Terror in the Philippines:

President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo said earlier this week her security forces had uncovered an Abu Sayyaf cell in Manila, arresting six men and seizing nearly 40 kg (80 lb) of explosives intended to be used in "Madrid-level" attacks. Relatives of two of the six said on Thursday they had been framed by police.

"Even we were surprised at how many want to be martyrs, the queue is long, we will not run out of bombers," Abu Sayyaf leader Khaddafy Janjalani was quoted as saying in the Philippine Daily Inquirer, the country's largest newspaper.

It's probably an April Fools prank, but Bush might veto a big spending bill, according to reports. (He has yet to veto anything since entering office.)

The White House originally proposed a six-year $256 billion highway bill, $38 billion more than the previous six-year period. The House wants $275 billion. The Senate already approved $318 billion.

The House bill authorizes $217.4 billion for highways, $51.5 billion for public transit and about $6 billion for safety and research programs.

It contains about $11 billion for "high priority" projects requested by members. Fiscal watchdogs name some of these, for riverwalks, museums, trails and building reservations, as some of the "pork" members are taking home to their constituents.

Some examples of that here.

To be fair I clicked over to the Air America stream and got smacked with beyond parody for my trouble. Bill Maher whining to Janeane Garofalo about "The Disney Corporation" canceling Politically Incorrect? The bad names conservatives called Bill and Hillary? Edgy guys. Real edgy.

Eugene Volokh links to news that police have brought up a Latrobe, PA, resident on child porn charges for circulating photos of a 15-year-old girl on the Internet. Which sounds like good news... except the person they've charged is the 15-year-old girl, who uploaded the photos herself. Now, I don't know the details; probably the girl could use a little counseling if, at that age, she's shooting strangers in chat rooms pics of "herself in various states of undress and performing a variety of sexual acts." But it seems a touch bizarre to punish her for exploiting... herself.

New at Reason: Not satisfied with your final two presidential choices? We tried to design our own, and the results give new meaning to the words "good" and "bad."

...and possibly quite a bit more. Today, in case you forgot to mark your calendar, is the debut of Air America Radio, the country's first liberal talk radio network. Err, except Pacifica. And maybe another tiny cluster of stations.

In the wake of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals decision that cops don't need a warrant to search private property as long as they insist it's for their safety and the search is "cursory," the Supreme Court decides that any old search at the border is presumptively reasonable.

The state of Delaware (with a federal grant of $346,619) begins use of GPS tracking to keep tabs on juvenile offenders under house arrest. Saving anti-surveillance pundits the trouble, the company selling Delaware the tracking services is actually named Big Brother Monitoring.

Intel says it will stop using gigahertz numbers to market its PC processors. It turns out that such numbers really do not tell consumers much anymore. Just about every processor on the market is plenty fast enough to handle most PC tasks.

More important performance factors these days might be video memory, overall system memory, and battery-life for laptops.

Maybe this is a good sign. In the conservative Collegiate Network's 2004 Polly Awards, the choice for biggest "campus outrage" is a tie between Sex Week at Yale (featuring a talk by porn star Devinn Lane) and a U.C.-Santa Barbara senior thesis paper on "Gay Men of Color in Porn."

The second place winner is the use of mandatory student fees at U.C.-Berkeley to oppose California's referendum on racial classification, which was defeated in October. Third place goes to a false report of "hate crimes" at Northwestern that resulted in criminal charges against the complainant. The chairman of Duke's philosophy department won fourth place by implying that conservatives are too stupid to work at elite universities, and people offended by a Catholic cardinal's condemnation of homosexuality at Georgetown's commencement won fifth.

There are some legitimate complaints here—especially about the campus campaign against Proposition 54, which seems like a worse offense than academic attention to dirty movies. But none of these incidents involved direct suppression of unpopular views, the most troubling aspect of leftish orthodoxy at colleges and universities. Either that's not happening anymore, or conservatives are getting more worked up about porn these days.

"The acreage of biotech corn plantings are up 9.7 percent to 46 percent of all corn planted in the U.S.; biotech soybean acreage increased 9.2 percent to 86 percent of all plantings; and biotech cotton acreage increased 9.1 percent to 76 percent of all plantings," according to a press release from the Biotechnology Industry Organization summarizing the results from the USDA's Prospective Plantings survey.

And still no scientific evidence that anyone has gotten so much as a sniffle or a bellyache from eating foods made with ingredients derived from genetically enhanced crops. Nevertheless, more Africans are at risk of starvation because of anti-biotech fears fanned by ideological environmentalists and European Union politicians.

BTW, I wonder how many European tourists pack their own GMO-free food before daring to visit the United States?

New at Reason: Will regulating university researchers stop the next levitating cult leader from getting bio-weapons? Ron Bailey says let dual use research flourish.

Speaking of medical marijuana, today a federal judge in California will reconsider a request from a Santa Cruz patient cooperative for an injunction that would shield the group's members from future DEA raids on their cannabis crop. Last August, U.S. District Judge Judge Jeremy Fogel dismissed a lawsuit in which the Wo/Men’s Alliance for Medical Marijuana, joined by the City and County of Santa Cruz, challenged the federal crackdown on medical marijuana growers. Since then, however, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit has ruled that the Controlled Substances Act "is likely unconstitutional" as applied to medical marijuana users in California, where state law recognizes the drug as a medicine. Aside from the drug policy angle, the case has important implications for interpreting the Commerce Clause and therefore for the distinction between national and state authority.

Darin Lowder of the excellent educational nonprofit The Institute for Humane Studies writes,

Each summer the Institute for Humane Studies sponsors a series of seminars for undergraduates, graduate students, and recent college graduates exploring a wide variety of issues. From globalization or the environment to the limits of freedom, we assemble top students and faculty from around the world for lectures, discussions, films, and socials lasting well into the night.

For more information, please go to: www.TheIHS.org/seminars

We also have two issues-focused websites - a brand new website on alternative approaches to environmentalism (www.aBetterEarth.org), and a
site on globalization (www.aWorldConnected.org) that you may find interesting. Both of those websites have launched essay contests with substantial cash prizes.

Full disclosure: Over the years, I've received various grad school and professional-development fellowships from IHS and I speak at some of their events. And I get a ton of junk mail from them, too.

Bruce Mirken of the Marijuana Policy Project reports some interesting polling data from Vermont and Rhode Island: As usual, large majorities (71 percent and 69 percent, respectively) said patients whose doctors think they would benefit from marijuana should be able to obtain it legally, but only a minority of respondents in each state (38 percent and 27 percent, respectively) realized the majority felt this way. Mirken suggests this divergence helps explain why politicians are reluctant to back medical marijuana despite strong popular support for that position. "People support medical marijuana by a whopping margin, but think they're in the minority," he says. "It's a safe bet that legislators and their campaign staffs are under the same misapprehension."

Possibly, but I suspect a more important reason for politicians' leeriness is that they believe (probably correctly) that people who oppose medical marijuana tend to feel more strongly about the issue than people who support it. (I'm thinking of the average voter on each side, not the activists.) If cannabis is such a potent symbol of evil to you that you can't even consider the possibility that it might have beneficial properties (as seemed to be the case, for example, with Clinton administration drug czar Barry McCaffrey), you are apt to read a politician's support for medical marijuana as an important signal. The same probably is not true for the typical person who does not object to medical use of the drug. If so, politicians could have more to lose by supporting medical marijuana than they would gain.

Forget the widely distributed, deeply felt "anybody but Bush" sentiments. It may be that an "anybody but Kerry vote" is starting to take shape. How else to explain Bush's recent gains in polls? The full impact of the Richard A. Clarke imbroglio, etc., is yet to be known, but Gallup says that "Bush Overtakes Kerry," and who's going to disagree?

In a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll taken March 26-28, Bush has pulled ahead of Kerry among registered voters, with a 49 percent to 46 percent lead. In the beginning of the March, those same numbers stood at 45 percent and 50 percent, in Kerry's favor. Anything can still happen of course (and probably will) but I've yet to meet an anti-Bushie who is actually enthused about Kerry, who really comes off a bit too much like the Frankenstein monster without the charm (and the sportscoat) to win many hearts or minds.

Scads of info--none of it all that useful at this point in time, of course, but fun to read anyway--here.

In a city of 8 million, why narrow your selections? (I ask this with affection, and as someone who was born in Brooklyn, grew up in the Gothamic shadowlands of New Jersey, lived in Queens, and toiled for some years in Manhattan.)

The NY Press is back with its annual list, many of which are on-target and many of which are not. What the hell, it's comforting to read a newspaper that uses the word douchebag as a spacefiller.

Here's a rundown of some of the media types who got a Bronx cheer:

50 MOST LOATHSOME NEW YORKERS

[snips throughout]

39
Eric Alterman
Pundit
WHAT LIBERAL DICKWAD? Milhouse is all grown up: He has a goatee, a PhD from Stanford and an online diary where he proclaims his love for Jackson Browne. Liberal bloggers are holding it up like the fucking Alamo, but his run-in with Dennis Miller last month left Alterman looking like he was about to get his head dunked in the toilet—for the third time. Even if you agree with him about Ann Coulter and Alexander Cockburn, it's hard not to root against this smirking, center-left prick who likes his dinner dates rich and famous and his fois gras seared. "He constantly wants to remind you that he's Eric Alterman," one of his interns revealed in a rumor-confirming Village Voice hatchet-job, "[and] that he knows a lot of important people, and that you're a lowly intern." Dear future self-respecting Alterman interns: If this creepy Bruce Springsteen groupie ever cops an attitude, just take a breath, start laughing and print out some of his "Alter-Reviews" at random. If you're lucky, you'll hit a Jackson Browne box set.

38
Chuck Klosterman
Critic
KLOSTERMAN ISN'T A loathsome New Yorker so much as a loathsome creation of New York, a North Dakota circus monkey desperately trying to ape the role of an authentic Midwestern, beer-drinking mullet-head. In his excruciatingly stupid collection of essays, Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs, Klosterman declares that Billy Joel is "great," Steely Dan "more lyrically subversive than the Sex Pistols and the Clash combined." The author goes on to compare himself and his yuppie girlfriend to Sid and Nancy because they're both so "self-destructive." Lester Bangs would have vomited down this guy's shirt before shaking his hand.

32
James Frey
Author
IT STILL BOGGLES the brain that so many fell for this brawny brat's 2003 rehab memoir, A Million Little Pieces. Clearly there's a huge audience starved for dimestore, parodic Hemingway machismo. And Frey, the self-proclaimed "greatest writer of his generation," is the man to give it to them. He boasts about getting in real old-time fistfights with his fellow junkie patients and about beating a priest almost to death for daring to touch Frey's very masculine thigh—classic 1930s retro-prose, homoerotic and homophobic at once. His characters are as anachronistic as his writing; there's a steelworker "as hard as the material he works with" and endless tearful farewell scenes with a fisherman, who actually says, "I ain't much for words, kid." Frey's fellow patients all talk like outtakes from a Spencer Tracy movie, pasted into Frey's poorly written, 400-page ode to his family-funded self.

31
Judith Miller
New York Times reporter
CONSIDERED A DOUBLE expert in weapons of mass destruction and Islam despite lacking both a science background and Arabic language skills, Judith Miller is more than a veteran lecture-circuit fraud. By relying on Pentagon officials and Ahmed Chalabi for her "scoops," she was instrumental in pumping bogus intelligence into the media echo chamber in 2002 and 2003. Thousands of dead later, she's been outed by nearly every serious watchdog journal in the country but is still defending herself. When the Army unit with which she was imbedded decided to abandon its fruitless search for weapons, she threatened to write an unfavorable story for the Times unless the search was resumed—forcing what one officer called a "rogue operation." Considering Miller's sources, it shouldn't shock us that no WMD ever turned up. It should shock us that the bitch still has a job.

27
Bonnie Fuller
Tabloid Queen
THIS CANADIAN-BORN tabloid succubus has been getting a hail of belated bad press for mistreating and overworking her underlings. Despite being among the highest-paid editors in publishing, she reportedly still hogs the promo merch like
a shifty intern. Her Evil Queen act would be forgivable if her formula weren't, as described by her former employer the Toronto Star, "sex, shopping, clothes, celebrity hairstyles, gossip and more sex." Her big genius move at Us Weekly was to run pictures of sweatpants-clothed celebrities without makeup. She also—call the Pulitzer committee!—ran a slutty picture of Kobe Bryant's accuser on the cover of the Globe. Anyone who's ever wondered in post-9/11 reverie Why They Hate Us need only ponder this woman's career. Better yet, do what one of Fuller's former colleagues allegedly did: Foul her lunch with bodily fluids.

23
Diane Sawyer
Anchorwoman
THE QUEEN OF broadcast journalism infotainment, Diane is ABC News' incessant ingenue that we hope one day interviews a hungry Siberian tiger. As Good Morning America's 50-something going on 30-something blond and blue-eyed eternal debutante, she coyly sucks pudding from Wolfgang Puck's spoon, creams over celebrities and moguls of any stripe, cries like an insipid crocodile for the victims of fêted daily tragedies and bats her eyelashes while touting her Nixon-White-House-past. For her current multi-million-dollar-per-year contract, Diane guarantees an overdose of saccharine sufficiently strong to send viewers into a coma, but not strong enough to flush the fourth-place network's morning ratings out of the toilet.

20
Lloyd Grove
Gossip Columnist
HE CAME FROM the Washington Post as a sniveling insider notable for daring to report that Tim Robbins threatened him with violence for reporting a simple truth. As gossip columnist for the Daily News, Grove has been flummoxed by the city and is reduced to covering petty internet bickering long after it's old news. Check out his sterling reporting on Martha Stewart, hacking away several days after the verdict to tell us that Hillary Clinton has sympathy for a perjurer. Big scoop, Lloyd. This would usually be incompetent instead of loathsome, but the stakes were raised once you conned the Daily News into paying massive bucks for your groveling.

16
Billy Bush
Access Hollywood Reporter
IT'S A NOBLE thing to insult and infuriate celebrities. But the key is to do it out of contempt for them and in a spirit of humor. (Remember the UK's Dennis Pennis?) When you're just another paparazzi who pisses off Tom Cruise by being an even bigger asshole than he is, that's a rare accomplishment in loathsomeness. Normally we'd applaud someone who offended Oprah Winfrey, mortally embarrassed Keisha Castle-Hughes and disgusted Nicole Kidman, but we can't begrudge anything to the Access Hollywood reporter and presidential cousin Billy Bush. Just imagine the man Billy Crystal called "the most annoying man in show business" in a red-carpet screaming match with Brad Pitt's publicist over allotted mic-time. Now say you don't want to see Angelina Jolie smash his nuts into five easy pieces.

15
Choire Sicha
Blogger
WHERE'S AL QAEDA'S crack cyber division when you need it? When edited by Elizabeth Spiers, Gawker was occasionally funny—vapid and cloying, but occasionally funny. When Spiers left the site to slog buckets for New York magazine, she handed the reins to Choire Sicha—yes, folks, that's pronounced "Cory", and yes, it's a dude—who turned Gawker into an unreadable circle-jerk for the cream of New York City's wannabe media asshole crop. To read Gawker now is no longer an enjoyable five minutes in the morning; it's stumbling into a horrifying online cocktail party hosted by a humorless, obnoxious prick and attended by his even less interesting obnoxious prick friends. Go ahead and gawk, but there's nothing to see here.

7
Howard Stern
Disc Jockey
WE NEVER CARED for Howard's mooky blatherings, but we support him in his 11th-hour conversion to free-speech champion. Too bad the jackass waited so long to take a stand—a more chickenshit millionaire you'd be hard-pressed to find. He choked when he ran for governor, helping instead to elect the biggest tax-and-spend Republican in New York history (who gave us two of the biggest subway fare hikes in history). With his money and fan base, Stern could've taken on the criminals at the FCC a long time ago, but as always, the smut jock went ostrich, burying his face in a pair of fake tits while the Constitution got crumpled. Come to think of it, scratch the opening line. We hope Ashcroft locks him away for 10 to 20.

4
Rupert & Lachlan Murdoch
Media Moguls
WHEN BRITISH TELEVISION playwright Dennis Potter learned he had terminal cancer, he named the tumor "Rupert." A bloody, distended hemorrhoid might have been more apt. The Aussie-born antichrist is alive and well, enjoying U.S. citizenship and avoiding his tax obligations, while Fox News continues to offer the world a glimpse of what American fascism would look like. In the run-up to the Iraq invasion, all 175 of Murdoch's papers argued for war and threw editorial acid on those who disagreed. But if you're one of the millions of people who can't think of a single good reason why Rupert Murdoch shouldn't die a slow and painful death next week, here's one: Lachlan, his tattooed, 32-year-old idiot-savant heir currently serving as the publisher of the New York Post. As a newspaper reportedly losing between $15 and $20 million each year, the Post is tied with the pyramids for biggest vanity project in history—all so that Little Lachlan can have a star-spangled tabloid in New York. If there is a chunk of the WTC that hasn't yet fallen to Earth, let it crash onto father and son the next time they're dining at the Carlyle.

Who's number 1? Read the whole list here.

Here's a list of the "binge-drinking" rates of 120 urban areas, as compiled by the American Journal of Public Health. (A binge is defined as having five or more drinks in a single bout of boozing.) San Antonio tops the list, with 23.9 percent of residents saying they binge; the national median is 14.5 percent. See where your hometown ranks and glow with pride (or shame)!

And here's a story about that list from the Cinncinati Enquirer. The story is less interesting for any information it conveys than for how it illustrates the passive-aggresion endemic to smaller-city newspapers when it comes to playing the local angle on a national story.

"Fewer here binge drink than in U.S.," crows the headline. But hey, Queen City lushes rule the region: "The binge-drinking rate in Greater Cincinnati, which includes Northern Kentucky and parts of Indiana, is slightly higher than rates in Cleveland, Columbus, Lexington and Louisville."

The study, which is based on surveys conducted by the Centers for Disease Control between 1997 and 1999--a period when all of America was drunk on the present and the future, if hazy memory serves--says that variation in rates is a combination of (duh) metro area age rates and gender splits, access to alcohol, religious beliefs, and pricing.

This sort of story makes one pine for the days when plane and train delays were explained simply by weather and copious mechanical problems. Via Drudge:

Threats Prompt Searches of U.S. Planes and Trains

DETROIT (Reuters) - Bomb threats against three U.S. passenger jets and two Amtrak trains triggered extensive security checks on Tuesday but no explosives were found, authorities said.

Security officials, aided in some cases by sniffer dogs, took hours to sweep through the planes operated by Northwest Airlines . But the searches, of passengers and luggage as well as the airliners themselves, ended without incident....

The aircraft included one that arrived at Detroit's Metropolitan Airport on a flight from Miami, according to Clark and a spokeswoman for Northwest.

The second and third flights, from Memphis to Miami and Los Angeles to Detroit, were grounded before takeoff and screened by federal officials and airline staff. Both eventually departed for their respective destinations, Northwest said....

There were also bomb threats against two Amtrak trains traveling between New York and Miami.

A spokesman for the railroad said more than 140 passengers were taken off the northbound Palmetto at the Selma-Smithfield station in North Carolina and the train was searched. Service resumed after a delay of nearly 2 1/2 hours.

At roughly the same time, 176 passengers were evacuated from the Silver Meteor in Philadelphia. Service resumed after a 45-minute delay....

As reader Paul Bent noted in passing this story along, the most surprising thing may be that Georgia has beauty pageant rules.

Miss Nude Contestant Stripped of Court Victory

So far, the 1997 Miss Nude World International pageant has been one big tease for Vanessa Steele-Inman.

When she competed in the Atlanta-based event seven years ago, the former stripper qualified for the semifinals before being kicked out on what she said were trumped-up charges of cheating.

Three years later, a Fulton County jury said the contest promoters and managers of the Pink Pony nightclub should pay Steele-Inman more than $2.5 million in compensatory damages, punitive damages and attorney fees for slander and tortious interference with business relations.

But last week the Georgia Court of Appeals took away her victory, leaving her a consolation prize of $3,500 in attorney fees for the pageant's violation of state beauty contest rules....

Whole thing here.

Andrew Chamberlain notes an interesting paper [PDF] which appears to show that we become happier as we shift our consumption from goods (manufacturing) to experiences (services). Andrew summarizes:

1. Experiences are more open to positive reinterpretation later than goods—we tend to be nostalgic for even our worst vacations, for example;

2. Experiences are more central to our identities—life is literally the sum of past experiences, not past purchases; and

3. Experiences have greater “social value.” Sharing them helps us form more satisfying relationships that lead to happiness—think of the difference between a bar-room story about your European backpacking adventure vs. your new Sony flat-screen.

Keep that in mind next time you hear complaints that our shift toward services represents a “hollowing out” of the U.S. economy.

New at Reason: The campaign to discredit Richard Clarke has failed so far, and will fail even if it succeeds.

New at Reason: Cathy Young explains why the pro-choicers blew it on "Conner's Law."

Matt Yglesias summarizes some interesting results from a study that examined the connection between support for the Iraq war and beliefs about it:

The authors examined the pervasiveness of three pieces of misinformation in the American public: that the United States has discovered WMD in Iraq, that evidence has been found showing that the Iraqi regime worked closely with al-Qaeda, and that world opinion favored America's decision to go to war. Support for the war was found to be highly correlated with the possession of false beliefs on these three matters -- 86 percent of those who believed all three supported the war, as did 78 percent of those who believed two, and 53 percent of those who believed just one. Among people who knew the truth on all three scores, just 23 percent supported the war. One key finding was that misinformation about the state of world opinion was the single strongest predictor of support for the war.

Update: Commenters add the fair point, worth noting, that we don't know what sorts of countervailing false beliefs war opponents held. Also worth pointing out is that we don't know which way causation runs here. There's a well known cognitive phenomenon called confirmation bias: We tend to notice information and form beliefs that confirm what we thought in the first place. So it's not necessarily that people who supported the war did so because they had false beliefs. It may rather be that people who took a strong position on the war either way are more likely to later form beliefs—justified and unjustified—that give them the comfort of "confirming" that they were right.

Mario Vargas Llosa, whose work has appeared in Reason's pages, writes an interesting piece on Madrid for the Guardian:

Madrid's modernity is not only in its buildings, new developments, infernal traffic jams, proliferating fast food outlets, the piebald invasion of tourists, or the alert ear that can, in the queues at the Prado or at night around the Plaza Mayor, hear all the languages in the world. It is in the mental cosmopolitanism of its people who, in their diversity, have grown emancipated from the stigma of a "municipal" Madrilenian identity (as Rubén Darío would say) and who, like the people of London, Paris or New York, have become citizens of the world. Thus, in an exhibition at the Galería Moriarty, the Japanese photographer Atsuko Arai a couple of years ago could show how, without leaving the historic centre of town, the capital of Spain was a microcosm harbouring the landscapes and cultures of half the planet.

He has a nuanced critique of Zapatero, too.

Read the whole thing here.

[Link via Arts & Letters Daily]