So not only did Bush and Cheney refuse to testify under oath before the 9/11 commission, not only did they prohibit video and/or audio recordings of the testimony, not only will there be no official transcript, not only were press not invited, the actual 9/11 commissioners themselves were required to give up their notebooks before leaving the White House. Administration officials will then purge the notebooks of classifed information before returning them.

At least that's what WH correspondent Nora O'Donnell reported on Imus this morning.

We've explored before on this site the White House's rather broad (and neglibible) parameters for what information deserves to be classified.

Matt Welch has more on how the Bush administration's penchant for secrecy hampers national security.

Amount of money the Clinton DOJ requested for anti-drug operations in FY 2001: $3.1 billion.

Amount requested for counter-terrorism: $998 million.

Amount of money the Bush DOJ requested for anti-drug operations in FY 2002 (before 9/11): $2.9 billion.

Amount requested for counter-terrorism: $1.04 billion.

Some of you wonder how I can say that our government failed us on 9/11. These numbers are a big reason why. Perhaps no amount of spending or competenece could have foreseen what was coming. But when our government spends more of our own money perscuting us for victimless crimes than it does protecting us from people who want to kill us, I think we ought to ask some questions when people do succeed at actually killing us.

And yes, I think Clinton has just as much to answer for as Bush.

Source: Chris Strohm in The New Republic.

Both by NRO's Andrew Stuttaford.

1) Soso Whaley's eating nothing but McDonald's for a month, to counter Morgan Spurlock's new movie about a similar endeavor. Read her diary here.

2) The Irish smoking ban, and it's fascist little man of an instigator, Michael Martin.

Any of you in the Tampa-St. Pete area need to take a trip to Buddy's Smoking Pig restaurant. Spend some money while you're there.

When the state snuffed all cigarettes in restaurants, the popular barbeque joint turned outlaw.

"We put a sign up that says this is a smoking establishment," explained owner and namesake Buddy Clark. "I think everybody should have a right to do what ever they want to do."

"The people have a choice. They can either eat here in the non-smoking, or eat up here in the smoking. Or if they don't like it at all, they can go to another restaurant," added Clark's wife, Barbara...

...Meanwhile, Buddy's smokers and non-smokers both appreciate the restaurant's atmosphere. None of them want to see Wildwood's favorite lunch spot close up shop.

"You can't smell it at all over here so it doesn't really bother me," a diner explained from the non-smoking section.

"Who in the hell is the state to come in and tell you and me what we can do in our own place?" observed smoker Sonny Schmidt.

134 dead in April, more than a year after the war allegedly ended. 46% vs. 33% of the people we liberated believe we did more harm to Iraq than good. 58% of Iraqis say U.S. forces have conducted themselves "badly or very badly." 57% want us to leave. And we're now inviting Ba'athists -- the very regime we just overthrew, to take part in the new government.

Then there's this (click here, if you can stomach looking at the actual photographs).

No, I don't think what happened in those pictures is at all indiciative of the U.S. military as a whole. And I'm certain that an overwhelming majority of the men and women serving in Iraq find those pictures deplorable.

But it doesn't matter what I think. When it comes to fighting terrorism, it matters what the world's one billion Arabs think. And you can bet those pictures will be splashed across every Arab newspaper and all over al-Jazeera for months to come. And they'll likely become al-Qaeda's best recruitment tool to date. Combine anomalies like this one (which were bound to happen) with the fact that Arabs wake every day to see U.S. troops wearing U.S. flags outside Arab mosques, schools, and markets -- and no, I don't think this does much good for our image in the Arab world.

Let's hope the U.S. soldiers in those pictures are put away for a very, very long time. Because those pictures will probably be directly responsible for more than a few dead Americans in the years to come.

Are Americans safer now than before we went to war?

I'd say the point is arguable, to say the least.

Poor fella'.

...you shouldn't click on if you're easily offended.

1) This one if the sacreligious irks you.

2) This one if you're a Republican.

They're both pretty funny, though.

Porn goes overseas for cheap labor.

Alexandria, Virginia school superintendent Rebecca Perry was arrested the other night for drunken driving. She blew a .12, which is 50% higher than the state's legal limit.

I have mixed feelings about her arrest. On the one hand, .12 isn't much. It's just a hair above what the legal limit ought to be, and amounts to just three drinks over a two-hour period for someone of Perry's build.

But Perry was driving erratically, which is why she was pulled over. In that case, it seems the alcohol she'd consumed was affecting her performance on the road, making her a danger to other motorists and pedestrians. I'd probably have more sympathy for her if she had been nabbed at a sobriety checkpoint.

So arrest her. Charge her. Convict her.

But should she be fired?

My first inclination is to say "no." Most anyone who drinks socially could easily find themselves at .12 without feeling much effect at all. This isn't stumbling drunk. Also, this isn't isn't a habitual problem for her -- it's her first DWI.

But that inclination flew out the window when I read Marc Fisher's column today in the Washington Post. Seems that when it comes to alcohol, Perry is a big fan of zero tolerance policies for the kids she oversees. In fact, her predecessor was invited to the White House to tout T.C. Williams High School's get-tough policy on drugs and alcohol. Perry carried on that policy. Fisher writes:

Discretion and proportion are lost concepts in the realm of public school behavior codes. Schools must set clear expectations and enforce rules, but they must also be places where it is safe for kids to be kids, where mistakes are expected, explained and examined. The goal is education, not expulsion.

Zero tolerance undermines trust and teaches entirely the wrong lessons: That intent doesn't matter, that people in authority must not be allowed to exercise judgment...

...Ideally, School Board members would look at Perry -- in a public meeting, not in the secret sessions it has held so far -- and decide whether her talents more than make up for this mistake, in which case they would keep her. Then, having thought this through, they would start rolling back the trend toward unthinking, undiscerning approaches to student discipline.

But in a system that does not trust itself to make judgments about individuals, in schools that cede their moral authority to lawyers and codes and simplistic bromides such as zero tolerance, the verdict on Perry must be the same as it would be for the children whose suspensions she manages when she's sober:

Show her the door.

And maybe holding one zero tolerance zealot's feet to the fire will make like-minded folks think about the day when they themselves are cut down by the same asinine rules they apply to others.

But I doubt it.

Seems the White House can't even pick a director for the National Archives without donning its now-tired cloak of secrecy and stealth. The White House replaced acting director John Carlin earlier this month before he'd even resigned, and did so without the public debate and consultation with scholars and historians traditionally involved in the process.

The secrecy has fueled speculation that the White House wants an ally archivist who may delay or redact embarassing information about current Bush administration officials who served under President Bush's father. Bush 41 archives are set for public release in January.

Both the White House and the National Archives deny that Carlin's ouster has anything to do with politics, but then why the secrecy and break with tradition?

If Bush wins in November, keep an eye on this story come January.

I have a 2001 Alero. It's a great car. I love it. It's been problem-free, save for an odd glitch in the air conditioning/heating fan.

But at the moment, my dashboard has three idiot lights illuminated -- "change oil," "service engine soon," and "check tire pressure." I got my oil changed two weeks ago. Tire pressure is fine. The car runs fine, so I'm guessing there's nothing really wrong with the engine, either. The lights in fact go on and off all the time. The "change oil" light came on immediately after I got my oil changed.

What's frustrating is that if there was something wrong with my car, and one of these lights came on to let me know about it, I'd ignore the light because of all the damn false alarms I get. Which means the warning lights are now pretty much useless.

This isn't Oldsmobile's fault. It is, as you might guess, the federal government's -- specifically DOT and EPA. The government has coaxed (usually under threat of massive fines or lawsuits) the major auto manufacturers into making idiot lights extra sensitive. Just about anything can trip them off.

Why, you ask? Environmental regulations.

Low tire pressure and travelling too many miles without an oil change hamper fuel efficiency. So the government wants to make sure you're getting these things checked regularly, whether or not there's an actual problem. More nefariously, in the late 1990s, the EPA began suing auto companies to force them to program vehicle notification systems into setting off the "check engine soon" light -- for the sole purpose of tricking car owners into getting their emissions checked on a regular basis. Pre-programmed oversensitivity causes 99% of drivers to get a false warning light within the first 10,000 miles traveled in a new car.

So once-useful technology auto manufacturers originally installed to warn drivers about potential car problems has been co-opted by federal bureaucrats, and rendered pretty much useless. Thank God regulators are looking out for us.

More on this in James DeLong's book Out of Bounds, Out of Control.

I told you it was coming.

The California state assembly is now considering a law banning you from smoking in your own car if your kids are riding with you.

Make no mistake, they'll be in your home next.

In other jaw-dropping nanny news, we turn to Loo-sianah, where "House Bill 1626 would punish anyone caught wearing low-riding pants with a fine of as much as $500 or as many as six months in jail, or both."

And it's not the first time they've tried it!

And a year earlier, state Rep. Cynthia Willard, D-New Orleans, filed a bill requiring Louisiana's 66 school boards to ban baggy pants that expose underwear or backsides. That bill, which was never heard by the House Education Committee, said the fashion "encourages youth to engage in inappropriate behavior and shows a lack of respect for others in society."

Shepherd, an attorney, said his bill aims to change the fashion sense of teenagers, who have adopted the "disrespectful, obscene and unprofessional" practice of letting their pants hang off their hips at school, at the mall and even on the basketball court.

"There's a way to shoot hoops professionally," he said. "You don't have to shoot hoops with your pants below your waist."

He admitted, however, that the bill does not target minors specifically and therefore does not directly mirror other laws that restrict teenagers' curfew and the kinds of movies they may see.

Shepherd said that like Willard's failed bill, his legislation aims to correct a fashion faux paus that has implications not only on a young person's sense of style but also on his or her sense of self.

"Hopefully, if we pull up their pants," he said, "we can lift their minds while we're at it."

Speaking of oppressive city regulations and regulatory capture, New York City's annual taxi medallion auction this year brought the price of a driving a private cab in the Big Apple to well over $300,000.

That doesn't include the cost of the actual cab. Or the myriad of inspections it needs to pass before it can be used for business.

Folks struggling to get a financial foothold -- as cabbies often tend to be -- then must go nearly a third of a million dollars into debt and deal with the hassles of monthly payments and interest before New York will allow them to drive patrons in their privately owned vehicles from point A to point B.

Of course, independent cabbies tend to be immigrants with little political pull. Certainly they don't have the pull the big cab companies have. So making them pay a third of a million dollars apiece for the "right" to earn a living is pretty easy pickings.

While I'm clicking my toungue at friends, let me be the "purist" who calls Julian on his approval of state health departments inspecting restaurants. Julian's explains that when you eat at a dining establishment, you have an implied contract of sorts, and part of that contract carries the expectation that your food won't be tainted with rat droppings.

Well, maybe not. But how just how much cleanliness is expected in the contract? All regulatory agencies allow for some impurities -- one finger allowed, for example, in every so many cans of soup. If a restuarant gets you sick, you can take private action against it. If it repeatedly makes people sick, its actions approach fraud, perhaps on a criminal scale.

Frankly, I'm willing to tolerate the occasional rat or mouse citing if it means I have more restaurants to choose from. Hell, I've caught two mice in my own apartment in the last three months, and I still eat food I prepare in my kitchen.

One of the most common responses I get from smoking ban proponents is that the state has the right to ensure that diners are provided with a healthy eating environment, and safe food. They then inevitably bring up the fact that these mysterious "property rights" I speak of don't allow a restaurant to serve you tainted meat, spoiled milk, or rat meat they label as chicken, so why doesn't the state have the right to be sure you're not breathing arguably cancer-causing smoke while gnoshing on buffalo wings?

It's not a bad argument. Once we say it's okay for the state to come into a privately-owned restaurant and inspect the food, and check the cupboards for mice, we've surrendered a bit of the sanctity of property rights -- of the absolute right of a business owner to conduct business with his customers in a manner he sees fit -- and we open the door to forced compliance with fire and safety codes, building code compliance, ADA compliance, and yes, secondhand smoke restrictions.

Often, these regulations are fairly arbitrary. Almost always, they're terribly expensive to comply with, sometimes prohibitively so (see the NY Times piece from awhile back on New York City's burgeoning underground restuarant scene). They're also subject to the same abuses of power that accompany any bureaucracy, such as example-setting, arbitrary enforcement, and regulatory capture. Check this book or this report to read case studies of bureaucrats manipulating seemingly innocuous health and safety regulations to shut down businesses they have it out for.

If we didn't have city and state bulding, fire, food safety, and various other inspection agencies, it's a near-certainty that private inspection services would spring up to fill the void. Diners could then look for the seal of approval from their preferred private inspection agency in the same way we now use Zagat.

In fact, I'd submit that such a system would make restaurants cleaner and safer than the current system. If I'm running a private inspection agency, and the restaurant I give a gold star to serves up a batch of bad meat two weeks later, my reputation as a trustworthy seal of approval takes a hit. I'm going to make certain then, that any spot displaying my seal damn-well earns it. Since government inspectors tend to be the only game in town, there's little of the same competitive incentive to be sure the restaurants they approve really pass muster.

I'd imagine you'd get a range of these kinds of private inspection agencies under such a system, and each agency might have a range of grades. More adventurous or cost-conscious diners might try spots with lower health ratings, or approved by less prestigous agencies -- either out of desire to spend less money on a meal, or in an attempt to discover new restaurants not yet established enough to comply with costlier "gold-star" inspections.

Good for them. I guess.

....of abortion, I've been meaning to link to this stellar piece on pro-life (or, er, anti-abortion) libertarianism by Jeremy Lott. It's extremely well-thought and well-written.

I was watching an episode of Hardball last week (forgive me). Chris Matthews was interviewing a Catholic priest and scholar who also writes on culture. The priest had commissioned a survey of U.S. Catholics and found that on the three public policy issues the U.S. bishops have deemed most important at the moment -- abortion, the war, and capital punishment -- less than 3 percent of U.S. Catholics take the church's position on all three.

Oddly enough, I'm with the church on all three, though I don't think my position is quite as stalwart on abortion as the church's.

Considering that the Catholic church tends to favor state involvement in both fiscal and moral issues, I never thought I'd say this, but on the three issues it puts most stock in at the moment, I'm more Catholic than 97% of U.S. Catholics!

Assuming my Pacers make it to the NBA Finals, I'd really had no preference as to who we'd play. Given that we've been disparaged all year as the best team in what amounts to a minor league conference, it would have been easy to get up for any team out of the west.

Well, now I want the Spurs.

I'm normally fairly passive in my anti-abortion views. I believe it ought to be an issue decided at the state level, if not at a level even more parochial. So I've no use for a "pro-life amendment," but I'm not crazy about a federal guarantee to an abortion, either. I see a clear and distinct difference between a morning after pill (which I'd probably even allow to be legal if it were up to me), and a late-term, partial birth abortion, which really can't be distinguished from infanticide. But I also have no problem with, for example, Utah banning any and all abortion. If the issue is important to me, I can choose to live in a state with readier access (and that's really the state of the procedure today -- in practice if not in letter).

That said, the pro-choice rally this weekend on the National Mall felt ugly and untoward to me. It was pretty clear that the signs, the chants, and the cute phrases amounted not to an affirmation of a morally troubling but still (arguably) ascribable right, but rather a celebration of abortion as gender or sexual liberation; a celebration of the actual practice of abortion -- not as a sometimes-needed but lamentable medical procedure, but as a political statement. You got the feeling that if they could, many of these women were ready to immediately go and have an abortion if for no other reason than to piss off John Ashcroft.

I'm all for pissing off John Ashcroft. But I'd rather we not have a collective abortion to do it. Couldn't we all just download some porn instead?

This brings me to a post by Brooke Oberwetter.

No, I don't think Brooke wants to have an abortion to piss off John Ashcroft. But I was troubled by hints of that kind of pro-abortion thinking by one clause in this otherwise thoughtful post (that I of course largely disagree with).

Brooke levels the ad hominem claim that men have no place in the public debate over abortion because men aren't significant stakeholders in the actual abortion procedure.

One rebuttal to that is that about half the fetuses aborted are male (not to mention human), meaning men have the same stake in the abortion debate as, say, Christians in America do when speaking out against the persecution of Christians overseas. Or that any of us do, really, when speaking out against the mistreatment of anyone other than ourselves (yes, I know the word of contention here is "people." More on that in a moment).

Maybe a metaphor will bring the stakeholder question into sharper focus.

I realize that the quickest way end an abortion debate is to invoke slavery and/or the Holocaust, but here I think the slavery metaphor is apt (actually, the quickest way to end an abortion debate is...to actually have an abortion debate. But we're already there.).

If Brooke's claim that those without a personal stake in the issue have no room in the public debate is true, then couldn't we say the same thing about non-slaveholding abolitionists?

After all, they were neither slaves nor slaveowners. Just as pro-choicers say the decision to have an abortion is between the woman, her body, and her doctor, so too could slaveowners say the slavery question was between a man and his property, his slaves. Why should it be of any concern to someone who is neither?

And just as the pro-choice crowd today says a fetus doesn't retain the set of rights a full-fledged person does, slavery factions said the same things about slaves,didn't they?

Yes, looking back, we can objectively say to day that slaves were indeed human beings, and that we all, also as human beings, also had a stake in the debate. But the question wasn't so settled at the time, was it?

And isn't this what the pro-life folks say about the fetus? That it's human? I'm not sure that asserting your own belief that a fetus isn't human gives you carte blanche to then say no man has any right to speak out about abortion. You're accepting as a premise a point that's still in contention.

I'd submit that the stake non-slaveowning northerners had in the slavery debate is precisely the same stake Brooke ascribes to men in the abortion debate.

To her credit, Brooke does acknowledge in the comments section that she'd give men the right to "abort" parental responsibility early on in a pregnancy, bringing at least some notion of equity to the reproductive debate. Of course, that would likely inspire more abortions, and it's a proposition neither side would ever sign on to, for obvious reasons. But I find it's a useful test of pro-choicers (particularly of the libertarian stripe) to see if they abandon all notion of equity and reason on an issue this contentious.

Brooke didn't. Dammit.

One other thought on the weekend protests here in D.C.:

I've often made the case (and been chastised for it) that the pro-choice folks' claims to be "pro-choice, not pro abortion" is mostly bunk (it's also my opinion that pro-lifers aren't any more loyal to their preferred moniker, given the way many of them treat single mothers). Not all of them, of course. But most of them. And particularly the loudest ones. I think my point would be made if you'd pull any random protester from the past weekend aside and ask how she'd feel if a woman planning to have an abortion were somehow dissuaded from the decision by a pro-life activist on the way into the clinic.

How many do you think would feel "relieved" that a potential abortion had been thwarted? By contrast, how many do you think would be annoyed, angry, or outraged that a pro-lifer had successfully prevented a woman from exercising "choice?"

I've asked every activist pro-choicer I know this question (and yes, many people who are pro-choice aren't the hardcores on the Mall this weekend). So far, every one of them has objected to the woman being talked out of the abortion. I've also asked if they'd rather live in a country where abortion is forbidden, or where it can be forced upon women, as is sometimes the case in China. Or, which half of "choice" is more important, the right to have children, or the right to abort them?

Most all say they'd prefer the latter.

Together, both questions suggest to me that "choice" for many pro-choicers is only truly "choice" when it results in abortion. Actually carrying a pregnancy to term is something else, but it isn't "choice."

Enobarbus at FauxPolitik has more.

Which Bob Dylan song are you? Tangled Up In Blue

Click Here to Take This Quiz Brought to you by YouThink.com quizzes and personality tests.

More Photoshop fun.

My entries here, here, here, here, here, and here.

...on WIBA AM at 4:35pm today.

I'll be discussing smoking bans.

While she was in town for a clerkship a while back, I once took my law school friend Sara to a local hash. Now she's in Chicago, and she just completed the Nashville, TN marathon. Don't think she'll mind if I share this amusing detail from her race:

I wanted to tell you that around mile 16 or 17 I saw someone holding a huge sign that said "On, on!" They were handing out candy and pretzels -- I stopped and asked if they had any beer, and they gave me a dixie cup...I felt pretty cool!

If this post has thoroughly confused you, read more on hashing here. Unofficial website of the D.C. hash scene is here.

Blogs as intel aids:

As a result, some analysts say U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials might be starting to track blogs for important bits of information. This interest is a sign of how far Web media such as blogs have come in reshaping the data-collection habits of intelligence professionals and others, even with the knowledge that the accuracy of what's reported in some blogs is questionable.

Still, a panel of folks who work in the U.S. intelligence field - some of them spies or former spies - discussed this month at a conference in Washington the idea of tracking blogs.

"News and intelligence is about listening with a critical ear, and blogs are just another conversation to listen to and evaluate. They also are closer to (some situations) and may serve as early alerts," said Jock Gill, a former adviser on Internet media to President Clinton, in a later phone interview, after he spoke on the panel.

Some panel and conference participants, because of their profession, could not be identified. But another who could is Robert Steele, another blog booster. The former U.S. intelligence officer said "absolutely" that blogs are valid sources of intelligence and news, though he said authenticating the information in blogs "leaves a lot to be desired."

...The CIA and FBI haven't publicly commented about use of blogs in their work, but many D.C. observers believe both agencies monitor certain blogs.

At least one nation, China, is actively tracking blogs. It's also reportedly trying to block blogs. Several press reports earlier this year said the government shut two blogging services and banned access to all Web logs by Chinese citizens.

Many journalists write blogs and use other blogs to help find sources or verify facts and rumors. Blogs hail from just about any spot on the globe. They can provide first-hand insights into local events and thinking, even in parts of the world where there's little official information.

Manalaplan, Florida police will soon begin using a traffic camera system to snap photos not merely of red-light runners and speeders, but of all automobiles passing through the city. Digital snaps of license plates will then be automatically checked against criminal, stolen car, and terrorist databases.

Don't say you weren't warned.

Over at Hit & Run, Brian Doherty notes that some are calling Michael Moore a hypocrite for outsourcing his website to Canadians. Doherty then mulls whether the ad hominem "hypocrite" charge really does much to advance public debate. Later, in the comments section, a discussion breaks out as to whether Moore really is even a hypocrite, given that he's outsourcing to a country with "fair" labor practices and standards.

My take...

As for hypocrisy, I think it's a perfectly legitimate charge, both rhetorically and, more importantly, when attempting to generate enough political momentum to pass the public policy you'd like to see implemented. I've always thought pointing out that, for example, Hillary Clinton and Jesse Jackson sent their kids to private school while at the same time advocating public schools for people who don't make the money they do does a couple of things.

First, while you could certainly classify the charge as ad hominem (which won't get you any debate points), you might also classify the charge as an appeal to authority -- even better, a very reluctant one. Appeals to authority are perfectly legitimate in debate, and generally, the more reluctant the authority, the more weight the appeal carries (getting a tobacco executive to concede that cigarettes exacerbate asthma, for example, carries much more weight in argument than the mother of someone who died of asthma making the same claim). Pointing out that someone studied and well read on an issue like school choice as Clinton or Jackson also happens to send his/her kids to private school you might say is their way of revealing they don't have much faith in public schools.

The hypocrisy card is all the more powerful politically. Moore will have a hard time playing up the "greedy corporations don't care about Americans" angle now that we know he's outsourcing part of his own "corporation" to Canadians. It's not really an argument against his case (except as noted above), but it is an argument against him making that case.

As for whether or not Moore really is a hypocrite, I'd say he is. The bottom line on outsourcing is that people like Moore are insisting that U.S. coroporations take jobs away from Americans and giving them to foreigners.

I'm not sure what "fair" labor practices means. Is it "fair" that Canada's minimum wage costs its lowest skilled workers a chance at a job to begin with? Would it be "fair" if Bangladesh insisted that any company doing business within its borders must meet U.S.-European-like labor standards and, consequently, no foreign companies invested, and so Bangladeshis were forced back into back-breaking subsistance farming, begging and/or prostitution? What exactly is "fair?"

I'd say "fair" means governments step back and let employers and employees find one another and let each extract what the other wants without barriers or obstacles.

Given that foreign workers are better off working for western companies than not working for them (or else they wouldn't take the job), there's simply no validity to the argument that they're being exploited (in fact, western companies typically pay two, three, sometimes up to ten times the prevailing wage).

So the only real argument people like Moore have against outsourcing is that U.S. companies aren't hiring U.S. workers. Or, that there's some sort of patriotic obligation for American companies that benefit from American tax dollars (in the form of national defense, courts, laws, etc.) to employ domestic labor.

And Moore isn't doing that with his website.

So yeah, he's a hypocrite.

Journalist-cum-anti-fat activist Peter Jennings will host an anti-obesity conference with Time magazine this June. The speaker's list is a who's who of nannies, central-planners, and anti-food Puritans.

There is at least one guy from the Atkins team. Other than that, I don't recognize a single name on the three-day list of speakers that might make the case for personal responsibility and ownership of one's personal health and well being.

Given the line-up, this conference is bound to generate quite a bit of media attention. At the very least, you can be sure ABC News and Time will give it some play. To give you a hint of what might come out of it, check out this teaser quote on the website splash page:

As we look to the future and where childhood obesity will be in 20 years... it is every bit as threatening to us as is the terrorist threat we face today. It is the threat from within.

- Vice Admiral Richard Carmona
U.S. Surgeon General

Let's say you send your kids to a private school. Let's say that said private school is performing poorly, that it is in fact the most poorly performing school of its kind in the region, likely in the country. It's rife with crime, mismanagement, and outright corruption among the very people who are supposed to be looking out for and taking care of your kids.

Now let's say you read in the newspaper that the head of this school makes $74,000 per year and despite the school's poor performance, the school's board of directors decides to give her a $33,750 bonus -- nearly half her salary.

Most of us would immediately move our kids to a new school. Unfortunately, if you're a parent in Washington, D.C.'s public school system, you don't have that option.

Julian finds another good one.

1) Hey Crackhead.

2) Photo essay on Japanese vending machines.

Amazing (and -- fair warning -- extremely graphic) pictures from Iraq.

I attended today's IMF/World Bank protest in DC. Basically, I didn't have any pressing engagements and it was a really nice day to be outside.

The highlight of my afternoon had to be my discussion with a socialist who noticed my new "Enjoy Capitalism" t-shirt courtesy of the fine folks at Bureaucrash. I won't go into detail, but libertarian minded readers who have had the same opportunity will know pretty much how it went.

Anyway, I posted a webpage of my day here. Enjoy.

Cato's Chris Preble debates, and destroys, Rep. Charles Rangel on CNNfn.

Topic: the draft.

I'll have more on the draft later (I think my next Fox column may be on conscription). Frankly, the momentum the idea is generating depresses me.

But the news out of this debate is the slur Rep. Rangel casts on the Navy. Both Rangel and Preble are introduced on the program as veterans, Rangel from the army, Preble from the Navy. The anchor begins the segment by saying she's looking for a forward a draft debate "between two former soldiers."

Rangel immediately corrects her by saying, with noted condescention, "Sailors are not soldiers. And I doubt the Navy has much to do with the war in Iraq"

Later in the debate, Rangel again disparages the Navy by saying of Preble, "...it's fine for a Navy officer to say that..."

I'm guessing the family of Petty Officer 3rd Class Fernando A. Mendezaceves, 27, would disagree with Rep. Rangel's assessment of Navy valor. Mendazaceves was killed on April 6, 2004 during combat operations in the Al-Anbar province of Iraq. At least 10 other coalition deaths served in the Navies of their respective countries. I'm sure the 37,000 Navy men who died in World War II would beg to differ with Rangel, too. Or the 1600 that died in Vietnam. Or the 500 who died in Korea.

Correct me if I'm overreacting here, but isn't it awfully shady for a sitting member of the U.S. Congress to disparage the men and women of the Navy this way? Particularly in wartime? This wasn't off-the-cuff between-branch rivalry talking. It's pretty obvious to me that Rangel simply doesn't have much respect for the Navy.

It's wonderful that Rep. Rangel served his country, and that he made the Army the branch where he'd perform that service. But plenty of Navy men and women have died in service of the country. And it's disgusting that a man of Rep. Rangel's rank and position would undermine the sacrifice those men and women made on national television.

Here's Rangel's official web page. Drop him a note if you like.

www.johnkerryisadouchebagbutimvotingforhimanyway.com

Watch the stellar Rheingold Beer ads aimed at prying New York City from the overprotective mammaries of one Michael Bloomberg.

If you live in NYC, go get yourself a Rheingold tonight, to support the cause.

Thanks to Courtney for the tip.

This kind of thing pisses me off more than when SWAT thugs get the wrong address, beat down the wrong door, and shoot the wrong guy.

Jesus. What has it come to when we throw cripples and the infirmed in jail for trying to ease their fucking pain? Here's hoping John Ashcroft and like drug warriors find themselves stricken with a condition that bring immense, unrelenting pain. And here's hoping their own damned laws come back to bite them in the ass. And let's have Jeb Bush get the same illness.

Cruel? Yeah. Probably. But so is handcuffing terminally ill seniors to their beds while federal agents confiscate their medicinal marijuana. So is throwing paraplegics in prision for drug trafficking -- when all they're after is a little relief.

What country is this?

I forget sometimes.

Look in the New York Times tomorrow for this correction:

Yetserday, the Times identified a man on page A21 as a Ku Klux Klan member found guilty of murdering a black sharecropper. Actually, the man was Pete Coors, head of Coors Brewing Company, and a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate. Coors is not in the Ku Klux Klan, and did not murder a black sharecropper. The Times regrets the error.

How terrible.

Pat Tillman, the NFL star and 2002 Agity "Hero of the Year" who gave up a multimillion dollar contract with the Arizona Cardinals after 9/11 to join the military has been killed in Afghanistan.

What the anti-outsourcing crowd lacks in originality they certainly make up for in bile. Just a handful of similarly-themed hatemail sent to me today:

-- My wish comes true when your company outsources your job.

-- Maybe Fox should start doing their news broadcast from New Deli; then we see how fast you change your tune.

-- Obviously, it would be no great loss if your job were outsourced to some Indian.

-- I vote that we can improve US productivity and quality of life by outsourcing most of the extremist propaganda creation and propagation jobs to low wage offshore bloviators.

-- As a writer, you make $15 bucks an hour. If an Indian will write the same article for $2 bucks, I say in the interest of economy, why not ship all the writing jobs to India? Or how about YOU work here for $2 bucks an hour.

-- Maybe we should outsource journalists?

-- Methinks the Cato Institute would do well for itself if it outsourced policy analyst "jobs" to India.

-- I started reading your article on why outsourcing is not bad for America and decided I could get the same or better point of view on this subject by reading the comments of someone like yourself who lives in India or the Ukraine. Certainly, I can get a quality point of view from someone there who makes a lot less money than you. Guess what? You've just been outsourced.

-- Interesting piece on outsourcing. How do you feel about outsourcing non-profit "educational institutes"?

-- I suggest taking a sabbatical from the think tank and work for a couple of years in industry. Maybe take a job that will eventually be outsourced India or Mexico or ? Or maybe we should outsource the Cato Institute and they can rehire you when they decide to employ American workers!

-- Continue to think you're right. See how it feels when your articles are written in India!

You are an obsequious scumbag to the high-tech companies and I hope you rot in hell. There is absolutely nothing worse than someone willing to sell out fellow Americans for a few pieces of silver.

Joseph Lee

Copper, maybe.

A while back, I filled you in on the saga of current U.S. Ambassador to Italy, avid drug warrior, accused child abuser, and apparent penis pumper Mel Sembler.

Richard Bradbury, an alumnus of one of Sembler's Straight, Inc. drug rehab centers combed through Sembler's trash, found the Italian ambassador's noodle-stretcher, and attempted to sell it on Ebay as a way to draw attention to Sembler's drug warrior fanatacism, and the fortune he made on the backs of troubled kids (many of them not troubled until they encountered Sembler's tough love clinics).

Sembler's predictably litigious lawyers fell right into Bradburry's trap. They sued Bradburry for swiping the pump, which of course generated media coverage -- both for Sembler's personal problem and for Bradburry's broader misison.

Today, the story finally made the Washington Post.

Swamp City pulls the absolute best quote from the whole mess. It comes from anti-Straight Inc. agitator Wes Fager, and taken out of context, it may be the quote of the year. Fager told the WaPo:

"The story is not about a man's penis pump -- it's about child abuse."

Somebody get Barlett's on the phone!

My favorite reply so far to the outsourcing piece:

Your article is absolute rubbish and you know it. If you had your head any further up Mr. Bush's rectum we wouldn't be able to tell where he ends and you begin.

Sincerely,
Mr. Todd Anderson
U.A.W Local 592
Rockford, Illinois

Symblic, ain't it?

Fire him already.

Hat tip: Wonkette.

A pretty nice day in Radley Balko land.

1) I'm quoted at considerable length this morning in a front page article for the Dallas Morning News. It's about a local attorney who's taking on aggressive DUI laws. It's a very fair piece, and frames the DD debate on refreshingly honest terms.

2) My FoxNews column for this week is up. It's an attempt to debunk many of the myths about outsourcing. Judging by my mail, I either didn't do a good job, or we have a long, long way to go to win this debate. It's about 90% negative so far.

3) I also have a piece on Tech Central Station that pokes fun at modern critiques of capitalism. The gist is that anti-capitalist used to base their case on sweeping predictions of overpopulation, mass shortages, and class warfare. Those haven't panned out. Instead, we get people like Gregg Easterbrook and Barry Schwartz lamenting that we have too much spam email, we're overwhelmed by too many choices at the grocery store, and we all suffer from suburban angst. My point is that all things considered, those are pretty good problems to have.

A World Connected, a website yours truly has written a fair amount for, and that Agitator.com web host P.J. Doland helped design, is up for a Webby Award.

It's also one of the few non-commie sites that got such recognition.

Kudos.

There's an old Onion article that carried the very funny headline "Study Shows Secondhand Smoke Leads to Secondhand Coolness." Well, the National Bureau of Economic Research has just published a new paper by an MIT professor entitled "Asymmetric Social Interaction in Economics: Cigarette Smoking Among Young People in the United States, 1992-1999." Here's what the abstract says:

We analyzed cigarette smoking among people aged 15 - 24 in approximately 90,000 households in the 1992 - 1999 U.S. Current Population Surveys. We modeled social influence as an informational externality, in which each young person's smoking informs her peers about its coolness.' The resulting family smoking game,' with each sibling's smoking endogenous, may have multiple equilibria. We found that the pro-smoking influence of a fellow smoker markedly exceeded the deterrent effect of a non-smoking peer. The phenomenon of asymmetric social influence has implications for financial markets, educational performance, criminal behavior, and other areas of inquiry where peer influence is important.

Smoking is cool. And people who want to be cool are more likely to hang out with people who smoke than with people who don't.

More evidence that when it comes to classifying information, the Bush administration's definition of "national security" apparently means "anything that might hurt us politically."

The Pentagon deleted from a public transcript a statement Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld made to author Bob Woodward suggesting that the administration gave Saudi Arabia a two-month heads-up that President Bush had decided to invade Iraq.

At issue was a passage in Woodward's "Plan of Attack," an account published this week of Bush's decision making about the war, quoting Rumsfeld as telling Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador to Washington, in January 2003 that he could "take that to the bank" that the invasion would happen.

The comment came in a key moment in the run-up to the war, when Rumsfeld and other officials were briefing Bandar on a military plan to attack and invade Iraq, and pointing to a top-secret map that showed how the war plan would unfold. The book reports that the meeting with Bandar was held on Jan. 11, 2003, in Vice President Cheney's West Wing office. Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also attended.

To my knowledge, a decision had not been taken by the president to go to war at that meeting," Rumsfeld said. "There was certainly nothing I said that should have suggested that, and any suggestion to the contrary would not be accurate."

Woodward supplied his own transcript showing that Rumsfeld told him on Oct. 23, 2003: "I remember meeting with the vice president and I think Dick Myers and I met with a foreign dignitary at one point and looked him in the eye and said you can count on this. In other words, at some point we had had enough of a signal from the president that we were able to look a foreign dignitary in the eye and say you can take that to the bank this is going to happen."

The transcript made it clear that the foreign dignitary Woodward was discussing was Bandar, although Rumsfeld would not say that. "We're going to have to clean some of this up in the transcript," Rumsfeld said in the omitted passage. "We'll give you a -- I mean you just said Bandar and I didn't agree with that so we're going to have to -- I don't want to say who it is but you are going to have to go through that and find a way to clean up my language too."

All told, the Pentagon transcript omits a series of eight questions and answers, some of them just a few words each. Yesterday Rumsfeld described the deleted passages as "some banter."

Just to refresh your memory, Saudi Arabia's ties to al-Qaeda are exponentially stronger than Iraq's. Sixteen of the nineteen 9/11 highjackers came from Saudi Arabia. The House of Saud has given millions to al-Qaeda over the years, and continues to support terrorist groups all over the world, including holding telethons for the families of suicide bombers in Israel.

Yet not only do we invade Iraq instead of Saudi Arabia, we gave the Saudis access to our friggin' battle plan. And if Woodward is to be believed, we gave them said access before giving it to our own Secreatary of State.
Who wants to defend the White House on this one?

1) Modern Drunkard Magazine has list of the 40 Things Every Drunkard Should Do Before He Dies. Check 1, 2, 4, 10, 19 and 21 off my list. Should I be sad that's it not more? Probably makes my family pretty happy (although 5 is probably too many for them.) Also, is anyone else surprised and a little scared that there is a Modern Drunkard Magazine? How long before Robert Wood Johnson tries to shut it down.

2) Its getting to be old news but Clairol is considering hiring Apprentice villainess Omarosa for its commercials. I'll boycott Clairol products and apparently others will as well. If you didn't watch the show, its probably tough to understand how one woman can stir up so much hatred in a few short weeks. It wasn't just the baseless charges of racism made against a fellow contestant; it wasn't just the laziness, the 2 hour lunches in the middle of projects; it wasn't just the lying to her team for no other reason than she didn't want to get up from her nice dinner (and then later to cover her ass after she lied to stay at diner); it wasn't just the gross incompetence in performing her duties, constantly losing Jessica Simpson; it wasn't just the hypocrisy of saying that Kwame should have gotten more upset when things were going wrong, when she was the primary reason things were going wrong. No, it was all these things. She sucks and I can't believe any company would want to associate their product with her or the image she presented on the show.

3) Modest Mouse has a new album out. I have not had the chance to pick it up yet but I have been listening to the first single "Float On" for a couple of weeks now. I got it as a pre-release off the i-tunes. Its outstanding. Highly, highly recommend spending the $0.99 to check it out.

4) I've been out of action from the blog scene for a while. In part it was because of work but the main reason is that I have been concentrating on taking my first step into adulthood - home ownership. I am now about 2 weeks away from closing on my first place. The seller and I are still negotiating a little bit but its looking like its going to happen. (knock on wood). The place is a two-flat in the Lincoln Park neighborhood in Chicago. Not only am I plunging into home ownership, but I will also be a landlord. I have a tenant lined up for the downstairs unit and will be living in the upstairs. It needs some rehabbing, and I have never been much of a handyman, but I am looking forward to trying to do some of the projects myself. (and then possibly calling a contractor to do them right.) I have already told Radley that I've scheduled him for shelf installation later this summer.

The interview I did last week on outsourcing with The 700 Club should air today. Check your local listings.

I'm sure most of you Tivo Pat Robertson, anyway.

UPDATE: Here's the piece.

"Small Dent."

Here's another one. Consider it the clip-on tie of souped-up car world.

And, finally, own your own wax Stella Parton! Because who doesn't already have a Dolly?

Sen. Chuck Hagel's on board.

....to start ending all of my phone conversations with, "Seacrest out."

I'll also soon be looking for new friends.

Seacrest out.

Rep. Rob Portman of Ohio wins the "Hysterical Drug Warrior of the Week" award:

While the expressed purpose of this legislation, the "Drug Impaired Driving Enforcement Act of 2004,'' is to target and remove drug-impaired drivers from our nation's roadways, the reality is that this poorly worded proposal would do little to improve public safety. Rather, it would falsely categorize sober drivers as "intoxicated'' simply if they had consumed an illicit substance, particularly marijuana, some days or weeks earlier.

John and Jane Doe attend a party. John enjoys a glass of wine while Jane takes a puff from a marijuana cigarette. The next day, John and Jane are pulled over. John is given a breathalyzer test and tests negative for alcohol. Jane is asked to submit to a urine test and tests positive for marijuana. Jane is then arrested for "driving under the influence of drugs,'' despite the fact that any impairment she experienced from smoking marijuana would have worn off hours earlier.

That's because Portman's proposal, so-called "zero tolerance'' per se legislation, presumes individuals guilty of driving while intoxicated simply if trace levels of a controlled substances or even drug metabolites (inactive compounds indicative of past drug use) are detected in their bodily fluids -- even if the individual is neither under the influence nor impaired to drive. For anyone who enjoys an occasional toke from a marijuana cigarette, this news ought to be especially unsettling, as marijuana metabolites are often detectable in a person's urine for days or even weeks after the drug is consumed.

Not sure whether to laugh or cry.

Lots of you repeatedly ask, if I'm against Iraq, opposed the PATRIOT Act and various other loosenings of criminal and civil liberties protections, and against harassing immigrants, but I still blame the U.S. government for failing us on September 11, what exaclty would I do to prevent another attack and keep us safe?

It's a fair question. And I'm working on an answer. In the meantime, go read what Jim Henley would do. I agree with nearly all of it.

Despite the hullabaloo over Rupert Murdoch, Ted Turner and the gang, we've got reams of information at our fingertips.

A few bullet points from Richard Saul Wurman's new book Information Explosion that put today's widespread availability of knowledge into perspective:

-- A weekday edition of the New York Times contains more information than the average person was likely to come across in a lifetime in seventeenth-century England.

-- More new information has been produced in the last 30 years than in the previous 5,000. About 1,000 books are published internationally every day, and the total of all printed knowledge doubles every eight years.

-- This is not to mention the relentlessly dramatic expansion of electronic information on the Internet, which is probably doubling the production of information every four years.

-- In one year the average American will read or complete 3,000 notices and forms, read 100 newspapers and 36 magazines, watch 2,463 hours of television, listen to 730 hours of radio, buy 20 CDs, talk on the telephone almost 61 hours, read 3 books, and spend countless hours exchanging information in conversations.

Blender ranks the worst bands in the history of rock. I'm game with most of the list. They describe Air Supply as "the sound of eunuchs sobbing." That's funny.

I'd quibble with Toad the Wet Sprocket. Not only are they not awful, I kinda' like them.

The print edition of the magazine ranks the worst songs of all time, and settles on Starship's "We Built This City."

I'll work on my list for both and get back to you.

Your humble Agitator turns 29 today.

Here's some more important stuff that also happened.

From the Small Business Survival Committee:

...new data from the Congressional Budget Office shows that the top 20 percent of households (by earnings) pay more than four-fifths of all federal income taxes, but earn less than half of all income. Conversely, the bottom 40 percent of earners pay a small percentage or no income taxes, “or even receive money in the form of refundable tax credits – while higher earners pay a rapidly rising share of their income in taxes.”

A 50 year old housewife, mother of four, and twenty-year resident of Virginia is in jail, and will likely be deported. For what? "Embezzling" $70, a crime for which she has paid $3,000 in restitution and served a year of probation. Unfortnately, Mi-Choong O'Brien isn't an American citizen, and she commited her crime in an age of anti-immigrant, anti-terrorism fervor.

On Jan. 8 she told her husband, home on leave, that she was going to the store. Instead, she met her probation officer in Fairfax.

That is when the United States immigration system swallowed her life.

The probation meeting was a setup. O'Brien, petite and refined, walked into a room of armed federal agents and local police. They pushed her against the wall, handcuffed and manacled her.

She barely had time to call her stunned husband with the long-hidden truth before she was hustled into a van, still manacled and with no seat belt, for a jolting ride to the Hampton Roads Regional Jail in Portsmouth.

O'Brien is still there three months later, awaiting possible deportation to a country she no longer knows and far away from the family she has raised in America.

"I have to go back to a country with no family to support me," she said recently, quietly sobbing during an interview at the jail. "I have no job opportunities. I have no house, no money. It is like a death penalty for me."

...Since 1996, people with misdemeanor convictions and nonviolent felonies, such as Mi-Choong O'Brien, have been branded as "aggravated felons." The law does not allow immigration judges to weigh the good against the bad in deciding whether to deport people living legally in this country, sometimes since infancy.

Longtime residents can be jailed and deported for crimes they committed long ago, even decades before Congress passed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act in 1996 and changed the rules.

Misdemeanors under the laws of Virginia can be aggravated felonies under the law of immigration. A person sentenced to a year in jail is considered a felon - even if the time is suspended, even if the sentence ultimately is dismissed after its terms are met.

Detention is mandatory. No bond. The immigrant has a right to a lawyer, but the government does not have to provide one.

Many of the detainees held on relatively minor crimes would be free if they were American citizens. But they aren't citizens and don't have the same rights as Americans.

The law is bad enough, critics say, but the government's rigid enforcement since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks has made it worse. Immigration officials often won't use the discretion they have under the law.

Agitator.com villain and anti-immigrant crusader Mark Krikorian looks particularly heartless in this piece. Guess in some conservative circles, anti-immigration sentiment trumps family values.

Follow-up here.

Japan's version of Social Security is apparently semi-optional. Consequently, young people aren't paying in, realizing that there's a pretty good chance they'll never see their contribution returned to them. That led to this delicious scenario:

The Japanese Government has suffered embarrassment after it was revealed that a popular actress it hired to persuade reluctant citizens to pay their contributions to the state pension scheme was not paying hers.

The case of Makiko Esumi, who starred in the 380 million yen ($4.8 million) poster and television campaign, has highlighted the delicate state of a pension system creaking under declining income and rising payouts.

Matt Welch finds the latest bit of hypberbole from Victor Davis "Type Harder" Hanson:

But the tragedy is that if we are paradoxical, self-incriminatory, and at each other's throats, our enemies most surely are not. They know precisely what they want from us — an Islamic world of the 8th century, parasitic on the resources and technology of the 21st, by which all the better to destroy a supposedly soft and bickering West. And if the present chaos here at home continues, they are apparently on the right track.

Norway is the latest European police state country to go fjord-to-fjord smoke free, though with an interesting twist. Apparently, bar and restaurant owners are subject to fines if their patrons are caught smoking, but same owners do not have the authority to eject patrons for lighting up. And patrons themselves can't be punished for smoking in public. Weird.

So if you own a bar, your customers can light up without fear of reprisal, you can't kick them out for it, but if they're caught, you get fined.

If I'm a bar owner, and a competitor opens up the street, I'm thinking I send all my buddies over to light up, then call the local commissar to bust the place up with fines.

I'm quoted in this rather biased article about the Chicago cigarette tax in the Northwest Indiana Times.

The reporter sent me an email, which I responded to. But she never called to ask me to specifically address claims she presents elsewher in the article by Chicago city officials and the American Lung Association.

Most are pretty easily refutable. The claim, for example, that the last cigarette tax increase in Chicago resulted in an 8.9% decrease in cigarette consumption is rather dubious. How was that data collected? From cigarette sales? Surveys? Does it include cigarettes sold off the books?

The summer after my first year in law school (okay, my only year in law school) I clerked in the Chicago office of the Illinois attorney general. My supervisor was in charge of prosecuting convenience stores in the city that were caught selling cigarettes without the city sticker -- meaning black market cigarettes smuggled in from elsewhere, probably Indiana. There were hundreds of cases, many of which we never got to before the statute of limitations ran out.

When we hear "black market," we tend to think of some guy in a trench coat selling cigs under a bridge. In truth, you could be buying black market smokes at your neighborhood 7-11 without ever being the wiser.

So when you see stats showing that a sin tax decreased use or sales by some percentage, exercise some skepticism. Unless the number came from a survey (also pretty unreliable, particularly when you're asking people to report habits generally considered undesirable), it likely refers to legal sales, not the actual number of people still entertaining the habit.

The NBA playoffs start this weekend. For the first time ever, my team has the best record in the league. I tend to get a little nuts around playoff time. I once quit a job because they asked me work during game seven of the Pacers-Bulls conference championship.

My favorite moment ever is captured in the picture above. Click for a larger version. Note the hint of impending despair on Spike Lee's face.

Vanilla Ice will perform at D.C.'s Gallaudet University this weekend.

For non-locals, that's the school for the deaf.

Bob Dylan talks to the LA Times about songcraft.

I have a piece up at Tech Central that takes a cynical look at the 10-year anniversary of the Contract With America.

Ann Louise Bardach interviews Castro fetishist Oliver Stone.

If there's a just God, Stone will rot in hell when he dies. And that hell will be a lot like Castro's Cuba.

But hey, at least he'll have access to health care.

...that I repost this, which is probably the funniest thing that's ever appeared on this website.

Enjoy.

...here.

William Saletan climbs into the president's mind.

Hysterical story found by Eugene Volokh. And from it, Glen Whitman extracts a public policy lesson.

Fun items over at my offspring blog, Pieces of Flare:

An anti-tax screed from "Hoey" Robbins.

A tribute to one of the greatest (and most overlooked) Saturday Night Live skits of all time.

And some common sense on the faux Paul Hornung -- Notre Dame dustup.

....list of requests can be found here.

Watching Bush's press conference. Jesus. Horrifying. Painful.

Just a trainwreck of arrogance, hubris, malopropisms, obstinance, bumbling, and tunnel vision.

When Richard Clarke addressed the families of 9/11 victims before testifying to the commission, he apologized. "Your government failed you," he said, "I failed you." Say what you want about Clarke (and no, I'm not sold on the guy), it was a touching and surprising display of contrition from a man who once held an enormous amount of power.

A reporter tonight asked Bush if he planned to apologize to the families of 9/11 for failing them, as Clarke did. Nope. "The person responsible for 9/11 is Osama bin Laden," he said. The highest priority of the U.S. government is to protect its citizens from harm. The U.S. government failed. The head of the government can't admit he let the people down? He can't apologize for failing in his single greatest responsibility? That's not admitting culpability. It's humility. Harry Truman, he ain't.

Another reporter asked President Bush if there's anything he would have done differently before 9/11. He said "hindsight is 20/20." He wouldn't admit a single mistake. Actually, that's not true. He said he regretted not creating the Department of Homeland Security before 9/11. That's it.

Another reporter asked him what his biggest mistake has been since 9/11, and what he's learned from it. He couldn't name one.

Another asked him why he and Vice President Cheney insisted on testifying before the 9/11 commission together. He said, "because they asked us to testify, and we look forward to supplying them with answers." The reporter followed up. "But why together, when the commission asked you to testify separately?" President Bush said, "because we're looking forward to testifying."

My favorite part of the press conference?

"I don't make decisions based on polls."

Actually, maybe he's right. He doesn't make decisions based on polls. Karl Rove does.

Had a TV interview today on outsourcing with, believe it or not, The 700 Club. Actually, CBN.

Should air sometime next week.

In the comments section, the esteemed Jim Henley writes:

Piscataway braves raid a Virginia town. In response, Goodman Johnson starts a broadsheet, regularly published, in which he details the ill-doings of the Natives. If he hears of a Native who beats his wife in Pennsylvania, he writes about it. If another kills his daughter, he writes about it. If he learns of Natives in New York who attack other Natives in New York, he writes about it, explaining it as proof of their warlike nature. If word comes to him that some Native somewhere has complained that the English have themselves caused some of the trouble between White Man and Red, he writes about it. When Natives say nothing on the subject, he writes, darkly, of their tacit approval of Piscataway violence. He writes approvingly of those who call for war with just about any group of Natives you can name, and disdainfully of those who demur. Not just Piscataway, but Pomonkey (with whom there has been no trouble), the Five Civilized Tribes in Georgia, the Seminole far off in the Land of Flowers, the Aztec in Spanish America. He doesn't say, "They should all be killed!" Never. Nor does he ever complain about any incident in which they are, by European settlers.

And he writes of essentially nothing else, for two years and more. He goes out of his way to find material.

This is before the Internet. There are no "comments sections." Is this man's behavior evidence of bigotry toward American Indians?

Swamp City shows you how to get your very own Subservient Chicken mask.

The 2004 Thomas Jefferson Muzzles have been announced, citing acts of both pubic and private censorship that disregard Thomas Jefferson's assertion that free speech "cannot be limited without being lost."

I'm on board with the premise, but I don't know if I'd necessarily equate the censorship activities of private companies (think CBS refusing to run the MoveOn.org ad) with the censorship activities of private citizens against private citizens (harassing protesters), school boards against students, or regulatory agencies against, well, all of us. I'm willing to be much more understanding of the former. I don't think advertisers should have to support content they disagree with, and I don't think broadcasters should accept ads with messages they don't like.

That said, it's a pretty interesting list and certainly worth a read. I'd like to add Congressman Ernest Istook (R-OK), and re-nominate Ashcroft for his war on porn.

Any more suggestions?

So I've been teaching aesthetics (philosophy of art) at Howard University here in DC. Last week we discussed Hume's "Of the Standard of Taste". Hume defends the claim that aesthetic judgments need not be merely subjective, but may reflect a sort of fittingness between the objective qualities of artworks and our psychological constitution. Hume emphasizes that while anyone has the capacity to become a good judge of aesthetic quality, actualy being a good judge requires the education of taste and the development of discernment.

Well, I decided to bring in a little music so that my students could exercise their judgment on pairs of songs. You will be horrified to learn that The Monkees' "Last Train to Clarksville" was judged better then The Beatles' "Back in the USSR," and that Blink 182's "All the Small Things" won in a landslide against The Misfit's "American Psycho". NAS did top Jay-Z, however, just as Michael Jackson ("Off the Wall" era) topped J. Tim, so there is hope.

Although I was nonplussed, it was, as they say, "a teachable moment." Hume emphasizes the importance of knowledge of the historical and cultural context of works of art, which I was able to bring to bear on the lamentable case of preferring Blink 182 over anything resembling authentic punk. They did not seem to understand, for instance, that the bright, clean, highly produced sound of Blink is by no means an advantage. Nor did they grasp the playful cold war satire of "Back in the USSR." And that's fine. That's what adjunct instructors are for.

A well-researched report from Jeremy Lavine, future president of the Sierra Club.

Damned funny.

From the NY Daily News:

Mayor Bloomberg got downright frosty yesterday with Rheingold.

With the brewer set to air ads today dousing the mayor's smoking ban, Bloomberg blasted Rheingold as a bad corporate citizen that long ago abandoned its Brooklyn roots.

The mayor's comments came as Rheingold is due to start airing 30-second ads today on cable TV that poke fun at Bloomberg's smoking ban, cabaret laws and silly summonses. The spots will run despite an angry phone call from Deputy Mayor Daniel Doctoroff to Rheingold execs.

In one ad, dancers shake their booties until a banner appears on screen warning: "No Dancing. Fine: $300."

The most controversial spot, "Ashtray," shows several people striding down the street with ashtrays in their pockets.

They pop into a bar, slam down the trays and are served a Rheingold before the screen fades to the message: "No Smoking in Bars. Fines issued: $200 and up."

"It's all about freedom of choice, which is one of the things that makes this city so great," Rheingold President and CEO Tom Bendheim said of the ad campaign.

Thanks to Andrew Chamberlain for the tip.

Given all the wrongheaded positions the left advocates when it comes to economic development, it's worth noting that we've come a long, long way.

It's almost impossible, for example, to find a respected economist these days who will argue that planned economies are preferable to trade and market economies when it comes to nudging the developing world toward prosperity. Debate seems to be more over just how free the markets, and how free the trade. But the idea that really smart people coupled with massive foreign aid could carve a sustainable economy out of dirt is pretty much dead. Fifty years ago, you'd have been hard pressed to find an economist who didn't buy into wholesale central planning.

There might be signs of progress in other areas, too.

To wit: the remarkable sight of the New York Times Magazine publishing an article entitled (!) "What the World Needs Now is DDT."

Here's a handy tool to measure the potential devastation of a potential space object colliding with earth.

Fun way to start the day.

Seems Little Green Footballs is the talk of the blogosphere again. A site sprung up that quizzed users to distinguish Nazi sloganeering from comments left on the LGF website. The joke of course is that there isn't much difference at all, save for the target of the invective.

Johnson and his defenders claim that he can't be held responsible for comments left on his site. Let's assume for a moment that Johnson's posts themselves are completely devoid of spite and hate for Muslims. Arguable, to say the least. But let's assume that's the case.

To a certain extent, it's true that you can't hold Johnson responsible for everything that appears in his comments section -- particularly when his posts generate comments sometimes several hundred posts deep. Were he to adopt a relatively hands-off approach to his comments boards, he'd probably have a case (though you have to assume that when you set out red meat, you're going to attract carnivores).

But hold on. Johnson does edit his comments section. Rigorously. He regularly bans detractors from commenting. He has on occasion banned entire ranges of IP addresses. When other websites criticize him, he blocks them from linking to him, often redirecting links from offending websites to Jewish defense organizations with some bravo technical wizardry.

Once you go to those kinds of lengths to block out content you find objectionable, I'm sorry, but you assume an enormous amount of responsibility for the content you do allow to stand. That's certainly true when it comes to legal liability. I'd say it holds for moral liability, too. Johnson can't ban an entire spectrum of ideas from appearing on his website -- some vile and despicable sure, some merely disagreeable, and some perfectly legitimate debate -- but then claim to wash his hands of the virulent anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, anti-Persian filth that he still allows to infect his discussion threads.

Caught this little bugger while I was at work today. I saw him darting across my floor yesterday afternoon, so I put a trap down by the dogfood dish. I caught his cousin about six weeks ago. Woke up to my alarm, stumbled to the kitchen, half asleep, and started pouring dogfood into the pup's dish. That's when the mouser poured out of the dogfood bag with the food, zoomed out over the dish, scampered across my foot, and escaped into my living room. Sumbitch scared the daylights out of me.

Here's my problem: Gluetraps work well. But what do you do once you've caught a mouse? A friend of mine says he smashes their little heads in with a dumbbell. I don't know. Not sure I want to get mouse goo all over whatever I might smash him with -- not to mention the splatter potential. So I drowned this little guy in the sink.

I had a dream a few weeks back that I opened my cupboard one morning to see a mouse stuck in a gluetrap. As soon as I looked at him, he looked right back at me, proceeded to chew his own leg off, then jumped up on my face, and started gnawing on my eyeball.

That was a scary dream.

Here's a snap of a critter much more pleasant to look at. Taken the past weekend as the pup stretched out in a spot of sunbeam. She's struggling to keep her eyes open.

Eugene Volokh authors the latest edition of Cato's Techknowledge newsletter, and has some foreboding analysis of John Ashcroft's new war against pornography.

This is a load of tripe.

Gimme' a break. As Gene points out, U.S. presidents have been waging needless, unjustified, unauthorized wars for about as long as we've had presidents. If Clinton could lob cruise missiles to deflect attention from his sexual trysts, why does anyone think Bush would have been impeached for taking out the Taliban? Hell, I doubt he'd have faced significant criticism.

Easterbrook's smarter than this. It would have been pretty damned easy for George W. Bush to forge into Afghanistan, particularly given the Taliban's brutality, and that we could pin the '93 Trade Center attack and the U.S.S. Cole on al-Qaeda. Impeachment? Removal? Come on. Yeah, a few Democrats would have raised a ruckus. But most of America would have rallied around the flag, as we most always do.

If you're wondering, yes, I'd likely have supported a raid on Afghanistan. I'd certainly have supported an effort to wipe out terrorist camps. And I'd probably have been on board with wholesale regime change, provided things would have unfolded pre-9/11 the way they did post 9/11. That is, we give the Taliban ample opportunity to turn over al-Qaeda operatives, and they refuse.

A more interesting alternative history scenario -- and one much more likely to result in impeachment proceedings -- goes like this:

On 9/11, fighters at Andrews Air Force Base are able to scramble about 10-15 minutes sooner than they actually did. They're able to intercept both New York-bound planes and both D.C.-bound planes well before they reach where the terrorists intend to take them. The White House sees that two planes are en route to D.C., two to New York. The White House knows they've been hijacked. The NSA team, the president, the appropriate cabinet officials, and the vice president put two and two together and order all four planes shot out of the sky.

Then what happens? How many of us would have believed pre-9/11 that 9/11 could have happened? How many of us could stomach the thought of the U.S. military shooting four civilian planes out of the sky? What would the families of those on board have done? Would we have trusted the judgment of the president that those planes were headed for NYC skyscrapers, the Capitol, or the White House?

I'd like to think I'd have been open-minded enough to think something like 9/11 could have happened. But truth be told, I'd have been furious. I'd have been extremely skeptical. And I doubt I could have been convinced that a plot as surreal as what actually happened on September 11 was even plausible.

The fair Courtney did some checking with college chums, and finds that this story about Dr. Laura's son and the hookah store is true after all.

About 10 years ago Harvard professor Henry Wechsler published a much-hyped study of alcohol consumption on college campuses. Wechsler and his colleagues reported that some 50% of college men and 39% of college women were "binge drinkers." The study generated all sorts of alarm, and triggered anti-alcohol initiatives all over the country. Wechsler publishes an update to the study pretty much every year, generating pretty much the same kind of alarmist headlines. He's made a career out of giving the neoprohibitionists something to kvetch about.

The problem is that Wechsler has always used the rather ridiculous definition of "binge drinking" adopted by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. NIAAA defines a "binge" as the consumption of five drinks on one "occasion" by men, four by women. No time limit. No exception for body weight, diet, medication, etc.

That means five beers over the course of say, a five-hour afternoon of watching football constitutes a "binge." Two cocktails at a two-hour cocktail reception followed by two drinks later in the evening qualifies as a "binge" for women.

One study in Montana found that many students who'd gone on what the NIAAA calls a binge didn't even break .06 on the BAC scale -- the threshhold at which NIAAA says the deleterious effects of alcohol begin to present themselves.

Now, the NIAAA has backtracked a bit. It now defines a binge as five drinks in two hours or less for men, four in two hours for women. Seems more plausible, and seems like a definition that would at least put most people over .08.

I wonder how many college students now qualify as binge drinkers?

More to the point, I wonder how many strident anti-alcohol laws enacted due to inflated statistics effected by the old definition will now be revoked because of the new one?

Nathan Newman has devised a nifty budget simulator. Cut or boost funding of various federal programs, add in tax cuts, then crunch the numbers to see how you did.

Me, I cut so many programs that I doubled the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, and still came out with a $500 billion surplus.

But that probably doesn't surprise you.

The GOP-led Congress coughs it up again. This time, it passed a honking hunk of corporate welfare that allows corporations to continue borrowing from defined benefit pension plans promised to their workers.

The problem is, these plans are guaranteed by U.S. taxpayers. So if the corporations go bankrupt, or -- more likely -- merely come crying to Congress 10 years from now when its time to pay back their retirees, you and I get to pick up the tab.

A party controlling the White House and Congress that was truly limited government-minded would have gone about phasing out the entire notion of forcing U.S. taxpayers to insure private pension plans. Instead, the Republicans bent over for the special interest groups (most notably the airlines) that control them and handed over yet another blank check.

Yes, I know. The Democrats would have fattened the bill even more. That's not the point. The Democrats aren't in power. And they've never claimed to advocate limited government.

So cash-strapped Washington D.C., which can't fix its roads, adequately police its streets, or keep from poisoning its own citizens with lead-laden water, apparently can find $340 million to build an entirely taxpayer-funded baseball stadium in hopes of luring the Montreal Expos downtown.

Here's what Alaska's only but very powerful congressman put into the federal highway bill:

Even by the standards of Alaska, the land where schemes and dreams come for new life, two bridges approved under the national highway bill passed by the House last week are monuments to the imagination.

One, here in Ketchikan, would be among the biggest in the United States: a mile long, with a top clearance of 200 feet from the water — 80 feet higher than the Brooklyn Bridge and just 20 feet short of the Golden Gate Bridge. It would connect this economically depressed, rain-soaked town of 7,845 people to an island that has about 50 residents and the area's airport, which offers six flights a day (a few more in summer). It could cost about $200 million.

The other bridge would span an inlet for nearly two miles to tie Anchorage to a port that has a single regular tenant and almost no homes or businesses. It would cost up to $2 billion...

...People here in Ketchikan, in far southeastern Alaska off the coast of British Columbia, are grateful for Mr. Young's efforts, and they can certainly use the 600 or so jobs that a vast government works project would bring. A veneer mill, supported by $17 million in federal aid, lies empty and rusting, in search of an owner. The town's biggest job provider, a pulp mill, shut down in 1997.

But as a transportation solution, the Ketchikan bridge is seen as something of a joke. It would replace a five-minute ferry crossing.

"Everyone knows it's just a boondoggle that we're getting because we have a powerful congressman," said Mike Sallee, 57, whose mother homesteaded here and who now runs a small timber operation. "That ferry of ours has been pretty darn reliable."

...In all, the current House bill would give Alaska $540 million in earmarks, including down payments of $120 million for the Ketchikan bridge and $200 million for the one at Anchorage. Those two costs alone are more than the total for earmarked projects in all of 41 other states, according to an analysis by Taxpayers for Common Sense...

...The bridge in Anchorage would cross Knik Arm, which is clogged by ice blocks the size of cars for much of the year, and connect the city to an undeveloped area around Port MacKenzie. In their proposal, state officials said it was needed for domestic security and to "coordinate operations" between the Port of Anchorage and the MacKenzie port, which has only one permanent tenant...

...It calls for a span that will be longer than the George Washington Bridge, over the Hudson River, and will connect to Gravina Island through a middle island. Builders will be cutting into the flank of a mountain to anchor it.

Yet the bridge may make for a longer trip to the airport, people here say. Anyone driving from Ketchikan to catch a plane will have to head south of town, move past a main drag frequently clogged with tourists, ascend a mountain, cross the mile-long bridge westbound, then circle north around the back of Gravina Island to reach the airport. In addition, the airport will have to build a parking structure, at an estimated cost of $11 million.

"The funny thing, when that big bridge is done, it will take more time to get to the airport than it does now on our little ferry," said Dale Collins, a mariner who heads the ship pilots association here. "But it sure will be big. It's unbelievable, the size of that bridge."

But if this is pork, the Republican behind the House bill says bring it on, with extra fat. Representative Don Young, Alaska's lone member of the House, where he is chairman of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, is already known as Mr. Concrete but would like to wear another title as well.

"I'd like to be a little oinker, myself," Mr. Young told a Republican lunch crowd here, taking mock offense at the suggestion that Ted Stevens, the Alaska Republican who is chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, directs more pork to their state than he does. "If he's the chief porker, I'm upset."

...Mr. Young, mindful that the highway bill comes up for renewal only once every six years or so, and that the House Republican Conference imposes three-term limits on committee chairmanships, says the opportunity to pour so many federal dollars into his home state comes once in a lifetime, and should be seized.

"If you don't do it now, when are you going to do it?" he said at the luncheon. "This is the time to take advantage of the position I'm in, along with Senator Stevens."

He said he would support an increase in the federal tax on gasoline — a "user fee," he called it — to pay for even more projects than were included in the newly passed bill...

..."If I had not done fairly well for our state," he said, "I'd be ashamed of myself."

..."It's not a good way to legislate, although I got a lot of stuff in it," Mr. Young told The Anchorage Daily News in December. "I mean I stuffed it like a turkey."

Good turnout. Interesting crowd.

It was fun, though I apparently missed out on the good conversations. There were multiple Matthew Yglesias citings. P.J. Doland convinced me to read a comic book called The Watchmen. This will be the first comic book I've read in about 20 years.

Also, I had far too many bourbons, and have been slowly nursing myself back to functionality all day.

Dr. Laura Schlessinger's Son Leaves Hillsdale College to Start Hookah Bar.

I really don't know what to say.

He does almost anything you ask of him.

From today's Washington Post

In his second major policy address of the general election campaign, the Massachusetts Democrat harked back to the fiscal and political policies of President Bill Clinton, sacrificing social spending to the goal of reducing the budget deficit by half in five years and eventually eliminating it by raising taxes on the rich and restraining government spending.

Kerry pulled back on promises made during the Democratic primary crunch to immediately make preschool universal and cover the cost of college for students who provide national services, such as volunteering. Both programs would cover fewer people than originally billed. Sarah Bianchi, the campaign's policy director, said Kerry is also cutting in half a proposal to send $50 billion to cash-strapped states. The Democratic candidate has been under relentless attack by the Bush campaign as a big spender.

Its about a year old, but still rings true.

The Onion's been pulling quotes from my comments section.

Here's the top entry when you type "Santorum" into Google.

...what I think of this.

It's very cool to look at it. It's sort of cheap. It's sad. It makes a point.

Check it out for yourself.

If you thought this cruise looked bad, check out this late summer treat.

That's right, it's the Salon.com Seminar Cruise. Your cruise director will be David Talbot, Salon's founder and CEO. Soak in the rays of sunshine and words of wisdom from such speakers as Joe "16 words" Wilson, Sid Blumenthal, and former Texas Governor Ann Richards. Among the trip's listed highlights? "Traveling with like-minded Salon.com readers."

For some reason the only joke popping into my head involves Ann Richards, a cabana boy, and a lot of Pina Coladas. Disturbing.

I'm a little late to this party.

But in case you missed it, here's the very funny video from Orlando where President Bush motivates a young lad to, well, exhaustion.

Proving once again that it has no sense of humor, nor a sense of integrity, the White House told CNN the morning after it aired on Letterman that the tape was a hoax, and the kid was edited in by Letterman's tech team. When presented with evidence that the kid was there, the White House then admitted he was there, but that he wasn't actually standing behind the president, as depicted in the video.

Guess what? The White House lied again. The kid was there. And he did stand behind the president.

Yes, I know. This is all very trivial.

Which begs the question -- then why lie about it?

UPDATE: Okay, I suppose the perils of being late to a story are that you miss the follow-up, too. Apparently, CNN has admitted it made a mistake, and wasn't directed by the White House to say the tape was a hoax.

That I guess is sufficient for me to admit that I'm wrong. Wrong, but still a little suspicious. Why would CNN say that the White House called to say the kid was edited in when that didn't happen? An, then, why would CNN change that story with yet another story, also wrong, saying the kid was at the speech, but not in front, and say the White House told them that one, too?

Seems awfully odd to me. But rather than buy into the unlikely scenario of CNN covering for the White House, I'll go ahead and cop to jumping to conclusions on this one.

The kid's still funny.

My Fox column this week is a primer on the subject.

Regular readers here and libertarians generally are probably familiar with most of the arguments.

So by now you may have heard about Sen. Chris Dodd's effusive praise for Sen. Robert Byrd earlier this week. I don't think the Trent Lott comparisons are valid for a couple of reasons.

First and foremost, Dodd is a liberal Democrat from Massachusetts with no history of racial animus. He has a record, for example, of supporting affirmative action. Yes, I realize you could make a case that affirmative action is in its own way racist. But it's hard to make the case that someone would devoutly support affirmative action out of hatred for black people.

Lott, on the other hand, is a conservative Republican from Mississippi. He has a record, for example, of affiliating himself with the Council of Conservative Citizens, and giving interviews to the Southern Partisan magazine.

Put into the context of their personal histories and careers, Lott's comments smack of racism, Dodd's don't.

I called for Lott's resignation because I didn't think he could any longer be an effective leader on matters related to race. Frankly, Dodd's not much of a leader, anyway.

Still, you have to wonder what the hell Dodd was thinking. It's one thing to praise Byrd's public service, his reverence for the US Senate, and so on (I wouldn't praise either, mind you). But Byrd's Klan history is pretty well known. As is the fact that he once supported segregation. Why in the world would Dodd then say that Byrd would have been "right" during the civil frickin' war? And why would he then say something absurd like, "I cannot think of a single moment in this Nation's 220-plus year history where he would not have been a valuable asset to this country?"

Really? There was a time when Klansmen were assets? When segregationists were right?

It's just weird.

You might remember that your favorite blog posted a bit about Dodd during the whole Lott affair. Here's what Dodd said about Lott at the time:

"If Tom Daschle or another Democratic leader were to have made similar statements, the reaction would have been very swift," Mr. Dodd said. "I don't think several hours would have gone by without there being an almost unanimous call for the leader to step aside."

"It has often been said that the man and the moment come together. I do not think it is an exaggeration at all to say to my friend from West Virginia that he would have been a great Senator at any moment. Some were right for the time. ROBERT C. BYRD, in my view, would have been right at any time. He would have been right at the founding of this country. He would have been in the leadership crafting this Constitution. He would have been right during the great conflict of civil war in this Nation. He would have been right at the great moments of international threat we faced in the 20th century. I cannot think of a single moment in this Nation's 220-plus year history where he would not have been a valuable asset to this country. Certainly today that is not any less true."

I've lost count. But it's been awhile.

Tomorrow night, Rendezvous Lounge, 18th and Kalorama.

7:30ish.

All the usual suspects will be there.

Andrew Sullivan cites this poll and writes:

43 PERCENT: That's the Pew poll's latest finding on Bush's approval rating. And that's with the public behind him on Iraq.

If you look at the poll, the public is nowhere near behind him. In fact fewer people approve of the way he's handling Iraq (40%) than approve of the job he's doing generally (43%). Just 32% say Bush "has a clear plan" in Iraq. And just half of respondents believe we ought to leave troops in Iraq (44% want to bring them home, 6% aren't sure).

This time on pornography:

Lam Nguyen's job is to sit for hours in a chilly, quiet room devoid of any color but gray and look at pornography. This job, which Nguyen does earnestly from 9 to 5, surrounded by a half-dozen other "computer forensic specialists" like him, has become the focal point of the Justice Department's operation to rid the world of porn.

In this field office in Washington, 32 prosecutors, investigators and a handful of FBI agents are spending millions of dollars to bring anti-obscenity cases to courthouses across the country for the first time in 10 years. Nothing is off limits, they warn, even soft-core cable programs such as HBO's long-running Real Sex or the adult movies widely offered in guestrooms of major hotel chains.

Department officials say they will send "ripples" through an industry that has proliferated on the Internet and grown into an estimated $10 billion-a-year colossus profiting Fortune 500 corporations such as Comcast, which offers hard-core movies on a pay-per-view channel.

IMHO, Ashcroft himself is reason enough to toss Bush out of office come November.

I have an op-ed in the Chicago Sun Times today.

A few of you have emailed to ask why I'm running an ad for something called "Bush Meet Up."

Well, because they paid for it. Short of anything overtly offensive, I'll take just about anyone's money.

I don't endorse or necessarily not endorse any ads that run here. And no, I won't temper my posts to make anyone happy.

Now, go buy yourself a damned tooth pillow.

Continuing the slow stroll through my inbox:

Generally speaking, I don't hold FoxNews in high regard - it's overly sensationalist and usually hideously biased, and the only non-conservative columnists usually look and sound like maniacs (deliberately so, I am sure).

That said, Balko's article was a surprisingly coherent and intelligent piece. A cut above the usual fare on FoxNews, even though I happen to disagree with large chunks of it.

The largest deaf advocacy organization in the country wants all movie theaters to install "open captioning." If they get their way, every movie you seen in a theater would be sullied with subtitles, whether you want them or not.

Deaf activism (as opposed to def activism, yo) has reached near-parody proportions. John Leo wrote two years ago about parents that refused to allow their daughter to have cochlear implants -- which might have saved her hearing -- because doing so would remove her from "deaf culture." They inspired the movie Sound and Fury.

Reason's Cathy Young wrote about them, too.

Sometimes really bizarre ones, like this one from "Starpaws:"

Hi, don't be confused by my name. I'm not an "out in the cosmos" person. I'm a middle class widow, and my email name is in honor of the family pets. Anyway, I tried to find Barbara Streisand's web site to voice my disagreement with her asinine political statements and suggest that she stick with singing, shopping, etc. and stay out of politics. How do I email my opinion to her? You journalists always seem to know these things. Thanks.

If you've a little money to spend (or are a student -- scholarships are available), and want to immerse yourself in a week of hard-core libertarian learning, I can't recommend Cato Unviersity enough.

I've been three times now, and would go to every session if Cato would let me. You'll be exposed to a series of lectures by some of the top thinkers, scholars and libertarian brains in the world. It's like an intense week of grad school, only with professors who are interesting. And who think correctly.

But the best part comes after dinner each night, when class and faculty retire to the bar, and begin debate and discussion over a beer or three.

This year's weeklong course (there's a shorter course in the fall) is at the Rancho Bernardo Inn near San Diego. I've been there twice. It's a wonderful facility. Food is top-notch, too.

Agitator.com favorite Anne Applebaum won a 2004 Pulitzer Prize yesterday for her book Gulag.

A well-deserved award, and one that at least makes some amends for the prize committee's refusal last yearl to revoke Walter Duranty's award.

Applebaum's book documents Stalin's prison camps. Duranty's award came from dispatches he sent back from the Soviet Union praising the dictator, even when faced with evidence of the man's prison camps, work camps, forced famines, and purges.

Pretty neat trick they pulled off in the upcoming issue of Reason. From the NY Times:

When the 40,000 subscribers to Reason, the monthly libertarian magazine, receive a copy of the June issue, they will see on the cover a satellite photo of a neighborhood - their own neighborhood. And their house will be graphically circled.

On one level, the project, sort of the ultimate in customized publishing, is unsurprising: of course a magazine knows where its subscribers live. But it is still a remarkable demonstration of the growing number of ways databases can be harnessed. Apart from the cover image, several advertisements are customized to reflect the recipient's particulars.

Bob Novak writes on the highway bill that just passed the GOP-led Congress:

The 1982 highway bill contained only 10 earmarks. The 1991 bill, the last highway bill passed under Democratic leadership, contained 538 such projects. But the addiction for pork has grown so large that the current bill contains at least 3,193 earmarks.

The addiction is bipartisan, thanks to the policy of the House's reigning king of pork. While House Transportation Committee Chairman Don Young has packed the bill with money for his state of Alaska, he makes sure Democrats are allocated their share of money for roads and other goodies in order to build a bipartisan majority on the floor...

...-- Construction of "Renaissance Square" in Rochester, N.Y., including a performing arts center. $7 million. Rep. Louise Slaughter, a highly partisan liberal Democrat.

-- Renovation of a historic depot and bus station in Jessup, Ga. $1 million. Rep. Jack Kingston, a leading Republican conservative.

-- Improvement of the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich. $1.5 million. Rep. John Dingell, the senior member of the House and a fierce Democratic battler.

-- A new parking building in Oak Lawn, Ill. $4 million. Rep. William Lipinski, an 11-term Democrat.

-- A series of improvements for the Blue Ridge Music Center in Galax, Va. $2.5 million. Rep. Rick Boucher, an 11-term Democrat.

First question. Can anyone tell me why the gazillion-dollar endowment Ford Foundation needs $1.5 million in taxpayer dollars to fix up the museum named for its founder?

Second question. Can anyone tell me how spending $4 million of taxpayer dollars on a parking garage in your home district so you can keep your job as Congressman is any different than Dennis Kozlowski spending ten grand of shareholder dollars on a shower curtain?

If anything, the parking garage is worse. Tyco Shareholders can invest in another company. Taxes are taken from us at the point of a gun. And there's no other government we can pay them to to keep the current one honest.

(Aside to John T. Kennedy: Yes, I know. Save your breath.)

If history is any indicator, that's a plausible outcome of the city's drastic 82 cents-per-pack increase in the cigarette tax. One pack of cigarettes in Chicago now costs six bucks, second only to New York City.

You'd think that Chicago would know a thing or two about black market crime. Apparently not. Look for smugglers to start bringing cigs in Indiana, and making a fortune doing it. In New York, the problem has gotten so bad that pot dealers have switched to smuggling cigarettes. They're more lucrative and generally don't carry jail time if you're caught.

If Chicago's lucky, small time dope dealers are all the new tax will attract. New York's cigarette black market finances international terrorist groups, including the IRA, Hezbollah, and al-Qaeda. Remember the Buffalo Six al-Qaeda cell? Financed with black market cigarettes.

What's worse, tobacco taxes are terribly regressive -- poor people spend a greater percentage of their income on cigarettes. They're also more likely to smoke. So any alleged new programs the new tax funds will be underwritten by Chicago's poorest. According to the Congressional Budget Office, cigarette taxes also grow more regressive over time. That is, to the extent that they encourage people to quit smoking, they tend to encourage middle and upper income earners to quit, as they're the folks who can afford more expensive methods of quitting, can afford to replace their tobacco fix with another vice, or are generally happy enough in life that they can do without the comfort that comes in a cigarette.

More crime. A more lucrative black market. All fincanced by poor people.

Nice move, Chicago.

It's called Half Bakery, and it's the coolest new use of the Internet since What's Better.

People log onto Half-Bakery and enter the crazy ideas they have. Could be an invention, a business idea, or just something you can do without much investment. Other people rate them.

My favorites: Coffe-Colored Mug. The Hundred Thousand Gallon Restaurant. White dipsticks. Panic PIN. Spravy. Safeway Club Club. New Curse Words.

Hat tip: Pieces of Flare.

Interesting article on how the Bush administration determines what information ought to be classified in the interest of national security and what information is safe to be released.

Looks more and more like national security has very little to with what gets classified. Instead, information that backs or backed the administration's case for war is deemed okay, where information that might hurt the White House is censored for alleged national security reasons. The most obvious example is Richard Clarke's original testimony to a House committe investigating 9/11 that was critical of the White House. That testimony was once determined to be too sensitive for release. Now that the White House sees an advantage in releasing it -- namely, discrediting Clarke by revealing reported discprencies in his two testimonies -- his original testimony is suddenly hunky-dorey for public consumption.

There are other examples, too:

To make its case for war at the United Nations, the White House also released recent audiotapes of intercepted conversations -- usually among its most highly guarded secrets -- between Iraqi military officers...

... A 25-page version of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction was released in October 2002. It made clear-cut statements about Iraq's nuclear, biological and chemical weapons capabilities in two pages of "Key Judgments."

"Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons. . . . [I]t will probably have a nuclear weapon during this decade," the section said, adding that "most analysts assess Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program."

When a fuller, eight-page version of the key judgments section was released after the war, it contained lengthy, well-marked dissents by some in the intelligence community.

On the question of whether certain aluminum tubes were imported to Iraq for use in nuclear weapons programs, the first document said: "Most intelligence specialists assess this to be their intended use, but some believe that these tubes are probably intended for conventional weapons programs."

The second document included a dissent by the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence Research (INR), which said it did not believe there was "a compelling case" that Iraq was working to acquire nuclear weapons. And INR and the Department of Energy questioned whether the tubes were well-suited for centrifuges used to enrich uranium.

The second declassification, said Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, a group devoted to declassifying secrets, showed the administration was not "protecting sources and methods. They were creating a document for public consumption that argued for the war."

Something tells me the White House will define "national security" broadly enough to include "anything that might hurt Bush's chances for reelection."

...because I think banning outdoor smoking, as Port Orange, FL is about to do, is a ridiculous idea.

You try and teach your kids not to smoke. If you're going have people right around, second hand smoke is probably really bad as it is," says Port Orange resident Harry Eoulmegis.

John Jackson, a former city council member, proposed the ordinance. He says this is about more than second-hand smoke. To him, it's also about setting a healthy example for children.

But how can I do that when every time I take them out in public, people like John Jackson might be around, needlessly exposing my vulnerable children to secondhand, small-town fascism?

We ought to ban John Jackson.

Response to my article on outsourcing:

It is all well and good for techno-sycophants, such as you, to wax philosophically about the tech job sinks. You will still be overpaid and under-employed wherever the technical hub of the world resides.

That which was built in the U.S.A., by the sweat blood and lives of its citizens belongs to its citizens, not to the cow and rat worshippers nor to the devotees of Mao Tse Tung nor to anyone else that has not paid the price.

What is "the price"? The price is a willingness to trade life for freedom. The price is sending our troops and our dollars to vermin infested hell holes around the world to deliver those less fortunate from themselves. The price is drawing a line in the sand and backing up that line with the full force of U.S. might. The price is offering the olive branch of peace repeatedly and tirelessly until that branch is ripped from our grasp and hurled back in our faces.

Until the populations of these lesser states ascend to the greatness and goodness of the American people, they can remain in their dark age morass.

The tech jobs can and should stay here where the price HAS been paid. Tell the multi-millionaire corporate executives that "you have enough already, leave the rest for the "REAL" Americans, the American work force.

--Mark S. Kincaid

Nice to see conservatives are willing to break with principle on the really important issues, like using the power of the federal regulatory state to keep their favorite football radio announcers on the air.

Hat tip: Skip Oliva

Email responses to my Fox column on the morass of laws and regulations we're forced to comply with:

I am an Architect in the middle of creating an 85 home mixed income development on an eleven acre site in Tampa, Florida on a piece of property that was never built on as it abuts closed city landfills. I am getting a hard education in the beuracracy of land development. Not only do we have to first work with the surrouunding neighbors to get our site plan approved by the city council, but we then have to face the various city staffs and get them to agree to our design. Keep in mind, none of these city agencies work with each other. After that we have the Army Corps of Engineers, the State DEP, the Federal EPC, the State SWFWMD (water management), the Federal land development permit, the FEMA and coordinate all the various utility providers requirements. The city water, sewer, roads, landscape, stormwater, zoning, subdivision, wildlife, and building departments all have separate permits and requirements which contradict many times with each other and the federal and state reg's. Obtaining the final approvals is a task beyond comprehension. It only gets more burdensome every year.

--Chris Kirschner, Clearwater, FL

I am a regulatory specialist by trade and I agree with you totally. I used to track OSHA, EPA and DOT regulations and requirements. I had to give up OSHA as there weren't enough hours in the day. If you think the federal regulations are a mess, you should look at California. We have a facility there, and the regulators don't even understand their own regulations or how other regulatory bodies private set intertwine with theirs. Some regulations are for counties, some are for districts, some are for regions or cities; of course then there are the everpresent State and Federal statues. I have two consultants out there trying to keep up with the regulations and permits we have for emitting water into the atmosphere and we still got an NOV. God help us if we were real polluters like say..... people with fireplaces.

--Mike Johnston

Republican Liberty Caucus Chairman Douglas Lorenz writes:

Have you considered updating the Libertymeter due to Bush’s recent calls for a constitutional amendment banning same sex marriages? The level to which he is trying to bring this into the public discussion should be worth a couple of points at least…

I know that he hasn’t actually enacted legislation, which is the way you’ve modified the libertymeter in the past. However, the primary strength of a President in issues such as this is the bully pulpit, which he has been using to promote something that is a good deal less than libertarian…

I think Justin Logan said it best in the comments section at Gene Healy's site. Responding to the wrenching attacks in Fallujah, Logan writes:

"The Israel analogy isn't overwrought at all: If we fight back, we lose. If we don't fight back, we lose."

Now, hawks like Andrew Sullivan are calling for a nationwide gasoline tax to ensure that we stay in Iraq even longer, imploring us all to "sacrifice."

Sacrifice for what? More Fallujahs? More anti-Americanism? An ever-bigger pool of Arabs willing to die to kill us? So Iraqis can wake up to see American troops in their backyards, schools, and city streets for the next five, ten, or twenty years?

You've got to admire Sullivan's testicular fortitute. Gosh. An anti-tax conservative is willing to abandon his fiscal principles in order to force the entire country to "sacrifice" to continue a nation-building expedition many of us believe is doomed to fail, and will only get more Americans killed?

How noble of him.

Oh yeah, here's the kicker: Sullivan doesn't drive.

So let me correct myself. Sullivan wants everyone but him to sacrifice in order to support the continuing and failing occupation of the country he insisted we invade.

Again, how noble of him.

A rising star in Irish politics was fired from his party, and faces a likely end to his political career.

Why, you ask? Was he caught, as Huey long once said, in bed with a dead girl, or a live boy?

Nope.

For smoking in public, shortly after Ireland passed a nationwide smoking ban.

Seriously.

Longtime Agitator.com reader Brian Hipp has spun his own group blog, Pieces of Flare.

Check 'em out.

Quick list of April Fool's spoofs that The Ecnomist has run over the years.

Jim Henley got in on the spirit, too. And it was much better thought-out than mine.

So I've been doing this blogging thing for well over two years now. And it occurs to me that unless I just throw caution to the wind and take some drastic action, I'm probably never going to make any real money at it.

So I've decided to make this an exclusively premium site.

Check back tomorrow, with your credit card, and I'll have more information.

Right now, I'm thinking $29.95 per month.

UPDATE: Yeah, yeah. April Fool's. I had planned to make this more elaborate, but the date snuck up on me.

More posts tomorrow.