If you haven't already done so, you should take a few moments to check out the Coalition Provisional Authority web site, which has tons of interesting information on the reconstruction of Iraq.

You can check out all the official "regulations" and "orders" of the CPA, which are the de facto law of the land in Iraq. Download day-by-day Excel spreadsheets full of data on power production and consumption. Or check out images of the new Iraqi currency.

Good stuff, all, and pretty impressive transparancy for an "occupation" government.

One recent order, though, leaves me wondering. Order 62 (PDF) was published on March 1st --- just a few days ago --- and states in part:

"When determined necessary for security and public order within Iraq, the Administrator of the CPA may disqualify an individual from participating in an election as a candidate for, accepting a nomination to, or holding public office, at any level, if that individual:

f) Has publicly espoused political philosophies or legal doctrines contrary to the democratic order and rule of law being established in Iraq."

This is obviously a pretty broad power. And I don't necessarily have a problem with it, particularly given that the order explicitly states that it "shall remain in effect only until the CPA is disolved.

The odd thing to me, though, is that I had assumed that the June 30th handover of power would disolve the CPA as well. So why publish an order like this now, a mere four months before that happens? Does Bremmer expect to actually use this power? And if he doesn't, why bother with the order?

I would certainly hope that if he does plan on using it, he has an ironclad reason for doing so --- because clearly, even if this order gives him the authority to do so, the political fallout from using this power could be catastrophic if it were abused.

Yet again, I don't have answers here, but am asking the questions. Anybody else have thoughts on what, if anything, this might mean?

Update: Well, I'm not crazy on one point at least. The November 15th Agreement (PDF) explicitly states that June 30th is it for the CPA: "By June 30th, 2004, the Iraqi Transitional National Assembly will elect it's leaders and assume full sovereignty for Iraq. The Governing Council and the Coalition Provisional Authority will be dissolved." So clearly Bremmer could only use this power between now and then.

Andrew Sullivan, 3/2/04: "It seems clearer and clearer that the religious right amendment to ban civil marriage rights for gays is not really intended to pass any time soon. The point is to use the issue electorally - threaten the civil rights of some Americans to get a few percentage points in a few Senate races and possibly against Kerry..."

Good morning, Andrew! Glad you could join us!

We'll let you slide just this once, but next time, you'll be marked as "tardy" on your class report...

John Kerry makes a habit of bragging about his refusal to accept PAC money. In fact, so does his campaign website:

Facts on John Kerry and Special Interests

PAC FREE: John Kerry has not taken a dime of PAC money during his four Senate elections or during his presidential race. PACs contribute a huge chunk of the money given to politics. Corporate PACs have given $1.2 billion to campaigns and parties since 1990. Not one dime has gone to John Kerry.

Strangely, the Federal Election Commission seems to think differently, showing contributions such as the following for Kerry:

CITIZENS ACTION PAC 06/27/2003 1000.00
CITIZENS WATCH 2000 PAC (FEDERAL) 06/27/2003 1000.00
SHEET METAL WORKERS' INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION POLITICAL ACTION LEAGUE 08/05/2003 5000.00
FLORIDA CRYSTALS INC PAC 06/27/2003 1000.00

(That's a total of $8,000 --- or 80,000 dimes --- for these particular contributions, for those of you counting at home).

Certainly, Kerry appears to have received very little PAC money relative to his overall contributions. And it also seems that some PAC's contributions were returned --- the entry for "O'MELVENY & MYERS POLITICAL ACTION COMMITTEE" shows a contribution on 04/24/2003 for $1000, and then an entry for -$1,000 on 06/03/2003.

But "very little" is different than none, and certainly different than "not one dime."

So what am I missing here? Am I being overly pedantic or misreading this data, or has the maintstream press simply a) forgotten to bother to check Kerry's zero-PAC-money claim or b) judged it as "close enough"?

Reporters Without Borders released a report Friday on Internet censorship in China, warning that this situation is getting worse:

Reporters Without Borders today condemned the latest Chinese effort to gag the Internet by means of directives to portals that have discussion groups. As a result of the directives, many news groups have closed since 23 February and filtering of online messages has been stepped up.

The report also highlights the rather disturbing decision of VeriSign to assign China a dedicated root DNS server.

I'm not an expert on Internet architecture, but I think Reporters Without Borders is quite correct to be concerned about this decision. According to root-servers.org, there are currently only 13 root servers globally; VeriSign appears to be planning to add one new server in Korea as well as the China server, which would "sit at the top of the DNS hierarchy in China, handling all .com and .net requests, and pointing top-level domain lookups to their respective servers" according to Computer Business Review Online.

This certainly sounds like it would at a minimum make Internet censorship a lot easier in China (by allowing the Chinese authorities to simply block a site at their root server, rather than having to do so across many lower-level servers). And when you look at the organizations currently running the existing root servers ( VeriSign itself, NASA Ames Research Center, University of Maryland, the Internet Software Consortium, etc.) it is rather jarring to picture adding "Chinese Ministry of Information Industry" to that list. (Yes, the U.S. military already runs a couple, but a) they built it to begin with, and b) Yes, damnit, I'm far more comfortable with our military than I am with China's "Ministry of Information Industry".)

Anyone else know more about the architecture involved here, or the previous steps China has taken towards controlling the Internet? Chime in, please...

Update: Here is the official VeriSign press release on the decision. The announcement seems to imply that VeriSign itself would maintain control over the server, stating "The DNS Internet constellation site operated and managed by VeriSign, will contain an authoritative master list of all top-level and country-specific domain names and will provide the first line for resolution services required by Chinese users."

So does that mean the Chinese government will have no ability to mess with the server? Hard to say. The specific agreement was apparently "a Memorandum of Understanding" signed by the Ministry of Information Industry. One would assume that this agreement would shed significant light on the "who has control" question. Are such documents a matter of public record? And if not, why not?

Just in case you are looking for a refuge in the Blogosphere, I absolutely promise not to blog a single damned word on The Passion of The Christ.

Carry on...

I'm not one of those who regularly heap scorn on Andrew Sullivan for his various failings; I actually think he's a good writer and an consistently entertaining blogger.

But I can't help noting that Andrew's intellectual flexibility seems to continually bring him nothing but heartache. Let's face it: the man has got a serious jones for abusive relationships.

First and most famously, he's a gay man in the Catholic Church. If that isn't asking to be kicked around, I don't know what is.

And now, Andrew is shocked --- shocked! --- to learn that George W. Bush is, in fact, a social conservative who doesn't approve of gay marriage.

Andrew, not to be harsh, but, er, what was your first clue?

Honestly, some men just seem to have a masochistic streak in them --- looking for that special relationship to which they can devote their heart and get a few good beatings in return.

So I have to ask: look past the physical appearances, and tell me: could they be separated at birth?

This is not acceptable, even with St. Patricks Day approaching.

I assure you all, I will be having words with the bear union about this shameful mistreatment of one of my fellow brothers. Will somebody please wash that bear!

The National Zoo in Washington is facing troubled times, and the director has resigned:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. National Zoo's director resigned on Wednesday, hours after an expert panel criticized the park's handling of animals, including the deaths of two red pandas, a zebra and an elephant.

"It's time for me to move on at the end of this year," zoo director Lucy Spelman said at a news conference. "I have become a lightning rod for too much attention."

Ms. Spelman added that her departure will allow her more time to pursue her true passion: taxidermy.

My fundamental problem with "marriage" as an institution of the government is that in my ideal state (i.e., a truly secular one), marriage would be a religious concept, with the state only blessing "civil unions". So essentially, if it were up to me, I'd rewrite all our laws to refer only to civil unions --- which could be between any two people, regardless of gender -- and then various religious denominations could do whatever they damn well please about blessing this or that particular permutation as acceptable or not for their faithful.

That, of course, ain't going to happen. But while we're all getting overexcited about Bush's statements today, it's important to remember that a constitutional amendment barring gay marriage ain't going to happen either.

Let's all remember our civics class, kids: amending the constitution requires the proposed amendment to pass both houses of Congress with a 2/3 majority, and to then be approved by 3/4 of the states.

With Republicans lacking a 2/3 majority in either house of Congress, what are the chances that the Democrats are actually going to allow such a measure to pass in an election year? About the same that George and Dick are actually shacking up together on the side: i.e., nil.

Furthermore, it isn't even clear that Bush is actually proposing to ban gay marriage, contrary to most news coverage today.

So my counsel is: chill. This is political gamesmanship for the election; nothing more, nothing less.

With that said, however, a legal question did occur to me. Let's say that an amendment did pass that said something explicit like "Marriage is defined as the union between one man and one woman." Isn't it still possible that some future Supreme Court could hold that this new amendment is trumped by the old 14th Amendment, which guarantees "equal protection of the laws" to all persons?

How would such a conflict be resolved, or would it simply be up to the particular sitting Court to choose as it will? To be extra-special sure that no such liberal activist Court ever took such a stance, would the safe bet be to include language in the new amendment explicitly stating that the 14th Amendment didn't apply in this case? (And wouldn't that just cause lots of fun politicially...)

Hmmm. Methinks those Slate characters are getting just a wee bit carried away. Note the pointer at the bottom of Richard Thompson Ford's piece on the SF marriage scandals (emphasis mine):

Related in Slate
Read Dahlia Lithwick's anaylsis of what exactly an attorney general can do to rein in an state official in conflict with slate law.

Update: Slate promptly fixed the typo after I emailed them about it, so it's gone now...and I even got a personal "thanks" from Ms. Lithwick, who I've been known to blog-crush on from time to time. Happy day!

From the useless but amusing category, the first ten tracks that popped up after I loaded my entire MP3 collection and hit shuffle:

Madonna - Music
Moby - Barracuda
U2 - The Three Sunrises
Ace of Base - Don't Turn Around
Indigo Girls - Love's Recovery
U2 - In a Little While
Orchestral Manoeuvers in the Dark - If You Leave
Moby - I Like to Score
Laurie Anderson - Sharkey's Day
Eagles - Take it To The Limit

Frickin' Windows Media sucks at shuffle, and so managed to get two songs each from two individual artists, which is pretty statistically unlikely, but all in all not a horribly misrepresentative sample...

Okay, the more I think about Nader getting in the race, the more sense it actually makes to me. Yes, you read that right.

The first thing to understand is that Nader deciding to be in the race today is a very different thing than Nader deciding to still be in the race in November. Just because he gets in doesn't mean he will stay in --- and in fact, that is quite possibly the entire point.

At a minimum, Nader now gets to exert serious leverage against the Democratic establishment, because since he's in, he now has the ability to give the Dems something they want: him out of the race. That gives him power to affect the Democratic agenda, and bring his pet issues closer to center stage in their platform. Having played chicken with Nader in 2000 and lost, Democratic leaders have to assume that he's at least as crazy this year as he was then, and that he's perfectly willing to kamakize the Democratic candidate once again if he doesn't get his way. Say what you will about his 2000 run, but the man now has credibility.

So by getting in now, he guarantees himself influence over the Democrats, and leaves himself in complete control of his own destiny, with two perfectly adequate choices. If he gets enough of what he wants in the Democratic platform, he bows out of the race and clears the field for the Democratic nominee --- allowing himself to be respected for both achieving some part of his progressive agenda and for doing his part to try to get Bush out of office.

And if he doesn't get sufficient concessions --- well then, it's kamakaze time again. He can rightfully say that he was willing to leave the race if the Democrats had simply returned to the progressive principles they have abandoned --- and Ralph now claims as his exclusive property --- and sleep well at night knowing that he is a Man of Principle.

Once you go through the logic, it becomes rather hard to understand why Nader would even consider not running, actually...

PS - Citizen Smash is currently holding the fort as link-gatherer of blogosphere commentary on Nader's entry...

Here's an odd passage from Eric Boehlert's Salon piece on Nader's candidacy:

Even some of Nader's closest progressive allies have their doubts. "I love and appreciate him, but I definitely want to get Bush out of office, so I won't vote for him, which would be a first for me," says Medea Benjamin, the Green Party candidate for U.S. Senate from California in 2000. She says it's good that Nader is not running as a Green Party candidate, because it will allow someone else within the organization to gain national attention as a presidential candidate.

So let me get this straight... Ms. Benjamin disapproves of Ralph's candidacy because it may hurt the chances of getting Bush out of office, but she is happy that the Greens will run another person as a national candidate in 2004? So there will be two leftist candidates on the national stage drawing votes from the Democrats?

This wasn't all direct quotes, so there's the possibility of misinterpretation here of course, but geez, if that's not the case, and this is the left's brain trust vision of election 2004, we kinda might as well not bother having one...

Well, I'll withhold my full thoughts on Ralph Nader jumping in the race until I can review his official announcement today, but we can at least start with his campaign website, which can be accurately summarized as lame.

No weblog. No forums. No chat rooms. In fact, not a trace of interactivity or real dialogue with the people Nader surely will claim to be giving voice to. (Oh, I'm sorry: he has a feedback form. My bad.)

It's all so very pre-Dean; so very 2003.

(Hey Ralph, I hear Joe Trippi is looking for work... give him a call! )

Jeff, please call your office; you can take it from here...

And the #1 reason to hope Kerry does, in fact, become the Democratic nominee:

To ensure that Mickey continues in his current agitatedly inspired state of frustrated indignation. You can just picture him gnawing on a pencil somewhere everytime Kerry takes a state or morbidly intones "Bring...it...on!" --- or worse, does both simultaneously.

I lack faith that Kaus could sustain the kind of gleefully meanspirited commentary he's treated us to for the last few weeks were Edwards to somehow end up with the nomination. Because Edwards is, you know, nice.

Unless, of course, we could convince Edwards to simultaneously attack welfare reform and declare his love for the Chrysler 300's tail lights... it's a valid Plan B to fall back on, I suppose...