global financial institutions to stop doing business with proliferators.

This strategy doesn't come without risk, however. As Dafna Linzer reports, the vast majority of financial actions taken by the US in the aftermath of 9/11 went unchallenged due to excellent intelligence; most of those targeted wouldn't dare show up in an American courtroom to reclaim frozen assets. That certainly wouldn't be the case with the next level, which have legitimate interests and won't fold up the tents to go on the lam. The US would have to produce the evidence in court to substantiate the claims, which might wind up harming intelligence operations.

The order sounds like a good idea, even as a tool rarely used but always at the ready. Its deterrent value would provide some needed leverage for greater cooperation in tracing money and assets back to terrorist operatives. Hopefully, it would rarely result in a court action but instead serve to remind financiers that terrorism doesn't pay.

The Unbearable Lightness Of Being ... Bill Frist

Charles Babington takes a critical look at the presidential aspirations of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist in today's Washington Post. While Frist has never come out as a contender for 2008, his candidacy has been widely expected, and earlier he seemed to have an inside track to frontrunner status thanks to his high profile and the success of extending the GOP majority after the last election.

Unfortunately for Frist, a series of miscalculations and apparent reversals have left that reputation in tatters, to the point where Frist now has the reputation as lacking in either ability or enthusiasm for political battle. That reputation will likely sink Frist's ambitions for higher office, Babington writes:

By noon last Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist seemed done with John R. Bolton's nomination to be U.N. ambassador. Bustling from the Capitol to have lunch with President Bush, he told reporters he planned no further votes to try to end the Democrats' long-running filibuster of the embattled nominee.

But after his presidential chat, Frist announced he would keep trying, prompting newspaper headlines such as "Frist Reverses Himself," which his staff called unfair.

The next day, the Tennessee surgeon-turned-politician again seemed to wash his hands of Bolton. "It's really between the White House and Chris Dodd and Joe Biden," he said, naming two senior Democratic senators. At 11 p.m., however, he was working the phones, successfully urging another conversation between Biden and White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. But the late-night Biden-Card call did not resolve a dispute over documents at the heart of the Bolton impasse, and Frist had little to show for his work but negative news reports and political headaches.

The Bolton double-180 raised eyebrows among the GOP, even those who don't necessarily hold much of a portfolio for the Bolton nomination. The main job of the Majority Leader is to make sure that the caucus gets a clear message and strategy on legislative and executive efforts. For a couple of days, it looked like Frist couldn't even decide that for himself, and a frustrated White House had to get the wires uncrossed twice in order to continue the pressure on Democrats to stop their filibuster.

The same wishy-washiness showed itself in the battle over judicial nominations. Frist miscalculated the depth of Harry Reid's conviction to continue the obstructionism of his predecessor, even after the historic -- and embarrassing -- spectacle of the Senate holding up the Electoral College vote just to regale the country with tales of GOP vote suppression that their own study later showed never took place. When the Democrats insisted on debating Condoleezza Rice's confirmation for Secretary of State in order for Mark Dayton to call her a "liar", Frist should have known at that time that Reid had selected executive-branch confirmations as his battleground, and reacted accordingingly with the Byrd option in January.

Instead, Frist dithered for months, and only pressed the issue when the rank and file lost patience with Frist sitting on what had been billed as the top domestic priority for the Senate. That lack of fortitude does not play well as a quality for an executive. People want to see decisiveness, insight, and the passion to fight for one's agenda in their leadership. The last thing that the GOP wants in the White House is a man who will get rolled by the opposition, especially when the GOP holds the majority and most of the political cards in the deck.

Put simply, when Frist had all of the advantages that could possibly accrue to a Majority Leader, he has failed to deliver on the agenda. That alone should disqualify him from serious consideration in 2008 for the Presidency. In the meantime, we all hope he quickly improves his performance in his current position, or the GOP will need to give someone else a tryout in his place.

'He Fooled Me'

L. Patrick Gray has long been a footnote in the annals of the Watergate scandals, a status that kept him in relative obscurity until recently. He had the misfortune of succeeding J. Edgar Hoover as the interim Director of the FBI, but rapidly lost the confidence of the Nixon White House when the President suspected that some of the Watergate leaks came from his top-level staff. That led to the notorious order to "let him twist slowly in the wind" that signaled the end of his aspirations to make his appointment official.

In an extraordinary interview with George Stephanopolous yesterday, Gray talked about his betrayal by both Richard Nixon and his FBI assistant whom he admired until the moment, this year, when Gray discovered he had been stabbing him in the back all along:

Former acting FBI chief L. Patrick Gray III said in a television interview broadcast yesterday that his former deputy, W. Mark Felt, became the mysterious Watergate source known as Deep Throat out of personal revenge and "a desire to get rid of me."

Ending 32 years of silence about his role in the Watergate scandal, Gray told ABC's "This Week" that he had reacted with "total shock, total disbelief" to the revelation that Felt had held a series of secret meetings with Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward. He said he felt betrayed by Felt, who had repeatedly assured him that he was not Deep Throat.

"He fooled me," said Gray, 88, who was forced to step down as acting FBI chief in April 1973 because of suspicions that he had facilitated the Watergate coverup. "It was like I was hit with a tremendous sledgehammer."

Gray had worked for several years with Nixon on his political staff before coming to the FBI -- an appointment that created tremendous resentment within the Bureau, and especially with Mark Felt. Felt thought that an insider should have been promoted to succeed Hoover, but Nixon and most of Capitol Hill knew how dangerous Hoover had become and that his deputies most likely had just as much access to the secret files that had provided Hoover so much political cover. Promoting one of Hoover's inner circle had as much chance of passing muster with the Senate Judiciary Committee as picking G. Gordon Liddy as a special prosecutor for Watergate itself.

Much has been written about Mark Felt over the past few weeks since he (or really, his family) revealed his status as Deep Throat, most of it nonsense. Felt didn't betray his country and he didn't act heroically, either. To the extent he acted in the public good, he did so only in half-measures. Gray made it clear, for instance, that he would have supported Felt had the deputy decided to come clean about what he knew of Watergate and the surrounding scandals, although his own actions of the time certainly would have given Felt some reason to doubt that:

During the interview, Gray acknowledged providing raw FBI investigative files to White House counsel John Dean and destroying several files found in the White House safe of E. Howard Hunt, the organizer of the Watergate break-in. But he denied complicity in the coverup, and said he had opposed White House efforts to stop the investigation on the grounds of a CIA connection.

Felt described Gray as a political hack to Woodward and Bernstein in their series of clandestine meetings, but during the day worked on apple-polishing to put Gray at ease. The ruse worked so well that Gray refused to fire Felt even after the White House requested his termination on several occasions. Gray didn't even consider giving Felt a polygraph to determine if the leaks came from him, because he felt it would be too degrading for such an upstanding agent to have to endure such a test of loyalty.

At the heart of Gray's disillusionment was his belief in Mark Felt as the ultimate FBI agent -- daring, competent, erudite, and most of all loyal. While the Post review of the interview tries to make this point, it doesn't quite come across as well as it did during the interview, part of which I happened to see yesterday. It matched his earlier admiration for Richard Nixon, a man to whom he became so embittered that he refused all contact from the former president, even when Nixon sent him books and personal notes. Gray never responded to Nixon, but clearly felt differently about his former deputy until last month.

Gray's fate was to be betrayed by two people whom he trusted far more than either deserved. That final revelation appears to have embittered Gray even further as he now understands that he may have to live in Watergate history as one of the scandal's biggest patsies, played by both sides against the middle. Small wonder that he has chosen to speak out now, more than 30 years after being chased out of the FBI, in an effort to balance the heroic portrait of Mark Felt that the media has painted these past few weeks. Gray's story should remind us that no one came out of Watergate clean, and that this is one story where heroes unfortunately cannot be found.

Jaafari Calls Europe To Pay It Forward

Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari writes a lengthy call for Europe to step up to the plate in today's Times of London, regarding Iraqi reconstruction after its establishment of Western-style democracy. Invoking the Marshall Plan that rescued the Continent after the devastation of two World Wars, Jaafari pleads with a revitalized Europe to now adopt Iraq and the Middle East the way America adopted Germany and Western Europe in the aftermath of World War II:

Marshall said: “Our policy is not directed against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos.” Today is the time for a new international Marshall plan towards Iraq and the broader Middle East — directed not for or against any policy but against ignorance, tyranny, hatred and anarchy.

Marshall repaired the decaying infrastructure of Germany after six years of war and 12 years of Nazi rule. In Iraq we have had nearly 40 years of fascist rule and have been in practice at war for half that time. I have seen throughout Iraq the marks of economic collapse and depredation this has left. Iraq today has few English speakers, it has hundreds of thousands of ex-soldiers trained for nothing but war, and its universities — which once enjoyed a worldwide reputation — now lag behind those in the rest of the region. It has debts totalling hundreds of billions of dollars and there has been no investment in its infrastructure for more than 20 years.

Three generations of Iraqis have grown up under a dictatorship, learning to take orders but not take initiatives or responsibility, and educated in religious and political hatred and isolationism. My people are a strong people: their will survived. The marks of Saddam’s brutal and divisive rule, however, will take time to heal. Many of my people, as well as soldiers from the multinational force, are still being killed by terrorism.

The way will not always be easy. I am confident, though, that the prosperous democracies of the world will be as far-sighted today as Marshall was in 1947. Much blood had to be shed, and money spent, before peace was achieved in Europe. In Iraq the fight for democracy has cost hundreds of thousands of lives. In the long run, however, it can secure centuries of peace and prosperity. Iraq’s fight against terrorist networks and training camps, and the poverty and ignorance that supply them, has become the world’s fight for the security of humanity.

While Jaafari writes powerfully, its effect on Europe's leaders will be minimal at best. The question of Iraq has become, for Europe, so reflexively tied to George Bush that raising more than the minimal assistance now grudgingly given will be almost impossible. It would be analogous to George Marshall proposing his historic plan to rebuild Europe after the United States remained neutral in World War II, having heeded Charles Lindbergh and the German-American Bund. The isolationists and flat-earthers would have said, "Let Europe fix Europe with its own resources."

Of course, such an action would have been terribly short-sighted, as would have been neutrality in WWII. Putting Europe back on its feet was definitely a vital interest of America, especially in the face of Soviet expansion on the Continent, but also to ensure that democracy maintained its primary status for Western thought. That had been questioned during the Depression, and a European war without American involvement would have been seen as the nadir of democracy. The false dichotomy of a future divided between Communism and fascism would have gained tremendous credibility, and it well could have undermined the American system eventually.

Now Europe faces the choice that American interventionism made so obvious in the late 1940s. After abandoning Iraq to Saddam Hussein through the corruption of Oil-For-Food and the obstinacy of France and Russia to enforce sixteen UNSC resolutions, the people of Iraq nonetheless have emerged triumphant with a democratic government and the seeds of stability and prosperity on Europe's doorstep. Europe must decide whether to continue in its blinkered obstinacy or to pursue its long-term interest in Southwest Asia.

George Marshall and America rescued Europe from its prostrate status after the two world wars it provoked. Now Europe should pay it forward by helping Iraq off the mat after a war it should have helped fight in the first place.

Another Jihadi Gets His Wish

The UAE-based Khaleej Times reports that US and Iraqi forces killed the number-two man in the Abu Musab al-Zarqawi network over the weekend, using a Jordanian newspaper as its source. Khalid Suleiman Darwish had apparently been regarded in Arab circles as Zarqawi's successor during the period when Zarqawi's condition appeared serious enough that a transition appeared possible. Now the dentist has transitioned himself into the ground:

A senior member of Iraq’s Al Qaeda branch was killed recently in a US crackdown on insurgents in the Iraqi town of Qaim near the Syrian border, a Jordanian newspaper reported yesterday.

Khalid Suleiman Darwish, better known as Abu Alghadiya, was among those killed in the operation, the daily Alghad quoted “well- informed sources” as saying.

Abu Alghadiya, a Syrian dentist married to a Jordanian woman, was described by Arab media as the ‘number two’ in Iraq’s Al Qaeda network and tipped to succeed its leader Abu Musab Al Zarqawi.

A statement posted on Thursday on a web site used by militants announced the death of another Al Qaeda fighter in the same crackdown. He was identified as Abdullah Al Rashoud, a Saudi national listed on that country’s most wanted list.

I noted the earlier statement regarding Rashoud last week. The operation in Qaim appears to have been based on some excellent intelligence indeed, if two generals of the foreign-based insurgency got caught up and killed in open battle. With both Darwish and Rashoud now gone, it leaves Zarqawi even more exposed. That may be why the commander of US forces in Iraq, Gen. John Abizaid told CNN yesterday that Coalition forces have a "good idea" where to find him now.

Zarqawi, on the other hand, kept himself busy by reacting to the news that some insurgent groups had met with Americans to attempt a negotiated end to their part of the conflict:

Earlier Sunday, Zarqawi warned militants against contacts with the "enemies of God" and dismissed as lies revelations that US officials had been in contact with insurgents in Iraq.

"We are warning anyone who meets the Jewish, the Crusaders and their agents," according to an Internet statement attributed to Zarqawi's Al-Qaeda Organization in the Land of Two Rivers.

This all comes as good news to the Coalition and the Iraqi government. One of the efforts that the US clearly has made in its negotiations is to split the insurgency, based primarily on ethnicity. It wants native insurgents to return to their families and eventually assimilate, as long as it's done peacefully, because in the long run that's less expensive in lives and reconstruction than killing every last one of them. However, the foreigners who claim to be insurgents are the terrorists that we would face here at home eventually if they weren't being drawn to Iraq instead, trying desperately to keep Iraq from establishing a modern, liberal democracy that would undermine all of their efforts to impose Islamic dictatorships throughout the ummah.

If we can create enough tension between the different factions, they will wind up spending more time attacking each other than ordinary Iraqis and the US forces in the area. It will hasten an end to the native insurgency and wind up isolating the foreigners, both within the native groups and in Zarqawi's network. Iraqi security forces will have much less trouble if the issue narrows down to that kind of focus -- allowing them to take over that much quicker.

So much of this war occurs behind the scenes, where strategies play out subtly and without much fanfare. Bush warned that the majority of the war would not comprise well-publicized battles but low-key campaigns that would escape much notice by the media. The signs are all there; it appears that many have forgotten and instead have their eyes only open for the fireworks.

Bicentennial Rick, Old Glory, And Dodger Stadium

My friends and colleagues at Power Line and Shot In The Dark post today about one of the many memorable moments from Dodger Stadium. Rather than a baseball play or a championship season, though, they recall the heroic actions of then-Chicago Cubs outfielder Rick Monday on April 25, 1976, when he rescued the flag from protestors who had run onto the field to burn it. Make sure you read both posts, but being the lifelong Dodger fan that I am, I'd like to add another perspective to this story.

First, here's the story from Larry Henry, a sportswriter from the Everett Herald in Washington, written in 1998 to celebrate Flag Day:

On this spring day in '76, he was on a Cubs team that was headed for a fourth-place finish in the National League East. It was the fourth inning with the Dodgers batting. The Vietnam War had ended a year before, but people didn't need a war in order to protest. What these two ding-a-lings who had just dashed onto the field of Dodger Stadium were all about nobody knew, but here they were, and where was security? They had come from the left-field corner and had run past Cubs left fielder Jose Cardenal. One carried something under his arm but Monday couldn't distinguish what it was.

Once they reached shallow left-center, they stopped and brought out the object. Monday could see now what it was: the U.S. flag. He recalled that they laid it on the ground almost as if they were about to have a picnic. Then one of them dug into his pocket and brought out something shiny and metallic. "I figured having gone to college two and two is sometimes four," Monday said. "They were dousing it with lighter fluid."

Then they lit a match. Which flared momentarily and died.

By now, Monday was in full stride, running towards them. "To this day, I don't know what I was thinking," he said. "Except bowl them over." He was also thinking they were trying to commit a terrible act. "What they were doing was extremely wrong as far as I was concerned," said Monday, who served six years in the Marine Reserves.

He reached them about the time they got the second match lit and were about to torch the flag. "There's a picture that I think won a Pulitzer Prize and it showed me reaching down and grabbing the flag," he said. ... Monday got the flag and handed it to Doug Rau, a Dodgers pitcher. That was the last Monday saw of it until a month later. The Dodgers came to Wrigley Field and Al Campanis, a Dodgers executive, presented the flag to Monday. "It's displayed very proudly in my home," he said.

Dodger coach Tommy Lasorda had also started running out to the outfield from the other direction, and fortunately for the two nuts involved, security got there before he did. Monday, in other interviews, has said that Lasorda had murder in his eyes as Monday passed him in full stride. He had no doubt that the two individuals, who appeared stoned and somewhat amused at Monday's deft steal of the flag, would have presented no challenge whatsoever to the middle-aged but well-known battler.

Lasorda himself, in his memoirs from years ago, acknowledged that he meant to stop the pair any way he could. But that was not the prevailing attitude in 1976. For those too young to recall, the nation had reached what we thought was the depth of our national crisis of confidence. A year earlier, we had watched on television as the last Americans in Saigon had to be airlifted out by helicopter from our doomed embassy as the North Vietnamese overran the allies we abandoned in 1973. Two years earlier, our President resigned from the office he disgraced, taking the credibility of the national law-enforcement and intelligence agencies with him.

With the bicententennial of the Declaration of Independence coming up, the country had started a celebration of the event that overloaded on red, white, and blue. The nation tried to put on a coat of faux patriotism it didn't really feel, and the entire effort felt commercialized and hypocritical. With Independence Day two months away, many already had had enough of the celebration.

However, when Monday took off with the flag, all of the cynicism and defeatism of the past two years melted away. Watching Monday rescue the flag from two lunatics who tried to hijack a baseball game for their protest, which would have provided the perfect nadir of American morale at that time, the crowd did something no one expected. Lasorda recalled in his book that starting softly, the crowd started singing "God Bless America", completely unprompted, until all of the tens of thousands of Dodger fans had joined together to sing it. It was one of the few unscripted and spontaneous patriotic displays in our Bicentennial, and one of the most moving at any time.

Monday became a favorite of Dodger fans from that moment on, and the next year the team traded for Monday. He played on three pennant-winning Dodger teams and played a key role in their World Series win in 1981. Today he still works for the Dodgers as a broadcaster, continuing an almost 30-year association with the team that began with that daring rescue of Old Glory. Monday not only saved the flag from burning that day, but at least for a brief moment in time, united us in genuine love of country and showed us what real patriotism looked like. For that, Monday has always been and always will be one of my favorite Dodgers -- and favorite sports figures -- of all time.

Just another slice of Dodger history that I hope everyone will enjoy.

UPDATE: CQ reader E.O. reminds me that the scoreboard operator at Dodger Stadium recognized the import of Monday's actions immediately. After the incident, he or she put up the message: RICK MONDAY - YOU MADE A GREAT SAVE! Quite an acknowledgement for a visiting player.

What A Difference Actual Research Makes

After blathering on for weeks about the supposed gulag-like conditions at Guantanamo Bay, members of Congress finally visited the facility for themselves this week. To no one's great surprise, they left with a considerably change in their attitude after having done some actual research:

During a tour of the U.S. prison for suspected terrorists on Saturday, House Republicans and Democrats, including one who has advocated closing the facility, said the United States has made progress in improving conditions and protecting detainees' rights. ...

"The Guantanamo we saw today is not the Guantanamo we heard about a few years ago," said Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-Calif.

Still, lawmakers from both parties agree more still must be done to ensure an adequate legal process is in place to handle detainee cases. In the meantime, said Rep. Joe Schwarz, R-Mich., "I think they're doing the best they can to define due process here." ...

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (news, bio, voting record), D-Texas, is one of many Democrats who have called for an independent commission to investigate abuse allegations and have said the facility should close. She said she stood by that position, but acknowledged, "What we've seen here is evidence that we've made progress."

No, Congresswoman Lee and Congresswoman Tauscher, what we see is that the two of you and most of your colleagues shrilly slander the US military without doing anything to check your facts beforehand. Prior to this delegation, only eleven Senators and a handful of Representatives had visited Camp X-Ray at Gitmo, despite having access to the facility since the war started. Instead of taking advantage of their opportunity to travel on official business to investigate this "hellhole", as one Democrat called it during open debate, the Leftists like Tauscher and Lee simply regurgitated slanders and accusations from hysterics like William Schulz at Amnesty International, who later admitted that he didn't have any idea whether what he said was accurate or not.

No one wants to muzzle dissent, especially not in Congress. But before our elected representatives at any level start making accusations of systemic abuse at places like Gitmo, where they have access to review the facilities for themselves, then we expect them to have made that trip and gathered the facts before launching broadsides at the armed services and our intelligence community. Shame on them for jumping to conclusions and publicly condemning them without making that effort -- and for playing into the propaganda of our enemies during a time of war just to play partisan games on Capitol Hill.

Harper Hits The Road But Passes On The Parade

Stephen Harper has started out on his summer-long effort to connect with the Canadian electorate, starting off by opening the annual Dragon Boat festival in Toronto. He engaged in banter with the friendly crowd, asking for a rescue if he jumped into the lake to cool off, but his choice of apparel -- a business suit, sans tie -- looked a bit out of place and uncomfortable, an unfortunate allegory to his last few weeks in the Commons:

Tory Leader Stephen Harper continued his image makeover tour Saturday after an embarrassing week that saw his party ambushed on a budget bill it had promised to defeat.

Mr. Harper helped launch Toronto's International Dragon Boat Race Festival by cracking jokes about a quick rescue if he were to leap into Lake Ontario to escape the stifling heat. ...

The embattled leader, who plans to hit the barbeque and festival circuit this summer in an effort to lighten his staid image, wore a suit but left the tie at home and unbuttoned the collar of his dress shirt. He was all smiles throughout the appearance and and admitted he maybe should have dressed down for the sweltering heat.

Mr. Harper was warmly received by the crowd on Centre Island in Toronto's harbour and briefly manned a barrel-sized drum leading the dramatic dancing parade that opened the festival.

Harper came under some criticism for skipping the Toronto Gay Pride parade, an understandable scheduling decision given Harper's opposition to the upcoming gender-neutral marriage bill that now is widely expected to pass. He showed that while he wants to get out and give people reasons to open up to the Tories and vote for them, it won't be by pretending to be who he's not -- a rather apt analogy to the Gay Pride festivities, if one considers it for a moment. Harper did so without denigrating or even referencing it, a wise choice on his part.

However, less wise was his answer to reporters immediately after the race of the shenanigans that accompanied last week's vote in the Commons on C-48, in which Harper had held out hope for a confidence vote that could topple the Liberals. He attacked the other parties as "unprincipled" and denied that his leadership had any role in his defeat. He then made this statement, which will probably come back to haunt him in his tour:

"Canadians are going to be concerned to see the government having a deal with the socialists and the separatists," he said. "I don't think that's the kind of coalition the public voted for."

Given that Harper himself aligned with the "separatists" of Bloc Quebecois for most of the past two months, that seems like a rather cynical and self-serving excuse. Harper gave that opening to NDP Jack Layton, who quipped that Canadians expected their MPs to be in their seats, ready to vote. Harper should think about being magnanimous at this point, as these recriminatory statements will only serve to create barriers later on and reinforce the notion that the Tories represent a negative force in Canadian politics. He needs to present the positive image of change and reform, and remind Canada why it needs both and why the Liberals cannot deliver either.

Polling shows that Canadians have a trust issue with Harper. As I suggested earlier, Harper would be well served to research and adopt the self-effacing and open style of Ronald Reagan and learn to react more graciously in defeat. Voters will not trust a politician who cannot truthfully acknowledge setbacks and who make a habit of dodging responsibility for them. It's early in his summer campaign, so he has time to learn, but he should start now.

The Dreams Of Palestinian Women

Manuela Dviri of the Telegraph follows up on the story of Wafa Samir al-Biss, the young Palestinian woman who tried to repay the Israelis for their generosity in providing her medical assistance for her burn scars by becoming a suicide bomber for Fatah. Dviri interviewed Biss about her attempt to kill Israelis and the motivation for suicide bombing:

The girl had big, brown eyes and her black hair was tied in a ponytail, but it was the strangeness of her gait that attracted the attention of the security officials at the Erez crossing, the main transit point between Israel and the Gaza Strip.

When a soldier asked her to remove her long, dark cloak, she turned to face him. All her movements were taped by the military surveillance camera at the checkpoint: calmly, deliberately, she took off her clothing, item by item, until she looked like any normal young woman in T-shirt and jeans. It was then that she tried to set off the belt containing 20lb of explosives hidden beneath her trousers. To her horror, she did not succeed. Desperate, she clawed at her face, screaming. She was still alive, she realised. She had failed her martyrdom mission.

That afternoon, on June 21, the 21-year-old, Wafa Samir al-Biss, was brought before the press by Israeli intelligence. Her neck and hands were covered with scars caused by a kitchen gas explosion six months earlier. The ugly scars - which had been treated in a hospital in Israel - had probably helped turn her into the perfect would-be huriia (virgin), the ideal martyr, since they would make it difficult for her to find a suitable husband.

Biss told Dviri that she had not decided to kill herself over her scarring, but that martyrdom had long been a dream of hers. "I believe in death," she tells Dviri, in an admission that perfectly encapsulates the entire problem with the Palestinians in charge of the territories. Fatah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad -- these groups have never offered anything else other than death for decades. When one scans the political landscape of the Palestinian Authority, no one argues for life; one only finds varying degrees of support for terrorists and militias that teach nothing but hate and death to their children.

That's why a young woman like Biss dreams of killing children rather than bearing them. She told Dviri that her attempt to blow herself up was intended to kill twenty or fifty Jews, even babies at the hospital which the attack targeted. In almost the same breath, she asks if the Israelis will have mercy on her because she still hasn't killed anyone. It's this dislocation from reality, the disconnect between their obscenity of indiscriminate bloodthirstiness and their expectation of mercy from their enemies that also gives the best representation of the difference between the two societies, and why the notion of statehood for the Palestinians holds out little hope of creating a peace between them.

Dviri then extends her interview to other women who tried to become martyrs and failed, held at the same facility that Wafa Biss will no doubt spend a significant portion of her life. When Dviri interviewed a would-be bomber named Kahira, the conversation suddenly turned uncomfortably personal. Kahira actually did conduct a successful attack, one that did not kill her but did kill a pregnant Israeli and her husband, and wounded 80 others:

Kahira was given three life sentences and another 80 years. She looked pale, sad, anguished. I asked her if the dead tormented her during the night. "No," she said. "Anyway, the actual attacker would have blown himself up even without me. I didn't kill anyone myself, physically."

Who do your children live with? "With my mother-in-law, my husband is in jail, too."

Aren't you sorry you ruined their lives as well as your own? "I did it to defend them. I'm not sorry, we're at war. But perhaps I wouldn't do it again. It was an impulse," Kahira answered balefully. ...

What did you do? "I helped the attacker to get into Jerusalem. I gave him some flowers to hold in his hands."

When? "I don't remember the exact date, only that it was Mother's Day. That's why I prepared him some flowers."

Then it was February, I told her.

"How can you remember it so well?" she asked.

Because my son was killed on Mother's Day, I said, and I watched as she grew pale and seemed to stagger.

No, it wasn't you, I explained. He was killed in 1998, while your attack was in 2002. But we certainly have an anniversary in common.

At this, Kahira gave me a look that I'll never be able to describe. She didn't utter another word.

Incredibly and to her credit, Dviri ends with the statement that neither side should be punished as a group for the acts of their extremists. However, Dviri doesn't have the courage to acknowledge that the difference between the two sides is that the Palestinians have allowed their extremists to take charge for decades, and now have no other voices to lead them away from their culture of death.

US Negotiating With Iraqi Insurgency

The Times of London reports this morning that the US has opened negotiations with the native insurgents in Iraq, attempting to find a way to bring the Iraqis opposing the new order in Iraq into the mainstream without violence. Hala Jaber reports that sources within the insurgency have disclosed the meetings and that progress went well enough to stage a second round of talks ten days later and to plan for even more talks:

After weeks of delicate negotiation involving a former Iraqi minister and senior tribal leaders, a small group of insurgent commanders apparently came face to face with four American officials seeking to establish a dialogue with the men they regard as their enemies.

The talks on June 3 were followed by a second encounter 10 days later, according to an Iraqi who said that he had attended both meetings. Details provided to The Sunday Times by two Iraqi sources whose groups were involved indicate that further talks are planned in the hope of negotiating an eventual breakthrough that might reduce the violence in Iraq. ...

Washington seems to be gingerly probing for ways of defusing home-grown Iraqi opposition and of isolating the foreign Islamic militants who have flooded into Iraq to wage holy war against America under the command of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq.

The talks appear to represent the first serious effort by Americans and Iraqi insurgents to find common ground since violence intensified in the spring. Earlier informal contacts were reported but produced no perceptible progress.

Zarqawi’s group, which has been blamed for many suicide bombings and beheadings, has not taken part.

This takes a lot of tapdancing on all sides. Americans have long held to the principle of non-negotiation with terrorists, and the situation is further complicated by the fact that the native insurgency comprises mostly remnant of the previous regime. The Shi'ite majority in Iraq has taken most of the casualties from this group, which makes them less appreciative of American efforts to bring them into the political process. The Sunnis themselves do not appear terribly appreciative of the insurgency being waged ostensibly on their behalf, but mostly because it has the effect of digging the Americans more stubbornly into their positions in Iraq.

As such complications would suggest, the meetings did not go well. The Iraqis, perhaps emboldened by press reports of American domestic politics, insisted on a timetable for American withdrawal, although they claimed not to care about the length of time as long as it was defined and finite. The Americans insisted that the Iraqis cut ties with the foreigners of al-Qaeda and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who did not get invited to this tete-a-tete. Neither group succeeded in doing much than irritating the other, but both agreed to continue meeting.

The Times reports that tribal sheikhs arranged the meeting between the half-dozen groups of native insurgents and the Iraqi government and American military. These community leaders have lost patience with the fighting and have decided that the violence is bad for business. They at least acknowledge that further fighting is pointless but don't want to risk getting killed for saying it outright. The sheikhs want a way to bring these errant Iraqis back into the mainstream, allowing the new Iraqi army to deal with foreigners, most of which the Iraqis have detested all along.

In other words, in direct contradiction to what Ted Kennedy said in the Senate hearings this week, the sheikhs know that the insurgents have lost the war -- and they want the residual fighting to stop to protect the innocent Iraqi civilians. The insurgents know they lost the war now, too; otherwise, they would not be satisfied with just an American promise to withdraw by any date we choose. For domestic Iraqi purposes, the Americans and the new Iraqi government would far prefer to find a solution short of complete annihilation for the far-larger native insurgency, which will give even more credibility to the political reforms already in place in the new government as well as allow the security forces to concentrate on the foreigners of the Zarqawi network.

The sheikhs, the terrorists, and the new Iraqi government all realize that the war is over and the good guys won. Can someone now please alert Congress?