Like Making Candles Out of Ear Wax? - I don't know if trying to find a home for libertarians in the Democratic Party is really like those radio commercials for home insulation where the tale of some amusing eccentric precedes the tagline "Think that's a waste of energy?" but it might be. I promised myself after last week's reassessment that I'd write a "Not Abandoning Libertarianism" item, the upshot of which is this:

I oppose both torture and high marginal tax rates. But that doesn't mean I abominate them both in the same degree. Forced to choose between a Party that favors torture and opposes high marginal tax rates, and a Party that opposes torture and favors high marginal tax rates, I'll take the latter, thank you. (And hope that the former wins the occasional tax rate battle.) I am speaking synechdotally here. I am not sure, however, that by the time the Democratic Party gets done reassessing the Lessons of Campaign 2004 that that will be the choice on offer. So I'm in wait and see mode.

In the meantime, there's a blog of, by and for Libertarians - excuse me! libertarians - trying to work within the Democratic Party, and there's the Democratic Freedom Caucus, and maybe it's roomate too. I kid! Check them out.

(Via Where HipHop and Libertarianism Meet.)

Sentence First . . . - I followed the Peterson trial just enough to know that I agree with John Cole's take.

Fallujah Twice - It's only to be expected that the various sets of numbers floating around about the Fallujah battle don't add up. Fog of war. AFP/Xinhuanet report that Iraqi national security advisor Qassim Dawood says "more than 1,000" rebels have been killed and about 200 detained. Meanwhile, Ryan Scarborough in the Washington Times quotes US officials who suspect that there may have been fewer than 1,000 rebels in the city at the time the attack began. The other day Sheikh al-Janabi was probably dead. As of today he has probably escaped. The city is "completely occupied" but not "completely subdued." I believe it may contain a cat who is half dead.

Meanwhile, AP reports that

Hundreds of men trying to flee the assault on Fallujah have been turned back by U.S. troops following orders to allow only women, children and the elderly to leave.

The military says it has received reports warning that insurgents will drop their weapons and mingle with refugees to avoid being killed or captured by advancing American troops.

I take their point. But just how they plan to solve the problem is under-explained:

Army Col. Michael Formica, who leads forces isolating Fallujah, admits the rule sounds "callous." But he insists it's is key to the mission's success.

"Tell them 'Stay in your houses, stay away from windows and stay off the roof and you'll live through Fallujah,'" Formica, of the 1st Cavalry Division's 2nd Brigade, told his battalion commanders in a radio conference call Wednesday night.

But if that works for innocent men, isn't it too an option for the insurgents? Slip away from their positions, drop their weapons, stay away from windows and appear as much a civilian as any unarmed man trying to walk past a checkpoint. The Army hasn't solved the problem of distinguishing combatants from civilian men, IF it intends to let any men currently in Fallujah survive. It has simply made it less likely that any noncombatant men who made it as far as the checkpoint will live through the weekend.

If the US intends to imprison all surviving males, or detain and vet them (for however long), it could simply start by detaining every man who comes to a checkpoint, rather than sending them back into the maw. Keep in mind that any genuine anti-American male sent back into the city becomes an immediate incremental increase in danger to American soldiers and marines. He can take up a gun again and shoot someone. We'll leave aside the possibility that a noncombatant male sent back into the city becomes radicalized and, pending the survival promised by Colonel Formica, joins the resistance himself, becoming a danger to American troops down the line. That's fuzzy, wooly-headed dove talk, and it presumes that any men live at all.

Once the battle ends, military officials say all surviving military-age men can expect to be tested for explosive residue, catalogued, checked against insurgent databases and interrogated about ties with the guerrillas.

None of which requires sending them back into the city. The best possible construction to put on the checkpoint policy is elusive.

Postscript: By using the term "insurgents" in this and other items, I am, according to Tex, "participat[ing] in the Orwellian propaganda of the Bush administration." I thought you should know.

Imitation Tech Blog Item - Upgraded to Firefox 1.0 from 0.8 finally. Hurm. Extensions I lived by (RSS Panel and Google Toolbar) haven't been upgraded to work with 1.0 yet. The available newsreader extension, Habari Xenu, doesn't have a fetch command that I can find and won't even sort my titles alphabetically. Weirdly, if I click on a bookmark from the bookmarks menu, nothing happens. This last may have something to do with having the betas installed on my machine, though the FAQ stated that so long as I disabled old extensions and exited completely before installing 1.0, I shouldn't have any problem. Also, another little thing that makes it just that much more annoying to use. If you clicked inside the address field of the beta toolbar once, it highlighted the entire URL. That was nice because then you could just type over it. Click once in the address field for 1.0, and you place a cursor within the URL. You have to bother to highlight the entire address with the mouse to type over it. Bother.

Hand-Stitched Trackback - Flit, Matthew Yglesias, Alan Sullivan and Matt Welch have at this site, at least in passing.

Cut Out the Middleman - Teresa Nielsen Hayden hips readers to something really cool. Via eBay, westerners can prder new custom-made garments direct from tailors on the subcontinent. Higher margins for them and better deals for you. I imagine that this is just the beginning of the kinds of direct trade opportunities that will be possible via eBay and other online outlets. She offers a report card on three vendors and explains how to find them using eBay's search function.

Blah Blah Blah - Am I required by blogger law to say something about Yasser Arafat? Okay, fuck Yasser Arafat. He got the chance to make the same jump from violent revolutionary to statesman that Nelson Mandela and other erstwhile terrorists took, and he never quite got up the nerve. I realize the Israelis dealt the Palestinian Authority cards from a stacked deck. But Arafat was too interested in feathering his own nest and hewing to the path of least resistance to lead. He gained an incredible opportunity through what I consider to be despicable means. "He cared more about his status than his people" should go on his monument in the West Bank.

Imperial Habeas - Michael "Anonymous" Scheuer has slipped free the surly bonds of the CIA bureaucracy and will be speaking freely, I learn from Justin Logan. Fireworks are promised. It's surely a case of getting out while the getting's good, and I expect to read very soon on every single hawkish blog in existence that Scheuer's personal shortcomings turn out to have been directly responsible for the success of the September 2001 atrocities. Still, good times. Okay, not good good times. But you know.

PG Night Continues at Unqualified Offerings - Get a load of the graphic on the front page of the DC Hashing website. No, I had no idea what "hashing" is until I followed a link to a Primer on the topic. Short version: a bunch of people chase one other person. Then they drink.

Maybe they don't always wait on the drinking. If this sounds like your idea of a good time, find a hashing organization near you. Cause if you just start drinking and chasing random people, there'll be trouble.

(Thanks to Courtney Knapp for the tip.)

Smack My Country Officer Up - This World Bank PDF contains the phrase "pimp training" but it's apparently not as bad as it sounds. Kidding aside, there's a genuine ethical dilemma in the concept, which is whether it's worth working with a criminal and frequently predatory class of men if it will help reduce the spread of sexually-transmitted diseases. I don't like pimps. I believe they exist only where man and women who engage in sex work are put outside the law, either by statute or by the less formal disregard of courts which refuse to enforce their contracts. There's an argument to be made that public health officers can't afford to wait around for societies to legalize prostitution while the fight the spread of HIV, but I suspect close commerce with pimps would tend to give health professionals that icky feeling. Maybe that's why the only World Bank-listed pimp training test dates from 1996.

Fallujah Once, Shame on YOU - To the surprise of people who don't read this weblog

U.S. and Iraqi forces established control over more than 70 percent of Fallujah on Wednesday, U.S. commanders said, and troops described encountering only small pockets of resistance as they pushed through a city that they likened to a ghost town.

"It's a lot lighter than we expected," said Staff Sgt. Jimmy Amyett, 24, of the 1st Infantry Division's Fox Troop, 4th Cavalry. When his unit first moved into Fallujah, he said, "we thought the city would explode on us."

reports the Washington Post today. Well, I told you so.

But I wonder if I got something wrong too. My suspicion last week was that most guerrillas were withdrawing from Fallujah in advance of a heavily hyped assault. A better question is, were they all there in the first place? Was Fallujah really the geographical nerve center and quartermaster's store of the insurgency, packed to the gills with foreign and Iraqi fighters, like we've been reading all these months? Or was Fallujah just another trouble spot that got hyped into Death Star status by the media and the military? If so, were the brass and Washington believing bad intelligence, or were they consciously fostering an anti-insurgency of symbolism? That is, was Fallujah another in a long line of Things But For Which Everything Would Be Swell (Saddam, Sadr, Zarqawi, The Sunni Triangle)?

I can easily believe that the publicity organs of the government would try to reduce the public locus of their intractable problems to one Evil HQ. I can even believe that they'd put out advance warnings of Vietnam-level casualties ahead of time to make an easy victory look like a smashing triumph and great relief. But I can also believe that sincerely motivated leaders could be taken in by confirmation bias and poor information. There have been hints throughout the occupation that our intelligence on the resistance is as poor as our intelligence on pre-invasion Iraq itself. And I don't want to believe that Our Rulers would willingly incur the publicity costs of blasting the city to flinders for the triumph of a phony "offensive." I'm even still willing to believe that a lot of guerrillas really were in Fallujah but ducked out before the battle, as you'd expect. What I'm long past believing is that the so-called professionals have a great deal more insight into such topics than the rest of us.

Now I Understand - Mad Science explains Michael Ledeen:

While many of us in the reality-based community just assume that most problems within the Bush administration are caused by the bat-shit crazy things they do and say. Michael points out that there are some members of the administration that are not technically bat-shit crazy and therein lies the problem. The Bush administration is bogged down in a self imposed morass created by its continued tolerance of memberes who are "Bat-shit Crazy In Name Only" (Bat-shit CINOs for short).

But is Ledeen sincere, or is it simply that his Iranian Masters figure that even more bat-shit craziness from the Bush Administration maximizes their own power?

Hm. What if "Mad Science," with all of one blog post to his name, is ALSO working for the Iranians? Not that there's any proof, mind you, for either him/her OR Michael Ledeen. That's why internment is such a valuable national security tool. It gives us the time to make sure.

Squaring Accounts - Max Sawicky says the work experience to cry Nonsense! at suddenly popular claims that the red states are all tax sponges. And The Glittering Eye finds that even such numbers that are out there are inconclusive. Maybe liberal commentators will stop pissing off Ginger Stampley.

Oh. My. God. Just Oh. My. God. - Wait till the red states get a load of this. (Via . . . muttered the ogre. And after it's all over, spoil your fun here and here.)

I'm Too Sexy for my Foreign Policy - Sometimes you've just got to let the throbbing cock of benevolent hegemony slip free of the crotch-binding pants of sanity:

The important thing now, of course, is not simply to acknowledge past achievements, but to build upon them. This will require, among other things:

o The reduction in detail of Fallujah and other safe havens utilized by freedom's enemies in Iraq - a necessary precondition not only to holding elections there next year, but to the establishment of institutions essential to a functioning and stable democracy;

o Regime change - one way or another - in Iran and North Korea, the only hope for preventing these remaining "Axis of Evil" states from fully realizing their terrorist and nuclear ambitions;

o Providing the substantially increased resources needed to re-equip a transforming military and rebuild human-intelligence capabilities (minus, if at all possible, the sorts of intelligence "reforms" contemplated pre-election that would make matters worse on this and other scores) while we fight World War IV;

o Providing, to the fullest extent possible, for the protection of our homeland - including the adoption of sensible policies on securing our borders and contending with illegal aliens, and by deploying effective missile defenses at sea and in space, as well as ashore;

o Keeping faith with Israel, whose destruction remains a priority for the same people who want to destroy us (and for the same reasons - i.e., our shared, "moral values") - especially in the face of Yasser Arafat's demise and the inevitable, post-election pressure to "solve" the Mideast problem by forcing the Israelis to abandon defensible boundaries;

o Contending with the underlying dynamic that made France and Germany so problematic in the first term: namely, their willingness to make common cause with our enemies for profit, and their desire to employ a united Europe and its new constitution - as well as other international institutions and mechanisms - to thwart the expansion and application of American power where deemed necessary by Washington;

o Adapting appropriate strategies for contending with China's increasingly fascistic trade and military policies, Vladimir Putin's accelerating authoritarianism at home and aggressiveness toward the former Soviet republics, the worldwide spread of Islamofascism, and the emergence of a number of aggressively anti-American regimes in Latin America.

These items do not represent some sort of neocon "imperialist" game plan.

Good thing he told us! That's Frank Gaffney, ladies and gentlemen. He'll be here all - four years. Shit.

Fun with Exit Polls - Mindles H. Dreck has an interesting item about confirmation bias in reading the election returns, and it's true enough, but it goes further, I think, than he suggests. Not just bitter Democrats but evangelical poobahs are convinced that the white conservative Christian vote put Bush over the top last Tuesday. Warbloggers are convinced it was the War on Terra, since if you add the "terrorism" and "Iraq" segments of the "most crucial issue" segments of the exit polls you get the single biggest bloc of votes for grabs, or maybe that strikes them as the crucial fact because they're warbloggers. I myself e-mailed Alex Knapp Saturday night with a good-natured "I just about have you!" after doing some easy math on the Ohio and Pennsylvania exit polls. Then I looked at Florida and it argued against my own thesis. (Briefly, Kerry lost Ohio and won Pennsylvania. The percentage of voters naming Terrorism and Iraq their top issue was higher in Pennsylvania than in Ohio. Guess what was lower. Yup: Moral Values. But then Florida has Terrorism/Iraq at 41% and Values in between Ohio and PA and Bush wins it. So it's a bit of a muddle.)

Meanwhile, Mrs. Offering is mad at me because I'm not giving Business enough credit. The Prosperity Project helped employers convey their views of which candidates were "pro-business" at both state and national levels. Industry groups are anxious not to get cheated out of credit (login: bugmenot69/Beranek) for their own get-out-the-vote efforts. The reason I am in dutch is that while I see some impressive inputs by business - the Prosperity Project has stats on the number of webpages viewed and absentee ballots requested and so on - I haven't seen any solid proof of outputs. Secret ballots being what they are, about all we have to go on are exit polls, and the exit polls indicate that if you combine the "Economy/Jobs" voters with the "Taxes" voters, Kerry wins those categories handily.

It's indisputible that the biggest change in exit poll categories from 2000 is the jump from a "World Affairs" most-crucial-issue score of 12% to a 2004 Iraq/Terror score of 34%. What originally followed was a lengthy excursion into comparative arithmetic, but I've sinec realized I need to check a key assumption behind it first, so we'll belay that for now. Instead, I'll suggest just a peak into the Abyss. The list of seven (the Top Seven?) Most Crucial Issues changed subatantially between 2000 and 2004. And a lot more people came out to vote. At the Presidential level, the result was . . . not much change. All of three (?) states ended up flipping between Republican and Democratic candidate. 9/11 Changed Everything - except for the other 47 states. It may be that we're looking at things from the wrong end. Maybe people don't decide to vote Republican because of Terrorism, Taxes or Moral Values, and don't decide to vote Democrat because of Iraq, Jobs or Education. Maybe people decide to declare a concern about Terrorism or Taxes or Moral Values because they're Republicans, and likewise for Democrats and Iraq, Jobs and Education. The game changes but not the teams.

More Anon.