Posted 8:37 PM by Robert Musil
Damn The Balloons, Full Speed Ahead!
 
I wasn't watching CNN at the Great Balloon Moment, but this e-mailed account is hilarious:

TOO funny!  Here I am reading the judge's sentencing of Richard Reid after listening to as much of Kerry as I can stand, when I hear a voice start hollering "Go Balloons! Go Balloons! Increasingly frantic, till finally, "What the fuck are you guys doing?? We need more balloons!!"(pardon his French)  A fitting end to the extreme makeover, eh?? Would write more, but I can't stop laughing!

Here's the audio link [from DRUDGE.] The whole thing is just one more indication that the entire Stepford (Oops! I mean "Boston!") convention has been beyond parody from beginning to end. No doubt tomorrow we'll be hearing from the Kerry campaign that the whole balloon shortage was a Republican dirty trick, perhaps along the lines of another Fox News  interview with Mary Beth Cahill:

HUME: i must ask you about this balloon shortage that suddenly emerged and fell in your laps last night - or rather didn't fall into your laps last - or at least not enough of them. there he was, the senator, left at the podium with what most people would consider a peculiarly insubstantial amount of balloon support, which i guess the hall operators were supposed to provide to him. how did that come about?

CAHILL: well, yesterday senator Kerry personally - or it might have been Theresa - cleared the balloon count dynamics with the hall operator's logistics arm and was told confidently that everything would be fine, just fine, when it came to the balloons. And then there was this leak of one of our most dedicated operatives pleading, just PLEADING for adequate balloon coverage, that CNN just "happened" to pick up transmit to the public. 

HUME: it was leaked?

CAHILL: yes.

HUME: it was made by CNN, right?

CAHILL: yes, it was.

HUME: so the campaign had no idea there would be any balloon shortage or potential balloon shortage.

CAHILL: none.

HUME: when arrangements were finalized with with the hall operator on the balloon count.

CAHILL: there was no mention of a possible shortage. and all of the sudden these leaked imprecations are getting broadcast. "balloons! more balloons! what the fuck, balloons, etc." are out.

HUME: do you smell a dirty trick here?

CAHILL: well, what do you think?

HUME: that CNN is not a particularly Republican organization.

CAHILL: and here's another thing. while i would never point fingers and descend to the kind of un-American incivility and pattern of unsubstantiated accusations that we all know has come to characterize the right wing in this country, i do find it strange that the hall and the hall operator seem to have pretty close ties to Mitch Romney, a well-known Republican.

HUME: can you tell me exactly what you meant by "un-American incivility?"

CAHILL: I didn't say that.

HUME: with respect to the balloon shortage and leak, you don't have anyone in mind? do you think --

CAHILL: i don't.

END

Posted 2:06 PM by Robert Musil
Disproportionate Impact

 John Kerry's prepared remarks are reported to paint a portrait of a nation suffering economically after four years of Republican rule: 

"Wages are falling, health care costs are rising and our great middle class is shrinking. People are working weekends; they're working two jobs, three jobs and they're still not getting ahead."

Perhaps this New York Times report explain why Senator Kerry seems to feel the pain of those who lost income during the Bush term:

While the recession that hit the economy in 2001 in the wake of the market plunge was considered relatively mild, the new information shows that its effect on Americans' incomes, particularly those at the upper end of the spectrum, was much more severe.  ... The unprecedented back-to-back declines in reported incomes was caused primarily by the combination of the big fall in the stock market and the erosion of jobs and wages in well-paying industries in the early years of the decade. ... "Risks used to be confined largely to executives and business owners with large incomes,'' said Edward N. Wolff, an economist at New York University who studies wealth and income. "But now for many people with more modest incomes their earnings are more volatile,'' Mr. Wolff added ... ... Falling incomes, rather than tax cuts, appear to count for the greatest share of the decline in income taxes paid. That is because the higher one stood on the income ladder the greater the impact was likely to be from the stock market crunch. At the same time many of those whose incomes fell the most - those reporting $200,000 to $10 million in income - paid at the highest rates, which meant that the drain on revenues was even greater when their incomes shrank. More than 352,000 taxpayers, one of every eight who had worked their way above $200,000 of income in 2000, fell below that figure in 2002. At the very top the ranks thinned by more than half. The number of taxpayers reporting adjusted gross income of $10 million or more fell to 5,280 from 11,215.  The combined income of this rich and thin slice of Americans plummeted 63 percent ...

My goodness! The "Bush Recession" disproportionately hurt the rich! The increase in the federal deficit was mostly caused by rich people making less money! How can that be? Why didn't Herr Doktorprofessor Paul Von Krugman warn us? And what about that risk-reward kicker? Is the Times admitting that people who make good but not great money do it increasingly by taking more risks?! What happened to the no-risk, hi-income, silver-spoon crowd?

No wonder John Kerry feels this pain so intensely. With a wife worth something like One Billion Dollars and a social circle to match, we're not talking here about pain he feels in the abstract. We're talking about the kind of pain he and she hear about every day at their country club and at the best restaurants!

MORE: Good things from Steve Antler.

Posted 12:25 PM by Robert Musil
Is This "Bounce?"
 
Maybe after the Big Speech tonight we'll see more "bounciness." Why does the whole concept of "bounce" seem so odd when it's John Kerry?

In the mean time, the glacier continues to advance bit by bit by bit. Of course, one can never take the economy for granted - so Mr. Bush hasn't won this one yet. But an advancing economy should have particularly potent effect in states such as Ohio - again assuming the economy there advances.

Posted 11:47 AM by Robert Musil

Remembering The Shoe Bomber

A friend e-mails:

Remember [Richard C. Reid,] the guy who got on a plane with a bomb built into his shoe and tried to light it? 

Did you know his trial is over?  [It's early stages received some media coverage.]
 
Did you know he was sentenced?

Did you see/hear any of the judge's comments on TV/Radio?

Didn't think so, media at work again. Everyone should hear what the judge had to say....... 

Ruling by Judge William Young U.S. District Court -- Prior to sentencing, the Judge asked the defendant if he had anything to say.  His response: After admitting his guilt to the court for the record, Reid also admitted his "allegiance to Osama bin Laden, to Islam, and to the religion of Allah," defiantly stated "I think I ought not apologize for my actions," and told the court "I am at war with your country."  Judge Young then delivered the statement quoted below, a stinging condemnation of Reid in particular and terrorists in general. 

January 30, 2003, United States vs. Reid.  Judge Young: 
 
"Mr. Richard C. Reid, hearken now to the sentence the Court imposes  upon you. On counts 1, 5 and 6 the Court sentences you to life in prison in the custody of the United States Attorney General. On counts 2, 3, 4  and 7, the Court sentences you to 20 years in prison on each count, the sentence on each count to run consecutive with the other. That's 80 years.  On count 8 the Court sentences you to the mandatory 30 years  consecutive to the 80 years just imposed.  The Court imposes upon you each of the eight counts a fine of $250,000 for the aggregate fine of $2 million. The Court accepts the  government's recommendation with respect to restitution and orders restitution in  the amount of $298.17 to Andre Bousquet and $5,784 to American Airlines.  The Court imposes upon you the $800 special assessment.  The Court imposes upon you five years supervised release simply because the law requires it. But the life sentences are real life sentences so  I need go no further. This is the sentence that is provided for by our statutes. It is a fair and just sentence. It is a righteous sentence.  Let me explain this to you. We are not afraid of you or any of your terrorist co-conspirators, Mr. Reid. We are Americans. We have been through the fire before. There is all too much war talk here. And I say that to everyone with the utmost respect. Here in this court, we deal with individuals as individuals, and care for individuals as individuals. As human beings, we reach out for justice.  You are not an enemy combatant. You are a terrorist. You are not a soldier in any war. You are a terrorist. To give you that reference, to call you a soldier, gives you far too much stature. Whether it is the officers of government who do it or your attorney who does it, or that happens to be your view, you are a terrorist. And we do not negotiate with terrorists. We do not treat with terrorists. We do not sign documents with terrorists. We hunt them down one by one and bring them to justice.  So war talk is way out of line in this court. You are a big fellow. But you are not that big. You're no warrior. I know warriors. You are a terrorist. A species of criminal guilty of multiple attempted murders.  In a very real sense, State Trooper Santiago had it right when you  first were taken off that plane and into custody and you wondered where the press and where the TV crews were, and he said you're no big deal. You're no big deal.  What your counsel, what your able counsel and what the equally able United States attorneys have grappled with and what I have as honestly as I know how tried to grapple with, is why you did something so horrific. What was it that led you here to this courtroom today? I have listened respectfully to what you have to say. And I ask you to search your heart and ask yourself what sort of unfathomable hate led you to  do what you are guilty and admit you are guilty of doing.  And I have an answer for you. It may not satisfy you. But as I search this entire record, it comes as close to understanding as I know. It seems to me you hate the one thing that is most precious. You hate our freedom. Our individual freedom.  Our individual freedom to live as we choose, to come and go as we choose, to believe or not believe as we individually choose.  Here, in this society, the very winds carry freedom. They carry it everywhere from sea to shining sea. It is because we prize individual freedom so much that you are here in this beautiful courtroom. So that everyone can see, truly see, that justice is administered fairly, individually, and discreetly. It is for freedom's sake that your  lawyers are striving so vigorously on your behalf and have filed appeals, will go on in their representation of you before other judges. We are about it. Because we all know that the way we treat you, Mr. Reid, is the measure of our own liberties.  Make no mistake though. It is yet true that we will bear any burden,  pay any price, to preserve our freedoms. Look around this courtroom. Mark  it well. The world is not going to long remember what you or I say here. Day after tomorrow it will be forgotten. But this, however, will long endure.  Here in this courtroom and courtrooms all across America, the American people will gather to see that justice, individual justice, justice,  not war, individual justice is, in fact, being done.  The very President of the United States through his officers will have to come into courtrooms and lay out evidence on which specific matters can be judged, and juries of citizens will gather to sit and judge that evidence democratically, to mold and shape and refine our sense of justice.  See that flag, Mr. Reid?  That's the flag of the United States of America. That flag will fly there long after this is all forgotten.  That flag stands for freedom. You know it always will.  Custody, Mr. Officer. Stand him down." 

So, how much of this Judge's comments did we hear on our TV sets? We need more judges like Judge Young, but that's another subject.  Pass this around. Everyone should and needs to hear what this fine  judge had to say. Powerful words that strike home....   

Posted 11:23 AM by Robert Musil
The Boy (Or Is It "Spermatazooan?") Who Cried "Dirty Tricks"

From a story linked by DRUDGE:

There was no "dirty trick" behind the photographs of Sen. John Kerry wearing the blue anti-contamination suit while touring the shuttle Discovery on Monday. .... Furthermore, NASA spokesman Bill Johnson said the Kerry campaign asked that the pictures be taken of the senator's unusually up-close tour of the Discovery and that processing be expedited so reporters could have them.

All of which is a bit different from the way Kerry campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill  told it to FOXNEWS  (again from DRUDGE):

HUME: i must ask you about this photograph that suddenly turned up and fell in our laps last night nobody thought it was come. nobody had reported on the event which led to-t but there he was, the senator, on all fours in this very peculiar outfit, which i guess nasa had given him. how did that come about?

CAHILL: well, yesterday senator john glenn, obviously he was an astronaut in his previous life sexrvings senator carr took a tour of a bio facility at nasa. it was just the two of them, and the nasa staff, and all of a sudden this is a leaked photo.

HUME: so the campaign had no idea there would be any photographs.

CAHILL: none.

HUME: when it was agreed he would put on his th costume.

CAHILL: there was no press there. there was -- nothing. all of the sudden these photographs are out.

HUME: do you smell a dirty trick here?

CAHILL: well, what do you think?

The Kerry campaign seems to be repeating a mistake committed by Al Gore in the last Presidential campaign: They've learned from Bill Clinton to lie big, casually and as often as needed, but they fail to incorporate his gift for telling lies that are difficult to check out.

MORE:  From Spaceref.com:

NASA sources reveal that NASA KSC gave the Kerry campaign people about 30 CDs, which were to be distributed to local media by the Kerry people. The photos in question were on these CDs. Local reporters were seen with with these CDs later in the afternoon. 

As such, assuming that the reporters got the CDs from the Kerry campaign, the Kerry people distributed the photographs themselves! There was no "leak".

FURTHER UPDATE:

More on the ongoing Kerry campaign bunnysuit clown show:

O'BRIEN: You know, here's the interesting -- I've been talking to my pals at NASA about this: This stuff was not leaked. It turns out that the Kerry campaign asked for all these images and then distributed them to the media.So, they didn't realize -- yes, I know you're slack-jawed...

BOORTZ: You're joking.

O'BRIEN: Yes -- yes, they let it out.

BOORTZ: You're joking. Well, we were talking this morning that the difference between the Dukakis tank picture and the Kerry bunny suit picture, being nice, is that in the tank picture, the campaign actually distributed that. And now you're telling me that the Kerry campaign has admitted the same thing? O'BRIEN: You can run with it. I -- this is true, the folks at NASA, who are absolutely incredulous...

BOORTZ: Wow.

O'BRIEN: ... that it was leaked, because they set the whole thing up at the request of the Kerry campaign to distribute the images.

Also note Al Franken stalking Boortz.

This is pathetic on John Kerry's part - and on the part of his whole organization. Just pathetic. Is anyone in the mainstream media going to ask the nominee about this, say around the time he gives his BIG SPEECH tonight?

Link from Henry Hanks.

Posted 10:04 AM by Robert Musil
Dropping More Than Balloons

The Democratic faithful now wait in Boston for the big balloon drop and a skit by some John Kennedy impersonator - but in Sacramento Arnold Schwarzenegger is preparing to drop something rather more substantial on the California legislature. His apparent strategic vision in these matters is a revelation. 

By the end of the week California will have a $105.3-billion budget, with the Assembly already accepting the negotiated deal, which incorporates some of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's spending proposals. But the budget constitutes very little real progress:

The proposed budget has so much borrowing and so few long-term spending cuts that the state will be facing yet another fiscal crunch next year. Economists say it would take an upswing in the economy of dot-com boom proportions to avoid it.

"I just don't see the economy bailing us out under any foreseeable circumstances," said Michael Bazdarich, senior economist with the UCLA Anderson Forecast. ... "The steps we are taking to solve it are pretty tiny for this late in the game."

The budget plan does rein in some spending. ... Overall spending will go up by less than 1%. In a typical year it goes up several times that.

But the temporary cuts to schools and local governments will help the state keep spending down. They have been given assurances that two years from now the state will return to giving them more money. ... [A] shortfall of as much as $10 billion that is projected to emerge in 2007.

So this year's budget punts the big problems into the future, and next year's budget is the first part of that future. What happens then? If California faces another of its typical budget impasses next year, an impasse avoided by this year's negotiated budget, both the Legislature and the Governor can expect their poll ratings and popularity with voters to fall dramatically. That happens with every budget impasse, and the fall can be very painful: After the last such impasse and fall, Grey Davis was ejected from office in the recall election that brought Mr. Schwarzenegger to Sacramento.

One might ask what the last impasse and that recall have to do with next year's budget. And that's where Mr. Schwarzenegger's thinking gets really interesting. The poll and popularity falls following a California budget impasse are not permanent. They do take a while to dissipate, but that dissipation happens before the next election scheduled after the face-off. The Legislature counts on the timing of that dissipation in handling the impasse.

What if there were no substantial time? What if a special election were scheduled just a few weeks after the budget was supposed to have been enacted? What would happen then? Well, the legislators would face an angry electorate. A very large portion of them would share the fate of Mr. Davis.

A special election of the Legislature can't be scheduled that way. But Mr. Swarzenegger may call a special election next year asking voters to, among other things, convert the Legislature to part-time status, strip legislators of their power to draw their own districts and restrict campaign contributions, his spokesman said Tuesday.

If such an election were scheduled to be held soon after next year's budget is supposed to be enacted, the dynamics of the annual Governor/Legislature impasse would change dramatically - and not entirely predictably. The Governor would not face any form of re-election threat. The legislators would become very nervous about creating or maintaining the impasse as they watched their polls plunge. In the past the Legislature has received approval ratings below 20% during such periods. During such a period the Legislature would obviously not welcome a special election asking voters to convert the Legislature to part-time status, strip legislators of their power to draw their own districts and restrict campaign contributions. There would probably be lots of unintended and unexpected side-effects, of course, from such a dramatic proposal. For one thing, the electorate might come to see the Governor's move as an undesirable power grab and rebel against him. But one thing is sure: the stakes would be a lot higher than they are in a typical year, and the Governor could win very big.

Of course, it is not easy to schedule a special election in California. One must first acquire sufficient voter signatures: hundreds of thousands of them. In practice that means one must hire and pay professional signature-gathering companies. The Grey Davis recall signature effort, for example, did not take off until it was financed by Darrell Issa, an Orange County millionaire Republican Congressman. Such people are not easy to find.

And that brings us to another of Mr. Schwarzenegger's features that the Legislature must find truly terrifying: his wealth. Mr. Schwarzenegger could easily write a single check to finance the signature-gathering effort for his proposed Constitutional amendment. Indeed, he used exactly this tactic to force the Legislature to enact a reform of California's workers' compensation law that was almost identical to one that he had already formulated as a ballot initiative:

"Why have we waited this long to do these reforms?" asked Assemblyman Russ Bogh, R-Beaumont. "It's no accident, let's be honest. We are here today because of one thing: because over 1 million people answered Gov. Schwarzenegger's call for signed petitions to reform workers' compensation."

Could this Governor spin the dross of the legislators' unbounded craving for office into the gold of a budget that really fixed California's finances by personally financing the signatures for his constitutional amendment "reforming" the Legislature?  An old joke comes to mind: Do I believe in infant baptism? Why, I've seen it done!

The score so far: This year's budget is OK, but not great. But it looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger is planning to be back.

Posted 6:04 PM by Robert Musil
The Convention Addresses II

Bill Clinton

Bill Clinton's address to the Convention was a mess - probably an intentional mess. The address will do the Kerry-Edwards campaign effort little if any good. In expressing this view, I agree with the Viking and respectfully dissent from the views of almost every other commenter, including Dick Morris and Jim Taranto.

Before Mr. Clinton spoke there was fear among the Kerry-Edwards campaign and the mainstream liberal media that he would "overshadow" the nominee - and that his speech would mostly advance his own interests.  And exactly was feared would happen did happen - just not quite in the way some had thought it might happen. Yes, Mr. Clinton's address requires one to admire his ability to achieve his effects without his audience and critics catching on as to how he does it. Of course, that too further advances his interests.

The best way to evaluate the former President's address is to compare it to the many addresses he has made over the years on his own behalf. Ideally for the Kerry camp, Mr. Clinton's address would have resembled the many addresses he has given to advance his own interests but directed entirely at advancing Senator Kerry's bid for the White House. Bill Clinton's speech was not that.

Mr. Clinton famously confided in Tony Blair that Mr. Clinton expected to be remembered as a man who mostly won elections - to Mr. Blair's reported horror. Bill Clinton's speeches generally included things that were necessary to get him elected and, once in office, to maintain his personal support even at the cost of depriving him of any significant mandate - and for no other aims. By the time he first ran for President Mr. Clinton knew that memorable phrases and clear meaning were not what got a Democrat struggling to patch together an incoherent coalition elected to, or maintained in, the Presidency. Instead, Mr. Clinton's speeches were characterized by vague and ambiguous phrasings, meaning very different things to very different groups. Not for him was there to be any "ask not what your country can do for you" silliness. And during his eight full years in highest office he did not trouble himself with the likes of "touched the face of God" or "tear down this wall." The closest Mr. Clinton came to a memorable speech was perhaps his expressed desires to make abortion "safe, legal and rare" and to "end welfare as we know it" - the latter a catchy phrase that he came to regret when a Republican Congress used it to impose real welfare reform.

But Bill Clinton's own speeches were effective. Especially after the big health care disaster and initial budget success of the first year, a typical Clintonian State of the Union effort consisted of a string of minor proposals, a recitation of minor accomplishments, some anecdotes and some fairly well crafted partisan name calling. It worked. Conservatives hated and condescended. Liberals knew he was handing them a very dubious bill of goods. "Good" speechwriters complained that his addresses were flaccid. From the standpoint of classical or standard rhetoric, they were flaccid - much more flaccid than was his Convention address, which is relatively focused and full of pseudo-rhetorical, ultimately ineffective phrases: Strength and wisdom are not conflicting values and Republicans believe in an America run by the right people, their people, in a world in which we act unilaterally when we can, and cooperate when we have to and Sure these countries are competing with us for good jobs, but how can we enforce our trade laws against our bankers? This kind of thing sounds good to a partisan delegate - but it's nearly worthless for getting more votes.

Although, and in large part because, they were not clear or moving, Bill Clinton's speeches were effective. And they were long. A good indication of how much Mr. Clinton's convention address differed from his most effective efforts is the length of his convention address: about 25 minutes. That was much too short. Some people require a lot of time, and Mr. Clinton is one of them. Quality writers, such as Peggy Noonan, believe that a speech about everything is a speech about nothing. You have to decide. But Bill Clinton's most effective speeches were generally not "about" something - they were usually about "everything" - and were often criticized for being about almost "nothing." He refused to decide, he "downsized" the Presidency and he talked and talked for very long periods about his "nothings." And, in the end, he convinced a lot of people that he should be and remain President while presenting little in the way of his own substantive agenda. Bill Clinton's speech should have convinced a lot of people that John Kerry should be President while presenting little in the way of a substantive agenda. It didn't. In his own speeches Mr. Clinton's cadences and local intonations had a cumulative effect, like the almost unconscious, cumulative linguistic "rhythms" spread over much time that Proust points out render some writers - and some composers, such as Wagner - ultimately persuasive. Those who take Strunk & White as their bible will never understand. But, then, E.B. White didn't write À La Recherche Du Temps Perdu or Parsival- he wrote nice little books about a spider, a mouse and a swan. Mr. Clinton's Convention address was nice, too.

Mr. Clinton's Convention speech was "clever." And it is true that his cleverest rhetorical device was to cast himself, repeatedly, as an ungrateful beneficiary of President Bush's tax cuts. The problem with this clever device is that it doesn't transfer from speaker to listener. Yes, a newly-minted multimillionaire such as Mr. Clinton can "at first" feel like he wants to thank President Bush for his tax cut, until he realizes that "all of you" had to pay for it. But for the ordinary taxpayer who received a tax refund check was perfectly happy to keep it - without qualm. In fact, for most people receiving the tax refund check was the second best thing about the cuts - second best after spending that same refund. This "clever" device meant Mr. Clinton repeatedly drew attention to the best aspects of the cuts - instead of an endless, dripping series of anecdotes and observations about the putative negative consequences of those cuts. Something like those endless, dripping series of anecdotes and observations in the speeches he used to run for and occupied the office of the Presidency. Even his repeatedly casting himself as a tax cut beneficiary cast as a beneficary a person the audience liked.. Mentioning Mr. Scaife or some other ultra-wealthy beneficiary instead would have been much less "clever" but far more emotionally effective. And this was by no means the only point in his address at which Mr. Clinton subtly substituted entertaining "cleverness" for broader "effectiveness."

Mr. Clinton's own speeches were never "clever" "Clever" is what may be needed to get one elected in France. But while "clever" can work in the United States, it is a dangerous approach. In the United States even the expression "too clever by half" is, well, too clever by half for almost any broad political speech. And, worse for a man who sincerely struggled with his questioner over the meaning of "is," a "clever" speech almost demands clarity. And, sure enough, his Convention speech achieved a clarity that his typical speeches completely lacked. That clarity - along with its brevity - is a good indication that something went seriously wrong with this speech, which has been broadly and casually characterized as "demagogic" even by some of its admirers. A speech easily labeled "demagogic" is unlikely to be effective, and is much more likely to be thought effective by second-rate politicians than by ordinary voters.

Another clear and, for Senator Kerry, uncomfortable, aspect of Mr. Clinton's speech was his particular and somewhat peculiar form of praise for Kerry's Vietnam service:

During the Vietnam War, many young men--including the current president, the vice president and me--could have gone to Vietnam but didn't. John Kerry came from a privileged background and could have avoided it too. Instead he said, send me.

Mr. Clinton's reference to the Senator's "privileged background" is gratuitious and negative with respect to John Kerry. Are we supposed to be grateful for Mr. Kerry not using a "priviledge" we do not possess? The reference also constitutes subtle self-stroking since Mr. Clinton did not come from a "priviledged background" but avoided service anyway. And, of course, John Kerry didn't say "send me."  Senator Kerry had no choice but to go into the military (or seek conscious objector status, flee the country or the like) since his draft board had just turned down his request for an extension of his deferment to allow him to study in Paris.  Further, as most college age men believed at that time, enlisting in the Navy was a "safe" alternative to being drafted into the Army. When Senator Kerry volunteered for Swift Boat duty, it was blockade duty, not heavy combat. He got into combat because only because the rules of engagement were changed by Admiral Zumwalt when he began operation Sealords. Once Kerry was in combat, he gamed the system to get out of it as quickly as possible. But he did serve with a courage in very difficult conditions. Those conditions may not have been quite as difficult as he has since led the public to believe - but I view that as quibbling. Bill Clinton did not emphasize John Kerry's courage in combat - Mr. Clinton chose to emphasize exactly the most problematic and potentially embarrassing aspects of the Senator's presentation of his service record.  But Senator Kerry can hardly complain  about Mr. Clinton's approach, since the nominee's own vanity has often led him to stress exactly the same problematic aspects of his record. Mr. Clinton has always been skilled at using his opponents vanities against them - just ask Newt Gingrich. And, once again, by pointing out that Mr. Bush has a service record better than his own, Mr. Clinton defanged Senator Kerry's own argument. After all, if Mr. Clinton - who was never in the service - is presented at that podium as an ultra-successful President, what is left of the Senator's argument that the President is relatively deficient for want of a service record equal to the Senator's own?  In such ways "cleverness" erodes "effectiveness" - but can make for a more entertaining speech.

One could go on and on. It is interesting (at least to me) that the redoubtable and perceptive Peggy Noonan did not include Bill Clinton's Convention address in the ones she reviewed so perceptively for the Journal. And I agree with Dick Morris that the former President committed a "masterpiece" here - but not a masterpiece that Senator Kerry should covet. Bill Clinton does not want John Kerry to become President because Hillary Clinton doesn't want that. But neither Clinton would have been served by a speech that didn't seem to push all the right buttons - to line up all those right, ripe issues Mr. Morris notes in his article. But raise them in bloodless fashion - each one drained quietly like a butterfly drawn dry by a naturally skilled spider.

Yes, indeed, a "masterpiece."

Posted 5:42 PM by Robert Musil
Keys to Election 2004

Allan J. Lichtman's Keys Model still predict that the locks in the White House doors will open again for George W. Bush.

So does the Fair model. Ray Fair hasn't updated his calculations since April of this year - the model various factors indicate that the incumbent has continued to entrench himself in the probabilities demed significant by that model.

Posted 4:49 PM by Robert Musil
Brutal But Funny

John Kerry = Woody Allen = Gomer Pyle 

Posted 2:17 PM by Robert Musil
The Deficit

The White House is now predicting a budget deficit of about $420 Billion, about $100 Billion less than had previousy been predicted by the White House. The new estimate is a record in numerical dollar terms but - at about 3.5% of GDP - quite a bit lower than the circa-6% deficits of the mid-1980's.

Since it's an election year, the size of the deficit is naturally the topic of political discussion. That's especially true in respect of conditions prevalant during the second Clinton administration, when the government ran a "surplus."

But it is common knowledge that the "surplus" run by the federal government in the late Clintonian  era depended heavily on tax revenue - largely capital gains tax revenue - realized from the "internet bubble." It is now widely believed that much (but by no means all) of such tax revenue did not correspond to actual wealth creation, since the "internet bubble" is widely viewed as just that - a "bubble." While this effect runs deeply into the federal figures, its most spectacular consequence was undoubtedly reflected in the California state budget, which swung hugely into deficit as a result of increased spending justified on the basis of such ephemeral revenues - increased spending that could not be funded after those revenues evaporated.

So it's an interesting political thought experiment to ask: What would the federal deficit be today if the late Clintonian tech boom were still going on - even given the Bush tax cuts?

I haven't seen these particular calculations and comparisions carried out since the new deficit estimates were announced. But they would be interesting from a political perspective. My guess is that with the added Clintonian revenues, the federal deficit might now be less than $200 Billion - or less than 2% of GDP.

Posted 9:26 AM by Robert Musil
Whither The Base?

Donna Brazille has more recently professed to have come to "like" John Kerry. But she has famously pointed out that the Kerry campaign has not paid nearly enough attention to minorities and women, and that the Republicans are doing a far better job of grass-roots campaigning. She is correct in her assessment, and the results are increasingly apparent, as in this report from Terry M. Neal right there in Roxbury, the center of Boston's African-American community:

Roxbury has long been the center of black life in Boston, and it's no surprise that all of the people we talked to here today said they planned on voting for Kerry. What was perhaps surprising is that none of them said they had ever seen Kerry campaigning in their neighborhoods or heard of him doing so, and that they had no special affinity for him.

This seemed to reflect the criticism from African American leaders that Kerry has done little to appeal to black, urban voters. The fact that black voters in his own state seem ho-hum about him in any other year might be a cause of alarm. But this is not a normal year, and the issue isn't so much whether blacks will vote for the Democrat, but whether they will come out in significant numbers at all.

"Kerry is the man," barber Louis Richardson, 42, told us, after launching into a long, angry tirade against Bush. Later in the conversation, however, he complained that Kerry's personality was "weak" compared to Bush's, and chided the candidate for never coming to Roxbury.

Check out the video of our visit here.

Mr. Neal and Ms. Brazille know what they're talking about. A major reason for the Democratic election disaster in 2002 was low turn out of minority voters. I have only one real reservation about Mr. Neal's observations: I think the problems between the Democrats and minority communities (including African-Americans - but especially Hispanics) run far deeper than anything that could be fixed with some campaigning.

Posted 8:25 AM by Robert Musil
More From Nuancy Boy On The September 11 Commission Report

John Kerry is talking again about the September 11 Commission Report, and he has Mickey Kaus "presuming:"

kf Celebrates Diversity: Referring to the 9/11 Commission, Kerry today announced,

"I would have immediately said to the commission, yes, we're going to implement those recommendations." [The link seems a little off, since it doesn't lead to an article with the quoted phrase in it, which this article does contain.]

Presumably this means he'd implement the commission's marquee recommendation--for a cabinet-level czar who consolidates the management of the government's various intelligence shops. (Kerry's endorsed the idea before.) But, as an alert kf reader emails:

 Doesn't [this] seem like a terrible idea ... 

What follows is a typically Kaussian hi-quality analysis of the issue, which the reader is encouraged to consider. The kausfiles analysis includes a note that Senator Levin seems to be seriously opposed to the idea of a cabinet-level czar who consolidates the management of the government's various intelligence shops. In that respect Senator Levin squarely represents the opinions of the the liberal wing of the Democratic Party - who are, of course, not the only opponents of this idea.

In my opinion kausfiles is "presuming" way too much on this topic. A hint of Senator Kerry's probable strategy can be seen in the opening line of the "corrected"-linked article:

Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry called Tuesday for extending the mandate of the bipartisan commission that investigated the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, saying it should keep working for an additional 18 months to help ensure that its recommendations are implemented.

Does one accelerate implementation of the Commission's recommendations by sending them back to the kitchen? Of course not. That's a way to allow Congress to stall when a tough issue comes up by passing the buck to the Commission for "clarification and further review." Senator Levin's opposition to the Commission's "marquee" proposal guarantees that such issues will come up even if the White House proposes exactly what the Commission proposed. John Kerry is just attempting the hoary "death or delay by committee" skam.

And that likely indicates the real Kerry position overall.

Posted 10:56 AM by Robert Musil
Pale Image

Don Luskin notes that Atrios seems to be "Duncan Black" -- another goddam economics professor - apparently one with much too much time on his hands (Don thanks his reader Larry Mitchell for the link).

The original Duncan Black was a first-rate Scottish economist - and an underappreciated genius. In fact, as noted in a prior post, that Duncan Black was not only an underappreciated genius but was also gifted at discovering and appreciating important work of other underappreciated geniuses - including that of Lewis Carroll (Charles L. Dodgson), the author of the Alice books and other fanciful works, who made foundational contributions to the mathematics of voting that are perhaps as profound as those made by anyone, ever. Completed at a time when such matters were of urgent public interest and of paramount importance to the then rapidly evolving British political system – in the throes of a radical expansion of its voting franchise and rethinking the very basis of its democracy – Carroll’s work was, of course, entirely ignored except in the few instances in which it was dismissed with utter contempt of the kind commonly found today on the Atrios website (another remarkable coincidence!). It goes without saying that those involved in political matters in Carroll’s day did not understand the significance of even the most basic mathematical structures applicable to their field. On the other hand, the Alice books did pretty well.

As recounted in a marvelous book, Carroll’s profound work was rediscovered many years later by the original (one might say "real") Duncan Black , who explained and extended them with profundity. The "new" Duncan Black of course spends his time and effort in a different fashion.

Goes to show what's in a name.

Posted 8:43 PM by Robert Musil
The Convention Addresses
 
Jimmy Carter

Few can rival Jimmy Carter's exquisite talent for finding the mal mot, that precisely wrong thing to say and at precisely the worst time. To really possess this talent and make it part of one's self, it is not enough to be able to speak inappropriately. One must be able to identify a topic and viewpoint that does occupy the moment, an opinion that hovers in the air but which other have not addressed - and then to find just the language to express that opinion in a way that makes everybody who shares it absolutely squirm in the greatest possible discomfort. There was indeed a "crisis of confidence" when Mr. Carter noted it during one of the many low points of his presidency, and when he several days later talked of "a national malaise" nobody could doubt that one existed in the part of the nation comprising the environs of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. These irksome ideas and opinions were in "in the air" at the time - part of an unarticulated zeit geist - but it took a man of Jimmy Carter's particular caliber to express these ideas and opinions so perfectly at exactly the time the nation neither wanted or needed to hear them. Nor does Mr. Carter's talent operate only on the grand but impersonal national scale. On a more intimate level, we can be confident that Mr. Carter indeed "lusted in his heart" when he pointlessly confirmed something already presumed about the President and most other men in that 1976 interview with Playboy's Barry Golson and Robert Scheer so evocative of fingernails drawn across a blackboard.

 So who but Jimmy Carter would open a Convention set to nominate as its candidate a man married to a woman worth One Billion Dollars with the line:

[W]e need new leaders in Washington whose policies are shaped by working American families instead of the super- rich and their armies of lobbyists in Washington!

 Ah, Jimmy! Every time one hears him speak it brings back so much, so many memories. Fortunately for Senators Kerry and Edwards, it appears few voters were watching or listening last night to have those memories exhumed.

Posted 6:15 PM by Robert Musil
Pathetic ... And Bound To Lose: How Liberal Is John Kerry?

USA Today publishes a curious little box asking "How liberal is John Kerry?" and purporting to summarize the evidence pro and con (with the assumption that being a "liberal" is a very bad thing). The "pro-liberal" factors all make sense:

Evidence that he's liberal:

Supports abortion rights.

Opposes the death penalty except for terrorists.

Was one of only 14 senators who opposed the Defense of Marriage Act, which says states do not have to recognize same-sex unions performed in other states.

Is an environmentalism who threatened a filibuster to block drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska.

Called the 2001 Bush tax cuts that went mostly to the wealthy "unfair, unaffordable and unquestionably ineffective" to improve the economy.

Opposes a constitutional amendment to ban flag-burning.

Voted against authorizing the Persian Gulf War of 1991.

But things get very strange with the other column - the one labeled "On The Other Hand." Following is a reproduction of that column with notes describing Senator Kerry's relationship to the factor:

On the other hand:

Helped write the 1985 Gramm-Rudman-Hollings law to restrain federal spending. [Senator Kerry now proposes huge increases in federal spending or tax subsidies, including a massive health-care program costing at least $600 Billion over ten years. He also seems to contemplate huge tax increases - which is apparently supposed to justify his claim to being a "fiscal conservative."]

Proposed legislation to end teacher tenure, which angered teacher unions. [Senator Kerry has long utterly repudiated that position and that legislation. Today, Kerry once again espouses pure Democratic dogma on education. His Web site pledges to "stop blaming and start supporting public school educators," vowing to give them "better training and better pay, with more career opportunities, more empowerment and more mentors." It doesn't mention seniority or tenure.]

Voted in 1993 for the North American Free Trade Agreement, which unions opposed. [Senator Kerry repeated his pledge this month to review trade accords in his first 120 days as president and said he wants to change treaties so companies can't challenge environmental and health regulations. The change would limit a company's ability to sue other nations to recover lost investments. He is now alienating U.S. companies such as Harken Energy Corp. and United Parcel Service Inc. with his plans to limit their rights under international trade agreements.]

Criticized affirmative action in 1992 for fostering a culture of dependency. [Senator Kerry has long utterly repudiated this position and now fully endorses broad affirmative action.]

Supported the overhaul of welfare in 1996 that added a work component. [After being relentlessly pounded by Mr. Weld throughout the first half of 1996 for voting against two conference reports containing real welfare-reform plans in 1995, Senator Kerry reversed years of hostile opposition to welfare reform and finally supported the 1996 bill - but only in the face of losing his entire political career. His vote probably saved his political career, but was clearly inconsistent with his most deeply held beliefs. More than anything else, the need to save his political career explains why he cast that vote. John Kerry spent years fighting real reform and strongly supported Mr. Clinton when he vetoed two solid, Republican-initiated welfare-reform plans in late 1995 and early 1996. Senator Kerry revealed his aggressive hostility to welfare reform in 1988. Then-Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole introduced a "workfare" amendment. The Dole amendment would have required -- by 1994, six years later -- at least one parent in a two-parent household receiving welfare to work a minimum of 16 hours per week. By any standard of toughness, this was a very weak requirement. But it proved to be too draconian for the liberal standards of Mr. Kerry, who voted against the amendment, which passed with bipartisan support. During Senate debate, he complained that the 1988 welfare-reform bill "contains provisions troublesome to me, such as the 16-hour weekly work requirement for two-parent families." During his 1996 Senate re-election campaign Senator Kerry opposed the work requirement for two-parent welfare families because he favored work requirements for single-parent families. Having voted against the workfare amendment in 1988, Senator Kerry in 1992 opposed "learnfare," a reform that would have permitted states to withhold welfare benefits from parents whose children failed to attend school regularly. Two years later, his hostility to reform continued. In 1994 Senator Kerry introduced two amendments to a Senate welfare-reform bill that would guarantee to continue to "provide Supplemental Security Income benefits to persons who are disabled by reason of drug or alcohol abuse" despite scandals in the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program. During the 1995 welfare-reform debate, Mr. Kerry voted against the "family cap" provision, which would have prohibited states from raising a welfare recipient's cash benefits for having additional children while collecting welfare. He also voted against an amendment that would have required most able-bodied, non-elderly food-stamp recipients to work 10 hours a week. Mr. Kerry eventually voted against the 1995 welfare conference report. After fighting in 1994 for SSI benefits for crack addicts, in 1996 Mr. Kerry voted against random drug-testing programs for welfare recipients. He also opposed an amendment with bipartisan support that would deny welfare benefits to legal immigrants. In yet another vote to encourage immigrants to go on the dole, he voted to delay for two years a provision that would have denied Medicaid benefits to immigrants for five years.]

Opposed liberal positions in Senate showdowns on missile defense and procurement of F/A-18 Navy fighters. [It is true that John Kerry has voted for omnibus defense appropriations bills that contained provisions which he had actually opposed - and once opposed a particular amendment that would have cut a few F/A-18 Navy fighters. That means very little. Senator Kerry has, in fact, been a consistent opponent of most advanced weapons programs. As Joshua Muravchik noted in the Washington Post: As leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Kerry accused American soldiers of "war crimes . . . committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command." ... As a first major foreign policy cause, he championed the "nuclear freeze." ... The litany of weapons systems that Kerry opposed included conventional as well as nuclear equipment: the B-1 bomber, the B-2, the F-15, the F-14A, the F-14D, the AH-64 Apache helicopter, the AV-8B Harrier jet, the Patriot missile, the Aegis air-defense cruiser and the Trident missile. And he sought to reduce procurement of the M1 Abrams tank, the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, the Tomahawk cruise missile and the F-16 jet. ... When U.S. troops intervened in Grenada, Kerry denounced the action as "a bully's show of force." ...[H]e made himself one of the Senate's most vigorous opponents of aiding the anti-Communist contras as a means of pressuring Nicaragua's Sandinista regime. ... When Saddam Hussein swallowed up Kuwait in 1990, Kerry voted against authorizing the use of force. ... By 1995, with the death toll there estimated to have reached a quarter-million, Congress voted to end the arms embargo hamstringing the beleaguered Bosnians. Kerry was one of 29 senators who opposed this resolution. ... He now says that some of his stands against weapons systems were "stupid." And those medals he tossed away in protest, he explains, actually belonged to someone else.]

Voted to authorize the invasion of Iraq. [Senator Kerry says he didn't construe his vote as authorizing an invasion of Iraq and, in any event, didn't have correct and full information on which to base his vote. In effect he has repudiated his vote while saying he does not regret that vote at all. of course, Kerry did vote for the invasion, but he rolled out a murky explanation afterwards that he meant to only threaten military action. And, of course, he famously voted against that $87 Billion bill to finance the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan (after first voting for it).]

It is more than passing strange that Senator Kerry has a severely compromised relationship to every single one of the factor cited by USA Today to support the possibility that he is not thoroughly "liberal?"

Posted 10:50 AM by Robert Musil
Two Wall Street Journal Items
 
A front-page item in today's Wall Street Journal leads with:

As Democrats gather in Boston this week to nominate a presidential candidate, the two big issues of the 2004 campaign -- the war and the economy -- are playing out precisely the opposite way both parties expected just a few months ago.

Republicans, despite their history of scoring better on national-security issues -- and with a war president in the White House -- are now playing up the economy. Democrats, who watched their historic advantage on lunch-pail issues slip as the economy improved, are uncharacteristically turning to foreign policy to put Republicans on the defensive.

It is certainly correct that some Democrats are talking about foreign affairs and terrorism. There may even be a few Congressional districts where those considerations may make a critical difference in November, such as the one around Storrs, CT that is misleadingly selected as a good example of the national dynamic in the Journal article despite the fact that that district contains the very un-exemplary main campus of the University of Connecticut. The curious timing and make-up of the  Democratic convention has created a micro-climate having an atmosphere thick with the swamp vapors of foreign affairs. The coincidental release of the September 11 Commission report on the very eve of the Convention opening guarantees that media coverage and even the polls are paying much more attention to the the terrorism issue than will likely be the case in more than three full months. And convention delegates  and media operatives are much more focused on foreign affairs - and much more negative on the war and the incumbent's approach to foreign dealings generally - than the population, the electorate, the Democratic Party generally or even the candidates-to-be. Those skewed views further skew media coverage. Even John Kerry has recently mused publicly about possibly emulating the last time a Democrat captured the "national security" issue: John Kennedy's success in his 1960 run, a success effected only by Kennedy's exploitation of his huge "missile gap" lie.  That's quite a feat for Senator Kerry to want to emulate.  But House  Democrats, especially, who think that foreign policy considerations are likely to put them in office are in for a very rude awakening in the months ahead.

But what are the smart Democrats with some room to choose their own agendas thinking and writing about right now? Well, Senator Hillary Clinton is right over there on the today's Journal's Op-Ed page with a "think piece" about - of all things - the domestic economy. In fact, Senator Clinton is back to considering "outsourcing."

While her choice of topic is revealing, the substance of her approach is hardly worth serious consideration. She pronounces certain sectors of the American economy to be "competitive" - and concludes that they therefore require more government subsidies and assistance and attention than we had thought. 

Ah, yes. Is a sector weak? Rush in the government subsidies and assistance and attention! Is a sector more competitive than thought? Better rush in more government subsidies and assistance and attention! The Senator is nothing if not consistent. I particularly like what she calls her co-sponsored legislation to create a 10% tax cut for manufacturers. Think of that: All manufacturers would get a nice government subsidy. And who would pay for that subsidy? The Senator doesn't say - but the economy has only one other big sector: services. Services are supposed to be America's relative strength in the world economy. And the Senator wants to tax them to subsidize manufacturing. Forward, into the past!

And the Senator does not stop there. She pushes on into more advocacy of destructive government economic meddling, and informs us:

We also need a national broadband policy. It is inexcusable that the U.S. ranks 11th globally in broadband penetration per household. I have introduced legislation to enhance access for rural and underserved areas that would accelerate the transformation to a digital economy.

Yes, yes, everybody loves to have access to broadband. It's just that few want to pay what broadband actually costs, so nothing significant is going to come of the Senator's proposals, as the New York Times reports:

Presidential campaign proposals to build a national broadband network may be difficult to sell to the American public, according to a survey conducted jointly by CNET News.com and Harris Interactive.

The nationwide poll, which surveyed more than 1,000 people with Internet access, found that 72 percent of respondents support government efforts to make high-speed Internet access universally available. But backing for the activist policy has stalled on the question of who pays--and how much.

"People are in favor of many things, until you put price tags on them," said Blair Levin, a telecommunications analyst at financial firm Legg Mason Wood Walker. "As most folks in Washington want to have their cake and eat it, too, why should consumers thinking about broadband be any different?"

President Bush earlier this year called for universal broadband connections throughout the United States by 2007 and ordered federal agencies to accelerate the process of granting broadband providers access to federal land. He has also strongly advocated the extension of a ban on Internet access taxes.

Democratic challenger John Kerry also backs the idea of universal broadband access, likening it to the government's program to provide electricity to rural areas in the 1930s. Kerry proposes a 20 percent tax credit for companies investing in "next generation" broadband networks and, like Bush, supports the use of more wireless spectrum for the high-speed technology. ....

[B]y a margin of 56 percent to 44 percent, [poll respondents] opposed any government plan to directly subsidize the extension of broadband access to rural areas or for low-income citizens. Similarly, nearly 70 percent was against paying higher access fees to fund the expansion of broadband to those areas.

In this case the public is a lot wiser than Senators Clinton or Kerry. But it won't matter - her tract is only intended to be remembered as indicating her concern for the domestic economy, not to be actually understood by voters in its silly details. Senator Clinton's understanding of - and actual care about - the substantive welfare of the economy are not her strong points. She's an economic loon from that standpoint. Good grief, we're talking about someone who wanted to essentially nationalize about 1/6 of the economy.

But she is shrewed and capable of learning in her area of competence: political calculation. Today, as her Party's convention opens in a crapulous fog of foreign policy blatherings, such calculation has her writing feel-good economic buzz-words on the domestic economy in the Wall Street Journal.

The reader, in my opinion, should remember that.

Posted 8:42 AM by Robert Musil
On "Shoving It"

The Associated Press reports:

Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry doesn't have a problem with his wife telling an insistent journalist to "shove it" when urged to explain her plea for more civility in politics. Neither does Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. "I think my wife speaks her mind appropriately," Kerry told reporters.

I partially agree with Senator Kerry: His wife's comment was "appropriate" in the sense that it exactly expressed the quality of the thought behind it. Of course, her comment was grossly and obviously "uncivil" and, despite what her husband says, therefore completely inappropriate and hypocritical given the venue and the nature of the address she had just given.

But the incivility of her comment is not the most striking aspect of her behavior - that would be her sheer looniness in this event. Mrs. Kerry had told her audience "We need to turn back some of the creeping, un-Pennsylvanian and sometimes un-American traits that are coming into some of our politics." Minutes later, the Tribune-Review's Colin McNickle asked her what she meant by the term "un-American." As recorded in the video of the confrontation, she then agitatedly said "I didn't say that" several times to Mr. McNickle - quite clearly meaning that she had not said "un-American." A few minutes later she broke from a conversation she was holding with others and returned to McNickle, telling him: "You said something I didn't say. Now shove it."

But she had said it. He asked her what she meant by "un-American" and several times she denied having used that term and accused the reporter of putting words in her mouth. But she had used the term only minutes before in front of a lot of people and the videocam.

The AP also reports that Senator Hillary Clinton commented, "A lot of Americans are going to say, 'Good for you, you go, girl,' and that's certainly how I feel about it."

Somehow, despite the credibility problems of this source, I do believe that is exactly the way Senator Clinton "feels about it." But both Kerrys might not want to count Senator Clinton's feeling that way as a good thing.

Posted 10:10 PM by Robert Musil
Worn Down

There is a basic problem with the New York Times' concept of a "public editor": He has to live around all of those incredibly nasty, intellectually dishonest, determined, remorseless and ultimately ruthless and irresponsible people who staff the Times. As with a baby sitter of incredibly nasty, intellectually dishonest, determined, remorseless and ultimately ruthless and irresponsible children, the inevitable consequence to the public editor is being worn down.

Don Luskin does a wonderful job demonstrating the ghastly process in (in)action.

Posted 3:13 PM by Robert Musil
Pathetic ... And Bound To Lose XLIX: UPDATE TO: Misquoting And Not Paying Attention At The Washington Post

Another, more extensive, Kerry quote:

Democrats shifted their attention from the report's limited faultfinding to what is likely to be the next political battle: a pre-election struggle to turn the commission's extensive policy recommendations into law. Kerry issued a statement applauding plans by Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.) to write legislation based on the recommendations. "The administration and the Congress must get to work on this legislation immediately," Kerry said. Promising to convene an "emergency security summit," he added: "If I am elected president and there has still not been sufficient progress on these issues, I will not wait a single day more."

Same evasions. Still no call for Congressional "enactment" of any particular reform proposed by the Report. Same ambiguous call for others to "get to work" while he holds back on all substance until such time as he is elected president.

And we also have this:

Democrats served notice that they will try to deny Bush an opportunity to rebuild his terrorism credentials and that they will do this by fighting for more expeditious action on the recommendations -- an unusual proposition three months before the election. Former Clinton chief of staff John D. Podesta complained that GOP leaders "have promised no action on the recommendations until after the November elections." He added: "Americans deserve that this report be taken seriously and acted on without delay and with bipartisan support."

Mr. Podesta's primary loyalties are to the Clintons, and he is likely speaking for them - especially her. It is also probably no accident that he is well ahead of Senators Kerry and Edwards. It will be interesting to see what happens if the administration forces Senator Kerry's hand by actually having Congress step up before election day, as Mr. Podesta demands - and as today's reports now indicate the White House favors.

FURTHER UPDATE: More nuanced evasion from the Kerry-Edwards camp. This press release/open letter to the September 11 Commission was posted today on the Kerry-Edwards campaign website. It is designed to suggest that Senator Kerry is all for legislation enacting the Commission's recommendations (quoted extensively in the addendum):

I support the recommendations you have made for making our nation as safe as it should be. You said Thursday that we look back so that we can look forward. I agree, and I share the Commission's view that America must act now, without delay. A number of the recommendations can be implemented directly by the President, while others will require legislation. I offer my full support for immediate action and will work with you to implement the recommendations.

But a closer reading indicates that the letter/release is not such an endorsement at all. Of course, the first tip-off is that it is preposterous to expect Senator Kerry or anyone to endorse every recommendation of almost any commission reporting on a topic this complex. Yet Senator Kerry's letter/release seems to do just that - quoting and endorsing what seems to be every single Commission recommendation, right down to the Commission's semicolons. How could that be?

Well, it isn't. In fact, any suggestion that the letter/release is intended to actually bind the Senator to actually supporting enactment of the recommendations for which he says he "offer[s his]full support for immediate action and will work ... to implement" is undermined by this caveat:

Your Commission has provided an excellent roadmap to make our nation as safe as we can be and now we must work out the details in a bipartisan manner that lets us accomplish our goal of defeating the terrorists and protecting our nation.

Ah, yes. We all share the same "goal" of "defeating the terrorists and protecting our nation." But our approach to reaching those "goals" must be "bipartisan" - and on the Democratic side, that, of course, means something like the Church Committee approach that erects a wall between criminal and intelligence investigations. The Patriot Act - which is clearly endorsed by the Report's recommendations? Well, there's no real "bipartisan" support for that Act.

Work out the details in a bipartisan manner, is it? The devil here is clearly in those very details. What else could Senator Kerry mean?

In any event, the caveat that now we must work out the details in a bipartisan manner that lets us accomplish our goal of defeating the terrorists and protecting our nation is quite clearly intended to reserve Senator Kerry's right to respectfully disagree with any one of the recommendations he purports to "support."

Now that's what I call nuance.

But all the fancy, evasive, nuanced wordplay isn't likely going to hold up if Congress actually has to step up to the plate before the election. For that matter, it probably won't hold up through the first Presidential debate.

ANOTHER UPDATE:

It seems likely that once Congress is seriously pressed to act, or Bush presses the point in the debates, Senator Kerry is simply going to have to choose. He can repudiate the essence of the basic recommendations of the September 11 Report, which would be consistent with his own history and that of his wing of the Democratic Party, but will pose very obvious problems for him that he is now trying desperately to avoid with his nuancy, non-responses. Or he can embrace the basic specific recommendations of the Report, in which case the Senator is going to have to deal with alienation of his left wing, which of course is what Ralph Nader is waiting for. That is, Senator Kerry is going to have to deal with the reaction of people who write this kind of thing in The Daily Kos:

Certainly, our intelligence operations need improving. ... On the other hand, this call to do something right this instant gives me the creeps. The 9/11 Commission has, after all, recommended the broadest overhaul of U.S. intelligence in five and a half decades, one that will be with us for many decades to come. Every great change generates unintended consequences. Speedy change offers vast potential for more such consequences. For instance, one key recommendation is centralization. That could be beneficial or terrifying. ... Finally, if you're like me and took a dim view of certain aspects of the CIA and our overall intelligence operations long before the failures associated with 9/11, you'll want Congress to make any changes slowly enough that issues such as those brought up in the 1975 Church Committee report are not forgotten.

Ah, yes. The 1975 Church Committee. It certainly will be interesting to see how the recommendations of this Report - which, as noted above already encompass the Patriot Act so hated by the left and then a lot more - can be reconciled with the approach and imperatives of the Church Committee, which essentially shut down human operations in the CIA, prohibited many necessary intelligence operative dealings with "criminals," erected all of those "walls of separation" between intelligence functions and institutions, and lots, lots more to impede the connecting of dots. The 1975 Church Committee, whose leavings Senator Kerry and the entire left wing of the Democratic have embraced as sacred catechism for a very long period spanning the entirety of John Kerry's career in the Senate - and which are still no doubt as fresh and dear to him and them as a Linda Ronstadt song heard on a 1970's "Oldies" station.

None of this is intended to suggest that Mr. Bush is likely to embrace the entire set of Report recommendations. He and his senior administration representatives have been fairly clear about that, as recounted in this Associated Press report, for example:

Legislation that would carry out two of the report's recommendations will be the focus of an unusual round of hearings in August while Congress is in recess. "The 9/11 commission's recommendations will help guide our efforts," said the president. "We will carefully examine all the commission's ideas on how we can improve our ongoing efforts to protect America and to prevent another attack."

Kean, a Republican, has left no doubt what he thinks should be done, saying that unless the panel's recommendations are implemented swiftly, "we're more vulnerable to another terrorist attack." "We're in danger of just letting things slide. Time is not on our side," Kean said.

Bush has not said how quickly the administration will act. Two important administration officials, Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge and acting CIA director John McLaughlin, oppose a Cabinet-level overseer of the intelligence apparatus, saying improving the current structure is what is needed.

But "improving the current structure" through legislation tending substantially in the direction of the establishment of a Cabinet-level overseer of the intelligence apparatus, or otherwise materially advancing the recommendations of this Report, would be violently inconsistent with the 1975 Church Committee approach. Liberal foes of the Patriot Act vigorously pointed out that inconsistency in connection with that Act's passage - and the Report recommendations go much further.

And the White House seems to have figured that out.

STILL MORE EVASION: From the New York Times:

Mr. Kerry said he had skimmed parts of the report overnight and found at least two dozen proposals that could be adopted through presidential prerogative, saying, "I would act with great haste."

"If I were president today, or yesterday, I'd be appointing one person in the White House responsible for liaison with the Congress and the agencies immediately to implement immediately the vast majority of the recommendations of the 9/11 commission," he said. "I wouldn't waste a moment in order to make America as safe as it can be."

"I regret that many of these have not been put in place over the course of the last few years," Mr. Kerry added.

Whatever is that response supposed to mean? The Report's recommendations that the Senator regrets "have not been put in place over the course of the last few years" only amount to "many of these" made in the Report. But that seems to be fewer that the "vast majority of the recommendations of the 9/11 commission" that he refered to one sentence back. And his open letter to the September 11 Commission Co-Chairs wants to imply that the Senator supports all of the Report's recommendations. So does he support Congressional enactment of "many of these" recommendations, the "vast majority" of those recommendations or "all" of those recommendations?

Senator Kerry is perfectly capable of saying clearly and consistently whether he supports immediate or rapid Congressional enactment of "many" or a "vast majority" or "all" of the Report's recommendations, if that's what he believed. But whatever his various responses mean, or are supposed to mean, one should keep in mind that the Senator hasn't said that he supports Congressional enactment of "all" of the Report's recommendations, or the "vast majority" of them, or "many" of them - although his responses can be reasonably read to suggest all of those possibilities. In fact, the Senator has not said that he supports Congressional enactment of any of the Report's specific recommendations.

As noted above, there are good reasons for that straddle.

And, for the record, maybe someone can let me know how the Senator managed to write that open letter to the Commission Co-Chairs that's on his campaign website, the one listing and putatively supporting all of the Commission's recommendations, even though the Senator told the Times that he had skimmed parts of the report overnight?

He's a remarkable man, that Senator Kerry. A remarkable man.

Posted 1:49 PM by Robert Musil
Home Run For Mr. King

Washington Post columnist Colbert I. King hits a home run with a completely intelligent, down-to-earth, spin-free call on Sandy Berger's lifting of classfied documents:

At issue is not Berger's sense of injustice or embarrassment, or the gotcha game that is being played out by Republicans, or the Democratic establishment's willingness to give Berger the benefit of the doubt because he's one of their own.

The question is, was Sandy Berger's violation due to negligence -- at best -- or was it deliberate -- at worst? And should he be held accountable for his actions? Or is he too important and well-connected to be treated like everyone else? What's the answer, Washington?

Read the whole thing.

Posted 10:43 AM by Robert Musil
Pathetic ... And Bound To Lose XLVIII: Misquoting And Not Paying Attention At The Washington Post

The Washington Post reports that President Bush's embrace of the September 11 Commission Report recommendations is so complete that the administration may move for Congressional action to enact those recommendations before the election. That's all well and good. However, the Post then reports:

Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, on Thursday urged rapid action on the Sept. 11 commission's recommendations. Kerry said that if reforms are not enacted and he is elected president, he would immediately convene a security summit to push for changes.

Really? As noted here previously, John Kerry actually said:

This report carries a very simple message for all of America about the security of all Americans: We can do better. ... We must do better, and there's an urgency to our doing better. We have to act now. ... If I am elected president and there still has not been sufficient progress rapidly in these next months on these issues, then I will lead. .... Unfortunately, this administration has had an ongoing war between the State Department, the Defense Department, the White House. ... People have been at odds, everybody knows it, they'll deny it, but everybody does know. And the fact is that it has created a struggle that has delayed our ability to move forward.

Does "if I am elected president and there still has not been sufficient progress rapidly in these next months on these issues, then I will lead" mean the same thing as "if reforms are not enacted and he is elected president, he would immediately convene a security summit to push for changes?" I don't think so. But in either event, neither construction of the Senator's highly nuanced (O that word again! - one might say with more accuracy "deliberately confusing") position is that he definitely has not said that the "reforms" he will insist see "sufficient progress" are the "reforms" included in the Report.

So here's a question for the media to ask Nuancy Boy:

Senator Kerry, do you favor Congressional enactment of the main recommendations of the September 11 Commission Report, including the integration of the intelligence services under a cabinet level intelligence tsar as the Report suggests?

The problem is not just that the Senator's statement doesn't track the wording of the Post article. The Report and the Senator's stated position are, in fact, irreconcilable. The Report rejects the conclusion that the intelligence problems are attributable to the peculiarities of any particular administration. Instead, the Report stresses the need for specified legislated structural reform. But Senator Kerry says the problems addressed by the Report are attributable to an ongoing war between the State Department, the Defense Department, the White House that he will fix once he is elected. That means there is no urgent need for substantial legislative reform within the Senator's approach.

In his typical fashion the Senator grossly dilutes the Report's conclusions and specifically avoids endorsing any of its detailed recommendations: This report carries a very simple message for all of America about the security of all Americans: We can do better. ... We must do better, and there's an urgency to our doing better. But the Report has a lot more to say than that "very simple message" - and a lot of its recommendations, especially the recommendations for legislation integrating the various "walled off" intelligence services - are wholly inconsistent with the approach of liberal Democrats, including Senators Church and Kerry, for decades. The Report does not view all efforts to "do better" as equivalent as long as they possess "urgency." The Report says there are certain specified things that we must do to "do better." But the Senator doesn't say he endorses those things, and those things are certainly not consistent with his past approach or that of his liberal wing of the Democratic Party, most notably the Church Committee and its descendants.

And, just for the record, my guess is that senior White House operatives have detected the deep problems that the Report's specific legislative recommendations pose for Senator Kerry and the Democrats, and (unlike the Post) have paid attention to the Senator's evasive, nuancy non-response. And, remember, the New York Times noted that compared to the Senator, Mr. Kerry's running mate, Senator John Edwards, was more circumspect in his response to the report ... . I further speculate that the fast-tightening White House bear hug of the Report and its specific recommendations is largely a consequence of the administration's growing understanding that those recommendations pose a much bigger problem for Senator Kerry and liberal Democrats generally than they do for the White House and Republicans. That should all come to the surface pretty fast if Congress is asked to act before the election - which is exactly what the Post reports the administration (and probably Republicans in Congress) would like to see happen.

"Urgency?" Nothing in the Capitol air excites a sense of "urgency" in Congress like a heady perfume with an animal base note of election year partisan advantage concealed by a woody top note of general national need recommended by a sainted independent commisssion!

Ah! Breath it in!

UPDATE:

Posted 8:46 AM by Robert Musil
Unintended Consequences?

His mind concentrated by a close-up look at Bill Clinton's anti-trust noose, Bill Gates, long presumed non-partisan or somehow vaguely moderate-Democratic, has become a rather high-profile Republican.

And now Microsoft is reportedly selling Slate, it's non-partisan or somehow vaguely moderate-Democratic on-line magazine.

The Clintonian enforcers joining with certain Utah Republicans (home of a Microsoft competitor) argued that Microsoft's browser-dominance allowed it to control the future! The "future," at the time, was the same as the ill-considered internet boom. That "future" is now long over, leaving us with the remains of the Microsoft case (Europeans salivating at the prospect of savaging Microsoft) and the question:

When the Beltway crowd maintained their ill-considered jihad against Microsoft did they imagine they would be affecting Mickey Kaus so profoundly?

Posted 10:44 PM by Robert Musil
Berger Rejected Four Plans To Kill Or Capture Bin Laden
 
The Washington Times reports:

President Clinton's national security adviser, Samuel R. Berger, rejected four plans to kill or capture Osama bin Laden, worrying once that if the plans failed and al Qaeda launched a counterattack, "we're blamed." ....

According to the [September 11 Commission] report, the first plan of action against bin Laden presented to Mr. Berger was a briefing by CIA Director George J. Tenet on May 1, 1998. Mr. Berger took no action, the report says, because he was "focused most" on legal questions.  "[Mr. Berger] worried that the hard evidence against bin Laden was still skimpy and that there was a danger of snatching him and bringing him to the United States only to see him acquitted," the report says.     Mr. Clarke asked Mr. Berger: "Should we pre-empt by attacking [bin Laden's] facilities?" Mr. Berger decided against it, but later that year, Mr. Clinton ordered an attack on a chemical plant in Sudan that was suspected of providing bin Laden with dangerous weapons material.

Another opportunity to strike at bin Laden occurred on Dec. 4, 1999, according to the report, when Mr. Clarke suggested carrying out an attack on an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan in the last week of the year.     "In the margin next to Clarke's suggestion," the report states in a footnote, "Berger wrote, 'no.'

Finally, in August of 2000, five months before Mr. Clinton left office, Mr. Berger was told that aerial surveillance from a Predator drone suggested another opportunity to kill bin Laden.     Mr. Clarke told Mr. Berger that the imagery captured by the Predator was "truly astounding," and expressed confidence that more missions could find bin Laden. Mr. Berger, however, "worried that a Predator might be shot down, and warned Clarke that such an event would be a 'bonanza' for bin Laden and the Taliban."     "In the memo's margin," the report states, "Berger wrote that before considering action, 'I will want more than verified location: we will need, at least, data on pattern of movements to provide some assurance he will remain in place.'

The commission's report also notes a speech that Mr. Clinton gave to the Long Island Association on Feb. 15, 2002, in which — in the answer to a query from a member of the audience — he said that Sudan offered to turn over bin Laden to U.S. custody, but Mr. Clinton refused because "there was no indictment" in hand.

Mr. Clinton told the commission in April that he had "misspoken" and was never offered bin Laden.

There's more. The whole story is a grim view of the ghastly decision making process that characterized the clown show that was the Clinton administration. And the Kerry camp is already hiring these guys again!

Posted 6:02 PM by Robert Musil
More Democratic National Committee Paranoia

It is a well known device - pioneered by Mr. Gergen - for government officials to "dump" information to which they don't want the public to pay much attention on Friday afternoons.

But that doesn't stop Democrats from paranoid musings that it is all about them - whatever "it" happens to be and even when "it" is all about a Republican president:

The Democratic National Committee called the "supposed discovery" of Bush's payroll records late on Friday -- on the eve of the Democratic National Convention -- "highly questionable."

Posted 1:31 PM by Robert Musil
Pathetic ... And Bound To Lose XLVII: Comic Relief

Why does the Los Angeles Times spend good money on its ridiculous and methodologically absurd polls and on attaching Ron Brownstein's Democratic cheerleading (er, I mean "poll analysis") to them when the paper already runs a perfectly serviceable funnies pages?

The reader may recall that last month's Los Angeles Times poll showed John Kerry leading George Bush by more than 7% - a result which Karl Rove promptly pointed out was not even mathematically consistent with the details of the poll results unless Democrats had been over-sampled by more than 10%. Mr. Rove turned out to be right.

Now the Times is back with a "new" poll and mostly absurdist color commentary from Mr. Brownstein that does not even mention, never mind admit, the sampling problems of last month's poll - but which now shows Senator Kerry leading Mr. Bush by a mere 2% among registered voters. There is no mention of the party affiliation of the sampled voters, and Mr. Brownstein directly compares this month's results to last month's - all of which ought to means that the poll methodology has not been changed, unless the Times is leaving out a whopping material fact that makes Mr. Brownstein's comparisons completely misleading. But what else would be new? Mr. Brownstein's comments are discussed a bit here and here, but I want to focus on what is really the biggest news in this poll. Mr. Brownstein notes:

The poll found signs of positive trends for Bush since the June survey. The 54% who say the country is on the wrong track is down from 58% last month; the percentage that says the economy is doing well edged up from 51% last month to 55% now. But both those changes are within the survey's margin of error.

Kerry's lead has also dwindled since June. In the new survey, he leads Bush by 48% to 46% in a two-way matchup; last month he led by 7 percentage points. In a three-way contest, Kerry now draws 46%, Bush 44% and Nader 3%; last month, Kerry held a 6-percentage-point lead in this matchup.

While the media just doesn't want to address it, what we are seeing here is the glacial advance of the continuing good news for the domestic economy. Even in this preposterously biased poll, Kerry is shrinking and both the "right/wrong track" question, and its near-surrogate asking if the "economy doing well/poorly," each swung 4% in favor of the incumbent in one month. As often noted here, if the economy continues to improve, that progression will continue for the next several months leading to the November election. The accumulation of that trend would be more than enough to put Mr. Bush and his party snugly back in power.

That the Democrats and the campaign will focus on the domestic economy is further evident from the poll being just chocked-full of reasons for Senator Kerry to steer well clear of terrorism-related and "values" topics. For example, there is Mr. Brownstein's buried admission that Bush leads by 18 percentage points when voters are asked which candidate "would be best at keeping the country safe from terrorism"; he holds a 6-percentage-point advantage when voters are asked which candidate shares their moral values. Sure enough, the Senator has promised to begin to "lead" on intelligence reform and terrorism only well after he takes office, so don't bother him for terrorism "leadership" or ideas during the campaign.

Seems like he'd much rather talk about how the economy is failing voters in those "battlefield states."

Fancy that. Who would have thought such a thing?

Posted 10:35 AM by Robert Musil
Pathetic ... And Bound To Lose XLVI: Spinning And Spinning In A Widening Gyre

Frankly, one tires a bit of pointing out that the coming election will be driven by the domestic economy even as the media fusses endlessly over what sometimes seems like every nit of the War on Terror and foreign affairs (Was there another roadside bomb outside Baghdad? How about that electrifying poll of asking Americans if they "approve of torture?")

But release of the September 11 Commission counts for something worth some serious consideration - although not much new. The full Report is Brobdingnagian and willfully diffuse - but its Executive Summary is worth reading. The Democrats and their media hangers-on seem to have been a bit gobsmacked by the Report's failure to criticize the Bush administration. The Dems and their media for some unaccountable reason were counting on such criticism (did Ms. Gorelick steer them wrong?) - even to the point of arguing as late as yesterday that the disclosure of Sandy Berger's thefts of confidential documents was motivated by administration intent to "distract" the public from the Report. It would be interesting to revisit with Messrs. McAuliffe and Gergen and others who voiced such opinions to ask them now exactly what they find in the Report from which the administration wanted to "distract" the public. 

Public expressions of Democratic hope on this count seems to gush endlessly, if not spring eternal, even as their media sycophants acknowledge disappointment, as with this hilarious spin by Dan Froomkin in the Washington Post: 

It was an indictment without a defendant. Bush praised the report yesterday morning, and by afternoon was describing its recommendation as consistent with his policies. Underneath its everyone's-to-blame veneer, the report includes some weighty assertions that are potentially very damaging to the White House. The report, for instance, criticizes the concept of the "war on terror" that has been the signature issue of Bush's presidency. It concludes that what is required to defeat Islamist terrorism is something more nuanced than that. And it does not support the argument that the war on Iraq was either related to or helpful in that quest.

Does any serious person think that "underneath" this Report immediately praised and embraced by the President is a disaster for him and his administration? Such an assertion is in the same nonsense category as Linus Roache's line from The Chronicles of Riddick that "The Underverse will be reached only by those who have embraced the Necromonger faith!" One can just imagine the whoops of delight at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue if the Kerry-Edwards campaign had the temerity to repudiate the War On Terror  in favor of something "more nuanced than that." And Mr. Froomkin seems not to have carefully read the Report's language regarding Iraq and terrorism, since that language is now so complex and "nuanced" as to be essentially anodyne - almost incomprehensible. Abandoning the Commission's interim conclusion of no "collaborative relationship" the Report now finds no "collaborative operational relationship" to attack the U.S. Huh? Whatever that means, it won't make for a good bumper sticker.

On first reading the Report seems to be mostly a big criticism of liberal Democratic intelligence policies going back to the Church Committee. For example, the Report urges that the CIA, FBI and other intelligence agencies be given an common chief and otherwise more closely integrated. Could there be a more thorough repudiation of the grotesque Church Committee approach? The Wall Street Journal gets this aspect of the Report exactly right by pointing out that the Report is largely an assault on the infamous "wall of separation" between intelligence and law enforcement that was reinforced in 1995 by Clinton Deputy Attorney General (and 9/11 Commissioner) Jamie Gorelick. The Patriot Act took down that wall, and the report amounts to a rousing endorsement of that much-maligned legislation." Worse for liberal Democrats, the Report is full of recommendations for legislation running entirely against their whole philosophy of intelligence gathering.

Is the Kerry-Edwards campaign going to embrace all that? It seems to have escaped the notice of Mr. Froomkin and the liberal media generally that John Kerry and his clique have not embraced the Report, as with these comments from Senator Kerry:

This report carries a very simple message for all of America about the security of all Americans: We can do better. ... We must do better, and there's an urgency to our doing better. We have to act now. ... If I am elected president and there still has not been sufficient progress rapidly in these next months on these issues, then I will lead. .... Unfortunately, this administration has had an ongoing war between the State Department, the Defense Department, the White House. ... People have been at odds, everybody knows it, they'll deny it, but everybody does know. And the fact is that it has created a struggle that has delayed our ability to move forward.

Unlike the Commission, in the above quote Senator Kerry is clearly attempting to lay the blame for the lack of "dot connecting" on the Bush administration - not on the structure of the nation's intelligence apparatus. Senator Kerry's approach certainly deflates any imperative to seek further formal integration of the intelligence services, such as appointment of the grand intelligence chief and other urgent structural reforms suggested by the Report. In Senator Kerry's comment, all that is needed to stop the ongoing war between the State Department, the Defense Department, the White House is to elect him President. That is not at all consistent with what the Report says. It's no wonder that he intones "If I am elected president and there still has not been sufficient progress rapidly in these next months on these issues, then I will lead. From his comments, he expresses no desire to "lead" now - and certainly not to "lead" in the basic direction advocated by this Report.

To say the least, Senator Kerry's response  is well,  more nuanced than the bear hug from the White House.  But then, this Nuancy Boy seems to reserve most of his bear hugs for his cute running mate. Interestingly, as pale as Senator Kerry response to the Report has been, the New York Times reports:

Mr. Kerry's running mate, Senator John Edwards, was more circumspect in his response to the report ... Mr. Edwards praised the "bipartisan nature" of the commission's work, then called on Mr. Bush to act immediately on those recommendations that could be accomplished by executive order, and for Congress to work on the rest. "We had thousands of Americans who lost their lives on Sept. 11,'' Mr. Edwards said, "and it is very important for us, those of us in positions of responsibility, to pay the greatest tribute we can pay to them, which is to take action and reform our intelligence operations."

Essentially none of the Commission's significant recommendations can be effected by Executive Order, and Senator Edwards wants "Congress to work on the rest." He doesn't suggest that Congress actually enact the rest, mind you - or actually enact any of what the Commission wants. Just work on the rest.

And, of course, sometimes Congress just works and works and nothing gets done. I know it's hard to believe, but that sometimes just happens. Jeepers.

Posted 12:52 PM by Robert Musil
Just Amazing

After the irresponsible media orgy of accusations against the President regarding the "sixteen words" in his State of the Union address and the whole Plame/Wilson mess, this editorial from the Washington Post is so amazing that I just can't resist reproducing the whole thing - copyright or not.

So sue me.

The Sixteen Words, Again

Wednesday, July 21, 2004; Page A18


REMEMBER THE affair of "the sixteen words"? A year ago this month official Washington was convulsed by a controversy over whether President Bush had knowingly twisted the truth about Iraq to persuade the country to go to war. A former U.S. ambassador, Joseph C. Wilson IV, made that charge. As evidence he cited Mr. Bush's statement in his January 2003 State of the Union address that "the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa," a finding that seemed to support the conclusion that Iraq's nuclear weapons program was active. Mr. Wilson suggested that the White House should have known this was not true, because he himself had traveled to the African state of Niger at the request of the CIA a year before the speech and debunked the intelligence. A few days later, embarrassed by the fact that part of the evidence about Niger was a forgery, the White House said the sentence should not have been included in the president's speech.

Amid the subsequent uproar, we suggested that if Mr. Bush had indeed falsified the case for war, his offense would be a grave one -- but we cautioned that all the facts were not known. We still don't have all those facts -- and some of the investigations of them, unfortunately, will not be completed before the November election. But over the past 10 days two major official reports, by the Senate intelligence committee and a special British commission, have concluded that the claim in the "sixteen words" may, after all, have been justified. Britain's Butler report called it "well-founded"; the bipartisan Senate investigation said the conclusion was a reasonable one at least until October 2002 -- and that Mr. Wilson's report to the CIA had not changed its analysts' assessment.

What is to be learned from these findings? Not necessarily that Mr. Bush and his top aides are innocent of distorting the facts on Iraq. As we have said, we believe the record shows that they sometimes exaggerated intelligence reports that were themselves flawed. A case against Saddam Hussein could have been made without such hyperbole; by indulging in it, the Bush administration damaged its credibility and undermined support for the Iraq mission. But, as both the new reports underlined, no evidence has been presented that intelligence on Iraq was deliberately falsified for political purposes. In the intelligence community, analysts struggled to make sense of fragmentary and inconclusive reports, sometimes drawing varied and shifting conclusions. In the case of Niger, some chose to emphasize the evidence that Iraq explored the possibility of purchasing uranium. Others focused on the seemingly low probability that such a deal had been concluded or could have been carried out without detection.

Mr. Wilson chose to emphasize the latter point, that no deal was likely -- but that does not negate the one Mr. Bush made in his speech, which was that Iraq was looking for bomb material. This suggests another caution: Some of those who now fairly condemn the administration's "slam-dunk" approach to judging the intelligence about Iraq risk making the same error themselves. The failure to find significant stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons or an active nuclear program in Iraq has caused some war opponents to claim that Iraq was never much to worry about. The Niger story indicates otherwise. Like the reporting of postwar weapons investigator David Kay, it suggests that Saddam Hussein never gave up his intention to develop weapons of mass destruction and continued clandestine programs he would have accelerated when U.N. sanctions were lifted. No, the evidence is not conclusive. But neither did President Bush invent it.

Posted 12:52 PM by Robert Musil
Desperada II

What to make of Jim Fusilli's peculiar defense of Linda Ronstadt in today's OpinionJournal? What to make of a professional writer with a great many strong opinions about popular music, who purports to give us the wisdom he has garnered after seeing about a thousand rock concerts.

"Seeing" concerts? Well, yes. It is a commonplace to note that many rock concerts - apparently including the ones favored by Mr. Fusilli over the years - are designed mostly to be "seen" and not "heard." That is: the music is often not the main point. For many people attending enough of these over-amplified events makes "hearing" any music almost out of the question. The condition is sometimes known as "club disease."

Perhaps that is why Mr. Fusilli chooses his vocabulary as he does. But in that case it is odd that his article seems to argue that one should focus on Ms. Ronstadt's music, music, music. He writes: She doesn't need the kind of publicity the Las Vegas incident provided to drive her career. As a musician, she still has the goods. But Mr. Fusilli is a subtle thinker. Although he is sure that Ms. Ronstadt doesn't need the kind of publicity the Las Vegas incident provided to drive her career, he also writes that It's too early to tell whether this controversy will re-energize Ms. Ronstadt's career. Ah, the inscrutable Wild Occident of Las Vegas!

In any event, is an entertainer mostly concerned about serving the best music! to her audience who gives concerts at which, as Mr. Fusilli puts it, she had to combat not only the noise from a passing elevated subway line and motorcycles roaring toward Coney Island, but a swarm of unidentified bugs? I've heard and enjoyed many outdoor concerts at venues where railroad, traffic, aircraft and other noises were very much part of the performance environment. Those venues include Ravinia and the Hollywood Bowl. But I've never thought such concerts were mostly about the music! Live and learn.

Mr. Fusilli deems Ms. Ronstadt a pop singer extraordinaire - mostly, it seems, because she has sold a lot of records. That is not an insubstantial accomplishment on Ms. Ronstadt's part - and she should be proud of it. But modern recording and amplification technology assure a performer that success need not depend on the quality of one's singing or voice. And Ms. Ronstadt - to her credit - has taken full advantage of such technology. But if pop singer extraordinaire is supposed to mean more than good, lifetime record sales, Ms. Ronstadt cannot be counted in the first rank. To really get a sense of what these modern marvels can do, it's worth watching (and that is the right word) a recording session of someone like Paul Simon, a man with no detectable singing gift whatsoever - but who has commendably sold a very large number of records. Of course, Mr. Simon's records are mostly of songs he has written himself - a claim which Ms. Ronstadt cannot hope to aspire, just in case Mr. Fusilli uses pop singer extraordinaire as having anything to do with the ability to compose a popular song. But Ms. Ronstadt sounds good in her recordings and good enough on stage. Indeed, the ordinary reader would likely be amazed what modern recording and amplification technology can do for the reader's own voice.

But the fact is that Linda Ronstadt has always been notoriously dependent on amplification and heavy engineering to make her musical points. When she is heard unamplified and unengineered the reviews generally have this cast, regardless of whether she is warbling pop or folk or opera

The fault was Ronstadt's. Her voice seemed small and uncertain, and she was unable to move from her strong, rock­belter's low register to her silvery high notes without shifting gears awkwardly in her uncertain middle range, where most of Mimi's singing is done. It seems doubtful that her deficiencies are readily curable.

Mr. Fusilli also oddly associates Ms. Ronstadt with a song canon for which she is not known - a canon of first-rate songs not one of which she has ever made a popular hit:

Mexican songs  ... the great American songbook ... Gershwins' "Someone to Watch Over Me," Billy Strayhorn's "Lush Life" ... Cole Porter's "Get Out of Town"  ... Frank Loesser's "Never Will I Marry."

Yes, Ms. Ronstadt has covered a lot of recording turf over the last several decades. But these are not the songs that made Ms. Ronstadt's career or her pop singer record sales extraordinaire. Her well-known greatest hits were pleasant but distinctly second-rate musical offerings which are still available: here and here and here. As the saying goes, they are liked by their friends. Ms. Ronstadt recognizes her "greatest hits" - it's no accident she dedicated "Desperado" to Mr. Moore, not "Night and Day."

But perhaps wierdest of all is Mr. Fusilli's treatment of Ms. Ronstadt's introduction of her unwelcomed political material as just one more example of how she sprinkles a teensy bit of left-leaning politics onto the tail end of her shows, did so on Saturday night at the Aladdin Casino and Resort in Las Vegas. His implication seems to be that the audience should have known that she would "sprinkle" her politics as she did. Strange, then, that so many of them paid to be offended and claimed they didn't expect to be "sprinkled" at all. Also strange that Aladdin management says they didn't expect to be "sprinkled" by Ms. Ronstadt.

The Aladdin in fact seems to have experienced Ms. Ronstadt's event as a lot more like the shit hitting the fan than a sprinkle.

Posted 11:03 AM by Robert Musil
Considering The Archivists
 
Sandy Berger's apparent theft of confidential government documents seems to have been caught by alert and surprisingly clever employees of the National Archives, not agents of the FBI or any other intelligence service. That all seems to have happened in the last quarter of 2003, with the resulting investigation still ongoing.  Who are these archivists who caught the Great Slippery One? I don't know anything about them.

But it is possibly interesting that back in April of this year the President's "sudden" appointment of Allen Weinstein as the Archivist of the United States - replacing John Carlin, who was appointed by Bill Clinton in 1995 - produced quite a kerfuffle for the filling of such an apparently obscure, technical position.  Although he has tendered a resignation latter, John Carlin remains the Archivist of the United States.

Although Professor Weinstein has worked closely with the Senate in the past, there were many paranoid-flavored chatterings on the left about his facilitating "excessive secrecy," the coming release of the Presidential papers of George H. W. Bush (there is a 12 year cooling off period before such release, which is soon ending), even characterizations of this highly qualified and distinguished man as a "Zionist insider" in the thrall of Israel(!), and so on ... and on ... and on. 

Indeed, the resulting kerfuffle was so substantial that one can recall asking one's self at the time: Is somebody stirring this up? Why would anybody do something like that?

Why indeed!

Posted 12:14 AM by Robert Musil
If Only ... V

Deeper and deeper goes Mr. Berger. The Washington Post reports:

The government source said the Archives employees were deferential toward Berger, given his prominence, but were worried when he returned to view more documents on Oct. 2. They devised a coding system and marked the documents they knew Berger was interested in canvassing, and watched him carefully. They knew he was interested in all the versions of the millennium review, some of which bore handwritten notes from Clinton-era officials who had reviewed them. At one point an Archives employee even handed Berger a coded draft and asked whether he was sure he had seen it.

At the end of the day, Archives employees determined that that draft and all four or five other versions of the millennium memo had disappeared from the files, this source said.

This source and another government official said that archivists gave Berger use of a special room for reviewing the documents. He was examining the documents to recommend to the Bush administration which papers should be released to the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Archives spokeswoman Susan Cooper said that employees closely monitor anyone cleared to review classified presidential materials.

If this is true, it's no wonder that the Kerry campaign and Democratic-leaning media representatives have been panicked.

UPDATE: Maybe there's something to be said for the Kausfiles' observation that although the Kerry campaign is saying they didn't know about the Berger investigation until a few days ago, the Big Me says he had better sources but didn't let on to his party's presumptive nominee:

Clinton said he has known about the federal probe of Berger's actions for several months, calling this week's news a "nonstory."

And did Senator Clinton also know and not tell? How big was the Clintonian conspiracy of silence against Senator Kerry? On the other hand, who would still be so foolish as to believe Bill Clinton about anything?

Posted 5:36 PM by Robert Musil
If Only ... IV

Tom Maguire reminds us of one of the many instances in which Sandy Berger has lied about his role in anti-terrorism, seriously and with malicious intent, to the media and Congress.

Maybe it's that reputation and his reported failure to inform them that he was under FBI investigation that has the Kerry campaign operatives so on edge, despite his bland assurances. And maybe that is what has much of the Democratic-biased media bordering on open panic.

Sandy Berger is just asking for their trust, again.
No wonder they're nervous.
Sandy's just asking them to go to battle for him, again.
No wonder they've panicked.
To mix quotations from the Bard's works, Sandy Berger is just asking the Democrats and the liberal media to go once more into the breach for the sake of TIME's fool!
"Come on, boys," the sergeant said, "Do you want to live forever!!"

Posted 10:57 AM by Robert Musil
Desperada

There exists a curious, hackneyed ploy used by some fading entertainers to stir up controversy and, they hope, breath a bit of new life into failing careers: (1) The entertainers introduce unadvertised, controversial material - usually of a political and/or sexual nature - into their dated  performances. (2) Some people in the audience raise a fuss. (3) The fading entertainer and his/her supporters fuss back, crying "censorship," "artistic freedom" and the like. The resulting media fuss is supposed to provide the career lift.

Linda Ronstadt is the latest cantante desperada to avail herself of this device - but the trick has been around for many, many years. In fact, the trick has been around for more years even than Linda Ronstadt has been around, and that's a long time - we're talking about someone here who shared a safari tent with Jerry Brown in the 1970's. The Las Vegas Aladdin casino recently fired the plump, pop diva following a concert during which she lovingly dedicated the song "Desperado" to Michael Moore, producer of "Fahrenheit 9/11," causing the room to "erupt" into boos and cheers and making hundreds of angry people stream from the theater, some of them reportedly defacing posters of her in the lobby, writing comments and tossing drinks on her pictures.

The New York Times predictably gets it all wrong:

[Ejecting Ms. Ronstadt] from the premises ... assumes that Ms. Ronstadt had no right to express a political opinion from the stage. It implies - for some members of the audience at least - that there is a philosophical contract that says an artist must entertain an audience only in the ways that audience sees fit. It argues, in fact, that an artist like Ms. Ronstadt does not have the same rights as everyone else.

Perhaps her praise for Mr. Moore, even at the very end of her show, did ruin the performance for some people. They have a right to voice their disapproval - to express their opinion as Ms. Ronstadt expressed hers and to ask for a refund. But if their intemperate behavior began to worry the management, then they were the ones who should have been thrown out and told never to return, not Ms. Ronstadt, who threatened, after all, only to sing.

The Times is utterly wrong because the significant issue raised by Ms. Ronstadt's ploy is consumer protection for the audience - not the right of an artist to freedom of expression. The Aladdin  didn't advertise Ms. Ronstadt's concert as having political content - it was billed as a concert of her old songs,  her "greatest hits." In fact, Ms. Ronstadt took strong issue from the stage even with that  advertising, criticizing it as misleading. She suggested that the Aladdin was therefore remiss for misrepresenting her performance to the audience. But she was much more guilty of misleading her audience and her employer.

In short, it is not the case that her dismissal implies - for some members of the audience at least - that there is a philosophical contract that says an artist must entertain an audience only in the ways that audience sees fit. Rather, it implies - for every member of the audience - that there is a contract that says an artist must entertain an audience only in the ways that the artist and her employer have led the audience to believe will be the case. And that contract is a good thing.

Given the advertising for her show and her own agreement with her employer, those who chose to spend their time and money on Ms. Ronstadt rather than on her competitors on the strip - that is, the audience and the Aladdin - had a perfect right at showtime to expect an aging chanteuse who was never of quite the first rank warble a series of songs not of quite the first rank, interspersed by innocuous, nostalgic banter for the 1970's. Such is the standard nature of the Las Vegas show of the likes of which Ms. Ronstadt has now descended to pay for her mortgage and walking around money, and such was the message the advertising conveyed to her public.

If Ms. Ronstadt had desired to present a political show at the Aladdin she could have informed her employer of that fact. The Aladdin would then have had the opportunity to modify its advertising to note that Ms. Ronstadt would be expressing controversial - even flakey - political views. She chose not to do any of that.

Suppose Ms. Ronstadt had elected to express herself on that same stage by removing her clothing or, to cite another Vegas example, biting the ear off someone she didn't care for. Would any sensible person argue that she was within her rights to present her plump, old, naked body to that audience or that she had her right (like any other pooch) to "one bite" - or that the audience's resulting expression of outrage amounting only to "defacement" of her misleading posters and cat calls was so "intemperate" as to spare the performer all blame or make her less blameful than the audience? Of course not.

Moreover, the Times criticism of the audience is particularly off base since it is well known that Las Vegas audiences are generally drunk. They are supposed to be or get drunk - or nearly so. The casinos make their money by selling them drinks - lots of drinks - and that drink money helps pay Ms. Ronstadt's fee. And she knows all that and so does the Times. To demand as the Times implicitly does that an audience which the casino has deliberately made drunk behave as if they were all soberly sitting in some airless newsroom in mid-town Manhattan is grotesque. Ms. Ronstadt's use of her ploy on an audience she knows perfectly well is largely intoxicated makes her judgment all the worse.

But the Times judgment is even worse.

Posted 4:51 PM by Robert Musil
If Only ... III

More unfounded insinuations, as the Associated Press fusses:
 
Word of the Berger investigation comes a week before Kerry's convention and two days before the commission releases its report into the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, which could prove politically damaging for President Bush.

Note that the AP writer doesn't offer a jot of evidence that the final report will prove politically damaging for President Bush. Indeed, most of the Commission's activities and conclusions have already been pretty well vetted in public, so it's hard to see how it's final report is likely to change much of anything. For example, the Commission's final report reportedly won't declare that the September 11 attacks were "preventable" - and whatever that means it doesn't sound too bad for Mr. Bush. But the complete absence of facts and likelihoods seldom stops a frustrated leftish reporter on the make!

Further, the Kerry campaign is saying that Mr. Berger never told them about his problems. If that's true, it's hard to see how Mr. Berger's problem is going to be a major problem for Senator Kerry or a distraction from the convention. But the proximity of the Democratic convention does have the potential of swamping the news of the Berger pilferage - to the extent anyone outside the Beltway is paying attention at this time of year at all. And if the timing of the "word" of the Berger misdeeds is supposed to be keyed to the Democratic convention by nasty but nameless administration operatives, why not drop the "word" during the convention to achieve the maximum distraction from Senator Kerry's big moment? For that matter, there is clearly more than enough evidence to indict Mr. Berger, and any trial at which he might attempt a rebuttal would be held well after the November election. So why didn't the administration sit on the whole story and bring an indictment against Mr. Berger in, say, late October - or in early October to preserve appearances? The administration could always plead "national security" for not saying anything earlier.

Wow! If this is already coming from the AP, I can hardly wait for the paranoid explosion this whole affair is almost certain to produce under the gnomish dome of Herr Doktorprofessor Paul Von Krugman and in the skittery brain of Maureen ("Big Mo") Dowd! Clear the decks!

UPDATE: The New York Times is reporting:

Mr. Berger's mishandling of the documents, which were related to terrorism and which he took from the National Archives in preparation for his testimony before the 9/11 commission, seemed today to become a bigger problem for the Kerry campaign almost by the hour — and at the worst possible time, as Mr. Kerry is hoping to gain a big lift by next week's Democratic National Convention in Boston.

Yes, Senator Gordon Smith, Republican of Oregon, called on the Kerry campaign to "immediately disavow any connection with Sandy Berger" and turn over any documents supplied by Mr. Berger, and that "Right after the documents were taken, John Kerry held a photo op and attacked the president on port security. The documents that were taken may have been utilized for that press conference."

But how could Senator's Smith's suggestion have anything to it if the purloined materials were what Mr. Berger says they were: Copies of drafts still in the record - or not materially diferent from drafts still in the National Archives? The near-panic evident in the Times article (the hyper-partisan David Stout and Mark Glassman are the reporters) seems to go far beyond fear of any consequence just emanating from Mr. Berger's being an informal Kerry campaign advisor. Why the Times reported only days ago that the Kerry campaign circle of advisers has swollen to include unweildy thousands. Justification of the reporters's anxiety seems to all but require that Mr. Berger's description of his own acts and his connection with the Kerry-Edwards campaign are untrue and that the reality is much worse.

Why would Messrs. Stout and Glassman be having such anxieties? After all, a spokesman for the September 11 Commission, Al Felzenberg, says that Mr. Berger's actions would have no effect on the work of the Commission, which Mr. Felzenberg said had had access to all the materials it needed. Could Messrs. Stout and Glassman be worried because Sandy Berger often lies and the truth is often much worse for him than he says? Or could their anxiety be related to the fact that they also report that Mr. Berger's lawyer says it took him a full week to return some of the documents and notes that he eventually did return to the Archives (some have not been returned) after being caught (er, I mean "contacted") by the Archives and/or the FBI?

Posted 2:15 PM by Robert Musil
Slow Dancin' In The Big City 

One of the more curious aspects of Sandy Berger's self-admitted lifting of classified documents is that the investigation of his acts has been pending since last October, yet government and congressional officials said no decision has been made on whether Berger should face criminal charges.
 
Really? Eight months is not enough time to make such a decision - or interview the culprit (look what an interview did to Martha Stewart) - or even convene a grand jury that might assist in the investigation? That's pretty slow dancing on the part of a Justice Department that much of the leftish media has been eager to suggest uses federal investigations to intimidate its opponents. Herr Doktorprofessor Paul Von Krugman, for example, is often very keen  to read insidious political intent into the relative speed of investigations, as he did in connection with Richard Clarke's likely perjury before Congress and Paul O'Neill's own retention of government documents: 
 

Senator Bill Frist's suggestion that Mr. Clarke might be charged with perjury may have been his own idea. But his move reminded everyone of the White House's reaction to revelations by the former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill: an immediate investigation into whether he had revealed classified information. The alacrity with which this investigation was opened was, of course, in sharp contrast with the administration's evident lack of interest in finding out who leaked the identity of the C.I.A. operative Valerie Plame to Bob Novak.

  
Of course, we now know that the administration was quite right not to take the bait by charging out with an aggressive investigation of who leaked the identity of Ms. Plame to Bob Novak, since her husband was lying all along about her involvement with his Niger mission - with her knowledge and aquiescence.

But consider Herr Doktorprofessor's line of reasoning on its own terms. If there is anything to what he writes, isn't the administration's long lassitude in the investigation of the very guilty-looking Mr. Berger suggestive of anything but an inclination to persecute political foes? Indeed, the administration didn't even bring this matter up when Mr. Berger testified before the Senate or the September 11 Commission.
 
Perhaps the paul Krugman's of the world will want to suggest that the administration held the investigation as a Sword of Damocles over Mr. Berger's head, to pervert his sworn testimony. That would make for an interesting show, since the crime of suborning a person's perjury  is serious, and generally requires that the person actually commit the perjury.
 
Mr. Berger? Mr. Berger? Are you listening, Mr. Berger?

Posted 11:26 AM by Robert Musil
What They're Hearing
 
GOP pollster Bill McInturff presented his thoughts and polls to the Republican Governors Association in the form of a Public Opinion Strategies survey showing more impact on voters from John Kerry's message of middle-class squeeze than from President Bush's message of improved economic performance.

That probably won't last. But some Public Opinion Strategies material is available here, and it's interesting.

Posted 10:20 AM by Robert Musil
If Only ... II

As the night follows the day, Democratic and media insinuations that the reports of Sandy Berger's theft of classified documents are "politically motivated" have followed those reports:

Former Clinton aide David Gergen, who worked with Berger in the White House, was interviewed on NBC's "Today" show Tuesday and said of Berger's actions, "I think it's more innocent than it looks."  Gergen said Berger was not attempting to remove anything critical of the Clinton administration.  .... "I have known Sandy Berger for a long time," he said. "He would never do anything to compromise the security of the United States."  Gergen also said he found it "suspicious" that news of the investigation should surface just at the Sept. 11 commission is about release its report.

Is stuffing highly classified documents from a secure area in one's socks and then destroying them "more innocent than it looks?" How could it not be?
 
But what of Mr. Gergen's "suspicious" insinuation? Is the timing "suspicious?" If the reports of Mr. Berger's theft had surfaced at any other time since last October, when the  investigation of Mr. Berger's theft began, there would have been some event or hearing in the immediate future that could have been cited as "suspicious." Senate Committee hearings? September 11 commission hearings? Release of September 11 commission preliminary draft? Release of Senate Committee report? Richard Clarke's book release fuss? Abu Graibe? Iraq government turnover? Various Democratic primaries? Senator Kerry's acknowledgment that Mr. Berger is his campaign advisor?  One could go on and on.
 
Can the reader think of a substantial period of time since October which has not been at least as politically charged as the present moment? In fact, we are now in the summer dolldrums during which the public is widely regarded as paying no attention whatsoever to political news. Late July and August are generally periods in which politicians try to "dump" information they want to have minimal effect. Further, the conclusions and contents of the final September 11  Commission report have been pretty much know for some time - the final, formal release of that report is hardly a very significant moment. The timing is anything but "suspicious."
 
Mr. Gergen knows all that. In fact, he was one of the pioneers at exploiting such devices of information release manipulation. But that doesn't stop him from dropping his uninformed insinuations.
 

Posted 9:15 AM by Robert Musil
Again, Why Martha?
 
The Man Without Qualities generally views the case against Martha Stewart as unwarranted, unnecessary and weak  - far too weak to have supported her conviction. Setting aside the jury verdict is another thing entirely. I am suggesting here that a reasonably jury should not have convicted her, not that the jury's decision was reversible and wrong as a matter of law. So Ms. Stewart may be stuck, and that's probably not a "good thing" for anyone - including the American economy and society.   This Wall Street Journal op-ed by George Melloan does a fine job of summarizing the excesses of the Stewart prosecution and putting the whole mess in a larger, wealth-destroying, context.
 
But it is also worth asking, and not rhetorically: Why Martha Stewart? That is, why did the Justice Department choose to go after this woman so viciously when so many other more serious, high-profile cases against celebrities end much more modestly? (Remember Mr. Gutfreund? He who manipulated much of the entire United States Treasury securities market? He who received a slap on the wrist compared to Ms. Stewart?) This is after all a woman whose life is, whatever her personal faults, an exemplary American success story in many ways. Why her for less than $50K?
 
Since Ms. Stewart has just been sentenced, and is therefore much in the news, I re-post a possible explanation that appeared here before:

The case against Ms. Stewart is, to my eye, emerging as so weak that again one must ask the question: Why is the Justice Department prosecuting Martha Stewart?I do not mean that question as a rhetorical device or one with an obvious answer ("They shouldn't."). No. I suspect there is more here. Namely, I suspect that the SEC and the Justice Department are aware of many other incidents in which Ms. Stewart is strongly suspected to have committed federal securities crimes - but the authorities can't prove those crimes, either. I suspect this because it is more than passing strange that a brilliant, successful, politically-connected businesswoman such as Ms. Stewart - who is so admirable in so many ways, despite the carpings of her rather obviously envious detractors - should be the focus of such strenuous enforcement efforts for her first offense, especially where that offense netted her so little money and civil and business penalties (loss of her NYSE seat, fall of her own company's stock price, high civil fines, bad publicity, etc) have already been so serious. What's going on?

A similar question was raised by the prosecution and conviction of Wynona Ryder for shoplifting at Saks Fifth Avenue in Beverly Hills. Wouldn't it have been enough for the police to confront her and warn her and for Saks to have made her pay trans-full-retail prices for the stolen merchandise - maybe obtain her contribution of a largish sum to some charity and her agreement to do some community service? All without actually prosecuting or arresting her?

Well, yes - for a first offender. Say what one will about the need to make examples of the successful, the fact is that if the Beverly Hills incident had been her first offense Ms. Ryder probably would not have been prosecuted. Neither Saks nor the district attorney would have wanted that.

But it likely wasn't Ms. Ryder's first offense: Transcripts made public after the trial disclosed that Ryder was suspected of shoplifting from two other high-end department stores in the past, but no charges were filed. Prosecutors were not allowed to present those allegations during the trial. Yes, prosecutors were not allowed to present those allegations during the trial - but those earlier incidents almost certainly affected the exercise of discretion on the part of both the prosecutors and Saks to press forward with charges against Ms. Ryder.

Similarly, my guess is that Ms. Stewart has long inhabited that peculiar Park Avenue demi-monde in which insider stock tips are traded at parties like the names of new hot boutiques. It would be interesting to see the SEC's and DOJ's files on Ms. Stewart. How many past incidents have terminated with a personal belief on the investigator's part that Ms. Stewart broke the law, but with no action other than a memo to files to "watch" her in the future? If Ms. Stewart has such files, it would be a rare member of Congress who would act vigorously on her behalf. In any event, the "watching" has now ended in legal action.

I am not convinced that the above argument completely explains the apparent excesses of the SEC and the Justice Department - even assuming the speculation on which the argument is based is correct. But the argument does help make what seems to be a completely bizarre set of official decisions make at least some, partial sense.

Posted 9:47 PM by Robert Musil
If Only ...
 
... the Justice Department has the guts to charge the pathologically lying and hugely destructive Sandy Berger with the federal felonies he almost certainly has committed when he lifted and probably destroyed highly confidential documents.
 
One can only hope. It seems Mr. Berger removed the highly classified terrorism documents and handwritten notes from a secure reading room during preparations for the Sept. 11 commission hearings.  Mr. Berger's home and office were searched earlier this year by the FBI with warrants after he "voluntarily" returned documents to the National Archives - once National Archives employees told FBI agents that the Archives employees saw Berger place missing documents in his clothing. Some drafts of a sensitive after-action report on the Clinton administration's handling of al-Qaida terror threats during the December 1999 millennium celebration are still missing - and Berger may have lost or destroyed them. That memo was prepared under Mr. Berger's direction by none other than Richard Clarke. Both men have subsequently grossly misrepresented their handling of al-Qaida, especially to the media and also to Congress. Reports are that the Archives is believed to have copies of some - but not all - of the documents believed to have been purloined by Mr. Berger. 
 
But perhaps the Justice Department is too busy with pressing its pointless, wildly excessive persecution of Martha Stewart to be bothered with prosecuting Mr. Berger's felonies.

UPDATE:

Berger and his lawyer said Monday night he knowingly removed the handwritten notes by placing them in his jacket, pants and socks, and also inadvertently took copies of actual classified documents in a leather portfolio.

Yes, yes. Another one of those stories. Many people innocently walk out of secured areas with highly classified documents stuffed in their socks - and then "lose" them. Yep. Happens innocently all the time. Like the girl who got pregnant from swimming in the municipal pool.

Posted 5:13 PM by Robert Musil
Love and Let Love: The New Richard Epstein, The One From From The University Of Stepford

Richard Epstein, a professor of law at the University of Chicago and a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution, has made many brilliant contributions to legal theory generally and federal constitutional law, in particular. As do his contributions to the importance of property rights and the "takings clause" of the Fifth Amendment, his work has often succeeded by demonstrating that "libertarian" principles widely dismissed as mere recent ahistoric innovations (sometimes from Ayn Rand, God help us!), or internally incoherent, or somehow superseded or simply irrelevant, are, in fact, historically, textually and precedentially grounded, coherent and consistent to the point of necessity, and central to current controversies. But Live and Let Live, Professor Epstein's recent contribution in the Wall Street Journal to the same-sex marriage debate, does not come close to succeeding, except as a cautionary example of how even the most accomplished people can lose their way in this treacherous terrain.

Professor Epstein's huge analytic problems are evident just from the utter absence of the word "child," or any derivative of equivalent of that word, in his entire opus. Yet, the traditional family - and therefore marriage - is entirely constructed from the foundation of accommodating and fostering children. Unlike the version of Professor Epstein manifested in this uncharacteristically shallow effort of his, I do not pretend to have the correct answers to "same sex marriage" questions  - or even to the questions of how "same sex marriage" relates to libertarian principles.
 
But I do know that those answers are most certainly not going to be forthcoming unless the correct questions are asked and the correct issues are spotted. Questions and issues relating to children have always been an inconvenient element of sex, and they remain as inconvenient for the over-intellectualized libertarian law school professor as they have always been for the over-eroticized high school football quarterback. But any such professor or quarterback who attempts to ignore those questions and issues is in for some very messy surprises a little later in life.
 
The fact is that marriage is not even close to being a two-person game or contract or institution or anything else on wants to call this sui-generis structure - children make sure of that. And the necessary consideration of those small but inconvenient actors makes Professor Epstein's failure to even mention them in attempting a libertarian analysis more than passing strange, and ultimately as intellectually irrelevant as any analysis that completely ignores the foundation of the institution under consideration.
 
The failure of Professor Epstein's analysis to recognize that marriage cannot be dealt with meaningfully as a two-party affair is even stranger given the fact that he has been a particularly pointed and eloquent critic of those pseudo-libertarian analyses of abortion rights that fail to acknowledge that at some point the fetus must be considered, and that the resulting third-party considerations change matters completely. For example, Professor Epstein, called [Richard A. Epstein, "Substantive Due Process by Any Other Name: The Abortion Cases," in Philip B. Kurland et al., The Supreme Court Review, 1973, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974): 184.] the Supreme Court's stand on fetal viability "astonishing," pointing out that Roe v. Wade placed no meaningful barrier against abortion even after viability:

... the Court holds that the state is entitled, but not required, to protect its, the unborn child's, interest. The reason for the entitlement is that the fetus is now capable of an independent life outside the mother. But the problem is, why should not the claims of the fetus [between viability and birth] be sufficiently strong to require, and not merely to permit, the state to intervene for its protection? After the Court expressed such firm views on the proper balance [between the claims of the woman against those of the fetus] until the onset of viability, it gave no explanation why the state must be allowed to make its own choice after that time."

Professor Epstein's old critique of the Court's abortion rulings is clearly correct. Much of the Court's effort to craft a constitutional law of abortion has been utterly incoherent exactly because at some point before birth the "fetus" clearly become one of those inconvenient "children" who render any attempt to approach the matter as an exercise of two-party libertarian principles pointless.

Similarly, any effort - such as Professor Epstein's new one in the Wall Street Journal  - to analyze the institution of marriage while ignoring that its foundations lie in the accommodation of children is also just as doomed to incoherence, simply because any such analysis will necessarily fail to ask the right questions or identify the right issues - or even identify where one might look to find those questions and issues.

And if the reader wanted any further evidence of just how badly off track Professor Epstein has caroomed, it is worth meditating for an entire minute on the following question:

Does the reader really think that the legal prohibition on marriage between a human and a dog has ever had anything whatsoever to do with Professor Epstein's assertion that "people and poodles can't tie the knot because one half in the relationship (some would say the better half) lacks the capacity to enter into a contract"?

That quip may make for a clever joke around the law faculty lunchroom dining table. But it's presence in what Professor Epstein presents in the Wall Street Journal as a serious attempt to apply (or at least to outline an application of) libertarian principles to same-sex marriage is a hideous personal and intellectual embarrassment. Unfortunately, Professor Epstein is correct to include the quip here as a serious observation - exactly because it follows from and exists on precisely the same intellectual level as his entire argument.

Which is sad. And very strange. Sad and strange enough to make one wonder if that's still really Richard Epstein sitting in the elegant Eero Saarinen glass pavilion out on the Chicago Midway - or is it a fancy simulacrum that sounds and looks the same, but without the intellectual combativeness, substance and soul of the original. Perhaps all that was lost in a misquided quest to "live and let live" or "love and let love" in late middle age?

Posted 12:19 PM by Robert Musil
Separated At Birth ... Or Just At The Lobes?
 
Maureen Dowd on Teresa Heinz Kerry:
 

After watching Mrs. Kerry in action at last month's Hollywood fund-raiser featuring Barbra Streisand and other glitteries, when she gave her whispery Out-of-Africa autobiographical riff as the candidate waited patiently, entertainment liberals are nervous about how she will handle her unusual spousal star turn in a prime-time speaking slot at the convention.

Even in a place where everyone is constantly reinventing, people are a little stunned at the way Teresa casts herself as a "third worlder" and "daughter of Africa," a wretched-refuse-of-your-teeming-shore sort of immigrant rather than a "White Mischief" émigré, the daughter of a prosperous Portuguese doctor in colonial Mozambique who met John Heinz when they were studying in Switzerland. When Mrs. Kerry presents herself as an African-American or says, "I'm an immigrant, too," and when her son Chris Heinz says he's looking forward to the day when there is a "first-generation American" in the White House, it doesn't always strike the empathetic chord with Hispanic and black audiences that the campaign hopes for.
 
Some Hollywood contributors want to censor any Teresa tidbits, including any mention of her nickname among some in the Kerry circle — "the Stepmoney." Others sanguinely say she's showing some improvement, not talking about her first husband as much as she used to.

 

 The Smoking Gun on Martha Stewart:

In opposing Martha Stewart's bid for leniency, federal prosecutors scoffed at the multimillionaire's claim that her record of community service and charity was so extraordinary that she deserved to be rewarded with less prison time. While Stewart's own presentencing memo was submitted under seal, details from that document are contained in a memo filed by Manhattan federal prosecutors who--gleefully, it seems--pointed to some of the, um, charitable acts claimed by Stewart. The convicted felon, 62, "greeted new neighbors with freshly baked bread" and "gave cocoa to the parents of children appearing on her television show." And then there was the time she "consoled a friend whose father died the same day as the verdict in this case." And who could forget how she complimented staff members at lunch, barbecues, and Passover seders. Also, while visiting Peru, she even "took underprivileged children to Machu Picchu." Prosecutors also termed Stewart's claim that her charitable donations were significant as "specious," pointing to paltry contributions listed on her personal tax returns (though exact numbers were redacted from the government memo, an excerpt of which you'll find below). On a related note, we're waiting to find out the names of those "industry leaders, journalists, and even royalty" who wrote character reference letters on behalf of Stewart and codefendant Peter Bacanovic. Click here to read the strange little letter Stewart herself wrote yesterday to Judge Miriam Cedarbaum. (5 pages)

With respect to Senator Kerry's wife, Big Mo also writes that you never know what the lovely but strange Mrs. Kerry will blurt out. But that's not true at all. We need only look to Martha Stewart - one of Hillary Clinton's best buds and contributors, by the way! - for guidance.  Mrs. Kerry and Ms. Stewart both say the kinds of things ultra-rich, detached, narcissistic people have been saying at least since Marie Antoinette served her own  sweet "tidbits" to all those revolting peasants.

Posted 11:27 AM by Robert Musil
Partial Awareness
 
The first signs that the mainstream media are beginning to understand that this election is probably going to be about the domestic economy - not foreign affairs - are beginning to appear.  Not too surprisingly, those signs correspond with a simultaneous dawning of an understanding that this is not good news for the media's favored Democrats and that the higher reaches of the Democratic Party understand that they have a big problem on their hands. The Associated Press breathlessly reports:
 

Democrats John Kerry and John Edwards are gambling that there is enough lingering uneasiness about pocketbook issues that their message about a struggling economy and loss of jobs will resonate despite rising public optimism. 
 
"It's the best issue they've got, especially in some of the swing states," said Democratic consultant Dane Strother.

When it comes to voters' anxiety about the economy, this election year is a far cry from 1980, when Ronald Reagan (news - web sites) famously asked: "Are you better off today than you were four years ago?"

Nor does 2004 measure up to 1992, when Bill Clinton (news - web sites)'s team summed up the campaign's theme with the memorable phrase: "It's the economy, stupid."

Kerry and Edwards have a bigger selling job than Reagan had in 1980 when he defeated President Carter or Clinton had in 1992 when he beat the first President Bush (news - web sites).

In June 1980, three-fourths of Americans disapproved of Carter's handling of the economy at a time of rising inflation and little growth.

In June 1992, three-fourths disapproved of the elder Bush's economic performance when the economy was just starting to revive.

An AP-Ipsos poll this month found that voters were about evenly divided about the current president's handling of the economy, with 49 percent approving and 50 percent disapproving. Also, consumer confidence has been on the rise.

 
Yes, indeed, and that 49-50 split is a November disaster-in-the-making for Democrats. For some reason most of the media - including this AP report - willfully ignore the fact that historically it has taken about six months for consistently good economic news (especially consistently good employment news) to translate into solidly higher support for an incumbent - and that the support for the incumbent tends to accelerate towards the end of that period and closer to election day. Looking back to the point at which consistently and clearly good jobs data began, we see the country is now at about the third or fourth month point in that six-month period. The positive economic news  continues despite the pathetic attempts of those such as Herr Doktorprofessor Paul Von Krugman to spin it otherwise. 
 
If the economy continues to  perform (never to be taken for granted, but likely at this point) and there is no enormous new development in foreign affairs (including a major foreign terrorist attack on American soil), the glacial and overwhelming progress of the domestic economy on voter perception should put Mr. Bush back in the Whitehouse and the Republicans back in control of Congress by very nice margins.
 
The smarter Democrats, including Senator Kerry but still a surprisingly small minority of the Democratic Party, know all that. All-but-certain knowledge of their coming serious defeat explains some recent Democratic shenanigans - such as the bizarre attempt to bar Hillary Clinton as a major speaker at their Boston convention and the sharp public counterattack on that attempt launched by Senator Clinton's camp - a public tiff widely seen as driven by Senator Edwards' desire to suppress Senator Clinton's rise.  Such doings make most sense in the context of a general scramble for advantageous positioning by those assuming that the Kerry-Edwards ticket will probably go down hard in November.
 
What does it say about a candidate like John Kerry when his own convention planning is most consistent with his own coming defeat? Isn't that carrying his policy of trying to have things both ways just a tad too far?

Posted 12:38 PM by Robert Musil
Catty Shack

If, like Calvin Klein, one aspires to fashion demigodhood, it is probably not a good thing that Guy Trebay's New York Times article on one's way-over-the-top house warming party for one's way-over-the-top re-cycled Southampton Dupont mansion summarizes itself with pristine, minimalist, mortal efficiency with its last sentence:

[Bruce Weber] ... was wearing his characteristic knotted bandanna and looking blissed out as he piloted past Mr. Klein and his celebrity guests and the many for-hire beauties who all disported themselves happily in a house Mr. Klein named, none too subtly, for the land in classical mythology where the blessed go when they die.

Youch!! It almost makes one feel for Calvin Klein.

Almost.

Posted 11:05 AM by Robert Musil
A Johns' Tale: Return To The Inscrutable Occident

Fresh off the boat (or, in this case, the jetliner) from China, the Man Without Qualities gazes with fresh amazement at American political scene. Here is John Kerry selecting John Edwards as his running mate: A man who for decades masqueraded as an Irish-American selecting a man who has for decades masqueraded as the "son of a mill worker" - but who can actually remember his father only as a mid-level textile company supervisor. The Boston Globe reported last year: "By Johnny's third birthday the family had moved five times across the Carolinas, and up the economic ladder as well. Wallace Edwards spent most of his career with Milliken & Co., which owned a string of textile mills, and he received promotions from floor worker to 'time study' jobs - monitoring worker productivity - to supervisor. Over time, the family went from living in a public housing project to a ranch-style brick home on a tree-lined street." So "Johnny" was the son of a mill worker in only a misleading, attenuated, technical sense - the kind of sense which a fancy trial lawyer makes his stock in trade. Did "Johnny" lie to his public? Or did this Senator merely lay out the misleading facts and let the public misdirect itself - just as John Kerry allowed his public to misdirect itself as to that Senator's ethnicity? They have so much in common!

The Globe article also points out that "Johnny" has repeatedly asserted that his father, Wallace Edwards, was "blocked" in his efforts to advance economically by his lack of a college degree. Education certainly helps one advance in life, but others - such as billionaires Kirk Kerkorian and Jack Kent Cooke, just by way of example - didn't find their lack of a college degree to be an insurmountable obstacle to their advancement. Lack of a college degree was not all that uncommon in North and South Carolina fifty or more years ago, and it would be interesting to know how many Milliken & Co. employees senior to Wallace Edwards (and more-senior Carolina textile company officers generally) did not brandish that particular credential. My guess is that quite a few bright ambitious Carolina men without college degrees did quite well in the then-growing textile business - quite a bit better than the fairly comfortable middle-level supervisor position held by Wallace Edwards during much of the part of his childhood "Johnny" can actually remember.

In public "Johnny" cultivates and emphasizes his resentments against large classes of people and institutions. Listening to the Senator speak that way, I do not find it hard to imagine Wallace Edwards cultivating and emphasizing - in conversations with his son and in his own mind - his own resentment of whatever obstacles he had confronted. Many fathers do.

But how much of the rest of this Edwards "Fathers and Sons" tale is as attenuated and overstated as Senator Edwards' "son of a mill worker" drollery?

Despite the media's easy, recurring infatuation with John Edwards, by many important measures he is clearly a weak choice. He is a man who won exactly one primary - in the state of his birth. He was failing in the polls in North Carolina when he decided not to run for re-election. His "two America's" stump speech was cast in a polarizing tone generally viewed as appropriate at most for primaries, and not for the "tack back to the center" needed to win the general election and contained a much-criticised and embarrassing belaboring of that ficticious little girl "somewhere in America" who "will go to bed hungry, hoping and praying that tomorrow will not be as cold as today, because she doesn't have the coat to keep her warm." John Edwards' tendency to embellish fact makes Al Gore's truth-extensions that many commenters believe hurt so much in 2000 seem benign in comparision. Then there's his lack of "gravitas" and his nearly Hillary-esque ability as a trial lawyer to incite the Republican base to open their wallets and storm the polls (although the Man Without Qualities views any Republican thought that the November election can be moved significantly by appealing to a putative general public hostility to plaintiff lawyers as mostly an indication that too many Republicans have lost touch by spending too much time surrounded only by people who hate plaintiff's lawyers). And, of course, the John-John ticket has so far not materially advanced the Democrats in the polls. [UPDATE AND CONFIRMATION: From Ellisblog.][FURTHER CONFIRMATION: Little or no Edwards "bounce."

Why did Senator Kerry do it? The New York Times reports in the always dubious form of Adam Nagourney:

Senator John Kerry's political advisers plan to dispatch his new running mate, Senator John Edwards, to rural areas in critical states across the Midwest and the West, in the belief that Mr. Edwards could be an unusually powerful advocate for the ticket in regions viewed as President Bush's stronghold.

Mr. Nagourney thinks it makes perfect sense that to capture "critical states across the Midwest and the West" Senator Kerry ditched uber-midwesterner Dick Gephardt of Missouri and every Western Democrat in favor of a washed-up North Carolina lightweight. Sure.

There is one respect in which the selection of John Edwards is very good news for Democrats: John Edwards' utter irrelevance to all aspects of foreign affairs demonstrates that the highest reaches of the Democratic Party understand fully that this election - like almost all American presidential elections - will turn overwhelmingly on the domestic economic situation, and not on foreign affairs - including Iraq and especially including any Iraq prisoner-abuse scandal or stories derived therefrom. Senator Edwards' selection demonstrates that John Kerry and the higher reaches of the Democratic Party are, in this respect, vastly more sophisticated than is the bulk of the mainstream media (left and right).

The argument that the election will be driven by foreign affairs generally concedes that the domestic economic situation may constitute most of what determines the voters' choice, but the economic situation is what it is and is fairly good but not perfect - so Democrats will just have to accept it, not talk too much about it and hope that things in Iraq get bad enough so that foreign affairs move the election enough to eject Mr. Bush from office. This approach would be a dead loser.

But there is at least one other approach: Since perceptions of the domestic economic situation overwehelmingly determine a presidential vote (say, 80% of the decision, just for illustration), it follows that even a small perturbation in the public perception of the domestic economic situation will have at least as much effect on the election as a much larger change in public perception of foreign affairs.

If one adopted this other approach, it would make perfect sense for the Democrat to choose for a running mate a shallow spin meister focused on domestic matters and with some reputation for expertise in class warfare and cultivating and emphasizing feelings of resentment and victimhood.

Posted 9:26 PM by Robert Musil
Hiatus

Blogging has been scarce here recently because the Man Without Qualities has been preparing to go to China for the last couple of weeks.

Tomorrow we fly to Shanghai and then to Beijing and, ultimately, a river cruise.

So perhaps there will be even less blogging here until about the Fourth of July.

All the best to my readers! I'll be back.

Posted 9:03 PM by Robert Musil
The 2004 DNC Convention Official Program

(E-mailed from a friend)

6:00pm - Opening flag burning ceremony.
6:30pm - Anti-war rally no. 1. (Moderated by Jane Fonda)
6:40pm - Ted Kennedy proposes a toast.
7:00pm - Tribute theme to France.
7:10pm - Collect offerings for al-Zawahri defense fund.
7:25pm - Tribute theme to Spain.
7:45pm - Anti-war rally no. 2. (Moderated by Michael Moore)
8:00pm - Chappaquiddick Synchronized Swim Team Performance
8:25pm - Ted Kennedy proposes a toast.
8:30pm - Terrorist appeasement workshop.
8:45pm - Ted Kennedy proposes a toast.
9:00pm - Gay marriage ceremony.
9:30pm - * Intermission *
9:45pm - Ted Kennedy proposes a toast.
10:00pm - Flag burning ceremony no. 2.
10:15pm - Re-enactment of Kerry's fake medal toss.
10:20pm - Ted Kennedy proposes a toast.
10:30pm - Cameo by Dean 'Yeeearrrrrrrg!'
10:40pm - Ted Kennedy proposes a toast.
10:50pm - Pledge of allegiance to the UN.
10:55pm - Ted Kennedy proposes a toast.
11:00pm - Double gay marriage ceremony.
11:15pm - Maximizing Welfare workshop.
11:20pm - Ted Kennedy proposes a toast.
11:30pm - 'Free Saddam' pep rally.
11:35pm - Ted Kennedy proposes a toast.
11:45pm - Senator Clinton Keynote Address - Cuba: Our Good Friends
11:59PM - Ted Kennedy proposes a toast.
12:00pm - Nomination of democratic candidate
12:01am to 7:00am - Open Bar - Kennedy Suite
12:01am to 7:00am - Cigar Lounge - Clinton Suite

Posted 12:45 PM by Robert Musil
Grinning With The Gipper One Last Time

Lots of people are writing and posting their own memorials to Ronald Reagan. That's good. But I think I'll pay homage to this great man by posting a joke I'm pretty sure the Gipper would have enjoyed (e-mailed from a friend):

Four men were bragging about how smart their cats are.

The first man was an engineer, the second man was an accountant, the third man was a chemist, the fourth was a government worker.

To show off, the engineer called to his cat, "T-square, do your stuff." T-square pranced over to a desk, took out some paper and a pen and promptly drew a circle, a square, and a triangle. Everyone agreed that was pretty smart.

But the accountant said his cat could do better. He called his cat and said, "Spreadsheet, do your stuff." Spreadsheet went out into the kitchen and returned with a dozen cookies. He divided them into four equal piles of three cookies each. Everyone agreed that was very good.

But the chemist said his cat could do better. He called his cat and said, "Beaker, do your stuff." Beaker got up, walked over to the fridge, took out a quart of milk, got a 10 ounce glass from the cupboard, and poured exactly eight ounces without spilling a drop. Everyone agreed that was outstanding.

Then the three men turned to the government worker and said, "What can your cat do?" The government worker called to his cat and said, "Coffee Break, do your stuff." Coffee Break jumped to his feet, ate the cookies, drank the milk, pooped on the paper, attacked the other three cats, claimed he injured his back while doing so, filed a grievance report for unsafe conditions, put in for Worker's Compensation, and went home for the rest of the day on sick leave.

Goodbye, Ronnie. We can't say we hardly knew ya - but we're glad we did and it was a mighty good, long run.

Posted 10:23 AM by Robert Musil
The Media Just Report What They Think Is Material

The Supreme Court just held that a 1976 federal law does allow some people to sue foreign governments - such as Austria - for such things as the return of property looted by the Nazis. That all seems fine, if dry and rather technical. No doubt the Justices got a lot of briefing about long-standing theories of foreign sovereign immunity and Congressional intent. But what's with the bizarre closing sentence in the Associated Press article - which the New York Times reproduces:

Justice Stephen Breyer, in a concurring opinion, said that Americans will still likely have to pursue claims in foreign countries first, and they may face other obstacles in U.S. courts, including statutes of limitations. Breyer is one of two Jewish members on the court.

Is this supposed to be some insinuation that Justice Breyer was influenced by his ethnicity consciously or, worse, unconsciously? Or that the case had special meaning to him because of his ethnicity? Or that the dissenters didn't vote with the majority because of their ethnicities? If any of those amazing insinuations was intended, it should have been spelled out.

Just why the heck was Justice Breyer's ethnicity noted at all? And if a need was felt at the AP to cite some irrelevant factoid about the man, why didn't the AP and the Times point out, for example, that Breyer is one of two members on the court appointed by President Bill Clinton. Or Breyer is one of two members on the court less than [insert favorite applicable age of Justices.] Or any number of other things.

Will the AP and the Times be running the same unexplained annotation of Justice Breyer's ethnicity if he separately concurs in, say, a Court decision construing the right of national banks to charge interest at rates they set independently of local and state regulation? One can hardly wait.

Posted 10:00 AM by Robert Musil
Herr Doktorprofessor Tells The Truth! IV: Fear And Loathing On West Forty-Third Street

In the Washington Times, Joel Mowbray writes about the descent of the New York Times reporting into absurdist Gonzo farce:

According to the reporting of the New York Times, upon being told that his country's code had been compromised, an Iranian intelligence agent turned around and sent a message back to the mullahs that the United States had cracked the code — by using the cracked code.

Never mind that the message could have been delivered by hand following a 2-hour drive.

Knowing that your code has been cracked is about the best gift that can be given. The potential for misinformation is enormous. Any Iranian intelligence agent would have had common sense enough not to slaughter the golden goose before it had been given the chance to lay any eggs. ....

The previous week, the paper had run a series of stories, first an attack on Mr. Chalabi with vague accusations of passing intelligence to Iran, and then an attack on Mr. Chalabi's strongest supporters, the hawks in the administration, specifically at the Pentagon. The pattern was repeated one week later.

The paper even went so far as to do its best to explain away the transparently goofy scenario. In the article, Iran's transmission of Mr. Chalabi's supposed leak was rationalized as the agent "possibly not believing Mr. Chalabi's account" after a single test message was not seized upon. But common sense dictates that far more than one test would have been sent before revealing to the United States that the code was broken.

But here's where the New York Times story gets downright contemptible. The article states that the administration had requested that news agencies hold off on the "code" story, "citing national security concerns," and "the Times agreed." Except there was nothing secret about the "code" story. .... And, for the record, the charges were published by National Review Online exactly two weeks ago — the Monday after the raid and fully nine days before the New York Times was given the government's OK to release the information. ....

Smearing Mr. Chalabi and administration hawks has the clear effect of undermining, in the public's eye, the justification and legitimacy of the war. Consequently, Mr. Bush gets hammered, since his support is pegged to the war's.

And that's the point...

It looks as though the New York Times has taken off the gloves, dropped the acid and roared off on a savage quest straight into the heart of the liberal media dream on this one. As Glenn Reynolds says: Read the whole thing.

Posted 11:50 PM by Robert Musil
On Never Learning

The apparently infinitely recalcitrant New York Times editorializes:

Looking back now, we can trace some of the flaws of the current Washington mindset - the tax-cut-driven deficits, the slogan-driven foreign policy - to Mr. Reagan's example.

Yes, those tax-cut-driven deficits that formed an integral part of policies the somehow restored the United States to prosperity, and that slogan-driven foreign policy that somehow turned out to be essentially correct when the Soviet Union dissolved and the Russians started confessing its misdeeds wholesale.

Has the person who wrote this editorial never been to Russia or consulted with any Russians or other people from the former Soviet Union? There don't seem to be many of them who would choose to accuse Ronald Reagan of having maintained a slogan-driven foreign policy. Most Russians seem to pretty much say he got the major points all right the first time around - and thank God he did.

Mr. Reagan had vision, enough vision to see many things as they were and to see where they were headed. That was especially true in foreign policy - where his keen observations and predictions were routinely dismissed by the Times as "slogans." Mr. Reagan was very unlike the New York Times, which began its coverage of what would become the Soviet Union by missing the real story of the Bolshevik Revolution because its writers and editors "were nervously excited by exciting events" (as Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz wrote in 1920), and ended its coverage of the Soviet Union by denying that predictions (including Mr. Reagan's) of its impending end were more than ignorant, partisan "slogans". Indeed, the Times persisted in its denials almost up to the day that misbegotten pseudo-nation dissolved and consigned itself to the dustbin of history - admitting it had been an "Evil Empire" all along.

This hilarious editorial proves that even years after the fact the Times is still incapable of seeing things that Ronald Reagan saw so clearly and correctly when they still lay years in the future.

Posted 2:21 PM by Robert Musil
Herr Doktorprofessor Tells The Truth! III: Mr. Chalabi's Secrets

The Man Without Qualities does not know Ahmad Chalabi personally, but the already superhot invective and wild maneuvering surrounding him is absolutely fascinating. To read Mr. Okrent from the New York Times, one could easily conclude that the only meaningful question remaining concerning Mr. Chalabi whether his constant prevarication is pathological or merely strategic:

On Friday, May 21, a front-page article by David E. Sanger ("A Seat of Honor Lost to Open Political Warfare") elegantly characterized Chalabi as "a man who, in lunches with politicians, secret sessions with intelligence chiefs and frequent conversations with reporters from Foggy Bottom to London's Mayfair, worked furiously to plot Mr. Hussein's fall." The words "from The Times, among other publications" would have fit nicely after "reporters" in that sentence. The aggressive journalism that I long for, and that the paper owes both its readers and its own self-respect, would reveal not just the tactics of those who promoted the W.M.D. stories, but how The Times itself was used to further their cunning campaign.

But, as the Wall Street Journal points out, Chalabi personally has by no means been shown to be the kind of sinister prevaricator the Times and Okrent are making him out to be. If the Times didn't do enough checking and follow-up to suit their current or previous standards, fine. But the efforts to twist their own deficiencies into an excuse for a purer shade of hostility towards Bush in their reporting is disingenuous and -- as Don Luskin correctly put it -- rings fundamentally false.

There are well-known signs that Mr. Chalabi has been in a kind of death battle with George Tenet - who has now resigned as head of the CIA without good explanation.

And now, entirely contrary to the spirit of the New York Times' castigation of Mr. Chalabi, we have a very high profile defense of Mr. Chalabi coming from the Defense Department:

The U.S. military has rated intelligence from the Iraqi National Congress led by Ahmad Chalabi as the best received from any anti-Saddam Iraqi group.

A U.S. Army report determined that INC intelligence was the best of five Iraqi organizations that helped topple the Saddam regime. The report said INC tactical military information provided accurate and wide-ranging intelligence on the situation in Iraqi cities and the location of leading Saddam aides.

"In the final analysis, the INC has been directly responsible for saving the lives of numerous soldiers as a result of early warning and providing surveillance of known enemy elements," the army report said.

The report was commissioned in March 2004 as part of a Defense Department review of the cooperation by five Iraqi organizations, including Sunni, Shi'ite and Kurdish groups.

The Defense Department is, of course, headed by Donald Rumsfeld, who only yesterday said that while he was aware of the press reports that an investigation was underway regarding allegations that Mr. Chalabi had betrayed the US to Iran by disclosing the fact that the US had broken the Iranian code, a piece of information Mr. Chalabi was never supposed to have and says he didn't have. Mr. Rumsfeld said had no personal knowledge of any such investigation: "I don't know that there is an investigation. I said I've read that in the press. If there is one then that's a good thing because people ought to be investigating possible wrongdoing, if there has been wrongdoing." Mr. Rumsfeld and his aides have, of course, historically been big supporters of Mr. Chalabi. The President recently backed Mr. Rumsfeld strongly and publicly in the face of his critics efforts to use the Abu Graib situation to dislodge the Defense Secretary.

Just how good is Donald Rumsfeld's relationship with George Tenet, anyway?

Posted 11:32 AM by Robert Musil
Smackdown In The Battle Of The Predictors II: Yale Wins, Again

More data from the Senate Joint Economic Committee of the type that will have a big effect on the November results:

The Department of Labor reported today that payroll employment increased by 248,000 jobs in May following even larger job gains in both April (346,000 new jobs) and March (353,000 jobs).

Highlights:

Over 1.1 million new jobs have been created in 2004. If this pace of job growth continues, over 2.8 million new jobs will be created this year.
Since August 2003, payrolls have risen by 1.4 million jobs.

Employment continued to expand in manufacturing, rising by 32,000 jobs in May. There have been 91,000 manufacturing jobs created in the past four months.

April statewide data from the Department of Labor also showed that the unemployment rate has fallen in 47 states over the past year.

Full report:


Charts:

Over 1.1 Million New Jobs in 2004

Unemployment Rate Declining

Today's numbers followed an upwardly revised total of 346,000 jobs in April and 353,000 in March. The 947,000 jobs created in the March-May period made it the strongest for any three months in four years. .... Virtually every major sector of the economy added jobs in May, from retailing to construction industries. Particularly notable were 32,000 new hires in manufacturing -- a fourth straight monthly increase and the biggest for any month since August 1998 when 143,000 manufacturing jobs were created, the department said.

And, let's look a bit into the future. Today's numbers indicate that about 250,000 new jobs were created in May. If that rate were to continue (by no means assured, of course), another about 1,250,000 jobs will be created by election day.

But we are asked by Mr. Elliott's formula and many pundits to believe that none of that will drive the election. Not even general national security considerations will drive the elections, we are told. No, the many pundits assure us that developments in Iraq will drive the election. In fact, stories and images of how some Iraqi prisoners were treated will drive the election.

Sure. Sure it will. You bet.

But then it seems that Mr. Elliott shouldn't believe his own formula either, since he offered his own 21 reasons why it's wrong. The 21 reasons haven't been updated, and his formula does not include meaningful allowances for most of his 21 factors. Hence his formulaic problems. If all 21 Reasons ever mattered, why don't they all matter now? - in particular, why don't they matter enough to put in the formula? Still a few methodological and consistency bugs in the system, eh?

Posted 3:01 PM by Robert Musil
Smackdown In The Battle Of The Predictors: Yale Wins

Scott Elliott's ElectionProjections.com attempts to predict the probable 2004 Presidential election results with a formula that adjusts each state's 2000 margin based on current national opinion polls. With all due respect to Mr. Elliott, to point out that such a methodology is "weak" would be to speak in high euphemism. Can even he take seriously his "prediction" that Kerry will beat Bush, 337 electoral votes to 201, with a popular vote total of 52.87% to Bush's 45.3% - with Kerry picking up every state Gore won plus several of 2000's red states: Ohio, Arizona, Nevada, Florida and Missouri? His formula also awards New Hampshire to Kerry, who is, after all, from the state next door, which may mean something.

But the rest is ridiculous. The Elliott prediction is a dance in a hall of mirrors: current media fussing tends to disturb polling to make it less reliable. Poll users and taker know that - which may have something to do with the fact that they're not taking many serious polls right now. In any event, polls show at best a tiny edge for Kerry even after all the fussing - which is not good news for him.

Does any sensible person seriously believe that the Abu Graid prisoner abuse scandal - which is essentially what is responsible for the President's drop in the polls - is really going to count for more than the overall performance of the economy or is not going to dissipate by November? If that's right, then it will be the first time a prisoner abuse scandal has meant anything much as an election issue, although such scandals come up all the time - as Bob Herbert ably points out. Hopeful Democrats fixating on current polls have offered no explanation why things should be so different this time around. It probably won't happen. It never has.

Some Republicans are worried and some Democrats are hopeful that voters aren't giving enough attention to the positive economy. But how much of a naif does one have to be not to recall that it takes about six months of strong employment numbers before voters seriously get the message that the economy is doing really well - and that six months has not yet run, but the numbers are still very good. It probably will happen. It always has.

Perhaps Mr. Elliott and others could help themselves to come back to earth by taking a quick review of the well-known Fair Model Presidential Vote Equation, which keys off fundamental economic patterns. The Yale professor (Roy Fair) responsible for the model last applied it to information as of April 29, 2004, when it showed Mr. Bush prevailing with 58% of the two-party vote. Is a prisoner abuse fuss 5,000 miles away going to undo that margin? Worse for Democratic fantasists, this is what Professor Fair had to say at that time:

The predictions of GROWTH, INFLATION, and GOODNEWS for the previous forecast from the US model (February 5, 2004) were 3.0 percent, 1.9 percent, and 3, respectively. The current predictions from the US model (April 29, 2004) are 3.2 percent, 2.0 percent, and 3, respectively. In the previous forecast 2004:1 was predicted to be a GOODNEWS quarter, but it turned out not to be. For the current forecast 2004:2 is predicted to be a GOODNEWS quarter, so the total number of GOODNEWS quarters is the same at 3. The economic predictions thus changed very little. The prediction of GROWTH, the per capita growth rate in the first three quarters of 2004 at an annual rate, has increased to 3.2 from 3.0 for the previous forecast, and the prediction of INFLATION has increased from 1.9 to 2.0. These new economic values give a prediction of 58.74 percent of the two-party vote for President Bush rather than 58.68 percent before. The main message that the equation has been making from the beginning is thus not changed, namely that President Bush is predicted to win by a sizable margin.

Note that both quarters 2003:4 and 2004:1 are close to being good news quarters. The non per capita growth rates are 4.1 and 4.2 percent respectively, and with population growing at about 1 percent, these are per capita growth rates of 3.1 and 3.2 percent respectively. The trigger for a good news quarter is 3.2 percent per capita growth. In the above discussion I have not counted 2004:1 as a good news quarter because the growth rate to two decimal places is slightly less than 4.2 percent, but this is a very close call. If both of these quarters are counted as good news quarters, the vote prediction rises from 58.74 percent to 60.42 percent, since each good news quarter contributes 0.837 percentage points to the vote prediction.

If anything, every one of these factors has improved (or, in the case of inflation, not deteriorated materially) since April 29. The reader is invited to calculate his or her own up-to-date prediction using this page. Note to hopeful Democratic fantasists: "GOODNEWS" means the number of quarters in the first 15 quarters of the Bush administration in which the growth rate of real per capita GDP is greater than 3.2 percent at an annual rate - not the amount of positive coverage the Administration is able to squeeze out of the mainstream media. Indeed, growth rates for past quarters have recently been revised upwards.

Absent some very striking new developments, this election will not be decided by Iraq or even national security issues generally - contrary to way too many short-sighted pundits. But, to the extent national security matters in the election, the issue generally favors Mr. Bush in the large.

And, with respect to Iraq in particular, John Kerry has no particular advantage over the President.

MORE

Posted 10:30 AM by Robert Musil
International Trade and American Jobs

The cant from Democratic and left wing quarters on "exporting America" has quieted dramatically in recent months (other than Lou Dobbs, of course, who just can't shut up). I believe that quieting is in large measure attributable to an awakening of sorts on the left as to just how much damage they were doing and just how big a nightmare for their electoral prospects they were creating for themselves.

Here's some further evidence from the Senate Joint Economic Committee (JEC):

The full report.

Highlights:

Over the past 20 years the unemployment rate has fallen significantly despite a steady increase in imports.

Foreign companies employ thousands of U.S. workers in every state.

While some U.S. companies hire foreign workers overseas, the United States still dominates the world in exporting services.

U.S. multi-national corporations have consistently employed the vast majority of their employees within the U.S.

Charts:

Trade Does Not Have a Negative Impact on Employment

The U.S. Has a Trade Surplus in Services

The U.S. Leads in the Export of Services

Multinational Firms Employ More Workers in the U.S.

Of course, none of this copious information and analysis from the JEC explains why one of the world's greatest self-anointed experts in international trade, Herr Doktorprofessor Paul Von Krugman, has had essentially nothing to say about the whole "oursourcing" issue. And this is a man whose basic academic work supposedly fundamentally transformed international trade theory ... but which is never mentioned in the outsourcing discussions! Not even by Lou Dobbs!

Why does Herr Doktorprofessor not instruct the ignorant masses? Surely, the people cry out for his wisdom! ... Don't they?

Posted 9:58 AM by Robert Musil
Mr. Tenet Finds The Egress, But Who's That Piping Up?

The big news today is that George Tenet has resigned from his position as head of the CIA for unspecified "personal reasons." Fine.

Much of the mainstream liberal media, including the New York Times [UPDATE: See note below] and the Associated Press and CNN have been passing out these fairly nasty comments on the resignation:

The official announcement was unconvincing to a former C.I.A. chief, Stansfield Turner, who held the post under President Jimmy Carter.

Mr. Turner said the resignation is "too significant a move at too important a time" to be inspired by nothing more than personal considerations.

"I think he's being pushed out," Mr. Turner said in an interview on C.N.N. "The president feels he has to have someone to blame."

Mr. Turner went on, "I don't think he would pull the plug on President Bush in the midst of an election cycle without being asked by President Bush to do that."

Retired Adm. Turner is entitled to his views and his uninformed speculation, although his offering such thoughts based on the paucity of information at his disposal speaks directly and not well about his own tenure as head of the CIA. Ret. Adm. Turner was once head of the CIA - and the AP and CNN articles identified him only to that extent. To its credit, the New York Times (in the excerpt above) adds that Ret. Adm. Turner held the post under President Jimmy Carter.

But neither the Times nor the AP nor CNN bothers to note that Ret. Adm. Turner is an official advisor to the John Kerry Campaign.

Does that help to explain the rather nasty, partisan edge to Ret. Adm. Turner's comment? What does it say about the AP and the Times and CNN that they make no mention of his affiliation with the Kerry Campaign? And what does it say about Ret. Adm. Turner that he made no reported mention of that affiliation to the reporter who took his comments?

Ah, if only Ret. Adm Turner had been such a sly spook when he was running the CIA.

POSTSCRIPT: The Times article, by serial partisan offender David Stout, also opinionizes: Mr. Bush announced the resignation of the 51-year-old Mr. Tenet in a way that was almost bizarre. What follows is a completely anodyne description of the President giving the information to reporters assembled for a different matter in the Rose Garden. The only thing "almost bizarre" about the proceedings as reported in the Times article is the partisan stamp put on them by Mr. Stout.

UPDATE: The link to the New York Times no longer leads to the original David Stout article, which appears to have been entirely purged from the Times archives. The link now leads to a new Times article by Elisabeth Bumiller and Douglas Jehl which does not include any reference to stealth Kerry advisor Ret. Adm Turner and also omits Mr. Stout's pointless and partisan assertion that Mr. Bush announced the resignation of the 51-year-old Mr. Tenet in a way that was almost bizarre. While it is certainly to the Times credit that the original flawed Stout article has been deleted, and I realize that the Stout article did not appear in my print edition of the Times. But the appearance of a flawed article in the internet edition is also fairly serious. And while the Times has gone far in the right direction, some form of notice to on-line readers that the Stout article included a cite to a Kerry advisor posing as an independent qualified expert is still in order. "Rowback" is really not enough, even where publication is only electronic.

To my knowledge CNN and the AP remain completely shameless, with the Turner references intact and the Kerry connection unexplained. Since writing the original post above, I have actually seen the actual broadcast Turner CNN interview. It is vastly more partisan and speculative than the print version suggests. It's a disgrace - and CNN is still running the interview. But, then, repeat, prolonged disgraces are not unusual for CNN.

Posted 10:11 AM by Robert Musil
Modernizing The Military

John Kerry announced on May 27 a 4-prong proposal to deal with national security which he described in part this way:

It's time for a new national security policy ... we must modernize the world's most powerful military to meet the new threats. ... War has changed; the enemy is different - and we must think and act anew. .... I will also offer specific plans to build a new military capable of defeating enemies new and old .... As president, on my first day in office, I will send a message to every man and woman in our armed forces: This commander-in-chief will ensure that you are the best-led, best-equipped and most respected fighting force in the world. You will be armed with the right weapons. .... I will modernize our military to match its new missions. We must get the most out of new technologies.

That's a lot of blather and not so many specifics. But one specific Senator Kerry subsequently provided in a June 1 address is that the "modernization" of the armed forces he envisions will include no development of any new nuclear weapons:

As President, I will stop this Administration's program to develop a whole new generation of bunker-busting nuclear bombs. This is a weapon we don't need. And it undermines our credibility in persuading other nations. What kind of message does it send when we're asking other countries not to develop nuclear weapons, but developing new ones ourselves?

What's most interesting about the Senator's approach is its generality: What kind of message does it send when we're asking other countries not to develop nuclear weapons, but developing new ones ourselves? That implies not only that the US will not develop a whole new generation of bunker-busting nuclear bombs that the professional military officers in the Pentagon want to develop and build - but sweepingly prohibits development of every single future nuclear weapon the Pentagon might favor. Yet, Senator Kerry also said this in his May 27 address:

This Administration has disregarded the advice, wisdom, and experience of our professional military officers. And often ended the careers of those who dared to give their honest assessments. That is not the way to make the most solemn decisions of war and peace. As president, I will listen to and respect the views of our experienced military leaders - and never let ideology trump the truth.

So president Kerry would listen to and respect the views of our experienced military leaders - except when those same leaders propose new nuclear weapons to modernize the armed forces. And in the face of the extreme and ideological presidential policy the Senator announces here, what exactly would happen to the careers of those who dared to give their honest assessments that new nuclear weapons were needed in a future Kerry administration? The Senator tells us we must think and act anew - but not if the "anew" includes anything nuclear. He will send a message to every man and woman in our armed forces: This commander-in-chief will ensure that you are the ... best-equipped ... fighting force in the world. But not if that equipment might be nuclear. President Kerry will ensure that our troops will be armed with the right weapons. But the "right" weapons will never be nuclear weapons, even if a nuclear weapon might bust a bunker full of enemy soldiers who want to kill our troops. Senator Kerry will modernize our military to match its new missions! and get the most out of new technologies! - but not if those missions would be best accomplished by nuclear means or if the new technologies have a nuclear aspect.

It is also worth noting that the Kerry national security proposals are focused almost exclusively on terrorism - an important issue, to be sure. But the Senator all but dismisses the need to consider and prepare for potential direct conflict with a hostile and aggressive nuclear nation. That's yesterday's imperative, the Senator says.

China is bigger, more militaristic and more aggressive and more nuclear by the day. And it has big plans - including but not limited to US ally Taiwan (or is Taiwan a US ally as far as John Kerry is concerned?). Is China now an "enemy" of the United States. No. But neither are China's aspirations entirely benevolent as to the US or its Asian allies - and it is far from the case that the US can assume that China poses no nuclear threat to this country or any other country, including Taiwan and Japan. I guaranty that Taiwan and Japan don't view China as purely benevolent and pacific. But China doesn't even warrant an implicit mention by John Kerry:

There was a time not so long ago when dealing with the possibility of nuclear war was the most important responsibility entrusted to every American President. The phrase "having your finger on the nuclear button" meant something very real to Americans, and to all the world. The Cold War may be over, the nuclear arms race between the Soviet Union and the United States may have ended, but the possibility of terrorists using nuclear weapons is very real indeed. The question before us now is what shadowy figures may someday have their finger on a nuclear button if we don't act. It is time again that we have leadership at the highest levels that treats this threat with the sense of seriousness, urgency, and purpose it demands.

I have a note for John Kerry: The phrase "having your finger on the nuclear button" still means something very real to sensible Americans, and to all the sensible world. Not that I expect him to figure that out.

Posted 8:43 AM by Robert Musil
O Those Unkept (Or Is It "Unkempt"?) Promises

Claudia Rosett in OpinionJournal today:

But by the yardstick of most criticism now leveled at President Bush for freeing Iraq, by the rhetoric of John Kerry, who has deemed the venture a failure involving "one miscalculation after another," by lights of the chronic dismay over every setback or mistake in the face of 1,001 uncertainties, one might start to think America and its allies had on a whim invaded Sweden, reducing the place to the kind of condition you'd expect after about a quarter-century under Saddam.

Do you think she's exaggerating? At another point in the article she suggests that she is. But she really isn't exaggerating one bit when she calls attention to how preposterous the media bar-raising has become, as exemplified by this quote from an article that appeared in what was actually presented as "news" reporting in the Los Angeles Times:

Outside, the squat schoolhouse glistens with fresh lime-green paint, courtesy of the renovation spree launched by the U.S.-led coalition. Inside, the floors are buckled, the blackboards are scarred, and the bathrooms are little more than open-air sewage pits. There is one working water fountain for 1,125 students, who must pick their way through a parking lot strewn with mounds of trash to get to the school's front doors.

"They promised to make it a paradise," said Hana Abbood, a teacher of Arabic language at Shura. "But all they've changed is the paint."

To many Iraqis in the area, the sorry state of the school is a symbol of how the coalition has failed them.

There you have it. The Los Angeles Times is holding the Coalition's feet to the fire for failing to make good on its famous promise to make Iraq a paradise within a year. Thank goodness somebody has the courage to "out" Messrs. Bush and Blair for this kind of thing. And it's no accident that the people at the Los Angeles Times, that sworn enemy of "junk journalism," are just the guys to do it. The Times includes no analysis of what the Coalition leaders actually said because the Times has determined that none is needed.

Nor does the Times make the slightest effort to connect the preposterous expectations of the Iraqis they interview with the country's infinite history of having no democracy in which any (invariably corrupt) government operative could be held to account. The Iraqi people therefore have had no experience whatsoever in thinking seriously about what they should expect from their government or their economy, and therefore always assume the worst. The Times misidentifies as a problem created by the war and the occupation what is really an inevitable consequence of a local culture utterly lacking in enterprise and democratic understanding that dominates the entire Middle East outside of Israel and Turkey - and that leads people to invariably assume the worst. Why not make that assumption? Those governments aren't accountable to the people, and most individual initiative is only punished and the wealth it creates looted by the political class. It's exactly that dispirited culture and its consequences that the Coalition needs to address. And it is properly addressed not by bringing in more and faster welfare-flavored goodies to passive Iraqis waiting for blessings from on high - but by facilitating a system of Iraqi democracy and personal and social initiative.

The Times even passes up the opportunity to point out that Los Angeles has it's own school-of-broken-promises: the never-to-be-finished $160 Million plus Belmont High School, built just a few blocks from the Times HQ with proceeds of a dubious bond offering that was vigorously supported by the Times, just as the Times has vigorously opposed school vouchers and all other meaningful efforts to address the pathetic state of Los Angeles public schools. What do the Los Angeles and Iraq experiences have to say about the promise of democracy? Could there be a message in cynical Iraq about traditional American welfare-style liberalism? The Times couldn't be bothered even asking any such questions that might "bring the war home" in uncomfortable ways for the left. The Times is too busy arguing the need to bring in the US government financed benefits faster to Iraq.

There. The Times did it and they're glad. Cawabunga-Gonzo!

And, O yeah, ... this guy's not exaggerating, either. I'll bet Fox News viewers don't even know that the Coalition promised to make Iraq a paradise within a year! - unless they're lucky enough to read the Los Angeles Times.

Posted 10:20 AM by Robert Musil
The Fall Of The House Of Eisner XX: Mel Mouse?

Mel Karmazin, the "architect of the CBS rebound", is out at Viacom ... long before his contract was to expire, long after he supposedly patched up his problems with Sumner Redstone, and with no real explanation.

On the other hand, the Walt Disney Company has been under strong pressure to fix it's lack of succession planning for nearly-semi-deposed Michael Eisner. One argument that keeps coming up is that there just aren't that many people with the right experience to run a media conglomerate ... especially in turning around a troubled major television net work.

Of course, there's Mel Karmazin ... but he's already working for Viacom.

UPDATE: I think it is unlikely that the trained poodle circus that passes for the Disney board would seriously consider replacing Michael Eisner with Mel Karmazin.

However, if Mr. Karmazin were willing to work with Roy Disney and, say, Steve Jobs in putting together a new, proposed management team and a new proposed board of directors, he might be a major player in a proxy contest for the Disney board. Messrs. Karmazin, Jobs, Gold and Disney could propose themselves as new, replacement Disney board members - along with whatever other proposed board members they select. Let the Disney shareholders vote.

Proxy fights are complex and expensive. But if the shareholders who were willing to withhold approval of Mr. Eisner at the last shareholder meeting were to spread the costs among themselves, a proxy fight would be quite feasible. And, if it happened, I would wager on a Karmazin-Disney-Jobs team simply because none of them is a spent force where Mr. Eisner clearly is.

In the mean time, all is completely predictable at Disney ( via Reuters)

Chairman George Mitchell on Tuesday said he was confident in current management as Mel Karmazin, long seen as a potential Disney chief, left rival media company Viacom Inc.

Dissident Disney shareholders Roy Disney and Stanley Gold immediately called for the board to look at Karmazin as a replacement for embattled Disney chief executive Michael Eisner.

Karmazin's abrupt resignation as president and chief operating officer of Viacom reignited speculation that he could replace Eisner.

Karmazin left the company unrestricted by any noncompete clause that would have stopped him from joining a Viacom rival. ....

Mitchell backed Eisner in a statement when asked to comment on Karmazin's exit.

"The board has complete confidence in the current management. On the strength of our recent results we believe that confidence has been justified, and will be further validated as our performance continues to improve," he said.

Disney and Gold said that Mitchell and the Disney board should consider Karmazin as they put together a succession plan for Eisner.

"We would assume he has or will be contacting Mel Karmazin, among other obvious candidates," they said. "(Karmazin) should definitely be on the Disney board's short list," they added.

Posted 8:35 AM by Robert Musil
Krugman v. Brooks

New York Times columnist David Brooks is not an economist. So the sophistication of his column today on the economic track record of the Bush Administration is telling when compared to the primitive rantings on the same subject in the column dropped by Herr Doktorprofessor Paul Von Krugman.

One particularly nasty indication of just how intellectually empty Herr Doktorprofessor's effort really is lies in this admission:

For most families, the losses from these cuts will far outweigh any gain from lower taxes. My back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that 80 percent of all families will end up worse off ...

Herr Doktorprofessor is a full professor of economics at Princeton (lucky them!) with free access to all manner of computer models, lots of economic data, sharp assistants and graduate students, accomplished colleagues (on the other hand, if you were Herr Doktorprofessor's colleague would you talk to him on a regular basis?). He has been ranting regularly for years that the losses from the Bush tax cuts will far outweigh any gain from the lower taxes. His columns have made clear that he is in wide contact with other economists and political operatives and consultants who share his views and also have lots of resources. Yet today he admits that the best he can do to back up his opinion is a back-of-the-envelope calculation. One feels unclean after reading such an admission. In any event, what's to dispute? Why bother arguing with the back of an envelope? Life is too short. In any event, Herr Doktorprofessor again raves as if the deficit were mostly attributable to the Bush tax cuts, where sensible studies keep pointing out that it's increased federal spending and a soft economy that caused about three-quarters of the recent deficit. Federal spending reductions are needed, but to Herr Doktorprofessor a federal program is sacrosanct if it is merely "popular" - and evidence that the White House is girding up for just such necessary reductions is taken as nothing but evidence of its perfidy. He's merely childish - and the silly fourth-grade-level word play he uses to fill up the column inches today should be intensely embarrassing to the Times.

Now Mr. Brooks, on the other hand, has done some homework:

[A] dozen distinguished and politically independent economists ... like Charles Schultze of the Brookings Institution, the longtime Federal Reserve economist Lyle Gramley, David Wyss of Standard & Poor's, among others - a pretty good sampling of mainstream economic thinking ... gave the Bush team a B-plus for short-term fiscal policy, a C-minus for long-term fiscal policy, a B for regulatory policy and a B-minus for trade and international economics. These aren't the grades that win you a Rhodes scholarship, but they're not too bad.

I ... asked a few senior officials to respond.

The senior officials did respond, and the responses are worth reading regardless of whether one agrees with them. Personally, I do not agree with some of what Mr. Brooks says, including that the White House lacks a compelling response to the argument that the stimulus could have been stronger if more of the cuts had been distributed down the income scale. Consumer spending, which might have been increased by such "distributing down," was not the biggest problem - lagging post-dot-com-boom capital investment was. A permanent tax cut structured to increase consumer spending while permanently understimulating capital investment would have been structurally unsound - and Mr. Brooks admits that the White House has good responses to the argument that the cuts should have been temporary.

But Mr. Brooks does have one thing to learn from Herr Doktorprofessor. Mr. Brooks writes:

What I don't understand is why the administration doesn't now pivot and say: O.K., we had a potential crisis. We prevented it. Now the recovery is in full swing. Let's address the long-term problems. Let's talk about the consequences of the aging baby boomers. Let's talk about reforming the tax code to encourage domestic savings.

As noted above, it is Herr Doktorprofessor's panicky conviction that the White House may be preparing to do just that. But probably not enough.

But the main point is that after reading the Brooks column one feels that one has actually been presented with some considered thought, not an empty rant, contemptuous to all Times readers, written on the back of Herr Doktorprofessor's envelope.

UPDATE: Don Luskin points out blatant intellectual dishonesty in Herr Doktorprofessor's rant.

Posted 8:33 PM by Robert Musil
Dream Team

Some people suggest that John Kerry would love to have John McCain as his vice presidential running mate. Such people have a CBS poll indicating that a Kerry/McCain ticket is a winner. Senator Hillary Clinton recently said that she could support Senator John McCain as the Democrats' vice presidential partner for John Kerry.

It's curious that Senator Clinton's statement has not (to my knowledge) been analyzed together with a still-obvious truth: Hillary Clinton almost certainly does not want John Kerry to be elected in November because his election would sour her own presidential ambitions. She therefore likely believes a Kerry/McCain ticket would further the result she desires: a Democratic loss in November. And in my view Senator Clinton would be right in holding such a belief.

Unlike Senator Clinton, those who naively pine for John McCain to run as vice president with John Kerry cannot have spent much time considering how poorly Senator McCain's personality meets the requirements of a vice presidential nominee. The first requirements of a vice presidential nominee are to remain quiet when told to, and to subordinate all previously held and expressed beliefs to the needs of the presidential nominee. Does that sound like John McCain? The obligations of a vice presidential nominee in the area of self-abnegation go far beyond being a mere "team player" - and John McCain has shown no inclination or ability to be a team player since he assumed federal office.

Perhaps the naive McCain-for-VP supporters should cast their minds back to consider the fate and agonies of poor old Joe Lieberman. He surrendered many of the most important issues that had defined him politically and personally for most of his career, and essentially lost his personal credibility and most of his dignity in the process. He even lost some of his religious orientation. All to serve the needs of the feckless, bloated Al Gore. Sad.

Arch-narcissistic John McCain simply would not and could not submit to anything like what Joe Lieberman endured without a peep. But he would have to. Indeed, the political and issues gap between Senators McCain and Kerry is far wider in most areas than the gap between Senator Lieberman and Al Gore was. At least Al Gore had once been a nominal Democratic centrist! And when John McCain could endure no more, and had to speak his conscience and his ego to the world, sure disaster would follow for the Kerry campaign. It's almost bound to happen if he's nominated. Even John McCain seems to sense it.

And smart people, like Hillary Clinton, know it all for a fact. That silly CBS poll and various Democratic media McCainiacs give her cover for her bona fides in advancing his name. One's admiration for her grows.

But John Kerry seems not to have a clue. I hope he never catches on. I'm with Hillary on this one.

Posted 5:00 PM by Robert Musil
America's Abu Ghraibs

Bob Herbert is mostly right on the facts in this column describing how the conditions described as prevalent in the Abu Graib prison are often reproduced in prisons right here at home:

Most Americans were shocked by the sadistic treatment of Iraqi detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison. But we shouldn't have been. Not only are inmates at prisons in the U.S. frequently subjected to similarly grotesque treatment, but Congress passed a law in 1996 to ensure that in most cases they were barred from receiving any financial compensation for the abuse.

We routinely treat prisoners in the United States like animals. We brutalize and degrade them, both men and women. And we have a lousy record when it comes to protecting well-behaved, weak and mentally ill prisoners from the predators surrounding them.

Very few Americans have raised their voices in opposition to our shameful prison policies. And I'm convinced that's primarily because the inmates are viewed as less than human.

The message brought by Mr. Herbert should be very disturbing to any Democrat who has been so foolish to believe that the Abu Graib doings will have a meaningful impact on the November elections. As I have noted in prior posts, such prisoner abuse scandals don't amount to much as election issues at either the state or federal levels - even though prison activists routinely bring these conditions to the media's attention (as Mr. Herbert is doing here) and even though the mistreated prisoners are Americans. And that remains the case even though there are sometimes "images" accompanying the reports of prisoner abuse in America. I note that the military has now banned cell phone cameras in Abu Graib, which should address some of the "images" issue in that quarter.

Actually, there is to my mind an even bigger issue with common thinking about American prisons than those raised by Mr. Herbert or the prison activists he cites: Prisons may actually increase the overall crime rate. And I don't mean that in the sense of "root cause" theory. I mean it seems entirely possible to me that sending people to prison actually and essentially immediately raises the crime rate quite a bit - but in a way of which the public silently approves.

For example, consider a man (call him "Spike") sent to prison for a serious felony such as armed robbery. Now, many armed robbers commit more than one such robbery. But it would take a very energetic robber indeed to commit an armed robbery once every day or so.

Suppose a new, young man is assigned to Spike's cell, and Spike imposes himself sexually on this new inmate ... in the manner the California Attorney General wished on Kenneth Lay, for example. Surely every act of sexual dominance will involve Spike in the commission of several serious felonies, beginning ... but by no means ending ... with homosexual rape. And Spike will likely commit such multiple felonies on a daily basis ... or near to it.

And the opportunities for daily commission of serious felonies in prison do not end with sex or crimes against a cellmate. Prisons have political structures among the prisoners. Those very structures are for the most part illegal "conspiracies." Prisoners are often involved in the bribing of guards, in the intimidation or robbery of other prisoners, in the obtaining and use of drugs ... and many other things. And many acts that are not crimes outside of prison are serious crimes when committed by prisoners inside of prison: fashioning a soda can or other metal object into a make-shift knife, for example. Threatening to report a prisoner's commission of a crime to the authorities unless the other prisoner pays up in some way or other is extortion .. another serious felony. And, of course, there is the fact that prison guards have wide latitude over prisoners' lives ... and if Mr. Herbert and his activists are right, those guards often and routinely commit quite a few crimes against prisoners.

Few crimes committed by prisoners or against prisoners are reported, especially crimes committed by prisoners or guards against other prisoners. And unreported crimes don't go into the crime statistics. It seems to me entirely possible that the recent reduction in overall crime we have experienced in this country would be much less striking - maybe nonexistent - if one were to include all crimes committed against prisoners by prisoners or guards. Crime in Los Angeles may go down because a repeat offender is taken off the streets, but crime in Soledad Prison may right away go up by more than enough to offset the decline in Los Angeles, especially if one includes crimes committed against the newly-incarcerated offender. Looking to the other side of the crime/punishment equation, many people have argued that prison has little of no deterrent efffect on future crime on the streets - it's said that the removal effect (that is, taking repeat criminals off the streets) of imprisonment that the biggest effect on "reducing" crime.

Incarcerating lots of criminals for long periods may reduce reported crime and crime on the streets, but it seems altogether possible that that reduction is more than off set by an increase in unreported crime in prisons.

To be clear: I am not arguing that I know or can prove that prisons increase the overall crime rate. But from what I have seen, including reports such as those cited by Mr. Herbert, it is entirely possible. And, of course, that would be just fine with most of the public if the inmates are viewed as less than human.

Posted 10:03 AM by Robert Musil
Pathetic ... And Bound To Lose XLV: The National Security Plan

John Kerry just gave what his camp called a major national security speech that outlined his four "imperatives" for his new national security policy: 1) build & strengthen our international alliances, 2) "modernize" the military, 3) deploy "all resources" against terrorism (diplomatic, economic, etc), and 4) end dependence on foreign (Middle Eastern) oil. The solemn obfuscation in the Kerry text is so thick it could be cut with a bread knife. But let's have a sandwich:

(1) International Alliances. Senator Kerry exhibits no recognition of a basic economic fact: no European country not already actively cooperating with the US in Iraq is willing (or, in some cases, able) to spend what it takes to maintain a meaningful military. Not Germany, not France, not Russia. That means that if America agrees to the kind of "international cooperation" (that is, French and German approval) to major uses of our military, our "alliances" become a way for these European countries to have access to a first-class military force without having to pay for it: they just use ours. Isn't it nice when you don't have to buy an expensive tool because you have a rich neighbor who will always lend you his?

That free riding would be bad enough, but matters get a whole lot worse when one considers that these "allies" have big economic and political incentives to help themselves to more free rides by cooperating in times of "peace" with US antagonists (nuclear facilities in Iran and Saddam's Iraq, for example, oil contracts everywhere there is oil, the corrupt "Oil-for-Food" program, much else). Indeed, the continuing "relevancy" of France and much of Europe outside of Britain, as intentionally designed by European politicians, is to be had through both forms of such free riding. The Bush Administration called Europe's bluff - and they're mad at that. Bill Clinton went along, and we saw the total disintegration of Yugoslavia, the North Korean mess, the 9-11 disasters, reduced Israeli security, unchallenged spreading Islamic fundamentalism and the rest of the foreign policy mess that now has to be addressed.

The Democrats and Europeans want to obscure matters, but the big picture is not that hard to see: Cooperation with European "free ride" diplomacy and foreign policy will lead to ever greater disasters. But the Europeans are wedded by economic imperatives to those policies. That's not a problem that's going to go away by either cooperating with them (in which case, America pays their way towards more disasters) or not cooperating with them (in which case they continue to complain about American "unilateralism"). Put another way: America making itself a free-of-charge common carrier for European economic and military aspirations is not a viable American policy, and charging tolls is going to make the Europeans complain.

(2) Modernize The Military. There is no reason not to call this point a simple fraud on Senator Kerry's part. "Modernizing" the military in any meaningful way would require a bigger defense budget, especially because much of the military was allowed to age under the Clinton Administration. A President Kerry would not spend the money it would take to effect a meaningful "modernization." At best, "modernization" is being used here by Senator Kerry to mean "downsizing." Downsizing of the military is well within his capabilities.

(3) Deploy "All Resources" Against Terrorism. For example, Senator Kerry mentioned depriving terrorist organizations and their facilitators of the use of the American banking system. Obviously, terrorist organizations are not allowed to use American banks. If a President Kerry extended current policies much further than the policies already in place, he would immediately face questions as to whether the entire Iranian or Saudi Arabian governments, their state-owned and insider-owned companies are to be shut out of the American banking system (in each case, in the braod sense prohibiting acess to those who transact business with any of them, as do international oil companies who buy from Iran). Is that a "diplomatic" crisis? Even meaningful new disclosure requirements for users of the banking system would make US banks less competitive, and their European (and Asian) competitors would be more than happy to pick up the slack. (See point (1) above). More importantly, even draconian economic sanctions have very modest political effects (consider Cuba and Iraq, for example). And, since Senator Kerry's address exhibits his fundamental refusal to face the basic economic factors involved in the current national security situation, any economic efforts he might make would probably have even less positive effects and more negative effects than such efforts would have had if he at least agreed faced up to reality.

What about "diplomacy?" To the extent the US is not receiving diplomatic cooperation from its "allies," there are again the basic economic and political issues and incentives described under (1) above, which Senator Kerry simply ignores. Neither his whining nor ignoring them as he does in this address will not make those issues go away.

(4) End Dependence On Foreign Oil. Senator Kerry again ignores the basic economic reality: fossil fuels are by far the cheapest and most practical form of energy sufficient to service a modern economy - with current technology or any reasonably foreseeable technology. Nuclear power is the only meaningful complement. Could other forms of energy be exploited? Sure they could, if fossil fuel prices go and stay high enough - although high prices tend to lead to more fossil fuel supply as well as other supplies, which tends to bring energy prices down again. That's all good.

The US therefore faces a basic economic decision that Senator Kerry refuses to admit: spend money for national defense in the form of (A) military expenditures or (B) higher energy prices. A President Kerry will not end (or seriously reduce) US dependence on foreign energy supplies for exactly the same reason he would not increase the federal military budget: he and his political supporters want to use the money elsewhere than national security. In any event, achieving significantly increased energy independence would probably cost a lot more than the alternative modernizing of the miliary. But a modernized military can be used to address a wide range of national security threats, where reduced dependency on foreign energy only addresses one narrow range of such threats - a range that does not even include all significant security threats relating to the Middle east. Just by way of example, the United States would not be able to actively defend any ally faced with an invasion (such as Israel) with a reduced US dependency on foreign energy.

That means that a Kerry Administration would probably look like the Clinton Administrations: we would have no upgrade of the military and no reduction in foreign energy dependency, but we would have quieter Europeans free riding on what is left of American past and present military expenditures while the whole world looks the other way and disasters much worse that those of 9-11 fester. And when the inevitable disasters are upon us, the political classes can point fingers, assert that nobody was connecting the dots, and claim that everything has now changed.

But, of course, Senator Kerry's address makes clear that for a lot of the political class and most of the Democratic Party nothing has changed but the fig leaves.

POSTSCRIPT: Senator Kerry includes "oil independence" as a prong of his national security policy, but this prong can also be seen as an environmental measure, in which guise it is if anything more perverse, unweildy and expensive than it is as a national security measure. The US has lots of coal - which is worse on the environment than other fossil fuels - and discouraging use of foreign fuel supplies just encourage use of US coal ... and US oil located in environmentally sensitive areas. Senator Kerry now says he deplores added fuel taxes. If so, what would that leave of this prong as an effective environmental measure? Other legal measures, such as increasing fleet milage requirements, have not worked to reduce US use of foreign fuels in the past, and further such requirements are not likely to work in the future. But, if they did, discouraging US use of foreign fossil fuel will also tend to subsidize its use by China, India and other countries, by reducing US competition for the world's supply (at increased costs to the US). Since those countries have few environmental controls compared to the US (thanks in part to the perverse Kyoto Accord sell-out), the net effect would likely be a lot more worldwide pollution.

Posted 12:15 PM by Robert Musil
Zogbyrot

To approximate a Zogby Poll, one only has to ask:

What polling results would get the pollster the largest amount of media fuss?

Let's see. There has been a big supposed drop in President Bush's approval ratings as the media flogged the long-dead Abu Ghraib story - but a curious failure of that drop to be much reflected in Mr. Bush's ranking against Senator Kerry, especially in most "battlefield states."

Voila! The Zogby Poll (click on "Battlefield States Poll") finds Kerry leading Bush by big margins in lots of battlefield states! Much more so than any other poll except the silly CBS methodologically-hilarious blip.

Whowuddathunkit?

But it's all nonsense. The constant barrage of hostile media coverage of Mr. Bush and his administration has mostly served to distort polling results and generally make polls less reliable and likely more pro-Kerry and pro-Democrat. Zogby's willingness to engage in flagrant media flirtation has exacerbated the whole distortive effect in that poll - making it essentially worthless and making the real question it raises: Who at the Wall Street Journal has judgment so bad as to have hired Zogby at all? In any event, this kind of distortion of public opinion resembles the ripple from pebbles tossed into a pond: Flashy, but it doesn't take long to dissipate.

For example, Ohio is supposedly a big, key battlefield state leaning towards Kerry. Except it isn't:

Republican Bush was at 47 percent, followed by Kerry at 41 percent and Nader at 3 percent among registered voters surveyed by Mason-Dixon Polling and Research for The Plain Dealer. Results were released late Saturday.

Nine percent of voters were undecided.

Bush's lead came although about half in the poll expressed disapproval of his handling of the economy, found to be the No. 1 issue among Ohio voters. The state is one of several in the region to lose manufacturing jobs under Bush, while Kerry has made the jobs issue central to his White House campaign.

These latest results come two weeks after an American Research Group poll of 600 likely voters found Kerry had edged ahead of Bush in the state, 49 percent to 42 percent, with Nader at 2 percent.

And just think about what these poll numbers will read once a lot more voters figure out that the economy is actually doing quite well and things aren't going badly in Iraq at all and we're winning the war on terror.

UPDATE: Some specific, South Dakota, Zogbyrot - nicely skewered by RealClear.

Posted 9:04 AM by Robert Musil
Herr Doktorprofessor Tells The Truth! II: Come Here For The Climate, Do You?

One message (some of it implied) of Mr. Okrent's current opus is that of the old publisher's form letter of rejection: Your manuscript, Herr Doktorprofessor Paul Von Krugman, is good and original. Unfortunately, the good part is not so original, and the original part is not so good. Herr Doktorprofessor and Mr. Okrent agree that the Times reporting on the Iraq weapons of mass destruction issue was lacking - both in substance and in Times procedures. That is by no means as clear objectively as either of them - or the Times preceding mea culpa - now assert. [UPDATE: Don Luskin makes some excellent and trenchant observations in this regard.] But for now it is enough to accept that none of the Times, Mr. Okrent nor Herr Doktorprofessor view the Times reporting on the Iraq weapons of mass destruction issue as satisfying the Times' own internal (what one might call institutionally subjective) reporting standards. Where Herr Doktorprofessor parts company with the others is in his analysis of the issue: Why did that happen, assuming it did happen? Through the gap one can view Herr Doktorprofessor slathering the Times with paranoid drippings similar to those with which he has so lavishly sauced the business community, the Republican Party, the Administration and many others who have incurred his ire.

Just what went wrong? Herr Doktorprofessor says:

The New York Times ...[is] currently engaged in self-criticism over the run-up to the Iraq war. They are asking, as they should, why poorly documented claims of a dire threat received prominent, uncritical coverage, while contrary evidence was either ignored or played down. ... Iraq coverage was embedded [in]a climate in which the press wasn't willing to report negative information about George Bush. ....

So why did the press credit Mr. Bush with virtues that reporters knew he didn't possess?

One answer is misplaced patriotism. ... Another answer is the tyranny of evenhandedness. ... And some journalists just couldn't bring themselves to believe that the president of the United States was being dishonest about such grave matters. Finally, let's not overlook the role of intimidation.

Herr Doktorprofessor's analysis proceeds from his claim that the Times' reporting deficiencies are attributable to the decisions of individual journalists who credit[ed] Mr. Bush with virtues that reporters knew he didn't possess. In other words, Herr Doktorprofessor argues that the ultimate fault lies with journalists at the Times and elsewhere who actually knew what they were doing was wrong when they did it. He then proceeds to explain his theory as to why the Times journalists deliberately lied: (1) misplaced patriotism, (2) the tyranny of evenhandedness (now rejected), (3) credulity of the press towards a president already "known" not to possess the virtues with credited to him, and (4) intimidation. Once again, it's all sinister individuals and conspiracies for Herr Doktorprofessor: much of the press seemed to reach a collective decision that it was necessary, in the interests of national unity, to suppress criticism of the commander in chief.

It's all very clear to Herr Doktorprofessor: The Times and its individual journalists were corrupted into deliberate error and conspiracy against their trusting readers by what Herr Doktorprofessor terms a climate in which the press wasn't willing to report negative information about George Bush. And, just to drive home the point, he claims that it's not just Iraq, and it's not just The Times.

In similar terms Herr Doktorprofessor had earlier dismissed all claims that the recent corporate goverance difficulties were confined to a few bad apples, or the results of perhaps serious negligence or oversight. No, no, no! Herr Doktorprofessor often patiently explained that corporate America is deeply and broadly and deliberately corrupt, and so are many (it not most!) of the more senior individuals in it (with the exception of the occasional, sainted, usually female, whistle-blower). And, of course, it was all somehow attributable to George Bush and another of his evil "political climates" that Mr. Bush somehow manages to create and manipulate while being hopelessly stupid - as in this sweepingly magisterial condemnation:

The wave of scandal was made possible, if not caused, by a political climate in which corporate insiders got pretty much whatever they wanted. Since the politicians who did their bidding haven't paid any price, that climate hasn't changed.

But there is no overlap whatsoever between Herr Doktorprofessor's explanation of the posited deficiencies in Times coverage of Iraq W.M.D.'s and that of Mr. Okrent and the Times. Rather, in a plea sadly reminiscent of those bleated fecklessly by many directors of public companies, their chief executive officers and corporate accountants, Mr. Okrent pleads that neither the Times nor its individuals were corrupt. Yes, Mr. Okrent admits that the Times was as guileless as a Big 4 accounting firm partner, deficient in institutional policy, and plagued by negligence and corner-cutting. Mr. Okrent offers touching cris de coeur:

The failure was not individual, but institutional.

[What] journalistic imperatives and practices ... led The Times down this unfortunate path[?] There were several.

THE HUNGER FOR SCOOPS ... One old Times hand recently told me there was a period in the not-too-distant past when editors stressed the maxim "Don't get it first, get it right." That soon mutated into "Get it first and get it right." ... Times reporters broke many stories before and after the war - but when the stories themselves later broke apart, in many instances Times readers never found out. ...

FRONT-PAGE SYNDROME ... There are few things more greedily desired than a byline on Page 1. You can "write it onto 1," as the newsroom maxim has it, by imbuing your story with the sound of trumpets. Whispering is for wimps, and shouting is for the tabloids, but a terrifying assertion that may be the tactical disinformation of a self-interested source does the trick. ... [Some] stories pushed Pentagon assertions so aggressively you could almost sense epaulets sprouting on the shoulders of editors.

HIT-AND-RUN JOURNALISM The more surprising the story, the more often it must be revisited. ... Stories, like plants, die if they are not tended. So do the reputations of newspapers.

CODDLING SOURCES There is nothing more toxic to responsible journalism than an anonymous source. There is often nothing more necessary, too... But I believe that a source who turns out to have lied has breached that contract, and can fairly be exposed. ... To a degree, Chalabi's fall from grace was handled by The Times as if flipping a switch; proper coverage would have been more like a thermostat, constantly taking readings and then adjusting to the surrounding reality. (While I'm on the subject: Readers were never told that Chalabi's niece was hired in January 2003 to work in The Times's Kuwait bureau. She remained there until May of that year.)

END-RUN EDITING Howell Raines, who was executive editor of the paper at the time, denies that The Times's standard procedures were cast aside in the weeks before and after the war began. (Raines's statement on the subject, made to The Los Angeles Times, may be read at poynter.org/forum/?id=misc#raines.)

But my own reporting (I have spoken to nearly two dozen current and former Times staff members whose work touched on W.M.D. coverage) has convinced me that a dysfunctional system enabled some reporters operating out of Washington and Baghdad to work outside the lines of customary bureau management.

In some instances, reporters who raised substantive questions about certain stories were not heeded. Worse, some with substantial knowledge of the subject at hand seem not to have been given the chance to express reservations. ...

No one can deny that this was a drama in which The Times played a role. ... Chalabi [is] "a man who, in lunches with politicians, secret sessions with intelligence chiefs and frequent conversations with reporters from Foggy Bottom to London's Mayfair, worked furiously to plot Mr. Hussein's fall." ... The aggressive journalism that I long for, and that the paper owes both its readers and its own self-respect, would reveal not just the tactics of those who promoted the W.M.D. stories, but how The Times itself was used to further their cunning campaign.

Interesting. No mention of George Bush or any of his "climates." No "misplaced patriotism." No "tyranny of evenhandedness" (now rejected? - who knows?). No credulity towards a president already "known" not to possess the virtues credited him. No intimidation. No "collective decision to suppress criticism of the commander in chief."

Do Herr Doktorprofessor (on the one hand) and Mr. Okrent, Times Executive Editor Bill Keller and Managing Editor Jill Abramson (on the other hand) work for the same publication? - or in the same media industry? Are these people living in and writing about the same country? - or the same war? - or the same journalists and reporters? - or the same media coverage?

Or is it that one of them is just plain wrong?

Posted 11:48 AM by Robert Musil
Herr Doktorprofessor Tells The Truth!

Today, Herr Doktorprofessor Paul Von Krugman tells the truth!

Of course, it's not the whole truth or nothing but the truth - so, if he had said it under oath it would technically be perjury - but, still, it's a start! The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step!

And it is both an important truth that Herr Doktorprofessor is telling and one that has been noted by the Man Without Qualities in a prior post. In fact, for the first time it is possible to summarize the worthwhile portion of one of Herr Doktorprofessor's columns by quoting from a Man Without Qualities post:

The current state of mainstream liberal media political coverage is substantively Gonzo, written by people who (by the Pew poll) increasingly admit their orientation but (by the Carroll speech) still cling to the fiction of their professional and institutional accuracy. The next step, of course, is full-fledged, overt, out-of-the-closet liberal Gonzo journalism in the currently accepted meaning (not the Thompson original meaning) of that term: inaccurate, crazy, essentially a license for liberal journalists to write anything they want.

Herr Doktorprofessor says it his own way. First comes the admission that current mainstream liberal coverage has already gone Gonzo:

But it's not just Iraq, and it's not just The [New York] Times. Many journalists seem to be having regrets about the broader context in which Iraq coverage was embedded: a climate in which the press wasn't willing to report negative information about George Bush. People who get their news by skimming the front page, or by watching TV, must be feeling confused by the sudden change in Mr. Bush's character. For more than two years after 9/11, he was a straight shooter, all moral clarity and righteousness. But now those people hear about a president who won't tell a straight story about why he took us to war in Iraq or how that war is going, who can't admit to and learn from mistakes, and who won't hold himself or anyone else accountable.

So very true. That's just what the mainstream media have been doing recently. One may not be one of his fans, but one has to admit that when Herr Doktorprofessor is right he's right. And he's also dead-on when he notes that mainstream media is in the process of overtly casting off what he terms the "tyranny of evenhandedness." How else to achieve true Gonzo bliss?

Of course, it is not necessary to tarry for more than a moment over the rest of his spin and explanations. His suggestion that the Times or mainstream liberal media ever broadly presented Mr. Bush as a straight shooter, all moral clarity and righteousness is just delusional in the standard-issue Herr Doktorprofessor fashion. Yes, it is a little peculiar (even for him) to suggest that the New York Times has presented Mr. Bush as a straight shooter, all moral clarity and righteousness with respect to what Herr Doktorprofessor terms the President's "budget arithmetic," or that the Times has not been "willing to check his budget arithmetic." And, of course, the Times and the rest of the liberal media were very hostile to Mr. Bush's decisions to invade both Afghanistan and Iraq, and indulged in quite a bit of challenge to the President's bona fides at the time. For example, before the Afghan war there was the looming Afghan "quagmire," and that deadly Afghan winter that would exacerbate it, whose risk the President the mainstream media repeatedly reminded us was not admitting. Herr Doktorprofessor tells us we're just imagining that - and so much more.

His argument that reporters on the Times and other liberal media have been silenced by "intimidation" is mostly a bizarre insult to such reporters. How many Times reporters, for example, would be willing to accept this characterization of their intestinal fortitude:

After 9/11, if you were thinking of saying anything negative about the president, you had to be prepared for an avalanche of hate mail. You had to expect right-wing pundits and publications to do all they could to ruin your reputation, and you had to worry about being denied access to the sort of insider information that is the basis of many journalistic careers.

Herr Doktorprofessor writes so well! One can practically hear the Times reporters whining to each other in the powder room off the newsroom floor: "O-O-O, I can't report something negative about the President - or Sean Hannity might disagree with me on television, maybe mention my name! Or I might get a nasty e-mail! ... By the way, am I getting a pimple here?" Who knew that Herr Doktorprofessor considered the Times reporters to be such gutless wonders? And it would be hilarious to survey the Times reporters to determine how many of them are in agreement with Herr Doktorprofessor's charge that they censored their reporting out of what Herr Doktorprofessor calls "misplaced patriotism," or will admit that they "reach[ed] a collective decision that it was necessary, in the interests of national unity, to suppress criticism of the commander in chief" or that the Bush administration played them "like a fiddle."

But, relative to Herr Doktorprofessor's overall precarious mental condition, such evidence of further marginal deterioration is but detail! The important thing is that Herr Doktorprofessor understands and has come to tell us all that (1) mainstream liberal media reporting has now gone Gonzo ("A new Pew survey finds 55 percent of journalists in the national media believing that the press has not been critical enough of Mr. Bush, compared with only 8 percent who believe that it has been too critical. More important, journalists seem to be acting on that belief."), and (2) they're casting off that old tyranny of evenhandedness fig leaf - unafraid to let the world at large see what they've got and what they're made of!

This is important stuff. As Alcoholics Anonymous has long counseled: Recovery often can only begin after the dipsomaniac has hit bottom and admitted what he has become. That may now be happening for the liberal media. As with so many of "his" academic economic insights, Herr Doktorprofessor may not have been the first to see what is happening, but he has now popularized the observation.

And that matters.

Of course, one problem for what Herr Doktorprofessor hopes to gain from all of this is that there are now other places for consumers of news to obtain quite a different spin and explanation for the truths to which he admits here - including those dreaded right-wing pundits and publications before whom he thinks liberal reporters cower. In other words, the public is very likely now to figure out what the liberal media are up to - thereby depriving them of the credibility and influence that the modest, discarded tyranny of evenhandedness provided. Indeed, even Herr Doktorprofessor's own truthful admissions on the subject help to advance that process of public education. And for that we truly owe him our thanks.

Odd, though, that he misses the economic point that it's cheaper for the media companies to have reporters just write their biases than actually go out and find news. Isn't he supposed to be an economist or something?

POSTSCRIPT: Curiously, the Times' own analysis of what it now says were deficiencies in some of its Iraq coverage specifically rejects attempts by "some critics" (apparently including of Herr Doktorprofessor, in advance) to place the blame on individual reporters acting under any incentives - which would seem to include "intimidation" of individual reporters, or "misplaced patriotism" of individual reporters, or any of the rest of Herr Doktorprofessor's silly litany:

Some critics of our coverage during that time have focused blame on individual reporters. Our examination, however, indicates that the problem was more complicated. Editors at several levels who should have been challenging reporters and pressing for more skepticism were perhaps too intent on rushing scoops into the paper. Accounts of Iraqi defectors were not always weighed against their strong desire to have Saddam Hussein ousted. Articles based on dire claims about Iraq tended to get prominent display, while follow-up articles that called the original ones into question were sometimes buried. In some cases, there was no follow-up at all.

Gee. Editors "intent on rushing scoops" without incurring the costs of fact-checking and follow-up? That's another way of saying that the problem was mostly caused by editors trying to increase production while minimizing costs: the very economic incentive approach Herr Doktorprofessor leaves lying untouched. The Times note to its readers was written by Executive Editor Bill Keller and Managing Editor Jill Abramson. Those worthies would do well to ponder that their own economic instincts and insights here are considerably more acute than those of Herr Doktorprofessor, especially when they proceed to the next logical step of their analysis: exactly why did the Times have policies and procedures in place that encouraged its editors to cut such corners? Profit maximization, anyone? Or was it "agency costs," perhaps? Any parallel here with the Jayson Blair fiasco? (Howell Raines, who was Times executive editor during that period [from October 2001 through May 2003], objected to the editors' note, calling it "vague and incomplete" and saying a broader examination was warranted. In a statement on www.poynter.org, the journalism Web site, he wrote that faulty reporting did not result from a desire for scoops: "No editor did this kind of reckless rushing while I was executive editor." Amazing.) Neither the Times nor anyone else gets the useful answer without asking the correctly focused questions. No help there from Herr Doktorprofessor.

And given his paucity of insight, they would also do well to ponder exactly why they think the Times needs Herr Doktorprofessor on its staff.

Posted 5:12 PM by Robert Musil
Pathetic ... And Bound To Lose XLIV: Bar-B-Q Poll

Yes, the pornographers posing as concerned editors continue to flog the Abu Ghraib story, and, yes, the unrelenting assault has taken a minor ding out of the President's lead over John Kerry. But all that will mean essentially nothing much in November.

What will mean something, especially for the large number of voters who aren't now paying any particular attention to politics, and won't until much closer to election day, is that John Kerry, personally, is personally a loathsome jerk. This is not my personal opinion. This is an objective fact. His hateful, self-destructive comment "did the training wheels fall off" is just the most recent bit of evidence in an already overwhelming case.

And voters eventually understand all that. As people get to know John Kerry, they almost always tend to dislike him personally with greater and greater intensity, and the idea of actually spending time at a barbecue with the man is something only the most devoted Democratic partisan could stomach:

Voters would rather flip burgers and drink beer at a backyard barbecue with President Bush than Sen. John Kerry, according to a national poll that found Bush leading Kerry on "regular guy" qualities. Half of the registered voters surveyed said they would rather have a barbecue with Bush, while 39 percent chose Kerry and 11 percent either didn't know or would not answer the question posed by Quinnipiac University pollsters. More voters also would trust Bush, 46-41, to run the family business.

Of course, that John Kerry is personally a loathsome jerk does not by itself guaranty that George Bush will be returned to the White House. But it stacks the deck pretty well. And, as far as quality barbecue time, have I got the guy for you.

Posted 1:10 PM by Robert Musil
Nancyboys III: Poor L'il Dewey

Female moral hegemony? Worse and worse.

Yet the women and feminist writers remain silent!

Posted 1:10 PM by Robert Musil
Potentially Key Facts

E-mailed today from a friend:

1. The liquid inside young coconuts can be used as a substitute for blood plasma. [MWQ Note: In an eerie coincidence, my 5-year old son only last night said that a mosquito sucking blood from his arm was like his sucking the liquid inside young coconuts through a straw!]

2. No piece of paper can be folded in half more than seven (7) times.

3. Donkeys kill more people annually than plane crashes.

4. You burn more calories sleeping than you do watching television.

5. Oak trees* do not produce acorns until they are fifty (50) years of age or older.

6. The first product to have a bar code was Wrigley's gum.

7. The king of hearts is the only king without a mustache.

8. American Airlines saved $40,000 in 1987 by eliminating one (1) olive from each salad served in first-class.

9. Venus is the only planet that rotates clockwise.

10. Apples, not caffeine, are more efficient at waking you up in the morning.

11. The first owner of the Marlboro Company died of lung cancer. So did the first "Marlboro Man."

12. Walt Disney was afraid of mice.

13. Pearls melt in vinegar.

14. The three most valuable brand names on earth: Marlboro, Coca Cola, and Budweiser, in that order [UPDATE: - or maybe Coca-Cola, Microsoft and IBM, in that order.]

15. It is possible to lead a cow upstairs...but not downstairs.

16. A duck's quack doesn't echo, and no one knows why.

17. Dentists have recommended that a toothbrush be kept at least six (6) feet away from a toilet to avoid airborne particles resulting from the flush. (I keep my toothbrush in the living room now!)

18. Richard Millhouse Nixon was the first U.S. president whose name contains all the letters from the word "criminal." The second? William Jefferson Clinton.

And the best for last.....

19. Turtles can breathe through their butts.

______________________________
* Fact (5) may be intended to refer just to the familiar red and white oaks. I am informed by a reader - apparently an oak cognoscente - that burr oaks are acorn prodigious prodigies. More generally, I have not personally verified any of these facts.

UPDATE: Some fact checking links have been added. But I don't vouch for anything!

Posted 9:03 AM by Robert Musil
Moore v. Clarke

Richard Clarke is a hero, right? A whistle-blower of the sort sainted by Michael Moore, right?

Well,

In an interview with The Hill yesterday, Richard Clarke claimed sole responsibility for authorizing the post-9/11 flight that allowed many of Osama bin Laden's relatives to leave the country.

The mystery of who authorized the flight has been a staple of the Michael Moore left for some time now, especially since 9/11 Commission Chairman Lee Hamilton mentioned publicly that the commissioners had asked the question at least "50 times" but had never gotten an answer. They have one now. Or do they?

In the interview Clarke said:

“I take responsibility for it. I don’t think it was a mistake, and I’d do it again...”

"It [authorization of the flight] didn’t get any higher than me. On 9-11, 9-12 and 9-13, many things didn’t get any higher than me. I decided it in consultation with the FBI.”

But Clarke's response seems to contradict his public testimony before the 9/11 Commission:

“The request came to me, and I refused to approve it,” Clarke testified. “I suggested that it be routed to the FBI and that the FBI look at the names of the individuals who were going to be on the passenger manifest and that they approve it or not. I spoke with the — at the time — No. 2 person in the FBI, Dale Watson, and asked him to deal with this issue. The FBI then approved … the flight.”

“That’s a little different than saying, ‘I claim sole responsibility for it now,’” Roemer said yesterday.

However, the FBI has denied approving the flight.

FBI spokeswoman Donna Spiser said, “We haven’t had anything to do with arranging and clearing the flights.”

“We did know who was on the flights and interviewed anyone we thought we needed to,” she said. “We didn’t interview 100 percent of the [passengers on the] flight. We didn’t think anyone on the flight was of investigative interest.”

When Roemer asked Clarke during the commission’s March hearing, “Who gave the final approval, then, to say, ‘Yes, you’re clear to go, it’s all right with the United States government,’” Clarke seemed to suggest it came from the White House.

“I believe after the FBI came back and said it was all right with them, we ran it through the decision process for all these decisions that we were making in those hours, which was the interagency Crisis Management Group on the video conference,” Clarke testified. “I was making or coordinating a lot of the decisions on 9-11 in the days immediately after. And I would love to be able to tell you who did it, who brought this proposal to me, but I don’t know. The two — since you press me, the two possibilities that are most likely are either the Department of State or the White House chief of staff’s office.”

Instead of putting the issue to rest, Clarke’s testimony fueled speculation among Democrats that someone higher up in the administration, perhaps White House Chief of Staff Andy Card, approved the flights.

“It couldn’t have come from Clarke. It should have come from someone further up the chain,” said a Democratic Senate aide who watched Clarke’s testimony.

Clarke’s testimony did not settle the issue for Roemer, either.

“It doesn’t seem that Richard Clarke had enough information to clear it,” Roemer said Monday.

“I just don’t think that the questions are resolved, and we need to dig deeper,” Roemer added. “Clarke sure didn’t seem to say that he was the final decisionmaker. I believe we need to continue to look for some more answers.”

There's more ... and Moore. Ah, ya' gotta love those Mooreian shadowy connections!

Posted 8:11 AM by Robert Musil
Jobs, Anyone?

Gregg Easterbrook advances the hoary notion that more national gasoline taxes create all kinds of benefits (and Andrew Sullivan is happy, too). Mr. Easterbrook argues in part:

Had federal gas taxes gone up 50 cents a gallon 10 years ago, several things might not have happened or would have had far less impact. The S.U.V. and pickup-truck crazes would not have occurred, or at least these vehicles would be much less popular; highway deaths would have been fewer; and gasoline demands would be lower as would oil imports. ....

The consequences of using the tax system to create the supposed "benefits" Mr. Easterbrook posits are far more complex than he admits. His column is a virtual tour-de-force of omitted important considerations and disingenuous reasoning. Some of these implicit errors and omissions are the focus of Caroline Baum's wonderful article (although it is not a response to the Kerry-Easterbrook-Sullivan proposal as such). As she notes just by way of example, a gasoline tax does not create incentive for increased exploration or supply - unlike the demand-driven price rise we are seeing now. But Mr. Easterbrook counts as a "benefit" of his tax proposal that the chance of this kind of demand-driven price rise would be suppressed by his proposal. As the old saying goes, be careful what you wish for ... And Mr. Easterbrook's approach gets worse ... a lot worse ... mostly in ways he is careful to avoid even mentioning. [Baum link from Luskin.]

I don't want to generally attack the prospect of a rise in the gasoline tax, or even to argue that such a rise is an absolute negative under all conditions. Indeed, perhaps such a rise could be a positive if coupled with a decrease in other taxes, as proposed in 1999 by N. Gregory Mankiw, now chairman of President Bush's Council of Economic Advisers, a proposal disingenuously cited by Mr. Easterbrook are support for his own quite different proposal. Professor Mankiw's argument proceeded from a set of beliefs regarding the virtue of increasing overall national economic efficiency and reduction of wasteful economic "externalities," not to advance economic redistributionism or some vague environmental imperative. Mr. Easterbrook's past writings certainly show no sign of embracing an approach like Prof. Mankiw's - and Mr. Easterbrook signals no change of heart here. And Mr. Easterbrook's approach gets worse ... a lot worse ...

But what of Mr. Easterbrook's argument taken on it's own terms, setting aside its omissions, implicit dishonesty and outright incoherence? What, for example, is one to make of his naive, unexplained citing as a "benefit" from his (and Senator Kerry's) proposed tax that the S.U.V. and pickup-truck crazes would not have occurred, or at least these vehicles would be much less popular? Senator Kerry and many other Democrats have made a big stink of the "loss" of American jobs, especially American manufacturing jobs, to overseas companies. One of the main reasons more American jobs have not been "lost" is that American auto manufacturers have been relatively good at turning out those S.U.V.'s and pickup-trucks that "crazed" (Mr. Easterbrook's term) American consumers have been buying instead of foreign cars. Those S.U.V.'s and pickup-trucks have been made in this country by American companies employing American manufacturing workers.

Is it a clear benefit that those manufacturing jobs would have been forfeit? Or is the job loss to be considered a loss but a loss obviously worth the cost - so much so that this particular manufacturing job loss doesn't even warrant a mention in a column defending Democrat Kerry's endorsement of a loopy gas-tax increase?

Posted 10:46 AM by Robert Musil
Nancyboys II: Barbara At Barnard

A prior post included this note about high female involvement in the Abu Ghraib scandal:

Significant time has passed and we have seen no ruminations from Big Mo or even Ms. Noonan on these latest exemplars of the "female" moral hegemony - including the facts that it was investigations by macho organizations (the SEC, the DoJ, the Army) that rooted out the irregularities and, to the extent there were whistleblowers, they were all men. Will these two scribbling worthies hold Army Pfc. Lynndie England, Spc. Sabrina Harman or Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski responsible for their respective acts or failures to act? Or will we see some reversion to the assumption that women are not responsible for their own acts while around men - especially macho men: the Hillary Clinton "pink-suit-interview" approach. Will the gender aspect be discussed by these two scribbling worthies, and other women commenters, at all - or will we see it all put down to some genderless "these-guards-were-just-untrained-losers" dismissal? Or will one or more of them come up with something containing a bit more ingenuity and integrity?

I haven't seen anything yet.

Well, I still haven't seen much - and nothing at all from Msses. Dowd or Noonan. But feminist author Barbara Ehrenreich had this to say in her commencement address at Barnard College on May 18:

"[In] these photos from Abu Ghraib, you have every Islamic fundamentalist stereotype of Western culture, all nicely arranged in one hideous image: imperial arrogance, sexual depravity -- and gender equality.... Maybe I shouldn't have been so shocked. Gender equality cannot, all alone, bring about a just and peaceful world. What I have finally come to understand, sadly and irreversibly, is that the kind of feminism based on an assumption of moral superiority on the part of women is a lazy and self-indulgent form of feminism" -- .

That's a nice start. Of course, much of Ms. Ehrenreich's talk is predicatably deranged: "Well, it turns out they were just operating under different management. We didn't displace Saddam Hussein; we replaced him." But at least it's something. In a culture in which almost every "first woman this-or-that" rates a national media annotation, where is the outpouring of feminist musings on the many "women's historic firsts" coming out of Abu Ghraib? For example, surely "first American woman likely to be court martialed for torture and sexual humiliation of a man" is worth a witty Maureen Dowd column with all kinds of fancy word play. And now that Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, the woman in charge of Abu Ghraib prison at the time of the offenses largely committed by other women then under her command, has been suspended while pleading "scapegoat," surely many, many column inches are being written by Ms. Dowd and the many, many of her ilk to document this particular chapter of feminist progress and female moral hegemony! I must just have overlooked them.

But Ms. Dowd has her BUSHWORLD! book coming out. She won't leave out that chapter!

Will she?

MORE:

Apparently, the deaths of some female soldiers warrant a consideration separate from the consideration given to the deaths of male soldiers by the national media. But for some reason the immoral acts of some female soldiers don't warrant such separate consideration - even though a big deal was made of gender by the same media in the corporate scandal context.

Posted 9:20 AM by Robert Musil
Kobe Chatter: Playing The Race Card II

In prior posts the Man Without Qualities has pointed out that while the media is almost obsessively attempting to ignore the racial aspect of this case, it can't and shouldn't be ignored and will eventually be raised pointedly by Mr. Bryant.

Mr. Bryant is now doing exactly that:

A defense lawyer asked a judge Monday to approve expert witnesses he said will show that the investigation of rape charges against Kobe Bryant was shoddy enough to suggest bias against the NBA star.

Bryant attorney Hal Haddon said in court papers he wants to call two experts to testify that the work of sheriff's detectives Doug Winters and Dan Loya was incomplete.

Haddon said the men "closed their eyes" to potential physical evidence at the site of the alleged crime that might have confirmed Bryant's innocence.

"The failure to conduct the most 'regular' police procedure — investigation of a crime scene and collection of physical evidence — suggests both a bias against Mr. Bryant and a willful or reckless unwillingness to consider the possibility that Mr. Bryant committed no crime and that the accuser was lying about the sexual encounter for ulterior motives," Haddon wrote.

It isn't as good as having a God-send like Mark Furman's racial slurs to exploit, but Mr. Bryant's defense team is giving the race play all they've got.

Posted 8:10 PM by Robert Musil
World War II Memorial


Amazing.

I actually agree with almost every word Timothy Noah writes about the World War II Memorial.

I was all suited up to loathe it ... until I saw it.

And I also agree with his dissing of all the copycat "death list" momuments that have followed the Vietnam War Memorial like a dumb cortege, including the New York Times' dreadful, kitschy "Portraits of Grief" for Sept. 11.

Posted 1:46 PM by Robert Musil
Not So Hot Air

The Scotsman reports that wind power is probably just as much of an illusion as any clear headed Scott already thought.

Nuclear power, on the other hand ...

Posted 1:46 PM by Robert Musil
Oozing Charm From Every Pore,...

... He oiled his way around the floor.

That may have been true of that rudapest from Budapest Zoltan Karpathy, but Herr Doktorprofessor Paul Von Krugman has big problems understanding the production of both charm and oil.

Don Luskin does the fisk.

Posted 9:03 AM by Robert Musil
More Overt?

"Moderate" is a much-abused term. For example, many commenters - led, I believe, by James Taranto - have noted that for most of the liberal media there are no surviving "liberal" Republicans. To the liberal media there are only "conservative" (sometime "arch-conservative" or "ultra-conservative") and "moderate" Republicans. Even such worthies as Arlen Spector (left-wing Republican senator from Pennsylvania) and other such Republicans furthest to the left, even Republicans with voting records comparable to liberal Democrats, and even Republicans who launch crusades against conservative Republicans and their causes, are "moderate." The most aggressive RINO (meaning "Republican in name only," of course) is a "moderate" in the bizarre quasi-Newspeak of the mainstream liberal media.

And the generally liberal functionaries of such media employ its quasi-Newspeak to christen themselves "moderates" when responding to the Pew poll and the like, as a kind of extreme example of the tendency noted by this Washington Post item:

Hans Noel, a political scientist at the University of California at Los Angeles, is the author of a paper called "The Road to Red and Blue America." In an interview, he said, "Most people say they are 'moderate,' but in fact the country is polarized around strong conservative and liberal positions." For the first time in generations, he said, those philosophical lines correspond to party lines. The once-hardy species of conservative Democrats -- so numerous in the 1980s they had a name, "Reagan Democrats" -- is now on the endangered list, along with the liberal "Rockefeller Republicans."

Professor Noel overstates the case with respect to the public (in my opinion), but he is deadly accurate in identifying the tendency of liberal media representatives to hide behind the term "moderate."

The media trade paper Editor and Publisher runs this article concerning a Pew Research poll again confirming that the nations reporters and media staff are far to the left of the American people (link from DRUDGE). That much is not news - except, perhaps, to the more intellectually dishonest denialists on the left such as Eric Alterman and his ilk.

But there is another development noted by the poll that is interesting:

While it's important to remember that most journalists in this survey continue to call themselves moderate, the ranks of self-described liberals have grown in recent years, according to Pew. For example, since 1995, Pew found at national outlets that the liberal segment has climbed from 22% to 34% while conservatives have only inched up from 5% to 7%.

The number of actual liberals in the media is almost certainly not increasing, at least not this rapidly. What is probably increasing is the number of media representatives who are willing to admit their actual political orientation. In other words, the Per Research poll suggests that media liberals are fast becoming more overt. That would be consistent with the tendency observed by some brighter commenters (such as Mickey Kaus) that the skewing of mainstream liberal media campaign coverage has fast become much more overtly skewed liberal and much more overtly hostile to George Bush and Republicans generally.

The effects of the increasingly obvious mainstream leftward skew is sometimes bizarre. Just by way of example, the Los Angeles Times assured its readers almost up to Recall Day that Governor Davis had a good chance of survival. That such media representatives are increasingly shameless can be seen, for example, in the fact that the man who presided over that particular Times journalistic travesty, Los Angeles Times Editor John S. Carroll, went on to deliver an unintentionally hilarious and ironic speech claiming that the media industry has been "infested" by the rise of pseudo-journalists who go against journalism's "long tradition to serve the public with accurate information." Catherine Seipp delivered a brilliant fisking of Mr. Carroll's pretensions and evasions.

Taken together, Mr. Carroll's speech and the Pew poll give an interesting snapshot: Media operatives are increasingly willing to admit to their own relatively extreme personal political orientation, but insist on retaining the fig leaf of the unbiased accuracy of their own media institution, while simultaneously slamming the few less liberally biased media outlets for "pseudo-journalism" (Fox News, in particular, which is clearly hitting a nerve).

The current state of mainstream liberal media political coverage is substantively Gonzo, written by people who (by the Pew poll) increasingly admit their orientation but (by the Carroll speech) still cling to the fiction of their professional and institutional accuracy. The next step, of course, is full-fledged, overt, out-of-the-closet liberal Gonzo journalism in the currently accepted meaning (not the Thompson original meaning) of that term: inaccurate, crazy, essentially a license for liberal journalists to write anything they want. Already some of the more self-satisfied media representatives on the left, especially those who feel secure and are closer to retirement, like Dan Rather, have begun to hint at more. A full scale outbreak seems imminent.

It is also inexpensive for a media outlet to fill time or space with the outpourings of a reporter's personal political biases - at least compared to actually gathering and editing real news. Maybe that has something to do with another development in journalism:

Many journalists believe that increased financial pressure is "seriously hurting" the quality of news coverage -- 66% of national newspeople and 57% of local journalists see it this way. That percentage is climbing when compared to past surveys. In 1995, for example, 41% of national and 33% of local journalists expressed this view. Not surprisingly, those national and local journalists -- about 75% -- who have witnessed newsroom cuts firsthand are among the most worried about the effects of bottom-line pressures, the study said.

Of course, at some point people may just stop watching, reading and listening.

Posted 9:32 AM by Robert Musil
Letting Go Of Abu Ghraib

This Washington Times editorial gets the media fixation on Abu Ghraib exactly right:

Accounts and graphic photos of Iraqi prisoner abuse persist in the press despite the fact that the story has run its course. The world already knows salient details of the prisoner humiliation and nudity, the causes of the abuse are under official investigation, and the courts-martial have begun. Yet, the caterwaul in the press against the American military and the war in Iraq continue.

Even today, the Washington Post is showing more icky nude photos and the Associated Press breathlessly informs us that prisoners were "fondled."

Why won't the media let go? Much of the explanation surely lies in the sterling excuse for running nude pictures (images! remember, this whole story is supposedly driven by the shocking images!) of nude men in sexual humiliation. In other words, the mainstream media editors are able to be pornographers without having to accept the lowly social positions of pornographers. Of course they want to continue long after the points have been made.

Then there is the political content. There is the simple fact - noted here previously - that both the general war on terror and the domestic economy are going the President's way (and, generally, the Republican way) as election issues for November. One can sense the joy in mainstream media reports of the decline in the President's approval ratings over Abu Ghraib, just as one can feel the corresponding frustration, even anger, over his continuing lead in almost every poll over his Democratic competitor - the one for whom the reporter writing the mainstream media story will almost certainly vote.

But the public is bored, and some media are getting the point. Even the front page of today's Los Angeles Times carries not a single Abu Ghraib story.

Give it up, guys. If people want pornography, there are better places on the net. And the prospect of driving a successful president from office with some pictures of Iraqi prisoner abuse was always fanciful and desperate, at best.

Posted 10:21 AM by Robert Musil
But What Will Warren Buffett Say?

According to the Seattle Times, Craig McCaw, Bill Gates and Michael Dell are all Republicans:

The Bush backers said they support the president for his stands on education, setting limits on lawsuits, visas for foreign workers and free trade. Former Microsoft executive Bob Herbold said Bush was the "spiritual force" behind a tax credit that has spurred research and development. Peter Neupert, chairman of Drugstore.com, said he supports Bush's decision to back electronic access to consumer health records.

Dell Computers founder Michael Dell was scheduled to attend but was stuck in traffic and missed the endorsement announcement. He was expected along with the others for a $250-a-person fund-raiser of Bush "Mavericks," the campaign's organization for donors under 40.

Through the end of March, employees of computer and Internet-related companies had given $1.4 million to Bush and $779,000 to Kerry, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan Washington think tank. The ratio is similar to 2000, when Bush collected $1.2 million from the industry, about double what Democrat Al Gore received. ....

Herbold, a longtime Republican activist whose wife, Pat Herbold, chairs the King County GOP, said the tech industry has begun to lean more Republican over the past five or six years. Microsoft founder Bill Gates was swayed four years ago when his company was under attack by the Justice Department of Democrat Bill Clinton, Herbold said.

"It became clear in the presidential election of 2000 that the company as well as the industry would be better off with a free marketplace, and that's what caused him (Gates) to come out strongly in favor of George W. Bush," Herbold said.

All Gates wanted to do was operate in a free-enterprise system, and "there's no party that supports the free-enterprise system like the Republican Party," Herbold said.

Gates has donated to Bush's re-election.

Posted 8:57 AM by Robert Musil
Daschle Descending X: Tom Goes For Broke, But This Time The South Dakotans Aren't Buying

The South Dakota Argus Leader reports:

Democratic Sen. Tom Daschle's lead over Republican challenger John Thune has dropped from seven points in February to what may be a statistical dead heat... Daschle ... holds a 49-47 edge over former three-term congressman Thune, the poll conducted for the Argus Leader and KELO-TV of Sioux Falls showed. Only 4 percent of those contacted said they were undecided in a race ... A similar poll in February showed Daschle with a 50-43 advantage and 7 percent undecided....

....A political science professor from Aberdeen , ... Ken Blanchard, said ... "[Daschle's] an incumbent with a presence in the state, and he's been around long enough that everybody knows him pretty well." ...

Daschle's campaign released a poll it had taken last week that showed the incumbent senator with a 55-42 advantage. The polling firm, Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research ... has numerous Democratic clients listed on its Web site.

With the real campaign likely to begin shortly after the special congressional election vote June 1, Daschle said he likes his position, and his campaign's poll numbers. "Polling from my campaign shows me with a sizeable and growing lead," he said. " ... He said the poll showed him claiming as much as 29 percent of the GOP vote. .... The Argus Leader-KELO poll placed Daschle's share of Republicans at 15 percent. It showed Thune with 8 percent of Democrat votes. The independent vote split 57-39 for Daschle.

Thune, who has been raising money and traveling the state but not advertising on television yet, said the poll numbers show him gaining support. .... Thune said he chose not to begin the public campaigning until June because he thinks people grew weary of the extended campaign with Johnson two years ago. ....

Northern University's Blanchard says ... "My guess is, most South Dakota voters, if they sat down and asked themselves 'What do I personally owe to Tom Daschle's position as a Senate leader,' they'd have to say, 'I don't know,' " ...

If Democrat Stephanie Herseth wins the open U.S. House seat, all three congressional posts in a solidly Republican state would belong to Democrats. ... Asked in the poll how the possibility of three Democrats would affect their decision on Daschle's re-election, 10 percent said it would make them more likely to support him, 25 percent said less likely and 64 percent said it would not affect their decision.

Here are the results for the recent Mason Dixon South Dakota Senate polls (MoE ± 3.5), reflecting the effects of the many millions of dollars Senator Daschle has already spent on campaign advertising:

"If the 2004 election for South Dakota's U.S. Senate seat were held today, for whom would you vote if the candidates were Tom Daschle, the Democrat, and John Thune, the Republican?"

............................Daschle(D).............Thune (R)..................Not Sure
..............................%....................... %....................... %
5/10-12/04.................... 49..................... 47....................... 4
2/5-7/04.......................50..................... 43....................... 7
10-11/03....................... 50.................... 44....................... 6
8/03........................... 48.................... 46....................... 6

So, let's see. Tom Daschle has spent millions on campaign advertising in a state that already knows him thoroughly before the "real campaign" begins or Mr. Thune has run ads. Mr. Daschle has thereby succeeded in losing a bit of support and is now again below the 50% mark. Turnout in the November race, as in most races, will be driven by the top of the ballot - in this case, the Presidential race. And nobody doubts that South Dakota will go thoroughly Republican in the Presidential race. By a ratio of 2.5-to-1 voters will be less likely to vote for Senator Daschle if the Congressional seat goes to the Democrat on June 1. Is it just me, or is all this beginning to sound like a chanted passage from Senator Daschle's own personal political Book of the Dead?

Posted 2:30 PM by Robert Musil
Pathetic ... And Bound To Lose XLIII: Back To The Races

As noted previously in this series, Senator Kerry seems to be having a bit of a hard time mastering the art of national Democratic identity politics, as large parts of several essential ethnic groups - native Americans, Hispanics, African Americans - threaten to go wandering off the Democratic plantation.

Now, wouldn't you know it, it's the jews:

Stuart Weil is ... a longtime Democrat who regularly attends synagogue. Four years ago, he voted for Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore. This year, not only does he plan to vote for President Bush, he's urging his Jewish friends to do the same. .... Weil and thousands of other AIPAC members welcomed Bush to their annual meeting with 21 standing ovations.... Bush won about 17% of the Jewish vote in 2000, but supporters are aiming to raise that to about 30% in this election, based largely on his support for Israel.

"By defending the freedom and prosperity and security of Israel, you're also serving the cause of America," Bush told the AIPAC delegates Tuesday.

His 39-minute speech was interrupted repeatedly with cheering and applause. On two occasions, at least a third of the audience burst into chants of "Four more years!" .... Steven Windmueller, an expert on Jewish voting behavior at Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles, agreed that Jewish voters were becoming less liberal, but he said the pattern was more complex than Republican strategists assumed. .... Since Bush came into office, his administration has made a concerted effort to court the Jewish community .... Moreover, Jewish leaders have had extraordinary access to the president.... "My impression was of a very human and humble individual who wanted to dialogue and not lecture, to share and not pontificate," said Jacob Rubenstein, chief rabbi at Young Israel in Scarsdale, N.Y., who attended one session in the Oval Office last fall. ....

One of the few polls of Jewish public opinion suggests some movement toward Bush. The survey, conducted last November and December for the American Jewish Committee and Foreign Affairs magazine, found that 24% of respondents said they had voted for Bush in 2000, and 31% said they planned to support him this fall. But the poll is unlikely to be an accurate gauge of voter behavior because it surveyed all adults identifying themselves as Jewish, not just those registered to vote or likely to vote. ....

Weil ... thinks otherwise. But his efforts to form a local branch of the Republican Jewish Coalition are stirring opposition among Jews in his community. "Oh, the hate mail I've been getting," he said. "You should see what they say."

And this kind of thing isn't going to help the Democratic effort.

UPDATE: Worse and worse:

"There is a strong fear among American Jewish leadership that the whispering campaign that 'the Jews started it,' will become public," a senior congressional staffer said. "We could be seeing others get on Hollings' bandwagon."

"Bush felt tax cuts would hold his crowd together and spreading democracy in the Mideast to secure Israel would take the Jewish vote from the Democrats," Hollings said in a column first published on May 6 in the Charleston Post and Courier. "You don't come to town and announce your Israel policy is to invade Iraq." ....

For his part, Hollings said Israel has never claimed that Iraq maintained a weapons of mass destruction arsenal. The senator, who later refused to retract his statements, said Wolfowitz's advocacy of a plan to promote democracy among Arab states comprised an Israeli initiative.

"With Iraq no threat, why invade a sovereign country?" Hollings asked. "The answer: President Bush's policy to secure Israel. Led by Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Charles Krauthammer, for years there has been a domino school of thought that the way to guarantee Israel's security is to spread democracy in the area."

It is only a matter of time before the cries begin that John Kerry has an obligation to denounce Senator Hollings' outrageous comments - for which he offers not one jot of evidence to support. Do Democrats think that they are helping John Kerry's presidential effort with unsupported arguments that "Bush lied! He and his people really wanted to help Israel, the dirty S.O.B.'s - but they didn't tell us that!

Isn't the Hollings approach a sure-fire way to convince American jews - indeed, people from all walks - that Bush has been a more committed friend of Israel than they had thought - and that many Democrats are a lot more untrustworthy, anti-semitic and anti-Israel than anyone thought? Is that good for the Democrats? Doesn't a ride on the Hollings' bandwagon require the Democrats to buy one-way tickets to oblivion?

POSTSCRIPT: And here's the most recent House of Ketchup roundup.

Posted 1:55 PM by Robert Musil
Pathetic ... And Bound To Lose XLII: John Kerry Tries To Waltz And Lambada At The Same Time!

Conventional is, of course, always murmuring low that a Democratic candidate may win the nomination by tacking to the left, but to hope for a win in the general election he had better tack back to the center. Ralph Nader has a fine understanding of that process, doesn't like the "centrist" Democrats it produces, and is running for President on a platform far to the left of center largely to spite that process. But John Kerry says he intends to directly appeal to Mr. Nader's voting base:

"It's my intention to speak very directly to those people who voted for Ralph Nader last time. ... I believe my campaign can appeal to them and frankly reduce any rationale for his candidacy. ... In the end, I hope I can make people aware that a vote for Ralph Nader is a vote for George Bush. ... A vote for John Kerry is a vote for the principles and values they care about."

In making his effort Senator Kerry knows that at least one argument will not work at all: Mr. Nader and his followers have shown themselves to be completely immune to the argument that their Nader votes frustrate efforts to turn out Mr. Bush. Nader and his supporters simply don't see any particular difference that they care about between a Bush presidency and that of a centrist-corrupted Democrat like Al Gore or John Kerry, should he tack to the center. Indeed, it's not only Mr. Nader's supporters who view Messrs. Bush and Kerry as Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum. This Fox News editorial pretty much sees them that way, too.

So John Kerry's promise to intention to speak very directly to those people who voted for Ralph Nader means that he will not tack to the center, correct?

Well, maybe. But then what to make of all the silly Vice Presidential speculation about the poll out Wednesday that supposedly suggests that John Kerry could be "competitive" in North Carolina if Sen. John Edwards were on the Democratic ticket? Does Senator Kerry hope that John Edwards will bring in North Carolina if the Kerry campaign is out fulfilling the Senator's intention to speak very directly to those people who voted for Ralph Nader?

Let's see. Waltz and Lambada? Ah one, and ah two, and ah three ...

Posted 10:26 AM by Robert Musil
Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me

Many media reports note that the Sex and the City paradigm - more young, single urban women than men - is a myth. In fact, there are substantially more such men than women. Yet my personal circle includes a substantially larger number of attractive, unmarried, educated, pretty successful, single women who want to get married (or say they do) than such men. And most of my friends and acquaintances of whom I have asked the question seem to have the same observation.

It's perplexing - until one excludes from the equation people of both sexes who say they want to be married but who have obviously structured their lives and mate-parameters to make marriage a ridiculously low probability. Then things seem to make more sense.

For example, a common Southern California male species is the man who does not so much want to be married as divorced with children, regardless of whether he has ever been married. Or at least the kind of man who has structured his mind and life to admit almost no other possibility. Of course, the most common form of this species is the actual divorced father - whose wife is given primary custody (either de jure or de facto) of the children, thereby reducing the father/child relationship to a kind of glorified uberuncle/niece-nephew pairing that seems to fit many such fathers just fine. They have children (once in a while), which is nice even though the cost in financial and emotional terms (ex-spouse, resentful, angry kids) is pretty high. Apparently, the cost is worth it for many such fathers. On the plus side, there are the new girl friends who are often chosen to have an educational and social level (even ethnicity) unacceptable to the father's family and circle of friends - thereby minimizing the inevitable pressure on the father to remarry.

If a man can establish a close relationship with actual nieces and nephews, he might even avoid the costs almost entirely. In that case he has to settle for children with a diluted genetic content, which evolution may deplore and which may be less satisfying emotionally than having his own emotionally attenuated offspring. But, then, there are sociobiologists who posit that this is exactly what bachelor uncles have always been for from an evolutionary standpoint.

From a personal perspective, much of the reason for such lifestyle parameters among men is often to expand the circle of women with which one may have sex. The more educated and financially successful and unfettered a man is, the broader his sexual horizons of womankind. Indeed, many hyper-educated, hyper-talented, rich men are more than pleased to dally with women of much less education, success, talent and money. Such marriages are not unusual. Indeed, the phenomenon of physically attractive but worthless heirs is a traditional common consequence of such male proclivities.

But if men view their education and success as opening for them ever broader vistas of sexual opportunities, the exact opposite seems to be the case for women, at least to the extent women were represented by participants in a colloquium at which the paper "The Growing Gender Gaps in College Enrollment and Degree Attainment in the U.S. and Their Potential Economic and Social Consequences" was presented, according to Wendy McElroy:

[T]he concern of the colloquium participants was a growing trend of women marrying men who were less educated and earned less money than they did. Minority women expressed the greatest concern Â? and with reason. According to the Sum study, Â?in 1999-2000, for every 100 degrees awarded to Black men, Black women were awarded 188 associate degrees, 192 bachelor degrees, and 221 masterÂ?s degrees.Â? Hispanic women earned nearly 130 degrees for every 100 awarded to Hispanic men. Sum concluded that highly educated women would have to consider "marrying down." He labeled the prospect as "a serious economic and cultural problem."

Ms. McElroy's observations are consistent with a personal anecdote. Recently, over dinner, a slender, beautiful, young, intelligent. educated, securities sales woman employed by one of the big New York investment banks shared with me her concerns following the break-up of her long-term relationship with a wealthy young Southern California male. After reviewing with her the various criteria she had established for a future replacement main squeeze, we together did some quick probabilistic calculations of the type those in or close to the securities business are prone to perform during their more intimate moments. The calculations took into account, for example, the fact that there was absolutely no chance that she would be interested in even the best looking, most congenial fireman one could imagine. Nor was she interested in "poaching" on the already-married or near-equivalent. Gay was no-go, of course. Etc. After some fast work on a note pad and calculator thoughtfully provided by the restaurant (whose napkins were of the expensive damask variety not suitable for scribbling except for the most aggressive) we determined that there are, perhaps, eight men now located in the United States who would make suitable mates.

My charming dinner companion passed on dessert.

Posted 1:27 PM by Robert Musil
Gandy v. Smith

NOW says it doesn't like single sex education:

But the National Organization for Women disputed the data and said separate classrooms are a dangerous step backwards — reinforcing stereotypes and breeding sexism.

"I think it's very difficult to make separate equal, even if you were to have the same teachers and the same curriculum, you don't have the same lively exchange and debate that you have if you leave out an entire gender," said Kim Gandy, NOW's president.

This NOW quote refers to primary and secondary education, but lively exchange and debate seems to be a lot less significant in primary and secondary education than it is in college, where students are supposed to have more knowledge and sophistication with which to engage in meaningful exchange and debate. And Ms. Gandy's observation obviously applies to both private and public education - as long as the student is able to choose whether to go to a co-ed or single sex school. (Ms. Gandy does not concern herself with choice or the ability of the student or anyone making a choice for the student to chhose wisely - her assertion is independent of choice.)

So isn't Ms. Gandy's argument a lot more applicable to single sex colleges than it is to primary and secondary education? Doesn't what she is saying imply that single sex colleges like, say, Smith College, are lacking in lively exchange and debate?

If so, Smith College, for one, doesn't seem to agree:

Today, of course, women have many options as they choose a college, but we have only become more convinced that, for many women, a women’s college is the best option. Providing the academic challenge, personal attention and wide-ranging opportunities you’d look for in any college are still our most important goals, but, as a women’s college, we think Smith offers some special bonuses. ... At Smith, women are the focus of all the attention and all the opportunities. ... Having a wide variety of female role models tends to boost the aspirations and career achievements of female college students. ... At Smith, faculty and alumnae offer outstanding role models. Leadership experience in college provides training and encouragement for leadership positions in your life, your community and your profession. At Smith, all of the leaders are women. ... At Smith, women can have a great social life. (Really!)

At Smith, there are no stereotypes about what women should do, but there are unlimited expectations about what women can do. Smith is a great training ground for careers that might still be considered non-traditional for women. At Smith, any career choice is an appropriate one. ... Even the Ivies can’t boast a network of thousands of successful women willing to share inside information about their professions with both undergraduates and other alumnae. It’s a lifetime guarantee!

At Smith, the “old boys’ network” becomes an “ageless women’s network.”

Of course, the world is coeducational. But Smith women enter it more confidently than women graduates of coed schools.

After Smith, the future is wide open.

Is Ms. Gandy saying Smith is bunk?

Posted 11:18 AM by Robert Musil
It Was Strange ....

... passing strange.

U.S. officials say the FBI questioned Berg in 2002 after a computer password Berg used in college turned up in the possession of Zaccarias Moussaoui, the al Qaeda operative arrested shortly before 9/11 for his suspicious activity at a flight school in Minnesota.

The bureau had already dismissed the connection between Berg and Moussaoui as nothing more than a college student who had been careless about protecting his password.

But in the wake of Berg's gruesome murder, it becomes a stranger than fiction coincidence -- an American who inadvertently gave away his computer password to one notorious al Qaeda operative is later murdered by another notorious al Qaeda operative.

Posted 11:18 AM by Robert Musil
Oddly Coy

I'm not exactly sure why the stories about Nick Berg are being so coy about his ethnicity. This one and this one and this one and this one and this one and this one don't even mention it. And this one is oddly coy: Nicholas Berg, the American who was filmed being beheaded, had been arrested by Iraqi police earlier and held on suspicion of being a spy because he had a Jewish name and an Israeli stamp in his passport, it has emerged. ... "He said: 'They arrested me because I had a Jewish last name and an Israeli stamp in my passport.' Then the Iraqi police put him with the US military because they thought he was a spy. .... In the Arab world, any indication that someone is a Jew or has links with Israel can be potentially fatal ...

But Nick Berg's ethnicity is no mystery at all:

Berg's father said his son was a practicing Jew and that "there's a better chance than not" that his captors knew it. "If there was any doubt that they were going to kill him that probably clinched it, I'm guessing," he said.

So Nick Berg was jewish and Nick Berg's father, at least, suspects that the lunatics who killed his son knew that and were motivated in part by anti-semitism - and what Nick's father suspects makes a lot of sense. Nick's earlier incarceration may also have been tied to his ethnicity. That's all significant. That all matters. Why be obscure on the point?

Posted 9:10 AM by Robert Musil
Kerry's House of Ketchup #11 ...

... is up and running on The American Mind.

Posted 8:04 PM by Robert Musil
Not Like The Old Days

German troops serving with the KFOR international peacekeeping contingent in Kosovo have been accused of hiding in barracks "like frightened rabbits" during the interethnic rioting that erupted in the province in March.

A hard-hitting German police report sent to the Berlin government last week criticizes the troops for cowardice and for their failure to quell the rioting in which 19 people died and about 900 others were injured. ....

So far, the German government has refused to acknowledge publicly the complaints made in the police report.

On the other hand, this story suggests that it's probably better that Germany didn't send troops to support the liberation of Iraq.

Of course, it could have been worse. They could have sent Forklift Driver Klaus!

Posted 3:37 PM by Robert Musil
Well, The "Horrible Act" and "Overshadowing" Part Is So Very True, Even If The Rest Is All Wrong

But it's still amazing that they said it at all:

"Hizbollah condemns this horrible act that has done very great harm to Islam and Muslims by this group that claims affiliation to the religion of mercy, compassion and humane principles," the Shi'ite Muslim group said in a statement. ... Hizbollah said Berg's killing had diverted the world's gaze from an escalating furor over the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by occupation soldiers. "The timing of this act that overshadowed the scandal over the abuse of Iraqi prisoners in occupation forces prisons is suspect timing that aims to serve the American administration and occupation forces in Iraq and present excuses and pretexts for their inhumane practices against Iraqi detainees."

One need not pause for a moment to wonder if Hizbollah cares a bit about Mr. Berg's death or its "un-Islamic" nature. They don't. Instead, what better proof could one need that the horrible murder of Mr. Berg has been a public relations disaster and setback of historic proportions for all arms of Islamic militancy. That's not much of a consolation for the Berg family. But it is at least possible that Mr. Berg's death will mean that the ability of Islamic lunatics to inflict at least some future deaths will be curtailed. The civilized world can only hope.

Posted 1:35 PM by Robert Musil
About Those Tax Returns

Theresa Heinz Kerry has been offering the peculiar argument that she need not disclose her tax returns because the financial affairs of her son, Chris Heinz, are intertwined with hers - and would be disclosed in her tax return forms. She now says that she is planning to make some trivial pseudo-disclosure, arguing that: "What I have and what I receive is not just mine, it is also my children's, and I don't know that I have the right to make public what is theirs," she said. "If I could separate it, I would have no problem."

In addition to the general policy arguments (such as those made in the linked Washington Post editorial) for not allowing candidates to use the financial privacy of their children as an excuse for withholding disclosure of tax returns, why should anyone take the financial privacy of Chris Heinz seriously anyway? Chris Heinz is politically active - indeed, he recently reestablished residence at the family estate in the Pittsburgh area, supposedly for the benefit of the Kerry campaign. He's been a guest of honor at Democratic labor events in Pennsylvania. He is widely believed to be preparing to walk in the footsteps of his late father, Senator John Heinz. And Chris Heinz is a candidate of the type Democrats have been stocking up on in recent years in their supposed quest to represent the ordinary citizen: campaign financing copiously included. Just ask populists like Senator John Corzine.

Chris Heinz is a big boy who has deliberately intertwined his life and political affairs with those of John Kerry and the Democratic Party (see Skiing With a Kerry Surrogate, for example). No one should take seriously his mother's argument that she can't make obviously appropriate tax disclosure because Chris Heinz needs to maintain his financial privacy. Of course, that Chris Heinz is allowing his mother and John Kerry to abuse his financial privacy for his stepfather's political gain does not speak well of Mr. Heinz's own political judgment or prospects.

It's now or in October, Senator. Now or in October.

MORE: The Viking is on a raiding party for the Heinz tax returns! Lots of good thoughts there - and follow the links to his earlier posts and sources.

STILL MORE: And on the subject of Theresa Heinz Kerry's political judgment, this succulent, vintage Newsweek morsel is well worth the calories:

A student at a small gathering of college Democrats in Lacey, Wash., asked Teresa Heinz Kerry why her husband had waited so long in the Senate (almost two decades) before deciding to run for president. The candidate's wife suddenly recalled something her mother had told her: that the Devil was powerful not because "he's so smart--he's so smart because he's so old." John Kerry as the Devil?

Teresa Heinz Kerry, who Newsweek calls a demanding, somewhat unpredictable 65-year-old demi-billionaire is living proof that sometimes people don't get any smarter when they get older ... and that demanding people aren't always demanding of themselves, especially if they're very, very rich by inheritance.

Behold!

Posted 12:54 PM by Robert Musil
Pathetic ... And Bound To Lose XLI: He's Making A List, And Checking It Twice!

Just how bad is John Kerry's political judgment? Well, with about two-thirds of Americans convinced that Donald Rumsfeld should remain as Secretary of Defense, Senator Kerry is running around with his silly list of replacements.

But Senator Kerry's bizarre lack of judgment and smarts doesn't stop there. Most on his list would not be appropriate in the best of times. Senator Kerry suggests the likes of Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich - who was one of the very few who actually voted against the Senate resolution authorizing the Iraq war after first trying to gut it with an amendment requiring further Security Council approval. That suggestion sure shows Senator Kerry's mettle. Or how about another Kerry pick - William Perry, who served as defense secretary under President Clinton while the whole al Qaida mess festered for years? Now there's an idea.

Is that what the candidate presumptive or his campaign staff think constitutes staying "on message" for the day?

Posted 11:08 AM by Robert Musil
Abu Ghraib II

What if you gave an OUTRAGE! party and nobody came?

Worse, what if you were part of most of the mainstream liberal media, you grossly overplayed and sensationalized a pedestrian story about some prisoner abuse in Iraq that you admit (but bury the admission) is pretty much like what is going on all the time in US prisons every day - and then the Administration and Republicans generally right away figured out how to neutralize the political effect of all your hard work and your guy sinks like a stone in the polls in comparison to the Republican President you're trying to hold "responsible" for the OUTRAGES? And suppose on top of all that, Rumsfeld basically tells you to get stuffed.

Well, if you're the New York Times you'd be hopping mad and run an absurd tantrum-cum-editorial like this one:

The administration and its Republican allies appear to have settled on a way to deflect attention from the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib: accuse Democrats and the news media of overreacting, then pile all of the remaining responsibility onto officers in the battlefield, far away from President Bush and his political team. That cynical approach was on display yesterday morning in the second Abu Ghraib hearing in the Senate, a body that finally seemed to be assuming its responsibility for overseeing the executive branch after a year of silently watching the bungled Iraq occupation.

Translation from the Newyorktimesese:

The domestic economy and war on terror are both pulling away from us and our candidate and party strongly - and now this Iraq thing doesn't look like it's going to do us any good, either. We're so mad we could spit - and here it is!

MORE: More OUTRAGE! I'm OUTRAGED! Express your OUTRAGE!

Hmmm.. sex between consenting US soldiers? No doubt enquiring minds will want to know: What kind?

UPDATE: And now those enquiring minds will have additional reason to watch for the pics!

Posted 8:47 AM by Robert Musil
Nancyboys

In 2002, while a prisoner of one of her many whistleblower tizzies, Maureen Dowd wrote in the New York Times:

Nancy Drew, ... teen-age detective, a plucky strawberry blonde with a blue roadster, emboldened millions of little girls to think they could outwit the world. The successors of the pretty young sleuth who always tripped up the bad guys are legion: Sarah Michelle Gellar in "Buffy," Jennifer Garner in "Alias," Jill Hennessy in "Crossing Jordan" and, most famously, the crackerjack F.B.I. agent Clarice Starling, the dot-connecting nemesis of Hannibal Lecter.

If the spirited Nancy Drew had grown up, she would probably have ended up a dispirited whistle-blower.

That's what happens to women of ingenuity and integrity in macho organizations -- from Sherron Watkins at Enron to Coleen Rowley at the F.B.I. -- who piece together clues and ferret out criminal behavior and management cover-ups.

To Big Mo, it matters that these were - to her mind - women of ingenuity and integrity in macho organizations. Big Mo carefully skirts analysis of what happens to women who lack ingenuity and integrity in macho organizations - giving her thoughts their customary tautological whirl. Don't blow the whistle? Sorry, you have no ingenuity and integrity. And, of course, she needs no examples of what happens to men of ingenuity and integrity who blow the whistle on macho organizations. Indeed, while she doesn't say so expressly, she seems - to my mind - to suggest that no such examples are needed for comparision because that almost never happens.

The significance of gender - especially the association of women with integrity - is by no means peculiar to Big Mo. The sensible Peggy Noonan, for example, tasted the same tonic - albeit without Big Mo's fruity flavoring:

We should study who these men are--they are still all men, and still being turned in by women--and try to learn how they rationalized their actions, how they excused their decisions or ignored the consequences, how they thought about the people they were cheating.

Well, things sure change fast - indeed, these particular things had changed well before Msess. Dowd and Noonan comments were written. We have had the Martha Stewart trial and conviction, which revealed what might be called a "macha" personality and the organization it spawned, and now we have all those images of Army Pfc. Lynndie England, seen worldwide in photographs that show her smiling and pointing at naked Iraqi prisoners, [who] said she was ordered to pose for the photos, and felt "kind of weird" in doing so. The face of Spc. Sabrina Harman can also be seen smiling in news photos over piles of naked Iraqi prisoners. And let us not forget that Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski was the person in charge of Abu Ghraib when the abuses occurred. So perhaps it is appropriate that some have suggested a less wholesome cultural significance for the Nancy Drew series ("There seems to be more bondage in the books than in all of the Marquis de Sade") than the one ventured by Big Mo.

Significant time has passed and we have seen no ruminations from Big Mo or even Ms. Noonan on these latest exemplars of the "female" moral hegemony - including the facts that it was investigations by macho organizations (the SEC, the DoJ, the Army) that rooted out the irregularities and, to the extent there were whistleblowers, they were all men. Will these two scribbling worthies hold Army Pfc. Lynndie England, Spc. Sabrina Harman or Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski responsible for their respective acts or failures to act? Or will we see some reversion to the assumption that women are not responsible for their own acts while around men - especially macho men: the Hillary Clinton "pink-suit-interview" approach. Will the gender aspect be discussed by these two scribbling worthies, and other women commenters, at all - or will we see it all put down to some genderless "these-guards-were-just-untrained-losers" dismissal? Or will one or more of them come up with something containing a bit more ingenuity and integrity?

I haven't seen anything yet.

Posted 8:13 AM by Robert Musil
Pathetic ... And Bound To Lose XLI: One Senator AWOL ...

... Don Luskin lays it all out.

Inside word from the Senate (word not specific to this vote) is that John Kerry is one of the most intensely disliked people in that body on either side of the aisle. Do his fellow Democrats in the Senate despise Senator Kerry so much that they didn't even tell him that this was about to happen? Are Senator Kerry's aides and campaign staff so incompetent that they don't monitor Senate upcoming votes that might embarrass the man? Can't the Democratic National Committee or MoveOn or some other Soros patsy organization keep track for him - like a kind of nanny?

Posted 8:17 AM by Robert Musil
Abu Ghraib

Outrage!

I tell you, we must express outrage!

What has happened at Abu Ghraib is bad, bad, BAD! Naked prisoners with or as dogs! Sexual humiliation! Quasi-torture! Amateurish photography! Bow-wow!

Yes, my reaction was one of deep disgust and disbelief that anyone who wears our uniform would engage in such shameful and appalling acts! I'm disheartened! I'm OUTRAGED! OUTRAGED, I tell you! I tell you that just like the President and media talking heads are telling you that they are OUTRAGED! Just like all those members of Congress who say they are reserving judgment until they learn more facts. "More facts" presumably being facts about how the whole thing is playing on the domestic political scene, of course, not facts about treatment of Iraqi prisoners directly.

OK, that's over. Can we now get on with our lives?

Yes, those on the Abu Ghraib staff who have violated military protocol and/or abused prisoners should be punished. And in what seems to be the very few cases in which the actual torture is involved should be examined more carefully and more resources allocated to inhibit repetition. Here's a link to the actual 53-page investigative report for those who are interested.

But few people will download that report, because few people are really all that seriously interested in - or OUTRAGED! at - the "abuse" and "torture." Part of that lack of interest lies in "abuse" and "torture" now being wildly abused and tortured terms themselves - stretched to include everything from use of electrodes on genitals for interrogation to forcing men to walk around in ladies' panties. (And, to the International Red Cross, "insults and humiliation to both physical and psychological coercion.")

But mostly the lack of interest flows from the simple fact that what has been uncovered at Abu Ghraib is just a boring administrative problem in prison operation of the type everyone running a prison has to deal with every day. Is it going to "inflame the middle east?" or "play into the hands of al Qaeda?" or "radicalize the Iraqi people?" Please. No. None of that will happen. None of that will happen because this kind of thing happens all the time, everywhere there are prisons, and doesn't result in any such nastiness. Indeed, even in the United States the big "prisoners' rights" effort launched by various civil rights organizations some years ago essentially died as a homunculus. Even the New York Times, whose coverage of Abu Ghraib has been at least as OUTRAGED! and idiotic as that of most of the mainstream media, buries this little gem deep in the bowels:

Physical and sexual abuse of prisoners, similar to what has been uncovered in Iraq, takes place in American prisons with little public knowledge or concern, according to corrections officials, inmates and human rights advocates. In Pennsylvania and some other states, inmates are routinely stripped in front of other inmates before being moved to a new prison or a new unit within their prison. In Arizona, male inmates at the Maricopa County jail in Phoenix are made to wear women's pink underwear as a form of humiliation. At Virginia's Wallens Ridge maximum security prison, new inmates have reported being forced to wear black hoods, in theory to keep them from spitting on guards, and said they were often beaten and cursed at by guards and made to crawl.

Of course, the front page of the Times is cluttered up with breathless OUTRAGED! headlines like President Backs His Defense Chief in Show of Unity and Head of Inquiry on Iraq Abuses Now in Spotlight and blah, blah, blah. In the mean time, California's Democratic attorney general Bill Lockyer joked that he would like to introduce Enron's Ken Lay to California prison conditions just like those of Abu Ghraib - thereby simultaneously admitting that the state's chief law enforcement officer was fully aware of the problem and thinks it is worthy topic for joking. All to no particular political consequence. Why? Because everyone who matters already knows this kind of thing goes on in prisons and everyone who matters has already decided that the resources needed to keep it from happening are just not going to be deployed. Those resources have better uses. The result is that some studies have revealed that on the average about 48 hours will pass before a young man consigned to an adult state prison in the US will be raped. It's a problem. It's a problem the political system has agreed to do nothing much more about to practically solve - even though politicians and the media must all express OUTRAGE! at the existence of that problem when it is called to their attention, and call for those responsible to be called to account.

Especially if there are pictures.

And exactly which state or federal election can the reader remember being driven - or even influenced - by such considerations?

The fact is that it is very unlikely that the Abu Ghraib story would have received anything like the attention it has received except that we are in an election year and the Democrats and much of their media establishment have become increasingly desperate as both the domestic economy (Strong Growth Continues into 2004, Unemployment Rate Declining, Over 1.1 Million Jobs Created in Past 8 Months)and the general war on terror issues have aligned so strongly in favor of the president and Republicans generally.

But the main consequence of all this fussing will probably be the same main consequence of other such prison scandals: It will be harder to take pictures inside Abu Ghraib in the future.

UPDATES:

George Melloan notes in the Wall Street Journal:

Opinion polls suggest that Americans approve of the way Mr. Bush has handled the Abu Ghraib affair. His expressions of outrage and his explanation to Arabs that the behavior of the guards at the prison camp was not consistent with American values, seemingly went down very well.

Exactly. As long as the Administration avoids the obvious pitfall of claiming things like "Our soldiers did it and we're glad!" there is a well-established way of dealing with this issue. Contrition. Outrage. Assert distance of events from values. Punish the perps. Ask who is accountable. Establish a commission. Wait for the whole thing to go away - which it will. And, remember, this is a well understood issue and circus performing without a net is not necessary or encouraged - this means you, Senator Inhofe. Callow truth is no defense for taking unnecessary political risks. Outraged at the outrage? Too clever by half.

Just look at your colleague, Senator ("I-committed-and-saw-committed-atrocities-or-maybe-I-didn't.") Kerry. After first imprudently calling for Donald Rumsfeld to resign as defense secretary, Senator Kerry is now talking about healthcare and the plight of small businesses and, of course, his politically cretinous wife. At least the Kerry campaign is showing it knows where the Abu Ghraib story is headed.

Of course, not everyone agrees. Some people, like Howard Kurtz, think the world will have few things better to talk about than pictures from Abu Ghraib for a very long time. ("Andrew Sullivan is rethinking his support for the war, which he had viewed as "vital to reverse the Islamist narrative that pitted American values against Muslim dignity. The reason Abu Ghraib is such a catastrophe is that it has destroyed this narrative.") Who knew it was all about a "destroying a narrative?" Aren't "naratives" things writers - as in media writers - fuss over? Odd how all the reports of shenanigans at domestic US prisons seem not to have "destroyed the narrative" of US democracy over the years. Of course, now there are pictures - images. That makes it all different. Time will tell. Maybe Mr. Kurtz is right. Maybe all the rules have changed.

In that case, about that matter transmitter I saw on Star Treck last night ...

FURTHER UPDATE:

Maybe voters are thinking about what this mess would look like if we had a President Kerry (and First Lady Theresa!). That might explain why the latest Investor's Business Daily/TIPP poll shows that the president would win if the election were held today. The nationwide poll of 981 adults, taken May 2-8 (after the prison scandal broke) revealed that among 823 registered voters Bush leads Kerry 46% to 41%, with independent Ralph Nader getting 5%. In a two-way race, Bush leads Kerry 47% to 44%. In an IBD/TIPP poll taken April 16-22, Bush led by four points in a three-man race. In swing states, Bush widened his lead from 3 points in mid-April to 9 points in early May. He now leads Kerry in the so-called battleground states 49% to 40%.

Yep, George Bush has had a terrible week. Just terrible. A few more terrible weeks like this one and John Kerry might just want to drop out and prepare to spend the rest of his life shuttling among his wife's many mansions: "Ah, today is election Tuesday, so this must be Wyoming!"

[California poll link thanks to Kausfiles. Did Zogby see this poll before making his typically bizarre, trademarked, intended-only-for-attention-getting prediction? How nuts is he?]

MORE

Posted 3:56 PM by Robert Musil
Pathetic ... And Bound To Lose XL: ... May The Wind Always Be At Your Back ...

Oops, I almost forgot he isn't Irish.

Maybe that's why with weeks and weeks of steady gales from the media and circumstances blown at his back, including the blast of lurid pictures - and now, videos! - from Abu Ghraib prison, John Kerry still trails President Bush by a slim margin even in the generally pro-Kerry, sample-plagued USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll released today.

And yet the domestic economic beat goes on in the President's favor.

The significance being given to the Abu Ghraib prison scandal is wildly overblown from a political standpoint, as is the entire Sadr mess. In fact, the rise in gas prices is a much more threatening issue for Mr. Bush - and it's not that threatening.

Posted 10:33 AM by Robert Musil
Ramblings Of The Former Mrs. Heinz

Astute reader D.A. e-mails the following trenchant comments:

Teresa Heinz-Kerry - whose $500 millions dollar wealth is the DIRECT result of her marrying a wealthy man - NAMED JOHN HEINZ, (HEIR OF THE KETCHUP COMPANY) - has blatantly charged VP Dick Cheney with UN-PATRIOTISM for NOT HAVING SERVED IN THE MILITARY, and she said NO ONE WHO HAS NOT SERVED CAN CRITICIZE SOMEONE WHO DID.

But the man who left his fortune to her, chose to become an AIR FORCE RESERVIST JUST LIKE BUSH, and - just like Bush - he did NOT see war-time duty - EVEN THOUGH - JUST LIKE BUSH - HE WAS IN THE RESERVES DURING THE VIETNAM WAR!

Here is an excerpt from the OFFICIAL JOHN HEINZ BIO at Carnegie-Mellon:

After enlisting in the U.S. Air Force Reserve, Heinz served on active duty from June to December 1963 at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas. For the remainder of his enlistment, he served with the 911th Troop Carrier Group based at the Greater Pittsburgh Airport. As an Airman Third Class, he received a U.S. Department of Defense citation for suggestions to improve the management of parts and supplies, saving the Air Force $400,000 annually. With the rank of staff sergeant, he received an honorable discharge from the Air Force Reserves in 1969.

This leads me to ask a few questions of Teresa Heinz-Kerry:

QUESTION #1: Does Teresa Heinz-Kerry think that her late husband served honorably? IF YES, then doesn't she think G.W. Bush did, too?

QUESTION #2: Does Teresa Heinz-Kerry think that her current husband - John Kerry - was UNPATRIOTIC for SEEKING a deferment - which he did do, but which deferment did not get? (John Kerry's request for a student deferment was turned down.)

QUESTION #3 - If John Kerry was NOT unpatriotic for SEEKING A DEFERMENT - but getting turned down - then HOW CAN SHE DARE CRITICIZE CHENEY FOR SEEKING ONE - or more - AND NOT getting turned down? In other words:

Why should Cheney have a lower "moral standing" than Kerry just because the DOD/SSS decided his request was MORE LEGITIMATE than her current husband's?

These are very uncomfortable facts and questions for the former Mrs. Heinz. It can't feel good to have essentially determined herself a hypocrite and to have implicitly called her dead husband (the one she calls her "real" husband, and who she publicly professes still to adore) an unpatriotic coward. And all that when she thought she was just smearing her current husband's opponent! Dear me, life can be so complicated!

But, then, she should get used to it. As she strives to place her husband in the world's most powerful office with her mouth stuck permanently in wide-open/brain-bypass mode, Theresa Heinz Kerry will be learning the hard way that life in the public glare is a lot less comfortable than the one to which her very private 500 million inherited dollars have allowed her to become accustomed. Of course, she'll always have her private jets to keep her warm!

Here's a suggestion for Mrs. Heinz-Kerry:

If you want to shoot your mouth off and have people take what you say on its own basis, instead of referring to your fortune and your husbands, get yourself an pseudonymous blog. In your case, perhaps blogging under the name "Marie Antoinette" would fit the bill. Also, you might want to avoid wearing hats that are quite literally half-cocked.

Just some thoughts.

UPDATE:

Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry warned his political opponents on Monday against attacking his outspoken wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, saying, "They're going to have to go through me."

Er, yes, Senator Kerry. That's exactly the point. "They" are going to go through you and to you. You are going to be the candidate, many people say - even though you, personally, seem a bit unclear on the concept of just what that means.

Now, how about a look at those tax returns for a woman who gives away between $50 and $70 million a year and who allowed you to "borrow" over six million dollars on "your half" of a house whose entirety is appraised for municipal tax purposes at less than that and which is located in a neighborhood in which comparable houses don't sell for anything like that. Huh? How about just a peek? You (or, rather, she) can release them now - or in October, when the pressure becomes unbearable and the effects are the most excrutiating for your campaign chances.

See how that works, Senator? "They" will be going through you and your political needs to obtain release of her tax forms - and that's just what "they" want.

Wake up, Senator. Wake up. It's a lot later than you think it is.

Posted 12:12 PM by Robert Musil
Coping With The Overzealous

Mickey Kaus points out that John Kerry is again blaming his overzealous speechwriters for his increasingly convoluted explanation for why he mentioned Jimmy Carter and James Baker as potential Mideast envoys, something that upset mainstream Jewish organizations. The Senator also says that overzealous speechwriters sneaked all that "Benedict Arnold corporations" demagoguery into his speeches that he is now repudiating.

This overzealous speechwriters excuse is a marvelous linguistic perpetual motion machine just waiting to transform our society. For example, just as Senator Kerry is not responsible for comments inserted into his verbal emissions by overzealous speechwriters, Martha Stewart and Frank P. Quattrone would not be sent to jail for statements made to federal investigators or to their business colleagues if those "criminal" statements were inserted by overzealous speechwriters! Ms. Stewart and Mr. Quattrone surely wouldn't be responsible for acts of overzealous speechwriters if Senator Kerry isn't.

Think of the possibilities! If John Kerry can get his transformative principle established he will make Al Gore look like a piker for inventing the internet.

Posted 10:12 AM by Robert Musil
Pathetic ... And Bound To Lose XXXIX: The Most Damning Photographic Evidence Yet

Yes, you've seen a lot of disturbing photographs recently.

But, be warned, if you haven't seen these before, it's a shock.

Posted 2:03 PM by Robert Musil
Souter?

Former Rep. Charles G. Douglas, a Republican who served with Souter on the New Hampshire Supreme Court, said that the justice is not awkward in public but still turns down most invitations. "He'd rather read a good book," Douglas said.

Garrow said that because Souter dislikes Washington, computers and attention, a retirement in the next year is possible even though the second-youngest justice is in good health. "This is not someone who is going to die in Washington, D.C.," Garrow said.

Posted 11:56 AM by Robert Musil
More Service Jobs

Earlier this week, the Institute for Supply Management's (ISM) survey of manufacturers showed registered 62.4 in April, down slightly from March's 62.5 but still indicating strong growth in manufacturing. But of course manufacturing is not where most of the US economy happens to be.

So the ISM is back with a U.S. service-sector report showing another record month of expansion in the service-sector for April, improving employment and rising prices:

Purchasing and supply executives report that business activity continued to increase in April in the non-manufacturing sector, and at a faster rate of increase than in March, with some indexes reaching record high values. The Business Activity Index for April is 68.4 percent. April's index indicates continued growth across almost all non-manufacturing industries.

Six more months of this to go before election day.

Posted 8:53 AM by Robert Musil
Pathetic ... And Bound To Lose XXXVIII: Autumn Of The Candidate Presumptive

Apparently working from the theory that the best use of scarce campaign resources is to let the nuclear bomb go off and then try to put out the fire, the Kerry campaign is still not addressing the lack of minority representation in his inner circle. The Washington Times reports the most recent wave of the obviously inevitable tsunami:

Democratic strategist Donna Brazile criticized Sen. John Kerry yesterday for failing to put black and Hispanic leaders into senior campaign positions, saying it raised serious questions about his commitment to racial diversity.

Ms. Brazile just keeps impressing with her hard nosed assessments of political realities. She had previously gone public to knock the Kerry campaign's failure to take immediate action and understand that it was being defined into its grave at this very moment - although as noted here at the time her comments then had obvious application to the racial aspect of the Senator's predicament.

Her new comments appear in Roll Call and are excerpted by the Times:

"If the past is indeed prologue, this message has been lost on Sen. John Kerry's campaign, which has failed to understand how to navigate one of the most important issues in American politics: race relations and diversity."

Her surprisingly sharp criticism of the party's presumptive presidential nominee was the second major broadside hurled at the Kerry campaign in the past week by a prominent minority leader.

In a letter to Mr. Kerry last week, Raul Yzaguirre, president of the National Council of La Raza, wrote that "relegating all of your minority staff to the important but limited role of outreach only reinforces perceptions that your campaign views Hispanics as a voting constituency to be mobilized, but not as experts to be consulted in shaping policy."

"Not a single one of your senior staff is Latino. Quite frankly, we find this deeply troubling," Mr. Yzaguirre wrote, adding that that raises "questions about the seriousness of your commitment to diversity."

Does John Kerry even begin to grasp how close he is to disaster here? Perhaps he does. He has withdrawn from the brink of extinction before, rising from his coffin to take Iowa and New Hampshire. Perhaps even now he is moving about one of the many palaces provided by the grace of his wife's vast inherited fortune, concocting some scheme to set things right, muttering, as Gabriel García Marquez's patriarch did so often before his final descent, "What a mess. What a mess."

But it's beginning to look more like over the weekend the vultures got into the presidential campaign.

UPDATE:

From Boston Magazine:

So it was with considerable surprise bordering on shock that Payne watched over the next month as the Kerry corpse lurched out of its coffin and tromped all over the competition en route to the most miraculous political comeback in presidential primary history. "I thought he was dead meat," Payne recalls now. .... "He's a guy who doesn't really start to pay attention until he thinks he may be in danger of dying," says Payne, who identifies classic early Kerry campaign symptoms: "Delays, inattention to details, sloppy staff work, not having a tight message. He'll allow this to just go on and on until someone hands him a poll and says, 'You'd better get it together.'"

And then no doubt he starts muttering: What a mess, what a mess. Where have we seen this before?

Thanks to Mickey Kaus for the hard-to-find (for me) internet link to the Boston Magazine artcile alluded to above.