I Know You Guys Will Tell Me To Buy An Apple ...

In preparation for the job change, I decided to get a spare laptop to use in case my main computer goes down. I bought the Sony Vaio PCG-7M1L last summer at Best Buy, along with the 3-year, drop-in-in-the-ocean-and-we'll-replace-it warranty, so a failure would get repaired for free. However, it would also be gone for up to 3 weeks if that happened, and that would mean 3 weeks of using my old, slow desktop -- not a good option, especially if I have to go on the road for Blog Talk Radio.

I went back to Best Buy and looked for an inexpensive yet serviceable laptop. I had originally looked at the Gateway MT6828 system on their website, as Best Buy had it on sale from $899 to $749. Unfortunately, the store and the site were out of stock, and instead I decided on the Gateway MT3705. Only $599, it had features that normally would be found on higher-ticket units, such as an Intel Duo-Core processor, a double-layer DVD+-RW/CD-RW drive, a 100GB hard drive, 1G of RAM, and Vista Home Premium edition.

So far, it seems pretty serviceable. It will probably not get much use unless the Vaio dies, but it seems quick and accessible. I had to de-install all of the freebie software on the system and load those programs I use for the blogging -- and I still have a couple left to go -- but it runs quickly enough and has a nice feel to it. I've been spoiled by the Vaoi's wide screen and more natural keyboard, but the Gateway has roughly the same dimensions as the Lenovo T-series laptop I use at my current job. The aluminum design gives it a more rugged feel than the Lenovo, in fact.

This is my first contact with Windows Vista, and I'm a little less impressed with it. The constant nag windows whenever the user tries to execute a program get old, but I feel as though I'm taking a risk by turning off the flag that enables them. I do like the new Explorer windows better, though, and Internet Explorer 7 and its tabbed interface comes with the system. (I use IE7 on the Vaio for blog entries, but Firefox for normal browsing; Firefox doesn't work as well with the Movable Type interface.)

Whenever I blog about my travails with technology, I always get advice from CQ readers to buy an Apple. I actually looked at Apples, but the price is out of my range for a backup that will see limited service, and I don't want to replace the Vaio. I've used Gateway before -- in fact, I bought a Gateway as my first prepackaged computer, after years of assembling my own, and I was happy with the result. If that changes, I'll let you know.

The MT3705 gets a pretty decent review here, too.

Addendum: The First Mate came home from the hospital this evening, and she's doing better. We have less than two weeks to go before the transplant. Hopefully we can keep her in good shape until then.

UPDATE: Jerry Albro, a Microsoft Software Engineer, e-mails me this kind response:

Greetings, and best wishes for the health of the First Mate…

Except when you are actually doing things that need admin privileges, you should not see the UAC dialogs. Of course, during that out-of-box de-crapification phase requires a lot of uninstall and installs of things you like and are familiar with. But you surely should not see that dialog box for routine operations. We made a lot of effort to make sure of that. Feel free to email me if you’d like to learn a bit more.

Here is a bit about UAC from one of the real MS security gurus.

This is a good point. I'm not really using Vista in a normal sense; I'm doing the "de-crapification" that one has to do when buying a new computer in order to get it to run right. (Great term, that.) Other than the UAC nag boxes, which should go away once I'm done with de-install and install tasks, it might turn out to be very nice.

NARN, The Lá Fhéile Phádraig Edition (Bumped)

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.

It's Saint Patrick's Day, and we'll have a bit of the Irish (music) for today's show. In between the craic, we'll talk about the stories of the week, including the latest in Democratic attempts to do everything to lose the war except the one option open to them, the apparent progress being made in Iraq, Hillary Clinton's shifting positions on the war and what that means for her Presidential aspirations, the return of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, and the declining patience in the GOP caucus for Alberto Gonzales and the serial blundering that surrounds the dismissal of eight federal prosecutors.

Be sure to call and join the conversation today at 651-289-4488.

BUMP: To top -- show's starting now.

Sadr Goes All In

Moqtada al-Sadr has played his hole card in his high-stakes game against the US and Iraqi forces in Baghdad. Sadr skipped town as the Coalition gathered its strength for the new surge stratgey to secure Baghdad, taking a powder east to Iran to consult with his sponsors. His whereabouts still unknown, he ended his silence by issuing a statement to fuel an anti-American rally in Sadr City:

Residents of the Shiite neighborhood of Sadr City on Friday showed signs of growing resentment toward the presence of U.S. troops in the area, chanting "No occupation!" and "No America!" in a march demanding the removal of a U.S. base there.

The protest came as U.S. military officials cited Sadr City, stronghold of anti-U.S. cleric Muqtada Sadr, as a success story in a month-old effort to improve security in Baghdad. It also coincided with an announcement that the Pentagon is speeding up the deployment of 2,600 soldiers in a combat aviation brigade. Commanders, who need support troops for the military buildup here, had requested the early deployment. ...

The Sadr City protest followed Friday prayers, which featured a statement from Sadr calling on followers to "raise your voices in unity" against "America, the grand devil." The statement, read by a prominent cleric close to Sadr, marked a toughening of his rhetoric as the U.S. touts its foothold in Sadr City.

The relationship between the United States and Sadr has become increasingly complex since the new security crackdown. Sadr frequently has called for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. But in recent weeks he has become an indirect but crucial ally of U.S. military officials. He pulled his Al Mahdi militia off the streets when the plan was launched, reportedly as a favor to Iraq's Shiite Muslim prime minister, Nouri Maliki.

That accommodation has helped U.S. forces carry out their operations. But analysts have been suggesting that Sadr risks losing his credibility as a voice of resistance if he is perceived as helping the U.S. cause. Concern over that possibility could explain his statement Friday.

His credibility is certainly at issue, but not just in the way the Times reports. Sadr finds himself in a box now, and the one weapon he has has proven ineffective in the past. He has not beaten the US in a street fight yet, and now he has allowed us to gain a foothold in his home turf.

This might explain why Sadr still hasn't poked his head above ground, another point against his credibility. It's fine to rabble rouse from a distance, but it doesn't carry all that much weight on the street. While Sadr hides out elsewhere, the US continues to gain more traction in Sadr City. The more that continues, the less relevant Sadr becomes.

At some point, Sadr either has to give up the Mahdi Army or try his hand against the US in increasingly worse position. However, if he tries and fails to raise enough force to eject the US from Baghdad, Sadr's career as a militia general will come crashing to an end. He has been smart enough to avoid the ultimate challenge so far, although he came close in Najaf -- when his credibility suffered as a result. If he can't inspire a successful challenge to the US and Iraqi forces clearing out Baghdad, he will probably not get another chance to do so.

The Official Breakfast Of Lá Fhéile Phádraig

You know it's Saint Patrick's Day in the Twin Cities when green makes its way onto the breakfast table:

It tasted pretty much like a normal bagel, but somehow my Irish eyes were smiling the entire time ...

Thompson Indicates A Move Away From The BCRA

Fred Dalton Thompson's flirtation with a presidential run has conservatives hopeful for a white knight in a field of compromise candidates in the GOP. The man whose career has spanned both Washington and Hollywood, and who has championed both conservatism and clean government, has a resumé that would make for compelling political theater. However, one issue in particular dogs every mention of his potential, and that is his support for the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, or McCain-Feingold -- the main reason conservatives distrust John McCain and have not supported his own presidential campaign.

That may be changing. John Fund interviewed Thompson for the Wall Street Journal, and Thompson acknowledged the futility of the BCRA's approach:

On issues, he addresses head-on the major complaints conservatives have about his record. He was largely stymied in his 1997 investigation of both Clinton-Gore and GOP campaign fund-raising abuses: Key witnesses declined to testify or fled the country, though evidence eventually surfaced of a Chinese plan to influence U.S. politics. He won't argue with those who say he showed "naiveté" about how he would be stonewalled in his investigation. He says he's wiser now.

Many on the right remain angry he supported the campaign finance law sponsored by his friend John McCain. "There are problems with people giving politicians large sums of money and then asking them to pass legislation," Mr. Thompson says. Still, he notes he proposed the amendment to raise the $1,000 per person "hard money" federal contribution limit.

Conceding that McCain-Feingold hasn't worked as intended, and is being riddled with new loopholes, he throws his hands open in exasperation. "I'm not prepared to go there yet, but I wonder if we shouldn't just take off the limits and have full disclosure with harsh penalties for not reporting everything on the Internet immediately."

If Thompson rejects the BCRA, the implications could be significant. None of the sponsors or supporters of the bill would have the national reach Thompson will if he runs, with the exception of McCain himself. Thompson's change of heart would put immediate pressure on McCain and perhaps even jump-start the effort to repeal the law altogether. If Thompson makes it a campaign issue, he could immediately siphon off conservative support for other campaigns. (Romney pledged to repeal the BCRA at CPAC earlier this month.)

That would not be the entirety of Thompson's attractiveness, either. He spoke with Fund about cleaning up the CIA, one topic that never seems to go away despite all of the post-9/11 efforts to reform the agency and the intel community as a whole. He wants to promote federalism, ending programs that should be handled by the states and curtailing the overreach of the national government. Thompson also supports the extension of the Bush tax cuts, telling Fund that the Kennedy, Reagan, and Bush administrations have proven that lowering taxes creates long-term economic growth, and that "millionaires serving in the Senate learned not to overly tax other people trying to get wealthy."

All of this puts Thompson squarely in the Reagan mold, along with a track record of real reform. If Thompson grabs the anti-BCRA banner, he could carry it all the way to the White House.

The Mountain The Administration Made Of A Molehill

The explanations keep shifting on the firing of eight federal prosecutors, creating a sustained firestorm out of what should have been a nine-day wonder. Karl Rove may now have to testify before a Senate committee to answer questions about the genesis of the plan to cull out those US Attorneys the administration felt did not support their policies:

“The first rule of damage control is get to the bottom of it, figure out what the worst is, conduct an internal investigation, collect all the evidence and then dump it out in one fell swoop,” said David R. Gergen, who has advised presidents of both parties. “Instead, they have made the mistake in this prosecutor story of apparently not knowing themselves what they had.”

Indeed, the administration’s changing explanations for the dismissals seem to be at the heart of the current clash, which both Republicans and Democrats say could cost Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales his job.

On Friday, with the release of more e-mail messages, there was yet another shift, as Tony Snow, the White House spokesman, backed away from the administration’s assertion that Harriet E. Miers, the former White House counsel, had proposed dismissing all 93 United States attorneys. Dan Bartlett, counselor to Mr. Bush, said earlier this week that Ms. Miers had “floated an idea” to do just that, but by Friday, Mr. Snow said he was no longer certain.

“This is as far as we can go,” Mr. Snow said. “We know that Karl had a recollection of Harriet’s having raised it. And his recollection is that he dismissed it as not a good idea. That’s what we know.”

This is a scandal of incompetence, not of malfeasance, but it doesn't make it any less of a problem for the Bush administration. Federal prosecutors are political appointees, and it breaks no rules to fire one, as long as it isn't done to obstruct justice. Despite some heated speculation on this point, no one has shown any evidence of obstruction, and Patterico, among others, have shown why the administration had some cause to be dissatisfied with the eight.

However, the termination of eight USAs for reasons other than malfeasance in mid-term were very unusual, and Gonzales should have been prepared to answer questions about it. No one at Justice or the White House apparently did any research on the history of mid-term dismissals, but only eight USAs had been terminated in that manner in the previous 25 years -- and most of them for obvious cases of malfeasance. The firing of this many at once was certain to raise eyebrows, and the White House and Gonzales should have anticipated that and prepared for it -- especially with a hostile Congress eager to launch a thousand investigations against the Bush administration.

Instead, they have looked like the gang that couldn't research straight. Gonzales and his staff made representations to Congress that no one at the White House had anything to do with the decision to fire the prosecutors, even though it wouldn't have been illegal or necessarily improper if they had. Somehow they missed Gonzales' own chief of staff's series of e-mails which easily disprove that contention. The blame shifted to Harriet Miers for a time, but when more e-mails arose, it shifted around the White House.

Had Gonzales prepared properly, all of this would have come out immediately, and while it still would have caused controversy, it would have avoided the look of a cover-up -- which implies some sort of underlying violation. Instead, Justice has looked more like Keystone Kops, especially with the fumble by the FBI on national-security letters this month as well. It demonstrates an incompetence that the administration cannot afford during the final two years of the Bush term, not if they want to get anything at all accomplished.

I suspect that the White House has already reached that conclusion, and that Gonzales will be spending more time with his family soon -- perhaps by the end of the weekend.

UPDATE: Power Line publishes an interesting letter from Stefan Sharansky, who covered the vote-fraud story in Washington in 2004, regarding the termination of John McKay:

You've been writing about the fired U.S. Attorneys, so I thought you might be interested in another side of the story on John McKay. The national media have transmitted without challenge McKay's story that he investigated allegations of vote fraud in Washington's 2004 gubernatorial race but saw "zero evidence" of fraud. Now he's being portrayed (see Friday's NYT editorial) as the victim/hero of partisan Republicans who are punishing him for refusing to launch a groundless, politically-motivated investigation.

There's much more to this than has been widely reported. A lot more credible evidence of election violations from the 2004 governor's race has been shown to McKay than he's been willing to acknowledge, let alone investigate.

It's taken me two years and some litigation to get the King County Elections office to release enough of the appropriate records, but I've compiled evidence of hundreds of illegal votes (nearly 4 times the official 129-vote "margin of victory"). These are not just random errors, but incidents of systemic mishandling of ballots by the elections office, most of which occurred just before the election was certified when the Democrat appeared to be trailing. At the very least it's official negligence that may well have changed the outcome of the governor's race. Was it all run-of-the-mill "good enough for government work" negligence? Or was it willful? Does it meet the legal standard of "fraud"? We don't know, as there's never been an investigation into any of this.

Be sure to read the whole thing.

The Dubiousness Of Political Loyalty

Peggy Noonan writes about the widespread impulse to act politically out of personal loyalty rather than agreement on policy on the part of American voters. In today's Wall Street Journal (subscription only), she decries the superficiality of brand loyalty, but interestingly, she doesn't extend that past candidates and campaigns.

She recounts speaking with a friend who told Noonan that he supported Hillary because he had known her for years, and he was a "loyal person":

I was puzzled. You're loyal. So what? You have a virtue, good. But that doesn't mean the person you're loyal to should be my president. That's not enough.

And I said this, in a more polite and less concise way.

Which made him defensive. "You should talk," he said. "You were loyal to Reagan."

"No, I wasn't," I said. "I agreed with him." I didn't know Reagan when I went to work with him; I only knew his views and philosophy and supported them. I wanted him to succeed because I wanted what he stood for to succeed. In time I came to feel personal loyalty. But agreement came first. And if, in his presidency, Reagan had turned into some surprising, weak, tax-raising, government-growing, soft-on-Soviets guy, I would have stopped backing him. I would have thought him very nice and a bit of a dope, like Jerry Ford. I wouldn't feel I had to hold high his memory and meaning.

Loyalty has nothing to do with it, not if you're serious.

Or rather personal loyalty has nothing to do with it.

As usual, Noonan captures a particular issue in a new and interesting light, but for once she seems to stop short of the real problem. Personal loyalty over policy support can be a problem long past an election, and it doesn't just apply to candidates. It also happens with political parties, and too often it leads to shading one's eyes to incompetence and destructive behaviors.

Mark Tapscott talked about this last year, when he started making the case that conservatives should put more separation between themselves and the Republican Party. A similar conversation occurred in 2004 on the Left, with anti-war activists agitated for a split from establishment Democrats, and to an extent in Connecticut last year with the challenge to Lieberman. In their ways, both made the point that policy should trump party and personality.

In the long term, effective politics focuses on ideas and policy. Voters should support the candidate and the party that represents their policy goals and their priorities, especially in primaries, but also in general elections. When the perform well, the politicians should get the support and endorsement of their constituents, but when they do not, they should not be spared from criticism, especially when they work against the policy goals of their supporters. That also applies to episodes of incompetence as well.

Does this mean we should toss people for minor disagreements and occasional failures? Of course not. We need to look at the totality of the policy positions of the candidate and the party, and not let the perfect become the enemy of the good. In general elections, we have to remember that we have the responsibility to make a choice, and not choosing represents an abdication of that responsibility. In general, though, if we are to make politics about policy and ideas and create the intellectual environment where we can win through reason, we need to quit making our decisions on the same basis on which we elect middle-school class presidents.

When The Hobby Becomes The Profession

Just a little over three and a half years ago, I began this blog as a creative writing outlet and a chance to hone my skills. When I launched Captain's Quarters, I had no idea how it would grow, that it would attract this wonderful community of readers and commenters across the political spectrum, or that it would change my life.

Today, with the support of family and friends, I made the transition from hobbyist to full-time worker in the New Media. I have accepted a position as Political Director of Blog Talk Radio, an exciting new venture known to the CQ community but one which I hope to help expand exponentially. It's a chance to work full time in the field which I have grown to love, and an opportunity to help others literally discover their voices.

Why Blog Talk Radio? After weeks of interaction with the owners and the staff, I have come to believe in the product and see it as the next frontier in the democratization of media. In a way, it has even more accessibility and enterprise than blogs did when they first began. For no cost, anyone with a decent broadband connection and a phone can host their own live "radio" show, streamed on the Internet, and accept callers and conduct discussions. When we start adding advertisements, hosts will earn money for their work in a revenue-sharing arrangement with Blog Talk Radio. To top it off, the show automatically podcasts itself and the replay stream is available within minutes of the end of the broadcast.

It's on the cusp of breaking into the mainstream. Last night -- opposite my show, of course -- Blog Talk Radio featured Jennifer Hudson in her own show. The Academy Award-winning actress and singer could interact directly with her fans and talk about her life and her experiences in Dreamgirls and on American Idol. The show attracted over a thousand live listeners and at one point had 125 live callers waiting to talk with Ms. Hudson.

That, by the way, happened with just hours of promotion time available to plug it.

Unfortunately, as one door opens, another closes. I will be leaving my career as a call center manager behind, after eighteen years in my particular industry. My company (which will remain anonymous) has treated the First Mate and I with affection and respect, and we have loved our time with the firm. My two bosses are among the most ethical and honest people with whom I have worked, and when I resigned earlier today, the VP to whom I report could not have possibly been more supportive of my decision. My actual departure date is still being negotiated, but it's fair to say that I will lend them my support in one manner or another for some time to come.

But, I hear you ask, what does this mean for Captain's Quarters? Well, that's the best part. I will have more time and flexibility to blog, as Blog Talk Radio wants to maintain and increase my presence in the commentary community. They see that as an asset for them as well as me. They also have agreed that I will have complete editorial control over the content of CQ. I will helm another blogsite for Blog Talk Radio, which is still in the conceptual mode; it will be similar to their Heading Left and will exist as a conservative partner to it.

Bottom line: within a few weeks, I will be a full-time worker in the New Media industry, working from home, and blogging even more constantly than before. I thank CQ's readers and the many friends I've made over the years that have helped me attain this position -- and I know all of you will find the next few years even more exciting.

UPDATE: Local reader Mr. Michael wonders whether I will give up my other outlets - the Examiner and the NARN. I'll still free-lance on occasion as I have always done, and write op-ed pieces for the Examiner; I'll have more time to do it, especially since I'll have about a two-second commute in the mornings and evenings. So far as I know, the Patriot will have no problem with my new status, so I plan to continue partnering with Mitch on Saturday afternoons, 1-3 pm CT, as always.

UPDATE II: I just called into QandO's Blog Talk Radio show, and had a blast with Dale and McQ. I swear I was not responsible for shifting their start time! Be sure to listen to the podcast.

Also, I want to thank Joe Gandelman for a very nice post about this announcement. Once I get started at Blog Talk Radio, I'll be working with Joe on a couple of projects ...

UPDATE III: Contrary to rumors, I occasionally link to Jeff Goldstein. And Jeff, the nice thing about Blog Talk Radio is that it doesn't come under the authority of the FCC. Drop me a line ....

Scoop Or Sham? (Update: Satire)

Has Kent State defended a history professor with ties to the Klan and a website calling for the murder of African-Americans? Mike Adams, a conservative college professor who defends free-speech rights for conservatives on college campuses, takes Kent State to task for continuing to employ a professor who allegedly ran a Klan website called Kill The Negroes:

Kent State University now has another problem on its hands. A member of the Ku Klux Klan who just recently was found operating a hate website has now been identified as a history professor at Kent State. The site has been closed but the controversy still looms because of some comments the professor has posted on blogs under the name “Lover of Anglos” while using his Kent State email address. ...

And, finally, here is what a Kent State spokesperson had to say about Piner:

“Julius Piner was not actually linked to the site, ‘Kill the Negroes,’ nor did he use any university resources when he was not operating it. Furthermore, there is no evidence that he ever advocated killing Negroes in his class lectures. We all have to remember that academic freedom is an important part of university life, even when we disagree with the views being expressed.”

Of course, many disagree with Kent State’s defense of Piner. Some of the most compelling reasons follow:

1. The “Kill the Negroes” site contained essays calling for the cleansing and purification of society via the mass murder of blacks.

2. Piner distributed videos on the website showing the actual lynching of blacks.

3. Piner circulated instructions on how to bomb black churches in the South.

4. Piner circulated a “battle dispatch” to give people specific information on America’s most “notorious” black churches.

Adams does not include links to media reports on Piner's involvement in the Klan or with the website, which could be helpful for people trying to get to the bottom of the story. If Piner did what Adams alleges, then Kent State -- a univerity run by the state of Ohio -- has some explaining to do. From the scant evidence supplied by Adams, I'm not even sure the situation exists.

The government should not be in the business of oppressing speech. However, incitement to murder does not have First Amendment protection -- and besides, that has no bearing on employment decisions. If Piner did what Adams alleges, then he has little credibility as a history professor. As Betsy Newmark asks, what kind of history would Piner teach his students about the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow?

However, that's a big if until Adams can come up with more independent evidence than he gives in his column. A Google on "Julius Piner" comes up completely empty. It comes up with nothing at the Cleveland Plain Dealer too, which makes me very suspicious about the controversy. A Klansman teaching history at Kent State while operating a website called Kill The Negroes would, I'm certain, garner just a little media attention in Ohio and elsewhere. Either Adams has the scoop of the month, or this story is extremely suspect. (via Memeorandum)

UPDATE: Or, possibly, a satire? That makes more sense, and it references Julio Pino, which Adams has covered in the past. I missed that.

UPDATE II: I updated the title of the post to answer my own question. Once you read Adams' posts on Pino, it makes this a pretty good satire, and highly effective.

Hamas-Fatah Unity Government Rejects West's Demands

Hamas and Fatah have formally created the unity government that has eluded them ever since Hamas unexpectedly won a majority of seats in the Palestianian Authority parliament. Palestinians hope that the new government will achieve two goals -- to end the civil war that has bubbled below the surface, and to restore the Western aid that keeps the PA afloat. It has not succeeded in the second:

The Hamas-led Palestinian government, boycotted by the West since its election more than a year ago because of Hamas’s support of terrorism, announced Thursday a unity coalition with the more moderate Fatah movement in hopes of ending the boycott.

But the political document guiding the new government does not fulfill the international community’s three demands — to recognize Israel, forswear violence and accept previous Israeli-Palestinian agreements — and Israel announced that it would therefore not deal with the new government or any of its ministers, Hamas or not. The United States is expected to follow suit but the European Union will face a fierce internal debate about whether to continue its isolation of the Palestinians.

Miri Eisin, a spokeswoman for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, said Mr. Olmert would continue “to maintain dialogue with the elected Palestinian president,” Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah, known as Abu Mazen, “who does accept the three principles.”

Other Israeli officials complained that Mr. Abbas had failed to make good on his promise to Mr. Olmert last week that a captured Israeli soldier, Cpl. Gilad Shalit, would be released before a new government is formed. “If Abu Mazen could deliver Shalit, he would, but he can’t,” an Israeli official said. “So it raises new questions about his ability to deliver,” meaning that Mr. Olmert’s discussions with him will be limited, the official said, “to the improvement of the quality of Palestinian life.”

The formation of the government represents a minor miracle in itself. Hamas and Fatah had conducted running gun battles, assassinations, and kidnappings until almost the moment the two sides put pen to paper in Mecca. Egypt and Saudi Arabia had tired of the internecine warfare in Gaza and the West Bank, and apparently made both sides an offer they couldn't refuse. It demonstrates that while Hamas gets funding and direction from Iran, the two Sunni Arab nations can still have a great deal of influence on Palestinian affairs.

However, they either cannot or will not get the PA to comply with Western demands for responsible statesmanship. Their unity document addresses none of the issues on which the West halted aid to the Palestinian Authority. It does not recognize Israel, nor does it reject violence. Indeed, it explicitly calls for violence as a means of further resistance, and it contains the demand for the Palestinian right of return that would destroy Israel as a political entity.

Israel has, of course, rejected the unity government on those bases, as well as on their failure to return Gilad Schalit. They will not remit the tax collections to this government that they have withheld from the previous Hamas administration for the same reasons. The US has supported Israel's position on aid. The EU may be another story. France has already announced that they believe the new government offers an opportunity for international relations -- by the same man, Philipe Douste-Blazy, who once called Iran a source of "stability" in the Middle East.

The West has to stick by its conditions. Demanding that a government abide by the treaties signed by administrations before it, unless formally withdrawn, is the basis of all diplomacy. One cannot allow a government to say that a treaty is invalid merely because a prior administration ratified it. Rejecting violence should be the minimum prerequisite for Western aid, regardless of the cause involved; legitimate resistance does not include purposely blowing up hundreds of civilians at falafel stands and pizzerias. If the Palestinians can't recognize that much, then they have no business asking for our money.

China Toddling Towards Private Property Rights

China has passed its first law explicitly protecting the right to private property, a major departure from six decades of varying degrees of Communist rule. The move comes as a two-steps-forward, one-step-back dance, as its passage came along with onerous press restrictions on the law itself:

After more than a quarter-century of market-oriented economic policies and record-setting growth, China on Friday enacted its first law to protect private property explicitly.

The measure, which was delayed a year ago amid vocal opposition from resurgent socialist intellectuals and old-line, left-leaning members of the ruling Communist Party, is viewed by its supporters as building a new and more secure legal foundation for private entrepreneurs and the country’s urban middle-class home and car owners.

But delays in pushing it through the Communist Party’s generally pliant legislative arm, the National People’s Congress, and a ban on news media discussion of the proposal, raise questions about the underlying intentions and the governing style of President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, experts say. ...

The measure could not pass the legislature, which acts under the party’s authority, without the active support of the top leadership. Yet the conspicuous silence of Mr. Hu and Mr. Wen appears to be a form of tribute to the influence of current and former officials and leading scholars who argue that China’s economic policies have fueled corruption and enriched the elite at the expense of the poor and the environment.

From their reticence to discuss it, we can draw two conclusions. One, capitalism works, and two, that truth doesn't quite sell yet in China. That could create some problems for Hu and Wen when it comes time to use the law in any practical manner.

That can already be seen. Beijing tried to sneak this law under the radar by keeping it out of the Chinese media. Two years ago when the idea of private property rights first came into question, the government widely circulated the proposal to get the maximum amount of feedback. Not this time; academics say that their universities pressured them to stay silent, and barely a peep was heard about it in the Chinese media. When the financial magazine Caijing made it their front-page story, Beijing forced them to recall the issue and reprint it without the article.

The law puts China on the right road, but they will need some time to assimilate what private property rights really mean. It has implications for free speech, too, a point Hu and Wen apparently missed. Caijing's printed issues are also private property, and Caijing should have had the right to sell them in the open market. The mind and soul of a person are also private property, with innate rights, which is why free speech is critical to liberty -- and private property rights.

Let's not be too critical, though. Even if the Chinese government bullied this law into being, its passage has the potential to free millions of people from the yoke of failed statist policy and oppression. It will undoubtedly assist in creating more room for free speech and liberty. Hopefully, it will take China one step closer to the dreams of the Tiananmen Square demonstrators, who foresaw a free China.

Mosul Court Sets Example For Independent Iraqi Justice

A court in Mosul, staffed by anonymous judges who operate courts that exclude Westerners as observers, has set an example for an independent judiciary in Iraq. Carefully guided by American military advisors but only after the adjudication of cases, the tribunal has established itself as a clean and impartial standard by which other courts can pattern themselves:

Last year, the criminal justice system here had nearly ground to a halt. Intimidated judges were refusing to hear trials. Some judges were allowing suspected insurgents to go free.

Then American advisers in this northern Iraqi city made a proposal: The Iraqis should bring in judges from Baghdad who would serve anonymously. And local officials and the chief judge in Baghdad agreed.

Now U.S. military officers and State Department officials here tout the Mosul program as a major success and a model for the rest of the country. But the Americans also acknowledge that the Iraqis' desire to rid the court of foreign influence has led to a situation they never anticipated. At the end of the first day of its first session in December, Major Crimes Court 15 banned Westerners from its proceedings.

So while the judges depend on the United States to help them with matters as basic as traveling safely from Baghdad, the Americans who hope to persuade the Iraqis to replicate the court across the country have no way of knowing firsthand what goes on inside. Instead, they meet with the judges in military-style "after-action reviews" that last an hour or so a few times a week.

The creation of an independent and unintimidated judiciary is a top priority for stabilizing Iraq, even before economic reconstruction and pacification. Every other issue flows through the court system; militias and insurgents have to be tried and convicted in a credible process, while trade and commerce rely on the civil judicial system to settle disputes amicably and definitively. Without an effective and independent system of justice, the Iraqis cannot build a civil society in the wake of strongman rule -- and will gravitate to other strongmen to get justice, which is why the militias retain some popularity despite their violence and intimidation.

Having judges serve anonymously might not be the best way to serve justice in the long run. In the short term, though, it makes sense. Judges who have their identities shielded will not fall prey to terrorists, and can therefore decide cases more dispassionately and fairly -- fair to both the defendant and the Iraqi community.

And that seems to be the experience in Mosul. The tribunal has heard 73 cases already from a large backlog, and acquitted 33 of the defendants who have appeared. That's a much higher acquittal rate than one finds in many US courts, which indicates that defendants get a fair shake.

The Washington Post met with the anonymous judges, and the interview showed the men to be courageous but not foolish. The Americans wanted some of their investigators to go to Tall Afar, still experiencing problems with insurgents, but they will not send them until their safety can be assured. One joked that he took the assignment in Mosul to escape his two wives, and another wanted to know why Americans keep asking them the same questions every week.

He probably doesn't read the American press. We're mostly used to that here.

KSM, The Dissolute

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's declaration of involvement in dozens of al-Qaeda attacks, actual and planned, comes as no surprise to those who have followed his career. The London Telegraph paints a picture of a man who joined the jihad for fun rather than faith, and whose life is filled with examples of excess:

In contrast to most of al-Qa'eda's senior leaders, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed liked to indulge in the sins of the Western civilisation that his movement is devoted to wiping out.

In the mid-1990s, while plotting the hijacking and bombing of a dozen US airliners and, to a lesser extent, the assassination of Pope John Paul II, he frequented nightclubs and pole-dancing bars in Manila with some regularity.

In Kuala Lumpur he reportedly buzzed a high-rise building in a helicopter where one of his numerous girlfriends was staying, ringing her from the cockpit and telling her to look out of the window.

He would introduce himself as a wealthy businessman from Qatar, which had some truth - he worked as an engineer for the government in the Gulf state for a time.

Peter Bergen, the author and leading expert on al-Qa'eda, said: "I think he really was in it for the fun. To use a horrible metaphor in this context, he was having a blast. He was obviously pathologically antisemitic but not very religious himself. He wasn't one to quote Saudi clerics."

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was not the only jihadi who indulged the sins of the flesh while on assignment as a terrorist. The 9/11 attackers also enjoyed so-called Western decadence during their short stay in the United States. As the 9/11 Commission report noted in its excellent recounting of the plot, a half-dozen of them made test flights to Las Vegas in the three months preceding the attack -- and while in Sin City, they indulged in alcohol, gambling, and strip clubs. KSM apparently lived the dissolute lifestyle as a rule, though, and not an exception.

US counterterrorist officials used to refer to KSM as Forrest Gump, having been involved in so many plots and places. He thrived as AQ's idea man, dreaming up large schemes and having to have them corralled into workable plans. Mohammed first conceived of 9/11 as an attack with ten planes at once hitting targets all over the US; Osama bin Laden scaled it back to four planes as a more practical attack to plan and execute.

Many have treated his claims with skepticism, especially his involvement with the death of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter beheaded in Pakistan in 2002. However, other captured suspects linked Mohammed to Pearl's murder before this, the Telegraph reports. Intelligence officials have independent confirmation of most of the acknowledged #3 man's claims of participation in the other plots on his list.

Was KSM's braggadocio meant to puff himself up in front of the American tribunal? Certainly. He doesn't have much to lose by declaring himself a master terrorist at this point anyway, and it fits with his personality. It also seems that it may have been the truth, too.

Bush Calls In The Cavalry On Prosecutor Firings

With new memos fueling the fire over the dismissals of eight federal prosecutors and a botched job of explaining them to Congress, the Bush administration needs some professional assistance in cleaning up the mess. Recognizing this, the White House has reached out to one of the GOP's best political consultants to start negotiating behind the scenes with Congress to smooth the tension over Alberto Gonzales' poor handling of the issue:

It was hardly a social call when Fred F. Fielding, the new White House counsel, turned up Wednesday afternoon on Capitol Hill.

He had come to negotiate with Democrats, who are investigating whether politics played a role in the dismissal of eight federal prosecutors and demanding testimony from Karl Rove and other top aides to President Bush. But Mr. Fielding’s real task is even bigger and more delicate: to serve as the point man for the White House as it decides the future of Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, a longtime Texas friend and confidant of Mr. Bush.

In bringing Mr. Fielding back to the West Wing this year, Mr. Bush turned to the kind of consummate Washington insider he disdained when he first came to town, a Republican who remained prominent in the capital as presidents of both parties have come and gone.

Now, occupying a job he held under Ronald Reagan more than 20 years ago, Mr. Fielding, 67, is the White House front man in a high-stakes showdown with the new Democratic majority on Capitol Hill even as he scrambles behind the scenes to determine what his new colleagues knew and when.

Soft-spoken and slightly rumpled, he was polite but did not reveal much on Wednesday, lawmakers said. He stayed 20 minutes, just long enough to hear Democrats make their case that Mr. Bush should not assert executive privilege to keep his aides from talking. He left without a hint of what he might do, and said he would report back to them on Friday.

Fielding is a man who understands how to handle a crisis. He has spent enough time in Washington to build his credibility as a man who understands how to stay clean, and how to get clean in a hurry. He issued the order to release the e-mails that have made clear how badly Gonzales botched the communication to Congress, whom he assured that the White House had no involvement in the firings. Fielding understands from his days in the Nixon and Reagan administrations that holding back information makes it much more significant when it finally comes out, and he's using a classic litigator's trick -- disclose before your opponents reveal.

Bush chose Fielding wisely. He replaced Harriet Miers when the former counsel left the administration, and one of his assets as counsel is his ability to broker deals across partisan divides. He worked to do so with the 9/11 Commission, as he did with previous administrations, garnering a reputation as a straight shooter with all sides. John Conyers left his meeting with Fielding satisfied that he could work with him on testimony to Congress about the bungled communications from the AG and his office to Capitol Hill, and that will help dial down the temperature to a rational level.

Last night, I discussed this controversy with Patterico on my CQ Radio show at Blog Talk Radio. Originally, I invited him on the show to debate, because we have had some differences of opinion about the issue. However, we found many points of agreement. Neither of us think laws were broken in the dismissals, and both of us think Gonzales screwed up badly enough in the aftermath that he's probably going to resign soon. We agreed that Kyle Sampson deserved the boot he got for his heavy-handed manner in which these dismissals were carried out, and especially for the notion that the DoJ should go ahead and fire people because they had the power to do so, and they should use it for the sake of using it.

The only points on which we disagreed was whether the firings were justified and whether they were a good idea. Listen to the stream (it's in the second half of the show) to hear the excellent discussion we had on the topic, and hear Patterico's background on these cases. I still believe the dismissals were a mistake, especially given the mid-term status of the eight prosecutors involved, but Patterico convinced me that they all had some level of justification.

UPDATE: Cavalry, not artillery. I need to go back to Cliché School.

Decline In Deaths And Attacks Shows Surge Success

US and Iraqi generals pointed to sharp declines in both attacks and deaths in the month since the new Baghdad security strategy has been implemented as a sign of its success. Civilian deaths declined by 80%, and 2,000 displaced families have returned to their homes:

Iraqi and US generals have hailed a fall in insurgent attacks as proof that the Baghdad “surge” plan is begining to show results one month into the operation.

Yet despite an apparent fall in the number of kidnappings and murders, the scourge of car bombs and roadside bombs has not abated and most officers caution that the crucial bench-mark will be Baghdad’s death toll in the coming months.

General Qasim al-Mussawi, spokesman for the Iraqi operation, said that the number of civilians killed in the past month had fallen to 265, compared with 1,440 from mid-January to mid-February. But there was no way to verify the figures independently.

Major General William Caldwell, the spokesman for US forces in Iraq, said that “there has been an over 50 per cent reduction in murders and executions” since Operation Fardh al-Qanoon (Imposing the Law) began. But US and Iraqi forces still faced about 200 attacks each day.

Other indications of success have already been released. Over seven hundred insurgents now sit behind bars, and the Iraqis still have over 1,100 more suspects to process besides them. The efforts of American and Iraqi forces in their clear-and-hold strategy has increased the level of intelligence gained from residents of the capital, and momentum is on the side of the Coalition.

They need to ensure it stays that way. The initial results are impressive, but everyone understands that they have to be sustained in order to really change the paradigm on the ground. US and Iraqi forces have to project both strength and staying power in order to keep the insurgents from shifting momentum back to the terrorists, forcing the Coalition to abandon the people they've liberated from the militias so far.

Most importantly, though, the plan has saved lives in Baghdad, and will save more as the strategy progresses. If we do not hand victory to the enemy, we can prevail -- and leave Iraq with a functional, secure central government. Only by doing that will we keep terrorists from establishing bases there from which they can plan and execute attacks on American interests around the world ... and here at home.

CQ Radio Tonight (Bumped And Updated)

CQ Radio will be back on the air tonight, at its regularly scheduled time, 9 pm CT. Tonight we'll be discussing the latest version of Cut and Run and its progress through Congress, as well as the rare veto threat coming from the White House. We'll also talk about Hillary Clinton's interview with the New York Times, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's confession at his military tribunal, the controversy over the firings of eight US Attorneys, and much more.

We'll be talking with Colonel Austin Bay, noted author and military expert, about the new Democratic plan and Hillary Clinton's latest bombshell on her Iraq strategy. NZ Bear from the Victory Caucus will also join us.

In the second half of the show, California prosecutor Patterico will join me to discuss the terminations of the eight federal prosecutors. Don't miss this opportunity to join in the debate!

You can listen live at the above link, and even join in the conversation by calling 646-652-4889. We may have more to discuss between then and now, and I'll be keeping the agenda wide open in case any breaking stories catch our attention.

UPDATE: Blog Talk Radio got another big name joining the line-up. Jennifer Hudson, who just won an Academy Award for her performance in Dreamgirls, will have a BTR show tonight as well! It's on the same time as CQ Radio, but with BTR, that doesn't matter -- the shows get podcasted within minutes of their conclusion. I know I'll be downloading Jennifer's show later!

GOP Defeats Reid Measure To End Deployment

Senate Republicans turned back an effort by Harry Reid to set a fixed withdrawal date for US troops in Iraq. Reid lost by a thin margin, 50-48, as three Democrats defected to the opposition for this measure:

Democrats aggressively challenged President Bush's Iraq policy at both ends of the Capitol on Thursday, gaining House committee approval for a troop withdrawal deadline of Sept. 1, 2008, but suffering defeat in the Senate on a less sweeping plan to end U.S. participation in the war.

In the Senate, after weeks of skirmishing, Republicans easily turned back Democratic legislation requiring a troop withdrawal to begin within 120 days. The measure set no fixed deadline for completion of the redeployment, but set a goal of March 31, 2008. The vote was 50-48 against the measure, 12 short of the 60 needed for passage.

Senate Democrats promptly said they would try again to force a change in Bush's policy beginning next week when they begin work on legislation providing money for the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Democrats want to keep digging on this issue until they weaken Republican resolve to see the war through to a successful conclusion. Gordon Smith voted with the Democrats, giving them some hope for more erosion later, but three Democrats voted against the bill. Joe Lieberman joined red-state Senators Mark Pryor and Ben Nelson.

What's next? Another attempt on another day. The Democrats don't know the meaning of the word surrender, unless it's on the battlefield.

UPDATE: It wasn't as close as I thought. The final vote was 50-48 against, but the amendment needed 60 votes for passage -- meaning it fell 12 votes short.

The Opportunity In Sadr City

A report by The Scotsman on the shock experienced by American troops on their first forays into Sadr City reveal an opportunity that we can seize to push the militias aside. Basic services such as sewage and trash removal do not exist, and although the residents of the slums have so far given the American surge a chance, success will depend on replacing those services provided by the militias:

In a capital where public services barely function and five straight hours of electricity is a cause for celebration, Sadr City stands out. Some 2.5 million people, nearly all of them Shiites, live in the northeastern Baghdad community. Many of them lack running water and proper sewerage. Hundreds of thousands have no jobs and subsist on monthly food rations, a throwback to the international sanctions of the Saddam Hussein era.

Streets in some parts of Sadr City run black with sludge. Damaged power lines provide, at best, only four hours of electricity a day.

Many US soldiers were unprepared for what they found. During a patrol last week, troops brushed flies from their faces as they drove through rotting heaps of refuse and excrement that were piled outside houses. One soldier opened his Humvee's door and vomited.

Improving the quality of life for Iraqis - including those in Sadr City - is part of the American strategy, articulated by the new US commander, General David Petraeus. Once areas have been rid of insurgents, criminals and death squads, the US hopes to pump in cash to encourage small businesses and revive the local economy.

The plan is for the Americans and their Iraqi counterparts to stay in the neighbourhoods to keep the militants from returning. But first comes security: economic improvement will have to wait until the streets are safe.

The sorry state of Sadr City has increased the appreciation of the Mahdi Army's role in the slums for American troops. What few services the residents received came from the Shi'ite militias -- along with protection rackets, violence, and exploitation. These people want to see their situation change, and they will be willing to work with almost anyone who can improve their conditions and allow them to get off of the dole.

General David Petraeus understands this. His strategy of neighborhood-based security allows for close interaction with the residents. He has adjusted the tactics used in implementing security to allow for softer, more friendly approaches to Sadr City residents, who will appreciate the difference between professional American troops and the crime-lord approach of the Mahdis. At this level, it is a hearts-and-minds strategy that Petraeus hopes will pay short- and long-term dividends.

At the same time, the US needs to start getting trash, sewage, and electical services running. Instead of having the Army or American contractors do the work, though, the US should invest resources to help create Iraqi businesses for these tasks. It would help employ thousands who need jobs and jump-start the creation of a Sadr City middle class. Entrepeneurialism will accelerate the process of clearing the trash and cleaning the streets while the sewage and electrical systems get put back to working order.

Security comes first, but efforts such as these have to follow soon after, or security will soon disappear. The US has a chance to make an impact on sectarian animosity by allowing everyone the chance for some prosperity, and to give Iraqis ownership of their own progress. A kick start beats a kicked-in door in the long run, as Petraeus knows. Let's hope Congress can figure this out as well.

Bush: I'll Find My Veto Pen

The White House has threatened to veto the new Democratic bill to limit his options in Iraq, which would double the number of vetoes in the Bush administration. No one expects the measure to pass in Congress, but the President wants to leave no doubt about its fate if it does:

In the face of determined opposition from the Bush administration, the Senate on Wednesday began an impassioned debate over an exit strategy from Iraq, headed toward a vote on a Democratic resolution aimed at a pullout of American combat troops in 2008.

Underscoring the mounting tensions between the Democratic Congress and the White House, administration officials immediately issued a veto threat, even though the measure is considered unlikely to win final passage. The administration’s statement denounced the Democratic plan in forceful terms, declaring that it would “embolden our enemies” and “hobble American commanders in the field.”

In the House, Democratic leaders scrambled on the eve of a critical test vote for their own Iraq legislation — a huge emergency spending bill that also includes a timetable for withdrawal in 2008. It is to go before the Appropriations Committee on Thursday and to the floor of the House next week. The White House has vowed to veto that measure as well. ...

What is at issue is a Democratic resolution that would set a goal of removing most combat troops from Iraq by March 31, 2008, and declare that the United States mission must be redefined to find a political — not a military — solution. Despite the measure’s slim prospects for final passage, Democratic strategists hope that it will step up pressure on the administration and Republicans on Capitol Hill to shift course on a war that, many noted, will pass the four-year mark next week.

Republicans described the resolution as an exercise in micromanagement. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, called it “unprecedented in the powers it would arrogate to the Congress in a time of war.”

Democrats countered that the resolution provided something the Republicans lacked — an exit strategy. Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Democrat, said, “To those who say we would micromanage the war I say, isn’t it time for somebody to manage the war?”

A veto here will be tricky. He needs supplemental funding for the Iraq theater to maintain operations, and Congress has to generate that appropriation. Vetoing a funding bill may mean that Congress simply won't produce one in a timely fashion, which would put the effort in Iraq in a very precarious position. Democratic leadership probably won't withstand pressure to keep the troops funded and supplied, but the temptation for mischief will certainly arise.

Republicans have started working on alternatives that will require the White House to communicate directly with Congress on progress on a regular basis but which avoids the timelines and tripwires of the Democratic bill. John Warner will float a proposal to establish political and military goals for the Iraq theater and demand testimony every sixty days from the Pentagon to update Congress on progress. It will not contain conditional elements that would require a retreat if progress does not meet the rather ridiculous conditions in Cut and Run 3.0, and Warner hopes to attract moderate Democrats to this alternative.

The Democrats have their own problems with the legislation. A large portion of their caucus do not believe the current proposal goes far enough, and some have demanded that an excised section barring the Bush administration from attacking Iran be restored. Jesse Jackson, Jr said that Democrats should not vote on party lines on issues of war and peace, which indicates that a significant number might defect, stage Left.

The White House will probably never have to veto this legislation, for the simple reason that it has little enough support as it is.

Clinton: I'll Ignore Genocide

Hillary Clinton made an astonishing statement on her policy for Iraq if elected President, in an interview with the New York Times yesterday. She refused to commit to total withdrawal from Iraq, saying that she would keep American troops in Anbar to fight terrorists, a stance that will not endear her to the anti-war Left in her party. At the same time, she said she would refuse to send troops back into Baghdad, even if a genocide took place:

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton foresees a “remaining military as well as political mission” in Iraq, and says that if elected president, she would keep a reduced but significant military force there to fight Al Qaeda, deter Iranian aggression, protect the Kurds and possibly support the Iraqi military.

In a half-hour interview on Tuesday in her Senate office, Mrs. Clinton said the scaled-down American military force that she would maintain in Iraq after taking office would stay off the streets in Baghdad and would no longer try to protect Iraqis from sectarian violence — even if it descended into ethnic cleansing.

In outlining how she would handle Iraq as commander in chief, Mrs. Clinton articulated a more-nuanced position than the one she has provided at her campaign events, where she has backed the goal of “bringing the troops home.”

More nuanced? It's abysmal, cynical, and completely self-serving. To commit the US to inaction in the face of genocide is nothing short of breathtaking, especially with the Left agitating for action -- and rightly so -- in Darfur. It should also remind voters of Bill Clinton's record in Rwanda.

This statement shows a complete lack of strategic and tactical thinking on the part of someone who want to assume the role of Commander in Chief. The key to stabilizing Iraq and beating the terrorists who have nested in Anbar is restoring order to its capital. If the central government falls, the other goals she mentions -- deterring Iran, protecting the Kurds, and so on -- will go right out the window. If Baghdad falls into utter chaos and ethnic cleansing, the rest of the nation will follow suit in short order, and Anbar will be the least of our problems.

That really would put the US contingent in Iraq in an untenable position. If Baghdad collapses, the Shi'ite south will likely fall into the hands of the radicals -- cutting off our lines of communication. We won't be able to resupply through the Gulf any longer, and Turkey made it clear in 2003 that they had no interest in assisting our logistics. Saudi Arabia has no desire to see us return to their territory, and Syria is obviously not going to cooperate, either.

Hillary has revealed herself as a joke on military strategy, and more importantly, on moral grounding. Who can say in these days and times that the US should stand by and watch a genocide take place within a day's drive of American troops? As a member of the UN Security Council, we have enough shame for inaction in Rwanda to last us a generation. This strategy would embolden the radicals to conduct their genocide -- and stain us for generations to come.

Novak: DeLay Not Likely To Endorse Gingrich

Apparently, Tom DeLay has some small amount of bitterness over his change in fortunes. According to Robert Novak, DeLay will blast Newt Gingrich as morally flawed, ineffective, and dishonest when DeLay's book hits the shelves next week -- setting back Gingrich's presumed plans to run for President:

Newt Gingrich's attempted phoenix-like rise from his own political ashes to a presidential candidacy will run next week into a harsh assessment by his former House Republican colleague Tom DeLay. The former majority leader's forthcoming memoir assails Gingrich as an "ineffective" House speaker with a flawed moral compass.

Gingrich is not the only erstwhile political ally to feel DeLay's wrath. In "No Retreat, No Surrender: One American's Fight," DeLay is even more critical of his predecessor as majority leader, Dick Armey, and assails George W. Bush as being more compassionate than conservative. Even the man DeLay handpicked to succeed Gingrich as speaker, J. Dennis Hastert, is accused along with Gingrich and Armey of opening the door to the Democratic purge of DeLay. ...

In describing Gingrich as an "ineffective Speaker," DeLay writes: "He knew nothing about running meetings and nothing about driving an agenda." He adds: "Nearly every other day he had a new agenda, a new direction he wanted us to take. It was impossible to follow him."

DeLay also declares that "our leadership was in no moral shape to press" for the impeachment of President Bill Clinton. Writing well before Gingrich's admission for the first time last week, DeLay asserts: "It is now public knowledge that Newt Gingrich was having an affair with a staffer during the entire impeachment crisis. Clearly, men with such secrets are not likely to sound a high moral tone at a moment of national crisis."

DeLay refers to Armey as "so blinded by ambition as to be useless to the cause" and a "poor leader" who had "few fresh ideas." He adds that Armey "resented anyone he thought might get in the way of his becoming speaker of the House. Beware the man drunk with ambition." He pleads innocence in his version of the failed 1997 coup attempt against Gingrich and accuses Armey, after realizing that he would not succeed Gingrich, of telling the speaker that DeLay was plotting against him: "He had lied to cover his ambitions, betraying both his movement and his fellow leaders."

So I suppose Gingrich can scratch DeLay off of the short list for keynote speaker at his rallies, right?

As Novak notes, this explains why the 1994 revolution foundered in its goal to reinvent government. Many believed that the showdown between Bill Clinton and Gingrich over the 1995 government shutdown kneecapped the conservative momentum, but if one reads DeLay, it started at the very beginning. The leadership of the GOP vanguard had little cohesion, differing priorities, and a lack of organization that doomed the project from its inception.

I'm not sure what DeLay intends in this memoir except a measure of dog-in-the-manger effect. His own activities in the House after 1994 have drawn considerable criticism from conservatives. Jeff Flake, one of the small-government conservatives still left of the coalition, accurately describes DeLay's contribution as limited to redistricting, lobbying, and pork distribution -- none of which exactly meshes with the 1994 revolution either. DeLay has obvious anger issues springing from a lack of effort among Republicans -- including Gingrich, Dick Armey and his protege, Denny Hastert -- to protect him after a politically-motivated indictment by Ronny Earle, a complaint with more than a little merit. He undermines his own argument somewhat by hauling out all of the dirty laundry and making clear that he didn't exactly act like a team player, either.

Will this hurt Gingrich if he decides to run? Probably, and probably in significant fashion. Many conservatives still wonder what happened to the opportunity to reshape government after 1994, and DeLay's memoirs will probably bring some answers. Joe Scarborough, in his memoir Rome Wasn't Burnt in a Day, had similar arguments about Republican leadership, which lends DeLay some credibility.

Gingrich's admission of the affair will not temper this kind of criticism from the Right, especially as it reflects on his competence as a leader. That issue had already been noted among CQ readers and other pundits, and DeLay's accusations will have some traction there. It will be very interesting to see how Gingrich responds, and whether Dick Armey will join the fray.

US Curbs Kurds

Responding to Turkey's complaints about PKK involvement in Kurdish guerilla attacks, the US has quietly pressured the Iraqi government and the Kurdish sector in Iraq to throttle support for the terrorist group. The issue threatened to bring Turkish troops streaming across the Iraqi border in retaliation for attacks and destabilizing the one portion of Iraq that has rebuilt itself:

The United States is dealing with Turkish complaints about Kurdish separatists operating in northern Iraq and has not ruled out military action against the rebels, the U.S. official assigned to handle the problem says.

Retired U.S. Air Force Gen. Joseph Ralston, a special envoy tasked with countering the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, said Wednesday in an Associated Press interview that U.S. pressure has resulted in moves against the group's operations by Iraqi and European authorities.

Turkish officials repeatedly have accused the United States of insufficient efforts to prevent attacks into Turkey from Iraq by the PKK, which has waged a guerrilla war for autonomy since 1984 at a cost of 37,000 lives. Turkey also has threatened military incursions into Iraq against the rebels, which the United States fears would alienate Iraqi Kurds, the most pro-American ethnic group in the region. ...

Ralston said negotiators from the United States, Turkey and Iraq are close to a deal to close a Kurdish refugee camp in northern Iraq that Turkey says is a haven for the PKK. In late January, U.S. and Iraqi forces searched the camp, known as Makhmur, and found artillery shells they believe belonged to the PKK, Ralston said.

He said PKK fighters have held a cease-fire since October that was arranged by Masoud Barzani, leader of Iraq's largely autonomous Kurdish region, after a discussion with Ralston.

This agreement would, if implemented, end one of the most troublesome problems facing the US in Iraq. The insurgencies can be defeated, if we have the will and the proper commander in place to do so. We could not stop the Turks from flooding across the northern frontier in Iraq, however, and the result of such an invasion would create a firestorm that would require hundreds of thousands of troops to quell -- if we could get them in there.

Ralston repeated the State Department's assessment of the PKK as a terrorist group, which puts a large responsibility on the US to shut them down. So far, our pressure has brought almost six months of peace in Turkey, or at least six months in which attacks did not originate out of Iraq. The camp in question still operates, however, and the Turks want it shut down permanently

The central government in Baghdad banned the PKK, with the reluctant assent of the Kurds, and shut down their offices. Some have reopened under different names, Ralston told the AP, and they will have to work hard to shut them down as well. France and Belgium rounded up dozens of PKK agents attempting to raise funds there instead last year.

Ralston has worked hard to keep the flashpoint from igniting with Turkey, and for good reason. The Turks and the Kurds have been fighting for over twenty years over Kurdish autonomy in that country. The success of Kurdish autonomy in Iraq has fueled Kurdish desire for a de facto Kurdistan, but we cannot allow terrorism to operate under any pretenses in the new Iraq -- not if we want to keep the Turks out of it.

The Popeye Strategy For Iraq

... or perhaps a better title for this post could be, "Vegetarian Pork To Fight Radical Islamists". The Democratic leadership in Congress has had to add some farm subsidies to the supplemental for our troops in Iraq in order to convince their caucus to support them. Which crops will get the subsidies? See if you can finish this lyric -- "I'm strong to the finish, 'cause I eats me --":

This just in from Congressman Jon Porter (R-NV):

The US Congress is preparing to vote on legislation to provide additional funding for our troops in Iraq. In order to persuade many of their colleagues to vote for the measure, the Democrats have loaded the supplemental with language to provide resources for unrelated projects including aid to salmon fishermen, dairy subsidies and $25 million for spinach producers.

Nice. Setting aside the facts that a) agricultural subsidies suck monkey bums and b) sticking fisheries aid, and dairy and spinach subsidies into a defense bill is really beyond the pale, may I just say how totally, completely, utterly unacceptable it is for Democrats to put Republicans in a position where either they behave like fiscal liberals, or they vote against providing critical funding for our troops?

I suppose it's par for the course for the joke that Cut and Run 3.0 represents, but still, one would hope that a supplemental for the war effort could avoid the pork-barrel treatment. Liz Mair also reports that it also got larded with billions more for agricultural disaster assistance, pandemic flu preparation, and the like.

The problem is more than just pork. Appropriation bills just got written; why weren't these "priorities" addressed in the normal spending process? For one reason, supplementals often get ignored when calculating deficit spending, due to the supposed emergency nature of the requests. Supplementals also usually address high-profile issues in which the White House has a large stake, and so therefore has low credibility for veto threats.

If we want to reform spending and curtail corruption, we should focus on ending supplementals. If we want to fund the troops in Iraq, that should be done through the normal budget process.

UNSC Big Six Agree On Increased Sanctions For Iran

The main powers at the UN Security Council have agreed on increased sanctions against Iran for its intransigence on nuclear proliferation. The five permanent members and Germany will vote to expand the penalties that already has Iran's economy near a free-fall, a move that could destabilize Mahmoud Ahmadinejad:

Ambassadors from six world powers reached agreement in principle on a proposed new package of sanctions against Iran and expect to introduce a resolution to the UN Security Council on Thursday if their governments give a green light, the US ambassador said.

Approval by the governments of the United States, China, Russia, Britain, France and Germany would be an important first step. The package would still need to be considered by the 10 non-permanent members of the UN Security Council who are elected for two-year terms and have not been part of the negotiations.

Nonetheless, an agreement by the five veto-wielding permanent members of the council and Germany would be a strong signal to the other council members of the unity of the key nations on the UN's most powerful body - and a sign that they want to send a united message to Iran to suspend uranium enrichment.

The change will be incremental, as the US and UK could not get Russia and China to move more quickly to total isolation of Teheran. More individuals will have their assets frozen, more companies will get locked out of the international banking system, and Iran will have their arms exports blocked. The latter may not make a lot of difference, as the CIA Factbook doesn't list arms as a major export anyway, but what little there is will be locked out of the world market.

More significantly, the new sanctions bans new grants, loans, or financial assistance to the Iranian government, a step that Russia and China rejected in the last round. Teheran needs hard currency; their economic crisis has fueled an inflationary cycle in Iran that their gasoline shortage will magnify. They do not have self-sufficiency in most items, and their ability to buy necessities will degrade significantly without infusions of non-inflationary cash.

The Russian ambassador said that he hoped for a positive response from Iran. He may have already received it. The UNSC president, South Africa's Dumisani Kumalo, said that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has indicated his desire to come to New York and present Iran's case in rebuttal to the Security Council. That would indicate a significant desire to avoid the increased pressure -- which indicates a significant amount of pressure back home on the mullahcracy.

The sanctions apparently have had some salutory effect already.

Cut And Run 3.0 On Display At The Victory Caucus

The Democratic plan to lose the war in Iraq has been transcribed by NZ Bear at The Victory Caucus. NZ also has a link to a PDF scan of the document, but the gist of the bill is captured in his transcription. The heart of its unconstitionality can be found in Sections 1902 and 1903:

Sec. 1902 (a) Congress finds that it is Defense Department policy that Army, Army Reserve and National Guard units should not be deployed for combat beyond 365 days or that Marine Corps and Marine Corps Reserve units should not be deployed for combat beyond 210 days.

Congress may also find that the executive branch sets that policy and its parameters for implementation. The Constitution gives Congress no authority to either deploy troops or to undeploy them, only to give the executive the authority to conduct war and the power of the purse to end it. This looks very much like an intrusion on the President's authority as Commander in Chief to determine troop movements during conflict, and puts the United States in a position where we have 535 Commanders in Chief -- definitely not what the founders had in mind.

After this, Section 1904 lists the series of benchmarks and timetables for achieving them. Among these are the fanciful notion that "Iraq's political authorities are not undermining or making false accusations against members of the Iraqi Security Forces" by July 1, 2007. That means anyone in any leadership position in the Iraqi government who makes a questionable criticism of the Iraqi security forces will force a withdrawal of American troops from Iraq -- an impossible standard, and one which shows how silly this exercise has become.

If we hear the word "doodyhead" from the chair of the natural resources committee in the National Assembly, applied to a police officer, the Democrats will force a retreat.

That's not the only ridiculous threshold, either. By October 1 of this year, the Iraqis have to amend their constitution to some unspecified purpose, or we have to start withdrawing immediately. I'd like the Democrats to point to a single amendment passed by the US that took six months from start to finish to implement, outside of Reconstruction and the original Bill of Rights.

This bill is a joke, and the authors are the worst comedians on the circuit.

KSM: I'm The Mastermind Behind AQ

The military tribunal of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed turned into a brag-fest, as the captured terrorist took credit for almost every attack al-Qaeda has attempted. His admitted work goes back to 1993 and the first attack on the World Trade Center, and extends to planning assassination attempts against world leaders from Pope John Paul II to Jimmy Carter (via Hot Air):

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the suspected mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, confessed to that attack and a string of others during a military hearing at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, according to a transcript released Wednesday by the Pentagon.

"I was responsible for the 9/11 operation from A to Z," Mohammed said in a statement that was read during the session, which was held last Saturday.

Mohammed claimed responsibility for planning, financing and training others for attacks ranging from the 1993 truck bombing of the World Trade Center to the attempt by would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid to blow up a trans-Atlantic flight with explosives hidden in his shoes. And he also claimed that he was tortured by the CIA after his capture in 2003.

In all, Mohammed said he was responsible for planning 28 attacks, including many that were never executed. The comments were included in a 26-page transcript released by the Pentagon, which blacked out some of his remarks.

I'm not sure if Mohammed's on the level or if he just wants to pad the legend for later jihadis. One would think that killing 3,000 people in a single day would be enough, but Khalid wants to make sure we get the point. However, if he's taking credit for attacks that never came off, it seems to me that he's adding to the reputation of American counterterrorism rather than his own track record of success at mass murder.

His hearing proved how bad the attacks would have gotten, had the US not taken the war to the terrorists. Mohammed spoke about AQ's efforts to develop biological and nuclear weapons to attack America:

He offered a chilling confession to “managing and following up on the Cell for the Production of Biological Weapons, such as anthrax and others, and following up on Dirty Bomb Operations on American soil.”

Ramzi Binalshibh and Abu Faraj al-Libi showed a little more intelligence and opted not to participate in the tribunals. Maybe they're rethinking the whole Legends Of Jihadis thing.

In The Mail: A Mormon In The White House?

Today I received Hugh Hewitt's new book, A Mormon in the White House?, his new campaign biography of Mitt Romney. Hugh structured the book by discussing "10 things every American should know about Mitt Romney," which is also the subtitle of the book itself.

It's not the normal authorized campaign biography, which should come as no surprise for anyone who knows Hugh and reads his books. Mormon talks about Mitt's involvement in the marriage debate in Massachussetts, his lack of military service, the evolution of his stance on abortion -- and of course, Romney's religion. It should make for a great read, and be sure to get your copy ASAP. It should also serve as an excellent reference guide for the upcoming primary fight.

Gray Lady Uses Skirts To Hide CAIR

The New York Times runs a remarkable article today on the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), painting the group as a victim of bigotry and anti-Islamist fear. Neil MacFarquhar uses the latest controversy over Democratic Congressman Bill Pascrell's arrangement for the use of a House conference room by CAIR to cast criticism of the group as wholly unfounded:

With violence across the Middle East fixing Islam smack at the center of the American political debate, an organization partly financed by donors closely identified with wealthy Persian Gulf governments has emerged as the most vocal advocate for American Muslims — and an object of wide suspicion.

The group, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, defines its mission as spreading the understanding of Islam and protecting civil liberties. Its officers appear frequently on television and are often quoted in newspapers, and its director has met with President Bush. Some 500,000 people receive the group’s daily e-mail newsletter.

Yet a debate rages behind the scenes in Washington about the group, commonly known as CAIR, its financing and its motives. A small band of critics have made a determined but unsuccessful effort to link it to Hamas and Hezbollah, which have been designated as terrorist organizations by the State Department, and have gone so far as calling the group an American front for the two. ...

Government officials in Washington said they were not aware of any criminal investigation of the group. More than one described the standards used by critics to link CAIR to terrorism as akin to McCarthyism, essentially guilt by association.

“Of all the groups, there is probably more suspicion about CAIR, but when you ask people for cold hard facts, you get blank stares,” said Michael Rolince, a retired F.B.I. official who directed counterterrorism in the Washington field office from 2002 to 2005.

Really? All they get are blank stares? Guilt by association? For an article that purports to inform its readers of the controversy surrounding CAIR, it does its best to avoid looking for any details of the criticism it has received -- which has been specific and part of the public record. Even while MacFarquhar notes Joe Kaufman, the Investigative Project, and the Middle East Forum, the only coverage he gives of their opposition to CAIR is a quote from Kaufman about CAIR being a front group.

Let's get specific and move past any blank stares, shall we? For instance, on Kaufman's site, they have screen captures from 9/17/01 of CAIR attempting to direct visitors to their web site to make donations for 9/11 relief to what they first identified as "NY/DC Emergency Relief Fund". The hyperlink took people to the Holy Land Foundation's website. The HLF funneled money to Hamas by the millions until the federal government shut it down in December 2001. Eight days later, they changed the hyperlink to identify the site as HLF and added one for the Global Relief Foundation -- which also got shut down in December 2001, this time for channeling money to al-Qaeda and Hamas.

CAIR exploited 9/11 to help fund the very group that perpetrated the attack. Is that specific enough for MacFarquhar? Why didn't he bother to note this very specific charge in his article, filled as it was with protestations of lack of specificity?

That's not all that makes critics suspicious of CAIR. Several of its officers have involvement in terror, including the founder of CAIR's parent group and the man who ran the Holy Land Foundation, Mousa Abu Mazook. The US deported Mazook in 1997 for his work with Hamas. Ghassan Elashi helped found the Texas chapter and served on its board until 2002 -- when the US deported him for selling forbidden computer technology to Libya and Syria. Rabih Haddad worked as a CAIR fundraiser until his deportation in 2003, as well as launching the Global Relief Fund that fed al-Qaeda and Hamas. Joe Kaufman included these specifics in a Front Page article three years ago -- again, something MacFarquhar apparently missed in his journalistic investigation.

In short, the Times has published an ass-kissing paean to the poor, misunderstood folks at CAIR and smeared its critics. It's practically a textbook example of hackery; spend all of an article rebroadcasting the complaints of one side and none of it covering the specifics of the other. MacFarquhar apparently couldn't disprove these specifics, and so pretended they didn't exist. The result should be an embarrassment for the New York Times, if they weren't already so incapable of shame.

UPDATE: Kaufman, not Katzman, as Noam Sayin pointed out to me. Sorry for the error. Also, I bumped this to the top. And Dafydd ab Hugh has even more thoughts and more specifics that elude MacFarquhar.

The Candy Man Can

Who can take tomorrow, dip it in a dream? The candy man, baby:

The commander of U.S. troops in Iraq wanted some sweets, and nothing was going to stop him. Not even the fact that he was tramping through a neighborhood that only days ago had been teeming with snipers and Al Qaeda fighters who would love nothing better than to say they just shot Gen. David H. Petraeus.

With soldiers casting anxious glances along the desolate dirt road, the four-star Army general made a beeline for a tiny shop and helped himself to a bite-sized, honey-coated pastry proffered by the owner.

Oblivious to the flies buzzing around his head, Petraeus chatted briefly with a man who said his cafe had been damaged in recent battles between U.S. forces and insurgents.

Then, after promising compensation for the cafe owner, Petraeus hiked on. "Tell him the next time I come back to Ramadi, we'll eat his chow," Petraeus said as he headed into the blistering sun.

Days ago, this might not have been possible, but in an effort to show off what they say has been a shift of allegiance among residents in Sunni Arab insurgent territory, U.S. and Iraqi officials Tuesday brought an all-star cast of military and political figures to Ramadi.

General Petraeus has a flair for the theatrical -- which shows he understands his mission well. It will not be enough for Petraeus to quell the violence momentarily. He has to show that he has changed the paradigm on the streets of Baghdad, and he has to demonstrate it publicy and boldly in order to build confidence that the city has turned a corner in securing itself.

Petraeus wants to show support for the Sunni tribal leaders and community as well. Ramadi, as the capital of Anbar, sits in the center of a storm of Islamist violence. In that sector, al-Qaeda and foreign terrorists play a much larger role in the insurgencies. Lately, the Sunni tribal leaders have shunned AQI and their foreigners and aligned themselves with the Iraqi government and the US, hoping to rid Anbar of the terrorist plague. These sheikhs need affirmation of the risk they took in doing so, and Petraeus' bold visit gives then a very public endorsement.

Simpson: Dump Ban On Gays In Military

With the recent remarks of General Peter Pace regarding homosexuality still reverberating through the national media, former Republican Senator Alan Simpson weighs in on the ban on gays serving in the military. One of the original supporters for the "don't ask, don't tell" policy, Simpson has changed his mind:

As a lifelong Republican who served in the Army in Germany, I believe it is critical that we review -- and overturn -- the ban on gay service in the military. I voted for "don't ask, don't tell." But much has changed since 1993.

My thinking shifted when I read that the military was firing translators because they are gay. According to the Government Accountability Office, more than 300 language experts have been fired under "don't ask, don't tell," including more than 50 who are fluent in Arabic. This when even Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently acknowledged the nation's "foreign language deficit" and how much our government needs Farsi and Arabic speakers. Is there a "straight" way to translate Arabic? Is there a "gay" Farsi? My God, we'd better start talking sense before it is too late. We need every able-bodied, smart patriot to help us win this war. ...

Military attitudes have also shifted. Fully three-quarters of 500 vets returning from Iraq and Afghanistan said in a December Zogby poll that they were comfortable interacting with gay people. Also last year, a Zogby poll showed that a majority of service members who knew a gay member in their unit said the person's presence had no negative impact on the unit or personal morale. Senior leaders such as retired Gen. John Shalikashvili and Lt. Gen. Daniel Christman, a former West Point superintendent, are calling for a second look.

Second, 24 nations, including 12 in Operation Enduring Freedom and nine in Operation Iraqi Freedom, permit open service. Despite controversy surrounding the policy change, it has had no negative impact on morale, cohesion, readiness or recruitment. Our allies did not display such acceptance back when we voted on "don't ask, don't tell," but we should consider their common-sense example.

Third, there are not enough troops to perform the required mission. The Army is "about broken," in the words of Colin Powell. The Army's chief of staff, Gen. Peter Schoomaker, told the House Armed Services Committee in December that "the active-duty Army of 507,000 will break unless the force is expanded by 7,000 more soldiers a year." To fill its needs, the Army is granting a record number of "moral waivers," allowing even felons to enlist. Yet we turn away patriotic gay and lesbian citizens.

Simpson has a long track record as a Goldwater conservative -- strong on national defense, fairly libertarian after that threshold, so this position comes as no surprise. He has no particular axe to grind, either; no one is mentioning Alan Simpson as a Presidential candidate. He has mostly enjoyed his retirement from partisan politics, focusing most of his public efforts on questions of policy.

He makes a strong case here. No one has ever shown openly gay servicemembers to be a particular threat to unit cohesion. Our allies have not had that experience, and the British openly recruit from gay and lesbian forums for their military, as I noted six months ago to the day.

Pace's comments, however, show a wisdom in the DADT policy that I had not considered before. It gave the military some breathing room to attempt to change the environment in order to make a future transition easier. It was also hypocritical and less than courageous -- after all, it acknowledged that gay and lesbian members serve with honor and distinction, but required them to remain silent and mostly unknown examples. However, DADT allowed a generation of leadership to pass from the service and brought in the next generation, one that knows only DADT and presumably understands the truth behind it. Pace is among the last of the old guard.

Nothing heats up the comments threads like the subject of gay and lesbian service in the military, and I expect to get plenty of criticism for my views on this subject. In the past, I have been criticized for not having served in the military and having no understanding of deployment (true), of having close family members who are gay (false to my knowledge), and of wanting to pander to the liberal bloggers and media (laughably false). I believe that patriotic men and women should be allowed to serve their country, regardless of sexual orientation, as a matter of principle, because in truth they do so now. As Barry Goldwater himself once said, I only care that they shoot straight -- and preferably at a jihadi terrorist.

Law Of Diminishing Returns

The Minnesota legislature will debate a proposal to require sex offenders to register their e-mail addresses and Internet chat identities, a move under consideration in several other states. Proponents claim that it will make it easier for prosecutors to link the offenders to these profiles when they need to charge them with future sex crimes:

Sex offenders already have to tell Minnesota authorities where they live, work, attend school and vacation. Soon they might also have to provide their e-mail addresses.

With children playing on the Internet as much as in the neighborhood park, lawmakers here and in at least 13 other states want to protect them from predators. They're considering bills that would make sex offenders register e-mail, instant-messaging and other addresses used to communicate on Web sites. A similar bill has been introduced in Congress.

A Minnesota House panel approved the proposal Tuesday after narrowly rejecting an attempt to require "Sexual Predator" license plates. Those who work with exploited children say that the policies won't put an end to sex crimes against children, but that they could help law enforcement agencies make cases against offenders by connecting them with their virtual identities.

I'm no bleeding heart; I'm a throw-away-the-key-and-let-them-rot kind of guy when it comes to sex offenders. Child molesters especially should get life in prison, since we have discovered over the years that the recidivism rates are so high and the compulsion so strong. We have an obligation to protect those who cannot protect themselves.

That being said, this law strikes me as an overreach. I'm not talking about civil liberties; I see nothing unconstitutional about this proposal. The problems with it should be obvious to anyone who regularly works on the Internet, which is to say that people can change e-mail addresses at a rate faster than they change the oil in their car, and chat identities at a rate similar to changing their socks.

Residential registration makes sense, because it allows the community to defend itself. When a sex offender moves into a neighborhood, that information helps let the other residents know about the potential danger from that predator. Those concerned can check websites on a regular basis to see whether they have any registered offenders near their homes. The license plate legislation would have done the same thing, only a bit more conspicuously, and it would have allowed witnesses to suspicious situations another hint that trouble might be brewing -- for instance, as a child got into a car near a school.

This legislation makes little sense. Even presuming that the offenders would comply, it would require a significant expenditure of manpower and funds for law enforcement to catalog and cross-reference the data. If the offenders did not comply, who would know? It's not the same as residential registration. People have to live somewhere, and unless very wealthy, only live one place at a time. Many people have more than one e-mail address, and they change on a constant basis. When will law enforcement check on this? How?

This bill seems like a colossal waste of time and money. It does nothing to secure neighborhoods, like residential registration does, and it creates an impossible standard for everyone to meet. I appreciate the legislature's intent, but they apparently don't know very much about e-mail, chat rooms, or the Internet.

Democrats Hijack Homeland Security For Unions

Democrats promised in the midterm elections to immediately implement the remaining recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, which they claimed the Republicans ignored. Yesterday, the Senate passed the bill Democrats introduced to meet that obligation, even though it missed one key provision and added unionization for Homeland Security workers, which the Commission never included in its recommendations:

The Senate overwhelmingly approved legislation yesterday to implement many of the remaining reforms suggested by the Sept. 11 commission, answering its three-year-old call for better emergency communications; more money for cities at high risk of terrorist attacks; and tighter security for air cargo, ports, chemical plants and rail systems.

In a sign of how far the politics of homeland security have shifted since the Democrats seized Congress, senators voted 60 to 38 -- with 10 Republicans and no Democrats crossing ranks -- to force a fresh national security confrontation with President Bush, who has threatened to veto the bill over a provision to expand the labor rights of 45,000 airport screeners. ...

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) criticized the legislation, saying it would weaken U.S. security overall by "pumping for big labor." By allowing the workers to unionize, Democrats "would make the Department of Homeland Security more like the Department of Motor Vehicles," he said.

The administration focused on the labor provision, noting that it was not recommended by the Sept. 11 panel. White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said that it would endanger American travelers by eliminating the Transportation Security Administration's authority to deploy workers to meet changing threats. The White House has lined up enough Republicans to uphold a Bush veto.

The Democrats used the bill as a Trojan horse to gain union access to the thousands of Homeland Security workers, a sop to their biggest contributors. The White House has argued that unionizing DHS would create a costlier and less effective force at a time when the department has enough difficulties in meeting the threat. Regardless of whether one believes unions will create problems and greater inefficiencies in securing the nation, the fact remains that it does nothing to improve security, nor has anything to do with the 9/11 Commission's slate of recommendations.

That isn't the only problem with this bill. Although the Washington Post article fails to mention it, Congress skipped over one recommendation that the Commission felt was critical to its overall plan. On page 30 of its Executive Summary, the Commission demanded reform of government oversight for intelligence:

Congress took too little action to adjust itself or to restructure the executive branch to address the emerging terrorist threat. Congressional oversight for intelligence—and counterterrorism—is dysfunctional. Both Congress and the executive need to do more to minimize national security risks during transitions between administrations.

• For intelligence oversight,we propose two options: either a joint committee on the old model of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy or a single committee in each house combining authorizing and appropriating committees. Our central message is the same: the intelligence committees cannot carry out their oversight function unless they are made stronger, and thereby have both clear responsibility and accountability for that oversight.

• Congress should create a single, principal point of oversight and review for homeland security.There should be one permanent standing committee for homeland security in each chamber.

• We propose reforms to speed up the nomination, financial reporting, security clearance, and confirmation process for national security officials at the start of an administration, and suggest steps to make sure that incoming administrations have the information they need.

The bill contains nothing that fulfills these goals. Once again, Congress has pushed through changes everywhere but in its own playpen. They have ignored an entire category of recommendations from the panel while celebrating their allegiance to it.

UPDATE: For those who need an explanation of how allowing unionization and civil-service status for DHS personnel will do nothing to make Homeland Security more efficient, Fred Dalton Thompson has one at NRO today:

Whether it’s the Katrina response, the problems at Walter Reed Medical Center, bungled border security, or the IRS and FBI which can’t get their computer systems working, it seems like we’ve lost our ability to take care of some of the most basic duties of government.

Not that this problem is new. For decades, the U.S. Government Accountability Office has told us, time and time again, that we’ve lost control of the waste and fraud and mismanagement in many of our most important agencies. And it’s getting worse.

A big part of the problem is our outmoded civil-service system that makes it too hard to hire good employees and too hard to fire bad ones. The bureaucracy has become gargantuan, making accountability and reform very difficult.

Faced with this managerial swampland, the number of talented executives willing to come to Washington continues to dwindle. Those who do accept the challenges usually want to tackle big national goals in the few years they spend in public service instead of fighting their own agencies. So the bureaucracy just keeps rolling along.

Rather than fix this problem, Congress just added to it.

Taliban Forcing Musharraf's Hand

The agreement reached between Pervez Musharraf and the tribal leaders of Waziristan appeared to allow the Pakistani leader to back away from the war on terror. Unfortunately, Islamist terrorists don't have the habit of respecting boundaries, and now they have begun to use their new autonomy for attacks in Pakistan rather than Afghanistan:

Along the Afghan border, not far from this northwestern city, Islamic militants have used a firm foothold over the past year to train and dispatch suicide bombers against American and NATO forces in Afghanistan.

But in recent weeks the suicide bombers have turned on Pakistan itself, carrying out six attacks and killing 35 people. Militant leaders have threatened to unleash scores more, in effect opening a new front in their war.

Diplomats and concerned residents see the bombings as proof of a spreading “Talibanization,” as Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, calls it, which has seeped into more settled districts of Pakistan from the tribal areas along the border, where the Taliban and Al Qaeda have made a home.

In Peshawar and other parts of North-West Frontier Province, which abuts the tribal areas, residents say English-language schools have received threats, schoolgirls have been warned to veil themselves, music is being banned and men are told not to shave their beards.

Then there is the mounting toll of the suicide bombings. One of the most lethal killed 15 people in Peshawar, most of them police officers, including the popular police chief.

This shows once again the folly of appeasing terrorists. Musharraf should have known better. The Islamists have twice tried to assassinate him, and he responded by backing off from Waziristan. They countered that by spreading their suicidal jihad into the heart of Pakistan, giving Musharraf's citizens a taste of radical Islamist terror -- and they do not find it to their taste.

Pakistanis have reacted with revulsion to the sudden plague of suicide attacks against fellow Muslims. The attacks have all come from the Wana region of south Waziristan, right where Musharraf left the terrorists to build their strength. The outcry from the attacks coming from the terrorist warlords has begun to undermine public confidence in Musharraf.

Now Musharraf faces a tough choice. Continue his failing appeasement strategy and watch as Pakistanis eventually reject his regime as the attacks continue or escalate it -- or end it, and hope to wipe out the jihadis before they can do the same to him. In fact, regardless of whether Musharraf continues his appeasement strategy, the jihadis will continue their attacks on Pakistan. Musharraf's only choice is to fight or surrender - if they'll let him.

The Trap That Gonzales Fell Into

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has fallen into a tough spot, either through his ignorance or by his own machinations. Gonzales testified to Congress that the White House had no involvement in the firings of eight US Attorneys, but a series of memos and e-mails show that his aide planned the terminations with senior White House staff:

Emails between White House aides and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales's chief of staff show an orchestrated effort to fire several U.S. attorneys, counter to Mr. Gonzales's previous assertions that the firings weren't instigated by the White House.

The emails released yesterday appear to conflict with statements Mr. Gonzales and other top Justice Department officials made to members of Congress in testimony and letters explaining the prosecutor dismissals. Some lawmakers and former Justice Department officials say Mr. Gonzales, a longtime friend of President Bush who previously served as White House counsel, seems to be acting more as presidential counselor than the nation's top law-enforcement officer.

Mr. Gonzales, who two years ago was touted as a strong possibility to be the first Hispanic chief justice of the Supreme Court, now faces demands for his resignation from some lawmakers and the prospect of frequent appearances before congressional committees investigating the U.S. attorney dismissals. ...

In a news conference yesterday, Mr. Gonzales accepted responsibility for what he called "mistakes," while defending the firings and rejecting calls for his resignation from Democrats in Congress. Justice Department officials say Mr. Gonzales wasn't aware of some of the emails and memorandums between his chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, and White House officials, which set out plans for carrying out the firings. Mr. Sampson, who resigned Monday, declined to comment yesterday.

"I believe very strongly in our obligation to ensure that when I provide information to the Congress, that it's accurate and that it's complete, and I am very dismayed that that may not have occurred here," Mr. Gonzales said. "I was not involved in seeing any memos, was not involved in any discussions about what was going on. That's basically what I knew as the attorney general."

That's pretty weak tea, and Gonzales should know it. When an AG makes statements to Congress, by testimony or official correspondence, as affirmative as his statements on the involvement of the White House were, Congress has a right to expect that the AG has explicitly determined the truth of those statements. Otherwise, the proper form would be to state that he has no knowledge of whatever is at issue.

One of two things must be true: either Gonzales knew of the coordination between Harriet Miers and and his aide Kyle Sampson, or he knew nothing. If the former is true, then he deliberately misled Congress. If the latter is true, then Gonzales has serious issues in management skills, and the White House must know it -- because Miers then deliberately bypassed Gonzales.

Neither option holds much benefit for Gonzales. If he knew nothing, then he didn't do much to determine the truth before making representations to Congress on the dismissals. If he did know about the work Sampson and Miers did for most of two years on preparing these dismissals, then Gonzales has opened himself to a contempt charge from Congress. Gonzales has to paint himself a fool rather than a liar in order to salvage his political standing.

The appearance of this report in the Wall Street Journal should underscore the depth of the problem (and my apologies for the rare link to a subscription-only report). The WSJ hardly qualifies as a member of a left-wing cabal of news organizations, and their recognition of the problem demonstrates its scope.

UPDATE: Yes, Clinton fired all 93 federal prosecutors at the start of his term. Yes, it interfered with investigations in process. Most of them, if not all of them, were approaching the expirations of their terms of office, however, and Clinton's unprecedented act was mainly that he "fired" them without having nominated most of their replacements. US Attorneys serve four-year terms coincidental to the presidency, and are retained or dismissed at the end of their terms at the pleasure of whomever occupies the Oval Office. It is unusual to sack US Attorneys mid-term, unprecedented to do so with eight of them at a time, and in the case of Iglesias, to do so with one ranked by the White House as a high performer but whose home-state Senator pushed for termination because of impatience in indicting activists from the opposition party for corruption.

I'm not saying that the firings were illegal, but they were certainly strange, and politically stupid. And, yes, very worthy of criticism -- as have been Gonzales' attempts to explain them away.

And since when do we accept the Clinton standard for ethical conduct, anyway?

UPDATE II: The Congressional Research Service can only find eight examples of mid-term dismissals for US attorneys over the last 25 years -- during which time hundreds of prosecutors served as USAs. The CRS found reasons for five of the eight:

* William Kennedy - Fired by Reagan after making public accusations that the DoJ annd the CIA were interfering in one of his cases (1982).

* J. William Petro - Fired by Reagan for allegations of misconduct; he later got convicted on six counts (1984).

* Larry Cottleton - Resigned after assaulting a reporter (1994).

* Kendall Coffey - Resigned after reportedly biting an exotic dancer on the arm at a strip club (1996).

* Frank MacNamara - Resigned instead of being suspended by AG Richard Thornburgh for allegedly lying about William Weld's use of marijuana (1989).

The CRS could not establish why three other USAs resigned with any degree of certainty, but one served 46 months of a 48-month term before leaving.

In 25 years, we had two outright mid-term dismissals and three mid-term resignations, all for obvious misconduct, and three other indeterminate resignations. Only 54 USAs have left mid-term in 25 years, most of them either appointed as judges or to campaign for elective office, but all of them (but the eight described above) on their own volition and for their own purposes. This should demonstrate the unusual level of dismissals in the short period after Congress allowed the AG to appoint interim USAs without Senate confirmation.

Illegal? No. But it smells.

Coleman Still Beating Franken In Polling

Rasmussen has conducted another poll for the 2008 Senate race in Minnesota, and to no one's great surprise, Norm Coleman still handily beats Al Franken. Following a month after a local poll showed Coleman far outstripping the comedian, the gap has narrowed, but not because Franken has gained any support (via Memeorandum):

Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman (R) knows he is high on the Democrats’ wish list this cycle and the first Rasmussen Reports Senate poll for Election 2008 shows the incumbent starting off below the 50% level of support. A survey of 500 Likely Voters finds Coleman leading Al Franken (D) 46% to 36% with 10% saying they’d vote for a third party option.

Generally speaking, incumbents who poll below 50% are considered potentially vulnerable.

Coleman is a freshman Senator who won his seat in 2002 by just two percentage points. Coleman replaced Paul Wellstone (D) in the Senate. Wellstone died in a plane crash near the end of the 2002 election and was replaced on the ballot by former Vice President Walter Mondale. Coleman was recruited heavily by the Bush team in 2002 but has distanced himself from the Administration lately.

The third-party option probably accounts for the difference between the two polls, and that doesn't hurt Coleman as much as it hurts Franken. The KSTP/Survey USA poll showed Coleman ahead of Franken 57-35 in a two-way race. Coleman stays under 50% when a third-party option exists, but here in Minnesota, a third party would mean Green or something equally left-wing.

Note that Franken either stays at the same level of support or slightly drops between the polls. He hasn't gained any traction at all, despite his attempts to move from his Air America rants to a more measured and polished public persona. Rasmussen indicates that Franken has a large hurdle to clear in that regard. Even here in a state with more liberal/progressive tendencies than most, Franken's favorability sinks below the surface. Where Coleman has a thin +9 favorability with Minnesotans (51/42), Franken tanks with a -7 (39/46).

Coleman has a long way to go before he can feel secure in his re-election bid. However, if Franken does win the nomination -- no sure thing, given the political climate here in the state -- the road will seem much brighter.

Homebound For The Moment (Bumped)

Due to some acute complications in the First Mate's medical condition, I'm at home today, as I was yesterday. She has less than three weeks before her transplant, but her kidney failure has reached a critical level where it has become inadvisable to leave her alone for more than a few minutes at a time. We're trying to find people who can stay with her while I'm at work, and we have coverage arranged for everything but this week. I'm hoping to resolve that today, so that my very accommodating employer can start getting some work out of me.

Since I have some down time, I figured I'd try hosting a Blog Talk Radio show today at 1 pm ET to discuss the stories of the day. Just as on Thursday evenings, simply call 646-652-4889 to join the conversation. The show gets streamed live to the Internet, and is almost immediately podcasted. We'll only go 30 minutes today, but we'll talk about any issue on your mind. Click on the link below to listen, and be sure to call and join us.

UPDATE: I plan to have a Hagelesque announcement regarding my potential entry into the presidential race at the beginning of the show. I'm alerting the media ...

Hillary And Her Conspiracy Theory

Hillary Clinton has returned to her "vast right-wing conspiracy" theme, a development that will keep Beth blogging for at least another four years. She used her favorite bogeyman on the campaign trail this morning while speaking with municipal officials in New York City:

Presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton told Democrats Tuesday the "vast, right-wing conspiracy" is back, using a phrase she once coined to describe partisan criticism.

Speaking to Democratic municipal officials, the New York senator used the term to hammer Republicans on election irregularities. ...

On Tuesday, she asserted the conspiracy is alive and well, and cited as proof the Election Day 2002 case of phone jamming in New Hampshire, a case in which two Republican operatives pleaded guilty to criminal charges, and a third was convicted.

"To the New Hampshire Democratic party's credit, they sued and the trail led all the way to the
Republican National Committee," Clinton said.

"So if anybody tells you there is no vast right-wing conspiracy, tell them that New Hampshire has proven it in court," she said.

A Wisconsin court found more people guilty of slashing tires to block Republican votes in 2004, including the son of a Democratic politician. That doesn't necessarily relate to a "vast" conspiracy to target George Bush, although one could fairly state that both get their share of irrational hatred. However, instead of simply noting that some individuals commit crimes to further their politics, Hillary has to blow it into a huge national conspiracy with her and a few others as a target.

Well, I'm sure that will sell with the nuts in her party already inclined to believe in conspiracy theories. There was a time when honorable politicians refused to pander to that crowd, leaving them for Lyndon LaRouche and other fringe demagogues. Hillary may have a harder time selling it after she had her VRWC fantasies blow up in her face in the form of a stained blue dress, and an admission from her husband that he'd played her for a fool while she defended his honor on national television.

One might think that a candidate for national office would avoid recalling such an example of paranoia and gullibility. Apparently, Hillary's desperation has reached a level where she needs to tap into the neuroses of her base. If it keeps Beth plugging away for the next few years, though, it will be well worth it.

Hundreds Of Mahdis, Thousands Of Insurgents Detained

The new counterinsurgency strategies of David Petraeus have shown remarkable initial success. USA Today reports that the US and Iraqi forces now employing the Baghdad security plan have captured thousands of insurgents as well as large numbers of Mahdi Army militia members -- and Moqtada al-Sadr has yet to poke his head above ground:

Coalition forces have detained about 700 members of the Mahdi Army, the largest Shiite militia in Baghdad, the top U.S. commander in Iraq said Monday.

The militia, which is loyal to radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and has clashed with U.S. troops in the past, has mostly avoided a direct confrontation with American and Iraqi government forces, Gen. David Petraeus said in an interview with USA TODAY.

Some of the militia's top leaders have left the capital, and Iraqi government officials are negotiating with al-Sadr's political organization in an effort to disband the militia, Petraeus said.

"I think in part one reason that al-Sadr's militia has been lying low … is due to some of the discussions being held," Petraeus said in a telephone interview from Iraq. "It's also in part due to some of the leaders leaving Baghdad" and others being arrested, he said.

The seven hundred Mahdis are only the tip of the iceberg. The White House estimated that 16,000 other insurgents are held by US and Iraqi forces as well, making this sweep an early success. In fact, the burgeoning numbers of detainess require the US to send more military police to guard them.

Moqtada al-Sadr has still not made an appearance in Iraq after the beginning of the surge. He skedaddled to Teheran to meet with his sponsors and hasn't made a public return. Some believe that the surge might wind up boosting Sadr if the surge suppresses the Mahdis but leaves the Shi'ites exposed to Sunni attacks. However, if that's the case, Sadr has avoided taking advantage of the situation. If he thought he would benefit from Shi'ite dissatisfaction, he would be leading protests on the streets of Baghdad. Instead, he's in hiding while Baghdad's Shi'ites have begun to live normal lives free of Sadr's goons.

Petraeus appears to be on the right track and gathering momentum. Congress represents the only real long-term obstacle to success.

Harriet Miers Wanted All US Attorneys Fired

The start of the process that eventually saw seven US Attorneys fired last December (and another earlier) began with Harriet Miers, the White House counsel who had briefly been a Supreme Court nominee, according to the Washington Post. Unhappy with a lack of progress in fighting voter fraud, Miers requested through aides that Alberto Gonzales fire all 93 prosecutors at once after the 2004 elections, a move the Attorney General considered too disruptive:

The White House suggested two years ago that the Justice Department fire all 93 U.S. attorneys, a proposal that eventually resulted in the dismissals of eight prosecutors last year, according to e-mails and internal documents that the administration will provide to Congress today.

The dismissals took place after President Bush told Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales in October that he had received complaints that some prosecutors had not energetically pursued voter-fraud investigations, according to a White House spokeswoman.

Gonzales approved the idea of firing a smaller group of U.S. attorneys shortly after taking office in February 2005. The aide in charge of the dismissals -- his chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson -- resigned yesterday, officials said, after acknowledging that he did not tell key Justice officials about the extent of his communications with the White House, leading them to provide incomplete information to Congress.

Lawmakers requested the documents as part of an investigation into whether the firings were politically motivated. While it is unclear whether the documents, which were reviewed yesterday by The Washington Post, will answer Congress's questions, they show that the White House and other administration officials were more closely involved in the dismissals, and at a much earlier date, than they have previously acknowledged.

Seven U.S. attorneys were fired on Dec. 7 and another was fired months earlier, with little explanation from the Justice Department. Several former prosecutors have since alleged intimidation, including improper telephone calls from GOP lawmakers or their aides, and have alleged threats of retaliation by a Justice Department official.

Sampson eventually coordinated with Miers on the limited dismissals, but that happened in January 2006, almost a year before the bulk of the firings. Sampson created a list of prosecutors ranked by effectiveness and loyalty to White House initiatives, and broken into three groups: high, low, and no opinion. Oddly, the terminated prosecutors came from both the high- and low-ranked groups. Three of the seven came from the bottom tier, but two of them -- David Iglesias and Kevin Ryan. Iglesias has alleged political interference by Pete Domenici and other unnamed Republican legislators, while Ryan's staff is apparently delighted to see him leave.

One question that these memos raise is why it took so long to dismiss these prosecutors if they were performing so badly. Sampson compiled that ranking list two years ago this month. The effort seemed to be back-burnered until September of last year, when new rules on appointment of interim federal prosecutors made their way through Congress as part of a homeland-security bill. The new rules allow Justice and the White House to forego Senate approval on interim appointments, and the terminations commenced almost immediately after the law went into effect.

If competence and performance were the reasons for the terminations, why did Justice wait almost two years to do anything about it?

Sampson's memos indicate that Domenici had exercised more political pressure than he has previously admitted in getting Iglesias canned. Iglesias -- ranked among the high-performing group in March 2005 -- had not acted with enough alacrity in charging Democrats in New Mexico for corruption, especially with the midterm elections approaching. Domenici called him to inquire about the status, a call he said was merely informative and not intended to pressure Iglesias. Yet one of Miers' aides noted in one memo that Domenici's chief of staff "is [as] happy as a clam" at Iglesias' dismissal. In another memo a week later, Sampson replied that Domenici would forward names for a replacement the next day, because the Senator was "not even waiting for Iglesias's body to cool".

Again, prosecutors serve at the pleasure of the President, and as with any other political appointment, they can be asked to leave when the pleasure becomes all theirs. However, prosecutors have tremendous power and should be free of undue political pressure. Just as with any other prosecutors, they represent all of the People and have a responsibility to ensure that filing charges serves the cause of justice, and not just indict people to pump up their resumés. Otherwise, trust in the system of justice breaks down. This situation looks suspiciously like some people forgot that basic premise.

Chuck Hagel's Bogus Journey

I didn't blog about this yesterday, probably because (a) I was laughing too hard, and (b) how does one write about a non-event? Dana Milbank does a pretty good job answering the latter in his look at Chuck Hagel's much-ballyhooed press conference yesterday, when the nation's news organizations met to see the Senator show why he isn't qualified for an executive position:

The 19th-century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a giant in the field of logic. The 21st-century philosopher Chuck Hagel? Not so much.

The Republican senator from Nebraska, flirting with a 2008 presidential run, scheduled "an announcement on my political future" for yesterday morning in Omaha. Media types flew in from across the country. The state's governor and attorney general, along with 15 television cameras, crowded the room. Cable networks carried the event live while pundits went wild: Would Hagel jump into the race? Run for reelection? Become an independent? Quit politics entirely?

"I'm here today to announce that my family and I will make a decision on my political future later this year," Hagel declared in front of a presidential-blue curtain.

That was the announcement? The cable networks quickly broke away. The reporters in Omaha were feeling had.

Everyone knows that the reporters there must have felt annoyed beyond comprehension. Hagel selected his alma mater, the University of Nebraska, for his announcement. Now, March in Minneapolis is no treat, but Omaha? Hagel dragged political reporters a thousand miles into the sticks just to tell them he's indecisive.

Perhaps Hagel has taken up performance art as a hobby. It's the only explanation for a bizarre decision. Newt Gingrich hasn't held press conferences on the basis of making significant announcements just to say he's not committing to the Presidential race; Gingrich has scoffed at the entire notion of campaigning at all this early in 2007. No one considered Hagel as a potential candidate until he scheduled the presser, so the excuse of tamping down rumors doesn't hold, either -- and even if it did, a conference call from Washington would have resolved it.

I don't have much sympathy for the reporters who got fooled into traveling to this festival of vacillation. The media has played a significant contributing role in this accelerated primary race that has most of us rolling our eyes. In a way, this seems like a bit of just desserts for the hyperbolic, breathless, moment-by-moment coverage of a race that has at least ten months to go before the first votes get cast.

However, the main story is Chuck Hagel and his strange performance yesterday. It's almost as if he was ready to take the plunge and start the process of joining the campaign and changed his mind at the last minute. The other option, that he has such an oversized sense of self-importance that he needs to hold press conferences to share his transitory state of mind, is too scary to be as funny as it could be.

WaPo: Pelosi Plan A Murtha Trick

The Washington Post excoriates the Democratic leadership for exploiting the appropriations process on war funding to pander for votes in a scorching editorial this morning. Calling Cut and Run/Slow Bleed 3.0 nothing more than a "trick" meant to impose an impossible timeline on a troop withdrawal, the Post blasts the Democrats for thinking about nothing more than their electoral prospects in 2008:

The Democratic proposal doesn't attempt to answer the question of why August 2008 is the right moment for the Iraqi government to lose all support from U.S. combat units. It doesn't hint at what might happen if American forces were to leave at the end of this year -- a development that would be triggered by the Iraqi government's weakness. It doesn't explain how continued U.S. interests in Iraq, which holds the world's second-largest oil reserves and a substantial cadre of al-Qaeda militants, would be protected after 2008; in fact, it may prohibit U.S. forces from returning once they leave.

In short, the Democratic proposal to be taken up this week is an attempt to impose detailed management on a war without regard for the war itself. Will Iraq collapse into unrestrained civil conflict with "massive civilian casualties," as the U.S. intelligence community predicts in the event of a rapid withdrawal? Will al-Qaeda establish a powerful new base for launching attacks on the United States and its allies? Will there be a regional war that sucks in Iraqi neighbors such as Saudi Arabia or Turkey? The House legislation is indifferent: Whether or not any of those events happened, U.S. forces would be gone.

The House bill lists benchmarks for Iraqi political progress and requires that President Bush certify by July 1 that progress is being made toward them. By October, Bush would have to certify that the benchmarks all had been reached. This is something of a trick, akin to the inflexible troop readiness requirements that Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.) wanted to impose to "stop the surge." Everyone knows that the long list of requirements -- including constitutional changes, local elections and the completion of complex legislation -- couldn't be finished in six months. In that case a troop withdrawal would have to begin immediately. If there was no "progress" by July, it would have to begin then and be completed by the end of the year.

The Democrats have tied themselves in knots attempting to appease the anti-war wing of their party, which demands an immediate withdrawal from Iraq. They have tried to compare Iraq with Viet Nam for the last four years, but the Democratic leadership has started to see that one Viet Nam comparison appears true -- that the Democrats want to force a surrender and defeat through domestic politics without regard to the consequences of such a collapse. Even Ted Koppel has started to talk openly about the catastrophe that would follow an American withdrawal.

Do the Democrats have a plan if this catastrophe comes to pass? Viet Nam may have had strategic significance only in a Cold War world, but the Middle East has tremendous economic and political significance for the US. If Iraq collapses and starts a regional war between Sunnis and Shi'ites, oil shipments will likely stop and millions of people in Southwest Asia could get killed. Egypt and Saudi Arabia have already stated that they will likely enter Iraq to protect the Sunnis if we withdraw, which would bring Iran in to protect the Shi'ites, with Syria joining as Iran's military ally.

The Democrats have no answer for this scenario. Their plans extend no farther than appeasing their political base while attempting to dodge responsibility for their actions. Pelosi and Murtha haven't dared to simply cut off the funding for the war, because they know they will lose the Blue Dog Democrats and their majority if they try.

We cannot afford another cut and run from Islamist terrorists, a pattern which started in Teheran and which has continued through every contact with them since. With al-Qaeda in Anbar and the Mahdi Army in Baghdad, a retreat will be correctly seen as further proof of our lack of will and courage, and not just by the terrorists. Those who might support moderation and democracy will lose all credibility if the US and the West run away from lunatic terrorists, and they will cut the best deals they can with the most violent terrorists in their neighborhoods -- setting up the Middle East for generations of gang wars like we see in Gaza and the West Bank now.

The Democrats have no answer for this, no strategy, no plan, other than to pander for votes in 2008. The Post correctly points out their utter lack of foresight and comprehension.

As The Meme Turns

Remember last week, when the Pentagon's failure to publicly discuss its Plan B to the surge indicated a lack of due diligence by military planners? At the time, we said that if the DoD was foolish enough to discuss other contingency plans openly, the media would cast that as a lack of confidence in the surge plan.

Bingo:

The Pentagon is actively considering a series of fallback positions for Iraq in the event that President George Bush's plan of expanding the US military presence fails. Among the options are adoption of the El Salvador model, which would see Washington withdraw most of its 150,000-plus troops and replace them with a few hundred, or few thousand, military advisers.

A more drastic option also being looked at is to retreat inside Baghdad's Green Zone and the heavily fortified airport on the outskirts of the city. ...

An adviser familiar with discussions inside the Pentagon said there was great pessimism about whether Mr Bush's troop "surge" would work, and military planners were studying a range of alternatives.

Let's see if we get this straight. When Bush chose the surge strategy, critics accused him of being inflexible. When the Washington Post wrote that no one at the Pentagon seemed willing to discuss Plan B, they accused the administration of a lack of preparation. Now that people have started to discuss contingency plans, they're suddenly pessimists.

Predictable. Sad, but predictable.

Letter: Speer Knew Of The Holocaust

For decades, Albert Speer insisted that he knew nothing of the planning of the Holocaust. He escaped the hangman's noose at Nuremberg in a convincing performance of contrition, and survived his 20-year sentence to achieve respectability as the example of a good German caught up in madness, bereft of insight during the reign of the most calculatingly brutal regime in history.

While his contrition might have been real, his cover story apparently was a lie. A letter written by Speer in 1971 makes clear that Speer had explicit knowledge of the plans for the extermination of the Jews of Europe:

A newly discovered letter by Adolf Hitler's architect and armaments minister Albert Speer offers proof that he knew about the plans to exterminate the Jews, despite his repeated claims to the contrary.

Writing in 1971 to Hélène Jeanty, the widow of a Belgian resistance leader, Speer admitted that he had been at a conference where Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS and Gestapo, had unveiled plans to exterminate the Jews in what is known as the Posen speech. Speer's insistence that he had left before the end of the meeting, and had therefore known nothing about the Holocaust, probably spared him from execution after the Nuremberg trials at the end of the second world war. ...

In the letter to Jeanty, written on December 23 1971, Speer wrote: "There is no doubt - I was present as Himmler announced on October 6 1943 that all Jews would be killed". He continued: "Who would believe me that I suppressed this, that it would have been easier to have written all of this in my memoirs?"

Historians always looked at Speer's claims of innocence about the Holocaust with some suspicion. William Shirer, whose Rise and Fall of the Third Reich remains the seminal work on Nazi Germany, wondered in his history how Speer could have remained ignorant of the death-camp system. Speer drew his workers from the same system, and demanded more and more as the war progressed. Any ignorance on their provenance or their fate had to either be willful or faked.

They also questioned his sentencing, even at the time of the Nuremberg trials. The men who supplied the forced labor to Speer had their necks stretched, while Speer essentially walked away from the ruins of Nazi Germany. Why? Speer made a calculated decision to defy Hermann Goering and admit all of the horrors of the Third Reich, expressing remorse and sorrow all along the way. Goering had rallied the rest of the defendants to assume a defiant tone, defending the Nazis and blaming the atrocities on everyone else. The tribunal allowed itself to be impressed by Speer's no-nonsense admissions of the obvious and rewarded him with his life.

Now it appears that Speer was more calculating even than most thought. The letter makes clear that Speer knew exactly what the Nazis would do to the Jews, and cared so little that he helped them work prisoners to death. Essentially, Speer lived a lie for the last half of his life, aided and abetted by a credulous West that for some reason wanted to believe his strange protestations of innocence.

UPDATE: It wasn't Wannsee, as I initially wrote; Wannsee was January 1942.

Earmark Reform Out Of Vogue Already?

One of the few highlights of the 2006 election came in the form of renewed discussion of the corrosive power of pork-barrel spending. Both parties, despite having long histories of pork production, promised to champion earmark reform and new sunlight on appropriation processes in Congress. The Democrats won the majorities in both chambers, and those of us who demanded earmark reform hoped that we might finally see progress.

Unfortunately, we see cloudiness on a Sunshine Week, as Mark Tapscott pointed out today:

When I heard last week from Hill sources that the White House congressional liason staff was pressuring OMB Director Rob Portman to not release all of the earmarks requested by Members of Congress to executive agencies under the FY2005 budget, I called the OMB press office.

When I asked for a copy of the earmark database and copies of all correspondence between OMB and executive branch officials and Members and Hill staff, I was promised a call-back from a senior OMB spokesman. Not surprisingly, that call never came.

Now this morning, word is circulating on the Hill that the Bush administration is going to release only a limited database of earmarks later today or maybe no database at all, but just aggregate or summary data.

Seems the White House legislative staff fears releasing the database would offend members of the appropriation committees in Congress. So, the public gets the shaft, again, on a topic on which there is no doubt where the American people stand.

Oh, yes. For us mere peons to ask our lords and masters in Congress about how they plan to spend our money apparantly is an unforgivable faux pas, a horrid little lapse in manners. How dare we question the bill while they enjoy the feast! Why, it's tantamount to forcing them to talk with their mouths full!

As Mark explains in his update, OMB essentially reneged on a promise to identify earmarks by the requestors. They had made it clear that they would start building openness into the appropriations processes, but suddenly everyone seems rather gun-shy. The White House doesn't want to offend the new majorities, while the new majorities spend most of their time trying to embarrass the White House or to declare defeat in Iraq.

The Democrats, of course, could steal a march on the Republicans by demanding that all earmarks get identified by their sponsors. That would put the White House and OMB on the defensive, trying to explain their new policy of pork politesse in the face of Democratic demands for frank and open policy.

I'll just hold my breath until that happens.

Thompson Gets His First Frist Endorsement

With the growing rumors of a Fred Dalton Thompson run at the GOP nomination for the 2008 presidential race, it was only a matter of time before he started lining up endorsements. The first appears to be Bill Frist, his Tennessee colleague and friend, who announced on his blog that he wants to see Thompson jump into the race:

I believe Fred Thompson should run for President.

I've not talked with Fred personally about a potential run, so I am basing my thoughts simply on knowing him well, having worked with him in policy and politics everyday for 8 years, and knowing the people across America want a genuine leader who represents them.

Fred understands real people and they understand him. He understands the legislative process and has a strong bipartisan appeal, though he is a real conservative.

He has the experience of government service with a real appreciation for all three branches of government. He is a commonsense leader.

Bill Frist at one time wanted to be the Volunteer who volunteered for the race, but he generated enough friction in his term as Senate Majority Leader to push off those plans for at least one cycle. It's a shame that Frist couldn't make a better show of it; he has a good autobiography and an excellent presence on the dais. If one Tennesseean can't do it, though, Frist has no problem getting behind Thompson.

Does this help Thompson? I think it does. Frist may not have excited Republicans as a Presidential candidate, but he represents the center-right of the party pretty well. His endorsement may have influence on the one most important person in the equation -- Thompson himself.

Dennis Kucinich, Profile In Courage

Who would have guessed that of all the candidates in the Democratic presidential primary race, Dennis Kucinich would show the most testicular fortitude? The man who demands a Department of Peace and the establishment of "peace math", etc, called out his fellow Democrats for redeploying over the debate horizon after left-wing extremists demanded that they pull out of a debate televised by the Fox News Channel:

“If you want to be the President of the United States, you can’t be afraid to deal with people with whom you disagree politically,” Kucinich said. “No one is further removed from Fox’s political philosophy than I am, but fear should not dictate decisions that affect hundreds of millions of Americans and billions of others around the world who are starving for real leadership.”

Kucinich said “the public deserves honest, open, and fair public debate, and the media have a responsibility to demand that candidates come forward now, before the next war vote in Congress, to explain themselves.”

“I’m prepared to discuss the war, health care, trade, or any other issue anytime, anywhere, with any audience, answering any question from any media. And any candidate who won’t shouldn’t be President of the United States.”

Or, as I said earlier, how can we trust these men and women to defend the United States and stand up to Iran, North Korea, and Osama bin Laden when they run screeching from Roger Ailes and Fox's viewers?

Memo to Democrats: When Dennis Kucinich has to scold you for lacking courage, you need a serious search-and-rescue for your party's stones. (via Michelle Malkin and Sister Toldjah)

Journalism 101: Not A Prerequisite For The Los Angeles Times

The Los Angeles Times visits the bubbling controversy over Rudy Giuliani's judicial appointments to the municipal bench while mayor of New York City, an issue that has some conservatives concerned over his presidential aspirations. Giuliani has sworn to nominate strict constructionists to the federal appellate bench if elected President, but the Times finds four appointments -- out of 127 -- that fail to fit that mold. And Tom Hamburger and Adam Schreck manage to miss a critical fact about judicial appointments in their supposedly comprehensive look at Giuliani's appointments:

Rudolph W. Giuliani, in an effort to temper his support for abortion rights and his other socially liberal stances, has been assuring conservatives that as president he would appoint "strict constructionists" to the federal bench, in the tradition of Supreme Court jurists Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and John G. Roberts Jr.

But now, some prominent conservatives are saying that Giuliani's record as mayor undermines that promise. In his eight years leading New York City, they say, Giuliani appointed a number of judges who did not appear to fit the conservative mold.

Giuliani, who has surged to a double-digit lead in polls in the race for the GOP presidential nomination, appointed or reappointed 127 municipal judges. He has cited that experience to conservative audiences to drive home the importance he places on judicial nominations. Municipal judges sit in family court, hear misdemeanor cases in city criminal courts and hear civil court claims of less than $25,000.

"Rudy's judges were mostly liberal," said Connie Mackey, a former New Yorker who now serves as vice president of FRC Action, the legislative and political arm of the conservative Family Research Council. "Any pro-lifer who believes they are going to get the kind of judge out of Rudy Giuliani that we see in either Roberts or Alito is probably going to be disappointed."

Some constitutional law experts disagree with that conclusion. But there is no question that Giuliani's appointment record has already drawn concern from some conservatives.

In support of this thesis, Hamburger and Schreck look at a total of four appointments -- less than 4% of the total number of appointments Rudy made. Of these four, two get flagged for having sympathies for the gay community, one for being pro-choice, and the other for just being incompetent. One of his appointments, the openly gay Paula J. Hepner, got married in a civil ceremony in Canada.

While that may be enough for the Family Research Council to get the vapors, it ignores two salient points. First, municipal judges do not decide cases on issues of constitutionality. Hepner, the only one of the four judges to respond to the LAT, makes this point when she states that she never had to consider the text of the Constitution during 17 years on the municipal bench. Why? Because municipal judges deal in cases involving city laws, for the most part.

The second point is that the Times is apparently too lazy to research the appointment process in New York City. As I reported during CPAC, the mayor does not select the candidates himself. An independent panel selects three potential candidates for each judicial appointment, and the mayor has to select one of the three. That process is designed to keep personal politics at a minimum in the decision to appoint judges to the bench in the city. Hamburger and Shreck make no mention of this in their article, nor how that impacted the selection of judges by Giuliani.

It seems to me that a newspaper article that purports to investigate an issue should look at all of the facts relevant to the story, especially process-related facts. That requires actual research, however, something the pair apparently skipped. Most of the information in this article came from The Politico, which published its exposé on Rudy's judges more than a week ago. It only took me about thirty seconds of Googling to come up with this website, which lists the members of the Mayor's Advisory Committee on the Judiciary.

Journalists would have taken some time to understand the process, but it looks like the LA Times doesn't have any on staff.

The Democrats And CAIR

CAIR will hold an event in a tony venue tomorrow in the DC area, a panel discussion on the effect of global attitudes towards Islam on American policy. The venue? A conference room in the Capitol building, courtesy of New Jersey Democrat Bill Pascrell. The organization got access to the room despite the history of CAIR leadership in support of terrorism:

A House Democrat has arranged for a conference room in the Capitol building to be used tomorrow by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Muslim advocacy group criticized for its persistent refusal to disavow terrorist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah.

The District-based group also is singled out by other Democratic lawmakers and some law-enforcement officials because of financial ties to terrorists.

Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr., New Jersey Democrat, reserved the basement conference room for CAIR's panel discussion Tuesday titled "Global Attitudes on Islam-West Relations: U.S. Policy Implications." ...

CAIR officials have been charged with -- and some convicted of -- offenses related to the support of terrorism, including CAIR fundraiser Rabih Haddad, founding board member Ghassan Elashi and former CAIR civil rights coordinator Randall Royer.

CAIR's ties to terrorism have been outlined by Joe Kaufman at Front Page for some time. They first came to light when the Islamic organization attempted to hijack 9/11 donations by sending them to the Holy Land Foundation -- a "charity" that funded Hamas. After getting caught, CAIR explicitly noted that the funds would go to the HLF and to a new entity called Global Relief Foundation -- which sent money to Al-Qaeda and other related groups.

In other words, CAIR attempted to exploit the generosity of Americans towards the victims of 9/11 in order to send their money to the people who perpetrated it. Nice.

Now the House Democrats want this front group to conduct its business in the halls of the Capitol. One may wonder how New Jersey voters, who felt the impact of 9/11 as much as New Yorkers, will feel about Pascrell's invitation. Even prominent liberal Democrats like Chuck Schumer understand the nature of CAIR. Schumer stated categorically that CAIR had ties to terrorism, specifically to Hamas.

Is this the new focus on national security that the Democrats promised in 2006? Allowing terrorist apologists to use Capitol Hill to conduct their business hardly seems like getting tough on terrorists.

A Funny Thing Happened On The Way Home From The March

Robert Novak points out some inconsistencies in Hillary Clinton's proclaimed personal history on the campaign trail. The woman who famously claimed to have been named after Sir Edmund Hillary after his ascent to the top of Mount Everest -- which happened when she was eight years old -- has attempted another bit of revisionism, this time on civil rights. After her attempt last week in Selma to drawl out her teenage epiphany from listening to Martin Luther King in 1963, Novak notes that she supported one of King's opponents:

While Hillary Rodham Clinton came out second best to Barack Obama in their oratorical duel at Selma, Ala., a week ago, the real problem with her speech concerned her claimed attachment to Martin Luther King Jr. as a high school student in 1963. How, then, could she have been a "Goldwater Girl" during the following year's presidential election?

The incompatibility of those two facts was pointed out to me by Democratic old-timers who were shocked by Clinton's temerity in pursuing her presidential candidacy. Barry Goldwater's opposition to the 1964 voting rights bill was not incidental to his run for the White House but an integral element of conscious departure from Republican tradition that contributed to his disastrous performance. ...

Speaking at Selma's First Baptist Church on the 42nd anniversary of the "Bloody Sunday" freedom march, Clinton declared: "As a young girl, I had the great privilege of hearing Dr. King speak in Chicago. The year was 1963. My youth minister from our church took a few of us down on a cold January night to hear [King]. . . . And he called on us, he challenged us that evening to stay awake during the great revolution that the civil rights pioneers were waging on behalf of a more perfect union."

Young Hillary Rodham answered that challenge the next year as the 17-year-old class president at Maine East High School in the Chicago suburbs. She described herself in her memoirs as "an active Young Republican" and "a Goldwater girl, right down to my cowgirl outfit." As a politically attuned honor student, she must have known that Goldwater was one of only six Republican senators who joined Southern Democratic segregationists opposing the historic Voting Rights Act, which King inspired.

Oops! Does the nation's First Black President know about this?

Hillary has shown signs of panic after the advent of Barack Obama as a potential contender for the nomination. This just provides yet another example of her anxiety. She expected the nomination this year to be a cakewalk, a coronation that would carry her on the shoulders of adoring throngs back to the White House. Now that she faces a real political fight, she appears unprepared and bumbling.

The Selma appearance reveals a little of the real Hillary. She has the same kind of authenticity issues that plagued Al Gore. The Edmund Hillary whopper showed that she has the same affinity for tall tales, but the Selma appearance puts her in a league of her own. She attempted a Southern accent that sounded more like Larry the Cable Guy rather than Scarlett O'Hara, and phonier than a three-dollar bill. If that wasn't bad enough, she attempted to assume the mantle of King while forgetting that her biography clearly shows her supporting Goldwater and, presumably, his opposition to the civil-rights legislation a year after her supposed epiphany.

At one time, I presumed that Hillary would win the nomination easily. Now I'm not so sure. She seems almost too incompetent to beat the smooth and skilled Barack Obama, at least on the stump.

Gonzalez Takes Fire From All Sides

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has begun taking fire from both Democrats and Republicans for the actions of the Department of Justice. While Senator Chuck Schumer called for his resignation yesterday over the firings of eight US Attorneys and the errors made by the FBI in domestic surveillance, Republican Congressman Thomas Davis accused Gonzales of stonewalling on dropped leak cases:

The top Republican on the House's main investigative committee, Rep. Thomas Davis of Virginia, is charging the Justice Department with stonewalling his inquiries about the FBI's assertion that it closed several leak investigations because of a lack of cooperation on the part of other government officials.

In January, Mr. Davis asked the Justice Department about a report in The New York Sun that at least three leak inquiries were shut down after officials at the "victim agency" ignored phone calls and canceled meetings with FBI agents assigned to the probes. The agents said some requests for information were rebuffed for more than a year.

On Friday, the lawmaker, the ranking Republican member of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, sent a sharply worded letter to Attorney General Gonzales, expressing "aggravation" at the Justice Department's handling of questions about the aborted investigations.

"General Gonzales, it would be an understatement to say I am frustrated and disappointed by your department's response," Mr. Davis wrote. Mr. Davis said he would agree to procedures for a classified briefing, but that the Justice Department replied that "the concern is not classification." Mr. Davis's letter also disclosed that the director of the FBI, Robert Mueller, is conducting an internal review of the bureau's handling of leak cases.

Schumer told "Face the Nation" that the firings of eight US Attorneys with otherwise good performance evaluations had politicized the DoJ. Arlen Specter, a frequent Republican critic of the administration, did not go quite so far, but agreed that Justice had "lots of problems", leaving the question of resignation to Gonzales and George Bush. Charges of politicization picked up steam yesterday when the White House acknowledged that Karl Rove had involved himself in the firing process in at least some of the dismissed federal prosecutors:

The new details about Rove's involvement emerged as the top Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee declared their interest in talking to him.

The committee is trying to determine whether the firings were part of an effort to exert political control over federal prosecutors. Democrats consider Rove the key source for any political interference at the Justice Department because of his role at the center of politics and policy in the White House.

Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., and Linda Sanchez, D-Calif., confirmed their plans after McClatchy Newspapers reported Saturday that New Mexico's Republican Party chairman, Allen Weh, had complained to Rove and one of Rove's deputies about Iglesias.

As I have noted before, the position of US Attorney is a presidential appointment, and as such is a political position. US Attorneys serve four-year terms, not coincidental to presidential terms of office. They have to get confirmed by the Senate, just as with any other high-level appointment, but they serve at the pleasure of the President. Since their terms of office expire roughly along that of the President, they usually get replaced when a new President takes office.

All that said, federal prosecutors rarely get replaced mid-term unless specific performance shortcomings reveal themselves. When they do get replaced, new prosecutors only had, under previous law, 120 days to serve on an interim basis before getting confirmed by the Senate through the normal appointment process. That requirement changed last last year in a little-noticed codicil to a homeland-security bill, which allowed Gonzales to replace prosecutors for an indefinite term without Senate oversight. As soon as the law took effect, Gonzales forced the resignations of almost 10% of all US Attorneys, a rather unusual move with unusual timing.

The FBI and leak cases have less to do with Gonzales and more to do with Robert Mueller and other agencies in the bureaucracy. FBI agents broke rules governing the kind of information they could retrieve under the looser restrictions of the Patriot Act, and then underreported the problem to Congress. The FBI is a part of the DoJ, but Mueller runs the FBI and is responsible for its operation. Gonzales may not have responded quickly enough for Davis, but the problem with the leak investigations is less one of enthusiasm at Justice than it is in finding witnesses willing to speak to investigators. The agencies where leaks occurred have not cooperated with the FBI, and if any Cabinet-level officials should take responsibility for that, it should be those who run those agencies, not Gonzales.

Gonzales needs to answer for the dismissals of the prosecutors and the manner in which they were handled, however. It seems highly suspect that the AG suddenly decided to clean house just after the requirement for Senate confirmation got waived on interim appointments, a change that the White House now says it will not defend from reversal by this session of Congress. It's not illegal to replace federal prosecutors for political reasons, but it's foolish to do so as baldly as Gonzales appears to have done -- especially when the White House has to work with a Congress newly captured by an opposition party eager to launch investigations as Helen launched ships from Greece.

UPDATE: The Wall Street Journal has similar thoughts about the incompetence at Justice:

Just when President Bush seemed to have beaten back the Congressional defeatists on Iraq, along comes his own Justice Department to undermine some hard-won antiterror policy gains. The incompetence at Justice is getting to be expensive for Presidential power.

The latest episode involves the FBI's failure to adequately supervise the issuance of so-called "national security letters," or administrative subpoenas for counterterrorism cases that don't require a judge's approval. Congress authorized these letters in 1986 and their scope was expanded as part of the 2001 Patriot Act. An Inspector General's audit has found that some of these subpoenas were improperly issued, and that the FBI lacked the means even to monitor how many were issued, leading to misreporting to Congress. ...

In particular, the Bush Administration shouldn't now give in to any such demands merely to appease Congress or save the jobs of Messrs. Mueller or Gonzales.

We raise that possibility because this is what seems to have happened after Justice's other recent fiasco over the firing of eight U.S. attorneys last December. Last week, under pressure from Congress, Mr. Gonzales said he and Mr. Bush wouldn't object if Congress wanted to strip him of his ability to replace U.S. attorneys without Senate confirmation and give that power to a district court judge. While a similar process prevailed before the Patriot Act, we think the ability to hire and fire attorneys is a core executive power that should not be abandoned to unelected judges.

Incompetence leads to many bad ends, and bad policy certainly is one of them.

Another Billionaire Independent Bid?

Michael Bloomberg, New York Citry's billionaire mayor, will consider a run for the Presidency as an independent if he feels the two major-party nominees are too extreme, according to a key ally. His deputy mayor also keeps talking up an outsider bid, even though Bloomberg won the mayor's office as a Republican:

Mayor Bloomberg is 80% likely to launch a bid for the White House if the two major candidates come from the "extreme wings" of their party, one of his first-term advisers said.

The comment from a Columbia University professor, Ester Fuchs, keeps alive the notion that Mr. Bloomberg is mulling the possibility of entering the 2008 race even as the Democrats and Republicans who have already declared are traveling the country and campaigning.

According to ABC News, which reported the comment on its Web site, Ms. Fuchs said it was "80% probable" that Mr. Bloomberg would run as an independent if both major parties put up extreme candidates. She cited Senator Edwards, a Democrat, and Mitt Romney, a Republican and former governor of Massachusetts, as nominees who would make Mr. Bloomberg's candidacy a possibility, ABC reported. ...

Until now, one of Mr. Bloomberg's deputy mayors, Kevin Sheekey, has taken the chief role of fanning the Bloomberg-for-president speculation. Having other allies such as Ms. Fuchs outline scenarios under which he would run adds credence to the idea that he is seriously considering the matter. It also helps keep him relevant during his second, and final, term as mayor.

Perhaps Bloomberg sees himself as the next Ross Perot. Similarities exist between the two. Both amassed large fortunes in business, and both see themselves as some sort of savior for the centrists. Both argued against the "extremes" of Democrats and Republicans.

The whole idea seems rather strange. Mitt Romney hardly qualifies as an extremist, and John Edwards hardly qualifies as a candidate. Bloomberg wants attention, and this certainly gives him better coverage than his tenure as mayor. Bloomberg has spent much of that time trying to enforce silly and onerous anti-smoking laws and pursuing other personal pet peeves. He remains a popular mayor, but more than half of all New Yorkers insist they would not support him for President.

If he did run, he could do tremendous damage, just like Perot. Thanks to the Texan with the short stature and oversized ego, Bill Clinton managed to beat the first President Bush while garnering only 43% of the popular vote, as Perot leached support away from the Republicans. Bloomberg has an even larger fortune, and as Larry Sabato notes, he could pay for a presidential run out of his own pocket, bypassing the need for fund-raising. Could he have the same impact as Perot? Probably not, but with elections running on razor-thin margins the last few years, he wouldn't have to do so in order to change the results.

Should Israel Go Public With Its Nukes?

It's a question that Ehud Olmert almost made moot last year, after an inartful public statement referred to Israel's nuclear capabilities, but one with even greater strategic implications now. Should Israel reveal its nuclear weapons capability and spell out the terms for its use -- namely, that a strike on Israel by Iran would get a response in kind? Some apparently believe that a Middle Eastern MAD scenario could cool Iranian ardor for their own nukes:

Israel should pursue a strategy of "open nuclear deterrence" towards Iran if international attempts to curtail Teheran's nuclear ambitions fail, a London think tank argues in a report to be released Monday.

Openly declaring its nuclear weapons stockpile and laying out the conditions of their use in the event of an Iranian attack is an option worth considering, a report published by the Royal Institute for International Affairs (Chatham House) stated, "if it is conceded that diplomatic efforts are doomed to fail, yet the price of war is too high."

Of all the options available to Israel to counter the Iranian nuclear threat, "the military option is the least desirable" as a strike against Iran "might push an already volatile Middle East into further hostilities, uniting anti-Western groups worldwide" against Israel and the US while "isolating moderate Muslim forces," the report states.

Would an Israeli declaration of nuclear strategy help settle Iran? Perhaps, but it has at least an equal shot at making the situation worse. Israel has avoided most non-proliferation criticism simply by keeping its capabilities secret. Exposing them now would also expose Israel to more nonsense from UN antagonists, plus add a healthy dose of rationalization to Iran's push for nukes as well.

As the report states, if nothing stops Iran from building nukes, then Israel has to focus on stopping them from using nukes -- against Israel. The US might fire nuclear weapons at Iran if they fire nukes first, but that is far from certain. The missiles would have to be aimed at American territory before the White House could order a retaliatory strike, at least without Congressional approval. The US might be more concerned with containing a nuclear exchange than in joining one.

The Israelis could make it clear that they have no interest in containment after the first nuclear missiles have flown. If the Iranians construct their own warheads, they already have the Shahab-3 on which to carry them as far as Tel Aviv, and perhaps much farther than that. Once the Iranians have that capability, the Israelis can't do themselves any harm by explicitly stating that they will launch a nuclear attack on any nation that shoots missiles in their direction. It might make for a good reminder for a couple of other nations in the neighborhood, too.

Thompson Says He's On Call

Newt Gingrich has reviled the extended primary season, calling it a jobs program for political consultants. Although widely expected to run for the presidency himself, he insists he will not make any announcements until autumn. Observers believe that this could be a brilliant strategy to allow the current front-runners to tire themselves out and jump into the race as a white knight just before the primaries.

It seems that Gingrich may not be the only Republican thinking along those lines:

WALLACE: There's been a lot of buzz, as we said, in Republican circles that there's no true conservative in the GOP presidential field. Now some top Republicans, including your friend former Tennessee senator Howard Baker, are putting out trial balloons about you possibly entering the race.

Question: Are you considering running for president in 2008?

THOMPSON: I'm giving some thought to it. Going to leave the door open.

WALLACE: Well, you say leaving the door open. What's going to go into your decision-making process, what factors? Why would you do it? And what do you see — do you see some holes in the current Republican field?

THOMPSON: It's not really a reflection on the current field at all. As you know, some of them are very good friends of mine. I'm going to wait and see how it pans out, see how they do, how it develops.

A lot of people think it's late already. I don't really think it is, although the rules of the game have changed somewhat.

I'm sorry I missed this interview when it aired, although I'm not sorry for the reason I missed it; we took the Little Admiral to Disney on Ice. Some things are more important than politics, even presidential politics.

It's a fascinating interview nonetheless, and Thompson seems very open to a draft of some kind. He refused to talk about his intentions, demurring on even having intentions at this stage. He wants to see where the other candidates take the race before making a decision on coming back from Hollywood to get star billing in 2008. That sounds like a strategy along the one presumed to be used by Gingrich -- to play white knight.

Thompson also had no trouble talking policy, even if some of the current crop of candidates have had some reservations about stating their positions in clear terms. On abortion, Thompson declared himself pro-life, and he also opposes gun control, two issues with which Republicans have issues with the current front-runner, Rudy Giuliani. He opposes comprehensive immigration reform as it is currently understood; he wants border enforcement first before any other considerations.

Chris Wallace asked him about campaign finance reform. He still considers soft money to be a huge problem and believes it should be regulated. That leaves a lot of space between that and the current state of the BCRA, but he's not asking for a repeal at this point.

Thompson appears to be ready for a run, if he sees an opening. Is it there? It could be. If he starts organizing, I know I'd like to hear what he has to say -- as long as it doesn't conflict with Disney princesses and the Little Admiral, of course.

Addendum: If anyone has contact information for Senator Thompson, I'd love to get it.

If America Wins In Iraq And No One Reports It, Will It Make A Difference?

The Washington Post, among other news outlets, made a stink last week about the lack of a publicly-stated Plan B in the event the surge strategy failed to make a difference in Iraq. However, with preliminary indications showing success, Robert Kagan wonders whether journalists have a Plan B for themselves:

Leading journalists have been reporting for some time that the war was hopeless, a fiasco that could not be salvaged by more troops and a new counterinsurgency strategy. The conventional wisdom in December held that sending more troops was politically impossible after the antiwar tenor of the midterm elections. It was practically impossible because the extra troops didn't exist. Even if the troops did exist, they could not make a difference.

Four months later, the once insurmountable political opposition has been surmounted. The nonexistent troops are flowing into Iraq. And though it is still early and horrible acts of violence continue, there is substantial evidence that the new counterinsurgency strategy, backed by the infusion of new forces, is having a significant effect. ...

Apparently some American journalists see the difference. NBC's Brian Williams recently reported a dramatic change in Ramadi since his previous visit. The city was safer; the airport more secure. The new American strategy of "getting out, decentralizing, going into the neighborhoods, grabbing a toehold, telling the enemy we're here, start talking to the locals -- that is having an obvious and palpable effect." U.S. soldiers forged agreements with local religious leaders and pushed al-Qaeda back -- a trend other observers have noted in some Sunni-dominated areas. The result, Williams said, is that "the war has changed."

It is no coincidence that as the mood and the reality have shifted, political currents have shifted as well. A national agreement on sharing oil revenue appears on its way to approval. The Interior Ministry has been purged of corrupt officials and of many suspected of torture and brutality. And cracks are appearing in the Shiite governing coalition -- a good sign, given that the rock-solid unity was both the product and cause of growing sectarian violence.

The defeatists have received large boosts from journalists all too willing to write about the successes of the insurgents but mostly silent on the successes of the Coalition. This may have been especially true in 2006, which did not go well for the Coalition, but got portrayed as an unmitigated failure in the American media during the 2006 election campaign. It made little difference in the end -- the Republicans did more to ensure their defeat domestically than anything that happened in Iraq -- but the result has left the media screeching like harpies that the mission in Iraq is doomed. Democratic leadership has taken the ball and wants to run with it in Congress, but only if they can do so without actually accepting responsibility for the retreat they demand.

If the surge succeeds, journalists won't be the only people who need a Plan B.

Wars occasionally produce negative, short-term results -- occasionally as in "frequently". The point of a war isn't to win every gun battle and force a surrender within 30 minutes. Iraq is not Grenada, and if it were, it wouldn't matter nearly as much to our national interests and global security.

The mission in Iraq is critical, and failure fatal. The collapse of Iraq would create a terrorist haven exponentially more dangerous than Somalia or Afghanistan, with oil revenues gorging terrorists on the hard currency they need to launch attacks all over the world. That's the reality now, the one we have to face, and that means we have to find ways to defeat the insurgencies and allow the elected, representative Iraqi government to gain enough strength to take control on their own.

Petraeus' counterinsurgency strategy seems to be showing remarkable results. Talking about defeat and retreat while we have not finished playing out our hand would represent an unprecedent capitulation by the US to an enemy in the field -- and not an enemy like Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, or the Soviets, with a military that should frighten us -- but an enemy that has so little support and so few combatants that they dare not show their face to American troops in the streets of their own cities.

Plan B should be victory by another means, not defeat by surrender to terrorists.

Iran Economic Decline Accelerates

The Iranians, rich in oil but poor in refining capacity, has imposed a gasoline-rationing program and increased the prices for fuel as a result of its continuing economic collapse. The decline comes in part from increasingly effective international sanctions, but mostly result from the economic lunacy psuhed by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to achieve Iranian self-sufficiency:

Iranians are bracing themselves for a fresh round of belt tightening after their government voted to impose petrol rationing coupled with sharp rises in the price of fuel.

The rationing system will limit Iranians to 22 gallons (100 litres) of petrol a month, two full tanks for a typical family car. It is a direct result of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's adherence to an economic model, based on Iranian self-sufficiency, that has caused housing and other living costs to soar.

The basic price of petrol will rise by 25 per cent, but Iranians who need to use more than the permitted amount will be hit by rises of up to 450 per cent.

Economists predict that the knock-on effect on the average Iranian will be dramatic, with retailers expected to pass on the additional costs to consumers.

For those Americans who lived through the 1970s, this will seem very familiar indeed. The price of gasoline acts as a force multiplier in the economy, as goods have to move through the various stages of the market. Transportation costs skyrocket, inflating prices at each stage of the distribution channel. At the same time, consumers have significantly less money to spend, thanks to their own fuel costs, and also due to rising unemployment as producers try to contain other costs to offset the impact of staggering increases in energy bills.

Welcome to stagflation. We've been there, and bought the t-shirts.

In fact, we managed to fight our way out of stagflation by relying on the free market, rather than imposing more government regulation. The Iranians show no sign of thinking in that vein, even if they didn't have limitations from the international sanctions boxing them into a corner with very few options. Ahmadinejad instead doubled down on central economic control when he should have put more money into oil refining capacity, especially during the time when the West dawdled on sanctions over the nuclear program.

It's too late now, and the Iranians will start paying a heavy price for the nation's drive to create a nuclear weapon. Inflation will bankrupt most of its citizens, and the government will have the added burden of feeding an increasingly impoverished nation. So much for Iranian self-sufficiency. So much for Ahmadinomics.

The Friends Of Ali Reza Asgari, Part II

The defection of Iranian intelligence officer Ali Reza Asgari did not represent a recent flip of a spy chief as first presumed. The Times of London reports that Asgari worked as a mole for years, passing information to the West, until he could get his family out of Iran and escape:

AN Iranian general who defected to the West last month had been spying on Iran since 2003 when he was recruited on an overseas business trip, according to Iranian sources.

This weekend Brigadier General Ali Reza Asgari, 63, the former deputy defence minister, is understood to be undergoing debriefing at a Nato base in Germany after he escaped from Iran, followed by his family.

A daring getaway via Damascus was organised by western intelligence agencies after it became clear that his cover was about to be blown. Iran’s notorious secret service, the Vavak, is believed to have suspected that he was a high-level mole.

According to the Iranian sources, the escape took several months to arrange. At least 10 close members of his family had to flee the country. Asgari has two sons, a daughter and several grandchildren and it is believed that all, including his daughters-in-law, are now out of Iran. Their final destination is unknown.

Asgari is said to have carried with him documents disclosing Iran’s links to terrorists in the Middle East. It is not thought that he had details of the country’s nuclear programme.

This explains a few points that seemed rather unclear at first. Iran's insistence on publicly identifying Asgari and pursuing his disappearance through Interpol seemed rather odd. When key members of the intelligence service drop off the face of the earth, their countries generally try to use lower-key methods to retrieve them, without tipping off too many other people to their disappearance -- especially if one suspects that they may have turned double agent. In this case, Iran knew it had nothing left to lose by going public, especially after Asgari's family slipped away.

Asgari must have provided a wealth of information to his handling agency, whose identity remains unclear. The Times suspects the Mossad, perhaps with a more acceptable (to an Iranian) Western intel agency as a middleman. Asgari might not have information on the nuclear-weapons program, but he has plenty of data on Iranian support for terrorism, especially Hezbollah, and probably good data on other weapons systems and unit dispositions for the Revolutionary Guard. No one has mentioned this yet, but an officer at that level of the intelligence service might also have some information on crypto, which would be a devastating blow to operational security for Iranian military and intelligence agencies.

However, it seems pretty clear now that Asgari has come close to the end of his usefulness. His defection ends his value as a mole; we assumed that he had defected in order to get us information, but it really leaves us a little more blind from February 7th onwards. He will be able to analyze information coming out of Iran for Western intel agencies and his experience will prove valuable, but having Asgari inside the Iranian establishment was a much better situation for us than having him outside of it.

The defection embarrasses Teheran, and it will touch off destructive mole hunts and damage control purges that almost certainly will reduce the readiness and effectiveness of its military and intel organizations. It makes the mullahcracy look like a bunch of amateurs playing at Great Game aspirations, and it further undermines their credibility at home. The only positive for Teheran is that Asgari can no longer get new information to the West, but that may well be akin to locking the barn door after the horse has bolted -- and leaving Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to clean up the stable.

The Quagmire Continues

After eight years of dawdling and paper shuffling, the UN finally resolved to do something about Kosovo's status. It elected to keep dawdling and shuffling paper:

A year of contentious talks on the future status of Kosovo ended Saturday in a bitter deadlock over a U.N. plan that would set the disputed Serbian province on the road to independence.

Serbia's nationalist prime minister, Vojislav Kostunica, warned of "the most dangerous precedent in the history of the U.N." if the Security Council -- which will have the final say -- approves the plan.

Kostunica said the blueprint, which would grant Kosovo supervised statehood and elements of independence including its own army, flag, anthem and constitution, could encourage other independence-minded regions around the world to break away. Serbian President Boris Tadic said he found the idea of parting with the province "unbearable."

Kosovo has been a U.N. protectorate since 1999, when NATO airstrikes on Belgrade ended a Serbian crackdown on ethnic Albanian separatists in the southern province. The U.N. plan is an attempt to resolve the final major dispute remaining after Yugoslavia's bloody 1990s breakup.

In 1999, the UN bombed Belgrade because the ethnic Albanians tried to break Kosovo away from Serbia, and the Serbians used force to stop them. Given the Serbs' predilection for ethnic warfare at the time, the UN reacted quickly to prevent another ethnic cleansing and to freeze the status quo. Ever since, the situation has remained in diplomatic amber, and the UN remains stuck in the middle of it.

Eight years has changed nothing. The ethnic Albanians still want their own nation in Kosovo, and the Serbians refuse to part with it. Another eight years will probably produce the same result. Neither side will give an inch on the main issue, which is independence for Kosovo. Both sides remain absolutely committed to the outcome they desire and will not negotiate away their demands.

Imagine if the UN existed in 1860, and blue-helmeted soldiers occupied the Mason-Dixon line after the shots were fired at Fort Sumter, or perhaps after First Manassas. Would either the South or the North conceded on their demands? How long would it have been before either Lincoln allowed the South to secede, or for Jefferson Davis to concede sovereignty back to Washington DC? And that conflict was neither ethnic nor religious in nature, and the history of our nation only went back four score and four years, at that point -- not centuries filled with conflict between the two sides, as in Kosovo and the Balkans in general.

The UN may or may not have stopped a genocide; it's safe to assume they did, given the Serbian leadership at the time. However, they have done nothing to resolve the underlying conflict that started the war, and given the diametrically opposed sides in the conflict, they don't have that capability at all. The UN went in without a plan, and now their only strategy appears to be to bore everyone with an extended deployment of peacekeepers, whose ability to keep the peace has been shown to be somewhat limited in any case.

If that really is their strategy, the UN will have to deploy there for generations or centuries, as the 40-year reign of Joseph Tito didn't solve the underlying crisis, either -- and his troops were much more effective in keeping the peace than the blue helmets in Kosovo today.