If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the
Indians
-Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943), The Devil and Daniel Webster
No Academy Award winner gave anything to George W. Bush's winning campaign.
Indeed, two of the seven Oscar-owners who donated to Republicans were the big Democratic donors Douglas and director Sidney Pollack, who each tossed $1,000 to maverick Republican challenger Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. Other donors to the Arizona war hero included actor Robert Duvall and Milos Forman (director of "Amadeus"), who came to the United States as a refugee from Communist Czechoslovakia.
Three award winners contributed to any Republicans besides the briefly trendy McCain. Renegade director Oliver Stone ("JFK") split his contributions between Vice President Al Gore and Clinton impeachment trial manager Rep. James Rogan, R-Calif. That Republican congressman went down to defeat, though, partly due to how much money more orthodox Hollywood contributors poured into his Democratic rival's campaign. The rest of Hollywood hated Rogan for prosecuting Clinton for lying about adultery.
The other GOP givers were William Friedkin, who directed "The French Connection" way back in 1971, and, of course, the National Rifle Association's former leader Charlton Heston.
Clint Eastwood (who won an Oscar for directing "Unforgiven" and was once Republican mayor of the artsy town of Carmel, Calif.) does not show up in the Center for Responsive Politics' database as a contributor. While Clint couldn't be bothered, his ex-wife Maggie Eastwood did send $1,000 to Republicans, however.
Since 1990, Schwarzenegger has given $4,000 to politicians, although that may reflect his politically delicate marriage. Half went to Republicans, half to his Democratic Kennedy and Shriver in-laws.
And folks wonder why Hollywood's product is so often antithetical to American values?
Since leaving Ted Turner's CNN in 1985 and joining National Public Radio, I've found a satisfying home for the evening of my career. I've also returned to an old love with a weekly column in The Christian Science Monitor.
I no longer pursue scoops, but concentrate on the context and meaning of things. I interact with journalists a third to half my age, who seem to regard me as a walking history book. If asked, I tell them one lesson I have learned in some 60 years in journalism: There are, today more than ever, pressures to conform and not rock the boat. At least once in your lifetime, take a risk for a principle you believe in.
Nice idea--didn't work out too well for Paul Hill though.
Spurred by conservative rumblings over the growing clout of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), the Australian government is taking a closer look at such groups' activities at home and abroad.
Earlier this year, Prime Minister John Howard offered to investigate all aid agencies working in Indonesia using Australian government funding, following complaints by President Megawati Sukarnoputri. And in a move that critics see as politically motivated, his government has hired a conservative think tank to investigate NGO influence on some government agencies.
The investigation by the Melbourne-based Institute of Public Affairs could potentially cut off some charities from further government access, funding, or tax breaks, experts say.
"NGOs are becoming very influential today - they sit on various committees and are seen to influence governments and big business. As global players they need to be more transparent," says Mike Nahan, executive director of the IPA.
IPA is not the only group scrutinizing NGOs. In June, IPA joined with two organizations in the United States - the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), known to be close to the Bush administration, and the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies - to launch www.NGOWatch.org. The site will monitor the operations of international NGOs and their relations with corporations and government.
There's no readily apparent reason why they shouldn't be treated like every other self-interested lobby group.
Posted
7:08 PM
by Orrin Judd PSSSST, IT'S NOT ACTUALLY MAGIC: Keepers of the Magic Kingdom: Watch closely among Disneyland’s tourists and you might spot the Disneyana people, protecting Walt’s vision and living most of their waking lives in the happiest place on Earth (Adam Davidson, 9/05/03, LA Weekly)
Benji Breitbart doesn’t go to Disneyland every day.
“I wasn’t here last Thursday,” he says as we walk down Main Street. “I usually come six days a week.”
We’re moving quickly. “I have things I need to do,” Benji says. He’s canvassing the park, looking for anything new or out of place.
“We’re reopening the Electric Parade, so they’re getting ready,” he says, indicating some people in white uniforms scurrying about. I hadn’t noticed them, and it’s hard to tell exactly what they’re doing. But Benji knows. He knows everything that happens here almost as soon as it happens.
We hustle down Main Street, take a left into Adventureland. He notes that the Tiki Room needs a paint job. At the Haunted Mansion, on the far side of New Orleans Square, he stops suddenly. “This guy is new.” A speaker has been built into the gate around the Mansion. “When they change something, it’s jarring.”
Benji’s running commentary on Disneyland includes park history (“The Mansion is the last thing Walt worked on before he died”), labor politics, new plans. He uses the pronoun “we” when talking about the place. “We’re planning a big new E-ticket ride for DCA [Disney’s California Adventure park, adjacent to Disneyland].” “We’re doing a good job on paint in New Orleans Square.” I ask him why he says “we,” since he doesn’t work for Disney and has no official role here. The question surprises him. After a pause, he replies: “I’m an owner. I own 500 shares of Disney stock.”
But that’s not why I think he says “we.” He says “we” because Disneyland is the central force in his life. Most of his friends are Disneyland regulars, people like him who don’t work here but come to the park several times a week. Most of his clothes are Disney clothes. When he worked briefly at DCA, he would get his hair cut at the Disney cast-member barbershop. “I go to Angels games, because they [used to be] owned by Disney. I never liked baseball before. I watch ABC because it’s owned by Disney. But I don’t watch TV usually. Why watch TV when I can come here and watch Fantasmic?”
It’s not shocking that sex would surface in this post-Clinton gubernatorial recall election -- especially given the movie star’s penchant for baring his butt and simulating coitus for the camera. After all, we remain fixated on everything in the entertainment industry that’s most sensational or scandalous because it’s the unifying prism through which we view the world, from Britney tongue-kissing Madonna, to Denzel’s and Halle’s Best Actor Oscars, to Robert Downey Jr.’s addiction saga.
But what is surprising right now is the continuing way that the media coverage remains muffled about each new explosive Arnold revelation. Not just the political bomb that he boasted about a gangbang and drug taking in a 1977 Oui magazine interview. It’s also the orgy he described in a 1981 Penthouse interview, the groping and fondling ascribed to him by a 2001 Premiere magazine interview, his Nazi father’s real wartime activities unearthed by the Los Angeles Times last month, the broken campaign promises he made in recent weeks, and then, last weekend’s report of alleged racist statements.
All of this smacks of celebrity worship or semicollusion with Schwarzenegger’s Republican campaign (demonstrating just how monolithic Big Media’s POV really is despite the FCC’s recent claims to the contrary).
Wasn't the point of the failed Clinton impeachment--where not a single Senate Democrat even read the House files, which detailed a series of sexual assaults perpetrated by Bill Clinton--that even criminal sexual conduct is not sufficient cause to bar someone from office?
Posted
6:35 PM
by Orrin Judd THREATEN?: Iraqis threaten to go it alone: Amid faltering US security and rebuilding efforts, homegrown militias and politicians emerge. (Ilene R. Prusher, 9/04/03, The Christian Science Monitor)
Close to five months after the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, frustration with the slow pace of rebuilding and the rapid decline in security is giving prominent Iraqis a platform to promote going it alone.
In two key spheres in which the US-led coalition is having a difficult time asserting its authority - security and governance - prominent Iraqis are threatening to ignore or upstage the Coalition Provisional Authority's (CPA) plans for Iraq.
Mohammed Bahr al-Ulloum, a highly respected Shiite cleric who withdrew from the interim Governing Council this week, says that he may set up militias around Iraq to address deteriorating security. Mr. Ulloum, who was appointed to the council in July by US officials, said he was leaving the council after a car bombing in Najaf a week ago killed at least 85 people, including Ayatollah Mohammed Bakr al-Hakim, one of the country's most senior Shiite leaders.
Such militias, already being organized by other groups who were initially supportive of ousting Saddam Hussein, could pose a challenge to US or multinational forces' attempts to assert control over the country.
This week's appointment of Iraqis to head the government ministries was intended to show progress in turning over decision- making powers to Iraqis. But at the same time, other Iraqi figures are now organizing a nationwide conference that will promote itself as the true face of the Iraqi democracy.
The Constitutional Monarchy Movement (CMM), led by Sherif Ali bin Hussein - a Hashemite family prince who is considered by royalists to be the heir to the Iraqi monarchy deposed in 1958 - is organizing a conference of what he says will be approximately 500 political, professional, tribal, and legal leaders from all over Iraq. The conference, which Mr. Hussein says will be held here later this month, will contest Washington's postwar approach in Iraq.
When your grown children tell you they're ready to move out of the house and get on with their lives, it's not a threat but a relief.
Strangely enough, Iraqi Shias and Shia leaders in the United States pointed fingers in a different direction: at the Wahhabi sect, which is the official religion of Iraq's southern neighbor, Saudi Arabia. Wahhabis are known for their genocidal hatred of Shia Muslims.
Only a day had passed when Najaf governor Haidar Mehdi Matar said two "Arab Wahhabis" had been arrested in the case, along with two Iraqis.
The Saudi authorities customarily rejected any claim that their subjects were involved and demanded proof of the charge. Yet according to dissident Saudis, over the Labor Day weekend a brief report in the Saudi media stated that a group of Wahhabi clerics had met with King Fahd, who told them they had to stop preaching jihad against the world. The Wahhabis replied that because of repression against extremists imposed on Saudi territory under American pressure, Wahhabis were heading to Iraq for sanctuary and the opportunity to die as martyrs.
Thus, while Western pundits searched their files for a Shia religious figure on whom to pin the crime, Shia mourners marched in Iraq chanting "La ilaha illallah--Wahhabi adwu allah"--"There is only one God--Wahhabis are God's enemies." In addition, the Iraqi media were filled with articles condemning the Saudis and the Wahhabis in the most extreme terms. For example, "May Allah destroy the House of Saud and their brutal Wahhabism." And at social occasions and other encounters wherever Shias were to be found--including those in the United States, who hail from Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Azerbaijan, and the Balkans--the same opinion was heard. [...]
I believe Iraqi Shias remain grateful for their liberation by the coalition, and look toward a future of stability and democracy. But the United States and other coalition partners must stop dithering and telling themselves they know more about the situation than the Shia clerics and the Shia masses, who understand exactly who their enemies are. The United States should stop relying on Iraqi police bodies filled with Baathists. No more American troops are needed, and United Nations troops should not even be considered. Iraqi Shias, non-Wahhabi Sunnis, and Kurds, working together, can establish order in Iraq. But the Iraqi border with Saudi Arabia should be sealed, and Saudi Arabia should be put on notice to end the migration of Wahhabis north. As if they'll listen; I predict the Najaf bombing will simply be added to the list of Wahhabi crimes, exemplified by September 11, about which the West has assumed a uniquely spineless attitude.
Shi'astan vs. the Sauds couldn't hurt our interests either.
The United States on Tuesday sneered at plans by four European countries to create an autonomous European military command headquarters near Brussels separate from Nato, referring to the idea's proponents as "chocolate makers".
In unusually blunt language that drew surprised gasps from reporters, State Department spokesperson Richard Boucher scoffed at Belgium, France, Germany and Luxembourg for continuing to support the proposal that they first introduced at a mini-summit in April.
He described the April meeting as one between "four countries that got together and had a little bitty summit" and then referred to them collectively as "the chocolate makers".
He sounds like he's paraphrasing The Third Man, wherein Harry Lime (Orson Welles) has the immortal line:
In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed - but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
Kerry spent just short of $6 million on his virtually uncontested (without a Republican opponent) 2002 Massachusetts re-election campaign in order to bombard southern New Hampshire through the Boston media market. A month after the Massachusetts election, a New Hampshire poll showed Kerry with 40 percent and Howard Dean with 9 percent. Kerry has eight regional offices in the state and paid 38 visits there over two and one-half years.
That explains the shock inside the Kerry camp when the Zogby Poll showed a 21-point lead by Dean on Aug. 27. While Kerry has certainly not abandoned New Hampshire, his campaign team has hastened to construct a backup position in South Carolina. [...]
On "Meet the Press," Russert played a tape of Kerry addressing the Senate last Oct. 9 with a hard-line speech declaring Iraq "is capable of quickly producing weaponizing" of biological weapons that could be delivered against "the United States itself."
"That is exactly the point I'm making," Kerry replied to Russert. "We were given this information by our intelligence community." But as a senator, Kerry had access to the National Intelligence Estimate that was skeptical of Iraqi capability. Being tricky may no longer be as effective politically as it once was.
Senator Kerry is about a month away from using the George Romney line and saying he was brain-washed with regard to the Iraq War.
Again, we apologize for the lack of comments and regret the bile buildup we're surely causing to Darwinists, football yobs, and folks who think David over Goliath was an upset. These recent difficulties though have finally precipitated our long promised switch to Moveable Type. We should be fully transferred over by next Monday, but, in the meantime, we're testing the new version at the link above and will try to double post everything from here on in. You can comment there and we'd be especially grateful for feedback on the look and useability of the site.
Predictably, European commentators reacted to the Bush administration's decision to enlist U.N. help in Iraq with somewhat smug satisfaction. The dominant sentiment was that U.S. insistence on managing Iraq's reconstruction on its own had come home to roost.
Despite White House statements to the contrary, in Europe this was seen as an outright reversal of Washington's much vaunted go-it-alone policy. "Bush has second thoughts," said the leading Rome daily La Repubblica. "Now the United States in Iraq needs the United Nations. The (Bush) administration is in the process of surrendering."
Le Monde, the leading French newspaper, commented, "The project to enlarge the U.N. mandate contrasts with Washington's previous approach (to Iraq)."
The Left has had a field day trying to pick apart the Administration's rationale for war, so it seems like turnabout is only fair play. The most widely recognized problem with ignoring the UN and going it alone in Iraq was that we might get stuck with the entire task and whole bill for rebuilding the country afterwards. Had President Bush asked for help after the war the opponents of the war--Kofi Annan, China, Russia, France, Germany--would almost certainly have scoffed and refused. Today they consider it a victory that they're going to replace us in the quagmire. And Br'er Bush just keeps hoppin' along...
While I.B.M. officials deny it, evidence is being offered by stricken employees that unusually large numbers of men and women who worked for the giant computer corporation over the past few decades have been dying prematurely.
I.B.M. employees, and relatives of employees who have died, are claiming in a series of very bitter lawsuits that I.B.M. workers have contracted cancer and other serious illnesses from chemicals they were exposed to in semiconductor and disk-drive manufacturing, laboratory work and other very basic industrial operations. . . .
Some of the stories are chilling. Gary Adams, a chemist, sadly offers the names of friends and co-workers from the mid-1960's to late 1970's who were part of a small product development group in Building 13 at the I.B.M. complex on San Jose's South Side: John Wong, Ray Hawkins, Gordon Mol, Dewayne Johnson, Al Smith, Dan Fields, Robert Cappell, Ken Hart.
All of them died after contracting malignant illnesses, most of them succumbing in their 30's and 40's. Incredibly, four of them died after developing brain cancer, a rare disease in adults.
'There are not many still around,' said Mr. Adams, who had a nonmalignant bone tumor removed from his left leg in 1985 and now suffers from a precancerous condition in his esophagus. 'If we'd known all this from the beginning,' he said, 'we'd never have gone to work for I.B.M. We'd all have become shoe salesmen or something." . . .
Alida Hernandez, a retired I.B.M. employee, held a number of jobs that required her to work with toxic chemicals. She learned she had breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy in 1993. She told me this week, "If they had told me when I first interviewed that I would be working with hazardous chemicals that might cause cancer, I would not have gone to work."
I.B.M. has vehemently denied all of the plaintiffs' claims, and is being represented by Jones Day, one of the firms that represented R. J. Reynolds in the tobacco industry's fight against a long line of lawsuits.
Take 100 pennies. Toss them into the air. Because their path is effectively random, Bob Herbert expects them to land in a nice, evenly distributed pattern. If they don't, someone must pay. (Yes, I know that they'll land in a bell curve type pattern. Let's ignore that for now, as it doesn't effect the point.)
In fact, although the pennies will, overall, land in a predictable pattern, there will be some anomolies. A couple of pennies will land together at the edge of the pattern. In a couple of other places, there will be a dearth of pennies. All this is random and while the landing spots can't be predicted, it is entirely predictable that penny clusters and penny voids will occur. And the same is true of cancer.
Now, let's look back at the case Bob Herbert mounts against IBM. A woman had of breast cancer. Some other people who worked together over a couple of decades also had cancer. Four men died of brain cancer; suspicious, Bob implies, because brain cancer is a rare disease in adults. Here are the age-adjusted mortality rates for brain cancer from 1969 through 2000. (Here is the same information for all ages.) I'm going to, arbitrarily, use 3 deaths per hundred thousand as the expected rate of brain cancer deaths among IBM's workforce. The rate has been gradually declining over time, but the range in 2000 was about 3.4 for white men, 2.1 for black men and white women, and 1.1 for black women. IBM's US workforce is about 150,000, so every year IBM should expect to lose 4.5 current employees to brain cancer. So, over the last 35 years, how suspicious is it that four men who worked together should all die of brain cancer? It raises questions, to be sure, but enough so that the New York Times should simply accept that a nefarious employer was knowingly risking its employee's lives -- an employer that is now using a law firm the tobacco companies also used, cementing its guilt. (By the way, the overall cancer mortality rate is about 200 per hundred thousand.)
Finally, Herbert quotes IBM employees as saying that if they had known that their work was risky, they never would have taken it on. Rather than work in chip manufacturing, Mr. Adams, the chemist, would have sold shoes. With all due respect, people take on dangerous jobs every day. Lots of people, few of whom are paid particularly well, do jobs much riskier then any job offered by IBM.
IRS centers established to help people prepare their tax returns gave incorrect answers--or no answer at all--to 43 percent of the questions asked by Treasury Department investigators posing as taxpayers.
The investigators concluded that half a million taxpayers may have been given wrong information between July and December 2002.
Service varied widely by state, with some of the worst in the Midwest and Plains and some of the best in the Northeast.
Auditors were given correct answers to 57 percent of their tax law questions during the study. Less than half, or 45 percent, of the questions were answered correctly and completely. In 12 percent of the cases, the answer was correct but incomplete.
Internal Revenue Service employees gave wrong answers to 28 percent of the questions. Twelve percent went unanswered, as taxpayers were told to do their own research in IRS publications. In 3 percent of the attempts to get questions answered, the auditor could not get any service at the center.
The IRS disputed the results. Using the raw numbers gathered by Treasury investigators, the IRS recalculated the error rate and ignored any instance when taxpayers were denied service or told to do their own research. Of the questions answered, the IRS calculated that 67 percent were answered accurately.
''We recognize that an accuracy rate of 67 percent for tax law service is inadequate,'' Henry O. Lamar, the IRS commissioner overseeing individual tax returns, wrote to the investigators.
No one can be expected to know a tax code as ridiculously complicated as ours. Time to go to a VAT or a flat tax--maybe 18% across the board on individuals' income above a certain earnings level.
What American politics urgently needs, in other words, is not a new left, but a new center. Democrats need to refocus domestic debate around a handful of fundamental goals on which all Americans can agree -- goals that in turn become the new basis for setting fiscal priorities and tradeoffs.
Yes, there will be fights over details. But if we first ask what equal opportunity and a decent life in America mean, can't we agree that anyone who works full time should be able to provide for his or her family? That every citizen should have basic health coverage? And that special efforts should be made to make sure that poor children have good schools?
Fixing these problems will take federal dollars, an amount of cash that is mistakenly viewed as "unaffordably liberal" under existing terms of debate. In fact, an agenda that covered the uninsured, subsidized a new living wage of $9 an hour and adequately compensated teachers would cost less than two cents on the national dollar, or 2 percent of the nation's gross domestic product.
Such new angles of vision are necessary if we're to get serious about America's biggest domestic problems. But the first step is for Democrats to climb out of their decade-long crouch. Republicans have been allowed to frame the conversation for so long that the terms of public debate have become surreal. After all, Margaret Thatcher would have been tossed from office if she'd proposed anything as radically conservative as Bill Clinton's health plan -- which still would have left several million people uncovered and had the private sector deliver the medicine.
As Democrats start sprinting toward their primaries, the candidate who can take what the Republican Party denigrates as "wild-eyed liberal dreams" and reframe them properly as simple common sense will have the best chance to beat President Bush -- and of deserving to.
Facing the impending decimation of the Party in November 2004, liberal commentators have adopted the idea that this is their 1964, when a candidate returns his party to first principles and, though he loses badly, motivates a generation of activists. The problem with this theme, as Mr. Miller notes, is that none of the Democratic candidates is truly in favor of classic Democratic (Statist) solutions to problems. Where Barry Goldwater was associated, fairly or not, with a willingness to use nuclear weapons to end the Cold War and wholesale opposition to the New Deal, there is no contender today who is willing to advocate these two rather basic refoms of Mr. Miller's: universal health care and a universal living wage. Sure, they all oppose any effort to privatize Social Security or use vouchers in public schools and they all support some kind of hike in taxes, but none are willing to advocate the tax levels that would be required to pay for all of this, nor the trade protections that would be required to keep jobs here if everyone made $9 an hour. All of us who value a vvibrant and competitive two-party system have to join Mr. Miller in hoping that the Democrats find their Goldwater, someone willing, even eager, to return the Party to its noble New Deal/Great Society past. Americans already have their party of freedom, The Republicans, what's lacking is an alternative party of security--why not let the Democratic Party be that party again?
The administration's sudden embrace of a broader U.N. role should not be limited to security issues. The resolution Washington is now circulating invites the U.N. to work with Iraq's American-appointed Governing Council to develop a timetable for constitutional rule and a return to Iraqi sovereignty. But for that to make a difference, the U.N. will have to be given broader political authority. Until his death in the headquarters bombing, the U.N.'s representative in Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello, did an impressive job within an unduly circumscribed mandate. His successor should have clearer powers. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund must also have the right to rule on policy decisions affecting the long-term disposition of Iraq's economic resources, mainly oil. Currently, they are limited to an auditing and advisory role. [...]
Bringing security, democracy and prosperity to postwar Iraq was always too big a challenge for Washington to have taken on alone. Fuller U.N. involvement would not only reduce the costs in American lives and dollars -- it would also improve the chances for success.
This is precisely right. The world community should be considered to function something like Hamas, with the US as its military wing and the UN as its political. We'll go out and change regimes--N. Korea, Cuba, Syria should top the list--and then the UN and others can pay for and administer the rebuilding.
While Iraqi police claim that they already have suspects for the August 29 car bombing in custody, there would be no shortage of non-Iraqi suspects. Al-Hakim was indeed a target for Saddam loyalists, but he also could have died at the hands of Iranians, rival Shi'ite groups, or Islamist militants.
Given the list of suspects--militant Shi'ites, the Iranian regime, al Qaeda, or the Ba'athists--it should be possible to turn the bombing to our advantage. These groups are our enemies too.
Posted
8:36 AM
by Orrin Judd OKAY, MALAYSIA HAS A LONG WAY TO GO (via Mike Daley): "Work hard for success": The following is a translation of the text of the National Day speech delivered by Prime Minister Datuk Seri Dr Mahathir Mohamad in Kuala Lumpur on Saturday night. (New Straits Times)
This year, we celebrate our 46th Independence Day. Our people are truly fortunate to be able to celebrate it without fear of any threat while the world is shrouded in apprehension caused by violence, invasion and war.
It's almost been five decades since we have been free from foreign rule. This is because our people of many races have matured politically and democratically, and cherish stability and peace.
We are not greedy in wanting to grab everything just for ourselves. We are not violent in taking our share. Instead, we believe in and are willing to share, to wisely share what we have. We are willing to accept a portion, because we believe and know that in peace and stability our share will grow and expand. We also know that if we grab everything for ourselves, the result is racial tension, causing the country to become unstable and not peaceful. Thus, whatever we have obtained would not grow. Indeed, it would shrink, and in the end we would have nothing.
If the world's problems are carefully observed, it's clear that cruelty, chaos and wars are caused by greed and selfishness. An unwillingness to share is the cause of chaos. That's the reason why in formulating the New Economic Policy, for instance, although the Bumiputeras formed the majority, they were willing to accept only 30 per cent, not 40 per cent for Bumiputeras and 30 per cent for foreigners. We know it is not that easy even to achieve this target. After 33 years of the NEP, the Bumiputera equity is just 19 per cent. We can protest, but the figure will not increase. On the contrary, it will decline.
There are some among us who are unhappy with our failure to meet the objectives of the NEP after 46 years of independence. Surely, some would like to find fault, especially with the Government. Can't the Government just give the Bumiputeras their allocation? In fact, the Government has done that. But if the Bumiputeras are still short of their equity, it is because they sell their shares to non-Bumiputeras for fast profit. Not only shares but also contracts, opportunities and whatever else is given has been sold, which will undoubtedly cause the NEP to fail. Even the 19 per cent equity has been attained because the shares are allocated to Bumiputera institutions which have not sold them.
Why is this happening? Why have the objectives of the NEP not been fully achieved? Why dispose of the portions allotted to us? [...]
As I said earlier, Malaysia is already halfway towards achieving developed-nation status. We cannot get the quality of facilities of a developed nation and yet expect to pay costs on par with that of a developing nation.
The country's finances are not unlimited. If the nation's development were fully dependent on the Government's finances, it is unlikely that we would today have highways, electricity and water supply, sophisticated telecommunications, light-rail services, ports, and other facilities like we have now. The reason we can have all these is because consumers pay to consume.
The Government gives a reasonable amount of subsidies. If the Government has to bear all costs, then those who don't consume will also be forced to pay indirect taxes. It is grossly unjust to force everyone to pay for facilities that are only used by some of the people.
The alternative is to not have all the facilities that are available now. If that is the case, then our quality of life will be no better than that of other developing nations.
There are developed nations whose per capita income is 10 times higher than ours in terms of US dollars. But their purchasing power is only three times higher than ours. In this regard, the purchasing power of the ringgit in Malaysia is almost two-and-a-quarter times or 225 per cent more than the purchasing power of the US dollar in America.
The ringgit's strength in our country is due to our ability to control the price of goods and services, control inflation so to speak. With that, even though wages in the country are low compared with developed countries, our quality of life is not that low compared with them.
So too does the rooster believe its crowing brings the dawn, but then wonders why it can't stop the sun from setting.
Here's just one more reason why baseball is sublime. The A's made 5 errors in this game and allowed 9 runs, but all were earned. It consumed a whole bowl of Cracklin' Oat Bran and half a pot of coffee just trying to figure out how such a thing is possible. No one has ever so much as looked at a football linescore.
The impact on college and university campuses of legions of unprepared freshmen is never positive. Millions of dollars must be spent annually in remedial education. And the rate of failure is still extraordinarily high. The ACT estimates that one in four fail or drop out after one year. A third of the freshmen at the relatively select University of Wisconsin-Madison do not return for a second year. I toiled for decades on a Wisconsin campus on which a mere 18 percent of the entering freshmen ever graduate. The financial costs, let alone the emotional toll on the young people involved, is scandalous.
Even more important is the impact of intellectually unprepared people on the educational process itself. Anti-intellectualism is the Great Enemy of the educator, and with a classroom full of people who do not read, study, or think, academic standards inevitably suffer. In an article titled The Classroom Game, I described my own tribulations with students in an open-admissions environment. The most well-intentioned professor cannot educate those who refuse to be educated. All too often, such students demand that they be passed through the system and awarded a diploma, as they were in high school. [...]
In America and all across the western world, intellectuals are enthralled with the abolition of moral and intellectual standards. In the courts and in the media, as well as the classroom, they are ramming this dogma down the throats of the vast majority. Are our nineteen students better off for being enveloped by the very poison that is slowly killing our civilization? Are we by definition doing them a favor by sending them to college? They may earn more during their lifetimes. But at what cost?
Shortages in skilled labor abound. Why not a billboard boasting that, say, eight of our nineteen young people have been sent to tech schools, have learned trades, and are currently in the work force leading productive lives and earning good wages? Is a machinist or a carpenter any less of a respectable American than someone who spent six years studying Mass Communications and Anthropology? In my judgment, we say so at our national peril.
I recently read about an auto mechanic whose high school counselor told him that he was ruining his life by opting for vocational training. The young man is now in great demand in the job market, works extremely hard, and makes over $100,000 a year. He is a happy and productive citizen. Did he waste his life? Not in this old professor's book.
NPR ran a great story this summer about the shortage of repairmen for quality watches and how much folks can make if they decide to study the trade, including having their training paid for. Of course, the main problem is guaranteed student loans and other forms of government intervention that make it not only possible but almost socially required for every kid in America to attend college. In reality, a college education is neither necessary nor warranted for a great many people, while forcing them into the system tends to dumb down the institutions to everyone's detriment.
Rate Your Music and YACCS are unavailable due to a server failure.
Estimated time for fix: September 8, 7PM EST
Update (September 3, 4:35 PM EST): It looks like the old server is still failing intermittently. I can't debug the problem (since the server is located across the country), so the quickest solution is to ship a new server to the colocation facility. I'm going to build a server tomorrow and ship it on Friday. It should arrive Monday, September 8 around 6PM EST and should be online around 7PM.
Again, I apologize for the downtime. Unfortunately, there is nothing I can do to speed things up; the process of ordering and shipping a server takes time, and yesterday was the first day since the outage that any stores were open.
The good news is that the new server is much better than the old one, so the site should be significantly faster/more responsive once it's running.
Nina Shokraii Rees, the Bush administration's point woman in the effort to start a school voucher program in the District, had her first public school experience under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
In 1982, at age 14, she left Iran with her family because the revolution made life intolerable for them there. But when the family settled in Blacksburg, Va., and young Rees began attending public school, she reached an unsettling conclusion: Khomeini's schools were more rigorous than America's.
"In Blacksburg, it was very easy to get an A," she recalled in her fourth-floor office overlooking the Mall. "In Iran, I never got an A."
That conclusion launched Rees on a two-decade quest that has landed her, after two years in the Bush White House, as the deputy undersecretary of education in charge of "innovation and improvement" -- including the effort to expand the reach of school vouchers.
Her labors will be tested this week. On Thursday, the House is set to take up legislation by Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.) to try a $15 million pilot voucher program in the District that would provide as much as $7,500 each for as many as 2,000 children in low-income families to attend private school. Senate Democrats blocked a similar plan last month, but the administration is hopeful the experimental plan can still win congressional approval. Though still in doubt, the prospects for a voucher plan in the District have never been better, aided by the support of such top city officials as Mayor Anthony A. Williams, School Board President Peggy Cooper Cafritz and D.C. Council education committee chairman Kevin P. Chavous. That support comes, in part, from Rees's legwork.
"She really does epitomize the compassionate conservative," said Chavous, who contrasts her with the "many Republicans [who] are amazingly cynical about the state of the city." D.C. leaders insisted that the voucher program be an addition to existing education funding for the District, and "Nina's been helpful in bringing other people along," Chavous said.
Compassion for is not necessarily mutually exclusive of cynicism about the state of the District.
... The legislation, by Sen. Gil Cedillo, D-Los Angeles, would help undocumented immigrants get drivers' licenses by allowing them to submit a federal taxpayer identification number or some other state-approved form of identification to the Department of Motor Vehicles instead of a Social Security number.
The U.S. Internal Revenue Service issues taxpayer identification numbers to tax filers who cannot qualify for Social Security numbers, which authorize a person to work legally in the United States.
Davis has vetoed two similar bills since he became governor, citing law enforcement's concerns about the legislation. After he vetoed the bill last year, the Legislature's Latino caucus refused to endorse him for re-election.
Last month, at an anti-recall rally in Los Angeles, the governor said he would sign the latest bill "in a heartbeat" if it reached his desk.
But it's not the blatant ploy for the taxes and the votes that's so laughable ....
[...] But Democrats said up to 2 million illegal immigrants are driving without proper licenses already and that someone who wants to obtain a fake drivers' license can get one now on big-city street corners.
Cedillo's bill, they said, would improve public safety by helping ensure that all drivers pass a driving exam and have insurance.
It's the ridiculous notion that, by simply changing the rules, people who are already perfectly content breaking the law will suddenly be compelled to pay more money in fees and insurance to comport with it.
Posted
8:00 PM
by Orrin Judd BREAKING THE CYCLE: Market gets second wind: Technology-fueled rally recovers its poise near the close; indexes hit new multi-month highs. (Alexandra Twin, September 3, 2003, CNN/Money)
The major indexes managed to close out the session Wednesday with fresh multi-month highs -- despite last-minute profit taking -- thanks to buying in technology and optimism about the economy.
Whether investors can build on those gains Thursday may depend on the slew of economic news that is due.
"I like the rally today and the volume is good, but we still have a lot of economic reports to get through the rest of the week that could either undermine it or strengthen it," said Timothy Ghriskey, president of Ghriskey Capital Partners. [...]
On Wednesday, the Nasdaq composite (up 11.42 to 1852.90) added 0.6 percent, the Dow Jones industrial average (up 45.19 to 9568.46) closed with a gain of about 0.5 percent, while the Standard & Poor's 500 (up 4.28 to 1026.27) index closed up around 0.4 percent. The Dow and S&P; had only been modestly higher earlier, but the Nasdaq had traded up as much as 1.1 percent before the rally fizzled a bit.
Nonetheless, the gains were sufficient to push the indexes to new highs for the year, for the second session in a row. The Nasdaq hit a new 17-month high, closing at its highest level since April 1, 2002, when it finished the session at 1,862.62.
Both the Dow and S&P; 500 ended the session at new almost 15-month highs, seeing their best closes since June 18, 2002. On that day, the Dow closed at 9,706.12 and the S&P; closed at 1,037.11.
Given that the doldrums in the economy for the past few months--if not longer--have been almost purely psychological, all we need is a little contagious optimism to get the thing going again. And a series of consecutive quarters where Americans see their 401k's growing again is a recipe for a landslide in November 2004.
Every morning at 10 a.m., the oldest daughter of Karima Selman Methboub dons her black head scarf, grabs her press card, and walks down the broken steps of the family's lightless apartment stairwell to begin work.
Fatima is a volunteer at the recently founded Al Muajaha newspaper, or "The Iraqi Witness," and spends her days typing up stories on a computer in Arabic - without pay - and learning about journalism.
"I'm trying to learn more - I'm excited by this job!" says Fatima.
The 17-year-old was forced to drop out of school three years ago because of high fees, and because she was needed at home to help her widowed mother care for Fatima's seven siblings. "I hope this newspaper will be big in the future."
That's not the only bright spot in the Methboub's postwar lives. Another is that the primary school attended by Duha and Hibba, twin girls who are 11, is being completely renovated by "the Americans."
"There will be a cafeteria, air conditioning, and even a television - though that is for the headmaster, not us," says Duha breathlessly. "They gave us a paper saying that children are the future."
These are signs of hope, to be sure, in lives once overshadowed by the repressive grip of Saddam Hussein. But for the large and strug- gling Methboub family - which the Monitor has followed since last December - life in postwar Iraq has also been hard, and fraught with new dangers.
Obviously it would be wonderful if we could make their country go from Saddamism to something like Bridgeport, CT in six months, but, with all due respect: how about taking some responsibility for your own freakin' country and the damage you allowed to be done to it over the past several decades, huh?
Posted
7:17 PM
by Orrin Judd THE DISTURBERS: The Falseness of Anti-Americanism: Pollsters report rising anti-Americanism worldwide. The United States, they imply, squandered global sympathy after the September 11 terrorist attacks through its arrogant unilateralism. In truth, there was never any sympathy to squander. Anti-Americanism was already entrenched in the world's psyche -- a backlash against a nation that comes bearing modernism to those who want it but who also fear and despise it. (Fouad Ajami, September/October 2003, Foreign Policy)
“America is everywhere," Italian novelist Ignazio Silone once observed. It is in Karachi and Paris, in Jakarta and Brussels. An idea of it, a fantasy of it, hovers over distant lands. And everywhere there is also an obligatory anti-Americanism, a cover and an apology for the spell the United States casts over distant peoples and places. In the burning grounds of the Muslim world and on its periphery, U.S. embassies and their fate in recent years bear witness to a duality of the United States as Satan and redeemer. The embassies targeted by the masters of terror and by the diehards are besieged by visa-seekers dreaming of the golden, seductive country. If only the crowd in Tehran offering its tired rhythmic chant "marg bar amrika" ("death to America") really meant it! It is of visas and green cards and houses with lawns and of the glamorous world of Los Angeles, far away from the mullahs and their cultural tyranny, that the crowd really dreams. The frenzy with which radical Islamists battle against deportation orders from U.S. soil -- dreading the prospect of returning to Amman and Beirut and Cairo -- reveals the lie of anti-Americanism that blows through Muslim lands. [...]
A century ago, in a short-story called Youth, the great British author Joseph Conrad captured in his incomparable way the disturbance that is heard when a modern world pushes against older cultures and disturbs their peace. In the telling, Marlowe, Conrad's literary double and voice, speaks of the frenzy of coming upon and disturbing the East. "And then, before I could open my lips, the East spoke to me, but it was in a Western voice. A torrent of words was poured into the enigmatical, the fateful silence; outlandish, angry words mixed with words and even whole sentences of good English, less strange but even more surprising. The voice swore and cursed violently; it riddled the solemn peace of the bay by a volley of abuse. It began by calling me Pig . . . ."
Today, the United States carries the disturbance of the modern to older places -- to the east and to the intermediate zones in Europe. There is energy in the United States, and there is force. And there is resistance and resentment -- and emulation -- in older places affixed on the delicate balancing act of a younger United States not yet content to make its peace with traditional pains and limitations and tyrannies. That sensitive French interpreter of his country, Dominique Moisi, recently told of a simple countryman of his who was wistful when Saddam Hussein's statue fell on April 9 in Baghdad's Firdos Square. France opposed this war, but this Frenchman expressed a sense of diminishment that his country had sat out this stirring story of political liberation. A society like France with a revolutionary history should have had a hand in toppling the tyranny in Baghdad, but it didn't. Instead, a cable attached to a U.S. tank had pulled down the statue, to the delirium of the crowd. The new history being made was a distinctly American (and British) creation. It was soldiers from Burlington, Vermont, and Linden, New Jersey, and Bon Aqua, Tennessee -- I single out those towns because they are the hometowns of three soldiers who were killed in the Iraq war -- who raced through the desert making this new history and paying for it.
The United States need not worry about hearts and minds in foreign lands. If Germans wish to use anti-Americanism to absolve themselves and their parents of the great crimes of World War II, they will do it regardless of what the United States says and does. If Muslims truly believe that their long winter of decline is the fault of the United States, no campaign of public diplomacy shall deliver them from that incoherence. In the age of Pax Americana, it is written, fated, or maktoob (as the Arabs would say) that the plotters and preachers shall rail against the United States -- in whole sentences of good American slang.
Those on Left and Right who counsel that we should heed this rising anti-Americanism are in some sense asking us to forsake Americanism (which is really Anglo-Americanism). That we must not do.
Maybe it was the ginger tea or the homemade brownies, but Democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry ran a gamut of emotions on Wednesday, angrily denouncing President Bush as 'dead wrong' on Iraq and shedding tears at a jobless woman's story. . . .
Kerry, a senator from Massachusetts and a Vietnam combat veteran with a reputation for aloofness, lost his composure when Barbara Woodman of Concord told him how she was battling to educate her children after being laid off from a publishing company.
'I don't care how many jobs I have to work, those kids are going to college,' she said. 'And if I can, I'll do whatever it takes to make this country stronger.'
Kerry, sitting beside her in Mary Ann's Diner, a popular small-town New Hampshire stop for 2004 presidential candidates, choked up and his eyes watered. . . .
Kerry's campaign has been fighting slippage in the polls and the perception it has been too detached, too flush with old-guard Democratic advisers and too slow to retool. Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean has eclipsed Kerry in early polls in New Hampshire, although the primary is more than four months away and the general election 14 months away. . . .
"There's something about September," he said. "The sky's bluer, the air's clearer ... and this campaign has plenty of gas."
I take it from this that Reuters doesn't like Kerry, which is surprising. I'd think he'd be just their cup of tea. But I guess their heart belongs to Dean.
I'm willing to accept labile Presidents. After all, we're all new century men here and I've admitted tearing up over stories of heroism from 9/11, Afghanistan or Iraq. But, has Kerry ever actually met an American? There are lots of hardluck stories out there; a woman vowing to work hard to put her kids through college and to help strengthen the country just isn't one of them. This isn't Muskie in the snow but it ought to be President Bush I and the supermarket scanner.
John Kerry said he's running for president. But it looked like he's running for admiral.
The senator came down to Mount Pleasant, S.C., for his announcement Tuesday. You might think it's odd that a Massachusetts Democrat would give that speech in South Carolina. Massachusetts Democrats don't stop in South Carolina unless the car runs out of gas on the way to Disney World.
[I]t is the nature of religion to go too far. That is its history -- in the distant past and just yesterday as well. All over the world, people are hideously butchered in the name of God, which is to say condemned to death on account of an accident of birth.
It is actually because religion is a matter of chosen belief--rather than an immutable quality of birth, like race, ethnicity, etc.--that it is permissible for a society to be intolerant of non-believers in its organizing principles. Just as it was appropriate to persecute Communists who were opposed to our very constitutional system, so it may be appropriate for a society to persecute those who oppose its fundamental basis.
By March 2002, the terrorist called Abu Zubaydah was one of the most wanted men on earth. A leading member of Osama bin Laden's brain trust, he is thought to have been in operational control of al-Qaeda's millennium bomb plots as well as the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in October 2000. After the spectacular success of the airliner assaults on the U.S. on Sept. 11, 2001, he continued to devise terrorist plans.
Seventeen months ago, the U.S. finally grabbed Zubaydah in Pakistan and has kept him locked up in a secret location ever since. His name has probably faded from most memories. It's about to get back in the news. A new book by Gerald Posner says Zubaydah has made startling revelations about secret connections linking Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and bin Laden.
Details of that terrorism triangle form the explosive final chapter in Posner's examination of who did what wrong before Sept. 11. Most of his new book, Why America Slept, is a lean, lucid retelling of how the CIA, FBI and U.S. leaders missed a decade's worth of clues and opportunities that if heeded, Posner argues, might have forestalled the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Posner is an old hand at revisiting conspiracy theories. He wrote controversial assessments dismissing those surrounding the J.F.K. and Martin Luther King Jr. assassinations. And the Berkeley-educated lawyer is adept at marshaling an unwieldy mass of information--most of his sources are other books and news stories--into a pattern made tidy and linear by hindsight. His indictment of U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement agencies covers well-trodden ground, though sometimes the might-have-beens and could-have-seens are stretched thin. The stuff that is going to spark hot debate is Chapter 19, an account--based on Zubaydah's claims as told to Posner by "two government sources" who are unnamed but "in a position to know"--of what two countries allied to the U.S. did to build up al-Qaeda and what they knew before that September day.
Zubaydah's capture and interrogation, told in a gripping narrative that reads like a techno-thriller, did not just take down one of al-Qaeda's most wanted operatives but also unexpectedly provided what one U.S. investigator told Posner was "the Rosetta stone of 9/11 ... the details of what (Zubaydah) claimed was his 'work' for senior Saudi and Pakistani officials." The tale begins at 2 a.m. on March 28, 2002, when U.S. surveillance pinpointed Zubaydah in a two-story safe house in Pakistan. Commandos rousted out 62 suspects, one of whom was seriously wounded while trying to flee. A Pakistani intelligence officer and hastily made voiceprints quickly identified the injured man as Zubaydah.
Posner elaborates in startling detail how U.S. interrogators used drugs--an unnamed "quick-on, quick-off" painkiller and Sodium Pentothal, the old movie truth serum—in a chemical version of reward and punishment to make Zubaydah talk. When questioning stalled, according to Posner, cia men flew Zubaydah to an Afghan complex fitted out as a fake Saudi jail chamber, where "two Arab-Americans, now with Special Forces," pretending to be Saudi inquisitors, used drugs and threats to scare him into more confessions.
Yet when Zubaydah was confronted by the false Saudis, writes Posner, "his reaction was not fear, but utter relief." Happy to see them, he reeled off telephone numbers for a senior member of the royal family who would, said Zubaydah, "tell you what to do." The man at the other end would be Prince Ahmed bin Salman bin Abdul Aziz, a Westernized nephew of King Fahd's and a publisher better known as a racehorse† owner. His horse War Emblem won the Kentucky Derby in 2002. To the amazement of the U.S., the numbers proved valid. When the fake inquisitors accused Zubaydah of lying, he responded with a 10-minute monologue laying out the Saudi-Pakistani-bin Laden triangle.
Mr. Posner is the very opposite of a conspiracy theorist. His book on the Kennedy assassination, Case Closed, simply demolishes every extant theory that Lee Harvey Oswald was part of a larger plot. Killing the Dream, about the Martin Luther King assassination, leaves open the possibility that James Earl Ray had help from family and others, but dispels the notion that there was any kind of broader conspiracy. So one is inclined to give this report great credence.
Gov. Gray Davis of California today released his first television advertisements of the recall campaign. The commercials, though long anticipated, are perhaps most noteworthy for what they do not say and where they will not be seen.
The two advertisements feature Senator Dianne Feinstein, a fellow Democrat, at her San Francisco home urging Californians to vote against the recall. Mr. Davis, who polls show is widely unpopular, is not mentioned by name, and his photograph appears only briefly near the bottom of the screen among the credits. [...]
Mr. Davis also sought today to strengthen his economic credentials by announcing the appointment of Leon E. Panetta, a White House budget director in the Clinton administration, to a panel of finance experts who will look for ways to address the state's budget shortfall. Public frustration with the state's $38 billion budget gap helped fuel the recall movement.
Whatever else those two moves do, they serve to remind you that there are at least a couple Democrats who'd make much better governors of CA than either Gray Davis or Cruz Bustamante.
The Viejas band of Kuemeyaay Indians announced today that it is contributing a record $2 million to three different campaigns to help elect Cruz Bustamante as governor should the recall succeed.
The tribe is giving $1.5 million to Bustamante's 2002 reelection committee and $21,200 to the "Yes on Bustamante" committee. In addition, the tribe will be spending $479,800 on an independent expenditure targeting Latino voters in San Diego and Imperial counties promoting a message of "No on the recall, yes on Bustamante."
It is the largest political contribution to an individual ever made by the 289-member tribe and surpasses the $1.5 million in direct political donations Bustamante has received from Indian tribes since he was elected to the state Assembly in 1993, a large share of that from the Viejas band.
With the tribe's latest donation, Bustamante has raised close to $3 million from Native American governments for his recall campaign.
Man, you've gotta hand it to those CA Democrats; they actually found a guy with less sense of shame than Gray Davis.
Rep. Cal Dooley (D-Calif.) said Tuesday that he will not seek reelection next year. [...]
Dooley is a co-founder of the centrist New Democrat Coalition, known for its pro-business views. He has promoted free trade and the importance of technology. [...]
The 49-year-old Dooley won 63 percent of the vote in 2002. He is a member of the Agriculture and Resources committees.
When you're a permanent minority party it gets very hard to retain members.
State Sen. John Whitmire said he is returning to Houston tonight in a move that could potentially end the holdout of Texas Democratic senators who fled Austin on July 28 to stop a vote on congressional redistricting. [...]
Whitmire indicated he would keep his options open as to whether he would flee again if Gov. Rick Perry calls another special session to deal with redistricting. [...]
Whitmire set off a firestorm among the self-exiled Democrats last week by saying that he planned to return to Houston for the Labor Day holiday.
That led to Democratic caucus Chair Sen. Leticia Van de Putte to declare loudly behind a closed door that Whitmire was betraying the group. Van de Putte said Whitmire agreed to stay in New Mexico and planned to spend the weekend in Santa Fe.
Whitmire, in a statement, said he did not abandon the group.
"I returned as I had always planned -- not a bolt from the group, but a planned return after sine die (the official adjournment of the Legislature) on Tuesday, August 26," Whitmire said.
Everything you need to know about the current state of the Democratic Party can be summed up by citing its two great triumphs in the W Era:
There will be a conference this month to celebrate the mass murders of Sept. 11, 2001.
It will be held in London, exact date unknown. The sponsor is Al-Muhajiroun, a Muslim extremist group that, for the record, disputes reports characterizing the gathering as a celebration.
Also for the record: Posters promoting the conference depict the Sept. 11 hijackers as "The Magnificent 19." Draw your own conclusion.
Al-Muhajiroun's event was first reported last week by British newspapers and "NBC Nightly News." Coincidentally, the story broke just days before officials released transcripts of telephone calls and radio transmissions made from the World Trade Center that awful morning two years ago.
To read from those transcripts is to be swept into a universe of fire and smoke, confusion and fear. A Port Authority executive seeks assurance that rescuers are on the way. "They will come up, huh? They will check each floor?"
An emergency dispatcher struggles to comprehend what a caller has just told her. "Sir, you have WHAT jumping from buildings?"
"People," he says.
A desk sergeant says, "Oh, my G-d," as a colleague on the scene reports the unthinkable.
"Say a prayer, brother," the colleague replies.
If you can juxtapose that with Al-Muhajiroun's party without a shudder of cold fury, you're a better person than I.
ONE of the leaders of Malaysia’s Islamic opposition has upset women in the country by suggesting that they should stop wearing lipstick and perfume to lower the risk of being raped.
Nik Abdul Aziz, the spiritual leader of the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party, claimed that even women who wore Muslim head-scarves could arouse men if they also wore make-up and perfume. The end result could be rape or molestation, he said.
One persistent and disheartening theme of pronouncements by Islamic leaders is that wrongdoers are never responsible for their own actions--someone else is always to blame.
This Friday the foreign ministers of the European Union will gather in Italy to ponder a vexing question that has long haunted the Continent: Is paying for the murder of Jews a bad thing?
Under pressure from the United States and Israel, the 15-member states of the EU are poised to decide whether to cut off completely the flow of funds to Palestinian terrorist groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
While the Europeans did include Hamas's so-called "military wing" on their terrorist blacklist in December 2001, they have nevertheless allowed money to continue flowing into the group's coffers for "social activities" (bingo for bombers, perhaps?).
Apparently the EU finds it hard to grasp that by permitting money to go to Hamas they might actually bear responsibility for facilitating attacks against Israel.
After all, they must be telling themselves, all those Euros are undoubtedly going to feed the hungry, since Hamas would never, ever do anything so terrible as diverting funds to violence, would it?
Israel should send money to Sinn Fein and the political wing of ETA (the Basque separatist movement) and see how the Europeans like it.
It's not as if California hasn't seen a political creature like Arianna Huffington before. In some ways, she shares an intellectual lineage with her old (briefly) beau and friend, Jerry Brown.
Himself a scion of privilege, and labeled "Governor Moonbeam" for his unorthodox ideas, Brown was similarly focused on the spiritual, studying in a Jesuit Seminary before taking a law degree from Yale and degrees in Latin and Greek from U.C. Berkeley. He was twice elected Governor as a Democrat, and is in his second term as mayor of Oakland as a nonpartisan. He shares with Arianna a similar passion for the great untried idea, and an immunity to risk. He refused to live in the governor's mansion, renting a small apartment instead, and he drove a plain, state-issued Plymouth. He eschews party political machinery. He has been embraced by the Greens, whose motto is "neither left nor right but forward." Sound familiar?
"Don't you need somebody who has transformed in order to transform?" asks Jodie Evans, now an advisor to Arianna's campaign. "When transformation of the system is what you're after, you have to have someone who knows what it means."
But Jerry Brown is more of a known quantity than Arianna.
I understood Nixon's and Reagan's southern strategies. I even understood Father and Son Bush's South Carolina firewall strategy. But John Kerry's South Carolina strategy is nuts. (And he accuses President Bush of not being a good strategist.) I've been to South Carolina. In fact, I was there just a few weeks ago at a barbecue stand. There was a young man waiting for an order, dressed in full confederate uniform. Inside, they were selling beautiful color T-shirts that portrayed General Robert E. Lee in battle uniform on his fierce white horse leading a magnificent confederate charge against the Yankee intruders.
Down the road a piece from that stand was a restaurant named The Swamp Fox -- which I believe invokes the fond memory of Confederate guerrillas sneaking up on Yankee encampments to deliver justice to the blue bellies from Maine, Michigan and Massachusetts. If ever there was a figure from Massachusetts, it is John F. Kerry. The senator is a man who doesn't look all that comfortable dining at The Four Seasons in Georgetown. The thought of this quintessential moralizing, haughty, Boston Brahman campaigning over drawn pork down at The Swamp Fox could persuade even a cheapskate to pay the price of admission. And what on Earth would he say to the South Carolina voters?
Um, not quite. The Swamp Fox was Francis Marion, a hero of the Revolution. Mel Gibson's fiilm, The Patriot, was based--quite loosely--on his exploits in SC.
At first blush, it is hard to criticize President George W. Bush too severely. Preoccupied with other foreign-policy challenges from Iraq to Afghanistan to Israel, his time for Northeast Asia is limited. Rightly indignant at how North Korean leader Kim Jong Il treats his own people, and aware of North Korea's extortionate tendencies, he refuses to give North Korea inducements to stop a nuclear program it should already have ended according to the 1994 accord that President Bill Clinton signed.
But upon closer scrutiny, Bush is making a big mistake. [...]
The U.S. needs to push North Korea to reform its economy and even its political system in the way both China and Vietnam have done in recent decades.
This plan can only work if North Korea cuts deeply into its oversized conventional forces, which presently gobble up at least 20 percent of gross domestic product. It can only work if Pyongyang invites Chinese economists and technicians into its country to teach its people how to carry out market reforms. It can only work if it also agrees to verifiable elimination of its chemical weapons and ballistic missiles, an end to counterfeiting and drug trafficking, and the departure of all Japanese kidnapping victims and their family members from North Korea. And of course, the nuclear program must be quickly and verifiably frozen and then fully dismantled over time; North Korea's energy demands should be addressed with conventional power plants rather than new nuclear reactors.
The plan can only work if the U.S. does its part, too. That means easing trade sanctions. It means contributing substantial aid resources, along with South Korea and Japan and China, to help North Korea develop its infrastructure. These efforts should start in the so-called special economic zones and then be broadened to include the rest of the country as well as health and agricultural and education programs. The plan also requires a peace treaty and diplomatic relations among the region's key countries to reassure private investors from South Korea and elsewhere that they should risk their money in a reclusive land.
Our policy towards China and Vietnam should be regime change, but Mr. O'Hanlon instead wants us to reward N. Korea for building nukes, violating agreements, and murdering its own people while asking only that it become more like its less Stalinist communist neighbors? Yeah, that'll learn 'em.
Strategy is simple: Crank up a superserve, preferably 125 miles per hour or faster. If that fails to win the point outright, slug away from behind the base line until one player can't handle the blistering pace.
The trouble, say many who follow the game closely, is that despite all the tremendous athleticism on display, the game can be boring. And it's shown among fans. Though interest in the women's game has spiked since emergence of the Williams sisters, Serena and Venus, the men's game has languished. [...]
A certain "blandness" has overtaken the sport, says McEnroe in his 2002 book, "You Cannot Be Serious." Now a tennis commentator, he recommends a return to the wooden rackets of yesteryear. "You need strategy and technique," McEnroe says. But right now, tennis is a "wham, bam" game.
"I don't think that you have to serve-and-volley [all the time], but you have to have people coming to the net sometime," says Bud Collins with a hint of frustration in his voice. "They don't seem to want to do that now."
Mr. Collins, a tennis author, journalist, and TV commentator for the past four decades, points out that last year Lleyton Hewitt won Wimbledon without playing a single serve-and-volley point. "What I think the game is suffering from is what I call the 'ugly-fication' of topspin," says the dean of tennis journalists. "That's what to me makes the game dull." The intense spin players can create using the larger rackets lets them hit tremendously hard without their shots sailing into the grandstands.
Today's rackets, built to bulk up base-line bashing, mean "you're not going to have another McEnroe," says Collins. [...]
Though McEnroe's suggestion to return to wooden rackets is "impractical," Collins says, limiting today's rackets, which are made from high-tech alloys, to the same dimensions as the old woodies - 27 in. long by 9 in. wide - would help.
"They couldn't do what they're doing now," he says. "They'd have to show a little ingenuity."
It should certainly be possible by now to make alloy rackets that, though as indestructible as other metal ones, would replicate the less forgiving sweet spot of old wooden rackets. Why not use new technologies to remove the advantages that pro tennis players and golfers are currently enjoying and crank them back until they're relying on skill, strategy, & precision again?
The outcome of this childhood was what psychologists call an authoritarian personality. Authoritarianism was identified shortly after the second world war as part of research to discover the causes of fascism. As the name suggests, authoritarians impose the strictest possible discipline on themselves and others - the sort of regime found in today's White House, where prayers precede daily business, appointments are scheduled in five-minute blocks, women's skirts must be below the knee and Bush rises at 5.45am, invariably fitting in a 21-minute, three-mile jog before lunch.
Authoritarian personalities are organised around rabid hostility to "legitimate" targets, often ones nominated by their parents' prejudices. Intensely moralistic, they direct it towards despised social groups. As people, they avoid introspection or loving displays, preferring toughness and cynicism. They regard others with suspicion, attributing ulterior motives to the most innocent behaviour. They are liable to be superstitious. All these traits have been described in Bush many times, by friends or colleagues.
His moralism is all-encompassing and as passionate as can be. He plans to replace state welfare provision with faith-based charitable organisations that would impose Christian family values.
The commonest targets of authoritarians have been Jews, blacks and homosexuals. Bush is anti-abortion and his fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible would mean that gay practices are evil. But perhaps the group he reserves his strongest contempt for are those who have adopted the values of the 60s. He says he loathes "people who felt guilty about their lot in life because others were suffering".
He has always rejected any kind of introspection. Everyone who knows him well says how hard he is to get to know, that he lives behind what one friend calls a "facile, personable" facade. Frum comments that, "He is relentlessly disciplined and very slow to trust. Even when his mouth seems to be smiling at you, you can feel his eyes watching you."
His deepest beliefs amount to superstition. "Life takes its own turns," he says, "writes its own story and along the way we start to realise that we are not the author." God's will, not his own, explains his life.
Most fundamentalist Christians have authoritarian personalities. Two core beliefs separate fundamentalists from mere evangelists ("happy-clappy" Christians) or the mainstream Presbyterians among whom Bush first learned religion every Sunday with his parents: fundamentalists take the Bible absolutely literally as the word of God and believe that human history will come to an end in the near future, preceded by a terrible, apocaplytic battle on Earth between the forces of good and evil, which only the righteous shall survive. According to Frum when Bush talks of an "axis of evil" he is identifying his enemies as literally satanic, possessed by the devil. Whether he specifically sees the battle with Iraq and other "evil" nations as being part of the end-time, the apocalypse preceding the day of judgment, is not known. Nor is it known whether Tony Blair shares these particular religious ideas.
However, it is certain that however much Bush may sometimes seem like a buffoon, he is also powered by massive, suppressed anger towards anyone who challenges the extreme, fanatical beliefs shared by him and a significant slice of his citizens - in surveys, half of them also agree with the statement "the Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word".
As the author notes in passing, better than half of the people Mr. Bush governs share these "fanatical" views. In effect, Mr. Bush is in the mainstream of American life. It is then those who believe otherwise who would have to be considered alienated from societal norms.
After years of debate at the Legislature and a gubernatorial veto that gained national attention, one might expect the new state Pledge of Allegiance requirement to stir up a little controversy at that all-American institution known for spirited opposition and protest - high school.
Don't count on it.
As schoolchildren and their families prepare for today's start of classes, the new legislative mandate that Minnesota's public school students recite the Pledge of Allegiance at least once a week has caused little commotion.
Most elementary students already recite the pledge, often on a daily basis. Most high schools have not made the pledge a part of their school day, but students and principals don't think the new weekly requirement will be a big deal. With young Americans dying in Iraq on a too-regular basis and the patriotic wave after 9/11, a Pledge of Allegiance requirement will get a better reception than it would have in years past, they say.
"It would have generated a lot of good discussion and a lot of protests in the past, but I don't see that happening today because of the political environment,'' said Robert Schmidt, executive director of the Minnesota Association of Secondary School Principals.
It's a shame American boys have to be in harm's way for the Left to stop mewling about the Pledge.
A special analysis of Gallup data on the politics of Americans between the ages of 25 and 38 -- post-baby boomers who correspond roughly to "Generation X" -- points toward a more conservative ideology than one might expect, given their relatively young age. Two survey questions focusing on respondents' stances on social and economic issues shed light on where Gen Xers stand ideologically.
The famous 1960's admonition to "never trust anybody over 30" alluded to people's penchant to grow more conservative as they get older. Gallup's data suggest that this transition toward conservatism may occur closer to age 40 than age 30.
When asked about their views on social issues, the youngest American adults (18- to 24-year-olds) skew slightly liberal, with 36% saying they are liberal on social issues, compared to 27% who say they are conservative (another 36% say they are moderate on social issues). Gen Xers are more ideologically balanced: 31% identify themselves as liberal, 33% as conservative, and 34% as moderates.
That shift toward conservative thought on social issues plays out among Gen Xers' elders: among those aged 39 and older, just 19% say they are liberal on social issues, while 40% are conservative and 38% say they are moderates.
Which is why the franchise should be curtailed, with a hike in the voting age--to 25--heading the list of reforms.
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7:38 PM
by Orrin Judd DID THAT $100 TRILLION PURCHASE BUPKUS? The coming first world debt crisis: The reckless financial policies of leading western powers in the last two decades make it likely that the next seismic debt crisis will be in America, not Argentina. It can be avoided, says Ann Pettifor of the Real World Economic Outlook, only by serious efforts to bring regulation and balance to the international economy. (Ann Pettifor, 9/1/2003, Open Democracy)
On a global level, there is $100 trillion of debt outstanding, but only $33 trillion of income with which to repay those debts. Even the drastic recent stock market falls have barely dented the credit superstructure. When this credit bubble bursts in the United States and Britain, it will be middle-class consumers that will first bear the brunt of the financial crash.
That will be unjust and unfair, because American and British consumers have been actively encouraged in their borrowing by the financial deregulation policies of both central bankers and governments. Moreover, politicians and bankers have watched as dutiful and compliant consumers have propped up these two big economies – helping to keep the global economy afloat. They will be rewarded for their heroic efforts by bankruptcy, losses, liabilities, and personal anguish – which will extend some time into the future. The impact of a collapsing credit bubble will reverberate around the world, and hurt the poorest most.
The crisis will be exacerbated for individual consumers, because the end of the credit boom will take place in a deflationary environment. Deflation is in part a consequence of the policies of central bankers and finance ministers for opening up markets, and clamping down on wages and prices. Deflation is good for lenders, but bad for debtors. This is because the value of debts rises in real terms in a deflationary environment. This is in contrast to inflation, which ultimately erodes the value of debt.
A financial crisis under debt-deflationary conditions will be catastrophic for many debtors. It will also be grossly unjust and unfair, because while central bankers and finance ministers have clamped down on prices and wages – they have used the credit bubble (borrowing) to inflate asset values (stocks, bonds, and property) to extraordinary heights.
On the whole, it is the poor and the middle classes that rely on wages and salaries – while the rich derive their incomes from wealth. However, while the rich have been getting richer, they have not become indebted. Nor are they using these assets to spend and boost the economy. Instead, on the whole, they are standing by while their assets rise in value. The poor, by contrast, have watched as their wages and salaries declined as a share of GDP, and have had to borrow to compensate for these losses. By doing so, they are providing a service to the rest of the economy, and helping asset prices stay high.
Okay, but the real value of those assets--even if they're currently somewhat inflated--isn't $0 is it? In fact, mightn't the global value of assets be at least $77 trillion-$100 trillion? Or, suppose for just a second that every property on Earth, all added together really is worth $0: would any graduating college student have great reason to be concerned if they had assumed $200,000 in debt and had a yearly income of $66,000? Isn't that pretty manageable?
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6:52 PM
by Orrin Judd LAST OF THE TUDOR KINGS: Frederic Tudor, the Ice King: Frederic Tudor had a bold idea: Cut winter ice from the ponds of New England and transport it by ship for sale in far away lands including India and Singapore. Stranger still, it worked. (Carl Seaburg and Stanley Paterson, Sep 1, 2003, Harvard Business School Working Knowledge)
The ice trade flourished only because Boston was the port of entry for southern cotton destined for the textile mills that surrounded the city. Since the South imported no goods from Boston, vessels on the return trip had to go in ballast, which sometimes meant a hold filled with rocks. Thus, ship owners were prepared to give ice cargoes a low rate. By the same token, Boston had the ice trade almost entirely to itself: The other principal ports—New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore--shipped farm produce from their back country to the South. The mountains in western Massachusetts blocked Boston from produce grown west of the Hudson River, and the soil east of the mountains was too poor to support large-scale agriculture. Consequently, the growing ice trade could make a substantial contribution to the economy of New England only.
Of just such fortuitous circumstances are many fortunes made.
Rate Your Music and YACCS are down due to a server failure.
Services are expected to return to normal in 24 - 48 hours.
Thanks,
Hossein Sharifi (sharifi@ cc.gatech.edu)
Update (August 31, 12:25 AM EST): The server has been repaired; however, due to the fact that it is Labor Day weekend in the US, I may not be able to reinstall/reconnect the server until Tuesday, September 2 (or possibly September 3). I apologize for the downtime; I will make sure to keep this page updated.
We repeat that we truly do miss your comments, so much, in fact, that this may push us over to Moveable Type finally.
In the meantime, while you're all silenced, let me just say, without fear of contradiction:
(1) Darwin, Freud, and Marx were nearly identically quackish.
(2) WWI, WWII, and the Cold War were all tragic mistakes for the US.
(3) Nazism is a function of rational secularism.
(4) Julia Roberts and Eric Roberts are the same person.
(5) Orwell was a conservative; Hoover and Nixon weren't.
In the effort to shrink the huge wealth gap that has developed over the past decade or two, the first step is straightforward: the US government should extend the same opportunities that better-off Americans now have to everyone else, through refundable tax credits and matching deposits to encourage college education, home ownership, business ownership, and retirement saving.
But the next step has to be bolder: a Homestead Act for the 21st century. Here's how it might work. Every one of the four million babies born in America each year would receive an endowment of $6,000 in an American Stakeholder Account. If invested in a relatively safe portfolio that yielded a seven percent annual return, this sum would grow to more than $20,000 by the time the child graduated from high school, and to $45,000 by the time he or she reached 30 (assuming that the account had not yet been used).
Funds in the American Stakeholder Account would be restricted to such asset-building uses as paying for the cost of higher education or vocational training, buying a first home, starting a small business, making investments, and, eventually, creating a nest egg for retirement. Withdrawals would of course decrease the account; work and saving would build it back up. Family members and others could also add money to the account.
Although the program would be universal, giving every American child a tool to help meet his or her lifelong asset needs, it would especially benefit the 26 per cent of white children, the 52 per cent of black children, and the 54 per cent of Hispanic children who start life in households without any resources whatsoever for investment. For these children and others, an asset stake would provide choice, a ticket to the middle class and, most important, hope.
One change we'd make is to require much more aggressive investment in the account right from birth--at least $2,000 a year, from employers, the government (in the case of the very poor), parents, other family, or charities--and its initial use as a Medical Savings Account.
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3:55 PM
by Orrin Judd FOR ONCE A HEALTHY TURN FROM DEMOCRACY IN GERMANY: The exhausting grind of consensus: In his push for economic reforms, Gerhard Schroeder is changing the way German democracy works (The Economist, Aug 28th 2003)
A MUCH heralded commission chaired by Bert Rurup, one of the few top German economists who get their hands dirty in politics, has at last told Germany's Social Democratic-led government how to reform the country's creaking public-pensions system. In the commission's view, pension contributions should be capped (at 22% of monthly gross salary), despite an ageing population. More strikingly, Mr Rürup's commissioners want to raise the legal retirement age to 67 from today's 65, adding a month a year between 2011 and 2035. They have also proposed a new formula to calculate pensions, which would take into account the age composition of the population. Most painfully, Germans would have smaller incomes to retire on: 40% of average gross earnings instead of the current 48%.
These suggestions are milder than the minimal changes that more radical economists say are needed to put public pensions on a stable footing. But they are probably the most ambitious that Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has any hope of implementing. Even so, they have provoked a barrage of criticism and counter-proposals, in particular from his own ruling Social Democrats. And there may be further feverish negotiation before parts of the proposed reform are enacted in the Bundesrat, Germany's upper house of parliament, where the Christian Democrat-led opposition has a majority.
Whether or not Mr Rurup's plans are implemented, his commission shows how German democracy has changed in recent years—and illustrates Mr Schroeder's approach to reform. The members of the Bundestag, the lower house of parliament, are supposed to “represent the whole people”, according to Germany's Basic Law, its constitution. But German politics is increasingly being conducted in councils, at round tables and by groups composed of academics, politicians, businessmen, lobbyists and ordinary citizens that seek to further reform while preserving Germany's post-war system of consensus.
The proliferation of such groups is due largely to Mr Schroeder and his left-of-centre cabinet, who have created more of them than any other German government. New participants, alongside Mr Rurup's commission, include the National Ethics Council, the Commission for the Reform of Municipal Finances, the Council for Sustainable Development, and the Expert Commission on Corporate Governance. This commissionitis is now so pervasive that Hans-Jurgen Papier, head of the Constitutional Court, recently warned Germans of a rampant “deparliamentisation”. If parliament ceases to be the hub of politics, he said earlier this year, citizens will lose their sense of representation and elections will be devalued.
Yet Mr Schroeder's seeming fondness for commissions is not due to a contempt for parliament. Rather, suggests Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who runs the chancellor's office, it is because the many checks and balances of Germany's consensual system mean that decisions cannot be taken quickly enough to match the break-neck speed of change wrought by globalisation and new technology. Commissions, Mr Steinmeier wrote in a candid article in 2001, are a way of breaking Germany's systemic gridlock.
Fareed Zakaria's book examines this issue too and it is really quite central to the future of liberal democracy: the question is whether the relatively direct institutions of democracy are capable of reforming the welfare benefits that the people have voted themselves or whether it will require resort to more undemocratic means to effect real change. Recall that here in the States we were only able to pass the minimal Social Security reforms we did and close a few of our many excess military bases after similar commissions reported.
It is hard to rank the likely victims of a war in Iraq, but there can be little doubt that the 4 million Kurds of Iraq, who for the moment have achieved unusual progress in the northern enclaves under the uneasy alliance of Masoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani, are in particular danger. Anders Lustgarten may prove to be right in his warning that “none stand to lose more than the occupants of Iraqi Kurdistan,” and that “any successor to Saddam will see the Kurdish threat to Baghdad in the same light”. Apart from their vulnerability to murderous Iraqi assault, and the anticipated Turkish reaction if there is any hint of a move towards meaningful autonomy, some 60 per cent rely for survival on the UN ‘Oil for Food’ programme, according to studies by humanitarian organizations, which is likely to be severely disrupted in the event of war.
“Free Kurdistan is like a huge refugee camp,” one Kurdish leader commented: it is dependent on UN-run programmes for food and on Baghdad for fuel and power. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees is planning for the possible flight of hundreds of thousands to neighbouring countries, where they are not likely to receive a warm welcome, and where the prospects for the indigenous Kurdish populations are sufficiently grim even without what might lie ahead. But there are some real signs of hope in the Middle East.
It is obvious that the rich and powerful countries, primarily the US and Britain, will have an enormous influence on future development, as they have had in the past. And in free societies, where fear of repression is slight, that means that popular forces and independent organizations like the Kurdish Human Rights Project can have a decisive influence. For 10 years the KHRP has compiled a stellar record in promoting and significantly advancing the cause of human rights in this tortured part of the world. In the coming years, its tasks will be even greater, and its concerns will reach well beyond the Kurds, severe as their problems are.
Agreed; the Kurds could end up being betrayed by the US and Britain as they try to establish their own state. Oh, wait, he doesn't even say that. What the heck is the point of this column?
George W. Bush has a forthright speaking style which convinces many people that he's telling the truth even when he's lying. But in under three years, Bush has told at least as many impressive untruths as each of his three predecessors. His style of deception is also unique. When Reagan said he didn't trade arms for hostages, or Clinton insisted he didn't have sex with "that woman," the falsity of the claims was readily provable--by an Oliver North memo or a stained blue dress. Bush and his administration, however, specialize in a particular form of deception: The confidently expressed, but currently undisprovable assertion. In his State of the Union address last January, the president claimed that Saddam Hussein had ties to al Qaeda and a robust nuclear weapons program, and that therefore we needed to invade Iraq. Even at the time, many military and intelligence experts said that the president's assertions probably weren't true and were based on at best fragmentary evidence. But there was no way to know for sure unless we did what Bush wanted. When the president said on numerous occasions that his tax cuts--which were essentially long-term rate reductions for the wealthy--would spur growth without causing structural deficits, most experts, again, cried foul, pointing out that both past experience and accepted economic theory said otherwise. But in point of fact nobody could say for sure that maybe this time the cuts might not work.
This summer, when it became clear that Iraq had no active nuclear weapons program--indeed showed no apparent evidence of any weapons of mass destruction at all--that the economy was still losing jobs, and that the administration's own budget office predicted deficits as far as it dared project, Bush's reputation for honesty took a turn for the worse. By the middle of July, only 47 percent of adults surveyed by Time/CNN said they felt they could trust the president, down from 56 percent in March. The president's response to all this was to make yet more confidently expressed, undisprovable assertions. He simply insisted that his tax cuts would create jobs--and who knows? Perhaps someday they will--and that American forces would eventually turn up evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But by then, the press was beginning to pick up on deceptions in other policy areas--the redaction of evidence of global warming in EPA reports, the administration's refusal to provide Congress with any estimates whatsoever about the costs of the occupation of Iraq. The White House seemed guilty of what might be called persistent, chronic up-is-downism, the tendency to ridicule the possibility that a given policy might actually have its predictable adverse consequences, to deny those consequences once they have already occurred, or--failing that--to insist against all evidence that those consequences were part of the plan all along. By late July, even a paragon of establishment conservatism like Barron's columnist Alan Abelson was lamenting the president's "regrettable aversion to the truth and reality when the truth and reality aren't lovely or convenient."
The president and his aides don't speak untruths because they are necessarily people of bad character. They do so because their politics and policies demand it. As astute observers such as National Journal's Jonathan Rauch have recently noted, George W. Bush campaigned as a moderate, but has governed with the most radical agenda of any president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Indeed, the aim of most of Bush's policies has been to overturn what FDR created three generations ago. On the domestic front, that has meant major tax cuts forcing sharp reductions in resources for future government activism, combined with privatization of as many government functions as possible. Abroad, Bush has pursued an expansive and militarized unilateralism aimed at cutting the U.S. free from entangling alliances and international treaty obligations so as to maximize freedom of maneuver for American power in a Hobbesian world.
Yet this is not an agenda that the bulk of the American electorate ever endorsed. Indeed, poll after poll suggest that Bush's policy agenda is not particularly popular. What the public wants is its problems solved: terrorists thwarted, jobs created, prescription drugs made affordable, the environment protected. Almost all of Bush's deceptions have been deployed when he has tried to pass off his preexisting agenda items as solutions to particular problems with which, for the most part, they have no real connection. That's when the unverifiable assertion comes in handy. Many of the administration's policy arguments have amounted to predictions--tax cuts will promote job growth, Saddam is close to having nukes, Iraq can be occupied with a minimum of U.S. manpower--that most experts believed to be wrong, but which couldn't be definitely disproven until events played out in the future. In the midst of getting those policies passed, the administration's main obstacle has been the experts themselves--the economists who didn't trust the budget projections, the generals who didn't buy the troop estimates, intelligence analysts who questioned the existence of an active nuclear weapons program in Iraq. That has created a strong incentive to delegitimize the experts--a task that comes particularly easy to the revisionists who drive Bush administration policy. They tend to see experts as guardians of the status quo, who seek to block any and all change, no matter how necessary, and whose views are influenced and corrupted by the agendas and mindsets of their agencies. Like orthodox Marxists who pick apart mainstream economics and anthropology as the creations of 'bourgeois ideology' or Frenchified academic post-modernists who 'deconstruct' knowledge in a similar fashion, revisionist ideologues seek to expose "the facts" as nothing more than the spin of experts blinded by their own unacknowledged biases. The Bush administration's betes noir aren't patriarchy, racism, and homophobia, but establishmentarianism, big-government liberalism, and what they see as pervasive foreign policy namby-pambyism. For them, ignoring the experts and their 'facts' is not only necessary to advance their agenda, but a virtuous effort in the service of a higher cause.
Here's what may be a useful exercise to try with this essay; simply reverse all of the arguments:
(1) The economy would be growing jobs faster if an additional $2 Trillion in taxes were being taken by the Federal Government.
(2) Saddam Hussein's conmtinuance in power would have had no effect on our national security.
(3) More US troops are needed in Iraq now, rather than less.
(4) It is possible to state with some precision what the remainder of our Iraq occupation will cost.
(5) We know both that humans are causing global warming and how to remedy the situation.
Now, it's certainly possible, if one is beholden to liberal ideology to say any of these with confidence, but are any of them any more truthful per se than what the President has said? Or would we have to test these assertions too? And what is the relative danger of trying out these ideas--some of which have already been proved wrong in the past, unlike supply-side economics, which worked for JFK and Ronald Reagan--as opposed to the alternatives that the President adopted instead? But, in particular, why would it have been sensible to wait and see if Saddam was a genuine risk when there was no reason to allow him to continue his reign of terror in the first place?
In early February, President Bush dropped a bombshell on the education world: A $75 million proposal for a multi-city voucher program, and Washington, D.C., would pioneer it. "My initial reaction was, 'No,' "says District Mayor Anthony Williams, a center-leaning Democrat. "But I started thinking: Why am I against this?" In his city, around 70 percent of fourth graders can¹t read or work math problems at grade level. And eighth graders are just as badly off. "I couldn't think of a lot of reasons why I was against it in D.C.," he recalled. With a school system in dire condition and rising demand for change, "you have got to have a compelling reason why you shouldn¹t try something new." So, he came out in support of the $15 million program that would give a $7,500 voucher to about 2000 poor D.C. children.
Williams is facing a problem with which nearly every Democratic urban mayor across the country struggles. Constituents are screaming for educational alternatives, and most of the options on the table have been exhausted, except, it seems, for one: vouchers. The Democratic Party has long opposed vouchers, more on political than policy grounds, but Williams¹s choice should sound a very loud alarm as the Democrats head into Election 2004. Democrats are on the verge of losing the rhetorical battle in the politics of hope. Parents like Tracy Tucker of Washington, D.C., aren't supporting vouchers out of ideology but pragmatism; vouchers represent the hope for a better life for her two children. "I received a Pell Grant when I was in college,"says Tucker, a black single mom who works part-time and makes about $25,000 a year. "I really see this as an extension of those programs to uplift children at an earlier age. Right now, I¹m looking at the school system and what it¹s doing--it¹s like sending your child to prison."
Declared dead two years ago when Bush dropped a voucher component of his education reform bill to win its passage, vouchers are in resurgence. A year ago, the Supreme Court ruled that vouchers for private and religious schools do not violate the First Amendment. That eliminated a major hurdle for voucher advocates. Soon after, the Colorado Legislature passed a voucher proposal that goes into effect this month. Florida now has three voucher-type programs, and the decade-old Milwaukee voucher experiment is expanding.
Federal pilot programs like the one proposed for Washington, which Congress will take up as part of the budget battles this fall, offer a new route for voucher advocates. And discerning observers of the political scene can see the outlines of a key component of Bush's reelection strategy. [...]
Indeed, the No Child Left Behind Act is quietly building up grassroots support for vouchers. In addition to tests, the law requires states to designate which schools aren¹t performing well now, and incrementally give them a kick in the pants. Those schools that can¹t do better eventually get shut down, and the students who attend them are sent to other public schools. But as it happens, there aren¹t nearly enough slots in well-performing schools to accommodate all the students who are likely to be looking for a new classroom sometime in the next few years. As school districts look around for places to put their students, they may find that private and parochial schools are among the few alternatives. Says Nina Rees, the deputy undersecretary of education who is responsible for the D.C. voucher initiative, "you have in effect created a constituency that could conceivably ask for private choice."
She nearly figures out that No Child Left Behind is a school choice program in all but name. After that the essay tails off though into a proposal that Democrats embrace vouchers with some slight cosmetic changes in order to make their surrender palatable. Republicans notoriously made themselves the permanent minority party by just such a strategy, which comes across to any but the most detail-oriented wonk as petty sniping on an issue where you've admitted that your opponent was right and you wrong.
Attorney General John Ashcroft tells USA Today that he won't run again for elected office, but that he'd like continue serving in the Bush administration should the president win a second term.
Ashcroft, who has been elected as Missouri auditor, state attorney general, governor and U.S. senator, said: "I can't really imagine running another political campaign. I don't have that in mind. I'm getting older."
Mr. Ashcroft would be an ideal Chief Justice, bringing to the job impeccable conservative credentials and the political background that this Court so sorely lacks.
Russia today is facing a real population crisis as young people emigrate, those who stay have fewer children and the life expectancy of men is falling. Russia's population, now 145 million, is shrinking by almost 700,000 annually -- a predicament that President Vladimir Putin has called a "creeping catastrophe."
The answer to a declining population is not curbs on abortions.
The Times has an honored tradition of turning a blind eye to Russia's mass killings, but given that every nation with legalized abortion has a declining population this assertion seems manifestly insipid. Restricting abortion is a sensible, though not a sufficient, step.
Yasser Arafat should "disappear" from the Palestinian leadership, and Israel may have to decide by year's end whether to expel him if he continues to get in the way of a U.S.-backed peace plan, Israel's defense minister said Tuesday.
Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz issued the warning as Arafat and his prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, remained locked in a bitter power struggle. Abbas, backed by the United States and Israel, is increasingly unpopular at home and could be ousted -- possibly in a parliament vote next week.
The idea that Arafat cares at all about the lot of the Palestinian people or would take any action whatsoever for peace must be a tenet of some strange religion, because there is no factual support for it whatsoever.
About 543 million years ago, the world was a dull rather than brilliant place, inhabited by primitive sponges, jellyfish and worms. But in a dramatic event known as the Cambrian explosion, the number of major animal groups skyrocketed from three to the 38 we know today, in a matter of a few million years. "It involved a burst of creativity like nothing seen before or since. Animals with teeth and tentacles and claws and jaws suddenly appeared," says Parker, an Australian researcher at the University of Oxford in England.
The reason for this short evolutionary flourish has mystified many, not least Charles Darwin. But to Parker, the explanation now seems blindingly obvious: the evolution of the eye.
Fossils records show the first creature to develop an eye was a small trilobite that lived at the very beginning of the Cambrian period. With the power of vision, it would have found easy prey in the blind, soft-bodied creatures around it. "The evolution of that very first eye must have been a monumental event," says Parker.
"A light switch was turned on. All animals (even those without eyes) needed to be adapted to vision before they were eaten, or before they were outwitted by their prey."
That's terrific, but the usefulness of eyes doesn't explain why they evolved. Wings are useful too, as would be telepathy, but we don't have them, do we? Of course, Darwinists just respond that we don'tt need them--we've already filled our niche--and that's why we didn't evolve such things. Perfectly circular, isn't it? That which a species has it needed; that which is doesn't it didn't.
George W. Bush has the habit of changing the subject--using a moment when all eyes are on him to frame issues in a new way, one that maximizes public support and consigns the opposition's (and the press's) preoccupations to irrelevancy. This is exactly what he did in defining the axis of evil in last year's State of the Union address and in raising the question, nine months later, of whether the United Nations would enforce its own resolutions on Iraq. So he is likely to do it once again in the 14 months before the presidential election next year. Here are two predictions of how he will do so.
The first concerns weapons of mass destruction, the issue the press and the Democrats have been nattering about lately. On July 31, David Kay, the official in charge of the search for WMDs in Iraq, testified in closed hearings on Capitol Hill and met with Bush in the White House. Kay is a tough-minded former United Nations weapons inspector. "We are finding documents that relate to WMD activities," Kay told reporters. "Physical evidence we have found."
Some time this fall, perhaps soon, Kay is likely to present a comprehensive report, with copious evidence, outlining Saddam Hussein's banned weapons programs. It's likely to be convincing; as Kay told NBC News's Tom Brokaw on July 15, "We do have a great desire to be sure that when we put it out for the American public, there will be absolutely no doubt about its meaning." Bush will let Kay have the spotlight momentarily. But soon after, look for him to take advantage of a high-visibility moment to reframe the issues in the war against terrorism. One occasion may be his annual September speech at the United Nations. Bush doesn't usually provide many hints about what he'll say when he changes the subject. My guess is that he will challenge the nations of the Middle East to act against terrorism and move toward democracy and human rights.
My second prediction is that Bush will put the spotlight, probably in his 2004 State of the Union speech, on his proposal for individual investment accounts in Social Security. Assuming Congress passes a Medicare bill this fall, this would be the only one of the four major domestic planks in his 2000 platform on which action has not been taken. Bush is known to believe that this was a winning issue for him in 2000. He will pledge, as he did then, not to change the benefits of current Social Security recipients and those due to reach retirement age soon. His focus will be on the young and whether the system will be there for them. The Social Security trustees estimate that Social Security payouts will exceed revenues in 2018. They estimate further that the Social Security trust funds will be exhausted and no longer able to pay full benefits in 2042. I see Bush arguing that changes must be made now to make sure benefits are available when young people retire.
There's a far more drastic reframing that can't be ruled out and that would leave Democrats high and dry: the President could move towards another regime change. Possibilities include N. Korea, Syria, and even Cuba--this last would really devastate the Democrats who are tring to exploit the Administration's return of refugees to Cuba in order to woo Florida's Cuban-American vote. How do you criticize Mr. Bush for being soft on Castro and oppose his ouster at the same time?
What if you seriously believe that Bush is defeatable? Who's the best candidate to do that? Dean? Hmm. Gen. Wesley Clark, the former NATO supreme commander and lion of Kosovo, currently playing electoral footsie with the Dems? I don't think so. The one to watch is the candidate who polls better than any other against the incumbent: Hillary Rodham Clinton.
The Clintons didn't get where they are without being bold: No experts thought Bush Sr. could lose in '92, but an obscure Arkansas governor did; no experts thought a sitting first lady could run for office, but Hillary did. They had plenty of luck: Ross Perot vote-splitting in '92, and the pre-9/11 Rudy Giuliani going into emotional meltdown in 2000. But fortune favors the brave, and if Hillary was to shoot for the big one, I wouldn't be surprised if some equally unforeseen breaks go her way.
The way to look at it is like this: What does she have to gain by waiting four years? If Bush wins a second term, the Clinton aura will be very faded by 2008. And, if by some weird chance Bush loses to a Howard Dean, she's going to have to hang around till 2012. Logic dictates that, if Hillary wants to be president, it's this year or none. In her reflexive attacks on Bush over the war and the blackout and everything else, she already sounds like a candidate. The press will lapse into its familiar poodle mode (''Do you think you've been attacked so harshly because our society still has difficulty accepting a strong, intelligent woman?'' etc.). And, more to the point, when the party's busting to hand you the nomination, you only get one opportunity to refuse.
Realistically, Hillary has to decide in the next eight weeks. If the meteoric rise of Howard Dean has stalled by then, the answer's obvious. And, even if it hasn't, you need an awful lot of $20 Internet donations to counter a couple of checks from Barbra Streisand. This is Hillary's moment. You go, girl.
One thing to keep in mind is that when folks like Sam Nunn, Mario Cuomo, and Colin Powell decided that it wasn't their time to run, what they really determined was that they were never going to run. If Hillary ever plans to run she'll run now, when the nomination is hers for the asking, which means she's running.
It's opening day for the Chicago public schools, and for many of them the year ahead can best be described this way: The Big Fix.
Two "Renaissance" schools are reopening after being shuttered 15 months ago because of flagging scores; 10 other low-performing grammar schools have one year to improve or face closing under a deal struck with the teachers union; four new small high schools are opening inside three failing high schools; and three more charter schools are opening their doors.
The efforts are mostly directed at the city's low-performing schools and high-risk students.
"This makes sense," said Steve Zemelman of Leadership for Quality Education, a reform group. "Each school has its own culture, so rather than mandate a 'single size fits all,' this means teachers have some choice, get to make a commitment and feel in control."
"It's about time lots and lots of energy was focused on these schools," added Chicago Teachers Union President Deborah Lynch. "The real challenge and success of urban public education hinges on turn-around strategies that will enable us to show success in schools struggling with high concentrations of poverty."
The year also opens with 38 schools taking in some 1,035 students from low-scoring schools under the federal No Child Left Behind law--a transition that promises to be chaotic with parents only receiving notice of transfers on Friday.
Any day now someone besides George W. Bush and Ted Kennedy will realize how completely the President duped the Senator into passing at least public school choice.
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11:41 AM
by Orrin Judd CURTAIN #4: North Korea's endgame: There is little doubt that North Korea will fall; what matters is how. The manner of the regime's demise depends on how others handle it. A gentle transition is possible, but so is an East German-style collapse, or, even, a cataclysmic war (Aidan Foster-Carter, August 2003, The Prospect)
While no one knows how this chapter of Korea's history will end, it is relatively easy to spell out the possible scenarios-and having done so, to rank them in a clear order of desirability. They are basically four.
The dream, not yet quite dead, is a soft landing. Slowly but surely, Kim Jong-il comes in from the cold, adopting reform at home and peace abroad. Tensions are defused; investment and aid from South Korea and others help the North to rebuild its shattered economy. North Korea remains its own master, but becomes a diminishing threat. A peace dividend helps South Korea afford the investments needed for Northern reconstruction. Here the best hope was when Clinton and Kim Dae-jung were in office. But Kim Jong-il blew it; his chance may not come again.
A second possibility is for the status quo to limp on, with Pyongyang alternately hinting at change and breathing fire. Containment keeps North Korea in check; the rest of us go about our business and prosper, while seeking to persuade Kim Jong-il that ours is a better way than his. The hard question is whether a nuclear North Korea now rules this out.
The third scenario is the path followed by Germany: collapse, followed by reunification through absorption. Despite sighs of relief all round that a maverick menace is no more, for South Korea this is a grim prospect. As the German precedent shows, the cost will be high. In Korea, the gaps between the two countries are even wider, it would be a case of one country, two planets. South Koreans bin more food than the North eats, are visibly taller, and export more in two days than the North in a year. So if 22m Northerners suddenly became a charge on the South Korean exchequer, the social strains would be overwhelming. Besides, the process of collapse is unlikely to be peaceful in Korea; it may well be fraught with danger.
The final scenario is Seoul's worst nightmare. As noted above, a second Korean war would be even more ghastly than the first. The DPRK would perish, but not before turning greater Seoul and beyond-maybe as far as Tokyo-into a sea of fire. Kim Jong-il might go down with a bang, using chemical, biological or even nuclear weapons. Millions could die. When it was all over it would cost trillions of dollars to rebuild not just the North-itself a multibillion task, even if peaceful-but the whole devastated peninsula. No game can be worth this candle.
A further worry is the unpredictable leadership on all sides. Kim Jong-il's goal is regime survival; he no longer dreams of conquering South Korea. For him, nuclear weapons are a deterrent and, as Pyongyang has recently admitted, cheaper than a vast conventional army. But the latest zigzags and defiance, including of China, are simply reckless. He might be desperate, but he-or the generals to whom he may be in thrall-are acting in ways that make it harder for the few who still want to help North Korea to do so. A hoped-for breakthrough with Japan last year backfired, when North Korea finally admitted to past kidnappings of Japanese citizens but claimed that many of the victims had since died of natural causes, and that their graves had been washed away in floods.
And what is Bush's game? Those with imperial ambitions in Washington seem keener to remake west Asia than east. Overall, the recent US approach may be read as signalling acceptance of North Korea's possession of nuclear weapons as a fait accompli, despite the risk that this could prompt South Korea, Japan, and even Taiwan to follow suit. China, however, may be less sanguine about unleashing any such regional nuclear arms race.
Actually, the best option would appear to be cataclysmic war, which would demonstrate our seriousness about nuclear non-proliferation.
As the administration prepares for the next round of negotiations, it must decide what it ultimately wants them to achieve. This will be no small challenge for an administration that, despite tough public pronouncements, continues to be badly divided between hard-liners who have pushed to isolate the North (with the eventual goal of regime change) and other officials who favor engagement because they believe isolation could lead to a catastrophe.
The choice is simple: regime change or appeasement.
"Over 85 percent of the workers at the bento factory are now foreign, mainly Latin American," said a Japanese manager who didn't want to be named. "You can't get Japanese people to do this work anymore."
Everybody knows the problem: Japan's labor force is set to shrink. Japanese women now have an average of just over 1.3 children in a lifetime, well below the level needed to maintain the current population of 127 million.
If the trend continues, the population will plummet to just over 100 million by 2050, shrinking the country's labor pool by more than a third and dragging down the country's national wealth.
The solution seems equally obvious.
Throw the country open to the millions of poor Asians, Africans and Latin Americans who would certainly come if invited.
A recent United Nations report estimates that Japan will have to import over 640,000 immigrants per year just to maintain its present work force and avoid a 6.7 annual drop in gross domestic product. Recent signs are that business and political leaders are starting to come to the same conclusions.
The chairman of Japan's top business federation, Hiroshi Okuda, favors importing up to 6.1 million foreign workers in the near future. Even Shintaro Ishihara now says he supports mass "controlled" immigration.
But standing in the way of a clear-cut policy decision is a political culture that seeks to have Japan remain ethnically pure and avoid the social problems associated by many in the old guard with immigration in Western cities.
Can those who are not ethnically Japanese ever be accepted as "Japanese" and, if not, what happens as their numbers grow and they remain unassimilated?
MOUNT PLEASANT, S.C. - John Kerry, maintaining that 'George Bush's vision does not live up to the America' the decorated war hero once defended, officially declared his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination Tuesday.
Using the aircraft carrier USS Yorktown as a backdrop, the Vietnam War veteran presented himself as the alternative to the Republican leader -- and the Democrat with the credentials to emerge from the crowded field of nine aspirants and seize the party's nomination.
I'm not sure which is more interesting, the choice of an aircraft carrier or the choice of South Caralina. His primary target right now has to be Dean -- he has to drive him out of the race before the New Hampshire primary -- and the aircraft carrier is a two-fer, useful against Dean and Bush. But announcing in the South is odd. Is he going to argue that Dean might take New Hampshire as a favorite son, but only JFK can win back the South? That's pretty desperate.
Rival Sen. John Kerry (Mass.) today "officially" launches his own sagging campaign in hopes of jump-starting it - after a weekend of blasting Dean as a soft-on-defense tax-hiker who can't beat President Bush.
But Kerry's campaign launch is a key to his problems: He's doing it in South Carolina instead of his home state of Massachusetts in what's widely seen as a move to create a fallback position in case he loses New Hampshire.
As if it weren't amusing enough that a guy who advocated ceding Vietnam to terrorists and an allied terror regime is saying that he'll be tough on terror now, the idea that SC can be a "fallback position" for a MA candidate is ridiculous. Even Mike Dukakis and Paul Tsongas won NH for cripessake.
Back-to-school pop quiz: Why do poor children, and especially black poor children, score lower on average than their middle-class and white counterparts on IQ tests and other measures of cognitive performance?
It is an old and politically sensitive question, and one that has long fueled claims of racism. As highlighted in the controversial 1994 book 'The Bell Curve,' studies have repeatedly found that people's genes - and not their environment -- explain most of the differences in IQ among individuals. That has led a few scholars to advance the hotly disputed notion that minorities' lower scores are evidence of genetic inferiority.
Now a groundbreaking study of the interaction among genes, environment and IQ finds that the influence of genes on intelligence is dependent on class. Genes do explain the vast majority of IQ differences among children in wealthier families, the new work shows. But environmental factors -- not genetic deficits -- explain IQ differences among poor minorities.
The results suggest that early childhood assistance programs such as Head Start can help the poor and are worthy of public support. They also suggest that middle-class and wealthy parents need not feel guilty if they don't purchase the latest Lamaze mobile or other expensive gadgets that are pitched as being so important to their children's development.
This article touches on a number of issues we've been discussing over the last few weeks: nature v. nurture, twin studies, determinism v. free will and even editorializing in news articles (Weiss' statement that "early childhood assistance programs such as Head Start can help the poor and are worthy of public support" is pure opinion, unsupported by anything in the article).
The conclusion - that poor kids might not be able to express their full genetic potential - is so obvious that it's annoying that the methodology here is so poor and PC concerns so obviously limited either the scope of the study or the article. As reported, this study tells us nothing of any interest. The interesting question is what is the limiting factor. Is it nutrition? Is it the lack of role models? Is it lousy schools? Is it a street culture that punishes academic achievement? Is it all of the above? What effect is welfare reform having, if any? Was there a difference between the married poor (if any, the data was collected for a purpose that would indicate it doesn't include many married couples) and the unmarried poor? At least the article, by noting that IQ is the best predicter of achievement, seems to concede implicitly that it is not vast racist conspiracy.
The answers to these questions will show us whether government has a role and where our money is best spent. Thus, Weiss' throw away line about Head Start, a liberal shibboleth never shown to have any long-term effect. But let me ask a more fundamental question that is rarely asked anymore: if the reason is not governmental racism, why should the government take any action at all?
Finally, note the reference to class throughout the article. The United States does not have classes, we have quintiles.
North Korea is an isolated country, poverty stricken, paranoid, apparently self-sacrificial and amazingly persistent ...
The development of advanced rocketry and now a potential nuclear capability is further proof of their scientific resources....
There was another crisis in 1994 ... A satisfactory agreement was concluded and later confirmed by both governments, with participation by South Korea, Japan and others. But neither side honored all the commitments.
The situation is rapidly deteriorating again. North Korea feels increasingly threatened by being branded an "axis of evil" member; deployment of anti-ballistic missiles in Alaska; Washington voices expressing military threats; interception of North Korean ships; ad hominem attacks on President Kim Jong Il; condemnation of previous efforts by President Clinton and South Korean leaders to resolve issues peacefully; and U.S. refusal to negotiate directly with North Korea. America's newly declared policies of pre-emptive war and first use of nuclear weapons also concern North Koreans.
We Christians honor Christ's sacrifice, and think of 'self-sacrificial' as a term of the highest praise, as a fulfillment of Christ's mandamus, his last command -- "love one another as I have loved you." Thus it is particularly irritating to hear Jimmy Carter, a professed Christian, describe North Korea with this term when a more appropriate term would be 'self-destructive' or just plain 'destructive' -- a different concept entirely.
It's curious also that his enumeration of North Korea's grievances includes such U.S. affronts as deployment of ballistic missile defenses in Alaska. Does he really think that, as North Korea announces plans to deploy offensive nuclear-armed missiles targeted against us, that we can't justifiably deploy missile defenses? If not, why does he let this pass as a U.S. offense?
Some on the left seem to be more nationalistic (on behalf of America's enemies) than foreign nationals. Jimmy Carter, who has made a fair bid for the title of worst U.S. President, seems to be among their number.
Frustrated at the failure to find Saddam Hussein's suspected stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, U.S. and allied intelligence agencies have launched a major effort to determine if they were victims of bogus Iraqi defectors who planted disinformation to mislead the West before the war. [...]
Although senior CIA officials insist that defectors were only partly responsible for the intelligence that triggered the decision to invade Iraq in March, other intelligence officials now fear that key portions of the prewar information may have been flawed. The issue raises fresh doubts as to whether illicit weapons will be found in Iraq.
As evidence, officials say former Iraqi operatives have confirmed since the war that Hussein's regime sent "double agents" disguised as defectors to the West to plant fabricated intelligence. In other cases, Baghdad apparently tricked legitimate defectors into funneling phony tips about weapons production and storage sites.
"They were shown bits of information and led to believe there was an active weapons program, only to be turned loose to make their way to Western intelligence sources," said the senior intelligence official. "Then, because they believe it, they pass polygraph tests ... and the planted information becomes true to the West, even if it was all made up to deceive us."
Furst, it seems like the spooks have been reading too many novels about fictional spycraft if they think Saddam Hussein hatched and carried out such a complex scheme. Second, suppose it's true: he tricked us into destroying his regime. Isn't that clever? Hopefully, Kim Jong-Il is doing the same thing and will harvest similar results.
Prosperous, dynamic Malaysia is a country populated mostly by Muslims, a religion adhered to by a quarter of the world's population but which is widely seen in the West as wedded to an impoverishing system of economics and law.
Thus does Malaysia defy the stereotype, and underscore the universal effectiveness of market economies. It is now the tenth largest trading nation in the world. Its exports have grown from 1 to 100 billion dollars since 1963. Its economy has grown for 30 years with 7% average annual growth, with very varied agricultural and hi-tech manufactured exports. It has had a nearly 40% internal savings rate. GDP is nearly $10,000 per person for its population of 23 million. It is now also the U.S.'s tenth largest trading partner.
Malaysia in the coming years will offer an excellent proving ground for Fareed Zakaria's thesis, posed in The Future of Freedom, that per capita GDP is very nearly determinative of whether a nation can evolve into a liberal democracy. He puts the target at between $3,000 to $6,000 and says that the chances a democracy above the higher number will fail is only one in 500. Of course, Malaysians need to have the will to attempt the creation of a liberal regime, because wealth is a defense, not a creator, of democracy. The importance of this theory lies in the recognition that democracy requires certain preconditions in order to flourish, an idea that makes nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan look dubious.
Before the euro was introduced, Eurosceptics worried that in focusing on Europe's core (Germany and France), the periphery would be disadvantaged. For example, if growth in the centre were strong but smaller countries were showing weaknesses, monetary policy would follow the centre's needs.
Few anticipated how events turned out: institutional rigidity prevented the European Central Bank (ECB) from responding to weaknesses in Europe's most important economy, Germany. Combined with the stability pact - another case of institutional rigidity that prevents effective use of fiscal policy - this has sent Europe into a major slowdown, if not a recession.
Confidence in the euro, along with mounting evidence of America's economic mismanagement, offered an opportunity for Europe to lower interest rates to stimulate growth. But by focusing on inflation, the ECB made Europe lose twice: both the lost investment that lower interest rates might have prompted, and the loss of exports and increase in imports that are sure to follow the euro's higher exchange rate.
Supporters of the euro point to the success of the US, with its single currency. But America's institutional structure differs markedly from Europe's. Labour mobility is an important part of the adjustment mechanism in the US. In the early and mid-1990s, when cutbacks in defence expenditure led to unemployment rates of over 10% in California, many Californians migrated to find work. Moreover, the federal government could boost California's economy by redirecting expenditure to that state.
While labour mobility in Europe has grown, language and cultural barriers mean that it is far lower than in the US. And besides the common agricultural policy, expenditures at the European level are meagre.
Finally, America has steadfastly refused to tie its hands in the way that Europe has. A balanced budget amendment to the US constitution was rejected, as were attempts to change the Federal Reserve's charter, which mandates that it focus on employment and growth as well as inflation.
Were people seriously expecting that creating a massive bureaucratic super-state would give Europe more flexibility?
Goran Persson, the Swedish prime minister, on Monday attacked Germany, France and Italy - the eurozone's three biggest countries - for failing to prepare for euro membership and undermining the eurozone economy.
With less than two weeks to go before Sweden's referendum on joining the euro, Mr Persson said Germany, France and Italy - which make up about 60 per cent of the eurozone economy - should have done more to put their public finances in order and build up budget surpluses before the euro was launched.
"If they had behaved as Sweden, Finland, the UK and others during the 1990s, preparing their economies for the downturn, we should not have had this situation today," he said.
Of course, if Germany, Italy, and France had behaved like Finland and the UK in the 1930s & 40's, Europe wouldn't be in the situation it is today: dying.
Asked about the obstacles that had arisen during the talks in Beijing last week, Wang Yi, a vice foreign minister who was China's chief delegate at the negotiations, replied, "America's policy toward the D.P.R.K. -- that is the main problem we are facing." North Korea's formal name is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
Mr. Wang made the comment to reporters during a conference he was attending in Manila, and it was not immediately clear if he spoke for China's Foreign Ministry, which has sought to maintain a neutral position while urging both parties to continue negotiating.
But the remark may reflect frustration that the United States offered no concessions to North Korea during the talks, which were organized after extensive diplomacy by Chinese officials.
The Bush administration has maintained that North Korea must dismantle its nuclear program before discussions can begin on any benefits it might receive for doing so. North Korea says it is willing to give up its nuclear program, but only if the United States offers a nonaggression treaty first.
Mr. Wang suggested that the next round should focus on forcing the United States to elaborate on its verbal commitment to consider North Korea's security concerns.
The Administration, by making North Korea concede to six-party talks and treating them as nothing more than an opportunity for North Korea to make further concessions, has effectively won already.
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12:39 AM
by Orrin Judd WHO EXPLODES?: Probing the roots of terror: The attacks of 9/11 galvanized a phalanx of scholars to dissect terrorism from every angle. What they've learned so far may surprise you. (Mark Clayton, 9/02/03, The Christian Science Monitor)
Many of [Claude] Berrebi's friends on campus knew he was a Parisian who had lived in Israel and lost friends to terror bombings. They pressed him to explain why the terrorists had acted as they did. But he could not explain it, he says. And that void in understanding troubled him. The economists
"After 9/11, I felt terrorism was no longer a problem of distant regions in a state of clear conflict, but a global threat," Berrebi says. "I realized that I might be able to contribute in a field mostly unexplored ... to be one of those who might help understand the factors that motivate terrorism."
One of the questions that most intrigued him: Did a fetid mix of poverty and lack of education drive some people to commit acts of terror, as pundits often claimed on TV? Berrebi hoped to find out.
Within days, he was conferring with his adviser, economist Alan Krueger, about changing his research topic. Dr. Krueger might have discouraged him: Getting data to support a new thesis would be tough.
But Berrebi had an idea for how to get the information. So Krueger gave the go-ahead, and Berrebi began by focusing on Palestinian suicide bombers. Krueger, meanwhile, would do the same, focusing on Hizbullah terrorists.
For almost two years, Berrebi prowled the Internet archives of websites belonging to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and Hamas. From each, he painstakingly translated from Arabic details about individual suicide bombers, the "martyrs," as the websites called them. Krueger, for his part, culled other data sources for information.
What the two men discovered surprised them both.
Among Hamas and PIJ members, Berrebi found, only 20 percent were poor - fewer than the 32 percent who qualified as poor among a similar slice of the general Palestinian population between ages 18 and 41. But among suicide bombers, the contrast was even more pronounced: Just 13 percent were from poor families.
Educational backgrounds of people aligned with those groups showed similar results. Among suicide bombers, 36 percent had finished at least secondary school. Only 2 percent had not gone past primary school. It looked as if the pundits might be wrong: The suicide terrorists were fairly well educated and were far from being poor.
Krueger and his co-researcher, Jitka Maleckova, found similar results among Hizbullah's militant wing during the 1980s and '90s. In a recent issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, the pair wrote that their research and Berrebi's findings "provide no support for the view that those who live in poverty or have a low level of education are disproportionately drawn to participate in terrorist activities."
Isn't the idea that it would be predominantly poor people taking this much initiative with their lives inherently dubious? The poor, after all, don't get that way by having mammoth ambitions, significant planning skills, and suicidal will power.
Perhaps it was the extreme climate of eastern North America, with its heat, dampness, and freezing cold, that led not only the Native American cultures but also the European one that replaced them to be far more functional and utilitarian than Europe. Americans rejected every ism, and that has been to the good. Even the "European Enlightenment," Daniel J. Boorstin, the former librarian of Congress, has written, "was in fact little more than the confinement of the mind in a prison of 17th- and 18th-century design." The Enlightenment, Boorstin argues, "itself acquired much of the rigidity and authoritarianism of what it set out to combat." In western Massachusetts, and elsewhere along this icy, unforgiving frontier, the Enlightenment encountered reality and was ground down to an applied wisdom of "common sense" and "self-evidence." In Europe an ideal could be beautiful or liberating all on its own; in frontier America it first had to show measurable results.
The Enlightenment philosophes, comfortable in their salons, saw the state as the proper and rational instrument of progress; on the virginal slopes of the Appalachians the state was fine so long as it didn't get in the way of development. Because the Enlightenment was an intellectual discovery, it was, inevitably, elitist, whereas an oral philosophy of common sense issued from the ground up. To wit, the separation of Church and State in America was no beau idéal but a practical response to the fact that the rugged pioneer spirit of optimism and free thought begot different Protestant sects, and none of them held sway over the new political establishment. These sects competed fiercely for souls throughout New England. For the first time in recorded history faith became purely a matter of choice. Such free religious competition and the fervor that ensued became known as the Great Awakening. Democracy in America was the product of a specific culture's interaction with a harsh landscape.
The native inhabitants were part of that landscape. The Stockbridge Indians soothed the soul of Jonathan Edwards, the severest Calvinist of the Great Awakening, who came here in 1751 to write and to minister to them as part of an exile from the swirl of doctrinal controversy he had stirred up in Northampton. The Native Americans here were the first to be granted U.S. citizenship, in honor of their service as scouts in the Revolutionary War. But that is local minutiae, and the broader picture counts for more.
King Philip's War, in 1675-1676, was as brutal as any spate of Balkan atrocities, with native and white civilians, many of them children, central to the carnage. The settlers' losses were awful, but the war's end saw the virtual extinction of native life in southern New England. Though Native Americans fared better in western Massachusetts, the very process of development, combined with unsavory land deals, drove them onto reservations. The fact is, as King Philip's War proved, removing the Indians was eminently practical: the same applied wisdom that had made the rarefied notions of the Enlightenment usable for ruthlessly pragmatic settlers in North America also closed the door on accommodation with the native inhabitants. Here is an even more troubling reality: much or all of what America has achieved domestically and internationally might have been impossible had its dynamic new capitalist society -- which emphasized self-discipline and industry and allowed the individual to rise above the group -- been diluted by the mores of the native culture.
"History," according to its Greek root, means merely a narrative, and a narrative that is rich and deep is often unresolvable. The Caucasus still endures such bloodshed because all the isms that promised utopia there have been reduced to ethnic blood feuds. The American narrative is morally unresolvable because the society that ultimately saved humanity in the great conflicts of the twentieth century was built on enormous crimes -- slavery and the extinction of the native inhabitants.
History, though, can also be the story of ideas -- and the more useful the idea, the greater the history. America's was an anti-idea: all philosophers are finally wrong, and the masses -- left alone to seek their own interests -- know best. Such democratic populism tempts cruelty and barbarism, and it cannot be successfully applied everywhere, even if Americans -- the missionary zeal of the Great Awakening still within them -- believe otherwise.
This is one of the paradoxes at the heart of the Republic: amidst all the cant about "toleration", America was established on a ruthlessly intolerant annihilation of the native cultures and none of us bat an eyelash over it. (Was it Chesterton who said, "America has the morals of an army on the march"?) Nor is there much reason to believe we'd be terribly tolerant of any other truly different culture that sprang up in our midst in any considerable strength. America assimilates immigrants not just as a means of accepting them here but as a means of destroying the cultures they bring with them. And that's why America works.
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11:22 PM
by Orrin Judd PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, GIVE US YOUR TIRED....: In shrinking Spanish hamlets, immigrants welcome: Newcomers are enticed with jobs, housing, and airfare. But the repopulation efforts have not been without growing pains. (Dale Fuchs, 9/02/03, The Christian Science Monitor)
As in the rest of Western Europe, most leaders in Spain worry more about how to keep out immigrants than how to make them feel at home. But driven by a dearth of manual labor, a network of 83 one-bus-stop bergs like Aguaviva ("Living Waters") are setting out the welcome mat in the sparsely populated regions of Teruel, Soria, Huesca, and Valencia provinces, most of them in the country's arid, mountainous northeast.
The enticements include a job with benefits, a reasonably priced apartment, and plane tickets for the whole brood - the more kids the merrier. Since the crossborder courtship began here in 2000, the nonprofit Spanish Association of Municipalities Against Depopulation has attracted 56 families from Argentina, Uruguay, Romania, and Ecuador.
When the newcomers arrive, the collision of two worlds often ends in alienation. Some, mostly the Argentines, have scoffed at the construction and farming jobs offered; the lack of opportunities for women; poor communications with the nearest cities; and, naturally, the meddlesome townsfolk, who don't hide their disapproval of what they consider "frivolous" purchases, such as television sets, microwave ovens, or PlayStations for the kids.
The longtime residents, for their part, sound like jilted lovers when they describe the rejection of their way of life and the "lack of gratitude" for their generosity.
"They couldn't feed themselves in Argentina. They come here and what did they expect - a satellite dish on every house and a Mercedes at the door?" asks Juan Altabella, owner of the town hotel.
"The South Americans confused repopulation with colonization," says the town doctor and mayor, Lu?s Bricio, author of the immigrants-welcome drive. No fewer than 15 families, he says, have "turned their back on the town" after being greeted with baskets of food, clothing, and even furniture by well-meaning locals.
But newcomers like Mazzeo who manage to push through the initial culture shock have incorporated themselves into the rhythms of small-town life.
The bidding wars to entice immigrants to come live in the dying nations of the West are going to be tragically funny.
Students at elite U.S. universities that follow an honour code cheat significantly less than their counterparts at other institutions, says Don McCabe, a U.S. academic researcher.
At schools with honour codes, such as Stanford and Princeton, students make an official pledge not to cheat and, in return, are not policed by the university.
Dr. McCabe, a business professor at Rutgers University who has researched cheating for more than a decade, found, for the most part, students stick to their pledge.
"You find virtually no cheating at schools with very, very traditional honour codes," he said.
This is similar to the difference between morality, which is internalized, and law, which is external. Of course, the secularist project seeks to destroy the basis of morality, Judeo-Christianity, and build up the State, which then spews forth laws, regulations, etc. to control the behavior of people.
France's new ambassador to Israel caused a diplomatic row with his hosts yesterday after he was reported to have described the Jewish state as 'paranoid' and called its prime minister, Ariel Sharon, 'a lout'.
Limor Livnat, Israel's education minister, said the remarks attributed to Gerard Araud were 'very grave'. If true, she said, Israel should refuse to accept his letter of accreditation. . . .
In a statement, the French foreign ministry spokesman, Hervé Ladsous, said: "Gerard Araud denies in the most formal way all of the comments attributed to him by an Israeli journalist with respect to the state of Israel and its prime minister".
Is there a difference between denying something in the "most formal way" and admitting it?
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, admits today that the Anglican Church faces a 'messy' future with the danger of disintegration into rival factions.
In his bleakest assessment yet, Dr Williams concedes that cracks are widening over a range of issues, from women priests to homosexuality, and predicts that 'new alignments' are likely. . . .
Conservative evangelicals in Asia and Africa, who warned that such a move would 'shatter' the Communion, plan to force Dr Williams to expel the US Church from the Anglican fold.
Those arrogant hard right religious Americans, always ignoring the wisdom of the Third World.
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2:43 PM
by Orrin Judd ADDING BALLAST TO A SINKING SHIP: Storm clouds over the euro: Battles raging in France, Germany and elsewhere over social security reform and the debate on social rights in the EU's draft constitution will decide the future of the European currency (Georges de Menil, Sep 01, 2003, The Taipei Times)
The governments that launched the EMU anticipated that their workers and businesses would eventually be sufficiently mobile and flexible to adjust to economic changes affecting them differentially. At present, workers throughout the EU resist moving to change jobs, and social regulations hamper the mobility and adaptability of businesses. Legislatures are under pressure to relax these constraints.
But little noticed social provisions in the EU draft constitution, which Europe's leaders are expected to sign in less than a year, could compromise the liberalizing process.
In Part II of the draft constitution, a list of "social rights" is incorporated as "constitutional rights," enforced by the European Court of Justice. These include protection against "unjustified dismissal," the right to "working conditions that respect the worker's health, safety and dignity," and "entitlement to social security benefits [apparently regardless of cost] ... in cases such as illness, old age, and loss of employment."
Faced with these new statutes, the court might well change its basic approach. Since its inception, the court's thrust has been to enforce the economic freedoms mandated by successive agreements since the Treaty of Rome. A Bill of Social Rights will require the court to balance this liberalizing mission with attention to the new protections. In this new legal environment, national efforts to dismantle business restrictions could grind to a halt.
The consequences for the euro would be grave. Without further liberalization, the EMU will remain subject to potentially fatal strains arising from shocks that affect some countries more than others.
Couldn't these "rights" also limit the capacity of European nations to reform their social welfare systems?
To the rest of the world, our recall election might be a circus -- and they just may be right, according to Republican Party officials.
People have fun at a circus -- and California Republicans haven't had this much fun in years. Voters are actually paying attention to the GOP with actor Arnold Schwarzenegger and state Sen. Tom McClintock of Thousand Oaks drawing a combined total of support of nearly 50 percent of voters.
The state GOP has suddenly been flooded with interest from the news media, and even from its own members, as it plans its Sept. 12-14 convention in Los Angeles. "We are going crazy," said Mike Wintemute, communications director for the party. "Compared to prior years, we are getting requests for information not only from the traditional political press, but from the national and international media as well."
It is a situation the state party hasn't seen since the heyday of former President Reagan -- and it's a problem they clearly enjoy.
If you're a Democrat, how excited can you be about an election that asks you to try and save Gray Davis or replace him with Cruz Bustamante?
The Canadian economy shrank in the second quarter, its first decline in almost two years, and economists warn the rest of the year will continue to be slow.
Canada's gross domestic product contracted at a 0.3% annual rate during the period between April and June as the outbreak of SARS and mad cow disease slowed business, while the soaring Canadian dollar crimped exports, according to a Statistics Canada report released yesterday.
"The Canadian economy took one wicked beating," said TD Bank economist Marc Levesque. "Much more disheartening, however, is the fact that the Canadian economy ... may be hard-pressed to record much growth in the third quarter either."
That raises the risk of a technical recession, should growth shrink again this summer.
Canada's record as an economic powerhouse compared to the United States is likely over, said Craig Wright, Royal Bank chief economist
Wow! Remember the stories from this Summer crowing aboput how this was the "Canadian moment"? Looks like that's exactly how long it lasted: a moment.
Other times, politicians are indeed obliged to lie to us.
During World War II, for example, John Curtin never told the Australian people how bad things were in February 1942.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, for his part, kept on lying to the American people until the Japanese strike on Pearl Harbour finally got America into the war with Hitler.
In my own time, I can still remember Dwight Eisenhower telling us that there were no U2 flights over the Soviet Union until of course the Russians shot down Gary Powers and put him on trial.
I can also remember John F. Kennedy telling the world that he did not cut a secret deal (US missiles out of Turkey) with Moscow to get Soviet missiles out of Cuba.
These were state secrets at the time and therefore acceptable.
What is not acceptable is the murderous blather of politicians who put their own people in harm's way, for political ambitions.
If you failed to predict the gist of the essay based on the title please slap your own wrist.
"The right of workers to make their own free choice to join a union has been effectively canceled in a huge majority of unionization elections," [AFL-CIO President John] Sweeney said....
As part of this campaign, the labor movement will contend that the right to form unions without intimidation — a right guaranteed by international convention — is routinely violated in the United States and that the government does little to protect that right.
"What we're seeing is a fundamental violation of people's human rights every single day," said Stewart Acuff, the federation's organizing director and the foremost advocate of this campaign. "Workers don't have the right to form a union."...
Ninety-two members of the House, almost all of them Democrats, have written Cintas, a Cincinnati corporation that is the nation's largest industrial laundry and uniform company, urging it to make it easier for its workers to form a union. Cintas is battling efforts to unionize 17,000 of its workers and labor's demands to let its workers organize by signing cards, rather than by a lengthy election process.
Officials at Cintas and many other companies say that they have a First Amendment right to oppose unionization and that it is fairer to gauge pro-union sentiment through an election rather than by signing cards.
To show his backing for the A.F.L.-C.I.O. campaign, Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, said he would introduce a bill this week that would require companies to recognize unions once a majority of their workers signed pro-union cards in a process known as card check.
"It's become next to impossible to organize," Mr. Schumer said. "I asked union organizers what do you need to succeed, and they say card check."
Here, at the very end of the article, we get to the real issue. In elections by secret ballot, unions routinely lose; so they want a different method, in which union organizers can approach workers individually and, using their skills in the art of persuasion, get them to sign a card. Apparently, many workers who in the privacy of a voting booth would vote against unionization will, in the presence of union activists, sign a card. Thus, the card-check method works greatly to the unions' advantage.
To justify this new legal standard by which the government will coerce dissenting workers into a union, the unions claim that election by secret ballot represents "intimidation" against unions -- whereas signing a card while surrounded by union activists is a truly free act.
If this argument is really sound, what did the Left have against Pinochet and Franco, anyway?
President Bush, along with first lady, Laura Bush, and members of the Waco Midway Little League Softball World Series championship team, react as Bush accidentally drops his dog, Barney, Saturday, Aug. 30, 2003, at TSTC Airfield in Waco, Texas. Bush quickly scooped up the dog who was not injured. (AP Photo/Duane A. Laverty)
Posted
9:49 AM
by Orrin Judd CLAPTRAP?: The martyrdom of unsaintly Pauline: It is still not politic to condemn the former leader of Australia's racist One Nation party - even though she has been jailed for fraud (David Fickling, September 1, 2003, The Guardian)
Poor old Pauline Hanson. The former leader of Australia's defunct, racist One Nation party has swapped her glitzy power-suits for prison overalls. She has been picking at her institutional dinners. Friends and family are only allowed to greet her from the far side of a glass wall. She had to be medicated after a strip search. My heart bleeds. By the outpouring of public sympathy that has followed her imprisonment for electoral fraud, you might have thought that Hanson was mother Theresa. Her supporters have nominated her as Australian of the year. Every frontline politician seems to think her three-year sentence is too harsh. Fewer than one in seven Australians think she should have gone to jail. Today she was refused bail and will remain in jail until her appeal begins in November. [...]
The success of One Nation, and the rage at its destruction by mainstream politicians, is the story of an electorate losing patience with the big parties that were running the country in a cosy duopoly.
Many of those who voted for Hanson did so not because she opposed Asian immigration or welfare for Aborigines, but because she was the only alternative item on the electoral menu. Terry Sharples, the former candidate whose lawsuit against One Nation led ultimately to Hanson's imprisonment, has no truck with her extremist views and had previously applied to be a candidate for the leftish Democrats party.
It is a shame that when Australia first took notice of someone saying the unsayable, what was being said was so much racist claptrap. There are plenty of other issues on which the mainstream parties still act as a cartel, agreeing not to disagree and in the process stifling debate.
There is a warning to them in One Nation's success: you cannot kill debate, only suppress it. Hold it down for long enough, and when it eventually emerges it may have taken on a more alarming form than you could ever have suspected.
Have you ever noticed how in the Left's mind the platform of Far Right parties has little to do with their appeal? You saw the same thing when Le Pen finished second in France's last presidential election. Unfortunately they're quite wrong, racism, xenophobia, and anti-immigration are all terrific political issues and the difficult task for the traditional Right is to separate out the policies that make sense in defending one's own culture from the visceral appeals to treat some group as hated "others".
That said, it's ridiculous to send someone to prison for misregistering a political party in a democracy. Just fine them out of existence.
Posted
9:36 AM
by Orrin Judd LAWRENCE WAS RIGHT: The Ayatollah: Iraq's archduke?: The killing of an Iraqi Shia leader could be the event that ignites the country's tensions and causes a regional conflagration (Brian Whitaker, September 1, 2003, The Guardian)
Iraq as a country was stitched together after the first world war, from three incompatible provinces of the old Ottoman Empire: the Arab and Persian Shia of the south and south-east, the Sunni Arabs in the middle and south-west, and the Kurds (who are also Sunnis) in the north.
Although the Sunni Arabs were the smallest of the three groups, Britain decided they should be dominant and installed a king from Saudi Arabia to rule the new country. This arrangement was more for the benefit of Britain's relations with Gulf rulers than for the Iraqis themselves; the difficulty of holding Iraq together was one reason why it ended up with such a brutal dictator as Saddam Hussein.
The underlying religious and ethnic tensions were kept at bay through decades of minority rule. Saddam Hussein suppressed them with utter ruthlessness but also, as the Americans are now learning, with considerable skill.
Fear of opening up a can of worms in Iraq was one of the main reasons why George Bush Sr held back from invading in 1991 after the liberation of Kuwait. Now, though, his son has lifted the lid off.
In the days of Saddam, Ayatollah Hakim's death might simply have gone down as one more in a long line of Shia martyrs, but circumstances have changed and he is unlikely to be forgotten so easily. After many years of oppression, the Shia of Iraq now have an opportunity to assert themselves - and his death provides the rationale.
A weekly bulletin issued by security consultants Kroll Associates last Thursday - the day before the assassination - carried the prescient heading: "Spectre of ethnic and inter-religious violence looming".
Besides highlighting a failed attempt to kill Ayatollah Hakim's uncle in Najaf, the report looked at the worsening situation in northern Iraq, where clashes erupted between Kurds and Turkoman tribesmen, leaving at least 12 people dead.
There was a danger, it said, that this could expand to encompass the Arab minority who were transplanted to the region by Saddam to dilute the Kurdish population.
"Tensions have been brewing between all three communities over control of the north, especially Kirkuk," it continued. "The Kurds' rush to redressing years of repression at the hands of the old regime has ignited major tensions."
It might not be quite so bad if these internal conflicts were a self-contained Iraqi matter, but they are not: they affect almost all of Iraq's neighbours.
The stateless Kurds, for example, are spread across four countries. Apart from the five million in Iraq, about 15 million live in Turkey, six million in Iran and up to 1.5 million in Syria - and Kurdish assertiveness in Iraq worries all of these nations.
Turkey is also concerned to protect the two million Turkomans of Iraq from the Kurds. The Turkomans, as their name suggests, speak Turkish and have an affinity with Ankara. If they are seriously threatened Turkey could feel obliged to intervene.
To the south, meanwhile, the predominantly Sunni countries - Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the Gulf states - worry about Shia assertiveness in Iraq. There are already some signs of Saudi attempts to bolster Iraq's Sunnis against the Shia.
Iran, on the other hand, has a natural affinity with Iraq's Shia and supports them to some extent. Its support, however, is limited because it does not want the Shia to become dominant in Iraq, for fear it would undermine Iran's own status as the centre of the Shia world.
The danger here is not just that Iraq will plunge into civil war but that the warring elements will find sponsorship from neighbouring countries, with all the attendant risks of a region-wide conflict.
When your policy in the region has been disastrously mistaken for eighty years, don't you have to expect that when the bill comes due things are going to be a bit ugly? And the bill always comes...
I do not believe there is a NASA culture other than a willingness by its engineers to work their butts off to keep us in space. It might be said, however, that there is a Shuttle cult. It is practiced like a religion by space policy makers who simply cannot imagine an American space agency without the Shuttle. Well, I can and it is a space agency which can actually fly people and cargoes into orbit without everybody involved being terrified of imminent death and destruction every time the Shuttle lifts off the pad. [...]
So what should be done? Let's get practical. We can't just shut the thing down instantly. History's got us by the throat. We need the Shuttle to finish the space station and to also keep the Russians and Chinese from dominating space. I for one am not willing to see that occur while we dither. Human spaceflight is important to this country. But I think the Shuttle is as safe as you're going to get it pretty much with what is in place today. Let's fire the managers responsible for Columbia (they are not difficult to identify) so as to warn the next crop they'd best be competent, put the toughest engineers we can find to be in charge of the program, fly the thing eight to ten more times over the next four years to finish the space station and meet our international obligations. Then let's close the program down in a controlled fashion and replace it with proven expendable launchers and a shiny new spaceplane. And, this time, put it on top.
It is beyond comprehension that the focus of our space research still does not center on a vehicle that can fly into space and return on its own power. It's merely ironic to hear even Rocket Boy saying we need to get past the mistaken emphasis on rockets that is the sour legacy of JFK's dilettantism.
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