Party Blogging - Went to a cool housewarming party at Justin Logan's new, and freshly-renovated, apartment in Columbia Heights last night with a Cato-centric crowd. Had a great time. Gene Healy talked about his martial art of choice, Krav Maga, the Israeli self-defense discipline. From Orange belt on up, apparently, it's all about defending yourself from people with knives and guns. (Gene: "They tell you, if someone points a gun at you and says 'Give me your wallet," give them your wallet. It's only when they say 'Get in the trunk' that you're supposed to go after them.") Brooke Oberwetter reprised her on-blog defense of outed Congressman Dan Dreier for Mrs. Offering, though allowing that Dreier's vote against gay adoptions was harder to justify than his others. She also told us all about her new puppy. That's right, Brooke "Le Mot Juste" Oberwetter, the razor-sharp, the incisive, the bracing wit and terror of softheadedness of all sorts, has a fuzzy little puppy. A beagle puppy. A kissy beagle puppy. Aw, as they say. This strikes me as a natural progression from taking in guest bloggers. (Seriously, as another dog person, I'm nothing but delighted.)

I met ex-Obernews guest blogger Adrienne Aldredge. It went like this:

Me: Adrienne Aldredge! Jim Henley.

Adrienne: How old are you?

Kids these days.

I should state right out that she had an excuse. As she explained, being a young libertarian (she is fifteen and a ha - no, I kid! she is 21) a lot of her college fellows tell her she just believes the sorts of things she does because "You're young and naive." And here was I, someone who believes the things she does and is decidedly NOT . . . young.

Julian Sanchez held forth in defense of Kinsey's sexuality spectrum, to a certain amount of skepticism from, well, me. It became clear to me that we were each generalizing our own limited (in our separate ways) experience into articles of faith.

Will Wilkinson was there, which occasioned much discussion of the Max Borders kerfuffle. And I had a great time discussing health, fitness and sports with Courtney Knapp.

That About Sums It Up - Chad Orzel speaks dog, and has translated a new History of the Past Couple of Years.

Bastards! BASTARDS! - So after all the fitness blogging last year and all the running this year, I get my blood tests back, and I've dropped my LDL cholesterol from 152 to 96 in a year and a half - and Science goes and drops the recommended ceiling from 99 to 70. Those rotten sons of bitches! My doctor wants to start me on a statin. I realize this is not in itself a terrible thing, but I'm a man, dammit. We cheat on hearing tests. We're competitive to a fault. And this means I "lost" my !#^%$#@$ blood test game!

UPDATE: Rereading the NYT article, I think my GP is cracked - the 70 ceiling is for people in the highest risk category, which is folks who have established heart disease AND another risk factor. I have one risk factor (hypertension), but no existing heart disease. So I win!

Now Playing - FInally picked up The Delivery Man today, a good two days after it became available. Ah, age. It makes us slow and lazy. I put a fair amount of effort into trying to like his previous rock album, When I Was Cruel, but ultimately it didn't take. Liking this one - I'm in mid-first listen - is taking no effort at all.

This is Costello's Americana album, recorded in Mississippi with the his road band, the Imposters, plus duets by Lucinda Williams (one song) and Emmylou Harris (three). It's a demi-quasi-deliberately-subverted concept album. Several of the songs are part of a fractured, out-of-order and by no means crucial to enjoying the record narrative about a delivery man in a small southern town who makes all the ladies' hearts go pitter-pat, and who, many years ago, killed a childhood friend.

My favorite two Costello albums of the last dozen years have been the art song cycle with the string quartet (The Juliet Letters) and the orchestral pop collaboration with Burt Bacharach (Painted from Memory). After Cruel, I half decided that Costello should just stop making the occasional rock CD on the grounds that he'd lost his feel for it. If so, he got it back.

This is less a review than a first-listen play-by-play. The album alternates rockers and ballads. I'm not wild about the first two songs, "Button my Lip" and "Country Darkness." The latter is too . . . English in its instrumentation. "Lip" has a lot of energy, but I've already forgotten how it goes.

Starting with track three, however, this is almost nonstop joy. "Story in Your Voice" is the duet with Lucinda Williams. Strong tune, steady beat, soaring vocal lines and Williams growls and snarls her way through it with gusto. There's some controversy on Costello-L about how well their voices mesh. To me, they fall safely into ragged but right territory. "EIther Side of the Same Town" is soul-inflected country music like they make in the Mississippi Valley. Bassist Davey Faragher contributes a wonderful harmony vocal. Since Elvis has had only himself (multi-tracked) as a backup singer for most of his career, hearing a second voice is a novelty. A good one too.

"Bedlam" is the album's masterpiece - current events as a rapid-fire series of curveball lyrics fired at "Subterranean Homesick Blues" pace. The next semi-clunker doesn't come until track 8, "Nothing Clings Like Ivy." This is a real country ballad, and the first appearance of Emmylou Harris. It's a minimalist melody and . . . leisurely rhythm scoring spare lyrics. It didn't leave much of an impression on first listen. Better is "Heart-Shaped Bruise" two tracks later, which is also a country ballad featuring Emmylou Harris, but a more engaging song.

The penultimate song is "The Judgment," which Costello wrote for Solomon Burke. This version is, to my mind, ruined by Steve Nieve's overly obtrusive upright piano. Hardcore Costello fandom divides into pro-Steve and anti-Steve factions and I'm often in the anti camp. This song won't make me budge.

The closer is "The Scarlet Tide." Alison Krauss sang the version on the soundtrack to the Cold Mountain movie. This is another spare song, but a damn fine one. This rendition is Elvis and Emmylou singing along with a ukelele. The chorus:

We'll rise above the scarlet tide That trickles down the mountain And separates the widow from the bride

The "scarlet tide" is war of course, but it's not hard to take it to be time itself, the looming shadow over so much of Costello's "mature" work. I have long thought that, at least since the early 1990s, Costello had become (semi) popular music's Philip Larkin. The implacable clock and the imponderable beyond it haunt most of his 90s work, from "Couldn't Call It Unexpected #4" on Mighty Like a Rose through most of The Juliet Letters to the most compelling parts of the uneven lapsed-Catholic album, All This Useless Beauty. In the Bacharach collaboration Painted from Memory, Death takes a holiday - only the Lesser Abyss within the human heart troubles that record. The Delivery Man is a country record and a soul record. Those are genres with some deep shadows in them, unless you go out of your way to avoid certain hollows and swamps, as contemporary radio country does assiduously. It's good territory for Costello. I started my second listen before I even got to this paragraph.

More from the Party of Limited Government - Republican candidate for the Senate in MarylandIllinois Alan Keyes does not like polls, as you might imagine given his numbers. And he knows just what to do about them:

"They (polls) are manipulative and degrading and damaging to our political system, and they should not be allowed when it comes to the actual time frame in which people are making up their minds," Keyes said during a meeting with The Pantagraph's editorial board

Side issue: Is "The Pantagraph" the coolest newspaper name ever? Yes. Without Question.

Anyway, Keyes wants to ban polls; George Bush wants to get rid of all that unregulated political speech and John McCain can barely contain his fury that the FEC restricts itself to enforcing the stupid law he authored rather than the stupider law he wishes he'd thought up. He won't be happy until everyone who ever tried to run a political ad is in a tiger cage somewhere.

I see a pattern.

Let's Think About Something Else Instead - Drezner has an item on The Neocon Split Over George W. Bush.

A few weeks ago I was talking with someone far more plugged into Washington than myself. We were chatting about the neoconservatives and my breakfast partner raised an important distinction -- that one had to distinguish between the neocons who supported John McCain in 2000 (Robert Kagan, Bill Kristol) and the neocons who supported George W. Bush in 2000 (Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle). Both groups had the same overarching policy goals, but there was one important difference -- the McCain supporters understood that democracy promotion in the Middle East and elsewhere was not something that could be done on the cheap. In the case of Iraq, for example, the McCain neocons believed that statebuilding in Iraq would require a heavy force, while the Bush supporters bought into Rumsfeld's idea that shock, awe, and a light force could do the trick.

This split has persisted in the wake of what's happened in Iraq. However, there's now a deeper question that could really split the neocons -- is the Bush administration really interrested in democracy promotion at all?

My immediate, cynical reaction was, That lineup makes perfect sense: on one side you've got the people who actually have to implement policy in the real world; on the other, people who only have to bloviate about it in print.

But that cut a little close to home so I decided to find other stuff to read instead.

On the Radar - The Kerry speech on Iraq. At a first skim, it's best at harmonizing Kerry's vote for the Use of Farce resolution in Fall 2002 with his evolving criticisms of what the Bush Administration did afterward. I still hold Kerry's vote against him. You had to be wilfully naive by October 2002 to imagine that you were voting for anything other than war at a time of the Administration's choosing.

But he could be worse. He could be - the incumbent. Tim Cavanaugh's cockeyed optimism notwithstanding, I think the contemporary Republican Party is institutionally biased toward war. It's the closest thing to a consistent electoral winner the Party has. During the 1990s one facet of the argument of the "national greatness" conservatives was that the Republican Party had lost a winning issue with the end of the Cold War and needed to find a way to put "national security" front and center again. They were not so choosy about how they would manage this - new cold war with China? fear of "a resurgent Russia?" Confrontation with rogue states like Iraq? All of the above? Rotate according to a schedule? Whatever was to hand. National "security" was boffo in the 2002 midterms and may well put the President back in office a few weeks from now. A party doesn't turn its back on a winning strategy no matter how strong the incumbent's manana feeling. (I am also raining on Diana's parade here. And she was just trying to cheer me up.)

Besides, America's armed forces are second to none, which is why they're so useful to hide behind. If Bush's second term does suffer the usual run of scandal and discord Diana references, he'll have all the more incentive to keep the martial pot bubbling. Nothing new there. Look how much more military intervention the Clinton Administration undertook in its second edition compared to the first.

Nothing Gets Past Dave Intermittent. Or Eve Tushnet. Thanks, guys. I am indeed back and up to my old tricks. (Such as, announcing that I will soon blog about A and then blogging about B instead.)

It's hard, though. Frex, I was going to suggest that the Democrats may have proven themselves foolish in throwing over Howard Dean for John Kerry. Turns out, though, that Daniel Radosh already made the points I wanted to make a week ago.

The problem with picking someone solely because he is electable is that if it turns out (ahem) that he is not, what are you left with? I'm not saying Dean could have defeated Bush. Honesty, he probably couldn't (Edwards had a better shot). But you can be sure that right now we'd be having a real national debate about the issues, and that Howard Dean would be setting the terms of that debate.

I think this is exactly right. Dean was widely ridiculed for saying something that turned out to be perfectly true (the capture of Saddam Hussein has not made America safer). The fact that he said it when it wasn't popular might have stood him in good stead once it became obvious - foreign policy as character issue. Then there's the famous "Dean Scream." This strikes me as the sort of thing any competent politician would have been able to defuse with irony, given a couple of weeks to work with it. If Ross Perot could finesse "Crazy," Howard Dean could have turned the tables on the Scream. Perhaps in the end the odd sense of distance between Dean and his wife would have done him in - sad, since Mrs. Dr. Steinberg Dean was my favorite thing about his candidacy - there's something about a brainy, good-looking political wife with no interest in politics that gets my libertarian juices flowing. Not that you wanted to know that.

Hey, maybe it wouldn't have worked. But nominating Dean wouldn't have represented Democratic activists second-guessing themselves the way choosing John "Electable" Kerry did. Watch, now Kerry will win and I'll look stupid. (And what's worse, John Kerry will be President. About the only less appealing outcome I can imagine is if George Bush were President.) But even if he does win, let's admit it, this campaign season has sucked in ways a Bush-Dean matchup wouldn't have sucked.

NOW How Much Would You Pay? - The official unofficial scuttlebutt is that after we get through all this election bother and the Bush Administration has packed this Kerry Edwards guy back to the Senate, things will start hopping. The New York Times says American commanders "are preparing operations to open up rebel-held areas" between our election day (a formality) and Iraq's (a fantasy). (Via Matt.) Meanwhile there's more official unofficial scuttlebutt that we're planning a bigass attack on Iran's nuclear infrastructure, or at least the parts we can find and hit. Meanwhile Kevin Drum has been warning and warbloggers across the land have been hoping that "a vote for Bush is a vote for more wars." Iran? Syria? Sure.

A fair and balanced appraisal of the rumors out there requires one to acknowledge that while some aspects of the talk may be cynical manipulation of the base - reassuring Administration-friendly voters and elites - other parts may be sincere, genuine batshit craziness.

Let me put it this way: how much would you like to pay for gas? At a very rough estimate, our ingenious plan to stabilize the world's major oil-producing region has taken about a billion barrels a day out of the supply chain (amortizing the various, continuing! losses of production or export to war, reconstruction follies and sabotage). We're paying about a quarter per gallon more for gas in this country than in the summer before Operation Rocky Freedom.

So go ahead. Attack Iran! Bomb the shit out of wherever you think the nukes are, or just take the place over with whatever troops you can scrape together. You think you have sabotage in Southern Iraq to worry about now? Just wait until our pals the Iraqi Shiites see American bombs falling on their big Persian brothers. (The compulsively readable one makes this point himself.) Now add in sabotage in Iran, sabotage in any oil patch where there's a sizable contingent of Shiite guest workers. Hell, maybe we get another OPEC boycott out of the deal. We'll just take over the Saudi oil fields then! That'll show the bastards! Yes. Sure. And we've got no ability whatsoever to run the bulk of the Middle East's oil production ourselves, by command - to secure the wells, the pipes, the ports; to get people to show up to work and put in an honest day's labor or to coordinate bringing in new workers who will. We cannot even reliably pump the oil out of the one country we have taken over so far. On the bright side, further Middle Eastern wars in the short term may just bring this whole benevolent hegemony business crashing down in a hurry, once we can't fuel it. On the downside, it would really suck to be us. Surely there are more pleasant ways to get my humbler America.

As for the drive to retake rebel-held areas of Iraq, first, I'm sorry, back before the war - hell, back last summer - November even - which blog would give you more of an impression that, a year and a half after the commencement of Operation Rocky Freedom, there might be "rebel-held areas of Iraq," this one here, or those big strategic thinker blogs like Winds of Change?

Sorry. Hardly back from hiatus and siezed by an Advantage: Whoever fit. You deserve better for your patience. Anyway, here's a short history of the future in which we launch our drive to retake "rebel-held areas of Iraq" right after the November elections.

Tacitus writes something rueful but stirring, full of sorrow that this necessary step was so long delayed but grimly reassured that at last the country is meeting its responsibilities. Even I am moved, briefly. Dan Darling posts an impressive-looking order of battle followed by vatic pronouncements about the certain doom facing the enemy. Someone named Trent Telenko appends 50 comments about how we "Jacksonians" are going to end up having to kill all the Muslims anyway, not that the idea gives him any pleasure, you understand. The newspapers all report that military spokespeople announce that hundreds/thousands of insurgents/terrorists/guerrillas/anti-Iraqi forces/deadenders/rebels have been killed. Some newspapers pick the wrong term from the list of options in an article or two and Glenn Reynolds links to 50 bloggers expressing their outrage. The Command Post goes into overdrive, and does an excellent job of posting breaking news. Foreign news sources have the bad taste to show dead bodies, proving that they are not patriotic Americans at all. Somebody stops to add up the Fermi numbers of enemy casualties and compares it to public estimates of the size of the resistance back in Fall 2003. This person does not get linked by Glenn Reynolds. Mark Steyn reprints his annual column about how the press is ignoring the good news from Iraq. Military spokespeople announce that they believe they might be very close to capturing or killing someone who may be either Abu Zarqawi or a popular female impersonator come to Anbar province to perform at an anniversary party in the desert. Most importantly, military spokespeople announce that we're winning, and soon thereafter, that we've won. Iraqi police and army units are bused into recaptured towns with great fanfare. We actually capture or kill Abu Zarqawi. Cries of triumph ring from NRO to Little Green Footballs.

And then it unravels over the next few weeks and months, on schedule. The inside pages of the nation's newspapers note that some of those Iraqi police and army units aren't showing up for work every day, and a few of them may, may you understand, be supplying weapons to the rebels. Oh yeah. It turns out there are still rebels out there. Some IEDs go off. A few suicide bombs. A brief quiet becomes decidedly less so. Some version of an election is held, at the end of which various personages pronounce themselves unsatisfied. None of these people work in the White House. It dawns that arrangements to turn security over to "Iraqi army and police units" amount to reestablishing No-Go zones. Military spokespeople caution reporters that there may be a spike in violence in the runup to the inauguration of the new government since "that's what the insurgents most fear." Hawks darkly mutter that they'd have gotten away with it too, if not for those treasonous doves.

Then the whole cycle starts again, because that's how hell works.

Aim? True. - From the Scotland on Sunday profile of Elvis Costello this morning:

"It's more against fear than it is against war. 'Cause it's the fear that allows the war to happen. And that idea is going through the record."

Tuesday!