Unqualified Offerings: Corrupting America's Youth Since 2001 - Your free IHS Summer Seminars list.

UNworkable - Stupid unaccountable bureaucracy! Ineffectual talking shop on the Hudson! It took the UN seven months to fire the staffer the leadership considered most responsible for allowing the August 19 bombing of its Baghdad headquarters to occur. Seven months! You'll note that when the the government of, by and for the people suffered an even bigger atrocity in September 2001 it only took the government - um. Um.

Latest Notes from the Hellmouth - Your daily dose of outrage comes, as so often, from Zero Intelligence:

MLK is one of those 'progressive' schools that suspends everybody in a fight regardless of whether they were instigating it or defending themselves. They have a solution for her problem though - for the past couple of months they've kept her alone and secluded in her classroom while the rest of her schoolmates (including her bully) go outside to play.

There is, alas, more.

A Fanboy's Labor-Saving Device - Eve Tushnet spends three paragraphs saving me work:

First let me get the polemical point out of the way: People who complain about superhero characters' vigilantism are being too literal-minded and missing the point. The situations superhero characters confront are meant to mirror or illuminate situations we face. Sometimes the vigilante nature of the superhero helps call societal conventions into question, emphasizing the primacy of conscience and placing the hero alone in a moral landscape a lot like the landscape of the Western (another very American genre--and more on this stuff soon). Sometimes vigilante status is just a way to clear away bureaucracy and real-world constraints so that the storytelling can move fast and keep a tight focus on the central character's choices. For those of us who read those serial-killer-profiling books, in the second kind of story vigilantism is m.o.; in the first kind, it's signature. Obviously, many superhero stories use both aspects of the convention, with one or the other predominating.

Comparison: the costumes. Superhero comics use costumes for a host of reasons. Mechanical: Costumes make it easier to tell the characters apart, especially when the artists keep changing. They also make it easier for readers to slide into the fantastic--they're like unicorns; when you see one you know you've left real-world conventions and should readjust your expectations accordingly. Plot: Costumes make it easier to suspend disbelief that characters with secret identities can maintain their secrecy. Thematic: Like secret identities in general, costumes help emphasize themes of identity-creation, personal vs. public persona, and the attractions and stresses of playing a role.

But costumes aren't there to suggest that dressing up in colorful spandex is actually an effective response to trouble in the world or in one's psyche. That's just not what they're doing. Ditto, IMO, vigilantism. It serves mechanical, plot, and thematic purposes, but there's no point in trying to force it from symbol into policy prescription. Therefore, criticizing it for being a lousy policy prescription misses the point.

Then she goes on to give an entirely different take on the appeal of the superhero story that is, however, at least as plausible as my own. In that light, I recall an academic symposium at which a panelist recounted the story of a gay kid who felt that Spider-Man helped him get through his adolescence because the the alienation, the compulsion to act in secret, the desire to engage society but on one's own anarchic terms spoke to him deeply.

Also: How to raise a non-reader!

But What About the Mysterious Blue Area on the Moon - Dave Allan, official second-oldest friend of Unqualified Offerings, tips me to Nobel-Laureate Steven Weinberg's critique of the President's Manned Mission to Mars program in the New York Review of Books. (Read it fast. Most NYRB articles pass behind a pay wall within a couple of weeks.)

To an extent this is a dog-bites-man story. As Weinberg himself notes

Astronomers and other scientists are generally skeptical of the value of manned space flight, and often resent the way it interferes with scientific research. NASA administrators, astronauts, aerospace contractors, and politicians typically find manned space flight just wonderful.

but Weinberg makes a plausible-sounding case that the Mars program, vaporware or not, is already cutting into NASA's science budget. He misses the obvious conspiracy theory for some reason. Which scientific research will suffer most heavily? Experimental cosmology. Which scientific research in NASA's purview would most naturally discommode the Christian fundamentalists in the President's base? Hey, I don't need two separate answers to dispose of both of these questions!

But what about the romance, dammit? It tugs at my heart. It urges me to forsake my libertarian principles for the sake of mankind's greatest adventure. Weinberg claims to feel it too:

I hope that someday men and women will walk on the surface of Mars. But before then, there are two conditions that will need to be satisfied.

One condition is that there will have to be something for people to do on Mars which cannot be done by robots. If a few astronauts travel to Mars, plant a flag, look at some rocks, hit a few golf balls, and then come back, it will at first be a thrilling moment, but then, when nothing much comes of it, we will be left with a sour sense of disillusion, much as happened after the end of the Apollo missions. Perhaps after sending more robots to various sites on Mars something will be encountered that calls for direct study by humans. Until then, there is no point in people going there.

The other necessary condition is a reorientation of American thinking about government spending. There seems to be a general impression that government spending harms the economy by taking funds from the private sector, and therefore must always be kept to a minimum. Unlike what is usually called "big science" - orbiting telescopes, particle accelerators, genome projects - sending humans to the moon and Mars is so expensive that, as long as the public thinks of government spending as parasitic on the private economy, this program would interfere with adequate support for health care, homeland security, education, and other public goods, as it has already begun to interfere with spending on science.

The last thing I want, Loyal Reader, is to get you to stop thinking of government spending as parasitic on the private economy. And even if we hurried up and became Swedes tomorrow, we presumably wouldn't believe in or be capable of infinite taxation and public spending. The Mars mission would still have to compete with your favorite basket of public goods for funding, and it will still, on Weinberg's logic, lose. Note that the apparent choice already before Weinberg is one that favors Martian trips over, among other things, expanded government health care. Weinberg clearly wants expanded government health care and such a lot more, Kim Stanley Robinson notwithstanding.

It pains the twelve-year-old me, but I have to agree - at least about wanting other things more than the Mars mission, like significant deficit reduction. When the robots discover something only humans can further study, let's talk about the wisdom and constitutionality of government-funded manned space travel again. Until then, if you want to go, do it with your own money and your own time. Put together a convincing enough plan, though, and I might chip in.

Toward More Gaudy Nights - Last week was a busy one, so I haven't been able to properly address the comment thread for "Gaudy Night" at Brainwash. I hope to get to it in the next day or two. The most sweeping objections come from Rich Puchalsky and deserve detailed comment, but in brief, I think he's prey to various levels of excessive literalism (re both the essay itself and superhero stories as well). I'll post something here when I've posted something there.

Meanwhile, Sean Collins and J.W. Hastings tripped over a grammatical infelicity of mine. I wrote

Most of the field's best writers have been liberals or leftists, so our core questions tend to get answered accordingly: the powerful should behave like social workers at home (violent social workers, mind you) and neoconservatives abroad.

By this, I was not intending to distinguish how the powerful (superheroes) should behave domestically from how they should behave internationally. It just reads that way. (Bad Jim!) I could better have written

the powerful should behave the way social workers behave at home (violent social workers, mind you) and neoconservatives behave abroad

That is, the powerful should actively intervene to "help" others, and here are two real-life models that fit how they should do so. (Because Yes, Sean, I think of the Siamese twins of neocon benevolent hegemony and Blairite humanitarian interventionism as simply the Nanny State overseas.

A Fanboy's Reviews - Yes, I've become a crummy comics blogger! Let's try to make up for it a little with some reviews:

Tell Me Something (Jason) - Basically, a James M. Cain story for furries. One-name cartoonist Jason chronicles a love triangle involving a crow poet-turned-pickpocket, his coke-snorting crow ex-girlfriend and her dog husband, who is either a crime lord or someone who just happens to have the phone numbers of hit men. And the female crow's father is a dodgy character himself, who keeps bully boys and porn photographers around. The template is silent movies - each page after the first one has two by three panels as regular as a reel of film; there's no word balloon dialogue at all, just a handful of word-only panels interspersed among the pictures like dialogue cards in a pre-talkie. The pictures carry the story. If, as Eve Tushnet, Dave Fiore and I were musing last week, page layout is to sequential art as meter is to verse, then Jason is Alexander Pope rather than Shakespeare - his six-panel grids have all the regularity of Restoration verse, and like the better Restoration verse, manages to weave a lot of event on its tight little loom.

I liked it. We are not talking timeless work of genius here - one of the reasons Jason is able to convey his wordless story is because you've seen most of it before, elsewhere - but the plot describes a satisfying spiral and the storytelling has a pleasing economy to it. The book's anthropomorphic world is amusing and baffling at once (sometimes "cartoon physics" works for our hero, the crow poet, sometimes they don't) and suggestive. (While there are other animals, dogs and crows predominate. I at least want to read a certain ethnic tension into the book's dog-crow relations.) And the package is lovely - crisp black and white line art, thick brown cardstock cover with foldovers, and only 8.95.

Light Brigade, 1 of 4 (Peter J. Tomasi and Peter Snejbjerg) - During the closing days of World War II, a company of American GIs gets caught up in a war between rebel and loyal angels. The color art is lovely. Snejbjerg does a great job of indiviuating the soldiers' looks. The snow scenes are gorgeous, the battles evocative if not altogether realistic. (I suspect the German soldiers stand too close together when charging, but hey - they're zombie!) The story is, frankly, standard-issue Vertigo eschatological horror, not that there's anything wrong with that. The human-interest hook is GI Chris Stavros, who suffers an irony surfeit at the beginning of the book. (Crouched in a foxhole, he learns that his wife has died back home and his son is crippled.) The MacGuffin is a sword that must not fall into rebel angel hands. I might have preferred a straight-up war comic. Still, Nazi zombies. Cool.

Conan #2 (Kurt Busiek and Carey Nord) - Retells Robert E. Howard's short story, "The Frost Giant's Daughter." Writer Busiek does a serviceable transcription job getting Howard's simple plot across. I've read "Frost Giant's Daughter" twice, and once this year, and detect no false notes. The art is uneven. There are some gorgeous landscapes. The panel layout is vigorous - rarely so many as six panels to a page and a lot of insets. Like Snejbjerg and Light Brigade colorist Bjarne Hansen, Nord and colorist Dave Stewart do beautiful snowscapes. The aftermath of a skirmish that crosses pages four and five, and the distant-view chase scene atop page 13 are striking. Njord's rendition of Howard's Frost Giants is impressive. As to human figures, there's good and bad. He has a gift for the outrageous musculature that has become a trope of sword and sorcery art. (For good - or evil; as Ron Edwards has pointed out, prior to the invention of the Nautilus machine - and anabolic steroids - even fit men just didn't have such physiques.) Conan and his opponents look like someone took a human-shaped net bag to Safeway's annual steak sale and just kept shoving purchases in there. But all cartoonists have their favorite views, and Nord's is one from which a charging Conan's chin all but disappears. And, maybe because the pages are shot from Nord's uninked pencils, we tend to lose Conan's eyes in shots where the character appears at any distance.

I would go so far as to say that Nord hasn't mastered the basic trick of making a character look like the same guy consistently from panel to panel and page to page. But his art has an appropriately brutal energy about it and his page designs forgive much.

Mother, Come Home (Paul Hornschemeier) - How I have feared to review this book. Because I may not be up to getting across how good it is. Right now, this is my graphic novel of the year. If it somehow loses eligibility because the chapters were originally serialized in the author's ongoing Forlorn Funnies comic, change the rules.

This is the story of a boy, Thomas Tennant, and his father. The boy's mother, the father's wife, has died, and they're trying to cope with her loss. It doesn't go so well. Hornschemeier is a young man, I've learned, but he knows an awful lot about not just sons but fathers.

Jeez, you know what? I'm going to have to try this again later. The book deserves better than I can manage to give it right now. Come back soon, but don't wait to buy it.

Counterpoint - Hesiod defends the Clinton Administration from - me.

Here's the essential problem with Jim's argument. The Clinton administration did not invade or launch a massive attack on Afghanistan for PRACTICAL reasons. Reasons that did not exist with respect to Kosovo where we had a unanimous NATO backing us up.

Hesiod makes a good point. While the original article I quoted (and various liberal blogs) stressed lack of domestic in addition to international support, the political geography of Southwest Asia was not nearly so congenial to military intervention as Southeastern Europe was. Al Qaeda's atrocities in New York and Washington didn't just change the balance of public opinion in the US; it changed it abroad as well (for a time, at least).

I think that the case for the Clinton Administration is, therefore, better than you'd think from my original item. That said, the US didn't just happen into a situation in 1999 where NATO was just begging us to take the organization to war. The US overcame reluctance among various parties and worked the media to raise the sense of urgency.

So far no evidence has come to light that the Clinton team made the same kind of effort re Afghanistan. The Taliban were terrible folks fighting a dirty civil war against various domestic opponents. That's the same sort of situation that the US has turned to rhetorical advantage time and again. We still don't know quite what combination of blandishments and threats secured Pakistani cooperation in October 2001 - some combination of them could have been tried in earlier years. (Just as a for instance: an end to anti-nuclear sanctions, lower tarriffs for Pakistani exports and a veiled threat to take out Pakistan's beloved nukes.) Might have worked. Might not have. And the 'stans were the other possible avenue. This would have provoked Russian objections. So did Kosovo, of course.

Still, the argument that the Clinton administration faced a less international situation than the post-WTC Bush Administration did is a good one.

Not Much Gets Past the Boy - Matthew Yglesias finds the flaw in the "remake the Middle East" ointment:

Along these lines, it's worth raising the question of whether the current administration really wants a democratic Iraq, or whether the reason their policies seem so unlikely to create one is that they in fact fear such a thing.

Why might that be, Matt:

Fundamentally, America's beef with Saddam was not that he was a nasty dictator (lots of nasty dictators in the Middle East) but that his policies were inimical to America's strategic interests in the region -- defense of Israel, and preventing the emergence of a hegemonic regional power in the Persian Gulf. Replacing Saddam with an elected government, however, might do very little to change any of this. Saddam's hostility to Israel was, broadly speaking, in line with public opinion. Iraq's quest for hegemony, meanwhile, is a logical outgrowth of the factual situation. Unlike Saudi Arabia or Kuwait, it has a large population; unlike Egypt or Syria it has a lot of oil; and unlike Iran, it's majority-Arab and hence suited for regional leadership.

But wait, there's more!

There are large Shi'a populations in Saudi Arabia and at least one other Gulf state (Bahrain, I think) and they're not very well treated. It would be natural for a democratically elected Shi'ite president of Iraq to see himself as the champion of the rights of his co-religionists right across the border, possibly through methods including military intervention. If a legitimate Iraqi regime were to use force against, say, the Saudi monarchy, it's sort of hard for me to see how the United States could credibly characterize such a move as illegitimate.

Matt does forget one thing - the core principle that we could invoke in such cases: "We decide."

As to the rest of it, near as I can tell, the public-consumption version of Neo Theory is that Arabs and Muslims hate Israel and America because they are oppressed. Not by us, you understand, and certainly not by Israel, which is the only democracy in the Middle East if you live in the right zip code. Rather, repressive Arab and Muslim governments scapegoat Israel (and the US) and their silly subjects believe it. Democratize the Middle East and elected governments will have no need for scapegoats because everything will be swell all day and well into the evening hours, and the citizens of those governments, freed of state propaganda, will leave off their mad rages against Tel Aviv and Washington.

The evidence for this theory seems poor, especially as regards Israel. The US, for instance, has more citizens of Arab and Muslim background than ever, including not just recent immigrants but people who have lived here a generation and more. It's fair to say, I think, that their views on Middle Eastern issues touching on Israel and US foreign policy are a lot closer to those of their confreres in the Old Country than to the New Republic's. And as Fouad Ajami writes today, the democratic welfare states of Europe have been the incubators of the most radical Islam the modern world has yet seen. (Via Outside the Beltway.)

What got Matt started on this line of thought was Juan Cole's reporting of Iraqi reactions to the assassination of Sheik Yassin, late of Hamas.

Let's Not Kid Ourselves - Amid the back and forth between the Clinton and Bush camps over who did and didn't do enough to prioritize antiterrorism before the massacres of September 11, 2001, the lamest apologia for the Clinton Administration is that they couldn't have taken stronger military measures against al Qaeda because public support wouldn't be there. This from the gang that dragged NATO into Kosovo and began that war with no Congressional approval and with a minority of the public supporting it. When the Clinton Administration really wanted a war, they got a war. Bob Kerrey gets it right:

Testifying Tuesday were Albright, Powell, Rumsfeld and former Clinton Secretary of Defense William Cohen. The pairs of representatives agreed with each other on many broad issues, including the difficulties of targeting bin Laden and his allies prior to Sept. 11, 2001, and the perceived lack of political support for military action during those years. Some commissioners, particularly former Sen. Bob Kerrey, D-Neb., argued that both administrations could have rallied support for military operations just as they did in Kosovo and Iraq, respectively.

Now let's up front about this: I might well have opposed military action in Afghanistan at the time. But I opposed Kosovo too, and you'll notice that didn't stop anybody. Had the Clinton Administration gone into Afghanistan at the time against public opinion, it almost certainly would have enjoyed the same "rally round the flag" effect that Gulf War Phase I, The War for the KLA and Gulf War Phase II enjoyed.

Both administrations have a lot to answer for. And massive military action against al Qaeda at the turn of the millenium may even have been objectively unwise. You think I'm being an idiot isolationist again, but if an early attack on Afghanistan precipitated an Islamist coup in nuclear-armed Pakistan, you wouldn't like it. And, as was also pointed out in the hearings:

The officials from both administrations also struck a similar theme on the question of preventing the terror strikes, arguing that it is unclear how effective aggressive action might have been given the extent of the plot and the determination of the participants.

Imagine the post hoc ergo propter hocs if we had invaded Afghanistan and the World Trade Center attacks happened anyway - as they might have.

But for better or for worse, and to my mind it's for worse, any President who really wants a war can have one almost any time. Events prove that the Clinton Administration wanted to insert itself into a Balkan civil war a lot more than it wanted to go to war against anti-American terrorists in Southwest Asia. This excuses not a single Bush Administration failing. But let's not kid ourselves about a lost Golden Age of anti-terror vigor.

Aargh! Now They've Got Me Doing It - Reader Mark Shawhan e-mails

On reading your most recent post (on that special forces unit that got pulled out of Afghanistan), I noticed two things. One of them is a bit trivial: in the fourth paragraph from the end (the one beginning "back to the Guardian claim"), it seems like you reversed Iraq and Afghanistan (at least, the paragraph makes a lot more sense if you read it the other way round).

Help! When it comes to the war on terror I can no longer distinguish between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein!

Anyway, thanks to Matt, and I fixed the error. He continues:

As for the other thing: doesn't deploying special forces to Iraq in 9/02 damage the hawkish argument that President Bush went to the UN to pursue diplomacy, etc, in good faith? If we're already laying the groundwork for our invasion as W. is making his speech to the General Assembly, that doesn't look like we're really giving diplomacy a chance, now does it?

Well, yeah, but we disposed of that one more than a year ago.

UPDATE: Mark Shawhan, not Matt Shawn. Will no one fact-check my ass?

Fair's Fair - Virginia Postrel has a point:

Remember when putting troops on the ground in Afghanistan was a sure ticket to disaster, a military action hardly more conceivable than launching a nuclear attack? Remember the lessons of the Soviets and the British? Judging from this week's discussions, not many people do.

True! Which is why, at various times, I argued that the Bush Administration had handled Afghanistan about as well as it was possible to handle it. The last thing I wanted was huge numbers of regular infantry clumping around in easy truck bomb range of Taliban sympathizers or disgruntled warlords.

But I certainly didn't want these guys pulled out:

Fifth Group Special Forces were a rare breed in the US military: they spoke Arabic, Pastun and Dari. They had been in Afghanistan for half a year, had developed a network of local sources and alliances, and believed that they were closing in on bin Laden.

Without warning, they were then given the task of tracking down Saddam. "We were going nuts on the ground about that decision," one of them recalls.

"In spite of the fact that it had taken five months to establish trust, suddenly there were two days to hand over to people who spoke no Dari, Pastun or Arabic, and had no rapport."

Along with the redeployment of human assets came a reallocation of sophisticated hardware. The US air force has only two specially-equipped RC135 U spy planes. They had successfully vectored in on al-Qaida leadership radio transmissions and cellphone calls, but they would no longer circle over the mountains of the Pakistan/Afghanistan border.

British Press, so you have to check. Googling around suggests that, while 5th Special Forces really did have a good number of Arabic speakers, its Pashto and Dari was mostly picked up on the run. And that "given the task of tracking down Saddam" straight out of Afghanistan is hard to verify independently, because of secrecy and casual reporting.

But here they are in Afghanistan on November 12, 2001. It's where Master Sergeant Jefferson Donald Davis died on December 5 of that year. And there they are outside of Baghdad by August or September 2002.

This excellent St. Louis Post-Dispatch series about the life of one 5th Special Forces soldier and the death of another says that

They had deployed again in January 2003, had taken part in the fall of Baghdad and then had gone on the hunt for Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida.

This is what John Bolduc's old unit was doing by late-Spring 2003: "By late May, the team was providing security for several Iraqi politicians, a task that bored Morehead but that he understood was risky."

It wasn't until July 2003 that 5th Special Forces was assigned to the Saddam hunt, according to the Post-Dispatch series. But they're the kind of soldiers we absolutely want chasing down al Qaeda supporters and leaders, they're the kind of soldiers whose skills are rare and whose deployments represent therefore a clear choice - Send them on Task B and you are perforce prioritizing it over Task A. The Bush Administration's decision to send 5th Special Forces and Task Force 121 to Iraq rather than Afghanistan represents a clear choice to prioritize Iraq over al Qaeda. There are hawks who have spent considerable energy justifying that choice, but it makes no sense to deny that it happened.

Back to the Guardian claim. Does it represent a (misleading) compression of events for dramatic effect? Maybe. It's possible, though, that there were still elements of 5th Special Forces in Afghanistan after others had been moved to Iraq, that the quoted soldier was one of them and that these troops were pulled out in Summer 2003 to hunt Saddam. As the Times reported in November, General John Abizaid decided to merge Afghanistan's Task Force 5 and Iraq's Task Force 20 into the new Task Force 121 in July 2003. If that involved shifting Task Force 5 troops from Afghanistan to Iraq for the Saddam hunt, then Guardian reporter Philip James' source could have meant exactly what he said.

Now that Saddam has been captured, and only now that Saddam has been captured,Task Force 121 has been shifted back to Afghanistan to track down al Qaeda leaders. Priorities, priorities.

This excerpt from the Washington Times article is rich:

A Defense Department official said there are two reasons for repositioning parts of Task Force 121: First, most high-value human targets in Iraq, including Saddam Hussein, have been caught or killed. Second, intelligence reports are increasing on the whereabouts of bin Laden, the terror leader behind the September 11 attacks.

Task Force 121 isn't the sort of unit that just waits around for intelligence reports. Task Force 121 develops intelligence itself. Now, two and a half years after al Qaeda's slaughters in New York and Washington and a year after the start of our Mesopotamian detour, it's developing some in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Well, like I say, priorities.

Voting for the Terrorists - Well, which ones, darnit? Fafnir helps you make an informed choice. (Will you have the right to slap a "Don't Blame Me, I Voted for Apulus" sticker on your SUV?)

Sweet Relief - What's that floating away? At least a few libertarian anxieties about John Kerry:

For the first time, he will target a popular tax incentive, known as "deferral," offered to most U.S. companies that do business in lower-taxed foreign countries.

To soften the blow to corporations, Kerry will propose a one-time, one-year offer to tax at 10 percent any profits a company brings back to the United States and invests here, an expanded tax credit to companies that create domestic jobs, and a reduction in the corporate tax rate to 33.25 percent from 35 percent -- a 5 percent cut.

writes Jim VandeHei in the Post.

Drezner writes:

1) This is a lot more about symbolism than substance. According to the Post story, the total sums involved in these tax changes are around $12 billion. That sounds like a lot, but it's around 1% of the federal budget. Not a lot of money either way.

2) That said, the symbolism is important, in that "corprate tax reductions" sound a lot better to the business community than "Benedict Arnold CEOs."

3) The economic advisors quoted in the Post story are Roger Altman and Gene Sperling. They fall decidedly into the "sane" camp of Democratic economic advisors.

Point 1 is partially undercut by the truism that everything important happens at the margin, but to the extent thatDrezner's right, the plan looks even better: offshoring is not the apocalypse, current Democratic rhetoric to the contrary. So dressing up minor countermeasures as a bold plan is actually reassuring. Assuming Kerry wins the election (a big assumption), the plan may be stillborn anyway, since many Democratis legislators and interest groups will hold out for something bloodier and Chamber of Commerce Republicans will carry water for the estimated one percent of all corporations that are projected to see tax increases under the plan - they happen to be the very largest corporations.

My preference is that taxes be: a) low, and b) revenue-neutral. The Kerry proposal has minimal virtues in the direction of the former. The "loophole"-closure does not seem to do special violence to the latter. There are some social-engineering aspects to the "job creation" provisions, but they're time-limited. There's another arguably-interventionist provision that is, by Democratic policy standards, sensible: you can continue to defer taxes on overseas income if you expand into a country to sell in that country. That is, if you build an auto plant in India to sell cars in India, you don't have to wear the Scarlet 'O' around your business-casual neck.

Other aspects of Kerry's anti-offshoring and "jobs-creation" platform are still troublesome. Some, like the "plan" to "invest in renewable energy and technologies that will create 500,000 jobs and make energy more affordable for businesses" are not just wasteful but downright silly. Then there's the "International Playing the Dozens" plank:

John Kerry will crack on countries that violate trade agreements . . .

President John Kerry today asserted that "Hey China! Your mama fucks better than she looks!"

Point is, there's plenty wrong with Kerry's rhetoric - he's certainly not making the anti-protectionist case. And there's plenty wrong with some of his substantive proposals. But from a libertarian perspective they could be worse, and Kerry's not running against a libertarian, but against a President who has committed copious economic sins of his own.

A Fanboy's Head's Up via this kind e-mail:

NPR's Morning Edition will be doing a feature on Mike Mignola/Hellboy this April 5th. I did a taped interview with Morning Edition this afternoon to be used in connection with the feature. Our local NPR runs from 5 to 7am and repeats from 7 to 9am. Your local may be different.

All the best,

P. Craig Russell

ps. Just came across your blog and have been enjoying it.

So. Just remember two things: 1. Hellboy feature on Morning Edition, April 5th. 2. I got an e-mail from freakin' P. Craig Russell.

Another Fanboy's Notes - Good article in the Guardian last week about John Updike, lifelong cartoon fan. There's no indication that he still follows the field closely, but his love of the medium and his own attempts at a career in cartooning have clearly marked him.

If all Updike's stray references to comics were gathered together, they would form a focused little thematic volume, superior in insight to almost anything else written on the subject.

avers author Jeet Heer.

Look Over There - In case you haven't learned it from everybody else, former Calpundit Kevin Drum is now essentially The Washington Monthly website - or at least, his relocated and renamed blog, Political Animal, is the most prominent thing about the place. Still indispensible for political analysis from a mostly-measured Democratic perspective.

Annals of We Are Not Making This Up - "Man told to stay away from mascot chicken" reports the Salem, Oregon Statesman-Journal:

He was released from jail later that morning, five days after he took Speckles home from outside Ray's Food Place, where the chicken is a longtime mascot and local favorite.

Kathy Dean, Gombos' wife, said they were not regular shoppers at the store and were only thinking of the chicken.

I blame gay marriage. (Link via Mrs. Offering.)

Plan Ahead - Will Wilkinson explains why you should go to Libertarian Summer Camp.

Blogger Makes Good - Now-Somewhat pseudonymous Diana Moon has published a profile of film-maker Albert Maysles in The Forward. (Link requires registration. "jhenley/jhenley" will work.) Being a film ignoramus, I learned a lot from it. Like that Maysles made the Stones documentary "Gimme Shelter," which I've actually seen, and which was a pretty amazing piece of work. Plus all sorts of information about Maysles newest project, a documentary about the "notorious 1913 blood libel trial in which a Ukrainian Jew, Mendel Beilis, was wrongly accused of the murder of a 13-year-old Christian boy." Sadly, the topic remains relevant.

Note to Diana: The new blog template is aces. But you' ve lost your item-specific anchor links. Time for a little template editing.

Rebels in the Air - Tonight at a Reason party I met Tim Pozar, who runs the Bay Area Research Wireless Network. Out of his own pocket pretty much, BARWN is wiring up as much of the third world and as many economically-depressed areas in the US as possible for wireless internet connectivity - Oakland, Bhutan etc. They put 802.16 transmitters, which operate in the unlicensed portion of the RF spectrum, get donated bandwidth and spread the word through a kind of viral marketing. Now I'm a vector. Tim might be happy to fund his efforts out of your pocket too. His first US effort is Oakland. It occurs to me that if you've got the cash, he's got the expertise, and could help you contribute similarly to your own community.

Or you could wait until someone passes a law, I suppose.

Works for Me - Not easy reading, but Vietnam Vet Bill Larsen's "Mike MacParlane Taste Test" strikes me as exactly the right one to apply. It's not dissimilar from the "My Sister Libertarianism" that I discussed on this site back in olden times. I am fully aware that there will be some, even many, hawks who will say that the Iraq War passes the Taste Test for them, and some of them will neither be kidding themselves or us. But it doesn't pass mine.

(Via Antiwar.com blog.)

More Great Power, Less Responsibility - Franklin Harris says superheroes are not killing the comic book industry.

The industry to fashion a pillow large enough for the rest of the world to bite? - Be advised that this website does not exist. It is the basest conspiracy theorizing to suggest otherwise. Its Statement of Principles doesn't exist either. Nor does this Thomas Friedman column. Oh no no no, it would be irresponsible to even suggest that any of the links in this post were working links.

"America is in danger of someday not being at war."

The 300 - Comics criticism in general-interest right wing fora week continues. Today's entry, Brian Doherty praises Dave Sim's Cerebus in the American Spectator.

More Gaudy Night blogging tomorrow or Thursday. Tonight I have time only for the apologies:

I slipped three bonehead errors past my editor. My description of Hellboy as a "Dark Horse property" was misleading. Dark Horse publishes Hellboy, but creator Mike Mignola owns the rights. I also spelled Tim O'Neil's name wrong and misidentified the subject of his Comics Journal review. It was Grant Morrison's The Filth, not the same author's Invisibles. I apologize to my editor, Mike Mignola and Tim O'Neil. Tim has an excellent response item at The Hurting, and Bill Sherman applies the "literature of ethics" principle to the current Superman: Secret Identity miniseries - which, by the by, I am enjoying. Bill's review is a good place to find out why. Kip Manley sketches a response he might make if he had the time (don't I know the feeling). Other leads here.

No Duh - More from the front lines of "benevolent hegemony":

NATO secretary-general Jaap de Hoop Scheffer has accused Kosovo Albanians of orchestrating violence against minority Serbs which drove thousands from their homes last week.

"What happened last week, orchestrated and organised by extremist factions in the Albanian community, is unacceptable ... it should be condemned and it's a shame," he told a press conference during a visit to the southern Serbian province.

But remember, all that matters is fighting fascism. Even if you were doing so on behalf of, you know, other fascists.

Up to 30 Serb Orthodox churches and seven villages were torched, almost 300 houses were levelled and some 600 people were injured when men from the ethnic Albanian majority rampaged in the worst violence since the war.

NATO rushed fresh troops in to support the 17,000 foreign soldiers already in the impoverished province.

By the time they started arriving on Friday most of the damage had been done.

One searches the article in vain for any indication that, beyond uttering some concerned noises, that NATO or the Albanian government intend to lift so much as a finger to get the dispossessed back into their homes. This part is especially rich:

Before meeting the NATO Secretary General, Mr Holkeri and Kosovo's ethnic Albanian Prime Minister, Bayram Rexhepi, visited an apartment building in Pristina which had been burned and looted.

The building had housed most of the last Serbs remaining in Pristina after the end of the war.

All fled when the mob attacked on Wednesday, leaving belongings which were subsequently stolen.

"We will repair the damage but the lives of the people cannot be brought back," Mr Rexhepi said.

Translation: Over my dead body! But the repaired buildings - probably repaired at government and possibly NATO expense - will make fine new residences for ethnic Albanian Muslims.

Now I'm an anti-imperialist. If NATO were not essentially fostering the ethnic cleansing of this particular Serbian province, I'd agree that it was none of our business. But that's what we're doing: fostering the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo province. Those mobs are our mobs, incited by the people whose agenda we fulfilled in 1999. A purer example of the moral bankruptcy of "humanitarian intervention" can not be found, and I absolutely include Iraq among the candidates.

Dark Continent - Nate at Polytropos has a roundup of the latest developments in last month's underreported arrest of a planeful of mercenaries in Harare, Zimbabwe. Meaty and full of informed speculation.

A Fanboy's Essay - I reworked some of my recent superhero apologia writng, added some new material and called it an essay. The title is still "Gaudy Night." You can read it at Brainwash. Some parts will be familiar to regular readers, but there's new stuff too.

Costs of Outsourcing discovered by RiShawn Biddle. Excerpt:

Chances are that Premji has his assistants looking around at data and he'll hire some Washington lobbyists to make his case to Congress. But this isn't exactly free money: The more cash Wipro spends on participating in the political process, the less it will dedicate to such things as R&D and marketing, things that ultimately improve shareholders value and employee paychecks.

The political process also loses. One of the biggest complaints among the very same kind of people who oppose outsourcing is that corporate special interests are corrupting politics. But the reason why companies make campaign donations is to either get governments to help advance their interests a la AOL and other competitors of Microsoft, or in the case of a Microsoft or Wipro, protect themselves from unnecessary government interference. When governments screw around with the markets, companies will naturally protect their best interests and try to win the favor of the burghers and bureaucrats who run them. You reap what you sow.

Wrong $@#@#%*($ Corner Mail - Some theories about why US military deaths increased this month that hit my in-box. From Tacitus:

A few plausible explanations:

1) More troops in-theater means more casualties as per proportion.

2) They're using the overlap in rotation as a temporary force increase to conduct more operations.

3) I can't confirm this one, but I hear that cell phones are becoming more and more available in the country. These are massively useful in the detonation of explosives (recall that the Madrid bombs were apparently detonated via cell). This could be reflected in IED deaths.

1 makes sense. 2 was actually reported in advance (that we'd use the temporary increase in troop strength to do more.) 3 is a new idea, and plausible. I'd also add 4 - February's low total (20) was as much a statistical outlier as November's 87, as I suggested earlier this month. (For that matter, I think that back in December I pointed out that the 87 might be an anomaly rather than a trend.)

Eric Mauro writes

Hi Jim, maybe the troops who were leaving just stopped patrolling. I actually read a guy whose commander said "let's just hunker down here until we can rotate the fuck out of this place". Maybe they didn't want to get killed on their last month in Iraq.

The flaw in that approach is that the guerillas are too strong, and aren't simply angry about the troops. They want to take over again. So they start killing or intimidating the Iraqi police, who by the very nature of their provisioning must be less well armed than the guerillas. (They can't be well armed, because then some start attacking the US soldiers with decent weapons.)

I think StrategyPage had an article this last week arguing that the Iraqi police were increasingly well-armed and armored, which was why the guerrillas had started attacking even softer targets like hotels. But if so, to Eric's point, it was apparently Iraqi police that killed blogger Bob Zangas

"The Dorkiest Use of Spring Break Ever" - Katherine of Obsidian Wings continues to give the Maher Arar story the sort of detailed coverage we normally reserve for important issues like Janet Jackson's nipple shield. Longtime readers who recall the Torture Brouhahas (this site has been involved in two of them) shouldn't miss a passage Katherine excerpts from the Globe and Mail:

"They tortured him until he told them, 'What do you want me to say?' Imam Hindy said in a recent interview. ". . . He said, 'What if I used a truck?' They said, 'Okay, very good idea but which building are you going to hit?'

". . .So he said, 'How about the Parliament Buildings?' They said, 'Oh, it's a very, very good idea.'

"So he wrote everything and signed, and after that they didn't touch him and they sent him to Egypt," Imam Hindy said.

It's Just an Old War / Not Even a Cold War - Atrios channels Marianne Faithfull. ("What are you fighting for? / It's not my security").

This is sounding more and more like the scandal of the age, where scandal is less a synonym for "peccadillo" than "willful dereliction of duty."

Clarke relates, "I began saying, 'We have to deal with bin Laden; we have to deal with al Qaeda.' Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, said, 'No, no, no. We don't have to deal with al Qaeda. Why are we talking about that little guy? We have to talk about Iraqi terrorism against the United States.'

"And I said, 'Paul, there hasn't been any Iraqi terrorism against the United States in eight years!' And I turned to the deputy director of the CIA and said, 'Isn't that right?' And he said, 'Yeah, that's right. There is no Iraqi terrorism against the United States."

As a libertarian, I believe we are always going to be governed by fools and knaves. But these are the wrong damn fools and knaves.

Turning the Wrong @#$*(&%# Corner - As Atrios notes, US military deaths are going back up this month after February's low. I'm wondering why, sincerely. I'm convinced that a big reason casualties dropped was that we were keeping our troops out of harm's way as much as possible. (We are conducting a new anti-guerrilla sweep of Baghdad this week, though.) This is what pisses the ordinary Iraqi the most: they blame the US for not providing better security.

In this, they're like a lot of Democratic bloggers, who criticise the Administration for not doing more to provide safety in post-invasion Iraq. I suspect the Dems are wrong on this, and that if we did have our troops out there in full "helpful mode" the Iraqis would like it a lot less than they think they would. That ABC News poll reports that 3 out of 4 Iraqis have never seen an American soldier, an astonishing number. But it also reports that, of those who have encountered American troops, half formed a favorable impression and half an unfavorable one.

That's a bad ratio.

Yes, man bites dog and Henley says the government is probably pursuing the best available policy - within their own self-set parameters, at least. "Doing more" would just piss off more Iraqis. We've always known that 100,000 troops was going to be inadequate for the occupation. That was assuming the occupiers did stuff. Might as well be inadequate but piss fewer locals off while doing so. (Counter argument: the current policy annoys everybody, because the people who don't see any Americans resent us for the lack of security. Ah, but remember, the idea is to minimize the production of new terrorists. Abstract resentment for a service unprovided lacks the special tang of up close and personal humiliation by an actual overbearing foreign soldier. Counter argument two: The Marines have gone the high-contact route with some apparently genuine success. Yes, and when the Army becomes the Marines, and dismounted cavalry become trained infantry, then we can try again.) Given that Iraqi attitudes remain largely hopeful (again per ABC), and that twice as many Iraqis trust the new Iraqi police and army as trust the CPA and occupation troops (rightly or wrongly), it's hard to say the Administration has made the wrong call.

But it does leave the mystery of why casualties are going up. Is it because of the current troop rotation? Or have the insurgents come up with some new wrinkles?

Dilatory News Blogging - If Ayman al-Zawahiri did escape, it's too goddam bad. It's pretty obvious that if he's not already running the show, he's being positioned as heir apparent upon OBL's trip the the 72 brand-new dialysis machines in Paradise. If he was within the Pakistani cordon in the first place and the whole thing wasn't staged to give us a little pick-me-up after a bad week.

King Conscience Is Dead - Prominent hawkish pundit David Warren on the lesson of the Spanish elections: "Then as now we made a lot of blather about "democracy". But screw democracy . . . "

Via Flit, noted convert to Firefox.

I H8 Eerie Prescience! - A poem I never finished to my satisfaction written after the 2000 election included the line "the future belongs to caudillos in mufti." I was actually thinking about the Gore campaign's lawyers and symps on certain elections boards, but the concept may have other applications. (Via Electrolite Sidelights.)

Fiendishly Clever - The Nielsen Haydens decide to drive traffic to their weblogs by providing updated content. Well, hey - it worked on me. Making Light recounts the latest incident of Passion-inspired violence, and Electrolite notes that - actually, I'm speechless. Simply speechless.

When Titans Clash! - Late-Night Conversation at a Herndon Citgo:

Me: Jeez, it really wasn't about the oil!

Eve Tushnet: How much?

Me: Dollar seventy-nine a gallon!

Neilalien: Come on, Jim. You didn't think the savings were going to trickle down to your level, did you?

Thus went part of the comics blog-semi-comics blog crossover event of the year. The Mysterious Palindrome was a lot of fun to meet, and among the three of us, we settled every single extant issue related to comics, blogging and comics blogging over a Ruby Tuesday's Big Easy appetizer plate. We even found out how Neil became such a big Doctor Strange fan: he looks exactly like the character, and has since he was seven years old. (There were other reasons too, some of them actually factual.)

Anyway, tons of fun, and Eve left me with a bagful of stuff to read. Can you believe she, for the sake of politeness, sat through a 25-mile car ride with copies of the newest issues of New X-Men and Daredevil next to her and forebore reading them because it would be unsociable? If that's not Lenten self-discipline, I don't know what is.

If You Can't Say Something Nice at least say it in rhyme. Politics aside, Frederick Turner's imprecation against the Spaniards is not bad for one day's work, though the second stanza could use some attention:

El Cid has risen from his tomb, he's parted with Ximene, His people, whose bright honor still has never suffered stain, Now run from battle, hide their heads: he is ashamed of Spain.

That word "still" is all wrong. Turner is saying that until now there has been no stain on Spain's honor.

I'll confess to a level of personal pain here: Turner's epics and his early nonfiction were a huge influence on me. His "popular" treatment of his themes, The Culture of Hope, was weak - a book's worth of thesis statements looking for supporting paragraphs - but his earlier essay collections, Natural Classicism and Tempest, Flute and Oz were superb. We once shared a cab which I determined probably held every single American poet who had ever had to check his poem's math on a calculator.

But I'm all for poets mixing it up in the public sphere. Left wing poets have done this for decades now, and right wing poets ought to be able to mix it up too.

Speaking of poetry, Obsidian Wings decided to have an online poetry slam last night. UO represents. (See comment thread.)

TV Guide - Kelly Jane Torrance, whose picture appears in the "Target Demographic" section of the New Criterion's marketing plan, praises a Spike TV cartoon. It's not just the idea of a TV show where "the conservative [s]sn't the idiot" that appeals. This Just In sounds technically innovative too:

The show is made using the digital Flash animation system. This bare-bones technique, widely used on the Internet to create everything from punk rock kittens to fake political ads, allows the creators to write and produce each episode the very week it airs, thus giving the show a just-torn-from-yesterday's-headlines feel.

If I ever find myself in front of the TV with no basketball game on, I plan to check it out. (Hey, I've seen two episodes of Monk this year. That's more television fiction than I watched all last year. I'm lightening up!)

UPDATE: Preempting any smartasses, yes, I know perfectly well that Flash animations are not, in themselves, technically innovative. But their use here - reducing production time on a cartoon by, most likely, orders of magnitude, is. So I'm claiming.

Good News and Bad News - Working on an article tonight, and thus no time to discuss the newest ABC News (et al) poll of Iraq. So this link is pretty much a sticky-note. My immediate impression is that the reporting on the poll is pretty darn good, in contrast to a lot of articles about polls. I do wish that they had been able to break Sunni and Shia out from the "Arab" category, and been more consistent in breaking out Arab from Kurd. (They do it for some major questions but not others.) Lots and lots of discussion fodder here.

Brief note: Hesiod is mad at Glenn Reynolds for scanting the percentage of Iraqis who say it's "acceptable" to attack Coalition troops, publishing a dismissive Reynolds e-mail that reads:

Nah. Lots of your antiwar cronies think it's "acceptable" for Palestinians to blow up school buses. But that doesn't mean they'll strap on the bombs themselves.

Actually, I could sort of see Glenn's point here, except for the sleight-of-hand involved. Firstly, he's partly right. (There remains the problem of Iraqis who won't strap on bombs themselves but will either abet those who do or look the other way in specific cases of actual attacks. They are a problem for us. Viz. Northern Ireland or the urban drug wars of the 1990s here.) The problem is that Glenn's "cronies" consider that Palestinians who find it "acceptable" for others to blow up Israeli civilian targets constitute a "culture of death," even if they are not personally strapping bombs on. So the Palestinians somehow excuse the Iraqis without themselves being excused. How? Magic!

Culture, Commerce and Cred Crap - The Dual Lens calls a couple of critics on the destructive (sometimes fatally so) mania for "authenticity" in rock music:

Coley is particularly venemous, he is a critic who assumes that if anyone beyond he and his friends have heard a song, it automatically sucks-and even his friends are suspect.

Lots more good stuff, embedded in a review of a documentary about the legendary band, Half Japanese.

Check Your Calendars and tell me if it's April Fool's Day yet:

WHAT do you give someone who's been proved innocent after spending the best part of their life behind bars, wrongfully convicted of a crime they didn't commit?

An apology, maybe? Counselling? Champagne? Compensation? Well, if you're David Blunkett, the Labour Home Secretary, the choice is simple: you give them a big, fat bill for the cost of board and lodgings for the time they spent freeloading at Her Majesty's Pleasure in British prisons.

On Tuesday, Blunkett will fight in the Royal Courts of Justice in London for the right to charge victims of miscarriages of justice more than £3000 for every year they spent in jail while wrongly convicted. The logic is that the innocent man shouldn't have been in prison eating free porridge and sleeping for nothing under regulation grey blankets.

Blunkett's fight has been described as "outrageous", "morally repugnant" and the "sickest of sick jokes", but his spokesmen in the Home Office say it's a completely "reasonable course of action" as the innocent men and women would have spent the money anyway on food and lodgings if they weren't in prison. The government deems the claw-back 'Saved Living Expenses'.

Warning: British Press! (In this case, the Sunday Herald.) But man. (Via the Modulator.)

That's One Way to Do It . . .

In order for us to reach a broader market, RAIJIN COMICS, RAIJIN GRAPHIC NOVELS, and MASTER EDITION will be placed on hiatus for the time being.

Via Grotesque Anatomy.

In Memoriam - Bob Zangas is dead. He was a civilian volunteer with the Iraqi Coalition Provisional Authority, murdered by rogue Iraqi policemen last Tuesday, on the road between Hilla and Karbala. He was also a blogger. Here is his final entry. I find it terribly sad. Before volunteering for his reconstruction job, he did five-months in Iraq as a marine reservist, and planned to wrap up his civilian work in time to return to Iraq with the marines in June. He leaves behind three children. He was clearly one of the big-hearted, cheerful young men this country has a genius for producing. His weblog remains as an excellent primary source on America's involvement in Iraq, for good and ill. Would that he too remained.

(Via Outside the Beltway.)

More Pain in Spain - At last it can be revealed: the "one of my top sources" for Spanish-language analysis was Matthew Yglesias, who e-mails his take on the Spanish-language coverage of the pre-3/11 Rajoy campaign. Rajoy, to remind people, was the chosen successor of outgoing Prime Minister Aznar. His name does not come up nearly as much as you might expect, which is surprising since he's the guy who lost the election:

My reading of those stories is that Rajoy was trying to avoid bringing the issue up -- the war was unpopular and, from the Spanish perspective, basically over. Just a few troops over there, miniscule casualty rates. The fact that the Socialists seemed to bring it up way more than the PP makes me think this is some unpopular policy the PP was stuck with, but that the electorate didn't regard as a big deal. Like how the Democrats are hoping they can just run and hide every time someone says "gay marriage."

This tends to confirm the English-language reporting I found from before the Madrid atrocities.

And there you go, my hawkish friends: your stalwart, brave allies, true leaders for sure, spent the election campaign hiding from their policy like a - like a simile! An apt simile! Probably one involving little kids or housepets.

Funniest Spain quote of the day comes from my colleague Sean T. Collins: "The thing is, though, that thus far Zapatero has shown no sign that his lip-service to getting tough on terrorism is anything but lip-service:" I mean, what the fuck, right? The man's been elected for hours now. He probably hasn't actually taken office yet - he may not have even had a bowel movement since the vote - but that's no goddamned excuse. Down with the Do-Nothing Zapatero Administration!

Fistful of Euros has a long analysis that, on the plus side, betrays some preexisting understanding of Spanish politics, and on the minus side, contains the phrase "Spain is a society of contradictions." Read it anyway.

The Fistful of Euros item ties in with something I read in an Obsidian Wings comment thread: Discussing the apparent Moroccan origin of several of the bombers, the commenter suggested that perhaps the lesson of the bombing was that maybe the United States should be doing more militarily in North Africa. Well, I don't know - how about Spain doing something militarily in North Africa? They know the territory better and may soon have 1,300-odd extra troops to spare. Could that be what Zapatero means by "making terrorism a top priority?" We shall see. Sometimes the hawks are like a Mom who complains that Dad never does enough around the house, then insists "Let me do that!" when he bestirs himself. (No, Loyal Reader, this simile is not autobiographical in origin.) Even if Spain is not already highly-motivated to do this, a nimble US government would suggest it take over the North African account in exchange for reduced unpleasantness about the Mesopotamia situation.

And hopefully Thomas Nephew has finally had the chance to read the rest of my item on the politics of the Spanish election. His assertion that "Jim Henley suggests even if the PP had won, Aznar's successors might not have stuck with the US in Iraq -- a theory based on an article about rightist Spanish resentments about their lost empire" is an accurate characterization of the entire article up until the many, many paragraphs that follow the first pull-quote. But I probably should have also excerpted the passages from the first Herald-Tribune article that detail the structural reasons why Spain can't long sustain the Iraq deployment on top of its commitments in Afghanistan etc. Thomas, by the way, is an eminence gris of blogging, with archives back to September 23, 2001, and has become the closest thing going to "Unqualified Offerings Watch" lately. If you're looking for frequently critical and sometimes indignant takes on what you read here, Newsrack Blog is your likeliest source. He also provides particularly in-depth coverage of German-language news.

The Pain in Spain - Follow-ups on last night. Atrios e-mails

Mrs. Atrios is intimately acquainted with Spanish politics and a native spanish speaker, so we spent Sunday listening to/reading spanish media sources.

Short version - people turned out to vote out PP because they though (correctly or incorrectly) that they'd tried to play politics with the bombing and kept pushing the ETA story even after they should've known better.

When I was convinced that the election results represented, in an uncomplicated way, a referendum on Aznar's Iraq policy prompted by the bombings, I discovered that what I intended to write had already been written by Diana Moon. See here and here. I'd have put some things differently and changed some emphases, but she covers the important points.

Let's stick with the American conventional wisdom for a second, that the election was all about us, meaning, the Bush Administration's construction of the meaning of "War on Terror" and Spain's role in same. From that perspective, the election results do indeed look for a victory for Al Qaeda. But from this, the hawks draw the wrong conclusions (as usual).

Aznar joined a war that 90% of his countrymen opposed. He was a fool to do so. People around the world have shown themselves willing to endure great hardship for wars they think necessary. For wars they think unnecessary, or wrong, or evil, they are not. Aznar's policy could only sustain itself so long as it exacted only minimal costs from an electorate that opposed it almost universally. That is the most hubristic assumption about war that one could make. It is deeply, deeply irresponsible politics. And yes, what happened will, rightly or wrongly, embolden Al Qaeda to try this stunt again. But like I say, the hawks totally misunderstand the significance - what it really means is that Aznar should not have joined the Iraq War in the first place, and the US should not have inveigled him to do so. "We" went out of our way to weaken our own alliance in advance.

To-Do List, en Espanol - We are all talking about the message of the Spanish elections and it occurred to me that we may, as a class, have no fucking clue. For instance, I didn't fully realize (blatherspeak for "plain didn't know") that PM Aznar himself was voluntarily stepping down already - today's election pitched his Popular Party successor against the Socialists, not Aznar himself. (Hat tip: The Talking Dog.)

This may be a clue. A clue to what puzzle? This one: 95% of Spaniards opposed Aznar's decision to join Gulf War Phase II. So even before the terrible bombings of Thursday morning, why was his Party doing so well? Among the possibilities I considered:

o Man, even in Spain people hate socialism;
o Modern Western countries don't sweat seemingly low-cost overseas wars, so long as they remain low-cost.

But it turns out there may be more: maybe Spanish voters doubted the post-Aznar Right's commitment to his Iraq policy in the first place. Consider a poorly edited Herald-Trib chin-puller about Spanish politics that came out the morning of March 11 by Dan O'Brien. Its thesis is that Aznar's foreign policy will not survive him, and not just because the Socialists oppose it:

Less obvious, but arguably more important given the likely outcome of the election, is that the Spanish right also does not feel a strong bond to the United States. A traditional distrust of the great Protestant nation in this most Roman Catholic of countries is one reason.

But more important was the U.S. role in depriving Spain of its last colonies. In the Spanish-American war of 1898, the United States ejected Spain from her last remaining colonies in Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. For many on the right this humiliation is still seen as the beginning of Spain's decline.

Aznar's successor, and the Popular Party's candidate for prime minister, prime ministerial candidate for the Popular Party, Mariano Rajoy, avoids talking of foreign policy when he can. Unlike Aznar, who has come to seems almost uncomfortable not taking sides, Rajoy is an altogether more emollient figure and is likely to seek, at the least, to steer a middle ground between Europe and America if new divisions emerge.

There are other reasons to believe that Aznar's foreign policy is likely to be reversed.

The implication here is that the Right's performance in pre-election polls was not a sign of support for Aznar's Iraq policy at all.

Now, back in November, Rajoy "ruled out a withdrawal of Spanish troops from Iraq in the short term," saying it would be "irresponsible" to "abandon 26 million people whose future is extremely worrying."

A John Vinocur think-piece from the March 7 Herald-Trib declares both that

Rajoy's tactic appears to be one of letting the Socialists go on about the war without response. After all, the method largely worked when the Popular Party easily won regional elections just after Saddam Hussein's ouster.

and

The Socialists' platform on Iraq comes down to Zapatero saying, if he gets in, he'd pull out the Spanish contingent on June 30 - although on the not terribly likely condition that the United Nations has taken over responsibility for the country.

and notes both that the Socialists were explicitly arguing before March 11th that Aznar's Iraq policy had made Spain a primary target for terrorism and that

In fact, a senior official who works with both Aznar and Rajoy in the Moncloa executive complex believes the Socialist attempt to tie the government's good relations with the Bush administration to an alleged new element of daily danger in Spanish life may have backfired.

And then backfired again, apparently.

Here's the thing: you can find a few official Rajoy statements of support for the government's Iraq policy in English-language reports Google pulls up. That makes the case that Rajoy was with the program. What you can't get from most of those reports is a sense of how Rajoy was campaigning. You may have heard that George W. Bush considers himself, first and foremost, a "war president." And he's going to make sure you know it. Support or oppose the US President's Iraq policy (and I'll leave you in suspense re my own opinion on the matter . . . ), he isn't soft-pedalling it.

What about Rajoy? The Herald-Trib says the Popular Party have mostly not said anything about Iraq - they've left that to the Socialists. Are they right? Let's see: A Google Site search of Rajoy's official website for "Iraq" finds a single result - the same November quote discussed above, in Spanish. A similar search of georgewbush.com finds 23 pages of hits.

Other links: Expatica.com from January. ("But support for the war, which Spaniards largely associate with Aznar himself, only dented the PP support for a few months." My emphasis.)

And it can't have helped Rajoy that he was prominent in blaming ETA in the early hours and days after the Madrid atrocities. See News 24 and the Hindustan Times. Leave aside that, apparently, many Spanish voters suspected the PP, and therefore Rajoy, of dissembling about the ETA's role for political reasons - what they saw days before the election was Rajoy himself getting it wrong. That can't help your case to be Prime Minister in the electorate's eyes, and the problem may have been compounded by the fact that Rajoy was, as Aznar's Interior Minister, responsible for fighting the ETA in the first place. Jeez, buddy, if you don't know this what do you know? seems like a plausible reaction by some voters.

Let me be clear: I am not saying it doesn't look to the outside world, including Al Qaeda, like Spain turned out the PP as a reaction to being attacked. It does look like that. I'm saying that, based on various reports, it may not look like that to Spaniards themselves. And on the available English-language evidence, the PP appears to have been playing down its Iraq policy in the first place.

I may be wrong about that. English-language reporting on non-English-speaking nations is always fragmentary. I have sought an expert opinion on the Spanish-language evidence from one of my top sources. But because our information on such things is inevitably fragmentary, and because we never get around to paying attention to these things until it becomes about us, we should be slow to declare their significance.

And We Are Not Saved - Duane's Interminable Ramblings (in MT's unfortunate hard-to-read default grey type) makes the case that when it comes to spam, all proposed solutions are doomed, doomed! to fail. Doomed!

The real problem here is economic and sociological. At the moment you can sell other people's attention for much less than they value it at. No technology is going to reverse that - on the contrary. It is only going to get cheaper to deliver larger volume, more sophisticated, more precisely targeted data. Email technology itself is actually irrelevent. If everyone abandons it the pressure just shifts to the next communications channel. USENET is dead; long live USENET.

So what do we do then? We get used to it. In the future you will have vastly better and easier access to everyone. And everyone will have better access to you. It is a tradeoff; a concept much beloved of engineers. You will still be able to restrict/improve personal access, just as you can today, and with similar costs and benefits. In the future we will lead different lives - richer in some ways, poorer in others.

To this layman his case is compelling. Read the whole thing (as we bloggers say). He's got a set of links to more technical versions of the argument.

This Should Be Grimly Interesting - The Socialists have apparently won the Spanish elections. So! How many of those who were falling all over themselves with solidarity and compassion yesterday will suddenly discover, and unburden themselves on, deep weaknesses in the national character of our Spanish brethren? I haven't felt savage enough to start looking yet. Maybe it's already begun.

Salary Showdown - Guess who earns more. (Via Comics Worth Reading.)

Spanish Embassy Contact Information - The Embassy in DC is at

2375 Pennsylvania Av. NW
20037 Washington D.C.

Mrs. Offering set off with the kids today to bring flowers but . . . couldn't find it. She's going to try again tomorrow.

Grimly amusing conversation with the Matron of All Offerings this afternoon.

Me: [Mrs. Offering] is taking the children down to the Spanish Embassy with some flowers.

Mom: So they'll learn a lesson. Good!

Me: The Spaniards?

If you're not in DC, you might wish to check the list of consulates.

The latest news, of course, is the arrest of five non-Spanish men apparently tied to Muslim extremist groups. I refuse to tell you What It All Means. Much pedagogy has been written in the blood of the dead this weekend already, but I'm convinced lessons can bear waiting another day or two. Saturday was the final of Spain's three national days of mourning. Perhaps Sunday we may all begin explaining to them exactly what their loss means.

Annals of Questionable Genius - The Boston Globe reports that

Senator John F. Kerry has been steeling himself for Republican charges that he is a "Massachusetts liberal," but senior Bush strategists say they won't treat the presumptive Democratic nominee like another Michael S. Dukakis. Instead, they plan to paint him as Al Gore -- a waffling Washington insider too aloof to connect with average Americans.

Is this, um, smart? I couldn't stand Al Gore myself. But not quite half of all Americans liked him well enough to vote for him last time around. That's a lot more than voted for Michael Dukakis and about a half million more than voted for - George W. Bush in the same election.

I fully expect Kerry's lead in the polls to dissolve and more than dissolve. I don't think the White House has even started yet. But my expectations are premised on the idea that the President's campaign people are actually very clever.

The Blue Matt - Yglesias explains, with no words minced, why the Democrats suck. And he's right. Bill Clinton's stalwart guardianship of his own low pleasure rights drove conservatives nuts, but it also obscured how willing Clinton was to throw lesser beings to the lifestyle police - V-chips, drug prosecutions, "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and a whole range of minor-to-major paternalisms Clinton either fostered, coopted or just couldn't be bothered fighting. (Remember school uniforms?) If it didn't involve terminating a pregnancy, your right to just about anything was, in Bill Clinton's view, negotiable.

It makes it harder, in these troubled times, for libertarians to work up much enthusiasm for cooperating with liberals. When, time after time, I have liberals complain that, since libertarians oppose affirmative action we lack "compassion" for African-Americans, I respond, "When you stop voting to keep locking up every seventh black guy for the crime of selling something other people want to buy, then come back and talk to me about my compassion deficit." And what I typically get is some mumble about, "Well, most liberals I know are against the war on drugs as currently practiced."

Great. And you and your friends have done what about that? Made it a litmus test for a nomination? Refused to vote for an enthusiastic drug warrior just because he or she bears the Democratic Party stamp of approval in the general election? Worked to elevate anti-prohibition candidates to office?

I didn't think so. And we're talking about a set of policies that were not only, in those days before the Bush-inflected version of the War on Terror, the single greatest nemesis of American civil liberties; we're talking about policies whose fell weight falls most heavily on the Democratic Party's core and most loyal constituency: African Americans.

For all the proclamations of committed liberals that the Democratic Party is the guardian of "personal liberty," the record shows that - it's just not. A critical mass of Democratic politicians will surf just about any censorious wave that gets rolling, whether it's drugs or broadcast standards or the rights of gay people to do the things that straight people do, to speak only of national issues.

If I did face a choice between a major party that wants to keep government out of the economy and a major party that wants to keep government out of people's personal lives, well, that would be some choice. But Republicans only imagine that they're the former and Democrats only imagine that they're the latter.

Wilderness of Lindauers III: The Counter-Counter-Counter Narrative - You know, the fact of Lindauer's distant relationship to Andrew Card and parentage in the (periphery of) Republican establishment make her apparent belief that she could work a back channel between Iraq and the US look marginally less delusional. Which is not to say, not delusional - anyone who imagined that the Bush Administration could be dissuaded from war by then (and yes, I spent a week like this myself) was experiencing the old triumph of hope over experience. But she could reasonably imagine that she had the sort of workable personal connection that opens Washington doors.

Area for further research: possible connections between Lindauer's overture in January and the Imad Hage overture of March 2003.

A Wilderness of Lindauers - Reports last night purport to identify the "government official" to whom espionage-related program activities suspect Susan Lindauer gave her January message:

The U.S. official was not identified. But a government official, speaking on condition on anonymity, said the recipient of the letter was White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, a distant cousin of Lindauer.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said that the last time Card recalls seeing or talking to Lindauer was during January 2001 inaugural events. McClellan said the FBI interviewed Card about his contact with Lindauer and that Card cooperated fully.

Card told the FBI that Lindauer had tried to contact him on behalf of the former regime several times.

That's from AP. And apparently her father was once Republican candidate for governor of Alaska, according to Newsday.

The connections to prominent Republicans open the possibility of a counter-counter narrative - that the indictments have actually softpedalled Lindauer's crimes for the sake of her father and Card. (And let's not forget the original, very live possibility, that the indictments are a reliable account of her actual transgressions. It happens sometimes.)

Links via Daily Kos, which is mostlyconcerned about the partisan political angle (magine!) via Antiwar.com blog.

Over the Other Line - Okay, now the Bush ad people really have gone too far.

Curious Omissions from the Libertarian Purity test we were all talking about the other day:

1. The right to self-defense is the most basic human right, true or false. (Answer: True.)

2. The right to earn a peaceful living may not be number two, but it's way up there. (Answer: True.)

English is Hard! - You know, it's going to be very hard not to link to Zero Intelligence every day. Latest gem: previously-unappreciated nuances in the meaning of the phrase "zero tolerance":

"There's sometimes mitigating circumstances that will support the principal's decision to not go strictly by the zero tolerance rule," she said.

Gilyard can't on comment on Renard's individual case, but does say meeting with parents and the student in question may help resolve the problem. She also says that when it comes to enforcing zero tolerance, there should be no exceptions.

Remember, this woman is employed in an educational institution. But then, I do think I'm learning.

UPDATE: Left out the part of the quote that makes it funny in the first draft of this item.

Over the Edge - The biggest story not from Spain today was the arrest of one Susan Lindauer of Takoma Park, MD, on charges of prohibited dealings with the Iraqi Intelligence Service from 1999 through 2002, including taking $10,000 for her services in 2002 in a forbidden financial transaction, and "plotting to aid resistance groups in Iraq after Hussein was ousted by U.S. forces." Interestingly, Lindauer was not charged with espionage as such.

I have no idea if Lindauer is guilty. If she was indeed working for the Iraqis, her motives seem distinctly ideological. She belonged to various antiwar groups and signed petitions against the Iraq War, and let's face it, $10,000 is not all that much of an inducement. Her resume reads like that of someone on a downward career spiral, moving down the Congressional food chain as a staffer to, apparently, a final position as a spokesperson for Carol Mosely Braun, to spokeswoman for a fledgling, would-be C-SPAN competitor until, according to the information that came out of her arraignment today, employed but "not on a regular basis." She speaks of having survived "several assassination attempts," but there's no evidence she's the sort of person who could thwart determined professional killers.

In other words, at first glance, she fits the profile of someone who decides to betray her country, and if she really did decide to aid resistance groups in Iraq, that is what she did. Oppose the war, but don't fund the killers of our uniformed countrymen. Oppose the federal government, but don't bomb crowded buildings. Oppose abortions but don't shoot doctors. There are lines the dissident must not cross. As a radical, I'm all too familiar with people who hold some versions of my own beliefs crossing over to the dark side, but I'm neither used to it or reconciled. If Susan Lindauer tried to materially aid the killers of our troops, she should rot in jail.

There is of course the possibility that she didn't do this. At least one counter-narrative suggests itself. First, there's the matter of her pre-war contact with the IIS. One incident was curiously dropped from the later edition's of the Post's online coverage, but is still in the SF Chronicle's version of the AP report:

On Jan. 8, 2003, prosecutors said, Lindauer tried to influence U.S. foreign policy by delivering to the home of a U.S. government official a letter in which she conveyed her access to and contacts with members of Saddam's regime. The official was not identified in the indictment.

This is not exactly hiding your Iraq-contacting light under a bushel. This means the government's own indictment against Lindauer claims that she seemingly intended to make sure the Federal government knew of her contacts with Iraqi officialdom more than a year ago. The obvious inference is that Lindauer, a peace activist, wanted to set up a back channel between the US and Iraq to head off the coming war. This is obviously a grandiose ambition, and consistent with the prima facie evidence in the early news reports of a delusive personality. But while acting as an unregistered foreign agent is illegal, trying to "influence U.S. foreign policy" surely isn't (still!) a crime in itself. What would we do with Mr. Chalabi?

Now let's advance the counter-narrative to the postwar period:

The indictment said she met on two occasions in Baltimore in June and July with an undercover FBI agent who posed as a Libyan intelligence representative who was seeking to support resistance groups in postwar Iraq. It said she discussed the need for plans and foreign resources to support these groups.

According to the indictment, she continued to correspond with the undercover agent until last month and followed the agent's instructions to leave packages on two occasions in August in "dead drop" operations.

Who initiated the contacts, the FBI or Lindauer? Why did they stop meeting after August? What was in those packages? What did the correspondence say? Was Lindauer, as before the war, imagining herself somehow capable of being a go-between? Who took the initiative in keeping the contacts going, her or the FBI? Did the FBI's actions rise to the level of entrapment? Going back to the pre-war period, did Lindauer even know that the Iraqi UN Mission employees she met were intelligence officers, or did she imagine they were "diplomats?"

I have no idea. Do I think the counter-narrative makes Lindauer some kind of hero, or at least okay? No, I do not. IF she took foreign money from a hostile country without registering, she betrayed not just her country but the peace movement itself. It doesn't matter that the amount was, in spy game terms, small. Once they have your signature on the receipt for an illegal transaction, they own you. Even if you think you're working for yourself, or Peace, or the higher ideals your country should aspire to, they've got evidence that you committed a crime and they can burn you at any time. You have made yourself a soft target for extortion by a hostile power. You are at the very least criminally naive, and that's leaving aside the plain truth that no decent person should want a dime of Saddam Hussein's largesse.

That's if she took the money. And again, that hasn't been proven. And of course, while the early media picture is consistent with a sad sack falling apart as she subsides through middle age, the early media picture may be wrong. I did a lot of independent Google-mining on Lindauer this morning - the fruits of it are available in this Outside the Beltway item, not that you could tell where it came from - and drew the "Falling Down" picture independently, but it's still just an interpretation. My best guess is that, at the least, Lindauer crossed a line she shouldn't have crossed between opposing her country's foreign policy and advancing another's. It is an honorable thing to oppose an unwise or an unjust war - IF you do it of, by and for love of YOUR country. You don't take money from an evil regime, or even give its minions the time of day. (Imagine Lincoln accepting funding from Santa Ana.)

It may be as true that the government took advantage of a weak woman's naivete in hopes of political gain. We'll find out. Though I doubt we'll all agree with what we find out.

Spain - My heart goes out to the people in Madrid. I can't tell you What It All Means, but neither can anyone else right now - never trust the early reports. Iberian Notes blogs from Spain in English, so keep checking there for news. When I come across relief donation opportunities I'll post them here.

This is Sports Center with Unqualified Offerings - This site congratulates the Washington Wizards on last night's 99-62 drubbing of Tracy McGrady.

You Call That Dark-Skinned? - I've got relatives with darker skin than the actor playing the terrorist in the new Bush ad that's the outrage of the day. Okay, they're African-American, so they've got a head start, but still - I think some of Mrs. Offering's Italian-American relations are duskier than this guy. (I'd peg his ancestry as just north of the Med rather than just south if you made me guess based only on that eybrows-to-cleft closeup.)

The real outrage is that it's more of the Bush Administration trying to frighten the electorate into submission by accusing John Kerry of wanting to repeal the PATRIOT Act - and "Weaken Fight Against Terrorists" as it says in the scary red box at the bottom of the screen. (Does Kerry really want to repeal the PATRIOT Act? Because the man still has time to convert me from a leaner to a supporter, appalling as he is in so many ways. Keep me posted!) On the skin tone complaint, I call bullshit.

(Via Atrios.)

Math is Hard! - The White House and Pentagon refuse to include moneys in the FY2005 defense budget for Iraq and Afghanistan:

The Pentagon's refusal to estimate costs is the same stance it took before the war.

For months leading up to the invasion, officials said they couldn't estimate because they didn't know how long it would take to fight the war.

Within days after it started, however, the Pentagon sent Congress a request for $63 billion.

''So you know they had it in their back pockets,'' all along, said Cindy Williams, a former congressional budget officer now with the MIT security studies program. ''They were just not wanting to disclose to the American people on the eve of the war how much it was going to cost.''

reports Newsday. Maybe they've hired a bunch of Patrick Henry College accounting graduates, and Patrick Henry doesn't have enough professors to cover the concept of accruals yet? Let alone the methodology of projections? If the Pentagon will drop me an e-mail, I can recommend some real accountants for them.

Because leaving those moneys out of the budget has an unfortunate, utter coincidence to it:

Had Bush included it in the budget proposal sent to Congress in February, the government's surging deficit problem would have looked even worse.

I'm sure nobody wants to confuse the American people about the true size of the deficit.

Imitation Tech Blog Item - Kevin J. Maroney points me to Character Cleaner from Malevolent Designs, which will replace high-ascii characters with low ones (e.g. smart quotes to striaght quotes), or convert them to Unicode. Cool! As Kevin notes, you can save the page to your desktop and run it locally.

For my purposes, I'll have to go a paragraph at a time. It either wants to add paragraph break tags for you based on spacing or lump everything into a single big paragraph. You get to choose, but since I use MovableType's paragraphing functionality, neither of those options is particularly good for me. Still, very useful web utility.

And Steve from Snarkout points me to a cool Mozilla-family extension, Flash Click-to-View, which works with Mozilla, Firebird/Firefox and maybe Netscape too for all I know. It suppresses Flash animations until and unless you activate them. No more trying to read deep thoughts while animations flash in your face.

Speaking of Ironies - How about all the Big Government Liberals selling blogads while the anti-government libertarian continues to eschew advertising? What's up with that?

On the other hand, the redesign of Matthew Yglesias' site shows the power of the profit motive in fostering beneficial change. (I admit the ads that flash can be distracting. To quote Homer Simpson: Did we lose a war??)

Speaking of Matt, I highly recommend his item about "low bar syndrome" in Iraq, and what really lies ahead. While I happen to have been one of the people who did expect a messy occupation phase, he's absolutely right that the real dangers haven't even had a chance to arrive yet.

The one hope might be that Low Bar Syndrome somehow works on the Iraqis themselves - that is, when we finally hit the legendary "pre-war levels" of whatever, it will make them giddy with joy - despite the fact that, at the time, they thought pre-war levels amounted to privation.

Tech Support Ticket - Any Zempt users know a quick and easy way to replace non-ascii typographical characters with standard ones when copying text for quoting? Zempt 0.6 of course chokes on smart quotes and em-dashes and such. It's darn tedious sometimes to have to zap every apostrophe and hyphen one by one in a lengthy blog item. I've tried pasting an entire item into Textpad and copying it back into Zempt, but this appears to be one of a handful of things Textpad won't do.

The Fall of the Towers - The stunning thing about Rick Atkinson's series on the invasion phase of the Iraq War? The Post allows the first-person singular to appear in the reporter's narration. That's the kind of decline in standards that leads to men marrying men and women marrying women.

Urgent Communication for You - Here we go, my spam mail - roundup style with little comment because of the hour and fatigue. Thanks to everyone who wrote in.

Michael Croft:

Eudora tells me (bless it's pointy, statistic-full littl' haid) that I send, on average, 152 messages a month. Fully half of these are to PBeMs, so that when they go out, 76 of them are expanded to about 1520. Eudora also tells me that of the 2500 pieces of mail I received in February, (those not stopped by server-based protection routines) about 7% were Junk. Significantly more than half of those were viruses designed to exploit security flaws in MicroSoft products. Bill Gates needn't worry about the mote of spam 'til he has removed the beam of viruses.

What Bill Gates wants is not your penny, although he'll take it. What he wants is to drive the next mandatory software/hardware upgrade cycle to lock in more companies to Exchange Server. He's hoping that a Y2K/HDTV kind of technology upgrade will get him both a lot of software profits both for Exchange Server and from upgraders who need better versions of his server software to run it on. And he's banking that he can exclude Linux from the trough because it's open source. If he gets your penny or dime in the process of making alternatives to his monopoly look bad, then that's gravy.

Ginger writes more e-mail than I do. I don't want to pay $35+/month to run our game at a penny a message, and we'd close down for sure if the e-stamp act wanted a dime a shot. And I certainly don't want to pay it to the guy responsible for the real on-line pollution problem so that he can use it to eliminate alternatives to his products.

As a mail server admin of a free server, it looks to that what he's proposing would balkanize the net, creating multiple bordered zones that would exclude admins like me from . In this I am anti-enclosure, although the tragedy of the commons is clear to see. For my purposes, I would probably provide all my players with whiterose.org email addresses. But considering how many games I know run on the dog's breakfast called 'Yahoo Groups', I don't think this will work for most people.

Richard Puchalsky quotes a paragraph of me, then comments:

"His model is tradeable pollution allowances or tradeable catch permits for fisheries, which most pragmatic libertarians prefer to preexisting regulatory models. But on the general question of "market mechanisms" in government policy, libertarian opinion is diverse, and my impression is that we've grown more skeptical of them over time. They tend to be financial incentives to behave in government-approved ways."

As a big government liberal, I agree with you fully on this one. I think that the general rule is that whenever government creates a new form of unreal property, government undergoes a net expansion.

And this particular case is a really poor one for a new unreal "property right". Sending spam is better modelled as a crime, or if you really prefer non-governmental models a social gaffe, punishable (after warnings) by the refusal of other sites to pass on all Email sent by the server or network that sent it. Surely it must be easier to implement that than to force the world to buy Email stamps.

Steve from Snarkout:

Not that this takes away from your point vis a vis Kevin Drum and the libertarian response to email, but the "stamps" Bill Gates is supposedly endorsing are mostly the result of lazy journalism. The idea, if I'm correct, is similar to the one bandied about that's called "hashcash" -- you set up a computer somewhere (yours, or the mail server's) to bounce or filter as junk any email which doesn't contain an encrypted version of the header, including your address and the time. The encryption mechanism is set so that it takes a non-trivial time -- five seconds, say -- to compute, but a trivial amount of time to verify. The idea, then, is that sending out a normal person's mail will involve a few minutes weekly of wasted computational time, but sending out spam adverts at five hundred thousand copies a pop will bog down into impracticality. You're better set to analyze the implications in terms of market efficiency and rational choice; personally, I'll just assume that the spammers will figure a way around it, probably involving vast numbers of 0wnz0red proxy computers to do the calculations. This will be bad for my inbox, but good for my vague disquiet with the idea that it's the 21st century and there are not mirrorshaded cyberoutlaws fighting the man.

(The greylisting methodology proposed here, seems like a less intrusive and marginally more likely to succeed variation on the theme of making spammers spend a little bit of extra computational time per mail. But I have little hope.)

The calculation thing sounds weird to this layman. The biggest problem with spam is that it's supposed to be a huge bandwidth hog. So people want to fight it by increasing the bandwidth required to handle every e-mail? These earthmen are strange.

Another reader (anonymous by choice) offers a way that "e-mail postage" really could come about as a market solution:

I've been following your discussion with Kevin Drum over charging for sending email as a way to reduce spam, and I think you've misunderstood the way for this to come about as a consequence of the market.

You assume that the fee would go to the ISP of the sender, which, as you argued, would just cause spammers to find or create ISPs which didn't charge. Instead, imagine an architecture where for every email sent, the sender has to pay a fee to the recipient's ISP, and the recipient's ISP would just reject any email that didn't have a virtual stamp attached to it. Now, once most accounts are capable of sending email with virtual stamps, everyone will want their account to only accept email which has virtual stamps. They can still receive email from people they want to receive email from, because the price is negligible, say a fraction of a cent, and they get almost no spam. No government intervention necessary.

So why hasn't this arisen because of market forces? Because of course, the cost of clearing a fee for each email sent is far higher than fractions of a cent, and perhaps more than people are willng to pay. So then why did Bill Gates propose such an economically unsustainable system? Quite simply, he didn't. Read the article again. Bill Gates proposed requiring the sender to perform a costly computation for each email sent. He analogized this to buying stamps in the postal system, and other people have talked about a fee-based system, so the net result is that the journalist and the headline writer get confused.

A computation-based system could arise out of market forces in the same way as a fee-based system, with the advantage of not needing the infrastructure for clearing the transactions. So why hasn't the computation-based system caught on? I'm not sure. Probably, because it needs to be widely adopted to work, so it needs some big player in the computing industry, such as Microsoft, to push it, and get those high levels of adoption.

Which is Michael Croft's nightmare.

Paying the recipient of an e-mail seems more attractive the user than paying the recipient's ISP. I can't see why the ISP would ever let unstamped e-mails through if it got to collect the postage, regardless of the user's wishes.

As a blogger, I benefit from receiving unsolicited e-mail (clearly!). So given my choice I'm going to err on the side of accepting unsolicited e-mail. Even my filter just tucked a moving announcement from the best man at my wedding into the Junk folder. It was consigning Alan Sullivan's e-mails there for awhile, and I suspect Alan's filter is culling mine too.

Anyway, spam. What a pisser, huh?

Broken English - Some of the Reason staffers who write for the Lebanese Daily Star should try editing the paper. For the life of me I'm having a hard time tying out some of hte numbers in today's article on oil exploration opportunities in Iraq, especially this part:

Ghadban said Iraq is currently producing 2 million bpd and exporting over 1.75 million bpd. He expects the figure to increase in the coming months. Ghadban added: "We are now producing more than 2.5 million bpd and exporting oil from two terminals in Basra for the first time since 1980."

If I read this right, Iraq increased oil production by 500,000 barrels per day in the pause between paragraphs. Now that is surely reconstruction progress.

But wait, there's more, at the very beginning:

"We are now refining almost half a million barrels per day (bpd), but we shall increase this capacity in the coming months. We want to go back to the 700,000 bpd so that we satisfy [domestic] demand," he said.

And this site wishes the Iraqi Oil Ministry Advisor the best of luck in doing so. But again, numbers problems.

2 million bpd produced
-1.75m bpd exported
0.25m bpd for domestic consumption

Which is half 500,000. The Saban Center's Iraq Index pegs February production at 2.276mbpd (which is, um, slightly lower than the Dec-February levels) - that would cover the difference. (See page 15 of the PDF.) Of course, the Saban Center also pegs Iraqi exports for February at 1.44mbpd (the lowest level since October) - so that would leave even more oil available for domestic consumption. It also happens to contradict the Oil Advisor's own export numbers.

It's just annoying when the numbers in an article aren't at least internally consistent, darnit. By the way, according to the Saban Center, Iraq's domestic consumption availability numbers for February are the best since the Occupation began keeping score, though not yet up to the fabled "pre-war levels."

More number crunching this weekend. (Daily Star link via Hesiod.)

Another Source of Homeschooling - This Zero Intelligence report on a Talawanda Middle School student's attempt to deal with bus bullies, and the hell her life became in the aftermath, filled me, as they say, with a towering rage.

Alicia went to Counselor Sandy Greenberg that day and reported that she was being bullied by four girls on the bus. As she wrote out a statement about the bullying, three of those girls were brought down to Ms.Greenberg's office. After a brief discussion with the girls Ms.Greenberg left them together unsupervised to write their own statements.

Oh that was a good idea! (My emphasis.)

All Homeschooling Apologetics Are but Footnotes to Tushnet - Why am I not surprised that Eve was a year ahead of me on the social implications of homeschooling versus not. Very good stuff. Eve goes lightly on the real danger that homeschooling can replace one kind of isolation (the kind she documents schools fostering) with another (the kind that comes from those parents who do use homeschooling as a way of shielding their children from even engaging with contemporary values, if only to reject them), probably because she sees the latter risk as obvious and well-covered elsewhere.

After last night's item I got to thinking about another parallel: contemporary feminist apologias for all-female colleges. The major variations are that women "learn differently" and that some women will blossom intellectually when removed from the glandularly-charged and dominating presence of young men. I have my doubts that women as a group really do learn differently, but taken together the arguments suggest that one size decidedly doesn't fit all.

You can say that the social "benefits" of group schooling are good for most kids and I won't argue, for all that I rank James Conant among the most evil Americans of the 20th century. But guess what? Most kids undergo group schooling already. Homeschoolers are a small minority of all school-age parents, and as Eve notes, the models for homeschooling are more various than ever. It's when you push the argument to the next level - since group schooling is good for most kids, we should require it for all kids - that I must fight you tooth and claw.

Reading Around - Congratulations to Kevin Drum. Building on the momentum he acquired from winning the "Least Dispensible Weblog" category in the 2003 Unqualified Success awards, he has clawed his way into a paid blogging position with the Washington Monthly. I am shocked at this blatant display of liberal bias by the liberal magazine, but can't escape thinking that this is an insanely good choice on their part.

Zero Intelligence is a new blog tracking "zero tolerance" follies in "our" schools.

You know those blogs that are full of cool, unpredictible material brought to you by an always-pleasant host? The Modulator is probably my favorite of those right now.

Speaking of the Modulator, he makes a useful point in his item on the meme of the day, the Libertarian Purity test:

I suspect that how you score on this test has a lot to do with the perspective you use when taking the test and that for the results to be somewhat comparable this bias needs to be included. For instance, I took the test from the perspective of what I thought an anarcho-capitalist might answer and scored 153. Tomorrow I'll try to take it from the perspective of a libertarian minarchist and see what kind of score I get. Then I'll try again from the position of ok, I have libertarian leanings but what is practical in the near term (20-40 years).

As he notes, I scored a 101, but the whole time I was taking the test I had a little voice whispering, "Go hardcore!" I suspect if I took it again I'd come in lower, maybe all the way down to Julian's 79. And as a commenter on Radley's site notes, it's really an anarcho-capitalism purity test. There are certainly plenty of people who mistake anarcho-capitalism for the whole of the libertarian movement, but it's just not the case. Yazad, whose blog is new to me, has more on problems with the test, which is too bad - we can't actually discuss it any more because, a couple of dozen comments down Radley's thread on the topic, Gene Healy, who scored 111, mentions Hitler.

James Joyner, who has somehow managed the trick of becoming the successor to Instapundit without Instapundit retiring, is expressing common qualms about home schooling:

Are there people who home school their children for reasons other than religious brainwashing? Sure. By and large, I'm still not sure it's a good idea. A large part of schooling is the social process of interacting with other students, dealing with the rigors of a set schedule, learning to live with seemingly arbitrary rules set by others, etc. While I'm often disgusted with the quality of the teachers at public schools, they at least expose their students to views beyond those of their parents. That's a good thing.

One of my nieces is being homeschooled, and while we aren't homeschooling Offering Boy or the Littlest Offering, I'd consider it under certain circumstances. Having followed my sister's efforts, including her (successful) efforts to find secular course materials, I've come to some conclusions: first, there are people out there who homeschool for nonreligious reasons, like, for instance, the local school sucks big time (in educator-speak). Second, the social value of schooling can be overrated. Schools can be savage tutors of sociability. The structural support they provide the shy child, the eccentric child, the impulsive child, can be small to nil. In the wrong circumstances they can do more harm than good, teaching the impressionable that other people mean inscrutable torment.

As liberals are fond of saying, different students learn at different rates, but this is true of social learning too. Offering Boy is a swell kid, but he is shy around others, excitable, and prey to lashing out when his feelings are hurt. He is much, much better socialized than he was as a preschooler, and increasingly successful at managing his relationships with his classmates. But when Mrs. Offering went back to work this year and we looked at after-school care options for him, we rejected the in-building program because it has quite a lot of free-for-all about it. He needs more supervision and smaller groups of kids.

And he's far from the worst-socialized child I've known. Awkward children plunked down among their peers can find themselves sucked into feedback loops where their awkwardness sparks hostility which engenders further awkwardness and so on. Some children, probably most, survive it. Some even, eventually, flourish. Some are able to use alienation as the engine of their intellectual development.

But some kids end up as gibbets in the spittle of the sleek and savage weasels that appear in the educational ecology as early as preschool. The thing to do with those children is not to leave them in place to try to reconstitute their psyches in the midst of the frenzy but to pull them out and find another entry vector into society. Homeschooling can be not only acceptable for such kids, it can be crucial. Also, from what I've seen, homeschooling parents tend to be very sensitive to socialization issues. Any area with a large density of homeschoolers will have networks of parents formed for the express purpose of giving their kids contact with other kids.

Now, James is writing in the context of recent reports on Patrick Henry College, which is nowhere I'd want to send my child to get a bachelor's. But you know what? It's nothing but diversity in action. Patrick Henry College is, from what I can tell, something under a thousand students out of the millions of kids who got their secondary education at home. A country of three hundred million has room for that many eccentrics and more.

Wait, this was supposed to be a blogwatch-style item! What happened? Anyway, Outside the Beltway is probably the best way to keep up with the world of Republican blogging these days.

Tacitus reminds me that I still have to get back to the basic issues in our differences of opinion. Hold that thought. Sometimes I leave off warblogging for a bit because it starts to bore even me.

Legendary roleplaying game designer Robin D. Laws has started a livejournal. An early post is his Blogging Pledge, consisting of the things he won't do. So there's your dead pool opportunity.

Tomorrow morning: spam mail.

Strictly Your Alanis Morrisette Kind of Irony - Kevin Drum was kind enough to comment on my item about Bill Gates' proposal to move e-mail from a flat-rate to piece-rate model, adding:

As a libertarian, I'm surprised that Jim doesn't look more kindly on this proposal. After all, it's just a way of enforcing property rights on our collective time and bandwidth. Why not let the market sort the whole thing out?

But no. In an odd reversal of roles, it's the big government liberal who thinks that using market mechanisms to solve this problem has a lot of merit. In fact, I suspect that in the end there's no other solution. The only possible way of reducing spam to tolerable levels is to find some way of making it economically infeasible.

Let's acknowledge something up front: new classes of property rights do arise in the course of time and get codified in law. It is certainly possible that "my in-box, my right" will turn out to be one of these new classes - is becoming such even as we type. However, there's a reason why the big government liberal is more drawn to these sorts of "market mechanisms" than the libertarian. It's not irony. It's because we're not actually talking about "let[ting] the market sort the whole thing out" at all.

The market has already sorted out e-mail as follows: practically everyone who sells e-mail service offers a flat rate for access, and practically everyone who buys e-mail pays a flat rate for access, inbound and outbound. Note that there are some few services that charge by the piece now, and in the early days of internet service providers there used to be more. People voted with their dollars for flat-rate, and flat-rate became the dominant, even ubiquitous model. Most vendors charge extra for more than a certain number of mailboxes, most vendors either limit mail storage space or charge extra if you exceed your storage limit. In principle, very heavy e-mail users could fall foul of bandwidth charges. But "the market" clearly says: e-mail wants to be "free." (After you spend $1400 on your computer and $10-50/month for your ISP - more for business-class broadband.)

Virtual stamps as a way to limit spam only work if everyone _has_ to buy virtual stamps. If virtual stamps become simply one pricing method among many, spammers will decline to go that route and chances are the rest of us will too. We already have. The virtual stamp model is a proposal to forbid my ISP from selling flat-rate e-mail, and me from buying it.

Whatever that is, it ain't letting the market sort the whole thing out.

It's a sin tax, really. And its one that must apply the world over. By the way, World, you're with us or you're against us on this too! Otherwise it just doesn't work. If spammers may still buy flat rate e-mail service in Barbados, spammers will move to Barbados.

Now, Kevin is too smart to confuse the virtual stamp solution with a free market, and I would not want to accuse him of imagining otherwise. His model is tradeable pollution allowances or tradeable catch permits for fisheries, which most pragmatic libertarians prefer to preexisting regulatory models. But on the general question of "market mechanisms" in government policy, libertarian opinion is diverse, and my impression is that we've grown more skeptical of them over time. They tend to be financial incentives to behave in government-approved ways. In many cases, we don't feel it's the government's business to approve or disapprove. In others, we doubt that the particular mechanism will be either effective enough or flexible enough.

So it's not all that odd that Kevin likes the virtual stamp idea more than I. Nor am I necessarily right and him wrong. As I've written before, I do not get that much spam. It's the rare day I get more than a dozen pieces. But this is because my penis is already famously massive. That's not going to be true of most bloggers.

Weekly Fitness Blog Item - It's amazing what a little exercise will do for one. 166 pounds this morning, two lower than last week, with midweek readings at 165. Got in some about five miles of walking between last Sunday and this - not much, but keeping my hand in. Winter is gone, hibernation over.

Marathon prep: Ran some today on a cub scout hike. First sustained running I've done in the New Year. This week starts the "pre-training" program in earnest.

Stuff to Read: Bruce Baugh has switched to Weight Watchers. I look forward to reading about what the experience is like, as I've long been skeptical of WW's effectiveness, and it's certainly never sounded like a regimen I could stick with. Can't argue with his early results, though.

Higher Fitness Blogging: Bruce and I were exchanging e-mails about stuff, including whether any given diet was more likely than others to lead to boomerang weight gain.

Bruce: My impression is that most people gain back weight whatever they do, really.

Me: The body wants us to die. You know this better than the most, but it's true for the rest of us too.

Which brings us to the President's so-called Bio-ethics Commission, which recently purged some members for having the wrong ethics. Matthew Yglesias explained exactly what is so hideous about the official "Kass position":

Simply put, the view is that scientific research holds the promise of radically improving human health and therefore must be stopped.

To be clear, the view is not that scientific research holds the promise of radically improving human health and nevertheless must be stopped because of some other issue (this would be, I take it, the "pro-life" thought on stem cell research). No. The view is that the problem with the research is that it might succeed in letting people live longer.

Folks, the Bush Administration wants to kill Bruce Baugh. I realize that there are people all over RPG.Net who say they want to kill Bruce Baugh too, but the chances of hardcore gamers working up the ambition required to complete a real-world task like that are pretty slim. Politicians don't suffer from the same inertia, and killing people - by design, by neglect, by convenience - comes easy to them. "We" will be better people for their care, there just won't be as many of "us." I'd be surprised to see the population of them drop significantly, though.

Too Late! - I avoid IM as much as possible. So naturally I didn't know:

Michael has a reasonably common screen name (first initial, last name) on AIM. In addition to the weirdos who think he must be the person they know, he gets a fair amount of porn webcam spam, and has done for some time.

There's already a lot of IM spam out there, not to mention IM viruses/spyware/malware that will IM your friends using your buddy lists to suggest that your friends download this new k3wl thing "you" recommend. Since I'm not platform-impaired, I don't worry about the malware, but the "cum on see me on my webcam" is still annoying.

That's Ginger Stampley in e-mail, loyal readers, so au courant she even knows what stuff like "L33T" means.

Rerouting the Flood - On Obsidian Wings, Edward speculates about how behavior would change if people had to pay by the message for e-mail. Bill Gates and others have suggested that "we" start "buying" e-mail "stamps" as a possible remedy for the problem of spam.

Now, the cynic immediately doubts that Bill Gates and said cynic constitute a meaningful "we," that Gates' proposal can be translated to mean that "they" should start "selling" e-mail "stamps" that Bill Gates has in mind, being more of a "they" than a "we," and that somewhere down the road he's wanting the government to make us buy "stamps" for e-mail, and that this is pretty classic rent-seeking behavior on Bill Gates' part.

But leave that aside. Edward talks about what the model change would mean for the behavior of ordinary e-mail users. But what would it mean for spam? I think it would mean several things, by which I mean, three. Or so.

1) It's always cheaper to buy in bulk. That's true of meatspace postage today. Volume purchasers will get better rates than the rest of us. In other words, e-mail will cost money, but it will cost less for spammers.

2) Edward says people will write longer e-mails and eschew short ones. True. But people will also move quickie traffic to instant message channels like AIM, MSN Messenger and IRC.

3) Spammers will figure out how to bother you through your instant message client.

4) Bill Gates will suggest that "we" should "buy" virtual stamps for instant messages.

5) And so on. Down the line spammers are beaming Cialis come-ons directly into our frontal lobes and Bill Gates is suggesting that "we" should "buy" virtual stamps for our thoughts.

6) At that point the Cialis people aim lower.

Okay, that's sort of more than three. But I thought it would be three.

Demon Balls - Linking to this cool, time-wasting web game should up my "disappointed search engine user" traffic. (Via Gamer's Nook.)

You Can't Be Too Careful - The Modulator has a whole bunch of identity theft protection tips.

From the Department of Slippery Slopes - Here we go again:

The caffeine controversy

The wake-me-up stimulant is a fact of life for most people, but caffeine abuse is something Gov. Johanns wants Nebraskans to think about

That's from the Grand Island Independent. No doubt the class action lawsuits will come just as soon as the relevant lawyers and attorneys-general calculate that they've extracted all the wealth from America's food industry than can profitably be stolen.

Mike Johanns is a Republican, for those of you keeping score at home. (Also via the Agitator.)

It's a GOOD Thing - Get your "Free Martha" t-shirts right here. (Via the Agitator.) I want one of the "No Justice No Quiche" bumper stickers. Why? Michael McMenamin explained months ago.

From the Department of Entirely Too Cool - "Cell phone software creates bogus backgrounds":

SoundCover, developed by a Romania phone software company called Simeda, can add artificial traffic and road works to a call at the press of a button. It can mimic a thunderstorm, the dentists drill or even a circus during a call.

Different backgrounds can also be assigned to different phone numbers so that they automatically kick in when a certain person calls. The software can even create the sound of another phone ringing to provide a handy excuse for cutting short a call

Via Amygdala.

Who Are You Going to Believe, Me or Your Lying Eyes - Matthew Yglesias links to a Virginia Postrel graph plotting income per worker over time for four regions of the country, and writes that it shows "that income growth has proceeded way faster in the post-New Deal era than in did in the era of laissez faire." That seems quite a stretch. The graph plots too few data points to say anything about income within twenty-year periods. Particularly, we have no data showing what happened to incomes across the 1932 divide up to the ramping up of war production in 1940. We see large income growth from 1940-60, and smaller growth between 1960-80.This is consistent with the idea that US incomes went up partly because the rest of the world's advanced industrial infrastructure was in ruins after World War II, then gradually came back. Matt is of course too smart to imagine that correlation equals causation, and so am I. The chart proves that US incomes went up a lot, and that the rate of increase jumped around the beginning of WWII. And that's about it. Frankly, the picture doesn't even really show the "convergence of incomes across regions" that both Matt and Virginia maintain it does, unless you're talking convergence on a percentage basis rather than in terms of absolute dollars.

Under the Eye of the State - Go read Radley Balko on traffic intersection cameras. Now, I tell you!

Some Travel Required - The Jacksonville Sun-Sentinel has a story about marine families worried that "Haiti looms for Marines just returning from Iraq." In fact, no returning marines have been tapped for Haiti duty yet, but the article usefully explains some of the things the Corps does to try to help families cope with the stresses of deployment.

Print-on--De-Oops! - Dirk Deppey e-mails that a major patent case has gone against Amazon, Ingram and Lighning Source for their print-on-demand book sales. (Verdict here.) A jury found all three companies guilty of willfully infringing on a 1995 patent held by On Demand Machine Corporation. That "willfully" opens the company up to possible extra damages the Judge could add to the jury's 15 million.

I haven't had a chance to read the verdict - hey, you try working in accounting AND blogging heavily the first week of the month - so I can't tell if this is one of those real patent violations or one of those wacky patent violations. You know, "I think it would be really cool to sell books on demand. You'd have, like, a computer here and a database server there and a binding machine next to the client station and you'd clear the customer's credit card via secure internet connection to the merchant and then, hey! out pops their book! Cool, huh? That's my patent, so pay me if you do that."

My impression is there are too many such patent cases in software and e-commerce, but like I said, I don't know that this is one. Maybe Dave Intermittent, Esq. will look into the matter and favor us with am expert opinion. Or maybe your Talking Dog, if he can take time out from preparing for the next Ice Age.

AP reports that Ingram et al say they will appeal. The article certainly makes it sound like Harvey Ross's patent was more substantial than "wouldn't it be cool if."

Actual Journalism Watch - Knight-Ridder reporters Strobel, Landay and Walcott examine the evidence for operational ties between Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden and conclude

The Bush administration's assertion that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had ties to al Qaeda -- one of the administration's central arguments for a preemptive war -- appears to have been based on even less solid intelligence than the administration's claims that Iraq had hidden stocks of chemical and biological weapons.

Most intriguing:

Vice President Dick Cheney told National Public Radio in January that there was ''overwhelming evidence'' of a relationship between Hussein and al Qaeda. Among the evidence he cited was Iraq's harboring of Abdul Rahman Yasin, a suspect in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Cheney didn't mention that Iraq had offered to turn over Yasin to the FBI in 1998, in return for a U.S. statement acknowledging that Iraq had no role in that attack. The Clinton administration refused the offer, because it was unwilling to reward Iraq for returning a fugitive.

Most damning:

Administration officials reported that Farouk Hijazi, a top Iraqi intelligence officer, had met with bin Laden in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in 1998 and offered him safe haven in Iraq.

They left out the rest of the story, however. Bin Laden said he would consider the offer, U.S. intelligence officials said. But according to a report later made available to the CIA, the al Qaeda leader told an aide afterward that he had no intention of accepting Saddam's offer because ``if we go there, it would be his agenda, not ours.''

There's a whiff of "not for lack of trying" about this latter incident, as reported. But it probably amounts to less "trying" than Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and other countries.

And there's this last:

Iraqi defectors alleged that Saddam's regime was helping to train Iraqi and non-Iraqi Arab terrorists at a site called Salman Pak, south of Baghdad. The allegation made it into a September 2002 white paper that the White House issued. The U.S. military has found no evidence of such a facility.

Since the war, I'd been frustrated by the lack of anything about what was found at Salman Pak outside of oddly-sourced items in the Republican press.

A Fanboy's General-Interest Notes - Alan David Doane has been snagging interviews with comics creators whose work is actually of general interest, and producing great interviews. For instance, he recently got coherent, concise and tragically informative answers from the controversial Dave Sim of Cerebus fame - probably the first Sim exchange in years where you learn less what Sim hates than what he loves. This morning he has a lengthy "5 Questions" with Alan Moore, and last month another five questions with cartoonist Paul Hornschemeier, whose Mother, Come Home is, so far, the graphic novel of the year.

Caligula's Horse Moves On Up - Various loyal readers confirm that Warren Harding was the other 20th Century President who got elected to the office out of a current Senate seat. (Thanks, Steve Casburn.) Doug Muir adds

Before Harding... mmm... Benjamin Harrison.

There haven't been too many, no. Four, maybe five. Governors and generals are much more common routes.

Note that before about 1900, an intelligent Senator might not /want/ to be President. You could wield more power and have more fun in the Senate. Even as late as the 1920s, Harding regretted taking the job... he'd had himself a gay old time in the Senate, and he found the Presidency a sweathouse of tough decisions and unnerving public scrutiny.

And from Patrick Nielsen Hayden:

Two incumbent senators have been elected President, both in the 20th Century: John F. Kennedy and Warren G. Harding. Of those, fully fifty percent occupied, at the time of their election, the post of junior senator from Massachusetts.

Former Senators who later became President: James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, John Tyler, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Benjamin Harrison, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon.

Of those, one-third ascended to the Presidency on the death of their predecessor.

Of _those_, fully one-half were Vice Presidents named Johnson who became President following an assassination. This is why a little-known clause of the 25th Amendment, ratified in 1967, specifically forbids the nomination for Vice-President of any more people named Johnson.

Also, Lincoln had a secretary named Kennedy. Oh, wait, you'd heard.

Lincoln had a secretary named Kennedy? What a coincidence!

UPDATE: Full and frank exchanges of views ensued between Patrick Nielsen Hayden and Doug Muir. Patrick:

You've closed out your "blockquote" statement two paragraphs early in your quotation from my letter, so that it looks like my last two paragraphs are by you.

Doug Muir is wrong about Benjamin Harrison, who was defeated for re-election to the Senate before being elected President in 1888. I'm pretty sure Harding and Kennedy are the entire list of incumbent Senators elected President.

Doug:

Patrick is right and I'm wrong. Kennedy and Harding were the only sitting Senators to become President. Benjamin Harrison left the Senate a few months before taking the nomination, so he's out.

Twelve nonsitting former Senators vs. just two who were still in office
suggests some sort of pattern. OTOH, with a sample size of just 45,
it's still very possible to have noise in the system.

...Kerry is looking down the barrel of a $200 million campaign, running
uphill against a not-that-unpopular incumbent. Putting personal biases
aside, I know which way I'm betting.

Whichever way it goes, here at this site I plan to stick up for the same core principles as ever, chief among them that you never use a colon immediately after a verb. I think I read that somewhere.

Quick I Told You So - Another modern election, another cycle with no brokered convention. Interesting variation on the logic in my "no brokered conventions" item from early November: I talked entirely about the interests of the party apparat. But in this primary cycle it seems like it was Democratic voters themselves who intentionally cohered around a nominee as quickly as possible.

Congrats to Senator Kerry. Now let's see. Last sitting Senator to win the Presidency: John Kennedy in 1960. And before that? Um. Not Eisenhower, Truman, FDR or Wilson. Not Teddy. Coolidge or Harding? Coolidge was a governor, wasn't he? Do you have to go clear back to the 19th Century to find one?

Now There's a Pisser - Interesting e-mail from Rich Puchalsky. Excerpt:

I think that the larger question involved is not "Will liberals agree that Clinton lied about Iraq as well as Bush?" (sure, I think that most will agree to that, although the magnitude and consequences of the lie differ) but "Are liberals really isolationists?" Looking at American history, I think that there is a tendency for the party out of power to be isolationist. This seems natural; one of the big uses of the Presidential bully pulpit is to sweep the country off to some exciting war, and the party out of power naturally objects and then starts to justify its objection in theoretical terms, which are promptly jettisoned as soon as they are back in power. In that sense, I don't think it much matters what liberals say about Iraq intervention now, in terms of its being a guide to later liberal behavior.

In keeping with that, I would question whether libertarians are really
isolationist. Aren't they the ultimate out-of-power party, and thus subject
to the urgings I've mentioned above? I wonder whether, if libertarians did
arrive at a position of political power, we might see wars over trade policy
and the like.

This last speculation is, as they say, bravura. And given the attitude toward the current war of those libertarian types who seem to identify with the Bush Administration, seemingly inclined to think of it as, in important ways, theirs, not one I feel comfortable dismissing out of hand.

Son, How'd You Get This Way - Ivan Eland notes that Haitian history - and US involvement in same - goes back farther than this month or even the Clinton Administration.

And similarly, if we dig below the latest happenings in Haiti, we find much more than first meets the eye. Much of Haiti's current problem lies in weak civil institutions and no rule of law. Unfortunately, U.S. government policy toward Haiti has contributed heavily to that state of affairs. Throughout the 20th century, the U.S. military intervened repeatedly in Haiti. From 1915 to 1934, the U.S. Marines even occupied the country. During that time, they dissolved Haiti's parliament, instituted martial law and created the thuggish Haitian army. That army - containing senior officers on the CIA's payroll - overthrew a democratically-elected Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1991. The remnants of it, with U.S. help, have just done it again.

Ah, but this time we're going to do it right. Maybe. I believe that's what the last Administration said. Perhaps the succession of Presidents from Wilson to FDR figured we were "doing it right" during the long occupation. Perhaps that's what the next US government to intervene in Haiti will say too. More Eland:

No workable solution can be imposed from the outside on Haitians, least of all by a superpower that helped destroy Haitian civil society in the first place. Haitians have to learn to solve their own problems, instead of always looking to the United States to send troops to bring temporary peace. Racing in with military forces to quell disorder merely rewards those local forces perennially initiating violence to draw in the United States. Paradoxically, if the United States declared that it would not interfere in Haitian society in any way under any circumstances, more Haitian lives would probably be saved in the long-term and the country would likely be better off. That is, removing the reward for violence would likely lessen its occurrence.

I realize that must sound naive and even cruel. But the record is the record: our meddling in Haiti has done only fitful good against lasting bad. And Eland's thesis that our interventionism essentially infantilizes other countries seems more solidly grounded than belief in our potential for successful stewardship.

Finally, yes, it all comes back to this blog's obsession with Iraq. The Good News reports linked below are Caesar. The news from Haiti is the jester whispering memento mori in his ear.

Hold That Thought - David Adesnik has a useful item gathering the latest round of Good News from Iraq articles. I haven't had a chance to dig into them yet, but I look forward to it. Once I'm done with closing February at the office, I'll set to closing February in Iraq using the Saban Center documents and the CPA website.

If you start without me, remember the usual things to watch out for - "Real Soon Now" claims where the real good news is what hasn't happened yet. There appears, at first blush, to be some of that in the material Adesnik cites - much talk about the amount of money Iraqi oil could bring in this year, confident predictions about how much power the Ministry of Electricity will generate and so on. Also, keep an eye on Low Bar Syndrome, typically something approaching "prewar levels" which reflected the infrastructure degradation of a dozen years of sanctions. However, as loyal Unqualified Offerings readers learned last month, the power situation did start trending upward in February, and as far as low bars, you gotta start somewhere. (It does occasion a certain deja vu when you hear that the reconstruction is rapidly approaching the same benchmark again and again over the course of a year.)

The best news, wonderful news, is that US military fatalities dropped to 20 last month, which is the lowest level since the war began. As with November's record figure, the question is whether it will prove to be atrend or an outlier. I suspect the former because the impression I get is that the US has been increasingly keeping our troops out of harm's way. The massive rotation of forces this spring may scramble things up a bit, though.

Mail Call - Behind on e-mail again, but this letter stood out:

Having drifted away, in frustration and disgust, from the NRO crowd, I went in search of something other than stale bromides and mere emotional appeal when addressing the subject of OIF, which I gradually but finally concluded is Kosovo Plus (that is, another arbitrary, non-defense-related endeavor, but with considerable casualties).

Never would I have predicted - especially after 9-11 - that the Bush administration would out-Albright the previous administration in its unwise and even cavalier use of the armed forces, but here we are - and indeed they have. My husband is an Army officer who sacrificed considerable time and energy to Clinton's Balkan follies (three Thanksgivings, Christmases, and New Years - that's how I tally it.) Now he has chosen to put in his time, this Spring, in Afghanistan rather than in Iraq, figuring the former is, with regard to relatively clear and objective aims, worth the risk and work involved, whereas the latter simply is not. He is extremely fortunate in having a choice.

I've now read quite a bit on the Iraq war and the developments leading up to it and am beginning to see what happened and why, and, more personally, how I came to be suckered into supporting a type of endeavor that I had come to associate almost exclusively with the insupportable, out-of-focus, defense policy drift of a Democratic presidency. What was it that Will Rodgers said about the difference between the two parties?

Here's looking forward to the safe return of my correspondent's husband from his new tour of duty. And I appreciate his sticking out his commitment to the military at such cost to his family. As I said at the beginning of the Iraq invasion last march, if this had been an actual emergency, these are the people we'd want between us and trouble. Godspeed.

Batting Cleanup - Those long roundups get away from one. See Why also addresses the Ackerman article. The item is long and substantial. This excerpt is short:

I would also like to rise to Henley's challenge and say, for the record that Clinton's Iraq policy was perfectly good . . . to poop on!

Abu Aardvark weighs in too He forgives me for the whole "Why aren't people linking to this" maneuver, which I appreciate. That item came out wrong anyway, since much of my motivation was simply to learn what liberal bloggers would make of the piece. And now I know.

Love Them They Are Liberals - So my violation of Blogger Etiquette Rule No. 3, "Don't act like everybody else has to blog about what interests you," regarding the Mother Jones article about Clinton-era Iraq policy occasioned a number of noteworthy responses. (Rule Number One? "Don't e-mail to say that you'll link to me if I'll link to you." Contrary to Monty Python, there is a Rule Number Two, but we won't go into it now.)

For those keeping score at home, Rafe Colburn's citation actually predated my article. I apologize for not counting him before - he's a blogger and a liberal, but I don't really think of him as a liberal blogger, probably because I am a stupid git. Nell Lancaster tells me The War in Context also cited it, and a Google site search seems to back her up, but the site's archiving system is obscure enough that I couldn't read the actual article.

The bloggers who were kind enough to respond to the article at my, ahem, request wrote some very interesting stuff. The Talking Dog connects the long Iraq enmeshment with our recurring Haiti follies and allows that perhaps I'm not altogether wrong that "we'd just be better off with minimal intervention abroad." Why?

In the "government of laws, and not of men", the foreign policy arena seems a tad too dependent on the men.

I read the Poor Man's excellent disquisition on the topic in this context. PM quite rightly quotes my own precept back to me about not simply accepting the word of defectors, and argues that the Hussein Kamel report is all MoJones author Seth Ackerman really has to hang his case on. Of the problems I have with PM's article, one is specific to Iraq, while the other is more general. As to the former, PM allows that the Clinton Administration engaged in a certain amount of . . . shading as regards its Iraq policy, but that the comparative virtue of the Clinton Administration:

Isn't it just like what Bush did, when he lied to get us into a war? Sure is, except for that "get us into a war" bit at the end.

This seems to require defining a policy that entails 14,000 bombing sorties a year for a decade and multiple coup attempts, plus a sanctions regime that lasted so long as it did only at US insistence, as the Poor Man himself notes, all with the declared aim of overthrowing the current (despicable) government, as somehow Not War. I submit that this distinction is 1) mistaken; and 2) practically a definition of what we sour exremists call the neo-imperialist mindset.

The general issue gets back to what the Talking Dog said. The Poor Man acknowledges forthrightly that

I think we'd all agree that lying is a wicked and naughty thing to do. Trouble is, that doesn't necessarily mean it's not a good idea. For example: if we have already captured, or killed, or believe we've killed, Osama bin Laden - as I believe we have - it is both wicked and naughty to lie about it, but it's also, I think, the right thing to do. Because, sadly, there's just no way of always telling the truth to the American people while simultaneously keeping our enemies in the dark about what we do and do not know.

Now I must get all theoretical and libertarian on you folks. I largely agree with what the Poor Man says here: foreign policy and international conflict will frequently require dishonesty to retain any prospect of operational success. But official dishonesty is anathema to democratic governance and open societies. That's a big reason why a representative democracy should minimize the amount of foreign policy and international conflict it has. For the thousandth time, this is quite different from saying that a representative democracy's society should minimize interaction with the rest of the world. People should travel and businesses should trade. Immigrants and visitors should enrich our shores. But the government should tread lightly abroad. By the nature of the endeavor, we can't know everything it's doing, but what it does is done in our name.

Dave at Backwords suspects the Clinton Administration's slipperiness with the sanctions regime and inspections was motivated by Saddam's dire human rights record and possible attempt to assassinate the first President Bush. He may be right. This is essentially what the Bush White House's supporters have argued about the policy of Clinton's successor. I reject both cases of the argument: first because I care more about how the United States is governed than how Iraq is governed; second because in both the Clinton and Bush cases, our policy of human rights war actually amounts to "We decide."

Lean Left, commenting on Ackerman, writes

Second, our intelligence apparatus is pretty much useless, because there is nothing to keep unscrupulous Presidents from cherry picking the results. Whats worse, there is nothing to keep Presidents who believe they are doing the right thing (as Clinton's team and the neo-cons probably sincerely did. No one risks the kind of blowback those two groups did without believing they are taking the right steps. That doesn't make their deceptions any less dangerous or their actions any less incorrect, however.) from seeing what they want to see.

Odd thought: Along about 1994, I decided, like Daniel Patrick Moynihan, that it was time to sunset the CIA. The Cold War was over, and anyway, history seemed to show that the Agency was often wrong, and on those occasions when it was right, nobody listened. Leave military intelligence to the armed services and political intelligence to the State Department.

Now imagine I got my way. On September 12, 2001, Congress and the media are screaming for my head. Jim Henley brought yesterday's atrocity on! He blinded the United States to foreign threats when he disbanded the CIA! Yesterday's terrible events could never have happened if we still had a genuine intelligence service in this country.

Avedon Carol offers what can only be called the counter-intuitive take:

We did want to talk about that stuff in the '90s, but no one seemed to be interested. I mean, what with the murder of Vince Foster, and the blow-jobs, and all the really important stuff they had to talk about, yeah?

This argument is strongest if one concedes that Clinton-haters like me were correct that many of WJC's interventions abroad were driven by domestic political concerns. I would welcome Avedon's company in that view.

Last but never least, Matthew Yglesias usefully complicates the question of exactly what the Clinton Administration knew at the time before concluding

If you let Bush be the bar, the bar is very low, and Clinton can clear it. Nevertheless, we see once again that the Clinton foreign policy was, with a few exceptions, not very good.

Matt makes an even more important point about Why It Matters:

Bill Clinton's not going to be president again, so this didn't strike me as crucially significant at first, but of course members of his team are likely to return to office, so it is significant after all, and should be looked into more to determine who is culpable for what.

I can think of one former Clinton Administration official in particular that this applies to.

I thank all the bloggers who humored me on this matter, including Kevin Drum, with whom I had an enjoyable exchange of e-mails.

Free Comic Book Month - For nothin' but postage and handling, cartoonist Scott Mills will mail you a copy of his minicomic, Cells. I reviewed this favorably back in October. Now, for hardly any money at all, you can see if I was right to admire it. We're talking one dollar here - a third of what I was glad to pay.

Via Comics Worth Reading.