Same sexual misconduct? A consensual affair? Hookers and extortion? Revenge of the Israeli homeland security adviser? You make the call. All I can say is: This sort of thing wouldn't have happened when Brendan Byrne was the Archduke of Trenton.

Talk about language prescriptivism! Six years ago, the German government instituted spelling reforms, trying to make the language simpler. Now, the peasants are revolting:

Since then opposition to the changes has grown. It culminated in Germany's two leading publishing houses, Axel Springer and Der Spiegel, announcing on Friday that their publications would revert to the old spelling.

The reforms had failed, the publishers said, providing neither 'enlightenment nor simplicity'. They urged other newspapers to follow the example of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, which had gone back to old spelling.

We are all creatures of habit, of course. It reminds me of this Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling that made the rounds as an e-mail forward a few years ago.

Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.

In the one of the comments to today's first post (about Nazis, Stalin, and Slavoj Zizek), reader D Anghelone did us all a great favor by linking to David Ramsay Steele's wonderful article, The Mystery of Fascism.

Ramsay Steele recovers the bizarre, hugely favorable reception accorded Mussolini by the glitterati of the day (ardent fans included not just Ezra Pound but also George Bernard Shaw and Sigmund Freud). Those of you familiar only with the ditty about Mussolini biting Hitler's weenie (and now it doesn't work) will be surprised to learn that Il Duce gets a big shout-out from Cole Porter, the subject of De-Lovely, currently flopping in theaters everywhere: "You're the top!," sang Porter in one of his signature tunes. "You're the Great Houdini! You're the top!
You are Mussolini!"

More seriously--and more on point with the conversation raised below--Ramsay Steele helps explain why, despite being branded as "right-wing," fascism is best understood as a manifestation of a left that set itself against liberalism:

Fascism began as a revision of Marxism by Marxists, a revision which developed in successive stages, so that these Marxists gradually stopped thinking of themselves as Marxists, and eventually stopped thinking of themselves as socialists. They never stopped thinking of themselves as anti-liberal revolutionaries.

Whole thing here. Well worth a read.

Nick Gillespie is sure he's seen Dick Cheney on an old episode of Mannix.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - California's Supreme Court annulled more than 4,000 gay marriages in San Francisco on Thursday, finding that the city acted improperly in granting the marriage licenses earlier this year in defiance of state law.

Complaints by celebrities Chevy Chase, Joan Rivers and Susan Lucci that property had been stolen from their luggage has led to the arrests of four security screeners at LaGuardia and Kennedy airports, authorities said yesterday.

One of the screeners was later shot dead while trying to sell the last known copy of Oh, Heavenly Dog! to an undercover police officer. Link via Free-Market.net.

At our RPPI sister blog, Ted Balaker has a roundup of things that've been banned and things that might be. Not, sadly, a comprehensive one—that could be a blog all its own.

Like a sprite from the pen of Bil Keane, our old pal Non Sequitur has left his comrades Not Me and Ida Know behind in order to haunt the war on terrorism. This time, it's acting Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Lester M. Crawford who has invoked the spirit of bin Laden to counter the threat of...Canadian drug importation. In this AP interview, Crawford says the possibility of terrorist tampering tops his list of worries about drugs coming in from Canada:

Crawford said the possibility of such an attack was the most serious of his concerns about the increase in states and municipalities trying to import drugs from Canada to save money.

"We get our cues from chatter that occurs around the world, which is relayed to us by the intelligence community, and also from past incidents and things that happened domestically," he said.

Leave aside that this is the sort of scheme for mayhem even The Penguin would dismiss as unnecessarily convoluted (why bother with Canada, when, as Crawford himself notes, product tampering is still a frequent occurence in the Good Ol' USA?), that a DHS spokesman conspicuously fails to support the commissioner's claim in the same article, and that the other threats Crawford mentions—lack of refrigeration in shipping, sale of counterfeit products, and incorrect potencies—seem far more likely to occur than this one. What value would the FDA be adding with regard to this particular threat? I understand our neighbors to the north already have one or two regulatory agencies of their own.

In a Reason article from a while back, Todd Seavey tried to figure out the point of the FDA.

Brian Doherty talks with John Perry Barlow about Bush, intellectual property, and going to the gym.

Matt Welch sheds some light on the Bush administration's secrecy fetish.

We should know in a few days how the most important engagement since the initial "thunder runs" through Baghdad pans out. Right now the Marines have won control of the massive cemetery and Fox News reports some 1,000 militants are hold up in the Imam Ali Mosque.

All along the goal of Moqtada al-Sadr has been to get U.S. troops to attack the holy mosque, but U.S. commanders say only Iraqi troops will draw that duty.

Will they be up to the task?

Steve Koppelman has some advice for The Miami Herald: "Next time you assign a story on what a wasteland some low-rent business district is, talk to a couple of the people who run and patronize those low-rent businesses."

The interesting blog Fenimore Cooper's Daily Excesses points toward an interview with Slavoj Zizek in The Believer that touches on a question of continuing conversation on this site: Why is Nazi Germany (rightly) seen as Evil with a capital E while the Soviet Union, which in the long run killed more people, is sometimes seen as quaint and kitschy, or even worthy of emulation in sort of new and improved way (if only that Stalin hadn't taken over!)?

Zizek says

To put it in simplistic terms, Fascism is relatively easy to explain. ... In Stalinism the tragedy is that its origin is some kind of radical emancipatory project. ... for me, the key phenomenon to be accounted for in the twentieth century is Stalinism. Because again, Fascism is simple, conservative reaction gone wrong. The true enigma is why Stalinism or communism went wrong.

Zizek, who has been working to revive Lenin as a model for intellectuals, is wrong here and his error helps answer the question above. Stalinism wasn't in any way emancipatory (the fact that he focuses on Stalin rather than Lenin, who got the CCCP ball rolling, is itself a telling elision); and to the extent that it claimed to be, so was Nazism. Both offered utopian visions of society that ultimately (and explicitly) were predicated upon the eradication of whole classes of human beings. If that's emancipation, then I don't want to be free.

Buying into the fiction that if only Lenin--a murderous thug in his own right--or Trotsky (ditto) had stayed in control the Soviet Union would have been A-OK is deluded idealism of a particularly left-wing sort (as is the idea that National Socialism was simply or clearly a product of the "right"). Stalinism and communism went wrong for a host of reasons (including an ignorance of basic economic laws) but the main error that led to the gulags was an unwillingess to buy the basic liberal tenet that human beings are ends in themselves, not means to someone else's ends.

More Zizek on Hit & Run here and here.

And while we're at it, check out this Reason piece on the reissue of The God That Failed and this one on Martin Amis' Koba the Dread.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld worries that opium money is undermining peace, stability, and democracy in Afghanistan. "The enormous wealth that comes from dealing drugs can be put to uses that are adverse to our interests or the interests of the Afghan government," Rumsfeld notes. "To the extent that millions of dollars are available to criminals and to people who are not democratic, it puts at risk the entire system." If so, why does the U.S. work so hard to make sure that thugs, warlords, and terrorists continue to enjoy this windfall?

This is amusing if it's legit: blogger Matt Gunn claims to have seen a transcript of Fahrenheit 9/11 outtakes including the following interview with newly-appointed CIA head Porter Goss:

INTERVIEWER: [Y]ou come from intelligence. This is what you did, this is what you know.

REP. GOSS: Uh, that was, uh, 35 years ago.

INTERVIEWER: Okay.

REP. GOSS: It is true I was in CIA from approximately the late 50’s to approximately the early 70’s. And it's true I was a case officer, clandestine services officer and yes, I do understand the core mission of the business. I couldn't get a job with CIA today. I am not qualified. I don't have the language skills. I, you know, my language skills were romance languages and stuff. We're looking for Arabists today. I don't have the cultural background probably. And I certainly don't have the technical skills, uh, as my children remind me every day, 'Dad you got to get better on your computer.’ Uh, so, the things that you need to have, I don't have.

Granted, being qualified to be a field agent isn't the same as being qualified to direct the agency—the latter scarcely requires fluency in Arabic. Still, I'd be surprised if this footage didn't get out and start running in heavy rotation on the news channels within the next 48 hours.

Ron Bailey gets his groove back at the TransVision 2004 conference.

The misleadingly-named XBox murder case is heading in an even more bizarre and tragic direction than I imagined. Several government officials have already been fired over their handling of the violent repeat offender at the center of the case, but transcripts of 911 calls made by victim Erin Belanger suggest Volusia County may also need a new sheriff.

The presence of a violent, screaming group of people at Belanger's home several days before the murders was evidently not a big deal. Deputies were dispatched to "discuss" options with Belanger, but no arrests were made. A sheriff's spokesman has suggested there was little more to be done as Belanger did not give them any names of the people threatening her and banging on her door.

The news stories on the case do not make clear if the officers ever went out looking for anyone in connection with the multiple calls made by Belanger, or if they merely rolled up to the residence and considered the matter closed. Nor is it clear if a stolen property report was ever taken from Belanger regarding the electronics that went missing from her grandmother's home.

Reading between the lines of what transpired, a regrettable leap, it seems as if the Volusia sheriff's office regarded Belanger's complaints as some sort of low-intensity domestic squabble between former roommates. It also seems that minor property crime is not a law enforcement focus in Volusia, and is perhaps even tolerated as long as a firearm is not involved. And it is a safe bet that had ex-con Troy Victorino gone onto government property and threatened a county official, officers would not have insisted on a name before trying to find him.

Orrin Hatch Induces vomiting in Hanah Metchis.

From Tennessee, a revolutionary plan to fight obesity.

For the war opponents in the crowd, a bit of Times op-art I forgot to link earlier: Next time some glib jackass asks why you wish Saddam Hussein were still in power, ask him why he's glad we haven't done all these things that might've actually made the U.S. safer.

Jeff Bergner, writing in The Washington Post, on "Michael Moore's non-question."

The Guardian has a good scene story on Baghdad's poster war. Apparently, the place is covered with posters. "Everyone," writes Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, "is competing for the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people - the Americans, the new Iraqi government, the religious parties, the insurgents, the mujahideen and even young clerics such as Moqtada al-Sadr. And while the Americans are playing left against right, the insurgents are blowing up civilians and the Iraqi government are re-instituting the death penalty, all are using the same method to actually talk to the people: posters. And they are everywhere."

The only ones that stay up, however, are the religious posters, which "are used to mark territories of influence." Sadr's posters supposedly feature the best graphics, but the most numerous are of Ayatollah Sistani, "who prints more than 50,000 posters every month."

At least Baghdad's printers are happy. Says one, "Before [the fall of Saddam] we had to get permission from the ministry of information for anything we wanted to publish, even for business cards. Today we're free. Yesterday I printed posters of Moqtada, and today I am printing chewing gum stickers."

Border patrol agents will now have the power to deport illegal immigrants caught within 100 miles of the U.S. border, eliminating in many cases the intervening authority of an immigration judge to review, for example, asylum requests. The system as it stands is hardly ideal, but the idea of having the officer who makes an arrest hand down verdict and sentence as well makes me a little uneasy. Since at least one reader suggested that I be sent "back to Meh-hee-co" after I wrote a pro-outsourcing piece (it'd have to be two trips, since I've never been to Mexico), maybe I should watch my back.

The Dallas Observer has an interesting and balanced piece on one of the most heated sub-battles of Campaign 2004: Swift Boat Veterans for Truth vs. Veterans for Kerry. (I can't help thinking of these groups as somehow akin to the David Lee Roth Van Halen vs. the Sammy Hagar version.)

The story gives good background on John O'Neill, the vet who has battled with Kerry since the early '70s, arguing that the Bay State Blowhard mischaracterized American war crimes in 'Nam (the two memorably appeared on the old Dick Cavett show together and O'Neill eventually shilled for Richard Nixon at the GOP convention in '72).

Writes the Observer:

If there's any common ground between the two groups, it's that Swift Boat Veterans for Truth [SBVT] and Veterans for Kerry strongly believe in what they're saying, and they plan to keep preaching right up until the election. Their ongoing battle, they hope, will bring voters around to their side and their version of the truth. And so Americans are left to wade through the post-Vietnam muck, left to determine who's lying and who's not before casting their ballots. It is an important task for the country, and a difficult one, too--on that, there can be no disagreement.

The article also implicitly makes the case for 527 groups, those reviled organizations such as Moveon.org (and SBVT) that, whatever else you can say about them, have so far provided many of the most memorable moments in the current political season.

Whole thing here.

Accounts differ, but Kinks guitarist Dave Davies has reportedly suffered a stroke.

I have no larger political or cultural point to make. They're my favorite band, and I wish him a speedy recovery.