Treasure Planet is the best movie of all time.

Chil'in' Again - Forget Thanksgiving. Wednesday, Unqualified Offerings could no longer fight the urge to make chili again, incorporating ideas from some of the reader e-mails on the subject. (See here if you don't remember, and scroll up for more.) UO's goal was to use much less spice this time, allowing the ingredients to shine. So:

2# chuck, ground for chili (coarse grind)

Not all supermarket meat counters package this, but you can ask the butcher to "chili-grind" a piece of chuck for you

2# red bell peppers
1.5# yellow onions (approx)

1 12oz. can beer
2 12oz. cans tomato paste

The Grant Gould variation! On reflection, two cans of tomato paste was more than was necessary. Next time I'll stick to one.

1/2tbsn kosher salt
1/2tbsn black pepper
1/2tbsn chili powder
1/2tbsn brown sugar
1 tspn cumin
1 tspn cayenne pepper
1 tspn white sugar

1. Brown and drain meat in a stock pot with a 1/4 cup water. (Gas on high.) While meat is browning, start chopping onions and peppers.
2. Return meat to pot. Reduce heat to low-medium. Add entire can of beer.
3. This is key! Underneath the crowns of the red peppers, clinging to the pulp, are seeds. Scrape the seeds into the pot! (Then discard the tops or save for "garbage soup.")
4. Stir in the chopped vegetables.
5. Stir in the tomato paste.
6. Add the spices.
7. Simmer. How long you simmer is a tradeoff among two values:

a) The penetration of the spices.
b) The texture of the vegetables.

I would, for instance, experiment with adding the onions early and the bell peppers late.
8. Serve and eat! Store the rest,

Results: Slightly modified Yum! As UO said above, in retrospect, one can of tomato paste would have been plenty. The chili still had plenty of kick to it, even with about a third as much spice as UO used earlier in the month. (A moderate amount of salt lays the tongue open to the other spices without overpowering them, and cayenne pepper will have its day. The beer surely plays its role here too, though you don't actually taste beer.)

Unqualified Offerings cannot stress enough how much you gain by using chili-grind beef over hamburger-grind. The only reason to make chili with hamburger rather than coarse-ground beef is if

Hamburger is all you have in the house, and
The roads are closed.

This was a lesson UO had forgotten. It will endeavor not to do so again.

Revolver is the name of an excellent essay on the Beatles and buying a handgun, on Seablogger. It's not every day you'll find the September 2001 massacres, beach bums and deer hunters in the same piece of writing.

Happy Thanksgiving to this site's US readers! Today is an excellent day to make a start on what Unqualified Offerings likes to call "garbage soup," a dish that UO guarantees is better than it sounds.

It's actually not a soup recipe as such, just a way of making sure you can always have stock if you need it. Get yourself a ziploc bag. Now you just put certain things in the ziploc bag that would otherwise go in the garbage disposal or the trash can: mushroom stem tips, the tops and bottoms of onions, the crowns of peppers - and bones. Seal the bag and stick it in the freezer. Next time maybe you're stringing beans; put the tips in the bag. Potato skins. Squash rinds. When you need some stock, simply dump the frozen contents of the bag into a pot and add water. Simmer as necessary. At the end of the process you have

stock
garbage that's really garbage now (discard or compost)

You can freeze whatever stock you don't need. In the meantime, start a new bag.

Disrecommended: corn cobs. But it's up to you.

(Yes, Unqualified Offerings got this idea from the Tightwad Gazette.)

Put Away Childish Things - Memo to the Backstreet Boys: If your youngest member is 22, you're not a boy band any more (Backstreet Boys sue label for $75M).

NEW YORK (AP) -- The Backstreet Boys have sued their record label for $75 million, saying the label has been courting their youngest star, snubbing the rest of them and delaying their chance to further cash in on their fame.

This has been your imitation The Minor Fall, The Major Lift post of the day.

In Through the Revolving Door - Quotable Talking Dog on another topic:

[T]he President named "Ten Most Evil Men of Twentieth CenturyTM" member Henry Kissinger as head of the commission to study the events surrounding the September 11th terror attacks. I have nothing to add. Which is ALSO what we can expect from this commission.

The Israeli Beat - Your Talking Dog has interesting musings about the current Israeli election campaign. First he considers whether Labour candidate Avram Mitzna's platform constitutes "appeasement":

Guess what? Israeli settlers shouldn't be in Gaza – it’s not in ISRAEL'S national interest to have them there. Strategically, they present a problem (seemingly recognized only by Amram Mitzna!) but from a moral authority perspective, they are a disaster. The same is true (less true, but mostly true) for much of the West Bank. While a unilateral pullout may be perceived as a victory for terrorists, it is ALSO a victory for Israel: a recognition that the "Greater Israel" concept for anything much larger than the '67 borders will always present a problem. A free, democratic, JEWISH STATE just cannot have millions of Arabs who don't want to be under its control.

But I have ALSO said this: Israel invested BILLIONS in the settlements -- this investment can be traded against the troublesome "right of return" once and for all, because that's what friends do. If the Palestinians refuse to make such a deal, any pullout should include physical destruction of the settlements and scorched earth -- that's what you do for enemies.

Obviously, Unqualified Offerings has to like Avram Mitzna, since he's running on UO's platform. So it looks like Mitzna can count on both this website and the Talking Dog. Now if he can just bring some actual Israeli voters into the tent he'll be cooking with gas.

TD's coverage continues here. It looks like his will be a good site to follow the campaign from.

Canard Lines - Contrary to what the folks at Giants and Dwarfs seem to argue, it is not necessarily antisemitic to speculate on what Israeli intelligence may have known in advance about the attacks on the World Trade Center. (One more time: Governments do creepy things sometimes; Intelligence agencies do creepy things sometimes; Israel has a government; Israel has intelligence agencies.)

"4,000 Jews didn't show up for work at the WTC on 9/11" = anti-semitic (implicates all Jews)
"1,200 Israelis didn't show up for work at the WTC on 9/11" = not necessarily antisemitic (implicates only Israeli citizens)

BUT, the latter claim, made here by David Graham Du Bois, is still stupid and wrong, and it's time to put it to rest. Not just by reflecting on how long 1,200 people can keep a secret, either. Giants and Dwarfs have troubled to compile names of actual Israeli victims of the World Trade Center attacks. This is a signal service. It's even worth memorizing them, so the next time someone says, "How come there were no Israelis killed in the World Trade Center, huh? Huh?" you can say, "What about Haggai Sheffi? Or Shai Levinhar? Or

Leon Lebor
Danny Lewin
Alona Abraham

None of which proves or disproves Israeli foreknowledge one way or the other. (Unqualified Offerings has addressed the question here, among other places. Cliffs Notes: The Israelis knew something and, according to several reports, issued non-specific warnings in the summer of 2001.) But "No Israelis Died on 9/11" is a canard and deserves to die.

A Fanboy's Notes: You Can't Make This Stuff Up Edition - Via Metastasis, this story of a costumed vigilante in New York City. Let Unqualified Offerings rephrase: this article about a costumed vigilante in New York City. From ABC News. There's an arch-villain too.

But while Terrifica has never addressed Fantastico directly, her alter-ego Sarah has. Sarah says she was seduced by Fantastico years ago.

However, Fantastico does not even remember Sarah and has no idea that she is Terrifica. He does remember Terrifica, though.

"While I don't know a Sarah, I do know Terrifica. She does exist, and we have crossed paths from time to time," he says.

"What? You mean he doesn't remember me?" Sarah asks, stunned. "You see, that's why Terrifica exists, that's why she's needed."

Unqualified Offerings further sayeth not.

What is the Opposite of a Peace Process - Superb article by Jim of Objectionable Content on the so-called "No Fly zones" in northern and southern Iraq - what they are not (mandated by the UN), what they don't do (protect Iraqi civilians) and what they do do ("What's the opposite of a peace process?" Jim asks). Jim documents that the US and Britain have repeatedly declined opportunities to use airpower to defend actual Kurds and Shi'ites, all while flying an average of 34,000 sorties a year since 1991. (Yes, Democrats, all through the Clinton years, too.) As Jim writes:

As hawks and doves debate the merits of a full-scale invasion of Iraq, it is easy to ignore the fact that we have been conducting a low-intensity war for more than a decade.

Then the Defense Department pronounces itself shocked, shocked that the Iraqi government has issued a series of anti-US statements during this period.

When you examine the record, it becomes clear that the no-fly zones have variously been intended to

o fulfill the "do something!" imperative after Bush I incited post-Gulf War rebellions in the North and South of Iraq that he then allowed Saddam to crush;

o humiliate Iraq by violating its sovereignty on a constant and casual basis, diminishing Saddam's standing with his own military and provoking a coup;

o attrit Iraq's defenses along possible future invasion routes (Bomb radar installations? Yes. Bomb ground units suppressing the locals? No.);

o provoke Iraq into responding either by attacking the airplanes themselves or something else, so its actions can be claimed as a casus belli when the time is ripe.

Your tax dollars at work, loyal reader. Just as a reminder, it would be "anti-American" to imagine that 34,000 sorties a year over an Arab country for more than a decade contributed to anti-American attitudes in the region. After all, it wouldn't bother you if, say, the Chinese bombed western Canada for ten years.

Jim concludes

Perle's comments [about inspections] simply reinforce what the no-fly zones have illustrated for years: the steps we are taking are meant not to avoid war but to make it inevitable.

We are victims of self-fulfilling policy.

Though the policy-makers themselves, of course, are not.

Department of Amplifications - Eve Tushnet says that Unqualified Offerings simply hasn't found a loud house concert yet - they exist regardless. It also occurred to me that while, in my original piece, I noted that the listener/reader/viewer could grow bitter at the realization that there is more work of merit out there than he or she could possibly encounter, I completely repressed the complementary frustration - that of the artist. Knowing that the world is full of poets or songwriters or sculptors who deserve attention just as much as you do sucks big time. The most popular psychological defense is denial. Then the problem becomes, from your perspective, that your work is rare and precious and has not been given its due because of flaws in the system.

The market is the popular villain here, but it needn't be. When I was actively writing and publishing poems, one of the reasons I was all for eliminating public funding for poetry was that I thought the money made it too easy for people. Also that it contributed to the country's main poetry problem, which is an acute oversupply.

Artists tend to be liberals and to abhor "supply side economics." Unless they're the suppliers! Public arts policy is premised entirely upon subventions to producers. Turns out that if you build it, very very few will come. That was my villain, anyway.

(What would you do, smart guy? Return us to the era of patronage. The occasional rich person with taste, however idiosyncratic, is worth a dozen featherbedding grants committees. John Quinn, si! NEA no!)

Blogstipation - Brother Gene slacked off a bit and now says that he's having trouble getting back into that blogging swing. Go to his site, post amusing comments, send him nice e-mails and perk him back up.

Kurds Away - Interesting story in the London Times about the situation of Syria's Kurds. No, Unqualified Offerings didn't know either:

Mr Omar is one of about 25,000 Kurds in Syria classified as maktoumeen — “unregistered”. His house and clothes shop are held in other people’s names because he cannot own property. He cannot travel abroad, his marriage is illegal under Syrian law and officially his four children do not exist.

Another 225,000 of Syria’s 1.7 million Kurds are categorised as “foreigners”, holding only a red identity card for domestic travel.

Things may actually be changing for the better, and hawks will enjoy the reason given by the Times:

But the prospect of war in neighbouring Iraq appears to have spurred the Syrian authorities to reassess their 40-year suppression of the Kurds’ identity. Damascus fears that any automony granted to northern Iraq’s Kurds after the removal of President Saddam Hussein could prompt their Syrian brethren to agitate for self-rule in their adjacent homeland of northeast Syria.

The apparent approach that Bashar al-Assad has hit on? Don't look now but it's - appeasement:

Syria’s youthful President al-Assad recently paid a rare visit to Hasake, the principal town in the area, in an apparent attempt to appease the disenfranchised Kurds.

“The message from the President is: ‘Yes, we will look into your problems, but don’t use this as a card to press for more,’ ” a Damascus-based analyst said.

The unregistered and "foreign" Kurds say that autonomy is not their concern. Citizenship is, as seen by this admittedly strange-sounding statement by Ahmad Barakat, of the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Progressive Party:

But in Syria, we just want our culture and freedom as Syrian nationals.

Our freedom as Syrian nationals. It really is a big world.

Here's another sentence you don't see every day:

Some restrictions were eased in 1970 when Hafez al-Assad, the former Syrian President, assumed power.

How about restoring our familiar picture of the world a bit, okay Mr. Times Man?

But despite the pastoral scene, residents say that the security presence remains powerful in Qamishly, as well as in other Kurdish-populated towns and villages. “We’re afraid to speak to people, afraid to speak in the streets. We’re always worried that someone is listening to us,” Mr Omar said.

Thank you. Sounds like Syria's Kurds are closer to the true experience of Syrian citizenship than they may yet be aware.

Meanwhile in Iraq, as my Stand Down colleague Harold Moss notes

Turkish officials are preparing to send troops up to 60 miles into northern Iraq on what they say is a mission to prevent an influx of refugees in the event that a war there sets off a mass movement toward Turkey's borders.

The plan, which is being circulated among top government officials, is giving rise to fears that it could be used as a cover for the Turkish military to snuff out any attempt by Iraqi Kurds to set up their own state if President Saddam Hussein falls from power.

Gee, do ya think? Pull quote is from this New York Times story. The Kurdish region of Iraq also has some lovely oil facilitiess that, under this plan, Turkish troops would be on top of.

Harold Moss appears to be one of Stand Down's liberal contributors. Thus he writes

Truth be told, the oppression of the Kurds has never been anything but a talking point for this or the last Bush, and the Kurds themselves only a tool of convenience to be dropped without a second thought.

This is not giving the President who came between the Bushes his due; for the truth is the Kurds were never more than a talking point for Bill Clinton either. Let's set the Wayback Machine for 1996. Our guide will be the US Committee for Refugees

Responding to the KDP invitation, Saddam Hussein's tanks surrounded the city of Erbil, the erstwhile "capital" of Kurdistan. His agents moved in, searching house to house, executing scores of political opponents on the spot, and taking hundreds back to Baghdad, presumably for the same fate, only more brutal and drawn out. President Clinton responded immediately by evacuating the last of the U.S. citizens administering Operation Provide Comfort in the north, bringing to an end the U.S. presence on the ground either for assistance or security. He then sent two salvos of cruise missiles to southern Iraq, a decidedly mixed message about his willingness to protect the Kurds of the north.

This was under the "safety umbrella" of the northen US no-fly zone. It's not as if Bill Clinton was squeamish about lobbing ordnance at foreigners either. By 1999, the US and Britain were bombing Iraq 100 days a year. He just didn't waste any ammo protecting the Kurds.

In 1998, two years after the US and Britain stood aside while Saddam's troops slaughtered the Kurds of Erbil, the New York Times reported that

The Administration also is accelerating efforts to help unite feuding Kurdish and other groups into a cohesive opposition.

Everyone knows the New York Times doesn't publish cartoons, so an illustration of Lucy with the football did not accompany the article.

Morning Murder Minute - Sad and at times infuriating story in the Tacoma News-Tribune about the aftermath of the Keenya Cook murder in Tacoma, Washington in February. Cook is suspected of being the first victim of John Muhammad and/or Lee Malvo, who later went on to bigger and worse things. The evidence connecting them to the murder is just good enough to be convincing outside of court and vague enough to be a likely loser in court. The Associated Press reports that Tacoma prosecutors may never file charges in the case:

Even if they believed they could prove the two sniper suspects killed a woman in Tacoma, prosecutors here might not file charges, a newspaper reported.
...
"Essentially, we're at the end of a line of half a dozen states who want a piece of them," Gerald Costello, chief criminal deputy in the Pierce County prosecutor's office, told The Seattle Times.

Meanwhile the Antigua Sun says local police have detained a Jamaican woman they believe to have obtained a fraudulent passport from John Muhammad's immigration ring.

Laura Parker of USA Today writes that "crime analysts say the enduring lesson from the 23-day hunt for the suspects could be law enforcement's continuing difficulties in using technology to quickly solve complex cases involving multiple agencies in different states."

If you're counting on the reward money, you may need to redo your personal finances:

And as the scope of the attacks grows to earlier shootings in other states, the task gets tougher for authorities deciding which tips were the big breaks and who deserves a payout.

"It's going to be very complex," said county spokeswoman Donna Bigler. "There were a number of tips from all across the country that came at different points during the investigation."

Experts say handing out large rewards like the sniper cash is often a difficult and time consuming task, because authorities usually can't pay until after cases make their way through the courts.

So says the Associated Press.

On the Why Am I Not Surprised front, nothing has come of "possible connections" between Muhammad and Malvo and Jamaat al-Fuqra. Somehow that Richard Reid angle still hasn't panned out either. For those keeping score at home, the third-hand report of a single county sheriff uninvolved with the sniper case is the only "evidence" linking Muhammad and al-Fuqra, still.

Beverly Taylor, widow of Tucson golf course victim Jerry Taylor, has announced a $13,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and indictment of her husband's killer. She believes Muhammad and Malvo killed her husband. There is good reason to think so. Muhammad and Malvo were in Arizona at the time visiting one of Muhammad's relatives. It fits their MO. Unfortunately, we don't have a gun. Muhammad and Malvo appear not to have stolen the famous Bushmaster until months after Taylor's murder. So if it was them, they used another weapon, and who knows where it might be.

The Old Order Changeth - Since its inception, this site has promised to cover "War, Peace, Freedom, Fish, More."

It has sucked at the fish part.

Unqualified Offerings has just been terrible as a fishing blog. (Partly this is because Unqualified Offerings is not much of a fisherman.) So what to do? The manly response would be for UO to rededicate itself to its self-chosen angling mission, preparing now to more fully chronicle the wonderful world of freshwater gamefishing come spring.

But that would be work.

So instead, Unqualified Offerings has changed its descriptor. It is now officially your website for War, Peace, Freedom, Food and More. Fishing is, for the time being, to be found among the "more." Unqualified Offerings reminds its readers that food has no beans in it.

Lyrics of the Day

Are you a convicted felon?
No.
Do you plan to be?
No.
What is the gun for?
To get me to Canada...

Brian Gundersdorf, "Albany" (We're About Nine)

Profusion - Last night Mrs. Offering forced this website to discover something of which it was hitherto completely ignorant: the "house concert" scene. A house concert is just what it sounds like - a concert in someone's house. This one was in the basement of a much nicer place than La Familia Offering lives in, someone's McLean colonial. Baskets upstairs and downstairs for the money (requested donation: $13 per person). Two acts, professional musicians, performing unmiked for about 30 people. (UO's fellow libertarians are running the take figures in their head right now. Don't forget to add the CD sales.)

The "opening act" was We're About Nine, a trio self-classified as "College/Indie/Lo-Fi, Rock, Folk" according to their website. The headliner, if the term is appropriate, was Eric Schwartz, a solo singer/songwriter with a proclivity for the (hilariously) scatalogical and satirical. (Try "Who Da Bitch Now," but before you do, know that Eric said he played it for Pete Seeger at a folk festival and Seeger supposedly said, "I wouldn't sing it.")

And it was good. Brian Gundersdorf, who writes all the songs for We're About Nine, has keen senses of both psychology and lyrical economy. Schwartz's songs were dynamic and striking. I don't mean, in either case, that they were promising. I'm not saying they "show potential." I'm saying that if you like Americana - what the Grammies prefer to call "Contemporary Folk" ("Country radio won't play it because some soccer mom might wreck the minivan") - you would like these songs.

It brought home a bittersweet truth: there is more merit in the world than any one of us are going to discover before we die. I now know about "Albany," but what haven't I heard? Who was in who else's basement last night performing songs I'd have admired?

House concerts presumably have real limitations. They're not going to work for thrash bands or electronica groups in most cases. Most neighbors would balk if you staged the Clash reunion in your rec room. They seem to tend toward small acoustic ensembles, duos and soloists, playing folk, country, jazz or chamber music. But add it to the rave scene and to the short-lived clubs that still, one hopes, spring up in condemned buildings (BBQ Iguana was a legendary DC venue) and DIY lives. Heck, forget the performers. I didn't know about house concerts themselves until last week. There are entire media out there to be discovered.

It's like weblogs. I almost missed Bin Gregory's item about John Walker Lindh I linked to over the weekend, but it was as good as anything anyone had to say on that sorry subject - I daresay I've found nothing better. But most people don't know it exists. There are comics I'd enjoy that I'll never come across, even if I read nothing but comics for the rest of my life. More poems that I'd like than I can read, more poets than I can know.

Whatever our culture is, it's not a wasteland. Even the crap is just the manure in which the good stuff grows. (Eric Schwartz did a hilarious number that grew out of Mademoiselle magazine and Whitney Houston, a soulful piano ballad called "I'm Shaving Off My Muff - For You.") But you'll never, ever pick all the blossoms, or even find them.

That could make one bitter.

(For more on House Concerts, see, well, houseconcerts.com, which has a venue finder. Moore Music is an active series local to the DC area. Unqualified Offerings hasn't been there yet, but they too will be hosting We're About Nine, on December 9th. The Moore's have an informative "About" page. It led me to the New York Times article from 1999.)

You're Not from Texas in most cases, but Michael Croft is, and he weighs in on the question of chili and beans on Ones and Zeros. Lengthy, interesting, "Texas Pride" kind of post by a liberal Texan. Excerpt:

My wife tells a story about her father’s dining experience in London which I think is relevant to this question. Lonely for the taste of home while in England, he decided to dine at an eatery advertising ‘Tex-Mex food’. He started by ordering nachos, which should have been perfectly safe. They quartered a tortilla, covered it with mozarella cheese, and added black olives to the top.

Ginger’s father’s comment: “That’s not a nacho, that’s a god-damned pizza.”

His item includes the lyrics to "If You Know Beans About Chili You Know That Chili Has No Beans," and an analogy involving the number of legs on a dog. No recipes, though.

Bradley Ralko of the Agitator e-mails to disagree, and, as one should expect in these circumstances, to brag on his own cooking:

I've been told many times over by "serious" Texas chili aficionados that my sweet-with-a-spicy-kick Cincinnati-style chili (to be eaten with peanut butter sandwiches, cut diagonally, and dunked therein), is so blasphemous that it shouldn't even be called chili. It has three varieties of bean, and is loaded with sweeteners (honey, ginger, cinnamon). Still, they almost inevitably have another bowl.

And I'm 7-1 in international competition.

My lone defeat came at the Cato Institute chili cookoff/happy hour last spring.

The embarrassing part was that I came in second to....a British guy. Who had never made chili before. And who got his recipe off the Internet.

Unqualified Offerings affirms much of the Cincinnati tradition, though even there, it believes, beans are properly an optional accompaniment, not a historical requirement.

One reader writes that he is "actually finding the posts on "real chili" both tedious and offensive" and that "if it's a joke, it's already gone on way too long." Unqualified Offerings heard that longevity was the soul of wit, though admittedly its hearing is not what it once was. The real issue is:

Unqualified Offerings just hates beans. Hates them. And while our reader finds obviously joshing avowals on the part of Texans that beans have no place in "real chili" to be "parochial," UO finds the unexamined assumption on the part of the rest of the country that chili must have beans in it to be personally oppressive - just cook the beans on the side, people. Your guests can stir them in to their dish if they wish at serving time.

Reader Robert Langham writes:

I make mine with venison, ground or cubed, expressly and personally shot for that purpose. I use one VTU* per serving, beer, various non-legumes, cut back on the salt and end up with a scrumptious and grounding repast.

VTU = Venison Thermal Unit.

Reader Leslie Hale writes

I have lived for many years each in N. and S. New Mexico, and on the Texas/Mexico border. In my opinion:

Texas Chili without beans can be wonderful.

Mexican Chile con Carne with beans (preferably frijoles) can be wonderful.

Southern NM Green (preferably Hatch) Chile Stew with pork (and frequently a few spuds) can be wonderful.

Northern NM Chile con Carne, usually with red chile and w/wo beans, can be wonderful.

Without beans it is better for the Atkins diet, and with beans or potatoes for poor people who can't afford to be Libertarians.

"...can't afford to be Libertarians." And Unqualified Offerings about to lose its job. Sheesh.

By George, I Think He Gets It - Responding to John J. Miller's notorious New York Times whine about libertarians voting, you know, Libertarian, rather than Republican, Randy E. Barnett has useful advice for the Republican Party at NRO (imagine!):

While I am not a libertarian who advises others to vote Libertarian, many of my libertarian friends and relatives feel otherwise. They view the Republican party as cavalier about individual liberty, supporting big government when it serves their purposes as much as Democrats do when it serves theirs. What conservative Republicans often fail to realize is that libertarians are an important constituency that should not be ignored or taken for granted lest their votes be driven to the Libertarian party or even to the Democrats. Telling libertarians they should vote Republican despite their serious reservations about Republican policies is futile. These concerns need to be addressed rather than ignored.

Subsequent paragraphs itemize a bill of particulars:

o Oppose intrusions into privacy as vociferously as you would if it had been proposed by the Clinton administration.

Most libertarians I know despised Bill Clinton as much as most conservatives. God knows I did. But we didn't despise him for all the same reasons that conservatives did. A big reason we hated Clinton was that he was terrible on civil liberties. Come Republicans who are terrible on civil liberties, we'll hate them too. Viz. too much of the current administration.

o Oppose intrusions upon the Bill of Rights more consistently in Congress.

Republicans can be as lame as Democrats on the First Amendment, worse on the Fourth and Fifth, and even, despite liberal portraits of the Repubs as "in thrall to the gun lobby," tend to cave on the Second, too. It needn't be that way.

o Nominate more libertarian-conservative judges like Clarence Thomas to the courts who care about protecting individual liberty, not just traditionalist-conservative judges like Robert Bork who care most about the "liberty" of the majority to enshrine its preferences into law. (His words not mine.)

Yes. I've written before that while Thomas is far from ideal on liberty issues, he's the best we've got. (Better than Scalia, who has one foot solidly in the Rhenquist-authoritarian camp.)

o Care more about the free market.

Barnett notes that Republicans have declined many chances to cut corporate welfare and enacted a Farm Bill (pushed by President Bush) that makes a mockery of the Repubs' fitful free market rhetoric.

o Care about federalism in the Congress.

Barnett notes that Republicans are at best fair-weather federalists. Democrats are right to argue that Republicans only talk federalism when they want to oppose a particular Democratic program. Why do Republicans want to make Democrats right?

o Stop making snide gratuitous remarks about libertarians.

They could start in, why, National Review Online!

o Back off [drug] Prohibition.

Barnett knows it's unrealistic to call for the Republicans to explicitly legalize everything. But he argues that they should push the question down to the state and local level. He also argues that, at the very least, support of prohibition should not be a Republican litmus test: if anti-drug war opinions make bright and promising politicians like New Mexico's Gary Johnson "radioactive," libertarians are left with no Republican politicians they can invest their hopes in.

Baldly, the Repubs have little chance of winning the allegiance of Unqualified Offerings specifically in the near future. Drug prohibition and the war are bottom line issues for me. I won't join any party committed to continuing this wasteful and evil drug war, and I believe that as long as the country maintains a robust intervenism abroad, that a lot of the things on Barnett's list will be impossible for the government to do.

But a lot of other libertarians could be swayed if the Republican Party took Barnett's advice.

(Barnett link via On the Third Hand...)

Reconstruction Women - Unqualified Offerings will not, not, not , not, NOT entitle this piece "Pimp Mommy," even though Eve Tushnet's e-mail began

I found you a couple moderate Muslim chicks...

Eve's blogwatch links to the wide-ranging Veiled for Allah, by Al-Muhajabah, which has a foot in both tech and pundit-blogging; for an altogether different blogging experience steeped in, shall we say, the carefree enthusiasm of youth, Eve offers The Muslimah Ya-Ya. This is a group blog of young muslim women from all over. Recommended for those who can handle the spelling "kewl" used unironically.

Eve herself has two substantial items on Israel, Zionism and US Christian support. See THE PAST IS ANOTHER COUNTRY and REGARDLESS.

Revising and Extending my Chili - Walter in Denver, who got the whole chili ball rolling the other day, clarifies his position:

Since I started this no beef/no bean thing I feel I should clarify what I meant.

Chili/e should be green and contain pork. (Chile con Carne) Sometimes this is referred to as New Mexico, or green, chili/e. This contains no beef, beans, or tomato. Red chili has tomato in it and normally contains no meat at all. This is used as a sauce, often on enchiladas. (Spanish word for 'in chile') The thing that most in the US are used to is Texas chili, a beef and bean concoction that while pleasant enough, isn't a Mexican food. I was referring to Mexican chile recipes.

Let Mexico be Mexico, Unqualified Offerings says. But Texas blogger Michael Croft of Ones and Zeros e-mails that his fellow Texans say

"If it had beans in it, we'd call it stew."

That's from an e-mail with the subject line, "In Texas, foreigners have been shot for requesting beans in Chili..." foreigners meaning anyone not from Texas. "Fillers (including beans) are banned from most civilized chili cook-offs," he adds, "Probably to forestall violence. An important consideration in Texas."

He further testifies that

Ginger and I are card carrying members of the Houston Heights Axis of Liberal Bloggers, and thus cannot agree with PNH that libertarianism is a rationale for understanding the difference between Chili and Stew/Roux/Ghoulash....

In response to a query from this website as to what constitutes "filler," he provided definitions and a list of links to chili contest webpages. Filler

are abominations (abominatia?) such as beans, hominy, pasta, etc. which may (in the case of rice or beans) be served as a side dish with chili, but not in it.

Contest rule links:

Washington (DC) Area Parrot Heads Club. (Scary. Sounds Jimmy Buffett-oriented.)

International Chili Society

Chili Appreciation Society

California State Chili Championship Cookoff

Mayou Spice's Texas Chili History page

Unqualified Offerings tried but failed to find a link to the lyrics, or even an mp3, of Kent Finlay's anthem titled "If You Know Beans about Chili, You Know that Chili Has No Beans."

Finally, Jesse Walker, who also admits to a proclivity for "neocon chili," follows up his e-mail of yesterday:

Like I said, I'm ambivalent about corn. More to the point: Like I said, if I were typing that e-mail in my kitchen, I would have remembered other ingredients. You mentioned one in your most recent post: cumin. How could I have forgetten?

People who watch ESPN much may recall a promo for the College Gameday show a couple of years ago. One of the younger Gameday guys (UO can't tell them apart) is passing through a stadium parking lot and stops to sample a tailgater's chili. "That's good!" he says, "but it would be perfect with one more thing:

"Cumin!"

The tag line of that promo series was There's nothing we don't know about college football.

...Is That Everybody Has Them - Matt Hogan e-mails:

In re: the below [on muslim bloggers the appeal of wahabism]:

Does this mean Wahhabis are Muslim neocons?

Well, yeah. Think of them as the "National Greatness Conservatives" of Islam.

Bound for Glory - Excellent article about Warren Zevon's Letterman appearance in The American Prowler by Paul Beston.

Yahoo reports that Zevon has done a cover of Bob Dylan's Knockin' on Heaven's Door" for the postumous album. Well of course he has. Also, Dylan has been performing as many as four Zevon tunes on his current tour, according to reports.

I Did Not Know This Department. From a New York Times profile of Irish poet Paul Muldoon, who co-wrote the title track of My Ride's Here:

He and Mr. Zevon had also been working on a musical, "The Honey War," about a dispute over gaming rights to an American Indian casino. Mr. Zevon recently announced that he has terminal cancer, and the project is on hold.

What Unqualified Offerings wants to know is, did he see the new Bond film like he wanted, and did he like it? And yes, UO googled the question. No information available.

In walked Charlton Heston with the Tablets of the Law
He said, It's still the Greatest Story
I said, Man I'd love to stay
But I'm bound for glory
I'm on my way
My ride's here

Warren Zevon and Paul Muldoon, "My Ride's Here"

Further Reading - Thomas Nephew of Newsrack also writes specifically about Aziz Poonawalla and other corners of the blogosphere. Worth reading.

Fables of the Reconstruction - One has heard much in the last year about the need for moderate muslims to "take their faith back" from extremist, intolerant crazies. (In between "religion of peace" items implying that there is no such thing as a moderate muslim.) Unqualified Offerings believes that the wished-for movement has begun - in the blogosphere.

Readers already know about Aziz Poonawalla of Unmedia and Shi'aPundit. His recent curse upon suicide bombers builds on an essential earlier essay he cross-published on the interesting alt.muslim site. The essay, "Bin Laden's Fatwa: A Call to Harabah," argues from Muslim theology that "Bin Laden's ignorance about Islam and the laughability of his claim to religious authority is well-illustrated by his own words."

What OBL calls for here is not jihad, since he has already explicitly targeted non-combatants, but note that he goes further here and calls for plunder as well. This is actually a call to harabah, or "war of intimidation." Note that harabah is strongly condemned in the Qur'an, for example the explicit reference in 5:33 to those whose intent is "mischief through the land".

Aziz claims, boldly, that "Islam is actually the solution to the problem." He argues for a program of taking the fight against Bin Ladenism to its real home ground, which is Bin Laden's claim to religious authority.

Aziz is just one of a new wave of moderate Muslims who have begun to work out the fate of their faith through weblogs, however. A newcomer to the endeavor is Zack of the Procrastination blog. Zack's first post dates from July, but he has only begun actively updating his site this month. He blogs photos, he talks hiking and other personal pursuits (nice pictures!), but he has also begun to join the "reconstruction" colloquy. Yesterday's "Wahabis as born-again" item picks up from a post of yet another American Muslim blogger, Bin Gregory. Gregory's item, "Wahhabism: Ideology of Discontent," starts by quoting a survey of attitudes among Muslims in the Russian republic of Daghestan, the province neighboring Chechnya. The quoted passage from the survey notes that "data indicate that the central determining factor in a respondent's evaluation of Wahhabism is his or her view concerning Daghestan's relation with the [Russian] federation," and that "Survey results also show that Wahhabism appeals more to men than women, more to rural than urban residents, and more to the young than to the old -- thereby supporting anecdotal observations that Wahhabism holds particular appeal to young men from the villages."

After paraphrasing the Dhagestan data as showing "Wahhabism is the ideology of discontent," Bin Gregory continues:

A study just waiting to be conducted is to compare affilliation with wahhabism to lack of religious upbringing [outside of the gulf, of course]. My own observation is that wahhabism appeals more to those who were irreligious in their youth and are then "converted", and those who come from irreligious households, where it plays into that perennial youthful vice of condemning your elders.

Zack notes that his own experience confirms this:

As a Muslim, I can offer some anecdotal evidence about this. The extremist and/or Wahabi strain of Islam, in my personal experience, is found mostly among people who are born-again Muslims. They can be Muslims born and raised in the West who found religion as a sort of rebellion from the mild religion/culture of their parents. They can be immigrants from Muslim countries who found religion as a reaction against Western society. There are also increasingly people in Muslim countries who are finding an extreme form of Islam somewhat late in life after a somewhat irreligious existence.

He continues to discuss the spread of Wahabism among the middle class as he has observed it.

Bin Gregory has been blogging steadily since July. (Unqualified Offerings is late to this party.) See his striking meditation on John Walker Lindh, whom he calls "my evil twin brother," upon Walker's conviction last summer.

From Bin's site you can also find a link to Muslims Against Terrorism. I suspect that if I had more energy, I could find more interesting "moderate" muslim bloggers by following Bin's links.

So what do we have here? A growing network of serious young men (I have found only men so far) actively engaged in challenging the extremists of their faith on the basis of their faith. They are already doing important intellectual work for far too small an audience, but we can expect that that audience will grow and that this formative work will not be wasted. Some of our muslim bloggers will go on to write for other media with more readers. Some of them will inspire people we don't know yet to do the same.

Do not expect their reconstruction to be an abnegation. Their repudiation of the murder of innocents, antisemitism and the stoning of women will not often also be their acceptance of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, nor even, in all cases, Israel's founding. It will not be tantamount to support for a US conquest of Iraq (and Iran, and Syria, and Saudi Arabia, and Egypt...) and a "MacArthur-style regency" to "reconstruct their culture like we did with Germany and Japan." Some of the thinkers we are discussing may support some of these things, others will consider them wrongheaded if not evil. "Islam" means "submission," but not submission to the Weekly Standard.

So what about the rest of us? First, we should acknowledge that this conversation has indeed begun. "We" here is warbloggers specifically and pundits generally. If you run a weblog, let there be no more "If the Islamists don't represent all muslims, how come we never hear 'moderates' condemning the Islamists?" posts. The answer henceforth is, Because you haven't told people. (Unless you have.)

Since the reconstruction must go beyond the world of political blogs to the world of politics itself, the next "rest of us" to consider is "What can US policy do" to further the effort. For a first start on an answer, let's return to Daghestan:

Data indicate that the central determining factor in a respondent's evaluation of Wahhabism is his or her view concerning Daghestan's relation with the federation.

These people have a big job ahead of them. Let's not make it harder, America.

Life Imitates Gene Wolfe, or, The Vodalus Approach, Continued. Newsweek reports that the FBI is investigating a possible financial connection between the Saudi government and the 9/11 hijackers. This is not We think someone may have known someone. This is, We think money from this government official passed through these specific people to these particular hijackers.

Nov. 22 — The FBI is investigating whether the Saudi Arabian government—using the bank account of the wife of a senior Saudi diplomat—sent tens of thousands of dollars to two Saudi students in the United States who provided assistance to two of the September 11 hijackers, according to law-enforcement sources.

Names, please?

THE BUREAU, THEY SAY, has uncovered financial records showing a steady stream of payments to the family of one of the students, Omar Al Bayoumi. The money moved into the family’s bank account beginning in early 2000, just a few months after hijackers Khalid Almidhar and Nawaf Alhazmi arrived in Los Angeles from an Al Qaeda planning summit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, according to the sources. Within days of the terrorists’ arrival in the United State, Al Bayoumi befriended the two men who would eventually hijack American Flight 77, throwing them a welcoming party in San Diego and guaranteeing their lease on an apartment next door to his own. Al Bayoumi also paid $1,500 to cover the first two months of rent for Al Midhar and Alhazmi, although officials said it is possible that the hijackers later repaid the money.

Sources familiar with the evidence say the payments—amounting to about $3,500 a month—came from an account at Washington’s Riggs Bank in the name of Princess Haifa Al-Faisal, the wife of Saudi Ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, and the daughter of the late Saudi King Faisal. After Al Bayoumi left the country in July 2001—two months before the September 11 terror attacks—payments for roughly the same amount began flowing every month to Osama Basnan, a close associate of Al Bayoumi’s who also befriended the hijackers. A federal law-enforcement source told NEWSWEEK that Basnan—who was recently convicted of visa fraud and is awaiting deportation—was a known “Al Qaeda sympathizer” who “celebrated the heroes of September 11” at a party after the attacks and openly talked about “what a wonderful, glorious day it had been.”

The shocking thing here is less the fact of a money trail connecting hijackers and the Saudi government - let's face it, a lot of us have assumed that one existed for over a year - than that the trail runs specifically through Prince Bandar. Bandar, who had his own small part in the Iran-Contra affair whose alums figure so intriguingly in current US "anti"-terrorism policy, has long been regarded as so solidly pro-US as to have diminished influence back home.

(Old British joke: Foreigner stops Brit on Downing Street to ask directions. Foreigner: Which side is the Foreign Office on? Brit: Yours. This joke captures a universal suspicion of non-diplomats toward diplomats.)

Newsweek adds an important caution:

Administration officials stressed repeatedly in interviews that they do not know the purpose of the payments from Princess Haifa’s account. It is also uncertain whether the money was given to the hijackers by Al Bayoumi or Basman. White House sources also raised a number of other cautionary notes, saying that it was not uncommon for wealthy Saudis to provide financial assistance to struggling Saudi families in the United States. “The facts are unclear, and there’s no need to rush to judgement,” said one administration official.

This is fair. Followers of the sniper case, for instance, have seen numerous "explosive" "connections" to international terrorism dissolve on examination. But it certainly deserves some serious follow-up.

Unless you're the Bush Administration!

But other sources describe the financial records as “explosive” and say the information has spurred an intense, behind-the-scenes battle between congressional leaders and the Bush administration over whether evidence highly embarrassing to the Saudi government should be publicly disclosed—especially at a time that the White House is aggressively seeking Saudi support for a possible war against Iraq. “This is a matter of the foreign-policy interests of the United States,” said another administration official, who cited the need to prevent a rift in the U.S.-Saudi relationship.

The only sane, the only patriotic response to this is, Yes, dumbass! This is a matter of the foreign-policy interests of the United States. Now start acting on those interests!

Al Qaeda slaughtered 3,000 blameless Americans fourteen months ago. They have made plain their intent to slaughter more. If a country paid for that slaughter, they are our enemies.

There was a moment in the Iran-Contra hearings that crystallized not just the arrogance but the opacity of a certain class of operators and their cheerleaders. Pressed on some detail of his part in selling military hardware to the Islamic Republic of Iran, the takers of American hostages and, through their Lebanese clients, the kidnappers of American officials and killers of American soldiers, Oliver North grew annoyed at the questioner's impertinence and determination to air all this dirty laundry, the soiled undergarments of the national security state.

"This country has enemies, Senator," he said, disdainfully.

Yes! this site shouted at the TV, there being no world wide web back then, and you've been playing footsie with them, you MO-ron!

As the poet said, "We must suffer them all again." How many times have you seen hawks claim that it's absurd, disingenuous, dishonest even, to argue, as some of us have, that the Administration's Iraq jones threatens to interfere with the war on Al Qaeda? Let's narrow down that pull-quote, shall we?

But other sources describe the financial records as “explosive” and say the information has spurred an intense, behind-the-scenes battle between congressional leaders and the Bush administration over whether evidence highly embarrassing to the Saudi government should be publicly disclosed—especially at a time that the White House is aggressively seeking Saudi support for a possible war against Iraq.

Can it get any clearer? No. It can't.

What's Cookin'? - Note that our food section contributors below are good for more than just meals.

In a follow-up piece on the coming Poindexterschina, Electrolite publishes reader mail explaining just what "story telling, change detection, and truth maintenance" mean in information science. Interesting and genuinely informative. (Elton Beard follows up too.)

Chad Orzel has links to pieces on the Muslim Brotherhood and a famous incident from the history of a sport Unqualified Offerings pays little attention to, college football.

Jesse Walker writes about the arrest of an Iraqi defector who has been well-placed to assume a major leadership position in post-Saddam Iraq but who - drat the luck! - just got arrested in Denmark for "war crimes, with human rights abuses, and, in general, with acting like Saddam Hussein." The phrase "gassing the Kurds" makes an appearance. These MacArthur-style regencies are like weddings, I guess. Just all kinds of little snags in the preparation.

Chil'in' - Naturally this morning's chili item brought more mail than anything this site has written since 911 got that call about the guys sacked out in the Caprice last month. Moral: be a food blogger. Food makes people happy. Politics upsets people. Consider Chad Orzel of Uncertain Principles. Sometimes he writes about politics, and when he does, he often sounds cranky. (And most of his commenters sound ridiculously cranky.) But when he writes about food, as in the following e-mail, things are quite otherwise:

You write: "Patrick Nielsen Hayden of Electrolite e-mails that Unqualified Offerings is 'wrong' that real chili should be bean-free. He blames this site's 'libertarianism.'"

I don't know as I'd blame libertarianism, so much as crediting the availability of Hard Times Cafe restaurants in the DC area. I still tend to think of chili as involving beans, but at the very least, their Texas-style chili convinced me that the beans are optional.

Yet another fine restaurant that I really miss from my days in Montgomery County (I lived a mile or so from their Rockville branch). I need to arrange another visit to NIST sometime soon, so I can get a "Cheap Eats" fix...

The virtues of Hard Times Cafe go beyond chili, actually. In fact, while Unqualified Offerings learned much about chili from eating there, these days it tends to pass the chili by. That's because Hard Times has the best buffalo wings in the area. Just as barbecue sauce is too often an excuse to cook meat badly, wing sauce often exists to disguise the fact that you have been sold a heat-blasted snippet of rope tied to a small bone. Hard Times wings are meaty and moist (saving the occasional off day), and the sauce will clear those winter sinuses too. They also serve a "Texas Chicken Sandwich," charbroiled filet coated with wing sauce, that is one of the planet's top ten food items.

Back to chili, the Hard Times recipe page is a bit of a cheat (box of [relevant] Hard Times spice mix appears frequently) but it does have some useful preparation tips that go beyond ingredients lists.

Jesse Walker goes beyond UO's ingredients list in this excellent e-mail:

You are, of course, absolutely right about chili. Beans are bland islands in a dish whose lively flavor should be uninterrupted.

That said, I'd put more into the dish than you would. I've never actually written down my chili recipe, but it includes not just the ingredients you listed, but cut tomatoes, sliced garlic, lime juice, three varieties of chili powder, a wee bit of sugar, and all sorts of fresh peppers (limited by how much spiciness I think the people I'm cooking for can handle: I dig habeneros, for example, but not everyone can deal with them). And more: even if you ignore the ingredients I'm ambivalent about adding (sometimes corn seems right, sometimes it doesn't), I'm sure I'm forgetting materials that would instantly occur to me if I were typing this in my kitchen.

Unqualified Offerings has been a fan of Jesse Walker's for years, but...corn? Lime juice sounds interesting though.

Reader Grant Gould adds his voice to the "anti-beaniotarian" chorus, and ties chili back in to politics:

You are 105% correct. Real chili does not contain beans. Out here on the East Coast, I even find it necessary to tell people that real chili is thick and viscous -- what they have out here is usually a thin, reddish bean soup. Chili heathens are everywhere.

I do have to slightly disagree with your recipe, though: Replace that tomato sauce with a bit of tomato paste and a bottle of beer. The alcohol from the beer will help draw out the flavour of the other ingredients. That will let you make a powerfully tasty chili from mild ingredients, rather than the how-much-spicy-stuff-can-I-pack-in "manly" chili that many sou'westerners and faux-sou'westerners insist on (they're probably neocons). It also helps to soften up tough cuts of beef, allowing you to use tough, cheap, flavourful meat.

It might be that chili recipes are really signifiers of one's political persuasion -- from the Southern Democrat (open "Hormel" can, pour out, stir) to the west-coast liberal (five beans, no meat, takes hours to cook). Neocons have their Habenero Hellfire Testosterone chili, East-Coast liberals their watered-down and inoffensive tomato-and-bean-soup, and of course the centrist just throws whatever is in the larder into the pot and boils it for a while (which works better than you'd expect, though sometimes you end up wondering why on earth this chili has a potato in it).

That tomato paste and beer substitution sounds genuinely exciting. Ironically, Unqualified Offerings tends to make what Grant classes as "neocon" chili. Its most recent effort included three different kinds of pepper (black, white and cayenne) plus chili powder (but also salt, brown and white sugar, and cumin). Next time it will try the beer, much less chili powder if any, and maybe at least taste it without the sugar and cumin before adding any. This website stresses that it used very moderate amounts of these last ingredients.

Finally, Patrick Nielsen Hayden avers that he would eat UO's chili recipe of this morning because it is Atkins-compliant.

More Decadence from the Coastal Left - Patrick Nielsen Hayden of Electrolite e-mails that Unqualified Offerings is "wrong" that real chili should be bean-free. He blames this site's "libertarianism."

Plainly, the liberal Patrick Nielsen Hayden is not from Texas. (Follow-up inquiries produced a claim that he is from Arizona.) Still, before this site's readers accept the hegemonic biases of a denizen of New York media circles try this:

Equal parts

beef (grind or cut of your choice)
red bell peppers
onion
tomato sauce (unless you really are from Texas)

Cook it like chili, seasoned to taste.

Sorrow and Anger - Some prick blew up a bus in Jerusalem today, killing 11 people, including children. Of course there will be wounded too, including the grievously wounded. Aziz Poonawalla's imprecation against the murderer is eloquent, driving fury, a prodigy of religious faith and moral clarity. I want to quote from it. I will not. Read the whole thing. Read it now.

Imitation Tech Blog Post - Reader/Gaming Buddy Mike Jacobs e-mails to point out this t-shirt.

Yes, Unqualified Offerings does think it's funny.

The Grand Strategy That Dare Not Speak Its Name Still - A Kuwaiti policeman seriously wounded two American soldiers by stopping their car and blasting them with a gun. He then fled to Saudi Arabia. AP calls it "the latest violence against U.S. troops who are preparing for a possible showdown with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein."

Meanwhile, in Iran, demonstrators carry pro-US signs and "press demands for freedom of speech and the release of all political prisoners." Why the difference in attitude?

We're not in Iran.

As Unqualified Offerings noted more than a year ago, paleoconservative Scott McConnell put it as pithily as it can be put. When it comes to the Middle East, "The conclusion is inescapable: the less we are there, the more we are liked."

Create two, three...many Irans, that is the watchword. There is even a role for massive troop movements. The bulk of our forces will be best concentrated here.

So Much to Blog, So Little Time - UO has all kinds of things it wants to write about, like "Rogue States' Rights" and "Pack vs. TIPS" and...other stuff. But it's a quick hits kind of night. This website feels it can lick that cold soon with some extra sleep, and it has to get in touch with its sister about revising the resume. Dang, Unqualified Offerings said, that takes us up to the weekend, and people don't read blogs on the weekend. (Except for those of you who do read blogs on the weekend, and Unqualified Offerings loves you for it.) Anyway...

Referral log discoveries. walterindenver is a libertarian blogger from, well, you guessed that part, right? He appears to have been blogging since June. Quotable: "Well, it would be much easier to build a successful religion than a successful Libertarian party. More lucrative, too, I imagine." See also his list of beliefs. Unqualified Offerings must reluctantly disagree with him about chili: the genuine article contains no beans.

Also discovered among referrers. Noosphere Blues praises "Jim Healy" for his liberty-based bashing of the Republican Party. Gene, I'll go halves with you on the credit.

Speaking of Gene Healy he explains the little reason why smart people are less upset with the idea of telemarketers collecting data on you than they are with John Poindexter collecting data on you.

Isn't intellectual honesty something? Max Sawicky, lefty economist, doesn't like the Republican idea of robbing the government of its "fuel" (money) now through tax cuts to stall the engine of government (new programs) later. But, says Max in this carefully-argued post, "by its own lights," it's been a relatively effective plan. (He's responding to a contrary argument by Brad DeLong.

Thanks for your memories. Colby Cosh wrote a special post just for Unqualified Offerings about a single, disastrous play in Sunday's CFL Western Final. A triumph of narrative art resulted. Quotable prelude: "I bet the CFL is a lot of fun to watch if you don't care about it." (UO would believe the kicker in question believes, like a lot of US sports fans, that the Canadian field is "ten yards longer" than a US gridiron, when, properly considered, the field is thirty yards longer. But Colby says the k-i-q is a product of Canada.)

The great debate is elsewhere. Eve Tushnet and Julian Sanchez file complementary reports on a highly publicised debate over Iraq policy between New Republic and American Prospect teams. The reports are excellent. The debates, according to Eve and Julian, not.

Crock Files - Chris Mooney points out in Slate that the so-called No Fly zones over northern and southern Iraq, and US and British enforcement of same, have no direct origin in UN Security Council resolutions:

However, the New York Times editorialized at the time that Resolution 688 provided a "dubious justification" for setting up the no-fly zones because it did not authorize the use of force to stop Iraqi abuses. And in 1993, the U.N. legal department announced that it could find no existing Security Council resolutions authorizing the United States, Britain, and France to enforce the no-fly zones. They are never explicitly mentioned in Resolution 688 or elsewhere. Furthermore, Resolution 688 was not enacted under Chapter 7 of the U.N. Charter, the section that is used to authorize and legitimize the use of force.

France later backed away from its involvement in the no-fly zones, leaving the United States and Britain to enforce them. Other U.N. Security Council nations have never accepted their legitimacy. So the dispute over whether Iraq's firing at planes over the no-fly zones constitutes a "material breach" actually exposes a long-standing divide at the United Nations. No wonder the administration has been hesitant to cite Iraq's recent anti-aircraft fire as cause to demand further military action from the Security Council.

Complaints that a country is firing on planes you're flying over their territory are a bit disingenuous. But then, what else is new?

Morning Murder Minute - How safe is Montgomery County? Or, if you prefer, out of touch with reality? This much: Police have released some of the 911 tapes from the second day of the sniper spree. Most callers did not initially recognize the murder victims as murder victims! Here are some excerpts, via Channel 7's website:

[Sonny Buchanan]
"What's going on there," the 911 operator said. "Um, this guy's lawn mower did something man, it chopped him up, he's bleeding real bad," the caller said. "He's down and out."

[Sarah Ramos]
"I need ambulance and police at Leisure World Plaza, at the end by the post office. A girl just got shot herself," the caller said.

"She just what?" asked the operator. The caller told the operator, "she just shot herself, sitting on the bench here."

[Lori Rivera]
"We need an ambulance at the corner of Knowles and Connecticut. A woman was vacuuming her car, something blew up, she's unconscious, she's got blood coming out of her nose and mouth," said another caller.

[Prem Walekar]
"Oh my God," said the caller. The operator said, "Ma'am, listen to me. What's wrong?" The caller responded, "a man has been killed in front of me." The operator asked, "how is he being killed in front of you?" The caller said, "he was shot, I don't know."

Meanwhile, Channel 7's website does not have any stories about their "special report" from Antigua.

Segway News You Can't Get Elsewhere - Lots of bloggers have noted that you can now by Segways from Amazon. Only Unqualified Offerings will tell you that it had a dream just this morning that it rode a Segway to visit its doctor.

A NyQuil-induced hallucination? We distort, you deride.

Anthrax Suspect Enters Plea! - Yes, Unqualified Offerings is an asshole to choose a title like that for this story in the Stamford Advocate. No, while the truth is a defense in libel cases, it is not a defense against charges of being an asshole. What can Unqualified Offerings tell you?

Spree Graphs Extra! - Scouring the web to bring you sniper news you haven't gotten elsewhere, Unqualified Offerings notes this original reporting from Blackalopolis News Center, by Tamarah Davis. It's an iron rule of sniper coverage that every biography of John Muhammad will assign different dates to his conversion to Islam and his family's name change, and Davis's report follows the rule. She places the initial conversion "to Islam shortly after splitting from his first wife and joining the Army" in 1985. (Alas, she does not provide a source for this date.) This passage about a rumored post-NOI conversion to more traditional Islam was interesting:

Some neighbors have reported that Muhammad had recently begun attending a mosque that is not affiliated with the Nation of Islam, though members of the Islamic Center of Tacoma, this city's largest traditional Muslim mosque, said he had not worshiped there.

as was this brief discussion of possible Muhammad-Malvo membership in the Nation of Gods and Earths, aka the "five percenters". Davis:

Members of the Five Percenters, which split from the Nation of Islam in the 1960s, said they have members in Seattle but not Muhammad. Their followers never take that surname. Daoud Majestic, a Five Percenter in Pennsylvania, said that when Muhammad became a black Muslim 17 years ago, the Nation of Islam often used ''Word is Bond'' and advocated that the black man is God. The Nation has since toned down its rhetoric, Majestic said, but some older members still use it. ''It's very possible that he still used that kind of terminology,'' he said.

But another Five Percenter said that the phrase ''Word is Bond'' is commonly used in hip-hop music.

This Davis, she talks to people. I think they call it reporting. Unqualified Offerings commends the practice, though it would (almost) never take such steps itself.

Here's the really intriguing part. Davis, who is apparently based in Seattle, may have found yet another attempt by Muhammad and Malvo to contact a Catholic priest during the spree, not in Ashland, VA, but in Bellingham, Washington:

Another element of Muhammad's medley of religious influences showed in the final week of the reign of fear, when the snipers reportedly reached out to Catholic priests in Ashland, Va., where that city's victim was felled, and in Bellingham, Wash., where Muhammad and his alleged accomplice, 17-year-old John Lee Malvo, had recently lived in the Lighthouse Mission, a homeless shelter.

Shortly before 5 p.m. on Oct. 18, Janene Jensen, pastoral secretary of the Catholic Church of the Assumption in Bellingham, received a mysterious call from the man she now believes is Muhammad. ''Is Father there?'' he asked. When she replied no, he demanded to know why, muttered something, then slammed down the phone.

The Rev. Jay DeFolco, who missed the call because he was at a funeral that evening, was startled when he saw Muhammad's face in the newspapers the following week. He recognized Muhammad from the free meals offered at the church each Sunday, often frequented by Lighthouse Mission members. ''He was one who was midlife, healthy, strong, capable, tall, so he stood out,'' DeFolco said.

Chilled by his encounter with the accused murderer of 10 people, DeFolco regrets missing that call. ''I wish I could have been here,'' he said. ''Maybe we could have saved another life.''

Davis' conclusion? "the piecemeal approach that John Allen Muhammad took to religion suggests that his fractured personality, more than his spiritual beliefs, led to the terrifying violence that killed at least 10 people."

For a sympathetic discussion of Five-Percenters and a kind of exegetical denial that Muhammad and Malvo could have been motivated by Five Percenter ideology, see this Middle East Research and Information Project backgrounder (No. 111, they ask citers to tell you). The refutation can't be definitive, since it turns on a claim that Muhammad and Malvo fail to adhere perfectly to the tenets of Five Percenter belief in their words and actions and, well, who adheres perfectly to anything? But it's worth reading for its brief history of the movement.

Spree Graphs - Matthew "False witness" Dowdy's trial was scheduled to start today, but it's been continued until December 30th, per Fredericksburg.com. Dowdy remains in custody.

There's a Pony in Here Somewhere Redux. Pants were wet in certain corners of the blogosphere when the Washington Times reported that "Federal authorities are investigating whether accused snipers John Allen Muhammad and John Lee Malvo had ties to a growing sect of militant American Muslims committed to waging holy war against the United States," a subsidiary of Jamaat al-Fuqra known as Muslims in America. The pattern is familiar - some organ reports that the Feds are going to check for this or that possible terror connection, neo-whatever pundits cry ah hah! and...nothing ever comes of it.

In this case, the WashTimes is even late with the story. The Post first reported that "The FBI is looking into whether the two men had ties to Jamaat ul-Fuqra..." on October 24th.The WashTimes reporter tells us that the sheriff of Charlotte County told the reporter that the FBI told the sheriff that there was a "connection" between Muhammad and an al-Fuqra outpost in Georgia, but not what the connection was. The reporter also tells us the the FBI would not tell the reporter anything about what the sheriff says they told him. Got that?

A Bad Man to Know. Meanwhile, the roundup of people connected with Muhammad's various document scams continues:

A Jamaican man who Antigua authorities believe showed the Washington, D.C.-area sniper suspect how to illegally obtain passports was indicted on passport fraud charges by a federal grand jury Tuesday.

says an AP story in the Stamford (CT) Advocate.

By the by, local channel 7, WJLA-TV, promises a special report from Antigua tonight by a reporter who, per the radio promos, tracked down one of Muhammad's friends, who gave them the "real reason" Muhammad spent so much time there. (Sun? Beaches? Island women? No place the ex would look for her kids? Nah. Must be something trickier.)

On the Other Hand... Those looking for a report (from someone other than Harjeet Singh )of Muhammad actually saying anti-American things in the wake of September 11 can find some satisfaction in this passage from last week's Seattle Times investigative report:

A few days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Muhammad, still living intermittently at the mission, wandered into the Horseshoe Restaurant, which boasts of being the oldest place in Bellingham for "great food, fine tobacco and a place to meet with friends over a good beer."

He picked a stool at the bar in the Ranch Room. A few stools away, on the other side of the L-shaped counter, a small group of locals sipped their own morning beers and vented their outrage at Osama bin Laden. One said the United States should bomb the hell out of al-Qaida.

Muhammad took exception. In a calm, even tone, he told the men that the CIA had sponsored a lot of terrorism in the world, and that the U.S. was itself a terrorist state. The group glared at the stranger who interjected himself into a private conversation.

One man came unglued.

He was a local fisherman and crabber named Drew Sandilands. He is 47, with weathered hands and a wiry, slender-strong build. If anyone in the group could have physically challenged Muhammad, it was Sandilands. And if anyone had reason to, it was he: His cousin was the airline pilot of one of the jets that was hijacked and slammed into the Trade Center.

Sandilands told Muhammad to get out or he would "get his ass whupped."

Another man in the group, Tracy Ridpath, held Sandilands back.

As calmly as he had walked in, Muhammad walked out into daylight and out of trouble. Sandilands followed him outside, but Muhammad was already gone. The fisherman later told his buddies that he had a feeling Muhammad was a terrorist.

The profile is actually pretty good, the passages on Muhammad's custody woes (substantially of his own making, it must be said) evoking pity and terror. As a merciless, clear-eyed portrait of a man on the road to hell, it is pretty strong. An excerpt:

During the most stable part of his marriage to Mildred in Tacoma during the 1990s, Muhammad ran an auto-repair business that thrived for a while, then fell apart. Close friends say that as the couple's marriage disintegrated, primarily because of Muhammad's chronic womanizing, so did the business.

Mildred's brother, Charles Green, who lived with the family for stretches at a time, has said Muhammad made a habit of taking sex from female customers as pay for his auto services. Family friends in Tacoma corroborate the story.

The ST team claims agnosticism as to Muhammad's "real" motives:

The degree to which his personal bitterness merged with militant ideology, or whether one exacerbated the other, may never be known. Muhammad himself may not know.

Why did Muhammad and Malvo focus their attack on the Washington, D.C., area? Was it to paralyze the control center of the nation Muhammad had fought for and had come to despise? Was it to extort the $10 million he and Malvo demanded in one of their taunting missives to police?

Or was it, as his ex-wife Mildred and her family believe, a perversely circuitous plot to kill her? She lived in hiding with their children in Clinton, Md., and Muhammad had located them.

The ST story also has a picture of Muhammad playing Risk with fellow GIs during the Gulf War.

Not a Strong Start. Lee Malvo's Virginia lawyers haven't had much luck with the judge so far, according to NBC4.

The oldest story? The Antigua Sun adds some detail to the Muhammad-Norman Migill Manroe connection. (Manroe is the man arrested in Connecticut.)

“[Manroe] was arrested and sentenced to prison in the name of Kenny Williams. After he served his time he was not deported because it was felt that he was Antiguan. Kenny Williams was sentenced on 16 Feb., 2000 and was fined $50,000 forthwith or seven months hard labour. He got out of Prison in June 2000,” Fuller added.

Fuller also disclosed that Muhammad paid a visit to “Kenny Williams” Manroe while he was in prison and the task force is trying to obtain a copy of the prison record.

Which is to say that Muhammad visited a convicted drug trafficker in prison. Hm. Williams served his time between mid-February and June 2000. According to this useful chronology in the Seattle Times, Muhammad arrived on Antigua in late March. That theoretically means that Muhammad could not have met Manroe on Antigua before Manroe's sentence. So Muhammad flies to Antigua and within at most a couple of months is looking up a convicted marijuana smuggler in prison.

Timelines and Terrorism. The breathless Washington Times report on possible "links" between Muhammad and Jamaat al-Fuqra claims

Mr. Muhammad converted to Islam in 1984 and, as a former U.S. soldier, was stationed at Fort Lewis near Tacoma, Wash., at the time of the initial al-Fuqra attacks. Al-Fuqra also was named in the August 1984 slayings of three India natives in Tacoma and in a series of fire bombings in Seattle.

This simply isn't true. As the Seattle Times chronology, among many other sources, notes, Muhammad didn't join the US army until late 1985, and was not at Fort Lewis until then. The date of Muhammad's conversion to Islam is also very much up in the air. The Post interview with Mildred Muhammad says the conversion came "by 1997." The Sacramento Observer says John and Mildred converted "after the Gulf War."

So let's go straight to the horse's mouth, shall we? In his official statement, Louis Farrahkhan declares that "We searched our own files. This young man, John Allen Williams, while he was in the armed forces in Ft. Ord, California, began listening to the teachings of Islam as taught by the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. And when Ft. Ord was closed, he then moved to Ft. Lewis in Tacoma, Washington, I believe it is, and he visited the Study Group in that area from 1994 and 1995. And in 1997, July 17, he became a registered member of the Nation of Islam." Farrakhan also says that NOI lost contact with John Muhammad in 1999.

According to CBS News, Muhammad was transferred to Fort Ord in 1992.

Speaking of Surveillance - On the I Did Not Know That front, Eric Mauro tips me to the news that

Bobby Fischer, the eccentric chess prodigy who dueled Soviet grandmasters and won a world title in 1972, was investigated by FBI agents who suspected his mother was a communist spy, according to the bureau's records.

according to the Washington Times.

Here's the original, fuller story in the Philadelphia Enquirer.

Cute story! FBI follows half-batty single mom around for thirty years:

FBI agents checked birth records, posed as student journalists, and considered cultivating other chess players. They hounded Fischer's mother, reading her mail, quizzing her neighbors, studying her canceled checks.
...
Did she hear FBI footsteps? "Absolutely," said her son-in-law Russell Targ, now a physicist in Palo Alto, Calif. "They made it hard for her to keep a job."

Hope you liked it folks, because it's all coming back.

Next Step - In First-Ever Ruling, Secret Appeals Court Allows Expanded Government Spying on U.S. Citizens, writes the American Civil Liberties Union.

So. Can they appeal this to the Secret Supreme Court?

Agitated - Unqualified Offerings has been taking it easy, but Radley Balko, aka The Agitator, has not. He delivers himself of two major pieces this week so far - a takedown of the absurd suggestion that CATO somehow launders corporate money for select politicians, and a no-holds-barred refutation someone named John J. Miller, who argued in the New York Times that if only libertarians voted for Republicans rather than Libertarians, a few more Republicans would get elected, making Republicans all happy and stuff.

In his merciless list of reasons libertarians could rightly care less if they ruin the occasional Republican candidacy, Radley leaves aside the whole empire thing and still has quite a long list. He doesn't even need to mention UO's absolute, bottom-liner: this site will swear its allegiance to no Party committed to maintaining our insane, cruel drug war (until just recently the biggest single menace to our status as a free people).

Unqualified Offerings wishes it could remember, but there was a superb essay in Liberty a couple of years ago, arguing that, taking the long view, the Republican Party was a far greater menace to libertarianism than the Democratic Party. That's because the Dems simply oppose the precepts of libertarianism forthrightly: they are the avowed Party of Government. Taxes must never go down; "we" have to have a policy for everything; There must be something we can do because there's always something we can do.

You can have, the author argued, a great debate with such people, a grand discourse on the nation's meaning and destiny.

But the Republicans! Their offense is not disagreement. Their offense is much worse. They appropriate our rhetoric, drawing the support of many who appreciate our principles - small government, voluntary exchange, self-defense and free enterprise, responsibility and liberty - but they besmirch those principles by their actions. Instead of free enterprise, corporate welfare. Instead of small government, trivial nips and tucks calculated to annoy no crucial interest group, instead of free trade, price supports and tarrifs, instead of responsibility, drug wars. Republicans traduce our ideals, and the public comes to associate their practice with our principles. It's not fair, but it's the way the mind works.

(Look at the damage slavery did to the prestige of property rights. It's absurd - the problem was not the concept of property as such, the problem was that holding propery specifically in other human beings was an abomination. [Okay: Using hairdryers. Not okay: Throwing a running hairdryer into your spouse's bath.] But that's the way many minds and much rhetoric works.)

Morning Murder Minute - The Hartford Courant reports that the FBI crashed a dinner party given by Paul Gianquinto last week looking for his brother Peter, Muhammad's alleged partner in his document swindles on Antigua. Not a close family, though:

"I told them I hadn't seen him in four years, not since the funeral for our mother," Paul Gianquinto told The Hartford Courant. "My brother certainly surrounds himself with shady characters, so this seemed fairly typical for him."

So his parents really did the "Peter/Paul" thing when naming their kids.

Good profile of Muhammad friend Robert Holmes in the Seattle Times. Holmes called the Seattle FBI with one of the crucial tips on Muhammad:

"John knew I was the only one who knew it was him," he went on. "No one knew what I knew." Holmes' knowledge included that Muhammad had fallen apart when he lost custody of his three children the year before, that his ex-wife, Mildred, lived on the East Coast, that Muhammad was a marksman, and that he had discussed equipping a long-distance rifle with an illegal silencer. Holmes said Muhammad had told him, "Can you imagine the damage you could do if you could shoot with a silencer?"

Whither the white van? The Post discusses.

North Korea Has Nuclear Arms says the MSNBC headline. That means it can't hug its children, right?

South Korean officials doubted the credibility of the report.

so maybe it can hug its children after all.

Lazy Blogging - Unqualified Offerings has to update its resume just in case, so activity has been light this weekend. This site hopes for more activity in the near future - some good e-mails have come in, and Scott Koenig has issued an interesting challenge on Indepundit. And in the meantime, for all you employers out there, there are two kinds of people in the world - the kind who get relational databases, and the kind who don't. Unqualified Offerings is one of the former.

American Dunkirk and Beyond - Bill Humphries of More Like This writes in praise of Glenn Reynolds' American Dunkirk article, and continues

I'm still stunned at how quickly NYC was able to clear the ruin of the Trade Center, it's as much a modern engineering/management marvel as the fabled project where things get built. Anyway, if you haven't read William Langewiesche's American Ground, serialized in the Atlantic Monthly, please do. His experience of the project mirrors what Prof. Reynolds talks about in his column, and gets past all the hero-worship that the FDNY and NYPD (to a much lesser extent) milked out of the tragedy.

Blogwatch Auxiliary - Stuff I've seen out there that I like:

DC Blows takes out after a peeve of my own - publicly-subsidized sports stadia. Also, praise for Colin Powell and a very personal catalog of selected DC bloggers.

Amygdala has so much good stuff that it's pointless to link to any specific item. Just start at the top and work down. I know you stopped checking Amygdala as often when Gary announced that he didn't have as much time for blogging, but there has been a recent explosion of activity and a visit will more than repay your time.

Colby Cosh has before and after pieces on the CFL Western Final, reminding me how aggrieved I am that there's not televised CFL in the US any more. Plus, advice for lovelorn women.

Colby's item reminds me of an occasional response of mine to people who ask me who I think really shot JFK. Lean toward the questioner, frown soberly and intone

I don't think Kennedy was really assassinated.

If you are so inclined, you then spin out a lengthy hypothesis involving Hodgkins Disease, the American Medical Association and Jackie's insurance coverage. Otherwise, just look annoyed at your interlocutors' naivete when they doubt you.

Eve Tushnet has more than one piece on objectivism and egalitarianism, but it's not nearly as gruesome as it sounds. Also the table of contents for her yet-to-be-written conversion memoir and some interesting pull-quotes on Zionism taken from her current reading.

Seablogger works around to an attack on Garrison Keillor, and why not?

Jesse Walker muses on Alexander Cockburn, Merle Haggard and the rocky road leading to left-right antiwar cooperation.

Steven Chapman has a very useful review of the extended-edition Lord of the Rings DVD (cliffs notes: Buy it), a new caption contest right below that, Kyoto, rain-dancing and the Myth of the Fall and more.

Samizdata offers a cool robot toy and Zombies in Britain, in and outside of the movies.

A Pack, a Herd, a Flotilla - Parallels - Do not miss Glenn Reynolds' Tech Central Station column, "American Dunkirk." Not just because I get a brief mention either. It's a moving story of self-organized community response in the immediate aftermath of the September, 2001 massacres in lower Manhattan. Excerpt:

"Day Four, when federal authorities took over." There's a lesson in that phrase, isn't there? This wasn't just an evacuation: it was a whole alternative logistic system, improvised on the fly by people who didn't work for the government. Fuel, water, and food were brought in; when there were problems moving big pieces of steel at the site, the boats brought structural ironworkers from New Jersey along with boots, oxygen and acetylene cylinders, and whatever else was needed. This effort got some coverage at the time, but has largely been forgotten in the aftermath, since ad hoc groups don't have PR agents, or even a motive, to keep their deeds in the public eye. Still, it was one of the most amazing feats of human self-organization ever, and it deserves more attention than it got.

Woman Moving On - I'm sad to confirm that selenously pseudonymous Diana Moon of Letter from Gotham is giving up her weblog. This one hurts. Diana and I had serious disagreements over all kinds of issues - Israel, Iraq, you name it - but it was nice having company, as she put it, "off the rez." Diana regularly committed the sin of being interesting, which led to a fair amount of carping from those who would never dream of so sinning, whether on her left or to her right. Along with the quiet disappearance of Istanblog and the retirements of Andy Kashdan and Ginger Stampley, my little corner of the blogosphere just feels lonelier.

Diana says she'll be pulling her archives soon, so get your favorite Gotham items before that happens.

Women on the Move - Avedon Carol celebrated the first anniversary of the Sideshow this week.

Speaking of anniversaries (aka "blirgdays"), Happy First to Moira Breen of Inappropriate Response!

"Live at the WTC" is dead. Long live Assymetrical Information. Megan McArdle, aka Jane Galt, has changed her blog's name and focus. Why? She got a job! Megan will soon be saying "Nice doggie" while the United States government looks for rocks. Consequently, she can't discuss foreign affairs any more. The new blog focus, economics, plays to her strengths and guarantees you at least one weblog where you can be sure Iraq policy will not be discussed. Unqualified Offerings officially approves of her new design, too.

On the Third Hand adds one more hand, as MommaBear joins Kathy Kinsley's staff (which previously comprised...Kathy Kinsley).

Off the Port Bow the Pontificator considers the neolibertarian phenomenon from a liberal perspective, then tries to adduce a new paradigm taking shape among left-leaning blogs. It's missing the sort of "in their own words" references that would establish this paradigm as extending beyond, well, the Pontificator himself, but it's an interesting start on the problem, and hopefully he'll revisit the issue in subsequent writing.

The Jordan Roles, Redux - Don't look now, sportsfans, but the whole Washington Wizards thing is...working! Last February, Unqualified Offerings argued that Michael Jordan had not been given his due as an executive - that he had done as much as could have been hoped in the fourteen months he'd had control of the team. A few more months and Jordan looks better yet. With the cap room he managed to clear in his first year, he was finally able to swing a trade for a marquee player, Jerry Stackhouse, who is the number 8 scorer in the league as of this morning's papers. Last year's problem child, high-school draftee Kwame Brown is starting, and playing pretty effectively, in Year Two, averaging just under 10 points, 9 rebounds and two blocks per game, playing just a shade under 30 minutes. That's excellent progress for a straight-from-high-school player, and astonishing considering where Brown's game and head were at just last spring.

Jordan saw how Tyronn Lue badgered Allen Iverson in the 2001 NBA Finals when he was with the Lakers and snapped him up before last season. Lue is an effective, high-energy reserve who had 18 points in last night's win over Utah.

Jordan's other find was...himself, which is also working out well this year. First off, you've got to admire his self-possession and self-knowledge, considering that you have here the greatest basketball player of all time recognizing that his proper function now is coming off the bench. And it's working! 16 PPG in 28 minutes per game, and a lot of those minutes in the fourth quarter, which is where you most want Michael Jordan anyway.

A winning record after nine games and this team is still learning how to play together (five new starters). And since Jordan is a reserve, there's no reason to think they'll collapse next year when he's no longer playing even as a reserve.

He's done it folks. Cleaned house, brought in genuine youth and talent, taught the kids how to win games. It's not that the team has no holes - a killer three-point shot is a priority - but it's already fun and good. Unqualified Offerings would never make the mistake of actually watching a regular-season NBA game, but they make good radio fare when driving, and the Wizards have made for some pleasant drives this fall.

The Clues Return to Neolibertariana - Natalie Solent on the Information Assessment Office:

I'd add that once a government has such power it is damn near inevitable that they will kill more than the terrorists would. I'm not making light of the terrorist threat, just giving the correct weight to the overmighty state threat. They've killed tens of millions so far.

Exactly.

Wells Now - Kevin Maroney writes about Saddam, Kuwait, Iraq, oil fields, then, and now:

The US and its allies did, indeed, get the Kuwait fires extinguished and the oil fields reopened pretty quickly, but the evidence is that the fires were staged hastily. If Saddam is smart and ruthless and willing to admit that he's going to lose control of Iraq, he can do a better job of sabotaging the fields, up to and including booby traps and radioactive contamination.

Perhaps Saddam is willing to admit that he's about to lose control of Iraq if you but this London Times story about his arranging an exile in Libya for his relatives and hangers-on. Or perhaps the London Times is passing on planted stories intended to undermine Saddam's standing with his underlings.

Note: This site has no trifecta, but it is in receipt of a twofer - an e-mail from a concerned reader with the subject line "nyquil and iraq":

Yeah, it was relatively quickly now that I recall. Red is still alive? Was a hero when I was a kid.

Still, I wonder if Saddam might not have more in mind....but I have no knowledge of oil stiff beyond, iit's sticky and burns.

Jim -- I got it! Let's give Bush-Cheney, Saddam, bin-Laden, Arafat, and Sharon all NyQuil! End of regional war!

Big problem: have to catch bin Laden to give him NyQuil...

Revolution in Economic Thinking from, of all places, the US Congress:

Both the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate pushed through legislation early Friday morning allowing copyright owners to offer webcasters a percentage-of-revenues royalty rate, essentially allowing the parties to mutually agree to override the controversial flat per-song rate set by the Library of Congress (LOC) in June. Small webcasters hailed the legislation as a "stunning victory."

At least we're getting something out of this Congress. What's the stunning concept behind the law?

Instead, the legislation grants copyright holders and webcasters the right to enter into a voluntary agreement "without fear of liability for deviating from the fees and terms" the LOC's rate ruling.

Letting private parties negotiate mutually acceptable business agreements. What a concept! Think it'll catch on?

Link via the Elvis Costello Mailing List.

A Fanboy's Notes: Life Imitates Art Dept. - Paging Jakita Wagner!

Though TransOrbital isn't laying down stakes, it's worth noting that the mission was spun off from the Artemis Project, a commercial venture to establish a lunar colony. Artemis has also founded a science fiction magazine and the nonprofit Moon Society.

So says the Village Voice (link via Amygdala). We can only trust that those noted pinkos in Planetary get the Village Voice.

Religion of Peace Item - From this morning's New York Times:

Mr. Osbourne, who lived above the restaurant, said he felt pity for the two, who appeared disheveled and seemed to have little money. He fed them and gave them clothing and his bed. He said the two were obsessed by two things: buying a cheap car and sticking to a strict health food regimen, which included a variety of nutritional supplements.

Their guide, which they carried with them at all times, he said, was a book, "The Tao of Health, Sex and Longevity," by Daniel P. Reid. The book's jacket describes it as an introduction to Taoist philosophy for Westerners, with information on diet and nutrition, breathing, "sex therapy" and herbal aphrodisiacs.

Free Material, aka reader mail, on Afghan wargame design! From your Talking Dog:

So- the Afghan war games? You're obviously correct strategically: we put in ground troops solely to hold up semifore flags to tell the stealth B-2's where to drop their bombs (they were BIG FLAGS, of course, as the pilots were tired from flying all night from Missouri), and otherwise, either outsourced ground troop activity to the Northern Alliance's branch of Kelly Girls (I believe, it was called "Khalid's Guys"; for all your minesweeping and cave clearing needs-- dial Kabul3- GUYS ), or pretended we didn''t need them at all (and then declared victory). With the MBA President, with his CEO cabinet-- outsourcing became the featured trend (saves on those military pensions, those funerals, those health care costs...)

Unfortunately, this activity suffered the fate of many outsourced government functions, be it private prisons (higher escape rate, lots and lots of civil rights complaints) or schools (the Edison project, comes to mind), or the $500 hammers. Its not a panacea. In fact, there are some things (national... defense...) that are just, well, not real good candidates for outsourcing at all! It didn't work. The Afghan allies, having achieved THEIR goals (warlordism makes a triumphant comeback) really didn't feel like getting killed to achieve ours (capturing Osama and Omar).

Hence, the campaign was mostly a failure. Sorry to break that to everyone, but Osama's and Omar's continued presence among the living means that the MISSION was MOSTLY a FAILURE. Forgetting that Al Qaeda cells are still there-- we not only didn't kill the body-- we didn't kill the head. A complete failure? By no means: the Taliban are gone, and Al Qaeda is substantially disrupted. But the Afghan campaign cannot be construed as an unqualified success-- until OBL no longer breathes.

You know, I'm reminded that every time the government tries to save a few bucks with this "privatization" thing, it often screws it up. That's going to happen a lot-- its the nature of the low-bid concept, be it in Kansas or Kandahar. The issue isn't really this "third way" crap-- we can do everything government does- but better. The issue is should the government be in this business at all. In national defense, it kinda has to be in that business, I'm afraid. The most hard-core non-anarchist libertarian would say if you had to name ONE core function of the government, it would be protecting the domestic population from foreign threats. Well? How're we doin'?

I was troubled immediately by Dick Cheney's statement-- before a single man or bullet was deployed- that this engagement would be the first time we encountered more civilian deaths than military ones in an action. Not that I WANT our military people to die (my God, no!)-- but how could he POSSIBLY know that in advance, unless he knew that we were going to deploy fewer troops than 9-11 casualties? Of course, this was the case for quite a while, until it became apparent we couldn''t get the job done entirely on an outsourced basis, and had to increase deployment.

So, at a time when the domestic polity would have endured a draft, massive rationing, a tax increase, and whatever else was necessary to destroy the threat, the MBA President and the CEO cabinet, in "alliance" with every other major country on earth, decided to send over an aerial demonstration team and hire some local temps to take out a guy who lived in caves and traveled on horses-- and it seems that so far, he won.

Unqualified Offerings can't hang with all the liberal talk, and it thinks there was value in scattering Al Qaeda at our initiative rather than there's. But even if the recent tapes are fakes and Bin Laden survives only in legend, so long as we can't prove the bastard is dead or captured, it's one for their side.

Kevin Maroney, whose sig, after all, reads "Games are my entire waking life," offers an in-depth consideration of the Afghan war as a wargame:

I think that any reasonable designer of the "US-Afghan War of 2001" wargame--call it "The Game of Operation Enduring Freedom"--would *have* to call the outcome at least a Marginal Victory *for al Qaeda*. Look at what the game would be. Once the war began, it was obvious that the US would drive the Taliban and al Qaeda from their positions of overt power; any well-designed wargame balances the victory conditions so that the goal of each player is to get as far from the *predictable* outcome as possible. A game about the Soviet invasion of Germany in 1945 starts from the assumption that Berlin will fall; victory depends on how quickly it falls and how much damage the Soviets take in the process.

Once the attack began, the Taliban were screwed. The wargame goal of the T/aQ player would be to get as many weapons, soliders, and especially leaders into hiding in or out of the country, and all the evidence is that they did a lot.

There is a larger game--call it The Game of The War on Terrorism--in which the US attacking Afghanistan is a negative development for the Insane Terrorist Idealist player, but in the smaller Game of Operation Enduring Freedom, al Qaeda won.

Readers love NyQuil! Someone should start a NyQuil blog - they'll shoot right to the top of the ecosystem ladder. Bill Dowling writes

My understanding of NyQuil (from my stoner friend/Computer Science major in college) is that while one dose of NyQuil will knock you out quicker than Tyson in his heyday, several doses of NyQuil will actually wake you up and make you think that there must be something illegal in the Q.

Unqualified Offerings must, however, ask readers to prune their e-mails of obvious redundancies like "stoner friend/Computer Science major." Mary Kay, who says her own vice is caffiene, writes

I'd have thought everyone realized that the best thing about NyQuil was that it put you to sleep no matter how bad your cold, and sleep is more effective than most remedies in dealing with viruses.

Turning to the subject of Iraq wargames, an anonymous reader writes:

I've seen no discussion of what i think is Saddam's final realistic option, requiring no fantastic WMD theories:

Burn his own oil fields as he did in Kuwait. He truly believes the USA is attacking him for oil and his end is near, he could have the specially loyal henchpeople (family loyalists who know if he goes they go) ready to fire them and.or otherwise destroy them. I am not up on the technicals of oil fields (are there possibilities of blocking access to undereground fields) but it seems he could poison the environment and prevent use of the fields for a while. And I dont think that's been factored in to any public estimate of risk.

This seems possible, but didn't the US, Kuwait and Red Adair succeed in getting Kuwait's wells back on line faster than most people expected?

Steve from new blog Tough Times e-mails to say he takes issue with UO's A Pack, Not a TV Show on his own site. His most interesting argument is that "the situation would be markedly different than the events of 09/11/01 - instead of reactionary, actions taken would be presumptive. Reaction to something that has happened, as opposed to action on something that may happen, are two different phenomena." I tend to think he's put so much energy into detailing the downside of the threat becoming public that he has scanted the downside of it remaining secret, but his piece is well worth reading.

More in Sorrow than in Anger Post - Neolibertarians and civil liberties-minded conservatives are aghast today at the Information Awareness Office, headed by killer clown John "Convictions Overturned on Appeal" Poindexter. First, and it gives this site no pleasure to say this, Advantage: Unqualified Offerings. UO brought the Poindexter story to the blogosphere last July, in Annals of Upward Failure and The Poindexter Beat.

Unqualified Offerings tried to tell you.

The other thing that's alarming the otherwise pro-war folks mentioned in the first paragraph is the swift passage of the Homeland Security bill. Glenn Reynolds has been in the forefront of hoping this monster would die of gridlock, but he's had company from many like-minded fellows. (On this issue, UO definitely counts as a like-minded fellow.)

Really, guys, what did you expect? Bush proposed it, Bush campaigned for it, Bush insisted the day after the election that the newly Republican congress pass the thing as submitted, and here it is. You mostly cheered the end of the gridlock that was all that kept this turkey in the freezer. Now we get the HSD and the IAO and, as William Safire puts it

Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend — all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as "a virtual, centralized grand database."

To this computerized dossier on your private life from commercial sources, add every piece of information that government has about you — passport application, driver's license and bridge toll records, judicial and divorce records, complaints from nosy neighbors to the F.B.I., your lifetime paper trail plus the latest hidden camera surveillance — and you have the supersnoop's dream: a "Total Information Awareness" about every U.S. citizen.

You don't like it, my neo friends, and that's to your credit, but in your small way you helped to bring it about. You did this by imagining that the likes of Robert Fisk were a bigger danger to you than John Poindexter. You did it by imagining that somehow the part you liked about the Bush administration - war on your target of choice - was separate and distinct from the part you didn't like - HSD, IAO, the brute-force linkage of the War on Drugs to the War on Terror, USA-PATRIOT. You put more energy into refuting "idiotarian" claims that our liberties had already been taken away than into fighting the people who were, right out in front of god and everybody, working to take them away in earnest. You imagined that war and repression somehow don't go together, even that war could function to inoculate against repression. You forgot or never saw a very important adage of Teresa Nielsen Hayden's:

Just because you're on their side doesn't mean they're on your side.

If you imagine yourselves as part of some coalition, ask yourself what you're getting for your trouble. You lost HSD. You lost USA-PATRIOT. You get IAO. An independent 9/11 commission? Gone. A lot of you favor liberal rules on therapeutic cloning. Think you'll get that from this Congress? Is there anything whatsoever that neolibertarians favor that the rest of the Republican coalition does not where you have gotten or expect to get your way? Any case where the Administration said "We've got to give the libertarians this?" Or where you can imagine them saying it? Remember, the war doesn't count. The neocons want it and the Christian Coalition wants it. They matter. Ditto for the tax cut. I'm talking about something that neolibertarians hold dear that neocons and/or the Christian Right oppose, where the will of the neolibertarians prevails.

I'm here every day. You can get back to me.

A proposition: Neolibertarians are to the Republican Party what African-Americans are to the Democratic Party - taken for granted because they have nowhere else to go.

We really weren't kidding, guys. War is the health of the state. It's time to stop imagining that this government will give you a generation-long war and occupation of however many countries without piling up the internal security measures, time to stop pretending that you have a box over here marked Good! that contains Don and Condi and a box over here marked Bad! that contains Ashcroft and Ridge and Mineta and that you get to pick one and not the other.

It's like I've been saying.

The Q Is E-Mailing Me - NyQuil mail: RGB Mike Jacobs writes

I misquote a comedian whose name I don't know...

"In the commercials, they show a guy taking it sitting in bed. For a good reason, if you take it in the kitchen, you ain't making it back to bed."

"Nyquil, the sniffling, sneezing, coughing, what the hell am i doing on the kitchen floor medicine."

Meanwhile, for once unclear-on-the-concept Kevin Maroney advises

Nyquil causes drowsiness because it has doxylamine succinate in it. Doxylamine is a powerful antihistimine, and is the main cause of drowsiness in Nyquil. In fact, it's in Nyquil precisely *to* cause drowsiness; it's better known as a "sleeping pill". There are many cold medicines which don't contain doxylamine, including Dayquil, which is Nyquil without the knockout drops. I take my local drug store's Dayquil knockoff when I have my annual cold and do pretty well by it.

But Kevin - Unqualified Offerings likes the knockout drops! Sadly, UO changed its mind about drug prohibition well after it was too old to benefit personally. And it doesn't drink alcohol either. The occasional, sanctioned shot of NyQuil is all it's got.

Tonight: Reader mail on Afghanistan: The Wargame.

So What Went Wrong?

WASHINGTON –– U.S. counterterrorism officials believe a new audiotape attributed to Osama bin Laden is probably authentic and are treating it as evidence the long-absent terrorist leader is still alive, a U.S. official familiar with the tape said Wednesday.

From today's Washington Post.

Remember that famous passage from Heinlein's Starship Troopers?

We are the boys who go to a particular place, at H-hour, occupy a designated terrain, stand on it, dig the enemy out of their holes, force them then and there to surrender or die.

Heinlein's point was that no matter how fancy the technology got, you were still going to need grunts to do the grunt work.

We tried to skip that part. We invented cavebusting bombs. They were excellent, so far as we know, at busting caves. At telling who, if anyone, was in the cave in the first place, not so good. We tried hiring out the grunt work. At doing things they wanted to do anyway, like exploiting breakthroughs our airpower punched into Taliban lines, the Northern Alliance was fine. At doing things we wanted them to do, like find certain people and capture or kill them, they weren't as effective. We fought the Afghan War against Al Qaeda in such a way that we couldn't even know whether we won or not, if winning is defined as the certain destruction of Al Qaeda's leadership and ability to wage terror against us. We did it for some serious reasons - fear of US military casualties, fear of Afghan civilian casualties, fear of public opinion in South Asia, the Middle East and the US, fear of (oh yes!) quagmire.

But when all is said and done, we did it in a manner that meant, in important ways, we couldn't win. At least not decisively. The wargame designers might end up classing the result we obtained as a Marginal Victory. Think of it as Clauswitz in action. "Hyperpower" or no, we fought for political goals under political constraints. Our leaders may well have, under pressure of those constraints, fought the war the best way they possibly could. If so, then those of us who favored going to War in Afghanistan have that much less complaint to make against those who believed the Afghan War was a bad idea.

Q: Can You Make This Stuff Up? - A: No, you can't make this stuff up.

7-foot-7 Manute Bol Tries Hockey

While You Were Out (Cold) - "you" being "Unqualified Offerings" - life continued on. Apparently

1. The 13-year-old boy that John Lee Malvo, by his own testimony, shot outside Tasker Middle School in Bowie last month, has come home from the hospital, according to this Washington Post story. Yay! At what lasting cost?

Physically, they're still in what his mother calls "the research and discovery stage. He has to sit up a certain way or he has trouble breathing. There's pain from the broken rib. And he still has pancreatitis; we don't know yet if he's going to be insulin-dependent."
...
Counting the eight holes in his body where various tubes once invaded, eyeing the two surgical scars, from sternum to navel and crosswise from midsection to his left side, he began singing a lyric from a favorite Christian pop band, Plus One: "I was a mess. . . ."
...
Fear is also a factor. The boy himself was convinced, irrationally, that the killers had targeted him specifically. "Did they see my face?" he whispered after doctors removed the tubes forcing air into his lungs.

"He told me he was worried that they would 'come back and finish the job,' " says Lisa Brown, 36, a tall, elegant single mother of three.

Note that during last summer's "weapons of some destruction" disputes among this website, Amygdala, Newsrack, Electrolite and Flit, much was made by some parties of the lasting debilities afflicting many chemical attack survivors. But anyone who knows even as little about gunshot/high-explosive wounds as Unqualified Offerings does is aware that they too can result in pretty miserable chronic conditions.

The article's account of the Brown family's story of the shooting incident itself and the aftermath is vivid and heartbreaking.

2. A "Third Man" arrested. Per the Post

A New Jersey man who spent time with John Allen Muhammad on the Caribbean island of Antigua has been arrested in New York by federal authorities investigating connections between the two men.

Peter John Gianquinto Jr., 53, was detained last week as he left his doctor's office in New York on charges of making false statements when he applied for a passport. Court documents indicate that federal agents quickly focused on Gianquinto in the days after Muhammad, 41, and John Lee Malvo, 17, were arrested, and he is now part of the broader inquiry into the sniper suspects.

Newsday also has a story. Gianquinto knew John Muhammad on Antigua and apparently left the Island shortly before Muhammad did. He has numerous bunco convictions and appears to have been running scams with Muhammad in the Antilles. He's also apparently been on a downward spiral financially, and given to spouting some of the same lines of patter as Muhammad - frex, claiming to be big in the music business. No picture, but bits in both articles indicate that Gianquinto is white. There's the Italian name of course, and a Newsday description of him as a "bleached blonde." An acquaintance in the Post article also talks about his "tan." Now Unqualified Offerings knows perfectly well that there are black people who tan and even burn, but the witness describes Gianquinto as working at his tan, which is a pretty white thing to do.

UO will boldly declare Gianquinto white until proven otherwise. Why this matters at all is that it undercuts any image of Muhammad and Malvo as rabid black nationalists. We get further from anything like a political motive for what turned out to be a cross-state spree all the time.

3. My buddy Dave Allan tipped me to this takedown of PBS's The American Experience from 2Blowards. It's a pretty good piece, and accords with my reaction to the network's Great War docuseries of a few years ago. The creators seemed so keen to assure us how much they hated war that they utterly falsified the experience and importance of the War. Because the essential truth of WWI was that, for every Hemingway or Graves who saw it as the atrocious collapse of a corrupt order, there were other soldiers who had the time of their lives. There were, that is, soldiers who grew too fond of it even though it was hell. You know the most famous of them, Adolph Hitler.

But Hitler couldn't have done what he did without an entire movement of men behind him who had loved the order and cameraderie of barracks life and wished to bring the same ethos to society as a whole. Veteran-led movements to militarize the homefront along Marxist or anti-Marxist lines afflicted every country in postwar Europe. (Ironically, the more overseas colonies you had, like the Brits, the less you suffered, because you had some place to send your at-loose-ends veterans. And the colonies, we have seen, were very very grateful for it.) The hardest thing about wars is ending them. As we have seen and will see again.

Sick and, by longstanding Unqualified Offerings tradition, that means a link to Dennis Leary's NyQuil rant. Scroll down to section 2, "Drugs." Just, as it were, a taste:

It says on the back of the NyQuil box, on the back of the box it says, "May cause drowsiness." It should say, "Don't make any fucking plans!

Unqualified Offerings has no plans. But it is currently between doses, so it can hold itself upright for typing.

Neolibertarianism in its Own Words - Before one goes putting one's own construction on people, it's worth asking how they see themselves. In the case of neolibertarianism, we have a couple of handy manifestos to consult. First, the header of the Neolibertarian News Portal weblog:

In general my views are very hawkish abroad and libertarian at home. Milton Friedman is my role model on domestic policy, Ronald Reagan on foreign policy.
By category:
Domestic Policy
In accordance with the Constitution, I favor protecting the rights of criminal defendants even if it means guilty people are freed by mistake.
People apprehended on our soil are entitled to the protections of habeus corpus, as prescribed by law, regardless of citizenship status.
I favor ending the War On Drugs™, especially marijuana and similar drugs, and focusing on treatment. Treat drugs like alcohol; if a person uses them in a manner that endangers public safety punish the person accordingly.
I favor undoing the damage done to the 4th and 5th amendments by the War On Drugs™.
I favor smaller government at all levels with the exception of defense and law enforcement, in which I favor spending more, not less.
I favor a full-blown voucher system in education where the money spent on education is divided among prospective pupils in the form of a voucher and parents choose their child's school.
I favor deregulation of commerce.
I favor reducing trade barriers, even unilaterally.
I favor increased legal immigration and refugee status for people escaping from communism, anarchy or any other form of tyranny.
Foreign Policy:
On terrorists I say kill the bastards at the source. Don't wait for them to come to us because it will, as a practical matter, mean curtailing liberties at home.
When we deem it necessary to go to war, as with Iraq, we should use it as an opportunity to provide freedom to the conquered country, which means nation building.
I generally dislike multilateral institutions such as the UN and the ICC. I favor coalitions of the willing and a multilateral institution that embodies that is fine with me.

Less systematically, but with more pith, there is this statement from VodkaPundit proprietor Stephen Green. An excerpt:

I’m a Falwell-tweaking, gay-marriage supporting, drug legalizing, pro-abortion, pro-immigration, anti-trade barrier, wary-of-organized-religion kind of conservative. Hardly a conservative at all, but I digress.

Let's Play Charades - You can't say Saddam Hussein doesn't have a sense of theater.

Oh the Irony Dept. - From Sunday's Washington Post:

Sources said that Malvo described himself and his partner as behaving like soldiers: One would be a lookout and communicate with the other on two-way radios.

If conditions, like traffic, were not right, they would not shoot, Malvo told investigators. They deliberately hopped from jurisdiction to jurisdiction to create confusion, and they watched the news coverage of their crimes, the sources said.

Emphasis, Unqualified Offerings. From today's Washington Post:

When Malvo and Muhammad were transferred to Virginia, they were effectively left without lawyers, because the lawyers who represented them against the federal charges in Maryland had not been appointed to defend them in Virginia.

That created an opportunity for investigators to seek to question Muhammad and Malvo on Thursday night and into Friday, before they appeared Friday in Virginia courtrooms and had attorneys appointed for them.

Emphasis, Unqualified Offerings.

Interesting passage from Monday's paper:

That source said officials theorize that Malvo likely pulled the trigger in most of the shootings that came from the 1990 Chevrolet Caprice in which the pair was arrested. The Caprice was modified to allow someone to shoot from the trunk and a hole had been bored in the back, investigators have said.

Sources said there have been no witnesses so far who saw a shot coming from the trunk, and no witnesses have reported seeing anyone with a rifle.

The source said that the trunk is probably too small for Muhammad to have shot from but added that investigators don't think any of the shots could have been fired through the hole in the back of the car. More likely, the source said, one of the suspects knelt in the trunk with the lid raised, fired a shot and then pulled the trunk closed.

"It's just a theory at this point, but it would have been very difficult for Muhammad to have been in the trunk and firing shots," the source said. "Instead, he was probably at the wheel or spotting."

Here's an idle question: Will there turn out to be much less to the whole "gun port" modification than we were initially led to believe? It's a poor gun port you can't shoot through, isn't it? Will the "gun port" turn out to have been a just a missing or damaged trunk lock mechanism?

Other business: This Washington Times story suggests that a Supreme Court ruling from just last year may also authorize prosecutors to use Malvo's Friday confessions.

My Heart Cries for You Dept.: In the Post, Malvo's court-appointed guardian is quoted as follows:

Todd G. Petit, a Fairfax lawyer who was appointed Malvo's guardian last week, met with Malvo yesterday and said his client "obviously is concerned. He's trying to be optimistic. But this is a very difficult position for a 17-year-old boy to be in."

This may be one reason why so many 17-year-old boys decline to undertake cross-state killing sprees. It's just not worth the trouble.

A Fanboy's Notes - Finally, with the feature-length Cartoon Theater presentation, Justice Leage: The Savage Time, the animated series comes as close to offering the perfect superhero story as we can probably hope, given the medium.

Plot precis: Six Justice Leaguers are in space when Something Happens and their ship gets zapped. They return to a very different world, where Germany somehow won World War II, pictures of an unknown "Leader" are everywhere, and an alternate version of the seventh Leaguer - Batman, of course - leads a small underground resistance. Alterna-Batman helps the other six go back in time to just after the D-Day invasion ("The beginning of the end") to try to set history right again.

Yes, huge Nazi war machines. Yes, superheroes knocking Messerschmidts out of the sky. Yes, Blackhawk. Yes, Seargeant Rock. Yes - Steve Trevor!

Amazingly, the Steve Trevor-Wonder Woman storyline is a highlight of the show, not bad since Trevor can make a fair claim to being one of the dullest supporting characters in the history of superhero comics and, for much of her history, Wonder Woman has been among the dullest of superheroes. Here everything works. WW comes across Trevor as he is escaping from behind enemy lines with a "top-secret communicator" and saves his life. She is astonished by his courage, by his willingness to stand against evil without the superpowers she herself possesses. He is astounded by those very superpowers - plus the stark sexual dimorphism common to the Timm/Fogel canon. Trevor indeed puts G-Rated moves on Wonder Woman, and she reciprocates in a G-Rated way. It actually works. And when they meet again, sixty years later, it's genuinely affecting.

The Easy Company arc features Jon Stewart/Green Lantern, whose power ring gives out soon after getting separated from the rest of the League at Caen. Determined to fight on, he just so happens to come across Sergeant Rock and his helpers - yes - behind enemy lines. There's pleasure and disappointment in this subplot. There's some nice, understated animation of Stewart/GL's obvious discomfort when the soldiers hand him a rifle, and when he decides, without saying anything, to bear and wield it. The show somewhat finesses that whole people die in wartime thing in a way a Japanese cartoon might not - there are exploding planes and shells, and things that crash in such a way that Nothing could have survived that! But there are also a soldiers on both sides who pull up wounded when they obviously should have died. When Stewart shoots a sniper in a tree, he its the enemy's hand, separating him from the rifle and causing him to fall, but not clearly killing him.

The other there where the show doesn't go is race. Sergeant Rock's army was a segregated one, but nobody says boo about Stewart/GL's melanin content. One private rides him constantly, but the official reason is that Stewart is useless without his "fancy powers" (which the soldier never had occasion to see in the first place).

JL: The Savage Time is surprisingly good at vivifying nobility and courage and sacrifice, all the virtues that even superhero comics made a decades-long project of deconstructing. WWII is a great subject for that, of course. Nostalgia for its role in midwifing so much "Greatest Generation" grandeur surely drives more "national greatness" visions than Caucasian pipelines or the Peril of Israel. You feel Stewart's bravery when, powerless, he faces Vandal Savage at the climax.

And yes, someone does twist a cannon barrel around so it explodes when fired.

Plugs - Did Unqualified Offerings realize that loyal reader Eric Mauro is a superb cartoonist and animator whose site, Qhead.com, features superb Mr. Questionhead Flash animations and funny pencil cartoons like today's?

No it did not.

Did Unqualified Offerings quite catch on that useful sniper tipster RonK of Seattle was also the proprietor of the well-regarded liberal blog, the Cogent Provocateur?

No, it did not.

Why not? Because these men are modest, and never really mentioned it in their e-mails. Unqualified Offerings had to pick the info up from the streets. Okay, not the streets exactly.

UO is pretty sure it even favorably cited a major CP consideration of Iraq policy over the summer, too. Anyway, go to those sites and have fun.

You Can Read It in the Sunday Papers - Two important columns in the November 3 edition of the Post.

(What? It's not like I named this weblog "Insta" anything.)

The one that's important in an unwitting way is by Robert Kagan, who spends his monthly allotment of column-inches whingeing about France. It has some nice passages:

If you want to see a country punching far above its weight class these days, look at France. The French don't have a lot of power, but they certainly know how to make the most of what little they do have. At the Security Council, France wields a veto, thanks to Franklin Roosevelt (and FDR didn't even like the French). That lets France's diplomats go toe-to-toe with the American behemoth, to the cheers of a proud French electorate and a grateful European public.

And

On European Union budget matters, in relations with NATO, on all kinds of issues ranging from economics to geopolitics, Chirac and his government seem these days to have testosterone pumping through their veins. And it's no secret why. Chirac was a dead politician walking just a year ago. His victory over right-wing villain Jean-Marie Le Pen this summer, and the end of cohabitation with the imploded Socialists, put the steam back in Chirac's stride. Now he's giving both Europeans and Americans a refresher course on what Gaullism really means.

And

Who would ever want to wake from such a dream? The real world of terrorists, tyrannical aggressors and weapons of mass destruction is a much less accommodating world for France than the legalistic, one-country, one-vote world of the Security Council or the postmodern paradise of the European Union. If the United States ever does invade Iraq, the French must either stand by helplessly or take their place by America's side, and that is not nearly as enjoyable. It's more fun to play Don Quixote, tilting at American windmills. And who knows? If France can prolong the game for a few more months, as Powell suggests, Bush's chance to remove Saddam Hussein will have passed and the Iraqi leader will be safe again. What a triumph that will be for France's vision of a just international order. And then only the American people and all of Iraq's many neighbors will have to stay awake, waiting for the next catastrophe to strike.

Here is what Kagan is saying without realizing it. That pesky Jacques Chirac is a National Greatness Conservative. Alas, his darn nation doesn't happen to be our darn nation. Well, as David Brooks once said, "We are all neoconservatives now."

This is the real problem with neocons: everybody has them. (Airstrip One pipes up to say: except Great Britain.) And unlike both transnational progressives and traditionalist-minded paleocons, your national greatness types from different countries can't really coexist for long, since they tend to see national greatness as a zero sum game and since they come, as we mentioned, from different countries. (Tranzis not only can live with foreign tranzis, the ache to do so. And since those conservatives who do the leave us alone stuff abroad too needn't come into conflict, they also do okay with each other.)

The other problem with "national greatness conservatives" is they make downpayments on their dreams now for which you pay and pay afterwards. Consider this undesignated companion piece to Kagan's on the same page by Anna Politkovskaya, about her mid-siege interview with a Moscow theater hostage-taker named Abubakar. Abubakar turns out to be a nasty and implacable piece of work:

-- What did you come to Moscow for?

-- To show you what we feel like during mop-up operations, when federals take us hostage, beat us up, humiliate, kill. We want you to go through it and understand how you have hurt us.

-- But let the children go.

-- Children? You take our 12-year-old children away. We are going to keep yours. To make you understand what it feels like.

For what he thinks of as his own nation, Abubakar is willing to do great evil. Don't worry, "moral equivalence" phobes, my point is not that Robert Kagan could be Abubakar if their positions were switched. My point is this: during the siege and after the (cough cough) rescue, I read various people referring to Lermontov's writings on the savagery of the Chechens. That was in 1832, when Lermontov wrote. It must have seemed like a real bright idea for Russia to take over that part of the Caucasus, and to fight so fiercely at various times to hold it, and no end to the fighting in sight, either.

Split-Screen Republicanism Watch

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

From this morning's Washington Post, below the fold, naturally:

GOP Revises Agenda Of Extensive Tax Cuts
Leaders Pursue More Modest Proposals

After talking expansively about an aggressive new round of tax cuts, Republican leaders are ratcheting back expectations and hoping to press forward next year with a modest tax agenda that is probably more symbolic than substantive, GOP congressional sources say.

The tax cut strategy will be two-fold. One portion will consist of a largely political push to make last year's 10-year, $1.35 trillion tax cut permanent after 2010. The other will be a stimulus package tied to economic recovery that could include an immediate increase of the child tax credit, a rise in contribution limits for retirement savings accounts and an expansion of tax breaks for business investment.

Whee. So what's up? Unqualified Offerings thought Republicans were savage tax slashers (UO being a regular reader of Max Sawicky's blog and all). Oh:

Even before they assume control of the new Senate and House, Republicans in the White House and Congress are beginning to confront the limits of their power. Tax cuts are still high on the GOP's agenda, but they are competing with demands for higher military and homeland security spending and a politically popular prescription drug benefit for the elderly.

Maybe Baghdad will get a tax cut?

Superb Unintentional Veterans Day Tribute by Patrick Nielsen Hayden on Electrolite. Many today have saluted the veterans of our armed forces for their courage and devotion, and they have been right to do so.

Patrick salutes them for their brains. Also their wisdom, nuance and wide-ranging experience. Not to be missed.

UPDATE: Forgot to explain the "unintentional" part. Patrick says in the comments to the post that he had forgotten about the holiday until he came out of the subway this morning and saw the parade. So the only reason he was praising the military is because he meant it.

Midday Murder Update- The Boston Globe runs the first interview with Nathaniel Osbourne that Unqualified Offerings has seen. (Note: The Globe is reprinting a Washington Post story.) Osbourne was the man who co-purchased the "death machine" Caprice with John Muhammad on September 10. Osbourne says that Muhammad and Malvo arrived looking destitute and that he fed them and gave them each a shirt. He tells the Globe that he knew Muhammad through Osbourne's brother, whom Muhammad met on Antigua. Previous reports have reported that Osbourne agreed to co-purchase the car as a favor because he had insurance and Muhammad did not. Osbourne also reports that Muhammad and Malvo arrived in Trenton by bus. They wanted a car to continue their travels.

The Barbados Advocate publishes an editorial that wanders eventually to an endorsement of life without parole rather than death for the killers. (This citation provided as a service to those Unqualified Offerings readers who like to know where the Barbados Advocate stands on an issue before making up their own minds.) The editorialist, Derek Gale, also sounds a bit...skeptical of the Antigua commission's assertion that John Muhammad ran immigration and emigration scams for a year with the aid of no more than "negligence" on the part of Antigua officialdom.

Lee Malvo's attorneys decried his Friday interrogation, as expected. Note: That doesn't mean they are wrong to do so. Followers of the famous "Egyptian Radio" case of last winter will recall that high-pressure interrogations can induce people to say all sorts of useless things. Especially at stake, given the vagaries of death penalty law, is who pulled the trigger for which shooting. This would seem to be just the sort of thing where you couldn't necessarily trust the answer you got under questioning without checking it against other available evidence.

It doesn't so far sound like prosecutors have decided to "get" one of the pair at the possible expense of the other. There's been no whisper of, say, making a deal with Malvo's attorneys that would save his life in return for testimony that would execute Muhammad. Prosecutors seem to want very badly to secure the death penalty for both men.

Declaration of Independence - One of those occasional intrablogger contretemps has broken out. As always, when such a thing happens, someone ends up writing a response to the quarrel that is so good its importance transcends the specifics of the quarrel. In this case it is Diana Moon of Letter from Gotham. Her meditation on "The War of the Warbloggers" is chock full of sobriety and moral acuity. For instance:

WITH FRIENDS LIKE THIS. I looked at this blogger's site and, despite the fact that his blog boasts, "I'm a Friend to Israel," I noticed (in fact, was almost relieved) that he does not link to any actual Israelis. It so happens that a real Israeli does have a blog, easily readable, easily linkable. He's no bleeding-heart leftist, but he has posted several times responses to the odious chants for expelling the Palestinians that emanate from the right both here and in Israel. Guess what: he's not going to do it. Now, he's the one who puts on the uniform every year, does reserve duty, carries the gun and does in real life what the "Warbloggers" do with the keyboard. And he's not gonna do it. Does that tell you something?(3)

Regarding Gaza, when Gil first started his blog, he was part of a unit that was...about to go into Gaza. The "military adventure" was called off. I detected in his blog-voice a distinct tone of relief. Geez, what's wrong with this guy, that he doesn't want to enact in real life the fantasies of some silly American warblogger?

Man, with friends like that...they remind me of Scott Fitzgerald's description of Tom and Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy--they smashed things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made….”.

Once his like get bored with Israel, they'll go onto something else, leaving the Gils and the Imshins and the Civaxes to pick up the pieces. Some friend.

There's lots lots more, all of it excellent. What I think Diana is writing about beyond questions of blogosphere etiquette is the question of mania, of hysteria, a question this site has also been working through over the last couple of months. Diana is far more hawkish than I am, but in a much less creepy way than the people she discusses.

Acting Like Grownups - Let's extend the themes of the fantasia immediately below this to foreign policy for a minute. A popular notion out there is that the United States has become, reluctantly, "the designated driver of the planet":

If you want put it in perspective, it's like we're the guy who ended up being the designated driver for the planet. Sure we'd love to sit back and drink ourselves into a stupor with the rest of the globe but we're responsible for getting as many people home safe and sound as possible. Every so often while we're sitting around wishing we could kill a few beers like the rest of the planet, a sloppy drunk, drooling, Europe comes over to where we're sitting. Then they take another swig of Vodka straight out of the bottle and tell us not to worry about a thing because they'll drive everyone home in their 'international law' van. But we know if we go ahead and drink up that we'll just get a call at 4 am asking us to bring our tow truck and the 'jaws of life' to clean up the bloody mess on dead man's curve. That's the burden of being an American.

Leave aside the question of just how reluctantly successive US administrations took up this "burden." (John Hawkins and David Frum would find considerable disagreement on this score. Let's consider only the structural question: What does the knowledge that there is a designated driver encourage?

That's right: irresponsible behavior. The whole point of designating an official sober person is to give everyone else license to get shit-faced and obnoxious. By taking on the role of official grownup, with whatever faux-reluctance, we guarantee that we'll always have plenty of parenting to do, because we put the rest of the world in the role of official makers of trouble with no responsibility for same. Like Superman's, ours becomes a never-ending battle. If we were really reluctant about this, we'd be giving some serious thought to how we honorably get out of that job.

A Pack, Not a TV Show - Unqualified Offerings understands that the plot of this season's well-regarded series, 24, is that terrorists have hidden a nuclear weapon in Los Angeles set to detonate within a day (or a dirty bomb, or whatever), and CIA officer Jack has to find it. The complication is that they have to keep the threat secret to forestall "panic."

Well now, to flog a familiar theme, Unqualified Offerings dreams of a different series. In this one

The Government learns of a nuclear threat. The President puts Jack on the case, enjoining him to secrecy because of the possibility of panic.

During his investigation, Jack is forced to take a local LA reporter into his confidence. The reporter abominates the secrecy. Lives are at stake! If Jack doesn't succeed, at least they can save some people. And some people Jack doesn't know may have important clues.

The philosophical dispute takes up an entire hour of this real-time series. Jack explains that most people are weak in a world of predators, that it's the job of people like Jack, and by implication, the reporter, to protect them. He takes his responsibility very seriously and swears he will do his damnedest to find the bomb and save the reporter's beloved city. The reporter argues that people are far more self-possessed than Jack and his masters give them credit for. When not deliberately infantilized, they are capable of acting with a nobility approaching grandeur. One ten-minute act is entirely taken up with a discussion of the Titanic, with Jack making much of the squalid refusal of the Duff Gordons to allow the crew of their lifeboat to rescue any of the drowning from the water. The reporter then tells the stories of several crewmen and passengers who acted to save others even at the risk or expense of their own lives. People are weak and strong in different measures, he concludes, but strong enough.

They part, Jack knowing what will come next. He continues with his investigation. The reporter publishes the news of the threat on his internet site. Official Washington explodes with apoplexy. Jack's boss demands an explanation for why he didn't stop the reporter "using all means at your disposal." Jack hangs up on him. The government scrambles to declare martial law, but it is too late.

In a spontaneous and ragged, but increasingly coherent, effort, the people of Los Angeles act to save themselves and each other as best they can, in an effort strongly reminiscent of the action of New Yorkers during the massacres at the World Trade Center in September 2001. (The producer tells Entertainment Weekly that the entire sequence was conceived, in fact, as a tribute to those ordinary people who rose to that occasion.) While the President and the feckless Governor attempt to rush the National Guard to the scene to set up roadblocks, the program shows us stunning vignettes of Angelenos "adaptive and effective" response to the terror, lighting now in Watts, now in South Central, now in West Hollywood. There is a touching segment in which a young couple conclude that they themselves have no chance of getting out of the city. They walk, hand in hand, to their favorite bookstore, where the manager and one cafe barrista have come to a similar conclusion.

That episode ends with the manager, the waiter and the couple sharing espressos. The woman insists on paying, and tipping too.

Since it's a realtime show, the evacuation, and the official apoplexy, stretches out over several episodes. Two shows before the end of the season, there is a confrontation at a hastily-constructed roadblock between a local rescue organizer and the nervous commander of one of the few guard detachments to arrive on the scene in time. Persuaded, the commander orders his men to help direct traffic out of town.

And on a parallel track, the reporter gets a tip from someone who noticed neighbors acting strangely. It made no sense at the time, but now that the tipster knows about the whole nuclear weapon thing, it seems obviously related. The reporter does enough digging to convince himself the tip is solid and contacts Jack.

The tip is as solid as it gets, but precious hours were lost to secrecy. Jack just misses arriving in time. You can see the hurt on his face just before the explosion. In the cafe, the couple glance at their watches, shake the hands of the employees, and kiss. At the former roadblock, the national guard commander turns to look away from the city, down the road along which so many have escaped with his help. The sky grows white behind him and he is lost to the glare.

The reporter uploads something from his computer, says, into his cell phone, "The important thing is that you got out. Yes, I - " and the scene cuts midsentence like the end of James Blish's classic novelet, "We All Die Naked."

In Washington, a clusterfuck of ass-covering and recrimination. The feds pick up a woman we learn is the reporter's wife, the unheard party to his final phone call, for questioning. She finds herself face to face with Jack's boss.

"What did you expect?" she demands. "We were as good, as dutiful, as mature, as you allowed us to be. Better, since you wouldn't have given us the chance. Tens of thousands are alive despite you. Tens of thousands more might have lived.

"You think we don't know it's a dangerous world? You think we drive past graveyards and tell ourselves it has nothing to do with us? And you know what makes me angrier than anything? You really want to do the best job you can. But the job you want is bigger than you have any right to. Us. You think of us as your job. It's too much for you. And damn you but you won't give it up.

"You love your work. Ask yourself if your work loves you."

After what happens to Jack, planning for the third season is a bit of a struggle.

Self-Involved Blogger Post About Blogging Stuff - I have conceived a candidate addtion to the blogosphere glossary that Samizdata maintains:

Traffic Gollum - One who lives for readership statistics. (My precious!)

That's it. Got nothing else to say on the subject.

Neolibertarianism, Take 1 - Kevin Maroney e-mails to nominate Greg Costikyan as an early example:

Greg Costikyan has openly been a libertarian imperialist for years. No, really; he's been a contributing editor of Reason, but dig up a copy of the afterword to Pax Britannica some time.

Alas, the afterword doesn't appear to be online, nor does Costikyan link to much of his political writing from his own site (presumably because he doesn't want to tick off any potential clients - smart man).

Franklin Harris e-mails

"Neolibertarian" is probably the right term for these semi-libertarian interventionists. (I can think of other terms, but I'll try to be nice this morning.) The first time I saw anyone use the term "neolibertarian" was 10 years ago, when Eric Rittberg, founder of the Republican Liberty Caucus, used it to differentiate the RLC from the LP and other libertarians. And, true enough, one of the specific policies that distinguished the RLC from other libertarians at the time was military interventionism, with the RLC was less inclined to oppose.

Indeed the one RLCer Unqualified Offerings knows, Brian Kelly of Liberty Blog, is as supportive of an Iraq conquest as anyone UO has run across.

Tom Burroughes of Samizdata wonders

Funnily enough, just to add another twist, I have often wondered how to label those libertarians who are anarcho-capitalists, who at the same time would support tough military strikes against enemies. Should they be "neo-anarchists"?

I have seen how the "neo" word has been used in various fields. In recent years those people who - like me - were broadly supportive of Ayn Rand's philosophy but questioned certain details prefer to be known as "neo-objectivists". I also do this to distance myself from the "official" Objectivist movement, which seems to be populated by the barking insane.

Samizdata's own "bellicose wing," which is just about everyone but Antoine Clarke seem to have comfortably adopted Airstrip One's "anarcho-militarist" jibe as a badge of honor (like Queer Nation adopted "queer"), and that seems better suited to the Samizdata crew specifically than "neolibertarian."

Some e-mails hinted that Unqualified Offerings might be imagining that it had invented the term, which is not true. Others suggested the UO thought the term was of more recent vintage and rarer than it actually is. That is true.

And Speaking of Conspiracy Theories the same article referenced in the prior post (from Eat the State) recounts a useful bit of debunking from...blogosphere bete noire Noam Chomsky!

The legend is that if only JFK had lived through a second term in office, he have would pulled US troops out of Vietnam and led a campaign for global disarmament. Never mind that JFK was responsible for escalating the low level US intervention on behalf of the regime in Saigon into a full blown US invasion of South Vietnam. There isn't any evidence up until the day he died that he was going to change course regarding US policy in Vietnam.

In his anti-conspiracy theory book "Rethinking Camelot," Noam Chomsky reviews every word that came out of JFK's mouth in his last days. There wasn't the slightest indication he was going to de-escalate the US invasion of South Vietnam. If the tin-foil hats were interested in how conservative elites really think, they would consistently read the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal and find that JFK ranks just behind Reagan as the editorial board's favorite post-World War II president.

It takes all kinds, Loyal Reader.

Digressing on the topic of JFK a minute, if you ever get the chance, visit the excellent Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas, which occupies part of the famous former Texas Schoolbook Depository. Among other things, you can stand one window over from the famous corner window. When Unqualified Offerings did this, one thing became crushingly clear: it wasn't even that hard a shot. The exit ramp onto Elm slopes down and away from the corner, holding the target on line for you. Add a 3X scope and it would be almost like stealing.

Travel Tips - Eric Olsen writes, I Think I'll Take the Bus.

What does it all mean? If nothing else, it means that traveling is a very dangerous business. Contrary to statistics, traveling by air is the most dangerous way to go, in the long run. Though it is much more likely that you will get in a car wreck than a plane wreck, it is also much more likely that you will survive a car wreck than a plane wreck, and more likely still that you will survive a bus wreck.

Paul Wellstone comes up.

Speaking of Wellstone leads one to baseless conspiracy theories. Which leads one to, Why not a conspiracy theory that the Democrats bumped him off? Repubs didn't need to - he was already facing very uncertain election prospects. But given the sympathy vote Jean Carnahan got after her husband died in 2000, and how that plus Jeffords' defection gave the Dems the Senate by the narrowest of margins, isn't it obvious that the Dem poobahs hoped for a similar bounce off the corpse of Professor Paul?

No it isn't, of course. In fact, it's astronomically unlikely to be true, same as the "Republicans killed him" theories. Conspiracy theories almost always tell us a lot more about the theorizers than the world.

Ecoutez-Vous - Unqualified Offerings literally does not know why it is telling you this, but it has discovered that the francophone rock station from the University of Moncton that it so enjoyed last March during its New Brunswick trip has added an internet feed. You can get the streaming audio of CKUM-FM from its (french-only) homepage.

Why does UO not know why it is telling you this? Because the station seems to have hard bandwidth limits that frequently keep one from logging in. However, UO likes this music so much better than almost anything on anglophone radio now that it simply must share the wealth. Much more rootsy and swinging than "Puddle of Creed-era" english language radio.

WARNING: They play french-language techno in the evenings! But that will surely be a feature rather than a bug for some readers.

REQUEST: This site seems to have more Canadian readers than it used to. (But then, this site just has more readers period than it used to. So if any loyal reader can point UO to an alternative radio source of francophone/bilingual/shiac rock that it could use during CKUM's bad bandwidth days, this site will be very grateful.

UPDATE: Now they're playing more hiphop type material. They also mix in english songs now and then, presumably Approved Canadian Content.

Preemptive Blogwatch - Interesting reader mail and links to libertarian matters neo, paleo and even meso. Plus the usual stuff like sniper news, war and whatever Unqualified Offerings happens to come across while intending to write about other things.

Happy Birthday to Gary Farber of Amygdala, simply one of the most eclectic and interesting weblogs going. Go to his site to find out about the Harry Potter books that haven't been translated into english yet, and more.

Blogwatch Auxiliary - Don't know if I'll be able to sustain this, but for some time I've been thinking that Eve Tushnet, the Last Blogwatcher, needed some company. So...

Seablogger: Global Warming and geologic time.

Nick Denton: Have downsized MBAs re-engineer the US intelligence snarl. (A generally good piece, though I quail at the thought of putting "all foreign intelligence work under the Department of Defense" since it's too easy then for ideologues to manipulate the single source. At a minimum, the State Department should have its own intelligence operations. Diplomats are supposed to be spies anyway.) Howard Dean. Immigration, discrimination and cultural self-defense.

The lluminated Donkey: Blog poker, for real. Who is the king of pizza slices?

Through the Looking Glass: Double-edged comparison of Bushian and Clintonian ethics. Were the Greens right after all? Memo to libertarians: Republicans are not your friends.

Uncertain Principles - Lots of great physics stuff, plus some best album lists.

Where Is Raed: Everyone's favorite gay Iraqi blogger (out of all of them!) casts a jaundiced eye on the UN's use of farce resolution. Israel's "weapons of mass love and harmony." Diana Moon's dresses.

Franklin Harris: Economics, Alabama, animé, and the five greatest superheroes of all time. (THE RESULTS - WILL - SHOCK YOU! Well, a little.)

So Say We All - For the sake of the children - Why we must ban all fun now. A British topic, but surely a lesson for Americans too:

Every year politicians implore us not to hold our own ad-hoc firework parties because a) we are too irresponsible and stupid to do so safely and b) we do not have the required training, qualifications, first aid badges, knowledge of the appropriate regulations, paperwork etc. So it was heartening this year to hear the call come from government level, in the person of the charismatic Minister for Stopping People Doing Things, Nick Raynsford.

Link via Natalie Solent.

Quotable - Micah Holmquist has an election postmortem too:

Despite what Eric Alterman, Andrew Sullivan and The Wall Street Journal like to believe, the Democrats aren't an anti-war party and anti-war activists tend not to be Democrats. It will be a big deal if any of this changes.

Pink Pistol - A striking adventure in simile from Teresa Nielsen Hayden:

Basically, I figure guns are like gays: They seem a lot more sinister and threatening until you get to know a few; and once you have one in the house, you can get downright defensive about them.

Unqualified Offerings can't wholeheartedly agree with her criticism of the NRA in the same post - it believes the NRA sounds extreme because it knows perfectly well that gun control enthusiasts really do want to take away all guns; it also believes that the NRA's political rhetoric works a lot better outside New York publishing circles.

That's a quibble. TNH's item is a must-read.

Split-Screen Republicanism Watch

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

NOW WIN THE WAR: I've been reading with some disbelief all sorts of proposals for president Bush's next two years. Here's the only one that matters: win the war. If we can rid the world of Saddam Hussein and see Iran's dictators pushed to the brink, then an entirely new set of circumstances prevails in the world. What the president needs to focus on now is disarming Saddam. This election wasn't a mandate for tax simplification or welfare reform (however important those two things are). It was a vote of support for victory. If Bush lets Saddam wriggle through the gaping U.N. net, and lets al Qaeda off the hook, then he will deserve to be defeated in 2004. Getting the war right is paramount. Everything else will follow. Nothing else, in comparison, matters.

Andrew Sullivan, yesterday.

CF. - Colby Cosh advises students of the Muhammad-Malvo spree to look into the 1973 case of Mark Essex. This we shall do in time.

Spree Graph Extra - Mildred Muhammad is out of seclusion, or at least came out long enough to give "a four-hour interview with The Washington Post."

UPDATE I: NOT out of seclusion. Says the Post: "she agreed to talk under the condition that her location not be disclosed. Since the arrests, she has not returned to her administrative job at Southern Maryland Hospital Center, and her children have not attended school."

UPDATE II: The missing link or our old friend, "It's all about me" syndrome?

I

Now she is convinced that his chief purpose in coming to the Washington area was to kill her. "I'm sure he had me in his scope," she said. "This was an elaborate plan to make this look like I was a victim so he could come in as the grieving father and take the children."

II

"They all died because of me," she said softly.

III

But now, when she looks back at the sniper's trail, she sees messages she thinks may have been meant for her. The Michaels crafts store was one of her favorite stores when she and her husband were living in Tacoma, Wash. It was at a Michaels that she had purchased the materials she needed to fashion a bride and groom to put atop their wedding cake.

IV

She has followed the reports about the sniper shootings and is certain that Muhammad was stalking her. "I don't believe in coincidences," she said.

Several of the shootings took place at stores, including Michaels and Home Depot, where she had frequently shopped in Tacoma. And now she views the sniper's warning contained in a letter left near a shooting scene – "Your children are not safe anywhere at any time" – as a message to her.

Muhammad was here. He had promised that she would not live to raise his children. And she knew that his word was bond.

UPDATE: So how'd you get this way? I:

After John divorced his first wife, he and Mildred were married in 1988 at Fort Lewis in Washington state, where John was stationed with the Army. He wanted to be a career soldier, but he returned from his tour of duty in the Persian Gulf War a changed man, she said.

He told her that black soldiers had been discriminated against. One incident in particular left him seething. After he was accused of tossing an incendiary grenade into a tent, Muhammad was hog-tied, arms and legs cuffed behind his back, he told his wife. When a siren sounded to alert the troops to a possible gas attack, no one gave him a gas mask. By the time he learned it was a drill, he had been humiliated in a manner that he never forgot, she said.

"When he got back, he was a very angry man," Mildred Muhammad said. "I didn't know this man. The one I knew stayed in Saudi. He didn't want anyone to become close to him. He became so quiet."

II

By 1997, Mildred and John and converted to Islam. As their domestic problems mounted, most of their friends at the mosque sided with John, she said. He had wrongly accused her of having an affair, she said, and took the matter to the mosque. As a result, she lost her job as a secretary.

"I was made to look as if I was incompetent and pathetic," she said. "He was telling me I am not good enough, that I was not a good Muslim, not a good mother."

III

In September 1999, he moved out of their home, and she filed for divorce three months later. It was then that she learned that Muhammad always operated with a plan.

On March 27, 2000, Muhammad told his wife he was taking their children shopping. When he called to say they had been delayed, he and the children were actually at the airport boarding a plane for the Caribbean island of Antigua. Although John Muhammad insisted later in court that he had Mildred's permission to take the children away, she said he had kidnapped them. She would not see the children again for a year and a half, until Sept. 4, 2001

UPDATE: So what have we learned? First, if Mrs. Muhammad's account is accurate, she did not see her husband this fall when he was in the area. Since witnesses saw the Caprice and someone looking like Muhammad in Mrs. Muhammad's neighborhood, and since Muhammad and Malvo are implicated in two robberies in Clinton in a ten-day span, there's at least cause to think that he was stalking her. The cross-state spree through Georgia and Alabama in late December took Muhammad to Baton Rouge - home of his cousin, Charlene Anderson, his sister-in-law Sheron Norman...and his first wife, Carol Williams. Muhammad had stayed with Anderson for a brief time in high summer. After that, he appears to have bounced between Maryland and Louisiana as between two poles.

Spree Graphs - In case any of this site's libertarian or neolibertarian readers were under the misimpression that only the government could be incompetent, RonK e-mails re the contrapositive:

TACOMA -- A Tacoma gun shop has filed a police report indicating that the rifle linked to a string of sniper shootings in the Washington, D.C.-area was stolen between July and October.

Though the .223-caliber Bushmaster XM15 semiautomatic rifle was on display and equipped with multiple accessories, workers at Bull's Eye Shooter Supply say they never noticed its disappearance and didn't realize it had been stolen until federal agents asked about it late last month, according to a police report filed Tuesday.

That's interesting, among other reasons, because it seems to rule out that rifle's being the weapon in the Tuscon sniper-robbery discussed here yesterday.

But remember our conservation law! If a murder seems to drop off the Muhammad-Malvo list, another must take its place:

Atlanta police yesterday added another name to the long list of shooting victims linked to John Allen Muhammad and John Lee Malvo, saying a man working in a liquor store there was slain Sept. 21 with a gun later found near the scene of a robbery-killing in Alabama for which the two sniper suspects have been charged with murder.

That would be the .22 pistol found in the woods near the Montgomery liquour-store robbery.

Including the sniper victims, Muhammad and Malvo have been charged or named as suspects in 21 shootings in which 14 people were killed and seven wounded in Maryland, Virginia, the District, Washington state, Alabama, Louisiana and Georgia. Attorney General John D. Ashcroft announced yesterday that Virginia authorities will be the first to prosecute the suspects – Muhammad in Prince William County and Malvo in Fairfax County. Both face murder trials and could be sentenced to death if convicted.

Unqualified Offerings reminds its readers that it is wrong to shoot, rob and murder. And besides, Muhammad and Malvo already took your turn in addition to theirs.

Harjeet Singh Credibility Watch:

Harjeet Singh, who befriended Muhammad and Malvo in Bellingham, Wash., before the sniper attacks, said yesterday that Malvo boasted in April that he and Muhammad had shot two men on Arizona golf courses and robbed them before concealing their bodies.

In an interview, Singh said Malvo "mentioned that it was older people they had shot." Singh said he did not report the alleged remarks to police at the time because he was not sure Malvo was telling the truth. He also said Malvo did not mention dates or the names of the golf courses. "He said that they buried [the victims] and he said they took things like rings, wallets and a watch from them," Singh said.

In Tucson, Assistant Police Chief Robert Lehner said: "We are taking [Singh's] statements very seriously," although investigators know of only one golf course slaying in Arizona. "We have already interviewed him once . . . and we will interview him again," Lehner said of Singh. Two Tucson homicide detectives flew to Washington state yesterday to reinterview him. "Obviously, to us, it is potentially a very important lead, and we are treating it very seriously," Lehner said.

Singh, in other words, is telling us about golf course murders for the first time only after a golf course murder has been made public. Recall this quote from October 25 in the Bellingham Herald:

The FBI and police went back and talked with Singh on Wednesday, Carroll said. He said Singh gave different information from what he said earlier, but would not elaborate.

"I think that Mr. Singh is trying to position himself in this community to be a bigger part of the totality of the circumstances than he truly is," [Bellingham Police Chief Randy] Carroll said.

A tentative path has Muhammad and Malvo moving south from Clinton, MD after the September 15 robbery, committing two murders in 21 hours in Atlanta on the 21st and then Montgomery, then reaching Baton Rouge by September 23, when they murdered Hong Im Ballenger outside her beauty parlor. (This article has a picture of Mrs. Ballenger and her husband, but I am going to get started again if I don't watch it.)

By the second, they are back in DC and on the way to making themselves famous and arrested.

You Don't Say - Title borrowed from Best [Neocon-Approved Items] of the Web, but it fits this Post headline: Townsend Laments Gubernatorial Defeat.

But here's a good reason why so many of the rest of us don't. Asked whether it was her campaign staff's ineptness or the sheer unpopularity of Givernor Parris Glendening that did her in:

Townsend declined to join that discussion.

"You know what? I'm going to go out as a class act. That's who I am," she said.

Here's a really basic rule: If you refer to yourself as "a class act," you are not one. This is less like a social rule than a rule of nature: it can not be broken. But Unqualified Offerings has caught people trying to break it before.

Speaking of Canadian Blogs there's a new one called The Ambler run by Kevin Michael Grace. He writes that "If pressed, I would call myself (after Erik von Kühnelt-Leddihn) a right-wing anarchist—or a 'paleoconservative.' (Actually, I may have invented the latter label, circa 1986.)" Worth watching. He seems to be another of those Canadians who is slow to implement item-specific anchors, but the bottom of his page currently holds his inaugural, introductory post.

Coming to Terms - Unqualified Offerings has struggled with what to call them, those pundits and bloggers who are anti-regulation, anti-gun control, anti-drug prohibition, anti-socialist, anti-theocrat and generally, you know, libertarian in outlook on just about all domestic issues but also favor the military conquest of Iraq (and Iran, and Saudi Arabia, and Syria, and Egypt, and...) and in most cases the maximal "reconstruction" project in the Middle East that neoconservatives and neoliberals favor - who are, in other words, interventionist and even imperial, however much they occasionally aver that they wish it could be otherwise.

UO hasn't been completely comfortable just calling them "libertarians," because anti-interventionism was woven into the libertarian movement from the start. It was the famous YAF schism over the draft and Vietnam that gave birth to the organized libertarian movement, and libertarians anti-communist and anti-New Deal forebears - Mencken, Lane, Paterson - were also skeptical of war and entangling alliances. They would not be with the regime change program either.

Not all the interventionists are comfortable with the term "libertarian," either. (Just today, Brink Lindsey explains his own discomfort with the label, or maybe just with the idea of being lumped in with those who recognize that, while national security may be a legitimate function of the state, the state is still the state when it performs that function.) Joseph Stromberg coined the term "liberventionism," which he takes to be a contradiction in terms. I pretty much do too, and "liberventionist" has a ring to it, but the ring is pejorative, and unlike Stromberg, I don't despise or disdain (most of) the people we're talking about. I think they're very wrong on the central question of the day, but they're right on most of the others.

So "liberventionist" I won't use, but it would be nice to have a term. Thanks to an item by Kevin O'Reilly of Howl on Stand Down, who links to this blog, I finally have a label I'm comfortable applying:

Neolibertarian.

The shoe fits, I think. It's certainly a new development. It grows out of libertarianism, for all that it dispenses with one of Libertarianism Classic's central pillars. It has interesting correspondences with "neoconservative" and "neoliberal," both movements that had their impetus substantially in national security concerns, both of which were substantially motivated by concern for the security of Israel - similarly a priority for the neolibertarians.

"Neolibertarian" is not an automatically pejorative term, any more than "neoconservative" or "neoliberal" are, though like the other terms, it can be used pejoratively. Certainly, my own every use of the term will contain an element of criticism, but not, I hope, of insult. Having named the thing, we'll consider the phenomenon of neolibertarianism in future items.

Return of the Autogoogle - You can't keep a good (egotistical) blog down. After dropping from result 2 to page 2 when Google jiggered their site-ranking algorithm, Unqualified Offerings has bounced back big time, currently holding down the number 7 Henley spot.

Speaking of Colby Cosh, the item containing this passage is not to be missed:

Everybody down there is milling about in befuddlement over the fact that the Republicans did better than the polls showed over most of the campaign. It was another test of my conviction that there are systemic biases against the right wing in ordinary voter polling. Hypothesis confirmed. There appear to be a small but consistent number of voters, in every Western country, who take a left line with pollsters and then vote their interests on the actual ballot.

Should this be surprising? Given the rise of bogus "push-polling" ("Would you change your vote if you knew Candidate X raped his children repeatedly...?") and other forms of quasi-psephological horsefudge, people have less and less incentive to be truthful with these strangers who interrupt our meals. We tell 'em what they want to hear, and nobody wants to hear that you're a callous right-winger who would take the folic-acid money away from Berber crack babies. But, at every election, it's the same old song. "Hey, Bob Dole did better than expected!" "Hey, Jean Marie Le Pen did better than expected!" "Hey, the Reform Party did better than expected!" "Hey, the Reform Party did better than expected...again!" Figure it out, pollsters. People are going to connect the dots on these repeated "late surges" after a while.

Now, me, I add an implicit 4-6% to any midterm polling figure given for a party of the right, anywhere. I know political scientists have studied this exact subject, too, and they agree with me (SMART MOVE, FELLAS), and I may even have a reference written down.

Unqualified Offerings can think of only one instance where Cosh's Dictum didn't prove out. That's right! Bush vs. Gore, USA 2000. Back then this site posted a lengthy prediction to the Elvis Costello Mailing list the weekend before the election explaining that this very iron law Cosh propounds augured a safe win for Bush, possibly by a margin of as much as five percent.

Famous last words. And yes, you still need to read the whole CC item to learn why Walter Mondale wanted to lose.

Blogwatch - You know what's a really good weblog? Duckboy is a really good weblog. A classic links-style blog, heavy on citations and links to politics and general weirdness. Unqualified Offerings likes to think of the previous item as a "Duckboy-style" post.

Puck Amuck - The US has a culture of litigiousness that is out of control. And we're not the only ones!

TORONTO -- A Canadian father is suing the New Brunswick Amateur Hockey Association after his 16-year-old son failed to win the league's most valuable player award.

Michael Croteau is seeking about $200,000 in psychological and punitive damages from the association. He also demands that the MVP trophy be taken from the winner and given to his son, Steven.

Croteau told the Globe and Mail newspaper in a story published Thursday that Steven was the New Brunswick Bantam AAA leading scorer, which made him the most valuable player. He said the youth was so crushed when another player won the award at a banquet in March that he lost his desire to play.

The league's nine coaches or managers select the most valuable player, and voting results are not disclosed.

Steven had a league-leading 45 goals and 42 assists in 27 games, while the boy named most valuable player finished fourth in league scoring with 21 goals and 39 assists.

"How do you justify that?'' Croteau said in the Globe and Mail. "It's quite obvious he's the most valuable forward in the league.''

No doubt Colby Cosh will be along soon to tell us this kind of behavior has nothing to do with Alberta. Of course, UO's groundbreaking reporting on New Brunswick: Socialist Hellhole was available to early adopters way back in March, including "Wither [sic] Canada - The Continuing Series", and "Things Are Sometimes What They Seem," among others.

Returns and Arrivals - Fans of politics (Unqualified Offerings is not one) have had high praise for The Scrum, an anonymous weblog admired for the caliber of its inside-baseball analysis. The proprietor took just about exactly a month off, but is back now with some post-election pre-election handicapping - that is, he tells you what this week's midterm election results mean for the 2004 Presidential campaign.

And there's a new blog out there, De Spectaculus, run by the pseudonymous Martial. In his early items meditation on the nature and identity of legitimate authority predominates.

Department of Touché - E-mailer David Dillon writes that

If the bad guys introduced plague as the opening shot in the biowar, they did it a few hundred years ago. There's 10-15 cases in the New Mexico area every year.

and Kathy Kinsley makes a similar point on her site. She also e-mails

The reason I got a kick out of your post on the plague was, in fact, because of that very tendency to associate everything with terrorism (I'm guilty there). I just found it amusing that you are debunking Malvo/Muhammad so enthusiastically, and still worry about bubonic plague. I guess we each have
our 'eek' points on things.

A hit, a very palpable hit!

Of course, Unqualified Offerings is changing its plague hypothesis when the facts turn out to better fit another explanation...

A Postrel Postmortem - As Unqualified Offerings hoped would happen, Virginia Postrel has a bunch of post-election coverage on her site (scroll down from top) including several excellent pieces on the Georgia races. There is also this more general item:

Here's a hint for Dems looking for a winning message: Nobody thinks a new prescription drug entitlement constitutes a governing philosophy. It may excite a few ideologues (mostly on the anti- side) and interest groups, but it's the sort of issue that makes normal people's eyes glaze over. Just say "Medicare Part B" and watch the reaction. "Free prescription drugs" can't define a party.

Which begs a couple of questions: 1) Doesn't synecdoche count? (Or would synecdoche constitute a governing poetics? 2) From an electoral philosophy, are governing philosophies all that they're cracked up to be?

UO's instinct is that they may not be. It seems like every two years the sky is seen to be falling in for one party or another, but it keeps changing. As of 1994, the Democrats were dead, dead, dead. Then the Republicans lost ground. After 2000, despite Bush's win, even some conservative pundits worried that the long term trends were against the Repubs. Now they've managed a razor-thin recapture of the Senate while maintaining a 10% advantage in the House and the Democrats are doomed, doomed!

UO would love it if gaseous rot blew the corpse of one of the major parties into smelly little gibbets, opening up the possibility of a grand realignment. It does not live in hope, though. The Dems will be back sooner than people think.

WTF? - Atrios takes time out from bemoaning the end of the world to link to an item about...the end of the world:

(New York-WABC, November 6, 2002) — Two patients at a New York City hospital have been diagnosed with a dangerous disease not seen in this region in decades. Eyewitness News has learned that doctors at Beth Israel Medical Center are caring for the two people who have the Bubonic plague.

Has the biowar balloon gone up? Too soon to tell, as professional journalists say:

The city and state health department were joined by the Centers for Disease Control in their investigation into how the couple contracted the disease. The state health department in Sante Fe, New Mexico, where the couple lives, tested rodents on their property this summer. Apparently many of those rodents tested positive for the Bubonic plague.

Doctors say they believe the couple was infected in their home state after sleeping in a sleeping bags that had been outdoors on their property for several weeks. Those sleeping bags are now being tested.

Officials say there are 20 to 30 cases of Bubonic plague worldwide each year. If caught early, the disease is very treatable, but it is often mistaken for a cold. If treatment is delayed, the plague can, of course, be fatal

Unqualified Offerings thinks that sparsely populated, dry New Mexico is not the place it would choose to introduce infected rats if it were attacking the United States. But you never know.

WTF? - Atrios takes time out from bemoaning the end of the world to link to an item about...the end of the world:

(New York-WABC, November 6, 2002) — Two patients at a New York City hospital have been diagnosed with a dangerous disease not seen in this region in decades. Eyewitness News has learned that doctors at Beth Israel Medical Center are caring for the two people who have the Bubonic plague.

Has the biowar balloon gone up? Too soon to tell, as professional journalists say:

The city and state health department were joined by the Centers for Disease Control in their investigation into how the couple contracted the disease. The state health department in Sante Fe, New Mexico, where the couple lives, tested rodents on their property this summer. Apparently many of those rodents tested positive for the Bubonic plague.

Doctors say they believe the couple was infected in their home state after sleeping in a sleeping bags that had been outdoors on their property for several weeks. Those sleeping bags are now being tested.

Officials say there are 20 to 30 cases of Bubonic plague worldwide each year. If caught early, the disease is very treatable, but it is often mistaken for a cold. If treatment is delayed, the plague can, of course, be fatal

Unqualified Offerings thinks that sparsely populated, dry New Mexico is not the place it would choose to introduce infected rats if it were attacking the United States. But you never know.

Midday Murder Update - Q: Where do known criminals with no fixed address who have spent a little time in homeless shelters get a laptop, if not from their Al Qaeda paymasters? A: They steal it.

Investigators have determined that a laptop computer seized from accused sniper John Allen Muhammad's car was stolen Sept. 5 in a robbery-shooting outside a Prince George's County pizzeria, law enforcement sources said yesterday.

That's from today's Post.

BUT WAIT! THERE'S MORE! Remember how some people argued that the snipers must be terrorists because they had not happened to have hit any muslim victims? There goes another theory:

Citing ballistics tests, Prince George's police have said that the .22-caliber pistol used to rob LaRuffa was used 10 nights later and about six miles away at Brandywine Liquor. An employee, Muhammad Rashid, 32, was closing the store Sept. 15 when he was shot once in the abdomen by an assailant who then searched Rashid's pockets and stole his wallet. Rashid has recovered from his wounds.

Muhammad's last name is still Muhammad, though. The Post story also notes a possible connection with yet another crime, a sniper-style robbery/murder in Tuscon on March 19. Someone shot a man dead on a golf course from perhaps 300 yards, and robbed. Here's the good part:

The chief said FBI agents told him that Muhammad and Malvo arrived in Tucson by bus from Los Angeles on March 13. They were picked up by Muhammad's sister, who was living on an Air Force base less than two miles from the golf course, Miranda said.

Recall that Muhammad and Malvo stole the credit card of a Greyhound bus driver around March 25, somewhere between Flagstaff and Nogales. Muhammad and Malvo were back in Tacoma by April 9, which is when they tried to use the card to buy gas.

Final thought: Muhammad and Malvo took the bus to Tucson. They didn't fly. But the director of the Lighthouse Mission homeless shelter said Muhammad was always talking about flying places. Not to go out on a limb, but could it be that, when Muhammad said this kind of thing, he was full of shit?

The Morning After - Some interesting postmortem commentary...

From Counterspin:

I'm happy.

No. Seriously.

At first I was pissed, then depressed. Then...I realized something.

WE'RE FREE!!!!

No more ass kissing the Bush Administration. No more rubberstamping.

From Jesse Walker:

I hadn't planned to support the Libertarian candidate for governor, but I did: He and his running mate looked so lonely, the only third-party ticket on the entire ballot, that I just had to give them my vote. Besides, my original plans for the gubernatorial race were in tatters. I had intended to write in a certain acquaintance of mine, but she refused the honor when I told her my plan, informing me that if I really wanted to help her I could clean one of the bathrooms before she gets home from the late shift.

From a UO reader who prefers to remain anonymous:

Everyone's missing it. Not only has Ehrlich won, and the first statewide elected black is a Republican, but:

Senator Baker, Chairman of the Judicial Proceedings committee, is out--all four Senate chairmen are gone, two through retirement, one in the primary and one tonight.

The two Democratic incumbents in Baker's district are gone as well, one an Appropriations subcommittee chairman.

Speaker of the House Casper Taylor appears to be gone. His district was rather conservative, and it appears they got fed up with his cozying up to the liberals in Montgomery, PG and the city.

Senator Mooney, frankly a bit far to the right even for my taste, has won a resounding victory in Frederick.

I can't wait for the Anne Arundel results on the Neall-Greenip race. Neall switched parties, despite being in the back rooms when the budget deals were made, and he may now pay the price.

Looks like a great night for Republicans in Maryland, and more importantly, a great night for democracy. Hopefully Ehrlich and the rest will govern with reason, and introduce the state to the notion of a two-party system...

From Will Vehrs of Quasipundit:

Undoubtably, there will be classless comments from winners and losers alike after this election, but I'd like to nominate Maryland Governor Parris Glendening for a special Nixon award:

[Kathleen Kennedy Townsend] was originally expected to coast to victory in the heavily Democratic state, but her gubernatorial bid foundered under the direction of an inexperienced campaign team and the burden of the public's growing dislike for Glendening, her political partner.

Glendening, for his part, blamed Townsend, saying she conducted "one of the worst-run campaigns in the country."

From Letter From Gotham:

Governor Pataki looks about to stomp his opponents. To the extent that they are paying any attention to this, I imagine the blogosphere will be reading all kinds of things into it: Republican tide in New York State, rejection of Clintonism, look out Schumer, and so on. It's not. Pataki was a healing figure after 9/11, and he's won by basically poaching Democratic issues. He's a Republican in drag. In any other state he'd probably be considered a liberal Democrat. This says nothing about rejection of Clintons, liberalism, at all. We have two Democratic Senators-for-life and certain issues are written in stone in this state.

Confirmation - Yes, Loyal Reader, this has been an entire day without a sniper update. UO would like to know how Muhammad and Malvo pulled off that Alaska quake, though.

Triumph and Tragedy - CNN has now called Maryland for Ehrlich, about 15 minutes after Unqualified Offerings did. For some reason they're still not calling the Eighth District even though Morella hasn't a chance in hell now. The real losers? The American people! Because Stephen Bassett only pulled 1% of the vote in the congressional race, possibly because the major-party contest was so competitive, and that means Montgomery County still won't have a candidate with the courage to push for an end to the "ET/UFO Truth Embargo."

UPDATE: The Post has had the wit to call the Eighth District for Van Hollen.

Free Free State Update - NOTE: Post contains many updates. In the Governor's race, Ehrlich is barely ahead, 50-49, with 46% of precincts reporting. That probably means he loses, if past practice continues. It's generally accepted that the Baltimore machine likes to report late, so that it gets credit for putting the Democratic candidate over the top.

Of course, back before accusing your opponent of fraud and demanding recounts became fashionable, it was alleged that the Baltimore machine did a little more than that.

UPDATE: The CNN feed (see link in first paragraph) is up to 62% and Ehrlich's lead is holding.

UPDATE: 10:25PM. Ehrlich's lead is up to 51-48%, with 74% of votes counted. That's just under 26,000 votes, easily made up by Baltimore, if those votes aren't part of the count yet.

UPDATE: A minute later. Checked my math. There are indeed 408,000 votes yet to be counted. A 26K lead is not secure.

UPDATE: They're still not calling MD-8, but it's crushingly obvious that Morella is going down. Van Hollen's ahead 51-48% with 84% of precincts reporting. He holds a 5500 vote lead with about 30,000 yet to be counted. That means that Connie would have to pick up about 60% of all remaining votes to pull it out. Ain't gonna happen.

UPDATE: The Baltimore Sun has a "live," blog-style feed.

UPDATE: Interesting. The Sun shows an AP tally with Townsend ahead of Ehrlich 52-48% at 9:57 with 37% of precincts reporting - less than CNN has been showing. The flip in results since 37% suggests that either AP is hearing from different precincts than CNN (don't know how that works) or that a lot of Townsend's best areas have already come in. In the 1994 Glendening-Sauerbrey race, Glendening lost every county in the state except for Montgomery and Prince Georges (the Washington suburbs), plus Baltimore, and squeaked out a 6,000 vote win. UO was in upper Montgomery just last weekend fishing and saw plentiful Ehrlich signs even there. Townsend needs huge huge margins in Baltimore and the DC suburbs or she's toast, because she'll lose everywhere else.

UPDATE: 10:43pm. CNN shows Ehrlich pulling away. 52-47% with 89% counted. That's a margin of 60K ballots. Crunching numbers...There should only be c. 175k votes yet to count. Unless Townsend picks up 2/3 of them, she's through.

UPDATE: Triangulation method, 10:50PM. How many Baltimore votes are still out there? Baltimore fits into the 3rd and 7th districts. Those districts cover a lot more ground than just Baltimore, but Baltimore will have most of the population. CNN's scoreboard on the MD-3 congressional race says 87% of precincts have reported. For the 7th district race, it's 92%. Unless they're keeping the gubernatorial results back, that doesn't leave Townsend a lot of makeup room.

UPDATE: CNN and MSNBC still haven't called the MD governor's race, but UO will risk looking foolish and call it for Ehrlich. The makeup votes just aren't out there. Note: That was at 10:55PM, the call.

Voting. All It's Cracked Up to Be? - Nah. You can find no end of Serious People telling you that your vote is your most precious right, that you have no right to complain if you don't vote, and on and on and on. While Unqualified Offerings did, in fact, vote, it has a lot of sympathy for both non and anti-voters.

Is your vote your most precious right? Hm. You vote once every year or two. You rely on being free to speak your mind, hang with the people you want to hang with, worship as you choose and be free from arbitrary search and seizure all day every day. Among other rights.

If you don't vote, you have no right to complain? Let's see. Say my neighbor Tayeb doesn't vote and tomorrow morning the government sticks him in an internment camp for muslims. Does Tayeb have no right to complain? The question answers itself. Say my neighbor's grandkid gets busted for selling pot and the police seize her car. She didn't vote. Does she have no right to complain? Who should she have voted for? (Yeah, I know - Spear Lancaster! And that would have saved her car how?)

You have the rights you have because you are endowed by your creator, not because you were a good girl and earned an "I Voted!" sticker from an elementary school.

There is a serious argument to be made that voting at all is a vote for "the system" as it has presently evolved: the two mushy, bossy parties, the regulatory state, the interventionist foreign policy, whatever your structural bugaboo is. "Don't Vote," the bumper sticker reads, "It'll Only Encourage Them."

Libertarian antivoting arguments can be found at the Voluntaryist site. A leftist argument for boycotting the 2000 election can be found at Znet Interactive. (Hey, it's not too late! And I couldn't find any of Coleman McCarthy's antivoting essays.)

Declining to vote is not even synonymous with political quietism. Unqualified Offerings is still struck by something Eve Tushnet told it a few months ago. Paraphrasing:

I think politicians do what they think they have to do under the prevailing circumstances, and the rhetorical climate is an important part of the prevailing circumstances.

Her political writing stands to have a bigger effect on US political life than any vote she casts. It could hardly be otherwise. (Here she has a good discussion of the importance of "philosophical/literary explanation[s]" for understanding political history.)

Exit Poll - Tony Adragna provides his own judicious meditation on electoral wars, and rumours of wars. It's precisely the kind of even-handed, acute and, somehow, humane perspective that led Unqualified Offerings to - no lie! - write Tony Adragna's name in for State's Attorney and one or two other offices. (There were several races where one candidate ran unopposed. Can't have that!)

Tony also comes right out and tells you how he voted, and why. (For governor. But Tony, did you go for Van Hollen or Morella? I'm betting Van Hollen.)

The Two-Party System We COULD Have - Ironically, one got glimpses during the 2000 post-election disputes of the Parties at their best and most principled. Don't look at Unqualified Offerings like that! It said glimpses.

The United States is by design a democratic republic. It is by design not a democracy, no matter what bad schoolbooks and ignorant commentators tell you. But any republican system of government has to declare for a means of choosing the representatives of its constituent parts, and democracy is what we chose.

It's easy to discern a tension between the democratic tendency and the republican one. One could be drawn more to the idea of the "voice of the people" as the surest and best way of guaranteeing the good of all, or to a belief in structure and procedure, regularity and rule as safeguarding the people from tyranny and whim. You could call these parties the Democratic and Republican Parties and have a rather interesting ongoing dialectic about the nature of the country. Each side could make claims against the other - "mob rule!" "Hidebound traditionalism!" In that country, this website would be a "Republican," whereas in this one it is merely "republican."

So, Florida. Among the best and most sincere commentators on each side, you could see the basic tendencies. Michael Kinsley really believed that what mattered was that the will of the people be done. George Will and Andrew Sullivan really believed that We have rules, the rules are what make any election fair, and the rules that count are the ones that are set out ahead of time. Both sides found themselves staring into an uncrossable abyss - the Florida election was a statistical tie. The uncertainty in the count was always going to be larger than the margin of "victory," no matter what recounts one did. Faced with this abyss, both parties, now and then, spoke to their theoretically truest principles.

But both contravened them, too. The Gore team was less concerned with "the will of the people" than with mining its most favorable precincts for extra votes. The Bush team proved just as willing to rely on made-up rules - the US Supreme Court - as the Democrats (the Florida Supreme Court). Because it was a statistical tie, and because the Democratic arguments, shifting as they were, amounted to "Don't punish us because our voters are too stupid or blind to follow directions" and because, while I voted against Bush, I am an instinctive republican (small 'r'), I thought the Gore team was wrong and even menacingly so.

Then the Bush team proved just as willing to pull ex post facto rules out of its ass.

What should have happened? The SCOTUS should have let the silly Florida Supremes ruling stand, the Republican legislature of Florida should have chosen a competing slate of electors per Florida law, and the House should have done its enumerated duty and chosen between the two slates. That would not have been a "constitutional crisis." It would have been the constitution. Bush would probably still have won, and the backlash might have cost the Republicans the House this cycle. But they may lose it regardless, and in the meantime both the Supreme Court and the Republican Party itself suffered more tarnishing than they need have.

But that would be under the two-party system we could have.

One Man, One Vote, One Last Time? - Pick one of the two major parties and you can find both its professional and its amateur partisans hurling loud charges of fraud and intimidation around. This whole process started, of course, two years ago. Everyone was sure the Presidential election of 2002 was being stolen right before their eyes - they just differed on who was doing the stealing. Now this may be our future. Jacob Levy wrote last week that we're seeing Anthony Downs' 1957 Median Voter Theorem in action. As Levy puts it

In a competitive two-party system with a unidimensional political spectrum (and some other technical constraints) the parties will tend to converge around the preferences of the 50%+1th voter. They sometimes make mistakes in their estimation of those preferences (though increasingly-refined polling makes that less likely). They are sometimes beholden to a base for volunteer effort, money, and so on in a way that keeps them from migrating to the center. And sometimes the threat of a third-party split at the left or right margin can exercise a short-term pull on the appropriate party that needs to head off the threat. But, in general and over time, we'll just see fluctuation around the preferences of the median voter.

Levy goes on to say that, while there are complicating factors

Most of the conditions Kaus identifies as going on in politics right now could be understood as making this competitive political market (with voters as consumers and parties as firms) work more efficiently and elastically. The absurd heights to which polling, focus-group-testing, and micro-targeted vote appeals have risen are central.

He also suggests some factors that militate against perfect centrist appeal by any party or candidate:

As important is his claim that unions and the Christian right have been weakened enough to allow each party to move to the center. I'm not sure he's right about that; remember the teacher's unions and vouchers. Also remember that the Greens are lurking out there on the Democrats' leftward flank, and the Libertarians-- while not right-wing in any general way-- often grab enough of the GOP's anti-tax and pro-gun base to tip House or Senate seats. And we've seen some evidence in the past few elections that one's base can simply get alienated and stay home on election day. So even now, neither party can simply lunge for the center, with no regard for what's happening among their most dedicated supporters.

I suspect that even the centrifugal forces that Levy identifies militate against candidates or parties achieving "landslide appeal" precisely because the base demands are so polarizing.

So elections become razor thin, and while the stakes may not be so high for the voters - the parties are converging toward the median voter's preference, remember - they sure are high for the parties. There are jobs at stake. Since the margins are thin, the temptation to cheat grows - a small cheat can have a big effect. That leads to two possible behaviors: 1) Cheating; 2) Conviction that the other guy is cheating. It puts a premium on legalistic (as opposed to "legal") maneuver and demagoguery - call the other guy a cheat no matter what he's doing. (It a lot easier than making an argument for your politics.) And if you're truly convinced the other guy is doing it, and you can't stop him, you have a strong incentive to do it yourself.

In a bad draft of an unpublished poem, I wrote, thinking of the after-election strife of 2000, "the future belongs to caudillos in mufti." They are not, goddammit, proving me wrong so far.

In down moods, I wonder if we've already seen our last "free and fair elections." The combination of zeal and suspicion you can see today on partisan websites reeks of decadence - reeks, really, of the Imperial. And there's that word again.

Vox Populi - Reader feedback on UO's matchless - as in "no spark" - election coverage! Bill Dowling writes about Maryland gubernatorial candidate Kathleen Kennedy Townsend's appearance on a Washington-area sports talk show:

I heard that same appearance! I thought it was hilarious that she was hyping a touch football game between Michael McCrary and Ethel Kennedy. Visions of McCrary sacking Ethel and doing a celebration dance over her comatose body ran through my head. Vote for me, I put senior citizens in mortal danger in hopes of reminding people that my uncle was a cultural icon!

Bill also responds to UO's quotation of Franklin Harris on the Green Party:

In order to "sell you out", wouldn't the Greens need to, oh, I don't know, actually win something first? It's easy to claim that you never reneged on a campaign promise if you never actually got into a position with the power to fulfill one.

What can you say to someone like that?

Meanwhile, RGB Greg Pearson finds himself surprised and, implicitly, disappointed that

The Coveted UO Endorsement went to Bob Ehrlich? What happened to [Libertarian Party Candidate Spear] Lancaster? Heck, given the choice offered up to Maryland voters /I'd/ vote for Lancaster and I don't even run a Libertarian blog. Or could you just not bring yourself to endorse someone whose first name is Spear?

Well Greg, the truth is that Unqualified Offerings...kind of forgot the Libertarian Party was running a gubernatorial candidate this year! Fortunately, the Party got the word out in the form of a direct-mail letter that arrived today and was waiting for UO upon his return from work - and voting. But you've made Unqualified Offerings feel guilty now. Thanks.

RINO Hunt - My instinct is that Connie Morella is finally going down this time, and that Chris Van Hollen will be my next representative. Fun's fun, byut Montgomery voters have had quite enough of proving what they're pleased to think of as their independence This is a very political citizenry with a critical mass of folks thinking control of congress. Hollen seems like the worst sort of Democrat, but then, Morella is one of the two worst kinds of Republicans (the other being the hardcore theocrat). Van Hollen, who has run against Morella repeatedly, might as well have chosen the slogan, MY LIFE HAS NO MEANING UNLESS I'M ELECTED. Morella, whose most passionate causes, other than constituent service, seem to involve government spending and subventions to government employees, would win pretty handily, I think, if she just changed her official party registration. There's a kind of honor in her not having done so.

I usually hold my nose and vote for her, and will again, for the simple reason that she opposed the use of force resolution last month and I promised.

The governor's race I ain't calling. I despise the Maryland State Democratic Party and anyone who came within hearing distance of outgoing governor Parris Glendening. Bob Ehrlich ticked me off with what I considered some weaselly comments about state gun control laws during the sniper case. You know Ehrlich doesn't like them, and I know Ehrlich doesn't like them, but he blamed the Glendening-Townsend administration for not enforcing the existing laws. Like Maryland's existing laws would stop a schmuck with a gun from Washington state.

Republicans, never what they should be.

KKT is loathsome, though. She made a brief telephone appearance on Sportstalk 980 yesterday adn worked several separate Kennedy family references into a five-minute appearance. She had just that day played touch football with Michael McCrary of the Ravens, her three children and Ethel! The wonder of it!

It all depends on whether the metropolitan core (Baltimore and DC suburbs) break as strongly for KKT as it did for her loathsome predecessor in 194. I kind of think it won't. But I'm no good at electoral predictions, so I won't.

Quotable - From Franklin Harris:

Like those at The Comics Journal, Doane conflates elitism and intelligence and assumes people (like me) dislike TCJ for the latter rather than the former.

Unqualified Offerings doesn't know this Doane guy, but it knows the attitude. A related attitude it's run into in gaming circles, when proponents of a theory of gaming attribute critics qualms to discomfort with intellectualism rather than disbelief in the theory.

Also from Franklin, notorious right-winger:

(Better Green than Democrat. At least the Greens won't sell you out on things like the USA PATRIOT Act and war with Iraq.)

That's pulled out of a post on electoral reform, which Unqualified Offerings isn't necessarily so big on, but there's a link to a Science News story on the topic too.

For the Good of the Country - Various folks have been kind enough to praise UO's coverage of the Muhammad-Malvo spree, which is kind of them. It occurs to Unqualified Offerings that it's been working under a handicap, though, stuck at this computer, sifting through the reporting of others. Wouldn't it be best for the public if this website were able to do more on-site reporting? Specifically, with so many loose ends there, wouldn't it be ideal if a major media outlet were to fly Unqualified Offerings to Antigua to do some investigating first hand? For as long as it takes, it goes without saying.

Spree Graphs - This CNN story offers good reason to doubt that the July 2001 murder of Benita White in Lansing Michigan is linked to John Muhammad and Lee Malvo.

[Lansing PD spokesman Ray Hall] said Benita White, a 41-year-old Lansing woman, was shot "sniper style" in July 2001 as she walked to the front gate of the city zoo. The attacker shot her once from several hundred yards away. The bullet was never found.

Hall said White was divorcing her husband, a state trooper, who remains a suspect.

"We have more reasons to believe it's not related [to the D.C.-area sniper killings] than reason to believe it is connected," Hall said. It's an extremely long-shot possibility."

Hall said the "sniper style" method of killing is all that would connect the case to the others.

And

Muhammad and Malvo are not known to have been in Michigan, but Nathaniel Osbourne -- co-owner of Muhammad's 1990 Chevrolet Caprice -- was arrested in Flint, Michigan, in connection with the sniper investigation. He is being held as a material witness.

which is no more impressive, as a link, than the formal destination on Richard Reid's plane ticket.

o Reader RonK writes

How stands the "sniper subculture" question?

Submitted for your consideration -- the Bellingham roommates' snapshot of Malvo in a "SNIPER" logo t-shirt ... the pivotal Alabama fingerprint on a gun-related publication ... knowing where to "shop" (undocumented transfers out of Bull's Eye inventory at nearly 1 per business day) ... and not one but two original crime schemes (the early "shoot from distant cover, grab at arm's length" killings, and the DC-area mass extortion killings) woven around the act of sniping, but poorly-conceived in terms of criminal gains.

At a minimum, M&M qualify as "gun nuts" of an uncommon subtype. They were also religious eccentrics (their own twists on the "five-percenter" fringe element of NOI faux Islam) and political eccentrics (even among their religious set). Interesting to have both alive ... I won't be surprised to see other elements of weirdness dribble out over time. Can their crackers & honey diet form the basis of a "Twinkie defense"?

UO mentioned something about the pair's apparent fondness for guns last week. Still, as Stephen Hunter pointed out a couple weeks ago, the actual method of their madness partook of almost none of the stuff that so-called sniper subculture marketing offers - specialized loads, specialized guns etc. They used a scope, but it's not like scopes are some big deal fringe accessory. Wildass theory: Muhammad chose an XM15 because it was closest to what he was used to from the service, being a civilian version of the M16. He doesn't seem to have put much effort into finding a more suitable weapon for sniping. He used what he had to hand and felt comfortable firing.

o In a related story, Unqualified Offerings has come into possession of this previously secret document, the original, planned December itinerary of Richard Reid from last year:

1. Egypt.
2. Paris.
3. Fiery conflagration over North Atlantic.
4. Antigua! Meet John.

Unqualified Offerings is not at liberty to divulge the source of this document.

o Will Vehrs implies that Muhammad should be executed for being a lousy tipper. Unqualified Offerings opposes the death penalty, but a one-cent tip is pushing it.

o The Sun Also Ariseth. We've provisionally disposed of the Michigan case, but the law of conservation of possible Muhammad-Malvo shootings must be observed. Thus, this report from FoxNews discovered by Duckboy:

BALTIMORE — Authorities are investigating whether the suspects in the Washington-area sniper attacks may have shot and wounded two people a month earlier in the town where the ex-wife of one suspect lives.

In one of the shootings, Paul LaRuffa was shot six times at close range after closing his restaurant on Sept. 5. Prince George's County police Capt. Andy Ellis said Sunday that the department is looking into whether the shooting in the town of Clinton is related to the sniper case.

In the other shooting, a liquor store clerk was shot and robbed as he locked the Clinton store where he works on Sept. 15, said police Cpl. Diane Richardson.

Clinton, southeast of Baltimore, is the home of John Allen Muhammad's ex-wife Mildred.

A Sony laptop computer was stolen from LaRuffa, along with more than $3,000 in receipts. A Sony laptop was found in Muhammad's car when he and John Lee Malvo were arrested Oct. 24 at a rest stop.

LaRuffa, 55, said Sunday he wanted to know if the laptop was his.

"I wish somebody would tell me 'yes, it's yours, no, it's not yours,' and that's what's frustrating about it," LaRuffa said.

M.O. Watch: LaRuffa was shot six times, which is a lot for you-know-whom. But it was a small-caliber handgun, so maybe they were being extra thorough.

Or maybe not.

In the Sept. 15 shooting, an attacker fired several shots from a small-caliber gun, striking the unidentified victim once in the abdomen, Richardson said. The man then fled with the man's wallet. The victim has recovered.

Richardson said the task force was investigating the Sept. 15 case because of the proximity to the earlier restaurant shooting and because Clinton is the home of Muhammad's ex-wife. She did not know if ballistic evidence linked the incident to any of the other crimes.

We'll see.

I Told You Not to Tread on Me - Sometimes one is just overwhelmed by the tragedy of war and the futility of violence. Sometimes not.

Help Nell a Little - Loyal UO reader Nell Lancaster would appreciate help coming up with more "Patriots for Peace" type slogans for an upcoming event in Lexington, VA. I've posted the details on NoWarBlog, which has a comments function. Nell and I ask that you post any good suggestions in the comments. I'm ruling out my own idea - I'D RATHER DIE AN AMERICAN THAN LIVE A HAPSBURG - as too long for a sign.

Commonplace Book - Nice:

On the shelf in the wardroom was a green steel radio with a wire mesh speaker at the center shaped like a daisy. It produced the transmissions of a dozen stations, which wandered on and off the air like restless cats.

Alan Furst, Blood of Victory, 2002

Wilderness of - Well, Not Wilderness Exactly - Here's the Antigua Sun article about the Richard Reid-John Muhammad snipe hunt. Good part one:

Last December, Reid, a Briton who had converted to Islam, allegedly tried to ignite explosives in his shoes while on an American Airlines flight from Paris for Miami. His intended final destination was Antigua.

Actually, his intended final destination was Paradise, as noted below. Good part two:

Two specialists from the Federal Bureau of Investigations and one from the Criminal Investigation Agency (CIA) came to Antigua over the weekend.

Now you know what CIA stands for.

Here's an editorial in the same paper saying the Muhammad case demonstrates the need for reform of the Island's "security and regulatory procedures in the state sector."

THAT'S IT!!! is what Peanuts characters used to shout when someone suddenly said something that made perfect sense. Loyal readers, I give you fellow loyal reader (I hope) Bill Sawyers via e-mail:

What these two losers remind me of are characters in an Elmore Leonard novel. Low-lifes (low lives?) on the wrong side of the law, with a propensity for violence, looking for a way to make a few bucks, maybe even one big score. I could easily imagine them threatening the Antiguan PM. Late at night after a few too many lagers - "Hey lets kidnap the Prime Minister". Doesn't mean there would ever be much of a chance of it happening.

The bullshit stories, the wild schemes, the violence-everything but the ending-Leonard could have written it.

Hmmm. Maybe we can blame it on him.

This comparison is so apt that any of us who have been covering this story and not thought of it should hang our heads in shame. That would be everybody, according to Google News and Google.

UPDATE: I left out Bill Sawyers' name in the first edition of this post! BAD Unqualified Offerings! BAD! (Sorry Bill!)

I Did Not Know That! - Samizdata luminary Brian Mickelthwait has started his own education blog, "about Brian's Education as well as about Education." It will be British-oriented, because what are you going to do with those people, writing about their own country and such, but dealing with general principles too.

Thought for the Day - You know what must really suck? Being a Nigerian official trying to send legitimate e-mail.

A Choice, Not a... Never Mind - Election Day is coming, and like many, you may be wondering, should I vote for the Party that pushed the RAVE Act, or the Party that passed the USA-PATRIOT Act with almost no dissent?

The answer is a two-parter: 1) That would be both major parties. 2) No, you shouldn't.

The People! Divided! Will Never Be United! - Saw my first episode of the Samurai Jack cartoon tonight. It's pretty stylish, which is good. It's on-its-sleeve archetypal, which is intriguing. My heart sank a smidge at the plot, though.

Jack has been catapulted into an evil future dominated by the shapechanger Aku. He makes his weary way to a small town, where the innkeeper cries at the front desk. Jack discovers that something has turned the children of the town evil. When he follows a mob of them through the woods he finds...a rave. Turns out the kids are in thrall to an evil deejay playing (and here Unqualified Offerings will commit redundancy) evil techno. In the climactic battle, the evil deejay assembles his sound equipment into a Transformers-style robot, which, UO must say, was way, way cool. Once Jack defeats the deejay and stops the music, the kids come back to themselves and return to the town. The innkeeper hugs his daughter. Jack leaves town, having balked Aku on this small thing.

Now someone will surely object that the episode was more tongue-in-cheek than I appreciated, but what bugged me was that it seemed to be another case of fratricide among objects of official infringement. Busybodies have seen violent cartoons as the source of all kinds of social problems. Busybodies have seen the rave scene as the source of all kinds of social problems. So here cartoons do the busybodies' work for them. In the feeding frenzy after Columbine, the NRA and Hollywood came under fierce attack for "causing" the massacre. So what did they do? They blamed each other.

"Do what you want with the girl," as George Carlin once said, "but leave me alone!"

Feh.

There's a Pony in Here Somewhere - FoxNews has a roundup-style article about evidence of a possible John Muhammad-Al Qaeda connection. Unqualified Offerings will confess that the article occasioned rippling peals of laughter in this website. This part may be the funniest:

The Antiguan Sun is reporting that members of the CIA and FBI are currently in Antigua investigating a potential tie between Muhammad and Reid. When Reid was questioned by police before boarding an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami, Reid said he was on his way to Antigua to visit family. Information received by U.S. investigators suggests the suspected shoe bomber's father was British, and that his mother was Jamaican.

Let's take this very slowly, shall we? Richard Reid. got on that plane. TO DIE!!!!!!!!!!! He wasn't really attempting to go to Antigua or any place OTHER THAN THE BOTTOM OF THE OCEAN! Unqualified Offerings has been, as loyal readers know, following the Muhammad case closely, and has a reasonable idea of his movements over time and can state categorically that John Muhammad was not on the bottom of the ocean on December 21, 2001. Actually, we know that Muhammad was still at the Lighthouse Mission in Bellingham, Washington, at that time. It was on December 19 that Una James, Lee Malvo's mother, and Malvo were picked up by the INS. (See the useful Richmond Times-Dispatch chronology.)

Here is a very basic principle of international terrorism: You can not commit a suicide bombing on your way to another appointment. That's in the handbook.

In the strictly-for-what-it's worth category, the Jamaica Observer reports that

The attorney-general [of Antigua] also said that investigations being carried out by two FBI agents is on-going and the task force found no evidence to link Muhammad to Richard Reid, the shoe-bomber who was overpowered by passengers on an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami last December when he attempted to detonate a bomb in his sneaker.

The FBI agents flew to St John's last week to check for a possible link between Muhammad and Reid whose final destination was Antigua.
When asked if the agents were still on the island, Thom said, "I don't know at this time. I know from time-to-time they will be travelling in and out of the Island."

That story is datelined today. It is of course possible that the story is wrong. The London Times also has a story, apparently, but it would cost Unqualified Offerings 40 pounds to read it. Any kind reader with an internet sub to the Times who would be willing to float this website the text of the Times story would earn its lasting gratitude.

Glenn Reynolds has an excerpt here. The excerpt strongly resembles, to UO's eye, one of those uncanny Kennedy-Lincoln similarities lists.

(Note: If there turns out to be anything to it after all, never mind!)

You Can't Always Get What You Want - I was kind of hoping for Comic Book Guy.

What
lesser-known Simpsons character are you?

Brought to you by the good folks at sacwriters.com.

Wilderness of Murders - With the partial release of Antigua's report on the activities of John Muhammad and Lee Malvo in that island, the sniper investigation has entered its rococo phase. The Post reports that

The commission's chairman, John Fuller, said tonight that an anonymous source told members that in early 2001 Muhammad spoke of kidnapping Antigua's prime minister, Lester B. Bird, and holding him for ransom. Fuller said the idea apparently did not advance beyond the talking stage. "It was more like throwing out an idea -- something to do to raise money," Fuller said in an interview.

He said the source, whom he described as credible, told the commission that Muhammad discussed taking other violent actions to raise money. Fuller would not elaborate.

The Seattle Times' article on the report (link via Kathy Kinsley) adds a further detail:

Ned said that Muhammad would arrange for people to fly to Antigua from the United States and other countries. Other people would use the return legs on those tickets to enter the U.S. with fake documents, Ned said.

Meanwhile, the people who had flown in would participate in some type of training with Muhammad, a Gulf War veteran, and would fly out later, when more people flew in on new tickets.

Other times, Ned said, Muhammad funded the fake documentation of others so they could attend training.

Asked by The Seattle Times in a telephone interview what type of training Muhammad provided, Ned said, "something like army training." But he said he never witnessed Muhammad do any training.

Fuller, the Antiguan investigator, said the task force has not linked Muhammad to any military training on the small island.

For the time being, Unqualified Offerings officially doubts that either the kidnap plot or the "army training" are true. In the case of the alleged kidnap plot, the revelation's timing seems awfully convenient. As UO noted Friday, Prime Minister Bird was just sued by a teenaged girl for sexual assault. A made up story about being the target of public enemy number one might be seen as just the ticket to changing the local headlines for a few days.

As to the "army training," what we have is an acquaintance, Kithlyn Ned, repeating what Muhammad told him. But we already know that Muhammad is a bullshit artist of Renaissance proportions. He "variously said that he was a CIA officer, worked for the FBI or was an international businessman" while on Antigua, as this Post report notes, and he told his cousin in Baton Rouge last summer that "he had retired from the Army but had been recruited into a secret military unit and assigned to find 500 pounds of C-4 explosives that were stolen from the Army in New Orleans."

If Muhammad told you the earth was round, you'd want to hire surveyors.

(Note: The Richmond Times-Dispatch article with the Baton Rouge conversation looks like a good, one-stop account of Muhammad and Malvo's movements.)

We do know that Muhammad tried to get a job "as a trainer at Special Security Services, a private security firm" on Antigua, but failed to get it because "Wilbur Purcell, the owner of the security business, said Muhammad failed to produce documentation on his military record and other paperwork showing that he had no criminal record," according to the Post.

Of course, the question remains how Muhammad was convincing people to fly to the Islands in the first place. The scam, reportedly, worked like this (per the Seattle Times):

Ned said that Muhammad would arrange for people to fly to Antigua from the United States and other countries. Other people would use the return legs on those tickets to enter the U.S. with fake documents, Ned said.

This would seem to leave the people who flew out stuck in Antigua. Now surely there are worse fates. Nevertheless. Another report (can't find the link) said that the people who flew out would fly back on a later trip, using a return ticket from another of Muhammad's outbound passengers. But Unqualified Offerings has a hard time making sense of that: you have one person per ticket each way, so there's a conservation law in effect. There's no way to get everyone who flies out back to the US and have room for Islanders to fly in too.

UO sees only two ways it could work: One, convince people in the US who are moving to Antigua to buy a round-trip ticket and give you the return portion. Two, keep buying more tickets in a kind of ponzi scheme. In any case, since the outbound flyers were apparently legitimate, police should have their identities. The next step would seem to be talking to them.

Jim, UO hears you saying, we haven't had a funny part in this item yet. How about it? Okay, here, from the Seattle Times:

"There is very good evidence showing that he was a very good forger of U.S. documents," said John Fuller, a member of the Antiguan task force investigating Muhammad's activities on the Caribbean island. "I think he used good American technology, Adobe Photoshop."

Yeah, that's good all by itself. But now compare this from the Post the other day:

He obtained citizenship and a passport by using a birth certificate from Louisiana that falsely claimed that his mother was born in Antigua. A close look at the document shows that the mother's name is in a different typeface and appears to have been pasted over the real entry.

"A 10-year-old could have done it better than he did," said John Fuller, who is heading a four-person government-appointed commission trying to sort out Muhammad's and Malvo's stays on the island.

GAPA Party Newsletter, British Auxiliary Office - The "Grow a Pair, America" idea just will not leave Unqualified Offerings alone. It expects to become quite obnoxious on the subject in the near future. But there's something to it, dammit, as British journalist Philip Knightley recognizes in this column:

If you go to the opera you risk being taken hostage. If you go on holiday you might be blown up. If you stop for petrol you could be shot by a sniper. Open a letter – does it contain anthrax? What's going on these days? Where will the next outrage be? People feel a sense of unease and a loss of innocence. Safer and happier times, they believe, are now gone for ever. But is life really more dangerous, or are we becoming wimps?

Read on. There's a lot more.

Happy Birthday! to Samizdata and the eponymous Natalie Solent blog. Unqualified Offerings couldn't imagine a better way to celebrate both birthdays than by directing you to this major essay by Perry de Havilland, appearing on Samizdata today.

Spree Graphs - We all knew this was coming, right?

Police link September shooting to sniper suspects
Friday, November 1, 2002 Posted: 9:57 PM EST (0257 GMT)

ROCKVILLE, Maryland (CNN) -- Task force investigators late Friday linked yet another shooting to the D.C.-area sniper suspects -- this one 2 1/2 weeks before the deadly 21-day spree that left 10 people dead and three others wounded in the Washington metropolitan area.

Suspects John Allen Muhammad, 41, and John Lee Malvo, 17, have also been linked to killings in Washington state, Louisiana and Alabama.

In the latest case, Benny Oberoi, 22, an employee of a liquor store in Silver Spring, Maryland, was shot and wounded by a single bullet soon after he and his boss closed up the store Saturday, September 14. He is expected to make a full recovery.

Oberoi was shot at 10PM on a Saturday night, so the killer would have had time to finish his job at the store and - never mind!

UPDATE: CNN writes

Montgomery County Police Capt. Nancy Demme told CNN ballistic evidence was inconclusive, but that the circumstances of the shooting, witness accounts and the fact that the sniper suspects' 1990 Chevrolet Caprice was in the area that day resulted in investigators tying the shooting to the other cases.

but doesn't say how they place the Caprice in the area that day. We know that they traced it to Louisiana based on receipts found in the car. Could be they did the same for the DC area, but it would be nice if they'd tell us.

What about that pistol Montgomery, AL, police saw Muhammad holding outside the liquor store? They may have found it:

A .22 caliber Magnum handgun was found Wednesday in the area where an officer said he was pursuing Muhammad, said Wilson. The gun, covered by leaves, was found by a civilian.

The pistol was stolen from a Texas gun show in July.

UPDATE: In the For What It's Worth Department, James Ballenger, whose wife Hong was murdered with Muhammad and Malvo's gun on September 23 as she blamelessly exited her bu - ahem. Must - reattach - mask of - objectivity! Anyway, Mr. Ballenger tells CNN that the death penalty contravenes his Christian beliefs.

James Ballenger, in an interview on CNN's "American Morning," said John Allen Muhammad, 41, and John Lee Malvo, 17, (aka Lee Boyd Malvo) "should live in prison for the rest of their lives and think about what they did" and receive Christian counseling for killing his wife, whom he calls an "angel."

Not that he is any kind of softie:

Ballenger said the two "didn't know what they were doing." He said they "just needed money" and "were too lazy to work for it." They committed a cowardly act by shooting "my wife in the back of the head."

I am going to go cry now. I am not joking.

UPDATE: Wow. Those rat fucking bastards. Funny how it comes on you all at once. I've been up to my elbows in the guts of these two losers' body of work for a month now, and it's been like dissecting a frog in biology class. It's when you pull back for a minute and get a good whiff and a slightly different view that the nausea comes.

UPDATE: The Post has a story on Muhammad and Malvo's time on Antigua. The government did not release its official report today, after all, because "officials said the attorney general needed more time because more information had been received." (Earlier stories covering the episode have characterized Antigua's government as notoriously corrupt, so perhaps some of the information that has been received concerns what the government finds it prudent to keep out of the report. In other Antigua news, a teenage girl "filed a lawsuit Thursday charging the island's leader with statutory rape, abduction, conspiracy and sexual assault.")

Make of this passage from the Post story what you will:

When others recited Christian prayers, Muhammad's children stood out for their Muslim traditions. The island has a small Muslim population, but there is no mosque, and other Muslims said they never met Muhammad or his children.

You may also be wondering how a sophisticated document forger and con artist like Muhammad could go so broke. Here's your answer:

He obtained citizenship and a passport by using a birth certificate from Louisiana that falsely claimed that his mother was born in Antigua. A close look at the document shows that the mother's name is in a different typeface and appears to have been pasted over the real entry.

"A 10-year-old could have done it better than he did," said John Fuller, who is heading a four-person government-appointed commission trying to sort out Muhammad's and Malvo's stays on the island.

UPDATE: Can we look on the bright side for a minute? Philosophers have long wondered, Is Man basically good or basically evil. Given that there appears to be a decent chance that Muhammad and Malvo committed just about every murder in the United States in recent memory, we may soon conclude that Man is, except for those two, basically good. Toward that end, Tony Adragna nominates another shooting crime for the list of possibles, a robbery from September 6 in Gaithersburg. (Here is the Gaithersburg Gazette account.) I'm going to go out on a limb here and doubt that the Gaithersburg robbery was Muhammad or Malvo, because the M.O. seems wrong:

A man approached them, showed a handgun and yelled for them to get on the ground, while demanding money, said Officer Joyce Utter, a police spokeswoman.

When the men and the woman did not comply, the suspect fired a round into the ground, Utter said. One of the men told the others to run.

The Potomac man tried to run and the suspect shot him in the back before running from the scene.

Every other robbery/shooting we've seen linked to Muhammad/Malvo so far has been shoot first, steal later. It's possible that the botch in Gaithersburg convinced them to take that approach, though. (For a few minutes, UO figured that, since Muhammad apparently first "tasted blood" with the murder of Keenya Cook in the spring, he'd already be well past trying to rob live bodies. But that's jumping to conclusions.)

But it's certainly worth police going through the mountain of receipts they've got and testing any recovered bullet against that .22 from the Alabama woods.

UPDATE: The Post has a little more about police thinking in the Hillandale matter, plus some info on the Michigan shooting.

Huh, you say? (Unqualified Offerings can hear you from here.) This is your very early, unconfirmed development of the night:

Police in states in every geographic region of the nation are looking at unsolved killings in connection with the pair's movements. One of those occurred in Lansing, Mich. on June 21, 2001. Lt. Steve Mitchell said police are looking at the fatal shooting of Bernita White at a picnic area in the Potter Park Zoo. Mitchell said White appeared to have been shot from 200 yards away with a high-velocity bullet. "We had no witnesses," he said.

If that one pans out, certain people are going to be reduced to theorizing that "Muhammad and Malvo expressed support for the attacks of September 11" three months before they happened. However, Unqualified Offerings is given to understand that whenever a spree/serial killer gets apprehended, numerous agencies entertain dreams that the suspect will be the key to closing their unsolved cases that have been hanging around. The hell of it is, it seems to be working pretty well for your local police in this instance.

And no sniper update would be complete without a "man bites dog" item. In this case, FBI Learns from Mistakes (Maybe):

As prosecutors look ahead, the FBI is examining some glitches in the investigation. FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III said yesterday that the bureau is reviewing the performance of its agents, analysts and trainees in the sniper investigation, which many law enforcement officials have said was hampered by its massive size and may have missed opportunities to catch the two suspects sooner.

Speaking to reporters during a wide-ranging briefing at FBI headquarters, Mueller said reforms to the FBI's "Rapid Start" crisis response system were being considered in the wake of the sniper hunt, including improved computer capabilities for those fielding citizen tips and a possible requirement that all hotline calls be recorded.

"Every time we hit one of these situations, we try to do it better," Mueller said. "I think we did a remarkable job with what we had as it went along."

Department of Corrections and Amplifications - Anent UO's fantasia on John Muhammad and Osama bin Laden, reader Eric Mauro writes, "You're a mean bastard, Jim Henley!" which makes Unqualified Offerings feel good, as it treasures praise from Eric.

About last night's post on self-defense, libertarianism, citizenship and deputization, Kevin J. Maroney writes

I am not sure that I care about "moral valence". I am sure that I care that people who are cold get coats. I believe, based on some experience, that more cold people get coats under a charity system with some elements of compulsion than under one which is completely voluntary.

UO has to wonder if Kevin is a real libertarian!

Okay, less fliply: There is no getting around the fact that, contained in the complex of beliefs this site sketched last night, there is a willingness that some indeed go without coats (or your good of choice), under the "right" circumstances. Different libertarians draw the line around acceptable "elements of compulsion" differently. Unqualified Offerings is a minarchist/constitutionalist sort. A more anarcho-capitalist type, like Gene Callahan, will concede much less than UO.

When UO wrote last night's piece, it was because it didn't know what it really thought about the whole "pack, not a herd" question. No such uncertainty plagues Chad Orzel of the ironically-named Uncertain Principles, who responds to just the musings on vigilantism, and does so emphatically. Chad seems to argue that any heavy-handedness by government law enforcement merely reflects baleful tendencies in the population. He also avers that, if anything, government law enforcement acts as a damper on public mania. It apparently never acts as an amplifier, or forms self-contained institutions that channel and cultivate the worst impulses of the populace for its own benefit.

Reader CLW informs Unqualified Offerings that "the .338 is a high-powered rifle caliber," not a pistol load, as UO wrongly asserted the other day. That means Muhammad and Malvo were driving around with rifle ammunition they do not appear to have had the means to use. Perhaps optimistic police departments across the country are digging through their files looking for unsolved shootings involving a .338 even now.

Meanwhile, on Shoutin' Across the Pacific, Chuck Watson explains how it probably happened that John Muhammad managed an honorable discharge after what appear to be years of objectionable behavior, and it's the answer you expected:

Probably to avoid discredit to the unit, they handled these infractions matter administratively. The Unit CO just about always has that option. Unless you end up with a courts-martial, you pretty much get an honorable.

(See comments to this item.)

Discoveries - Unqualified Offerings is greatly enjoying the ferment that is No War Blog. It has also discovered some great blogs among its collaborators, for instance, Franklin Harris. His blog, Franklin's Findings, covers politics, comics and pop culture from a libertarian/paleoconservative perspective. His writing is pithy and concise, and it's not like you're going to get that here! Consider:

The Comics Journal has a Web log. (I've included TCJ among my "Blogs of Note" for amusement purposes only.) Unsurprisingly, the TCJ blog, written by Dirk Deppey (if that is his real name), reflects all that is insufferable about the print version of TCJ.

He also runs PulpCulture Online. and he was on the staff of Warblogger Watch for ten or even twelve minutes, presumably when he was drunk.

Brad at DC Blows has favored UO with a kind mention. I get the impression from his site that, despite its provocative title, he cares a great deal about his city and wishes the best for it. Check out Would You Like Flies with That?, about misadventures in the school lunch program.

Duckboy leads Unqualified Offerings to this precious (there is no other word for it) encomium from Ellen Goodman for Maryland gubernatorial candidate Kathleen Kennedy Townsend:

The eldest of Robert and Ethel Kennedy's 11 children, Kathleen was born on the Fourth of July. She climbed the Matterhorn at 18 and Mount Rainier at 50, and after eight years as lieutenant governor, she is reaching for the top.

Unqualified Offerings can't think of a better place for Kathleen Kennedy Townsend than the Matterhorn!

Congrats to the legendary Unseen Editor! Your Talking Dog has given his site a makeover, with the UE's help, and it looks damn good.

Kuro5hin has a report on the San Francisco antiwar march, along with 313 comments on the report (two pending).

Newsrack covers some "distributed community-defense measures" to combat a specific, allegedly nonlethal scourge. (Unqualified Offerings must note, because it has a massive ego, that it offered "a voluntary, non-regulatory solution" to this very menace last December. Sometimes the old ways are the best ways.)

Lynxx Pherrett, whom Unqualified Offerings decidedly did not discover through No War Blog, quietly demolished the briefly-ballyhooed John Muhammad-Camp Ground Zero-al Qaeda nexus last week. In Whose Lie Is It Anyway he considers one patch of the great fog surrounding the Moscow theater "rescue," and considers it scrupulously.

He also offers a lengthy critique of Paul W. Schroeder's argument against a "preemptive" conquest of Iraq that appeared in a recent issue of The American Conservative. Unqualified Offerings happens to think Lynxx is mostly wrong on the matter. However, it's refreshing to see a hawkish blogger go beyond Ick! Pat Buchanan! when approaching TAC.

Colby Cosh wonders, somewhat to his surprise, if avoiding TV really might make you smarter.

Speaking of crime and paternalism, Diana Moon finds paternalism alive and well at the New York Post. And she has a series of fascinating posts on recent developments on the Israeli settlement front, including her interaction on the topic on a site Unqualified Offerings would as soon you find from her site rather than this one. See NES NESSIM and PSEUDO-JUDAISM.

Morning Murder Minute - The Chicago Sun-Times has a story on Muhammad's misadventures in the army and National Guard - striking a superior officer, stealing a rifle, setting someone's tent on fire with an incendiary, you know, that kind of thing. Naturally he received an honorable discharge in 1994.

Several stories pick up on the possibility of a third shooter in Alabama, based on witness descriptions at the scene. While we've seen that witnesses can be wrong (white van, anyone?), there are a couple of intriguing loose ends. Muhammad and Malvo had a box of .338 ammo in their car when arrested, but no .338. Alabama witnesses describe Muhammad as holding a pistol, though ballistics show that the victims were shot with the rifle. And LoneWacko has links to an Ashland story where a witness saw a second car interacting with a blue Caprice. This second car was...burgundy. (Cue Pascal Charlot witness reports.) Nothing definite yet, but intriguing.

The Post reports

"The investigation into possible involvement of Muhammad and/or Malvo in other local crimes is continuing," Englade said at a news conference. In addition to ballistics tests, he said, the two suspects were linked to the killing by dated store receipts found in the Caprice that show they were in Baton Rouge on the day Ballenger was slain.

Muhammad, a Louisiana native, grew up in Baton Rouge and has relatives there. They said that he and Malvo visited last summer and that Muhammad appeared destitute.

Meanwhile, amid the unedifying spectacle of state and federal prosecutors clawing their way past each other on the way to the limelight, this small bit of dignity. Discussing just where the Bowie shooting outside Tasker Middle School should fall in the trial schedule, Prince George's County State's Attorney Jack B. Johnson tells the Post

"I don't think we had standing to insist that these cases are tried first in light of the amount of death we had in other jurisdictions," Johnson said. "We're thankful to God, really, that we don't have that issue here."

On the adventures in professional law enforcement front, this:

ABC News reported tonight that it had obtained a recording of a call by one of the suspects to Rockville police. "Good morning," says a voice on a tape aired by the network. "Don't say anything, just listen. We are the people that are causing the killing in your area. Look on the tarot card: It says, 'Call me God.' Do not release the threat. We have called you three times before, trying to set up negotiations. We've gotten no response. People have died."

The call-taker replied: "I need to refer you to the Montgomery County hotline. We are not investigating the crime. Would you like the number?"

The caller then hung up.

The call was made on the morning of Oct. 15, and Rockville officials immediately turned the tape over to the multi-state task force, said Neil Greenberger, a Rockville city spokesman. He said he believes that the tape played by ABC News was authentic.

The Post also says that the Antigua commission looking into Muhammad's activities on that island has turned in its preliminary report to the attorney general and that it may be released as early as today.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Don't miss John Muhammad's letter to Osama bin Laden, below.

Oh There You Are - Several kind readers wrote in with a link to the Washington Post story about Mildred Muhammad's neighborhood in Washington, DC. It's right here. Thank you, everyone.

Music Notes - Elvis Costello - The Trainspotter's News has a bunch of items about the ongoing North American tour, including set lists and links to reviews. (La Familia Offering hoped to attend the DC show with Eve Tushnet last weekend, but tickets fell through.)

A written account of Warren Zevon's appearance on David Letterman last night appears on the Late Show website. (Link will grow stale, but there's an archive lookup function on the page.) From the Big Show Highlights page you can get a RealAudio clip of Zevon's discussion with Letterman. No music performances available, alas.

(For much more consistent and wide-ranging music coverage, see The Minor Fall, The Major Lift.)