Should Spanking Become A Crime?

California will soon debate whether to make spanking a child of less than 4 years of age a crime punishable by prison time. A bill in the state assembly intends to take the decision for disciplining their children out of the hands of parents, and the Governator says he may well sign it:

California parents could face jail and a fine for spanking their young children under legislation a state lawmaker has promised to introduce next week.

Democratic Assemblywoman Sally Lieber said such a law is needed because spanking victimizes helpless children and breeds violence in society.

"I think it's pretty hard to argue you need to beat a child," Lieber said. "Is it OK to whip a 1-year-old or a 6-month-old or a newborn?"

Lieber said her proposal would make spanking, hitting and slapping a child under 4 years old a misdemeanor. Adults could face up to a year in jail and a $1,000 fine.

I'm a bit of an agnostic on spanking. My parents spanked me from time to time, open handed on the seat of my pants, and I hardly consider myself abused. I'm not certain it's the most successful strategy for disciplining children in most circumstances, though. My son and daughter-in-law use subtraction and time-outs instead, withholding play time or toys when the Little Admiral misbehaves -- of course, now I'm speaking rhetorically, because my granddaughter never misbehaves. (Yeah, I know, I'm a sucker.)

However, I don't believe that spanking as normally defines constitutes child abuse. If it did, we'd apply the existing abuse laws in cases of spanking. This seems more to me like a hobby horse of some legislators and an opportunity to force their views regarding parenting on the citizens of California. The Los Angeles Times reports that many Californians think the same:

Assemblywoman Sally Lieber hit a nerve when she mused publicly this week about making it illegal for parents to strike children younger than 4.

The Bay Area Democrat hasn't introduced a bill yet, but critical calls and e-mails — including some personal attacks — have flooded her offices since her local newspaper wrote about her intention.

Unbowed, Lieber said she would introduce a bill next week to make California the first state to make the hitting of a toddler or baby a crime. Language was still being drafted, but Lieber was considering making a violation a misdemeanor, punishable by up to a year in county jail.

On an ironic note, Lieber is catching some flack for not having any children herself. This echoes the comments made by Barbara Boxer to Condolezza Rice, but in this case it has more application, since Lieber intends on regulating parental choices.

Regardless, this appears to be an unnecessary intrusion on the rights of parents. Parents have spanked children, open-handed and on the rear, for millenia and we've managed to survive it. I appreciate that many people do not agree with this strategy, and I'm not sure I'd use it, either. (MY son was too old for that when I married his mother.) However, just as I would not require parents to spank, I would also not bar them from using a method I do not consider abusive, certainly not with the enforcement of the government.

I'm interested in what CQ readers think about spanking. Vote in the poll below, and be sure to add your comments in the thread.

Venezuelan Democracy, RIP

The Venezuelan national assembly has followed in the footsteps of the German Reichstag in the 1930s in voting itself into irrelevancy. It gave President Hugo Chavez dictatorial powers, which he says he will use in the short term to nationalize vast swaths of the nation's industry and eliminate any term limits for his reign:

Venezuela's National Assembly has given initial approval to a bill granting the president the power to bypass congress and rule by decree for 18 months.

President Hugo Chavez says he wants "revolutionary laws" to enact sweeping political, economic and social changes. He has said he wants to nationalise key sectors of the economy and scrap limits on the terms a president can serve.

Mr Chavez began his third term in office last week after a landslide election victory in December.

The bill allowing him to enact laws by decree is expected to win final approval easily in the assembly on its second reading on Tuesday. Venezuela's political opposition has no representation in the National Assembly since it boycotted elections in 2005.

The transformation of Venezuela from democracy to banana republic is now complete. Chavez has reinvented the Fuerherprinzip, South America style, in having his rubber-stamp assembly grant him absolute power over the nation. No court, no legislature can overturn his decrees, at least not for the next eighteen months -- and one doesn't need a crystal ball to predict that Chavez will issue a decree negating that limitation as well, and probably sooner rather than later.

Western investors in Venezuela will suffer the same fate as those invested in Cuba before the fall of Batiste, or in Mexico during their occasional efforts to nationalize industries. They will be lucky if they can sell off their assets to Chavez for pennies on the dollar before he can seize them outright. The window for those transactions will close very shortly.

More importantly, Chavez has condemned the people of Venezuela to oppression and further misery. When outside investors stop underwriting projects in the country, their economy will head straight down. Chavez will use what remains -- the oil production -- to make splashy festivals for the poor and open a few schools and hospitals. The vast majority of what profit he can take will go right back into the pockets of Chavez and his cronies.

The drop in oil prices means that he will have less in his pockets already. Venezuelan oil is not of the highest quality and costs more to produce. Their margins are much thinner than the Saudis, for instance, who just pledged to increase production. If prices drop below $40 per barrel, which seems a stretch but still possible, Chavez will have almost no profit from oil production, and the lack of investors to build other industries in the country will cause Venezuela's economy to grind to a halt.

It wasn't that long ago that Chavez claimed he smelled George Bush's aroma at the podium of the United Nations, calling him a devil and an oppressor. In this case, I think we can conclude that Chavez smelled the enemy of the Venezuelan people -- and it was himself.

UPDATE: Some Leftists may indeed swoon with joy over Chavez, but the sensible Michael Stickings isn't one of them:

Chavez talks up his Bolivarean revolution -- his efforts to transform his country and Latin America, in alliance with like-minded rogue states like Iran, into a grand anti-American bloc -- but what forms the core of his rule is not liberation but absolutism. In this case, the rule of "revolutionary" law -- in effect, the arbitrary rule of a single unchecked man -- is nothing but tyranny, authoritarianism, the oppression of the people. Arbitrary rule always is. Which is why the rule of law, as opposed to the rule of man, is so central to democracy. And which is why, in our advanced democracies, we must safeguard the rule of law vigilantly and diligently, protecting it from the trespasses of those who would weaken it, scrap it, in the name of executive authority.

Well put. After that, he takes a cheap shot at Bush, but that's more habit than thought.

Stop The Presses -- Hillary Announces!

In what has to be one of the most anticlimatic campaign announcements since Ronald Reagan in 1979, Hillary Clinton officially announced her candidacy for the 2008 Presidential nomination. The official notice came as a posting on her website:

Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton embarked on a widely anticipated campaign for the White House on Saturday, a former first lady intent on becoming the first female president. "I'm in and I'm in to win," she said on her Web site.

Clinton's announcement, days after Sen. Barack Obama shook up the contest race with his bid to become the first black president, establishes the most diverse political field ever.

Clinton is considered the front-runner, with Obama and 2004 vice presidential nominee John Edwards top contenders. New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, who would be the first Hispanic president, intends to announce his plans on Sunday.

"You know after six years of George Bush, it is time to renew the promise of America," Clinton says in a videotaped message in which she invites voters to begin a dialogue with her on the major issues health care, Social Security and Medicare, and the war in Iraq.

Of course, it wouldn't be Hillary without getting Sillary. She tries for an Oprah-like chatty tone to her announcement, and winds up offering this laughable little nugget:

"I'm not just starting a campaign, though, I'm beginning a conversation with you, with America," she said. "Let's talk. Let's chat. The conversation in Washington has been just a little one-sided lately, don't you think?"

It has? What happened on November 7th, a tea party? Puh-leeze. The Democrats have hardly been silent during Bush's six years in office. They have been shrill, hysterical, and well-covered by the press and bloggers on both sides of the partisan divide. What they haven't been, until the last midterms, is convincing.

Hillary's announcement changes nothing. No one seriously thought she'd take a pass, and all this does is confirm what everyone already knew. It's interesting that she committed this early, though. Normally, candidates who already hold national office or governorships like to wait until later in the cycle so as to allow their natural access to the media to work as de facto campaign appearances. As long as they haven't announced, equal-time provisions won't apply. The early announcements of candidacies or of explorations by people like Barack Obama may have forced her into an early commitment.

So in one day we've had Hillary and Sillary. Perhaps we'll soon get Shrillary, who never stays quiet for long.

UPDATE: Kathryn Jean Lopez thinks this might be a swipe at Nancy Pelosi, too. Me-owwww.

Denny Doherty, RIP

For those who love the music of the 1960s, especially the folk-influenced rock that defined the era, the departure of Denny Doherty at 66 is a tough blow. Doherty was a member of the seminal group The Mamas And The Papas, whose brief tenure produced some of the era's most brilliant music:

Denny Doherty, one-quarter of the 1960s folk-rock group the Mamas and the Papas, known for their soaring harmony on hits like "California Dreamin'" and "Monday, Monday," died Friday at 66.

His sister Frances Arnold said the singer-songwriter died at his home in Mississauga, a city just west of Toronto, after a short illness. He had suffered kidney problems following surgery last month and had been put on dialysis, Arnold said.

The group burst on the national scene in 1966 with the top 10 smash "California Dreamin'." The Mamas and the Papas broke new ground by having women and men in one group at a time when most singing groups were unisex. John Phillips, the group's chief songwriter; his wife, Michelle; and another female vocalist, Cass Elliot, teamed with Doherty.

"Monday, Monday" hit No. 1 on the charts and won the band a Grammy for best contemporary group performance. Among the group's other songs were "I Saw Her Again Last Night," "Go Where You Wanna Go," "Dancing Bear," and versions of "I Call Your Name" and "Dedicated to the One I Love."

For those who want to know the group's pedigree, they sang it to us in "Creeque Alley". Doherty, Elliot, and Phillips had bounced around the folk-music scene for some time, along with founding members of The Loving Spoonful and The Byrds. Doherty linked up musically with Elliot when she was singing with the Big Three, which consisted of her and two men doing straight folk music. The group had some national attention for a short period, and Doherty brought her to John and Michelle Phillips. After some initial difficulties, the four formed the group and sang together for less than three years.

But what an amazing run they had! The melodies soared in songs like "Monday, Monday" and "California Dreaming". They tried older musical forms in such songs as "Words of Love" and "Dream A Little Dream Of Me", using the amazing talent of Cass Elliot to its fullest. "I Call Your Name" is one of my favorites. It starts off low and sultry, and it gradually works itself into a showstopper.

Elliot went on to a solo career as a singer, but the rest of the group faded off to some extent. Michelle Phillips has had a good acting career, while John tried to form the group without her and Cass Elliot, using his daughter Mackenzie and Elaine "Spanky" McFarland, who had some hit songs in the 60s with Spanky & Our Gang. It didn't fly; I attended one of the concerts in Los Angeles' Greek Theater, and while the music was good, it didn't have the same magic. Mackenzie, who had just joined the group, couldn't remember the lyrics to one of her father's new songs, which was just as well.

Doherty had taken the story of the group to Broadway in recent years. We saw him in a biography of Cass Elliot just a couple of weeks ago, and Doherty was crushingly honest in his assessment of the group and himself. He regretted that he never took up Cass' offer to marry, saying that as a young man that he was too shallow to see past her weight to all the love she had to offer, tears forming in his eyes. Doherty seemed to be the kind of man that one would be lucky to have as a friend, and certainly a performer we were all lucky to experience -- and luckier still that his performances remain with us.

Godspeed, Denny. We know you'll be arranging more harmonies where you're at now.

Duke Contemplates Its Own Navel For Fun And Profit

The sorry spectacle of the Mike Nifong prosecution of three Duke lacrosse players for sexual assault despite the repeatedly changing story of the accuser and the utter lack of physical evidence has captured the nation's attention for the past several months. One of the secondary issues in the case involves Duke University's abandonment of its students, suspending them after Nifong filed the charges without any consideration to the possibility of their innocence. Duke reversed itself earlier this month, allowing the three students to resume normal actvities at the university, after Nifong's prosecutorial misconduct became too clear to allow Duke's betrayal to stand.

Even before that reversal, Duke had not completely washed its hands of the lacrosse players charged in the case. As CQ reader azbookrat discovered, Duke hs no compunction about using them and the case as the subject of a women's studies course in the upcoming semester. Here's the synopsis from WOMENST 150-04, titled "Hook-Up Culture At Duke", which includes this description:

What is “hook-up culture”? What does it have to do with power and difference? Is the concept useful for framing gendered, raced, classed, and sexualized experiences at Duke?

This course, designed as a direct result of events last year on campus, will give students a unique opportunity to examine and reflect upon gendered/ sexualized life at Duke in relation to contemporary life in the U.S. We will ask:
how has the history of university attendance in the US (in terms of race, class, and gender) impacted campus culture? Are new technologies changing intimate or familial relationships between people? How are distinctions between “at home” and “at work” (or public and private) linked to new kinds of subjectivity and sociality? How do particular bodies gain value in contemporary commodity culture? And finally, what does the lacrosse scandal tell us about power, difference, and raced, classed, gendered and sexed normativity in the US?

Students at Duke would be better advised to ask what the "lacrosse scandal" (as opposed to the Nifong scandal?) tells them about Duke University and its loyalty to its students. The answer appears to be that they will throw students to the howling wolves at the first opportunity to appease locals on the thinnest of accusations, even before the evidence has been evaluated.

What I find fascinating about this course, offered in this semester, is that instructors Anne Allison and Margot Weiss believe that they can reach the conclusions they imply in the synopsis. New courses have to win approval from a faculty committee, which usually means at least a few weeks of preparation before the deadline for inclusion in the semester catalog. They will have already set their instruction before such developments as the discovery that Nifong conspired to hide the DNA evidence from the defense and knowingly misrepresented the case to the media. The pair have reached conclusions far ahead of hearing all of the evidence; is that the standard of education at Duke? It certainly appears to be the standard of administration there.

Mostly, though, the spectacle of Duke attempting to sit in judgment on a scandal in which it acted so badly is little short of despicable. Duke and its faculty and administrators should be ashamed of themselves.

Northern Alliance Radio Today

The Northern Alliance Radio Network will be on the air today, with our six-hour-long broadcast schedule starting at 11 am CT. The first two hours features Power Line's John Hinderaker and Chad and Brian from Fraters Libertas. Mitch and I hit the airwaves for the second shift from 1-3 pm CT, and King Banaian and Michael Broadkorb have The Final Word from 3-5. If you're in the Twin Cities, you can hear us on AM 1280 The Patriot, or on the station's Internet stream if you're outside of the broadcast area.

Today Mitch and I welcome D.J. Tice of the Star Tribune during our second hour. We'll certainly want to talk with him about the recent sale and what that means for the dominant newspaper in the Upper Midwest. We'll also cover the week's events, including the effort by Dennis Kucinich to resurrect the Fairness Doctrine, and what that will mean for radio and television.

Be sure to join us as we discuss the stories of the week. Call 651-289-4488 to add your own voice to the debate!

Movie Review: Children Of Men

I took half a day off from work today to take the First Mate home from the hospital and then get her to her regularly scheduled dialysis treatment. When I dropped her off inside the center, she teased me about what I would do with the unexpected few hours of free time, saying that she figured I'd spend the time blogging, "as usual". I told her that I might take the opportunity to do something different, perhaps even take in a movie.

I should have stuck with the FM's suggestion.

** SPOILERS **

The movie that best fit my free time was one that had flown under my radar, a grim apocalyptic movie called Children of Men by Alfonso Cuarón. The film features a fine cast, mostly British except for Julianne Moore as the leader of a terrorist group known as the Fishes, and she doesn't stick around too long. It wastes a fine performace by Chiwetel Ejiofor, who turned in a chillingly complex performance in Serenity as a government operative and true believer.

The acting is actually uniformly excellent. The cinematography and the direction are handled well, too. The problem is with the script, as it is exceedingly difficult to swallow. The premise of the movie is that the entire female population of the Earth suddenly became sterile in 2009 or thereabouts, and it is now 2027 and the human population has disintegrated. Armageddon has come and gone, and most of the nations of the world ceased existing in the intervening period, except Great Britain. (There'll always be an England!) Unfortunately, most of the people who are left have attempted to emigrate to the island nation, which has rounded the "illegal immigrants" up into concentration camps, where they fight the British Army and each other.

Most of this has to be gleaned from old scraps of newspapers that inexplicably cover a lot of the windows in this movie. The film itself operates as if the backstory is widely known, which is one hindrance to the telling of the tale. If you don't pick up some of the headlines, such as (paraphrased) "RUSSIA LAUNCHES APOCALYPSE, KAZAKHSTAN CEASES TO EXIST", you'll wonder why everyone wants to come to the perpetually gloomy and fascist Britain.

The film focuses on the political chaos that has ensued since the unexplained lack of fertility, an affliction affecting the women, according to the story. It's explained as resulting from sudden religious fervor and a fascist government takeover. All of the Left's hobbyhorses come into play in this movie, especially about fascism and the war on terror, because the people with whom we're intended to sympathize all are or were activists at one time or another. Michael Caine plays an old retired political cartoonist -- which you only know if you read the IMDB trivia section -- and adorning his walls, rather anachronistically, is a series of cartoons referencing George Bush.

Sublety is not Cuarón's forté, apparently.

The movie starts moving when Moore has her old flame Theo (played by Clive Owen) kidnapped so that she can ask him a favor: she needs transit papers for someone the Fishes want to hide. He uses a contact at the ministry to get the papers, and then joins Moore and her cohorts for a car ride in which Moore and two police officers wind up dead. It turns out that the woman who needed the papers is pregnant -- and the Fishes want to spirit her out of the country before the government can find out.

None of this makes any sense at all. The woman, Kee, meets Theo and despite his obvious lack of understanding of the situation, proclaims her trust in him above the people who have kept her safe up to that point. Theo convinces her to run away from the Fishes when he overhears that they want to kill him and probably her, too, after the baby is born, which again makes no sense -- since she's the only fertile woman in the world, and they want to use the baby to show that the human race isn't finished yet. In fact, it's really unclear what they want with the baby; it's never explained, except that somehow the child's presence will start a popular uprising that will overthrow the fascist government and free the illegal immigrants.

Theo and Kee go on the run, trying to find a way to reach a group called The Human Project which he believes will keep the baby and the mother safe. For some reason, even though Britain is an island, they figure the only way they can get to a boat is to break into a specific concentration camp. This allows Cuarón to show the depravities of British rule (which is a transparent stand-in for the Bush administration), but again makes no narrative sense at all.

Suffice it to say, the baby gets born at a bad time, Theo and Kee manage to get mixed up in a series of firefights in the camp (some of which involve radical Islamists for equal time), but the baby survives. It's predictable and it's silly. However, it is expertly staged, and there are harrowing and suspenseful sequences. The violence is very realistic, as is the birth scene, which comes as close to reality as I've seen yet in a film without using actual birth footage.

Children of Men isn't completely awful, but it's a waste of your time and money. Catch it on cable instead.

UPDATE: CQ commenter Coriolan notes that Anthony Sacramone didn't like it either, and for much the same reasons. He goes into more detail in his review.

Vigilance, Not Overreaction (Updated)

First Amendment issues remain foremost among my concerns, both as a blogger and as an American citizen. So when Congress appears to take action to infringe on my rights to self-expression, I take notice:

The following is a statement by Richard A. Viguerie, Chairman of GrassrootsFreedom.com, regarding legislation currently being considered by Congress to regulate grassroots communications:

"In what sounds like a comedy sketch from Jon Stewart's Daily Show, but isn't, the U. S. Senate would impose criminal penalties, even jail time, on grassroots causes and citizens who criticize Congress.

"Section 220 of S. 1, the lobbying reform bill currently before the Senate, would require grassroots causes, even bloggers, who communicate to 500 or more members of the public on policy matters, to register and report quarterly to Congress the same as the big K Street lobbyists. Section 220 would amend existing lobbying reporting law by creating the most expansive intrusion on First Amendment rights ever. For the first time in history, critics of Congress will need to register and report with Congress itself.

"The bill would require reporting of 'paid efforts to stimulate grassroots lobbying,' but defines 'paid' merely as communications to 500 or more members of the public, with no other qualifiers."

This would certainly make my blood boil, but the Vigurie statement is overblown and exaggerated. Stephen Bainbridge, who knows a thing or two about the law, actually read the bill, which Vigurie apparently did not bother to do:

The vast bulk of the section is definitional. When you parse out the operative language, the only persons or entities required to file reports under Section 220 are "gressroots lobbying firms." The term "grass roots lobbying firm" is defined as a person or entity that "is retained by 1 or more clients to engage in paid efforts to stimulate grassroots lobbying on behalf of such clients; and receives income of, or spends or agrees to spend, an aggregate of $25,000 or more for such efforts in any quarterly period."

Someone who engages in grassroots lobbying is not required to register or file reports under section 220. Someone who engages in paid grassroots lobbying is not required to register or file reports under section 220. Only someone who is retained by a client and either earns or spends $25,000 or more per quarter is covered.

There have been times when bloggers were hired by either political or issue campaigns to blog on their behalf. Such a blogger might be covered by this statute if they make more than $25,000 per quarter for doing so. But how many bloggers does that include?

Whether or not one agrees with lobbyist registration, the definition obviously does not include bloggers, or at least those whose political activity is limited to blogging. One would have to make $25,000 in a quarter just to qualify for the registration, a threshold even Glenn Reynolds might have difficulty achieving, and all of it would have to come from a client for the express purpose of lobbying on their behalf.

It's important to remain vigilant on free speech. It's equally important to refrain from hysteria and to make sure one has the details correct before going into Chicken Little mode.

UPDATE: We have a lively discussion in the comments section, which more or less unanimously takes me to task for this post. Let me explain myself more clearly.

Vigurie and other commentators explicitly called this a "blogger registration law", which it clearly is not. In fact, Vigurie headlined this with the statement, "Congress to Send Critics to Jail". Neither of those come close to the truth. Regardless of whether one supported the bill or not, Vigurie is misrepresenting it and its effect. When one uses hyperbole to that extent, it diminishes one's credibility -- and that does nothing to help protect the First Amendment, but makes us look like kooks.

This bill does not apply to anyone who communicates with 500 or more people "with no qualifiers", as Vigurie also states in his release. In fact, there's a huge qualifier: it applies to anyone who communicates on behalf of a paid client and earns $25,000 or more in a quarter, or firm spending $25,000 or more in a quarter on grassroots lobbying efforts. It's not intended to apply to people who communicate for themselves or who commit political activism for their pet causes. In order to fall under this law, a person has to work for one or more clients to conduct "grassroots lobbying efforts" on their behalf, or pay for $25,000 worth of it in three months.

In fact, this essentially requires paid activist facilitators to do what other lobbying firms must: register as lobbyists. If people object to this, then they should also object to the registration of all lobbyists and lobbying firms, defined as it is in the bill. Many people act as if this mechanism is something new, but it isn't. It would actually ensure that lobbyists for smaller and perhaps more radical groups -- like International ANSWER, for instance -- register as paid lobbyists representing clients.

I'm not sure how I feel about lobbyist registration. Perhaps no lobbyists should have to register as such, or perhaps the limit of getting paid $25,000 in a quarter is too low. I do know it's nothing new, and this legislation only extends the same mechanism to lobbyists representing groups other than unions and corporations, which seems to be a reasonable proposition.

To emphasize my point, this has nothing much to do with bloggers at all, and not much more to do with free speech, except to extend registration requirements to a wider class of professional lobbyists. Vigurie does us all a disservice by wildly exaggerating the legislation and its impact, and in the end that does harm to our credibility as conservatives.

UPDATE II: People are still missing the point. There may well be problems with this bill, and it doesn't sound like something I'd support. Even if we wanted to extend lobbying registration, which I question, I think the $25,000 limit is too low and sucks up too many smaller organizations.

That being said, two issues that this bill does not have are forcing bloggers to register and Congress granting itself powers to throw critics in jail. Making those charges without foundation does not do credit to the conservative cause, and it starts sounding like the boy who cried wolf.

Hillary Loyalists Mostly Loyal

The New York Sun reports that some Clinton administration officials have decided to seek employment in other campaigns rather than join their old bosses. While Hillary's campaign says this reflects prior ties to the other candidates, one has to wonder what kind of time frame predates 1993:

One of the biggest advantages Senator Clinton enjoys as she launches her presidential bid is the vast web of politically active Democrats who worked in the federal government under her husband, President Clinton. But not everyone who served during the Clinton years is promoting a reprise.

A handful of top Clinton administration officials and a smattering of lower-ranking ones have taken up with Mrs. Clinton's rivals for the Democratic nomination. Most cite pre-existing personal or professional loyalties. In some instances, however, the Democratic activists seem to have concluded that they will have more of an impact in the leaner ranks of a rival campaign than in the hierarchy of Mrs. Clinton's long-planned bid. And a former White House counsel to Mr. Clinton, Abner Mikva, told The New York Sun he thought the candidate he is backing, Senator Obama, has a better chance of winning than Mrs. Clinton does. The highest-ranking defectors include a political aide who shadowed Mr. Clinton for years and is advising Senator Dodd of Connecticut, Douglas Sosnik; a former secretary of commerce now backing Senator Obama of Illinois, William Daley, and a former chief of staff to Vice President Gore now in the camp of Senator Biden of Delaware, Ronald Klain.

"Most of the people have some sort of pre-existing connection or relationship," a former Clinton White House aide, Christopher Lehane, said. He said he doubted there were hard feelings in those circumstances, though there might be in cases where people had no obvious prior ties to one of Mrs. Clinton's rivals. "There are different gradations to all of this," Mr. Lehane added.

A former White House lawyer and longtime friend of the Clintons, Lanny Davis, said he knew of no one who worked on Mrs. Clinton's staff and was now backing another candidate. "I don't know of any defections," he said. "That says a lot about her as a human being." One of the challenges Mrs. Clinton faces in trying to maintain the loyalty of mid-level operatives is that so much of her campaign operation has been lined up for years. "That bus is full," one Democratic consultant, Joseph Trippi, told The New York Sun recently.

Well, opportunity for greater leadership roles certainly could be one reason to switch teams, as well as a full bus at Hillary's campaign, at least in the higher echelons. However, looking at the candidates where the defectors landed, one has to wonder how that makes any sense. Does anyone besides Christopher Dodd think he stands a chance next to Hillary, Obama, or John Edwards? Leaving the Hillary campaign to jump on the Dodd or Joe Biden bandwagon means leaping from the first to the third tier of candidates, bypassing the second level altogether.

The explanation of precedence sounds fishy as well. Bill Clinton served as President from 1993 - 2001, and Hillary has served in the Senate since before Bill's last day in office. It's hard to imagine that people who worked with the Clintons for up to thirteen years would suddenly recall that they worked for Biden sometime previous to that, and that that employment creates an obligation that overrides a desire to work for Hillary. It sounds more like a convenient excuse to avoid something (or someone) unpleasant, at least for a while.

The "full bus" argument makes a little more sense, but the Sun dashes a little cold water on that notion as well. Rahm Emanuel, for instance, had openly endorsed Hillary and pledged himself to her election -- but lately, he has retreated from that position. Now he's "torn" between Obama and his endorsee and won't commit either way. Sources within Hillary's campaign tell the Sun that if Gore decides to enter the race (which he has not completely ruled out), the exodus would be significant. Plenty of seats would exist on the bus after that, and ridership would apparently not rebound much.

Most of this is politics as usual, but Hillary's unique position in history makes this a little different. Staffers have the near-singular opportunity to return to the White House, the pinnacle of political careers, for essentially a third Clinton term, with Hillary as a front-runner. One would expect those who worked in the previous administration to maximize their opportunity to return to the top, but instead a number of them have chosen to align themselves with also-rans. That seems a little curious, and perhaps a bit revealing as to the atmosphere in the Clinton campaign.

Raising The Stakes In Space

Russia and China have pushed for a ban on weapons in space for the past few years, but the Bush administration has resisted it while the US develops its missile shield program. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US alone retained the ready capability of attacking and destroying satellites in orbit, and no one had actually attempted it in 20 years. That period came to an end yesterday, when the Chinese successfully hit and destroyed one of their older weather satellites, demonstrating clearly that they could do the same to our critical military reconnaissance satellites:

China successfully carried out its first test of an antisatellite weapon last week, signaling its resolve to play a major role in military space activities and bringing expressions of concern from Washington and other capitals, the Bush administration said yesterday.

Only two nations — the Soviet Union and the United States — have previously destroyed spacecraft in antisatellite tests, most recently the United States in the mid-1980s.

Arms control experts called the test, in which the weapon destroyed an aging Chinese weather satellite, a troubling development that could foreshadow an antisatellite arms race. Alternatively, however, some experts speculated that it could precede a diplomatic effort by China to prod the Bush administration into negotiations on a weapons ban.

“This is the first real escalation in the weaponization of space that we’ve seen in 20 years,” said Jonathan McDowell, a Harvard astronomer who tracks rocket launchings and space activity. “It ends a long period of restraint.”

White House officials said the United States and other nations, which they did not identify, had “expressed our concern regarding this action to the Chinese.” Despite its protest, the Bush administration has long resisted a global treaty banning such tests because it says it needs freedom of action in space.

The action brought immediate protest, and not just from the United States. Japan called for an explanation through its diplomatic missions of the test, and Australia warned against a weapons race in space.

Does China intend on striking our sensitive military satellites? Perhaps not. This seems more like a pressure tactic by Beijing to get the US to change policy on space weapons. Last October, the Bush administration reiterated its stance on the issue, claiming that America needed a free hand in space for research and development, and specifically refused to eschew the kind of test the Chinese conducted yesterday. Now that China has demonstrated its capability to successfully launch the same kind of mission, the Chinese probably hope that the US will reconsider its position.

However, the test itself could prove troublesome for all of the satellites currently orbiting the Earth. The explosion left a lot of debris and apparently accelerated their movement in space. Satellites are remarkably delicate instruments, and having them peppered with shrapnel could knock several of them out of commission. The Chinese used a blunt instrument for its attack, and the fallout could continue for years and force the expensive replacement of other satellites, and some owners might not be able to afford the cost. Will the Chinese offer to bear the cost of replacement over the twenty-five years or more that the debris will stay in orbit?

The Bush administration will have to consider its options. We can't really afford to have more debris fields get created in orbits where our critical assets operate. The kinds of offensive weapons that we are rumored to pursue (satellite-killing lasers) appear to still be years away, even with the combined R&D efforts of both the Clinton and Bush administrations. The reluctance may come from the impact such negotiations could have on the efforts to build an missile shield for the US using space-based laser systems to destroy ballistic missiles and warheads in flight. The question will be of priorities -- is it more important to secure our existing military and communications satellites, or to keep open a path to a missile shield that the Chinese now could knock out?

Bilateral Talks Produce 'A Certain Agreement'

North Korea announced that they and the US had reached "a certain agreement" in the lower-level talks between American negotiator Christopher Hill and their envoy, Kim Kye-gwan in Berlin. During the talks, the Kim Jong-Il regime asked what they would get in return for verifiably shutting down their nuclear reactor, and although the answer did not get made public, it apparently pleased the North Koreans:

North Korea has expressed interest in a U.S.-backed proposal that it suspend its nuclear program and allow U.N. inspectors to verify the suspension as an initial step toward dismantling its nuclear capabilities, diplomats said yesterday.

During three days of talks in Berlin that ended yesterday, North Korea's chief negotiator, Kim Gye-gwan, asked his U.S. counterpart, Christopher R. Hill, what the United States would be willing to do if the North turned off its nuclear reactor. A U.S. response, if any, was not made public.

North Korea's foreign ministry today called the Hill-Kim talks "sincere and positive." In the upbeat assessment, the communist state said the talks yielded "a certain agreement," but it declined to elaborate on the nature of the dialogue. The ministry said the talks were held in a "sincere atmosphere." Its comments appeared in a statement released by the country's official Korean Central News Agency.

That seems strikingly upbeat, considering the source, and it seems to underscore the broad nature of the talks Hill conducted with the North Koreans. Condoleezza Rice insisted yesterday that all of this was just preparation for the six-nation talks commencing in a few weeks, and that all agreements would be made there. Pyongyang apparently feels differently, or at least they want people to believe that substantive decisions were reached by Hill and Kim in Berlin.

Pyongyang does not make a habit of issuing conciliatory and complimentary statements regarding the Americans under any circumstances, so this seems fairly meaningful. If the North Koreans put that question to Hill as baldly as reported, then it indicates a desire on their part to end the standoff, naturally while maximizing their bounty from the exercise. It may show that the isolation and sanctions have begun to really bite, and perhaps that the brinksmanship might have affected Kim Jong-Il's grip on power. The cessation of luxury goods had to affect more than just KJI -- undoubtedly, Army commanders and other power brokers in the North had access to a similar lifestyle until Kim decided to defy China and set off a nuclear test. The threat of nuclear armament by Japan combined with the chilly wind blowing in from Beijing these days may also have convinced KJI to play Monty Hall.

All of which brings into question the continuing American demurral about the Hill talks in Berlin. The US could ill afford another collapse in talks at the six-party conference; the domestic and international pressure for direct talks would increase yet again. Rice and President Bush would want to guarantee some kind of progress, and one way to do that would be to quietly allow Hill to make deals with Kim that would just require ratification at the multilateral talks. Unlike with the Agreed Framework, the US would keep China, Japan, and South Korea informed of the offers and make sure they participated in the final agreement by staging it at the talks next month.

It's subtle and nuanced, and might actually work, as long as verification gets included in the final product. The six-nation talks will have set the stage for the Pyongyang capitulation on nukes, but Kim gets his bilateral agreement with the US in the end.

The Mouth Of Sadr Arrested

The new offensive against Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army continues to creep ever closer to the center of the problem. This morning, US and Iraqi troops arrested his media director and killed the man guarding him, effectively removing Sadr's propagandist from the fight:

U.S. and Iraqi forces arrested one of Muqtada al-Sadr's top aides Friday in Baghdad, his office said, as pressure increases on the radical Shiite cleric's militia ahead of a planned security sweep aimed at stemming the sectarian violence ransacking the capital.

Sheik Abdul-Hadi al-Darraji, al-Sadr's media director in Baghdad, was captured Friday and his personal guard was killed, according to another senior al-Sadr aide.

"We strongly condemn this cowardly act," Sheik Abdul-Zahra al-Suweiadi said.

The U.S. military said special Iraqi army forces operating with coalition advisers captured a high-level, illegal armed group leader in Baladiyat, but it did not identify the detainee. It said two other suspects were detained by Iraqi forces for further questioning.

The US believes that Darraji does more for Sadr than just schedule television appearances. While they did not refer to Darraji by name, they noted that the main suspect detained has involvement with death squads. One of those affiliated with Darraji may be Abu Diraa, a particularly notorious and brutal death squad commander in Baghdad -- and that might have been the reason they snatched Darraji. His central position in the organization would mean he possesses information that would be very attractive to American intel units.

Another interesting point about Darraji's arrest is where it took place. The troops raided a mosque in Baghdad to get him, which may show that initial reluctance to enter the worship sites has faded. This might be the best indicator of how seriously the Americans and Iraqis take this mission. They're not out to win hearts and minds with this phase of the new strategy, but to find and destroy the enemy. This is reminiscent of the action taken in 2004 against the Mahdis, before Sadr wisely capitulated in return for his freedom.

The question in this round is whether the US and the Iraqis have the tenacity to finish the job this time. As CQ readers have noted, we have let Sadr off the hook at least twice before. That has led us to this point, where our mercy and political correctness allowed one of the most troublesome figures of the post-Saddam period garner enormous power and infiltrate the elected government. Sadr is the key, and the mission to end the sectarian strife has to include his capture. If that happens, then we know the effort is serious indeed.

Hang 'Em High

No, this isn't another post about Saddam Hussein. Last night, I decided to relax and watch an old movie that happened to be on at just the right time, Clint Eastwood's Hang 'Em High. This was Eastwood's first film at his Malpaso production company, an attempt to create an American "spaghetti western" of the kind that Sergio Leone had made so successfully. While it's easy to dismiss Eastwood's early career in Westerns as cartoonish and overly stylized, Hang 'Em High deserves more consideration as an early Eastwood masterpiece.

It starts off as a simple vengeance story. Eastwood, as Jed Cooper, gets lynched by mistake when a party of vigilantes mistakes him for a criminal. After being rescued, he is determined to find the men responsible for his near hanging and becomes a lawman to do it legally. However, he wants them brought to justice, which means the court of Judge Fenton, whose enthusiasm for his job leads him to create spectacles out of executions and railroad people into death sentences.

It's a remarkably nuanced movie, where all of the characters get fleshed out to more than just single-dimension caricatures. Even the supposed bad guys get some sympathy for their fate, and while you want to hate Judge Fenton at times (played well by Pat Hingle), his dialogue with Cooper at the end makes his challenges more understandable, and show that he is trapped by his position to some extent. It serves as neither an endorsement nor a protest to capital punishment, at least not explicitly, but it argues against the kind of vigilantism that some of Eastwood's other movies tend to glorify.

If nothing else, viewers should watch it for the memorable score by Dominic Frontiere and the performances of a talented cast, including the doomed Inger Stevens. Even if Eastwood isn't your cup of tea -- and I'm not a great fan of his spaghetti westerns -- Hang 'Em High deserves special consideration. Paired with Unforgiven, it shows that Eastwood has always had a much more subtle approach to moviemaking when allowed creative freedom.

Toronto 18 Wanted To Start 'Chechnya-Style Resistance'

The 18 men arrested in Toronto this summer intended to shelter two suspected Islamist terrorists from the United States and start a resistance in northern Ontario based on the Chechnyan uprising. Canada's National Post interviewed the mole who infiltrated the group and discovered the extent of their plans against their own nation (via Newsbeat1):

A group of young Toronto men were planning to harbour two Americans accused of terrorist activity and protect them by setting up an armed "Chechnya style resistance" in northern Ontario against law enforcement officials, a police informant who infiltrated the alleged local extremist cell said in a CBC news program.

Mubin Shaikh, a former army cadet and paid police mole, revealed last night on The Fifth Estate that he helped look for a safe house in Opasatika, Ont. for two Atlanta men who authorities say were planning a terrorist attack in the United States.

The U.S. Department of Justice claims that Syed Haris Ahmed and his friend Ehsanul Islam Sadequee, both from Georgia, spent a week in Toronto and met with the alleged members of the "Toronto 18." They have both been indicted on charges of providing material support to terrorists.

"They were going to come up here for refuge and what we were going to do was provide a safe house for them and we even scoped the area out, did a little recognizance," Mr. Shaikh said. The plan was to have a resistance -- a Chechnya-style resistance in northern Ontario in the bushes... to have guys up there, we would fortify ourselves and if they came looking for us, we were going to take them on. We looked at the road and were saying we're going to booby-trap this, we're going to have snipers over here. "It was planned out."

Some people have downplayed the threat from the homegrown Canadian terror cell. The infiltration of Shaikh into the group allowed the Canadian security forces to divert them from purchasing real explosive materials, and the lack of an imminent attack makes this look like the Miami ring of mouthbreathers picked up by the FBI later in the summer. However, Shaikh does not share that assessment. He told the Post that he informed his CSIS handler that the ringleader was a "f---ing time bomb", and they apparently picked him up before he went off.

These homegrown cells represent the biggest domestic threat for both nations. The CSIS and RCMP appear to be up to the task of dismantling them, and we hope that the FBI has as much success.

UPDATE: It's Canada's National Post, not the Canada Post, who deliver the mail. Thanks to CQ reader David R, who sent me a funny message noting the difference.

Mahdi Army Under 'Siege'

The new operation to clean up Baghdad seems to have taken the Mahdi Army by surprise. Mahdi Army leaders tell the AP that even in their Sadr City base they have begun to feel under siege, hiding their uniforms and ending operations to avoid detection by the increasing American forces:

Mahdi Army fighters said Thursday they were under siege in their Sadr City stronghold as U.S. and Iraqi troops killed or seized key commanders in pinpoint nighttime raids. Two commanders of the Shiite militia said Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has stopped protecting the group under pressure from Washington and threats from Sunni Muslim Arab governments.

The two commanders' account of a growing siege mentality inside the organization could represent a tactical and propaganda feint, but there was mounting evidence the militia was increasingly off balance and had ordered its gunmen to melt back into the population. To avoid capture, commanders report no longer using cell phones and fighters are removing their black uniforms and hiding their weapons during the day. ...

The midlevel Mahdi Army commanders, who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because the group operates in secret, said at least five top commanders of similar standing were captured or killed in recent months, including one snatched in a night raid from his Sadr City hide-out on Tuesday. They refused to name him.

Two other key officials at the top of the organization were killed in raids last month:

• Sahib al-Amiri, a senior al-Sadr military aide, was slain by American forces in the Shiite holy city of Najaf on Dec. 27. The U.S. military reported his death, calling him a criminal involved roadside bombings. Al-Sadr lives in Najaf.

• The other top commander, identified by a third Mahdi Army commander as Abu al-Sudour, was shot to death in a joint U.S.-Iraqi raid last month as well. He was hunted down in Sadr City.

The Mahdis also revealed that the Americans and Iraqi Army units have conducted massive sweeps through militia-held neighborhoods. One commander said that any males old enough to hold a weapon have been detained pending determination of their status. They have stopped using cell phones in fear of the American ability to track their command personnel, and their combat readiness has declined accordingly.

So what changed? The Bush administration made it clear to Nouri al-Maliki that he was not going to take 'no' for an answer this time when it came to breaking the Mahdis. Maliki agreed to the new strategy in Jordan a few weeks ago, and promised that he would not block the mission against Moqtada al-Sadr's forces. The Sadrites knew that this offense was coming -- after all, we could hardly have telegraphed this punch any more clearly -- but they did not count on losing their political cover. They also appear to have severely underestimated American intel capability, which has them reeling.

One other dynamic may be at play. Sadr himself, knowing what was about to happen, apparently conducted a purge of his leadership. This is destructive to unit cohesion under the best of circumstances; Stalin crippled his army in the years leading up to World War II after Hitler manipulated Stalin into believing his officer corps was significantly disloyal. Sadr conducted his purge at the same time he was shifting forces around Iraq, making the communications problems even worse than they would have been without the purge.

The insurgents and militias may run out of Baghdad in the coming days, but General Casey insists that the new security plan is "holistic" and designed to account for a sudden retreat. Once they have the Mahdis and the other terrorists on the run, it will make it that much easier to find them and pick them off. (via Memeorandum)

Task Force 16 Takes On Iranian Influence

In another indication that the Bush administration has more than just one use for the extra troops going to Iraq, US News and World Report has an exclusive on a heretofore clandestine unit tasked with dismantling Iran's web of influence in Baghdad and greater Iraq. Task Force 16, modeled on the group that eventually took out Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, has operated in Iraq for most of the past year, collecting intelligence and now starting covert operations based on their data:

The U.S. military has launched a special operations task force to break up Iranian influence in Iraq, according to U.S. News sources. The special operations mission, known as Task Force 16, was created late last year to target Iranians trafficking arms and training Shiite militia forces. The operation is modeled on Task Force 15, a clandestine cadre of Navy SEALs, Army Delta Force soldiers, and CIA operatives with a mission to capture or kill al Qaeda operatives and Baathist insurgents in Iraq.">The U.S. military has launched a special operations task force to break up Iranian influence in Iraq, according to U.S. News sources. The special operations mission, known as Task Force 16, was created late last year to target Iranians trafficking arms and training Shiite militia forces. The operation is modeled on Task Force 15, a clandestine cadre of Navy SEALs, Army Delta Force soldiers, and CIA operatives with a mission to capture or kill al Qaeda operatives and Baathist insurgents in Iraq.

Task Force 15 killed al Qaeda's leader in Iraq, Abu Musab Zarqawi, last June.

The new classified directive is part of an escalation of military countermeasures against Iran, authorized by President Bush, to strike back at what military officials describe as a widespread web of Iranian influence in Iraq that includes providing weapons, training, and money to Shiite militias.

"It's present, and the issue is how do you deal with it," says a senior U.S. military official. "That's the question of the day. Those networks are something you've got to deal with. You've got to figure out, bottom line, who plans them, who finances them, who brings stuff across the borders."

This comes as no surprise, except perhaps for the extent to which Task Force 16 has already established itself. The troops know the extent of Iranian influence, just based on the armaments they find deployed against them. Roadside bombs have increasingly been a type known as explosively formed projectiles, or EFP. Iran produces these to puncture through armor, on Humvees in this case, in order to maximize casualties. US military personnel started seeing EFPs in the south, but they have begun seeing them in Baghdad and Diyala, two areas where Shi'ite militias operate in strength. They have also captured Iranian mortars and Iranian cellphones, found on militia members that only speak Farsi instead of the Iraqi strain of Arabic.

While Bush cannot just expand the war to Iran absent an immiment threat or a declaration of war from Congress, the authorization for the use of military force in Iraq certainly covers any forces in that nation that attack our troops or those of the Iraqi government. He has all the latitude he needs to fight Iranians in Iraq, within the rules of war. Politically, fighting Iranians makes a better argument for a surge/escalation in the regions where Shi'ite militias rely on Iranian support the most -- but that's probably only a marginal improvement at this stage.

That also explains why US News and World Report has this exclusive now. The White House has taken a lot of criticism for its refusal to negotiate with Iran in order to achieve stability in Iraq. The Bush administration has countered that demand from the ISG and others by saying that the Iranians have acted to destabilize Iraq, in some cases funding both Shi'ite and Sunni militias to fight each other. He wants to show the extent of Iranian mischief in the current instability there -- or at least if he's forced to negotiate, he wants a stronger position when he gets to the table.

Again, the existence of a unit like Task Force 16 should surprise no one. However, it does confirm that the Bush administration clearly sees the situation in Iraq in more pessimistic terms than just a few months ago, and the new leadership at the Pentagon and CENTCOM has begun to get more aggressive on the ground -- and perhaps in the media as well.

UPDATE: Corrected one instance of "Iraq" to "Iran", courtesy of CQ commenter Burt.

First Mate May Come Home Tomorrow

The First Mate continues to improve after her nephrectomy yesterday, so much so that her doctors expect to send her home around noon tomorrow. She dialyzed today and had a blessedly uneventful run, and her pain doesn't require any substantive control. She is anxious to leave, as she always is, and sounds very chipper indeed.

Unfortunately, I only know this by speaking to her on the phone. The windshield spray pump stopped working on my four-year-old Honda CRV, which may not sound like a big deal, but those who have driven in snowy areas understand how problematic that can be. I tried getting the wipers to clear the muddy moisture off my windshield on my way out of work, but it only smeared it and made it more difficult to see. I'm actually blogging from the customer Internet "cafe" at my local Honda dealership to see if they can replace the pump (or fix whatever is causing the problem) while I wait. If not, I'll have to rent a car for a couple of days, and the FM will get to have a new ride home from the hospital.

On the plus side, how cool is it that I can blog from the waiting room of my local car dealership?

UPDATE: More coolness from the dealer. The problem with the windshield fluid pump? A frozen line. They're running hot water through it to clear it out and will replace the fluid ... for free. They're also going to fix a nagging problem I've had with my door switch (which will cost me $65, which is very reasonable) that has made the interior lights act strangely. In case you wondered, the dealer is Richfield Bloomington Honda. If you need service for your Honda vehicle, this is a good place to go.

Want To Bet This Was Richard Armitage? (Update: I Lose!)

The BBC reports that Iran made an offer to the US in 2003 that would have given us everything we demand now, in return for normalized relations and the expulsion of a terrorist group from Iraq. Citing "a senior former official" in the State Department, a classified memo details the Iranian offer that Dick Cheney successfully argued against accepting:

Tehran proposed ending support for Lebanese and Palestinian militant groups and helping to stabilise Iraq following the US-led invasion.

Offers, including making its nuclear programme more transparent, were conditional on the US ending hostility.

But Vice-President Dick Cheney's office rejected the plan, the official said.

The offers came in a letter, seen by Newsnight, which was unsigned but which the US state department apparently believed to have been approved by the highest authorities.

In return for its concessions, Tehran asked Washington to end its hostility, to end sanctions, and to disband the Iranian rebel group the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq and repatriate its members.

Later in the report, the BBC said that the source was one of Colin Powell's top aides, which means this had to have come from Richard Armitage. Armitaga has a history of on- and off-the-record attacks on the Administration, and even when defending Powell's boss, he's managed to embarrass him. After watching Patrick Fitzgerald jail Judith Miller for months and attempt to pin the leak of Valerie Plame's identity on everyone in the White House, Armitage finally confessed to being the leaker -- three years later.

This is a bit of old news, though. The story of the supposed offer floated to the top of the news cycle briefly during the last election cycle, complete with the Cheney singlemindedness on "evil", as Armitage -- oops, the "senior former official and Powell aide" told the BBC. Only both the BBC and Armitage miss something about this unsigned offer, which is that it's unsigned -- and it demanded security guarantees and normal relations as a reward for ending its support of terrorism, something Iran shouldn't have been doing anyway. Daniel Freedman notes the same point:

The offer from the Iranians came because the mullahs were nervous -- pressure on their nuclear program was slowly building and American troops were right next door (hardly comforting for theocrats who rely on force to maintain their rule). So cheekily the mullahs asked America for security guarantees in exchange for stopping to do what they shouldn't have been doing in the first place -- funding terrorist groups and pursuing a rogue nuclear program. If the Bush administration would have agreed it would have sent the wrong message to other would-be rogue states -- start funding terrorism and pursue a nuclear program, and then give it up, and we'll guarantee the future of your regime.

And all that is based on the assumption that the mullahs can be trusted to keep their word. The reality is that the mullahs had been caught lying about their nuclear program for almost two decades. Suddenly they could be trusted?

An unsigned note means little. The official Iranian position had not changed, nor would it have after we had normalized relations. Teheran did not conduct terrorism around the world in order to win most-favored-nation trading status with The Great Satan. They conduct terrorism to push Israel into the Mediterranean and to gain control of Southwest Asia as a new caliphate based in Persia rather than Arabia. If they wanted to change their official position, someone in charge would have made clear that the offer was official, and backed by the government, rather than an anonymous note that could have originated anywhere.

However, some people are gullible enough to believe anything that comes from Iran, and it's no great surprise that an inordinate amount of them work at the State Department -- or in this case, used to work at Foggy Bottom.

UPDATE: Glenn at Instapundit notes that I lost my bet. The story credits this to Lawrence Wilkerson. Wilkerson, you may remember, was deeply involved in Colin Powell's presentations on the mobile biological-weapons laboratories presentation at the UN, and who insisted that the CIA never gave Powell or the Bush administration any hint that the Curveball testimony on those labs had come into question.

Why Was This Story Written?

The Washington Post runs a story today trying to analyze the resignations of two FEC lawyers who just landed big-paying positions in the private sector. One might think the reasons for their departure are rather obvious and spelled out in dollar signs, but the Post writes this story as if it were the result of a conspiracy to choke off dissent and free speech at the FEC:

The announcement yesterday that the top two lawyers for the Federal Election Commission had resigned helped spread an undercurrent of concern about the diminishing role of a once-prominent public voice on the intersection of money and politics.

The stated reasons for the departures of FEC General Counsel Lawrence H. Norton and Deputy General Counsel James A. Kahl was that the two men had landed private-sector jobs at a large firm with offices in six states. Norton and Kahl, reached yesterday, said their resignations were not intended to send any broader message.

But those who monitor campaign finance law with some dedication said the departures coincided with a perceived shift in the way the commissioners have worked with the general counsel.

Matthew Mosk continues in this fashion for several paragraphs. He includes quotes from oversight groups and former FEC counsel, both of whom imply that the FEC has not just diminshed the standing of its lawyers but have done so in an attempt to politicize the commission. They use as an example an arcane point about using unlimited funds for recount drives, which Norton publicly opposed in 2004 but didn't in 2006, when the FEC allowed it.

However, when readers get to the bottom of the article, they discover that Mosk misled them in the second paragraph. It turns out that Norton and Kahl said a lot more about the Post's concerns than just rejecting the notion that their departures were intended to send a message:

"I'm not shocked people would read that into our decision, but it has nothing to do with it," Kahl said. He and Norton said they are leaving together to give the firm Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice a sizeable footprint in the fast-changing area of campaign finance law.

"I've had as free a hand as ever to give the commission unvarnished advice," Norton said. "I have had ample authority, all the authority I need."

In other words, the two men who left the commission and whose departures Mosk wants us to believe signals a silencing of dissent and free speech at the FEC specifically told him that there's no story here. They left to make more money working on campaign finance law for candidates, and nothing more. They did not feel oppressed or silenced, just underpaid. This entire article is pointless; it reads like a template for conspiracy theorists that accidentally made it to print.

Perhaps Mosk would like to take on the real silencing of dissent and muting of free speech at the FEC: McCain-Feingold.

Bilateral Talks With North Korea?

The US and North Korea have quietly conducted one-on-one talks in advance of the next six-nation meeting on Kim Jong-Il's nuclear-weapons program. The pre-meeting seems to reverse the Bush administration's position against bilateral negotiations on the issue, but the White House insists that the meetings are intended to just lay the groundwork for the wider forum:

Seeking to revive stalled negotiations to end North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, the United States held “substantive” talks with North Korean diplomats here on Tuesday and Wednesday, said the chief American envoy, Christopher R. Hill.

The unusual one-on-one sessions, the first to be held outside Beijing during the Bush administration, were signs of progress since negotiations broke off in December after North Korea demanded that Washington lift financial sanctions against it.

“It was a substantive discussion,” Mr. Hill said in an interview on Wednesday, though he refused to give details. “The proof of the pudding will be when we all sit down together in the six-party negotiations.”

Mr. Hill briefed Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on his meetings upon her arrival in Germany after a mission through the Middle East and Persian Gulf. Ms. Rice said later that Mr. Hill’s discussions “should help to prepare the way for a more favorable atmosphere at the time of the resumption of the six-party talks, which we would hope would be soon.”

The US has resisted the calls for bilateral talks with the Kim regime, preferring to use the leverage provided by China as Kim's ally to pressure Kim into concessions. This has led the Bush administration to avoid even the lower-level contacts, although they have occasionally occurred depending on circumstances, usually to resolve one particular point.

This seems different; Hill and Kim Kye-gwan apparently met on the broad spectrum of issues involved in the impasse, according to Hill's comments afterwards. He mentioned that the normalization of the relationship between Pyongyang and Washington would have to develop "bilaterally" and over a long period of time. He also hinted that the US might loosen its sanctions on Kim's financial network, especially the bank in Macao through which he funnelled his counterfeit American currency, a key demand from North Korea for their continued participation in the six-nation talks.

Both Hill and Condoleezza Rice were quick to respond to questions about the apparent change of policy. Both said that the lower-level bilateral meeting was intended to find areas of agreement on which to build at the upcoming multilateral forum. They emphasized that they expected to return to those talks in the next few weeks and that any agreements would be made there, and not in these impromptu talks in Berlin.

Perhaps so. It appears, though, that the Bush administration has tried to use more flexibility in its approach to Kim Jong-Il, and that may well work. If it results in verifiable dismantling of the North Korean nuclear program and an end to the kind of provocations we saw last year, we will cheer this flexibility. However, we've been down that road before, and regardless of the venue, the Bush administration has to remain firm on verification -- and it's difficult to see how that will work without the looming presence of China to force compliance.

A Telling Set Of Values

The Washington Post reports today on the wave of anger and outrage sweeping the Arab world after the hangings of Saddam Hussein and two of his key henchment over the last three weeks. The accidental beheading, the rush to the gallows for Saddam, and his execution during Eid have gotten them pretty steamed -- and believing that executions were handled better under Saddam:

Beirut's daily an-Nahar newspaper ran a caricature Tuesday of the Iraqi flag adorned with three nooses. At the center of the red, white and black banner, the outline of the coiled ropes appears similar to the word "Allah" in Arabic script.

The cartoon appears under the caption "The New Iraq."

That gallows humor reflected the swelling tide of Arab anger and revulsion at the Iraqi government's execution Monday of Barzan Ibrahim, who was beheaded as he was hanged, and the cellphone recordings of the taunts and gloating that greeted Saddam Hussein before his execution Dec. 30.

Many in the Arab world questioned whether the beheading of Ibrahim, Hussein's half brother and his onetime intelligence chief, was a premeditated slight or, as the government has insisted, the accidental consequence of a sloppy execution. He was put to death along with Awad Haman Bander, leader of Hussein's Revolutionary Court, and the hangings evoked widespread condemnation from the United Nations, the European Union and human rights organizations. ...

The Saudi-owned al-Hayat newspaper, published in London, quoted a former Iraqi judge as saying that during his time in office, people on death row such as Ibrahim, who had cancer, were usually pardoned or given amnesty because of their ailments. Hussein preferred executing opponents of his regime by firing squad.

Oh, please. Only the "Arab world" could long for the days of rape rooms, people having their tongues cut out and their hands amputated, and genocides against the Kurds and the Shi'ites just because of three executions after the closest thing to due process that Iraq has seen in decades. While the Sunni world wails about poor Saddam getting executed on Eid, none of them mention the mass murders that Saddam committed with the power of the state behind him, and the mass graves he left as evidence of them.

Could the Iraqis have done a better job with these executions? Of course. Saddam got rushed to the gallows, and the scene that the Iraqis allowed to unfold (and videotape) cheapened the event, turning it into a rally for Moqtada al-Sadr. They eliminated the Sadr cheering section for the next executions. Barzan's beheading resulted from rank incompetence; the executioner used too long of a rope despite the expertise at hand from the American military.

All of that is just circumstance. The executions would have happened eventually anyway, and despite all of the outrage from the Arab street, all three of them richly deserved their fates. They went out a lot easier than the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis they dispatched during their reign of terror. And where were all of these outraged Arabs when Saddam and his henchmen brutalized and murdered all of these Kurds, Shi'ite Arabs, and even fellow Sunnis? Did they erupt in outrage and anger over those countless deaths through gassing, torture, and other unsavory means? Where were their voices when Saddam committed his genocides and atrocities?

The only deaths Arabs appear to protest are those of mass murderers and psychopaths. That tells us all we need to know about the values of the "Arab street".

Mahdi Army Leaders Arrested

Over the last few weeks, the Iraqi government has quietly rounded up some of the senior leadership of the Mahdi Army in preparation for the tactical shift by the US military. The arrests give hope that the Iraqi government may actually use this opportunity to separate itself from the radical Shi'ites that have influenced its operations, including Moqtada al-Sadr:

Facing intense pressure from the Bush administration to show progress in securing Iraq, senior Iraqi officials announced Wednesday that they had moved against the country’s most powerful Shiite militia, arresting several dozen senior members in the past few weeks.

It was the first time the Shiite government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki had claimed significant action against the militia, the Mahdi Army, one of the most intractable problems facing his administration. The militia’s leader, the cleric Moktada al-Sadr, helped put Mr. Maliki in power, but pressure to crack down on the group has mounted as its killings in the capital have driven a wedge into efforts to keep the country together.

Although the announcement seemed timed to deflect growing scrutiny by an American administration that has grown increasingly frustrated with Mr. Maliki, American officers here offered some support for the government’s claims, saying that at least half a dozen senior militia leaders had been taken into custody in recent weeks.

In perhaps the most surprising development, the Americans said, none of the members had been prematurely released, a chronic problem as this government has frequently shielded Shiite fighters.

“There was definitely a change in attitudes,” in the past three to four weeks, a senior American military officer said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Many of the critics of Bush's surge have argued, not unreasonably, that the new strategy relied too heavily on Nouri al-Maliki's government to show a tenacity that they had never displayed before. Maliki's ties to Sadr made this reliance seem a bit too trusting, and people wondered whether Maliki could survive after turning on Sadr -- literally as well as politically.

The change has had an effect on the streets of Baghdad. Where the militias operated openly as late as October, most of the militia members have faded out of sight. Checkpoints run by the Mahdis have disappeared, and weapons no longer get flashed on the street. The luckier ones now try to get passports to get out of Baghdad and Iraq altogether, and the poorer fighters have worked to stay out of the way. Most impressively, all of this has happened while hundreds of Mahdis sit in jails; normally, that would start street fighting and massive protests, but the Mahdis have suddenly discovered discretion.

One of the motivating factors is money. The Mahdis found a good living in Iranian subsidies and petty protection rackets. They want to keep what they already have, and they know that a stand-up fight against the US military would end all of that. "Italian shoes" was the explanation of one Iraqi to New York Times reporter Sabrina Tavernise. This underscores the need to follow the clear-and-hold with jobs for unemployed and bored Iraqis who are at higher risk to fall into the insurgencies. The fanatics probably can't be swayed, but their starving recruits who want food and money would probably rather earn it than steal it, and the US needs to have those resources at the ready.

It seems that Bush may have finally found the proper motivation for Maliki to put an end to the Shi'ite death squads. Now we have to help the Iraqi government find the incentives to get the Iraqis to work on rebuilding their nation.

British Special Forces Capture Taliban Commander

A senior Taliban commander finds himself in British hands today after a lightning raid on his home by SAS commandos. Without firing a shot or losing a man, the SAS plucked Mohammed Nabi from his fortified house:

A team of SAS soldiers captured a key Taliban commander yesterday in a lightning raid on a heavily-fortified compound in southern Afghanistan.

Without a shot being fired, the force of fewer than 30 elite soldiers, backed by Afghan troops, achieved "total surprise" and seized Mohammad Nabi in the early hours of the morning near Gereshk, in Helmand province.

Nabi is believed to be a key commander in the Taliban insurgency in the neighbouring province of Kandahar.

The compound, which had been under observation by Nato forces for around two weeks, was typical of the heavily-fortified homes favoured by the Pashtun tribes of southern Afghanistan, which often boast battlements and watch towers.

Initially, the British wanted to keep the story quiet, especially the identity of the target. They wanted to see how much information he would give before tipping off the second round of targets. The Telegraph describes this as a "secret war" in the region, mostly fought by commandos and intel agents, and any edge they could gain would pay dividends. The release to the Telegraph indicates that no further explotation can be made.

However, Nabi's capture shows that the British and other NATO forces appear to be getting better intel. The recent decimation of an infiltration colum and the Pakistani attack on al-Qaeda camps show an emerging pattern of success against Islamist terrorists in the region. If we could get Pakistan to work harder in Waziristan to keep terrorists from crossing over into Afghanistan, we could make real progress against Mullah Omar and his remnants.

Climbdown On Warrantless Surveillance (Updated And Bumped)

The Bush administration has apparently concluded that fighting to retain the warrantless surveillance program with a Democratic Congress would eventually be unsuccessful, and today announced that the presidential authorization for the program would not be renewed. Instead, the Department of Justice will transfer oversight responsibility to the FISA court, effectively ending the controversy over one of the most contentious counterterrorism projects adopted since 9/11:

The Justice Department, easing a Bush administration policy, said Wednesday it has decided to give an independent body authority to monitor the government's controversial domestic spying program.

In a letter to the leaders of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said this authority has been given to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and that it already has approved one request for monitoring the communications of a person believed to be linked to al-Qaida or an associated terror group.

The court orders approving collection of international communications — whether it originates in the United States or abroad — was issued Jan. 10, according to the two-page letter to Sens. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Arlen Specter, R-Pa.

"As a result of these orders, any electronic surveillance that was occurring as part of the Terrorist Surveillance Program will now be conducted subject to the approval of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court," Gonzales wrote in the letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press.

This change of policy will surely raise a few eyebrows. One of the arguments the Bush administration made was that it could not reach accommodation with the FISA court on expedited authorizations for wiretaps on international conversations with one point inside the US, on phone numbers already flagged as potentially related to terrorists. It discouraged Congress from drafting legislation mandating a process for such actions, stating that the authorization for the use of military force (AUMF) granted them all of the authorization needed for such surveillance.

The new position seems like a significant climbdown on all fronts. References to the AUMF seemed significantly absent from their statement as reported by the AP. The expectation that Congress would grant retroactive approval for the process initiated by the NSA expired at the midterm elections. Now Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has done what the Bush administration said they could not do, which is to construct a process for expedited requests with FISA -- and they've already used it once.

On one hand, having this process remain in our counterterrorism arsenal is great news. However, for those of us who supported the White House on this contentious point, the speed in which they reached accommodation with FISA will call into question that early support. By my count, we've had ten entire weeks since the midterms and they've managed to scale a mountain that they claimed was insurmountable for the previous five years.

Perhaps more explanations will be forthcoming. I, for one, will be waiting.

UPDATE AND BUMP, 9:15 PM: Several bloggers insist that this is no climb-down by the White House but more of a surrender by FISA. My good friend and blog partner Dafydd at Big Lizards makes the case most emphatically:

The media refer to President Bush's announcement that he will not reauthorize the NSA al-Qaeda interecept program... now that the FISA court has finally stepped up and issued orders allowing the very same program to proceed with judicial support, making it virtually impossible for majority Democrats to kill off. Surprise, surprise on the jungle cruise tonight (no surprise to "George Orwell," however), the MSM play this story as if it were a historic victory over Bush.

I have the pleasant task of bursting the latest anti-Bush liberal triumphalism: the media take is complete rot. The only reason they bypassed the FISA court in the first place was that it was too slow... and at last, the court has agreed to reforms, crafted by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, that not only dramatically speed up court review when necessary but also leave in place blanket approval of communications intercepts whenever there is probable cause to believe it's an al-Qaeda or related terrorist communication.

I don't want to excerpt too much of Dafydd's post because it should be read in full. However, I disagree with him about this being a Bush triumph, and my point can be found in the letter Gonzales sent to the committee:

In the spring of 2005 -- well before the first press account disclosing the existence of the Terrorist Surveillance Program -- the Administration began exploring options for seeking FISA Court approval.

This is my point, here. It's not that the program has ended; it obviously will continue. My anger is over the fact that the Bush administration insisted on two points: one, that the FISA court would not cooperate on streamlining the process for warrants on these intercepts, and the second that the Bush administration had the authority to proceed without it. They took everyone along for a big ride, making all sorts of legal arguments about the AUMF and Article II -- and now Gonzales has revealed that even they didn't really believe it.

If they were negotiating with FISA to place the program under their jurisdiction, then they must have agreed with their critics that insisted FISA was a covering authority for such action. And if they've spent the better part of two years reaching an accommodation with FISA, why not just tell people what they were doing when the program got exposed? And for toppers, why didn't they start negotiating with FISA in November 2001 when they started the program?

The Bush administration just torpedoed a large chunk of their credibility. This is in no way a victory for the White House, but a huge climbdown. All of that effort and argument went for absolutely nothing.

UPDATE II: Mark Levin understands:

For the Bush administration to argue for years that this program, as operated, was critical to our national security and fell within the president's Constitutional authority, to then turnaround and surrender presidential authority this way is disgraceful. The administration is repudiating all the arguments it has made in testimony, legal briefs, and public statements. This goes to the heart of the White House's credibility. How can it cast away such a fundamental position of principle and law like this?

It can if it never believed its own arguments, and the time frame of the FISA negotiations make that seem the case.

UPDATE III: Glenn Greenwald says, I told you so ... and he did.

First Mate Update

I got home from the hospital a while ago after spending most of the day there. My son, who attends the University of Minnesota, came over after class and spent a little time with the FM and I, and he and I ate at The Orchid, a Thai/Vietnamese restaurant a block or so away. The food was delicious, although both he an I asked for a 3 on the spicy scale (1-5); next time we'll both try a 2.

The FM is doing very well. They found a combination of medicines to avoid the nausea she usually feels after anaesthesia, and she is alert but very tired. She'll have to go through dialysis tomorrow and Friday, and she should be home by Sunday if all goes well.

So what's next? Her donor has completed his evaluation and all appears to be in order. She will have to recover from this surgery, perhaps 4-6 weeks, and the donor has a family vacation scheduled sometime in March. When he returns, we'll probably do the transplant immediately afterwards. I don't want to give any details about the donor, except that he and his family are exceptional people who have lived a life of service. It's impossible to tell you how impressive he and his wife have been even before they volunteered to do this. Keep them in your prayers, if you can.

Since I will be spending some time at the hospital over the next couple of days, posting will probably be a shade lighter than normal, but perhaps a bit heavier this weekend. We're on track and feeling optimistic, which is a direct result of all your prayers and kind thoughts.

A Return To Hospiblogging (Update And Bump)

UPDATE II, 3:11 PM: I'll update at the top of this post today. The FM just got out of surgery and all went well. She's in the recovery room at the moment, and will likely be there for an hour or two before going to her room. She lost very little blood and the kidney came out with no problem. I'll add more when I see her in a little while.

Posting may either be very light or very heavy today, as the First Mate will be having surgery to remove the previously transplanted kidney this afternoon. It's an expected step in the road to the next transplant, as the BK viral infection in the current transplant still has not fully abated and probably never will. While the BK virus remains, she cannot have another transplant, because the virus would kill the next kidney as well. I'll have updates on the FM's progress today and a more full explanation of what lies ahead.

Meanwhile, check out Daniel Glover's new website, Air Congress, and scroll down for my earlier posts.

UPDATE, 11:04 AM: So we're sitting in the lobby waiting for the nurses to come get the FM, when the television starts discussing this story:

Hospitals are usually where people turn for help, but twice as many Minnesota patients died from hospital errors or oversights in the latest 12-month period measured in a new report.

The Minnesota Department of Health report released Wednesday said hospitals' mistakes were to blame for 24 deaths, half of them from preventable falls by vulnerable patients. Another seven patients became disabled.

The report also found a spike in 27 types of serious mishaps that hospitals must disclose to the Health Department, ranging from administering the wrong medication to forgetting instruments inside patients after surgery. There were 154 such incidents, compared with 106 the year before.

Isn't that cheery? A search of the Minnesota database reveals that the Fairview University Medical Center, where we're at today, had 13 adverse events in the past year, resulting in four deaths and one serious disability -- but out of over 289,000 patient days and 20,692 surgeries. The context somehow got left out of the televised report ...

Have The Saudis Declared Economic War On Iran?

Noticed a drop in prices at the gas pump of late? After approaching or even topping $3 a gallon for gasoline, the prices have steadily fallen in recent weeks; stations here in Minnesota had it at $1.89 per gallon over the weekend. The decline at the pump comes from an unexpected glut in the market, and some OPEC producers had hoped to force a round of production cuts to bolster crude prices. However, Saudi Arabia announced today that it had 3 million bbls/day of spare capacity, and it intends to start using it (via Hot Air):

Prices fell in early trading after Saudi Arabia's Oil Minister, Ali al-Naimi, said his country has 3 million daily barrels of spare capacity and will push ahead with projects to expand output. Oil futures plunged yesterday after al-Naimi said he saw no need for an emergency OPEC meeting to consider further cuts in output.

``The Saudis are saying that they don't want to be the swing producer,'' said Bill O'Grady, director of fundamental futures research at A.G. Edwards & Sons Inc. in St. Louis. ``The Saudis have made substantial cuts, unlike a lot of the other OPEC members. Oil in a $40 to $50 range suits the Saudis much better than oil at $70.''

The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, which pumps about 40 percent of the world's oil, agreed to cut production by 1.2 million barrels a day starting Nov. 1, citing slower-than-forecast demand growth and rising stockpiles. Member states will cut daily output by a further 500,000 barrels on Feb. 1, the group said Dec. 14.

Venezuela and Algeria are seeking a third accord since October to reduce production because of the fall in prices. ...

Prices are down 21 percent from a year ago. Oil in New York has fallen 27 percent in the past year when measured in euros, 30 percent in British pounds and 18 percent in yen.

This will hurt those producers whose efficiency cannot match the Saudis, which primarily means Iran and Venezuela. It's doubtful that the Saudis care much about Hugo Chavez and his determination to nationalize the Venezuelan energy industry, but the Saudis care a great deal about Iran and its radical Shi'ite mullahcracy. The Iranians have a big economic problem at the moment, and their only hope is to keep oil prices high enough to cover their gaps. If oil prices continue to drop, it slices off most of the margin the Iranians can capture from oil sales, their only export of any significance.

It also frees the Western nations sanctioning Iran to conduct an agressive pressure campaign. The Iranians thought that they had more leverage than the West as a major oil producer, although Iranian exports only account for a small percentage of global commodity trading (around 5%) -- and that share gets smaller and smaller. The Iranians have had to use more of their shrinking production for domestic purposes, meaning that the lower prices have an exponentially crippling effect on their economy.

Put this another way; the Iranians contribute around 2.5 million bbls/day, that's less than the Saudi spare capacity. The Saudis have basically pledged to make an Iranian shutdown irrelevant in the short to medium term, taking away one of the Iranian trump cards in their standoff with the West.

A Guest Of The ISI

Mullah Omar has eluded capture ever since the end of the Taliban's regime in November 2001, presumably hiding in the mountainous region along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border while conducting a war against the democratic government that replaced his bloody and barbaric rule. Now a captured Taliban spokesman has pinpointed him specifically to a compound run by the Pakistani intelligence service:

Taleban leader Mullah Omar is living in Pakistan under the protection of its ISI intelligence agency, a captured Taleban spokesman has said.

The spokesman, Muhammad Hanif, made the apparent confession to Afghan agents who videotaped the questioning.

Mr Hanif is seen sitting in a dimly-lit room telling agents that Mullah Omar is in the city of Quetta. Correspondents confirm the voice is his.

The Pakistanis are in full denial mode, but the Afghan security service has a full-press distribution effort in promoting this video. They are intent on showing that the Pakistanis, or at least the ISI, has not ended support of the Taliban even five years after 9/11. Hamid Karzai made similar charges last year, but it was dismissed as an easy charge in a contentious relationship, but now he has more compelling evidence for that position.

The Afghan intel service also claims that they found anthrax in the house where they arrested him. That certainly will pique the curiosity of American intelligence, which might want to compare the strain to see where it originated -- and whether it matches the strain used in the attacks here in the US.

Allahpundit at Hot Air notes that American military analysts, in documents purchased by ABC news from an Afghan national in front of Bagram AFB, essentially agree with Hanif. If so, perhaps we should make an effort to discover his exact location for ourselves and do what the Pakistanis apparently won't.

CORRECTION: They found anthrax in the house where they arrested Hanif. I wrote that they found Hanif in the house where they arrested him ... thanks to Gerry in the comments for the correction.

Don Tancredo

One of the more amusing aspects of any presidential campaign is the people who believe they have a chance to win the nomination. This year, we already have one from each party. The Democrats have Chris Dodd, a man so non-descript that even his own constituents have trouble recognizing him. The Republicans now may have its own Don Quixote in Tom Tancredo, who announced the formation of an exploratory committee that will have to include windmills and some heavy-duty tilting:

Colorado's Tom Tancredo took his first official step Tuesday toward running for president.

The Republican congressman from Littleton - known for his hard-line stance on immigration - announced his plan to file paperwork for a presidential exploratory committee. He set up a website and within four hours, he said, collected about $10,000 in campaign contributions.

After spending the weekend in Iowa, where the earliest presidential nominating caucus is to be held in mid-January 2008, Tancredo, 61, said he decided there's a need for a candidate with traditional Republican beliefs of small government, reduced spending and conservative social values. ...

Tancredo acknowledges he has no chance to raise the "hundreds of millions of dollars" that likely candidates such as Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.; former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney; and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani could potentially acquire.

He said for now he needs to determine whether he can raise the $1 million or so he'd need to compete in Iowa. Tancredo has hired a representative to run his campaign there.

Tancredo says that a third-place finish in Iowa would be a victory for him, but that's a stretch. The top two finishers in Iowa and New Hampshire, if they're the same two people, will pretty much have the run of the primaries to themselves. Money follows success, and Tancredo has little prospect of either. He wants to raise one million dollars for Iowa, but in order to have any impact on those caucuses he will have to spend every last cent -- leaving him little for New Hampsire.

Some will say that the point of Tancredo's run isn't really to win the nomination, but to put pressure on the frontrunners to get more hard-line on immigration. Perhaps Tancredo himself has this in mind, too. However, it seems pretty counterintuitive to think that someone who has almost no chance of even cracking the top tier of the candidates can put pressure on anyone about immigration or anything else. The only way that would work would be if Tancredo had a realistic shot to win the nomination. Otherwise, the Romneys, Giulianis, Gingrichs, and McCains can safely ignore Tancredo and all of the other single-issue politicians vying for a small slice of attention in 2008.

And for Tancredo's fans, consider what a disaster a Tancredo campaign could be for hard-liners on immigration. Since he has no real national standing on any other issue, the lack of support that Tancredo will suffer will reflect directly on immigration reform. It will be much easier for moderates and liberals to show that the hard-liners on immigration are marginal at best if Tancredo runs against McCain and Giuliani and flops. It will reduce the influence of Tancredo and others who insist on border security and no amnesty or citizenship for illegals, not boost it.

Front runners in presidential politics usually get there by having a broad policy outlook and developing the kind of experience that lends credibility to their executive potential. Single-issue legislators rarely fare well when throwing their hats in the ring -- Bob Dornan springs to mind here -- and usually wind up as a laughingstock, and their issue marginalized. Tancredo's exploratory committee might want to take all of this into consideration before wasting political donations better used to help the eventual Republican nominee win the general election.

UPDATE: Why am I so hard on Tancredo? His prescription to "bomb Mecca" if we get hit by a terrorist nuke would certainly be one reason to keep his finger off the button. The North American Union nuttiness would be another reason to view him as a fringie. Americans don't elect people who don't have the mental discipline to avoid buying into urban legends.

Another Blow To Al-Qaeda

The Philippine franchise of al-Qaeda took a heavy blow yesterday, as the government announced that it had killed one of the leaders of Abu Sayyaf. If confirmed, the terrorists will have lost their leader and chief organizer within a span of weeks:

The Philippines said on Wednesday that troops had killed the top planner of the country's most deadly Islamic militant group in a clash at a rebel jungle camp in the southwest.

Abu Sulaiman, one of the top five leaders of the Abu Sayyaf militant group and who is believed to have links with al Qaeda, was killed in a gunbattle on Tuesday on the island of Jolo, military chief Gen. Hermogenes Esperon told reporters.

"We are confident that with the death of Sulaiman, who is actually the number one planner, most of the activities of the Abu Sayyaf will continue to go down," Esperon said.

Late last month, the military said Abu Sayyaf chief Khaddafy Janjalani might have been killed in September and sent tissue from a decomposing body found on Jolo for forensic tests.

In the extended areas of the radical Islamic jihad, retreat seems to be the order of the day. AQ-related Islamists in Somalia have fled in a rout and are getting picked off a few at a time as they try to escape to Kenya and points beyond. Abu Sayyaf has lost its leadership and finds itself mostly trapped on one island in the Philippine chain. Even in Baghdad, the AQ elements appear to be redeploying over an event horizon as a reaction to a bigger commitment by the US to smoking out the terrorists.

One of the key elements for terrorists to prevail is a notion of invincibility -- that their willingness to martyr themselves make them unbeatable. Western societies tend to play into that aura with their efforts to negotiate with terrorists and their unwillingness to commit to total war against them. Ethiopia showed that a sustained military effort can end what looks to be an intractable terrorist grip on a nation, and the Filipinos have shown that tenacity pays dividends.

When people realize that civilized nations will treat terrorists as a pestilence and not as acceptable political entities, terrorism will decline rapidly. When leaders and supporters of terrorism start getting killed for their use of terrorist proxies, then terrorism will dry up altogether. Once we remove all of the incentives for terrorism, the market will disappear.

French Diplomat Puts An End To Latest Appeasement

Despite the involvement of Iran in both sides of the sectarian strife and their development of nuclear weapons, France's Jacques Chirac decided that Iran could partner with him to settle the troubles in Lebanon -- troubles that Iran has deliberately fomented. He resolved to send his diplomats to Teheran despite the sanctions that the UN had just voted to impose on the mullahcracy. It fell to his chief diplomat, Phillipe Douste-Blazy, to tell Chirac that he needed his head examined:

At a time when most world powers have forged a united front against Iran because of its nuclear program, President Jacques Chirac arranged to send his foreign minister to Tehran to talk about a side issue, then abruptly canceled the visit earlier this month in embarrassing failure.

Mr. Chirac’s troubles stemmed from his deep desire to help resolve the crisis in Lebanon before his term runs out in May. To that end, he decided to seek the support of Iran, which, along with Syria, backs the radical Shiite organization Hezbollah, three senior French officials said in describing the effort.

So he planned to send Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy to Tehran, only to call off the trip two days before it was to have taken place, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly on diplomatic issues.

Both Mr. Douste-Blazy and senior Foreign Ministry officials concluded that such a trip was doomed to fail and that it would send the wrong signal just weeks after the United Nations Security Council unanimously approved sanctions intended to curb Iran’s nuclear program, they added.

That put Mr. Douste-Blazy in the uncomfortable position of having to tell Mr. Chirac that he did not want to go, one senior official said.

Being rebuked by one's foreign minister is bad enough, but let's remember that it was Douste-Blazy who insisted last summer that Iran was a 'stabilizing force" in Southwest Asia. His Road to Damascus moment came days after that particularly embarrassing statement, when Douste-Blazy retracted his earlier endorsement after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called on Islamic nations to destroy Israel.

In fact, it's difficult to understand why Chirac wanted to try this new Iranian appeasement policy. Other Arab nations in the region made clear to the French government their opposition to it. The Saudis dropped all of the flowery language of diplomacy, and of Arab culture, and told Douste-Blazy "Do not go." Egypt told Douste-Blazy the same thing, and the French knew better than to ask the US, which registered a diplomatic protest when the State Department found out about the trip.

And it's not over yet, either. Instead of Douste-Blazy, Chirac will send a lower-ranking diplomat and intelligence officer to Teheran, if the French diplomatic corps cannot convince him to drop this folly altogether. It may not be easy, because Chirac, nearing the end of his term, is apparently obsessed with Lebanon and finding some way to create stability there. He wants the Syrians prosecuted for Rafik Hariri's murder, and for some reason thinks the Iranians would be interested in assisting that process, even though Teheran has made clear their support for Bashar Assad. Hariri wanted independence for Lebanon, free of both Syria and Iran through their joint proxy Hezbollah, and the notion that Iran would drop their strategy for control through terror for a dinner with Phillipe is laughable, and somewhat deranged.

The War Of The Fleas

Michelle Malkin has returned from her embed with the US military in Baghdad and has published her first report on her experiences. It's a taste of a series of posts to come, and it underscores the frustration of the troops with both the Bush administration and the anti-war activists:

Modern war in the Middle East is no longer as cut-and-dry as shooting all the bad guys and going home. We are fighting a "war of the fleas"--not just Sunni terrorists and Shiite death squads, but multiple home-grown and foreign operators, street gangs, organized crime, and freelance jihadis conducting ambushes, extrajudicial killings, sectarian attacks, vehicle bombings, and sabotage against American, coalition, and Iraqi forces. Cellphones, satellites, and the Internet have allowed the fleas to magnify their importance, disseminate insurgent propaganda instantly, and weaken political will.

I came to Iraq a darkening pessimist about the war, due in large part to my doubts about the compatability of Islam and Western-style democracy, but also as a result of the steady, sensational diet of “grim milestone” and “daily IED count” media coverage that aids the insurgency.

I left Iraq with unexpected hope and resolve. ...

The troops I met scoff at peace activists’ efforts to “bring them home now.” But they are just as critical of the Bush administration and Pentagon’s missteps—from holding Iraqi elections too early, to senselessly breaking up their brigade combat team, to drawing down forces and withdrawing last year in Baghdad and Fallujah, to failing to hold cities after clearing them of insurgents. They speak candidly and critically of Shiite militia infiltration of some Iraqi police and Iraqi Army units and corruption in government ministries, but they want you to know about the unseen good news, too. ...

Winning the counterinsurgency battle is not just about keeping Iraqis safe. It’s about keeping Americans safe--by sending a message that the mightiest military in the world cannot and will not be outwitted and outlasted by the fleas. On the emblem of the Dagger Brigade are two imperatives: “Continue mission!” and “Duty first!” They are committed to their mission. They deserve our commitment to them.

For those who read Michelle's blog on a regular basis, her "darkening" pessimism had been noticeable of late, and I wondered if her visit would change that or accelerate it. We have our answer, and over the next few days we will start reading about the experiences that changed her perspective.

It's a long post, so be sure to read it all.

UPDATE: Bryan Preston also returns from his travels with Michelle:

Iraq is still very winnable. There are mistakes in every war. Iraq is a hideously complex environment to work in and its complexity has to be taken into account. Communities like Al Salam and Khadimiyah in Baghdad prove that at the end of the day most Iraqis value security and the chance to have a normal life above any notions of jihad and sectarianism, and we can work with most Iraqis to make their country safe. Most Iraqis want our troops there now, just not forever. Our troop morale is very high and they are focused on goals that they believe are attainable and will make Iraq stable. Most of the troops we spoke with support the surge; a minority don’t but it doesn’t seem to be a contentious issue. Democracy in Iraq probably won’t look like democracy here when the fight is over (and presuming that we here at home see it through), but if we correct our mistakes and change the media and political dynamics here, we can and should win. The price of failure is that Iraq would become a true hub for an al Qaeda that would see its “victory” in Iraq as Somalia times 100. Iraqi oil dollars would fuel this new terrorist power as long as Iraq’s oil infrastructure holds out. From secure bases in Iraq, the terrorists’ aims and capabilities would be practically limitless. Faith in America as a war ally would be shaken from Europe to Asian and everywhere else.

So whether we win ugly or pretty, we have to win. And we can.

And of course, be sure to read Bill Ardolino's dispatches from Fallujah at INDC Journal. Start at the top, keep scrolling, and throw a few dollars in the kitty to help him cover the expenses if you can.

The Year Of Nick The New Guy

Barack Obama sort of ended all the suspense this morning, by doing exactly what everyone expected, only a little sooner. Obama announced that he would create an exploratory committee as the first step towards running for President in 2008:

Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, whose best-selling books and political travels generated huge pressure to run for the White House, joined a crowded Democratic field yesterday, vowing to advance "a different kind of politics" in a campaign that could make him the nation's first African American president.

Obama, a state legislator just three years ago, announced that he has formed a presidential exploratory committee, accelerating his already rapid emergence in national politics and establishing him as his party's most formidable rival to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, the Democratic front-runner.

Obama, 45, portrayed his youth and short tenure in Congress as an asset in a statement distributed via Web video and e-mail. "Today, our leaders in Washington seem incapable of working together in a practical, common sense way," the senator declared. "Politics has become so bitter and partisan, so gummed up by money and influence, that we can't tackle the big problems that demand solutions."

It's early in the season, so we'll cut him some slack, but it isn't the job of the President to work on eliminating the partisan bitterness in politics. Most of that revolves around Congress anyway, and Obama would have more impact working on that goal from his current position -- which to be fair, he has. The President's job is to run the executive branch -- and for that task, we generally don't find a lack of experience to be an asset.

Obama has little choice but to latch onto the "change the tone" banner for this election. What else could he campaign on? He has served two years of his first term in the Senate, which is also his first two years in Congress at all. He hasn't served in any other national capacity. In fact, he has done little in foreign affairs at all except to demand a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq, and considering that foreign policy is one of the areas under the full purview of the White House, that lack of experience seems much less an asset than a liability.

Granted, the Democrats want to find a candidate who can capture the imagination of the American electorate, but one would hope that they wouldn't run an imaginary executive in order to do so. Unfortunately, it looks like we'll get two, the other being John Edwards, who almost served one full term in public office before running for President in 2004. Neither man has any executive experience, not even in the private sector, and between them they have eight years in national office. And yet, they rank #2 and #3 in straw polling for the Democratic Presidential nomination.

Obama is 45 years old. He has plenty of time to gain the experience and gravitas needed to lead the nation. He should run for governor in Illinois and build some executive entries for his resume, and show us he can run a state government before asking to take over the White House. I'm not inclined to give the keys to the business to Nick The New Guy, and Democrats should resist the temptation.

Has Baghdad Stopped Burning?

Two sources within Iraq report that al-Qaeda has begun to flee Baghdad in advance of the American troop surge. Richard Miniter, blogging at Pajamas Media, confirms with US military intelligence a report from an insurgent press outlet quoted by Iraq the Model:

Al Qaeda terrorists are fleeing Baghdad in advance of President Bush’s 21,500-man troop surge, a senior military intelligence officer told Pajamas Media today. Under orders from the al Qaeda commander in Iraq, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, fighters are streaming toward the Diyala region of Iraq.

This confirms reports posted on Iraq the Model, which cited al-Sabah, a well-known mouthpiece for al Qaeda in Iraq.

In speaking with Pajamas Media the military intelligence officer supplied several new details of the al Qaeda retreat.

The apparent evacuation of Baghdad by al Qaeda forces comes from direct orders issued by al-Masri, the former soldier who took control of the Iraqi wing of al Qaeda following the June 2006 bombing death of Zarqawi.

Initially, the intelligence officer informed Pajamas, the Baghdad-based AQ fighters did not want to leave. Al-Masri had to send unequivocal orders for their retreat, adding that one of the lessons from the Fallujah campaign was that Americans have learned how to prevail in house-to-house fighting. Masri said that remaining in Baghdad was a ‘no-win situation’ for the terrorists.

No other media outlets have reported on this story yet, but both Miniter and Omar are on the ground in the area. The al-Sabaah site appears to be down at the moment, and it may not have an English translation of any statements in any case. If confirmed, it would be the first public retreat by al-Qaeda forces, a damaging development for the network, which had just started to earn back some of its luster thanks to its efforts in Iraq.

Miniter warns that this could be just a tactical retreat to lure the Americans out of Baghdad. The strategy might be to pull the US into a region where the Sunni insurgencies enjoy more support and cover, and while we engage the native insurgents, al-Qaeda could slip around us and get back into Baghdad. Why that would be preferable to just staying in Baghdad from the beginning isn't immediately clear

In any case, the message from AQ, via its al-Sabaah mouthpiece, seems to be that the surge has made an impression on the right people. It already has the terrorists scrambling for position, and the motion itself will make them much more vulnerable.

Kucinich To Bring Back The Fairness Doctrine

The continuing impact of the Democratic takeover of Congress has just gotten worse. In a little-noticed development from this weekend, Dennis Kucinich announced that he would use his position on a House government-reform subcommittee to focus on the Federal Communications Commission -- and that the Fairness Doctrine may make a comeback:

Over the weekend, the National Conference for Media Reform was held in Memphis, TN, with a number of notable speakers on hand for the event. Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) made an surprise appearance at the convention to announce that he would be heading up a new House subcommittee which will focus on issues surrounding the Federal Communications Commission.

The Presidential candidate said that the committee would be holding "hearings to push media reform right at the center of Washington.” The Domestic Policy Subcommittee of the House Government Reform Committee was to be officially announced this week in Washington, D.C., but Kucinich opted to make the news public early.

In addition to media ownership, the committee is expected to focus its attention on issues such as net neutrality and major telecommunications mergers. Also in consideration is the "Fairness Doctrine," which required broadcasters to present controversial topics in a fair and honest manner. It was enforced until it was eliminated in 1987.

The Fairness Doctrine did not require broadcasters to present issues in a "fair and honest manner"; it required them to turn their stations into ping-ponging punditry if they allowed opinion to appear on the air at all. It created such a complicated formula that most broadcasters simply refused to air any political programming, as it created a liability for station owners for being held hostage to all manner of complaints about lack of balance.

Congress and the Reagan administration repealed the Fairness Doctrine in the mid-1980s, and it allowed a market for political opinion to flourish. It also revitalized the AM band, which had been badly eclipsed for music broadcasting during the 1970s due to the rise of static-free FM stations. Radio stations could air local and syndicated talk shows without having to worry about metering time between differing viewpoints, allowing the station owners to reflect the market and their own personal preferences for politcal viewpoints.

Why would Kucinich want to reimpose the Fairness Doctrine and kill off the AM band and talk radio? Because his allies have proven less successful than conservatives at building a market for their broadcasts. Rush Limbaugh, Hugh Hewitt, and a slew of conservative thinkers carved out an industry out of the AM wilderness, and the Al Frankens and Wendy Wildes can't keep up without government intervention. Air America would lose as well in this scenario, but I'm sure Kucinich sees that as a fair trade, and for good reason.

Democrats aren't wasting much time in rolling back free speech now that they have the majority. Putting Kucinich in charge of domestic policy reform was no mistake on their part. They want to kill talk radio, and if they manage to hold their majority and win the White House in 2008, they just might do it.

Law Of Unintended Consequences, Michigan Style

If philanderers want to find a cozy hideaway for their assignations, they may want to avoid Michigan, at least for a while. Its appellate court just ruled that thanks to an overzealous prosecutor's application of the law, adultery is now a serious sexual crime (via Memeorandum):

In a ruling sure to make philandering spouses squirm, Michigan's second-highest court says that anyone involved in an extramarital fling can be prosecuted for first-degree criminal sexual conduct, a felony punishable by up to life in prison.

"We cannot help but question whether the Legislature actually intended the result we reach here today," Judge William Murphy wrote in November for a unanimous Court of Appeals panel, "but we are curtailed by the language of the statute from reaching any other conclusion."

"Technically," he added, "any time a person engages in sexual penetration in an adulterous relationship, he or she is guilty of CSC I," the most serious sexual assault charge in Michigan's criminal code.

No one expects prosecutors to declare open season on cheating spouses. The ruling is especially awkward for Attorney General Mike Cox, whose office triggered it by successfully appealing a lower court's decision to drop CSC charges against a Charlevoix defendant. In November 2005, Cox confessed to an adulterous relationship.

How did Michigan manage to return to our Puritanical past? Cox wanted to prosecute a defendant in a drug case as a sex offender for taking sexual intercourse as payment for illegal Oxycontin sales. He made use of an obscure law that made any sexual penetration during the commission of a felony the same kind of sexual offense as rape and molestation, regardless of whether the sex was consensual or not.

When he first presented this rather novel method of sticking sex offender status on drug dealers, the trial judge threw it out. The prosecutor appealed when he discovered that the defendant had sex with a number of his customers, apparently scandalizing the legal community despite decades of this kind of behavior among drug users. Cox's office handled the appeal, and the court discovered that the law exists as Cox applied it.

This tale presents two lessons. First, the effort to eradicate drugs prompts the same extreme behavior that all militant efforts at "reform" produce. In this case, the prosecutors threw the kitchen sink at a drug dealer without any qualms whatsoever at their attempts to criminalize consenting sexual relations between two unrelated adults. Perhaps one could make an intellectual case of this being a form of prostitution, but that's just a misdemeanor and not a registerable sexual offense.

The second lesson is that legislatures often write laws badly, even laws with good intent. The Michigan legislature should revisit this provision in its penal code in light of prosecutorial attempts to criminalize sex among drug users. However, it will be interesting to see which politician will stand up to offer a bill to make adultery legal. I'd bet that it would have to be one without a spouse. Nevertheless, they should remove this particular arrow from the legal quiver, and soon.

NOTE: This post in no way should be construed as an endorsement of adultery. CQ's First Mate Approved position on adultery is that it's very, very bad. Did you see Fatal Attraction? 'Nuf said. Oh, and don't do drugs.

Castro Still Dying?

Fidel Castro's medical condition continues to worsen, the Spanish newspaper El Pais reported last night, and the doctors in Cuba have been unable to resolve the problem. An infection in his intestines as a complication of his earlier surgery has the long-standing dictator on death's door -- again:

Ailing Cuban leader Fidel Castro is in "very grave" condition after three failed operations and complications from an intestinal infection, a Spanish newspaper said Tuesday.

The newspaper El Pais cited two unnamed sources from the Gregorio Maranon hospital in the Spanish capital of Madrid. The facility employs surgeon Jose Luis Garcia Sabrido, who flew to Cuba in December to treat the 80-year-old Castro.

In a report published on its Web site, El Pais said: "A grave infection in the large intestine, at least three failed operations and various complications have left the Cuban dictator, Fidel Castro, laid up with a very grave prognosis."

The fact that the Cuban government flew Dr. Sabrido in from Spain to consult caused its own controversy a while ago. Cuba has always bragged about its free health care to Cubans as a key success for their workers' paradise, but the necessity of finding a qualified physician from outside Cuba -- an option not available to the workers in this paradise -- exposed a little of the truth about the health-care system on the island. (For a little more of the truth, check out my post from March 2005, and this Babalublog post.)

So does this spell the end of Fidel and the Communist dictatorship in Cuba? Maybe. He was supposed to be at death's door last year, too, but managed to hang on this long. He's in his eighties and cannot live forever, but he's done a pretty good job of surviving so far. While the Spanish press is much more reliable than the Cuban government-controlled media, it's hard to say how much to trust this latest report from two sources who have not attended Castro at all. I'd recommend a little skepticism. So far, Castro's final days seem more like the old SNL routine about Generalissimo Francisco Franco and his valiant effort to remain dead, but in reverse.

However, if you want to follow this story closely, you will want to keep an eye on Babalublog. Val and his co-bloggers have their pulse on the Cuban ex-pat community in Florida, a better source for the kind of signs that would accompany a change in power in Havana -- certainly more reliable than the Cuban press.

Romney Moves Ahead In On-Line Straw Poll

Last week I featured the monthly straw poll at GOP Bloggers, and once again CQ readers turned out in force to cast their ballots. Over 12,000 votes got cast for the January poll, and almost a third of them came from this blog -- and the results are a little surprising. Both among CQ voters and overall, Mitt Romney moved ahead of Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich, and especially John McCain. The overall percentages are:

Romney - 27.6%
Gingrich - 24.3%
Giuliani - 21.1%

CQ polling shows a little different order:

Romney - 31.7%
Giuliani - 25.4%
Gingrich - 23.2%

In candidate acceptability, Romney won by a landslide among CQ readers. His rating, 63.2%, outstrips his nearest competitors by almost 10 points. In fact, only the top three candidates had positive acceptability ratings. John McCain had a -23%, but Chuck Hagel and George Pataki continue to score even worse than McCain.

Up to now, Giuliani has led these polls, which has surprised me considering his liberal viewpoint on social issues. Romney has made a concerted effort, especially in the blogosphere, to claim the front-runner position. With his splashy fund-raising debut and his aggressive early campaigning, he may have succeeded.

Orange, Crushed

The Orange Revolution dramatically moved Ukraine from the Russian orbit under the corrupt hand of Leonid Kuchma and his hand-picked successor Viktor Yanukovich to the Westophile government of Viktor Yushchenko on a wave of massive, peaceful protests by Ukrainians, fueled by anger from an election Yanukovich fixed. Two years later, Yanukovich has eclipsed the man who led the Orange Revolution, turning him into a figurehead with the help of Yushchenko's Orange ally:

The man who led Ukraine's orange revolution two years ago has been transformed into a lame-duck president following a humiliating parliamentary vote that effectively strips him of all powers.

Viktor Yushchenko, Ukraine's opposition leader turned president, no longer has the power to veto the choice of prime minister or foreign minister. ...

The president lost his responsibilities after his ally-turned-rival Yulia Timoshenko decided to vote with the party of Ukraine's pro-Russian prime minister, Viktor Yanukovich.

In late 2004, Mr Yushchenko and Ms Timoshenko led the popular orange uprising against a rigged presidential election. Mr Yushchenko duly beat Mr Yanukovich as president.

Timoshenko captured the imagination of the West when she partnered with Yushchenko. Fiery, tactically reckless, and beautiful, her picture became an emblem of Ukrainian defiance towards Vladimir Putin and his allies in Kuchma and Yanukovich. Now her ambitions have led her to ally with the man she led street protests to remove, and her allies in the Ukrainian parliament scoff at the notion that she has betrayed the people she led to a peaceful revolution. This, they claim, is perfectly reasonable politics.

Is it? If it isn't, it would be hard to say who betrayed whom. Yanukovich had never lost all of his appeal after the exposure of the fixed election. His popularity continued in the eastern provinces that supported the closer Russian ties of Kuchma and Yanukovich. The clan system, one of the most underreported aspects of Ukraine during the political upheaval, still favors the old guard. Yushchenko won his battle against these elements but appears to have lost the war. He had the opportunity to partner with Timoshenko to form a government last year, but instead selected Yanukovich as his partner when he would not compromise with Timoshenko and name her as Prime Minister. And Timoshenko has returned the betrayal by throwing in with the factions supporting Yanukovich in a bid to bolster her own prospects for power.

Once a politician starts fixing elections, one can never trust them to run honest polls again. The failure of Ukraine to move away from its autocratic past, and the self-inflicted failure of its near-martyred revolutionary, does not seem to be reasonable politics from the outside. It looks a lot like backsliding and betrayal, potentially a sad ending to Ukraine's real independence from Russia and Vladimir Putin.

Rule #1: Don't Negotiate With Terrorists ... But That's Just The First Rule

Spanish Prime Minister Jose Zapatero came to office on the backlash against his predecessor for blaming the Basque separatist group ETA for the 3/11 Madrid bombings in 2004. After his election, he pulled Spain out of the Iraq coalition and then announced that he would honor the ETA cease-fire and negotiate with the Basques. However, after ETA killed two people in a bombing at the airport in Madrid, Zapatero found himself having to apologize for his naivete:

"All Spaniards heard me say on December 29 that I had the conviction that things were better for us than five years ago and that in a year's time things would be even better," Mr Zapatero told a special session of the Spanish parliament.

"Although it is not frequent among public leaders, I want to recognize the clear mistake I made before all Spanish citizens."

Despite allegations that he had been "fooled" by Eta, he insisted that he had been right to seek negotiations with the terrorist group after they declared a permanent ceasefire last March. "I did what most Spaniards wanted – to try to use the truce to end the violence," he said.

His opposition took a less charitable view of Zapatero's actions. Mariano Rajoy scoffed at the notion that Zapatero's embrace of negotiations was what Spaniards wanted:

Ignoring Mr Zapatero's calls for political unity in dealing with Eta, the leader of the opposition wasted no time in attacking him. "What is your word worth after all this?" Mariano Rajoy asked during the debate. "You have been fooled by a pack of murderers."

He reiterated his criticism of the premier's peace initiative with the words: "You don't negotiate with terrorism. Either you defeat it or you suffer from it."

Zapatero wants to find national unity in determining how to address the Basque terrorists, but the PP has made it clear that they will not endorse Zapatero's approach. The PM has apparently decided against further negotiations, but he has so far not offered any other ideas. His sole position seems to be that a refusal to negotiate is as far as he's willing to go to stop ETA.

That obviously won't address the problem. Terrorists do not bomb people in order to gain an edge at the bargaining table. They terrorize people in order to eliminate the need for bargains and force their opponents to skip right to capitulation, preferably as quickly as possible. Zapatero has already demonstrated a talent for this in his hasty exit from Iraq. He taught the terrorists a lesson -- that Spain would retreat from fighting terrorism if attacked. ETA figured it could get Zapatero to cave with a little more violence, and while he hasn't done that yet, he's still not talking about taking action against the group that just killed two of his countrymen and attacked his nation's transportation system.

The biggest laugh of the entire story comes from ETA, however. After setting off the bomb and murdering two Spaniards, the Basques released a statement that claimed no intent to kill despite planting a bomb in a busy airport --- and that it still considered its cease-fire to remain in effect. It sounds like the ETA has taken lessons from the Palestinians in the elastic definition of a cease-fire which includes all sorts of violence from one's own group but excludes any effort at counterterrorism by the government they target.

Spain has had to learn more than once that negotiating with terrorists only produces more terrorism. In fact, when a nation retreats from one set of terrorists, it emboldens other terrorists of completely different affiliations. The only way to beat terrorism is to ensure that it provides absolutely no rewards to the terrorists, and that means shutting off all political contact with them. Perhaps the Spanish opposition can return to office to re-implement that strategy shortly.

British Join US In Pressuring Iran

The British Navy has joined the US in bolstering its presence in the Persian Gulf. Although the ships consist of two minehunters in support of a frigate, in reality they are there for communications -- sendind a message to Teheran:

Two Royal Navy minehunters have arrived in the Gulf to reinforce a naval frigate on patrol in the area.

“We are going after their [Iran’s] networks in Iraq,” Zalmay Khalilzad, the outgoing US Ambassador to Baghdad, said. The aim was to change the behaviour of the Islamic regime in Tehran, he added. ...

The USS Dwight D. Eisenhower aircraft carrier group entered the Gulf in December.

It will be joined by the USS John C. Stennis carrier group. This is the first time since the invasion of Iraq four years ago that the US has deployed two carrier strike groups in the Gulf at one time.

In addition, President Bush has ordered the deployment of an air defence battalion equipped with Patriot missile batteries to protect America’s Gulf Arab allies from possible air attack from Iran.

Britain’s contribution is two minehunters HMS Blyth and HMS Ramsey, which will remain in the Gulf for an unusually-long two-year mission to keep shipping routes open in the event that Iran attempts to block oil exports.

Combined with the promotion of an admiral to command Centcom, these maneuvers send the strongest possible message to Teheran. The Iranians have obliquely threatened to cut off oil distribution through the Straits of Hormuz, which Iran shares with the UAE. Britain and the US have just made it clear that they will force the Straits open if the Iranians attempt to close it, and that could lead quickly to war.

Last week, people asked themselves if the Bush administration could declare a "secret" war against Iran, an oxymoron but not a bad question. If Bush wanted to declare war against Iran in the result of a complete diplomatic breach, he would have to go to Congress for approval;. The Constitution is pretty clear on this point; Congress has to declare war. However, in the case of an attack on American forces, Bush can respond with military action immediately, but would have to get Congress' approval within 90 days. That comes from the War Powers Act of 1973, a piece of legislation that most if not all succeeding presidents have rejected as an infringement on presidential prerogative. (Nixon vetoed it, and Congress overrode the veto.)

Politically, however, it would be suicide to attempt a war with Iran without Congressional approval. The current administration might not want to act in support of the WPA, but Bush would risk impeachment if he attempted to commit serious forces against Iran in light of his political problems with the efforts in Iraq. If he went to Congress about Iran, he might find more support for some kind of action against the mullahcracy than he would for continuing the fight against terrorists in Baghdad; some Democrats, notably Hillary Clinton, have made the argument for the last two years that Iran is the real danger in southwest Asia. They may have no choice but to back those arguments with action -- although plenty of them talked tough about Iraq between 1998 and 2001, too.

A war against Iran would be a dangerous and daunting proposition. It's three times larger than Iraq, with much more difficult terrain. It also has a weak but still dangerous military and ICBM capabillity, even if the warheads are still conventional at the moment. It has a navy, which Iraq lacked, and it has not suffered under the same kind of sanctions that weakened Saddam. As John McCain said, it's about the worst possible option outside of allowing the mullahs to possess a nuclear weapon. If the Americans and British intend to either face down or provoke the Iranians in the Straits, we had better make sure we have a winning hand.

Do The French Want To Disappear?

A strange document floated out of the postwar period yesterday that documented French efforts to effectively end their national identity in the 1950s. Guy Mollet, then Prime Minister, proposed a union of Britain and France in 1956 that would have returned France to the British Crown:

French prime minister Guy Mollet suggested a Franco-Anglo union to his English counterpart Anthony Eden in 1956, reports the BBC, citing newly-released documents from the British National Archives.

The formerly secret government cabinet paper dated Sept. 10, 1956 reads: "When the French prime minister, Monsieur Mollet was recently in London he raised with the prime minister the possibility of a union between the United Kingdom and France." The extraordinary suggestion was turned down, however, meaning that the prospect of a new Anglo-French country would remain an intriguing historial hypothesis."

The Times of London picks up the story from there:

A Cabinet official recorded the enthusiastic way that Eden responded when he discussed it with Sir Norman Brook, the Cabinet Secretary: “Sir Norman Brook . . . informed me the PM told him he thought in the light of his talks with the French: that we should give consideration to France joining the Commonwealth; that M Mollet had not thought there need be difficulty over France accepting the headship of her Majesty; that the French would welcome a common citizenship arrangement on the Irish basis.”

I'm not sure that any country has just offered to allow itself to be absorbed into another, especially not one that had at one point been considered one of history's great world powers. And yet the French in the 1950s, buffeted by social instability and the loss of its premier colonies, essentially tried to end their existence as an independent nation and accept the English monarch as their head of state for the first time since Joan of Arc.

From a historical point of view, it's fascinating -- but it isn't limited to history. It has echoes reverberating all the way to present day. Germany and France in 2003 essentially agreed to represent each other at the European Summit, although in this case it was France who did the representing. In the aftermath of the British refusal of the French offer, France turned to Germany to create the European Common Market, which evolved into the EU, so the partnership with Germany has its own precedents. And the EU has worked to erode the sovereignty of the individual member nations, replacing currencies and superceding legislatures.

The French seem to want to end national identities altogether. At least they offered to be the first nation to do so.

Pakistan Hits Al-Qaeda Hideouts

Pakistan has scored more hits on al-Qaeda operations, this time in South Waziristan. Their army announced the successful missions tonight, which resulted in several AQ casualties:

Pakistan's army destroyed three suspected al-Qaida hideouts in an air strike near the Afghan border on Tuesday, killing several members of the terror group, an army spokesman said.

The military carried out the operation in South Waziristan tribal region after receiving information that 25 to 30 al-Qaida members were hiding there, said army spokesman Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan.

"We believe most of them were killed, but we don't have a body count," he said.

Unfortunately, the Pakistanis do not believe than any high-value targets were among those killed.

Although Pervez Musharraf signed a deal with North Waziristan to keep the army out, no such agreement exists with South Waziristan. Tribal leaders there have not agreed to Musharraf's demands, and so he has kept the pressure on that region. The army still conducts raids on a regular basis, and this appears to be one of those missions.

Paging Brooke Gladstone ...

Earlier today, I posted an interview between myself and Brooke Gladstone of NPR on media credibility, specifically regarding the Associated Press and its reporting in Iraq. Brooke and I sparred about the relative reliability of the AP as opposed to bloggers, and I said that the AP normally does a good job but failed to follow its own rules in its Iraq reporting, using single sources for some very inflammatory stories and applying pseudonyms without noting them. Today, however, brings a more mundane example of either poor research, outright bias, or both. Instapundit noted this earlier today:

When it comes to squandering the earth's natural resources, residents of this desert land of chilled swimming pools, monster 4x4s and air-conditioned malls are on a par with even the ravenous consumption of Americans, according to the World Wildlife Fund.

The average person in the Emirates puts more demand on the global ecosystem than any other, giving the country the world's largest per-capita "ecological footprint," WWF data shows. The United States runs second.

But the oil-rich Emirates is considered a developing country, and even as a signatory to the United Nations' Kyoto protocol on global warming, is not required to cut emissions. The United States is no longer bound by Kyoto, which the Bush administration rejected after taking office in 2001.

Jim Krane obviously did not bother to check into when Kyoto went into effect in the United States. In fact, it never did, making his contention that the US "is no longer bound" by the treaty somewhat mystifying. Treaties do not become law in the US until ratified by the Senate, and the Clinton administration never bothered to submit it for debate. The reason? The Senate had voted 95-0 for a resolution proclaiming that they would not ratify any emissions treaty unless it included caps on emissions for all nations, most importantly India and China. (The resolution was authored by radical conservatives Robert Byrd and Chuck Hagel.)

In fact, the Bush administration has not adamantly opposed Kyoto except on this basis. He has followed the Clinton aministration's lead in refusing to submit Kyoto to the Senate, and in that period the Senate has not bothered to ask for it -- and since most of the people who voted to spike Kyoto in 1999 still serve in the body, one presumes that they still want to see China and India get emissions caps along with us before we approve Kyoto.

How hard was it to find this information? I found it at Wikipedia and The Environmental Literacy Council in about two seconds. We have never been bound by Kyoto, and the impetus for that position came well before George Bush's election -- and from a Senate controlled by the Democrats.

Krane must have gotten the notion that Bush spiked Kyoto from somewhere; that idea doesn't just come out of sloppiness in research. It seems as though Krane assumed that any policy that opposes environmental activism originated with George Bush, which also appears to indicate some sort of knee-jerk hostility towards the current administration. It apparently seemed so obvious to Krane that he never bothered to check his assumptions.

It's precisely these kinds of unchecked assumptions and lack of research that sours people on the media in general, and the AP in particular. When people allow their biases to keep them from checking their assumptions, that's when we get articles like this and supposed exposes of National Guard memos that are so obviously fraudulent that people wonder how journalists could have been so gullible. (also via several CQ readers)

Rice, Olmert To Meet Abbas

Condoleezza Rice will extend her contacts with Ehud Olmert to include Mahmoud Abbas in the near future in order to prompt movement in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. The moderate Arab governments have pushed the US to get more involved in the mediation, and hold out a carrot for us:

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice concluded a private three-hour meeting with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Monday morning, part of her diplomatic visit to the Middle East.

The two decided to hold three-way talks that would include Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, after which they would aim for direct peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.

A senior US official in Rice's delegation said the "trilateral meeting" will be aimed at "having a conversation about the political horizon leading to the establishment of a Palestinian state." He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to reporters on the record.

Olmert's spokeswoman, Miri Eisin, confirmed the prime minister had agreed "in principle" to attend the summit. But she said no date or place had been set.

For the moment, Rice will continue her trip to Jordan and Egypt, two nations that have pressured the US to get a deal cut between Israel and the PA. They have recently expressed some disenchantment with the "road map", preferring the Saudi arrangement of a return to 1967 borders and the end of all settlements in exchange for diplomatic recognition of Israel by all Arab nations. Now they have added more incentives for the Americans, pledging their active assistance in Iraq to calm the sectarian strife there if we can make the peace deal with Israel.

Abbas rejected temporary solutions over the weekend in his meeting with Rice. The Bush administration had floated the notion of skipping to the second phase of the road map, granting Palestinian statehood along temporary borders that reflected the positions of both sides at the moment. The idea was to give the Palestinians a state in order to bolster confidence in the process, but that didn't fly with Fatah or Hamas, who figure that the temporary borders would likely become permanent. They want 1967 at least, and 1944 if they can get it.

It seems hasty to rush into statehood with a governing class that has repeatedly proven that they cannot handle it. Regardless of Arab carrots for the US and Israel, the Palestinians have not produced a government interested in either peace or a two-state solution. In this case, we'd be granting national status to two territories that would already be in a state of war with its neighbor as well as with itself. How does this make sense? Do we want to create a Somalia on the Mediterranean just after Somalia finally may be putting itself to rights?

Let the Palestinians settle their internal conflicts before recognizing them as a state. While that war continues, they cannot reliably enter into agreements with Israel or anyone else, as Hamas proved when it took power last year. Only when they have decided that they want to live in peace in a two-state solution will any of this diplomacy make any difference at all.

Minnesotans Rescue Missing Hiker

Two Twin Cities brothers heard a faint sound while camping in New Mexico's Gila National Forest, strange enough to prompt them to investigate. They found Carolyn Dorn, a 52-year-old woman reported lost five weeks earlier, the subject of a search abandoned two weeks ago:

A faint sound made Albert and Peter Kottke stop and look around as they hiked out of the Gila Wilderness at the end of backpacking trip. A figure moved on the other side of the Gila River. As it drew closer, the two university students saw a woman, hunched over and moving slowly.

The Kottkes crossed the river to find Carolyn Dorn, 52, who had been alone in the Gila National Forest for five weeks after becoming trapped on the wrong side of the rain- and snow-swollen river. The search for her had been called off two weeks ago.

The brothers said they realized Dorn was too weak to go with them. They gave her food Tang, almonds, dried apples, an energy bar, some hot soup and a little cheese scavenged firewood for her from the other side of the river, filled her water bottles and left her a book suspense author Michael Connelly's "Chasing the Dime."

They hiked 20 miles over the next day and a half, and on Saturday hitchhiked into Silver City, where they contacted authorities.

Dorn was lucky. Described by her family as a "free spirit" who only infrequently contacts them, she could easily have been overlooked as her absence may not have been notable for months. Dorn went into the forest when the weather still was reasonable, but the flooded river cut her off for weeks and her food ran out. When the weather turned cold, she began to fail, and would likely have died within days had the Kottkes not found her.

The Minnesotans did the smart thing -- they provided for her and got the professionals to conduct the rescue. Thanks to their clear thinking, all three of them are alive today.

Rebuilding Teams Bolstered Under The Bush Plan

The Bush surge has more to it than just the deployment of 20,000 more troops for Baghdad and Anbar. One of the less-debated aspects of the new strategy is a higher investment in money and personnel for the rebuilding effort in Iraq. The number of teams will double and go further out into the Iraqi communities that they will attempt to revive:

As part of its latest plan to stabilize Iraq, the United States intends to more than double the number of regional reconstruction teams and to add nearly 400 specialists for existing and new teams, in fields from politics and the rule of law to agribusiness and veterinary care, according to an official outline of the plan.

The document calls for the measures to be taken swiftly, in three phases, with waves of new teams and personnel expected to be put in place in March, June and September. The teams are to carry out rebuilding and governance projects from small offices all over Iraq. ...

While the plan does call for the creation of about a dozen new reconstruction teams around Iraq, most of the new personnel will be added to existing teams, the plan indicates. While 400 may sound like a small number compared with the plan to increase the number of troops by more than 20,000, the existing 10 reconstruction teams have, at most, a total of about 100 civilian specialists, and recruiting that many has been difficult, officials say.

Without doubt, the slow pace of reconstruction has fed the security problem, primarily in Baghdad. The Iraqis expected the Americans to solve most of their infrastructure problems overnight -- and so did some Americans. The steady but slow progress in repairing power and water systems, complicated by insurgent attacks, have fed a strange sort of conspiracy theory among the Iraqis that the US wants them mired in poverty and chaos. After all, we terminated Saddam's unbeatable regime in three weeks -- and that meant we could do anything we wanted.

The men and women we have on the ground have done their best in difficult circumstances, but we missed some easy opportunities early in the post-invasion period. The Coalition insisted on centralizing the rebuilding efforts rather than put cash in the hands of local commanders who could make quick decisions on how to use it for smaller-scale projects. That method had a lot of success in employing Iraqis and keeping them too busy to fall into insurgencies or just disappointment and bitterness, and actually got some projects completed. Instead, the resources got shifted to centralized planners for big projects that took a long time to develop, and the Iraqis grew impatient with our bureaucratic processes.

If the Bush administration wants this aspect of the surge to succeed, he has to scale back to the local projects that had initial success in Iraq. This appears to be the thrust of the plan now, to move teams out into the field to manage rebuilding efforts from a closer perspective. Recruitment for these positions has been difficult in the past, as the State Department has tried to persuade civilians to relocate to Iraq with only sporadic success. The military, perhaps the Corps of Engineers and Seabees, would be better solutions, but the military has other priorities at the moment -- and the military has already been working on some of these projects during the entire post-invasion period.

We need to make sure that we have all potential resources committed to this phase of the new strategy. Employed Iraqis will not join insurgencies, and improvements in the standard of living will bolster confidence in the elected government and the democratic processes put in place after Saddam's fall. If we cannot turn on the power and get clean water into the houses of ordinary Iraqis, they may start getting nostalgic for strongmen who could get the trains to run on time. Some of them already are.

Saddam Deputies Hanged -- Film At 11?

Two of the remaining men on the execution list in Iraq for crimes against humanity in the Saddam Hussein regime were executed overnight, ending speculation on when the Nouri al-Maliki government would proceed with the hangings. The Iraqis forced witnesses to pledge to behave themselves, but one of the defendants lost his head, literally:

American military officials, who had custody of Mr. Hussein, were particularly upset and pushed hard to ensure that the execution of his co-defendants, Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, former head of the Mukhabarat secret police and the younger half-brother of Mr. Hussein, and Awad Hamad al-Bandar, who was chief judge of the revolutionary court under Mr. Hussein, was carried out properly.

The government spokesman who announced the executions, which took place at 3 a.m., Bassam al-Husseini, said both the executioners and the witnesses had to sign statements promising to behave in a dignified manner.

In what government officials called a “rare incident,” the head of Mr. Tikriti was severed from his body by the noose as it snapped tight around his neck.

In rare cases, a hanging can turn into a decapitation, which apparently was what happened to Saddam's half-brother. The BBC reported that the news of the decapitation got released by the government in order to head off certain criticism over the incident, which no doubt would have multiplied exponentially if the Iraqis had tried to hide the incident. Barzan ran the Mukhabarat, the secret police that killed, maimed, and tortured hundreds of thousands of Iraqis to keep Saddam in power, and while the decapitation was a particularly gruesome manner in which to die, it shouldn't outweigh the despicable manner in which Barzan maintained his power.

The other executed man, Awad Hamad al-Bandar, also had a perverted idea of justice. He ran the Revolutionary Court in the manner of Roland Freisler. Awad made sure that Iraqis had no chance for justice under Saddam. He ran a kangaroo court that served to dress up Saddam's brutality in a veneer of legal process. In the case at hand, Awad signed the death decrees for the residents of Dujail for the 1982 assassination attempt on Saddam, condemning men, women, and children to execution as a reprisal for the insult.

No doubt that this will inspire more protest by people around the world opposed to the death penalty, as well as those opposed to the Iraq War. They should remember the brutal methods these men used to oppress and murder Iraqis by the thousands, and the real fear that a coup d'etat by Ba'athist remnants could return them to their former positions. These are not common criminals but bloodthirsty tyrants whose deaths are required for Iraqis to have confidence in their departure from power.

The only question remaining is whether we will see more video from surreptitious cell phones. Even in Iraq, technology defeats lax security. I predict that we will see some imagery from this execution within 24 hours.

NPR Interview On Media Credibility

Last week, NPR invited me to do an interview with On The Media co-host Brooke Gladstone, for what was supposed to be a five-minute segment. Brooke and I ended up sparring for thirty minutes in a spirited debate, which I think we both enjoyed. NPR had to cut it down to five minutes, and I believe they did a good job in capturing the essence of both perspectives:

Granted, a lot of the conversation from both of us got cut out. The only point I wish they would have left in the mix, but which took too long for the segment length, was my specific objection to using a single source for such explosive stories without even asking their clients in Iraq to confirm them. The burning mosque story only had the one source, Jamil Hussein, and the AP's other clients in Iraq never heard anything about this story. I also pointed out that the AP broke its own rules by not noting the use of a pseudonym for their source, and that the use of single-sourced material in a war zone is an open invitation to manipulation by propagandists.

All things considered (heh), NPR and Brooke did an excellent job in editing the conversation. I hope you enjoy it.

Rome Returns

While many of my friends await the season premier of 24, tonight holds more of a classic tone for me. The second season of the brilliant miniseries Rome makes its debut in a matter of minutes. I just bought Season One on DVD, and for quite a while I had supposed it would be the only season. However, we will shortly see the aftermath of the assassination of Gaius Julius Caesar, the fall of Marc Antony, and the rise of Octavian played out in another twelve-episode miniseries. It will make a great end to a day of shopping, church, and good food that the First Mate and I enjoyed.

The Turkey Tangle

Turkey has issued another warning about the Kurdish insurgency in its eastern provinces, threatening to invade northern Iraq to put an end to the provocations. Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan has dismissed American assurances of cooperation, coming close to a diplomatic ultimatum against Iraq:

Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan on Friday reaffirmed Turkey's right to send troops into Iraq to crush Kurdish rebels there and chided U.S. officials for questioning it.

"The Turkish Republic will do whatever is necessary to combat the terrorists when the time comes, but it will not announce its plans in advance," Erdogan told a news conference after a meeting of his ruling AK Party.

"We say we are ready to take concrete steps with the Iraqi government and we also say these steps must be taken now."

In sharp language underscoring Turkish anxiety about the chaos in Iraq, Erdogan said it was wrong for Washington -- "our supposed strategic ally" -- to tell Turkey, with its historic and cultural ties in the region, to stay out of Iraq.

"We have a 350 km border with Iraq. We have historic relations ... the United States is 10,000 km away from Iraq, and yet is it not intervening in Iraq's internal affairs?" he said.

Turkey considers this its most important foreign policy issue now, even more so than its bid to join the EU. They fear the rise of an independent Kurdistan in a potential break-up of Iraq and its effect on the Kurdish minority in eastern Turkey. Erdogan, who faces a tough re-election bid this year, wants to show that he can secure Turkey and end the attacks by the PKK.

That puts Washington in a tough position. Turkey is, after all, a NATO member -- and the doctrine of NATO is that an attack on one member is an attack on all members. The US is therefore pledged to defend Turkey in the case of war. If the attacks in Turkey originate from Iraq, then it's much the same problem as the Syrian support for Sunni insurgents in Iraq are for the US. Are we willing to defend Turkey against Iraq?

Erdogan has a history of inflammatory statements for domestic consumption, and it behooves him to appear independent of the US. That doesn't mean he is making up the problem or that the Turks will not indeed attack northern Iraq, undermining the one unqualified success in our efforts there. We need to get the Kurds to end their support for the PKK and help end the provocations before Erdogan is forced to answer them himself. (via Michael van der Galien at TMV)

Return Of Employer Clinics

The fight over health-care costs keeps centering on employers, and now the largest of them may decide to operate health clinics directly in order to reduce their financial exposure. Toyota, Pepsi, and a host of other large corporations have opened their own primary care centers, allowing their employees free access in the hope that the companies can hold costs to a minimum and focus their insurance on more specialized treatment and hospitalizations:

Frustrated by runaway health costs, the nation’s largest employers are moving rapidly to open more primary care medical centers in their offices and factories as a way to offer convenient service and free or low-cost health care.

Within the last two years, companies including Toyota, Sprint Nextel, Florida Power and Light, Credit Suisse and Pepsi Bottling Group have opened or expanded on-site clinics. And many employers are adding or planning to add even more clinics, which were experimented with about 30 years ago but fell out of favor amid questions about their cost-effectiveness.

Today a new wave of clinics is opening, driven largely by a motive that was less of a factor in the past: employers’ desires to reduce their health insurance premiums by taking care of workers before they need to see outside doctors. More than 100 of the nation’s 1,000 largest employers now offer on-site primary care or preventive health services — a number forecast to exceed 250 by the end of the year, according to David Beech, a health benefits consultant.

Corporate America’s new in-house medical offices go well beyond traditional occupational health clinics that hundreds of factories have long maintained for job-related injuries and worker’s compensation cases. Employees can now stop by for check-ups, allergy and flu shots, pregnancy tests or routine monitoring for chronic diseases like diabetes and asthma.

When prescription drugs are required, some employers arrange for the pills to be delivered the next day at the office or plant, while others even maintain fully stocked pharmacies.

The last time this was tried, in the 1970s, the model collapsed as companies discovered that they could not keep costs below the market. However, costs have increased so rapidly that some believe once again that they can get in-house delivery of these services at a cheaper rate than what they pay in negotiated rates through group insurance. If this works, it could provide a market alternative to the notion of a single-payer, government-run health industry.

The arguments against this can be easily anticipated, and some of them should be considered. Given the history of abuses when corporations offer services to their employees, it's natural that this may make some people very nervous. Mining companies used to offer housing and groceries paid in company script, but when the miners either left their jobs or became too infirm to work, they found themselves homeless and penniless -- or even in debt to the mining company for "advances" on their wages. As late as 1994, tobacco and produce farms continued to operate in this manner, making virtual slaves out of their employees.

Given that impulse, the negative may be that the employer will set the cost on the employee, requiring higher co-pays to access outside doctors, or perhaps disallow any other providers except those provided by the company. They could also then require referrals to specialists from their doctors, who would have an incentive to keep such referrals to a minimum. The employees would then get stuck within a single system, with no economic ability to seek expensive private medical care, without any way to insist on high-quality medical care within these company stores.

However, all of that can equally be said about government-run systems. All of us would be stuck inside a single system, with no ability to work outside of it. Doctors within this system would have disincentives to write referrals to specialists, and thanks to rationing, it would take months to get in to see one in any case. When the government runs health care, there will be no market pressure or even regulatory pressure to ensure high-quality delivery of medical care. That has been the experience in both Canada and Britain.

In the end, it makes little difference in who runs the company store if all of us get nothing but script with which to bargain. Single-payor is an invitation to abuse, whether the payor is Toyota or Washington DC. Markets may be messy, but at least they offer consumers a choice.

Another Lesson In Not Crapping Where You Eat

The Washington Post reports this morning on a blogger who decided to write a post about one of the customers he served at work and got fired over the aftermath. Two days before Christmas, Chuckles of Freelance Genius (real name Charles Williamson) wrote the following about Tucker Carlson after he and his companion rented movies at his video store:

Tucker Carlson opened an account last night at my video store. I thought the name seemed familiar but I couldn't figure out why. It was after he left that I realized he was on the list of Gigantic Cobagz. I could tell you what he and his ridiculously wasped-out female companion (wife?) rented if you really want to know. I won't tell you where he lives, though. That would be wrong and stupid. I will also not be running around ordering 10,000 copies of America: The Book and having it sent to his place even if that would be more awesome than frozen urine treats for his home.

Williamson thought that the low level of traffic at his blog made him invisible enough for this to go unnoticed to all but his circle of friends. Unfortunately for Chuckles, nothing on the Internet is invisible, especially with Google and other search engines making all links more or less equal. The Post describes what happened next:

A week later, Williamson had forgotten all about it, he told us yesterday. That is, until Carlson, 37, reappeared at the video store and, said Williamson, "got pretty aggressive." According to Williamson, Carlson confronted him about the blog and said he viewed the post as a threat to him and his wife. "He said, 'If you keep this [expletive] up, I will [expletive] destroy you,' " Williamson recalled.

Williamson said he agreed to remove the blog post and did so later that night: "All I remember thinking was I was worried about what this guy was going to do." He consulted a lawyer friend and was told he had probably not broken any laws. "What I said was pretty juvenile, I'll admit," he said.

In a phone interview Thursday, Carlson acknowledged that he approached Williamson in the store and said he was "very aggressive" because he wanted the post removed: "I don't like to call the police or call his boss. . . . I'm a libertarian. I'm not into that."

On Monday, Williamson said, his Potomac Video manager called and fired him. Williamson said he was told the company was threatened with legal action "and the owner doesn't like that." He re-posted the original Carlson item later that day. Williamson said he later learned that a man who identified himself as a lawyer for Carlson had been in the store and asked Potomac Video employees questions about him.

Carlson told the Post that "this guy is threatening my family," a reference to the "frozen urine treats" in the original message. Williamson says that's a reference to an old gag he and his friends pulled on someone in the past. Carlson says that he has had to deal with stalkers twice before, which would certainly make someone rather sensitive to the issue of a hostile person having access to one's address.

It's at this point that the versions diverge. Carlson claims that he never called any lawyers, and that he in fact does not have a personal attorney. Williamson got fired, however, which seems to at least belie the assertion that Carlson had some libertarian objection to calling his boss, if not siccing lawyers on Williamson. According to Williamson, his termination came in response to threatened legal action, and in reading more recent posts, Williamson alleges that lawyers are still harrassing his former co-workers. The store manager would not comment for the record on Williamson's termination -- making him perhaps the smartest of the people involved in this story.

A few noteworthy bloggers have already weighed in on Williamson's story. Joe Gandelman at The Moderate Voice seems more sympathetic to Williamson as David against Carlson's Goliath. Patterico says that the original blog post was "creepy" and Williamson deserved to be fired for it. Ann Althouse takes Carlson's side, and Dan Riehl wonders why Carlson ever became famous in the first place. Sister Toldjah says that regardless of what one thinks about Carlson, he had an expectation of privacy that Williamson threatened.

I think most of the above is probably correct. Someone certainly called Williamson's boss to get him fired, and it seems more likely that a lawyer did it -- or perhaps NBC's security department. While I think Carslon overreacted a bit -- it may have been a smarter move to have a friendly chat with a clerk who already has access to your address and get a better sense of his intentions -- the fact remains that celebrities often get targeted by psychos, and sometimes those psychos succeed in killing them. Joking on one's blog about having Carlson's address and issuing a thinly-veiled threat to release it (and to leave frozen urine at his residence) in a post that shows some obvious hostility towards Carlson would have to be taken seriously, especially by someone who has had to deal with stalkers before.

Free speech does not release one from responsibility for what they say and write. Writing about customers one serves at their job puts their employer at some risk for legal action as well as a negative impact on business. Williamson's boss has every right to fire him if Williamson used his position as an employee to even threaten to abuse personal information on customers. If a video store cannot build trust with their customers that their information (including, say, credit card numbers) will only be used for the express purpose for which the customer shared it, then customers will go somewhere else, and the business will suffer.

Most of this is common sense. It seems that most of the players in this drama suffered from a lack of it. (links via Memeorandum)

UPDATE: I guess Carlson's on NBC, not CNN, which shows you how little I pay attention to him. Thanks to Ordinary Everyday Christian for the correction (which I made in the text above).