I Think We Got Their Attention

Guess who wants to come back to the table?

North Korea wants six-party talks on the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula to continue, Deputy Russian Foreign Minister Alexander Alexeyev said Sunday following talks with his North Korean counterpart, Russia's Interfax news agency reported.

"The North Korean side repeatedly insisted that the six-sided process should continue, that it is not rejecting six-sided negotiations, and that the aim of the full denuclearization of the Korean peninsula remains," Alexeyev said.

He made the comments in Beijing en route to Seoul from Pyongyang, where he held talks with his North Korean counterpart Kim Ky-kwan, the news agency said.

"My North Korean colleagues said several times that Pyongyang would not under any circumstances pass on its nuclear capabilities to another country, or use them against anyone," Alexeyev said.

Is Kim running short on that French brandy already?

Sea Of Blue? (Updated)

We're a little more than three weeks out from the midterm elections, and a sense of pessimism can be sensed from the Right. It's expressed best, although briefly, by Power Line, which takes a look at the polling reports at Real Clear Politics and sees a "sea of blue". Dafydd at Big Lizards sees most of the races that give Power Line the blues as too close to call. Hugh Hewitt remains as optimistic as ever, but Hugh is an undying font of optimism anyway.

I'm inclined to lean towards Dafydd's analysis, which you should read in full. The GOP will no doubt lose seats in the midterms, but I'm not sure that the Democrats have enough momentum to wrest control of either chamber. The Senate races are more of a national campaign, but the Democrats have to pick up six seats -- and they're likely going to lose New Jersey, which makes that difficult. They could lose Maryland as well; Steele's close to Cardin and the GOTV efforts there will make the difference. Mike DeWine has rebounded against Sherrod Brown in Ohio, but that's a day-to-day thing at best.

In the House, the effort seems even more difficult. RCP identifies the most likely districts for Republican losses, but after the first seven, it seems the rest are within the margin of error in the polling. House races are fought on a more local basis than national, and the Democrats really haven't defined a national electoral strategy in any case. On a district-by-district basis, it's hard to read a massive tide of blue into the numbers that RCP has in contested House races.

I do expect this midterm to provide the first Republican setback in four elections, a not-uncommon dynamic in the sixth year of a modern Presidency. The numbers do not support the rout of "astonishing proportions" that Power Line predicts, but they do show the urgency of focusing on the winning messages and policies that won three straight elections for the Republicans in the final three weeks of this campaign. The GOP should start with the economy and press home the pocketbook advantage.

UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds does not work in the long form often enough, and proves what we're missing with his well-written analysis of the woes facing the Republicans in this election. It's well-written but not entirely convincing. He argues that five major errors in the last session of Congress have doomed the Republicans:

1. Terri Schiavo
2. Harriet Miers
3. Dubai port-security scandal
4. Immigration
5. William Jefferson and Denny Hastert's unexpected defense of him

I see these as overblown issues for the most part, and only with immigration does Glenn get to the point. The Republicans in Congress have damaged the enthusiasm of their base because they have dropped the issues that mattered most to it. Immigration is definitely one of these issues. They wound up doing what the base wanted -- passing a border-barrier bill -- but it took them far too long to get it done. After 9/11, and especially after the 9/11 Commission report, the Republicans had the opportunity to push through the border-security solution that Congress ignored in the 1986 amnesty.

But it's more than just immigration. Republicans built their majority on the promise of smaller, more efficient, and less intrusive government. During the Clinton administration, they stuck to the program. When Bush took office, the base expected the GOP to take off the shackles and really begin to reduce the federal government in significant ways. Their voters also expected the Republicans to reform the pork-barrel politics that they had decried during the last days of the Democratic majority.

That did not happen. The size of the federal government has grown significantly and steadily over the last six years, even in discretionary spending. They have done little to rein in entitlement spending. The GOP gets high marks for the courage to debate Social Security, but lose all of them for their addition of the new prescription-medication entitlement. They have also proven themselves just as likely as their Democratic colleagues to feed at the pork trough.

It's this relentless sameness that has damaged the Republicans among their base and killed their enthusiasm. The GOP has proven themselves to be not much different than the Democrats, and the argument that Democratic control would be worse is not ever going to generate much enthusiasm.

I don't believe we're seeing a blue tidal wave. However, the Republican Party's midterm woes come from Republican failures to match their actions to their rhetoric.

One final note: some of Glenn's readers take him to task for presenting analysis rather than cheerleading. That's hardly fair to Glenn and to any of us who believe that telling the truth is the only way we'll ever see any improvement.

UPDATE II: Bruce Kesler disagrees and thinks the House Republicans have earned a return to the majority.

UN Security Council Agrees On Sanctions

The US says that the five permanent members of the UN Security Council have reached agreement on the final language for the resolution that will impose sanctions on North Korea. The agreement comes just before the scheduled UNSC vote:

The United States, Britain and France overcame last-minute differences with Russia and China on a U.N. resolution imposing punishing sanctions on North Korea, U.S. Ambassador John Bolton said Saturday.

"We are very pleased at this outcome and look forward to the council's imminent adoption of the resolution, co-sponsored by all 15 council members," U.S. Ambassador John Bolton told reporters after a brief closed council meeting.

The Security Council was expected to approve the resolution unanimously Saturday afternoon.

The language will have an explicit disavowal of military action, but Kim Jong-Il has said he will consider any such resolution an act of war. China's support for the sanctions might convince him otherwise. More details as they become available ...

UPDATE: In the meantime, Major Mike takes down John Kerry and his comments about Kim's "Bush bomb" in this post.

UPDATE II: The new agreement also bans sale on a moderate range of military hardware, not all arms, as had been demanded by the US originally. It still ends the sale of tanks, warships, combat aircraft and missiles.

UPDATE III: UNSC passes sanctions unanimously:

The UN Security Council has voted unanimously in favour of a resolution imposing sanctions on North Korea over its claimed nuclear test.

Resolution 1718 includes a ban on imports on many military items and imposes financial sanctions, but is not backed by the threat of military force.

The vote had been delayed because of concerns raised by China and Russia about the US-proposed draft text.

The ball is in Kim's court now.

Northern Alliance Radio On The Air

Mitch Berg and I will be taking to the airwaves again today for the Northern Alliance Radio Network, starting at 1 pm CT on AM 1280 The Patriot. We'll be discussing the events of the past week, including Harry Reid and his land deals and the prospects of the upcoming election. If you're not in the Twin Cities, listen to the Internet stream on the station web site, and join the conversation by calling 651-289-4488.

The Answers To The FedSpending Pop Quiz

On October 3rd, I posted about the coming Internet sensation for pork-barrel spending foes: FedSpending.org. The interactive database provided by OMB Watch and the Sunlight Foundation holds five years of federal spending on contracts and grants, sortable by congressional district and containing plenty of details on the projects the money supported. The data comprises six years of spending, allowing for the proper historical context. OMB Watch and the Sunlight Foundation spent a lot of time and money on this project when the Coburn-Obama federal budget database seemed very unlikely to pass, and now it serves as a benchmark for pork investigators to demand from the federal site when it launches.

When I wrote the post, I had been given access to the beta site, but only on the condition that I didn't reveal any of the data -- which was really frustrating, because the site provided so many interesting nuggets of information. However, I did write a series of questions based on a few of the searches I ran, and promised that CQ readers could find the answers on the site. In case you haven't peeked at it yet, I'll give you the answer key to those questions now.

Pencils down, students!

1. What percentage of federal contracts come from full and open competitive bids?

For the six-year period provided by FedSpending, only 40.61% of all federal contracts come from full and open competitive bids in which multiple bids were received. Another 9.95% comes from full and open bid situations but where only the one bid was received, for a total of 50.56%. That number is not improving, either. in FY 2005, the combined categories only accounted for 47%.

25% of federal contracts come from no-bid awards, and that excludes follow-on contracts.

2. What contractor gets the highest percentage of federal contracts?

Lockheed Martin got 6.49% of all federal contracts for FY2005, which came to nearly $25 billion dollars. Only 37% of that came from full and open competition; the rest came from no-bids or excluded-sources bids. The second-highest category came from operation of government facilities, by the way, and not the defense materiel or R&D efforts which came in at positions 1, 3, 4, & 5.

3. What state has four of the top eight Congressional districts for federal grant recipients?

Florida. Connie Mack's FL-14 tops the list, followed by FL-13 at #3 (Katherine Harris), FL-2 at #6 (Allen Boyd), and FL-15 at #8 (Dave Weldon). FL-1 (Jeff Miller) comes in at #11. Where's Minnesota? Our first entry is at #43, with MN-04 (Betty McCollum). My own district, MN-02 (John Kline), comes it at #58.

4. Where does administrative/management support rank in the list of federal contract types?

It's the second-highest contract type awarded by the federal government, only outstripped by research and development. We spent $44.9 billion on it in FY2005. This is separate from facilities operation (#4, $21.1B). It far outpaces what we spent on aircraft and aircraft parts (#6, $17.6B) and ships (#19, $6.6B). Bear in mind that the contracts are for outside administrative/management support, in relation to all of the contracts for other purposes. The federal salaries of government employees are not part of these calculations.

5. Which federal contractor won 94.7% of its contracts in full and open competition?

You're going to laugh when you read this, but it's ... Halliburton. Halliburton is sixth on the list of government contractors, with $6 billion in FY 2005 contracts, one-quarter of what Lockheed Martin received. Almost all of that came from Army contracts, and almost all of it ($5.4B) went to logistics support. They got 94.7% of their contracts in full and open competition in multibid scenarios, and another 4.7% of them from full and open competition where only the winning bid got submitted. Only 0.6% of their contracts came from any kind of restricted bid process, far away from the overall trend in federal contracting.

Did we all pass? And do CQ readers have any questions they would like to see on the next quiz? If so, you know where to do your research.

Dialogue

One of the more unfortunate and utterly predictable reactions to Pope Benedict XVI's speech at the University of Regensburg -- which called for dialogue between faiths -- was the violence, death threats, and demands for submission by Muslims worldwide. Moderate Muslims scolded the Pope for daring to criticize apparent inconsistencies in Islam, and even some Westerners who purport to uphold freedom of speech told the Pope he should have kept his mouth shut. The Muslim reaction resulted in at least one murder, a rather chilling response to a call for open and honest dialogue.

After a series of apologies and clarifications, some Muslim scholars have finally answered the Pope's call. Islamica Magazine has created a panel of dozens of Islamic scholars, and they have crafted a scholarly response to the Regensburg speech:

An open letter to the Pope from 38 top Muslim clerics in various countries accepts his expressions of regret for his controversial speech on Islam.

But the lengthy letter carried on the website of Islamica magazine also points out "errors" and "mistakes" in the Pope's speech.

The clerics' letter is due to be passed to the Vatican on Sunday.

Islamica Magazine stated in its press release that the letter intends on addressing "misconceptions" of Islam in the Western world:

The letter is being sent, in the spirit of goodwill, to address some of the controversial remarks made by Pope Benedict XVI during his lecture at the University of Regensburg in Germany on Sept. 12, 2006. The letter tackles the main issues raised by the Pope in his discussion of a debate between the medieval Emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an 'educated Persian' such as compulsion in religion, reason and faith, forced conversion, the understanding of 'Jihad' or 'Holy War,' and the relationship between Christianity and Islam.

The Muslim signatories accept the Pope's personal expression of sorrow and assurance that the controversial quote did not reflect his personal opinion. At the same time, the letter represents an attempt to engage with the Papacy on theological grounds in order to tackle wide ranging misconceptions about Islam in the Western world.

Islamica also has the letter available on its website, but in a graphical form only. They will publish the text on Sunday, the same time that the letter will be received by the Papal Nuncio. However, the tone of the letter seems very academic, absent the passions of the millions of protestors. The first argument they tackle is the Pope's comments about the use of violence for conversion:

You mention that "according to the experts" the verse which begins, There is no compulsion in religion (al-Baqarah 2:256) is from the early period when the Prophet "was still powerless and under threat," but this is incorrect. In fact this verse is acknowledged to belong to the period of Quranic revelation corresponding to the political and military ascendancy of the young Muslim community. There is no compulsion in religion was not a command for Muslims to remain steadfast in the face of the desire of their oppressors to force them to renounce their faith, but was a reminder to Muslims themselves, once they had power, that they could not force another's heart to believe.

I'd have to return to the Regensburg speech, but I think that was the point of Benedict's reference -- that Muslim leaders do not live by that standard. For that matter, one could then ask why non-Muslims had their economic and professional opportunities significantly proscribed by the Qur'an and Mohammed's edicts, which also imposed a tax (jizya) on non-Muslims. After all, there are many varieties of compulsion, and those appear to be simply more subtle compulsions to convert.

One finds many points to debate with the scholarly arguments presented in the Islamica letter, but that's the entire point. The letter provides that kind of Socratic debate which has been lacking since the Manuel dialogue, and that was the point Benedict made during his Regensburg speech. The collected Islamic scholars -- and they come from hotspots like Iran, Oman, Chechnya, and Egypt -- have chosen to demonstrate more confidence in their faith and its intellectual standing than the massive numbers of rioters that magically appear every time a criticism of Islam appears in the West, spurred on by imams that value totalitarian control over faith and reason.

I am not a mindless Utopian. Dialogue does not solve all problems. However, the refusal to engage in dialogue solves no problems at all and creates all kinds of new problems, as we saw with the Danish Prophet cartoons and the Regensburg speech itself. Perhaps the example of the signatories to the Islamica letter will prompt Muslims worldwide to consider the lack of faith their violent reaction exposes. At the very least, it's a start towards forcing Islam towards its own Enlightenment.

The Identity-Theft Scare

We have heard a great deal about identity theft over the last few years, and the ever-increasing risk in the age of the Internet of having our names and credit ruined by imposters. An entire industry of cybersecurity generated from the hype. These fears crescendoed when reports of lost and stolen laptops from various federal agencies arose over the past few months, computers which held the personal data of hundreds of thousands of taxpayers.

But does the problem really exist on the level claimed by the security providers and the media that reports breathlessly on identity theft? In today's Washington Post, Professor Fred Cate of Indiana University says the risk has been vastly overrated by government and industry officials. The researcher for cybersecurity says that most identity theft comes from more mundane sources:

Identity theft is getting a lot of attention these days -- from news stories about missing laptops and lost data to television commercials for fraud prevention and credit monitoring services. Congress has held hearings, and members have issued forecasts of an impending plague of identity theft. Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), in a statement typical of many of his congressional colleagues, said that "Social Security numbers and date-of-birth information are pure gold in the hands of identity thieves, who quickly convert them into credit cards and cash equivalents to perpetrate massive frauds."

When a laptop was stolen from the home of a Department of Veterans Affairs employee this year, newspapers across the nation editorialized about the dangers facing the people whose data were on the computer. The Post alone published more than 40 stories and wrote that "26.5 million veterans were placed at risk of identity theft." The VA notified all 26.5 million of them and asked Congress for $160.5 million to cover the cost of one year of credit monitoring for the veterans.

Then the laptop was recovered -- the data untouched and the risk of identity theft shown to be nonexistent.

The happy ending to the VA saga should have come as no surprise. The fact is that few if any such breaches lead to identity theft or other consumer injuries.

Cate notes that a study by a national fraud-detection network puts the attempted identity thefts from stolen hardware at no higher rate than any other kind of identity theft. The people who stole the laptops probably never realized what they had, and even if they might, probably lacked the resources to exploit it. The overall rate of one attempted fraud per 1,020 stolen accounts approximates the overall risk of fraud, according to Cate. Hardware thefts have no greater likelihood of generating identity theft.

In fact, the study showed that half of all identity theft and fraud comes from the mechanism most people would have suspected before the age of the Internet: a lost or stolen wallet, checkbook, and/or credit card. And it gets even more personal than that. For the cases in which the perpetrator is identified, 35% are family members of the victim, and another 18% are friends or neighbors. People who have their identities stolen or manipulated for fraud are more likely to know the fraudster personally. Another 23% comes from dishonest employees where victims shop. That accounts for 74% of all identity fraud, even today.

The government has published estimates of what it calls identity fraud that reach up to 10 million cases every year. However, the vast majority of those cases are routine credit-card fraud, and consumers have a limited liability for such crimes. Congress passed a $50 cap on consumer responsibility for charges on lost or stolen credit cards, and most companies don't bother to bill victims at all.

So while the government and the media broadcast the scary numbers of exploding victimhood, how many cases of <>true identity theft have we found? In the last half of 2004, the Justice Department estimated only 538,700 cases in which the victim's information was used to set up fraudulent accounts. The put out a more public estimate of 3.6 million cases, which included those cases that only involved th use of stolen credit-card information. In 2005, the FTC only investigated 250,000 cases of real identity theft.

Does this mean we can be foolish with our Social Security numbers and leave personal data around with impunity? Of course not, and one of the reasons why the cases of real identity fraud are dropping is probably the increased awareness of the risk. We can stop buying the hype from the media and from the myriad of security products that prey on the overblown fears of Internet predators and recognize that the risk is manageable.

Was Patrick Lane Development In Rory Reid's District?

Earlier this morning I wrote about Rory Reid, Harry Reid's son, and his position on the Clark County Board of Commissioners around the same time that his father's Patrick Lane LLC benefited from a zoning change that allowed commercial/retail development of their parcels. It turns out that the district Rory represents includes Patrick Lane, and the Las Vegas Review Journal noted that in an October 2004 article on the development of a new Wal-Mart. This comes from Lexis-Nexis and has no link, but the article is dated October 5, 2004 (note: CQ reader Dennis S provides this link):

A controversial Wal-Mart Supercenter probably will be built on public land next to McCarran International Airport, but one county representative hopes he will score points with residents if a new soccer complex is included in the project.

County Commissioner Rory Reid, who oversees the older neighborhood, sent developer Marnell Corrao Associates away in June and said its plan for 160 acres of leased airport land would not be approved without input from residents.

Although some homeowners are firmly against a Wal-Mart on a 20-acre portion of a parcel at Russell Road and Eastern Avenue, Reid said he would entertain an opportunity for a developer to build soccer fields in an otherwise heavily developed neighborhood. ...

Under Marnell Corrao's revised plan, to be unveiled Wednesday, Wal-Mart will move from the southwest corner of Russell and Eastern. A 42-foot-high, 203,000-square-foot Wal-Mart would be built on the north side of Patrick Lane west of Eastern Avenue.

This may not be the same parcel that Patrick Lane LLC owned; it sounds as though the airport owned this parcel, at least in June 2004. However, it shows that Patrick Lane falls into Rory's district, which seems to tie him closer to his father's deal on the rezoned parcel, and I wonder whether Rory disclosed that when it came to the Clark County Board of Commissioners. Nothing in my Lexis-Nexis search discusses any aspect of Reid's land deal or the zoning change that enabled it between January 2001 and December 2004.

UPDATE: No, the Patrick Lane LLC parcels were not in Rory Reid's district. I noted that on another thread, but this is the one I should have updated. That assertion was incorrect, and I apologize for it. That doesn't change the rest of this story and the rest of Harry Reid's connections to Nevada developers, most of which have been reported by the Los Angeles Times and other mainstream publications, and which deeply involve his sons and their lobbying for the federal intervention into Nevada real estate championed by their father.

Maybe They Should Attend The School Of Hard Knocks

The New York Sun reports that two college students decided that planting fake bombs in the subway would be a humorous way to blow off some midterm steam. New York City officials are less than amused:

Police have arrested two college students for placing five fake bombs around the city's subway system as a hoax.

Officials said none of the packages – including backpacks, duffel bags, and a plastic tube used to transport documents – contained hazardous material. Robert Barrett, 21, of Angola, N.Y., and Jaime Davis, 21, of Allentown, Pa., were each charged with five counts of placing a false bomb, police said.

Police said the satchels were discovered September 28 between noon and 3 p.m., the day police allege they were planted.

Subway passengers and transit workers reported the bags inside subway cars and various stations throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn, police sources said. At least one was reported in Penn Station. Filler in the bags, including New York Post newspapers, helped investigators trace them to their owners this week, police sources said.

So they're not exactly master criminals. Apparently they left everything but their names and addresses for police to find. They actually took pictures of their stunt and planned to make it part of an art project.

Its theme? The inability of officials to detect terrorist plots.

I think they just flunked.

Is Kim Bluffing?

Kim Jong-Il has made a career lately of issuing threats and rattling sabers, but Westerners who do business in North Korea report that the populace has little inkling of war on the horizon. In fact, recent reforms have allowed capitalism to gain some momentum after the massive famine nearly leveled the nation:

Western businessmen who work inside North Korea, including several from Britain, provide a very different view of the country from the goose-stepping parades and patriotic dance festivals that are its most celebrated public face.

Many say that behind the military rhetoric of its relations with the United States is a country that is keen to reform itself economically and many of whose residents seem increasingly "normal" to outsiders. ...

Visitors to Pyongyang report that private markets, once banned, now sell a variety of consumer items such as television sets and a wider range of food, albeit expensive, than the rice and cabbage which has been the common diet in recent years. Some residents had even read Harry Potter, while smuggled mobile phones and South Korean DVDs have made ordinary people more aware of the outside world.

Some reforms went into reverse in 2005, when supply of basic foodstuffs reverted to state control, but Huang Yiping, chief Asia economist for the American Citigroup bank, recently visited Pyongyang and in his report compared reforms to what happened in China in the 1980s.

Another British businessman, who asked not to be named, said there was no sign on the streets of the military tensions. "If you ask people [about the nuclear issue] they just say they need it for defence."

The London Telegraph, which reported this story, does not lend itself towards appeasement of dictators, which makes this analysis both intriguing and vexing. Kim apparently wants to introduce some economic reforms, which makes sense if he wants to avoid more massive starvation and outward migration. The introduction of limited capitalism and private property ownership has raised the standard of living, and his subjects have begun to shed their blinkers about the outside world.

If that's true -- and again, the Telegraph isn't the likeliest place for a Communist fantasy -- then Kim's actions seem all the more inexplicable. In order to go to war, even in a blinkered dictatorship, a leader must prepare the population for the sacrifices necessary. It appears Kim has done none of that. He hasn't even started restricting goods again, according to this article, and the people in North Korea have no sense of imminent attack or danger.

Kim's playing a game, but its purpose is hard to discern. He doesn't appear to want war, but he's playing for peace on his own terms exclusively, which he might get. The most logical explanation is the most worrisome. Kim may have decided that the fastest way to get hard currency is to set up shop as a nuclear proliferator, especially since his counterfeiting operations have been shut down by American sanctions on the bank that acted as his fence. Therefore he's willing to risk everything on the notion that the world will do nothing effective to stop him from producing nuclear weapons -- and once in production, that he can slip them by everyone to make his sales.

He may well be correct. In order to stop that, we need China to exert its influence on Kim to move him away from that strategy, and China is the only nation with that kind of influence. Any unilateral effort by the US would be doomed to failure, because our track record with Kim is why he has banked on victory. We do not instill fear in Kim any longer, and we can't take away anything he needs. Only China can do that, and to a lesser extent Russia. The multilateral approach to the North Korean crisis is still the only possible method, outside of the temporary method of paying extortion, to end the nuclear threat.

Reid's Interventions And Family Connections, 2003 Edition

I spent most of the evening last night performing some research into the various machinations of the Harry Reid real-estate transactions that netted him a 175% return on his initial $400,000 investment, and the manner in which he hid his partnership with Jay Brown from the Senate. In this research, I discovered a Los Angeles Times article from June 2003 that outlines a lot of the structure that appears to have allowed Reid to ensure his success in his real-estate ventures. Not surprisingly, it shows Reid and his family at the center of efforts to promote developments that benefitted Reid and his cronies:

Over the years, Reid has used legislation to move federal land into private hands and private land into the public realm. He says he has done so to preserve scenic and environmentally sensitive areas while freeing up more land for urban growth.

Such was the case with the Clark County legislation. It was co-sponsored by Nevada's junior senator, Republican John Ensign, and the House version was introduced by Rep. James A. Gibbons (R-Nev.). President Bush signed it in November. ...

The bill also benefited at least five clients of Reid family lobbyists. And it contained a provision potentially worth millions of dollars to a senior partner of the law firm that employs Reid's four sons, a provision that was dropped at the last minute after questions were raised in Washington.

The bill freed about 18,000 acres near the cities of Las Vegas and North Las Vegas for development and annexation, by releasing two parcels of land from "wilderness study" protection. Key Reid and former Sen. Bryan lobbied for those provisions, lobbyist reports show. City officials did not return phone calls from The Times.

Harvey Whittemore makes an appearance here as well:

The Hughes swap was at least done in plain sight. The company name appeared in the Clark County bill, along with descriptions of what each party would get. Not so with Section 709 of the original bill, "Relocation of Right-of-Way Corridor Located in Clark and Lincoln Counties in the State of Nevada."

Only a close comparison of the provision with local property records for the Coyote Springs valley, which lies northeast of Las Vegas, revealed that the provision was intended to remove an obstacle to a proposed real estate development project headed by Harvey Whittemore, a longtime friend of Sen. Reid and a senior partner in the law firm that employs his four sons.

One might have wondered what the Senate Ethics Committee would have done with this information. We can surmise that it wouldn't have done much to stop it, mainly because the vice chair of the panel was none other than Harry Reid. He held the chair or vice chair for several years before rising to the position of Minority Leader for the Democrats after Tom Daschle lost his seat in 2004.

Another interesting fact comes to light in this article. Rory Reid, Harry's son and a lawyer/lobbyist who worked for Nevada's largest legal firm. Lionel Sawyer & Collins represented more than a few clients whose business became Harry Reid's Senate business, but that isn't news. In fact, his other three sons also worked for the same firm and did some lobbying as well. Rory, however, is a special case. Rory got himself elected to the Clark County Board of Commissioners in November 2002, which makes zoning decisions for Las Vegas and its environs.

Why is this important? It was a zoning change that allowed Reid and his partners to sell their parcels in 2004 to developers after being allowed to build a shopping complex on the land. So far, the exact timing of that zoning change has not yet come to light, but the coincidence looks very suspicious.

The more we dig into this story, a picture emerges that paints Reid as a manipulator for his own benefit and that of his family and friends. The Senate Ethics Committee has a great deal of work to do in order to clarify all of the strange coincidences that allowed Reid to pocket $700,000 in profit while hiding his partner from the public.

Addendum: The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution both call for a full Ethics Committee investigation of this deal, and the Inquirer calls for Reid to resign his leadership position.

UPDATE: Sensible Mom sees the full AP report, which noted Rory's seat on the Commission, but the zoning change took place in 2001. Rory took office in January 2003, which means he still supervised zoning issues in the same district as the Patrick Lane LLC parcels, but he didn't have any official input on the zoning change.

Warner Declines

Virginia Governor Mark Warner bowed out of the 2008 presidential race yesterday, stating that he wanted to spend more time with his family rather than pursue the White House. By vacating the center, Warner has left a hole in the party's offerings -- and an opportunity for at least one Democrat to seize the moderate position:

Mr. Warner, who five years ago became the first Democrat elected governor of Virginia since 1989, had drawn broad interest among party leaders assessing the potential 2008 field, both as a centrist elected in a Southern state and as a wealthy entrepreneur able to finance his own campaign.

But at a news conference in Richmond and in a subsequent interview, he said he had increasingly turned against the idea of running as he found that the obligations of even exploring a candidacy were consuming him and taking him away from family obligations. He said he had long set Columbus Day weekend as a deadline for making a final decision, fearing that to wait any longer would compromise aides who might want to sign on with other presidential campaigns.

“This is the right time politically,” he said in the interview. “It’s just not the right time for me in my life at this time.”

The 51-year-old Mr. Warner had made extensive preparations for the possibility of a run, assembling a staff of 35, raising close to $10 million for his political action committee and campaigning constantly on behalf of other Democrats. In fact, he had barely made his announcement Thursday when he left for Iowa, the first state on the presidential nomination calendar, to stump for a Congressional candidate.

So who does this help? Hillary Clinton should gain the most from this development. Ever since her first election to the Senate in 2000, she has tried to carve out a moderate record to convince voters that HillaryCare belonged in the dustbin of history. She has been mostly hawkish on Iraq, although she has indulged herself with plenty of shots at the Bush administration's execution of the war. Hillary demanded action against Afghanistan at a time even when the Left warned about the British Empire's failure in the 19th century. She has even tempered her rhetoric on abortion, to the dismay of the Democratic netroots.

Hillary had already been moving in Warner's direction. In fact, Democrats liked Warner because he had naturally taken more centrist positions and would have built more trust in his centrist resolve than Hillary, who continues to be seen as a political opportunist -- especially after her carpetbagging run for the Senate in New York. The Democratic Leadership Council followers thought Warner could have succeeded in wooing independents and centrist Republicans where Hillary repels them. Now that opportunity has been lost, and Hillary has an open shot at Warner's base.

The Times mentions other candidates as well, but none of them have compelling arguments for Warner's moderates. The best of the lot might be Barack Obama, but he's only served two years of his first term in the Senate, hardly a deep resume for the top job. He works well with Republicans, but he appears more rational than moderate. Evan Bayh claims to be a moderate, but he generates less electricity than a generic NiCad battery in need of a charge. After that, the Times gets laughable; they even claim John Edwards will benefit from Warner's withdrawal, although Edwards and his poverty schtick (as Michael Barone puts it) hardly will capture the imagination of moderates. Edwards will have to campaign from the Left, which will probably put his former running mate John Kerry in a particularly tough position.

What does this do for Republicans? They have to assume that Hillary takes the nomination now, barring the rise of a different candidate with executive experience and moderate credentials. The Democrats won't take another chance on a leftward pol who can be cast as soft on terror and hard on capital. Hillary's nomination would be a mixed blessing: the GOP thinks she can't win, but they have to find someone with her name recognition on the Republican side. That favors Rudy Giuliani, which gives the 2008 election a Subway-Series tinge. If not Rudy, then perhaps Mitt Romney, but after that the name recognition factor starts dimming considerably. Newt Gingrich would rate high on that scale, but so would his negatives, which is the same problem as Hillary. After that, the prospects dim. John McCain seems obvious, but he won't win enough primaries to matter.

It's going to be a long campaign, and perhaps the real winners have not yet revealed themselves. Both parties have to hope that's the case at the moment.

A Chat About Immigration

Nick Gillespie of Reason's Hit and Run and Judd Legum of Think Progress joined me in another chat-room debate hosted by the Associated Press' ASAP, moderated by Otis Hart. Last week the topic was ethics, and this week we took on immigration -- and it got pretty lively. In fact, Otis had to pare down a few of the exchanges in order to stay on topic and to stay within his word-count limitations, and he did a fine job.

Here's a taste of the exchange:

asap: Do you think there should be a border fence dividing the U.S. and Mexico?

Nick Gillespie: absolutely not. one of the great moments of the 20th century was when the berlin wall fell... one of the most disturbing of the current century -- a century of globalization and increasing integration of the world -- is a fixation on keeping mexicans out of america.

Nick Gillespie: if we're concerned about folks sneaking across the southern border, legalize immigration in a big way; it's easier to regulate business that's in the open rather than in the shadows.

Edward Morrissey:I do. If we want to enforce our immigration law, obviously we need to stop the easy access to border violations and that requires a barrier or a deployment of many thousands of border guards.... and let's remember that the Berlin Wall intended to keep people penned up in a police state. It's not comparable at all.

Nick Gillespie: the east germans, who put the wall up, said it was to keep people out, not keep people in.

Edward Morrissey: Nick, come on, you believe that?

Nick Gillespie: if we're willing to tolerate the free flow of goods from mexico, we should be willing to tolerate the free flow of people. on this, the European Union is doing things right.

Judd Legum: I really think the wall issue is a way for people to avoid tackling the real question. Which is how do we deal with the undocumented immigrants ... building a wall will do very little to keep new people from coming in and nothing with the 12 million people or so who are already here.

Otis keeps this in the original chat format (I compressed the excerpt), which makes it much more conversational. Nick and Judd both impressed me in both of the chats we have conducted as thoughtful and operating from a fixed set of principles. In this exchange, you will see Nick especially adhering to his open-market libertarian philosophy that he supports so well at Reason, and on which I often agree -- but not on immigration. Judd had a more moderate position on immigration and made a number of good points. For myself, I'm not as hardline as some CQ readers, but on securing the border, I'm very conservative.

The three of us will be meeting each week for more chats on different topics before next month's election, and I'm looking forward to debating Nick and Judd again.

Standing On Chapter VII

The usual suspects of appeasement took center stage again last night at the UN after the US circulated a draft resolution imposing sanctions on North Korea. Russia and China objected to the use of Chapter VII language in the proposed sanctions, which could later support military action against Kim Jong-Il, but John Bolton said he would not back away from the reference this time:

The American push to win Security Council backing for tough, swift sanctions against North Korea appeared to be set back by China and Russia on Thursday, in an echo of the obstacles the United States faces in a similar push to punish Iran.

The United States circulated a softened draft resolution to the Security Council in response to North Korea’s assertion that it conducted a nuclear test on Monday. The United States pressed for a vote by Friday, but China and Russia immediately signaled their opposition to critical parts of the measure and said they needed more time. ...

The resolution still cites Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter, which makes sanctions mandatory and suggests the possibility of military enforcement. China and Russia have consistently opposed Chapter VII enforcement for North Korea.

The United States was able to win a unanimous Security Council resolution condemning North Korea’s missile launchings last July only by dropping the reference to Chapter VII, but John R. Bolton, the American ambassador to the United Nations, said he would resist that step this time.

“In light of the fact that North Korea has claimed a test of a nuclear device, we need stronger language,” he said.

This is exactly right, although it will kill the deal. Issuing another vague and empty scolding to Pyongyang will do even less than the same message did in July. It will confirm that the UN will never act to enforce its own resolutions, and now will hesitate to even issue them lest the member states get tasked with enforcing them.

It's not just North Korea who has an interest in the outcome of this debate, either. Iran, facing its own showdown with the UNSC, has to be learning a valuable lesson in the gastric fortitude of the Council. After hiding its own nuclear research and development from the UN for over a decade, Iran has flouted its pursuit of uranium enrichment for the last three years. In fact, they regularly hold rallies celebrating the program, and have taken steps to turn their reactor into a tourist attraction. They do not fear the UN's enforcement, and the Security Council response thus far to North Korea shows why.

Bolton noted that Teheran would certainly note the response to a full-blown nuclear test, or partially blown in this case, and he expressed optimism that the UN would respond in a strong and unambiguous manner. He tried to tell people that a Chapter VII reference would not authorize military force, but that a separate resolution would still be required. Diplomats seem unconvinced, with China saying that more talks and study of the issue would be needed before a vote. Of course, China and Russia have said the same about Darfur, Iran, and said it for twelve years with Iraq.

We can't wait twelve years for Russia and China to perhaps change their mind on North Korea. No one wants to fight another war on the Korean Peninsula; it would likely kill more than a million people. Neither can we just wash our hands of the situation and walk away, leaving allies in the lurch. If the UN cannot provide a clear, unambiguous, and strong response to a rogue state conducting nuclear tests -- then why would we need a UN at all?

Final Push For The Rightroots Candidates

The Rightroots campaign started by a handful of conservative bloggers, including yours truly, has raised over $200,000 for the slate of candidates in competitive elections. The money will come in handy for these Republicans in their efforts to keep control of Congress with the GOP. However, time has almost run out for contributions to these campaigns, as fellow founder Wizbang! notes:

You can still make a difference, but time is short. It takes time for ABC Pac and the campaigns to do the paperwork on the money that's received, so for contributions sent into Rightroots to have a chance to make an impact in this election cycle, they really should be received by October 15th.

We have our deadline -- so be sure to make those final contributions before the clock runs out. Thank you for your continued support!

Reid Offers To Disclose His Land Deal ... Five Years Late

Harry Reid, stung by the AP's exposure of his complicated land deals with a lobbyist he helped make rich through his personal interventions in Congress, has told the Senate Ethics Committee that he will file amended disclosure statements that would reveal his business relationships for the first time. Reid claims the amendment would be "technical":

The Senate Democratic leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, said his office contacted the Senate ethics committee on Wednesday and offered to correct his financial disclosure statements if they misrepresented his ties to a land deal in his home state in which his family made a profit of about $700,000.

In a statement, Mr. Reid did not acknowledge errors in the disclosure forms but said he was ready to make a “technical correction” if the ethics committee determined that adjustments were needed. ...

In 2001, the timeline showed, ownership of the land was transferred to a holding company, Patrick Lane LLC, named for a street near the properties, as part of effort to rezone the area for development of a shopping center. Mr. Reid became a partner in the holding company. After the rezoning was approved, the land was sold for $1.6 million, with $1.1 million directed to Mr. Reid as his share, a return of about $700,000 on the investment.

The senator’s financial disclosure statements during the period show that he never reported that the land had been transferred to the holding company, leaving the impression that he continued to own the land directly instead of through a partnership with Mr. Brown and others.

Congressional ethics specialists said the omission was at least a technical violation of the disclosure rules, which are intended to identify a lawmaker’s business partners and potential conflicts of interest. Spokesmen for the Senate ethics committee did not return phone calls Wednesday night.

Reid's avoidance of disclosure hid two aspects of his business relationships. The first was his association with Jay Brown, who has a history of being involved in scandal. The NY Times describes him as "a prominent Las Vegas lawyer," but they never get around to mentioning his involvement in a federal bribery case in Las Vegas. Nor do they mention Brown's work as a lobbyist, as the AP did, nor do they follow up on the AP's report of connections between Brown and organized crime.

The other part Reid wanted to keep secret was the financial ties between himself and Harvey Whittemore. The AP story reported that Reid bought the parcel from "a developer who was benefiting from a government land swap that Reid supported," a perfect description of Whittemore in 1998 when Reid purchased the land. For the next seven years, Reid would work to ease Whittemore's difficulties in developing the Coyote Springs project by forcing the government to swap its right-of-way for less valuable land owned by Whittemore; he tried to get the government to literally give away more of its land to Whittemore, although he would not succeed; and in the end, he pressed federal regulators to lift a endangered-species restriction on Whittemore's Coyote Springs real estate. All of this helped give Whittemore an opportunity to make tens of millions on residential and commercial development in the former test range site.

Disclosing those partnerships, the latter of which the NYT doesn't even bother to mention from the AP report, would have exposed Reid's machinations for Coyote Springs as financially beneficial to himself through his partnership with Whittemore and Brown. Reid has no choice but to amend the disclosures, but by now it's far too late; Congress agreed to almost everything Whittemore needed already, pushed by Reid in a blatantly corrupt manner. And now we know the payoff: a real-estate "investment" that garnered a 175% return in six years.

Disclosures now are pointless. The Ethics panel needs to order a full investigation not just into the $700,000 profit, but all of Reid's business partners and any legislation or intervention with federal regulators Reid pushed on their behalf.

BUMP: To top.

Cowboy Diplomacy Looks Pretty Good These Days

After ridiculing George Bush as a unilateralist cowboy for most of his term in office, the New York Times demands more unilateralism from the White House in its editorial today. The Gray Lady wants Bush to start bypassing the United Nations on a range of issues, a rather startling 180-degree turn:

Closing our eyes for another two years isn’t an answer. Washington needs to assert its leadership, no matter how tattered, on all these fronts.

We suspect that cargo inspections and a cutoff of military and luxury trade will not be enough to get North Korea to back down. But having started there, Mr. Bush now needs to tell China and Russia that all future relations will be judged on how they hold the North to account.

Beijing and Moscow would find it harder to say no if Mr. Bush made a clear pledge — no caveats and no fingers crossed behind his back — that he would not try to overthrow North Korea’s government if it abandoned its nuclear weapons. Mr. Bush needs to make the same unambiguous offer to Iran. As for Darfur, Khartoum might feel less cocky if Mr. Bush announced that he was taking the lead on soliciting troops for a peacekeeping force while asking NATO to start drawing up plans for a possible forced entry should the United Nations fail to act.

So now it's OK to invade another sovereign nation without UN approval? Funny, the Times didn't take this position on Iraq, a nation that had continually violated the cease-fire Saddam Hussein signed to keep his butt in Baghdad in 1991. They didn't think invading Iraq to stop genocides of Shi'ites and Kurds was such a fine idea. The Times didn't approve of it despite Saddam's numerous attacks on our military pilots enforcing the no-fly zones that protected those populations from further reprisals.

He's not the only newly-converted unilateralist, either. Kofi Annan, the blessedly outgoing Secretary-General of the UN, also demanded unilateral diplomacy to resolve the standoff with North Korea, cutting out the other nations that have to live with the Pyongyang pipsqueak:

As Mr. Bush spoke, Secretary-General Annan urged America to hold one-on-one talks with North Korea, something America has refused to do.

I guess that cowboy philosophy sounds much better when other nations block one's own pet causes. (via It Shines For All)

France Facing Intifada

The French police have suffered 14 injuries a day trying to quell riots in the Muslim housing projects as the nation has started to recognize that they face an organized, armed resistance. While management says that the confrontation involves organized crime, the boots on the ground say the issue has evolved into a less secular conflict than the politicians care to acknowledge:

Radical Muslims in France's housing estates are waging an undeclared "intifada," or uprising, against the police, with violent clashes injuring about 14 officers each day.

As the Interior Ministry announced that nearly 2,500 officers had been wounded this year, a police union declared that its members were "in a state of civil war" with Muslims in the most depressed "banlieue" estates. Banlieue, which means outskirts, is the commonly used euphemism for the low-income housing projects heavily populated by unemployed youths of North African origin.

The police union said it had asked the government to provide police with armored cars to protect officers in the estates, which it said were becoming no-go zones.

The number of attacks has risen by a third in two years. Police representatives told the newspaper Le Figaro that the "taboo" of attacking officers on patrol has been broken. Instead, officers -- especially those patrolling in pairs or small groups -- are facing attacks when they try to arrest locals.

Some have even used the term "civil war" to describe the scene in France. The police face ever-increasing resistance to their presence in the Muslim projects. Police speak about how a simple arrest can empty the local apartments and turn into a massive confrontation, as the locals try to keep police from detaining Muslims. They face coordinated attacks, using stones and Molotov cocktails, attempting to drive them out of the projects and drawing a demarcation of French power on French soil.

The French have a real problem on their hands in the projects. Where radical Muslims gain ground, a rejection of state authority follows, and the French resistance to assimilation has allowed radical Islam to fester in these areas. It should surprise few now that the isolation of the Muslims in France has resulted in violence and a de facto intifada, and the problem will not get better by appeasing the rioters and allowing them to drive the police out of the projects.

Le Intifada should serve as a warning to Europe and the West, and not just in terms of immigration policy. Radical Islamism threatens the basis of the nation-state, and once it gains a toehold, it becomes difficult to roll back. That's why we have to push back against it whenever and wherever it appears and convince moderates and fence-sitters that theocratic rule is not inevitable.

Gaza Descends

Gaza has begun its descent into all-out civil war as the economy continues to tank and no one has the political will to solve the problem. Hamas has committed summary executions of protesting government workers unhappy with the lack of pay, and Fatah has struck back with attacks of its own:

As Yusuf Siam stood to greet mourners, a boy arrived with a handful of papers marked from the al-Aqsa Brigade, a Fatah-affiliated militant group, and handed them out. The letter offered condolences to the family and then vowed revenge. "For the families of the people who lost their sons at the hands of Hamas we swear that their blood will not be spilt for nothing," it said. "We will give a lesson to Hamas."

There are signs that this is more serious than rhetorical rivalry between militants. "The Palestinian situation is marred by sharp divisions and battling; it is a misery and shameful for any Arab and any Palestinian," Egypt's foreign minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit, who has tried to mediate in this crisis, told the Al-Ahram newspaper this week. Some senior Palestinians are openly warning now of the danger of civil war.

In the offices of Palestinian politicians some try to downplay the crisis. "We are not worried about this ... I am confident we will not reach the point of war," said Yehya Mousa, a Hamas MP from Khan Yunis in southern Gaza.

But in the rival camp, aides to Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, are suggesting that he assert his authority, dissolve the Hamas government, and set up an emergency interim administration. This, Mr Mousa said, would be tantamount to a "coup". Hamas leaders see this as Fatah smarting from its election loss and trying to take back power.

The Western embargo on aid and the suspension of tax receipts by the Israelis have forced the Palestinians into a crisis of ideology. None of the factions involved want to make a lasting peace with Israel, but that's no longer the primary issue at hand in the territories. Hamas and Fatah have finally found their way to the basic power struggle that their shared hatred of Israel has always masked. This conflict pits the older, secular Arab terrorists against the newer, Islamist Arab terrorists -- and this time it will be all of the Arabs in the area that pay for the conflict.

The Palestinians can't blame Israel for this. Shootings such as the one that took Rafiq Siam have their origins in a divide that war alone can address now. In the end, neither side can win, because both are essentially nihilistic and will not stop. The Palestinians have created a death cult in two different flavors, and both sides value martyrdom so much that both will fight until everyone is dead in order to keep power in their own hands, once the fighting starts.

Eventually the Palestinian people will have to demand an end to their misery and jettison both factions from their polity. An all-out civil war might wake them from their political coma and shock some sense into them. Siam's father tells the Guardian that he's "sick of both sides because they can't control the situation." This realization that they have failed to produce a rational ruling class might finally force the Palestinians to generate one before the terrorists kill them all.

If that happens, those rational Palestinians will find a delighted Israel and the West eager to do business and allow for a two-state solution so they can pursue their own course. Until then, the two-state solution and peace between the two peoples is nothing but a pipe dream. It will almost assuredly, and unfortunately, take a civil war to get the Palestinian people to take responsibility at long last for the terrorists in their midst.

Japan Imposes Sanctions, North Korea Threatens

Japan unilaterally imposed severe sanctions on North Korea in response to its nuclear test earlier this week, and the Kim regime responded by promising "strong countermeasures". Pyongyang warned Japan to keep its eyes open for the specifics, saying that North Korea does not issue empty threats:

The Japanese government decided on a package of additional economic sanctions against North Korea on Wednesday in response to the regime's claim of a nuclear test, including a ban on all imports from the country and the docking of North Korean ships in Japanese ports.

The sanctions are expected to go into effect after they are approved by Japan's Cabinet Friday.

"We will take strong countermeasures," Kyodo quoted Song Il Ho, North Korea's ambassador in charge of diplomatic normalization talks with Japan, as saying in an interview on Wednesday when asked about fresh sanctions by Japan.

"The specific contents will become clear if you keep watching. We never speak empty words," he added.

One response has been the cancellation of normalization talks, which seems moot anyway. The two nations had tried working through the open issues that kept them from having normal diplomatic relations, among them Japan's imperial occupation from 1910-1945 and North Korea's abduction of Japanese citizens in the 1970s and 1980s. The talks never went very far because of Kim's nuclear pursuit and his habit of testing his missiles by firing them at Japan.

The sanctions that Japan has imposed have teeth. North Korea can no longer dock its ships in Japanese ports, stripping them of a vital lifeline to hard currency. They normally export clams and mushrooms to the Japanese, who will look elsewhere for their cuisine needs now. North Koreans are barred from entering Japan except for a narrow set of circumstances. Essentially, Japan has closed its doors entirely to North Korea, which leaves the Kim regime with a big gap in its exports -- a problem for a country whose economy is already in free-fall.

How will Kim respond? He might force a naval confrontation with Japan, attempting to dock his ships in defiance of their orders, in the hope that Japan will start a war. A few more missiles might overfly Japan to the same purpose. I doubt that he would overtly attack Japan, an act that would push his only ally, China, even further away diplomatically. The stakes are going up for Kim Jong-Il, though, and one has to wonder what he thinks he's holding.

British Revamp Defamation Laws To Protect Free Speech

Americans have grown used to a tort system that zealously protects free speech involving criticism and reporting involving public figures. In the US, any public figure that sues for defamation, libel, or slander has the burden of proof to show that the speech intentionally and maliciously defamed and damaged the plaintiff. However, even in other Western nations, the protection on free speech varies widely, and has been loosest in Britain. The UK requires defendants to prove their published allegations in court or to pay damages. One of the most famous examples of this dynamic is George Galloway, who won a judgment against the London Telegraph for their reporting on his connections to the Oil-For-Food program.

That kind of award may soon be in the past. The Law Lords have overturned a judgment against the Wall Street Journal Europe and stated categorically that the law should protect journalism on stories of public interest:

Britain’s highest court ruled Wednesday for the first time that journalists have the right to publish allegations about public figures, as long as their reporting is responsible and in the public interest.

The ruling, a unanimous judgment by the Law Lords, is a huge shift in British law and significantly improves journalists’ chances of winning libel cases in a court system that until now has been stacked against them.

English judges have traditionally been so sympathetic to libel plaintiffs that many people from abroad have sued in English courts — even if the publications in question have tiny circulations here — because they have had a much better chance of winning here than at home.

Newspaper editors said the decision, in the case of Jameel v. Wall Street Journal Europe, would free them to pursue stories vigorously without constant fear of lawsuits.

“This will lead to a greater robustness and willingness to tackle serious stories, which is what the judges said they wanted,” said Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian. Until now, he said in an interview, newspapers have had to police themselves to the point where “stories weren’t getting in the paper or were being neutered by clever lawyers who knew how to play the game.”

This decision is apparently final, and it sets a significant precedent. Britain now will not attract so many of these lawsuits from abroad, an abusive tactic under any circumstances. Technically, as long as a publication had a measureable readership in Britain, plaintiffs could bring suit against writers and publishers regardless of whether or not they lived in the UK. It forced defendants to spend a lot of money just to answer the charges in court, which meant that the accused had a big financial incentive to offer settlements -- which meant that public figures had a big incentive to use those threats for litigatory blackmail.

The decision should be applauded by supporters of free speech. Public figures have to be open for criticism and investigative journalism in order to ensure that any corruption or criminality gets exposed. While we often complain about the motivations and the execution of these efforts -- which seem suspiciously more enthusiastic when a conservative is the subject -- we want journalists to report freely. We'd just prefer that they do it fairly.

Harry Reid And The Culture Of Corruption

Once again, we discover why the Democrats quietly dropped their "culture of corruption" theme for the upcoming midterms. The AP catches Harry Reid without a disclosure on real-estate deals that netted him $700,000 in profit:

Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid collected a $1.1 million windfall on a Las Vegas land sale even though he hadn't personally owned the property for three years, property deeds show.

In the process, Reid did not disclose to Congress an earlier sale in which he transferred his land to a company created by a friend and took a financial stake in that company, according to records and interviews.

The Nevada Democrat's deal was engineered by Jay Brown, a longtime friend and former casino lawyer whose name surfaced in a major political bribery trial this summer and in other prior organized crime investigations. He's never been charged with wrongdoing - except for a 1981 federal securities complaint that was settled out of court. ...

The deal began in 1998 when Reid bought undeveloped residential property on Las Vegas' booming outskirts for about $400,000. Reid bought one lot outright, and a second parcel jointly with Brown. One of the sellers was a developer who was benefiting from a government land swap that Reid supported. The seller never talked to Reid.

In 2001, Reid sold the land for the same price to a limited liability corporation created by Brown. The senator didn't disclose the sale on his annual public ethics report or tell Congress he had any stake in Brown's company. He continued to report to Congress that he personally owned the land.

After getting local officials to rezone the property for a shopping center, Brown's company sold the land in 2004 to other developers and Reid took $1.1 million of the proceeds, nearly tripling the senator's investment. Reid reported it to Congress as a personal land sale.

In fact, this isn't a new development for Harry Reid. Less than two months ago, I wrote about Reid's questionable involvement and compensation in a related real-estate deal outside of Las Vegas, and the post turned into a column for the New York Post. Harvey Whittemore, a lobbyist and real-estate investor, plied Reid with campaign contributions and employed Reid's family members -- and in exchange, Reid did a number of favors that allowed Whittemore to realize large profits at the expense of environmental regulations that Reid helped Whittemore bulldoze. I wrote at the time:

The story of Coyote Springs sounds like a Horatio Alger story. The land Whittemore bought in 1998 from a defense contractor who intended on using it for target practice had a number of restrictions on its use. A quarter of it was subject to a federal power-line right of way. Another quarter had federal protection for the desert tortoise, an endangered species that also is Nevada's official state reptile. The land had a fragile series of streams and washes that required special permission on which to build without ruining the desert's ecosystem.

None of these obstacles proved too difficult for Whittemore, at least not while he had his friend Harry Reid running interference in Congress. Interior refused to relocate the tortoises for over five years, until the Bureau of Land Management agreed to swap the land for another parcel abutting a federal preserve elsewhere. No one ever did an analysis to determine whether the deal was fair to either party, nor did the BLM go to Congress for approval on the changes to a project that Congress had explicitly legislated.

In 2002, Reid worked on the power corridor. He inserted obscure provisions into a land management bill that relocated the power corridor, freeing Whittemore to build on the 10,500 acres that Congress had previously held -- which means that someone else now had to lose property value for Whittemore's benefit, and for no cost whatsoever. That bald move caused raised eyebrows at the BLM and the Senate's Energy and Natural Resources Committee, and Reid backed away -- for the moment. Less than two years later, Reid tried again to give Whittemore the land for a song ($160,000), but Congress balked again. He finally settled for freeing the land for development and allowing Whittemore to buy it at a fair market rate, and forcing the government to relocate the power corridor.

In 2005, Reid and fellow Nevada Senator John Ensign conducted a series of interventions with the EPA to eliminate the final obstacle -- the environmental impact on the fragile ecosystem in Coyote Springs Valley. When the agency blocked Whittemore's efforts, Reid and Ensign held several meetings with EPA officials to pressure them into submission. Whittemore used another Reid son, Lief, to lobby his father's office for assistance. In the end, the pressure paid off, as the EPA backed down from its opposition after winning a few concessions on the development plan.

What did Reid get in exchange for all of this support? According to the Times, Whittemore contributed $45,000 to Reid and his PACs since 2000. He also gave the DSCC $20,000 in 2000, when it pushed Reid as a leader for the party in the Senate. Reid's son Josh got $5,000 for his unsuccessful campaign for a city council seat; his other sone Rory got $5,000 for his successful effort to win a spot on the Clark County Board of Commissioners.

This appears to be of a piece with the Whittemore connection. In fact, it seems as though Whittemore's project was part of the transactions the AP discovered. "One of the sellers was a developer who was benefiting from a government land swap that Reid supported" -- that's the same project as Coyote Springs. A major portion of that story had to do with Reid trying to grease the skids for the land swap so that Whittemore could get around the federal right-of-way.

Hilariously, this appears just days after James Webb tried smearing George Allen with a pseudoscandal over stock options that Allen disclosed and never exercised, meaning that he never cleared a dime from the options. Now we have the Democratic caucus leader dodging disclosures and failing to disclose $800,000 in profits from a project on which he partnered with a lawyer suspected of connections to organized crime and a bribery scandal. And let's not forget Reid's connections to Jack Abramoff, whom Democrats tried mightily to use as a poster boy for Republican-only graft:

The activities _ detailed in billing records and correspondence obtained by The Associated Press _ are far more extensive than previously disclosed. They occurred over three years as Reid collected nearly $68,000 in donations from Abramoff's firm, lobbying partners and clients. ...

Abramoff's records show his lobbying partners billed for nearly two dozen phone contacts or meetings with Reid's office in 2001 alone.

Most were to discuss Democratic legislation that would have applied the U.S. minimum wage to the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. territory and Abramoff client, but would have given the islands a temporary break on the wage rate, the billing records show.

Reid also intervened on government matters at least five times in ways helpful to Abramoff's tribal clients, once opposing legislation on the Senate floor and four times sending letters pressing the Bush administration on tribal issues. Reid collected donations around the time of each action.

Reid also had a former staffer go to work for Abramoff, who then held campaign fundraisers in Abramoff's offices.

No wonder Reid hung up on the AP reporter when they asked him to comment on this story. Reid has demonstrated that he has few scruples when it comes to using his position and power for his personal enrichment and that of his family and "associates". If the Democrats continue to have Reid as the leader of their Senate caucus, voters should realize the kind of leadership he will provide if the Democrats win control of the Senate.

UPDATE: This story provides an answer to a question I had regarding Reid's dealings with Whittemore. The earlier story showed that Whittemore benefited Reid's kids and his election campaigns, but Reid worked awfully hard for Whittemore's benefit for no direct personal payoff. This land-swap deal and the $700,000 profit shows that Reid had a direct financial interest for his earlier interventions on Whittemore's behalf.

GOP Straw Poll (Updated)

GOP Bloggers have a new straw poll, and these are getting more and more sophisticated. We will be able to track responses by CQ readers as the poll continues. I'll check on it later this evening and update my post with the trends.

UPDATE 9 PM CT: In 14 hours, CQ readers have cast over 4200 votes, and the results are interesting. In the votes for acceptability, Giuliani and Romney come close to a tie (2685-2650, Romney). However, in the first-choice selections, Giuliani leads substantially with 35.9% of all CQ readers. Romney drops back to 20.9%, barely ahead of Newt Gingrich with 19.9%. George Allen gets 6.8%, and everyone else winds up in the hash.

The highest unacceptability ratings came from a surprising source. 54.2% of all CQ readers found Chuck Hagel unacceptable. George Pataki got 45.6% disapproval, and John McCain came in third at 42.3%. Bill Frist got 23.8% disapproval, a mild surprise given his recent successes in passing popular legislation.

In the two- and three-way races, Giuliani wins easily. He beats Romney head-to-head 54.5%-42.6%, and Rudy tops Romney and McCain 52.3-40.8-4.7.

I find these results fascinating, given conservative skepticism for Rudy -- and the self-description of CQ readers as an average 8 on the conservative scale. Keep checking back!

A Brookings Review Of The Clinton Effort On North Korea

My earlier posts on North Korea has created a debate about when the Kim regime began its cheating on the 1994 Agreed Framework. This has taken up a large part of the comments thread on John McCain's guest post from yesterday. The Brookings Institution, hardly a apologist for conservatives, makes the timeline pretty clear in a review that has plenty of sympathy for the Clinton administration (emphases mine):

When entering office, President Bush understandably wanted to revise the Clinton administration's approach to North Korea. The latter had a number of important accomplishments over roughly a five-year stretch from 1994 to 1999, but it had stalled by 2000.

The Clinton administration helped produce the important 1994 Agreed Framework, under which North Korea effectively froze its major nuclear programs and promised effectively to undo whatever nuclear weapons progress it had earlier made at its small research reactor (the same one now at issue). At the time, the United States and allies South Korea and Japan were accused of giving in to North Korean blackmail, but the deal they signed was a smart one: energy in exchange for energy and nonproliferation.

Washington and its allies did not provide $4 billion in cash for Pyongyang, as often claimed by critics, but instead provided the dollar equivalent of a $4 billion value to produce energy that the Yongbyon nuclear facilities would otherwise have produced. If the deal had a flaw, it was that it left North Korea in possession of its spent fuel rods for too long, though it is not obvious that Pyongyang would have agreed to quickly surrender them. It also promised North Korea new types of nuclear reactors, purportedly—proliferation resistant—but not entirely free from the danger of having their spent fuel ultimately diverted to weapons purposes by the North Korean regime. But those reactors will almost certainly not be completed, so at worst the 1994 accord bought time.

Following the accord, a process of diplomacy and engagement began on the peninsula, involving summits between the leaders of the two Koreas, South Korean tourist visits into North Korea, and some reunions for families separated since the Korean War. After a North Korean long-range missile test over Japanese territory in 1998, Pyongyang adopted a moratorium on future testing, which remains in place (though it is scheduled to end in 2003).

This engagement process slowed by 2000. North Korea stalled on its promises to continue the series of summits and family exchanges. It provoked military clashes at sea. And meanwhile, though not known at the time to U.S. and allied intelligence, it had initiated a secret uranium enrichment program to add to its nuclear stockpile.

The Clinton administration continued to try to engage North Korea even as détente weakened. Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright visited Pyongyang. President Bill Clinton considered a trip as well, if his administration had first been able to clinch a deal that would buy out North Korea's missile programs and end its missile exports in return for compensation worth perhaps several hundred millions dollars a year. ...

But this approach risked encouraging North Korea to use extortion as its main tool of interaction with the outside world. Moreover, a fix that did little to reform North Korea's economy would probably have proved only temporary, making it likely that Pyongyang would try to play a similar game at a later date with other weapons. And whatever one thinks of the Clinton approach, it clearly needed to be revised once the United States uncovered evidence of North Korea's illegal and illegitimate uranium enrichment program by the summer of 2002.

So Clinton, pressed by Jimmy Carter, cut a deal with the North Koreans that allowed them to keep their spent fuel rods -- the same material for which critics blame the Bush administration -- and then watched as they continued to test long-range missiles, which the Clinton administration apparently failed to address. They also left verification out of the Agreed Framework, which made the entire agreement a fantasy. Well before the end of the Clinton administration, the North Koreans had started clandestine uranium-enrichment for weapons. Meanwhile, Clinton and Albright did nothing, although they did consider engaging in bilateral talks once again in order to pay blackmail to Kim Jong-Il, stopping only because someone finally realized that Kim could simply play that game as often as he liked.

Brookings clearly shows that the Kim regime had started its violations well before Bush took office, and that Clinton's appeasement policy gave Kim the head start he needed to build nuclear weapons. Pyongyang went nuclear before Bush had a chance to take the oath of office, and the lack of American resolve allowed it to happen.

NOTE: A number of the commenters here have solid military and intelligence backgrounds. Lexhamfox, Ordi, SwabJockey are among them. So is Jerry, of which I have personal knowledge. Regardless of their individual perspectives, CQ commenters should not take their input lightly or hastily dismiss them as phonies.

It's The Economy, Even If The Media Doesn't Report It

Bill Clinton got elected on the James Carville slogan, "It's the economy, stupid." Fourteen years later, it's the media playing stupid, as a roaring economy has been treated with more secrecy than national-security programs by newspapers and television news channels. Michael Barone points out the hypocrisy:

The Labor Department Friday announced that the number of jobs increased between April 2005 and March 2006 not by 5.8 million but by 6.6 million. As an editorial in the Wall Street Journal notes, "That's a lot more than a rounding error, more than the entire number of workers in the state of New Hampshire. What's going on here?" The most plausible explanation, advanced by the Journal and by the Hudson Institute's Diana Furchgott-Roth in the New York Sun, is that lots more jobs are being created by small businesses and individuals going into business for themselves than government statisticians can keep track of. Newspaper reports on the number of jobs usually focus on the Labor Department's business establishment survey. But over the past few years, the Labor Department's household survey has consistently shown more job growth than the business establishment survey. The likely explanation: The business establishment survey misses jobs created by new businesses. Our government statistical agencies do an excellent job. But statistics designed to measure the economy of yesterday have a hard time reflecting the economy of tomorrow.

The federal budget deficit has been cut in half in three years, three years faster than George W. Bush called for. Why? Tax receipts were up 5.5 percent in FY 2004, 14.5 percent in FY 2005, and 11.7 percent in FY 2006. That's up 34.9 percent in three years. And that's after the 2003 tax cuts. When you cut taxes, you get more economic activity, and when you get more economic activity, the government with a tax system that is still decidedly progressive gets more revenue.

The bottom line: The private-sector economy is much more robust and creative than mainstream media would have you believe.

What? Your newspaper hasn't told you about the massive addition of jobs since the Bush tax cuts? Perhaps they've mentioned the new historical highs for the Dow Jones index. No? How about that falling deficit, driven by a huge boost in tax revenues caused by record employment and increased profits (and therefore taxes) in the private sector? Page C-17, you say?

What a shock in a midterm election season!

When the last labor report came out, many people pointed to the small job growth as a point of criticism for the Bush administration. However, with unemployment at 4.6%, we're approaching the point where there aren't many left to employ. At a certain point, the unemployment figure reflects transitional status and not joblessness of any significant length. As Barone notes, it also might reflect the effect of new investment in small businesses, which do not report employment as rapidly as corporations and which created the 800,000 shortfall in the new-job count the BLS just corrected.

If critics want to see more jobs get created, then they should promote the freeing of capital for investment into the economy. Raising taxes will have the opposite effect, something George H. W. Bush found out the hard way in 1990.

India To Refine America's Gasoline

America has not built a new refinery in almost 30 years, and the increaded demand for gasoline has our existing refineries operating at near-maximum capacity. The Bush administration has often proposed easing environmental rules that handcuff refiners from opening new facilities in order to meet the new and varied demands for different mixtures for regional requirements, but to no avail. Now a massive new refinery has been built for American production of gasoline, but Americans might be surprised to discover its location:

Sitting on the edge of the water in the Gulf of Kutch on India's western shore is one of America's dirty secrets. A mass of steel pipes and concrete boxes stretches across 13 square miles (33sq km) - a third of the area of Manhattan - which will eventually become the world's largest petrochemical refinery.

The products from the Jamnagar complex are for foreign consumption. When complete, the facility will be able to refine 1.24m barrels of crude a day. Two-fifths of this gasoline will be sent 9,000 miles (15,000km) by sea to America.

India's biggest private company, Reliance Industries, with a market capitalisation of $33bn (£17.8bn), runs the plant. Controlled by billionaire Mukesh Ambani, whose father Dhirubhai founded the company, Reliance towers over its industry rivals, contributing 8% of India's exports.

The company's ambitions in Jamnagar have helped India move from being a net importer to an exporter of refined petroleum products. "We want to make a statement that India can be an industrial giant. Jamnagar is a refinery for the world, based out of India," said Hital Meswani, executive director of Reliance Industries. "In the mid-90s when this project was conceived, no one believed it would work. We were told there was too much capacity, returns were not great and every management consultant we hired told us don't bother."

India has caught the wave provided by global instability and nervousness in the oil markets. Suddenly, refining has returned to profitability, thanks to the higher energy prices of the past year. The American refinery crisis after Hurricane Katrina arrived in time to confirm the wisdom of Reliance in its investment in the massive facility.

However, it also confirms the short-sightedness of American policy. The reason India can derive a profit from refining gasoline for Americans is because we have failed to provide for our own energy needs. That adds one round trip to every shipment of oil or gasoline we import. Instead of delivering the oil directly to the US, it now has to pass through India to get the gasoline from a half-million barrels of oil every day. How much does that second trip add to the cost?

The Saudis plan on eliminating some of that additional cost. They plan on opening a refinery capable of handling 400,000 barrels of oil per day. Some of that capacity will undoubtedly be used for exports to nations unwilling to refine their own crude. Saudi Arabia already exports 1.4 million barrels of oil a day to the US, and now we make ourselves even more reliant on Arab energy than ever before.

It's not just an issue of cost, either. The gasoline from a half-million barrels of oil comprise a small but significant part of our energy imports. Having tankers sailing every day with that cargo puts a massive weapon into the hands of terrorists, if they can manage to wrest control of the ship away from its crew. This is no idle talk; the Council on Foreign Relations has been warning about this for at least two years:

Not only has piracy never been eradicated, but the number of pirate attacks on ships has also tripled in the past decade-putting piracy at its highest level in modern history. And contrary to the stereotype, today's pirates are often trained fighters aboard speedboats equipped with satellite phones and global positioning systems and armed with automatic weapons, antitank missiles, and grenades.

Most disturbingly, the scourges of piracy and terrorism are increasingly intertwined: piracy on the high seas is becoming a key tactic of terrorist groups. Unlike the pirates of old, whose sole objective was quick commercial gain, many of today's pirates are maritime terrorists with an ideological bent and a broad political agenda. This nexus of piracy and terrorism is especially dangerous for energy markets: most of the world's oil and gas is shipped through the world's most piracy-infested waters.

We can take two lessons from this. Anything that keeps our energy resources on the seas longer than necessary creates that much more risk for this critical component to our economy and national security. More importantly, it underscores the pressing need to drastically reduce our reliance on overseas oil. We need to boost domestic production of both crude oil and refinined gasoline and eliminate the risks of the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf. That means more drilling and refining in the US for the short term, and a plan to move to completely different sources of energy in the long term, preferably clean sources like nuclear energy.

The Latin Mass Returns

Catholics celebrated Mass for centuries in the primarily Latin rite of the Tridentine Mass. In order to understand the Mass, Catholics had to learn Latin, as vernacular was used for nothing except the homily. Forty years ago, the Catholic Church decided to use vernacular for all portions of the Mass in order to make Catholicism more personal and approachable for modern Catholics, many of whom never learned Latin and found the Tridentine Mass too frustrating and incomprehensible. Predictably, the reform urge took on a very autocratic nature, and Rome demanded an end to all Tridentine Mass celebrations except those specifically authorized by the Church.

That may be changing. The Times of London reports that Pope Benedict XVI will authorize all priests to celebrate the Tridentine Mass, only forbidding it when bishops explicitly forbid it in writing:

THE Pope is taking steps to revive the ancient tradition of the Latin Tridentine Mass in Catholic churches worldwide, according to sources in Rome.

Pope Benedict XVI is understood to have signed a universal indult — or permission — for priests to celebrate again the Mass used throughout the Church for nearly 1,500 years. The indult could be published in the next few weeks, sources told The Times.

Use of the Tridentine Mass, parts of which date from the time of St Gregory in the 6th century and which takes its name from the 16th-century Council of Trent, was restricted by most bishops after the reforms of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65).

This led to the introduction of the new Mass in the vernacular to make it more accessible to contemporary audiences. By bringing back Mass in Latin, Pope Benedict is signalling that his sympathies lie with conservatives in the Catholic Church.

Many Catholics will rejoice at the return of the old celebration. Two generations of Catholics have grown up without it, but many of these wonder why the Church forbid it outright rather than just encourage both forms to be celebrated. The Times notes that several high-profile conflicts over the rite resulted in excommunications and various minor schisms, in retrospect a silly episode in Church history.

I recall when I started attending church again in the mid-80s that a nearby parish had a very conservative pastor. He had the smalled parish in the diocese, reportedly because the bishop suspected that he would turn the altar around and start celebrating Mass in Latin. In fact, one of the employees of the parish told me that the diocese would stop by just to make sure that he hadn't violated the restriction. This was not an isolated impulse, as the controversy proves.

In many parishes, priests celebrate at least one Mass in Spanish, and of course many parishes in immigrant communities use their own languages. It seems odd that the only language that priests could not use without express permission was the official language of the Church itself. The intense reaction to Vatican II shows what can happen when reformers take themselves too seriously, and how damaging that can be to an organization or a community.

I would much prefer to celebrate Mass in English. I never studied Latin, so I would understand little of the ceremony except for the correlation to the vernacular Mass I know well. It's doubtful I could say the Pater Noster or the Gloria, and that limitation would make me feel like an outsider in a Mass that should be about inclusion. However, I see no reason why a parish that celebrates five Masses in a weekend could not perform one in the Tridentine tradition; I would simply attend another and be perfectly happy to do so.

I think Benedict has the right idea, and now I can at least have the opportunity to experience something I have not since I was a toddler, far out of my memory. In a Church that celebrates its catholic as well as Catholic reach, a little Latin will hurt no one.

UPDATE: Mary Pat notes in the comments that the Novus Ordo Mass is celebrated in Latin and had been an acceptable form of celebration, so language isn't the primary issue. The Tridentine Mass had other elements which the Vatican deemed objectionable after the Second Vatican Council, including moving the altar around so that the priest faces away from the congregation. None of the elements really supported the near-absolute ban on the centuries-old Mass, in my opinion.

South Korea Shrugs

South Korea has decided to continue its policy of appeasement despite the obvious results shown with North Korea's nuclear test. President Roh Moo Hyun eschewed urgent action and instead called for a period of extended "coordination" between the nations trying to convince Kim Jong-Il to return to the bargaining table:

THE prospects for tough, swift action against North Korea were scuppered yesterday when it became clear that South Korea will not abandon its policy of engagement with its totalitarian neighbour, in spite of North Korea’s claimed nuclear test.

As the US and Japan called for tough punishment for Monday’s test and experts predicted that a second may be imminent, leaders in Seoul appeared to have accepted that they will have to live with a nuclear North Korea — at least until Washington can be persuaded to engage in direct talks with the isolated Stalinist state. ...

Diplomats said last night that China opposed US plans for international inspections of all cargo going in an out of North Korea. Beijing also wants any sanctions focussed only on North Korea’s nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programmes, and does not want any reference to enforcement under Chapter VII of the UN Charter. Russia broadly endorsed the Chinese position.

Even before this week, the US and Japan have favoured the most aggressive action against North Korea, but they have been frustrated by China, South Korea and Russia, which seek a stable continuation of Kim Jong Il’s regime rather than the chaos and refugee exodus that could result from his overthrow.

So what does that leave for a strong response? John Bolton introduced a resolution at the UN Security Council that would ban all nations from conducting business in arms and nuclear technology with Pyongyang, as well as with the nations and companies that have facilitated North Korea's counterfeiting and drugrunning operations. It also bans the sales of luxury items. a codicil intended to humiliate Kim, who favors Western trappings. However, it doesn't place an embargo on North Korea, mostly because South Korea refused to cooperate with one. In fact, Seoul refused to cancel its joint projects with Pyongyang.

The three nations that border North Korea clearly do not want the Kim regime to suddenly collapse, which is the reason that they have not advocated tougher measures at any point in the ongoing crisis. They fear the chaos that will ensue -- the release of a million-man army from state control, the mass panic of a starving nation, and the potential use of the regime's war toys by instant warlords. A failed state on the Korean Peninsula could have catastrophic consequences ... but so could Kim's plans for war.

If a nuclear test doesn't get Russia, China, and South Korea serious about Kim's lunacy, we can assume that the UNSC will never move beyond banning Kim's favorite French brandy. That conisgns the region to a nuclear arms race or a war on the peninsula to stop one -- or perhaps both.

Allen Stock-Option Story Pays Thin Dividends

I haven't followed the latest controversy in the Allen-Webb campaign for the Virginia Senate seat, mostly because I found it less than compelling. Apparently, so do Virginia voters; they have Allen up by six points according to last week's Rasmussen poll despite the Webb campaigns weird smears of Allen as a secret Jewish racist.

This kerfuffle revolves around stock options owned by Allen in 2000 that supposedly didn't get disclosed. The Webb campaign, boosted by Bloomberg News, claims that they were worth $1.1 million dollars at one point (emphasis mine):

In March 2000, Allen held 60,000 options when Xybernaut shares closed at an all-time high of $23.75. That would have made the options worth $1.1 million, less commissions and fees, had Allen exercised them.

At that time, Allen could have paid $5.47 and $1.56 respectively for two groups of options, sold them and pocketed the difference. He was awarded another 50,000 options in October 2000.

Greg Walden, an attorney at Patton Boggs LLP in Washington who represents Allen, said the options with Xybernaut expired 90 days after Allen left the board in December 2000.

Walden said Allen never exercised the options. They became worthless as the share price fell. The company went bankrupt in 2005.

Now, I'm no financial genius, but I do believe that stock options that never get exercised are worth -- nothing. And expired stock options are worth -- nothing. The only thing that could make this story even less interesting is if Allen actually declared the stock options.

And look! It gets even duller:

Senator Allen did disclose the stock options in an amended 2000 financial disclosure report ...

The Senate Ethics Committee staff verbally advised the Senator’s office that stock options that are “underwater” have “no value” and are not required to be disclosed. This was consistent with the language of the preparation instructions for the report forms, and with the Ethics Committee staff’s subsequent lack of comment on their absence. When notified of a difference between the ethics form and the ethics manual, naturally, the Senator’s office quickly moved to ask for a clarification and will comply with the determination.

So to recap, Allen disclosed stock options that had a net value of $1250 by the time he was ready to take office, never exercised them, and therefore received absolutely no benefit from them. The only instance of supposed influence Webb can state is that Allen asked the Army to respond to a letter from the company, after which Allen never took up the issue again. He never realized a single dime from the options, not even after the company won a $2 million contract in 2003.

Oh yea, this is a compelling story for Virginians. What's next from the Webb campaign -- did Allen rig pinball machines in high school in order to get free plays?

Kim: Sanctions An Act Of War

Kim Jong-Il seems determined to have himself a little war, whether anyone else wants it or not. This morning, the North Korean Foreign Ministry warned that any applications of sanctions against them would result in "physical" responses:

North Korea said Wednesday it would respond with "physical" measures to counter U.S. pressure against the communist regime after its claimed nuclear test.

"If the U.S. keeps pestering us and increases pressure, we will regard it as a declaration of war and will take a series of physical corresponding measures," the North's Foreign Ministry said in a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency. The North didn't specify what the measures would be.

"We were compelled to prove that we have nuclear weapons to prevent the increasing threat of war by the U.S. and protect our sovereignty and survival," the North said, criticizing an alleged nuclear threat from Washington and sanctions. "We are ready for both dialogue and confrontation."

"Even though we conducted the nuclear test because of the U.S., we still remain committed to realizing the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula through dialogue and negotiations," the ministry said.

Either this is a bluff, or Kim really has decided that the moment to go to war is now. It might seem propitious to Kim, with the US focusing on Iraq and Iran and NATO tied up in Afghanistan. The Russians have Georgia on their minds, and show no particular inclination to put the brakes on Pyongyang. The Chinese would not want a war, but they're probably not ready to expend the hundreds of thousands of troops necessary to stop one.

That leaves Japan and South Korea pretty isolated. A lot of speculation has been offered about Kim launching ICBMs at the western US, but that presumes Kim can launch a Taepodong-2 successfully, which he has never done before. However, both Japan and South Korea are in easy reach of his shorter-range missiles, and the latter also in range of massive artillery batteries ready to fire now.

It's likely that all of this is a massive bluff, intended to frighten the players into capitulation on Kim's terms. However, Kim has hardly been a rational actor up to now, and one has to consider the real possibility that he's ready to throw the dice on a regional war. He may think that he can beat the US due to a lack of resolve to respond militarily to an attack. If so, he has sorely misread the American people.

Oops -- He Did It Again? (Updated: False Alarm)

Japan has announced that they suspect North Korea conducted another nuclear test in the last couple of hours. Details are sketchy and contradictory, but Japan said they detected a tremor from North Korea:

The Japanese government detected tremors on Wednesday that led it to suspect North Korea had conducted a second nuclear test, officials and news reports said.

Shortly after Japan said it suspected another test had been conducted, the country's meteorological agency reported a magnitude-6.0 earthquake shook northern Japan.

U.S. and South Korean monitors said they had not detected any new seismic activity in North Korea on Wednesday.

It may have sensed a pre-quake tremor from its own territory which confused their sensors. A nuclear test that caused a 6.0 earthquake in Japan could never have been missed by South Korea. Still, Japan's quake may have been coincidental to a nuclear test. More as this develops ...

UPDATE: It appears that Japan just has the heebie-jeebies. An update on the same link as above has the South Koreans insisting it saw no unusual seismic activity:

The head of South Korean seismic monitoring station said no activity has been detected in North Korea that could indicate a possible second North Korea nuclear test.

"There's no signal from North Korea, even no small event," Chi Heon-cheol, director of the South's Korea Earthquake Research Center, told The Associated Press.

Of course, that could mean an even worse dud than the first test, but let's not go there ...

Guest Post: Senator John McCain On North Korea

Please welcome Senator John McCain as a guest poster at Captain's Quarters. He delivers a tough, no-nonsense reponse to the latest provocation from North Korea.

Time for Decisive Action on North Korea

Korea doubts the world’s resolve. It is testing South Korea, China, Russia, Japan, and the United States. They launched seven missiles in July, and were criticized by the Security Council, but suffered no serious sanction. We have talked and talked about punishing their bad behavior. They don’t believe we have the resolve to do it. We must prove them wrong.

I am encouraged by the Security Council’s swift and strong condemnation of the act on Monday, but the permanent members must now follow up our words with action. We must impose Chapter 7 sanctions with teeth, as President Bush has proposed.

China has staked its prestige as an emerging great power on its ability to reason with North Korea, keep them engaged with the six party negotiations, and make progress toward a diplomatic resolution of this crisis. North Korea has now challenged them as directly as they challenge South Korea, Japan, Russia and the U.S. It is not in China’s interest or our interest to have a nuclear arms race in Asia, but that is where we’re headed. If China intends to be a force for stability in Asia, then it must do more than rebuke North Korea. It must show Pyongyang that it cannot sustain itself as a viable state with aggressive actions and in isolation from the entire world.

They have missiles, and now they claim to have tested a nuclear device. Eventually they will have the technology to put warheads on missiles. That is a grave threat to South Korea, Japan and the United States that we cannot under any circumstances accept. North Korea also has a record of transferring weapons technology to other rogue nations, such as Iran and Syria.

The President is right to call on the Council to impose a military arms embargo, financial and trade sanctions, and, most importantly, the right to interdict and inspect all cargo in and out of North Korea. I hope the Council quickly adopts these sanctions, and that all members enforce them.

The worst thing we could do is accede to North Korea’s demand for bilateral talks. When has rewarding North Korea’s bad behavior ever gotten us anything more than worse behavior?

I would remind Senator Hillary Clinton and other Democrats critical of Bush Administration policies that the framework agreement her husband’s administration negotiated was a failure. The Koreans received millions in energy assistance. They diverted millions in food assistance to their military. And what did they do? They secretly enriched uranium.

Prior to the agreement, every single time the Clinton Administration warned the Koreans not to do something -- not to kick out the IAEA inspectors, not to remove the fuel rods from their reactor -- they did it. And they were rewarded every single time by the Clinton Administration with further talks. We had a carrots and no sticks policy that only encouraged bad behavior. When one carrot didn’t work, we offered another.

This isn’t just about North Korea. Iran is watching this test of the Council’s will, and our decisions will surely influence their response to demands that they cease their nuclear program. Now, we must, at long last, stop reinforcing failure with failure.

Saddam's Trial Resumes

The trial of Saddam Hussein continued today, and the testimony painted a grim picture of life and death under his regime's grip:

Prison guards under Saddam Hussein used to bury detainees alive and watch women as they bathed, occasionally shooting over their heads, a former female prisoner testified Monday in the genocide trial of the ex-president.

Speaking in Kurdish through an Arabic interpreter, the 31-year-old witness recalled what she saw as a 13-year-old girl who was detained during Saddam's offensive against the Kurds in the late 1980s. ...

A prison warden she identified as Hajaj - whose name has been given by earlier witnesses in the trial - "used to drag women, their hands and feet shackled, and leave them in a scorching sun for several hours."

"Soldiers used to watch us bathe," said the woman. The guards also fired over the women's heads as they washed.

The woman said several relatives disappeared during the offensive against the Kurds. "I know the fate of my family (members). They were buried alive," she testified.

The prosecution presented the court with documents showing that remains of the women's relatives turned up in a mass grave.

I have no comment, save for thankfulness that this group of butchers find themselves in the dock instead of in palaces. I'm just going to let the victims speak for themselves.

Paper Trails At The Voting Booth

E. J. Dionne tackles the controversy over electronic voting machines that has arisen since their rushed implementation following the 2000 presidential election. Dionne argues that a little paranoia isn't always a bad thing:

Sometimes, paranoids are right. And sometimes even when paranoids are wrong, it's worth considering what they're worried about.

I speak here of all who are worried sick that those new, fancy high-tech voting systems can be hacked, fiddled with and otherwise made to record votes that aren't cast or fail to record votes that are.

I do not pretend to know how large a threat this is. I do know that it's a threat to democracy when so many Americans doubt that their votes will be recorded accurately. And I also know that smart, computer-savvy people are concerned about these machines.

The perfectly obvious thing is for the entire country to do what a number of states have already done: require paper trails so that if we have a close election or suspect something went wrong, we have the option to go back and check the results.

For most of us, the perfectly obvious thing was to question why a balloting process that had been in use for decades had to be tossed aside simply because one party didn't like the outcome of the race. In California, we had used the butterfly ballot for decades; we had one in every election in which I voted. The punch-card ballots made it very easy to ensure that my vote was recorded correctly, and booth instructions warned voters to check that all chads got properly cleared from the ballot before filing it.

All of a sudden, because of one close election, American voters suddenly discovered that the venerable punch-card ballot was the gravest threat to democracy since Huey Long and J. Edgar Hoover. Rather than comprehend that every election will have its share of voters who do not follow instructions, reformers insisted that our freedom hinged on our ability to provide a voting system that would protect us from our own incompetence. These reformers -- including many of the same people who now object to the electronic voting machines -- proclaimed the electronic machine the savior of the electoral process.

However, the reformers didn't take into consideration that the system they hailed simply wasn't ready for prime time. Diebold rushed it to market, unmindful of security problems and internal errors in its programming. It occasionally misrecorded votes, and voters had no way to check its output. For most products, this would mean more R&D and a few more trials to determine reliability. In time, this could have been an excellent product -- and the punch-card system had enough reliability to give it that time, under normal circumstances. Instead, reformers insisted that local governments buy these new and flawed systems by the thousands, wasting millions of dollars and ruining Diebold's reputation.

Dionne is right, but he fails to mention the paranoia that fueled this laughable cycle of so-called electoral reform. Paranoia is never a good basis for public policy, and neither is panic. The reason we find ourselves in the situation Dionne rightly decries is because a bunch of sore losers convinced a large number of people to buy into their paranoia and forced a change that turned out badly.

As for me, I live in Minnesota, where we use an optical-scan ballot. We use a black pen to fill in the circles for our desired candidates, and then we put the ballot into a reader. If the ballot has an error, it spits it out and we re-do it. If not, we see the reader accept the ballot and we leave, secure in the knowledge that our vote will be counted. Maybe the rest of the country might catch up with us by the time we host the Republican National Convention in 2008.

Mexico Wants UN To Block Fence

Mexico wants to take the border fence authorized by Congress last month to the UN, in order to get it stopped. Foreign Minister Luis Ernesto Derbez says that Mexican lawyers will research their cause to determine whether the UN can intervene:

Mexico's foreign secretary said Monday the country may take a dispute over U.S. plans to build a fence on the Mexican border to the United Nations.

Luis Ernesto Derbez told reporters in Paris, his first stop on a European tour, that a legal investigation was under way to determine whether Mexico has a case.

The Mexican government last week sent a diplomatic note to Washington criticizing the plan for 700 miles of new fencing along the border. President-elect Felipe Calderon also denounced the plan, but said it was a bilateral issue that should not be put before the international community. ...

"What should be constructed is a bridge in relations between the two countries," Derbez said.

We could start by having Mexico police its own border and cease encouraging their citizens to migrate north for work. Evem better: Mexico could clean house and rid itself of the rampant corruption that creates the conditions for the substantial poverty that plagues its country, thereby making the massive migrations unnecessary. Better yet, Mexico could mind its own business about the kind of border security we see fit to install on our side of the border.

Perhaps Derbez could explain the Mexican border policy on its own southern border. They enforce a border policy that the Center for Immigration Studies notes is much harsher on illegal immigrants than the treatment Mexico demands of its own citizens in the US. Even before Mexico started getting somewhat tougher on the actual border crossings at the behest of the US government in early 2001, the Mexican government looked the other way as ranchers made slaves out of the workers, in some cases even refusing to pay them or feed them. Their normalization option gets almost no publicity, and only a few thousand have been granted Mexican residency.

The American border barrier will sit on American territory, and it will be used to enforce our national border. The need for that enforcement comes from a failure of Mexico to ensure that its citizens cross the border in a legal manner, as well as a failure of the Mexican government to provide the means for their citizens to prosper on their own. Derbez opposes the border because Mexico depends on the American money these workers send home to their families as well as the safety valve the border provides that keeps angry and starving young men from threatening the political order. If Derbez thinks the UN can solve those problems, then he will be sorely disappointed when he files his complaint.

Kim: Just Another Shrimp On The Barbie

The Australians have stepped up to the plate, as they always do when tyrants threaten global security, in the wake of the North Korean nuclear test. They didn't bother to wait for the UN Security Council to slap sanctions on the Kim Jong-Il regime, and told the UN that they had better snap to it themselves:

Australia will impose a range of measures on North Korea, including curtailing visas and supporting any U.N. sanctions, in response to the country's nuclear test, Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said Tuesday. ...

"We were urging our friends and allies in the United Nations to pass a resolution imposing sanctions," Downer told reporters.

Downer said the nuclear test had made the region less secure, and that North Korea had "humiliated" its biggest ally, China.

Australia has diplomatic relations with North Korea, restoring them six years ago after Pyongyang insisted that it would behave itself and stop making nuclear weapons. After this test, Australia considered ending the relationship again, but decided that having the North Korean ambassador in Canberra to scold was a better idea. Downer did just that yesterday, calling Chon Jae-hong to express Australia's displeasure at the latest lunacy from Dear Leader.

Downer also took an opportunity to support Condoleezza Rice. He told the press that Rice had worked tirelessly to garner a consensus among the leading nations for tough action against Kim Jong-Il. The two diplomats had spent time earlier in the day discussing strategies for handling the crisis, and Downer apparently decided to lead by example. (The US already has a comprehensive sanctions regime against North Korea.)

Australia has a significant role to play in this Asian power play. The Western nation has long been a bastion of freedom in that part of the world, and its own economy competes in the same arena that China wants to dominate. As always, the Aussies don't rely on platitudes and wishful thinking when protecting their own interests -- or ours, for that matter.

North Korea Threatens Nuclear Launch

Kim Jong-Il either needs a hug or a straitjacket. North Korea followed its rogue nuclear test by issuing an explicit threat to attack the US with a nuclear missile unless we allowed Pyongyang to operate its counterfeiting business without interference:

A North Korean official threatened that communist nation could fire a nuclear-tipped missile unless the U.S. acts to resolve its standoff with Pyongyang, Yonhap news agency reported Tuesday.

"We hope the situation will be resolved before an unfortunate incident of us firing a nuclear missile comes," the unnamed official said on Monday, according to a Yonhap report from Beijing. "That depends on how the U.S. will act."

Yonhap didn't say how or where it contacted the official, why no name was given or why it delayed reporting until Tuesday. ...

"We have lost enough. Sanctions can never be a solution," the official said. "We still have a willingness to give up nuclear weapons and return to six-party talks as well. It's possible whenever the U.S. takes corresponding measures."

The official didn't elaborate on what the corresponding measures would be. But one of them is believed to be a long-standing North Korean demand that Washington lift financial restrictions imposed on the communist regime for its alleged counterfeiting and money laundering.

I wrote a few minutes ago about China's reassessment of their relationship with the Kim regime; this is likely to speed that process considerably. Given that we will not grant Kim a franchise to print US currency nor allow him to flood the global financial system with fake $100 bills, the situation appears to be heading towards a war that only Kim wants to fight. Even threatening such a launch provides the US with a casus belli, if it chose to act on it.

Obviously, we'd prefer to avoid it, and for a number of reasons. Any limited strike on North Korea would result in a launch of tens of thousands of rockets on Seoul, which could reduce the city to dust. This isn't Hezbollah in Lebanon, after all, and Seoul is too close to the DMZ to protect it adequately from the threat. We would not be able to eliminate that threat without carpet-bombing North Korea -- and even if we did, we'd have to face off against the DPRK army, which would no doubt swarm across the border. We could be back to 1950 within days. Pusan perimeter, anyone?

Nevertheless, we may be left with no choices other than war and blackmail. China can't seem to keep control of its client any more, and South Korea's attempts at appeasement disappeared in a seismic boom two days ago. I would expect that the next attempt to launch a missile will get much more attention from the American military, and that may just take us into a conflict that we should have been ready to fight in 1994 -- and which Bill Clinton was prepared to fight, at least publicly, until Jimmy Carter interfered with American foreign policy and forced Clinton to back down.

Bridge To Nowhere Senator Defeats Reform Again

Ted Stevens, who championed the infamous Bridge to Nowhere and threatened to quit the Senate if denied his pork, has quietly undermined another attempt at pork reform. Robert Novak reports that Stevens stripped a key requirement in the Defense appropriation that would have required a review of all earmarks:

Sen. Ted Stevens, considered the Republican king of pork, just before the pre-election congressional recess killed a requirement for the Defense Department to evaluate unauthorized earmarks imposed by members of Congress on the Pentagon.

Freshman Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma had won Senate passage of the ''report card'' as part of the Defense appropriations bill. The evaluation would show that the military really does not want most of the estimated $8 billion in earmarks added by Congress this year.

However, Stevens succeeded in stripping the reform from the final version of the bill before it was signed by President Bush. Coburn intends to try to pass the report card as a freestanding bill during the lame-duck session after the election.

The utter predictability of Ted Stevens somehow gives me a warm feeling in a world full of surprises. Once again, the porkmeister has decided that American taxpayers do not need to know how politicians like Stevens spends their money. In fact, he's decided that Congress doesn't need to know how the Pentagon views the cornucopia of pork that winds up in its appropriation.

Senator Coburn has done a tremendous job in pressing for openness and honesty in appropriations. Coburn has become the bete noir of Stevens and politicians like him, elected officials that use earmarks to bribe others into voting for expensive appropriations with little or no debate and also to ensure their own survival in districts and states filled with federally-funded projects. Some politicians still have not discovered that times have changed, and that their constituents are watching more closely than ever.

Speaking of which, be sure to check out the new federal spending database co-sponsored by OMB Watch and The Sunlight Foundation. It debuts later today, and I think it may be Kryptonite to Ted Stevens.

China Rethinks Its Alliances

The nuclear test by North Korea yesterday may have produced results which Kim Jong-Il did not anticipate. China issued an unusually harsh response to their client state, and the London Times reports that Beijing may reconsider its relationship with the impulsive Stalinist:

CHINA responded with rare fury to neighbouring North Korea’s nuclear test, resorting to language generally reserved for imperialist opponents rather than communist friends.

Beijing’s response was unusually swift. “The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has ignored the widespread opposition of the international community and brazenly carried out a nuclear test,” it said.

Long gone are the days when China and North Korea described their relationship as being “as close as lips and teeth”. Indeed, North Korea’s test has delivered China to a diplomatic crossroads: it can choose to act tough with a troublesome neighbour or to stick with the cajoling and persuasion that have now been seen to fail. ...

That China is furious at the test was more than reflected in the tone of its official response. Beijing had urged Pyongyang only a day earlier not to take such a provocative step.

Zhu Feng, an expert on North Korean ties, said that the statement showed China’s increasingly tough policy towards a country that was once its closest ally. “This is a very significant signal,” he said.

China wants to make itself the primary power in east Asia, and it originally saw the Korean crisis as an opportunity to demonstrate its leadership and influence. China got cut out of the Agreed Framework discussions, which predictably resulted in their lack of assistance in enforcement. The Bush administration's insistence on multilateral talks accepts China's influence as a given, and they had an opportunity to show how they could exercise their diplomatic clout to reach a solution on behalf of the Americans and the North Koreans.

All of that dissipated in the seismic tremor felt throughout the Korean Peninsula. China had convinced new Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to make Beijing his first destination of his term, a departure from the traditional visit to the US. This was supposed to highlight China's waxing importance (and the waning influence of the US) and open a new level of engagement between the two economic powers of the region. Instead, Kim embarassed Hu Jintao at exactly the moment when he wanted to make China appear strong. Hu could not even influence a world leader that relies on Hu to survive.

It's not just embarassment that drives China to reconsider. The nuclear test will surely convince Japan and South Korea that they have little choice but to acquire their own nuclear arsenals in answer to Kim's threat. China does not want to see a nuclear escalation throughout the region, especially by Japan, who would certainly also upgrade their navy. China wants to be the only military power in the region, and Hu knows that Japan's economy could easily outproduce their own in military armament. Japan could also purchase materiel from the US quite easily; China has no such option.

China may have no choice but to accept sanctions against Pyongyang. They rarely give their approval to such actions, but Kim may have left them no manuevering room now. Even their own think tank suggests such a policy change, a clear signal that Beijing has something in mind for the UN Security Council.

Only China can influence Kim to end his nuclear pursuits; that much we know. Whether they want to do so will be seen soon enough.

Fizzlemas In North Korea

Bill Gertz writes in tomorrow's Washington Times that the nuclear test performed by North Korea may not have been nuclear at all. American intelligence has begun reviewing the seismic data and are increasingly convinced that the test was either a failure or a hoax:

U.S. intelligence agencies say, based on preliminary indications, that North Korea did not produce its first nuclear blast yesterday.

U.S. officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that seismic readings show that the conventional high explosives used to create a chain reaction in a plutonium-based device went off, but that the blast's readings were shy of a typical nuclear detonation.

"We're still evaluating the data, and as more data comes in, we hope to develop a clearer picture," said one official familiar with intelligence reports.

"There was a seismic event that registered about 4 on the Richter scale, but it still isn't clear if it was a nuclear test. You can get that kind of seismic reading from high explosives."

The underground explosion, which Pyongyang dubbed a historic nuclear test, is thought to have been the equivalent of several hundred tons of TNT, far short of the several thousand tons of TNT, or kilotons, that are signs of a nuclear blast, the official said.

The White House took care earlier today to call even the claim of a successful test provocative, and now we understand why they made the distinction. The Washington Post also reports that American experts expressed surprise at the meager power displayed in the test, but does not go quite so far as Gertz. They also include new information on Pyongyang's expectations:

The explosion set off by North Korea yesterday appears to have been extremely small for a nuclear blast, complicating U.S. intelligence efforts to determine whether the country's first such test was successful or signaled that Pyongyang's capabilities are less advanced than expected, several senior U.S. and foreign government officials and analysts said. ...

A senior intelligence official called it a "sub-kiloton" explosion detonated inside a horizontal mountain tunnel and said its low yield caught analysts by surprise. "For an initial test, a yield of several kilotons has been historically observed," the official said.

A U.S. government official said the North Koreans, in a call to the Chinese shortly before the test was conducted, said it would be four kilotons. The official said it is possible the explosive yield was as low as 200 tons. France and South Korea both issued sub-kiloton estimates, and officials dismissed as inaccurate an early Russian estimate that the blast resulted from a five-to-15-kiloton explosion.

If this is accurate, Kim expected to get 20 times more energy released from the test than the result. That points to a failure, another embarassing flop that follows on the heels of the Taepodong-2 test in July that exploded seconds into its flight.

One interesting note: look where the Post places this story in tomorrow's paper. Wouldn't one expect the possible failure of the first nuclear test since 1998 to make the front page, especially considering the high profile the test got the day before?

Pelosi Speech A Revelation In More Than One Way

Hugh Hewitt points to a speech by Nancy Pelosi that seems rather interesting in light of today's nuclear test by North Korea -- but also in another way that Hugh missed. Pelosi spoke in April 2003 to accept an award -- to which we'll soon return -- from the Global Security Institute. In that speech, she gives her perspective on missile defense, even post-9/11, which the Democrats might want to bury:

"Some of our most significant foreign relations achievements over the last 30 years were our agreements with the former Soviet Union to reduce the size of our nuclear arsenals – the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the START treaties.

"Yet by shredding the ABM Treaty and flirting with the unthinkable – 'usable' battlefield nuclear weapons – the Bush Administration turns the clock back on three decades of arms control.

"The United States must not create new nuclear weapons and ignite new arms races. As the only nation ever to use nuclear weapons, we have a moral obligation to be a leader in ridding this scourge from the face of the Earth forever.

"The United States does not need a multi-billion-dollar national missile defense against the possibility of a nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile.["]

The ABM suited the purposes of a binary world-power system, in which two superpowers only had each other to fear and the rest of the world chose sides. In that world, both superpowers acted rationally if at cross purposes, and the doctrine of mutually-assured destruction ensured that both powers would refrain from ever launching the missiles. Under those circumstances, the ABM made sense. The pursuit of missile defenses could have destabilized the MAD equation, although as it turns out, Reagan used that destabilization to win the Cold War.

In a world where ICBMs now appear in the hands of many nations, including some seriously non-rational actors such as the apocalyptic Shi'ites in power in Iran, the eschewing of missile defense is ludicrous. Iran has no interest in MAD doctrine; they have made clear that world chaos suits them just fine, as long as the Twelfth Imam shows his face as a result. The ABM had lost its meaning ten years prior to Bush's withdrawal from the treaty, as North Korea and Iran have shown in their clandestine pursuits of nuclear weapons throughout the 1990s and their open development of long-range missiles during the same period.

If the lunatics and millenials of the world possess missiles of any kind that can reach the US, then we had better build defenses that work, rather than wave treaties like a modern-day Neville Chamberlain. Anyone who cannot tell the differences in context between 1970 and 2003 has no business running a nation.

But Hugh misses one interesting aspect of Pelosi's speech. She gave it while accepting the Alan Cranston Peace Award, and showered praise on the longtime California Senator after whom the GSI named it:

"To Members of the Board of GSI, thank you for the honor you have bestowed upon me. As a personal friend of Alan Cranston, it is a personal and official privilege to receive the 2003 Alan Cranston Peace Award.

"It is an honor to receive this award named for a leader worthy of so many titles. Public servant. Senator. Statesman. Patriot.

"When Alan Cranston became Senator Cranston, Lyndon Johnson told him, 'There are two kinds of senators: show horses and workhorses. You are a workhorse.'

"I beg to differ – he was both.["]

Pelosi goes on in this vein for some time, taking about a third of her speech to lionize Cranston. A few kind remarks would have been polite, but Pelosi gushes over Cranston at quite some length. For the leader of a party that wants to proclaim a "culture of corruption" in its midterm, one might want to rethink the love for Cranston. He departed the Senate in 1990 after having been labeled by the Senate Select Committee on Ethics as the worst of the Keating Five. Cranston took over a million dollars in campaign contributions from savings and loan mogul Charles Keating in exchange for interfering with federal S&L regulators on his behalf. Cranston got the only official censure from the Senate as a result of his corruption.

What was that theme you wanted to discuss, Rep. Pelosi?

The Farce Is Strong With This One

CQ reader Consabo decided that we needed a moment to lighten up, and he sent this parody of Star Wars now appearing on YouTube. Normally I don't go in for too much of the parodies on the site, but this one is simply too good to let pass unremarked. If you wonder what happened behind the scenes of the Galactic Empire, this short movie explains everything (rated TV-14, I'd say):

Hope you enjoy the brief moment of geekery here at CQ!

Secure Fence Act Has Secure Support

Yesterday I analyzed the possibility that the lack of a presidential signature on the Secure Fence Act (HR 6061) might be an attempt at a pocket veto. President Bush has never given very enthusiastic support to any border solution that didn't include a plan for normalization for illegal immigrants already inside the US. Mickey Kaus started counting the days since Congress passed the bill and wondered whether the White House had decided to simply ignore the bill to death.

I took a few minutes at my lunch break to contact a senior staffer on the Hill who has worked the immigration issue. He told me that, as some CQ commenters had speculated, Congress has not formally sent the bill to the President. That means the clock has not started for his signature. The 10-day period starts only after Congress formally prints and delivers the bill for the President to sign into law.

Why has Congress waited? The Secure Fence Act, which requires that the border barrier be constructed, is a very high priority for Republican leadership in both chambers. They and the White House want to schedule the signing for what they see as the maximum impact to the midterm elections. This means waiting for other stories to fall off the front pages. My source told me that the terrorist detention and interrogation bill will be signed on October 17th, and they want this to come after that.

Expect to see this get signed somewhere between October 24th and November 1st. The White House considers this bill a front-and-center accomplishment and wants the boost to last all the way through Election Day. Bush and the Republican leadership in Congress (especially Bill Frist, I'm told) want this to get as much coverage as possible. After the signing ceremony, expect to see this bill get trumpeted in the final advertising push for all Republican incumbents running for re-election.

No one on the Hill or in the White House has missed the message from the base. Everyone understands the importance of signing this legislation for the midterms. My impression is that they didn't realize that people expected the bill to get signed at the same time as the Homeland Security appropriation, and now they understand the confusion. Bottom line: the Secure Fence Act will get signed into law.

Did 9/11 Put Teflon On Rudy?

The New York Times, never one of Rudy Giuliani's fans, does a profile of the former mayor today that reports on an intriguing quality Giuliani seems to have gained after 9/11. His performance under fire appears to have forged a political suit of Teflon for Rudy, one that deflects a number of issues that would derail other candidates:

For many loyal Republicans — and more than a few independents and Democrats — his national security message seems to work, blotting out the central question facing his candidacy: whether a supporter of legal abortion, gay civil unions, immigrants’ rights and gun control; a thrice-married, Catholic New Yorker whose split with his second wife took place publicly and none too neatly, can win Republican presidential primaries and caucuses.

“I’m well to the right of Rudy on social issues,” said Sid Dinerstein, chairman of the Republican Party in Palm Beach County, Fla., after an appearance there by Mr. Giuliani two weeks ago. “But this is a man who, when it comes to dealing with bad guys, has infinite courage.”

In August, at a fund-raising dinner in Charleston for South Carolina’s very conservative Republican Party, Mr. Giuliani spoke about port security. When the party faithful had a chance to pose questions, they did not ask him about abortion or gays — only reporters did that.

Mr. Giuliani is never asked about recent charges that he, among others, did not do enough to protect rescue workers at the trade center site from inhaling toxic dust.

Nor is he asked about his friend, former police commissioner and former business partner, Mr. Kerik, whom President Bush nominated to be homeland security secretary in December 2004, with Mr. Giuliani’s support. Mr. Kerik withdrew his nomination as questions were raised about unpaid taxes involving his nanny, ties to people accused of involvement in organized crime, an illegal gift and an unreported loan. Just 19 months later, he pleaded guilty to two misdemeanors.

In a way, Richard Perez-Pena tries to make these quasi-scandals stick while reporting that they won't. He goes into detail about Kerik, for instance, even though Giuliani has nothing to do with the allegations Kerik faces now. He details the policy stands that put Giuliani at odds with the Republican base. He also recounts the mayor's messy personal life, something that would normally turn off the religious voters that the GOP needs to win nationally.

However, all of these issues have already received wide notice, and yet Giuliani remains popular. That certainly has something to do with the fact that Giuliani has not campaigned for office since 9/11, but there's more to it than that. It might have some parallel with -- bear with me -- the national college football championship. When teams suffer a loss early, they can still contend for the championship, because the voters tend to focus on what the teams have done lately. Giuliani's faults and dissents have been well known for years, and we're not likely to hear anything new on the negative side.

It also may have some basis in the threats we face today. We had hoped, in vain, that domestic politics might gain some maturity after 9/11. In that we have been disappointed, but Giuliani represents at once that hope and that potential. Given the terrorist threat and the menace from North Korea and Iran, we clearly need someone with significant toughness in the Oval Office. Of all the potential candidates in the ring thus far, how many honestly project that kind of toughness that would create confidence in them as a wartime president?

I'm not sold on Rudy -- yet. I especially mistrust him on the Second Amendment. After today's nuclear test and five years of fighting terrorists, though, I'm hard pressed to see anyone on either side of the aisle that has Rudy's toughness and resolve. In 2008, that may trump all other considerations.

Russia Flacks For Kim Jong-Il

The seismic record of today's nuclear test by North Korea reveals a very small impact, almost so small that nuclear experts wonder if it isn't a hoax by Kim Jong-Il. Russia, however, wants everyone to know that they're very impressed by the test:

Russia's defense minister said Monday that North Korea's nuclear test was equivalent to 5,000 tons to 15,000 tons of TNT. That would be far greater than the force given by South Korea's geological institute, which estimated it at just 550 tons of TNT.

By comparison the bomb the United States dropped on Hiroshima during World War II was equivalent to 15,000 tons of TNT.

The AP reports that Pyongyang alerted Russia to the test two hours before the test took place. Perhaps Russia is working from their pledged yield. In the meantime, one has to believe that South Korean seismologists would have a better position with which to measure the force expended by the test.

Why is this important? The yield of the device has to be significant enough to provide a military deterrent. A 550-ton-yield nuke is worse than useless. One can build conventional bombs with more impact than what Kim tested this morning, and with none of the diplomatic messiness that Kim has created over the last twelve years. A 550-ton-yield nuke doesn't even make a good tactical weapon, let alone a strategic deterrent. (See Update II below)

Even a 5000-ton-yield nuke would have a questionable deterrent level, considering the inventory in the arsenals of the world's declared nuclear powers. It might have some value as a terrorist weapon, but it would do no more damage than a Stealth bombing run can do, and the latter has a lot more accuracy than the former. No one would shrug at a bomb that has one-third of the power of the bomb that leveled Hiroshima, but we expected more than that -- and right now, it looks like Kim only has a bomb one-tenth of that size.

So why is Russia insisting on overstating Kim's success? Other than sheer bloody-mindedness, it's hard to say. If we take them at their word, then we'd have to insist that Russia join in sanctions immediately, which they have so far refused to do. They may want to make the argument that Kim has enough of a nuclear deterrent that we should leave him alone, but that won't fly either.

The Russians may simply want to continue its game-playing against the West, but as I wrote earlier, the stakes are going to get very high for Vladimir Putin as well as Kim Jong-Il. If they want to bet the house on a pair of deuces, they had better prepare to lose everything.

UPDATE: For those who wonder what a 4.2 Richter measurement really means, this site's deconstruction of an earthquake falsely assumed to have been a nuclear test seems particularly relevant:

Size of 1997 Event The Washington Post for August 29 gives the seismic magnitude of the event as 3.8. Quoting Pentagon officials, the Washington Times on the 28th states "initial data on the event produced 'high confidence' that the activity detected was a nuclear test equivalent to between 100 tons and 1,000 tons of TNT. The relatively small size would be consistent with tests used to determine the reliability of a nuclear weapon . . .such as a scaled-down test of a warhead primer." The Reviewed Event Bulletin of the IDC gives a seismic magnitude, mb, of 3.9, obtained by averaging readings from two stations. Magnitude is proportional to the log of the amplitude of seismic waves.

The Richter scale is an exponential/logarithmic scale (we native Californians know this from birth), so the difference between 3.9 and 4.2 would mean that the seismic strength was three times stronger than the 1997 event. That would mean the yield on North Korea's nuclear test would have been between 300 and 3,000 tons, not 5K - 15K as the Russians claim. It fits with the initial Western estimate of 550 tons, although that's on the low side of the scale. Unless the estimate of the seismic strength gets revised upwards, we're dealing with a very small yield -- which is why the North Koreans may be preparing a second test.

This chart seems even more clear (h/t QandO):

3.5 73 tons
4.0 1,000 tons Small Nuclear Weapon
4.5 5,100 tons Average Tornado (total energy)

A 4.2 seismic event would therefore put the energy towards 2.5 and 3 kt maximum -- much ado about almost nothing.

UPDATE II: Yeah, well, obviously the first cup of coffee hadn't kicked in while I wrote this. The biggest bomb in the arsenal is the MOAB, and it has a TNT yield of 12 tons, not 12 kt, which I mixed up this morning. A few CQ readers kindly asked me whether I had mixed up my tons and kilotons, which obviously I did.

Another point that some have made today is that some nuclear tests are deliberately set up to produce low yields; their point is to test designs, and when dealing with a limited amount of fissile material, this small test works best. However, I doubt that the North Koreans wanted to do that kind of design test. Their intent was to make a big splash and frighten people. While a 550 kt device would make a good terrorist weapon, it doesn't do much strategically.

Will Baker Bring Back Federalism For Iraq?

Both the New York Times and the London Times indulged in a little speculation about the advice James Baker will give the White House after his Iraq Study Group concludes its research into war policy. The NYT focuses more on the open nature of the inquiry, while the British newspaper believes a decision has already been made:

James A. Baker III , the Republican co-chairman of a bipartisan commission assessing Iraq strategy for President Bush, said today that he expected the group to depart from Mr. Bush’s call to “stay the course.”

In an interview on the ABC News program “This Week,” Mr. Baker said, “I think it’s fair to say our commission believes that there are alternatives between the stated alternatives, the ones that are out there in the political debate, of ‘stay the course’ and ‘cut and run.’ ”

Mr. Baker, who served Mr. Bush’s father as secretary of state and White House chief of staff, did explicitly reject a rapid withdrawal from Iraq, which he said would only invite Iran, Syria and “even our friends in the gulf” to fill the power vacuum.

David Sanger reports that Baker will work within the larger framework of Bush's foreign policy, which means that a Murtha-style "rapid redeployment" will not be one of their recommendations in any event. In finding a middle ground between cut-and-run and retreat, one has to assume that the solution will have to fundamentally change the Iraqi equation as well as the American equation. Sarah Baxter believes that Baker intends on exactly that approach:

The Iraq Study Group, co-chaired by James Baker, the former US secretary of state, is preparing to report after next month’s congressional elections amid signs that sectarian violence and attacks on coalition forces are spiralling out of control. The conflict is claiming the lives of 100 civilians a day and bombings have reached record levels.

The Baker commission has grown increasingly interested in the idea of splitting the Shi’ite, Sunni and Kurdish regions of Iraq as the only alternative to what Baker calls “cutting and running” or “staying the course”.

“The Kurds already effectively have their own area,” said a source close to the group. “The federalisation of Iraq is going to take place one way or another. The challenge for the Iraqis is how to work that through.”

So we're back to federalism, a solution that is almost guaranteed to enrage the Sunnis. Baker's study group envisions a canton-style Iraq with a bare framework for a national government, one that only concerns itself with external security and the distribution of oil revenues. That last is a sop to the Sunnis. but that will not mollify them. If the Sunnis wave goodbye to the Kurds and the Shi'a, they understand that they will wave goodbye to the only natural resource they have. A weak central government will never be able to force the Kurds and the Shi'a to split their oil revenue; eventually the two will starve the Sunni, especially given the hard feelings from decades of Sunni domination, and the Sunni know it.

It also doesn't address the issue of Turkey. The Turks have millions of Kurds in their east, and they do not want to see an independent Kurdistan on their borders. The creation of such a protostate will almost certainly cause Turkey to take military action against their own Kurds to keep them from opening the border to their Iraqi cousins. Turkey will vociferously oppose any federalist solution that allows the Kurds to maintain their own army in the North.

And in the South, the split will allow Iran to exert even more influence and power in Iraq. Iran may actually prefer to keep Iraq united, because a canton system will keep its influence limited to the south, whereas their reach extends throughout Iraq, with the possible exception of the Kurdish areas. However, the lack of a strong central government will allow the Basra area to fly into Teheran's orbit much more significantly than it otherwise would. That seems like a bad idea, considering the nuclear ambitions and the genocidal impulses of the Iranian ruling class.

If this is what Baker will suggest, one should ask him when a weak central government has ever made a nation stable and able to protect itself.

North Korea Conducts Nuclear Test

North Korea conducted a nuclear test today that has set the world on edge, according to Pyongyang's announcement and confirmation through seismic monitors. The yield, however, looks almost impossibly small:

North Korea said Monday it performed its first-ever nuclear weapons test, claiming it set off a successful underground blast in a "great leap forward" that defied international warnings against the communist regime.

The reported nuclear test sparked condemnation from regional powers who said that, if confirmed, it would be a serious threat to regional stability. The U.S. called for immediate U.N. Security Council action. ...

South Korea's seismic monitoring center said a magnitude 3.6 tremor felt at the time of alleged North Korea nuclear test wasn't a natural occurrence.

The size of the tremor could indicate an explosive equivalent to 550 tons of TNT, said Park Chang-soo, spokesman at the Korea Institute of Geoscience and Mineral Resources — which would be far smaller than the nuclear bombs the U.S. dropped on Japan in World War II.

The atomic bomb that struck Hiroshima, Japan on Aug. 6, 1945, had the destructive power of about 15,000 tons (33 million pounds) of TNT.

Kim Jong-Il has threatened a nuclear test for some time, and in the last few weeks seemed serious about it. Many had doubted whether his nuclear program even existed, as the only evidence of an actual nuclear device was Kim's braggadocio. A North Korean test of its nuclear capability would show that the Kim regime had acquired the skill top not only produce the fissile material but also to construct the device itself -- a tricky bit of engineering. The test would have to demonstrate a significant yield in order to be convincing.

Right now, it looks like the North Koreans failed. The seismic activity shows a much smaller explosion than anyone would have predicted. The White House won't even confirm a nuclear test has taken place with the evidence at hand; in fact, only the Russians have confirmed the event as a nuclear test. American officials told the AP that it looks like "more fizzle than pop", given that its force only amounts to 1/30th of Hiroshima. In fact, with a yield that small, it's questionable whether it could possibly have been a nuclear explosion.

Kim had better hope it turned out better than indicated, because he has certainly reaped a whirlwind of protests. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who had issued a strong warning yesterday from his first state visit to Beijing, called it "unpardonable" from Seoul this morning. South Korea suspended critical aid shipments and announced that its military was "fully ready" to respond to Kim's provocations. Even China, which joined Abe yesterday in warning Kim about the nuclear test, says that Baijing remains "resolutely opposed" to the nuclear tests.

What now?

The US has demanded that the UN Security Council take action against North Korea, assumably in the form of a tough sanctions regime. It will be difficult for Russia and China to put them off any longer. Kim has not responded to diplomatic pressure, and worse, he's openly conducted an act of deep provocation. Japan will demand that the UN take significant action -- they have pressed the point more than any other nation over the last few months -- and the unspoken undercurrent of Japanese rearmament will be a powerful incentive for the stragglers. Abe, a nationalist under any circumstances, has already said that he wants to amend the Japanese constitution to allow for more military options, and the Japanese people will see this nuclear test as a good reason to do so.

That will set off an arms race throughout the region, which will threaten the power of the two large Asian nations. Russia and China cannot afford to have their backyard go nuclear, especially with Japan leading the way. The window of opportunity for them to allow action will be small; Japan has all the technical knowledge they require to go nuclear in a very brief period of time. If the UN refuses to act based on Russian and Chinese intransigence, all rogue nations will understand that the global community will not act in the face of obvious nuclearization, and act accordingly. The West will have to make a decision about whether it can abide that, or whether the UN no longer serves any useful purpose and resolve to act on its own to neutralize the threat.

The stakes have been raised to the highest level. Kim had better hope that he's got more than just a pair of deuces in his hand.

DNC Still Can't Find An American Soldier To Support

The Democratic Party website has been changed since the discovery that they used a picture of a Canadian soldier on the page that proclaimed their support for "our troops". Apparently, though, they still can't find a picture of an American soldier to support:

Does anyone at the DNC know what an American soldier looks like? They accuse the Republicans of hiding behind the flag all too often. This appears to be a much more blatant example than anything I've seen from the GOP.

UPDATE: Even the photo at the top of the page is suspect. Fred, in the comments, notes that the people cheering with fists upraised comes from a stock-photo website.

A Pocket Veto On Border Fence?

Mickey Kaus has checked the calendar and wondered if George Bush might issue a passive-aggressive veto on the Secure Fence Act passed last week by Congress. Normally, bills passed by Congress become law if the President signs them or does nothing for ten days, but the Constitution also provides an exception for this in Article I, Section 7:

Every Bill which shall have passed the House of Representatives and the Senate, shall, before it become a Law, be presented to the President of the United States; If he approve he shall sign it, but if not he shall return it, with his Objections to that House in which it shall have originated, who shall enter the Objections at large on their Journal, and proceed to reconsider it. If after such Reconsideration two thirds of that House shall agree to pass the Bill, it shall be sent, together with the Objections, to the other House, by which it shall likewise be reconsidered, and if approved by two thirds of that House, it shall become a Law. But in all such Cases the Votes of both Houses shall be determined by Yeas and Nays, and the Names of the Persons voting for and against the Bill shall be entered on the Journal of each House respectively. If any Bill shall not be returned by the President within ten Days (Sundays excepted) after it shall have been presented to him, the Same shall be a Law, in like Manner as if he had signed it, unless the Congress by their Adjournment prevent its Return, in which Case it shall not be a Law.

This is known as the pocket veto, and it has plenty of precedent. However, it is not as easy as it sounds. The Supreme Court has ruled in the past that an adjournment would have to be for a significant time to enable a pocket veto. Both houses of Congress adjourned on September 30th and are not scheduled to resume the session until Thursday, November 9th, two days after the midterm elections.

The Secure Fence Act passed Congress the day before its latest adjournment. Excepting Sundays as the Constitution requires, that would mean that Bush would have to sign the Act on October 11th at the latest. If he fails to do so, would that comprise a pocket veto? And as such, could Congress even take a vote to override it?

It certainly would be bad politics, and it might be a flawed tactic. No one disputes the ability to issue the pocket veto at the end of a session, but intrasession pocket vetoes are very controversial, although used by Reagan, Bush 41, and Clinton. Following a pocket veto by Nixon and a legal challenge to it by Congress, the DC appellate circuit held that intrasession failures to sign legislation does not prevent the President from returning the bill to Congress upon their return. Since then, Presidents have usually returned the bills to Congress in the interests of collegiality and to avoid having the Supreme Court issue a precedent-setting ruling that would wipe out intrasession pocket vetoes.

Robert Bork argued against the intrasession pocket veto during the Ford administration in his position as Solicitor General:

On January 26,1976, Solicitor General Robert Bork wrote a memorandum to Attorney General Edward Levi, concluding that President Ford should not exercise the pocket veto during intrasessions and intersessions, but only at sine die adjournment at the end of the second session, provided that Congress has authorized an officer or other agent to receive return vetoes.26 Bork reached that conclusion by taking into account both historical and practical considerations. He wrote: “We do not believe that the length of the intra-session adjournment can be constitutionally significant under modern conditions, so long as an agent remains behind who is authorized and available to receive a return veto. Nor do we regard the difference between intra-session and inter-session adjournments to require a difference in constitutional practice.”27 The use of a pocket veto, he wrote, “is improper whenever a return veto is possible.

Clinton's attempts at intrasession pocket vetoes all came in the last year of his presidency, and probably was meant to tweak the Congress that had impeached him. In all instances, however, he handled them as "protective return", and in two of the three cases, Congress took up override votes, treating his refusal to sign the bills as normal vetoes rather than as passage into law. In the third case, they replaced the bill with another that Clinton supported.

Will this history of tension between the executive and legislative branches get another spin in modern times? It seems odd that Bush has not yet signed the Secure Fence act, and his opposition to all but a comprehensive approach to immigration may be tempting him to spike the bill. If he thinks that will happen quietly, though, he is sorely mistaken, and that tactic will rebound horribly against a Republican Party that has enough trouble on its hands in these midterm elections. It would provide a fascinating showdown between the White House and Congress over the meaning of Article I, Section 7, and it may wind up giving the Supreme Court the final word on intrasession pocket vetoes that has been lacking for 200 years.

UPDATE: Some commenters think Bush already signed the Secure Fence Act last Wednesday. Not true. While in Arizona, he signed HR 5441, the appropriation bill for the Department of Homeland Security. The Secure Fence Act is HR 6061 and was not mentioned at all in Bush's remarks. In fact, the word "fence" appears nowhere in his remarks.

Rice's Diplomacy In Middle East Starting To Pay Off

Herb Keinon sheds some light on the murky efforts by Condoleezza Rice in confronting the radicalism in the Middle East, especially as it relates to the Israeli-Palestinian mess. His length analysis points out the progress Rice has made in the past several weeks in convincing the existing regimes that democratization presents a far less significant threat, especially in the long term, than Iranian- and Syrian-backed radical Islamists. This slow realization has begun paying dividends as the Arab states now see organizations such as Hezbollah and Hamas as threats to their own survival as well as Israel's:

Remember, as well, that unlike the days when Colin Powell led the State Department, now there is largely one source of foreign policy power in Washington, and it rests with Rice. She needs some kind of achievement. Forming a coalition of moderate Arab states to counterbalance Iran, Hizbullah, Syria and Hamas would fit the bill, and here she is showing some nascent signs of success.

Last November, Rice traveled to the Persian Gulf before coming here, as she did this time as well. But then, in Bahrain, a high-profile, US-backed summit meant to promote political freedom and economic change in the region ended without an agreement, delivering a severe blow to US President George W. Bush's democratization program for the Middle East. ...

This time, however, Rice was greeted warmly in Saudi Arabia, as well as at a meeting of the foreign ministers of Jordan, Egypt and the Persian Gulf countries in Cairo. It is not that the leaders she met with suddenly saw the wisdom of Bush's democratization plan, but rather that the rulers of these moderate Arab regimes realize that ,although democracy may theoretically challenge their positions somewhere down the line, the more immediate threat is right around the corner, in the form of a nuclear Iran and Islamic extremism. The radical mullahs, in other words, are now more dangerous than the democracy-minded NGOs.

Ironically, the concerns of the moderate Arab regimes - generally believed to be Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Oman and Kuwait - have given birth to yet another "diplomatic window of opportunity," as some diplomatic officials now term this post-Lebanon-war period. ...

The IDF turned over a huge boulder during the war in Lebanon, and unearthed all types of nasties crawling around underneath. These nasties, now apparent to all, threaten not only Israel, but also the moderate Arab regimes. Now that the boulder has been overturned, it is impossible for them to claim not to see.

The Hezbollah power play and the Hamas hardline positions in the territories may have awoken the neighboring states to Iranian and Syrian intentions. It comes in the context of Iran's singleminded pursuit of nuclear weapons and the inability of the global community to stop it. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan all understand the consequences of Iranian success in this regard: the Persians will achieve ascendancy over the Arabs in an attempt to wrest control of Islam and their people away from them. Iran wants to rekindle the Persian Empire in a 21st-century guise of influence and control, and the Arabs have yet to find a way to stop it.

In this cause, they find themselves with a very strange bedfellow. Israel not only faces the same kind of threat from Iran, but they have the weapons to counterbalance Teheran, or at least everyone assumes they do. Israel has the willingness to fight open wars against the Iranian proxies that they lack, and neither one of them really has made a dent against Israel militarily. Hassan Nasrallah can brag about his epic victory over Israel all he wants, but no one believe that a man who has to get Israeli assurances of non-assassination before appearing at his own celebratory rally. All Hamas has managed to do is to get Israel to re-invade Gaza and destroy its infrastructure again. Neither have been able to cow Israel into acquiescence.

The key development from Rice's point of view would be to get the moderate states into a diplomatic conference to discuss all of these issues, including the Palestinian question. Rice wants to return to the road map, and now Israel's more moderate neighbors want a resolution more than ever. They do not want groups like Hamas and Hezbollah gaining strength through Iranian support and would like to undercut their entire raison d'etre. Israel has long avoided such conferences as inimical to their interests, preferring to negotiate one-on-one with Fatah as the only representative of the Palestinians. Now, however, Rice wants to use the developments from this summer to convince all of the parties that they have much more in common than ever before, and a common enemy that needs to be faced down.

The Arabs and the Israelis could finally find some common ground for security. It would be ironic if after all of the efforts of the West to resolve the standoff over the last sixty years, the Iranians proved to be the real -- if inadvertent -- peacemakers.

A Split In Teheran?

The visit to the US by former Iranian president Mohammed Khatami had approval from the highest levels of government, the London Telegraph reports, and it served a clandestine American purpose. The US contacted Khatami on his trip to carry a message back to Iran's Guardian Council, the real power of the Islamic Republic, in an attempt to manuever around Mahmoud Ahmadinejad:

The Bush administration made secret overtures to former Iran president Mohammed Khatami during his visit to the United States last month in an attempt to establish a back channel via the ex-leader.

American officials made the approach as part of a strategy to isolate Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Mr Khatami's hard-line successor, by using the former president as a conduit to the Iranian people.

They also hoped that Mr Khatami would report his conversations to senior members of Iran's theocratic regime who are wary of the current president. Diplomatic sources said that "third parties" were authorised by Nicholas Burns, the US under-secretary of state responsible for relations with Iran, to talk to Mr Khatami in a step towards "engagement" with senior Iranians.

The clandestine contacts with Mr Khatami reflect a significant shift in American policy, away from preparation for military action and towards increased diplomatic pressure on Iran, which is defying United Nations demands to suspend its nuclear programme.

The Telegraph reports this as a change in policy from a war footing, which seems a bit unlikely to me. The Bush administration has never prepared the country for war against Iran, and for good reason. Iran presents a much more difficult target for military action, even for limited strikes on its military and industrial infrastructure. It has little open territory, unlike Iraq, and Iran has dispersed its nuclear development assets specifically to resist such an attack. The White House has constantly resisted the temptation to escalate the Iranian standoff into a military crisis, preferring to allow the Europeans to drive the diplomatic efforts instead of taking charge ourselves.

It does represent another change in direction, however. The Bush administration has often tried to speak directly to the Iranian people and encourage them to remove the theocracy that controls them. In order to maintain support for democracy activists in Iran, the US has carefully tried to stay clear of engagement with the current regime. This back-channel opening to the mullahs through the supposed reformer Khatami looks like an abandonment of that principle to a more realpolitik approach of arm's-length engagement with a distasteful regime that we know to oppress its people.

Did the Axis of Evil suddenly get kindler and gentler, or did all of the other options fail? It seems like the latter more than the former, especially since -- as the Telegraph reports -- it looks like the mullahs don't trust Ahmadinejad, either. This does provide some opportunity to see if the Guardian Council wants to step back from the brink and minimize the threat posed by its hand-picked populist president. If the rumors are true, it's possible that the mullahs seriously underestimated Ahmadinejad's ability to grow his own power base, and now see a threat from the formerly obscure radical they placed into the presidency.

Also, the White House may simply be keeping all of its options open. Khatami's invitation may have provided an unforeseen opportunity that they grasped. Nothing in a simple behind-the-scenes contact requires the US to back away from democratization in Iran, and we have no assurance that Khatami even delivered the message. The bad publicity that resulted from his temporary visa may convince the White House that further engagement with the Iranian mullahcracy may not be politically possible at the moment, and they can easily drop that course at any time.

I'm skeptical of the Khatami mission. The mullahs may have some problems keeping Ahmadinejad from eclipsing their power, or they may not, but the main source of anti-American fervor still resides on the Guardian Council. It would be nice to believe that they have a rational outlook on governance and foreign policy, but so far they have done little to demonstrate it.

UPDATE: Michael Ledeen remains very skeptical. In the comments on this thread, Michael says:

[T]he idea of "the mullahs" trying to work around, limit, or oust Ahmadi-Nezhad is as fanciful as the older idea that "the mullahs" were being challenged by Khatami "the reformer." They are all members of the same cult. There's a person in that country whose job description is "supreme leader." And it's not Ahmadi-Nezhad. It's Khamene'i.

That doesn't appear to have changed much since 1979.

The Compounded Tragedy Of Dahianna Heard

Dahianna Heard became a widow this past March, when her husband Jeffrey got killed in an ambush delivering supplies to American troops near Fallujah. Jeffrey worked as a contractor in Iraq after serving in both the Army and the National Guard. She and her one-year-old son will have to live without him, and in a particularly cruel twist of fate, will have to do so while being deported back to her native Venezuela:

Dahianna and Jeffrey Heard often talked of their life after the war as a dream they would live together: buy a house, raise a family, travel abroad.

But Jeffrey, a Casselberry contractor for a security company supporting U.S. troops in Iraq, was shot to death this spring during an ambush of his convoy near Fallujah.

Now his wife, a Venezuela native raising their 1-year-old son, faces possible deportation.

One reason: They hadn't been married long enough. She was three months short of the two years needed to satisfy immigration-law rules.

She is appealing for residency. But if that fails and she must leave, she said their son Bryan may have to grow up in her native country -- despite being a U.S. citizen.

Had Jeffrey died in June, Dahianna would have no problem staying in her adopted country. The fact that her husband died serving his country in a war zone as a civilian has no legal impact on her status. All that matters in this case is the length of the marriage, and ICE will not recognize the marriage as non-fraudulent unless 24 months pass -- regardless of the fact that the Heards had a son together.

Congress has an exemption that would cover this situation in committee, but it will not reach the floor in time to assist Dahianna in her situation. The exemption already exists for members of the armed forces and their surviving families, and a number of attempts have been made to extend it to civilians working for the Pentagon either directly or as contractors. The situation apparently has come before Congress before, because Dick Durbin and Barack Obama sponsored a resolution that allowed one of his constituents to remain in the US after her husband was killed in Iraq in 2004.

Several factors have complicated Dahianna's application. For one, she allowed her original tourist visa to expire a few years ago, staying on a succession of temporary work visas. She and Jeffrey dated for two years, but he stayed in Iraq for much of their marriage. He came home for vacations but the work in Iraq was pressing. ICE will probably argue that the lack of time spent in the marriage justifies their skepticism of its credibility. Jeffrey's mother believes differently, and has argued for Dahianna's cause, but to no avail.

If ICE cannot make an exemption for Dahianna, then she will have to return to Venezuela and the Hugo Chavez regime, a particularly galling outcome for the widow of a man who died serving freedom. She will take Jeffrey's child with her and out of the country Jeffrey protected in several different phases of his life. Surely this cannot be justice. (via The Florida Masochist)

Sauce For The Goose

Earlier today, Mitch Berg wrote a post about a Star Tribune article on Republican Congressional candidate Alan Fine, who is competing for Martin Sabo's MN-05 seat against Keith Ellison. The Strib highlighted a years-old arrest of Fine for domestic abuse, one which later got expunged as the charges were withdrawn:

Minneapolis congressional candidate Alan Fine was charged with domestic violence in 1995 and nine years later had his record expunged, in a case in which he and his first ex-wife give different versions of the events that led to him ending up in the Hennepin County jail.

His wife at the time, Rebecca Wexler, dropped the abuse charge, and Fine succeeded in having the case removed from Hennepin County court and police records, according to documents recently obtained by the Star Tribune.

Fine, who is the Fifth District Republican candidate, said in a recent interview that he never struck Wexler.

He said he sought to have his records expunged because he was innocent.

This story sent Mitch and Power Line into a fine fury, and for good reason. Fine never got tried for the charges, let alone convicted, and the court expunged the record in a routine fashion. The Strib engages in a he-said-she-said that proves nothing, and his ex-wife fills the pages with allegations she never bothered to test in court. She claims that Fine intimidated her into withdrawing the charges, even though her father -- a Hennepin County judge -- supported her case.

That said, politics ain't beanbag, and Fine had to know that this would probably come out when he started campaigning for public office. These days, anything salacious in the past will get dug up by people who want to attack candidates on character rather than policy, and that happens in both parties; sauce for the goose, as they say. Especially since Minnesota Democrats Exposed exposed Ellison's own history of domestic abuse. The complaints involving Ellison came from 2005 and 2006, and will receive adjudication on October 23rd. We'll wait to see when the Strib gets around to reporting these accusations -- since MDE noted them almost exactly a month earlier.

Both men should have been presumed innocent in the absence of convictions, especially when considering the frequently irrational accusations that get tossed around during divorces and the end of sexual relationships. Neither has any real bearing on the qualifications of the candidates. What I find fascinating is that the Strib decided to report on years-old charges against the Republican that had been expunged by the court when it so far has pretended that the ongoing charges against the Democrat have been unworthy of comment.