Day Two Of Transplant

Nothing much new to report on Day Two of the new transplant. The First Mate has been moved to a regular room, and her vital signs continue to look good. She didn't want a lot of conversation today, so as I remarked earlier, my sister and I mostly worked on our computers and watched Bob Newhart Show DVDs. The FM just wanted the company, and has mostly rested or slept the entire day.

I visited the donor and his wife for a while today, until he tired out this afternoon. He's doing remarkably well. They still think he may go home tomorrow, but if not, Monday at the latest. He's looking forward to the NCAA semifinals tonight, and I think he's hoping for a Florida-Ohio State matchup in the finals. He'll get more rest tonight and we will all get together tomorrow.

For those who are interested in the technical details, which are all looking excellent, the new kidney produces around 300-400 cc of urine each hour. The FM's blood pressure has been excellent, but her blood sugar has been high. That's not indicating a problem with her pancreas, but a normal reaction to the high doses of steroids she gets in the first few days after surgery. Except for some nausea, everything has been going according to plan.

The Great Rimpau Medical Co-Op Experiment

One of the ways we're passing the time here at the hospital is watching DVDs of classic TV shows, and today we're watching the Bob Newhart Show. The third season DVD has an episode called "The Great Rimpau Medical Arts Co-Op Experiment," a very funny episode from 1974 which shows the result of the various doctors in the office forming a co-op for medical care between the associates and their families.

The episode starts with Bob complaining that the plastic surgeon on the floor of his office charged him $85 to remove a wart. That got everyone talking about forming a co-op for free medical care. However, as soon as they did, everyone started filling each other's schedules with a never-ending stream of complaints. Bob tries to organize everyone into group therapy, with disastrous results.

It occurred to me while I watched this play out to its comedic conclusion that the episode provides an object lesson in the rationing of services. When a rational basis for regulating the demand for services is removed, the demand increases exponentially. Without that regulating force of money, the demand far outstrips the supply, creating shortages. It shows that money offers an objective control on demand so that the market can have flexibility in increasing supply and benefitting suppliers in a manner that barter simply cannot. Without it, there is no objective way in which to prioritize and ration access to services.

There's a lesson in there for advocates of single-payor systems and nationalized health care, in which decisions on rationing get transferred to the government rather than the consumer or supplier. It's not a direct analogy, but the episode certainly suggests an example for that as well.

NARN, The Transplant Edition

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.

In the earliest days of the NARN, we used to use JB Doubtless' on-air exclamation about "urine-soaked drunks" riding the public transportation system in the Twin Cities as part of our intro. It seems we've gone full circle, because I plan to talk about the urine production of the First Mate during today's show. We'll also be talking about how Nancy Pelosi plans to piss away our alliance with the Turks, how the Senate Democrats managed to dribble out a win on the mandatory timetables for a withdrawal from Iraq, whether the British can hold their water in the crisis over Iran's capture of their sailors, and the general incontinence of Democrat budgeting.

Be sure to call and join the conversation today at 651-289-4488. Kidney and urine allusions are strictly optional.

UPDATE: I've decided to stick around the hospital today, but be sure to tune in to Mitch.

Feed A Foe, Starve A Friend

Let me see if I get this straight. The Democrats want to condemn Turkey for a genocide that the Ottoman Empire committed before the Turks overthrew them, in order to invest Congress with a certain level of moral authority, if not historical illiteracy. At the same time, Nancy Pelosi -- who has pushed for the condemnation of our Muslim ally in the war on terror -- now wants to fly to Damascus to hang on the words of our enemy in the same war (via the indispenable Memeorandum):

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) will visit Syria next week, her office announced yesterday, prompting the White House to call the trip "a really bad idea." ...

The White House accuses Syria of sponsoring state terrorism and of fanning sectarian violence in Iraq. The Bush administration has cut off most high-level contacts with Damascus since former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri was assassinated in February 2005. A United Nations prosecutor has implicated Syrian officials in the Hariri slaying.

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said yesterday of Pelosi's visit: "Someone should take a step back and think about the message that it sends and the message that it sends to our allies."

Allies? Nancy Pelosi doesn't think we have any, or thinks that the ones we do have are useless. She wants to deliberately antagonize Turkey at a point in time where we need their cooperation, but at the same time wants to suck up to a man who funds, shelters, and organizes the Islamist terrorists who target Israel, the US, and the West.

Is this the kind of foreign policy we can expect from the Democrats if they win the White House in 2008? What kind of message does this send to our allies and enemies? If you work with us, we'll abandon you at the first opportunity, as well as sneer at you for actions your government never took. On the other hand, if you hate us and support religious lunatics in their efforts to murder as many of us and other Westerners as possible, we'll fly to your capitals and prostrate ourselves before you in the name of "diplomacy".

Want to guess which direction this will motivate other nations to turn?

The Democratic leadership has once again demonstrated why no one took them seriously on foreign policy and national security for the last twenty years. It's difficult to achieve this conjunction of idiocy in a single week, but Pelosi & Co have proven themselves just the idiots for the task.

Olmert To Arabs: You Broke It, You Own It

Ehud Olmert has made it clear to the Arabs pushing the 2002 Saudi peace initiative that Israel will not accept even a single Palestinian refugee under a notion of "right of return". Olmert stated yesterday that the Arab nations created the refugee problem with their multinational war of annihilation against Israel, and they can deal with its consequences now:

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said in interviews published Friday that Israel would not allow a single Palestinian refugee to return to what is now Israel, and that the country bore no responsibility for the refugees because their plight resulted from an attack by Arab nations on Israel when it was a fledgling state. ...

In an interview with The Jerusalem Post, Mr. Olmert seemed to rule out any negotiation on refugees. He would not accept any notional Palestinian “right of return” to their homes, telling the newspaper: “I’ll never accept a solution that is based on their return to Israel, any number.”

Mr. Olmert said that the refugee problem was caused by the Arab attack on Israel in 1948 and called it “a moral issue of the highest standard.” He said: “I will not agree to accept any kind of Israeli responsibility for the refugees. Full stop.”

Then he added: “I don’t think we should accept any kind of responsibility for the creation of this problem. Full stop.” He said the return of even one Palestinian refugee to Israel was “out of the question.”

Olmert went farther than Ehud Barak did during his negotiations with Bill Clinton and Yasser Arafat. In those talks, Barak agreed to a suymbolic return of a small number of refugees if the Palestinians would then agree to a compensation system for the rest of the original refugees. Arafat later rejected the settlement that Barak offered, calling for an intifada instead that claimed thousands of lives in the years since.

Israel understands that the right of return means the end of Israel. The Palestinians would flood into Israel with full voting rights, and they would overthrow the Israeli government and send Jews fleeing for their lives -- again. Any national security system would be destroyed within hours of the return, and Palestinian terrorist groups would have a field day targeting Israelis. It would be preferable for Israel to annex the West Bank instead, although it would eventually produce the same results.

The Arabs know this, too, which is why any initiative that includes a right of return cannot be taken seriously. If the Arabs want to insist on this, they are just posing for domestic consumption. If they seriously want peace, then they have to acknowledge their own complicity in keeping the Palestinians as refugees for their own political purposes rather tham just insisting on a return of the West Bank to Jordan, to which it belonged prior to the 1967 war. Jordan then could declare it a free state on its own.

The entire sad history of Arab futility feeds this demand that Israel grant in peace what the Arabs could not win in war. Even a rather weak leader like Ehud Olmert understands that Israel cannot survive a massive migration of their sworn enemies into their country, and no nation could. If that means the Arab nations want to remain in a state of cold war with Israel, then so be it -- but we will take them seriously only when Saudi Arabia allows a massive migration of Jews and Christians into Mecca.

Willy Wanker And His Chocolate Factory

The display of a life-size, anatomically correct Jesus at an Easter exhibition has been cancelled after a meltdown by Christian critics, including William Donahue of the Catholic League. The hotel in which the exhibition would have appeared booted the display after people began organizing a boycott:

A Manhattan art gallery canceled on Friday its Easter-season exhibit of a life-size chocolate sculpture depicting a naked Jesus, after an outcry by Roman Catholics.

The sculpture "My Sweet Lord" by Cosimo Cavallaro was to have been exhibited for two hours each day next week in a street-level window of the Roger Smith Lab Gallery in Midtown Manhattan.

The display had been scheduled to open on Monday, days ahead of Good Friday when Christians mark the crucifixion of Jesus. But protests including a call to boycott the affiliated Roger Smith Hotel forced the gallery to scrap the showing.

Numerous bloggers have already weighed in on this controversy, and Joe Gandelman has prepared a balanced roundup. Michelle Malkin and My Pet Jawa both make the comparison to the expected Muslim reaction to a naked, genitalia-displaying chocolate Mohammed during Ramadan -- or Eid, or any day ending in a Y, for that matter. Preemptive Karma and Best Week Ever claim that it perfectly satirizes the contemporary Christian celebration of Easter as thoroughly commercialized, with chocolate bunnies taking center stage rather than the resurrected Lord.

If that's the basis for the chocolate Jesus, though, it's rather thin. No doubt that many people, most of them Christians, spend tons of money on sweets and indulge silly fantasies about magical rabbits when celebrating Easter. If that's all they did, it would be worthy of satire. However, almost all of that is employed to give small children a day of fun, a little bit of joy that does no one any harm and gives dentists some extra work. Christians who celebrate Easter are most likely to also spend the day in worship of God and in thanks for the sacrifice they consider the bedrock of their faith, and in gatherings of family to commemorate the day.

The artist could have made his satirical point in any case without showing the genitalia of the crucified Christ. That was needlessly provocative, and certainly intentional. As one person put it, who wouldn't have expected controversy over that particular artistic choice? The artist's assertion that Catholics should let him off with ten Hail Marys after he asks their forgoveness also shows a cluelessness about the Catholic faith. Penance only works when the sinner has truly repented and admitted his sins. It's not a price list for offenses in that the commission of a particular sin costs 10 Hail Marys each time you commit it. For Cosimo Cavallaro to get any benefit from his 10 Hail Marys, he'd have to destroy the chocolate Jesus first.

However, I wouldn't demand that in any case. I can't peer into his soul to determine whether he meant to be deliberately sacrilegious or is just an idiot who didn't know any better. What the Catholics and other Christians did was perfectly legitimate -- boycotting the host and sponsors of exhibits they find offensive. They didn't toss bombs at embassies or threated to destroy New York for blasphemy. Given the sympathetic press that Muslims around the world received for doing exactly that -- including the murder of a Catholic nun -- after the publication of editorial cartoons that depicted Muhammed, the sympathy granted to Cavallaro for his "oppression" in this seems far out of balance to the event.

A Week In The Life Of Robert Mugabe

In a hilarious reminder of why I love the British press, the Times of London runs a supposed diary of Zimbabwe's thugocrat, Robert Mugabe. Hugo Rifkind skewers Mugabe in grand Fleet Street style, and manages to nail South African Mugabe toady Thabo Mbeki along with him. A sample:

Tuesday I cannot see this moustache, although my eyes are not what they were. I would ask my fashionable wife, but she has taken the jumbo jet to Paris to see how many shoes she can get for 20,000 hectares of Matabeleland.

The telephone rings. It is little Thabo Mbeki of South Africa. Although I am careful never to exploit this, I am told he is in awe of me, because I am the original hero of southern African independence. Last month he lent me series five of The West Wing on DVD. He keeps calling to ask for it back. “You can’t have it,” I say.

“I understand,” says Thabo, solemnly. “Might I be permitted to ask why?”

“No,” I say. “Go away.” Little Thabo rings off. Later he rings back to apologise.

The pinnacle of Rifkind's deliciously nasty satire comes when Mugabe writes that British propaganda consistently portrays Zimbabwe's abandoned farms, 1800% inflation, and collapsed economy in a bad light. Read the whole thing; I wish I had written it.

The Long, Interminable Goodbye

Vladimir Putin has arranged Russian politics so that the president -- his current position -- can wield almost unlimited power in the Russian Federation. How inconvenient it is that the Russian constitution limits Putin to two four-year terms, the second of which Putin is now completing! Fortunately for the former spy chief, one of his minions has called for a change in the basic law that will allow Putin to rule as long as he likes:

One of Russia’s most senior politicians called yesterday for changes to the constitution to allow Vladimir Putin to run for a third term as President.

Less than a year before the presidential election, Sergei Mironov demanded the abolition of the two-term limit that prevents Mr Putin from standing. He also proposed extending the term from four years to five or even seven. Mr Mironov spoke out after senators reelected him by 156-0 as Speaker of the Federation Council, the upper house of parliament, after regional elections.

He described Mr Putin as a guarantee of stability, and said that he was voicing the demand of millions of voters. Mr Mironov urged provincial legislatures to consider the proposal over the next two months.

Such a change “should be debated in light of the possibility, and maybe also the need, for Vladimir Putin to have the legal and constitutional possibility to remain President for one more term”, he said. “The final decision, of course, will be up to Vladimir Putin. Maybe he will listen to the voice of the lawmakers.”

With approval ratings close to 80 per cent, Mr Putin would easily win the election on March 2 next year. He has insisted repeatedly that he would not change the constitution to allow himself a third term, yet has left open the prospect of responding to public demand to stay on. He said on television in the autumn that “although I like my job, the constitution gives me no right to run for a third term”.

As long as the Russian toadies of Putin want to change the constitution, they should ensure that they address all of the outstanding issues. They should do away with the popular elections, since the pollsters have such a great handle on Putin's popularity. Perhaps they should change the name of the office itself, since "president" implies a head of state that responds to a legislature with some power. What Russian term would adequately describe the office that Putin has created?

Ah -- I've got it! They can call it "tsar". That should do nicely.

Telegraph: We're Screwed

The London Telegraph analyzes all of the options open to Britain in the current crisis over the capture of 15 Navy personnel in the Persian Gulf, and comes up with one consistent conclusion -- none of them will work, at least not without the 800-pound American gorilla on their side. Whether sanctions, blockades, or military attacks get reviewed, the Telegraph reports that the UK no longer has the juice to pull them off:

The Government has few options if it wants to pressure Iran into releasing the captured Britons.

Military action is unfeasible without American support and so is a military blockade of the Gulf. Unless the United Nations shows more rigour, sanctions are unlikely to hurt Iran in the short term.

There is a feeling that the 15 could be in for a long stay in Iran and face the nightmare prospect for Britain of a show trial.

Washington has remained largely subdued on the crisis but some commentators have made clear that the situation would have been very different if it had been 15 American sailors.

Yes, it would have been much different. We would never have allowed the Iranians to threaten our forces without an immediate military response on the spot, for one thing. Had Iran actually succeeded in taking our forces hostage, we would have given them hours to return them, followed by strategic bombing of selected military sites, especially suspected nuclear-developmentr sites, until Iran handed them back. Bushehr would have been reduced to rubble. If the mullahs still refused to release them, we would have commenced targeting their political leadership.

The Iranians know we would have done this -- which is why they didn't capture Americans. They captured British sailors because they knew the British would have done none of this. That's not because the British have any less courage, but because the British are militarily incapable of such a response, and Iran knows it.

Instead, Britain tried to go to the UN, where Russia and China both passed on condemning their client state and source of their energy. They tried cutting off all other diplomatic initiatives except this crisis, but the Iranians still haven't demonstrated that they care at all about it. The Brits could demand tougher sanctions from the EU, and they might get them -- but good luck in enforcing them. It might only be weeks before France and Germany start back-dooring the Brits like they did with Saddam Hussein.

Even America has no particular rush to provide support for the UK. The Bush administration would probably love nothing better than to start taking out Iran's suspected nuclear facilities, but they have a big problem in Congress. The Democrats want to blame a century-old genocide on a country that didn't even exist at the time, but they're willing to flirt with a government that supports terrorism now while refusing to condemn Iran's actions. With such a schizophrenic sense of foreign policy, the Bush administration has its hands tied, at least for the moment.

This gives an object lesson on why the unilateral dismantling of the military by a global power makes no sense. The American nation learned from Pearl Harbor that it takes a strong military to keep troublemakers from causing headaches. Paper tigers get burned quickly -- and the UK has had its status as a power center exposed as exactly that. If they have no willingness to defend their own patrols, no one will consider them a threat at all -- and Britain can look forward to many more such tweakings in their future.

Last Word On Transplant For Today

I decided to post a separate item for a late-night wrapup, since it had been several hours since I updated the live-blog post.

First, let me tell you how much your messages meant to all of us today. We heard from everyone today either in comments or by e-mail, across the political spectrum of the CQ community. We got so much support that I had to have the donor's family take my computer and read all of the messages, just so I could show them what a great family we have here on line.

As I said earlier, the First Mate will spend the night in the ICU, but she's doing great. I called the nurse a few minutes ago to get an update, and she says that the new kidney continues to perform impressively. The FM has mostly stayed asleep, but when she's awake, she's alert. She can take her meds orally, but they're being careful about it. Blood pressure, heart rate, oxygenation, and all other vital signs look terrific. She should be back in her regular room tomorrow.

The donor is also doing very well. I spoke with him and his wife for a bit while the hospital transferred the FM from post-op to the ICU. He's tired but not in pain, very alert, and happy about the result. Honestly, even though I have known this couple for the past eight years, I have had a tough time knowing what to say to them during this entire process. It's so overwhelming that all I can do is thank them over and over again, and all he says in response is "Praise the Lord". He may go home as soon as Sunday, Monday at the latest.

It's been a good day.

Transplant Update (Update: Success! Update II: FM Speaks!)

Note: This has been bumped to the top; newer posts are below.

I have a few moments to update everyone on the First Mate's progress. She went into surgery around 9:15 CT, about an hour ago. The donor went into surgery earlier, as is normal, and everything we see tells us that both surgeries are going smoothly. Before that, we had an opportunity to gather together in prayer in the staging area, which helped the FM to relax.

I've been joined in the waiting room by my sister and the donor's wife and her friend. So far we've been regaling each other with tales of Marriage Encounter, which is apparently a much wilder group of people than one might think. It's been a good morning so far, and I will update you with any more news.

10:26 - The friend has a son who is working on his doctorate in political science. His topic? The role of Internet advertising in American politics. He has a survey that CQ readers might want to check out ...

10:31 - Well, I thought she had started, but I just got a call from the OR that they just anaesthetized her, and they're starting to clear a space for the new kidney. I'm guessing that they waited until they were sure that they had a viable kidney from the donor, whose surgery probably started an hour ago...

11:01 - The donor's surgical team started isolating the kidney at 10:45. It took two hours of work to get to that point, which underscores the complexity of the procedures here today, and the care that the medical teams take in performing them.

11:12 - Here's the link to the post I wrote about the FM's last kidney transplant, on June 8, 2004.

11:15 - Thanks to all who have offered their prayers in comments and e-mail. Hugh Hewitt, one of the best friends a guy could have in the blogosphere, asks his readers to offer their prayers for us -- and notes that live-blogging is a good way to deal with the stress. He's right ...

12:29 - Went and got some lunch. Nothing much new to report about the FM, but it sounds as if the doctors may have finiished with the donor. They're supposed to be coming out soon.

12:42 - I guess I timed that well. The OR just called to say that they have the artery and vein tied to the new kidney, and they're about to attach the bladder to the ureter. It's looking good, and she's doing very well in the surgery. We're going to offer a few prayers of thanks for the surgeons and nurse on both teams who are working hard to get her healthy again. And a big welcome to Corner readers!

1:24 - Excellent news! The surgery is done, and the kidney is already producing urine. The doctors saw stones in her appendix and decided to do an appendectomy as long as they had her open, especially since stones precede appendicitis. She will be in recovery for two hours and then will return to her room. The donor has also gone to recovery, and except for a little bout of high blood pressure, did just fine. He'll be leaving the hospital perhaps as early as Sunday.

2:34 - The donor has been released from Recovery to go to his room. He's in good shape, and they expect him to heal quickly after the surgery. It looks like it might be an hour or so longer for the FM.

2:44 - I love this comment by James Joyner, on learning that the doctors did an ad-hoc appendectomy: "Try getting that kind of service under socialized medicine!" If I may borrow from Glenn, who also sent his readers here: Heh. Indeed. And please read this kind note from our good friend King Banaian, who has more people that could use our prayers.

4:19 - Looks like they're going to keep her in the ICU for a while, rather than just return her to her room. They've made a point of being very careful with her, and I'm sure this is more of the same.

5:00 - The FM is awake and ready to go to her ICU bed. She wanted me to thank everyone for their prayers and thoughts, and says that she really appreciates all of them. She has made over 1200 cc of urine in the last three hours, so the kidney -- which the donor nicknamed Ricardo -- is already doing its job!

A Bad Time To Pick A Fight

Let's see. The US is in the middle of a fight to secure Iraq, drive the Taliban out of Afghanistan, and end Islamist terrorism. Iran won't stop developing nuclear weapons, Syria assists them in funding and supplying Hezbollah, and Lebanon can't keep control over the sub-Litani region to keep Iranian proxies from antagonizing Israel. We have few allies in the region that supplies most of the world's industrial energy.

Under those circumstances, one would presume that the US would choose its fights carefully with those nations inclined to support us, and only risk their ire for the most pressing of national interests. One would presume that, but one would not have considered the foolishness of Democratic foreign policy:

A planned vote in Congress that would classify the widespread killings of Armenians by the Ottoman Turkish government early in the 20th century as genocide is threatening to make bilateral relations unusually tense.

The speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, backs the resolution and at first wanted a vote in April. But under Turkish pressure, Bush administration figures have lobbied for the Democrats in charge of Congress to drop the measure.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates sent strong letters of protest to her and to Representative Tom Lantos, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, which has not set a date for the vote. “That has had an impact,” said Lynne Weil, a Lantos spokeswoman, referring to the letters. Copies were also sent to Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the House minority leader. ...

Mr. Gates and Ms. Rice, in joint letters, spoke sympathetically of “the horrendous suffering that ethnic Armenians endured” and called for more study of the events. But they also noted that when the French National Assembly voted last year, the Turkish military responded by deciding to “cut all contacts with the French military and terminated defense contracts under negotiation.”

I agree that the Armenians suffered a genocide at the hands of the Turks. Anyone who reads history understands that. I also understand that it makes it no more true to have Congress pontificate on the issue.

Why do Nancy Pelosi and her party leadership consider this a pressing issue at all, let alone now? The genocide had nothing to do with the US. It happened over 90 years ago, halfway around the world. It has no impact on the US as it is -- but Congress' efforts to stick our nose into the controversy will have a great impact on our foreign policy, and all of it bad.

We need good relations with Turkey, if for no other reason than to use our leverage to keep them from invading northern Iraq and destroying the years of work we have put into our success with the Kurds. Our relations with Ankara are critical in maintaining connections to moderate Muslims, as well as to spread democracy through southwest Asia. They are an important counterweight to Iranian ambitions in the region and allow the West an opening in which to project strength against Teheran and Damascus. And so far, they have mostly stayed on our side during the war, only objecting to transiting American troops during the invasion of Iraq.

The Democrats, with their usual grandstanding on matters of irrelevancy, threaten all of these strategic interests just to pass a resolution that makes them feel important on an issue for which they have no provenance. How utterly typical.

Two For The Price Of One, Redux

Rudy Giuliani told Barbara Walters in an interview that will air tonight that his wife Judi will be welcome to attend Cabinet meetings. Judi Giuliani, a nurse prior to her marriage to Giuliani, has said that she will take a special interest in health-care policy, which raises the specter of a Republican Hillary:

Former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani told ABC News's Barbara Walters that he would welcome his wife, Judith, at White House Cabinet meetings and other policy discussions if he were elected president next year.

"If she wanted to," Giuliani said in the "20/20" interview to be broadcast tonight. "If they were relevant to something that she was interested in. I mean that would be something that I'd be very, very comfortable with."

Giuliani, who is leading the Republican field in early polling, called his wife an important adviser to him. His wife, a nurse, said that she would probably play an important role in developing health-care policy in a Giuliani administration.

Understandably, this has some Republicans annoyed. We do not elect First Ladies (or First Gentlemen, either), we elect Presidents to lead the nation. If Giuliani wants to try the Bill Clinton line about getting two for the price of one, then the Giulianis had better be prepared for double the scrutiny, both in the primaries and in a general election.

However, this really means little in practical terms. Everyone knows that spouses have a great deal of influence on the policies of politicians. After all, people don't marry just to ignore their spouses, and if they do, they don't stay married for long. Nancy had some influence on Ronald, Laura has infuence on George, Rosalynn had influence on Jimmy. Hillary only ran into trouble because she insisted on a formal policy role, and then used it in an ill-considered attempt to nationalize one-seventh of our economy.

If Judi sits in on a Cabinet meeting or two, it will not signal the end of the Republic. If Rudy and Judi insist on campaigning on her ability to do so, it could be the end of his candidacy.

The Democratic Philosophy Enshrined

Gary Gross catches the Minnesota Democratic Party (called the DFL here in the Frozone) in a moment of rare honesty. Cy Thao, a DFL member of the state Legislature, explained his party's philosophy at a committee hearing yesterday:

“When you guys win, you get to keep your money. When we win, we take your money.”

That was Thao's explanation for how the DFL would raise the money to pay for its slate of new government programs. At least it was an honest answer.

Arab Nations Offer Peace But No Partner

The Saudis have pressed in recent days for Israel to accept in principle their 2002 plan for normalization in the region. Calling on the Israelis to accept a return to 1967 borders and some version of the right of return, the Arab nations endorsing the plan seem to have forgotten that the Palestinians haven't even accepted the pacts that they have already signed with Israel:

Arab leaders on Thursday reiterated their offer to normalize ties with Israel and showed signs of flexibility in their terms for peace.

At a news conference at the end of a summit where the Arab leaders' peace plan was the main issue on the agenda, Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal said Arab countries would establish normal ties with Israel as soon as it had resolved its disputes with its immediate neighbors.

"We cannot change the plan because it offers peace, and changing it would mean we're no longer offering peace," Faisal said, echoing Arab League chief Amr Moussa's insistence that there would be no changes in the plan ahead of negotiations. But Faisal said: "Once Israel returns occupied land and comes to an agreement with the Palestinians, returns occupied land to Syria and comes to an agreement with them, and it resolves its land issues with Lebanon, Arab states will immediately establish relations."

Saud's comments seemed to allow room for discussion on issues that are particularly problematic for Israel, including the final borders of a Palestinian state and the plan's call for a right of return to present-day Israel for Palestinians who fled or were forced out when the Jewish state was created in 1948.

It seems obvious that any eventual peace plan would mean an Israeli evacuation of the land it seized from Jordan after the 1967 war, as well as settling border issues with Syria and Lebanon. The latter would probably be resolved rather easily, although the Israelis would insist on a buffer zone for the Golan Heights, due to its strategic potential. The problem for Israel is the lack of a reliable partner for the former.

Israel has not made itself pristine in this area. The building of settlements in the West Bank continued for years after the complications of the settlements were obvious. Israel refused to annex the land and make its occupants de facto citizens, for clear demographic reasons, but instead carved out the communities by encouraging the expansion among Israelis. Any Palestinian state could not abide having little chunks of its land sovereign to another state.

However, the Palestinians have made it impossible to negotiate on even these grounds. Their charters still demand the destruction of Israel. The government elected by the Palestinians made it their first act to disavow previous agreements, which removed any credibility they have for future treaties. Hamas and Fatah, the only two political parties, both use terrorist attacks on civilians as part of their modus operandi. Even now, while demanding a state, the two terrorist organizations refuse to end their commitment to terrorism in the future.

The Saudis want Israel to commit to the concept of land for peace. Yet when Israel withdrew from Gaza, pulling out their settlements along with the IDF, did peace erupt all over? Most decidedly, no. The Palestinians used Gaza as a launch pad for their rockets, dropping them indiscriminately into Israeli towns, with only Palestinian incompetence keeping more civilians from dying. When that stopped amusing them, Hamas crossed into Israel to abduct Gilad Shalit, whom they still hold for ransom. Under those circumstances, why would Israel accept land for peace when they know they will not get it?

Israel would like peace and quiet. They don't want the peace and quiet of annihilation. Too many of their relatives got that kind of peace from the Nazis. When the Arabs give them true partners for peace, the Israelis will be only too glad to meet them.

Africa To Zimbabweans: Drop Dead

I suppose no one can ever underestimate the dysfunction of African governments, but the support given Robert Mugabe by the Southern African Development Community has to serve as a singular moment of disgrace. The SDAC didn't just ignore the increasingly brutal methods of Mugabe in clinging to power -- they endorsed them:

Zimbabwe’s neighbours fell in behind the brutal regime of Robert Mugabe yesterday and demanded that the West lift all sanctions on his country.

With opposition growing at home and a crumbling economy, pressure was mounting on the heads of surrounding states to urge their friend and comrade to reconsider his position. But in a communiqué issued at the end of what was billed as a make-or-break summit of the Southern African Development Community (SADC), 14 leaders reaffirmed their solidarity with the veteran President of Zimbabwe.

Their words will come as a crushing blow to campaigners who believed the tide to be turning against his increasingly autocratic 27-year rule.

Mr Mugabe smiled as he pushed past rorters in the Tanzanian capital, Dar es Salaam, and declared himself satisfied. “Excellent meeting,” he cried, clapping his hands gleefully, before climbing into a waiting limousine.

The SADC claims it pressured Mugabe into beginning a dialogue with his opposition, but Mugabe knows better than that. He just got a blank check from his neighbors to continue his purge. Not only that, but Mugabe got them to fight the Western sanctions on his country for him. It would be difficult to imagine how Mugabe could have gotten more of a free ride from his fellow members, unless they invited him to rule their nations as well.

As the SADC demanded that the West stop picking on poor Robert Mugabe, his goons hauled nine opposition leaders into court to accuse them of -- get this -- terrorism. They were charged with illegal possession of explosives as part of a conspiracy to set off gasoline bombs, which sounds like they have been charged with buying gasoline; no details on the charges have been brought forth. Their lawyers filed a motion to dismiss the charges, but the court adjourned at night without ever having addressed it.

The moral failure of these African nations is complete. Even South Africa's Mbeki collaborated in this shameful display, despite his nation's courageous fight for its own representative government. I recall when people around the world boycotted his nation in solidarity with their struggle for freedom. Now South Africa aids and abets a bloody and incompetent tyrant, even to the point of scolding the same nations that supported his cause for not selling out to a thug. South Africans should feel shame and embarrassment for not assisting their real neighbors -- those whom Mugabe has impoverished and oppressed for more than 27 years.

Nazis Considered Pope Pius An Enemy

The reputation of Pope Pius XII has suffered from an endless series of accusations of collaboration with the Nazi regime before and during World War II. In books such as John Cornwell's Hitler's Pope and others, the Pope and the Roman Catholic church face accusations of moral cowardice in the face of the most twisted regime in modern human history. However, new documentation shows that the Nazis themselves considered Pius and his Church their enemy -- because Pius assisted in the flight of Jews from the Nazi genocidists:

Pius XII, the wartime pontiff often condemned as "Hitler's Pope", was actually considered an enemy by the Third Reich, according to newly discovered documents.

Several letters and memos unearthed at a depot used by the Stasi, the East-German secret police, show that Nazi spies within the Vatican were concerned at Pius's efforts to help displaced Poles and Jews.

In one, the head of Berlin's police force tells Joachim von Ribbentropp, the Third Reich's foreign minister, that the Catholic Church was providing assistance to Jews "both in terms of people and financially".

A report from a spy at work in the Vatican states: "Our source was told to his face by Father Robert Leibner [one of Pius's secretaries] that the greatest hope of the Church is that the Nazi system would be obliterated by the war."

After the war, the Pope himself acknowledged that he did not speak out consistently against the Nazis, but claimed he held back in order to save more people from their clutches. In light of this new evidence, he may have done his best under the worst of circumstances. Certainly the Nazis understood him as a threat to their plans to wipe Jews off the face of the Earth, and recorded their concerns.

How did Pius get such a bad rap? Part of it comes from the circumstance of having been Pope during the war. The Vatican, after all, sits within Rome -- and the Italians who aligned themselves with Hitler had them surrounded. The Swiss survived under similar circumstances by essentially doing the same thing -- remaining quiet while doing what they could under the radar.

Now, though, it looks like there may be more to the story than just circumstance. The discovery of these records within the files of the Stasi -- the East German secret police during the Communist era -- indicates that the smear may have had political motivations. The Telegraph reports that some believe the story got circulated at the direction of Moscow to discredit the Catholics, which they saw as a potential rival in Eastern Europe. If they could paint the Vatican as Nazi sympathizers, then the Poles and other Catholics in the Soviet sphere of influence would discount them as an anti-Communist force.

In the end, of course, the Soviets failed in their strategy. Their smear lived on, unfortunately.

CQ Radio Tonight! (Bumped)

We have a great show already lined up for tomorrow night at 9 pm CT, as CQ Radio talks with the two front-running Republican campaigns for the 2008 presidential primaries. First, we'll talk with Jim Dyke from the Rudy Giuliani team. Jim just joined Team Rudy as a senior communications advisor, and we'll talk about his strategies for Rudy's message and how the campaign plans to address the concerns of conservatives.

We will also have one of my good friends from the blogosphere, Patrick Hynes, who works for John McCain's campaign as New Media coordinator. Patrick and I often debate and needle each other on e-mail -- all in good fun, though, as you'll hear during the show. Patrick is an eloquent spokesman for the Senator, and we'll hear from Patrick about McCain's strengths as I challenge him on his controversial stands.

Be sure to join the debate! You can call 646-652-4889 to join the conversation.

BUMPED TO TOP: I'm looking forward to this show, and hope we get plenty of calls. Given the developments for both candidates over the last 24 hours, we will have plenty to discuss!

BUMP AGAIN: We're still going to have the show tonight, so be sure to tune in at 9 pm CT!

UPDATE: Jim Dyke tried his best but could not get through to the show. We'll have him on soon. However, Patrick Hynes jumped in early and had a terrific appearance. If you missed us live, be sure to download the podcast.

Blair Not In A Haggling Mood

Tony Blair continued to firm his stance towards the Iranians today, stating that Britain will not bargain for the release of the sailors and Marines that Iran has taken hostage. Instead, he demanded that Iran unconditionally release the fifteen detainees, and suspended all communications with the Islamic Republic except for talks specifically about this crisis:

Prime Minister Tony Blair said Thursday that Britain would not negotiate over British sailors and marines held hostage by Iran. In an interview with ITV News, Blair again called for the unconditional return of the 15 Royal Navy personnel who were seized by Iranian authorities last week.

Britain's Sky News meanwhile said Iran had released another letter by captured sailor Faye Turney, this time calling for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq.

"The important thing for us is to get them back safe and sound, but we can't enter into some basis of bargaining," Blair said. "What you have to do when you are engaged with people like the Iranian regime, you have to keep explaining to them, very patiently, what it is necessary to do and at the same time make them fully aware there are further measures that will be taken if they're not prepared to be reasonable.

"What you can't do is end up negotiating over hostages; end up saying there's some quid pro quo or tit for tat; that's not acceptable," he said.

Iranian nuclear negotiator Ari Larijani has been assigned to handle the diplomacy on this crisis, which gives an idea of how critical the Iranians see this. Larijani started off by claiming that the British government has "miscalculated" by refusing to offer an apology for trespassing in Iranian waters. However, it seems clear that, at least so far, the miscalculation has come from Iran.

Teheran knew better than to try this with Americans, because they know that the US Navy would blow any Iranian boat out of the water before they would allow Americans to get captured. The British, they figured, would play ball, and at least during the initial confrontation, they were correct. Since then, Blair has not followed the playbook -- and he has made it clear that Britain will keep all of its response options on the table. "Further measures" is diplo-speak for high-powered renovation of Iranian ports, at least in theory.

It comes at a strange moment for the Iranians. They had worked with the British ever since the 1979 revolution, even after the US hostage crisis that broke diplomatic ties between Iran and America. Britain had played a moderating influence on American hard-line approaches to Iran, even after the exposure of their nuclear program. They have worked for years to get the US to agree to restoring relations as a part of a solution to the nuclear standoff, even with Iran funding Islamist terrorism around the world.

Now Iran has insulted and injured one of its connections to the West. Britain exported over $700 million in goods to Iran last year and is one of their major trading partners. An embargo by Britain would hurt an already stumbling economy, and it would cause the Iranian people to wonder how many other nations Mahmoud Ahmadinejad intends to annoy into military action against Iran.

The only miscalculation appears to have been made in Teheran. If they're not careful, they're going to miscalculate themselves into losing a ship or a port as a response to the act of war Iran committed this week.

Transplant On Schedule (Updated!)

We're at about 15 hours and change for the First Mate's transplant, and it looks like we're on track. We just met with the doctors, who went over all the risks and the plan for post-surgical treatment. Everyone here is in high spirits and waiting for tomorrow morning. The surgery will come early and last most of the morning, so posting will be very limited tomorrow. I'll post more updates as we go along.

UPDATE: Please include the donor and his family in your prayers and thoughts as well. He is a good friend of ours through Marriage Encounter -- as was the FM's previous donor. I don't want to release too many details about him and his family, since I have not asked for his permission to do so, but he and his family have approached this with enthusiasm and joy. God offers special people to help us through difficult times in our lives, and luckily for us He gathered them at Marriage Encounter so we could find so many of them at once.

Also, I'd like to offer a Happy Birthday to the Admiral Emeritus. Dad turned 75 tonight, and he celebrated last Saturday at a party that I could not attend, for obvious reasons (he lives in California). They don't make them any better than Dad -- he has been a rock for me my entire life, and I wish I could have been there to hoist a glass in his honor.

Democrats To Propose Largest Tax Hike In History

House Democrats today will propose the largest tax hike in American history, one which will add more poor people to the tax rolls and which will further burden millions of small businesses. They will position this as fiscal discipline while refusing to trim federal spending, according to Robert Novak:

The new Democratic majority begins dancing the next phase of the tax-and-spend minuet in the House of Representatives today. Following the example set by their Senate brethren last Friday, House Democrats will adopt a budget resolution containing the largest tax increase in U.S. history amid massive national inattention.

Nobody's tax payment will increase immediately, but the budget resolutions set a pattern for years ahead. The House version would increase non-defense, non-emergency spending by $22.5 billion for next fiscal year, with such spending to rise 2.4 percent in each of the next three years. To pay for these increases, the resolution would raise taxes by close to $400 billion over five years -- about $100 billion more than what was passed in the Senate.

It had been assumed that the new Democratic majority would end President Bush's relief in capital gains, dividend and estate taxation. The simultaneous rollback of Bush-sponsored income tax cuts was a surprise. This reflects Democrats' belief that they can survive a long-term commitment to bigger government. Here is an audacious effort to raise the banner of fiscal responsibility while increasing spending and taxes.

This Democratic strategy is encapsulated in what Harry Hopkins, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's main man, is alleged to have told a friend at New York's Empire City race track in August 1938: "We will spend and spend, and tax and tax, and elect and elect." While Hopkins denied ever saying those words, they represented successful Democratic government and political strategy for the next two decades.

Well, as pundits across the political spectrum note, elections matter. Many people abandoned the GOP in the midterms because of their lack of discipline in federal spending. Discretionary spending rose by over 30% during the six years that the Republicans controlled both elective branches of government. They reduced taxes and grew the economy, but the GOP never delivered on their initial promise to reduce government an rein in spending.

Based on those failures, the nation gave the Democrats the majority in both chambers of Congress. What did we get? No decrease in federal spending; the Democrats want to grow the government by 2.4% each year, which would mean adding close to $100 billion in spending each year. In order to do that, they want to increase taxes across the board, choking off economic growth and making people even more dependent on the government.

By 2011, the added tax burden on every taxpayer would be over $1100 dollars. Twenty-six million small businesses would have to pay almost $4,000 in extra taxes. More than five million Americans whose incomes are too low to pay taxes now would have to start paying in 2011, making the Democratic plan more regressive than what it seeks to replace.

Democrats and taxes, together again after twelve years in the wilderness. It sounds like a movie romance -- and we're footing the bill for the production.

Culture Of Corruption, Democrat Style

The new Congress has barely made it past its start before a new face has been put on lobbyist influence. Dianne Feinstein, the senior Senator from California, has resigned her leadership position on a subcommittee which put billions of dollars into her family's business (via QandO):

SEN. Dianne Feinstein has resigned from the Military Construction Appropriations subcommittee. As previously and extensively reviewed in these pages, Feinstein was chairperson and ranking member of MILCON for six years, during which time she had a conflict of interest due to her husband Richard C. Blum's ownership of two major defense contractors, who were awarded billions of dollars for military construction projects approved by Feinstein.

As MILCON leader, Feinstein relished the details of military construction, even micromanaging one project at the level of its sewer design. She regularly took junkets to military bases around the world to inspect construction projects, some of which were contracted to her husband's companies, Perini Corp. and URS Corp. ...

As of December 2006, according to SEC filings and www.fedspending.org, three corporations in which Blum's financial entities own a total of $1 billion in stock won considerable favor from the budgets of the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs:

* Boston Scientific Corporation: $17.8 million for medical equipment and supplies; 85 percent of contracts awarded without benefit of competition.

* Kinetic Concepts Inc.: $12 million, medical equipment and supplies; 28 percent noncompetitively awarded.

* CB Richard Ellis: The Blum-controlled international real estate firm holds congressionally funded contracts to lease office space to the Department of Veterans Affairs. It also is involved in redeveloping military bases turned over to the private sector.

Wasn't it the Democrats who insisted that the Republicans jumped into bed with lobbyists and special interests? Well, now we have a senior Democrat who made sure that over a billion dollars of federal money got routed through her own checkbook, with her husband as proxy. When can we expect to see a Democratic investigation into this brand of corruption?

During the 2006 election, Feinstein's party made a lot of hay out of non-competitve contracting by the government. Democrats railed especially about Halliburton, even though Halliburton won 95% of its contract dollars by full and open competition. Now we see that Feinstein herself had no problem with non-competitive practices, as long as it meant stuffing her own pockets with taxpayer money. Take a look at the percentages in the above. In 2005, CB Richard Ellis made $100 million in federal contracts, only half of which had been part of full and open competitive bidding.

When we talk about political corruption, this is exactly what we mean. Politicians who use their power and assignments to fill their own pockets with federal dollars corrupt our system and deserve to be tried in court for violating the public trust. Feinstein never should have sat on subcommittees that hand out federal contracts for markets in which her own family businesses compete. If the Democrats meant what they said in 2006, Feinstein provides an excellent test case for their new sense of ethics. They should expel her from the Senate and have California hold a special election to replace her. If they do nothing, then they have exposed themselves as the party of self-enrichment at the expense of taxpayers.

It's Safer To Hate Us

Germans, in a recent poll, believed that the US presented a greater threat to world peace than Iran. Forty-eight percent of Germans agreed with that statement, opposed by only 31%, and the number goes to 57% among younger Germans. In his essay in Der Spiegel, Claus Christian Malzahn skewers his countrymen for their reflexive and ignorant anti-Americanism:

The German political establishment, which will no doubt loudly lament the result of the poll, is largely responsible for this wave of anti-Americanism. For years the country's foreign ministers fed the Germans the fairy tale of what they called a "critical dialogue" between Europe and Iran. It went something like this: If we are nice to the ayatollahs, cuddle up to them a bit and occasionally wag our fingers at them when they've been naughty, they'll stop condemning their women to death for "unchaste behavior" and they'll stop building the atom bomb.

That plan failed at some point -- an outcome, incidentally, that Washington had long anticipated. Iran continues to work away unhindered on its nuclear program, and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad reacts to UN demands with an ostentatious show of ignorance. The UN gets upset and drafts a resolution.

Another item on the Iranian president's wish list is the annihilation of Israel. But that will take a bit longer. In the meantime, just to make sure it doesn't get out of practice, the regime had 15 British soldiers kidnapped a few days ago. But it's still all the Americans' fault -- that much is obvious. ...

Not a day passes in Germany when someone isn't making the wildest claims, hurling the vilest insults or spreading the most outlandish conspiracy theories about the United States. But there's no risk involved and it all serves mainly to boost the German feeling of self-righteousness.

Iran is a different story. The last time someone made a joke on German TV about an Iranian leader, the outcome was not pleasant. Exactly 20 years ago, Dutch entertainer Rudi Carell produced a short TV sketch portraying Ayatollah Khomeini dressed in women's underwear. Carell received death threats. The piece, which lasted all of a few seconds, led to flights being cancelled and German diplomats being expelled from Tehran. Carell apologized. Jokes about fat Americans are just safer.

I'm not going to claim that America has never made a foreign-policy error, but the notion that we represent a greater threat to peace than the main terrorist-sponsoring state in the world is nothing short of breathtakingly stupid. And Malzahn has this analyzed perfectly: it's safe to hate America. We don't set off bombs in discotheques or mass in front of embassies whenever anyone insults us or our leadership.

But the Germans really should know better. For decades, we stood guard on the freedom of most of Germany, putting American lives on the line to keep the Soviets from overrunning the rest of their country. We rebuilt their nation after their defeat in the last world war, and we have maintained European security even after the end of the Cold War. If anyone should understand the efforts we have made in keeping totalitarianism and terrorism at bay, it should be the Germans.

This should especially embarrass them considering the rhetoric used by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He has adopted the policies of the Nazis of late, calling for the destruction of the Jews and claiming that the Holocaust is nothing more than Jewish conspiracies against them. Ahmadinejad has thumbed his nose at German diplomacy to build nuclear weapons with one obvious target -- Israel.

Perhaps the Germans would get a better appreciation for security issues if they shouldered more of the burden for them. It's time to close down the relics of the Cold War in Germany, and locate our military forces in nations more amenable to America. Poland would probably have some interest in hosting American bases, and they would have more strategic location in this era than Germany. Let the Germans have their space from the warmongering Americans and pay for their own national security. We do not need to stay where we are not wanted or appreciated.

Beware The Legacy Dance

The Bush administration has started legacy hunting, and it has fixed its sights on immigration reform. The one issue where George Bush and the Democrats have common ground will get immediate attention, according to the Los Angeles Times -- a development that will concern border-security conservatives:

With President Bush looking to counter a legacy increasingly marred by the war in Iraq, the White House has launched a bold, behind-the-scenes drive to advance a key domestic goal: immigration reform.

For a month, White House staffers and Cabinet members have met three to four times a week with influential Republican senators and aides to hash out a consensus plan designed to draw a significant number of GOP votes.

With that effort largely completed, Republicans were set to present their proposal Wednesday to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., who would lead the Democrats in any attempt to move a bill through the Senate.

The intense effort -- conceived by the president's chief political strategist, Karl Rove -- is intended to ensure that Bush will achieve at least one crucial policy achievement in the last two years of his presidency.

Success on immigration reform could also accomplish another Rove goal, shoring up the GOP's weakened support among Hispanics, who are even more critical to the party as independent voters become increasingly disenchanted.

The administration had backed a fairly liberal immigration plan, co-sponsored by John McCain and Kennedy, before the midterm elections, when the White House needed conservatives. Now, they need a legacy, and the Democrats in Congress will use their new strength to push even harder for citizenship for illegals while they eschew border security. Already, the majority leadership has hinted that the border fence will likely not get funded, the one small victory gained by hardliners on immigration.

If Bush hopes to reach an agreement, he has to do so soon, before relations between Capitol Hill and the White House get too poisonous. The new Democratic majority plans a series of investigations into the administration in order to build a record for the 2008 presidential election. Given the fact that the administration keeps giving them excuses, like the strange terminations of the federal prosecutors last December and the incompetent handling of the aftermath, it's hard to see how the Democrats could possibly overplay that hand. That kind of ongoing activity will eventually shut down all channels of communication and turn every bill into a pitched battle.

Perhaps Bush hopes that a success on immigration reform, defined as such by the Democrats, will slake their thirst for dirt and humiliation. If so, I'd say that a surrender on immigration reform would prove highly disappointing. I'd rather he surrender on Alberto Gonzales, in the long run. That wouldn't keep the investigations from continuing, but it would give the administration a more competent AG and it would not involve approving another amnesty program with no border security.

The only cause for optimism is the inclusion of conservatives like Jon Kyl in the development process. He has remained insistent on border security first and foremost, even while some of his colleagues seem more than willing to promote open borders in an age of terrorism. The Times reports on the Republican efforts to include "triggers" in the plan, which would only allow the normalization of illegals in the US after security benchmarks have been met. However, the GOP couldn't make that work when they had the majority. Now that the Democrats control Congress, the "triggers" will never survive in a final bill. Democrats don't do benchmarks, after all, unless they want to surrender to our enemies in the field.

Those Republicans who want border security are outnumbered and outgunned by the Democrats, and will likely find themselves abandoned by an administration that needs to secure some sort of victory in its final months in office. Look for a rehash of last year's virtual amnesty bill.

Note: I should emphasize that I do support some form of normalization for most of the illegals here in the US. I believe that it is impractical to assume that we can make it so miserable for them that they will self-deport back into a poverty in Mexico that far outstrips anything seen here in the US. However, that has to come only after we achieve a secure southern border - a priority that should have been addressed in 1986, after the last amnesty.

Fruit Loops

Many of us railed against the pork that the House included in its supplemental spending bill for the Iraq war, along with its mandatory time tables for defeat and retreat. Proving that the House is a collection of pikers in a porkfest, the Senate added its own pork onto their version of the bill -- leading to the strange speech of Barbara Boxer using "Strawberry Fields Forever" in support of a war funding bill:

"There's a song called 'Strawberry Fields Forever,' " the California Democrat declared on the Senate floor, as an aide displayed a poster of an icy berry patch. "This is a strawberry field," Boxer continued, seeking funds for frostbitten fruit farmers. "It looks like an ice rink. The strawberries are somewhere in there; they are destroyed. I also want to show you oranges. . . . Here you can see the icicles near the avocados."

The relationship between crops and troops was lost on Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who backed an amendment that would remove spending for sugar beets and other agricultural pursuits. "I don't see how the asparagus-spinach problem helps us win in Iraq," he argued at a news conference. "This is a bill designed to help people that are getting shot at."

Oh? Immediately after this righteous plea in the Senate television studio, Graham went downstairs to the Senate floor and voted in support of an amendment to the Iraq bill directing an additional $5 billion to rural schools and counties -- right here in the U.S. of A.

It's common for lawmakers to complain that a spending bill is "loaded up like a Christmas tree" with pet projects. But the Iraq Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act going through the Senate this week is unusual in that it is loaded up with Christmas trees.

Specifically, it includes $40 million for a Tree Assistance Program that provides help for Christmas trees and ornamental shrubs. Also in the Senate's version of the Iraq bill: $24 million for sugar beets, $3 million for Hawaiian sugar cane, $13 million for the Ewe Lamb Replacement and Retention Program, $100 million in compensation for dairy losses, $165.9 million for fisheries disaster relief, and money for numerous other "emergencies."

I can understand that the stench of defeat would be so strong that politicians want to cover it with the aroma of Christmas trees. Leaving Iraq to the terrorists like lambs to slaughter could inspire some to fund replacement lambs. Rural schools will need to learn why we left Iraq to become a terrorist haven with access to billions in oil revenue.

This proves that this Congress is an even bigger joke than usual. Democrats who ran on a platform of opposing lobbyists and corruption have gone on a pork binge so obscene that it has become difficult to count the money that they are handing to lobbyists and supporters. They use funding for the troops to shovel federal dollars back to their home districts and states while promising the men and women fighting terrorists and insurgents more effectively than ever that they have no confidence in their ability to do the job.

Obscene and shameful. And this is just Month Three of the Democrat-controlled Congress. Just think what they will do by Month Twenty-Three, after they get warmed up.

John McCain suggested yesterday that George Bush should read the list of pork in a national speech when he vetoes the supplemental. I don't think the networks will give him three hours for his speech, though, so he'll have to play Pork's Greatest Hits instead. However, McCain has gone one step further and offered a petition for people to sign on-line to protest both the pork and the surrender offered by Congress:

* The supplemental appropriations bill that passed the Senate on March 27, calling for a date certain withdrawal from Iraq, is nothing more than a guaranteed date of surrender.

* It is a refusal to acknowledge the dire consequences of failure, in terms of the stability in the Middle East and the resulting impact on the security of all Americans, whether home or abroad.

* Democrats have chosen the politically expedient position of failure rather than putting aside the small politics of the day in the interest of our nation and the values upon which this nation rests.

* We the undersigned remain steadfast in our support for the war against terrorism and mindful of the consequences of failure in Iraq, even if Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid refuse to acknowledge those consequences.

* We support our troops and the new strategy and believe it should be given the opportunity to succeed. American national security interests are directly at stake. Success or failure in Iraq is the transcendent issue for our foreign policy and our national security. People say they want to defeat the terrorists, but if we withdraw from Iraq prematurely, it will be the terrorists' greatest triumph.

* If we leave Iraq based on an artificial timetable, al Qaeda will be free to plan, train for and conduct operations from Iraq just as they did in Afghanistan before 9/11.

We may have issues with McCain, but except for his attempts to get unlawful combatants undue access to American civil courts, he's been spot-on about the war. Be sure to sign the petition.

Mugabe Arrests The Opposition

Zimbabwe's political crisis deepened yesterday after Robert Mugabe started rounding up opposition leaders ahead of an African summit on Mugabe's dictatorship. Morgan Tsvangirai got arrested just before a scheduled press conference to discuss the political oppression suffered by Zimbabweans:

Forces stormed the offices of the Movement for Democratic Change in downtown Harare to gag its leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, who was preparing to hold a press conference on the continued violent repression of his party by the Mugabe regime.

Mr Tsvangirai, 50, and other MDC leaders were taken by bus for questioning to an undisclosed location by officials. The approaches to the headquarters had earlier been sealed and tear gas was used to keep people away.

"Tsvangirai and a number of others we have not been able to identify have been taken by police in a bus. We don't know their whereabouts. We don't know if they have been charged," said an MDC spokesman. Police said he was later let go. "We've heard he has been released but he is not at home or at the office and he is not reachable on his mobile," the spokesman said.

The raids came just hours before Mr Mugabe left for Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, to attend an emergency conference on Zimbabwe's mounting political crisis hosted by the 18-member Southern African Development Community.

The timing shows how insecure Mugabe feels. The SADC conference came at a bad time for the man who has held power for more than a quarter century, turning a once-fertile land into Africa's biggest welfare case. His departure, with all of the current unrest, could have turned into an opening for a coup. In order to prevent this, he simply had all of his opponents jailed while he travels to Dar es Salaam.

This puts enormous pressure on the SADC and the African Union to do something about Mugabe. In fact, Mugabe has more or less stuck a finger in the eye of both organizations, but especially the SADC. He effectively told the other African leaders that he has no intention of moderating his dictatorial practices even as they invited him to the meeting to look for some means to restore order and reverse the poverty that Mugabe has caused.

Hopefully, this provocation will finally get regional leaders to do something about Mugabe. The failure of Zimbabwe has created security problems for his neighbors. This latest stunt will make them appear weak and with no influence even in their own back yard. Even his ally, Zambia's Levy Mwanawasa, has called Mugabe's stewardship "the Titanic" of regimes in Africa.

If Africa ever wants to distance itself from its colonial past, it has to show that it can resolve these kinds of catastrophes on their own. Ethiopia did this in Somalia. Now the SADC has to show it can meet the challenge and defiance of Mugabe.

Maverick Is His Name?

Past Democratic Party leaders tell The Hill that John McCain negotiated for two months with them to abandon the Republican Party at around the same time that Jim Jeffords crossed the aisle. Tom Daschle and Tom Downey told Bob Cusack that unlike their efforts with Jeffords and Lincoln Chafee, McCain's top aide came to them:

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) was close to leaving the Republican Party in 2001, weeks before then-Sen. Jim Jeffords (Vt.) famously announced his decision to become an Independent, according to former Democratic lawmakers who say they were involved in the discussions.

In interviews with The Hill this month, former Sen. Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) and ex-Rep. Tom Downey (D-N.Y.) said there were nearly two months of talks with the maverick lawmaker following an approach by John Weaver, McCain’s chief political strategist.

Democrats had contacted Jeffords and then-Sen. Lincoln Chafee (R-R.I.) in the early months of 2001 about switching parties, but in McCain’s case, they said, it was McCain’s top strategist who came to them. ...

Daschle said that throughout April and May of 2001, he and McCain “had meetings and conversations on the floor and in his office, I think in mine as well, about how we would do it, what the conditions would be. We talked about committees and his seniority … [A lot of issues] were on the table.”

John McCain denies this charge, saying that he never considered leaving the GOP. John Weaver also refutes the notion that he proposed a switch in allegiance to Downey, saying that their chats amounted to nothing more than idle gossip about the Democrats' efforts to find a turncoat. Mark Salter, McCain's chief of staff then and a key member of his campaign staff now, also categorically and emphatically denies it.

This story sounds a bit strange, even if McCain has done his best to look like a Democrat at times. If McCain came to Daschle, one would have to imagine that Daschle would have closed the deal immediately. The once and future Senate Majority Leader would have offered a senior Republican like McCain almost anything he wanted to jump ship - even after Jeffords bailed. With the kind of interest reported by The Hill, McCain sounds as if the right deal would have cinched it for the Democrats.

McCain had his opportunity later as well. Recall the flirtation from John Kerry and the Democrats in 2004 about McCain serving as his running mate? If he had that kind of inclination in 2001, he would have found that sotto voce offer too tempting to refuse. Instead, McCain scotched the rumors and campaigned for George Bush and many other Republican candidates in the 2004 election.

However, there is another independent, if indirect, corroboration. Cusack reports that Chafee was another live target of this recruiting effort at the time -- and Chafee confirmed it to Cusack. Also, John Edwards reportedly played a key role in the negotiations with McCain, and The Hill confirmed it with an anonymous source "close to Edwards".

If true, this would effectively end McCain's presidential bid. He already has trust issues with Republicans, and this will do nothing but cause them to reject him entirely. However, the people who sourced this story have plenty of motivation to derail McCain, including Edwards, who thinks he may run against McCain in the general election. The principals tell completely conflicting stories, and the nature of the issue almost ensures that no independent proof one way or the other could exist. I'm betting this is nonsense.

UPDATE: Allahpundit puts more credence in it than I do, making the good point that if it were just a smear, they would have waited until the general election to use it. However, the same would be true if the story is on the level. Why talk about this now in either case? It almost seems like someone couldn't wait to spill the beans -- and that does give some weight to the story.

Brits On Parade

In an escalation to the crisis over the seizure of 15 British sailors and Marines, the Iranians have displayed them on television, apparently forcing the female sailor to read a public statement. The Iranians have also promised to release her as a goodwill gesture:

A letter allegedly written by a captured British sailor to her parents says she had "apparently" entered Iranian territorial waters, the Iranian Embassy in London said Wednesday.

The letter was addressed to the parents of Faye Turney, one of the 15 British sailors captured by Iranian forces after they allegedly trespassed in Iranian waters. An Iranian embassy official e-mailed a copy of the letter to The Associated Press, saying Turner wrote it on Wednesday. ...

Meanwhile, Iranian state TV showed video of some of the sailors and marines, including Turney, who wore a white tunic and a black head scarf and said the British boats "had trespassed" in Iranian waters.

"Obviously we trespassed into their waters," Turney said on the broadcast by Al-Alam, an Arabic-language, Iranian state-run television station that is carried across the Middle East.

"They were very friendly and very hospitable, very thoughtful, nice people. They explained to us why we've been arrested, there was no harm, no aggression," she said.

Allahpundit and Power Line have more on the odd syntax used by Turney in her televised statement. It suggests that its true author has little familiarity with British English, or at least a tin ear for it. For some reason, the Iranians seem to feel that these video releases will somehow put minds at rest about the treatment of their abductees -- they did the same thing in 2004, and the effect was just as creepy and unbelievable then.

Plus, it amounts to another violation of the Geneva Convention. Convention III, Article 13 states:

Likewise, prisoners of war must at all times be protected, particularly against acts of violence or intimidation and against insults and public curiosity.

The US has been accused of violating this just for showing video of the capture of combatants in Iraq and Afghanistan. This cuts much closer to the mark. Clearly, the Iranians want to capitalize on the "public curiosity" of their prisoners, and they want to pressure the British government into acquiescence based on the publication of the videos. This goes with the potential violation of charging military personnel captured in uniform with espionage, which the Iranians have threatened to do.

Once again, we strain to hear the cries of those who display such sensitivity to the widest possible interpretation of the GC when the conduct of the US or its allies are in question. So far, we have not heard any outcry from a definite violation and the threat of another from a non-Western nation. If the GCs are only applicable to Western democracies, then perhaps the critics can just acknowledge that honestly.

Rudy Hits A Homer

Rudy Giuliani has made a surprising entry into the primary race for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination. Not known as a conservative, Rudy has nonetheless stuck to his public policy stands -- and has been rewarded with broad, if not deep, support from the GOP. He has built momentum despite expectations that he will eventually falter on the basis of his pro-choice, gun-control past. Now he has garnered an endorsement that will not fail to impress fiscal conservatives:

Fiscal conservative Steve Forbes on Wednesday endorsed former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani's bid to become the Republican nominee for president in the 2008 race for the White House.

Forbes, chief executive of Forbes magazine who unsuccessfully sought the Republican nomination in 1996 and 2000, is considered a leader of the party's pro-business and tax-cutting wings.

"He is the man who can lead America in a world that is uncertain, fight the forces of evil and at the same time increase economic opportunity here at home," Forbes told a press conference.

Giuliani has tried to sell himself to conservatives as a member of the national-security, low-taxes Right while acknowledging the differences on social issues. He has counted on conservatives to make the calculation that half a loaf is better than none, especially when the half he offers has the most universal appeal among Republicans. In order to make that sale, though, he needed more credibility on economics and fiscal policy.

Steve Forbes delivers that credibility. Fiscal conservatives still lament his inability to catch fire in 1996 and 2000, and given the spending spree that the GOP has conducted since Forbes' last run, those laments have been particularly pointed. Given his consistent free-market, deregulatory stands, the Forbes endorsement represents a conservative Good Housekeeping seal of approval. His new positions as national co-chair and senior policy advisor allows fiscal conservatives and neo-libertarians to find a comfort zone they may have previously lacked.

Without a doubt, Team Rudy hit a homer on this endorsement. It gives more conservatives more leeway towards discounting the social positions of Giuliani in a time of war, and increases his potential to attract centrists and independents to the GOP in 2008. Giuliani has shown that he understands conservative concerns with his record and that he will work towards reaching an accommodation with them. In a field lacking a credible conservative of national standing, Rudy could carve out a wire-to-wire frontrunner victory.

Tony Blair: Carter Or Thatcher?

Tony Blair seems to grasp the disaster awaiting Britain if it takes the Jimmy Carter strategy on Iranian hostaging of its sailors and Marines. He warned Iran that anything less than an immediate release of British servicement would move the confrontation to a "different phase", as the US quickly filled the Persian Gulf with warships:

Tony Blair warned Iran yesterday that the dispute over the 15 British servicemen seized in Gulf waters last week could move into a “different phase” if diplomacy failed to secure their release.

His words, immediately condemned by Iran as “provocative”, came as the US Navy began its biggest show of force in the Gulf since the invasion of Iraq four years ago, with manoeuvres involving two aircraft carriers, a dozen warships and more than 100 aircraft.

As tensions rose, Margaret Beckett, the Foreign Secretary, had a robust telephone conversation with her Iranian counterpart demanding immediate consular access to the captured Britons.

In an interview on GMTV, Mr Blair said: “I hope we manage to get them to realise they have to release them. If not, then this will move into a different phase.”

Different phase -- as in "outside of diplomacy", a convenient euphemism for military conflict. Later, Blair backed down a bit from the challenge, his spokesperson saying merely that Britain would start producing the evidence which would clearly show that Iran snatched the group from Iraqi waters -- but the point got made nonetheless.

So far, though, Blair has not exactly been Margaret Thatcher in his approach. When the Argentinians seized the Falkands in the early days of her government, Thatcher told Argentina that they had two choices: withdrawal or war. She made good her threat, despite widespread skepticism that the British Empire could still fight a colonial war -- and she beat the Argentianians in their own back yard.

Blair has shown some steel, at least thus far, but Jimmy Carter made similar motions in the early days of the Teheran crisis. He just never followed through on them. It took him five months to attempt an ill-conceived rescue mission, far past the time when Carter had surrendered American prestige and power to a group of ragged students and a radical-Islamist theocracy. Not surprisingly, the same Islamists have decided to try it again with Britain, hoping that they will find a Carter rather than a Thatcher.

They may find an American Thatcher if the Iranians continue their provocations. George Bush didn't send warships to the Gulf to allow sailors to get a tan. Quietly, Bush has conducted a new effort against Iranian power in the region, capturing its agents in Iraq and daring Teheran to respond. Iran tried an indirect response by capturing the British sailors. The Americans might try something more direct in the Gulf if the Iranians pull another stunt.

Blankley: Don't Count On Obama To Take Out Hillary

Tony Blankley, the editor of the Washington Times, warns Republicans to get their act together now if they expect to defeat Hillary Clinton in 2008 for the White House. The Bush administration has begun playing into her one strength -- competence -- and the Republicans cannot rely on Barack Obama or John Edwards to stop her march to the Oval Office:

With every passing week it becomes more likely that Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic Party nominee for president. This thought, alone, should provide the strongest possible motivation to the Bush administration and the Washington Republicans to get their acts together so that the eventual Republican nominee for president doesn't start the general election campaign in too deep a hole.

The polls that show half the country saying they won't vote for Hillary should be discounted. At the election, the choice will not be Hillary or not Hillary -- it will be Hillary or someone else. And that is what the campaign is about. ...

Moreover, Hillary's strengths are not yet as appreciated as they will be. Don't get me wrong, personally I find her and her candidacy detestable as the worst form of unprincipled, ruthless, nihilistic, mud-throwing demagogic politics. But for the Democratic Party electorate (and some Independents and soft Republicans) her apparent strengths will become more persuasive. Currently she suffers by the media's focus on her lack of spontaneity, charm or pleasant voice -- particularly when compared with Obama and, to some extent, Edwards.

But charm is not the only path to the American voter. Richard Milhous Nixon won more national elections than any politician in our history (two vice presidents, three presidential nominations and two presidencies -- three if you count the stolen 1960 election against Kennedy). He didn't have any charm -- but he was smart, shrewd, highly political, hard working and ruthless. Sometimes the voters are looking for what they think is competence rather than a love affair.

It's an interesting argument, but not quite convincing. The Bush administration's recent troubles have created a competence issue, one that the Democrats exploited to some extent in 2006 and on which they hope to expand in 2008. The continuing saga at Justice has made that easy for the Democrats, and we still have nineteen months to go.

However, Hillary isn't exactly the poster girl for competence, either. More than one of the scandals in the Clinton administration revolved around her, such as the Travel Office debacle in which the White House attempted to gin up criminal charges against staffers there in order to fill their slots with political cronies -- something far worse than what anyone suggests happened at Justice. The Rose law-firm records of her work disappeared for a time, only to reappear in the White House itself, all without her knowledge. And focusing strictly on competence, her work on the nationalization of the health-care industry helped the Republicans win control of Congress in 1994.

Blankley hits the mark with Barack Obama and John Edwards, though. Like I wrote last night, Obama doesn't have the seasoning to determine the level of his competence. All he has is the "ludicrously enthusiastic media launch" and an undeniable charm at the podium. When pressed for policy specifics, he comes up empty except for a promise to conduct a different sort of politics. Edwards has a firmer grasp on policy, but at the moment serves Hillary's purpose of splitting her antagonists among the base. One of these men will likely become her running mate, if she wins the nomination.

But to me, that's a bigger if now than before. Hillary has not campaigned well, and her negatives have become too plain to ignore. She's nowhere near as charming as her husband, who turns out to be a liability for Hillary because of the comparison. Her Iraq vote caused her to stumble through some rhetorical twists than can only be called Clintonian, and she now wants to run on a repeat of her health-care debacle. She has all of Bill's slickness and none of the salesmanship that allowed him to get away with it.

And meanwhile, the very substantial Bill Richardson lies waiting on the perimeter, looking for an opening to claim that mantle of competence and experience from all three Democratic frontrunners.

And Five Years Later ...

Despite its insistence on curtailing political speech five years ago yesterday by passing the McCain-Feingold bill to remove corruption from politics, the Senate has never forced itself to adopt more effective measures to expose venality by its own members. While the House adopted electronic filing measures to disclose campaign contributions on an ongoing basis, the Senate has preferred the slow and impenetrable process of quarterly written statements -- which curious investigators see far too late to expose any shenanigans. Thad Cochran and Russ Feingold want to change that, and the Washington Post agrees that the effort comes late in the game:

TODAY AT 10 a.m., the U.S. Senate could take its first step into the 21st century when the Rules and Administration Committee meets to vote on a measure that would require candidates for the Senate to file their campaign finance reports electronically. That's great news for a voting public that ought to be able to see immediately who's giving to whom and how the money is being spent. Of course, this issue being at the crossroads of politics and money, the prospects of something so simple being passed today are anything but simple.

All that sponsors Russell Feingold (D-Wis.) and Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) wanted to do was bring to the Senate the common-sense advance that for years has been standard operating procedure for candidates for the House of Representatives and the White House and for political parties, "527" groups and PACs. Electronic filing for Senate candidates would eliminate the so-last-century practice of filing papers with the Senate Office of Public Records, which then scans and sends them to the Federal Election Commission, which then sends them out to a vendor, which keys the information into an electronic database and sends it back to the FEC in its new form.

Sounds great, huh? The Senate, five years after passing the most cynical incumbent-protection legislation ever, will finally get around to allowing timely exposure of who contributes to the incumbent campaigns. Except that they may not; as the Post notes, the vote requires a quorum of the Rules and Administration Committee, which has 19 members. If they don't get 10 of the members to show up for the vote, the proposal will wither on the vine.

Also, the committee has to deal with an amendment by Bob Bennett (R-UT) that will also prove controversial. Bennett wants to remove the limitations on party spending in coordination with candidates. That would put a hole in the BCRA wall against the use of soft money, a Byzantine structure that still enjoys some support as a bulwark against corruption -- for reasons no one can explain rationally. Bennett may have a good idea, but it doesn't really help to attach it to this legislation. We need this bill to pass on its own and make its way to a floor vote. It's five years overdue already.

If you want to make sure that the committee has its quorum, be sure to make wake-up calls to these R&A panel members. Note, please, the number of party leaders who sit on this committee:

Dianne Feinstein
Bob Bennett
Robert Byrd
Daniel Inouye
Ted Stevens
Mitch McConnell
Christopher Dodd
Thad Cochran
Chuck Schumer
Trent Lott
Dick Durbin
Kay Bailey Hutchinson
Ben Nelson
Saxby Chambliss
Harry Reid
Chuck Hagel
Patty Murray
Lamar Alexander
Mark Pryor

You can reach the Senate switchboard at 202-224-3121, and ask for the Senator whom you wish to contact.

The Flexible Loyalty Of Jim Webb

The case of the loaded gun got a little stranger yesterday after Senator Jim Webb spoke to reporters about the incident. His senior aide, Phillip Thompson, had just spent his 45th birthday being arraigned for carrying what Thompson claimed was Webb's gun through a Capitol Hill security checkpoint. However, while Webb charmed the press corps with his explanation for why he violates District of Columbia gun laws, he made it clear that Thompson can expect no public support for his assistance in doing so:

The complaint laid out Thompson's version of events: "The defendant stated that he was in possession of a pistol and two magazines belonging to Senator Jim Webb. The defendant further stated that he inadvertently left the gun that he was safekeeping from the previous days." Webb may be pleased to know that, according to the complaint, "the weapon was test fired and is operable."

And how does Webb feel about the whole thing? Hard to say. Gardiner wouldn't say who had retained him to represent Thompson. Webb himself, after calling the news conference to discuss the matter, then said he couldn't talk about it. ...

The senator was less forthcoming in his defense of Thompson. "He is going to be arraigned today," Webb said. "I do not in any way want to prejudice his case and the situation that he's involved in."

Prejudice the case? But wasn't it Webb's gun that his aide was carrying for him?

Webb wouldn't even acknowledge it was his gun. "I have never carried a gun in the Capitol complex, and I did not give the weapon to Phillip Thompson," he stipulated.

Webb had kind words for his aide -- "a longtime friend" and "a fine individual" -- but he seemed to be trying to cut Thompson loose as he spoke of the incident. "I find that what has happened with Phillip Thompson is enormously unfortunate," Webb reported. "I was in New Orleans from last Friday until yesterday evening. I was not in town. I learned about this when I was in New Orleans."

Given Jim Webb's predilection for carrying weapons and the unlikelihood of Thompson's desire to go postal on Capitol Hill, it's reasonable to assume that Thompson did what he said -- he carried his boss' bags to drop them in the office, without knowing or remembering about the weapon. Why can't Webb just admit that much? It doesn't make Webb culpable in any way -- as he made sure to point out, he has an alibi. It at least doesn't make Thompson look like a liar within hours of making bail.

Webb put on quite a bizarre little show. He staunchly defended the Second Amendment, something that even some Republicans won't do these days, and insisted that he needed to carry concealed weapons because of his stature. He noted that Presidents get Secret Service protection but not Senators or Congressmen, which is true, but not really terribly germane. Congress could create that kind of protection service for itself, or fund it through the Secret Service. Webb also refused to state whether he violates DC law, which requires registration which Webb apparently does not have for his weapons.

And while Webb waxed loquacious about his personal need for security, he never mentioned any effort on his part to allow other DC residents the right to make the same decision about their own safety, even though the GOP had offered an amendment to allow them to do just that last week.

Meanwhile, Webb's trusted aide, who inadvertently carried Webb's security plan into the Russell building on Monday, had to make bail just after Webb made sure to give reporters his alibi and refused to state whether the gun was his. So much for loyalty.

Now They Complain Of Overcrowding

You can never win. First critics said the surge would never work. Now that US and Iraqi forces have started rounding up terror suspects by the hundreds as a result of the improved security plan, the critics now complain that we've captured too many:

Hundreds of Iraqis detained in the Baghdad security crackdown have been crammed into two detention centers run by the Defense Ministry that were designed to hold only dozens of people, a government monitoring group said Tuesday.

The numbers suggested that the security plan’s emphasis on aggressive block-by-block sweeps of troubled neighborhoods in the capital had flooded Iraq’s frail detention system, and appeared to confirm the fears of some human rights advocates who have been predicting that the new plan would aggravate already poor conditions. ...

In one of the detention centers, in the town of Mahmudiya, south of Baghdad, 705 people were packed into an area built for 75, according to Maan Zeki Khadum, an official with the monitoring group. The other center, on Muthana Air Base, held 272 people in a space designed to hold about 50, he said, and included two women and four boys who were being held in violation of regulations that require juveniles to be separated from adults and males from females.

In an interview, Mr. Khadum said a majority of the detainees at the two detention centers had been picked up while the security plan, which began in mid-February, was being put into effect.

He said the detention system had been suffering from a problem of “fast detention and very slow release, especially for those who are not guilty.” His group includes 17 lawyers and is working under a government committee run by the Shiite politician Ahmad Chalabi.

"Especially for those not guilty"? Of course we do not want to detain the innocent, but we don't need to release real terrorists at all. Slow release, grinding down to none at all, should suit everyone just fine for the latter. That's why the US and Iraqis need to work on a competent process to review the data for those seized, but a lack of speed in that process is hardly an excuse for not capturing terrorists at all.

For a security plan that wouldn't work, it didn't take long for complaints of overcrowding to get made publicly. We need to find room for more detainees, because if the surge continues to fail in this fashion, we're going to have many more terrorists to house very soon.

Public Smoking Ban Passes State Senate

Yesterday, a family member came in from California to spend some time with the First Mate before her transplant on Friday. When she made the plan, we had assumed that the FM would be home until Thursday evening, but as it turns out, the doctors wanted her in the hospital for the entire week in order to keep her blood pressure under close observation. I took our visitor to dinner, and when we were asked by the hostess whether we wanted to sit in smoking or non-smoking, the Californian expressed surprise that Minnesota still allowed businesses to have smoking sections.

As it turns out, she just came out a few weeks too early. The state Senate passed its version of a statewide public smoking ban yesterday, one of the first significant acts to come out of the enhanced DFL (Democratic) majority:

The Minnesota Senate voted 41-24 on Tuesday to approve a sweeping, statewide smoking ban that would eliminate most indoor smoking in public places, including bars and restaurants, beginning Aug. 1.

The bill prohibits smoking in public places, aboard public transportation and at public meetings. Violations would be petty misdemeanors.

The measure allows bars, restaurants and bingo halls to build outdoor smoking patios. Electricity and heating would be allowed on the patios but not food or beverage service.

When California passed its smoking ban years ago, I didn't think too much about it. I had stopped smoking cigarettes by that time, and even when I did smoke, I found bars and bowling alleys to be so drenched in smoke that I had quit patronizing them long before. Some friends complained about being inconvenienced, but I didn't have much sympathy. Frankly, I enjoyed going to restaurants and other public accommodations without coming home smelling like an ashtray.

A statewide ban makes more sense than what Minnesota has done before now. Several cities and communities have passed similar bans, such as Saint Paul. Bar owners and restauranteurs have reported stark decreases in business as a result, because their smoking customers simply go to another community for their entertainment. A statewide ban would eliminate that problem, except on border communities like Stillwater and Duluth, for instance.

However, I am no longer so sanguine about these laws. It seems to me that a business owner should be able to set his own rules about the custom he wants, and if he or she doesn't mind smokers in the establishment, the state should not tell them any different. If the state has a great untapped consumer pool of people like me who would hang out in bars every night if it weren't for those darned smokers, bars that banned smoking would pull in good business. That has not been the case, and even it if was, those owners who don't mind smokers would still have the right to serve them.

No one doubts that the proponents of these bans have their hearts in the right place, but it opens a troubling precedent. Once we establish that the state has an interest which overrides two key rights -- the right to assemble and the right to private property -- just to modify personal behavior that the state considers unhealthy, where will they stop? Will Minnesota, like New York City, attempt to ban trans-fats from restaurants? Will we have two-drink limits at bars as well?

Smoking cigarettes is unhealthy and foolish. I was fortunate enough to give them up without too much trouble, and I only smoke a cigar about once or twice a year these days. However, unless the state wants to criminalize tobacco, then it really has no business dictating to bar owners and restauranteurs that they cannot serve smokers, even outside in a patio area.

UPDATE: I should credit Chad the Elder and Brian Ward from Fraters Libertas for helping me change my mind on this issue. We have had several debates on this over the past few years, and they have been very convincing.

Reid Scores A Victory On Iraq By Backing Defeat

Harry Reid won his most important victory as Senate Majority Leader today by unexpectedly passing the supplemental spending bill for Iraq with the mandatory timetables for withdrawal within 12 months. Two Senators, Ben Nelson and Chuck Hagel, reversed their stand on the automatic withdrawal from less than two weeks ago, when the Senate last considered it:

Senate Democrats scored a surprise victory yesterday in their bid to force President Bush to end the Iraq war, turning back a Republican amendment that would have struck a troop withdrawal plan from emergency military funding legislation.

The defection of a prominent Republican war critic, Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, sealed the Democrats' win. Hagel, who opposed identical withdrawal language two weeks ago, walked onto the Senate floor an hour before the late-afternoon vote and announced that he would "not support sustaining a flawed and failing policy," adding: "It's now time for the Congress to step forward and establish responsible boundaries and conditions for our continued military involvement in Iraq."

Democratic leaders think the 50 to 48 victory greatly strengthens their negotiating position as they prepare to face down a White House that yesterday reiterated its threat of a presidential veto. The Senate vote was also the first time since Democrats took control of Congress in January that a majority of lawmakers have supported binding legislation to bring U.S. troops home.

The Senate withdrawal provision, which sets a March 31, 2008, target for ending U.S. combat operations, is tucked into a $122 billion package to fund operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, a must-pass bill that Democrats view as their best shot at forcing Bush to change direction. The withdrawal language was nearly identical to that of a Senate resolution rejected 50 to 48 two weeks ago.

At least we have a clear statement from the Democratic majority in Congress. They have declared defeat while we still fight in Iraq, and they spent over $20 billion in pork to make that declaration stick. They still want to make Bush responsible for the withdrawal, but they've quit trying to cover their tracks with clever tricks about readiness definitions to do so.

I could go on and on about the many stupidities in this approach, but it won't do much good. We can talk about how giving timetables only emboldens the enemy to persevere and to keep their powder dry. I could point out the folly of having a rump force remain behind to fight only al-Qaeda -- as if they wear uniforms and our troops have the time to determine whether AQI or native insurgents are attacking them before responding. We've done all of that many times before, and yet the Democrats insist that their approach is the most reasonable.

What next? The President will definitely veto this bill, and the Democrats do not have anywhere near the votes needed to override. That means that Congress and the White House will have to reach some sort of compromise, or else theoretically allow the troops to remain in Iraq but without the funds to either fight or come home. If the President doesn't veto it, he has to start retreating in four months, to which he will not willingly assent. It will take weeks to unravel, and in that time I believe that Congress will work on a much smaller supplemental to keep funding going while the negotiations ensue. Reid, however, wants to wait until after the spring recess to start even on the conference committee talks, which will drag out the event even further.

Undoubtedly, Reid won big by declaring defeat. No one really expected this to pass, but Reid managed to talk Hagel and Nelson into reversing themselves, when even the ladies from Maine remained steadfast. He and Nancy Pelosi made it clear that the last election had its consequences, even if it took them several variations on the defeatist theme to do so.

One thing is certain: Chuck Hagel can skip the exploratory committee for the 2008 race.

Punching Above His Weight

The AP wonders whether the Barack Obama boomlet has run its course. According to political reporter Nedra Pickler, Democrats have been wondering where the beef is, too:

The voices are growing louder asking the question: Is Barack Obama all style and little substance?

The freshman Illinois senator began his campaign facing the perception that he lacks the experience to be president, especially compared to rivals with decades of work on foreign and domestic policy. So far, he's done little to challenge it. He's delivered no policy speeches and provided few details about how he would lead the country. ...

The differences were on display Saturday in Las Vegas, where the Democratic candidates answered questions about health care.

Former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, the only other candidate to serve less time in elective office than Obama, described in detail his health care plan to provide insurance for all Americans. New York Sen. Hillary Clinton doesn't have a written plan yet, but no one questions her expertise, since she was the chief proponent of the issue during her husband's presidency. ...

David Peter, a child support case worker and member of the SEIU in Las Vegas who was also in the audience, said Obama may have been better off not participating in the forum. Peter is a local organizer for anti-war candidate Dennis Kucinich, but said he was impressed with Clinton's health care plan and disappointed in Obama.

"He wasn't prepared for it," Peter said. "I saw him speak here about a month ago and it was on his issues and just on sort of introducing himself to the people and I thought he was much better on that speech than he was in this forum."

What a shock! The candidate with an entire two years of experience in national office turns out to be a policy lightweight. Who'd a-thunk it? It had to hurt that Obama got compared to John Edwards, widely considered an empty suit himself, and found wanting.

In 1984, Walter Mondale flummoxed Gary Hart by asking, "Where's the beef?" when debating the issues. Hart had a habit of speaking in nonspecifics, and Mondale rightly pinned him down on his inability to give specifics on his policy initiatives. Of course, Hart had been in office for over nine years at that point, unlike Obama, who has more of an excuse for his superficiality on policy.

I'm not even certain he wanted to run in this cycle; he may be a lightweight, but he's not stupid. Obama has to know that his thin experience would not generate confidence in his ability to lead the nation. Obama would do better to finish his term in the Senate and then win the governorship in Illinois, coming back in 2016 for the nomination a much stronger candidate -- and still at the young age of 54.

The more Obama campaigns and the veneer wears off, the more people will understand him to be a neophyte. Those of us who can count already knew this. For those who failed to realize that a two-year track record would reveal inexperience and a lack of depth, I award the Captain Louis Renault award. Shocked, shocked they must be who find Obama and his focus on "new politics" to be as substantive as gossamer.

Prayers For Tony Snow

I did not hear until well after I had left the house today that Tony Snow has been diagnosed with a recurrence of cancer, this time in his liver:

White House press secretary Tony Snow, who has become the face of the Bush presidency over the last year, has cancer again.

Snow's deputy, Dana M. Perino, broke into tears at an off-camera briefing this morning as she announced that the cancer has spread to his liver. Doctors discovered it when they operated on Snow on Monday to remove a small growth that had developed in his lower abdomen.

President Bush, in brief remarks to reporters later in the White House Rose Garden, asked Americans to pray for his ailing spokesman, who he said called him this morning from the hospital to pass on the information that his cancer had returned.

"His attitude is one that he is not going to let this whip him, and he's upbeat," Bush said. "My attitude is that we need to pray for him and for his family." He said his message to Snow is "stay strong; a lot of people love you and care for you and will pray for you. And we're hoping for all the best."

Bush added, "I'm looking forward to the day that he comes back to the White House and briefs the press corps on the decisions that I'm making and why I'm making them. In the meantime, I hope our fellow citizens offer a prayer to he and his family."

Tony has always been a friend to CQ. He knew me and my work when I ran into him at the 2004 Republican National Convention, which floored me at the time. Tony graciously spent a few minutes between engagements there talking blogs, politics, and the convention, giving me a great deal of encouragement to continue my efforts.

He exemplifies for me the proper manner in which to engage in the political debate -- tough, assertive, but personable and gracious. Where some radio hosts scream and use degrading personal attacks, Tony uses wit and rhetoric to score points, and always leaves people feeling that disagreement does not have to be disagreeable. When he took the White House job, Tony knew that he would have a tough task and absorb a lot of criticism onto himself for the administration's message, but he believes in it and always puts the most professional face on the White House press efforts.

As part of my new efforts with Blog Talk Radio and full-time engagement in politics, I hoped to interview Tony at some point just to get a feel for how he sees his role. I'm praying that Tony will recover and I can still have the pleasure of his company for a short time. Liver cancer is tough, but so is Tony. With our prayers, we can all hope that Tony has plenty of gas left in the tank.

And let's not forget Elizabeth Edwards in those prayers, either.

Giuliani Team On Blog Talk Radio Tonight

Given the status as frontrunner that they have surprisingly maintained, Rudy Giuliani's campaign team has not made themselves or their candidate terribly available to the blogosphere. Lately, though, they have started accelerating their outreach, especially with their recent additions of Jim Dyke and Mike McKeon as new Senior Communications Advisors. Dyke will make an appearance tonight on Eric Dondero's Blog Talk Radio program, Libertarian Politics Live. Given Eric's philosophical leanings, that should make for an interesting interview.

Misreading McConnell

The Washington Post reports that Senate Republicans, led by Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, appear to have retreated from defending the White House on the supplemental funding bill for the Iraq war. The decision to forego a cloture battle gets analyzed as am increasingly unhappy GOP caucus forcing Bush to fight the battle on mandatory timetables alone:

Unwilling to do the White House's heavy lifting on Iraq, Senate Republicans are prepared to step aside to allow language requiring troop withdrawals to reach President Bush, forcing him to face down Democratic adversaries with his veto pen.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) announced the shift in strategy yesterday, as the chamber took up a $122 billion war spending package that includes a target date of March 31, 2008, for ending most U.S. combat operations in Iraq. The provision, along with a similar House effort, represents the Democrats' boldest challenge on the war, setting the stage for a dramatic showdown with Bush over an otherwise popular bill to keep vital military funds flowing.

Republicans will still attempt to remove the deadline in a Senate vote expected as soon as today, and GOP leaders were reasonably confident they would muster a majority. But the margin is expected to be thin, requiring the presence of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who had skipped several previous Iraq votes to attend presidential campaign events. McCain canceled a series of fundraisers and meetings in Florida to return to Washington, telling a conservative radio program that he wanted to "beat back this recipe for defeat that the Democrats are trying to foist off on the American people."

No matter the outcome of the Senate vote, McConnell is looking ahead, assuming House Democrats will insist that withdrawal conditions be included when a final bill is sent to Bush. If so, McConnell said, Republicans would forgo the parliamentary tactics they used to block antiwar legislation that had forced Democrats to amass an insurmountable 60 votes to prevail.

As Inigo Montoya said in The Princess Bride, "I do not think it means what you think it means." Shailagh Murray and Jonathan Weisman leave two key items out of their analysis, which makes it clear that McConnell's strategy has little to do with capitulation to the Democrats.

First, time is an issue. A filibuster of the bill would undoubtedly stop it from passing, but that will eat up a lot of time -- and the funding of the troops runs out on April 15th. A spending bill has to get passed before then in order to ensure continuity of funding, including salaries, benefits, and so on. The Senate has to try to rewrite the bill so that it has no mandatory timetables for withdrawal, which Bush has made clear he will veto.

Second, the Republicans believe that they can prevail against the House version of the supplemental. Rather than go through the obstructionism of a filibuster, they would much rather beat the bill in a roll-call vote, if necessary. Thad Cochran and John Warner have worked on another version of the bill which would require more reporting from the White House on benchmarks, but would not use them to trigger mandatory withdrawal from Iraq. That has apparently convinced Ben Nelson (D-NE) to support the alternative -- which would also assuredly get Joe Lieberman's vote.

The key will be the conference committee, if McConnell can get the alternative passed instead of the House version. The troops will still need funding very quickly, and the Democrats may use that leverage to push for more restrictive language than Bush will accept. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid will control the composition of that panel, and we can expect to see Chuck Hagel, Olympia Snowe, and/or Susan Collins as part of the Republican contingent. McConnell will allow a bad result to get vetoed at that point, not because he wants to give up the debate, but because Congress has to put that bill behind them in order to quickly work on another supplemental.

McConnell has a much more robust strategy than simply waiting for a presidential veto. The Post underestimates his strategy on this bill.

An Anniversary To Remember (Updated)

Traditionally, fifth anniversary gifts come in wood, although more modern givers select silver. That seems appropriate as the nation celebrates the fifth anniversary of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, otherwise known as McCain-Feingold (Senate version) or Shays-Meehan (House version). Five years ago, wooden-headed politicians sold out the First Amendment for thirty pieces of silver in order to enact the first restrictions on political speech since the Sedition Act of the early 20th century.

Mark Tapscott celebrates the anniversary in his own way:

Five years ago today President Bush signed into law the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, the main sponsors of which were Sen. John McCain, R-AZ, and Sen. Russ Feingold, D-WI. Bush signed the bill despite having publicly expressed doubt that it was constitutional.

The law banned certain forms of political speech about incumbent congressmen for 30 days prior to a primary election and 60 days prior to a general election. Not since President Lincoln suspended habeus corpus and jailed prominent Copperhead newspaper editors during the Civil War has such a frontal assault been mounted against the First Amendment's guarantee of every American's right to express political opinion without official restraint. ...

And five years later, none of the promises of the McCain-Feingold advocates has been fulfilled. The "corrupting influence of money in politics" is as strong as ever and there is no evidence that the law has had one iota of influence on the degree of citizen participation in politics.

If anything, earmarks financed with tax dollars - the real corrupting influence of money in politics - is at an all-time high. Several congressmen have been convicted of crimes related to earmarks and the Republicans lost their congressional majority last November largely because they couldn't resist this genuine form of the corrupting influence of money in politics.

Ryan Sager also marks the event for the New York Sun in a column titled "Five Years of Failure":

Putting aside the ludicrous notion that 535 incumbent politicians sat down and tried to write a piece of legislation that would make it harder to get reelected, five years later there's no evidence electoral competition has increased. Sure, control of Congress turned over. But anyone who attributes the 2006 election to McCain-Feingold, as opposed to Bush-Cheney-Hastert-Frist, is delusional.

Some McCain-Feingold supporters promised that the bill would reduce the amount of money being raised and spent in elections. "This bill forces all of us," Senator Cantwell of Washington said during the debate, "to play by the same rules and raise and spend money in lower amounts." As the Sun's Josh Gerstein reports today, that certainly hasn't been the result. Candidates for both parties' nominations will surely be shattering first-quarter fundraising records next month.

Then there was the claim that McCain-Feingold could restore trust in government. On this score, Mr. Thompson declared that "we are making headway to do something that will reduce the cynicism in this country and that will help this body, that will help us individually." While, plenty of congressmen have helped themselves individually over the past five years (see: indictments and convictions and plea agreements, above), there is still enough cynicism around for Senator Obama of Illinois to make defeating it the main rationale for his presidential campaign.

Let's make this plain: even if the BCRA had managed to lower the amount of money spent in campaigns and reduce the cynicism that politicians from both parties created in spades, it still would be wrong. Our founders knew full well what happens when government becomes the arbiter of politically acceptable speech; it tends to allow only that speech which perpetuates its power.

For this, one need look no further than the BCRA itself. What did it restrict? It forbade the airing of campaign ads from special-interest groups that criticized incumbent members of Congress within a certain number of days before an election, supposedly to discourage unfair attacks by challengers. This was necessitated by the underperformance of incumbents in elections, where they typically had anemic re-election rates of around 96%.

Let's emphasize this once again -- the BCRA made it illegal to air criticisms of incumbent politicians. In America. Even if one can forgive the Byzantine and artificial categorization of cash that the BCRA extended, we simply cannot forgive this, even had it proven effective at cleaning up politics. And it hasn't.

So let's raise a toast to the fifth anniversary of our elected leaders selling out our American birthright. Five years from now, let's hope we're celebrating its repeal.

UPDATE: John McCain responds to critics in this statement, videotaped and published by the bloggers riding the Straight Talk Express:

This is ludicrous. McCain is correct that we have more avenues for free speech, but that has nothing to do with the BCRA. "Twenty years ago," McCain lectures, "Americans only had three sources for news -- ABC, CBS, and NBC." Aside from his faulty chronology (by 1987, we had CNN and C-SPAN), it's a complete non-sequitur. No one argues that we have a lot more options for information now, but those came well before the BCRA, and the BCRA has been used to interfere with at least some of them, including the blogosphere for a short time.

The BCRA has done nothing to restrain so-called checkbook politics, corruption still abounds, and people are less free to enter the debate than they were before the passage of the BCRA. The only thing the BCRA has done is to protect incumbents and to employ legions of lawyers and accountants. That's the legacy McCain avoids in this little bit of misdirection.

Red On Red In Iraq

Iraqi Sunni insurgents have begun turning on their former friends in al-Qaeda, to the point of open combat in some areas, according to Sunni politicians and insurgent spokespeople. The development gives hope that the Iraqi factions will reject foreign terrorists and that the conflict can provide an opening for the end of the native insurgencies:

Insurgent leaders and Sunni Arab politicians say divisions between insurgent groups and Al Qaeda in Iraq have widened and have led to combat in some areas of the country, a schism that U.S. officials hope to exploit.

The Sunni Arab insurgent leaders said they disagreed with the leadership of Al Qaeda in Iraq over tactics, including attacks on civilians, as well as over command of the movement. ...

Insurgent leaders from two of the prominent groups fighting U.S. troops said the divisions between their forces and Al Qaeda were serious. They have led to skirmishes in Al Anbar province, in western Iraq, and have stopped short of combat in Diyala, east of Baghdad, they said in interviews with the Los Angeles Times.

Al Qaeda in Iraq, which has taken responsibility for many of the most brutal attacks on civilians here, is made up primarily of foreign fighters. Although it shares a name with Osama bin Laden's group, it is unclear how much the two coordinate their activities.

Zalmay Khalilzad spoke about this on his last day as US Ambassador to Iraq. On his way to becoming the UN Ambassador, Khalilzad spoke about his efforts to reach out to the various insurgent groups since early last year, with varying degrees of success. The efforts had paid more dividends of late, mostly in the effort to fight off foreign terrorism, which has more to do with the lunatic bloodthirstiness of AQI and its predilection for indiscriminate killing.

Take the smaller Ba'ath remnant group with the long name, General Command of the Iraqi Armed Forces. They abruptly starting combat operations against AQI after two of their leaders got killed by AQI in Ramadi. The more well-known 1920 Brigades in Diyala hasn't had that problem, but they have tired of attacks on mosques, the slaughter of civilians, and even the targeting of non-security state services. Their spokesperson says they will "counsel" AQI to change their ways, but see the relationship at a "dead end", a particularly bad choice of words.

In its way, the Iraqi government proposes to do what Vladimir Putin did in Chechnya -- induce the native insurgents to change sides. Instead of fighting the representative government of Iraq in order to recreate the dictatorship of a dead man, the Shi'ite-led government wants the Sunni insurgents to act as their proxies against the foreign terrorists of AQI. That seems to have gained momentum, as Sunni politicians have thrown their weight behind the notion and as the pressure from the Shi'ite militias has lessened since the beginning of the year.

Potential hurdles still exist. The Sunni insurgents want to force the Iraqi government to recreate itself "from square one," according to a Shi'ite member of Nouri al-Maliki's party. The Shi'ites will resist that idea, and rightly so. The plans for the government came from an elected body of representatives, elected while the Sunnis boycotted the polls. Now they want a do-over, and it's too late for that. However, they can participate in elections now and offer amendments to their constitution to address their needs. The Shi'ites will have some desire to be flexible in exchange for an end to the factional fighting in Baghdad and the west.

The split between AQI and the natives could bring about a national reconciliation, if properly managed. Nothing unifies a people like a common enemy -- and AQI's brutal nature has made them an almost universal foe in Iraq.

Turning The College Kids Into Pros

No, I'm not talking about college athletes in high-revenue sports, such as basketball and football players, getting a share of the millions their schools make. Mitt Romney wants to pay college students who raise funds for his campaign a percentage of what they generate for his campaign:

A millionaire thanks to his work as a venture capitalist, Mitt Romney is acutely aware of the motivating power of money. His presidential campaign hopes it will have a similar effect on college students, which is why it's offering them a cut of their fundraising.

Participants in "Students for Mitt" will get 10 percent of the money they raise for the campaign beyond the first $1,000. While candidates often offer professional fundraisers commissions up to 8 percent, campaign experts believe the Massachusetts Republican is the first to do so with the legion of college students who have historically served as campaign volunteers.

"For the kids that want to get involved in a political campaign and they don't want to spend their summer painting houses, they can help the campaign and themselves at the same time," said Romney spokesman Kevin Madden. ...

"It may very well succeed, but I'd like to think that he'd approach young people and college students based on their commitment to the country, not because they want walking-around money," said Steve Grossman, a prominent Massachusetts fundraiser and past chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

Romney, who needs some good news after yesterday's polling, may have the right idea. While Grossman wants college students to play for the love of the game, Romney wants to reward them the same as anyone else outside of a college campus who plays in the big leagues. It will certainly generate buzz on college campuses -- and turn more than a few of the more apolitical into Romney supporters.

Is there any downside to this? Whenever one introduces a profit motive, the potential for corruption rises. Given the particularly Byzantine nature of campaign finance law, that could create any number of headaches for the Romney campaign. Paying commissions for these fundraisers connects the campaign more closely to any potential violations than mistakes by volunteers would, at least in public perception.

Romney's campaign will try to keep the kids from breaking laws by managing the process carefully. It looks like they will structure this so that the students do not actually touch the money themselves, nor will they do any of the accounting. Donations will be made in the student's name and given directly to the Romney campaign, which will do all of the calculations themselves.

All in all, this looks like a pretty smart move. Unlike in football or basketball, going pro in politics does nothing to hurt the standing of a college student, and it seems fair to compensate them for their assistance to the campaign.

The Secret War In Checnya

The war in Chechnya has not made headlines in the last several months, and that's because Vladimir Putin has willed that silence into being. The Russian autocrat recently declared the contest over after appointing a former rebel as the republic's president. However, the London Telegraph recently toured Chechnya with its new security forces and reports that the rebellion still operates, even if on a smaller scale:

Last month, Mr Putin named a former rebel, Ramzan Kadyrov, as the Chechen republic's new president.

The appointment was accompanied by a flurry of declarations from the Kremlin that the war was over and the last of the rebels had surrendered. But after witnessing the battle for Tazan Kala, The Daily Telegraph can reveal compelling evidence that a secret war is underway, and could last for years.

Sitting in his heavily fortified base in Chechnya's second city of Gudermes on the eve of the battle, the tracksuit-clad commander of the Eastern Battalion claimed there were well over 1,000 separatist rebels and foreign Islamic militants entrenched in the mountains.

"The war is not over," said Colonel Sulim Yamadayev, Chechnya's second most powerful loyalist warlord after Ramzan Kadyrov. "The war is far from being over. What we are facing now is basically a classic partisan war and my prognosis is that it will last two, three, maybe even five more years."

This isn't necessarily a bad development, despite Putin's accelerating efforts to consolidate power in Moscow. The nationalist uprising in Chechnya gave way years ago to radical Islamists, changing the nature of the war and in effect stealing the rebellion away from the rebels. They mostly faded away from the war, reconciling in some instances with the Kremlin, as Kadyrov did.

However, in some respects, the war reflects the nature of the head of state. Government forces have adopted brutal rules of engagement, with accusations of sexual torture and the execution of prisoners and civilians without much effort to distinguish between the two. Russia's allies in Chechnya don't necessarily refute those charges, instead claiming that the Islamists require heavy-handed treatment in order to suppress their terrorism.

In fact, Putin has many of the original rebels in the field representing Russia, which accounts for their tactics. They have proven adept at leveraging their experience fighting Russia against their new enemies, even if that takes a bit of work to overcome the cognitive dissonance of working to keep Russian sovereignty over their homeland. These Chechens have seen the force that could truly destroy the Caucasus and have realigned themselves accordingly.

If Putin wants to keep that secret, that's his choice -- but it should give encouragement that radical Islamists now find themselves on the defensive on yet another front.

Poll: Thompson Pulls Giuliani Votes, McCain Holds Steady

USA Today and Gallup offer their latest in polling for both parties in the extended presidential primary race, and a couple of changes have raised eyebrows. First, even the rumor of a bid by Fred Thompson has dented Rudy Giuliani's momentum, while John McCain's decline in support appears to have leveled off:

On the Republican side, former Tennessee senator Fred Thompson shook up the field with his announcement that he would consider getting into the presidential race. Thompson is familiar as the actor who plays District Attorney Arthur Branch on NBC's Law and Order.

Chosen by 12% of Republican and Republican-leaning voters, Thompson is third in the Republican field. He trails former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, at 31%, and Arizona Sen. John McCain, at 22%. Former House speaker Newt Gingrich is at 8%.

Thompson's support seems to come largely from voters who had supported Giuliani. In the USA TODAY poll taken March 2-4, Giuliani's standing had been 13 percentage points higher, at 44%. McCain's support had been 2 points lower then.

What does this mean? Conservatives who have supported Giuliani for his leadership and electability -- and plenty of them have -- would desert Rudy if a credible, consistent conservative entered the race. Some may have reservations that Thompson would fill that role, even if he did run, but his eight years in the Senate have left a more credible sense of consistency and center-right politics than Giuliani brings to the race. And according to the Post's blog The Sleuth, Thompson has begun seriously considering a run -- and has met with GOP powerhouse advisor Ed Gillespie.

What about McCain? For the first time in months, he has picked up support. After peaking at 28% support in December, McCain steadily fell until hitting 20% earlier this month. The rebound has come at the same time that McCain has increased the access to his campaign for both the press and bloggers; one can read some of the results here, here, here, and here. The warm receptions that McCain receives at his own rallies hardly surprises -- after all, this is a rather self-selected group -- but McCain obviously wants to reverse the perception that he has issues with bloggers. (He could do that better by reversing the BCRA -- but that's another story.) As far as I know, though, McCain has done the most to get bloggers the same kind of ride-along access that the national media gets on presidential campaigns.

Romney fared poorly in this poll. Three weeks ago, he had garnered 8% of the vote, enough for a distant fourth place behind Giuliani, McCain, and Newt Gingrich. In the latest poll, he lost more than half of that support, dropping back to an in-the-noise 3%, tying him with Sam Brownback. That has to be disappointing, especially since Hugh Hewitt's political biography and Romney's appearance at CPAC should have set the stage for a significant boost. Has Thompson's potential disrupted Romney's momentum as well? Possibly.

(links via Hot Air)

Gonzales Explains While His Aide Takes The Fifth

Two major developments took place in the controversy over Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and the firings of eight federal prosecutors late last year. Gonzales offered his first public explanation of the apparent discrepancy between his statement on March 13th and the release of a memo on Friday, while one of his aides revealed that she would invoke her Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination if forced to testify.

First, Marcia Goodling announced through her attorney that she would not cooperate in any Congressional probe into the firings and the documentation:

The senior counselor to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales will refuse to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee in the unfolding U.S. attorneys scandal, invoking her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, her attorneys said today.

Monica M. Goodling -- who is on an indefinite leave of absence from Gonzales's office -- also said that at least one senior Justice Department official blames her for failing to fully brief him prior to a Senate appearance, leading to "less than candid" testimony. ...

In the declaration presented to the Senate committee and released by her attorneys today, Goodling, 33, says Schumer, Leahy and other lawmakers have already "drawn conclusions" about the U.S. attorney firings. As a result, Goodling says, she has decided to "invoke my Fifth Amendment privilege against self incrimination and decline to answer any and all questions from the committee or its staff."

"I have decided to follow my lawyer's advice and respectfully invoke my constitutional right, because the above-described circumstances present a perilous environment in which to testify," Goodling says.

It sounds like Goodling fears a perjury trap. It's how Fitzgerald nailed Scooter Libby, after all, and Goodling probably sees a likely repeat. However, having a senior aide to the AG taking the Fifth in front of Congress will do no good for Gonzales' political fortunes. People will rightly wonder why senior Justice officials cannot testify honestly to Congress without incriminating themselves -- and they're not going to blame Congress. The assumption will be that some crime got committed, because without a crime there's no chance of incrimination, at least not in the legal sense.

Gonzales took a stab at explaining himself to Pete Williams of NBC in an attempt to head off any more political damage. After sounding wounded about having his integrity challenged, he offered this explanation of how he could have attended a meeting which approved the firings and the response plan while claiming on March 13th that he had seen no memos or had been involved in no discussions on the terminations:

Williams: Can you answer some of the questions that have come up over the weekend? As you know, there was a — an email that came out Friday night that showed that ten days before the firings there was a meeting in your office which you attended to discuss the firings. And yet when you talked to us here at the Justice Department two weeks ago, you said you were not involved in any discussions about the firings. Can you — can you explain what seems like a contradiction?

Gonzales: Let — let me just say — a wise senator recently told me that when you say something that is either being misunderstood or can be misunderstood, you need to try to correct the record and make the record clear. Let me try to be more precise about my involvement. When I said on March 13th that I wasn't involved, what I meant was that I — I had not been involved, was not involved in the deliberations over whether or not United States attorneys should resign.

After I became attorney general, I had Kyle Samson [sic] coordinate a department review of the performance of United States attorneys. And I expected him to — to consult with appropriate Department of Justice officials who had information and knowledge about the performance of United States attorneys. From time to time, Mr. Samson would tell me something that would confirm in my mind that that process was ongoing.

For example, I recall him mention to me that — inquiry from the White House about where were we in — in identifying underperformers? And there are other similar type reminders that occurred during this process that I'm going to discuss specifically with the Congress. I was never focused on specific concerns about United States attorneys as to whether or not they should be asked to resign. I was more focused on identify — or making sure that the White House was a prop — was appropriately advised of the progress of our review. And I was also concerned to ensure that the appropriate Department of Justice officials, people who know — knew about the performance of — of United States attorneys, that they were involved in the process.

Now, of course, ultimately at the end of the process or near the end of the process, the recommendations were — were presented to me. There had been a lot of work done to review the performance of the United States attorneys. And recommendations were presented to me that reflected the recommendations of Kyle Samson and of others in the department. And so there was obviously a discussion with respect to that — that recommendation.

And, of course — having decided there will be changes, there was — there was a discussion about how do we implement this change? And so that is in — in essence — the context of my involvement and the substance of my comments on March 13th.

First, let me make an observation about MS-NBC's transcription. It stinks. Not only do they misspell Kyle Sampson's last name repeatedly, but they refer to a "Senator Menacheet" later. It took me a moment to realize Gonzales said Senator Domenici. Doesn't MS-NBC employ editors and fact-checkers?

More to the point, Gonzales offered an extended version of the Scolinos explanation over the weekend. His categorical statement of March 13th that he "was not involved in seeing any memos, was not involved in any discussions about what was going on" still doesn't square with this version of events. He claims that he never had any discussions about the selection of the attorneys to be fired, but then acknowledged at the end of the process that Sampson presented him with the list for approval. It's certainly possible that Gonzales had so little interest in the project that he never asked a single question about why these people missed the cut, but if so, it hardly paints Gonzales in a good light as a "CEO", as he has described himself.

Later in the interview, Gonzales insists that he was committed to ensuring that no one got terminated for "improper" reasons, such as interfering with ongoing investigations and the like. In fact, he insists that none of them got fired for partisan reasons -- but how could he know that if he never discussed the reasons for their termination with Sampson? Williams asked Gonzales to explain that, but Gonzales only will say that "I know the reasons why I made the decision," which means that he had to have understood the reasons at the time of the November 27th meeting when he approved the terminations. Either he learned them by osmosis, or he and Sampson discussed the selection process for the terminations, which again makes his March 13th statement a lot less than candid.

This explanation and Goodling's use of the Fifth will do nothing to calm the waters. All of this could have been avoided had Gonzales followed Bush's example and told everyone what appears to be the truth -- that he had been involved in the decision to terminate federal prosecutors who hadn't pursued the administration's objectives to their satisfaction. A competent AG would have spoken plainly, just as Bush did with the NSA surveillance program, and taken what political benefit the terminations might have held. Instead, now we have administration officials taking the Fifth and Gonzales still ignoring the First Rule of Holes.

Constitutional Relativity

A grad-school thesis has once again made its way into the 2008 Presidential race. Previously, a 40-year-old treatise by Hillary Clinton lauding a radical leftist caused a few moments of consternation for her campaign, mostly because her husband's administration kept it suppressed until now. This time, Barack Obama may have to answer some questions regarding his views from law school about the elasticity of the Constitution, views which are less than two decades old:

Is Barack Obama a space cadet? The man who would become senator of Illinois and a top Democratic presidential contender was credited for editorial or research assistance in a page-one footnote of what may be the zaniest-titled article ever published by the Harvard Law Review: "The Curvature of Constitutional Space: What Lawyers Can Learn From Modern Physics," authored by noted legal scholar Laurence Tribe.

The 39-page densely argued treatise — think "The Paper Chase" meets "Star Trek" — argues that constitutional jurisprudence should be updated in a similar way that Einstein's theory of relativity replaced Newtonian mechanics, a view that would release judges from the original intent of the Founders of America. Published in 1989, with help of the much younger and politically greener Mr. Obama (a few others are also thanked in that footnote), the article is sprawling with references to cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz and physicists Stephen Hawking and Werner Heisenberg.

In 1990 Mr. Obama became the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. The long-ago article could indicate his views on the Constitution, which, if he is elected, could come into play in such matters as his choice of nominees to the Supreme Court. ...

"Oy vey," said a professor of jurisprudence at Princeton University, Robert George. "Constitutional law is not that complicated. There's just no need to complexify this," he said, adding that if one makes such discussion so abstruse that only highly trained academic specialists — "let's call them legal physicists" — can understand, then ordinary citizens would feel that evaluating legal decisions is beyond their ability.

No, Obama is not a space cadet -- but in this case, that isn't a good thing. What Obama wanted to do in this treatise is to disconnect the text of the Constitution from its application [see update below]. This would mean that anyone applying the Constitution to a case would be free to do so based on whatever that judge felt the Constitution meant to him or her at that moment, the exact opposite of strict constructionism.

Obviously, this has a lot more relevance to the presidential campaign than Hillary's schoolgirl swooning over radical leftists. Obama would, as President, nominate justices to the federal bench, including appellate and Supreme Court openings. If he believes that Constitutional law can be approached in the same manner as Einsteinian physics, then he would appoint judges who have no problem twisting the Constitution for any purpose they see fit -- rather than force legislative matters back to Congress and the states where they belong.

It's amazing that people cannot understand the beauty of the Constitution. It means what it says, and it allows for amendments as the nations finds necessary as we consider policy. In that manner, the Constitution is a living document; the people can modify it through established processes. Instead, Obama and others treat it like a work of art, one that should never get modified in any manner but which only holds relative truth in the eye of the beholder.

Nonsense. It's law, and it should be treated as such. Einstein, Newton, the space-time continuum, and the rest of science-fiction nonsense have nothing to do with it. Anyone who believes it does should not be allowed to appoint the jurists who govern the legal system.

UPDATE: Several readers point out that Obama was a researcher on this project, not a primary author, so it's a little much to pin this on him personally. Others have pointed out that grad students don't get grad degrees by writing papers that tick off the faculty, a point that could also apply to Hillary's thesis. Still, I'd like to hear Obama's take on this paper -- whether he agrees with its conclusions and whether he would appoint jurists from this mold. It certainly has more relevance to his campaign than whether his father took him to a mosque at the age of eight.

Has Chuck Hagel Read The Constitution?

Chuck Hagel floated the I-word yesterday during his appearance on ABC's "This Week". He warned that George Bush could face impeachment unless he adopted a policy on Iraq more to the liking of Congress. Hagel, who wants to run for the Republican nomination for President in 2008, has apparently learned the word impeachment in some other resource than the Constitution:

Some lawmakers who complain that President Bush is flouting Congress and the public with his Iraq policies are considering impeachment an option, a Republican senator said Sunday.

Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee and a frequent critic of the war, stopped short of calling for Bush's impeachment. But he made clear that some lawmakers viewed that as an option should Bush choose to push ahead despite public sentiment against the war.

"Any president who says 'I don't care' or 'I will not respond to what the people of this country are saying about Iraq or anything else' or 'I don't care what the Congress does, I am going to proceed' — if a president really believes that, then there are … ways to deal with that," Hagel said on ABC's "This Week." ...

In the April edition of Esquire magazine, Hagel described Bush as someone who didn't believe he was accountable to anyone.

"You can impeach him, and before this is over, you might see calls for his impeachment," Hagel told the magazine.

Only Senators completely ignorant of the Constitution would consider impeachment a viable option for dealing with policy differences between the executive and the legislature. The Constitution, in Article 2, Section 4, makes very plain the bases on which Congress can move to impeach a President:

The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.

It does not grant Congress the right to remove a President on policy grounds. In fact, the entire idea of the balance of powers is to ensure that policy differences get worked out by compromise and that Congress does not act out of a mob mentality. The founders made the branches co-equal for a reason, and that was to limit the power of both. Otherwise, they would have chosen the parliamentary model -- they had the British system as an easy example to follow -- and made Congress the arbiter of executive policy.

This is just another example of Congress trying to abdicate its own responsibility on Iraq. Congress could end the war in Iraq tomorrow by cutting off all funds for the deployment. They do not need George Bush to take that step. However, it would then put the responsibility for everything that follows squarely on the shoulders of Congress, and the Representatives and Senators there largely want to avoid that. A handful of them would rather initiate an unconstitutional impeachment adventure, which would leave Dick Cheney in charge and result in no policy change whatsoever anyway, than accept the responsibility of their own actions.

It's more than passingly strange that a man who wants to run for President seems so unfamiliar with the document that established the office. Hagel must be confused as to which party he proposes to lead. I don't think he's going to win much support in the primaries by running on the impeachment platform , at least not running as a Republican.

American Sanctions Bite Iran

As the UN Security Council voted to incrementally increase the sanctions on Iran this weekend, the efforts by the US to financially blockade Teheran continued to make a large impact on their own. The Bush administration has systematically locked Iran out of the global banking business, eliminating their ability to invest capital into their infrastructure and to fund terrorism:

More than 40 major international banks and financial institutions have either cut off or cut back business with the Iranian government or private sector as a result of a quiet campaign launched by the Treasury and State departments last September, according to Treasury and State officials.

The financial squeeze has seriously crimped Tehran's ability to finance petroleum industry projects and to pay for imports. It has also limited Iran's use of the international financial system to help fund allies and extremist militias in the Middle East, say U.S. officials and economists who track Iran.

The U.S. campaign, developed by Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, emerged in part over U.S. frustration with the small incremental steps the U.N. Security Council was willing to take to contain the Islamic republic's nuclear program and support for extremism, U.S. officials say. The council voted Saturday to impose new sanctions on Tehran, including a ban on Iranian arms sales and a freeze on assets of 28 Iranian individuals and institutions.

The US has targeted the Revolutionary Guard with its attempts at isolating the Iranians. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has transformed the Guard into an economic powerhouse in Iran, a major defense and civilian contractor even outside of its arms trading. This has made the Guard very loyal to Ahmadinejad, and the sanctions aim to both drive a wedge between the Guard and the president and also to cripple their ability to prop up the current regime.

In this, the US has received a great deal of assistance from a surprising source: Ahmadinejad himself. Global bankers who might otherwise have rejected American pressure to reduce their engagement with Teheran have either dropped their Iranian business or scaled it back sharply. Why? Ahmadinejad has made himself appear like a very risky investment partner, with his rantings about the Holocaust and wild statements about the destruction of Israel. Perhaps even more importantly, Ahmadinejad has undermined confidence in the Iranian stock exchange, comparing it to gambling. That doesn't make for an encouraging investment atmosphere even under the best of circumstances.

All of this results in a currency crunch for Iran. Importers now have to pay up front for their materials, having seen the normal credit environment disappear altogether. Banks will not issue loans or conduct capital investments into the oil infrastructure in Iran, which has now begun to crumble from years of poor maintenance. Iran can no longer generate the revenues of the past, which means that less money can go to radical Islamist terrorists like Hezbollah and Hamas. The situation has become so bad that Iran has worked to keep its name and the names of its banking institutions off of financial transactions in order to shield them from the prying eyes of the US.

The Bush administration has successfully conducted an indirect war on Iranian interests, and it is a progressive war. The effects of these efforts will be cumulative, and the Iranians have not much time left before their economy begins to completely collapse under the weight of them. Oil production accounts for 80% of their exports, and once those facilities start to fail, they will have nothing left with which to bargain -- and it will take years to repair the damage. When they reach that stage, Iranians will find plenty of motivation to shake off the disastrous reign of the mullahcracy, and even the Revolutionary Guard will not find much motivation to protect them.

Right Of Return Negotiable?

For decades, peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians foundered mostly on the demand for the right of return -- the right of refugees of the original partition that created Israel and their descendants to return to their lands inside Israel. The Israelis refused to consider it, as it would amount to nothing less than the destruction of Israel as a political entity, and the Palestinians refused to proceed without it. It helped caused the collapse of the Wye accord, even after Ehud Barak suggested further land swaps in exchange for dropping the demand. Until now, it has been a showstopper for both sides.

Now, though, the New York Times reports that the Palestinians have begun to accept the fact that they will never return to those lands -- and many do not want to do so anyway. Instead, they seek recognition of their displacement and could accept a deal without the return:

A resident of a sprawling Palestinian refugee camp in Jordan, Mr. Abu Ghneim, like most Arabs, says there can be no peace with Israel until he and 700,000 other Palestinians are permitted back to the homes they left in the 1948 fighting that led to Israel’s creation.

But with the Arab League expected to focus later this week on the Palestinian-Israeli dispute, there is another, albeit quieter, approach being voiced, especially by younger and wealthier Palestinians: it may be neither possible nor desirable to go back.

“Every time people talk peace, you hear discussion of this subject,” said Hanin Abu Rub, 33, a Web content manager at a Jordanian Internet startup, Shoofeetv, who has been active in Palestinian politics. “But now it is a major part of the discussions we have. When people think, ‘Is it possible for us to go back?’ deep inside they now know they are not going back.”

Even having such a debate — rethinking a sacred principle — was once impossible. Now the discussion is centering on how to define the right of return in a new way. Some have come to see the issue as two separate demands: the acceptance, by Israel, that its creation caused the displacement and plight of the Palestinians; and the ability to move back to the lands they or their families left.

Almost no Palestinian questions the demand for Israel’s recognition of the right to return; many, however, now say returning is becoming less and less feasible.

The return has never been feasible. Israel could not absorb millions of Palestinians back into the country and still expect to maintain its security, let alone its construct as a Jewish homeland. Hundreds of thousands of Jews fled Arab lands with little more than their lives, and they and their descendants made their homes in Israel. Ask about the Jews of Baghdad and Hebron and many other places, and one will have to ask what happened to their right of return.

The Palestinians will never see their lot improve until they release themselves from this fantasy, and it appears they have begun to do so. Israel and the West would gladly give compensation for the refugees and their descendants to resolve the question of return, if for no other reason to get the issue off the table so progress can begin on the two-state solution. One could argue that all of the aid the Palestinians have received since Oslo -- which got cut off after the Palestinians elected a terrorist group to govern themselves -- would have been that compensation, but it would still be worth it to pony up a complete financial settlement of this demand.

The question remains whether the leadership the Palestinians elected will agree to it. Neither the PLO nor Hamas have given up on the right of return, and Hamas won't even recognize that Israel exists. Their ratification of radicalism a year ago belies the moderation that the Times reports today. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist, but it does mean that the Palestinians have not acted on this new impulse before.

Where are the moderate politicians representing this new way of thinking? Where are the political parties arising on the impulse for peace and moderation? Until the Palestinians elect leadership of this stripe, it will make little immediate difference whether a significant number of them will forego the return. Their elected government hasn't even agreed to forego terrorism, let alone negotiate away one of their key demands.

UPDATE: The Jerusalem Post reports that two-thirds of Palestinians think that electing Hamas was a mistake, and a third overall want to emigrate outside of the territories:

More than two thirds of Palestinians feel Hamas has failed at running the government, according to a poll conducted in the Gaza Strip, Israel Radio reported on Monday. Over half of those surveyed felt that Hamas gave up a significant part of the group's election platform by joining the new unity government with Fatah.

In addition, less than a quarter of those surveyed said they would vote for the party again if elections were held now.

Did you catch the significance there? A majority of Palestinians felt that Hamas moderated itself too much by bringing Fatah into a unity government. Sounds like they still have a long way to go -- and almost a third of them want to start immediately.

Belarus Opposition Rallies

With Vladimir Putin increasing the power of the state by disbanding opposition parties, activists for liberty have poked their head above ground in one of his satellites. Opponents of the Alexander Lukashenko regime held a rally in Minsk, defying a disenchanted dictator who has started looking west for friends lately:

As many as 10,000 protesters took to the streets of Minsk, the capital of Belarus, on Sunday in one of the largest demonstrations ever staged against the authoritarian rule of President Alexander Lukashenko.

The demonstrators marched in three groups to a meeting away from the city center after riot police prevented them from entering a central square. No injuries were reported, but several activists were arrested, organizers said.

The rally was addressed by Alexander Milinkevich, who ran against Lukashenko for the presidency last year in elections that were widely condemned as flawed.

"We are the majority. We will win," Milinkevich told the protesters, who were marking the anniversary of the establishment in 1918 of an independent republic that was quickly suppressed by Red Army troops. "The authorities will fall under the pressure of their lies."

They may indeed fall, but the pressure of Lukashenko's aborted friendship with Putin will more likely be the cause. Lukashenko made a big display of unity with his sponsors in Moscow during the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, and cheered when Putin made Viktor Yushchenko pay for his rebellion by jacking up energy prices. Unfortunately, Lukashenko got the same treatment from Putin last year, even while Lukashenko acted like a loyal puppy to Putin.

With Putin consolidating his power in Moscow and Lukashenko no longer getting VIP treatment, he has tried opening a dialogue with the West. However, they have not responded with great warmth to the notion of an alliance with Europe's last dictator. Lukashenko has never held an election he did not corrupt, and his 83% share of the last vote holds more in common with Saddam Hussein's elections that those of free democracies to his west. The Poles would especially like to see Lukashenko gone, and have no desire to replace Putin as a prop to his regime.

Lukashenko may need to reach an accommodation with the native opposition. He will get nowhere with the Europeans until he acknowledges the falsity of Belarussian elections and agrees to hold a fair vote. Undoubtedly, the result of that election would not only put Lukashenko out of power but also likely behind bars. Before Belarus descends into violence, Lukashenko would do best by arranging a transition plan for Belarus that will allow him to maintain his freedom, if not some share of his current power.

As Ukraine proved, events can move fast if the people sense an opening. Europeans have a habit of stringing up despots that they depose. Lukashenko might want to recall that history.

Terrorist Gets Early Release To Avoid Her Inconvenience

German authorities released Baader-Meinhof terrorist Brigitte Mohnhaupt two days earlier than expected. They wanted to allow her to rejoin society without having to deal with the horrific experience of talking to the media:

A former Baader Meinhof militant, Brigitte Mohnhaupt, was released from prison yesterday after serving 24 years for nine counts of murder during a wave of anti-establishment terrorist attacks that shook Germany in the 1970s and 80s.

Ms Mohnhaupt, 57, who led the second generation of the Red Army Faction after the deaths of its founding members, Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, was last month granted early release, in a decision that split Germany.

Wolfgang Deuschl, the head of Ainach prison in Bavaria, southern Germany, said yesterday that she had been freed two days ahead of her scheduled release to avoid the intense media attention which has surrounded her case. "We reached an agreement [on Saturday] that she would be picked up by friends," Mr Deuschl told a German newspaper. She left prison early yesterday morning after cleaning out her cell, he said.

This has to be a joke. They wanted to protect a hardened murderer from getting hassled by reporters? How awful! We wouldn't want to have Mohnhaupt experience that kind of inhumanity!

Besides, what exactly do the Germans expect Mohnhaupt to do? She may disappear long enough to write her autobiography, or perhaps to market the one she probably wrote in prison. Afterwards, she will hit the lecture circuit, talking about the grand old days of revolution, when radical leftists like Mohnhaupt and her friends murdered bankers and abducted law-abiding citizens for fun and profit. She'll want to hold press conferences wherever she goes.

The Germans have to have a holes in their heads for ever letting Mohnhaupt out of prison. This latest concern over the inconvenience of answering for herself to a free press shows what a joke this process was from the start.

Royal: I'll Snub Our Allies

Ségolène Royal will find it difficult to work with Britain's Conservative Party as president of France, her significant other told the Daily Telegraph. She also rejects Margaret Thatcher as "ruthless" and says that Tony Blair hasn't been sufficiently socialist for her tastes, according to François Hollande:

Ségolène Royal, the French Left's candidate for president, would find it difficult working with the "anti-European" David Cameron and shuns comparisons with the "ruthless" Margaret Thatcher, her partner and Socialist party leader, François Hollande said yesterday.

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Mr Hollande said Miss Royal drew inspiration from Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, although there was "real divergence" on many policies, including on Iraq.

While Mr Hollande said his partner had been inspired by Mr Blair's strategic thinking - and especially the way he had modernised his own nominally socialist party - he said she "generally disagreed" with his policies. ...

"Margaret Thatcher has definitely not been a model for Ségolène. Even though she's a woman, Thatcher was known for her ruthless methods. She took many blows and this hardened her. Cameron is very much anti-European. It's because of this stance that he won the leadership of the party.

"But there's a natural opposition between the Conservatives in Britain and the Socialist Party in France. As parties we're very different.

"We'd certainly find it very difficult to envisage a future partnership with the Conservative Party."

One might suppose that Hollande and Royal want to send a message to the British not to elect Cameron if Royal wins the French presidency. Otherwise, the alliance between the two nations may come to an end. It's a rather arrogant statement from someone who wants to sell herself as a leader of her nation, and one which the British might want to keep in mind later.

Hollande later said that Royal didn't choose to run for her own personal glory, but for the French people. Odd, then, that she would project her personal dislikes onto Cameron and the Conservatives, who may one day run the UK after Blair leaves. The French people might want to maintain a good working relationship between Paris and London regardless of who Royal believes to be her opponent. The proper position for any candidate would be to maintain respect for the elected representatives of a nation's ally.

And in this case, Royal hasn't even bothered to visit the ally at all, an unusual omission for a French presidential candidate -- especially one who has decided that she can ignore a good chunk of their electorate. That makes her right about one thing: she's no Margaret Thatcher.

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished, Part 67C

The assassination attempt on Iraq's deputy prime minister now looks like an inside job, and the perpetrator had already been suspected of being a security risk. However, since both men are Sunnis and related to each other, the erstwhile assassin never got searched before blowing himself up within feet of the politician:

The suicide attack against Iraq's Sunni deputy prime minister is now seen as an inside job carried out by a member of his own security detail — a distant relative who had been arrested as an insurgent, freed at the official's request, then hired as a bodyguard, a senior security official and an aide to the victim told The Associated Press on Sunday.

The assassination attempt, at least the third major security breach involving a top politician in four months, prompted Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to order a government-wide security shake up, including plans to hire a foreign company to guard the Green Zone building where parliament meets, the security official said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak with reporters.

A suicide attacker came within feet of Deputy Prime Minister Salam al-Zubaie and exploded his vest during a Friday prayer service in the private mosque attached to al-Zubaie home. The Sunni official was seriously wounded and nine people were killed.

The senior security official as well as a key aide to al-Zubaie said Wahab al-Saadi, the distant relative accused of involvement in the attack, was the only person at the prayer service who has not been accounted for.

They said al-Saadi's car, which was parked outside the al-Zubaie compound, exploded within minutes of the suicide attack.

The assassin had served as al-Zubaie's bodyguard for a while, but had recently been removed from that assignment for being a troublemaker. No one has an explanation of what that specifically meant, but it apparently didn't rise to a level where Iraqi security would check him for explosives when he traveled with Zubaie. They never bothered to check his car, either, which looks like it was intended to serve as a backup plan in case the suicide vest didn't work.

In fact, Saadi wouldn't have kept his job if Zubaie hadn't interceded on his behalf. Saadi got arrested for suspicion of involvement in the insurgencies, but Zubaie sprung him from jail. After he did that, Zubaie insisted that Saadi join his security detail. Had Zubaie allowed Iraqi security forces to do their jobs rather than worry more about his family connections, he wouldn't be coming out of surgery today.

No one is certain what happened to Saadi. For the moment, they believe him to be the suicide bomber, although he apparently had help getting a second person close to Zubaie. Saadi could still be alive and on the run.

Let's hope that Zubaie has learned his lesson and doesn't try to spring him again, if the Iraqis get their hands on him again.

The Other Side Of The LA Times' Story

Earlier today, I wrote about the issues Mitt Romney would have to face in his presidential campaign regarding the evolution of his positions over his political career. This prompted some spirited discussion about the nature and value of consistency around the blogosphere and in the comments section here at CQ. This afternoon, I got a response from the Romney campaign regarding the points raised by the Times article, and I thought it intriguing enough to share.

The response comes in three parts. First, while Romney did make overtures to NARAL on abortion, NARAL wound up endorsing Romney's opponent, calling Romney dangerous:

“'He was very clear. He said over and over again that he supports the status quo in Massachusetts. He's not going to be a leader on this issue,' said Melissa Kogut, head of Mass NARAL's political action committee, referring to recent statements by the candidate. She called that stance 'dangerous,' saying that abortion rights are being attacked on a national level and noting that Massachusetts House Speaker Thomas M. Finneran opposes abortion rights." (Stephanie Ebbert, "Major Abortion Rights Groups Give Nod To O'Brien," The Boston Globe, 10/3/02)”

That to me is a rather weak response. Yes, NARAL called him "dangerous", but not because they predicted Romney would go pro-life. They would have labeled anyone not being an activist for expanded abortion rights as "dangerous". It's an interesting point but does not really address the essential point of Romney's stark reversal on this point. However, since Romney has already explained his shift on several occasions, this won't do much damage anyway.

Romney's camp scores better on their other two rebuttal points. The Times wants to give the impression that Romney has changed positions on gay rights, championing then opposing gay marriage and civil unions. The campaign produced quotes that long predate the 2002 campaign that demonstrates otherwise:

"I do not, however, favor same sex marriages." (Glen Warchol, "This Is The Place, But Politics May Lead Romneys Elsewhere," The Salt Lake Tribune, 2/14/99)

"But call me old fashioned but I don't support gay marriage nor do I support civil union … if a civil union is a Vermont-style civil union, with all of the associated benefits with marriage, then it's the same thing for me for all intents and purposes, and I draw the line there … I do not favor marriage between gays. I think marriage should be preserved for a husband and a wife of different genders." ("The Gubernatorial Debates," The Boston Globe, 10/2/02)

"BW: To you, what is the difference between civil unions between same-sex couples and gay marriage? MR: Very little, if any. For all intents and purposes, they are the same. BW: Do you support civil unions? MR: No, because I believe it's virtually identical to marriage. BW: Do you support gay marriage? MR: No. BW: If you do not support gay marriage or civil unions, what keeps you from doing so? MR: I believe that marriage is a union between a man and a woman." (Bay Windows Questionnaire, 1/1/02)

This makes his current positions much more consistent with his past. I'm not necessarily in agreement on either gay marriage or civil unions, especially the latter; I see nothing wrong with two adults entering in contractual partnerships for whatever purpose, as long is it has nothing to do with illegal behavior. The issue here is consistency, though, and the Times seems to have missed these in their research.

On global warming, the record will necessarily be pretty thin, as governors have had little to do with the issue thus far. In this case, the beef seems to be about honoring campaign promises, and Romney's campaign says that the Times left out some important context. They claim that Romney did intend to pursue the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), but he could not get protections for consumers and businesses against potential energy-cost increases, and they point to this quote as an explanation:

"'New England has the highest energy rates in the country, and [the pact] would cost us more,' Romney said in a telephone interview. 'We offered a simple safety valve and they rejected that and came back with a series of proposals to lessen the price escalation, but it was not a clean and sure safety valve.'" (Beth Daley, "Mass. Pulls Out Of Agreement To Cut Power Plant Emissions," The Boston Globe, 12/15/05)

Is that a good enough reason to renege on this supposed campaign promise? Probably not if one considers global warming to be the greatest crisis facing mankind, but almost certainly for everyone else who understands the need to keep Massachussetts competitive, as well as the US. This is part of governing -- making a choice between conflicting priorities. Somehow I don't see conservatives as excessively concerned about this particular choice.

Was the Times article misleading? I wouldn't go that far, but they had plenty of column inches to get some of this information into their story. I don't think that they did a particularly good job covering the consistency issues of Romney's record, and they tried to make it a bigger story than it is.

A Day Of Respite And Preparation

Today's been a slow day on the blog, but I have to plead innocent to goldbricking -- mostly.

The first pleasant weekend of spring qualifies as a state holiday for Minnesotans, and today has been especially pleasant. The temperature got above 70 degrees for the first time in months, even though I still have a tiny patch of snow on the shaded portion of my front yard. Since the First Mate unexpectedly came home from the hospital on Friday and this is the last weekend before her transplant, we decided to take it easy today. We went to church and then for a bit of a drive.

Storm clouds began rolling through the sky and the FM started feeling tired, so we came home. I have been meaning to clean up my office, in preparation for my new job at Blog Talk Radio. For those who know me, they understand that the scope of this task relates closely to Hercules' fifth labor of cleaning the Augean stables. I'm not going to get it done in a day, either, but I did manage to clear most of my desk and discover the floor sometime after an hour or so. After trying to get my old desktop working and discovering that it is not going to run fast enough to make me happy, I replaced it with my spare laptop -- and it works beautifully. I'm listening to XM Radio online and taking a moment to relax while the breeze blows through the house, and it's one of the best days I've had in months.

I may have the office more or less clean sometime today, but I'm not going to blow this entire day sitting around -- and I hope you all enjoy today as well.

Another American Peace Plan In The Works?

Condoleezza Rice will make yet another comprehensive tour of the Middle East in the coming days, which has fueled speculation as to the motivation behind it. The fourth trip in as many months appears to signal that the US, which has avoided creating an American plan for a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, may now have decided to risk the damage to our credibility by crafting our own solution:

In making her fourth trip to the Middle East in four months to try to breathe life into dormant Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has opened the door to the possibility that the United States might offer its own proposals to bridge the divide on some of the entrenched issues that have bedeviled the region for decades.

“I don’t rule out at some point that might be a useful thing to do,” Ms. Rice told reporters in Washington before departing for Aswan, Egypt, where she met with Sunni Arab allies on Saturday before her journey to Israel and the Palestinian territories.

Such an initiative would be proof of a profound policy change for the Bush administration, which has steadfastly refrained from trying to impose any American-made solution on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. ...

“We’re at a critical juncture right now,” said David Makovsky, a Middle East expert with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “The Arab states can reach out to the Israeli center, and to Olmert,” referring to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel, who Mr. Makovsky pointed out is politically weakened right now within his country. “But if they don’t, they shouldn’t be surprised if Israel moves rightward,” which could complicate the peace process, he added.

The sense of urgency has built within the Bush administration as well. Several State Department officials say there is now internal acknowledgment that the previous hands-off policy had caused prospects for peace to deteriorate. “This is a place where if you leave things alone, they don’t just stagnate,” one administration official said. “They get worse.”

I'd take exception to the notion that the Bush administration has left anything alone. This administration is the first to make the creation of a Palestinian state the official policy of the US, and ever since Rice replaced Colin Powell, we have visited this region more often than any other. The effort to keep American fingerprints off of any peace plan did not come from a lack of interest but from an attempt to show any eventual plan as organic to the region.

Other Presidents have attempted to create a Pax Americana in the Middle East, and have received mostly grief for their efforts. Ronald Reagan attempted to insert American forces in Lebanon to act as a buffer peacekeeping force in order to cool the temperature after the PLO established itself in Beirut. We withdrew after 243 Marines got killed in a truck-bomb attack, one of a line of missteps that bolstered radical Islam in the region. Bill Clinton tried to craft a peace plan and nearly succeeded -- until Yasser Arafat showed that he didn't really want a two-state solution and launched an intifada after the Wye accord got adopted by the Israelis. Jimmy Carter successfully brokered a peace between Egypt and Israel, but avoided the Palestinian problem and essentially bought Egypt for $2 billion a year in aid. (That's not to denigrate the courage of Anwar Sadat, who paid for that peace with his life.)

Could the US put a peace plan into action now? The Arab states have moderated their stances somewhat in the intervening years, apparently tiring of the Palestinians almost as much as the West has. They have accepted Israel as a fact of life, and appear to want normal relations with Israel more than before. However, they do not want to be seen as facilitating Israel's existence for domestic political reasons, so an American-initiated plan suits them better. They will want to see something along the lines of the Arab League plan, but could perhaps be persuaded to bend on some of the terms.

Unfortunately for everyone involved, any peace plan requires a Palestinian community ready to live peacefully. That has been the stumbling block for decades, and if anything, the situation is worse now than before. Instead of secular terrorists running the show, now we have Islamist terrorists in charge of the Palestinian Authority. The latest group of leaders won't even commit to honoring the thin number of agreements reached with the PA in the past. How can we expect to trust them to honor any future commitments they may or may not make?

An agreement may not even be the point. The continuous trips and the unsuccessful efforts may just be designed to show that the US remains engaged and willing to work towards peace, rather than reflect any hope that a peace agreement can be reached with the factions involved. If so, Rice really knows how to sell the performance.

Those Left Behind By Evolution

Mitt Romney has described the shift in his positions on abortion and other issues as an evolution, a gradual change that occurred when he broadened his perspective as time passed. Romney hopes that this evolution will please conservative Republicans enough to support him against the more liberal Rudy Giuliani and the mistrusted John McCain. However, in this case, Romney's evolution has left some bitterness behind in Massachussetts, as the Los Angeles Times reports:

Though Romney's policy shifts have become widely known, his meetings with activists for abortion rights and other causes — which have received far less attention — show he put much work into winning support from Massachusetts' liberal establishment only a few years ago.

Making personal appeals on the state's liberal touchstones — gay rights, abortion rights and the environment — Romney developed a persuasive style, convincing audiences that his passion matched theirs and that he was committed to their causes.

He impressed environmentalists by using rhetoric sharper than theirs. He met gay-rights activists on their turf, in a restaurant attached to a popular gay bar, and told skeptics he would be a "good voice" and a moderating force within his party.

And in many cases, he said his commitment had been cemented by watching the suffering of someone dear to him: a grandchild whose asthma left him worried about air pollution; his wife's multiple sclerosis, which had him placing hope in embryonic stem cell research; the death of a distant relative in an illegal abortion, convincing him that the procedure needed to remain legal.

In discussing the need to combat global warming, he said he worried about his family's favorite vacation spot.

"He talked a lot about his kids and his family and the place they go to in New Hampshire on vacation," said Cindy Luppi, an official from the group Clean Water Action, who was impressed by Romney's concern about global warming in a 2003 meeting — and later disappointed when he unexpectedly pulled the state out of a regional compact on greenhouse gases.

The personal touch got Al Gore in trouble in 2000. Recall when Gore used the death of his sister to explain his anti-tobacco passion -- and then it came out that Gore profited from leasing his land to tobacco interests years after her death? Republicans had no problem pointing out the hypocrisy involved then, and we can expect these anecdotes to come out of Romney's past in the 2008 campaign.

Other than that, the Times presents few surprises. We know that Romney has "evolved" over the last few years, although some might be a little surprised to see how recently some of those changes have occurred. If Romney was pushing global warming in 2002, one has to ask what changed his mind so significantly in the last four years. Similarly, a 2002 plea to abortion-rights advocates to allow him to "moderate" the GOP's hard-line stance also appears very close to his epiphany about the unborn.

"I'm a believer in simplicity," Romney told a NARAL audience in 2002, according to the Times. "I'm a strong believer in stating your position and not wavering." Unfortunately for Romney, that's the Giuliani argument this year -- that a man who can stand up to his party on domestic issues can stand up for America in foreign policy. Wavering has put him on defense early in the campaign.

That, however, may be by design. If Romney can get all of this out nine long months before the primaries begin, he can defuse most of it. It may give him some of McCain's headache -- can the GOP trust him to pursue his policy stands of late -- but he has a long time to reinforce his current messages. More of those unhappy activists who supported Romney for his more liberal stances in the past will go public, but they will have decreasing influence on the debate if Romney can stay on message now and keep talking about his "evolution".

It's no wonder, though, why conservatives have made it clear that they're still hoping for a hero -- and why they keep casting their eyes West for Fred Dalton Thompson.

The Downside Of Anger

George Will writes today about the caustic and self-involved nature of anger in American life in his column today, a topic that has bubbled in my mind for quite a while. He writes more generally about the effect that it has on politics, but anger is the germ of another related problem in politics that Will doesn't address:

Wood notes that there is a "vagueness and elasticity of the grievances" that supposedly justify today's almost exuberant anger. And anger is more pervasive than merely political grievances would explain. Today's anger is a coping device for everyday life. It also is the defining attribute of an increasingly common personality type: the person who "unless he is angry, feels he is nothing at all."

That type, infatuated with anger, uses it to express identity. Anger as an expression of selfhood is its own vindication. Wood argues, however, that as anger becomes a gas polluting the social atmosphere, it becomes not a sign of personal uniqueness but of a herd impulse. ...

Today, many people preen about their anger as a badge of authenticity: I snarl, therefore I am. Such people make one's blood boil.

Will makes a number of good points in this column. He points out that the culture used to value people who came to anger only slowly, or not at all. Will uses Gary Cooper in High Noon and Alan Ladd in Shane as examples, but I could easily include Mr. Spock in Star Trek and "the Force" in the first Star Wars trilogy; who can forget Ian McDiarmid's creepy exhortation to Mark Hamill to use all of his anger in order to make his journey towards evil complete? Tellingly, the second trilogy didn't use that formulation to anywhere near the extent of the first.

The anger Will describes creates another kind of problem. He notes that anger gives people an identity, but it goes farther than that. It creates a sense of shared identity based on anger, and also based on the object of that anger. It creates a sense of tribalism, where we join hands in anger towards a specific Other -- and that drives reason and compromise from the political arena.

In some cases, we should not compromise. Terrorists make themselves a rational target for anger, and those who stand against them have existential reasons for doing so. In times of war, anger towards one's enemy clarifies the priorities of the nation, assuming that we have correctly identified those enemies. In Iraq, for instance, we have done a good job of not allowing ourselves to blame all Iraqis for the ongoing violence, but the small minority of insurgents and terrorists who kill soldiers and civilians alike in their bloodthirsty pursuit of power -- which is true of both sides of the debate.

However, in other applications, this anger and tribalism creates a national sense of rhetorical civil war where we cannot ever agree enough to maintain standards of behavior or get anything accomplished. When Howard Dean stands up and says that he hates Republicans and everything for which we stand, that's not reasoned politics but tribalism. When we accept behavior from Republicans that we find unacceptable in Democrats, or excuse it because the other side did it (even though we howled when they did), that's another form of tribalism.

The point of politics is not to engage in primal screams, but to find ways to implement the best policies for the nation, states, and communities. Anger has its place, but we cannot allow anger to define our politics and our ethics. If we are to make a better nation and a better world, we have to insist on a focus on policy and performance regardless of which party is in power. Otherwise, we're just playing Capture the Flag.

UPDATE: I hadn't noticed it when I wrote this, but Joe Gandelman has some thoughts on tribalism today as well.