An Evening In The Rain

I decided to take the First Mate out for an evening after finishing the State Fair broadcast this afternoon. We had wanted to see The Devil Wears Prada for a few weeks but hadn't had a chance to catch it yet. The FM read the book (on CD), and with Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci, it looked like a good choice. I'll pass on writing a review -- it's been out for too long -- but it's definitely enjoyable. Streep is deliciously nasty, Tucci is excellent, and Anne Hathaway almost manages to steal the movie from both.

Some have asked for an update on the FM's health. She's improved over the summer, but the BK viral infection has made something of a comeback. She now has to have a weekly IV infusion of a powerful antiviral, and we're hoping that will solve the problem. Until then, we have to wait on any transplant. Her anemia has all but disappeared, though, and her energy level is much improved. My back is healing nicely as well.

We took our son and daughter-in-law out with us to the movie, and afterwards we debated energy policy while standing in a soft rainshower. David studies physics at the U of M and has always had an interest in American energy policy, ever since he and I looked into the use of hydrogen fuel cells for a high-school project years ago. He expressed frustration over our continuing reliance on fossil fuels rather than nuclear power. I asked him to write a paper on the issue, and he agreed to review the scientific implications of our energy policies for CQ readers. Hopefully I'll have something soon to share with you all; he's got some interesting ideas.

It's All Happening At The Fair

As I wrote last week, it's that time of year again here in Minnesota, when it seems that half of the state congregates within a square mile to sample food on a stick and make carny barkers rich. It's the Great Minnesota Get-Together, our State Fair, and as always, the Northern Alliance Radio Network will broadcast live from the AM 1280 The Patriot booth. We'll be broadcasting again today and tomorrow from the fairgrounds. Today, we will stick to our new expanded schedule of 11 am - 5 pm CT; tomorrow we will broadcast from 12 - 4 pm CT. If you can't get down to the fair on either weekend, tune us in at 1280 AM or on our Internet stream.

I'll be on with Mitch from 1-3 CT today and 2-4 CT tomorrow, so be sure to tune in!

QandO Hacked; I Question The Timing

Just a day after Jon Henke announced his new position with the George Allen re-election campaign, his QandO blog has been hacked. Individual posts still display, but an attempt to access the main page only displays a misspelled text message, supposedly from a Turkish hacker, saying "NO WAR!"

Uh-huh. Suddenly QandO has landed on the radar screen of Turkish hackers -- who manage to misspell 'Turkish'? And their anti-war fervor led them to hack a neo-Libertarian site? Riiiiiiiight.

If you don't have QandO's RSS feed, here it is. It appears to work just fine, and you can read anything new that the trio posts while it fixes the damage done by, er, Turkish hackers.

On The Decision For Martyrdom

David Schraub points to a strange column by David Warren that sounds like a demand for Christian or even Wsetern martyrdom regardless of one's own personal beliefs. Warren excoriates Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig for going through a mock conversion to Islam as a means of escaping their kidnappers:

Lately I have been looking at the large -- at how the West is proving unable to cope with a threat from a fanatical Islamic movement, that it ought to be able to snuff out with fair ease. (See my column last Sunday.) But the large is often most visible in the small.

The degree to which our starch is awash is exhibited in the behaviour of so many of our captives, but especially in these two. They were told to convert to Islam under implicit threat (blindfolded and hand-tied, they could not judge what threat), and agreed to make the propaganda broadcasts to guarantee their own safety. That much we can understand, as conventional cowardice. (Understand; not forgive.) But it is obvious from their later statements that they never thought twice; that they could see nothing wrong in serving the enemy, so long as it meant they'd be safe.

I assume they are not Christians (few journalists are), but had they ever been instructed in that faith, they might have grasped that conversion to Islam means denial of Christ, and that is something many millions of Christians (few of them intellectuals) have refused to do, even at the cost of excruciating deaths. Christianity still lives, because of such martyrs. Not suicide bombers: but truly defenceless martyrs.

I'm not going to do a point-by-point fisking here, because I doubt it would do much good, but Warren makes unsupported assumptions and then builds on them to a conclusion that seems almost as bad as anything radical Islamists say about suicide bombings.

Warren wants kidnapped hostages to die for Christianity and the West rather than jolly along their kidnappers to gain their own freedom. That may be a splendid sentiment, but it results in dead Westerners rather than dead Islamists, and I fail to see how that represents any kind of victory. One of the reasons why Western culture is superior to that of radical Islam -- and I say superior deliberately -- is that we value individual human life. Dying needlessly and purposelessly for the West doesn't gain us any converts in this conflict.

In his argument for martyrdom, Warren retells the story of the Italian hostage in Iraq that fought back rather than be beheaded. He leaves out the essential element of Fabrizio Quattrochi's story, however, which is that Quattrochi knew he was going to die. (He also makes an unsupported allegation that Quattrochi wasn't Christian.) Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's goons had gathered Quattrochi and his fellow victims for their execution. Rather than await the butcher's knife, the Italian charged his captors, who were forced to shoot him instead.

Brave, yes. Martyr ... not exactly. Quattrochi didn't die to defend the West; he died because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Warren complains about the image that Centanni, Wiig, and others who beg for their lives leave on the Muslim world. He says it makes Westerners look like wimps. That, however, is an indictment on their culture, not ours, that they place individual people in situations where they have to beg for their lives. Warren wants to play by Muslim rules, and he wants to do it with other people's lives. It's pretty damned easy to criticize hostages who have no idea how to stay alive except to cooperate and hope things work out well -- if the critic is heartless enough to do it.

Christianity did not survive because of martyrdom; it survived despite it, and the martyrs prepared themselves for the task. The church survived the oppression of the Romans in its first centuries, not by mindlessly dying for Christianity but for living for it. Romans did not seize people randomly off the street and tell them to deny their faith, but instead arrested and tortured the leaders of the Church. Had Warren spent any time researching the age of martyrdom, he would know that the early church cautioned the unprepared not to attempt it because of the risk of apostasy. It's hardly analogous to the terror of fanatical Muslims today, and Centanni and Wiig never volunteered to be the banner-carriers of Christianity or the West.

As I wrote this, I got an e-mail from Jules Crittendon regarding the same subject. He writes in the Boston Herald:

Centanni and Wiig -- abducted, bound and blindfolded by armed Islamic terrorists in Gaza -- were told they had to convert to Islam.They did so.They later said nice things about the Palestinian cause while still in the custody of Palestinian terrorist leaders. There was some premature debate among armchair heroes on the Internet about whether they should have done this. ...

Now, a sanctimonious Canadian, columnist David Warren of the Ottawa Citizen, has accused Centanni and Wiig of aiding the enemy through "conventional cowardice."This disgusting slur was amplified at www.realclearpolitics.com, a prominent and respected opinion website that saw fit to run these remarks under its own imprint.

Warren reportedly is a convert to Catholicism. Presumeably that conversion happened after his reported divorce, or he would be a sinner and a hypocrite rather than, as he presumeably is now, forgiven. He called Centanni and Wiig’s gunpoint conversion something we can "understand: not forgive." He assumes they are not Christians, but proceeds to argue for martyrdom, if not Christian martyrdom, then martydom for the West.

Warren’s condemnation of these men raises some very unusual questions. Clearly he’s eager for their deaths. But in his own case, does he long to be nailed to a cross of his own, or would he rather have some heretics to burn? Or is he just jacked up on self-righteousness and spouting off idly from the sidelines? Whichever it may be, he starts to sound a lot like some other religious fanatics I could name.

The though process behind Warren's diatribe eludes me. It's presumptuous and in the end, it's ludicrous. He wants to make the abductors' point for them and turn every Westerner into a combatant. That's his argument at its base -- that Centanni and Wiig should have understood themselves to be combatants and their cooperation with their captors amounted to treason, if not apostasy. It's an argument, though, that we don't even make with combatants any more. During the Viet Nam War, thousands of POWs got tortured for their brave resistance to demands for taped statements against the United States. When that information came to light after the war, the DoD revised its policies on treason to exclude the kind of facile rhetorical cooperation that the Vietnamese had demanded, the resistance to which cost American lives and health needlessly.

Everyone understands that statements made under duress have no meaning except to demonstrate the inhumanity of the captors rather than the politics or religion of the captured. Everyone understands this except for David Warren, I guess, who argues that religious fanaticism must be fought with more religious fanaticism. I, for one, am happy that Centanni and Wiig had the wits and the luck to get out of Gaza alive. That to me is a victory. That Warren sees it as a form of surrender makes me wonder exactly what kind of war he wants to fight.

North Korea Understands The Significance

The US successfully tested its missile-defense system again this week, and this time it specifically used North Korean missile technology in its test. The North Koreans did not miss the significance of the results:

The U.S. missile defense system yesterday shot down an incoming dummy warhead simulating the last-stage trajectory of a North Korean Taepodong-2 missile, a milestone that U.S. officials expect to counter critics of earlier tests.

It was the first time a dummy North Korean missile was intercepted, and the sixth successful intercept since 1999, said officials from the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency.

"What we did today is a huge step in terms of our systematic approach to continuing to field, continuing to deploy and continuing to develop a missile defense system for the United States, for our allies, our friends, our deployed forces around the world," said Air Force Lt. Gen. Henry Obering, director of the Missile Defense Agency.

He said there is "good chance" the system would be successful against a Taepodong-2 launched from North Korea.

Pyongyang test-fired a Taepodong-2 missile on July 4th, heightening tensions in the Pacific and raising fears that North Korea could now strike the US mainland. The TD-2 was intended to land outside of Hawaiian waters as a message to the US of Kim Jong-Il's reach in the Pacific, but it failed within the first minute of its flight. North Korea says it intends to keep testing the TD-2, regardless of the outcry in the region.

That led to the increased efforts to demonstrate the futility of the TD-2 project. After a successful intercept at or approaching the apogee of a multi-stage missile in June, critics complained that such an intercept would not adequately stop the warhead of an ICBM from wreaking havoc. This test appears to counter that criticism. The defensive system destroyed the warhead itself, a feat better than its design intended, and it shows that the US can stop at least a random missile shot, if necessary.

North Korea reacted as one would expect: unhappily. The demonstration of our missile defense "clearly shows that it is the U.S. which is increasing tensions on the Korean Peninsula and threatening war against our country." Kim pledged to continue work on his TD-2 to increase DPRK's "self-defensive deterrent", which in Orwellian Newspeak means offensive nuclear weapons capabilities.

Japan, meanwhile, is also discussing an end to official pacifism in the face of North Korean threats:

Shinzo Abe, the nationalist politician who is expected to become Japan’s next prime minister, said Friday that Japan should revise the pacifist Constitution imposed on it by the United States.

He made the statement as he formally declared his candidacy for the presidency of the governing Liberal Democratic Party, a post that would give him the prime ministership. Mr. Abe, the chief cabinet secretary, also said Japan should seek a larger role in the world and further strengthen its alliance with the United States.

“As the next L.D.P. president, I’d like to take the lead to put revision of the Constitution on the political agenda,” Mr. Abe said at a regional party convention in Hiroshima.

“I’d like to draft a new Constitution with my own hands,” he added.

The current war-renouncing Constitution, which was drafted by Americans during their occupation of the country after World War II, does not allow Japan to possess a real military.

This represents the real threat to Kim in the region: a re-armed Japan. It's one of two ace cards held by the West in dealing with Kim Jong-Il, the other being Taiwan, which is more of a pressure point for China. Neither wants to see Japan off its American leash, and China will be forced to exert its influence over its intransigent ally.

It would appear that George Bush has taken a page from the playbook of Ronald Reagan in dealing with North Korea. He has insisted on multilateral talks and offered some incentives for engagement. However, he refuses to trust Kim as a direct negotiating partner, and instead has worked to negate the threat through defensive measures. Once we establish that Kim's missiles will gain him nothing, Kim will have to build something to overcome the defenses. However, Pyongyang has almost run out of resources and almost assuredly will collapse, even if they avoid an arms escalation. If they try to surpass our missile defenses, Kim's regime will crumble from internal rot and a catastrophic economic situation.

In the meantime, the missile defense test sends a message to the other end of the Axis of Evil. The Iranians may be spending a lot of time and resources on a missile system that will be obsolete before they can tip them with the nukes they're pursuing. A sanctions regime would force them into the same bankruptcy as North Korea, but their restless populace will never let it get that far.

UPDATE: The Washington Post reports that further tests will come in December, and will include countermeasures to determine whether the interceptor can differentiate between them. Critics warn that this does not mean that the missile-defense system is 100% capable, and of course they're right. However, we would have been much closer to that state had we not taken a 10-year break from developing this program in the 1990s.

New British Terror Sweep Nabs 14 Suspects

British security forces arrested 14 people in a terror sweep they say is unrelated to the foiled sky-terror plot, the BBC reports. The arrests appear to focus on a madrassa in East Sussex:

Armed police have arrested 14 men following anti-terror raids in London, including 12 arrests at a restaurant in the Borough area.

Two people were held elsewhere in the city in what police said was an intelligence-led operation.

Police said the arrests were not connected to the alleged transatlantic jet bomb plot or the 7 July attacks.

An Islamic school near Tunbridge Wells has also been searched as part of the same operation.

The Jameah Islameah property, on Catt's Hill near Crowborough, East Sussex, is an Islamic teaching facility for boys aged between 11 and 16.

The school only had nine students at its last inspection, which seems very noteworthy considering the size of the facility. The school advertises to Islamic centers as a central instruction point for leaders of Muslim communities. Given the size of the facility, either Jameah Islameah has fallen on hard times -- which seems unlikely given the current state of affairs -- or it served as something more than an instructional facility.

In fact, the BBC's sources say that the arrests involved the operation of training camps for terrorists. It's the same kind of training that British investigators suspected the July 7 bombers of undergoing but were never able to establish when or where it happened. While investigators so far have found no connection between the school and the July 7 plotters, they apparently have taken that theory seriously enough to look for similar training centers for would-be terrorists.

The suspects were arrested as they ate at a halal Chinese restaurant, after having dozens of police officers come into the place looking specifically for them. One has to wonder why 12 of the 14 suspects had gathered in one place, and a public place at that, when the school would have provided more security -- if their meeting had a specific purpose. Likewise, if the police assumed that it did, was it a good idea to confront them in a public place, or should they have waited until they had them in more secure surroundings? It doesn't seem like an accident that so many security officers just happened to be available as backup at that Chinese restaurant.

The British have scored a number of recent successes in fighting the Islamists, if this proves to be correct. They appear to have made significant intelligence inroads into the radical Muslim community. It would be enlightening to know their methods.

UPDATE: Allahpundit at Hot Air questions the timing, too.

Shafer Smokes The Media Over Nicotine Coverage

Experienced bloggers and readers know that the two mainstream media critics worth bookmarking are Howard Kurtz at the Washington Post and Jack Shafer at Slate. Shafer demonstrates his brilliance in tonight's critique of this week's bad science coverage regarding a Massachussetts study that reported a 10% rise in nicotine levels in cigarettes. All of the major newspapers covered the story, and the New York Times even dedicated an editorial to berating the tobacco industry for its heartlessness, but Shafer reports that lazy reporting and bad sourcing created a hysteria over nothing at all:

Journalists give tobacco companies the same benefit of the doubt they do alleged baby-rapists, which is to say none. And who can blame them? For a century, the tobacco industry has lied and obfuscated about their products at every turn.

Yet serial liars aren't automatically guilty of every charge leveled against them. Even the tobacco company baddies, who took a wicked beating this week in the press, deserve a fair hearing before we hang them.

The news hook this week was a Commonwealth of Massachusetts report about nicotine yields in cigarettes increasing by 10 percent since 1998. The Boston Globe's headline reports "Cigarettes pack more nicotine," and the story's lede alleges that the boost makes "it tougher for smokers to quit." The story quotes Massachusetts officials, anti-smoking advocates from public health and law, but no critics of the report. The tobacco companies declined, across the board, to talk to the press.

The media jumped all over the Massachussetts report, in all instances framing the reported increase in nicotine as an attempt to make cigarettes more addictive. Would a 10% increase in nicotine actually result in a higher addiction potential? The newspapers never bothered to find out, nor did they ask themselves the obvious question as a reality check: would anyone argue that a 10% reduction in nicotine levels would make cigarettes less addictive?

Shafer performs the research that the newspapers skipped. He took the paper to a highly-regarded medical researcher at Lancet and investigated the research methodology used by Massachussetts. He found that shoddy research and reporting had made the allegations unprovable and a poor selection for reporting. It's a complicated story and almost impossible to excerpt, so be sure to read the whole article -- and to watch for Shafer's work at Slate whenever possible.

Workers Of The World, Rise Up Against Your (Democratic) Oppressors!

With the Democrats demanding a raise in the federal minimum wage and campaigning on the issue to highlight their sympathy for American workers. That sympathy, as Power Line noted earlier this evening, doesn't even extend beyond their own payroll. Democratic canvassers in Wisconsin have walked off the job as the Democratic Party refuses to pay them the existing minimum wage:

Alex Scherer-Jones began working for Grassroots Campaigns to fight the Bush administration and elevate the fortunes of the Democratic Party. The 21-year-old MATC student left feeling exploited and sour: "I went in there being very idealistic and it kind of ruined my idealism."

The job involves going door to door asking people to give money to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, using talking points that include a call to raise the minimum wage. For this, Scherer-Jones says he was paid far less than the state minimum wage of $6.50 an hour.

"I worked 37 hours one week and got paid around $130 [after taxes]," recalls Scherer-Jones, who quit after two weeks.

John Dedering worked for Grassroots Campaigns for about a month last year and again this year. He says the company paid a satisfactory base wage in 2005, when he canvassed for Environmental Action, but this year switched to a new system, dropping his wages to less than minimum.

Juan Ruiz says he put in about 45 hours working at Grassroots Campaigns for five days this year, and was paid just $56. And Miles Kristan produces pay stubs for two two-week periods, during which he says he typically worked 50 hours per week. One is for $339.81, the other for $281.50. Before taxes.

We have heard plenty of outrage from Congressional Democrats this year over the length of time since the last minimum-wage hike. Ted Kennedy and Barbara Boxer have railed about how minimum-wage workers have not had a raise in seven years, somehow neglecting to mention that the minimum wage is a transitional wage only and that raises come as part of a performance reward system when one stays at a job.

Their rationalization for breaking the law is laughable. Their contractor, Grassroots Campaigns, argues that special rules apply to canvassers that allow them to pay commission-based compensation. GC also acknowledges that they do not pay for employee time spent during orientation, claiming another exemption. Neither exemption exists, and even if they did, Democrats still would need to explain why they would support any system that paid $56 in wages for 45 hours of work.

For instance, Democrats around the nation have made a stink this year about the wages paid by Wal-Mart, which has an average starting pay of approximately $9 per hour. Suppose Wal-Mart created a set of incentives for compensation that allowed them to pay a wage as low as $1.25 per hour. How many broken legs would national Democratic candidates suffer in their stampede to press conferences to denounce the evil, heartless corporation of Wal-Mart?

Democrats demand a minimum-wage hike that will hit small businesses hardest. They regularly hold rallies outside of Wal-Marts to protest the low pay and benefits that the company offers its employees. The Democrats hope to use these arguments to get more people to register with their party -- and then they stiff the employees who have to find these voters.

Hypocrisy, thy name is Democrat.

An Exclamation Point On The Plame Denouement

The Washington Post's editorial board takes a shot at Joe Wilson, one of their anonymous sources three years ago, as the full impact of the discovery of Richard Armitage as the Valerie Plame leaker takes effect. The editors place the blame for Plame's unmasking where it always belonged -- on Wilson himself:

[I]t now appears that the person most responsible for the end of Ms. Plame's CIA career is Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson chose to go public with an explosive charge, claiming -- falsely, as it turned out -- that he had debunked reports of Iraqi uranium-shopping in Niger and that his report had circulated to senior administration officials. He ought to have expected that both those officials and journalists such as Mr. Novak would ask why a retired ambassador would have been sent on such a mission and that the answer would point to his wife. He diverted responsibility from himself and his false charges by claiming that President Bush's closest aides had engaged in an illegal conspiracy. It's unfortunate that so many people took him seriously.

It's more than unfortunate -- it was deliberate. Wilson and Plame set up this trip for the purpose of discrediting the elected officials of the American government in an attempt to keep them from exercising their policies on intelligence and foreign affairs. Wilson lied and deceived people, first by leaking his disinformation anonymously to the Post and the New York Times, and then in an editorial that relied on his diplomatic reputation to bolster the credibility of his false accusations.

This set off a political witch hunt the likes of which should embarrass the media and Democrats for years, but probably won't. They demanded an investigation into the leak, especially the editorial board of the New York Times, then wailed as the prosecutor started jailing reporters for non-cooperation. The whole time the media and the mainstream Democratic leadership -- including their presidential nominee John Kerry, who made Wilson a part of his campaign -- insisted that Wilson spoke truth to power, even while Kerry's own Senate intelligence panel reached a very different conclusion.

Now the Left and the media want to continue talking about Scooter Libby rather than the three-year travesty they have foisted on this nation during a time of war. At least the Washington Post knows when to stop.

FBI Investigates Terrorism Leads, Film At 11

The very next nine-day wonder of protest is about to break open, as King Banaian notes at SCSU Scholars. The Los Angeles Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education both report on a defunct FBI program that investigated suspected terrorists and accomplices by reviewing data on federal grants for higher education. Not surprisingly, the LA Times gets a significant fact incorrect almost immediately:

The Education Department acknowledged Thursday that at the request of the FBI, it had scoured millions of federal student loan records for information about suspected terrorists in the five years since the Sept. 11 attacks.

The data mining — known as "Project Strike Back" — was intended to determine whether terrorism suspects had illegally obtained college aid to finance their operations through identity theft or other means.

Project Strike Back did not involve data mining, no more than a check of a driver's license during a traffic stop can be called data mining. Data mining refers to the practice of taking large databases and sifting through it for self-identifying patterns in an attempt to pinpoint data that otherwise might remain hidden. Put more simply, data mining finds order in chaos.

PSB instead relied on old-fashioned police work. The FBI took information about people suspected of involvement with or support of terrorists -- no more than a thousand in a four-year period -- and searched government databases for any additional information that might reveal more evidence. Student aid would at least identify the location of individuals on watch lists, as well as give investigators some idea of concentrations of the suspects. If two dozen terror suspects show up as receiving aid to attend chemistry courses at the University of Minnesota, that might provide a few dots for the FBI to connect.

In the end, though, PSB turned out to be a bust. Most of its operations took place in the first two years after 9/11, and it shut down for good this June. What rankles some people is that federal education grants and loans are only available to American citizens and legal residents, which leads some to question its efficacy as a counter-terrorist program:

Mr. Hartle called the Education Department's project a "perfect illustration of the dangers of the unit-record system." He pointed out that, to receive federal aid, students must either be U.S. citizens or have a green card. "This is about finding Timothy McVeigh," he said. "This is not about finding Mohammed Atta. ... It's hard to be surprised when the government is mining every single database. In the war on terror, there are no safe harbors."

"This case is another example of Big Brother gone wild," said Michael D. Ostrolenk, national director of the Liberty Coalition, which consists of privacy-rights organizations across the political spectrum. "In the age of everything is a national-security issue, we are destroying the very liberties and privacy rights which make our country unique and great in the history of the world."

As King notes, finding the next Timothy McVeigh might be a good idea, at least before an attack. And since when do we provide safe harbor for terrorists under any conditions? Hartle appears to believe that universities exist in some sort of temporal vacuum where terrorism does not exist. And Ostralenk is simply hysterical. The database for federal education assistance are explicitly not private, nor should they be. It consists of data used to apply for federal money voluntarily -- more voluntarily than DMV information, for instance, and the DMV doesn't disburse thousands of dollars for the completion of the form.

King worries about the effect on terror investigations by the revelation of this program, especially if negative publicity convinces colleges and universities to stop cooperating with law-enforcement agencies. It does not appear that PSB found much of interest and the program already had concluded before its existence became public knowledge, although the FBI noted that the program's efforts were referenced in publicly-available briefings to Congress and the GAO. More likely PSB will become yet another urban myth of "trolling through massive databases", as the Times puts it, and undermine support for the efforts to secure the nation against terrorism.

In this case, this program proved ineffective and eventually ended. However, nothing in either the Times or the Chronicle reports indicate that any laws were even bent, let alone broken, nor that the FBI did anything more unusual than it would for any other kind of criminal investigation. If we continually carp about innovative but perfectly legal methods of finding terrorists, we will once again find ourselves with a smoking hole or two in the middle of our cities and screeching about failures to connect dots. And the next time, we will have no one but ourselves to blame for it.

In What Universe?

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan announced that Syrian dictator Bashar Assad assured him that Syria would enforce the arms embargo on Hezbollah, and that the Syrian army would patrol the border to ensure that arms traffic ceased:

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said Friday that Syria would step up border patrols and work with the Lebanese army to stop the flow of weapons to Hizbullah.

Syria will increase its own patrols along the Lebanon-Syria border, and establish joint patrols with the Lebanese army "when possible," Annan said after meeting with Syrian President Bashar Assad in Damascus. ...

Annan said Assad informed him that Syria would "take all necessary measures" to implement paragraph 15 of UN resolution 1701, which calls on countries to prevent the sale or supply of weapons to entities in Lebanon without the consent of the Lebanese government or UN peacekeepers.

It would be a lovely development if it were true. However, one has to be incredibly naive to think that Syria would give up its proxy in Lebanon just because Annan asked them to do so. For one thing, Assad needs Hezbollah's influence in Lebanon not just to keep Israelis on the defensive but to keep the government of Beirut hostage to Syrian demands. Hezbollah's status as the only civil-war militia still bearing arms is no accident.

Annan's first clue should have come when Assad declined to make a public statement after their meeting. Annan rushed to the microphones like Neville Chamberlain without the umbrella to announce Syria's commitment to peace, but Syria couldn't be bothered. That clear signal that states "You're on your own" apparently didn't dissuade the UN chief from casting Syria as a peacemaker despite their long involvement with terrorism in Lebanon and elsewhere.

Annan's job is to talk to world leaders and try to find common ground for peace, and no one begrudges efforts made in that capacity. However, Annan fails to understand the difference between talk and action, like most die-hard utopians. His credulousness in the face of one of the worst terrorist-support regimes in the world demonstrates his fecklessness and that of the organization he fronts.

Henke & Allen

Last week, I suggested that Jon Henke would make an excellent ambassador to the blogosphere for the George Allen re-election campaign. Perhaps someone in Senator Allen's office noticed the post, but they certainly made the right decision whatever the reason. The Allen campaign has hired Jon to be its Netroots Coordinator:

I’m very happy to announce that I’ve accepted a job as Netroots Coordinator with the George Allen Senate Campaign.

Obviously, this will change my focus quite a bit, but I will continue to blog at QandO whenever possible, generally on the issues and stories in this very important Virginia Senate race.

Naturally, as a Netroots Coordinator, I’ll be working directly with bloggers and readers who support George Allen. If I can help any of you, don’t hesitate to contact me.

I want to make a couple of observations about this decision, which delights me for personal reasons; Jon and I started blogging about the same time and have occupied each other's blogrolls since the start. He's also a terrific guy and a great blogger, and I'm excited about his success.

First, Jon isn't a doctrinaire conservative by any means. Jon calls himself a neo-libertarian, which I interpret as a Libertarian with common sense. His blog, QandO, has espoused positions that do not match easily with mainstream Republican thought, but show Jon's individualistic and non-dogmatic approach to politics. The fact that Allen and his campaign see Jon as a fit tells me that Allen does not dictate ideological purity but instead aims for competency and intelligence in his staff decisions -- a quality I had not expected, and one I appreciate.

Second, while I think the realization came a little late, Allen now knows how important the blogosphere will be in elections from now on. This epiphany seems slow to arrive with some politicians. Hillary Clinton hired the well-respected Peter Daou for her campaign. Not too many others have done anything similar. Both Clinton and Allen face re-election in the midterms, but one suspects that Jon and Peter will continue to stay on staff if their new bosses win their elections to prepare for the presidential campaign.

Lastly, one should note Jon's commitment to full disclosure. He will not give up blogging at QandO, but plans on putting a disclaimer on every post he writes, reminding readers of his status with the Allen campaign. It's no surprise for those of us who know Jon, but it should serve as a standard for all other bloggers to follow.

Congratulations to Jon on his new job, and congratulations to the Allen campaign for their smart and open-minded selection of the best candidate for the position.

UPDATE: Danny Glover at Beltway Blogroll claims some credit for this development, too. Ah, what the heck ... we can share!

Jon got off to a good start on his new job with this post about George Allen's efforts to assist black colleges to upgrade their telecommunications infrastructure. In fact, his legislative efforts were so successful that the Thurgood Marshall Scholarship Fund planned to give him their Thurgood Marshall Award for his efforts. Those plans got hijacked by Allen's political opponents:

This wasn’t just any bill for Senator Allen. He introduced the bill and spent multiple years getting it through Congress. This was a project for which Senator Allen worked hard. The Thurgood Marshall Scholarship Fund obviously recognized that contribution and so they decided to give Senator Allen the Thurgood Marshall Award.

That is how things are supposed to work: cooperation, results. Unfortunately, it’s campaign season, and the Democrats don't see it that way. (see Shaun Kenney for details on that)

When confronted with the prospect of Senator Allen getting an award for the actual work he's done in "support of public Historically Black Colleges and Universities", Democrats took political hostages. A quick pressure campaign was mounted culminating in threats to withhold donations. Not to withhold donations to Senator Allen...to withhold donations to the schools.

Rather than allow the Thurgood Marshall Scholarship Fund to recognize Senator Allen’s support for historically black colleges, critics used school funding to play blackmail. And rather than let the students be held hostage in order to score Democratic political points, Senator Allen has decided to decline the award.

Allen spent several years championing this legislation and rather than acknowledge the bipartisan efforts Allen made on behalf of African-American students, the Democrats attacked the schools to perpetuate a myth of Allen as some sort of racist. Read all of Jon's post.

'An Absolutely Hostile Attitude Towards Jews' In Germany

Charlotte Knobloch survived Nazi Germany's genocide on Jews to rise to the head of the German Jewish Council. In a disturbing interview with Der Spiegel, Knobloch -- whose personal history gives her the requisite perspective -- states that anti-Semitic attitudes have hit levels not seen in years:

SPIEGEL ONLINE: When you took office you said one of the main focuses of your work would be the struggle against right-wing extremism. Has the conflict in the Middle East worsened anti-Semitic attitudes in Germany?

Knobloch: It has, unfortunately. I see an absolutely hostile attitude towards Jews and Israel. Signs that read "Israel -- Child Murderers" are being carried through the streets at demonstrations here, for example. The police don't confiscate these placards. Persons that deal with the issue only marginally, or not at all, are influenced negatively. That's the basis of this hostile attitude. You can find it everywhere. We're currently organizing a fundraising concert, for example, and even there we get negative, anti-Semitic mail. No distinctions are made. We're sucked into the current Middle East conflict one hundred percent, as Jewish citizens in Germany. And those politicians who latch onto this hostile mood with carefully prepared statements are of course doing better than ever.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Who do you mean?

Knobloch: Oskar Lafontaine, the leader of the Left Party, for example. Left Party parliamentarians aren't particularly objective in their evaluation of the catastrophe in the Middle East. I'm also thinking of Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, the Minister of Economic Aid and Development and member of the Social Democrat Party (SPD). These people encourage the hostile mood against Jews. I've never experienced anything quite like this. It's on a new level. This hostile mood is now more noticeable in the German public than it used to be. It's infiltrated every group and every level of society. I hope this development can be reversed by a joint effort on the part of all democratic forces. Otherwise all the positive images I have about Germany would be put into question. I unpacked my suitcase in this country. And I don't want to have to repack it.

Knobloch's observations underscore one of the truths of the last century or more: the Jews are the canary in the coal mine. Europeans dealing with burgeoning Muslim populations find themselves stuck between the Jews and those who hate them -- and Knobloch sees the Jews losing that battle. The Israeli-Hezbollah conflict provides a sort of cover for anti-Semites to express their hatred to the Jews even though Hezbollah started the conflict. Logic has never entered into the calculations of anti-Semitism, of course, but in this case it at least seems calculated. Europeans see Muslims as an existential threat, and therefore have attempted to appease it by unleashing bigotry against the Jews.

Not all Germans indulge this, of course, and Angela Merkel surprised Knobloch by agreeing to a deployment of German troops to protect the Israelis from Hezbollah by joining UNIFIL. She notes that the agreement represents a watershed for Germans and Jews, a new way of thinking about the relationship between the two after six decades of the legacy of the Holocaust. Only six years ago, Knesset members walked out on a speech by Germany's then-president Johannes Rau when he visited the assembly.Now fully armed German soldiers will be at Israel's borders, but to protect them from Hezbollah nihilists.

Knobloch also warns Der Spiegel readers about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his rhetoric about Jews and Israel. She understands better than most how appeasement policies backfire, and she warns against dismissing his fiery calls for the destruction of Israel and the Jews. History, she says, repeats itself over and over, and people still do not learn. The rising levels of anti-Semitism demonstrates that Germans and perhaps Europeans in general still have not learned that it always starts with the Jews, but it never ends with the Jews. The last time this lesson got taught, six million Jews died among over 50 million worldwide over a six-year period. If Iran gets nuclear weapons, that total could be achieved in weeks instead of years.

IAEA Finds Highly-Enriched Uranium In Iran

The IAEA report states that inspectors found traces of highly-enriched uranium a year ago in an Iranian nuclear facility. This time, the IAEA analysis states that it did not come from contaminated Pakistani equipment:

The global nuclear monitoring agency deepened suspicions on Thursday about Iran’s nuclear program, reporting that inspectors had discovered new traces of highly enriched uranium at an Iranian facility. Inspectors have found such uranium, which at extreme enrichment levels can fuel bombs, twice in the past. The International Atomic Energy Agency concluded that at least some of those samples came from contaminated equipment that Iran had obtained from Pakistan.

But in this case, the nuclear fingerprint of the particles did not match the other samples, an official familiar with the inspections said, raising questions about their origin.

In a six-page report to the United Nations Security Council on Thursday, the agency withheld judgment about where the material came from and whether it could be linked to a secret nuclear program.

The excuse from the previous find was that the Pakistanis had not thoroughly cleaned the machinery Iran bought through the AQ Khan network. Analysts told the IAEA after months of study that the new sample came from a completely different source, which indicates that the Iranians produced it themselves. Not only that, but the level of enrichment significantly exceeds anything required for civilian energy production.

Of course, this could only surprise people who have either slept for the past ten years or are pathological optimists. Ahmadinejad has rejected an incentive package that would have all but given Iran peaceful nuclear energy, instead opting to pursue enrichment themselves, apparently with a lot of success.

That success led them to start barring IAEA inspectors from key sites. The agency states in its report that it has declining confidence in its ability to provide a complete picture on Iranian nuclear efforts as a result. That means that the information on Iran's program will become increasingly less reliable, a big danger considering the stakes of the decisions that have to be made on increasingly incomplete information, but it begs the question: if Iran only wants peaceful, civilian nuclear energy, then why all the secrecy?

None of this has apparently moved the Russians and the Chinese. According to Robert Einhorn, former State Department head on nonproliferation under the Clinton administration, only a "smoking gun" will convince them to support sanctions. Unfortnately, the only smoking object that would qualify for Russian and Chinese firmness would be the radioactive remains of Tel Aviv.

Kean Overtakes Menendez

Thomas Kean Jr has overtaken Democratic incumbent Robert Menendez in the New Jersey Senate race, according to Rasmussen's latest poll. Kean created a 12-point shift in the past month, going from six points down in July to six points up at the end of August.

This puts a serious crimp in the Democrat's plans to take over the Senate in these midterms. They need to hold all of their current seats before they can possibly hope to gain enough to take control of the upper chamber. Losing New Jersey makes that all but impossible. Expect the Democrats to start spending a lot of money to rescue Menendez in the coming days.

A Look Inside Insanity

Last night on the way to a meeting, I listened to a caller on the Hugh Hewitt show absolutely wrong-foot the normally unflappable Hugh when the caller suggested that he could prove that Republicans support Satanic control of world events, as long as we had an "open mind". Hugh asked how he could prove that, and the caller said that a website could prove that Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan conspired to murder John Lennon ... and that Stephen King had carried out the hit.

Yes, I mean that Stephen King.

Intrigued, I looked up the website and started knocking around it. If one ever wanted to peek inside the mind of a paranoid schizophrenic, this website -- which is completely earnest -- gives one the best possible potential. In its way, it illustrates all the faulty logic, leaps of conjecture, and paranoid thinking that creates conspiracy theories from Right to Left and in certain parts of the world where such thinking is mainstream. This is Mena airfields and one-world-government on steroids.

The most pathetic part of this website comes from a handwritten letter from Stephen King himself, who apparently tried to take pity on the nutcase (also named Steve) who obsesses about this theory:

Dear Steve,

I didn't kill John Lennon and I think you know that as well as I do, inside the wall of denial that you've put up. Your interest in me is a way of allowing you to avoid dealing with your own mental and spiritual problems. Let it go, why don't you, and find more constructive outlets for your considerable talents? Meantime, here is a fascinating book about the man who really did kill John.

Best, Stephen King

I'm impressed that King actually tried to talk the man down from his mental ledge, and King even sent him a copy of Let Me Take You Down, a book about Mark David Chapman. Unfortunately, the conspiracy nut believed that the book was a coded message that King used to threaten his life. I'd say that King might want to review his security situation.

It's a sad and extreme example of what happens when people stop looking for rational answers and instead adopt the lazy but satisfying belief that massive conspiracies exist just out of sight which explain everything wrong in the world. It's an impulse we see all too often, and the end result brings us to imagine that politically liberal novelists conspire with conservative politicians to murder entertainers, among other impossibilities.

Can Laffey Win?

Last November I selected Steven Laffey as Not One Dime's official candidate of the 2006 elections in his attempt to unseat Republican incumbent Lincoln Chafee. At the time, the task of beating Chafee seemed Herculean. Now, however, it looks like Laffey may have overtaken Chafee and garnered a commanding lead heading into the primary on September 12th:

U.S. Senator Lincoln Chafee may lose his seat to challenger Steve Laffey, according to a new statewide Republican primary voter poll released today by the Bureau of Government Research and Services at Rhode Island College.

The survey was conducted August 28-30, 2006, at Rhode Island College by Victor L. Profughi, director of the Bureau of Government Research and Services. It is based on a statewide random sample of 363 likely Republican primary voters in Rhode Island. The sample was proportioned among the state’s geographic regions to reflect the likely voter contribution from each portion of the state. Overall, the poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 5.1 percentage points.

If the September 12 primary were held today, 51 percent say they will vote for Steve Laffey, 34 percent support Senator Chafee, and 15 percent are undecided. A BGRS survey of Republican voters conducted in June had Laffey at 39 percent and Chafee at 36 percent. Chafee’s base is virtually unchanged since the June survey, while the number of Laffey supporters has grown 12 percentage points.

It appears from the changes between polls that Chafee hit his high-water mark early, and that he no longer has the confidence of mainstream Rhode Island Republicans. When an incumbent can't top 50%, we know he has serious problems. When his opponent tops 50%, it generally means he's through.

The demographics tell the story. Chafee only holds a lead in the urban area of Providence (13 points) and the East Bay (4 points). Laffey leads everywhere else in the state, even in Providence's suburbs, and that by over 20 points. He leads Chafee among men by 26 points, and among women by 9, although he does not have a majority of the latter. This comes from a small sample -- 363 likely voters does not seem impressive -- but it does give a clear indication that Chafee's in deep trouble for his re-election bid.

Laffey could well be on his way to knocking off one of the least Republican Republicans in Congress. Will he have enough juice to win the seat in the general election? Rhode Island College doesn't answer that question in its polling. Rasmussen's poll in July had Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse beating both Republicans, but that may soon change if Laffey can keep building momentum.

Frist Confirms S.2590 Will Come To Floor

Earlier today, I contacted Bill Frist's office to ask for an unqualified statement that would clearly state his intent to bring the Coburn/Obama bill, creating an Internet-based searchable database for the federal budget, to the Senate floor for a vote regardless of holds. Fifteen minutes ago, Senator Frist posted this to his blog:

I’m very encouraged to see that all one hundred Senators have now answered the blogosphere’s inquiries on the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act. Now is the time to act. In September, I will bring S. 2590 to the floor of the Senate for the vote it deserves.

Frist had to take care to keep from unduly antagonizing Robert Byrd and Ted Stevens, the two Senators that acknowledged their holds on the legislation. This statement makes clear that Frist will bring this bill to an up-or-down vote regardless of any attempted obstructionism, but he will still try to clear all of the objections in order to have unanimous consent for the vote -- which will avoid a complicated set of manuevers that would take days of effort to overcome.

An Unhealthy Fixation

I have often written about the fixation that the Left has on George Bush as a type of illness, which some name Bush Derangement Syndrome. This fixation leads some to blame Bush for all of the world's ills and to consider him more dangerous than terrorists, a nuclear-armed Iran, and just about anything else. It's this kind of thinking that led British filmmakers to create a fantasy-docudrama in which Bush gets assassinated in Chicago (via Hot Air and Michelle Malkin):

This is the dramatic moment when President George Bush is gunned down by a sniper after a public address at a hotel, in a gripping new docudrama soon to be aired on TV.

Set around October 2007, President Bush is assassinated as he leaves the Sheraton Hotel in Chicago.

Death of a President, shot in the style of a retrospective documentary, looks at the effect the assassination of Bush has on America in light of its 'War on Terror'.

The 90 minutes feature explores who could have planned the murder, with a Syrian-born man wrongly put in the frame.

I like a good political potboiler as much as the next guy, although the last really good entry in that category may have been No Way Out, or perhaps The Package, both of which featured the great Gene Hackman and the latter of which explores a similar theme as this movie. The Package centers on an assassination in modern time that is meant to recall the Kennedy assassination, right down to the use of a patsy in an office building nearby.

Filmmakers usually have the good taste not to use real-life people as characters in their movies when the plot involves killing them. It's not just a good-taste issue, either. Films that tie themselves to particular politicians almost immediately date their films, ensuring that it will be seen as an anachronism within just a few years. The Package makes that mistake by using a Gorbachev look-alike, but since it was a Cold War film anyway, it would have faced the same fate regardless.

In this case, the filmmakers use Bush as their character for one reason only: to engage fellow BDS victims. They want to pander to an audience that appreciates an assassination fantasy when it involves George Bush. They don't really want to see him assassinated, at least for the overwhelming percentage, but they don't mind imagining a world without him.

This should really offend Americans of all political stripes. If someone made a docudrama about the assassination of a real Democrat such as Harry Reid or John Kerry, I would find it equally offensive. We live in a world where too many people cannot distinguish reality from fantasy, and creating fiction about the ill and good effects of political assassinations of real leaders not only has no artistry to it, it has no point to it. Either the film would have to have a message that assassinating Bush is a good thing, which would be despicable, or that assassinating Bush would be a bad thing, hardly an earthshaking conclusion.

Peter Dale, the head of the television network which will air this film, believes it to be a "thought-provoking critique" of American society. I'd say it's an indictment of the lack of taste and judgment in the entertainment industry.

UPDATE: Of course, some on the Left will cheer this quite openly and explicitly. The Anchoress found this one, and has more thoughts.

Heavy, Man (Updated!)

Ever since the Iranians opened their new heavy-water production plant in Khondab, analysts have assumed that the mullahcracy intended to turn the facility into a Middle Eastern Los Alamos, where weapons-grade fissile material can be produced for nuclear weapons. However, Teheran's nuclear chief Mohammad Sa'idi tells the Iranian News Channel (IRINN) that the West has misunderstood Iran's intentions. It turns out that Khondab is meant to be the Middle Eastern Lourdes:

Interviewer: You just said that in some cases, heavy water can even be used for drinking.

Mohammad Sa'idi: Yes.

Interviewer: Could you elaborate on this?

Mohammad Sa'idi: One of the products of heavy water is depleted deuterium. As you know, in an environment with depleted deuterium, the reception of cancer cells and of the AIDS viruses is disrupted. Since this reception is disrupted, the cells are gradually expelled from the body. Obviously, one glass of depleted deuterium will not expel or cure the cancer or eliminate the AIDS. We are talking about a certain period of time. In many countries that deal with these diseases, patients use this kind of water instead of regular water, and consume it daily in order to heal their diseases.

In other words, the issue of heavy water has to do with matters of life and death, in many cases. One of the reasons that led us to produce heavy water was to use it for agricultural... medical purposes, and especially for industrial purposes in our country.

The Iranans continue to outfox themselves with this kind of ridiculous argument. Some experiments have been tried using heavy water to develop treatments of cancer, but they go back twenty years and apparently produced insignificant results. AIDS, being a viral infection, would hardly respond to drinking heavy water. If the Iranians really do treat cancer and AIDS patients using this strategy, it would only be for the purpose of recruiting for suicide missions.

Iran could make an argument -- and does -- that the Non-Proliferation Treaty allows for the development of peaceful nuclear energy, and that the West has no basis on which to stop their uranium-enrichment program. That argument puts the onus on the West to prove that they have other intentions for the nuclear cycle, which the West has attempted to do on several occasions. This kind of foolish argument only makes it more obvious that the Iranians have something else in mind besides producing miracle cures from water. The Iranians aren't scientific idiots and pretending to be only makes their deception clearer.

UPDATE: The above graphic comes from CaNN, which has a number of excellent photoshops. Check them out!!

UPDATE II: I forgot to give a hat-tip on that logo to Michael Ledeen, who spotted it first. Also, heavy water is not radioactive, as a number of e-mailers pointed out and Steven den Beste notes in the comments

Spellings: No Child Left Behind Just Needs Tweaking

Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings spoke with reporters over coffee to mark the start of the new school year and to provide her perspective on the federal efforts to manage education. The hallmark policy of the Bush administration, No Child Left Behind, has accomplished what it set out to do, Spellings said, and just needs minor course corrections:

"I like to talk about No Child Left Behind as Ivory soap. It's 99.9 percent pure," Spellings told reporters over coffee. "There's not much needed in the way of changes. . . . As much grist as there was for the mill five years ago on various fronts . . . we've come a long way in a short time in a big system affecting 50 million kids."

In a casual meeting at the agency, and with no particular agenda, Spellings said she believes NCLB -- a law that requires annual student assessments -- simply needs tweaking, and she emphasized that it is time to take it to the next level of development. Critics have long complained that the compliance requirements for NCLB puts too much stress on state resources and educators, many of whom say they must teach to the test at the expense of other learning.

"We need to take a look at our data across the whole spectrum and we ought to say -- for people who say, 'Wah, wah, we can't have spelling bees because we have to focus on math and reading' -- let's measure the spelling," she said. "Let's ask ourselves not how many are barely getting over the bar, but how many are acing the test. . . . Now that we have the infrastructure in place, we can ask ourselves a fuller range of questions about kids and how they are doing."

My perspective on education is that it should be left to local school districts and the states as a last resort. Part of the reason that we have so much trouble with literacy in our schools today is because of national movements that changed schools five decades or so ago, using untried teaching methods in math and reading that replaced proven strategies that had created a fine system of public schools over a century. Increasing federalization only means that the same kinds of impulses that transformed public schools from places of learning to self-esteem workshops will continue to impact our children and grandchildren.

However, at least NCLB has the right idea, even though it represents another poorly-funded federal mandate that drives conservatives batty. Objective testing of skills should continue, but even that would not be necessary if our schools did not rely on social promotion. Teachers flunked students who weren't ready for the next grade level before schools started worring about socialization ahead of education. The plethora of high-school students who cannot read or write above a grade-school level demonstrates the damage that these policies have created, especially considering the amount of teacher involvement it takes to handle the low-performing students. That takes away from the students who are ready to improve themselves to their grade level and beyond. Most high schools now have to offer at least three tracks of coursework: remedial, normal, and advanced placement. Remedial education tracks exist at the high-school level because of a failure to address the problems in grade school.

We have increased education spending by over 130% in the Bush administration. For that kind of money, Spellings and Bush had better hope that Johnny can read, write, and earn some of that money back.

Revisiting Katrina, Revisiting Truth

A year ago, many of us watched in horror while New Orleans disappeared under the raging flood waters released from the levees containing Lake Pontchartrain. At the time, we all assumed that the hurricane brought down the walls and that the federal government failed because of their lack of foresight in that regard. Over the past year, however, we have learned much more about the levees of the Big Easy, and Kevin Aylward argues in today's Washington Examiner that Katrina may have saved tens of thousands of lives:

In the year since Katrina, we’ve learned that the storm was a Category 1 by the time she hit New Orleans. We’ve also learned that the primary levee breach — the one that caused 70 percent of the flooding in the city — was not caused by the storm surge but by poor engineering.

After months of dissembling and obfuscation by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers — the designers of the levee system — the Corps was forced to admit what all the outside experts were saying; critical engineering mistakes caused the walls that were supposed to protect the city to collapse before they were overtopped by the storm surge. And on the east side of the city, the flooding was largely caused by a shipping channel the Corps dug three decades earlier. ...

All this leads to the even more shocking conclusion that Hurricane Katrina probably saved 50,000 lives.

That levee was doomed. While Katrina was the last straw, it was destined to fail. Studies done before the storm indicated that if a major hurricane overwhelmed the city’s levees, as many as 100,000 people would die as a result.

If the levee had failed without warning, there would have been no evacuation, no preparation, no state/federal support, no Coast Guardsmen in helicopters etc. If you think Katrina was bad with governmental preparations, consider an event half that size without it.

The same bad reporting that happened when the eyes of the nation were fixed on New Orleans -- do you recall news reports of cannibalism, roving bands of rapists, hundreds of homicides, toxic flood waters that would kill on contact -- persisted in the weeks afterwards. The news agencies seemed so intent on scoring points off of the Bush administration that they neglected to research the real problems in New Orleans: the lack of any coordinated local response, the refusal of Louisiana to authorize military intervention, and the real reason for the levee failure.

Incredibly, the evidence was available almost from the start. A video taken by firefighters at the start of the collapse showed the water levels behind the levees as far below what had been assumed, and far below water levels in the past. This led investigators to look further into symptoms of an engineering failure -- and they discovered that residents had warned for months about seepage under the levees, a sign that the walls had already begun to catastrophically fail.

The media showed little interest in pursuing the truth, as documented by many in the blogosphere, including myself. They still seem more attracted to political football than honest reporting on the anniversary of the disaster, a disaster that would have happened without Katrina, with a much greater loss of life. Kevin does a good job in reminding all of us of the media's failure to properly inform the public of the nature of New Orleans' destruction.

UPDATE: It's Wizbang Day at the Examiner. Lorie Byrd writes about the political benefits of embracing blogs:

As much as the Internet and blogs have changed journalism and politics, many candidates have yet to fully utilize the new medium. That, however, is quickly changing. With every election comes the realization by more candidates that engaging the blogosphere is smart politics.

It's always smart politics to listen to your constituents, and more than ever, they include bloggers and their readers.

Democratic Purity Campaign Hits Black Incumbents As Well

The Washington Times reports that the campaign to unseat the solidly liberal Joe Lieberman from the Senate for his opposition to the war is no isolated incident, nor are representatives of the Democrats' most loyal constituency immune from the purity purge. Black incumbents in the house have also been targeted in primary campaigns for insufficient party loyalty and supposedly conservative sympathies, none of which has to do with the war:

The trend of incumbent Democratic lawmakers facing primary challenges from the left is not sparing black lawmakers, despite their generally being among the party's more liberal representatives and blacks being the party's most loyal constituency.

Rep. Albert R. Wynn, Maryland Democrat, is facing a strong primary challenge from Prince George's County lawyer Donna Edwards, who says he is too conservative to represent his predominantly black constituency. The most unlikely Congressional Black Caucus member, Rep. Bobby L. Rush, Illinois Democrat, faced similar charges from his opponent Philip Jackson in the primary. "Our opponent in the primary attempted to use that strategy against Mr. Rush in relation to his vote for the energy bill last year," said a staffer for Mr. Rush.

Mr. Rush is a former Black Panther and recognized as one of the most liberal members of Congress yet he and Mr. Wynn were both attacked by their opponents for supporting the energy bill, a choice both men said they made after they successfully worked out a deal in committee to increase federal low-income home energy assistance program (LIHEAP) by $3 billion.

"My general view is that the Democratic Party used to be the big tent party where everyone is allowed to express their views; now it is being taken over by these bloggers and purists who can only see one way of thinking," Mr. Wynn said. "We can think for ourselves and not for somebody else's idea of what a liberal is supposed to be."

Primary challenges make sense when a party senses that their incumbent has neglected to support the party too often and a new candidate will provide a substantial difference in voting. That's why Lincoln Chafee makes such a good target for moderate Republican Steven Laffey; Chafee votes more closely to the Democrats than the Republicans, and in two of the three previous sessions, wound up inside the Democratic voting bloc according to Poole analyses. Except for the caucusing votes that allow the GOP to control the Senate, Chafee's loss would not affect the Republican legislative agenda much at all.

It's hard to say the same about Lieberman, Wynn, and Rush for the Democrats. The Left risks little with the Ned Lamont challenge, thanks to one of the worst GOP candidates for major office in the country, Alan Schlesinger, but the pattern that has emerged is one of a demand to vote 100% on party lines. Wynn notes that his 88% record hasn't kept the Left from staging an expensive primary battle that only undermines the Democratic attempt to hold his seat. And when a former Black Panther isn't leftist enough for party activists, then someone has a very unrealistic threshold for approval.

That 12% difference between purity and Wynn seems a rather cheap prize for all the effort and conflict the primary battle has created. The targeting of the two men also disproves the notion that the Left's purity streak is strictly an anti-war reaction to Bush and Iraq, too. They want strict adherence to the party agenda, at least as they interpret it, and will expel anyone who refuses to toe the line, regardless of the issue. Wynn voted to eliminate the death tax and the Terri Schiavo bill, and now faces an Inquisition for it, including public opposition from Danny Glover and Gloria Steinem.

In this case, the coordinated effort against Wynn may play into the hands of Michael Steele, the black Republican running for Paul Sarbanes' Senate seat this fall. By fragmenting the African-American vote in a solidly Democratic district, blacks in Maryland may rightly wonder whether their loyalty has any value in the present Democratic Party, and whether the party has become so radical that the GOP might make a better choice for them.

The fight for purity may give activists a sense of mission, but the victory of the extremists may wind up kneecapping the Democrats in the midterms. Money that would normally be used in the general election will have to be spent in the primaries, and while the Democrats may hold the seats targeted by puritans, the effort may starve the competitive races. Republicans should also take note of this dynamic and learn a lesson from the damage that party purges can create.

Doubling Down

George Bush signaled yesterday that he will continue to fight for his judicial nominations. He sent the Senate the names of five judges previously nominated for appellate court positions, including at least one whom the Democrats had threatened to filibuster:

Bucking opposition in the Senate, President Bush on Wednesday nominated five people for the U.S. Court of Appeals, including one whom Democrats have threatened to block with a filibuster.

News that Bush had decided to nominate the conservative jurists came before Bush spoke at a fundraiser for Bob Corker, who faces a tough Senate race against Democratic nominee Harold Ford Jr.

"I need a U.S. senator who understands that we need people on the bench who will strictly interpret the Constitution and not use the bench to legislate," Bush said.

A White House statement said Bush was nominating Terrence Boyle of North Carolina and William James Haynes II of Virginia to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, Michael Brunson Wallace of Mississippi for the 5th Circuit, and William Gerry Myers III of Idaho and Norman Randy Smith of Idaho for the 9th Circuit.

Bush has been tenacious on judicial appointments. His renomination of judges filibustered in his first term led to the eventual rise of the Gang of 14, led by John McCain, that forced the White House to abandon at least one of its nominees (Henry Saad) to put an end to knee-jerk filibustering on the part of Senate Democrats. With McCain trying to curry favor among conservatives, the White House may have decided to make hay while the sun shines.

It also provides another reminder for conservatives to put aside their diffidence of late and turn out for the mid-term elections. The messaging here is not subtle, and Bush made it explicit in his appearance. He wants a safe Republican majority in the Senate in order to put his stamp on the judiciary, a traditional privilege of the Presidency until the Reagan administration and the nomination of Robert Bork. Harry Reid reacted predictably, calling the renominations "extremely divisive", although Reid must have dreaded the thought of going through another election cycle with a recent history of obstructionism.

In our interview with Bill Frist yesterday, the Senate Majority Leader said that he was prepared for a fight on judicial nominations. Frist said that "[f]ilibusters are a good tool for legislation, but not for nominations. Someone took the rule and bent it for their political advantage, and I broke it. They may try it again, and I’ll break it again." That sounds like a man expecting a fight, and this time McCain may find it more difficult to undercut him. He wants to convince conservatives to trust him, and abandoning conservative judges isn't the way to do it.

In any event, judicial nominations certainly are a legitimate political interest in the midterm elections, particularly since the Democrats have made their confirmation into such a partisan trial. Voters have a right to consider how a shift in power in the Senate will affect the judges Bush can appoint to the bench; six years of Democratic obstructionism has legitimized it. Whether it can draw back disaffected conservatives remains to be seen.

You've Got Pink Slips

Radio Shack laid off 400 workers from its labor force yesterday. Perhaps taking their role as a technology company too seriously, they notified the workers of their termination by e-mail:

RadioShack Corp. notified about 400 workers by e-mail that they were being dismissed immediately as part of planned job cuts.

Employees at the Fort Worth headquarters got messages Tuesday morning saying: “The work force reduction notification is currently in progress. Unfortunately your position is one that has been eliminated.” ...

Derrick D'Souza, a management professor at the University of North Texas, said he had never heard of such a large number of terminated employees being notified electronically. He said it could be seen as dehumanizing to employees. “If I put myself in their shoes, I'd say, 'Didn't they have a few minutes to tell me?”' Prof. D'Souza said.

Consumers may want to rethink their loyalty to Radio Shack after this decision. If this is how they treat their employees, imagine what Radio Shack thinks of their customers.

It's an inexcusable business decision. Managers who lack the fortitude to communicate terminations directly should not serve in that capacity. I can tell you from long experience how upsetting a termination can be for the manager involved, but in well over a decade of management, I have never once been tempted to do it by mail, e-mail, or semaphore. Even the worst employees deserve to have their manager take the time to sit down with them and explain the decision to terminate employment.

I doubt this will get very wide press coverage, or even generate much comment or criticism in today's business climate. The professionals I know as my peers would be embarrassed to be associated with such a heartless and cruel method of downsizing for any reason, but shame appears to be waning as a quality in direct proportion to the waxing of mindless impersonality.

Abbas: End The Rocket Attacks

Two days after the official spokesman of the Hamas government in the Palestinian Authority castigated terrorists for turning Gaza into a chaotic nightmare, PA president Mahmoud Abbas demanded an end to provocations against Israel:

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has launched a scathing attack on armed groups that are firing rockets from the Gaza Strip, saying Wednesday they were responsible for bringing death and destruction to the Palestinians.

Addressing thousands of demonstrators outside his office in Ramallah, Abbas said, "So far we have about 250 martyrs in the Gaza Strip and thousands of wounded people and destroyed houses. Why? What are the reasons for this? Let's start searching for the reason for all this."

Abbas was referring to the number of Palestinians who have been killed in the Gaza Strip since the kidnapping of Cpl. Gilad Shalit in June. His comments, which were interpreted as criticism of Hamas and its government, came hours before Abbas headed to the Strip for talks with PA Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh on forming a national-unity government.

Abbas described the rockets that are being fired into Israel as "pipes" that provided Israel with an excuse to carry out military operations in the Gaza Strip. "Our people don't deserve these tragedies," he said. "If these pipes provide an excuse, it's time to stop using them."

Individual responsibility appears to be quite a fad these days in the territories. Ghazi Hamad raised eyebrows by blaming his fellow Palestinians rather than the Israelis for the poverty and deprivations of Gaza in particular, and the territories in general. Hamad went further than Abbas, but both have turned their rhetorical guns on the men who wield the literal guns, and rockets, and suicide bombs that have forced the Israelis into war in Gaza.

Abbas wants to form a unity government with Hamas in order to end an economic embargo on the Palestinians. That's what makes this speech remarkable; he addressed it to a group of demonstrators who demanded back pay after the embargo hit government employees. Normally Arab politicians would attack the United States, Britain, and Israel as the source of their woes. Instead, Abbas criticized the armed militias that fight each other when Israel fails to present a better target for their hatred.

This might demonstrate that Israel's new response to acts of war have brought dividends. Hezbollah and the Palestinian terrorist groups got surprised by the full-scale war that Olmert fought, even if he did fight it with less vigor than he should. The real losses and consequences of their provocations have brought a momentary clarity to some Palestinian leaders, who finally have publicly questioned the actions of the terrorists and the detriment of their alliance with them. It isn't a renunciation, but the first step to solving a problem is its recognition -- and it appears that Abbas and Hamad might be ready to take the Palestinians past that first step.

Of course, that doesn't stop UN chief Kofi Annan from trying to stop the real progress by insisting that Israel stop responding to acts of war waged against their civilian citizens. Annan demanded that Israel stop hitting back because Israel is more effective than the Palestinians:

Annan said after the meeting that the IDF had killed more than 200 Palestinians since the end of June, adding that this "must stop immediately." He said he fully agreed with Abbas that "the end of occupation and the creation of a Palestinian state living side by side with Israel is the key to resolving all the problems of the region. We have to implement all Security Council resolutions and that includes, of course, Resolutions 242 and 338."

It would help, however, if the PA honored the agreements it has already signed with Israel and publicly recognize its right to exist. It would also help if the Palestinians stopped shooting rockets into Israel, something they have done ever since the Israelis left Gaza. Annan appears to have absorbed none of this, and undermines the nascent impulses of Hamad and Abbas to accept responsibility for Palestinian actions. The 200 deaths wouldn't have happened if the Gaza Palestinians had spent their time creating law and order and a functional government rather than fire missiles at Israeli civilians and shoot at each other.

Annan, as always, works for the peace of annihilation.

Just A Note To E-mailers

I believe that self-promotion has a key role in the success of a blog. E-mailing other bloggers when one has a particularly good post, or one that complements a post at another's blog, makes good sense and is always welcome. However, when a blogger sends out multiple mass e-mails a day heralding every post and update, it clogs my inbox and makes it impossible for me to actually respond to anything good they may have to offer.

E-mailers who do that end up in my spam killfile, because I've learned not to ask them to stop. That usually generates a query as to why I suddenly hate conservative thought or an apology that somehow fails to end the mass e-mails. I'd rather hear from CQ readers on what they think is important rather than get added to listservs for which I never registered.

Yes, I've been buried in these messages recently, and it's almost as irritating as the rash of stock tips that some idiot spammers think will sell shares in their pet ventures. Sorry for the cranky post, but I can't keep up with e-mail as it is, and it just reached a breaking point tonight. I'll be perkier tomorrow.

Movie Review: Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against The West

During last weekend's appearances at the Minnesota State Fair, I met Vince Muzik of Minnesotans Against Terrorism, who told me of a new feature-length documentary MAT had assisted in producing. He agreed to send me a copy of the film on DVD for an opportunity to preview it ahead of its Minneapolis premiere next week, and we watched it tonight.

Based on Vince's casual introduction of it at the fair, I didn't know what to expect from Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against The West, the film produced by Wayne Kopping and Raphael Shore. It actually is quite an impressive production. Obsession, according to IMDB, had its release last year and has won several film festival awards, notably the Best Feature Film at the Liberty Film Festival and awards in Houston and Newport Beach festivals as well. Kopping's previous effort, Relentless: The Struggle For Peace In The Middle East, provided a critical look at the Oslo accords, but Kopping opts for a much broader view in Obsession.

The film takes care to differentiate between mainstream Islam and radical Islamism, and it does so for a reason. Several of the commentators featured in the film, notably former jihadist Walid Shoebat, Nonie Darwish, Prof. Khaleel Mohammed, and others are in fact moderate Muslims. They argue that mainstream Islam has to stand up and put an end to the perversion of Islamism, and only that will stop the genocides waiting to happen. It's a theme that returns over and over again. In fact, the movie begins and ends with the famous quotation from the great Irish statesman Edmund Burke about how the triumph of evil only requires that good men do nothing. Muslims such as Brigitte Gabriel make this point explicitly, especially at the end.

The opening sequence of the film takes up more time than I think it needs, and it delays one of the film's most important themes from developing until almost midway through, which is the correlations between Islamism and Naziism. To this purpose, the film makes excellent use of Alfons Heck, an elderly German academic who once served as a high-ranking officer in the Hitler Youth. Heck points out that a worldy and sophisticated German people fell for the crudest kind of anti-Semitic propaganda -- so why should anyone expect the Arabs to resist their own government-produced propaganda? Indeed, Obsession fills itself with television clips gleaned from all over the Arab world, giving American viewers perhaps their first real taste of how pervasive the paranoia gets in Arab culture.

This connection with Naziism goes beyond the hordes of jihadis sporting salutes that look suspiciously like Sieg Heils. Obession also reviews the historical connections between Adolf Hitler and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, whom Hitler embraced to the bemusement of his race-baiting followers. Heck recalls questioning why HItler allied with a non-Aryan group, and getting the answer that Nazis and Arabs wanted the same thing: the annihilation of the Jews. The Mufti later went to Bosnia and created an SS regiment of Muslims, one of the reasons that the Serbians -- who fought the Nazis -- felt betrayed by the West's alliance with the Bosnians in the 1990s.

Quite a few scholars and experts make appearances in this film, such as Prof. Robert Wistrich, Daniel Pipes, Salim Mansur, Khaled Abu Toameh, and Itamar Marcus. Other notables appear as well, although not by choice: Hassan Nasrallah of Hezbollah, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Abu Hamza al-Masri, and an assortment of imams and jihadis. The film even outs one British Muslim who posed as a moderate by denouncing the 9/11 attacks, and then catches him using the second anniversary of the attacks to praise the 19 hijackers at a conference of Muslims.

Obsession is well worth the 75 minutes viewers invest. If you happen to be in Minneapolis, it can be seen at the Oak Street Cinema twice a night between September 8th and 15th. I do not know how Kopping intends on putting this into wider release, but I will try to get more information on it later.

Let's Form An Emergency Study Commission!

In a further sign that the UN Security Council has little resolve with which to confront Iran over its nuclear program, the British UN ambassador says the body will need another month to get a report from the IAEA in order to translate "NO!" from Iran's Farsi language:

The U.N. Security Council will need until mid-September before acting on its threat to punish Iran if Tehran's leaders flout a Thursday deadline to suspend uranium enrichment as is widely expected, Britain's U.N. ambassador said Tuesday.

Ambassador Emyr Jones-Parry's prediction seemed to rule out the immediate threat of sanctions against Iran if it disregards the council's demands - spelled out in a resolution adopted this month - to suspend enrichment by Thursday. Iran has already said it would reject the deadline.

Jones-Parry said that before it can act, the Security Council will need to receive a report from the U.N. nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, on Iran's compliance with the resolution.

"Once we've had the report from the agency, had a further chance to discuss that, capitals will have a clearer view of exactly how this should be carried forward, but I would expect activity here to resume toward the middle of September," Jones-Parry said.

Perhaps we're just that much smarter than the UNSC, but we understood what Mahmoud Ahmadinejad meant when he said that Iran would never agree to suspend its uranium-enrichment programs. We understood it when Ayatollah Ali Khameini said it. We understood it when Iranian nuclear negotiator Ari Larijani said it. If the UNSC needs further clarification, we can set it to music and have someone provide sign-language interpretation. It shouldn't take much effort to provide the latter; only one finger would be required.

It's precisely this kind of diplomatic obtuseness that frustrates those of us who get lectured on the benefits of working through the League of United Nations. It doesn't take a study commission to understand all of the ramifications of Iranian intransigence. No means no, even in diplomacy, especially when repeated endlessly and celebrated in grand openings of heavy-water processing plants.

Daniel Freedman puts it more succinctly at It Shines For All -- "Read Ahmadinejad's lips: NO!" At this rate, the global community may find the testicular fortitude to confront Ahmadinejad in October ... of 2012.

Olmert And The Fixed Buffet

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has shrugged off repeated calls by UN head Kofi Annan to lift the military blockade of Lebanon, telling reporters that he sees the cease-fire agreement as a "fixed buffet" and, presumably, not a smorgasbord:

Mr Annan said the blockade should be lifted to help Lebanon recover from the month-long conflict.

But Mr Olmert said only that Israel would pull out of the Lebanon once UN resolution 1701 was implemented.

"[The resolution] is not a buffet where you pick up one item and leave others," he said.

"So far as we're concerned we entirely accept this, this is a fixed buffet and everything will be implemented including the lifting of the blockade as part of an entire implementation of the different articles."

Mr Olmert said unless two Israeli soldiers captured by Hezbollah on 12 July were freed, the UN resolution "cannot be considered as fully implemented".

Olmert may have mentioned that the cease-fire's failures go beyond the two soldiers that Hezbollah has still not freed. UNSC Resolution 1701 calls for the implementation of UNSCR 1559, which directs Lebanon to disarm Hezbollah. Lebanon, so far, has refused, which puts them in direct violation of both resolutions. Israel has no responsibility to lift the blockade while the Fuad Siniora government refuses to even attempt to meet the requirements of 1701.

The UN hasn't demonstrated any inclination to effect the terms of the resolution, either. Annan has said that the UNIFIL mandate will not extend to disarming Hezbollah; in fact he assured the Shi'ites in southern Lebanon that the UNIFIL forces will not look for arms at all. More to the point, Annan has also stated that UNIFIL will not perform interdiction missions to keep arms from flowing into Lebanon and back to the Hezbollah terrorists who find themselves critically short on missiles and rockets after the war. Olmert has to apply the blockade in order to do the tasks in 1701 that Lebanon and the UN refuse to do.

Olmert may have botched the military mission in Lebanon, but he has done much better in protecting Israeli interests in the post-1701 environment. The Israeli insistence on full compliance with 1701 will be the only way that either the Israelis realize their goals in the sub-Litani region or expose the global community for the appeasers they obviously are. The blockade must continue until Siniora and Annan understand the concept of the "fixed buffet". If they want Israel to abide by 1701, then they cannot expect to get a pass on its full implementation. If they are unable to meet that standard, then neither should have insisted on the cease-fire at all.

California Adopts HillaryCare

The California Assembly passed a bill on a party-line vote yesterday that would eliminate private health care and force Californians into a single-payer state-run medical system. It now falls to Arnold Schwarzenegger to determine whether he will reverse his previous stand against state-run health care or adopt the Golden State version of HillaryCare (via CQ reader Kurt K):

The Democratic-controlled Legislature is on the verge of sending Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger a bill that would create a state-run universal health care system, testing him on an issue that voters rate as one of their top concerns in this election year.

On a largely party-line 43-30 vote, the Assembly approved a bill by state Sen. Sheila Kuehl, D-Santa Monica, that would eliminate private medical insurance plans and establish a statewide health insurance system that would provide coverage to all Californians. The state Senate has already approved the plan once and is expected this week to approve changes that the Assembly made to the bill.

Schwarzenegger has said he opposes a single-payer plan like the one Kuehl's bill would create, but the governor has not offered his own alternatives for fixing the state's health care system. As many as 7 million people are uninsured in the state, and spiraling costs have put pressure on business and consumers. ...

"I don't believe that government should be getting in there and should start running a health care system that is kind of done and worked on by government," Schwarzenegger said in July at a speech at the Commonwealth Club. "I think that what we should do is be a facilitator, to make the health care costs come down. The sad story in America is that our health care costs are too high, that everyone cannot afford health care."

Previous California legislation on workers-comp protection and workplace regulation helped start an exodus of corporate headquarters for better business environments. Creating a whole new bureaucracy for health management and putting rationing decisions in the hands of bureaucrats may start a new exodus of healthy people looking for less-intrusive and less-costly tax regimes. Despite the long wait times for anything but primary care issues in single-payer nations such as Canada and the UK -- the latter of which has to destroy organs for lack of doctors to transplant them -- California wants to add to its already top-heavy bureaucracies and add more budget-busting entitlements to a budget that resembles science fiction.

Hillary Clinton tried to foist the same system onto the entire country, and the nation reacted by ending forty years of Democratic domination in the House. Perhaps the same result could come from this irresponsible social engineering project. When people start to understand that they just created a DMV for health care, California voters may just revolt against the entrenched Democratic power structure. Even the Democratic nominee for goverrnor won't endorse the Kuehl bill. Phil Angelides wanted to push more health-care mandates onto the private sector instead, a bad idea but nowhere near as disastrous as this.

In a move typical of the myopic state legislature, the bill doesn't even address the costs that the new bureaucracy will create. The Assembly noted that it will take several years to implement the mandate -- which means that they're going to pass the buck to another group of legislators. Term limits keeps Assembly members from serving more than six years, which means damned few of the culprits will be around to account for the massive bill that will come. However, they have considered revenue streams for the new regime -- an additional 8 percent on the payroll tax that businesses pay and a 3 point hike on the state income tax. That will come before the sunset of the health-care plans that businesses and their employees buy, creating an overlap of costs -- and that assumes that the revenue stream will be enough to pay for the massive spending necessary for the state-run system.

People around the country may shrug this off, figuring that it's just California. However, don't be surprised to see utopians in your neighborhood heralding the coming Brave New World in the Golden State and agitating for the same system where you live.

Did Coburn Out Stevens As The Secret Holder?

TPM Muckraker found a story in an Arkansas newspaper that reported on a speech by Senator Tom Coburn on his bill to create an online federal budget database, where Coburn fingers the Secret Holder among his colleagues. The culprit? Pretty much whom you'd expect:

One of the senators most criticized for his personal projects, Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, has a hold of his own on Coburn’s bill to make public the spending patterns of the government. Called the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act, the legislation calls for the creation of a database open to the public where citizens can track government spending.

“He’s the only senator blocking it,” Coburn said of Stevens.

Of course, I'm still waiting for a reply to Steven's office on whether Stevens put the hold on the bill. And one of the points raised by TPMM sounds familiar as well:

Stevens has been the odds-on favorite since the hunt for the Holder Who Dare Not Speak His Name began.

But did he really do it? Well, he had a motive: As the paper and others have noted, Stevens and Coburn have clashed before -- in particular over Stevens' now-legendary "bridge to nowhere." Coburn attempted (and failed) to block the $233 million boondoggle. And revenge certainly fits the senior Alaskan's m.o. "Stevens can play rough," the Seattle Times noted in June. "Despite denials from his staff, he retaliates - and doesn't mind waiting years to do so."

Interesting, especially if one considers this comment from my interview with Bill Frist yesterday:

Typically they don’t put a hold on because they don’t like the bill – it’s because they don’t like something else someone’s doing. It’s petty politics.

In this case, petty politics may have coincided with a healthy dose of self-preservation. I'd guess we have our culprit.

Carter Trying Private Diplomacy Again?

Former President Jimmy Carter has a long record of involving himself in foreign affairs long after voters revoked his mandate for such activity. His intervention with North Korea forced the Clinton Administration -- which had wanted to take a tough stand against Kim Jong-Il -- to accept the Agreed Framework, which the North Koreans proceeded to violate immediately and continue their progress towards nuclear weapons unhindered. Now it looks like Carter may lend his considerable talent for deadly mischief towards the Iranian nuclear standoff by reaching out to the former Iranian president Mohammed Khatami:

For an event that would turn a page in American history, former president Jimmy Carter has agreed in principle to host former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami for talks during his visit to the United States starting this week. ...

Iranians made the overture for the meeting, and the Carter Center in Atlanta is working on the possible timing, said Phil Wise, the former president's aide.

"President Carter, in his role since leaving the White House, has made his office and services and center available to basically anybody who wants to talk. He believes that it is much better to be talking to people who you have problems with than not to, and that's the approach he takes now," Wise said. "I can confirm that President Carter is open to a meeting if the former president of Iran would like to have one."

Carter believes in dialogue so much that he did nothing else when Khatami's movement seized power in Teheran 27 years ago, and when Khatami and his fellow revolutionaries seized and held the American embassy and over 50 of our representatives for 444 days. Carter's belief in dialogue did not extend to the revolution's preceding government, the Shah, which Carter undermined for its human-rights violations. The fall of the Shah set off a chain reaction of Islamist momentum, creating competing radical Arab/Persian visions for a new Caliphate which not only exponentially increased human-rights violations but resulted in a wave of state-sponsored terrorism from the Islamic Republic.

Carter's belief in dialogue mirrors the utopian vision of the Left, a moral-relativist existence where all people are reasonable and all conflict results from simple misunderstandings. Carter has never understood the nature of evil, even while confronted with it in office; his post-presidential career has not provided him with an education, either. Years of diplomatic and economic engagement with Iran by the EU has not brought about a moderation of its policies, despite his sanctimonious statement on "talking to people who you have problems with".

Iran has made it clear, through the mullah's latest mouthpiece Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, that they intend on eliminating Israel from the Middle East. Their new president talks about it constantly and has demanded that his trading partners in Europe carve out some of their own territory to house the Israelis before Iran fulfills its pledges. Khatami and his moderates have not spoken a word against these constant statements, nor have they lifted a finger to end the grip of the radical mullahs on Iranian government. None of these actions require American dialogue, and none of them would benefit from it as long as that dialogue seeks accommodation with radical nihilists.

As the White House noted, Carter is free to meet with whomever he pleases. However, they should make sure to inform Carter of their intention to enforce the Logan Act in case he gets any notions of repeating the disaster of the Agreed Framework with Iran.

Frist Interview: Iran

Yesterday, Senator Bill Frist sat down for an interview with Scott Johnson, John Hinderaker, and me, and spoke on a range of topics. Yesterday I posted about the secret hold on S. 2590, the federal budget online database, and Frist's pledge to push the bill regardless of holds. The Senate Majority Leader had more to say about Iran and the security challenges of the Islamic Republic.

SJ: I’d like to follow up on a couple of questions. One of the short-term problems is Iran. I wonder if President Bush has has said it’s unacceptable. Do you think President Bush is going to accept it or do something about it before the end of his term? Can you make any sense of that?

BF: I can’t really go beyond what the President said, because what he has said publicly is what he said privately. The moral suasion of that is strong, but the next question – especially coming off Iraq – is what does that mean. … I think now, what’s happening in Lebanon, what’s passing through Syria, what the President has been saying all along has been happening in Iran, now people understand why it’s important to have all the options on the table. Before, people said “I think the president is going to go in there and militarily take out their nascent nuclear facilities here.” Beyond that, I can’t really say much. Literally, all options are on the table, some of which we haven’t talked a lot about. Who we support, how we support certain people other than the governments.

JH: If it comes to military action, will there be support for that in Congress?

BF: I was implying that a little bit when I said there was a greater understanding of the threats and the lines being drawn now directed by Iran around the world. I think that the preparation and understanding will go a long way into building that support. Right now – I don’t know, it’s so hypothetical. If the President were to say that we have to launch a military strike, I don’t know what the support would be.

JH: My impression is that the Democrats are doing anything rather than take a position on Iran. They’re lying in the weeds, hoping that things go badly.

BF: I think what they’re doing – it’s such a political problem – is that they’re taking the spotlight and doing whatever they can to focus that spotlight on Iraq, and trying to separate Iraq from the larger challenges that we have with the rise of the fundamentalist extremists, and that will be it. When they take that spotlight and put it on Iraq, it takes it off of Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah, plus other areas where terrorism [exists]. What I will do when we come back, I will use two arms, I will spend a lot of time talking about security issues and other issues, one of which will be the Hamdan decision, which raises questions about the military tribunals and these illegal combatants, and we’ll resolve that. We’ll have an opportunity for debate. The other arm will be in all likelihood a discussion of terrorist surveillance and what tools the government should have and legislatively put that on the table. Arlen Specter has an approach that I haven’t seen the final draft of which works with the administration more closely. We’ll use those two arms, those two platforms to address the sorts of issues on war and terrorism, regarding giving the enemy the playbook and threatening the security of the American people.

SJ: Can you tell us whether you believe that the disclosure of the NSA program, the terrorist surveillance programs, [hurt counterterrorism efforts]?

BF: I answer that “yes”, immediately. You’re going to ask me for three concrete examples, and I can’t give them, although that’s a question I ask in my classified briefings. I can tell you unequivocally, whether we’re talking about the original Afghanistan disclosure or the terrorist surveillance program … or the financial terrorism disclosure four months ago. Each of these three have, when openly addressed, have undercut our ability to [stop terrorism].

SJ: We’ve been making that case out there since last January, and I just wanted to come back and ask that.

JH: Is there anything else we can say that is more concrete?

BF: [crosstalk] Let me just think, because I know what you really need are two or three good examples. I know what kind of information was picked up [on the British plot] a couple of weeks ago, but I’m not at liberty to say right now. …

EM: I’d like to ask what non-military action would get some support in the near future in terms of Iran? Maybe some stronger support for democracy activists?

BF: I will continue to introduce resolutions or statements where we continue to support democracy-promoting organizations. … I continually go back and forth, because before Ahmadinejad came in, there was an undercurrent among the young people, with satellite dishes and college campus type activity. And now he’s captured the elite, so we don’t have enough intelligence to answer the question [on support for democratic change]. The question is how much his leadership has penetrated down into the groups that we thought would foment discussion and debate and change from below. I think that in the last two or three weeks that we can do a lot more so that change can come from beneath. I say that because it’s a wealthy, educated, intellectually bright constituency there. I’m also getting word from my doctor friends over there who have been in this country and have connections over there, and it’s interesting because they’re educated – they had to leave back in the late 70s – and their connections are still among the more educated group.

JH: What you say about supporting pro-democracy elements raises the question of why we haven’t done more of that over the last five years. People like Michael Ledeen have been arguing and arguing for that, and it seems like kind of a no-brainer to me.

BF: I can’t really answer that except to say that we should do better.

SJ: The full text of Ahmadinejad’s letter to Angela Merkel was posted on the Internet yesterday. I’ve read his long letter to President Bush, and taking all his public statements together, it’s a little bit hard to figure out what’s going on. One thing is that they’re trying to desensitize the world to the concept of wiping Israel off the map by saying it over and over again. Do you have any thoughts?

BF: I haven’t seen the on-line posting. I’ll tell you what’s interesting about the psychology. You’ve got someone who started as an aberration but has built himself into a populist movement, and at the same time he’s driving back to the 7th century ideologically, and clearly he’s engaging the nuclear imagination. That bothers me, because he’s pulling younger people into his future. He’s making his case for a nuclear supply that will all be for peace, and that dichotomy there, I don’t know how it’s going to play out, but we have to be very careful. That means this whole nuclear issue is an urgency we need to aggressively address or I think his popularity may increase.

The sanctions issue, like energy, will be interesting to see how it plays out. If they didn’t have to import and heavily subsidize gasoline so much … I haven’t followed in the last 24 or 36 hours what the plans will be, but I think that you do have a real opportunity in terms of sanctions, in terms of energy … and a real opportunity in terms of pressure points. The international global markets in banking itself, and you all have been following the discussions on this.

JH: The answer is no, and are we wrong to be cynical about sanctions, and that would just be dithering and not effective?

BF: [pause to consider] I think it’s an important part of our diplomacy. Will it be effective? I think it will be absolutely critical to make the stab, make the effort, use the peculiar situation there that’s very different than just saying you can’t have tourists there. There is a huge chunk of money, parts of the $500 billion I talked about [earlier], pieces of that, the way energy flows, and the peculiar relationship about where the money goes. I think it’s absolutely critical from a diplomatic standpoint that [sanctions] get tried, exhausted, and then … we’ll see.

JH: When you say the way energy flows, do you mean the fact that Iran has no refineries?

BF: They don’t have refineries, and the gas they put in cars all has to be imported. And then they’re heavily subsidizing that as well.

I'll post more from the Frist interview, and later tonight will have a recap of the luncheon that preceded it.

Frist Interview: Politics

The final part of the Frist interview covered the politics of the Senate in the upcoming session.

SJ: Speaking of holds, John Bolton’s confirmation is coming up. Where are the Democrats on that now?

BF: I don’t know! [Laughs] No, no, no, I have no idea, but it’s coming.

SJ: He’ll be confirmed in September, then.

BF: It depends on what the Democrats do. I’m going to bring it up, we’re going to vote on it, and he’d better be confirmed. I will do port security next – these are my general plans, I haven’t even told my colleagues this – I want to do port security, I want to address the Bolton nomination, I want to address the Hamdan decision on these security issues, I want to address the Specter-FISA compromise. That right there – I’ve only got 15 legislative days, so you can imagine the challenge.

JH: Do you think those things will have an impact in November?

BF: I don’t know, but as I travel around and talk with people, everything gravitates back to security. I think there will be clarification with some people, instead of saying “I’m for the war on terror but I don’t like this.” We’ll look at the tools we need to fight the war on terror, and we’ll look at the issue the Supreme Court gave us. So there will be a lot of discussion of those, which will lead to the clarification. That’s what people want – to feel safer and more secure.

SJ: Since 9/11, it seems that there has been a CIA war on the Bush administration, of which this whole Joe Wilson has been a part. If there were a Democrat in office while this kind of thing went on, it would be a Seven Days In May kind of scandal.

JH: I don’t know if you’ve seen what we’ve written about this, but –

BF: No – [crosstalk] – Let me go back and read more about this. I don’t know, I really don’t.

[Press liaison says only time for one more question]

BF: I’ll look into it. See, I’m at the CIA every week, literally, working with the administration. I want to be very careful about where I say leaks are coming from.

JH: Do you think any of them are coming from the Senate?

BF: I don’t know, I don’t know. Even when we started talking about monitoring phone calls in Afghanistan, Democrat or Republican, where they came from I don’t know. …

SJ: This past December?

BF: No, this was a few years ago. [crosstalk]

EM: One last question, Senator. This whole Fitzgerald investigation has collapsed over the last couple of days with the revelation that the leak of Valerie Plame’s identity came from Richard Armitage, and that the Department of Justice knew about it five days into the investigation. Do you plan to review this investigation to determine if there has been an abuse of power?

BF: Don’t know. I haven’t had a chance to talk to my colleagues.

EM: Yes, this just happened a couple of days ago.

BF: Well, we’ll see what the facts are, and then see if the oversight committees want to look into it. From a practical standpoint, September will be interesting. I’ve been traveling around the country and will continue to do so. We need real clarification on a range of issues of what are the differences between Democrats and Republicans. I’d march down the list: prevailing versus cutting and running, strong border protection versus porous borders, tax cuts versus tax hikes, affordable health care versus predatory trial lawyers driving up costs, energy independence versus energy dependence, common-sense judges versus activist judges.

Floor time I’m going to spend on security. I’ve probably been in 75 meetings in the last three weeks like we just did, where it’s not hard-core politics but just listening to people, and everything keeps gravitating back to that. The questions of giving the playbook to the enemy, how we treat enemy combatants, how we get information has to be fully explored. You’ll see a lot of that on the floor in September.

FEC Kills Political Speech During Elections

As expected, the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act has forced the courts to issue a prior restraint against political speech during an election campaign. Mark Tapscott caught the story out of Washington, and laments the corrosive effect that the McCain-Feingold bill has had on freedom of speech:

Federal election regulators refused to ease limits on political advertising Tuesday, blocking an effort to let interest groups run radio and television ads mentioning elected officials within weeks of an election.

The Federal Election Commission voted 3-3 on a proposal that would have allowed such ads as long as they addressed public policy issues and did not promote, support, oppose or attack a sitting member of Congress. Supporters of the change said they wanted to strike a balance between campaign ad restrictions and constitutional free speech guarantees.

The measure failed on a tie vote with the commission's three Democrats voting against the proposal and the three Republicans backing it.

More than any other action from the BCRA, this demonstrates how the bill operates as a government-imposed safety net for incumbents. Who would have guessed ten years ago that Congress would pass a bill that would silence people who wanted to publish criticisms of incumbent politicians? Ten years ago, people wanted to implement term limits!

Mark believes that this will bury McCain's chances among conservatives for the presidential nomination in 2008. McCain had a big hill to climb in that regard anyway, but this does serve as a reminder of the kind of policy we will see from a McCain administration. His reformist bent produced the first limits on normal political speech and activity since the Sedition Act of 1918. Oddly, the same people who complain about "chill winds" when the Bush Administration answers its critics fall strangely silent when it comes to the real attack on free political speech that McCain's twisted approach to campaign finance reform represents.

In the debacle that has become the BCRA, all branches of government has blame. Congress passed it, Bush signed it, and somehow the Supreme Court found nothing unconstitutional about denying people the ability to publish criticisms about sitting politicians. Anyone who supports this legislation has no business in the White House, where they could do even more damage.

A Few Moments On The Phone

Before I met with Senator Bill Frist earlier today, I took a few minutes to call the offices of the few remaining Senators who had not gone on the record regarding the hold on S. 2590. TPM Muckraker has been keeping track of the score, and now Hot Air reports that we're down to the Final Three.

When I checked the list at TPMM, I noted three Republicans whose lack of response puzzled me -- well, two of them, anyway. Jon Kyl has been a consistent voice for fiscal responsibility, so I took out the cell phone and called his offices in DC. The friendly staffer who answered told me unequivocally that Kyl did not place the hold on S2590, and in fact supported the bill. I asked twice just to be sure he knew this for a fact, and received strong assurances both times.

Next I called Pete Domenici's office, and got a slightly different reaction. The polite but somewhat confused staffer had to check with others in the office -- apparently, mine was the first call she had taken on the subject. Her colleagues told her that Domenici didn't hold the bill, but none of them were willing to state that he supported it.

I sent these reactions to TPMM and set my sights on the white whale: Ted Stevens.

When I called Stevens' office, the staffer who answered was quite friendly -- almost overly so. His reaction to my question was ... not to answer it. "We've gotten that question a lot this week," he said, and then tried to get me to submit the question via their Senate website. Instead, I asked for a press liaison, and he transferred me to the voice mail of Aaron Saunders -- whose outbound message stated that he would be out of town until Friday. However, he left his e-mail on the message with the recommendation that it was the best way to contact him, so I sent him an e-mail asking him to confirm or deny that Stevens had placed the hold on S. 2590. Almost as an afterthought, I marked it for a return receipt.

Aaron Saunders read my e-mail at 11:56 am ET today. So far, he has not responded ... which might be an answer in and of itself. I'll keep you posted.

CQ On The Air Tonight

I'll be joining Rob Breckenridge on CHQR's The World Tonight, the excellent evening radio talk show out of Calgary. My segment starts at 9 pm CT after the newsbreak, and we will discuss the Plame flame-out, and perhaps other topics as well. Be sure to listen on the Internet stream if you do not live in Calgary; Rob makes these appearances a lot of fun.

UPDATE: I'll bet that CHQR's ratings look a lot better than those of Air America. They've plateaued -- and not in a very strong position. Their estimated audience for the Twin Cities -- with 2.6 million potential listeners age 12 and above -- comes to a paltry 29,000 and a 1.1 share, in a metropolitan area known for its liberal tilt. In Atlanta -- which Cynthia McKinney represents for another few months -- Air America attracts a total of 7,720 listeners. In Riverside, CA, they get a big goose egg. I guess not even the station employees listen to Al Franken. (via SCSU Scholars)

Bill Frist Pledges To Take S 2590 To Floor

I had the pleasure of attending a luncheon in honor of Senator Bill Frist at the Minneapolis Club this afternoon. The Senate Majority leader spoke on a wide range of topics, which will form the basis of at least a couple more posts today and tomorrow. Senator Frist also met privately for half an hour with myself, Scott Johnson, and John Hinderaker from Power Line.

I'm working on the transcript of the entire interview, but I want to be sure that CQ readers read what Senator Frist told us about the Coburn-Obama federal budget database bill, S. 2590. An anonymous Senator has placed this bill on hold, but as Frist explains, it's not as much of an obstacle as first thought.

EM: I’d like to change the subject. We’re looking at S2590 –

BF: Yes.

EM: -- the Coburn-Obama bill that came to the Senate, and you were going to schedule it to come to the floor. There’s been a hold put on that bill. I wanted to ask you a couple of questions about the hold and your options. I know you’ve been a supporter of this bill. You’ve already been asked if you put the hold on it and said no.

BF: I’m a supporter of it. I’m the one trying to take it to the floor. I’m a strong supporter of the bill.

EM: Do you know who’s holding the bill? Is that something that’s within your knowledge?

BF: I can find out, Ed. What a hold is – a lot of legislation has come to the floor and things are moving kind of fast – but what a hold is, is the ability of someone to say “Slow down and protect me on the floor.” You hear all the arguments about last-minute holds or holds occurring right before a break, and people will say, “Slow it down so we can take a look at it.” Part of it is that things come to us so quickly, and this particular bill probably most people didn’t see it because we were doing so much those last two or three days. But an individual can’t stop it or hold it from coming to the floor. What it does mean is “Put a pause on it until I can see it and protect our rights on the floor.” It’s a way to support the comity of the Senate. It doesn’t mean it can’t be taken to the floor.

EM: Are you going to take it to the floor?

BF: I did try the other day. The first step is to put it out there so people can read it. Probably only ten of 100 people have read it. But, when we get back people will know about it, because you all have done such a great job with it. The fact that I endorse the bill, that I’m trying to take it out [onto the floor], means everyone will have to go on record, because the Majority Leader is taking it out. Then they will have to say no, you can’t get unanimous consent to do it. The problem with that – people say yes, you can bring it to the floor, but gives us 24 hours, 72 hours to look at it. The 72 hours is not exact, but somewhere in there.

So what will happen is if I take it out to the floor, whoever it is – Democrat or Republican – will have to say, “I object.” And if you object, the problem with that is that it takes up to six days of votes to get it to come out to the floor. You have to file cloture positions and motions to proceed, and there have to be three of them. The first cloture is two days, the second is two days, and the third is two days. So that’s the advantage to the leadership to getting rid of these holds. I’ve not talked to the Democrats specifically about it. I’ve talked to Harry Reid.

EM: And he’s come out publicly and stated his support for the bill, as have a number of Democrats.

BF: Yes.

[Senator Frist's press liaison intejects with a detailed explanation that working behind the scenes to clear the hold is more efficient than using the six-day procedure]

BF: And I have a hundred other bills besides this one that need attention. It’s a huge disadvantage for me not to get all the people who have these holds and objections to proceeding with unanimous consent into a room like this. After that, the holds and objections typically go away. Typically they don’t put a hold on because they don’t like the bill – it’s because they don’t like something else someone’s doing. It’s petty politics. Now on this bill, I’ll just talk to everyone and if there’s still someone who wants a hold on the bill, I’ll take it to the floor and let him object.

JH: How big a problem are the Senate rules?

BF: You heard me in there [earlier] tell you what the biggest problem is. It’s filibusters. Filibusters are a good tool for legislation, but not for nominations. Someone took the rule and bent it for their political advantage, and I broke it. They may try it again, and I’ll break it again. So that’s challenging.

The holds are used by both sides. There would be a lot more spending going on without them. People would try to push spending through and try to sneak it it – well, not sneak it in but try to get it by if someone didn’t say give me 24, 48, 72 hours to look at it and then address it. The hold system in and of itself isn’t a bad system, but what it means is that you force people to the table, instead of just stopping petty things. There’s good things that has to be done in government today. I’ve got mixed feelings. It can be abused and at times it’s abused, but for the most part it forces people to the table.

Some people would say if there’s a hold out there, you ought to publish it in the Congressional Record. The problem with that is if you put it in the Congressional Record, people get locked down. They become “heroes”, and after that you never can move them at all. It’s much better to have an opportunity to talk to them one on one, Democrat or Republican, and work through it, which you can do 95% of the time.

I'll have more later. It appears that Senator Frist is very committed to getting this onto the floor for a vote, and he can accomplish that regardless of the holds.

UPDATE: I forgot to link to Senator Frist's own post on this subject at Volpac. It states less explicitly that he will take the legislation to the floor regardless of the holds, but also calls on all Senators to answer blogger calls on the hold honestly. One commenter already noted that Kit Bond's staff treated her rudely when she called. I'll have more information on status calls in a later update.

UPDATE II: Dean Esmay says he feels suckered with all of the Secret Holder publicity, saying that all we would have lost without the Porkbusting effort was six days. However, this means six legislative days, and there are only 15 of them before the election, according to Frist. The hold would make the calendar very tight, especially considering all of the appropriations bills awaiting action in the Senate. And don't forget that the House still has to take up S. 2590 after the Senate passes it.

Also, one should consider the message that our effort sent. The national attention should convice politicians that a new era of openness in government has come, even if we have to thrust it upon them.

Who Won From The Plame Flameout?

It's easy to add up all of the people who lost in the collapse of Valerie Plame leak case after Michael Isikoff and David Corn revealed that Richard Armitage originally gave the information to Robert Novak. Joe Wilson watched his carefully-constructed and mostly false version of events come apart at the seams. Novak lost his job at CNN (later catching on with Fox) and came under tremendous criticism for his refusal to act to free other journalists from legal action. Patrick Fitzgerald put a lot of tarnish on his previously sterling reputation for extending a criminal investigation for years after the culprit confessed five days into the Department of Justice probe. Judith Miller lost the respect of her peers because of a belief that she protected Bush administration officials and acted as a mouthpiece for them, an assessment that none of her colleagues bothered to revisit after the Isikoff/Corn story came out on Sunday.

The only man who appears to have emerged from the spectacle relatively unharmed and perhaps enhanced is Karl Rove. Nedra Pickler takes a look at Rove unbound in the wake of the botched investigation:

Karl Rove was not "frog-marched" out of the White House in handcuffs as his detractors had hoped, but the past year was certainly a low point for President Bush's close friend and chief political strategist.

A criminal investigation put Rove under scrutiny for months, then he was forced to surrender a key policy role in a move that raised questions about his authority in the White House.

The loss of the "key policy role" did not keep him from influencing policy, although his understandable preoccupation with the Fitzgerald witch hunt may have allowed the disastrous Harriet Miers nomination and the poor response to the initial outrage over the Dubai ports deal. In fact, the reduced responsibilities allowed Rove to focus more clearly on politics, the arena in which Rove shines brightest, and put him in a good position to quarterback the GOP's efforts for the midterms:

The slimmed-down portfolio leaves Rove freer to focus on politics, look at the big picture and provide a gut-check in a White House that has struggled with missteps that may leave Republicans vulnerable in the midterm congressional elections. ...

The Republican base never flinched at suggestions that Rove tried to smear administration critic Joe Wilson by revealing his wife's role as a CIA operative.

Publicity surrounding the case may have increased Rove's stature among Republicans and contributed to an almost mystical view of the longtime Bush strategist among the party faithful because he came out on top.

At a recent presidential fundraiser near Bush's Texas ranch, a line that formed for photos with Rove was nearly as long as the line waiting to see the president.

Rove is an impressive fundraiser himself, bringing in $10.4 million in 75 events this cycle, more than any other Republican official besides the president, first lady and vice president.

In recent months, Rove has rediscovered his groove. He has aimed sharp rhetorical barbs at John Kerry and Jack Murtha, and also castigated the New York Times for its penchant for blowing national-security programs. He has fully engaged just when the Republicans needed him most, and he appears to be enjoying himself immensely.

No one touched by the Plame scandal came out unburdened in some way, if in nothing else but public reputation. Rove may be the only one whose reputation has been enhanced by the collapse of the Plame meme.

Name The Secret Holder

The Club For Growth has a new poll on the identity of the Secret Holder -- the Senator who placed an anonymous hold on S.2590, the federal budget database for public scrutiny sponsored by Tom Coburn and Barack Obama. The early voting has Ted "Bridge To Nowhere" Stevens, the man who demanded that his pork pass Congress or he would say "A-beeble-a-beeble-a That's All, Folks!", in the lead, but the Club has several other leading candidates as possibilities.

Quite frankly, I believe we are looking at this from the wrong perspective. We're trying to figure out who would put an anonymous hold on legislation that promises a new era of openness and transparency in government. Perhaps we should consider the obvious choices of Senators who would not commit such a cowardly act. If your count looks anything like mine, it's a depressing but revealing exercise.

While CQ readers contemplate the polls, think about this: if you could ask the Senate leadership a single question, what would it be? Make sure you post the question to the comments section.

The Competence Of Conspiracy Theorists

We hear more voices these days expressing an age-old form of bigotry that always arises during times of conflict. Certain unhinged elements of society believe with a certain ferocity that secret Jewish cabals run the US government and create conflict around the world. When the proponents of such theories sport few teeth and carry the unmistakable aroma of high-tension liquor, they're easy to ignore. However, when they come from academia and have a few chunks of the alphabet after their name, people tend to take them more seriously than they deserve.

Today's case in point comes from Dana Milbank at the Washington Post, who amused himself by attending a lecture from University of Chicago political scientist John Mearsheimer and Harvard's Steven Walt. Mearsheimer co-authored a "study" with Walt that claimed to have laid out the machinations of the Jewish lobby. CAIR invited Mearsheimer and Walt to speak at the National Press Club to expand on their views:

University of Chicago political scientist John Mearsheimer was in town yesterday to elaborate on his view that American Jewish groups are responsible for the war in Iraq, the destruction of Lebanon's infrastructure and many other bad things. As evidence, he cited the influence pro-Israel groups have on "John Boner, the House majority leader."

Actually, Professor, it's "BAY-ner." But Mearsheimer quickly dispensed with Boehner (R-Ohio) and moved on to Jewish groups' nefarious sway over Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), who Mearsheimer called "Von Hollen."

Such gaffes would be trivial -- if Mearsheimer weren't claiming to be an authority on Washington and how power is wielded here. But Mearsheimer, with co-author Stephen Walt of Harvard's Kennedy School, set off a furious debate this spring when they argued that "the Israel lobby" is exerting undue influence in Washington; opponents called them anti-Semitic.

This shows the preparation and scholarship that comes into play when one writes anti-Semitic diatribes. Not that CAIR had any problem with the presentation, of course; they wasted no time giving the pair "Fight The Israel Lobby" buttons and cheered their denunciations of Israel and the Jews -- which was the entire point of the event.

The circumlocutions of their logic reminds me of the lame Family Circus cartoons with Billy's neighborhood meanderings in dotted lines. The two imply that American foreign policy has been hijacked by men with "attachments" to Israel -- with the "attachment" being their Jewishness. The conspiracy has to be subtle indeed; after all, how can John Boehner and Chris Van Hollen overcome the goyim who actually run Congress -- Denny Hastert and Nancy Pelosi? Likewise, the academics spend a lot of effort blaming Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith for insidiously leading the United States into war with Iraq for the supposed benefit of Israel, but never mention why this "attachment" affects gentiles like Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, and George Bush -- the people who actually made those decisions.

Walt at least attempted to maintain some semblance of rationality, although it turned his arguments incoherent. He said that the Israel lobby was "not a cabal" and that merely being Jewish didn't make one part of the conspiracy. That fails to explain why he keeps drawing that exact inference from the religious background of people like Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, neither of whom have been in the government for at least the past year. Mearsheimer just went with the full yahoud. He denounced Jewish activists, Jewish organizations, and the Israeli lobby, apparently stopping only at Jewish delis. He even told the group of Jew-haters that Israel exploited the kidnapping of its soldiers to attack Hezbollah -- somehow forgetting that the kidnapping came from a Hezbollah attack that left several IDF soldiers dead and covered by a number of rockets from Lebanon into Israel.

Milbank clearly has fun dissecting the two anti-Semitic paranoid conspiracy theorists, but Chicago and Harvard should be embarrassed by this display of hatred and defective thinking.

The Terrorists Who Come Out Of Nowhere ... Or Did They?

Germany's foiled bomb plot involved terrorists who defied any attempts at interdiction -- two seemingly normal Muslism students who suddenly turned radical. Only design flaws kept Jihad Hamad and Youssef el Hajdib from creating another Madrid or London scenario in Germany's mass-transit system, and German authorities still have no clue how to identify the next do-it-yourself jihadis:

But who in fact is Hamad? An Islamist who deliberately learned German at a language school in Tripoli so that he could enter the country as a student, essentially under the radar of counterterrorism officials, and calmly go about preparing an underhanded terrorist attack? Or did a young man, hungry for education, arrive in Germany on Jan. 2, 2006 and, for some unknown reason, suddenly and without attracting attention, turn into a killer?

By last Friday, investigators still hadn't found answers to these questions. ... The arrest of Youssef Hajdib, 21, promptly set off a security debate over the consequences of the presumed change in the overall threat of terrorism in Germany. Legislators called for more surveillance cameras in public areas (although even London's dense network of such cameras failed to prevent the 2005 bombings in that city), beefing up the country's police forces and internal intelligence agency and speeding up a planned effort to link all security-related information to a central counterterrorism database. One member of the German parliament, the Bundestag, even proposed stationing armed "rail marshals" on German trains in the future.

But whatever Schäuble and his counterparts in the state governments decide at a conference of interior ministers scheduled for Monday, and whatever measures they take, the one thing that has investigators especially concerned is that would-be attackers may not necessarily be members of a local "domestic terrorist organization," but simply Muslim fanatics acting entirely on their own. This presumed new breed of independent terrorists, officials believe, appear out of nowhere and form miniature cells of their own. Instead of a network and commanders, all they need is a reason to strike, bomb-building instructions they can easily download from the Internet and the conviction that they are acting on behalf of a greater cause. In some sense, these self-made terrorists may also believe that they are part of al-Qaida, which has long since transformed itself from being only a terrorist organization, instead encompassing an entire ideology.

This sounds familiar to the experiences of the British in the successful 7/7 London plot and the foiled sky-attack mission that the British uncovered this month, as well as the Toronto cell of homegrown jihadis. In this case, though Hamad and Hajdib aren't homegrown. They both came to Germany as students, in a manner similar to some of the 9/11 hijackers. If the Germans want to try detecting these plots early, they may want to start looking at their student-visa programs from Muslim nations.

Hamad's family tells the same story that British families and neighbors told about the suspects in the sky plot. Hamad only wanted to study languages, his mother tells Der Spiegel. "We have a pure son," she tells the reporter -- from behind her veil. His parents sent him to a Christian school, an unusual bit of background for a jihadi, but it did little to blunt his radicalism.

Besides, his parents hardly set a great example. Lebanese officials had a tap on the father, who belongs to the same Hizb-al-Tahrir group that claimed to have established the new Caliphate in Gaza. They heard him tell his son to get out of Germany as soon as he came under suspicion of the bombing attempt.

One might think that German security forces would have some investigation into the background of student visa applicants. If they had asked the Lebanese government, they might have discovered that Jihad Hamad came from a family tradition of jihadism. This additional information renders the mother's tearful insistence that her boy couldn't possibly be an extremist -- a claim made behind a veil -- almost laughable, if the subject wasn't so deadly serious.

Western nations have to understand that Islamofascists do not target them for their foreign policy; they target the West because it isn't Islamic. We need to start taking that threat seriously and performing tough investigations before offering visas to people from nations known to house terrorist organizations. Allowing the son of a Hizb-al-Tahrir officer into the country on a student visa seems very foolish, and if the Germans want to stop terrorist attacks, it has to stop that kind of foolishness as a first step towards sanity.

Olmert Dodges Independent Review Of War

Ehud Olmert has rejected calls for an independent investigation into the leadership and management of the war against Hezbollah in Lebanon, opting to stick with an internal review of the conflict split between three different government committees. Dan Izenberg writes in today's Jerusalem Post that the dodge will fool no one and may increase calls for the beleaguered Prime Minister's removal:

The Movement for Quality Government and the head of the army reservists protest movement have already declared they will continue their campaign for an independent state committee of inquiry headed by a judge. Meanwhile, University of Haifa law professor Emmanuel Gross described Olmert's proposal as a "cover-up committee." There will be many critics, and not only from the political opposition, that will agree.

The second Lebanese War raised questions regarding three major issues: the IDF's preparedness for and conduct of the war, the government's definition of its war aims and its decision-making process; and the manner in which the government and the local authorities prepared the home front for the war.
Since these three issues are interrelated, the obvious and most effective thing to do would have been to examine all of them within an integrated and holistic framework.

Instead, Olmert has chosen to establish three separate committees which have no clear links of communication, information-sharing or data analysis among them.

I have no special love for independent investigations. We just discovered -- again -- how dangerous one can become in strong political storms. Investigators and independent panels who have no accountability can take advantage of political firestorms to commit any number of abuses. They can also deliver a conclusion that fits their own political goals rather than reality or truth.

However, that being said, the solution Olmert wants seems designed for failure. Having three committees reviewing the same war but with no coordination gives one the worst of all situations: overlapping jurisdictions and bureaucratic jealousies. The resultant analysis will be fragmented and probably contradictory and will submerge Israeli politics into recriminations and conspiracy theories for years.

The only reason a politician would opt for such a scenario is to keep people from discovering the truth, and that indicates that Olmert knows a competent investigation would bury him.

I doubt the Israelis need a blue-ribbon panel to conclude that Olmert and his staff bungled the opportunity in Lebanon. The IDF troops themselves have carried that message back home, much to Olmert's chagrin. The troops performed well, but the leadership couldn't decide what kind of war they wanted to wage. They started by cautiously escalating during the first two weeks, allowing Hezbollah to adapt and redeploy early. Only when time ran out on Israel did they appear serious about actually fighting to win, and instead of the weeks Olmert's team said it would take to reach the Litani, they made it in hours when they finally took off the gloves.

The cease-fire allowed Olmert off the hook to some degree, and the end result actually favored Israel, as I have written before. However, the Israelis had the opportunity to do so much more, an opportunity that Olmert and his team wasted. Their war response took Hassan Nasrallah by surprise, and they should have exploited that in the first hours of the campaign. Olmert does not want that verdict to come from an independent panel, but Israelis won't be fooled by his musical-chairs committees. They know he blew Israel's big chance to strike a mortal blow to Hezbollah, and now they know he knows it.

Peacekeeper Muddle Exposes The Sham Of A European Union

Der Spiegel analyzes the fallout from the French hokey-pokey and European distancing from the formation of the expanded UNIFIL force in Lebanon. Now that Jacques Chirac got shamed into committing his troops to the peacekeeping force and Italy has also ponied up some of its own, the Europeans have commenced an orgy of self-congratulation. DS throws a dash of ice-cold water on the victory dance:

In the end, it wasn't just a success -- it was a big success. Almost a breakthrough. Appearing at a press conference on Friday, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan mused: "Europe has lived up to its responsibility and provided the backbone of the force."

Next up was German Foreign Minster Frank-Walter Steinmeier. "This was a success for Europe," he told the gathered reporters. If things go well in Lebanon, enthusiastic Italian Foreign Minister Massimo d'Alema said, perhaps the international peacekeeping force could later be deployed to restore order in the Gaza Strip.

But ultimately, the foreign minister's meeting in Brussels on Friday was a big piece of political theater. It provided a happy ending to a something that European leaders had threatened to turn into a farce. The 11th-hour agreement to send a 7,000-strong European contingent as part of the UN peacekeeping force for southern Lebanon created the illusion of a common foreign policy among European Union member states that doesn't truly exist. Indeed, the actual state of the EU's joint foreign policy was perhaps best expressed by Finnish Foreign Minister Erkki Tuomioka.

An angry Tuomioka told a Finnish newspaper in early August that his 24 colleagues in the EU play a "game of intrigue" and that they prepare for joint meetings as if they are preparing for "negotiations with countries of potentially hostile intent." Every single document relating to the Middle East conflict "is known within an hour in Tel Aviv and apparently Washington and Moscow, too." That, the Finn argued, is no way to forging ahead with a working common foreign policy in Europe.

The EU and Kofi Annan may "muse" upon their greatness for scratching up 7,000 troops to enforce a cease-fire that they themselves demanded and then refused to support with their own resources, but the rest of the world remains less impressed. In the end, this wasn't even an EU function, which gets to the heart of Der Spiegel's analysis.

First, the French insisted on playing a lead role in carving out the text of what would become UN Security Council Resolution 1701. Chirac joined with the US government to create the document and jointly proposed it to the UNSC. The other EU nations had little to do with the document except demand a formula for a cease-fire. When Arab nations criticized the draft, France also started criticizing it, despite their own involvement in its creation, and tried to get the US to rewrite it to meet Arab standards for approval. When the US refused to bend over in the manner of the French, Chirac settled for making the language a little more ambiguous, and the US got the votes for its approval.

At that point, the UN, the US, and the EU expected France to lead the new UNIFIL forces and meet its earlier commitment to provide 5,000 troops for the force. France instead offered 200, apparently all they could muster on short notice. Only Italy among the EU nations offered any substantial amount of troops to cover the French collapse. After receiving humiliating criticism, France finally indicated that they would provide 3,000 troops and lead UNIFIL for six months.

If that is what the EU celebrates as a major step towards becoming a world power, it explains a lot about their behavior during the twelve-year quagmire on Iraq and the current circle jerk on Iran. The EU, as demonstrated by these examples, best resembles a cat-herding exercise, where all of the cats believe they are better than all of the rest. It takes bureaucratic stumbling to the level of performance art. And while the EU powers celebrate their martial strength, bear in mind that none of them would agree to disarm Hezbollah or stop arms from crossing the border from Syria into Lebanon.

The military prowess of the EU will be on full display during this operation. If their diplomatic manuevers give us any hint of their military leadership, they will make Olmert look like von Clauswitz.

The Secret Hold In An Open Society

The hold in the Senate on the Coburn/Obama federal budget database bill has made national news, as people wonder who the anonymous obstructor could be. Hot Air has a video of Brit Hume giving the S 2590 secret hold story national coverage, and he notes that almost three-quarters of the Senate has yet to state whether they instituted the hold. Porkbusters has a running update on the explicit denials from individual Senators. Only 25 have definitively stated that they had nothing to do with the hold so far. TPM Muckraker says they have confirmed 58 Senators that are in the clear. That still leaves more than 40% who haven't bothered to address the issue. I address this in today's Heritage Foundation blog post, but I want to extend my remarks here at CQ.

This entire episode should shame every member of the Upper Chamber. Using a cheap and secret political manuever to block passage of a bill that would do more to provide open government than anything since the Freedom of Information Act is not ironic, it's cynical beyond belief. If anyone needed an example of why the nation needs S 2590, this display of political cowardice and secrecy gives perhaps the clearest one possible.

What do these men and women think we elect them to do in Washington DC? We expect our representatives to champion our interests, not cover their own expansive posteriors. The only interests served in obstructing the Coburn-Obama federal budget database is that of corruption and undue influence. At least one Senator -- and it could be more -- does not want taxpayers to know how Congress spends our money. I can think of few better reasons to kick someone out of politics for good.

The leaders of both parties should take this opportunity to eliminate the Senate tradition of secret holds. In an open society, few political manuevers should ever be secret -- only those explicitly concerning national security or private information. This hold does not qualify as either. Allowing one member of the chamber to deny the other 99 an opportunity to pass legislation is completely undemocratic, worse than a filibuster. Its secrecy only encourages political cowardice, a trait we see too often in other circumstances anyway, and it denies the American public the transparency in government we deserve.

At the very least, Bill Frist and Harry Reid should strip the mechanism of its secrecy. Some have defended the practice by posing a hypothetical situation where Congress attempts some "midnight legislation" to pass bills without enough public notice. Defenders argue that the hold allows one Senator to stall action until the public can mobilize on an issue. All that sounds great, except it doesn't explain why a hold under those circumstances has to be secret.

Frist and Reid should demand a public accounting from their caucuses. Failing that, the Senate should move for a rule change barring the practice of secret holds, just as they did with blue slips on judicial nominations a few years ago. Having these kind of star-chamber practices in the people's branch of the world's oldest democratic republic is a disgrace, a cowardly demonstration unfitting of the American tradition.

UPDATE: TPM Muckraker has a comprehensive list of all Senators who have answered with an explicit "no". I note that Harry Reid is among the missing here, but my guess is that the Secret Holder will be either Ted "Bridge To Nowhere" Stevens, Trent "Porkbusters Annoy Me" Lott, or Robert Byrd, the man who has managed to use pork to get his name everywhere in West Virginia except rest-stop toilet seats. I'd check the next transportation bill to see if that oversight gets corrected, too.

Time To Legalize Hemp? And Perhaps Marijuana?

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has a decision to make on hemp. The California legislature delivered a bill legalizing the plant for industrial purposes last week, a measure jointly authored by a San Francisco liberal and an Orange County conservative:

Seven states have passed bills supporting the farming of industrial hemp; their strategy has been to try to get permission from the Drug Enforcement Administration to proceed.

But California is the first state that would directly challenge the federal ban, arguing that it does not need a D.E.A. permit, echoing the state’s longstanding fight with the federal authorities over its legalization of medicinal marijuana. The hemp bill would require farmers who grow it to undergo crop testing to ensure their variety of cannabis is nonhallucinogenic; its authors say it has been carefully worded to avoid conflicting with the federal Controlled Substances Act.

But those efforts have not satisfied federal and state drug enforcement authorities, who argue that fields of industrial hemp would only serve as hiding places for illicit cannabis. The California Narcotic Officers Association opposes the bill, and a spokesman for the Office of National Drug Control Policy in Washington said the measure was unworkable.

Mr. Schwarzenegger, a Republican running for re-election, has been mum on his intentions, with the political calculus of hemp in California difficult to decipher. The bill was the handiwork of two very different lawmakers, Assemblyman Mark Leno, a San Francisco Democrat best known for attempting to legalize same-sex marriage, and Assemblyman Charles S. DeVore, an Orange County Republican who worked in the Pentagon as a Reagan-era political appointee.

The calculus in California should not be hard to discern. More than a decade ago the state legalized marijuana for medicinal purposes despite the fact that no official therapies exist involving its use. This measure would require hemp farmers to test their crops for the presence of THC, which would indicate that they are farming marijuana rather than hemp, which makes this more conservative than the medicinal allowance that enjoyed such wide acceptance. Had this been offered as a referendum, it surely would have easily passed.

This bill isn't really about hemp as such, but about the continuing criminalization of marijuana. California has long signaled that it wants to dump anti-marijuana laws but have been stymied by the federal government. The hemp bill is another demonstration of the difficult task in declaring a crop illegal, especially one that has such positive potential as hemp, simply to support a failing front on the war on drugs. Even conservatives in the Golden State have begun to question the resources spent on fighting marijuana.

Libertarians and conservatives share an impulse against government intrusion, but often split on anti-drug efforts. Conservatives have supported government impositions in the drug war that they would never tolerate anywhere else, such as confiscation laws, asset freezes, and the like. While conservatives will still likely support an effort to interdict narcotics and other strong drugs, at some point we have to ask ourselves if the power we grant to the federal government is worth the effort specific to marijuana.

The Governator is asking himself that question right now. It will be interesting to see the federal reaction if he signs the bill.

It's A Danger, All Right

Senator Chuck Schumer told a press conference yesterday that the UN presents a danger to the United States and especially New Yorkers, and demanded action by Kofi Annan and John Bolton to correct it:

The deteriorating condition of the United Nations headquarters should be a source of concern for firefighters and Turtle Bay residents who might be exposed to asbestos in the event of an emergency at the U.N., Senator Schumer said.

At a news conference yesterday, Mr. Schumer pledged to ask Secretary-General Annan and America's U.N.ambassador, John Bolton, to focus their attention on guiding to completion a plan to renovate the U.N.'s landmark building. The plan will cost an estimated $1.9 billion.

Mr. Schumer said yesterday that the long-considered renovation is an "American issue, but particularly a New York issue."

Oh, wait ... he's talking about the building? Oh. I guess the rampant sexual abuse of refugees by UN peacekeepers and the endemic bribery and corruption in the organization pales in significance next to an asbestos problem.

Schumer also says the lack of sprinkers in the building makes the building dangerous to its occupants and the firefighters who would have to respond to an emergency at Turtle Bay. The solution seems obvious. Knock the building down, and then pledge to rebuild it in the same manner that the UN pledges to enforce its Security Council resolutions. Let the diplomats meet in tents until the organization shows some spine in dealing with a real danger, such as Iran or North Korea.

That's a solution that keeps our heroes at the NYFD safe and gives the UN the respect it deserves.

Hamas, Getting A Clue

Golda Meir once said that Israel and the Palestinians would have peace when the latter learned to love their children more than they hate the Jews. So far we see little improvement on the latter, but the Jerusalem Post notes that Hamas may have started working on the former:

"When you walk in the streets of Gaza City, you cannot but close your eyes because of what you see there: unimaginable chaos, careless policemen, young men carrying guns and strutting with pride and families receiving condolences for their dead in the middle of the street."

This is how Ghazi Hamad, spokesman for the Hamas-controlled Palestinian Authority government and a former newspaper editor, described the situation in the Gaza Strip in an article he published on Sunday on some Palestinian news Web sites.

The article, the first of its kind by a senior Hamas official, also questioned the effectiveness of the Kassam rocket attacks and noted that since Israel evacuated the Gaza Strip, the situation there has deteriorated on all levels. It holds the armed groups responsible for the crisis and calls on them to reconsider their tactics and to stop blaming Israel for their mistakes.

"Gaza is suffering under the yoke of anarchy and the swords of thugs," Hamad wrote.

Hamad does more than just complain about the dangers of life in Gaza since the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit. The Hamas spokesman puts the blame not on the Israelis but on the armed factions that have turned the former resort area into a bloody and chaotic abbatoir. Hamad explicitly rejects Israeli blame, stating that this mindset is one of the reasons Palestinians cannot create law and order on the streets of the territory.

Hamad also notes the failure of the Palestinian actions against Israel in achieving any sort of benefit to Gazans. Since the Kassams started flying out of Gaza following the Israeli withdrawal, Palestinian terrorists have killed less than a dozen Israelis. In the same period, over 500 Palestinians have died and most of the internal infrastructure of Gaza has been destroyed. If anyone in Gaza thinks that looks like victory or a long-term strategy to wear down the Israelis, it isn't Hamad.

Hamad isn't counseling any sort of rapprochement with Israel, at least not yet. His missive appears to be aimed at the terrorist groups that have turned Gaza into a Wild West of the Middle East. He wants an end to the anarchy in the streets and a return to civilization in Gaza. He doesn't exclude Hamas from the indictment he levels of all groups having been "infected with the bacteria of stupidity", although he does blame Fatah and Mahmoud Abbas for sitting on the sidelines and not joining with Hamas to put an end to the lawlessness.

This missive isn't a recognition of Israel. It's not even a call to abandon terrorism. It is, however, the first sign that Hamas is willing to blame Palestinians for Palestinian problems, and to recognize that they have blown the opportunity to rule themselves in a civilized manner in front of the whole world. This isn't a victory, but it's the first battle of getting the Palestinians to love life more than death and to take ownership of their own actions.

Economic Simplemindedness Of The Wal-Mart War

The war Democrats have declared on Wal-Mart on behalf of the poor will make that constituency worse off, Sebastion Mallaby concludes in his Washington Post column today. Not only does the cost savings at Wal-Mart and other big-box discounters allow poor families to save 25% on their food bills, it provides a better economic safety net than food stamps:

Hillary Clinton and Sen. John Kerry have attacked Wal-Mart for offering health coverage to too few workers. But Kerry's former economic adviser, Jason Furman of New York University, concluded in a paper last year that Wal-Mart's health benefits are about as generous as those of comparable employers. Moreover, Clinton and Kerry know perfectly well that market pressures limit the health coverage that companies can provide. After all, both senators have proposed expansions in government health provision precisely on the premise that the private sector can't pay for all of it.

The truth is that none of these Democrats can resist dumb economic populism. Even though we are not in a recession, and even though the presidential primaries are more than a year away, the DLC crowd is pandering shamelessly to the left of the party -- perhaps in the knowledge that the grocery workers union, which launched the anti-Wal-Mart campaign, is strong in the key state of Iowa.

For a party that needs the votes of Wal-Mart's customers, this is a questionable strategy. But there is more than politics at stake. According to a paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research by Jerry Hausman and Ephraim Leibtag, neither of whom received funding from Wal-Mart, big-box stores led by Wal-Mart reduce families' food bills by one-fourth. Because Wal-Mart's price-cutting also has a big impact on the non-food stuff it peddles, it saves U.S. consumers upward of $200 billion a year, making it a larger booster of family welfare than the federal government's $33 billion food-stamp program.

Mallaby bashes Democrats for surrendering to their economically-statist Left in their mid-term campaign to demonize Wal-Mart. I noted this new offensive from the party two weeks ago, and Mallaby confirms that the entire party has fallen in line. The Democratic Leadership Council, a normally centrist caucus, has its last three chairmen all taking part in anti-Wal-Mart demonstrations this season. Tom Vilsack, the Iowa governor with rumored presidential aspirations and the current DLC leader, made sure to get in front of this war to mollify the union bosses.

And this is, of course, why the Democrats have adopted this mantle. They need to shore up their union support, and Wal-Mart is the bete noir of organized labor. They have had no success in penetrating Wal-Mart's labor force, and that failure has cut into their revenue -- revenue that unions can put to political uses. Since the Democrats overwhelmingly benefit from those political uses, the Democrats have decided to attack Wal-Mart to the point where the unions can gain a foothold with the retailer's employees.

Democrats argue that Wal-Mart pays below-market compensation to its employees, a ludicrous argument in a free market. As Mallaby notes, Wal-Mart would have no employees if it paid below the market rate. Their average compensation matches what retailers pay their employees, at least non-union retailers. John Kerry's own economic advisor concluded that their benefits package matches that of other employers in their class. If it didn't, the better workers would gravitate towards the better-compensated jobs, leaving Wal-Mart understaffed.

The Democratic cure would damage the very people that the party claims to champion. None of these economic thinkers such as Kerry, Vilsack, Clinton, or Bayh include what will happen to prices at Wal-Mart if they had to suddenly raised compensation above market levels. It would force other retailers to raise compensation, of course, but it would also force all of them to raise prices to cover for the extra expense -- or to lay off a compensatory amount of the workforce to keep internal costs stable. Low-income workers would find their buying power diminished and they would face more competition for employment from the former workers of Wal-Mart.

Anyone who actually runs a business and has responsibility for a profit-and-loss statement understands the impact of the Democratic anti-business crusade. Of course, that doesn't include Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Howard Dean, and the rest of the hysterics screeching about the evils of a free market.

Lantos: No Lebanon Aid Until Beirut Acts Responsibly

Rep. Tom Lantos wants Congress to perform the task that the United Nations appears unwilling or incapable of doing: forcing Lebanon to take responsibility for its own sovereignty. The ranking member of the House International Relations Committee wants to suspend aid to Lebanon until the Fuad Siniora government agrees to fully implement UN Security Council Resolution 1701:

A congressman said Sunday he would ask the U.S. administration to freeze the $230 million aid package to Lebanon proposed by President Bush until the Lebanese government takes control of its borders with Syria and prevents arms smuggling to Hezbollah guerrillas. ...

Lantos said he told Olmert the U.S. aid package to Lebanon was important, "but that this package should be withheld until the Lebanese government displays responsibility."

"A porous Syrian-Lebanon border will only invite the repetition of Hezbollah attacks in the future. Hezbollah must not be allowed to rearm again," he said.

This seems to be the right move at this point. With Kofi Annan rapidly retreating from any UN responsibility under 1701 and Siniora trying desperately to give Hezbollah a pass on compliance, it will fall to the member nations to underscore the need for Lebanese compliance. It makes a return trip from Israel by the IDF less likely if Western aid gets tied to the successful implementation of all requirements of the cease-fire.

It does have its risks. Iran has already sent plenty of cash to Hezbollah, which it has used to give large sums of cash to a number of families in the sub-Litani region. A de facto sanctions regime from the West leave Iran as the only benefactor willing to spend big cash in the region to rebuild the damaged infrastructure. That puts even more influence in the hands of the mullahcracy, a situation that neither the US nor Israel wants to encourage.

However, this situation becomes a catch-22 at this point. If the West cuts off aid, then Iranian money buys influence in a market with no competition. If we do not insist on full implementation of 1701, then Hezbollah gets re-armed and re-deployed on the Blue Line and starts conducting provocative attacks again. Either way, Iran can gain, but the odds are better for the West in the former rather than the latter. We want to support real reform in Lebanon, but we do not want to help fund the rebuilding of terrorist infrastructure, which is what our money will allow while Siniora avoids implementing the terms of the cease-fire.

Iraqi PM: Iraq Will Never Have Civil War

Nouri al-Maliki told CNN last night that Iraq would never fall into civil war despite the sectarian violence currently plaguing the capital. He also predicted that Coalition troops could start significant drawdowns within months as Iraqi forces take control of more provinces:

On a day in which at least 46 people were killed, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said he did not foresee a civil war in Iraq and that violence in his country was abating.

"In Iraq, we'll never be in civil war," al-Maliki told CNN's "Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer." ...

Asked when coalition troops might leave, the Iraqi leader was equivocal.

"It could be a year or less, or a few months," he said. "This has to do with the -- with our success of the democratic -- or the political process in Iraq, and to have the security agencies to protect this process."

Maliki has to remain optimistic, and recent events may help fuel his insistence on the inevitability of stability. The new security plan appeared to have some success, although yesterday did have almost four dozen deaths. If the Iraqis and the Americans cannot exercise more control over the sectarian militias and start to disband them, the street fighting will escalate into at least a civil insurrection in Iraq's largest city. That will look a lot like a civil war, even if the elected government holds the rest of the country with little problem.

One event that CNN reported gives more hope. A Sunni legislator has emerged alive after two months in captivity. Tayseer al-Mashhadani, one of Iraq's female politicians, disappeared in early July, but no one claimed responsibility for her abduction or offered any demands for her release. No one is quite sure who kidnapped her or why she was let go, even though the kidnapping was well-planned.

Another hopeful sign is the recent conference Maliki hosted to promote national unity. Over 400 politicians and tribal leaders met with the Iraqi PM to plan for domestic peace. The conference attendees agreed to help foster understanding, and Maliki told them to urge their followers to think of themselves as Iraqis first and above all. If that message can take hold, then Maliki could avoid the civil war he insists will never happen. We hope time proves him correct.

Nasrallah: Oops! Our Bad

Hezbollah admits that the war they provoked caught them by surprise in a television interview today. Hassan Nasrallah also told the Lebanese that he would not have ordered the operation had he known of the potential Israeli response:

"We did not think, even 1 percent, that the capture would lead to a war at this time and of this magnitude. You ask me, if I had known on July 11 ... that the operation would lead to such a war, would I do it? I say no, absolutely not," he said in an interview with Lebanon's New TV station. ...

Nasrallah also said the United Nations and Italy already had initiated "contacts" about beginning negotiations on a prisoner swap. Israeli officials have been refusing to comment on the record about the prospects of a prisoner exchange, citing the extreme sensitivity of the issue.

But military officials said earlier this month that Israel is holding 13 Hezbollah prisoners and the bodies of dozens of guerrillas that it could swap for the two captive soldiers, but would not include any Palestinian prisoners in such a deal.

Nasrallah gave this interview while remaining hidden; he says he will not come out in public because the Israelis would assassinate him if he did. The interview also sounds rather strange -- a terrorist leader having to explain his actions to the people of his nation. Winners do not have to give explanations. Winners do not have to live the rest of their lives in hiding. The notion that Hezbollah won anything in this conflict seems less believable every day.

The Israelis appear more resolute than the initial reports indicated this morning. Israel appears to be holding a hard line on exactly which prisoners they will trade for their soldiers. If all Nasrallah can get back are the bodies of his own men and the handful of jihadis who got captured during the fighting, the Lebanese people will see who really won this war -- and they will not take very kindly to Hezbollah's destruction of the nation just for the sake of their Syrian and Iranian paymasters.

A Fair Day For A Fair Broadcast

The Northern Alliance Radio Network returns to the Minnesota State Fair this afternoon on its abbreviated Sunday schedule. Mitch and I will be on the air from noon to 2 pm CT at the AM 1280 The Patriot booth, while King and Michael follow us from 2 - 4 pm CT. Be sure to stop by the booth, tune us in, or catch our Internet stream at The Patriot's website to join us! If you want to take part in the conversation, call us at 651-289-4488.

UPDATE, 11:27 AM: I've breached security here at the Patriot's booth and have commandeered their computer. It's a beautiful morning here, a perfect fair-going day. If you're in town, you really should be at the State Fair.

A Look At War Correspondents

Jules Crittendon pens a moving column about the life of a war correspondent, a subject made more topical by the release of Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig from captivity in Gaza. He describes from personal experience the internal conflict of the enthusiasm for covering so much misery:

My buddy Sig is back in Iraq, in Ramadi. He wrote about hearing AK fire, followed by mortars ... a need to hunker down at that point ... and the crack of M4s on the roof.He liked the familiar feel of adrenalin in his veins again.Sig has been counseled for post-traumatic stress, but he still goes back. I remember when Sig and I spent two days in a hotel room in D.C., drinking bourbon and just talking at each other non-stop, all of it pouring out.

I remember that feeling Sig described in his email from Ramadi, when I got over my own dread and discovered that I loved combat, even with its moments of uncertainty and terror. Then, when two newsmen I knew were dead, the horrible feeling that I would be dead soon too and that my children would be weeping like theirs were.Four other newsmen died in the next two days, but I didn’t.I got to come home.

Home is where the rage comes out. Home is where you remember a dead kid and fight back tears.Home is where you find yourself wishing you could be back in the most horrible of places.Then someone ends up brain-damaged, or someone is taken hostage and you see her pleading for her life on video, and you wonder what kind of person you must be to still want to be there.

Bloggers have often castigated "balcony journalists" who report on the war from the safety of a hotel room, but we also criticize them for talking with terrorists out in the field. It's a question of balance, of course, and our basic objections have come from the lack of coverage for all of the successes we have had in Iraq. We need to be careful to reject the journalism while respecting the journalists who go out into the field to get the stories.

Two days ago I criticized Ellen Knickmeyer and the Washington Post for going into harm's way to file a banal piece about Shi'ite death squads in Baghdad. It's an example of the difference. Knickmeyer had the courage to go outside the Green Zone to try to get stories on the war effort, and I respect that. I wish that Knickmeyer had spent her time to better use by telling us something we didn't already know, perhaps by riding along with American and Iraqi patrols in Baghdad and reporting in more detail on the new security plan and how it plays out on Baghdad streets. Even better, I'd like a better report about how Iraqi security is performing in other provinces, especially those which have either transitioned to Iraqi control or are about to do so.

Like Jill Carroll, though, at least Knickmeyer has the courage to go out and get her own stories rather than just give us an explosion count and a recap of the resultant hand-wringing. Crittendon reminds us that some of these people don't come home as a price for that courage.

Most Democratic Candidates Rejecting Withdrawal Timetable

Democrats in competitive Congressional races have distanced themselves from the activist wing of their party, rejecting calls for a timetable to withdraw from Iraq and backing the Bush administration's insistence on victory instead of retreat. This surprising survey redefines the "mainstream" of political thought in a manner that some Democrats will strongly dislike:

Most Democratic candidates in competitive congressional races are opposed to setting a timetable for pulling U.S. troops out of Iraq, rejecting pressure from liberal activists to demand a quick end to the three-year-old military conflict.

Of the 59 Democrats in hotly contested House and Senate races, a majority agree with the Bush administration that it would be unwise to set a specific schedule for troop withdrawal, and only a few are calling for substantial troop reductions to begin this year, according to a Washington Post survey of the campaigns.

The large number of Democrats opposed to a strict timeline for ending the military operations runs contrary to the assertion by President Bush and top Republicans that Democrats want to "cut and run" amid mounting casualties and signs of civil war. At the same time, the decision by many Democrats to refrain from advocating a specific plan for withdrawal complicates their leaders' efforts to convince voters that they offer a clear new direction for the increasingly unpopular war.

George Bush and the GOP can be forgiven for that characterization of the Democrats since most of their leaders continue to demand unconditional withdrawal. Led by John Kerry and Russ Feingold, and underscored by the dark-horse victory of Ned Lamont in Connecticut's Senate primary, Democrats have demanded an end to the mission in Iraq since last fall. Their street activists and money raisers have not only demanded that but also the impeachment of George Bush for getting us into Iraq in the first place.

As the Post reports, even the Democrats who won't call for a timetable avoid talking about the war at all. If they do nothing but complain about the war, they gain the support of the MoveOn wing without losing the moderates. Of course, this means they provide no explanation or plan whatsoever about how to succeed in Iraq. They see this as an opportunity to score points by blaming Bush without the messy task of formulating a coherent policy of their own -- a strategy they also employed in 2002 and 2004, with no success at all.

This lack of courage in the convictions of Democratic candidates shows that the mainstream of political thought -- even among Democrats -- does not run in anti-war defeatism. In fact, this candidate survey shows that Joe Lieberman exemplifies the Democratic center much better than Ned Lamont. Despite all of the money and demonstrations produced by MoveOn and International ANSWER, Americans still know that we cannot allow terrorists to push us out of Iraq or anywhere else. Voters will also understand that, once again, the Democrats intent to run on Bush-hatred and nothing else of substance. And if the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, the Democrats have allowed the inmates to take ownership of the asylum for a third straight electoral cycle.

Just A Plame Waste Of Time

Michael Isikoff and David Corn have a new book coming out that reveals the inside details of the leak that allowed Valerie Plame's identity as a CIA agent to be uncovered. As widely speculated, the leak came from Richard Armitage, Colin Powell's key deputy, and it came without malicious intent:

In the early morning of Oct. 1, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell received an urgent phone call from his No. 2 at the State Department. Richard Armitage was clearly agitated. As recounted in a new book, "Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War," Armitage had been at home reading the newspaper and had come across a column by journalist Robert Novak. Months earlier, Novak had caused a huge stir when he revealed that Valerie Plame, wife of Iraq-war critic Joseph Wilson, was a CIA officer. Ever since, Washington had been trying to find out who leaked the information to Novak. The columnist himself had kept quiet. But now, in a second column, Novak provided a tantalizing clue: his primary source, he wrote, was a "senior administration official" who was "not a partisan gunslinger." Armitage was shaken. After reading the column, he knew immediately who the leaker was. On the phone with Powell that morning, Armitage was "in deep distress," says a source directly familiar with the conversation who asked not to be identified because of legal sensitivities. "I'm sure he's talking about me." ...

Armitage's central role as the primary source on Plame is detailed for the first time in "Hubris," which recounts the leak case and the inside battles at the CIA and White House in the run-up to the war. The disclosures about Armitage, gleaned from interviews with colleagues, friends and lawyers directly involved in the case, underscore one of the ironies of the Plame investigation: that the initial leak, seized on by administration critics as evidence of how far the White House was willing to go to smear an opponent, came from a man who had no apparent intention of harming anyone.

This means that the Department of Justice knew the source of the Plame leak within four months of its occurrence. It also knew that the leak had no malicious intent. Patrick Fitzgerald, who almost certainly knew of it within the first days of his investigation, never attempted to indict the man whom he knew leaked the information. Why, then, has Fitzgerald's mandate continued after the first week of October?

Fitzgerald took the case on September 26 (see my first update -- this is incorrect). If this book is accurate about its dates, the DoJ and Fitzgerald would have known about Armitage's role as the source of the leak five days later. Instead of either charging Armitage or closing down the investigation, Fitzgerald went on a witch hunt. He didn't even talk to Scooter Libby until two weeks after Armitage's confession. A year later, Fitzgerald had reporters Judith Miller and Matthew Cooper imprisoned for contempt of court for refusing to divulge a source about a leaker from whom Fitzgerald had already received a confession.

This shows the danger of independent investigators who answer to star chambers instead of the elected representatives that have electoral accountability. The entire Fitzgerald investigation is a massive waste of money and energy, an ego project for one man, a wild-goose chase without the goose. Up to now, we all thought that Armitage never came forward or did so much later in the process. This time line shows Fitzgerald as a dangerous Cotton Mather with a briefcase. What else should we think of a prosecutor who hauls people into court and jails them for contempt when his culprit confessed at the very beginning?

Addendum: The more I think about this, the angrier I get -- and not just at Patrick Fitzgerald. Richard Armitage confessed to the DoJ in October 2003, and then sat on his ass for the next three years as the media and the Left play this into a paranoid fantasy of conspiracies and revenge. I know Armitage dislikes Rove, Libby, Cheney, and Bush, but what kind of man sits around while the world accuses people of a "crime" that he himself committed? Armitage did nothing while the nation spent years and millions of dollars chasing a series of red herrings, never speaking out to remove the mystery and end the witch hunt. Even three years later, Armitage hasn't mustered the testicular fortitude to publicly admit that he leaked Plame's identity and status; he has Isikoff and Corn do it for him.

Armitage should be through in politics, but he'll catch on with a presidential campaign this year. Watch very carefully to see which one has him as an "advisor" on foreign affairs. It'll reflect poorly on the candidate who continues an association with this bitter apparatchik.

UPDATE: One commenter notes that Fitzgerald didn't get assigned to this case until December 2003. In my opinion, that makes this worse. Fitzgerald should have brought the entire investigation to a close as soon as he got briefed on Armitage's confession.

UPDATE II: The Political Pit Bull has video of Novak on Meet The Press this morning. Novak tells Tim Russert, "I believe it is way past time for my source to come forward." Some now argue that Fitzgerald probably told Armitage to keep his mouth shut, but since Armitage had to know that Fitzgerald was using this as an excuse for a political witch hunt, his silence only abetted Fitzgerald's abuse of power; it sounds as if Novak agrees. Shame on Armitage for his silence.

UPDATE III: And shame on Colin Powell, too, who also knew by October 1, 2003, where the leak originated. He didn't have to stay silent -- he could have told the truth and ended this witch hunt -- but he also chose to stay silent. And please note from the Isikoff/Corn text in the excerpt that their source for this Powell/Armitage conversation has to be -- either Armitage or Powell, and almost certainly Armitage, who still fears legal repercussions.

UPDATE IV: Be sure to read Tom Maguire's post for a detailed look at the case as it stands with this revelation.

UPDATE V: Andy McCarthy links to this post from The Corner, but he missed the update I wrote earlier this morning, around 11:30 am CT, just before our show today. However, I neglected to edit the paragraph to point to the update, so his omission is more my fault than his. I've fixed it now.

Centanni, Wiig Released After 'Conversion'

Kidnapped journalists Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig won their release and have returned to safety. Their abductors only freed them after "converting" the pair to the Religion of Peace^TM at gunpoint:

Two FOX News journalists were released by their kidnappers Sunday, nearly two weeks after they were taken hostage in the Gaza Strip. ...

"We were forced to convert to Islam at gunpoint," Centanni told FOX News. "Don't get me wrong here. I have the highest respect for Islam, and I learned a lot of good things about it, but it was something we felt we had to do because they had the guns, and we didn't know what the hell was going on." ...

Later Sunday, the two journalists made a joint appearance with Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas. Haniyeh, Centanni and Wiig sat in a circle of chairs at the Beach Hotel. Wiig was also accompanied by his wife, Anita McNaught.

This is a better end to the drama than most people believed we would get. The initial reluctance of the group to claim responsibility for the kidnapping or to issue any demands led some to believe that the pair had been assassinated instead of kidnapped. When the terrorists finally issued commands, they were too fantastic to believe that the kidnapping would end happily.

It certainly ended happily for Ismail Haniyeh. The Hamas Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority got to make himself look like a hero to the West, and thankfully this motivation proved more valuable than two dead Western journalists for his propaganda purposes. Haniyeh made sure that he got to hold a press conference with the two former hostages to milk every bit of good press he could manufacture.

On top of that, Haniyeh gave himself the opportunity to tell journalists that not only did al-Qaeda have no part in this abduction, but that "Al Qaeda as an organization does not exist in the Gaza Strip." This contradicts intelligence coming from a number of Western sources that AQ has made a big push while Gaza remains in chaos. Even if AQ has made few inroads, though, Gaza still has Islamic Jihad, Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, and Hamas itself as active terrorist organizations in charge of the territory.

The Holy Jihad Brigade apparently wants to include themselves among the Big Three of Palestinian terrorism. They have a strange way of applying. Besides forcing the conversion of the two to Islam, they made them play dress-up and recorded a degrading video of the pair denouncing the West in Arabic robes. I'm not sure who they thought such a display would convince, but Centanni and Wiig wisely played along with the demands, and now this laughable statement gives evidence of the childish and intellectually stunted nature of Palestinian terrorism. Even Haniyeh will be embarrassed by that show.

Michelle Malkin has a great roundup of coverage to this story.

UPDATE: Allahpundit has the conversion video.

Prisoner Swap Deal In Progress?

Egyptian sources told a Cairo newspaper that a deal to release kidnapped IDF soldiers has been made, and the Israelis will swap Palestinian prisoners in exchange:

The Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram said Sunday morning that according to high-ranking Egyptian sources, an exchange deal is set to take place between Israel and Hizbullah within the next two or three weeks, Israel Radio reported.

The first stage of the agreement would be the release of the two soldiers kidnapped by Hizbullah last month, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, the report said. The next stage, the sources said, would be Israel's release of Palestinian prisoners a day or two after the soldiers are returned.

A similar deal has been made with the Gaza kidnappers of Gilad Shalit. the newspaper reported. All exchanges will be made within the next three weeks.

If this is true, then Israel has made a big mistake. One of the few real gains of the four-week war in Lebanon and the three-month incursion into Gaza has been the removal of the prisoner-exchance incentives for terrorist kidnappings. The Israeli response to the abductions surprised Hamas and Hezbollah, who assumed that the Israelis would simply toss a few bombs over a couple of days and then negotiate prisoner swaps on the 400:1 ratio normally used. Now the Israelis have undermined whatever deterrence their military response gained them.

Did I say Ehud Olmert would last until Yom Kippur? I may have overstated his popularity, if Olmert coughs up hundreds of Palestinian prisoners after having gone to war over the kidnappings.