Jumping To Conclusions

Remember all those Democratic complaints about how the Bush administration wasn't doing anything about corporate crime? How about five years in prison for Enron's treasurer?

(Think that will satisfy Democrats that progress is being made? Ha! We'll hear "So what? What about Ken Lay?" And when Lay is prosecuted, and the trial drags on, we'll hear, "Why did you arrest him unilaterally, instead of working through the UN? Now we're in a legal quagmire." (Er, sorry. I watched the first Democratic presidential debate -- the Hispanic debate -- last weekend, and the second Democratic presidential debate -- the black one -- last night. My cynicism about the Democratic party is unusually high right now.))

Two years. Hard to believe it. It seems almost surreal now, as it fades slightly into the distance. Almost hard to believe that it happened. And then you remember the little things, from Barbara Olsen on the plane to the horror of watching the buildings crumble, to the amazing concept of 72 hours without commercials, and it all comes back, if not quite as vividly as before.

But we've come so far. We've fought a war on terrorism in two theaters, while fighting a longer, more intense diplomatic war in between those two conflicts. In some ways, the world feels like it has changed so much since 9/11; we've gone from the End of History to the Clash of Civilizations. And yet in other ways, it feels as if it hasn't changed at all. Last year, 9/11 was a huge, emotional day. This year, the networks have forgotten about it -- or decided to ignore it -- and the media focus has shifted from remembrance of the events themselves to metastories about the way people are dealing with the anniversary of the events. Policywise, we've gone from "Oh my god, how should we react?" in 2001 to "What should we do? What's our long term strategy for foreign policy?" in 2002 to "Why did we do it? What did he know and when did he know it? How is this going to affect the 2004 election?"

In a way, it's depressing; the brief period of certainty, with a widespread shared sense of purpose, is gone. No longer does the national sense of unity endure. There will be no more 420-1 votes in Congress regarding American policy. Petty partisan squabbles again predominate, and foreign policy has been displaced by, or at least forced to share space with, the Kobe Bryant story.

And yet, in a way, it's reassuring; life does go on. The war is not over, not nearly over. There are major battles left to fight, both militarily and diplomatically. And national security will be back on the electoral agenda after completely disappearing for the 8 years of Clinton. But, we're not obsessed with it. And that's a good thing. We don't have to be. We're not Israel, constantly under siege; we can get on with our lives. We can pay attention to the campaign of the Governator and the World Series and Ben and J-Lo and the economy and the Ten Commandments in a courthouse. In the past, some -- such as Bill Maher -- have proclaimed our pre-9/11 obsession with these sorts of matters as a sign of American decadence. But it isn't; it's a sign of our strength. We can afford to pay attention to these matters, most of the time, because we focus on the important things when we need to.

So on this second anniversary of the Day Which Changed Everything, we should remember, and reflect, and mourn, and resolve to stay the course for as long as it takes until we have won this war as decisively as we won the Cold War. As we should every future 9/11. But we shouldn't wallow, and we shouldn't feel guilty about having "moved on."

A lot of conservatives are upset about the 9th circuit's decision to postpone the California recall election, finding it to be more unwarranted judicial activism -- and again, as in Florida and New Jersey, activism which coincidentally happens to benefit Democrats. There has been a lot of criticism about unelected judges taking elections out of the hands of the people.

Since I do think the U.S. Supreme Court made the right call on Florida 2000, I can't rightly object to judges intervening in an election. Equal protection is a valid reason, as longstanding precedent as well as Bush v. Gore make clear, for the federal courts to intervene in the electoral process. And at least this intervention, unlike the Florida Supreme Court's, took place before the election, so it's not quite so obvious that they're manipulating the outcome to benefit the Democratic candidate.

That having been said, it seems to me that the application of the Bush v. Gore precedent to this recall situation does not compel this result.

1. Bush v. Gore held that varying standards from district to district were a problem. That is, a chad hanging by two corners might be considered a vote in one county and a non-vote in another, based on the whims of poll workers.

   As seems to have been acknowledged at oral argument, the standards for accepting or rejecting contested ballots might vary not only from county to county but indeed within a single county from one recount team to another.

   The record provides some examples. A monitor in Miami-Dade County testified at trial that he observed that three members of the county canvassing board applied different standards in defining a legal vote. 3 Tr. 497, 499 (Dec. 3, 2000). And testimony at trial also revealed that at least one county changed its evaluative standards during the counting process. Palm Beach County, for example, began the process with a 1990 guideline which precluded counting completely attached chads, switched to a rule that considered a
   vote to be legal if any light could be seen through a chad, changed back to the 1990 rule, and then abandoned any pretense of a per se rule, only to have a court order that the county consider dimpled chads legal. This is not a process with sufficient guarantees of equal treatment.

   On the other hand, the California election doesn't present that problem. It merely presents the possibility that more ballots will be discarded in some counties as a result of errors -- errors by the voters, not by poll
   officials, though those errors may be facilitated (though not caused) by the choice of ballot technology used. And, indeed, Bush v. Gore explicitly did not address that issue:

   The question before the Court is not whether local entities, in the exercise of their expertise, may develop different systems for implementing elections. Instead, we are presented with a situation where a state court with the power to assure uniformity has ordered a statewide recount with minimal procedural safeguards. When a court orders a statewide remedy, there must be at least some assurance that the rudimentary requirements of equal treatment and fundamental fairness are satisfied.

   There's a big difference between mechanical error rates being slightly different and poll workers being allowed to pick and choose which ballots they wish to count without any possibility of oversight.

2. Even if the court found that different error rates presented a constitutional problem, that doesn't justify this decision. While other forms of ballot might have a lower error rate in general than punch cards, that does not mean that a newly-implemented system in these California counties will have a lower rate than an established punch card system. Training poll workers (who, let's face it, aren't the sharpest knifes in the drawer) to use entirely new technology in a short time period doesn't inspire much in the way of confidence that they won't make mistakes.

As to what is going to happen, I have no idea. I've got to imagine that the Supreme Court is going to be extremely reluctant to get involved. [Update: while I was writing this, word came down that the 9th circuit is getting involved, asking the parties to file briefs on whether they should hear the case en banc. Would they do so if there weren't a decent chance of reversing the panel's decision? I don't know.]

Having failed to make any impact whatsoever on Bush administration policies, the left has come out strongly on the counterattack, with the biggest theme being that the whole administration is dishonest. That's to be expected in politics (both dishonesty and accusations thereof), but reasonable people need to learn the distinction between differences of opinion, mistakes, and actual lies. Most importantly, if you're going to accuse someone of lying, shouldn't you make sure your facts are correct first? It seems like a good rule of thumb. But if so, someone needs to explain it to The Nation. In a column entitled The Latest Bush Gang Whoppers, David Corn attempts to dissect Dick Cheney's weekend appearance on Meet The Press, where he cited the meeting between Mohammed Atta and Iraqi intelligence in Prague as possible evidence of ties between Saddam Hussein and 9/11.

Let's start with Dick Cheney. He appeared on Meet The Press and was asked by host Tim Russert if there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks. He replied, "Of course, we've had the story that's been public out there. The Czechs alleged that Mohamed Atta, the lead attacker, met in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official five months before the attack. But we've never been able to develop any more of that yet either in terms of confirming it or discrediting it. We just don't know." This was a deceptive answer.

Shortly after 9/11, Czech intelligence officials did say they had a report from a source--a single source--that Atta had met with this Iraqi intelligence official in April 2001. Subsequent media reports in the United States noted that the source was an Arab student who was not considered particularly reliable. The FBI investigated and found nothing to substantiate the report of the meeting. In fact, the FBI concluded that Atta was most likely in Florida at the time of the supposed meeting, and the CIA questioned the existence of this meeting. (Even if there had been a meeting, one could not tell what it meant unless it was known what was said--and no one, not even Cheney, has claimed to know what might have transpired.

Oh, here it is:

Moreover, on October 21, 2002, The New York Times reported that Czech President Vaclav Havel "quietly told the White House he has concluded that there is no evidence to confirm earlier reports" of the meeting. And it seemed that Atta had gone to Prague in June 2000, not April 2001. "Now," the paper noted, "some Czech and German officials say that their best explanation of why Mr. Atta came to Prague was to get a cheap airfare to the United States."

For some reason, Cheney did not share with the Meet the Press audience the information about Havel's denial.

"It is a fabrication. Nothing like this has occurred," [Havel spokesperson Ladislav] Spacek said about Havel's alleged phone conversation with the White House.

There is, of course, serious debate about whether this meeting took place, and what it would prove if it did. The evidence for the meeting is limited to a single source, and he provides no details about the substance of the meeting. But that in no way justifies calling Cheney a liar for citing this as possible evidence of a connection, and it in no way justifies citing a fabricated New York Times story as evidence that Cheney lied.

Tip for politicians: when you consult your political advisers on a policy matter, you might want to also consult your economic advisers, to make sure that their ideas will actually work. Because when they don't, you're in trouble. Last year, the Bush Administration imposed tariffs on steel imports in advance of the midterm Congressional elections; now it turns out that the tariffs are backfiring.

Eighteen months later, key administration officials have concluded that Bush's order has turned into a debacle. Some economists say the tariffs may have cost more jobs than they saved, by driving up costs for automakers and other steel users. Politically, the strategy failed to produce union endorsements and appears to have hurt Bush with workers in Michigan and Tennessee -- also states at the heart of his 2004 strategy.

Sometimes bad economics can make good politics, but only in the short run.

I hear that once upon a time, in a galaxy far far away, people often offered to help other people in need. And when they did so, they did so without expectation of being paid. And they were known as volunteers.

And then government got involved, and suddenly "volunteering" turned into a big government program that needed an extra $100,000,000 just so that 20,000 more people could work for free.

It would be surreal -- if it weren't for the fact that these sorts of paradoxes are to be expected from government. The issue here is that what the program calls "volunteers" are, in fact, something else entirely, as their website makes clear:

Eligibility and Benefits
AmeriCorps is open to U.S. citizens, nationals, or lawful permanent residents aged 17 or older. Members serve full or part time over a 10- to 12-month period. Full-time members receive an education award of $4,725 to pay for college, graduate school, or to pay back student loans. They also receive health insurance, training, and student loan deferment. About half of the members also receive a modest annual living allowance of about $9,300, along with health insurance. Members who serve part-time receive a partial education award.

Gregg Easterbrook answers that imponderable question: why are there 175 candidates for the Democratic nomination?

First, to the extent the candidates are United States senators (four are), caution-contents-under-pressure egotism is the driving factor. It matters not that it has been 43 years since a senator was elected president. All senators consider themselves Great Men -- substitute Women where appropriate--and of equal importance, all senators consider all competing senators Bloated Gasbags. So when Senator A declares for the presidency, 99 other senators instantly think, Him? I'm better than him! Senators endlessly run, and endlessly lose, because they cannot stand the thought that some other senator views himself as more qualified.

Mark Whitaker went to Harvard. Graduated with honors. Then he went to Oxford on a Marshall Fellowship. Obviously, he's an educated guy.

Well, actually, it's not that obvious. He's now editor of Newsweek, and here is his idea of political analyis:

FROM THERE, I went to dinner with a veteran NEWSWEEK correspondent who covered Clark when he was commander of NATO. When I asked what he thought of the general, my colleague made an “L” with his thumb and index finger. “Loser!” he said. Sure, Clark was very smart, he conceded, but he was also brittle and egotistical.

That's right. A colleague made an "L" with his thumb. Wesley Clarke is, evidently, a "loser."

It's important to ask: what's not being reported in Newsweek so it can fill its space with tales of one reporter signaling another reporter with 8th grade put-downs?

Sheesh, leave the blogosphere for a couple of days and you're swamped by some story. The current one is the Plame affair, which went from simmering to boiling when the Washington Post published a big piece on it. The short version, for those of you too lazy to click on a simple link:

1. A rumor appeared that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Niger. Dick Cheney asked the CIA to investigate. The CIA sent former ambassador Joseph Wilson to Niger to do so. He did, and decided it was unsubstantiated. Either his findings were deliberately disregarded, or got lost in the bureaucracy, so the claims made it into the State of the Union. Months later, when Democrats were looking for Bush vulnerabilities and settled on the "16 words" in the State of the Union, Wilson began going around telling everyone who would listen that he had researched it, found it to be false, and that Bush lied.

2. Soon afterwards, columnist Robert Novak reported that someone in the Bush administration had hinted to him that Wilson (an anti-Bush, anti-Iraq war diplomat) had been chosen because his wife, a covert CIA operative, pulled some strings. This didn't get a lot of publicity at the time, but now it has suddenly exploded.

3. The Post is reporting that a bunch of other Washington journalists were also contacted by administration officials leaking this story to them. Now the Justice Department is going to investigate,because it's a crime to reveal the name of covert operatives, for obvious reasons.

My reactions to the scandal (other than "wait and see what an investigation reveals"):

• If the worst -- that Plame is a covert operative who was deliberately outed to retaliate against Wilson -- is true, the
  perpetrators should be shot, not merely for treason or for violating the law, but for criminal stupidity. What on earth did perpetrators have to gain by doing this? Supposedly it's "revenge," but where's the revenge? How is Wilson hurt by this? I suppose the theory is that his wife is hurt -- but how? (People she worked with overseas would indeed be hurt -- their lives would be in danger -- but it's rather perverse to suggest that the Bush administration tried to get overseas operatives killed in order to "punish" Wilson.)

  And if Wilson, through Plame, is indeed hurt, what's the point? To intimidate other critics of Bush, as some have suggested? That doesn't work; nobody was even paying attention to this until Bush's critics -- including Wilson himself -- brought it out in the open and turned it into a scandal. To simply get even with Wilson? For what? He was an insignificant figure before the scandal broke. His 15 minutes of fame about the "16 words" were long over.

• A lesser version of this scandal makes more sense: some in the administration were trying to discredit Wilson, so they leaked the story that the only reason he got the assignment is because his wife pulled some strings. Naturally, the next question a journalist would ask is, "His wife? Who? What strings could she pull?" And then the accurate response: oh, she works for the CIA on WMD. In this scenario, the motive for the crime -- it is still a crime, after all -- switches from revenge to diminishing Wilson's credentials. Also illegal, but inadvertently, rather than deliberately, so. The perpetrators weren't trying to harm Wilson, Plame, or her contacts, but were just trying to make Wilson look like a beneficiary of nepotism.

• If this story is true, it's just not going to be that hard to find out. If the perpetrator called at least six journalists, then there are gong to be phone records. There are only a limited number of people who knew and/or could find out what Plame did for a living, and there will likely be a paper trail of some sort regarding her personnel file. And that leads to my next point...

• There's a second -- and far lesser, don't get me wrong -- scandal here. Namely, what the hell is the media doing? I understand that journalists want to preserve their access, and protecting sources is an important part of that. But supposedly we have _six_ journalists who have firsthand knowledge of a felony on the part of a senior administration official, and yet they'd all rather keep quiet? What is wrong with them? There's a big difference between not revealing who told you that the judge has a secret bank account filled with bribe money, and not revealing who illegally handed you classified information for petty reasons.

I have generally agreed with Dan Drezner's take on Plamegate, but I think he gives a little too much credibility to administration critics, such as Salon's Eric Boehlert. Drezner writes:

Eric Boehlert's Salon piece undercut Robert Novak's credibility just as badly as Joseph Wilson's exaggerations undercut his credibility.

[...]

Surprisingly Boehlert buries the lead with this graf from the story:

[A] former senior CIA intelligence officer confirms to Salon that Plame is both an analyst and an officer who works undercover, and was undercover when Novak outed her. Now that her identity has been exposed she cannot again work overseas, and the network of agents she once oversaw may be at risk.

I think this falls under the "unbelievably disturbing' category.

Let me preface my comments by explaining that this is exactly why I don't like this story as a blogging subject: we don't really have any facts. We're discussing second- and thirdhand reporting using almost solely anonymous sources. We've got anonymous people commenting about news stories of other anonymous people, as if the first group knew the identity of the second when we have no way to know whether they do.

Boehlert's version of the facts simply doesn't sound credible to me, in two aspects:

1. Valerie Plame is "an officer who works undercover," who has a "network of agents she once oversaw."
   
2. Valerie Plame "was undercover when Novak outed her."

Moreover, if someone is "working undercover," while pretending to be an "energy industry analyst" as a cover -- as some stories have noted -- does it make sense that she doesn't have a cover? I spent some significant time the other day searching the internet, and found nothing about a Valerie Plame, energy industry analyst. Wouldn't there be something out there to establish her bona fides if she were actually operating undercover?

As to the second point, Novak has been explicit about the fact that, when he checked up on the story, the CIA didn't seem to care much about whether Plame was outed. If she were actively undercover, that doesn't sound right. Moreover, I would think their post-leak response would have been a little more aggressive, don't you?

Additionally, how would a "former senior CIA intelligence officer" be in a position to know what Plame's current assignment was?

And, in a related question, if she were actively undercover, how would anybody in the White House know, to the point where they could leak it to Novak? That sort of information isn't posted on bulletin boards. The identity of an undercover operative is, from what I understand, very closely guarded. It doesn't appear anywhere outside the CIA, not even in reports based on what that operative has found. It's not going to be something that a Karl Rove would even have access to.

These questions I raise have been bothering me for a couple of days now. Now, this could be based on my misunderstanding of the way covert operations work. But it doesn't quite pass the common sense test to me.

None of this means that the leaker didn't commit a crime and doesn't deserve punishment. But it does call into question the significance of the damage done.

(*)By the way, this really bothers me, now that I pay more attention to it. Several pundits have, in questioning why on earth Wilson was sent to Niger, noted that Wilson is an anti-Bush, anti-war partisan. That's one thing. But now that I see that's he's affiliated with the Middle East Institute, I'm very disturbed. The MEI is one of those Saudi-funded propaganda mills that Matt Welch brilliantly exposed last year. Now I really want to know what the people who originally picked Wilson were thinking.

To the surprise of nobody but Bob Graham, Bob Graham is out. Just 134 left. Oh, no, wait -- that's California. Just nine left.

Remember all the pre-election hysteria from Democrats about how the recall election was unfair? They gave many reasons:

1. The whole state elected Davis in 2002, while a handful of radicals were hijacking the state by pushing a recall which would be supported by only a few people.
   
2. There would be hundreds of candidates and someone could get elected with only a small percentage of the vote.
   
3. Davis could get more votes than the guy who replaced him and still "lose" to that guy.
   

Surprise! None of those things came to pass.

In fact,

• More votes were cast in the recall election -- 7.9 million so far -- than were cast in the November 2002 general election that let Gray Davis remain as governor (about 7.5 million).
  
• There were a large number of candidates, but not "hundreds," and the winner got 48.5% of the vote. Which was, in fact, a higher percentage than Gray Davis got in 2002, when he received 47.3% of the vote.
  
• Schwarzenegger got more votes in this election to win the job (3.7 million) than Davis did in the recall portion of the election to retain the job (3.5 million).
  

So adding up Arnold and McClintock, plus dropouts like Ueberroth and lesser known people, more than 62% of the vote went to Republican candidates. What does that say about the state of politics in California? (I have no idea. It wasn't a rhetorical question.)

By the way, the award for quirkiest vote total: in ninth place was "George Schwartzman." Who? I hate to be cynical about voters, but given that he got almost as many votes as more prominent candidates like Gary Coleman, Mary Carey, and Larry Flynt, it's hard not to conclude that there are a substantial number of retardsCalifornians who thought they were voting for Schwarzenegger, not Schwartzman.

There may be no more pre-election hysteria, but there's plenty of post-election hysteria. For example, this piece by The American Prospect's Robert Kuttner:

TRENDS AND FADS often start in California, and that thought should terrify anyone who cares about a functioning democracy. Yesterday's recall election is history's ironic revenge on a well-intentioned set of reforms championed by the Golden State's great progressive governor, Hiram Johnson. Johnson's Progressives, beginning in 1911, enacted the populist measures beloved by that generation of reformers -- the ballot initiative, the recall, and nonpartisan local elections. Johnson was a crusader against monopolies. He imagined that giving government back to the people would purge politics of the corruption of moneyed interests. [...]

So, in a sense, Hiram Johnson had a point. If elected officials want to keep the confidence of voters, they had better get serious about addressing real problems.

Unfortunately, Johnson's remedy is allowing disgusted voters to wreck democracy itself. California will be a long time digging out. Neither party should take any comfort.

Kuttner's point seems to be that recalls and ballot initiatives are great ideas, except when he happens to disagree with the reasons and the results. Then they become undemocratic. Unfortunately for him, a majority of Californians disagreed with him and supported the recall.

But why? On a certain level it doesn't matter, as Steven Den Beste points out:

Why do I think Davis was recalled yesterday? Because 55 percent of the voters wanted Davis out, and 48% of them wanted Schwarzenegger to be his replacement. That's why.

I know that sounds prosaic, but I think it's really the most important message of all. Yesterday we demonstrated that the government of the State of California works for its citizens and is controlled by them, and if the people become sufficiently dissatisfied with what the government does, they'll replace it.

Absolutely. And Robert Kuttner apparently thinks that we all should be as terrified of this message as he is.

A partisan Republican would be thrilled with the outcome of the Texas redistricting fight.

Gov. Rick Perry announced late Monday that he had signed the bill, which received final passage in the Texas Senate on Sunday night along largely partisan lines, 17 to 14.

Political scientists and other analysts on Monday identified 8 of the 17 Texas Democrats in Congress whose seats seem at risk under the remapping. Another district created around Midland, in West Texas, seemed clearly earmarked for the Republicans, who hope to pick up as many as seven seats next year. This would raise the number of Texas Republicans in the House to as many as 22 from the current 15.

On the one hand, this does feel rather heavy-handed. It's a blatant partisan power grab by Republicans, and at that, a grab that goes outside the usual channels; as is well known, districting typically takes place only once per decade, and this decade's districting has already been completed in Texas. Republicans are simply taking advantage of the fact that they have more power in the Austin legislature to force through an extra round of districting that will benefit from them.

On the other hand, the previous districts were hardly sacred; they were drawn up by a Democratic-leaning judicial panel after the legislature couldn't reach agreement on a plan, and they do not appear to accurately reflect the political views of the citizens of Texas. It's not clear why, just because Democrats happened to have more power a year ago, they should get to freeze their advantage in place for another ten years. And it's not as if Democrats are standing up for grand principle here:

Several of the Democrats at risk — including two congressmen with nearly 50 years of experience between them — reacted angrily on Monday, saying the map was an effort to concentrate African-American and Hispanic voters in certain districts and paint Democrats as the party of minority voters, costing them white support.

...

Mr. Frost said the changes were harmful enough to minority voters to require rejection by the Justice Department or the courts. A Republican tactic against the Democrats, he said, is to eliminate all white officials of consequence, so white voters will not identify with the Democratic party.

And on the third hand, the typical genteel, congenial, collegial approach, the one preferred by the editorialists and the other good government types, involves a process which in some ways is far more sinister. It involves a process in which both parties get together and draw lines in such a way as to protect each party's incumbents. Certainly the party with more electoral clout attempts to gain an advantage -- but in such a way as to minimize the effects on each side. Is that really preferable to the DeLay plan? The latter may be one-sided, but at least it's honest. It doesn't masquerade as anything other than the partisan power grab that it is. Voters can decide what they think of such flagrant partisanship, and approve or disapprove in a straightforward manner. Politicians don't have the cover of civility to mask their self-interested intentions.

I would have far more sympathy for Democrats in Texas if it seemed that they cared about anything here other than their own jobs. As long as they're only interested in their own partisan advantage, why should I care? Until they stand up for real principle, they don't deserve anything other than what they're getting. So what is the right approach, the one I could get behind?

Simple: End gerrymandering altogether. The problem with what's going on in Texas isn't that Republicans are drawing lines which hurt Democrats more than is seemly. The problem is that Republicans are drawing lines on a partisan basis. Partisan gerrymandering has always existed, of course, but politicians are so much better at it than they used to be; sophisticated software has made it possible to draw and redraw, down to the block level, until the optimal amount of gerrymandering has taken place. And to what end? Incumbent protection, of course. Every year, we hear about how there are so few competitive House races, how out of 435 seats up for reelection only a few dozen are actually in danger of changing hands. And no, it isn't because of insufficient campaign finance reform. It's because the other ~400 districts are drawn so that nobody from the other party could possibly win the seat.

Coming up with neutral nonpartisan (note: not bipartisan) algorithms to use in drawing districts, such that any partisan advantage in any decade is purely by chance, would solve many problems.

1. It would increase the competitiveness of House races, giving citizens more of a choice. Without requiring a resort to unconstitutional campaign finance censorship.
   
2. It would depolarize the House; a candidate who has a mixed constituency in his district has to govern closer to the center, rather than running towards the extremes of his party base.
   
3. It would eliminate the decadely redistricting fights in the state capitals, and obviate the need for federal judges to step in and draw lines when those fights fail to reach a resolution.
   
4. It would hopefully lessen the number of career politicians; fewer safe seats means politicians have to work to keep their jobs, which limits the attractiveness of the job to many of them.

Dave Yaseen is a good friend of mine, because we've learned to never talk politics. If he said anything like this to me at a party, I would, well, just politely excuse myself and get another drink:

Repealing that god-awful insult of a tax cut isn't a winning position? I beg your pardon? It wasn't all that long ago we could energize people by saying something like 'they're gonna take your money and give it to, of all people the rich! America, is that what you want?'

In other words, it wasn't all that long ago that Democrats could energize people by lying. Well, half lying. The government *is* taking away your money. That's called taxation. The lie is that a tax cut is the same as taking person X's money away to give to person Y. Let this fact sink in, folks: it is person Y's money in the first place! If I steal $100 from someone, and don't return $90 to him, you can't say I'm giving him $10. And you certainly can't say I'm taking $10 from you to give to him.

With repetition and coordination, it would have sunk in and won us a lot of races.

Yes, repeat the lie until people start to believe it. (Sadly, many people already do.)

Yes, this debacle of an election is the media's fault. But it's our fault as well, and we need to drastically change the way we do things in the Democratic party, not diddle around with how to phrase things to make them palatable to the electorate. If we have to drag American voters, kicking and screaming to chose their own interests, so be it.

Somehow I don't think "we're going to have to force the public to vote for us because we think the public is stupid" is much of a winning position. But hey, at least it's honest - in that it's an honest view into the elitist mindset of a good portion of our friends on the Left.

Two of my favorite talking points are touched upon in this New York Times story on global warming:

1. Media bias:

   As a developing country, China is exempt from the Kyoto Protocol, the pending international agreement to limit emissions of greenhouse gases. When President Bush rejected the Kyoto Protocol two years ago, he portrayed China's exemption as a serious flaw. The protocol has been embraced by most other big nations, however, and only requires ratification by Russia to take effect.

   Of course, saying that it "only requires ratification by Russia" is like saying that the liberation of Iraq "only required a UN resolution in its favor." Putin has said Russia isn't going to join Kyoto. But the bigger problem is that, once again, the Times is rewriting history to pretend that George Bush rejected Kyoto. Kyoto was DOA when Bill Clinton signed it. The Senate voted 95-0 against Kyoto in 1997, when Clinton was in office. So why does the Times keep trying to pretend that the Bush administration changed US policy in this area?
   
2. Reliability:

   Official Chinese statistics had shown a decline in coal production and consumption in the late 1990's, even as the economy was growing 8 percent a year. But many Western and Chinese researchers have become suspicious of that drop over the last several years.

   They point out that the decline assumed that local governments had followed Beijing's instructions to close 47,000 small, unsafe mines producing low-grade coal and many heavily polluting small power plants. Yet researchers who visited mines and power plants found that they often remained open, with the output not being reported to Beijing because local administrators feared an outcry if they shut down important employers.

   How much of the public policy debate is based upon the assumption that "official" statistics reflect reality? How accurate is that assumption? How accurate can global warming models be when the inputs consist of faulty data?

The Democratic Party there isn't exactly preparing a welcome wagon for all those Free-Staters:

"If you've got people saying we just want to mind our own business, keep government out of our lives, hey, we all feel that way," said Kathy Sullivan, chairwoman of the state Democratic Party. "But if they want to have a radical change in our form of government, no, you're not welcome here."

Quick, someone alert John Kerry!

I'm not a political junkie, so I can't answer this question, but maybe someone else can: is it a good sign when a presidential candidate fires his campaign manager with just a couple of months before the first primary?

Assuming this is a sign of the Kerry campaign's implosion, is this the worst campaign debacle ever by the presumptive nominee? Kerry was supposed to be the front-runner with the straight shot to the nomination; instead, he's reorganizing his campaign at this late date. (Okay, there's Gary Hart, but his campaign collapsed for non-campaign reasons. I guess Lyndon Johnson in 1968 would have to take the prize for the worst campaign failure by a front-runner. But Kerry's has to rank up there among flops. Though I must point out that I called the Dean phenomenon long before the media noticed him.)

Democrats should ignore the South in 2004; they aren't going to win it anyway, and they can win without it, according to UMBC political science professor Thomas Schaller.

Essentially, the logic goes that Gore almost beat Bush without the South anyway, so all the 2004 Democratic nominee needs to do is hold onto Gore's victories and then pick up a few more electoral votes. Schaller's theory is that the Southwest is ripe for a Democratic pickup, primarily because of the Hispanic influx in recent years. So to those states add New England, the Pacific states, and parts of the Rust Belt, and the Democrats win without any victories in the South.

There are a few flaws in Schaller's argument; the most obvious ones are these:

• The main basis for the thought that the Southwest is up for grabs is that Schaller's standard of comparison is Mike Dukakis. But doing better than Dukakis (or Mondale, Carter, and McGovern) is hardly evidence that the Democratic Party, as a party, is picking up ground in these states.
  
• If the Democrats write off the South, this frees up the Republicans to concentrate their attention in competitive states elsewhere. And it's not as if Democrats have a lock on all these other areas; Iowa, New Mexico, Oregon, and Wisconsin all went Democratic by very small margins. If Bush, who is already likely to have a financial advantage, is free to pour resources into these states, the Democratic nominee is in real trouble. And that doesn't even count California, where Arnold's election throws the whole dynamic out of whack.

Ultimately, it seems somewhat pointless to try to make these sorts of projections now, when so much depends on what the economy is doing in fall 2004. If the jobs picture continues to be mediocre, Bush is vulnerable; if the economy is in full recovery, Democrats aren't going to win in the South, North, East, or West.

I happened to be reviewing an old piece in the American Prospect about Paul Krugman, and his reply, and perhaps have a little bit more insight into Krugman's shrill partisan rhetoric. It might seem as if what separates Republicans from Democrats is the policies they prefer. But Krugman explicitly rejects that:

But the important point is that this objection presumes that we are agreed on what must be done--which brings me to the question of what it means to be a liberal.

To Bob Kuttner, liberalism means supporting more government intervention in the marketplace. Above all, it means supporting managed international trade and deficit-financed public investment. In fact, not only does Kuttner know what needs to be done: He knows, in advance, what the conclusions of future cutting-edge economic theory will be. He knows that I must have stopped being an innovator after the mid-1980s, because my work no longer seemed to provide a rationale for neo-mercantilist trade policies; and he knows that the remarkable revival of Keynesianism is a rarefied academic affair of no real importance, because the new Keynesians still think that we ought to reduce the budget deficit. (Why is it illiberal to think that monetary rather than fiscal policy can be used to increase aggregate demand?)

Somehow, though, I always thought that liberalism was about compassion and justice, and have never understood what import quotas and budget deficits have to do with it.

Now, it's hardly a surprise to hear that some (many?) liberals think this way. But one might think that Krugman, a highly educated, supposedly worldly, academic, would be a little more sophisticated than that. One would, apparently, be wrong. Krugman's philosophy is that liberalism is defined by compassion. Which explains why Krugman is the second most partisan pundit out there.

Except, of course, in New York, where the supposedly cash-strapped city has managed to find the money to fight public enemy number one:

In the corner office of Vanity Fair, on the 22nd floor, sits Graydon Carter. He is editor of the magazine and a liberal with libertarian tendencies who enjoys an occasional Camel. Although he keeps his door closed, someone at the magazine - no one knows who - called the city's health department more than once this fall. City inspectors visited Vanity Fair in September, October and November, and issued citations each time, said Sandra Mullin, communications director at the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

But that's okay, because at least they caught this dangerous criminal in the act, right? Well, not exactly:

She said no one was seen smoking when the inspectors made their unannounced visits, but that the presence of ashtrays and the absence of no-smoking signs represented a violation of the ban.

Mark Green, the former New York City public advocate who came scarily close to being our mayor, recently appeared on the O'Reilly Factor to defend the placement of religious symbols in public schools. Fair enough. One can in good conscience disagree with the ACLU and believe that a Christmas - or Hanukkah - play does not violate the First Amendment prohibition on the establishment of religion.

Yet Green is not defending *all* religious symbols. Just non-Christian religious symbols. Apparently, in the New York City public schools, menorahs and Islamic star-and-crescents are allowed, while Nativity scenes are a no-no. Green, supporting this rule, reasons thusly:

I was a city official, and I got a hundred thousand complaints over 10 years about all kinds of city services. Not one person said, you know, one of the biggest problems in New York is those Jews like Mayor Bloomberg and Joe Klein trying to trick 95 percent majority Christians into converting to Judaism. Bill, get a life.

So according to Green, the rule is okay because Christians don't complain enough. And when they do, he dismisses the complainer as someone who needs to "get a life". Clayton Cramer comments well on the obvious double standard. But he doesn't comment on Green's closing statement:

The ayatollahs of the Republican Party support your point of view, and I support the Bill of Rights.

Clayton doesn't comment probably because such stupidity practially defies comment. Never mind that nowhere in the Bill of Rights does it state that Jews and Muslims are entitled to their religious symbols, but Christians aren't. But come on, "ayatollahs"? As in the Republicans are going to repeal the Constitution and impose an Iranian-style theocracy?

That's patently absurd. Republicans aren't ayatollahs. Everyone knows that Republicans are Nazis.

Happy Thanksgiving.

I've been a little busy to blog lately, but for the moment, check out this post from Damien Penny pointing out a typical Noam Chomsky rhetorical trick.

Like a fat man who eats bowl after bowl of ice cream, legislators pass law after law after law. Probably because it feels good. Or perhaps simply because they can. Are all of them necessary? I highly doubt it. Case in point:

Legislation mandating the registration of beer kegs sold in New York, and which will require beverage stores to increase the deposit on the kegs to $75 and mandate new record-keeping obligations, has been signed into law by Gov. George Pataki.

The problem with laws such as these is that there is never anyone to stand up and say "Hey, wait a second! Doesn't the state have more important things to do than inspect keg records? Haven't we been doing well enough as a society for the past six or seven decades without government control of our kegs? Is creating more paperwork for retail stores and restaurants and bars to do a worthy goal of government?". Most likely, anyone who objects would just be branded a tool of the alcohol industry who wants to get our children drunk or some such.

Anyway, having just passed the law last week, legislators can now get back to the important and demanding task of... amending the law. Apparently, they didn't do it right the first time:

But where the new law is defective, [State Senator Nancy] Hoffmann says, is the requirement that the keg be returned within one month or the purchaser forfeits the $75 deposit.

"Beer in properly refrigerated kegs stays fresh much longer than one month," Hoffman points out. "The last thing we want to do is to force anyone to drink faster than they want to, or should."

Good job, guys. Me, I'd say the entire law is defective. But hey, as long as they don't come after my barrels of wine, why should I complain?

Those who support "affirmative action" in college admissions complain that those of us opposed to such racial preferences inconsistently appeal to "merit" as the appropriate guiding principle for admissions. That is, although opponents of affirmative action claim that merit should be the only factor, we don't object to preferences for athletes, legacies, etc. The accusation is somewhat unfair -- legacy status, for instance, is not a constitutionally protected class with a history of invidious discrimination attached to it -- but it has a grain of truth to it. Certainly if one is going to argue that colleges should, in order to fulfill their mission, admit the most academically qualified students, it's hard to defend extra preferences for those related to alumni of the schools in question.

In any case, the Powers That Be at Texas A&M decided that these criticisms had force; they've decided to end legacy preferences. But of course that doesn't satisfy supporters of race preferences, because that's not what they really wanted:

Local politicians had been outraged that the university continued to give special treatment to legacies, the vast majority of whom are white, while refusing to give the same consideration to minority applicants.

But ending preferences for legacies was not their goal. In fact, the same politicians said yesterday that scrapping the policy was a poor substitute for reinstating affirmative action as a way to achieve diversity on campus.

"This discussion is far from over," said State Representative Garnet Coleman, Democrat of Houston. "They act like they've done something for students of color by eliminating the legacy program. They have not. The new policy takes away the advantage of some students, but it does not remedy the obstacles faced by students of color and women."

Which leaves the following question: does the New York Times even pretend to screen their articles for bias? If so, explain the following quote thrown into the article:

Even ardent opponents of affirmative action often condemn legacy programs, arguing that they perpetuate the same kind of advantages as considerations of race.

Article II, Section 3:

He shall from time to time give to the Congress information of the state of the union, and recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.

I call on Congress to pass the requirement for a V-chip in TV sets so that parents can screen out programs they believe are inappropriate for their children. When parents control what their young children see, that is not censorship; that is enabling parents to assume more personal responsibility for their children's upbringing. And I urge them to do it. The V-chip requirement is part of the important telecommunications bill now pending in this Congress. It has bipartisan support, and I urge you to pass it now.

But I think George Bush managed to top it yesterday, with his latest contribution to State of the Union history:

To help children make right choices, they need good examples. Athletics play such an important role in our society, but, unfortunately, some in professional sports are not setting much of an example. The use of performance-enhancing drugs like steroids in baseball, football, and other sports is dangerous, and it sends the wrong message -- that there are shortcuts to accomplishment, and that performance is more important than character. So tonight I call on team owners, union representatives, coaches, and players to take the lead, to send the right signal, to get tough, and to get rid of steroids now.

Ugh. Is that really the best that the president and his speechwriters could do? Goodness knows I don't generally look to politicians for inspiration, and I certainly don't look to this president for rousing oratory. (Let's face it: whatever you think of his policies, you have to breathe a sigh of relief any time Bush manages to speak a whole paragraph without inventing a new form of grammar along the way.) But even so, I expect at least a minimal level of dramatic performance out of a State of the Union address. If we can't get a bold proposal, at least we're owed an interesting catch phrase like "Axis of Evil."

But this one? Yuck. I'd expect a Student Government president to give a speech like this one. It was just a rambling collection of blah, and while Bush occasionally projected an air of defiance, it was directed not at Al Qaeda but at his domestic political opponents. The entire speech was defensive in tone, as Bush seemed to be responding to every criticism that has been levied at his policies as though he had been saving up a list for just this occasion. And as though he were determined to give not even one inch of ground, to concede even the possibility that some of his policies need tweaking.

It's one thing to say, "Yay, tax cuts." That's core Republican belief, and there's some evidence that they're helping the economy, even if you'd never get Paul Krugman to admit it. But the Patriot Act? Come on. A third of the country hates it, and the rest are, I suspect, pretty indifferent. (Does anybody outside John Ashcroft's office sit around saying, "Praise the lord for the Patriot Act"?) So who was his defense of the Act aimed at?

Okay, the part where he listed all the countries in our unilateral coaltion was good; I'll give him credit for that. But the rest of the speech? We saw neither humor nor boldness, neither vision nor outreach. Some red meat for his base, as he denounced gay marriage, campaigned for abstinence, and proposed money for faith-based institutions. But nothing for the rest of us.

Not that the Pelosi-Daschle response was any more inspiring, mind you -- but at the end of the night I left the room (actually, I just changed the channel, but that's not the point) hoping that Joe Lieberman does well in New Hampshire.