Legacy-Media, New-Media, Micro-Media - It looks like e-mailer Andrew Solovay got as close to the story as anyone. He wrote:

9/11 was only three days after the violently antisemitic Durban Conference on Racism. The high-profile anti-Israeli conference might have boosted donations to McKinney all on its own; I'd also be willing to bet she was very noisily condemning the U.S.'s lack of participation in the conference, presenting it as us kow-towing to Zionist special interests. Might have brought in a few checks.

In fact, McKinney was all over Durban and ventilated about the conference in a press release between the end of that event and the September massacres. And the fund-raising event the Atlanta Journal-Constitution discusses must have taken place between the two events. She even put out a press release about her effort to get United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson to investigate the COINTELPRO program from the 1960s and 1970s.

Andrew opines:

Ms. McK accused Pres. Bush of knowing in advance about 9/11 and permitting it to happen to make money. Can you imagine what she would say if she saw a spike in donations to W. on 9/11? Say, a sudden influx of donations from people with Jewish names? Can you just imagine the sorts of conclusions she'd draw? Seems to me like she's due for some Karmic Payback.

Unqualified Offerings doesn't really disagree. But it has also had about as much fun with this story as it anticipates having, so unless authorities find a boxcutter in her office, this site has now said pretty much what it has to say on the matter.

Legacy-Media Follows the Money - The Atlanta Journal-Constitution picks up the McKinney donors story and adds some hard information. This is what legacy media does best - call people, ask questions, confirm quotes, write stuff down. What they do less well is credit new-media when new-media breaks stories. In this case, the entire article goes by without any mention that Scott Koenig of Indepundit found the donor anomaly in the first place.

Unqualified Offerings has e-mailed AJC reporter Bill Torpy to ask just why that might be.

But enough media-class resentment. What about the story itself? We learn from the AJC that

o "several people [on McKinney's donor list] have come under federal investigation for suspected links to Middle Eastern terrorists or have voiced support for extremist groups."

o "The McKinney campaign reported most of those contributions as having come Sept. 11, the date of the terror attacks in New York and Washington. But [campaign manager] Banks said the campaign had organized a fund-raiser a few days before Sept. 11 and the donations collected were coincidentally recorded on that date."

o "FEC spokeswoman Kelly Huff said the date listed on disclosure reports is supposed to be, by law, the date the campaign received the money. But FEC officials said it was up to the campaign to document the proper date."

o "Six of McKinney's donors were officers with companies and organizations that are under investigation."

Unqualified Offerings speculated that the checks might have been backdated, which turns out, according to the McKinney campaign, to be simply wrong. But UO's sloppy record-keeping theory was pretty close to the mark.

Valid point by the McKinney camp:

Banks said the campaign accepted contributors' money believing "in good faith that they are law-abiding citizens. If you did an investigation of everyone who gave money, people would stop giving."

Point by the McKinney camp that would sound valid if it wasn't phrased so...creepily:

"These are American citizens learning to use their money like the very small population which sways a lot of opinion with their money -- the Jewish community. That's the American way." - McKinney campaign coordinator Wendell Muhamad.

Advice for Wendell Muhamad: You can sound a lot less like a raving anti-semite if you don't refer to American Jews as "a very small population" and you allow for the possibility that American Jews might also "sway a lot of opinion" by voting, taking an active role in the nation's intellectual discourse, building coalitions with other constituencies, you know: citizenship.

Meanwhile, Scott Koenig has posted a follow-up item to his original piece. Among other things, he says

In fairness, I don't believe that McKinney is a paid agent of a foreign power--but I do believe that her objectivity may have been compromised by all of the money she is receiving from donors with ties to Hamas and other groups of questionable repute.

I can't really agree, because I don't think "objectivity" bulks large in the minds of politicians. McKinney's positions on the middle east and racial politics are broadly consistent with those of a large portion of black America. She may be right, she may be wrong, but it is far more likely that she gets the donors she gets because of what she believes than that she believes what she does because of her donors.

White Man's Burden Watch - Nick Denton takes on Victor Davis Hanson:

There's one thing less appealing than an empire, and that is a sanctimonious empire. That's as true now as it was in the 19th century.

Hanson used to get nothing but praise in the blogosphere, rightly or wrongly. (Here's a hint: wrongly.) Denton's piece follows Perry de Havilland's critique of Tuesday. To everything there is a season, eh?

Sullywatch: The Expanding Circle grows to include Will Wilkinson of the Flybottle, who responds to a couple of Andrew Sullivan questions about NYT war talk coverage:

Sullivan's reply: "Could it get any more obvious? One question: wouldn't lots of military spending help the economy?"

Yes! And, No! It could get a lot more obvious that the Times is trying to muffle the war drum -- everything they say is correct. Why is any of that editorializing? It seems a likely and straightforward consequence of ramping up for war.

And NO, NO, NO, lots of military spending will not help the economy...It does two things mostly. First, it moves a great deal of diffuse wealth and concentrates it in the hands of the war industry. Second, it simply destroys wealth. When the government takes huge amounts of taxpayer money and transfers it to the "military/industrial complex," no new wealth has been produced. Old wealth has been collected and moved.

The Blue Dress War - From today's London Times:

THE relationship between Osama bin Laden and Mullah Mohammed Omar, the ousted Taleban ruler, was rent with mistrust, anger and petty squabbles that led to a complete breakdown of trust before the September 11 attacks, according to documents discovered in Afghanistan.

By the summer of 1998, two years after the al-Qaeda leader sought refuge in Afghanistan with three wives, 13 children and a troop of bodyguards, Mullah Omar was so fed up with his unwanted guest that he had struck a secret deal with the Saudis to expel him.

But just before Mullah Omar’s order to oust the “arrogant, publicity-seeking” bin Laden, President Clinton launched a missile strike on Afghanistan and Sudan in retaliation for the bombing of US Embassies in Africa. Prince Turki al-Faisal, the head of Saudi intelligence who had brokered the deal, said: “The Taleban attitude changed 180 degrees.”

When he returned to Afghanistan a month after the missile attacks, he told The Wall Street Journal that Mullah Omar was “absolutely rude” and the deal to send bin Laden packing was off.

On the bright side, it got Bill Clinton's grand jury testimony off the front page. (Is this another right-wing "9/11 was Bill Clinton's fault!" item? Not really. It's another isolationist "military action ain't always an honest or sensible way to deal with a security problem" item.)

According to information stored on computers found in Kabul, far from being a terrorist’s paradise, Afghanistan was a nightmare for foreign Arab fighters. They grumbled about the appalling food, considered the Taleban leader an uneducated bumpkin and their efforts at world terrorism were frequently frustrated by the backwardness of the country.

“This place is worse than a tomb,” one bin Laden associate wrote to friends in Egypt, on a computer found in Kabul.

The Taleban complained that bin Laden was disrespectful and a snob. Almost as soon as he arrived he began to irritate more moderate Taleban officials, who had no interest in the global jihad. Mullah Mohammed Khaksar, then the Taleban intelligence chief, told bin Laden that he wanted peace. He said to the Journal: “I told him he should just go somewhere else. He got mad and we never spoke again.”

By 1998, bin Laden had also fallen out with Mullah Omar.

This doesn't demonstrate that the US could have used means short of war to pry bin Laden from the Taliban last fall, as Afghan-War doves urged, but it makes their case more plausible. Unqualified Offerings still thinks that toppling the Taliban government was a sound war aim. While the Taliban may not have known the specifics of "The Big Wedding" before it took place, they certainly knew that it was the kind of thing bin Laden wanted to do. So they were, politically, guilty, and destroying their regime set a good example. It strengthens the US deterrent against regimes sponsoring terror attacks on us.

Admittedly, since the administration refuses to use that deterrent power in the case of Iraq and whoever is next on their secret lists, doves could make the case that the Afghan War was a squandered effort.

Anthraxblog: The New Adventures - Things are hopping in anthraxland:

"They kept asking me did I think there might be a group in the biodefense community that was trying to land the blame on Hatfill," said Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, a microbiologist at State University of New York.

Mrs. Rosenberg said agents visited her hours before she learned Dr. Hatfill's apartment was being searched.

The FBI would neither confirm or deny her account.

Here is the Post story on the search Thursday of Hatfill's Frederick Maryland apartment. Unlike the previous search, this one was done with a warrant.

"We're obviously doing things related to him that we're not doing with others," one law enforcement official said. "He is obviously of more interest to us than others on the list at this point."

The search took place one day after Hatfill agreed to meet with agents and repeated his willingness to cooperate with them, said his attorney, Victor M. Glasberg, who criticized investigators for obtaining a search warrant, which he said was unnecessary.

"It's not fair," Glasberg said. "If the United States wants to charge anybody with a crime, they should damn well go ahead and do it in a fair manner. But that's different from the kids' game of telephone, bandying about allegations that get more expansive every time they're repeated, so you can't tell fact from fiction."

Meanwhile, Hatfill has been suspended for 30 days with pay by LSU, where he has been, as part of the National Center for Biomedical Research and Training, "teaching law enforcement and emergency personnel how to deal with biological threats."

Reports that Hatfill will next teach a course teaching biological threat suspects how to deal with law enforcement and emergency personnel could not be confirmed by Unqualified Offerings.

University spokesman Gene C. Sands confirmed that Hatfill was placed on paid administrative leave because of the FBI investigation and that the school will reevaluate his status in 30 days.

For newish readers, Unqualified Offerings posted some previous speculation on Hatfill and the anthrax case in June. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg has also appeared.

Over There - Istanblog offers a sober, skeptical consideration of Iraq-War plans and prospects.

Follow More Money - Further examination of the Opensecrets.org data on Cynthia McKinney's "9/11 donations" turns up an interesting pattern:

ALEXANDRIA, VA 22310 HOWARD UNIVERSITY/PROFESSOR 9/11/2001 $250
CENTREVILLE, MD 22020 9/11/2001 $1,000
FAIRFAX, VA 22032 CARFAX/GOVT. RELATIONS 9/11/2001 $600
FALLS CHURCH, VA 22041 AMERICAN MUSLIM FOUNDATION/PRESIDEN 9/11/2001 ($1,000)
FALLS CHURCH, VA 22041 AMERICAN MUSLIM FOUNDATION/PRESIDEN 9/11/2001 $1,000
FALLS CHURCH, VA 22041 AMERICAN MUSLIM FOUNDATION/PRESIDEN 9/11/2001 $2,000
FALLS CHURCH, VA 22041 SELF EMPLOYED/COMPUTER CONSULTANT 9/11/2001 $500
FALLS CHURCH, VA 22041 AMERICAN MUSLIM FOUNDATION/VICE PRE 9/11/2001 $500
HENDERSON, NV 89014 SELF/PHYSICIAN 9/11/2001 $500
HENDERSON, NV 89015 SOUTHWEST AIRLINES/PILOT 9/11/2001 $1,000
HERNDON, VA 20170 MAR JAC INVESTMENTS INC./PRESIDENT 9/11/2001 $500
HERNDON, VA 20170 9/11/2001 $1,000
LAS VEGAS, NV 89106 9/11/2001 $250
LAS VEGAS, NV 89107 QAZI MEDICAL CORPORATION/M.D. 9/11/2001 $1,000
LAS VEGAS, NV 89117 CENTER FOR LUNG DISEASES/PHYSICIAN 9/11/2001 $250
LAS VEGAS, NV 89120 9/11/2001 $500
LAS VEGAS, NV 89123 9/11/2001 $500
LAS VEGAS, NV 89128 9/11/2001 $250
LAS VEGAS, NV 89144 9/11/2001 $500
LOS ANGELES, CA 90077 OCCIDENTAL PETROLEUM CORP. 9/11/2001 $1,000
POTOMAC, MD 20854 ISLAMIC INSTITUTE/EXECUTIVE DIRECTO 9/11/2001 $700
SAN DIEGO, CA 92130 N/A/RETIRED 9/11/2001 $250
SPRINGFIELD, VA 22151 9/11/2001 $300
WASHINGTON, DC 20003 CAIR/DIRECTOR 9/11/2001 $500

NOTE: UO did not copy the names. Most of these people appear to be private citizens, with a handful of exceptions (the American Muslim Federation and CAIR folks) and it's not illegal for a private citizen to donate money to politicians. All names are Muslim names. What jumps right out is the geography:

9 donors from Las Vegas
2 from southern California
11 from the DC Metro area (one donor, Abdurahman Alamoudi, has three line items)

That's striking. UO notes that people from Southern California get to Vegas pretty readily. The Las Vegas occupations (the ones listed) tend to cluster in the medical sector. (With one doozy of an exception.)

Speculation: We might be looking at one or two donation-bundling initiatives. "Bundling" is gathering a group of individual donations, each of which meets the limit on individual campaign contributions, into a nice, juicy package. Bundling is illegal if done by a corporation, supposedly legal if done by an individual - so recalls our in-house campaign finance law expert, Mrs. Offering. She does not recall the legal status of bundling by associations like the American Muslim Foundation/American Muslim Council.

Areas for research:

Are there any ties between the "West Group" and the DC Group?

Did the leader(s) decide to put together contributions on their own, or were they urged to do so by someone in Representative McKinney's office?

Were all the checks actually written on 9/11, or were some or all of them backdated to that date?

The backdating possibility intrigues Unqualified Offerings: If you're writing checks on, say, 9/14, what kind of statement are you making if you backdate that check to 9/11?

Freaky fact dept. One of the Nevada donors lists his occupation as "pilot/Southwest Airlines." Clearly, if he flew at all on 9/11, he was done by mid-morning when all planes were grounded. All the same, wouldn't most pilots be a bit distracted on that day to think about contributing to politicians? That makes backdating seem marginally more plausible.

It needs to be said:

Arab-Americans have as much right to try to buy Congresspeople as Jack Valenti does.

9/11 was a working day for Arab-American and Muslim-American associations. The American Muslim Council issued three news releases that day. The Islamic Institute updated its website and likely began coordinating with other Arab and Muslim-interest groups on the September 13 statement condeming the massacres of September 11.

But dangit! that makes it much less likely that they take time out of their busy days to write Cynthia a check. Which makes it that much more likely that her office solicited donations in the immediate aftermath of the massacres.

Unqualified Offerings rather doubts there is a scandal here, but there certainly is a story. But which story? In a scary time, ethnic-American activists hope that financially supporting friendly politicians will increase their safety? Hard-nosed congressional staffer strikes while the iron is hot? Whichever story it is will have something to tell us about the relationship between money and ideology, and between access and fear. It'll be a story worth hearing.

Cry for Help - Someone named "brandon cecil" writes offering to enlarge the penis of Unqualified Offerings. No - on rereading, that is not it at all!

hello, i am the owner of the domain leftwingnews.com I'd like to sell it and i don't know very many liberals. I'm a right wing madman myself so i don't have much use for it. I know most of you already are involved in your respective projects, but if any of you are interested or know someone who is looking for a great news domain, let me know. I'd be willing to let it go for around $300 or less

That leaves anywhere from $250-280 bucks after he buys a keyboard with a working shift key. Presumably "right wing madman" brandon owns the domain leftwingnews.com because he bought it. Since he's buying things he admits he doesn't have much use for, Unqualified Offerings has a real concern that "brandon cecil" suffers from shopping sickness. He probably owns leftwingsanewoman.org too and can't bear to part with it. Since he solicited Unqualified Offerings to buy this domain (along with the superficially more plausible Matthew Yglesias and Josh Marshall), UO worries that "brandon cecil" may have something of a reading comprehension problem too.

If any loyal readers (or even ambivalent ones) know of ways to help "brandon cecil" with his shopping and reading problems, please e-mail Unqualified Offerings so this site can pass your advice along. UO will not post "brandon's" e-mail address publically, loyal readers, as he wouldn't want you to go spamming people.

Stupid Web Tricks - So what do you get when you Google Google? This.

No, it's not that interesting. But that's the problem: bloggers don't have editors.

Evil Toy Alert - In a sick way, this Amazon/AlexaWebsearch thing is way, way too cool. Here's Unqualified Offerings (sort of) on Amazon.com. It's certainly exiting to know that only 975,309 websites in the world are more popular than this one. Whoo-hoo!

Here's Eve Tushnet (sort of) on Amazon.com.

Ginger Stampley - Sites like Ginger's include Amygdala, Richard Bennett and Little Green Footballs.

Istanblog

For a few minutes it looked like Eve, Amygdala and Istanblog were tied for 1,338th place, but UO soon realized that that's the ranking for Blogspot, which hosts all three sites. Since Alexa still thinks Instapundit.com is just a pointer to the the old blogspot subdomain, Instapundit also shows as site 1,338.

Virginia Postrel is the 130,492nd most popular site on the web by Alexa's reckoning, presumably down a bit from the days when she actually updated her site. (Not that we are bitter.)

Scary thought: Just like on Amazon.com, you can post reviews. Some dumbbell gave Oliver Willis (who gets the "link via" credit on this item) one star.

May We Suggest - Welcome Best (Neocon-Approved Items) of the Web readers! It's very kind of you to drop by. The Cynthia McKinney item you came for is below. Unqualified Offerings will have some more on the topic tonight or tomorrow, sparked by reader mail and thoughts elsewhere. In the meantime, may UO be so bold as to suggest some other of its offerings? Try

Shanksville - La Familia Offering visits the Temporary Flight 93 Memorial.

The Vodalus Approach - An early offering speculating on the relationship of Osama bin Laden and the Saudi royal family.

Return to Somalia - Intervention, isolation and the evil of "help."

Weapons of Some Destruction - Nukes, gas and germs. Should you worry?

Deterring Iraq - How it has worked; how it can continue to work.

There are also a number of items below the McKinney piece on the Iraq question, intervention abroad and the upward failure of Iran-Contra alumni. Enjoy!

On the Other Hand - Ginger Stampley, who knows her immigration law, has a long, contrarian and exasperated item about the celebrated cause of 9/11 widow Deena Gilbey.

(Skip lightly past the "libertarian-conservative samizdittohead" crack. If the members of the newly-official leftie blogosphere want to imagine that they're not an echo chamber themselves - KARL ROVE! karl roooove...; ENRON! enroooon...; FLORIDA! floooridaaa...; HALLIBURTON! haallibuuurton... - well, we all need a reason to get out of bed in the morning.)

Strange Bedfellows: The Continuing Series - More from the official website of Representative Cynthia McKinney:

Yesterday's federal court ruling banning the Pledge of Allegiance and declaring it unconstitutional is legally questionable and morally unacceptable. Taking God out of the Pledge or the Pledge out of American life is like abolishing the flag itself.

The court's ruling is especially shocking as it comes at a time when our nation is still healing. Reciting the pledge in unison has always served to bring Americans of all races, creeds, and colors together – together as one nation, under God, and indivisible.

I have no doubt that the Supreme Court, which itself begins each session with the phrase 'God save the United States and this honorable court,' will overturn this absurd ruling. In the meantime, it is my strong hope that Americans, not only in the nine western states, but all over the country will continue to recite the Pledge exactly as it is and as it has been since 1954.

[UPDATE: Unqualified Offerings has added a special welcome message for Best of the Web readers. Thanks to editor James Taranto for being so kind as to acknowledge UO's work.]

Follow the Money - The contrarian bug bit when Unqualified Offerings read the Indepundit item on Cynthia McKinney's 9/11 checks from Arab donors (via Instapundit.com), so UO dumped the OpenSecrets.org data to Excel, reformatted and ran a pivot table. This website confesses it knew what it would find: that 9/11's donations were nothing special.

Fooled Unqualified Offerings! Indepundit's math is off - McKinney's 9/11 haul was $13,850, not $20,300 - BUT...

That's her third highest one-day haul for the entire cycle. From 1/5/1999 to 3/29/2002, she only posted higher numbers on two days. Number 2 ($30,700) came on 10/25/01. I just knew, without checking, that that would be the day of her open letter to Prince Alwaleed bin Talal - but by this time I'd learned to check anyway. That first Talal item appeared on 10/12/01. There are only two donation days between 10/12 and 10/25:

10/12 - $5200
10/18 - $250

Fun fact: On 10/25, she had a press conference with Jewish peace groups. Melvin Watt attended too. There are at most a couple of Jewish names on her 10/25 donor list.

(A Melvin Watt - similar racial, ideological, geographic profile - donor search shows only 4 line items since November 2000. Someone needs to do a better job of filing his paperwork... NOTE: Indepundit's kung fu is better than Unqualified Offerings' kung fu. UO can not get opensecrets.org to display all results for a donor search on one page with an address string that will take you right to it. Here is the Donor Search page. Add "Watt, Melvin" to the Recipient field and hit the Donation by Date radio button.)

She had a second letter on the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal controversy on 10/28 - the one that ran on the Post's op-ed page. No big donations followed.

Her biggest day ever was 4/17/2000, when she raked in 100 contributions for 97000. That looks like a big Election 2000 fundraiser.

Mrs. Offering used to manage a corporate PAC. She says the FEC dates, by law, are supposed to be the dates on the checks, not the date the checks are posted. That would put a crimp in the "Someone is moping around the district office that Tuesday and figures she might as well post the latest donations" theory.

Mrs. O. says that donations will cluster around fundraising events and solicitation letters. Even so the gaps among dates are striking. Theories:
1) "Here is your payment, Agent McKinney! Await our signal!" Pros: If Sony buys congresspeople, why not al Qaeda? Also, McKinney doesn't actually pull in that much money, comparatively, so a given interest group might have more "sway power" with her than with others. Cons: Something tells me Arab-American organizations get McKinney for free. Besides, what earthly good could she have done them? Also, it's a very serious matter to accuse someone of treason. Best delay until forced to do otherwise.

2) "Already had this fundraiser scheduled. Might as well go." Pros: Consistent with other bonanza days. Cons: Really, what are the odds? Her official website doesn't have a schedule, and there's no indication what she was doing on 9/11 or 9/10. Not enough info.

3) "We're not big on paperwork around here." Pros: This is an office that has a News Brief listing with the phrase "Reparations for Slaver (sic)" in the header. (Scroll down to 09/06/01.) Cons: Just about everyone but Glenn Reynolds was too bummed to do anything but watch TV and read Instapundit.com that day.

4) "We're in the shit now. The country is going to come down on us Arab-Americans like a ton of bricks unless we get ourselves some protection. Let's all send Cynthia checks, because she's been a friend." Pros: With the exception of RIAA donations, money tends to follow ideology rather than the reverse. McKinney didn't turn pro-Arab when the leaves changed last year. Cons: So how come no checks on the 12th? The thirteenth?

5) "This is ___________ from Congresswoman McKinney's office. The Rep wants to fight for the rights of loyal Americans of all faiths and races in this troubling time, but she can't do that without your support..." Pros: Hey, it might work! Cons: Again. How come this doesn't work on the 12th, or the 14th, or...

6) "It's a conspiracy!" Pros: Conspiracies are fun! Cons: My head hurts.

Considering the evidence and the comparisons I've done, I come down pretty firmly on the side of I have no idea. But I'm guessing a combination of 3 and 4.

Here are the donation summaries by date:

Sum of AMOUNT
DATE Total
3/29/2002 2250
3/28/2002 -1000
3/26/2002 1500
3/19/2002 11200
3/7/2002 4150
2/26/2002 750
2/25/2002 1100
2/13/2002 4600
2/1/2002 5500
1/24/2002 500
1/7/2002 200
12/28/2001 1000
12/12/2001 1500
12/6/2001 1000
11/26/2001 500
11/6/2001 1250
10/25/2001 30700
10/18/2001 250
10/12/2001 5200
9/26/2001 2000
9/11/2001 13850
8/24/2001 2000
8/10/2001 500
7/31/2001 1000
7/27/2001 250
7/3/2001 500
6/22/2001 250
6/4/2001 1000
5/2/2001 5250
4/24/2001 500
4/16/2001 200
4/10/2001 250
4/5/2001 1950
3/29/2001 500
3/20/2001 1250
3/13/2001 1000
3/12/2001 1250
3/10/2001 300
2/23/2001 500
2/20/2001 500
11/20/2000 250
11/17/2000 200
11/7/2000 2100
11/4/2000 1000
11/3/2000 3000
10/28/2000 2000
10/10/2000 200
10/2/2000 2920
9/22/2000 1250
9/11/2000 2250
9/6/2000 500
8/28/2000 2000
8/18/2000 1000
8/11/2000 -200
8/7/2000 2000
7/17/2000 2000
7/3/2000 500
6/27/2000 200
6/19/2000 200
6/16/2000 -1000
6/13/2000 200
6/9/2000 1000
6/6/2000 500
6/5/2000 3000
5/31/2000 1500
5/18/2000 4750
5/15/2000 200
5/8/2000 4250
4/27/2000 250
4/20/2000 2000
4/18/2000 3150
4/17/2000 95000
4/14/2000 250
4/13/2000 4000
4/11/2000 2300
4/7/2000 2000
4/5/2000 4750
4/3/2000 2250
3/31/2000 7000
3/29/2000 5000
3/27/2000 2000
3/23/2000 2000
3/21/2000 2000
3/10/2000 1000
3/3/2000 2000
2/16/2000 250
2/11/2000 1000
1/28/2000 250
1/21/2000 200
1/11/2000 1000
1/10/2000 1000
1/3/2000 300
12/20/1999 1000
12/14/1999 250
12/9/1999 450
12/6/1999 1000
10/12/1999 400
9/20/1999 250
9/14/1999 250
9/10/1999 400
9/1/1999 250
8/16/1999 200
8/6/1999 450
8/3/1999 500
8/2/1999 1000
7/30/1999 500
7/29/1999 1050
7/26/1999 1550
7/23/1999 700
7/21/1999 200
7/20/1999 500
7/19/1999 1250
7/14/1999 1250
7/9/1999 200
7/7/1999 2450
7/2/1999 500
6/30/1999 2650
6/29/1999 900
6/25/1999 2650
6/17/1999 950
5/7/1999 900
4/29/1999 500
4/28/1999 750
4/20/1999 1500
4/16/1999 750
4/14/1999 200
4/8/1999 750
3/31/1999 500
3/29/1999 750
3/23/1999 2250
3/17/1999 3450
1/14/1999 1500
1/5/1999 250
Grand Total 323420

Annals of Post-Constitutional History II - In response to Matt Welch, Andrew Sullivan directs readers to a Newsweek poll from last fall:

NINE OUT OF 10 Americans say they support the current military action in Afghanistan. Seventy-nine percent support the use of military force against suspected terrorist targets in other Middle Eastern countries, with 81percent approving the use of direct military action against Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

He further notes that yesterday's Washington Post refers to a more recent poll indicating that

more than 60 percent of Americans support the use of force to overthrow Hussein, "and that's without the administration doing much selling of the idea," said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center.

Let's leave aside several important matters, such as

o The Newsweek article doesn't link to the raw poll data, so we don't know the wording of the questions, for instance. This is the kind of thing that would bug Sullivan if the poll were about global warming or AIDS or another pet subject, and Unqualified Offerings would be right there with him.
o Andrew Kohut may not get universal agreement on the notion that the "Axis of Evil" speech, and Bush's Annapolis address, and Dick Cheney's highly-publicised trips and Donald Rumsfeld's many press conferences and all the leaked invasion plans can fairly be characterized as "administration [not] doing much selling of the idea."
o Support for an attack on Iraq has dropped something like 20 points between the October poll and the July one.

No, the only point one needs to make in response to Sullivan's numbers is: So what? The Constitution does not vest the warmaking power in Zogby and Gallup. It leaves that to Congress. (Don't worry: Congress is still allowed to stack the deck when it comes to calling witnesses.) Sullivan is hardly the first person to try to equate congenial poll numbers with wisdom, but it's still one of the laziest tricks available to the political disputant.

Welch responds in the comments to the post on his site that "his description of the 'opposition' to an Iraq-invasion is still a 'smear,' in my book."

Back and Forth - Brendan O'Neill says the problem with Iraq is not just the drive to war but the assumption that the West should intervene at all. Steve Chapman asks if Brendan really means it. Brendan says, Yeah, I really do.

Unqualified Offerings is with Brendan O'Neill on this one. It has been on record as favoring deterrence against Iraq because deterrence has worked. We kept Iraq from using weapons of you-know-what in Gulf War I by making it clear to Saddam that we would nuke his ass if he tried anything. Part and parcel of going to deterrence is ending sanctions and likely the UNSCOM inspections regime too (though not the IAEA one), plus "covert operations aimed at regime change" or whatever you want to call the coup and assassination plots the government has been pursuing with varying degrees of enthusiasm for the last decade.

Probably worse than outright conquering Iraq would be to continue the facsimile of a policy the US and Britain have had since 1991, which is the foreign affairs equivalent of bear-baiting. Unqualified Offerings thinks war with Iraq is a very bad idea. But continually poking a stick at a caged animal is a worse one.

(Note: The IAEA inspections regime is part of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, not the 1991 cease-fire agreement. IAEA was allowed to make a limited tour this year.)

The Poindexter Beat - Reader Munham Yam wonders if Unqualified Offerings had it quite right in its item below about John Poindexter returning to save us all! (See "Annals of Upward Failure" below.) Poindexter has been appointed the head of DARPA's Information Awareness Office, which has both a mission and a vision. Mission:

imagine, develop, apply, integrate, demonstrate and transition information technologies, components and prototype, closed-loop, information systems that will counter asymmetric threats by achieving total information awareness useful for preemption; national security warning; and national security decision making.

This worries UO: there is no indication that synergies will be realized. But at least Poindexter proved himself adept at the imagining part in his last job - e.g. imagining that it was a good idea to sell arms to Iran; imagining that there were moderates in Iran in the mid-1980s; imagining that the likes of Richard Secord and Manucher Gorbanifar were the sorts of folks you wanted to trust the nation's security to, imagining that he and Ollie North and Bud McFarlane were wiser and braver than their decadent subjects.

Now to the vision:

The most serious asymmetric threat facing the United States is terrorism, a threat characterized by collections of people loosely organized in shadowy networks that are difficult to identify and define. IAO plans to develop technology that will allow understanding of the intent of these networks, their plans, and potentially define opportunities for disrupting or eliminating the threats. To effectively and efficiently carry this out, we must promote sharing, collaborating and reasoning to convert nebulous data to knowledge and actionable options. IAO will accomplish this by pursuing the development of technologies, components, and applications to produce a proto-type system.

How will IAO defeat terror? UO highlights its favorites, the surefire terror-beaters:

o Collaboration and sharing over TCP/IP networks across agency boundaries
o Large, distributed repositories with dynamic schemas that can be changed interactively by users
o Foreign language machine translation and speech recognition
o Biometric signatures of humans
o Real time learning, pattern matching and anomalous pattern detection
o Entity extraction from natural language text
o Human network analysis and behavior model building engines
o Event prediction and capability development model building engines
o Structured argumentation and evidential reasoning
o Story telling, change detection, and truth maintenance
o Business rules sub-systems for access control and process management
o Biologically inspired algorithms for agent control
o Other aids for human cognition and human reasoning

Unqualified Offerings volunteers to help with the storytelling.

Hard work! ("It is difficult to counter the threat that terrorists pose.") Now, it's not necessarily all bunkum, but much of it reads as if the federal government were an alienated California suburbanite and IAO were Werner Erhard. What does this have to do with John Poindexter? The leftie-oriented hereinreality.com notes that Poindexter was a VP of Syntek Technologies, which worked with DARPA on Genoa, "kind of a military-grade Google/Napster for use in instant analysis of electronic data."

'Taint no big thing: just another spin of the famous revolving door. Anyway, while Poindexter's position is not in the (yet-unborn) Homeland Security Department, his office does seem to claim that it will defend the country. (Belay Libertarian Rant 364: Shouldn't protecting the US be the job of the Defense Department?)

Munham Yam, by the way, is a man after UO's own heart:

Even though I'm a right-wing nut, Ledeen scares me. I actually think he and Frank Gaffney are the same guy.

Jim Henley, 10:50 PM

Department of Corrections - Michael Croft of Ones and Zeros fact-checks the ass of Unqualified Offerings about just what he does during recording sessions, and concludes his e-mail with a popular army joke. Unqualified Offerings reproduces the entire text below. (Cliffs Notes: "I'm an engineer, not a producer.")

There are two important people in the control room of any recording studio, in addition to any number of friends, fellow band members, hangers on, significant others, insignificant others, interns, parents, wannabes and financiers. There is an engineer and a producer. Yes, sometimes there is only one person, but there are two hats.

The engineer is responsible for the technical side of the recording: setting up microphones and Direct Inputs and spit guards and such. Getting the recording and doing the punch ins and outs and making rough mixes and archiving the work tapes.

The producer is the person who listens to a recording that isn't coming together, screws up his (or her) face and says "Glockenspiel!"

There is much bleed. Producers are often heavily involved in the technical side of mixing the product. They may pick up an instrument and play the three note guitar highlight just the way they want it. And when the producer isn't sure if the take is going to work, checking the engineer's reaction is frequently the difference between pressing "talkback" and saying "Great, we got it! Take 5 while we reset for the next one!" and "that was really good, but let's see if we can get a better one."

Sometimes the engineer has to do some producing if the project doesn't really have anyone attached who can do it.

I have never actually produced on anything that was released. As a friend of mine who was asked if he was an officer during his time in the military once said "no, I worked for a living."

Another Day, Another Pot-Kettle Item - In a column debunking some internet legends, professionally-folksy Washington Post columnist Bob Levey informs us that

Young people think that anything on the Internet must be true. Oldsters know better. The Internet is a veritable bog of fish stories, larger than life -- and very often devoid of truth.

Levey offers no evidence that all or even most young people believe what they read on the internet, or even that all or most of the people who believe internet legends are young. All he does is note that there are some stories going around the internet that aren't true. But he must be right, or the Washington Post wouldn't print it. So just accept the truth: young people believe whatever they read on the internet; old people believe Ed McMahon is an insurance analyst.

Icthyoterror: The Latest - Reader/Gaming Buddy Bill Dowling and Gamer/Reading Buddy Mike "Epoch" Sullivan brought the latest northern snakehead analysis to UO's attention yesterday.

Mike has a gaming-oriented blog, which he'll let you read.

A Fangirl's Notes - Meryl Yourish plays Would-You-Rather with her favorite superheroes. Batman, Wolverine, Elongated Man, Wolverine and Mr. Fantastic um, come up big.

Matt Welch: Labor-Saving Device - Andrew Sullivan wrote some really dumbass stuff this morning about "determined and organized" opposition to war with Iraq. (UO only wishes. The extent of any "organization" it can claim is exchanging a couple of e-mails a month with Justin Raimondo, with about half the correspondence consisting of one of us explaining how wrong the other is about something.)

Happily, Matt Welch dismantled Sullivan before UO got around to it, which a) leaves time for other things; and b) keeps this site from writing when it is spitting mad.

(Note: Not content to let Matt Welch have all the fun, Micah Holmquist has a go too.)

Last Ditch Defense - Adjunct fellow Kevin Maroney e-mails about this morning's item on Clash songs in commercials:

Before you neener too neenerly, you should ask yourself if Strummer and Jones control their songs enough to have any say in whether they get sold to commercials. They probably do, but it's far from a certain thing.

This is at least possible. Unqualified Offerings put in some time this evening doing Google searches for possible statements by Strummer or Jones about their art being prostituted against their will. Can't find any, though Donald Rumsfeld would want to point out that that doesn't mean there isn't any. If any loyal reader can offer a definitive settlement of the issue, they will receive a public expression of gratitude - and get to see a snarky weblogger eat crow on his own site.

That's a quasi-contest. Here's another: Which Rage Against the Machine song will be the first one used in a commercial, and for what product?

Speaking of Rage Against the Machine, does this happen to anyone else? Whenever a certain passage in "Sleep Now in the Fire" plays, UO finds a compulsion to complete it as follows:

I am the Nina
the Pinta
the Santa
Maria
and just when
it hit them
somebody turned around and shouted

Play that funky music, White Boy!

Your Official Unfortunate Headline of the Day: "Celine Dion Developing Fragrance."

(From AP via the Washington Post.)

Death or Glory - "I believe in this and it's been tested by research," the Clash once sang, "he who fucks nuns will later join the church."

In my youth, the Clash were uncompromising radicals, who made propulsive leftist punk rock, and their biggest fans loved them as much for their politics as for their backbeat and reggae rhythms. A libertarian can unequivocally love "Julie's in the Drug Squad," and "Safe European Home," about a visit to the real Jamaica, shows a lot more self-awareness than a lot of political rock. But the anti-capitalism was forthright and undeniable.

So now rockers of Unqualified Offerings' generation (or half-generation if you prefer) are old enough that they are facing the same temptations to compromise with The Man that the boomer rockers faced. And the Clash, of all people, have sold not one but two songs to commercials. "Should I Stay or Should I Go" is the theme song for Stolichniya's Citrona commercials. Well, that song was already half a commercial compromise. But now comes word from a mailing list I'm on that "London Calling" is being used in - get this - Jaguar ads!

Unlike "Stay," "London Calling" was an uncompromising political tune, the apocalyptic opening track to an apocalyptic political album. Whether you agreed with its message or not, it represented devotion to a a fiercely-held ideal. Seeing this clarion anthem and touchstone of my youth turned to the basest commercial uses - well, what can even a flinty arch-capitalist like Unqualified Offerings say, except

Neener Neener Neener!

We Have People for That - Istanblog "cheerfully" notes that when it comes to suppressing the Kurds, our allies the Turks have the experience and the interest both:

Ideally they would make sure that the Kurds feel that being a part of the new Iraq would be better for them than being independent. This would mean convincing the Kurds that the new Iraq would give them a full voice in government, encourage their unique culture, and give them the opportunity to develop economically. Unfortunately the Turkish government, and especially its military, has never demonstrated this philosophy towards separatists, instead believing that bombing the hell out of villages is a better way to keep them in the fold.

Unqualified Offerings could swear that approach sounds like someone else we know.

Oh Really? - On Samizdata, Perry de Havilland dismantles a much-praised piece by the much-praised Victor Davis Hanson:

Ah yes, I frequently hear 'European' taxi cab drivers, nurses, office workers and house painters bemoan those tasteless Americans whilst listening to Beethoven on the radio and discoursing on Sartre with each other... oh pleeeease. I don't know who Victor Davis Hanson hung out with on his trip to 'Europe' (I guess 'Europe' is all just a homogenous mass to a Mexican Canadian Yank like Hanson) but mass culture in western Europe is pretty much overrun with Winnebagos, jet skis, and Play Station IIs... and ghastly low brow Euro pop music, tabloid newspapers, celebrations of half-wittedness like 'Big Brother' on television and other such manifestations of lower and middle class 'cultural empowerment'. The reality of what common people in 'Europe' think about the United States is that for the most part they don't really think about it much at all. The USA does not loom as large in the popular psyche as Hanson thinks.

It sure is great to have Perry back actively blogging again.

Samizdata also has a good, long piece by Christopher Pellerito about Big Media's "Don't Know, Don't Care" policy on financial reporting. An excerpt:

MSNBC wonders out loud whether it is possible to "time" the market -- that is, can investors count on making extra money in the stock market by picking the optimal times to buy and sell? This is hardly a controversial issue in the finance community -- the weakest version of the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) says that you cannot forecast stock prices by extrapolating present trends or by overlaying historical cycles -- that "market timing" is fool's gold. Yet in an attempt to make the story "balanced," MSNBC gives disproportionate weight to the crankish opinions of a "stock cycle" fetishist named Peter Eliades. The author of the story is totally unable to critically assess Eliades' claims.

Never mind that stock cycle theory is the phrenology of the finance world -- Peter Eliades is telling us that he can make money timing stocks. His "proof": stock prices fluctuate, so it is critical to buy and sell at the right times. Gee, you mean I would make more money if I bought at a lower price and sold at a higher one? That is a tautology, not an argument; it is not proof that any valid strategy for forecasting the peaks and valleys of the market can be devised. The MSNBC author seems totally incapable of making this critical distinction.

Lots more.

Annals of Upward Failure - Unqualified Offerings missed the news that President Bush appointed Iran-Contra alum John Poindexter to an important scare-quote homeland scare-quote security position at the end of February. (The press conference exchange on the appointment is priceless.)

With Poindexter on the inside and Michael Ledeen on the outside cheering things along, Unqualified Offerings feels secure indeed. There was even a Robert McFarlane sighting last fall.

Is this all supposed to end with Manucher Ghorbanifar on the Peacock Throne?

Swag: Two Views - Tres Producer-third Eric Olsen came up with an intriguing idea - get bloggers to sign up to review music, therefore becoming eligible for (oh yes!) free CDs! Michael Croft of Ones and Zeroes, a producer himself, explains why his conscience says no.

There's Good and Bad in Everyone Dept. - Patrick Nielsen Hayden has finally returned to Electrolite. Yay! Patrick Nielsen Hayden praises a Hendrick Hertzberg review of a book on the Constitution by Robert Dahl. Eh. Glenn Reynolds weighs in, arguing that both Hertzberg and Dahl are criticizing the Constitution for not being democratic enough, but that the framers weren't trying to produce a democracy, but a republic. Reynolds:

Since World War II the United States has made a big deal about democracy, as opposed to democratic republicanism, because it was simpler to explain, and hence an easier idea to sell than separation of powers, checks and balances, etc., etc. Interestingly, Americans have been more swayed by that propaganda than anyone else, and the importance of the Constitution's built-in countermajoritarianism has been largely ignored -- except where issues like school prayer or flag-burning come up.

But there's a lot more to the Constitution's countermajoritarianism than the Bill of Rights, and there's good reason to believe that the structural protections against tyranny have done more to protect freedom than the Bill of Rights -- which the Supreme Court didn't really do much with until the mid-20th Century anyway.

In response, Patrick writes

...but it seems to me that Hertzberg isn't calling for a reformist uprising against (for instance) the current arrangements for the election of Senators, so much as he's observing that--like any product of compromise and logrolling--the Constitution has its strengths and weaknesses and we'd delude ourselves less about contemporary politics if we could avoid the mental model in which the impossibly-wise framers gifted us with a system of near-perfection, which later and lesser men and women have brought to ruin.

But on the evidence of the parts Patrick quotes, it looks like Hertzberg and Dahl are finding the Constitution's "weaknesses" precisely in those areas where it is least "democratic." Which makes it a partisan critique in nonpartisan guise.

In other words, Advantage: Instapundit!

Your Tax Dollars at Work - From the Associated Press:

An Egyptian American academic was convicted a second time today of tarnishing Egypt's image and other charges and was sentenced to seven years' imprisonment in a case international human rights groups have condemned as politically motivated.

Egypt gets two billion dollars a year in US aid. You say you don't like Arab tyranny? Stop paying for it. Pull the troops that are "defending" the Saudis out of Arabia. Give them the same fine intelligence cooperation against their enemies that they've given us. See how long they last. You think the Iranian government is becoming too dangerous to Israel, what with all its support for Hezbollah and investment in long-range weapons? They can do that, because you're paying to neutralize their rival next door, Iraq.

Some pundits talk as if there are no intermediate steps available between propping these vicious regimes up and toppling them by force. That would be what we call an imperialist mindset. It's not necessarily evil, but Unqualified Offerings does think it's tragically misguided.

An Exercise for the Reader - Diane E. of Letter from Gotham has a long, important piece today that is the best summation of a first-principles, pro-Israel perspective on the assassination of Hamas leader Sheikh Shehadeh that Unqualified Offerings has seen. UO doesn't agree with all of it. (Diana makes much of the fact that most Palestinians and Arabs celebrate their atrocities while most Israelis wring hands and gnash teeth over their own. This used to impress UO. Lately however, it puts this site in mind of "The Walrus and the Carpenter.") But she makes an eloquent case in sober fashion, and it deserves attention.

The Odds Always Favor the (Ice) House - Interesting, skeptical consideration of the likelihood of cryonic resurrection actually working, by former unofficial substitute Unqualified Offerings Chad Orzcel of Uncertain Principles. Just an excerpt:

By opting to be frozen, you're betting your life on the propositions that:

1. Future medical technology will be able to cure what's killing you,

2. Future medical technology will be able to freeze and revive human beings,

3. Future medical technology will be able to repair any damage done in today's imperfect freezing processes, and

4. Someone in the future will actually care enough to bother thawing you out.

These are all dubious propositions.

There's much more, and he includes links to some other recent ruminations on the topic.

Annals of Post-Constitutional History - According to John Diamond of The USA Today,

An intensive effort by U.S. intelligence to establish a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq is being driven, in part, by a conclusion reached in recent weeks by White House and Pentagon legal and legislative advisers. They believe that connecting Iraq and the Sept. 11 attacks would allow the administration to avoid debates at the United Nations and in Congress over what some would call an unprovoked strike.

This is interesting. If the evidence exists, why try to avoid the debate? (In Congress - forget the UN.) Why not stride boldly into the Chamber, brandish the evidence and demand that Congress declare war on the malefactor (Iraq)? What could be better than to lay out a strong case that Iraq was behind the massacres of last September, secure the assent of the people's representatives and take a united country into battle against the foe?

The answer: nothing could be better. Which makes it striking that the administration wants to avoid doing so. It also makes it clear that the administration is naive. Because whatever evidence it manages to come up with will itself be the subject of the debate, and if the administration tries to duck the discussion it will have the dignity of those electoral candidates that get replaced by empty chairs when they refuse to show for candidates' night.

Diamond's article doesn't contain event the slightest hint that the administration is actually close to acquiring evidence of Iraqi involvement in the September massacres. It's pretty obvious to Unqualified Offerings why that is: there isn't any. But they could, in principle, surprise us. If they do, they should have the guts to act constitutionally.

Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Joseph Biden, D-Del., said top White House officials have asked him repeatedly what congressional authorization, if any, the administration would require.

What do they need to ask Biden for? Don't they have internet connections in the White House? There's an instruction manual for this kind of thing. Even after Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt still sought a formal declaration of war. (Give him that much, my isolationist confreres!)

Even if you favor war with Iraq, it should bother you the way this government wants to go about it.

The Love That Really REALLY Shouldn't Have Spoken Its Name - As many people know K/S or "slash" is an underground genre of fan fiction that allows Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock of Star Trek to - fulfill the prime directive as it were.

Now it turns out there is a whole new K/S genre, according to this AP story:

A Russian writer under investigation for disseminating pornography in a novel that depicts sexual contact between Soviet leaders Joseph Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev refused to answer police questions.

"I refused to give evidence because I consider this matter absurd, vicious and humiliating to me as a writer and humiliating to Russian literature as a whole," Vladimir Sorokin told reporters outside the Moscow police's main investigative department, where he was summoned.

Police began investigating Sorokin after prosecutors deemed pornographic parts of his 1999 novel "Goluboye Salo," which can be translated as "Blue Lard" or "Gay Lard." The book came to the attention of prosecutors after the youth group Walking Together filed a criminal complaint accusing Sorokin of disseminating pornography.

Good on the writer for refusing to knuckle under, and bad on the Sovi - excuse Unqualified Offerings! Russia for hassling him.

Still and all, Unqualified Offerings has to say that this story has occasioned the most upsetting unbidden images of sexual congress since the time, years ago, that UO learned that Martha Stewart and John McLaughlin were dating.

It's a Small World After All - This is just too cool somehow. AH Amin writes to describe himself as follows:

Ex Tank Corps Officer , Major ,Pakistan Army , Author :-- Pakistan Army Till 1965, Sepoy Rebellion Of 1857-59, Mans Role In History, Ex Executive Editor Monthly Globe Karachi, Ex Assistant Editor Defence Journal Karachi, Member Orbat.Com, Columnist Pravda, Nation Etc.

Free Lance Journalist And Author

What does this have to do with Unqualified Offerings? Way back on November 11 this site blogged a piece from Pakistan's International News with the then-controversial title "The Myth of Afghan Invincibility," by "AH Amin." About the author, Unqualified Offerings wrote "(No, I have no idea who AH Amin is.)" But UO admired the puckishness of

Now we come to the romantic tales of Afghan invincibility in the British period. The British are in the habit of dramatising the odds they faced and giving it a poetic touch.

Alas, the original link to the article is dead.

On an "It's all about me, note," the e-mail shows that Rebecca Blood was right when she counsels in The Weblog Handbook that one should never put something in one's blog that you wouldn't want someone to see down the line.

Negative Capability Is Your Friend - Matt Welch thinks Unqualified Offerings is wrong about the appeal and achievement of Glenn Reynolds:

If Reynolds was really concerned with “nurtur[ing] a cadre of libertarian-flavored center-right supporters of an expansive war,” then A) he wouldn’t have perma-links to Henley, Yglesias, Alterman or me, and B) he wouldn’t get all that lusted-after traffic. Glenn’s ideological promiscuity is actually a key to his popularity. His taste in blogs, and their relationship to his personal politics, is not un-analogous to Michael Kelly’s editorship of the Atlantic: quality trumps positioning on the political spectrum. Henley and Yglesias are dreaming of a partisan non-partisan.

Welch is a smart man, a kind man and right about an awful lot.

Now, my post about liberal bloggers and the possibility of a left-wing Instapundit had a couple of purposes:

1) Note one of Reynolds' great virtues, his willingness to lift less popular bloggers up rather than tread them under.

2) Twit the folks I guessed were the most popular liberal bloggers for having less - ALERT: Liberal totem word coming! - generosity than a "self-centered" (because he's a) rightie.

I'm okay with Matt's "partisan non-partisan" concept. Perhaps unlike Matt, I think it's less an oxymoron than a paradox, and paradoxes are real things. If we think of Glenn Reynolds as a "partisan-nonpartisan rightie (for lack of a better term) then I said the left lacks a "partisan-nonpartisan" promiscuously-linking blog star. (Note: I accept Reynolds' self-description as a whig rather than a conservative.)

It's worth noting that Ginger Stampley suggested that by making this claim I was insulting Matt Welch and Ken Layne! In my defense, I should note that at the time I put up the original post, both Matt and Ken Layne were coming off hiatuses. It was not clear that Matt's eruption into activity over Steve Earle was going to persist. It's also, he said as delicately as possible, not clear that their traffic approaches the levels of Josh Marshall or Eric Alterman, or Reynolds. (I'm pretty sure that when it comes to traffic, there's Instapundit, and then there's not exactly.)

Where am I going with all of this? Actually, I've just realized I have no freaking idea! (Q: Does this admission count as "Trustworthy Blogging?") Patrick Nielsen Hayden, in Matt's comments section, gets my argument about right.

Ignorance is Bliss - Hot Buttered Death thinks he wants to know what Lee Greenwood did to deserve UO's recent, um, fisking? But he's wrong. Very very very very wrong.

Hot Buttered Death looks like a great blog if you want great links and pithy commentary - as opposed to what you get here. (Unqualified Offerings should probably have called itself PAGE DOWN...) Here's a sample. There are lots more where these came from:

Father of 21 kids wants more, mother not so convinced.

How elderly people can think themselves to death.

Dutch police hunt serial defecator.

That's enough. Go to Hot Buttered Death and get the rest yourself.

Art of the Possible - Anglo-Texan Nigel E. Richardson says "NO ONE HAS A MORE ENGLISH NAME THAN I! NO ONE I TELL YOU!!!!"

Wait! That's not what he says! He says

Political blogs are starting to bore me now...

and kindly cites UO's appreciation of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen II as the sort of thing he'd rather read.

Man, Unqualified Offerings can relate. It's just that there's these wars. (Nigel also agrees with UO and "OC" and others that the term "anti-idiotarian" has jumped the shark. Go Nigel!)

Nigel's blog has some good stuff about his move to Texas. Check out his item on visiting San Antonio. (UO should say that what most struck it about the Alamo were the ironic "Please. No Concealed Weapons on the Premises" signs.)

And if you too are sick of political blogs, check out the Illuminated Donkey's recent series, Skeeball Week! Start here and scroll up.

Mirror, Mirror - Reader/Gaming Buddy Bill Dowling points out that the main League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume II annotation site linked below is Geocities and thus prone to bandwidth-limit outages. Bill notes that the mirror site, not on Geocities, might be a better bet.

Rimshot Alert

An article in yesterday's Washington Post points out once again that abstinence-only sex education leaves much to be desired...

Avedon Carol, ladies and gentlemen. She'll be here all week.

Nine (Thousand) Princes in Araby - Speaking of The Talking Dog, UO believes your TD was the first to note the odd pattern of sudden morbidity among the younger heirs to the Saudi throne and suggest that something strange might be going on:

Meanwhile, note that the Saudi Prince owner of the Kentucky Derby winning horse died of a "heart attack" at 46; his brother (another Saudi Prince) kicked off of a "heart attack" at 49 a few months ago; and yet another Saudi Prince, their cousin, died at 41 in a car accident on the way to the funeral. Could we be watching the Saudi version of a succession struggle, as three nephews of King Faud, all in their 40's, die more or less simultaneously? Or maybe they just all got a batch of bad hummus. Stay tuned...

Tipped off by TD, The Guardian has begun to look into the issue.

Big Tent - Naturally, The Talking Dog has a resolution to the War of Kurdish Suppression problem, vouchsafed to Unqualified Offerings in the following exclusive e-mail:

Actually, as troubling as your post on this issue is, and as rightly
concerned we should be with pissing off our long-time NATO allies in Ankara,
there is, as always, a creative solution to this troubling dilemma, and
without provoking a wider regional war than the attack on Saddam will already
be.

What the Turks have ACTUALLY said is that they do not want an
"independent" Kurdistan, particularly one on the Eastern border of Turkey
that will doubtless seek Kurdish hegemony by incorporating well, Eastern
Turkey.

Well, there needn't be an "independent" Kurdistan. You already know what
I'm going to say: "North Iraq" will become our 53rd state. (In fact, unlike
the Emancipation Proclamation, where Lincoln freed slaves not already under
his control, the United States is ALREADY in effective control of North Iraq
now.) If 200,000 American troops are required to topple Saddam, then why not
have most of them be volunteers from our "newest" Americans, the
Kurdish-American community of North Iraq (think of the logistical savings in
terms of troop movements alone!). As in Israel and Palestine, where American
territory will border friendly regimes based in Amman and Cairo, North Iraq
will border NATO ally Turkey and free and democratic post-Saddam Iraq.

2/3 of the "Axis of Evil" will be on the run: Saddam will be out, with
North Iraq electing 2 senators (probably Republican, in gratitude to
Son-Of-Bush), and Iran will not only have a Democratic Iraq on its doorstep,
but a REALLY democratic State of North Iraq. Take that, Ayatollah Khamani!
(Actually, Iran is a bizarre society-- a functioning democracy, albeit one
powerless against its theocratic masters, whose population is FAR more
pro-American than its government; in the face of neighboring pressure, Iran
will have to clean up its act-- FAST-- or I suspect a brisque business at the
border posts of Western and Northern Iran will have that population voting
with its feet).

While it appears I say all this tongue in cheek, let's look at the "facts
on the ground": since the end of the Cold War, "free and democratic Europe"
has formed a dysfunctional, unaccountable, anti-democratic "supergovernment"
while simultaneously devolving sovereignty along the lines of petty ethnic
disputes (be it effectively independent Northern Ireland and a
quasi-independent Scotland in Britain, or the Slovaks being suddenly unable
to live with the Czechs, or God help us all, the former Yugoslavia, where
even Montenegro can't seem to live with SErbia-- and SErbia has effectively
been dismembered!). The United States, by contrast, is not only holding
strong, and holding the line AGAINST international sovereignty erosion,
continues its march toward being a multi-cultural, absolutely tolerant
society (even of its Muslim communities) in the face of the tongue-clucking
(but incredibly INTOLERANT Europeans (whose controversial politicians get
knocked off by animal rights activists!)

Maybe it is NOT such an absurd point that we should start backing up our
friendly military, economic, cultural AND MORAL hegemony with some actual
political hegemony. Again, I have my doubts that a Kurdish plebicite would
NOT favor American statehood (if offered).

And now, a discussion of our 54th and 55th states, Jammu and Kashmir...

How's That Again? - Gene Healy culls an interesting passage from Malcolm Gladwell's book, The Tipping Point:

In the 1996 Houshold Survey on Drug Abuse, 1.1 percent of those polled said that they had used heroin at least once. But only 18 percent of that 1.1 percent had used it in the past year, and only 9 percent had used it in the past month. That is not the profile of a particularly [addictive] drug. The figures for cocaine are even more striking. Of those who have ever tried cocaine, less than one percent are regular users. What these figures tell us is that experimentation and actual hard-core use are two entirely separate things.

Healy points out that the risk of being prosecuted for answering the NIDA survey is very small, so the figures are probably broadly correct. As Healy says, "this information gives the lie to the idea that once given hard drugs we'd all act like lab rats pressing the lever for more cocaine pellets."

On the Record - There is one aspect of Andrew Olmsted's otherwise praiseworthy call for the President to ask Congress to declare war on Iraq that Unqualified Offerings can't let go:

Those who oppose such an invasion would have to explain and defend their position, and place themselves on the record should a future attack prove to have come from Iraq.

Why does that only work one way? If we attack Iraq and are later attacked by those claiming to be offended by our conquest, will the war's proponents be on the hook?

This is a sensitive issue because in 1990, opponents of the first war with Iraq (UO supported it at the time) argued that it was a bad idea because it would increase the risk of terrorist attacks on America. But every time there is a terrorist attack on America - WTC I, the abortive millenium bomb plot, Khobar Towers, the Cole, the embassies, 9/11 - by people claiming to be upset by America's actions in that war, or the fallout therefrom (e.g. troops in the "Holy Land"), and those 1990 opponents suggest that there just might be a, you know, connection, they're denounced as "blaming America."

Update: War of Kurdish Suppression - It's not just Unqualified Offerings who figures that the Iraq hawks are committing the US to operations to suppress Iraq's Kurds and Marsh Arabs in the aftermath of a Saddam overthrow. So, according to Thomas E. Ricks in the Sunday Washington Post, do some of the US military's top brass:

A major goal of U.S. policy in a post-Hussein Iraq would be to prevent the creation of an independent state in the heavily Shiite south, or an independent Kurdish state in the north. To fulfill U.S. promises to Turkey and Arab states that Iraq would remain whole, a defense official said, "I think it is almost a certainty that we'd wind up doing a campaign against the Kurds and Shiites." That would represent a striking reversal of administration policy of supporting the Kurds against Baghdad.

Not only is this borrowing trouble under normal circumstances, there's an aggravating factor: for the last ten years, the US has encouraged both the Kurds and the Shi'a in a collectivist opposition to the Iraqi state. If we crush them for trying to separate, they'll see that as a betrayal, for the simple reason that it will be. And if we let them go, then Iraq's nationalists will blame us for costing their patria two thirds of its territory.

Mind Your Ps and Not-Qs - Speaking of Sheikh Shehadeh and others, Unqualified Offerings has been doing some thinking. One thing that stands out is the nimbleness of the act's apologists. First we were told, authoritatively, that bastards like Shehadeh always travel with "human shields," including children, so the IDF had no choice but to add some noncombatant lives to the toll. Now we are told, authoritatively, that the IDF and Shin Bet believed that Sheikh Shehadeh was alone and that any people in the shacks nearby would suffer no more than shrapnel wounds and glass punctures.

The two excuses don't go together.

The Lamb Shall Lie Down with the Lioness - Another interesting comment thread on Protein Wisdom, this time involving the assassination of Sheik Shehada and others in Gaza last week, featuring the unlikely pairing of Diana Moon of Letter from Gotham and Jim of Objectionable Content on the skeptics' side.

Protein Wisdom, loyal readers - where, unlike certain other sites, the comments section is not a cesspool of savagery.