Loathsome Toad Watch - Free to run for President, Joe Lieberman runs for the sewer:

Lieberman seeks video game hearings
Gore "offensive to our most basic values"

Don't worry, Avedon. He's not talking about Al.

Time for a Gerard Jones citation, I think.

Link via Franklin Harris. The Cinescope article itself is by blogger Mike Whybark.

Speaking of Physics, Chad Orzel has great items on the physicist as jack-of-all-trades, and "fermi numbers," a longtime interest of mine.

Ironies of Physics - A warm spell before Christmas, so we have to turn the heat up. When it gets colder again we'll turn it back down. When it gets real cold we have to set the thermostat as low as 62F at night. It being up in the 40s tonight we'll have to keep it at 66. Nights in the low fifties we have to jack it all the way up to 68.

Why? Unqualified Headquarters appears, to the untrained eye, to be an aging, poorly-insulated split level in a modest neighborhood. (To the trained eye it appears to be a yurt.) The thermostat is near the back door. Heat rises. So:

o The rec room is a lost cause until March.
o Little heat stays by the back door, so the thermostat's thermometer is slow to rise and the heat slow to cut off.
o Most heat rises to the bedroom/office level.

So the colder it gets, the colder the dining room stays. If you set the heat high, it never cuts off. So you set it low. But if it warms up outside, it warms up in the dining room. So if you keep the heat low, it never gets cool enough to ignite, and the upstairs freezes.

Something tells me this is a bloggers don't have editors post. But hey, it's the weekend.

Hello Out There - If you've cited Unqualified Offerings recently, thank you. I may not know it, because my freaking referrer stats are messed up. I see tallies, so it's adding up and the logs are logging, but no names by the tallies. Obviously a problem with the database software. Still not fixed, though, since Monday. I'm switching hosts next month. Wonder if it will be fixed before then.

The Way the Future Wasn't - Reader Steve Cook claims, plausibly, that in "A Brief History of the Future" I confused TL Sherrod with Isaac Asimov:

Jim, I think you may be mixing up the endings of "E for Effort" and the Isaac Asimov story "The Dead Past"; if I recall correctly -- and no promises; I haven't read _E for Effort_ in some time -- "E for Effort" ends with them getting their _Alexander the Great_ movie made after blackmailing a bunch of rich people and the inventor (or possibly the narrator, who was more of a wheeling-dealing Hollywood type) marrying the secretary. "The Dead Past" features an academic obsessed with answering a question about, I believe, Sumerian practices of worship; the technology of viewing the past in that story is not a new invention, but something that is kept under strict controls by the government, and the protaganist hooks up with young physicist who manages to create a kit version of the time-viewer; the physicist's uncle then distributes the plans, leading to
the final scene you remember.

The funny thing is that I found myself forcibly reminding myself that "E is for Effort" was not by Isaac Asimov when I was writing the essay. Clearly "The Dead Past" made an impression. And it makes sense that an Asimov story ends with the words of wisdom coming from the government man.

Now I can't remember "E is for Effort" at all, and I'm sure I read it. (Barry Malzberg made much of the story in an essay collection called The Engines of the Night, too.)

Split-Screen Republicanism Watch

We do the national greatness stuff abroad and the leave us alone stuff at home. Sign me up.

Andrew Sullivan

I believe this just might be the other shoe:

The Bush administration is planning to propose requiring Internet service providers to help build a centralized system to enable broad monitoring of the Internet and, potentially, surveillance of its users.

The proposal is part of a final version of a report, ``The National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace,'' set for release early next year, according to several people who have been briefed on the report. It is a component of the effort to increase national security after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

(Link via Micah Holmquist.) Sure it is. Sure it will.

People, in the immortal words of the late George Allen:

The future is now.

Recommended Reading - Matthew Hogan explains why Oppressed People Suck and why that's no excuse for you. Julian Sanchez considers the possibility that George W. Bush too is a rational actor. And Dr. Manhattan tackles the connection, or lack of connection, between Thimerasol and autism.

Your Official Creep of the Day courtesy of Associated Press.

Sometimes the Slope Really Is Slippery - Your Talking Dog reads the foreign press and learns unsettling things about - here. TD is also your source for Israeli election coverage by a New York lawyer. Today he writes

Unfortunately, despite their rhetorical support for him, your TD remains convinced that the shakedown artists in charge of the Palestinian territories (and the terrorists therein) will increase the violence to PREVENT Mitzna's election -- and God help us if Mitzna and Labor start to improve in opinion polls.

I do too, alas.

It Didn't Start with Lott-ergate - The very good Charles Paul Freund on the very bad Woodrow Wilson, the man who brought Jim Crow to Washington.

The thoroughgoing awfulness of Wilson is one area where I have no difference with the paleos whatsoever. And, piling on, the Woodrow Wilson birthplace in Staunton, Virginia, stinks as a piece of curatorship compared to Monticello. In what way? The Monticello staff has been obsessive about recreating Jefferson's great home down to its last detail. If there's a book on a bookcase, it's because contemporaneous records indicate Jefferson owned that book in that edition. If there's a blanket on the bed, the pattern and fabric match what Monticello records indicate Jefferson had. (Monticello is also forthright about the role of slavery in supporting Monticello, without being unctious about it. And the shuttle bus drivers will happily discuss Sally Hemings with you. They don't know either, though they assume so.)

By contrast, the Wilson birthplace curators are content to fill the place up with period stuff. There was a very cool German tricycle where handles rather than pedals provide the motive power. Wow, I asked the tour guide, little Woodrow had one of those?

"We don't know," she said. "But they were popular back then."

The books also were just books from the turn of the century. A copy of Chapman's Homer open on the desk in no way indicated that Wilson or his parents had read Chapman's Homer in that house. It was all simply a matter of, Look! Old stuff! And a President was born here! (Note: All this was true in the late 1980s. Perhaps they have made giant curatorial leaps since then.)

There's a small outbuilding where the Wilson family slaves lived during Woodrow's childhood days. He clearly missed them.

Can You Keep a Secret? - Look who's baaaaaack...

(Link via Letter from Gotham.)

Strange Days - If I read this column right, Jonah Goldberg thinks he isn't a neocon. He doesn't think David Frum is one either.

Eerie Prescience Watch - They all laughed when I wrote last summer that "What the left lacks is an Instapundit." Now it's got one. (One more time: "For Good - or Evil . . . ")

It's striking how well Atrios fits the model:

o Comes to wide prominence (i.e. beyond the blogosphere) by doing energetic work on a story of great interest. Check.
o Story is such that said work inspires enormous gratitude. Check.
o Not a one-trick pony. Has other things to write about. Check.
o Generously supports less widely read bloggers with allied viewpoints. Check.
o Posts fast! Check.
o Posts lots! (Lotts.) Check.
o Frequently infuriates ideological opponents. Check.
o Secret Freemason. Ch-um, shhhh!

A Fanboy's Notes, Effendi - Bruce Baugh offers an excellent meditation on mutants, Marvel and metaphors. 'Nuff said?

Also, and this may shock people, he offers good reason to believe of the RIAA that "they are lying lying lying about the impact of piracy."

Mad as Hell. Will He Take It Any More? - Radley Balko has an item that is almost stunning in its hopefulness. This could be a genuine turning point in an otherwise dire history.

Libertarian Candidate Suffers Lopsided Loss - I'm getting killed in the voting for the Koufax Awards. I blame liberal bias! Actually, I'm an interloper anyway, since the Koufaxes are supposed to be for leftie bloggers. Solid liberal Atrios was running away with my category last I checked (best series), and surely he deserves it, for all that he is a hairy-backed grifter who has left a string of broken hearts and illegitimate children up and down the Mississippi River.

Look Over Here - Due to Blogger problems, Diana Moon has relocated Letter from Gotham for the time being. Find it here. Plenty of new material including a worthwhile one on T***t L**t.

I robbed Franklin Harris of a link last night due to an editing error. I quoted him but forgot to add the citation. Franklin, I'm sorry. Loyal readers, I heartily endorse Franklin's blog, the finding of which was genuinely exciting to me. Read Franklin Harris every day, like I do.

A Brief History of the Future - What's the big idea? I see three, and they interact in potentially dire ways.

1) The Stars My Destination. At the end of Alfred Bester's classic novel, Gully Foyle distributes the super weapon, PYRe, throughout earth's civilian population, putting a fission-class explosive that can be detonated with a thought in individual hands. Either humanity will learn to handle the power, Foyle says, or it doesn't deserve to survive. Why this matters: Nonproliferation is dead, even in the militant "Bush Doctrine" version. Nukes, gas and germs are mid-twentieth century technology at most. As Donald Rumsfeld keeps telling us, you can mix germs in a trailer. Nukes are hard to make, but there's a lot of theoretically working ones out there to buy, even if some are fixer-uppers.

I'm not talking just about proliferation among states, either. I mean this stuff is coming within the reach of you and me, or at least our Moose Lodge, whether Saddam dies peacefully in bed or before a firing squad.

2. E for Effort is a short story T.L. Sherrod wrote back in the forties. Two men invent a machine that can view the past. You can't go there, but you can see anything. They figure it will help unlock unsolved riddles of history. The government man at the end rebukes them. Don't you realize what you've done, he asks? What do you think the past is, anyway? The past includes last year, last week, yesterday and five seconds ago. The men have invented the ultimate surveillance device. Now you can spy on your spouse, your neighbors, your coworkers, anyone.

Total Information Awareness, hello. And a shoutout to the counter-insurgency, too. You probably know by now that a group has posted some of Information Awareness Office director John Poindexter's personal information on the internet. (Radley Balko's reaction to this is mine too.) Nothing personal, though. The John Poindexter Awareness Office site promises to "seek total information awareness about the personal lives, purchases, relationships, entertainment interests, reading habits, and travels of each and every employee of DARPA." (Link via Gene Healy.)

As lefties keep pointing out, DARPA's TIA program mostly aims to correlate capacious commercial databases that already exist. You and I can already buy books that promise to let you Get Anything on Anybody, and the technology is only going to get better and more widely available in the normal course of things. (Watch that phrase, normal course.) Tom Sherrod looks like one of about three genuinely prophetic science fiction authors. (For another, check out Clifford Simak's story, "Huddling Place," and ask if we aren't already half in that world.)

Welcome to the post-privacy era, which I believe David Brin has actually been writing about for some time.

3. Starship Troopers. No, not the movie! What are you thinking? Remember those potted histories of the passing of the age of chivalry? Remember why handguns got the slang term "equalizer" applied to them? Supposedly the ability of any man to kill any other man with firearms made armor useless and reduced the power of the small minority that had the money and desire to outfit themselves as knightly warriors. (Some folks nominate the longbow for this honor and say it was over for chivalry after Agincourt.) Second-Amendment purists argue that its importance is that it provides for the people to keep arms they can use to overthrow a tyrannical government.

So what happens when it all changes? What happens when one class gets to wear MIT's battle suit of the future and the other has to make do with Bushmaster XM-15s and dark shirts? Afghanistan and Waco both suggest how disparate capabilities have already become, and who can afford to equip the new knightly class? (The state has been intent on keeping the best toys to itself since shortly after the civil war, with the first measures against private ownership of gatling guns.)

Here's where it gets messy.

Proliferation augurs a world in which the nation-state cannot perform its second-most basic function - ensuring the physical security of most of its citizens. Any small group with a grudge or a bad hair day will be able to kill large numbers of people cheaply and conveniently. That could lead one to suspect that the nation-state is dead already, but hasn't quite caught on. But that brings us to the state's most basic function, which is to perpetuate itself. No way will it go quietly. For its own protection, it has recourse to shiny military technology that only it can afford, and it has Total Information Awareness. Both of these tend toward positive (from the state's perspective) feedback loops - the greater the advantage in information and violence, the more you can command a revenue stream to get both cooler weapons and fancier spy systems.

What's the obvious counter to the state's overwhelming advantage in guns and armor and target acquisition technology? Uh huh. Gas, germs and nukes. Who tends to get caught in the crossfire? Yes, us.

That leaves the surveillance front. Here the implications go way beyond politics (which is just the disposition of power), but let's stick with politics for just a second. You can be damn sure that to the extent that projects like the JPAO are successful, the state's reaction will be sheer fury. As Samizdata never tires of pointing out, they tell you surveillance is nothing to get upset about, but try pointing a camcorder at a cop sometime and see what kind of reaction you get.

Fury plus power equals repression. One plausible outcome is a savage twilight struggle between spooks and phreaks. A little of that already goes on, but the spooks won't be playing any more, and the phreaks will get pretty serious themselves. To make its life easier, the state has a tendency to prohibit things that are not commonly understood as crimes, but that make the state's job harder - like, oh, paying cash for expensive things, buying lots of grow lights, stuff like that. So in the course of defending itself the state may do a few things: It may create a new information caste system, comprising a class of people about whose private lives everything is an open book - we might call these people "ordinary" but we won't be able to follow it up with "citizens" - and another class about whose private lives the first class are forbidden to investigate or report. The second thing it may do is apply all sorts of restrictions to information technology and information exchange that don't (quite) exist yet.

If that happens, we all get very, very poor.

All this will be in the name of protecting us. If the information clampdown comes it will leave a whole bunch of educated folks underemployed and alienated from meaningful work. Viz. Mohammed Atta. Now see big idea One.

Note that, while I'm a libertarian and instinctively suspicious of the state, I'm not remotely arguing that the non-state actors that will arise are your friends. The first ones - Aum Supreme Truth and Al Qaeda - certainly are not. But the state's not your friend either, and it's going to be decreasingly able to convince you it's of much use. It will try its best, though, even if it kills you.

Done! - That's it. I'm all Lotted out. (And there was much rejoicing.)

UPDATE: Kidding. Just learned that Rand Simberg has taken a break from lame WWII-themed parodies of war skeptics to write an honest-to-god screamingly funny Lott revelation. You must not miss this.

Advantage: Radley Balko! - Gene Healy and CNN's story on the BET appearance make it clear that the Agitator called it right days ago:

So long as the GOP is led by Lott, the GOP is paralyzed.

There is, for example, a non-racist non-bigoted case to be made against racially-motivated set-aside programs for federal contractors.

But Trent Lott can't make it.

There's a non-racist non-bigoted case to be made in favor of not only extending welfare reform, but given its success, of cutting back benefits even more.

But Trent Lott can't make it.

There's a non-racist non-bigoted case to be made in favor of ending thought-policing, soul-exploring federal hate crimes statutes.

But Trent Lott can't make it.

There's a non-racist non-bigoted case to made against the growing support for slavery reparations.

But Trent Lott can't make it.

The official vote is scheduled for January 6, 2003. That's a dangerous amount of time to wait. One possibility is that the furor dies down enough that Lott is able to calm enough Republican senators to keep his phony-baloney job. That would be the best of all possible Democratic Party worlds. Another is that the unofficial decision date gets moved up to before New Years.

I've made it pretty clear over the past year that I have little use for the Republican Party. But if Trent Lott hangs on, Republicans won't even have any use for it themselves.

Here It Comes - Gene Healy listened to all of Lott's appearance on BET tonight (so much for Heinlein's thesis that people act always to make themselves happy) and is already preparing for the worst. ("I get the distinct feeling he’s going to demonstrate his spiritual growth by lightening my paycheck.")

Says Gene, among other things:

I don’t think for a minute that Trent Lott wants to see the reinstitution of state-enforced segregation. Nor do I think he’d sacrifice his seat making a principled stand against it, if Jim Crow suddenly became popular again. When it was popular and considered acceptable in the South, he was for it. When people awoke to its injustice, and it rightly became anathema in American political life, he was against it. In neither case was he guided by principle. Trent Lott doesn’t have principles—he has interests. Or “interest,” in the singular, more appropriately. His interest is staying in office.

There's more.

On the credit where credit is due front, Mrs. Offering e-mailed me a quote from Maureen Dowd that I can't find in her latest column. But I trust my wife who said Dowd wrote

Trent Lott says he'll appear on BET for an hour to discuss his hopes and concerns for African Americans. I have to ask. Hasn't Mr. Lott made the black man suffer enough?

That's a paraphrase, alas.

UPDATE: Reader Chip Taylor comes through with a link and a roadmap. "Eighth and ninth paragraphs" of this column, he writes:

"For a full hour, I will talk about my hopes and dreams for the people in this state and this country, regardless of their race, and to make sure that African-Americans have the opportunities that they deserve," he promised the press in Pascagoula.

For the love of Amos 'n' Andy, hasn't Mr. Lott punished the black man enough?

Thanks, Chip!

For the Defense - Various folks have dissented from the otherwise universal opprobrium directed toward Trent Lott, for various reasons. A lot of people have an understandable distrust of universal opprobrium. Others have other reasons.

From the land of curling and punting on third down, Colby Cosh warns US conservatives

. . . is there not something nasty and ill-considered, bordering on the manic, about the blogosphere's collective demand for Trent Lott's head? The argument against him generally takes the form "I know he's not a racist; I know he didn't mean it; but he's got to go anyway, because his comments are going to be used against him by the Democrats." Isn't this tantamount to accepting your political enemy's standard of judgment in such matters? And if you accept such a standard, how can you defend someone worth the defending, when the time comes?

Colby has a lot more to say that's worth reading. I think, though, that many right-wing webloggers seem anything but sure Lott is not a racist. Also, watching the story develop over time, I got the impression that the tactical concerns came second, and an instinctive revulsion first. That's true even for the worst of them. (Hold that thought.) And while it's cheesy of me to pull latitude, it's possible that even a brilliant Canadian conservative like Colby doesn't, on some level, quite grok how fraught the US race problem is for all sides.

Speaking of the worst of them, Gene Callahan doesn't like what Lott's most vociferous right-wing critics stand for - war and domestic surveillance, chiefly. I actually prefer the way he put the matter in an e-mail to the column itself, so I quote the e-mail with permission:

That's not what I meant to say. It's more like this: Let's say we're in Germany circa 1938. It comes out that Hitler likes to torture frogs. Suddenly, all these people who had been pretty quiet about him explode with fury: "The frog torturer must go!"

Now, I'm against frog torturing. But, with everything else he was doing, my response would be, "And you're upset over THIS?"

And I don't mean to trivialize the evil of Jim Crow. But, as I pointed out, it's pretty clear that Lott is not actually trying to re-institute Jim Crow. The very worst interpretation of his remarks is that he misses it but isn't trying to do anything about the fact. And my question is, "What have we come to when eviscerating the Constitution [e.g. USA-PATRIOT, Total Information Awareness, resolutions authorizing a Presidential decision to use force as opposed to declaring war, e.g. - UO] is a matter for polite discussion but this bad -- but absolutely meaningless to any policy -- remark creates a tempest and calls for resignation?"

Gene sells some of Lott's critics somewhat short here. The neolibertarians on his list have been pretty vociferous in their criticisms of the domestic security innovations of this administration and congress. I'll grant that I don't like their views on the prospect of war. Meanwhile, most of Lott's neoconservative accusers not only favor the most expansive, least subject to constitutional checks and balances sort of military action, they've also been among the foremost apologists for Bush's slalom down the slippery slope of "homeland" tyranny.

For my part, I'm just glad these folks got one right for a change.

Meanwhile, Gene's editor, Lew Rockwell, seems to think that Lott's problem is that his post-furor statements weren't whiny enough. In "What Lott Might Have Said," Rockwell fills Lott's mouth with, among other things, self-pitying resentment worthy of Nixon:

I grant that my comments were highly unusual in American public life. Even more intense than the race taboo is the rule against expressing any regret for the astonishing centralization of power in America since World War II. Question that, and you will have few friends, and legions of opportunistic enemies. Such is the fate of any dissident living under Leviathan.

Obviously, Rockwell is speaking for himself and his particular movement more than for Lott here, since there's no evidence that Lott has any particular problem with the centralizing of power. I share Rockwell's distaste for "a managerial regime that intrudes itself into every aspect of public and private life, often in the name of quelling racial conflict but in fact only creating more," but there are all kinds of reasons his site dropped off the regular reading list for me, to the extent that I risk forgetting to catch pieces by writers I enjoy like Gene Callahan and Joseph Stromberg.

I outlined my complaints about lewrockwell.com back in April. But now there's an update. As part of LR.com's coverage of the Lott fracas, they've republished a gushing letter of support to the State's Rights Party from heterodox right wing thinker Murray Rothbard. Rothbard led a fascinating, fiesty intellectual life. He's particularly an enduring inspiration to hard-core anti-state, anarcho-capitalist types. His uncompromising thesis that all governments are fundamentally gangs is one I accept to a degree greater than certain of my readers would be comfortable with.

Just as Rothbard ended his peripatetic intellectual journey in the arms of the paleos, it appears that he began with them too. The letter says, among other things

Although a New Yorker born and bred, I was a staunch supporter of the Thurmond movement; a good friend of mine headed the Columbia Students for Thurmond, which I believe was the only such collegiate movement north of the Mason-Dixon line.

Apparently all governments are gangs except southern state governments. This tenet of hardcore Rothbardianism is the one I've had the hardest time quite grasping.

I find the letter distasteful in the extreme, but keep in mind that it was written in 1949 by a 23-year-old. Problem is - and it's a big one - it was republished, clearly intended as an example of wisdom, in 2002 by someone considerably older.

One important caveat: It doesn't bother me that good writers choose to write for LR.com. It carries some worthwhile articles and links to some pieces worth reading. I even, on Gene's advice, offered them a chance to link to one of my own items within the last few months. (They declined.) In the immortal words of Jesse Walker, nothing is beneath the freelance writer.

As part of their grand strategy to increase liberty for all, paleolibertarians have embraced the confederate cause. To get an idea of what that means, let's go to the League of the South's Michael Hill on the Lott controversy:

14. And here we go, all you Confederate Southrons-Slavery is an institution ordained of God and regulated by His Word! It is not therefore “evil!”

Mr. Hill also informs readers that

"2. Sodomy is an abomination to God!" (And a hell of a lot of fun. - UO]

"6. Sex outside of marriage is the sin of fornication!" (So, to be on the safe side, Mr. Hill, go fuck yourself.)

"Whew! Now that we’re through shouting we can pause to reflect on just one more little factoid-your government here in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave is the biggest C[ultural] M[arxism] pusher of all. Go ahead, try and name just one of my Fourteen Points that Uncle Sambo doesn’t either legislate or otherwise tacitly support." ("Uncle Sambo?" Go fuck yourself twice, okay?)

Short. Also Sweet. - From Franklin Harris:

RE: Lott. It's very simple. If all he means by praising the Dixiecrats is that we would be better off today if we had true federalism, an apology isn't necessary. If he means anything else, an apology isn't sufficient.

Flushing the System of Trent Lott stuff is what I plan to do for the rest of the night. Bear with me, please. It'll be over soon. (Unless I get word of a link between Trent Lott and Jamaat al-Fuqra . . . )

The Comfort of Familiar Things - Someone named Kevin Walker of something called the Claremont Institute keeps sending bloggers invitations to link to whatever chin-puller they've most recently posted on their (non-blog) site. I've seen enough of them now to be able to say definitively that if you enjoy utter rehashes of current center-right conventional wisdom, and are averse to either original thought or fresh perspectives on familiar thought, the Claremont Institute is for you. Here's a piece on Republicans and health-care politics that may be the archetypal Claremont article.

Note to the Claremont Institute, not that they are likely to see it: I've done what I can for you, fellas. From here on it's up to you.

A Fanboy's Notes - RGB Bill Dowling writes about Marvel's 80s-era gay-free cosmology:

You know, I heard about that policy as well (it was attributed specifically to Jim Shooter, then editor-in-chief) and actually at the time found it to be intellectually consistent and appealing. It struck me that it was particularly a good idea not to have homosexual Mutants (like Northstar).

My reasoning was that Mutants are essentially homosexuals in Marvel. They are discriminated against, have laws passed against them for performing acts natural to them, and people cringe in fear that even their children might be one. Marvel is almost ham-handed in the way they present the Mutants as Minority in their comics, but the way it's handled is clearly more analogous to homosexuals than to races. No one ever worries that when their son reaches puberty he'll become black.

So in a literary world in which you're constantly exploring the homosexual condition through analogy, it doesn't make sense to then have a limited subset of those analogues actually be homosexuals.

My first reaction is: almost ham-handed? But that's just me. More than all their other transgressions, it's the thudding use of "anti-mutant prejudice" that has done more to ruin my enjoyment of Marvel Comics than any of their other sins. (It's actually handled pretty well, though, in the first couple volumes of Ultimate X-Men.) Among other things, isn't it absurd that the vox pop can tell the mutant supers from the non-mutant supers? And isn't the pseudo-science Marvel explains mutants with somehow more absurd than the pseudo-science it uses to explain most of its non-mutant characters? (A mutant gene, common to all mutants or something like that.)

Bill's thesis is intriguing, though, and I might even be tempted to place it above my own - "anti-mutant prejudice" actually stands in for the adolescent persecution complex and thus a narcissistic treat for Marvel's (at the time) adolescent readership.

Department of Corrections - I misidentified the Matthew Hogan item that Radley Balko responded to in my piece of last night. Radley was actually criticising one entitled "Lott, Racism, and Neocon War Party Hypocrisy." In making this correction, one thing that jumped out at me was that Matthew ascribes bigotry and "early Third Reich style" to "some neocon and fellowtraveller rhetoric." (My emphasis.) That's not the same as saying all hawks, even the ones on the expansive plan, are anti-arab/anti-muslim bigots. A key difference, I think.

My earlier concerns about the language used in some Stand Down articles stands. So does my admiration and respect for both writers.

Lott to Say - The Smoking Gun found what I couldn't - a copy of the 1948 Dixiecrat platform. The Smoking Gun rocks.

It's dispiriting to see so much talk of constitutionalism and individual liberty and opposition to enlarging the federal police power - all things that mean a great deal to me - so...befouled by their inclusion in this document, one whose fourth through sixth points make it clear that all those principles meant to them was the power to bring the full weight of state and local police power down on black chests. It's a theme, the contamination of your beliefs by odious people who hold a version of them, that I've had occasion to consider this weekend at length.

One thing alone cheers me up: their patent insincerity about constitutionalism and individual liberty and federal police power. Reading this document, you can be pretty sure that a Thurmond Administration would have enthusiastically swung the power of the federal government toward preserving segregation. You can imagine Thurmond directing J. Edgar Hoover to deal with "outside agitators," resegregating the army and passing latter-day "fugitive slave" laws to force states outside the region to support southern efforts to retard or reverse civil rights. (Viz. the Dred Scott decision, which, taken to its logical conclusions, would essentially have re-instituted slavery in the antebellum North.)

Spree Graphs - Iran Brown is the name of the thirteen-year-old boy whom Lee Malvo or John Muhammad shot in front of Bowie elementary school. He and his family met the press Thursday to talk about his ordeal. The Washington Post has two stories, both by Tamara Jones. See here and here. Oddest passage:

Iran glanced up at his mother for permission to answer a reporter's question about whether he felt angry about what had happened to him, but his mother shook her head no, and the teenager fielded a question instead about what he wants out of life.

Iran's a pretty nice story, though not without continued suffering:

Because his shattered spleen had to be removed, Iran will have to take penicillin every day for at least two years to offset the danger of bacterial infection, [Doctor] Eichelberger said. That risk decreases as patients age, he explained.

Meanwhile, Una James, mother of Lee Malvo, is back in Jamaica as of yesterday. the Post says she "may be permitted to return to the United States to testify at his trial, according to U.S. immigration officials." Or she may make her way back to the United States well before then.

She does seem to be a pretty sound judge of character, according to this earlier story:

"Mr. Muhammad is the devil," James told her son's lead defense attorney, Michael S. Arif, during a four-hour conversation Wednesday at a detention center in Bellingham, Wash.

That story also has some useful new information about the timeline of the trio's travels.

According to the order, James admitted paying $5,500 to Muhammad, an acquaintance from their previous home in Antigua, to provide her and her son with fake identification and airline tickets for separate journeys to the United States.

Una James arrived first, in June 1999, and sailed through the immigration inspection at the Miami airport, the document said. Several other accounts have placed her arrival date in 2000. The discrepancy could not be immediately clarified.

James applied for asylum, saying that she feared for her family's safety in Jamaica because her niece and nephew were victims of a politically motivated killing, the document says. But, it adds, "at some point she was told that Jamaicans are seldom granted asylum," and so she withdrew the application.

She paid a Florida man named Jeremiah Neal $2500 for a sham marriage. After the December 2001 arrest in Bellingham, Washington, where she went to pry her son from the clutches of John Muhammad, she delayed deportation proceedings by filing a false claim that her marriage to Neal had ended because of abuse.

Her immigration hearings were delayed while authorities examined that petition. Last month, James withdrew it.

"She conceded that most of the information she provided . . . regarding Neal's violent abusive treatment of her was untrue. In fact, [his] only mistreatment consisted of extorting money from her by threatening to turn her in to INS, and occasional verbal abuse," the document said.

Note: That's still not a nice way to treat someone.

In fiscal news, Northern Virginia counties are seeking reimbursement from the state and federal governments for the cost of the investigation and trial prep.

Gov. Mark R. Warner (D) said he had asked the state's congressional delegation to try to recoup from the federal government all or part of the $3 million in state money spent during the investigation.

The Post also has a useful summary of what is known of Muhammad and Malvo's pre-October movements. There's not a ton of new information in it and it settles few of the unresolved questions:

1. We still can't say whether Muhammad and Malvo shot Jerry Taylor in Tucson in March 2002.

2. We still don't know how Muhammad found out his wife was living in Clinton, Maryland, or even for certain that he did.

3. We still don't know if there was a purpose to the late September "return trip" to Baton Rouge, the one financed by liquor store robbery/murders, or if Muhammad met any of his "about thirty cousins" in the area on that trip.

4. There's no analysis of any possible political component to Muhammad and Malvo's motives.

No War War - A disagreement flared over the weekend between two of the starboard-side contributors to Stand Down, aka No War Blog. Radley Balko objected to the language and inferrals in a post by Matthew Hogan. I admire both writers a great deal. I don't think Matthew's item was as egregious as Radley did, or that it implies as much ethnoreligious hatred on the part of the hawks as Radley seemed to think. I agree with most of Matthew's thesis about the twinning of the forces of contempt and pity. But I do think Matthew resorts to some jargon (e.g. "the War Party") that doesn't really further the stated mission of Stand Down. Stand Down is supposed to be the place where we work to convince Iraq War skeptics. I don't think Matthew's language is maximally tuned to that end in the piece in question.