Nighthorse With No Name

Ron Gunzburger

When US Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell (R-CO) unexpectedly announced his retirement two weeks ago, the GOP instantly began a scramble to find a strong replacement candidate. Republicans quickly rallied around Governor Bill Owens — who would have been an instant frontrunner — but he soon opted out of the race citing family problems. The past week hasn’t been good for the GOP. Congressman Bob Beauprez? Out. Congressman Tom Tancedo? Out. Lieutenant Governor Jane Norton? Out. Former Republican National Chairman Jim Nicholson? Out. Congressman Scott McInnis? Out. State Treasurer Mike Coffman? Out. Congresswoman Marilyn Musgrave? Out. As of today, the Republicans have two announced candidates: former Congressman Bob Schaffer and attorney Dan O’Bryant. The only Republican of note still pondering the race is US Interior Secretary Gale Norton. On the Democratic side, meanwhile, party leaders continue to rally behind the candidacy of Attorney General Ken Salazar. Salazar faces only nominal opposition for the Dem nomination.

Interesting. I don’t have much sense of Colorado politics, but Norton would be an interesting choice. I mean, how much fun could the Interior job be, anyway?

Maiden Names

Katie Roiphe has an interesting piece in Slate entitled, “The Maiden Name Debate - What’s changed since the 1970s?” After a brief history of the pro’s and con’s of women retaining their given name upon marriage, she reveals something I hadn’t realized:

Interestingly, over the past 10 years fewer and fewer women have kept their maiden names. According to a recent study by Harvard economics professor Claudia Goldin, the number of college-educated women in their 30s keeping their name has dropped from 27 percent in 1990 to 19 percent in 2004. Goldin suggests that this may be because we are moving toward a more conservative view of marriage. Perhaps. But it may also be that the maiden name is no longer a fraught political issue. These days, no one is shocked when an independent-minded woman takes her husband’s name, any more than one is shocked when she announces that she is staying at home with her kids. Today, the decision is one of convenience, of a kind of luxury—which name do you like the sound of? What do you feel like doing? The politics are almost incidental. Our fundamental independence is not so imperiled that we need to keep our names. The statement has, thanks to a more dogmatic generation, been made. Now we dabble in the traditional. We cobble together names. At this point—apologies to Lucy Stone, and her pioneering work in name keeping—our attitude is: Whatever works.

In the end, many mothers I’ve encountered since becoming one myself have decided to change their names in line at the passport office, or in the post office, or in a doctor’s waiting room. They are not inspired to do it out of a nostalgic affection for tradition, or some cozy idea of family, or anything so charged or esoteric; they do it because giving in to bureaucratic pressures is easier than clinging to their old identity. In a mundane way, having the same name as your children is easier.

And then, of course, the beauty of the contemporary name change is that you don’t have to formally decide. You can keep your name professionally and socially, change your name for the purposes of school lists, or airline tickets, or your husband’s presidential run—in short, you can maintain an extremely confusing relation to your own name (or names). There is, at least for me, an element of play to the whole thing. There’s something romantic and pleasantly old-fashioned about giving up your name, a kind of frisson in seeing yourself represented as Mrs. John Doe in the calligraphy of a wedding invitation on occasion. At the same time it’s reassuring to see your own name in a byline or a contract. Like much of today’s shallow, satisfying, lipstick feminism: One can, in the end, have it both ways.

While this seemed a silly issue to me as recently as twenty years ago, the prevalence of divorce and remarriage among even “decent” folk these days has made the custom of women taking their husband’s name somewhat more problematic. But, as Roiphe notes, keeping one’s maiden name is simply impractical once children come into the picture.

Aristide Kidnapping

Carmen Gentile, UPI’s Latin America Correspondent, thinks Aristide’s tale of kidnapping is true.

Though Aristide will likely never gather enough evidence to force the Bush the administration to admit to any undiplomatic meddling, there does seem to be enough proof out there to fuel his conspiracy theory for years to come.

In addition to the eyewitness testimonies, there is the fact that some 50 Marines were deployed to Port-au-Prince a couple weeks before Aristide left. While officially there to protect the embassy and other U.S. interests, a force that size would also serve well to surround the Haitian leader and convince him to board the U.S. charted plane bound for Africa — no questions asked.

***

Suspicion in Washington has prompted some Capitol Hill lawmakers to call for an investigation into precisely what role the United States played in Aristide’s departure. Any investigation won’t likely get very far, particularly in the coming months as lawmakers will be busying themselves working to get re-elected. Coupled with the war on terror, the question of whether Aristide was yanked from power on the orders of Bush will likely fall by the wayside.

In the meantime, keep in mind that only a few months ago the world watched as a bearded Saddam Hussein was deloused and inspected by a military physician after his regime was forcibly overthrown by a U.S.-led coalition force.

Is it really so implausible that a Bush administration that never really liked Aristide decided to flex its muscle in its own backyard and frog-march Aristide right out of town?

I seem to vaguely recall them actually admitting to deposing Hussein. . . .

Tiger 'Joins' Army

ESPN/AP: Tiger’s army: Woods headed for military training

Playing in the Masters might seem like a vacation compared to what Tiger Woods has planned after his week at Augusta National — training with the Army.

Woods said Tuesday he will take part in four days of military training at Fort Bragg, N.C., before hosting a junior golf clinic April 16 at the army base.

Woods’ father, Earl, was a Green Beret during the Vietnam War.

“It’s an honor to walk in my father’s footsteps by training with the service men and women at Fort Bragg,” Woods said. “I have enormous respect for our armed forces and am thrilled this experience will include a junior golf clinic for these soldiers and their families.”

That’ll be four more days of military training than most Members of Congress.

Beltway Traffic Jam

• Matt Yglessias may have discovered why we’re ruled by idiots.
  
• Cam Edwards beat me to the punch with this caption contest.
  
• Laurence Simon muses on Lawyers of the Future.
  
• Jeff Jarvis was present at the creation of the term WYSIWYG.
  
• BoiFromTroy is apparently gay. No, really.
  
• Robert Prather argues Aznar is Spain’s Churchill.

Caption Contest Winners

The Kerry-Dean Edition OTB Caption Contest^TM has concluded.

The winners:

Photo courtesy Washington Post

1st, norbizness: The Skull and Bones secret handshake tutoring session enters its seventh hour.

2nd: Myria, “If you’re going to be the second African-American president you’re going to learn the homey handshake, Kerry.”

3rd, Phil Massey: The first rule of fight club is….

« Nothing more to see here.

Tragedy in Iraq

For the second day in a row, tragedy has struck in the blogosphere. Scott Elliot of Election Projection lost both parents yesterday. Dodd Harris reports that they were in Iraq. KWTX has the details:

Also killed in yesterday’s attack were 60-year-old Larry T.
Elliott and his 58-year-old wife, Jean Dover Elliott, both of Cary, North Carolina.

***

A U-S military spokesman says they were in a car in the Iraqi city of Mosul (MOH’-suhl) when they were attacked with automatic
weapons and rocket-propelled grenades.

The Elliotts had served with the International Mission Board in Honduras since 1978 and transferred to the Middle East in February 2004.

My condolences to Scott and his family.

Terrorists Win in Spain II

A flurry of articles on this topic have hit the mainstream punditocracy. Christopher Hitchens notes the “nutty logic” exhibited by Spain’s Left:

Many Spaniards were among those killed recently in Morocco, where a jihadist bomb attack on an ancient Moorish synagogue took place in broad daylight. The attack was on Morocco itself, which was neutral in the recent Iraq war. It seems a bit late to demand that the Moroccan government change sides and support Saddam Hussein in that conflict, and I suspect that the Spanish Communist and socialist leadership would feel a little sheepish in making this suggestion. Nor is it obvious to me that the local Moroccan jihadists would stop bombing if this concession were made. Still, such a concession would be consistent with the above syllogism, as presumably would be a demand that Morocco cease to tempt fate by allowing synagogues on its soil in the first place.

The Turkish government, too, should be condemned for allowing its Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan to visit the shattered synagogue in Istanbul after the latest mass murder (thus becoming, incidentally, the first Turkish prime minister ever to do so). Erdogan is also the first prime minister ever to be elected on an Islamist ticket. Clearly, he was asking for trouble and has not yet understood al-Qaida’s conditions for being allowed to lead a quiet life. Not that he hadn’t tried—he prevented the U.S. Army from approaching Baghdad through what is now known as the Sunni Triangle. He just hasn’t tried hard enough.

It cannot be very long now before some slaughter occurs on the streets of London or Rome or Warsaw, as punishment for British and Italian and Polish membership of the anti-Saddam coalition. But perhaps there is still time to avoid the wrath to come. If British and Italian and Polish troops make haste to leave the Iraqis to their own “devices” (of the sort that exploded outside the mosques of Karbala and Najaf last month), their civilian cousins may still hope to escape the stern disapproval of the holy warriors. Don’t ask why the holy warriors blow up mosques by the way—it’s none of your goddam crusader-Jew business.

Quite right.

Mark Steyn goes even further, charging that “the Spanish dishonoured their dead.”

At the end of last week, American friends kept saying to me: “3/11 is Europe’s 9/11. They get it now.” I expressed scepticism. And I very much doubt whether March 11 will be a day that will live in infamy. Rather, March 14 seems likely to be the date bequeathed to posterity, in the way we remember those grim markers on the road to conflagration through the 1930s, the tactical surrenders that made disaster inevitable. All those umbrellas in the rain at Friday’s marches proved to be pretty pictures for the cameras, nothing more. The rain in Spain falls mainly on the slain. In the three days between the slaughter and the vote, it was widely reported that the atrocity had been designed to influence the election. In allowing it to do so, the Spanish knowingly made Sunday a victory for appeasement and dishonoured their own dead.

And, if it works in Spain, why not in Australia, Britain, Italy, Poland? In his 1996 “Declaration of War Against the Americans”, Bin Laden cited Washington’s feebleness in the face of the 1992 Aden hotel bombings and the Black Hawk Down business in Somalia in 1993: “You have been disgraced by Allah and you withdrew,” he wrote. “The extent of your impotence and weaknesses became very clear.” To the jihadis’ way of thinking, on Thursday, the Spaniards were disgraced by Allah; on Sunday, they withdrew. The extent of their impotence and weaknesses is very clear.

***

For the non-complacent, the question is fast becoming whether “civilised society” in much of Europe is already too “undermined”. Last Friday, for a brief moment, it looked as if a few brave editorialists on the Continent finally grasped that global terrorism is a real threat to Europe, and not just a Bush racket. But even then they weren’t proposing that the Continent should rise up and prosecute the war, only that they be less snippy in their carping from the sidelines as America gets on with it. Spain was Washington’s principal Continental ally, and what does that boil down to in practice? 1,300 troops. That’s fewer than what the New Hampshire National Guard is contributing.

The other day, the editor of Le Monde, writing in the Wall Street Journal, dismissed as utterly false the widespread belief among all Americans except John Kerry’s campaign staff that France is a worthless ally: “Let us remember here,” he wrote, “the involvement of French and German soldiers, among other European nationalities, in the operations launched in Afghanistan to pursue the Taliban, track down bin Laden and attempt to free the Afghans.”

Oh, put a baguette in it, will you? The Continentals didn’t “launch” anything in Afghanistan. They showed up when the war was over - after the Taliban had been toppled and the Afghans liberated. And a few hundred Nato troops in post-combat mopping-up operations barely registers in the scale against the gazillions of Americans defending the Continent so that EU governments can blow their defence budgets on welfare programmes that make the citizens ever more enervated and dependent.

Thomas Oliphant takes the opposing view, citing the events of Saturday as “Spain’s vote against mendacity.”

Governments that lie and cover up on matters not only central to national security but also to the commitment of armed forces abroad are inviting rejection.

Governments that seek to use events as unspeakable as mass murder for political purposes are doing the same. It was clear something was wrong within hours of last Thursday’s bombings in Madrid. Virtually all of the sketchy information being gathered by US officials here and abroad pointed in the direction of Al Qaeda and away from the Basque terrorist group known as ETA.

But all the Spanish government’s statements pointed in ETA’s direction, and the Bush administration decided to suppress its own knowledge and evidence-based suspicions to the contrary in order to support one of its few unquestioning allies in the occupation of Iraq virtually on the eve of the national elections the bombings were obviously timed to influence.

This is indeed a fair point. Of course, the winning socialists were also playing politics with the terrorist attacks. As John O’Sullivan notes,

The People’s Party lost for one reason only: The police investigation increasingly suggested that the Madrid bombs were the work of al-Qaida. Hence they were seen as retaliation for the Aznar government’s support of the U.S. war in Iraq. And a majority of Spaniards decided by their votes to blame not al-Qaida but Aznar’s party for the 201 deaths.

***

Osama bin Laden will conclude, not unreasonably, that Zapatero won in coalition with himself. Al-Qaida as a whole will reckon that its bombs were the main factor in handing the election to an unworthy Zapatero. And that victory will instill the forces of Islamo-fascism worldwide with the belief that the people of Spain, Europe and the West are decadent — just as the 1930s Oxford Union refusing “to die for King and Country” convinced Hitler that the democracies then were decadent. Like Hitler they will then be emboldened by this belief to strike further — both against Spain and against other nations where resistance to Islamo-fascist terrorism is weak and uncertain. And the terrorist war on civilization will last longer and kill more people.

All Debts are Not Created Equal

Steven Taylor excerpts and comments upon a column noting that Alan Greenspan has changed his view on the impact of debt on the economy, noting in particular that the exponential growth in mortgage debt is quite positive.

I certainly agree. Buying a home is an investment and thus “good” debt. It should certainly be thought of differently than, say, buying a plasma screen TV on a high interest credit card.

Time to Save an Alliance

That’s the title of the latest column by Robert Kagan.

The terrorist attack in Madrid and its seismic impact on the Spanish elections this past week have brought the United States and Europe to the edge of the abyss. There’s no denying that al Qaeda has struck a strategic and not merely a tactical blow. To murder and terrorize people is one thing, but to unseat a pro-U.S. government in a nation that was a linchpin of America’s alliance with the so-called New Europe — that is al Qaeda’s most significant geopolitical success since Sept. 11, 2001.

The unhappy reality is that a significant number of Spanish voters seem to have responded to the attacks in Madrid exactly as al Qaeda hoped they would. They believed their government’s close cooperation with the United States, and specifically with the Bush administration in Iraq, had brought the wrath of the terrorist organization on them, and that the way to avoid future attacks was to choose a government that would withdraw from Iraq and distance itself from the United States. Other European peoples and governments have quietly flirted with this kind of thinking in the past, and not just recently but throughout the 1990s. But Spaniards have now made this calculus public. If other European publics decide that the Spaniards are right, and conclude that the safer course in world affairs is to dissociate themselves from the United States, then the transatlantic partnership is no more.

Certainly true.

Needless to say, that would be a disaster for the United States. The Bush administration needs to recognize it has a crisis on its hands and start making up for lost time in mending transatlantic ties, and not just with chosen favorites. The comforting idea of a “New Europe” always rested on the shifting sands of a public opinion, in Spain and elsewhere, that was never as favorable to American policy as to the governments. The American task now is to address both governments and publics, in Old and New Europe, to move past disagreements over the Iraq war, and to seek transatlantic solidarity against al Qaeda.

John Kerry has an important role to play now, too. The temptation for Kerry and his surrogates to use events in Spain to bolster their arguments against President Bush’s foreign policy may be irresistible. But Kerry should think hard before he pushes the point too far. After all, he could be president next January. If Europeans respond to the attack in Spain by distancing themselves from the United States, a divided and dysfunctional West will be his inheritance. Like Bush, Kerry should move the transatlantic conversation beyond the Iraq war to the common war against al Qaeda.

But the problem is not all on the American side, and neither is the solution. Responsible heads in Europe must understand that anything that smacks of retreat in the aftermath of this latest attack could raise the likelihood of further attacks. Al Qaeda’s list of demands doesn’t end with Iraq. The attack in Madrid was not just punishment for Spain’s involvement in Iraq but for involvement with the United States in the war on terrorism. Al Qaeda’s statement taking credit for the bombings in Madrid condemned Spain’s role in Afghanistan, too. Al Qaeda seeks to divide Europe and the United States not just in Iraq but in the overall struggle. It seeks to convince Europeans not only that the use of force in Iraq was mistaken but that the use of force against terrorism in general is mistaken and futile — just as Prodi is arguing. Are Europeans prepared to grant all of al Qaeda’s conditions in exchange for a promise of security? Thoughts of Munich and 1938 come to mind.

Indeed.

Interestingly, Sen. Joe Biden, with whom I seldom agree but usually find worth listening to, was talking about this piece on the Don Imus show as I was driving to the office this morning. Oddy, his take on the piece was that Kagan was saying this was all the fault of the Bush Administration, which is clearly not Kagan’s thesis. Partly, this is a function of Biden’s perspective going into the piece. But it’s also a case of a really bad title being applied.

Media Mathematics

EdDriscoll notes the irony of CNN’s coverage of two stories:

For CNN, what does 60 people protesting the Iraq war mean? Big news. How do they title an article that reports that the number of people with Weblogs is now in the seven digit range? “Study: Very few bloggers on Net”.

Thank you, thank you, thank you, CNN: you just made the point of my Tech Central Station article in a nutshell. [links omitted]

The article is worth a read as well.

Beltway Traffic Jam

I posted this around 5 this evening but accidentally left in in draft mode. . .

• Will Baude doesn’t think the terrorists won in Spain.
  
• Craig Henry on old-style American terrorism.
  
• Bill Hobbs on speedier news releases.
  
• Ian S. says we know who our friends are now.
  
• Jay Solo is surveying law bloggers.
  
• Kevin Aylward reports that Milosovek is likely to be acquitted.

Bob Zangas, KIA

Citizen Smash reports the death of Bob Zangas, a blogger and Marine Reservist, in Iraq.

U.S. Troops May Have Clashed With Iranians

DefenseLINK News: U.S. Troops May Have Clashed With Iranians at Border

U.S. troops may have traded shots with Iranian guards during a March 14 incident near the Iraq border, a senior U.S. official said at a Baghdad news conference today.

Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, deputy operations director for Combined Joint Task Force 7, told reporters the U.S. 4th Infantry Division reported that one of its border patrols in the northeastern part of Iraq “was, in fact, shot and fired upon by what is believed to be personnel wearing uniforms resembling those worn by Iranian border guards.”

The American soldiers “took self-defense measures (and) returned fire” against their assailants, Kimmitt reported, noting the exchange soon ended.

“We are now trying to ascertain what actually happened at that scene,” Kimmitt stated, noting both military and diplomatic channels are being employed to resolve questions surrounding what he said was not “a major incident.”

Interesting.

Robot Race III

DARPA [PDF] has put a good spin on the rather lackluster results of its robot race:

“Today was a most important first step in a long journey,” said Dr. Anthony Tether, Director of DARPA. “Although none of the vehicles completed the course, and we were not able to award the cash prize, we learned a tremendous amount today about autonomous ground vehicle technology. Some vehicles made it seven miles, some made only one mile, but they all made it to the Challenge, and that in itself is a remarkable accomplishment.”

Thomas Edison is quoted as having said, “Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results. I know several thousand things that won’t work.” Perhaps Dr. Tether is operating on the same principle.

Agencies Unite to find bin Laden

Rowan Scarborough has more details on the bin Laden hunt that Newsweek reported on last week.

Task Force 121, the secret manhunting unit formed for the war on terrorism, is a blend of warriors, aviators, CIA officers and deep-cover intelligence collectors who nabbed Saddam Hussein and now hope to grab Osama bin Laden.

“This is tightening the sensor-to-shooter loop,” said a senior defense official. “You have your own intelligence right with the guys who do the shooting and grabbing. All the information under one roof.”

***

Task Force 121’s composition includes four major elements:

•Grey Fox, a deep-cover organization based at Fort Belvoir in Northern Virginia. Members specialize in spying and intercepting communications. They carry hardware that can tap into electronic-eavesdropping satellites and that can splice fiber-optic cables.

Grey Fox maintains a fleet of aircraft at Baltimore-Washington International Airport. On occasion, members enter countries on “non-official cover” using assumed identities.

Created principally to combat international drug smugglers, Grey Fox has turned out to be the perfect unit for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld’s demand for “actionable intelligence” to kill or capture al Qaeda operatives and other terrorists.

The Army once maintained Grey Fox, but after September 11 the Pentagon shifted direct control to Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) at Fort Bragg, N.C. Ultimately, Grey Fox reports to U.S. Special Operations Command in Tampa, Fla.

Although officials still refer to the intelligence unit as Grey Fox, a defense source said its code name was changed during the war on terrorism. The source asked that the new designation not be reported. Grey Fox has operated under a number of different code words. In the early 1990s, for example, it was called “Capacity Gear.”

•JSOC: This is the headquarters for an elite 800-member group of Army Delta Force and Navy SEALs who specialize in counterterrorism. Left mostly on the shelf pre-September 11, JSOC is today the most active it has ever been.

JSOC was the bulk of Task Force 11 in Afghanistan that hunted bin Laden, Mullah Mohammed Omar and other high-value targets. It then reinvented itself as Task Force 121 in Iraq. Sources say it’s likely the task force will take on a new designating number now that it is back in Afghanistan.

JSOC and Grey Fox make up the “black” world of special operations. The “white” units — which operate more publicly — include Green Berets and civil-affairs officers.

•CIA Special Activities Division: These are CIA paramilitaries who can aid Task Force 121 by setting up networks of sources in Iraq and Afghanistan, and provide intelligence directly to the warriors.

•The 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment: This fleet of Black Hawk, Chinook and AH-6 “Little Bird” helicopters ferries the Delta Force and SEALs where they need to go, quickly, at night, at low altitudes. Saddam was loaded onto a “Little Bird” Dec. 13 and taken to Tikrit after Task Force 121 and a 4th Infantry Division unit found him hiding in a hole on a farm.

Al Qaeda's New Hideouts

Jim Dunnigan writes,

Iraq has become a training and testing ground for al Qaeda recruits. Unlike pre-2001 Afghanistan, where the fighting was against anti-Taliban Afghans, in Iraq the enemy is American troops. This makes a big difference because the al Qaeda suffer much higher casualties fighting American and coalition troops. This may be why the coalition has been unable to identify more than a few hundred “foreign” fighters in Iraq. There may have been a few thousand a year ago, but most of them were killed in battles with American troops. These fighters were eager, but not well trained. Those few that survived and fled back to their home countries were probably not very helpful when it came to recruiting. War stories that feature your side getting wiped out tend to discourage new volunteers.

Al Qaeda is not dead. It is scattered and trying to reconstitute. It is having a hard time doing that, and that conflict is a large part of the war on terror.

Sounds an awful lot like the Flypaper Strategy to me.

Desert Deserter

Blackfive has the bizarre story of SSG Camilo Mejia, an infantry squad leader with the Florida National Guard who deserted his unit in Iraq and is now suing for consciencious objector status.

Bin Laden Nearly Caught in Afghanistan

Reuters: France: Bin Laden Nearly Caught in Afghanistan

Osama bin Laden has escaped capture in Afghanistan several times and may be linked in some way to the Madrid train attacks that killed 200 people, France’s chief of defense staff said Monday.

Gen. Henri Bentegeat said about 200 French troops were operating with U.S. forces in southeastern Afghanistan against the Taliban and bin Laden’s al Qaeda. The Saudi-born militant is thought to be there or just across the border in Pakistan.

“Our men were not very far. On several occasions, I even think he slipped out of a net that was quite well closed,” he told Europe 1 radio. He did not specify a time frame.

I’m nearly quite pleased.

Presuming that these reports are accurate—and the combination of Reuters and the French military renders me skeptical—it would confirm that bin Laden is in fact alive.

Old Man Harris

Dodd Harris has reached a milestone:

I’ve given up on the whole “anniversary of my 29th birthday” thing. No-one bought it anyway. So I’m 35? Big deal.

I’ll be 38-1/4 tomorrow and, while, I occasionally note the various signs that I’m getting older, it has never occured to me to pretend that I’m not.

Too Late to Save Marriage

One Hand Clapping’s Donald Sensing has an essay in today’s OpinionJournal.

Since the invention of the Pill some 40 years ago, human beings have for the first time been able to control reproduction with a very high degree of assurance. That led to what our grandparents would have called rampant promiscuity. The causal relationships between sex, pregnancy and marriage were severed in a fundamental way. The impulse toward premarital chastity for women was always the fear of bearing a child alone. The Pill removed this fear. Along with it went the need of men to commit themselves exclusively to one woman in order to enjoy sexual relations at all. Over the past four decades, women have trained men that marriage is no longer necessary for sex. But women have also sadly discovered that they can’t reliably gain men’s sexual and emotional commitment to them by giving them sex before marriage.

Nationwide, the marriage rate has plunged 43% since 1960. Instead of getting married, men and women are just living together, cohabitation having increased tenfold in the same period. According to a University of Chicago study, cohabitation has become the norm. More than half the men and women who do get married have already lived together.

The widespread social acceptance of these changes is impelling the move toward homosexual marriage. Men and women living together and having sexual relations “without benefit of clergy,” as the old phrasing goes, became not merely an accepted lifestyle, but the dominant lifestyle in the under-30 demographic within the past few years. Because they are able to control their reproductive abilities—that is, have sex without sex’s results—the arguments against homosexual consanguinity began to wilt.

When society decided—and we have decided, this fight is over—that society would no longer decide the legitimacy of sexual relations between particular men and women, weddings became basically symbolic rather than substantive, and have come for most couples the shortcut way to make the legal compact regarding property rights, inheritance and certain other regulatory benefits. But what weddings do not do any longer is give to a man and a woman society’s permission to have sex and procreate.

***

[T]raditionalists, especially Christian traditionalists (in whose ranks I include myself) need to get a clue about what has really been going on and face the fact that same-sex marriage, if it comes about, will not cause the degeneration of the institution of marriage; it is the result of it.

Yep.

Dean Esmay comments as well.

The Vanishing Center

John Fund notes that several moderate incumbents of both parties have been defeated or face tough challenges in this year’s primaries, further signaling a polarized political culture.

With Congress so evenly divided, the pressure on individual officeholders to back their party’s prevailing positions on issues has become more intense. With party primaries increasingly featuring low turnout that is dominated by ideological voters—as this year’s Democratic presidential contests were—you can expect more primary challenges against dissenters in the future.
The argument against such primary challenges is that moderate voters in general elections don’t want candidates who deviate too much from the mainstream. But that calculation doesn’t matter as much anymore, as more and more districts are gerrymandered to eliminate competitive elections. Even in competitive seats, if both parties nominate ideologues, voters who are neither conservative nor liberal may not have much choice but to go either right or left, since the middle is fast disappearing.

Interesting.

Phony Toughness

William Safire thinks John Kerry is making a bad choice:

If his blunderbuss slander of Republicans as “the most crooked, you know, lying group” had been merely the irritated effusion of an exhausted speaker, I reasoned, Kerry would take care of it gracefully. To make lemonade out of his lemon, all he would have to say was something like “I was speaking of the vicious G.O.P. attack machine, not the legions of honest, truthful Republicans whose support I seek — especially those being outsourced by free-traitorous Benedict Arnold companies.”

But then something revealing happened. Kerry chose not to brush it off easily. On the contrary, in full macho mode he declared to a news conference that “I have no intention whatsoever of apologizing for my remarks.”

Obviously, the day after his overheard slander, the decision was made to strike a defiantly nonapologetic pose. Maybe Kerry-Kennedy-Soros masterminds in Boston passed the word to the candidate: Apologies are for wimps. Don’t even think of flip-flopping with an “I meant” — on the contrary, ram “crooked and lying” down Republican throats. Remember the title of Barry Goldwater’s book — “With No Apologies.” Show you’re decisive by refusing to back off anything. John Edwards just proved that nice guys get great press clips but don’t win elections.

Such advice is what the best political columnist of the past century, Stewart Alsop, said causes politicians to become “phony tough.” To counter the demonstrated tough-mindedness of a war president, Kerry’s handlers want their man to strike a pose of toughness in all his rhetoric.

***

That’s not the real John Kerry, a dignified man long steeped in civility. That’s a phony-tough John Kerry, obeying instructions to imitate a partisan caricature of George W. Bush.

Phantom Foreign Leaders

California Yankee has a roundup of queries on John Kerry’s claim that he has been privately told by foreign leaders that they hope he wins in November. Most damning is this story from The Washington Times

The Massachusetts Democrat has made no official foreign trips since the start of last year, according to Senate records and his own published schedules. And an extensive review of Mr. Kerry’s travel schedule domestically revealed only one opportunity for the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee to meet with foreign leaders here.

***

The Washington Times also scoured White House, State Department and other public records for all official trips made to the United States by foreign leaders since the start of last year. During more than 30 such trips, Mr. Kerry was out of town campaigning, at home or in the hospital for a prostate-cancer operation, according to his travel schedules from this year and last.
The only instance found when Mr. Kerry was in the same town as a foreign leader was Sept. 24, when New Zealand Foreign Minister Philip Goff was in Washington meeting with State Department officials. On that day, according to his schedule, Mr. Kerry received the endorsement of the International Association of Fire Fighters in Washington.

Hat tip: Kevin Aylward

Gas Prices Reach New High

MSNBC - U.S. gas prices reach record high

Prices for all grades of gasoline rose 1.34 cents in the last two weeks to a record high nationwide average of $1.77 a gallon, according to a study released Sunday.

Gas prices have jumped by nearly 26 cents so far this year, and while they won’t be falling by that amount any time soon, they aren’t expected to rise much higher, according to the Lundberg survey of 8,000 stations nationwide. The survey was conducted Friday.

The previous combined average record high was $1.76 in May 2001.

Of course, these sort of comparisons are silly since they don’t adjust for inflation. In real dollars, the current rates* are quite normal:

California Energy Commission

Indeed, real gas prices were substantially higher in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

*Note: The chart prices are for unleaded regular, whereas the $1.77 figure is the average of prices paid for all grades. But the chart is for California, which tends to have higher prices.

The Afflictions of Affluence

Robert J. Samuelson, writing in Newsweek, makes a point that I’ve made here many times:

It may seem a bit unnatural, but more and more of our social problems and complaints stem from our affluence, not our poverty.

The obvious example is obesity:

In 1950, Americans devoted a fifth of their disposable incomes to food (and less than a fifth of that to eating out). Now food’s share is a tenth (and almost half is out). We eat what pleases us, and so why should anyone be surprised that the average American now consumes about 150 pounds of sugar and sweeteners annually, up roughly 20 percent since 1980? The only saving grace is that some of the extra food “is thrown away—otherwise, all Americans would weigh 300 pounds,” says Roland Sturm, an obesity expert at the Rand Corp.

Compared to worrying about starving to death in the winter, dying during childbirth, or the various things that killed us at far younger ages a couple generations ago, though, obesity is a pretty good problem to have.

The other maladies Samuelson describes are almost laughable:

Getting wealthier spawns other complaints. One is the “time squeeze”—the sense that we’re more harried than ever. We all know this is true; we’re tugged by jobs, family, PTA and soccer. Actually, it’s not true. People go to work later in life and retire earlier. Housework has declined. One survey found that in 1999 only 14 percent of wives did more than four hours of daily housework; the figure was 43 percent in 1977 and 87 percent in 1924. Even when jobs and housework are combined, total work hours for women and men have dropped.

***

Psychologist Barry Schwartz of Swarthmore College makes the broader point in his new book, “The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less.” Our individual culture worships choice, but too much of it leads to choice congestion. Consumer Reports now “offers comparisons among 220 new car models, 250 breakfast cereals, 400 VCRs, 40 household soaps, 500 health insurance policies, 350 mutual funds, and even 35 showerheads,” Schwartz writes. People feel overwhelmed by the time it takes to make the “best” choice—and may later regret having made the wrong choice. Purchasing blunders may irritate, but bigger mistakes of choice (in careers, work vs. family) can be profoundly depressing, Schwartz argues.

Indeed, it makes one long for the good old days of the Great Depression.

As material wants are satisfied, psychological desires ascend. But these defy easy economic balm. “Most of what people really want in life—love, friendship, respect, family, standing, fun … does not pass through the market,” writes Gregg Easterbrook in his book “The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse.” (Note how paradox pops up in these titles.) Indeed, affluence may make matters worse. In 1957, 3 percent of Americans felt “lonely,” according to a survey cited by Easterbrook; now 13 percent do. Although more people can afford to exist apart, it may not be good for them.

Unlike the economic problems, I suspect this is probably a real one. We’re marrying later, divorcing frequently, cobbling together unorthodox family units, and moving around the country far more frequently than our ancestors. Plus, we’ve got a lot more leisure time to worry about issues like fulfillment rather than, say, how we’re going to make it through the winter. We’ve moved a little further up Maslow’s Heirarchy and can now feel “lonely” rather than “hungry.” A pretty good trade, I’d say.

Terrorists Win in Israel

Attack in Israeli Port Kills at Least 10; Talks Called Off

Two Palestinian suicide bombers killed at least 10 other people on Sunday in a double-attack at Israel’s port of Ashdod, prompting Israel to cancel talks on arranging an Israeli-Palestinian peace summit.

Police said at least 20 people were hurt in the blasts at Israel’s second-busiest port as day-shift workers headed home. Bloody limbs protruded from a shed that had been crumpled to a heap of twisted metal.

“People inside the workshop told us a guy came to them to ask for some water. When they gave it to him, he blew up,” said port worker Rafi Mashal.

The bombing took place just as aides of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qurie were wrapping up talks to arrange a long-awaited summit on reviving a plan for reciprocal steps meant to lead to a Palestinian state in return for peace.

The Israelis called off further contacts that had been planned for Monday ahead of a possible summit this week.

“We are not looking for a photo opportunity. We want a real undertaking from the Palestinians to crack down on terrorism,” said Sharon’s spokesman Raanan Gissin.

The Palestinian Authority condemned the attack by bombers who sneaked out of the fenced-in Gaza Strip, a hotbed of militancy 25 miles south of Ashdod, and said the attack appeared timed to scupper a summit.

Islamic militant group Hamas and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, part of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat’s Fatah faction, claimed it as a joint attack — the first suicide bombing in Israel since eight people were killed in a Jerusalem bus blast on February 22.

Clearly, the terrorists are in charge of the process since they can derail it any time a deal is near. With the Palestinian Authority unwilling or unable to do anything to stop them and the Israelis hamstrung by international opinion, there appears to be no end in sight to this cycle.

Baltimore's Barney Fife

For cop, a rump shot not jump shot

An off-duty Baltimore police detective was charged yesterday in connection with a gunshot that startled college basketball fans during a Maryland-Wake Forest game and left him wounded in the rear end.

Darren I. Sanders, described as a friend of Baltimore Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti, is accused of bringing a concealed pistol into Greensboro Coliseum, where the gun accidentally discharged late Friday night.

***

The pistol went off when the detective sat down after standing up to cheer, police said. He had adjusted the handgun, which did not have a manual safety, in its holster.

Witnesses reported hearing a loud pop and said they smelled gunpowder. The game, which the Terrapins won 87-86, was interrupted briefly.

From now on, he best keep that bullet in his pocket.

Putin Wins Russia Vote in Landslide

Putin Wins Russia Vote in Landslide

President Vladimir Putin easily won a second term in elections Sunday with 69 percent of the vote, according to an exit poll, confirming widespread expectations of a landslide victory. Just minutes after polls closed, a major fire erupted in a 19th-century landmark building off Red Square.

***
Assured of victory, Putin was looking for a powerful turnout to further strengthen his grip over Russia — already tightened by his appointment of a loyal new Cabinet just before the vote and by December parliamentary elections that gave the main pro-Kremlin party full control over lawmaking.

Putin, who reined in Russia’s independent media following his first election in 2000, dominated the nationwide television networks before the vote. His five challengers received less coverage, adding to the widespread impression that the vote was a one-horse race.

“I voted for Putin because he is going to win anyway and what is the point in voting for someone else,” said financial inspector Yelena Chebakova, 31, one of a handful of early voters at a Moscow polling station.

U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said he was concerned with a lack of openness in Russia’s presidential election and “a level of authoritarianism creeping back” into Russian society.

But he said he did not think Russia was reverting to the hard-line ways of the former Soviet Union.

I disagree. Russia doesn’t have free elections, a free press, or the ability for opposition parties to run in any meaningful way. There is no meaningful sense in which they’re a democracy.

Terrorists Winning in Spain

YahooNews /AP:Polls Show Spain Incumbents Losing Seats

Voters punished Spain’s ruling party in elections Sunday, with many saying they were shaken by bombings in Madrid and furious with the government for backing the Iraq war and making their country a target for al-Qaida.

Exit polls showed the governing Popular Party losing a large number of parliamentary seats, opening the way for a possible victory by the opposition Socialists. Voter turnout was strong, Spain’s electoral commission said, reported two hours before polls closed as being 7.5 percent higher than four years ago.

Many voters said Thursday’s bombings, which killed 200 people and wounded 1,500, was a decisive factor, along with the government’s much-criticized handling of the initial investigation.

“The Popular Party has made me lose faith in politics,” said Juan Rigola, 23, a biologist in Barcelona. “It deserves to lose and to see the Spanish people turn against them.”

So, they vote for the party that the terrorists prefer. Excellent move.

Congressional Clout

Robert G. Kaiser has an interesting piece in the Outlook section of today’s WaPo arguing that a realignment has taken place in the American political system.

In fundamental ways that have gone largely unrecognized, Congress has become less vigilant, less proud and protective of its own prerogatives, and less important to the conduct of American government than at any time in decades. “Congress has abdicated much of its responsibility,” Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel said in a recent conversation. “It could become an adjunct to the executive branch.”

***

Throughout American history, the status and influence of the three branches of government, and particularly of the executive branch and Congress, have risen and fallen like great historical tides. For long periods, most dramatically in the last third of the 19th century, Congress was dominant. Arguably this was also true in the last quarter of the 20th century, after Congress brought an end to the Vietnam War and forced Richard M. Nixon from office. Even in the ’90s, Congress played a key role in replacing Reagan-era budget deficits with the large surpluses George W. Bush inherited when he became president in 2001.

But Congress’s influence has waned in the past few years, perhaps since the unpopular and unsuccessful effort to remove Bill Clinton from office in 1998-99. Though it occasionally resists an executive-branch proposal, Congress today rarely initiates its own policies. Few members speak up for the institutional interests of Congress. “The idea that they have an independent institutional responsibility, that the institution itself is bigger than the individuals or the parties, doesn’t occur to the bulk of [members] for a nanosecond,” said an exasperated Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute, a longtime student of Congress.

***

Partly this is the consequence of one-party government. Now that Republicans control the White House, the House and Senate for the first time in half a century — for the first time since the modern, conservative Republican Party assumed its modern personality in the 1980s — congressional Republicans behave like players on a football team, said Mickey Edwards, a member of the House Republican leadership until he lost his Oklahoma seat in a 1992 primary. Edwards now teaches at Princeton. “George W. is the quarterback, and you go with your team,” he said. Because the Republicans enjoy such small majorities, team discipline is all the fiercer.

***

But the decline of Congress reflects more than temporary political alignments or partisan tactics. The very nature of the institution has changed, affecting who serves, how members are chosen, what their jobs consist of, how both congressional oversight and the legislative process work, and more. This changing anthropology is freely acknowledged by members of the House and Senate from both parties.

Work habits have changed. The House’s mostly-not-working schedule this year is an exaggerated version of what has actually become normal. Once the politicians elected to the House and Senate stayed in Washington for months at a time, but in the era of the jet plane, many members are in this city just two nights a week — Tuesday and Wednesday. In the House, Wednesday is often the only full work day of the week.

I don’t doubt that much of this is true, although I believe it’s exaggerated. Presidents have dominated the system since FDR asserted bold new powers for the office in fighting first the Great Depression and then World War II. The quick follow-on of the Cold War, which meant a permanent wartime footing with the dominance for the commander-in-chief that implies meant that presidents dominated for a period of over half a century.

There was an apparent resurgence of Congressional power after the 1994 midterm elections brought Newt Gingrich and company to power, but it was apparently temporary. In our fast paced, 24-hour media world, a legislature is necessarily at a huge disadvantage. There is no one star figure to focus upon and the plodding, give-and-take style that characterizes legislation appears antiquated. Indeed, over the decades, most of the tasks delegated to Congress in the Constitution have been abrogated to the executive bureaucracy, further increasing the power of presidents vis-a-vis the Congress.

The old saying is that “the president proposes and Congress disposes.” It is more-or-less true. Congress, and particularly the Senate, mainly serve as a checking mechanism to slow down or derail presidential action. There’s relatively little that Congress can do without a presidential signature but most of what a president wants to accomplish requires congressional action and funding. The denial of those gives the legislature substantial power.

Consensus

Jim Henley and Matthew Yglesias agree that Democrats suck.

Terrorists and Elections

It’s certainly looking like last week’s bombings were done by al Qaeda or another Islamist faction rather than the ETA. Officials Arrest 3 Moroccans and 2 Indians

Spain’s interior minister said early Sunday that a videotape has been discovered claiming that Al Qaeda carried out train terrorist attacks on Thursday that killed hundreds, but that its authenticity could not be confirmed. Several hours earlier, Spain arrested three Moroccans and two Indians in connection with the bombings.

At a hastily called news conference in the first hours of Spain’s national election day, Interior Minister Ángel Acebes said a man identifying himself as the military spokesman of Al Qaeda in Europe claimed on the tape that the group was responsible for the attacks that killed 200 people and wounded 1,500 in Madrid.

“We claim responsibility for what happened in Madrid just two and a half years after the attacks in New York and Washington,” said the man, according to a government translation of the tape, which was recorded in Arabic. “This is an answer to your cooperation with the Bush criminals and their allies.”

Hours earlier, Mr. Acebes announced that the Spanish police had arrested the five men in connection with the bombings. The men were charged with selling and falsifying a telephone card and a telephone attached to an unexploded bomb found in a gym bag on a train shortly after the bombing.

Mr. Acebes was noncommittal as to the government’s leading suspicions about the culprits, but in response to a question, he said one of the Moroccans arrested might have links to “Moroccan extremist groups.”

Keith B. Richburg reports,

The arrests appeared to throw the country into political turmoil just hours before polls were scheduled to open for national elections scheduled for Sunday, capping a long and emotional day spent burying and cremating dozens of victims of the attacks.

Reports of the suspected Islamic link brought thousands of anti-government protesters onto the streets of Madrid. They converged on offices of the ruling Popular Party and accused the outgoing prime minister, Jose Maria Aznar, of withholding information and trying to manipulate public opinion about the terror attacks before the elections. There were similar anti-government protests in Barcelona and Bilbao.

The protesters blamed Aznar and his pro-American policies — including sending 1,300 Spanish troops to Iraq — for the bombings, and said the government initially tried to ascribe blame to the Basque separatist group ETA to avert a popular backlash before the Sunday elections.

Aznar’s handpicked successor, Mariano Rajoy, has pledged to continue the prime minister’s pro-American policies. His Socialist Party challenger, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, has promised to pull Spanish troops out of Iraq immediately. In a speech Saturday night at the besieged party headquarters in Madrid, Rajoy called the protests outside illegal and appealed for people to remain calm and for the demonstrators to disperse, but his plea was ignored.

Acebes continued to insist Saturday night that no group had been ruled out as a suspect in the bombings. “Police are still investigating all avenues,” Acebes said. “This is an open investigation, which is only just starting.”

***

The discovery of a possible Islamic terrorist link to the attacks marks a major and embarrassing shift for the government and the Popular Party, since officials, including Acebes, asserted within hours of the attacks Thursday that the bombings were the work of ETA, whose initials in the Basque language stand for Basque Homeland and Freedom.

What’s fascinating about this is that the attack—and especially the timing of the video release—seem calculated to influence the outcome of the election. The obvious question is whether al Qaeda has something planned for just before the November election in the U.S. And what the impact would be if they’re successful.

The Shadow Parties

Steve Bainbridge observes that Daily Kos, WSJ, and John McCain all agree that “527” groups like MoveOn.org are party mouthpieces in all but technicality. From WSJ:

Senator [John McCain] — and his co-authors in the liberal press — are furious that huge “soft money” donations are being used to finance TV spots trashing President Bush. Not that most of them mind trashing Mr. Bush. They merely thought that such “big money” donations were banned under the McCain-Feingold reform that they devoted huge chunks of their lives and entire forests to passing.
Alas, their own “progressive” heroes — George Soros, Harold Ickes, the gals at Emily’s List — have now betrayed them by pumping soft money into what is transparently a shadow Democratic Party. Organized under loopholes in the law, these new “527” groups are soaking up fat-cat contributions to finance negative TV spots. The only difference from pre-McCain-Feingold campaigns is that these groups are harder to track and therefore less accountable.

Yep.

That this is happening isn’t a surprise, but the speed is. As I noted last June, in response to claims that the soft money ban mainly hurt Democrats:

I suspect the Democrats will adapt—or figure a way around the law—in the long term.

Given that this happened with every attempt at campaign finance “reform” for thirty years, that was pretty safe bet.

Generational Music Gap

Dean Esmay notes the passing of an era:

[R]ock is as dead as Glen Miller and Sammy Davis Junior. Dead and gone. Fondly remembered, still an influence on future generations, but gone.

Vestiges of rock do survive in the niche market known as “Hippy Jazz,” mind you, in groups like Phish and Widespread Panic. Nods to rock can also be found in much pop music. But as an art form, Rock lost its cultural relevance, and its vital animating force, some time ago.

This realization was underscored for me when I read a recent Blogcritics thread wherein people in their 30s and 40s complained that their kids don’t rock as hard as they do. These folks who grew up loving Metallica and the Clash and AC/DC and the Ramones and so forth are disappointed because their kids ask them to turn that music down, it’s too loud! They also complain because the kids think stuff like Matchbox 20 is “hard rocking” and can’t handle the power chords of some old-school Black Sabbath or Guns ‘n’ Roses. Why, these kids don’t even know what real punk rock is all about! The Violent Femmes would kick Avril Levigne’s ass!

I didn’t have the heart to tell them that the kids today who want hard core, intense music don’t listen to rock. The kids who want hard core listen to rap.

I think it’s just that two generations of parents grew up listening to rock, so it’s not rebellious music anymore. Groups like Staind, for example, would probably be more offensive in a 1970s context than any of the groups back then but the parents are accustomed to it. Rap, at least the hard core type, is the music of a criminal underclass, so it still has the ability to shock a middle class, suburban audience.

I’m not sure what’s going to displace rap—which has now been around 25 years in its own right—in another generation. Kids will either be listening to music about necrophiliac cannibals or they’ll be listening to the equivalent of Frank Sinatra. That is, the shock level has to continue to ratchet up or else it will be rebellion as counter-rebellion. Sort of like Alex P. Keaton rebelling against his hippie parents by going Republican.