THE 1980 TEMPLATE:

Hunting Mr. Democrat (SHERYL GAY STOLBERG, 8/01/04, NY Times Magazine)

Square-jawed and telegenic (when his female colleagues created a gag pinup calendar, Hunks of the House, Thune got top billing as Mr. January), Thune is also a regular guy -- someone who can wax eloquent on the various flavors of Gatorade or crack up his aides by reciting lines from the Chevy Chase ''Vacation'' movies. ''John doesn't have to turn it on, and a lot of candidates do,'' said Dick Wadhams, Thune's campaign manager. ''They think, Oh, I've got to be charming in a couple of minutes.'' In a state where politeness matters, Thune is unfailingly so. If he swears, I never heard it, and I never saw him drink anything stronger at dinner than cranberry lemonade.

The Thunes were not politically active, and Thune is not one of those politicians who got his start running for student council. His entry was basketball. One Friday night during Thune's freshman year of high school, Representative Jim Abdnor, a farmer and West River Republican, dropped into Murdo and watched Thune sink five out of six free throws. The next day, Abdnor stopped young Thune in town. ''I noticed you missed one,'' he said by way of introduction.

They struck up a friendship that would go far beyond the basketball court. Now 81, Abdnor said it was Thune who, barely out of high school, persuaded him to take on South Dakota's legendary liberal Democratic senator, George McGovern. ''He thought I could win,'' Abdnor said. ''He didn't have any factual stuff, but he was convincing.''

In 1980, Abdnor rode Ronald Reagan's coattails to the Senate by portraying McGovern as out of touch. In 1985, Thune, inspired by the Reagan message of lower taxes and smaller government, went to Washington to work for Abdnor. But his stint as a Capitol Hill aide was short. Abdnor was soon caught up in a race against Daschle to keep his Senate seat -- and in a Republican Party feud that colors South Dakota politics to this day.

In 1986, when Daschle was in the House and running for the Senate, Bill Janklow, a Republican populist just finishing two terms as governor, challenged Abdnor in a primary to decide who would face down Daschle. The irascible, domineering, occasionally gun-toting Janklow is among the most colorful politicians South Dakota has ever had. He might have beat Daschle but never got the chance; Abdnor, the conservative favorite, won the primary, then lost the general election. Daschle has been senator ever since.

In 1996, Thune ran an upstart campaign for the House, defeating Janklow's lieutenant governor in the primary and a former Daschle associate in the general election; he promptly gained a leadership spot in his freshman class.

WHO KNEW BABIES BOUNCED:

A Baby Bounce?: Kerry’s lead over Bush widens, though not substantially. (Brian Braiker, July 31, 2004, Newsweek)

Coming out of the Democratic National Convention in Boston, Sen. John Kerry now holds a seven-point lead over President George W. Bush (49 percent to 42 percent) in a three-way race with independent Ralph Nader (3 percent), according to the latest NEWSWEEK poll The poll was taken over two nights, both before and after Kerry's acceptance speech. Respondents who were queried after Kerry's Thursday night speech gave the Democrat a ten-point lead over Bush. Three weeks ago, Kerry’s lead was three points.

Kerry’s four-point “bounce” is the smallest in the history of the NEWSWEEK poll. [...]

For the NEWSWEEK poll, Princeton Survey Research Associates interviewed 1,010 adults aged 18 and older July 29 and July 30 by telephone. The margin of error is plus or minus 3 percentage points.

MY BUT YOUR POWDER'S DRY:

Bush Planning August Attack Against Kerry (ADAM NAGOURNEY and ROBIN TONER, 8/01/04, NY Times)

President Bush's campaign plans to use the normally quiet month of August for a vigorous drive to undercut John Kerry by turning attention away from his record in Vietnam to what they described as an undistinguished and left-leaning record in the Senate.

Mr. Bush's advisers plan to cap the month at the Republican convention in New York, which they said would feature Mr. Kerry as an object of humor and calculated derision.

SO MUCH FOR IMPROVING OUR IMAGE ABROAD:

Saudis Criticize Kerry for 'Bashing' Kingdom (Tom Doggett, 7/31/04, Reuters) - Saudi Arabia on Friday criticized Democratic presidential challenger Sen. John Kerry for "bashing" the kingdom when he called on the United States to cut its dependence on the Middle East nation's oil.

"Saudi bashing is not an energy policy," an official with the Saudi Embassy in Washington said.

COOKING UP A COVER FOR THE HUMANITARIAN MISSION:

US forces hunt down al-Qa'eda in Sudan (Damien McElroy, 01/08/2004, Daily Telegraph)

American special forces teams have been sent to Sudan to hunt down Saudi Arabian terrorists who have re-established secret al-Qa'eda training camps in remote mountain ranges in the north-eastern quarter of the country.

JIBJAB:

We despise the use of the Internet to disperse lame jokes, but this is hilarious.

MORE (via Matt Murphy):
Sue You: This Song Is Our Song (Rachel Metz, Jul. 29, 2004, Wired)

When was the last time you saw John Kerry on his knees before world leaders, clad in S&M gear and with a ball gag in his mouth? Or eyed President Bush looking sheepish in a red dunce cap?

Chances are it was sometime this past week on national TV and maybe 10 times before that on the Internet, thanks to JibJab, a site that is posting animators Evan and Gregg Spiridellis' latest creation, This Land.

The film features Kerry and Bush dissing each other like boys on a playground to the tune of Woody Guthrie's classic song, "This Land Is Your Land." It's made it around the world, with enthusiastic viewers commenting about the film on the site's blog from as far away as the Netherlands, New Zealand and Guam, and its historical value has been noted by the Library of Congress, which on Tuesday e-mailed the Santa Monica, California-based Spiridellises asking to add the animated short to its archives.

But while about 25 million viewers have been clogging JibJab to chuckle at the film's South Park-like Flash animation and juvenile insults (Bush labels Kerry a "liberal sissy," and Kerry responds by calling Bush a "right-wing nut job"), the Spiridellises aren't exactly laughing their way back to the drawing board.

In the wake of their short's popularity, which began soon after its July 9 Web release and has been punctuated by appearances and mentions on almost every major U.S. news show, the brothers found themselves in a legal skirmish with Ludlow Music, which, Ludlow attorney Paul LiCalsi said, owns the copyright to Guthrie's famous tune.

FOLKS ASSURE US THIS CAN'T HAPPEN...:

Troops deliver aid as Sudan backs down (news.com.au, August 1, 2004)

FRENCH soldiers stationed in Chad began airlifting aid to the border with Sudan's Darfur region today, as Sudan reluctantly agreed to accept a UN Security Council resolution threatening international action unless atrocities in Darfur were halted within 30 days.

French President Jacques Chirac ordered the mobilisation of his forces yesterday to help the 1.2 million people driven from their homes by Sudanese troops and Arab militia known as Janjaweed.

Since then, troops in Chad had begun flying relief supplies to the border town of Abeche and were preparing to send 200 troops to secure Chad's eastern frontier with Darfur, said army colonel Philippe Charles.

YOU CAN TAKE THE BIDDIE OUT OF FRANCE... (via Robert Schwartz):

Loved Ones Asked To Donate To Democratic Cause (Local 10, July 30, 2004)

A South Florida woman who died this week had an unusual last request. Instead of flower or contributions in her name to a charity, she asked those who loved her to try to make sure President George W. Bush is not re-elected. Loved ones said that Joan Abbey was committed to her political passions, even in death.

Abbey was born in Montreal...

WRONG TIDE:

Circus tiger escapes, causes scare in NYC (MICHAEL WEISSENSTEIN, 7/31/04, ASSOCIATED PRESS)

After escaping from the circus, a white tiger alarmed picnickers and motorists Saturday on what for him apparently was a calm, half-mile stroll through an unfamiliar urban jungle.

DAMN PRIESTS:

Gene Therapy Pioneer Arrested for Molesting Girl (Dan Whitcomb, 7/31/04, Reuters)

A Southern California scientist known as the "Father of Gene Therapy" for his pioneering work in that field was arrested on Friday and accused of molesting a young girl over a four-year period.

W. French Anderson was taken into custody at his home in the exclusive Los Angeles suburb of San Marino on Friday morning as sheriffs deputies served him with a search warrant for the premises.

Deputies also searched his offices at the University of Southern California's Keck School of Medicine and removed computers. Authorities declined to say what evidence, if any, was seized in those raids.

Anderson is accused of molesting the girl, a family friend who is now 17, over a four-year period starting in 1997 while he coached her in Karate, said Sandi Gibbons, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office.

Gibbons said the girl was 12 years old in 1997.

WAS THAT A PIG THAT JUST FLEW OVERHEAD...?:

Historic WTO Trade Pact Just a Gavel Away (Richard Waddington and Patrick Lannin, 7/31/04, Reuters)

Rich and poor nations were set for a historic deal Saturday to slash billions of dollars in farm subsidies, create more open industrial markets and put troubled global commerce negotiations back on track.

Although the accord must still be formally approved by the World Trade Organization's 147-members at a session due to start at 4 p.m. EDT, top negotiators from both North and South said that they had finished their work and the hard days of wrangling were over.

WHERE MR. PINK MET THE LADY IN RED:

Felonious and Urbane, Dillinger Still Charms (STEPHEN KINZER, 7/25/04, NY Times)

On a steamy night 70 years ago, the debonair bank robber John Dillinger, who had reached a level of fame equaled only by Charles Lindbergh and Franklin Roosevelt, stepped out of the Biograph Theater in Chicago and was shot to death by F.B.I. agents who were waiting in ambush. .

To observe the anniversary of his death, a band of historians, crime buffs and others met Thursday night at a tavern near the Biograph. Shortly before 10:30, the hour at which Dillinger and two female companions emerged after seeing the gangster film "Manhattan Melodrama," the group walked to the alleyway where his killers had laid their trap.

As the plaintive strains of "Amazing Grace" wafted from a bagpipe, Robert Ritholz, an amateur historian and artifact collector, solemnly poured a can of beer onto the ground at the spot where Dillinger fell.

Later, Mike Flores, a theater director who has immersed himself in Dillinger lore, said the shooting had touched off a public frenzy.

"Within minutes after he died, these streets were filled with thousands of people," Mr. Flores said. "No one could get in or out, not even ambulances. People were dipping their handkerchiefs in his blood. He was like a rock star."

Although Indiana lays a claim to him because he was born there, and although he robbed banks in at least five states in his 13-month crime spree, Dillinger returned time and again to Chicago. Many people here are still in thrall to his memory.

YOU'D THINK THEY'D LIKE BUSH AND REAGAN BETTER:

The Germans' Infatuation with Cowboys and Indians (Allan Hall, July 30, 2004, London Times):

IT IS hardly the Wild West -in fact the site used to be a part of the East and the only natural sand comes from a gravel pit 30 miles away. But tomorrow Silver Lake City will be inaugurated as a place where Germans can feel at home on the range.

Nowhere in the Western world, outside of America itself, is the cult of the cowboy so firmly entrenched as it is in Germany. Doctors, lawyers, car mechanics, teachers and civil servants, sober people who bind themselves to Teutonic rules during the week, throw off their inhibitions on Friday nights to play cowboys and Indians.

It is charades on a grand scale: there are hundreds of clubs dotted across the country with tens of thousands of members. Silver Lake City opens its doors this weekend at Templin, north of Berlin, to cater for the urban cowboy crowd from the reborn capital.

There is a main street with a saloon with swinging doors, a general store, a jail at the back of the sheriff's office and a horse trough. There is a bank that can be robbed to order and a hotel to sleep off one shot of rye too many.

Silver Lake City was inspired by Karl May's Winnetou and Old Shatterhand books: 1920s German pulp fiction about a cowboy and an Indian chief in a place and a time far from the drab, depressed Fatherland of the day.

Even Adolf Hitler was a fan and before conquering vast tracts of the world he read himself to sleep in the early days of the Nazi movement with a May book every night.

Psychologists say that it is precisely the formality and the order of German society that draws people to escape from it, even if only for weekends and in clothing that most people left behind in the toy-box at the age of ten.The Wild West boom is one of the few growth industries in a country with high unemployment and a collective depression about the future. Silver Lake City is a theme park for the family, but the family had better like its leisure served up in boots, Stetsons and spurs. It cost £12 million to build, as a venture of private and public capital, in a region north of Berlin with double-digit unemployment.

This toy town sprawling over 70,000 square metres is the grandest realisation of a tradition that even pre-dates the May books. Germans have been setting up Native American hobby clubs, Wild West towns, festivals and fairs celebrating Americana for more than a century.

At special events German frontiersmen and would-be Indian braves flock to ride bareback horses, shoot bows and arrows, cook around a campfire and drink in the large clubhouses that are decorated as western saloons.

A Germanic seriousness lies behind the weekend escapism. "We don't play cowboys and Indians," said Peter Timmermann, historian and curator at the Munich Cowboy Club. "Europeans have received a very distorted image of Indians. We do this properly. Of course it is a hobby, but we really try to take it seriously."

A VICTIM OF THE DEVIL'S GREATEST TRICK

The Devil’s Chaplain Confounded (Stephen M. Barr, August/September 2004, First Things)

A Devil’s Chaplain is a collection of essays, book reviews, forewords, eulogies, and assorted “tirades and reflections” selected by Richard Dawkins from his work of the past twenty-five years. It is a miscellany that touches on postmodernism, the jury system, New Age superstitions, the late Stephen Jay Gould, the deaths of friends, the wonders of Africa, the perils of quack medicine, and more. The author is known as a writer on evolutionary theory and is perhaps the best-known exponent of Darwinism writing today. His style is often truculent—it has been said that if T. H. Huxley was called Darwin’s bulldog, Dawkins should be called Darwin’s pit bull—and on the subject of religion, in particular, he is rabid. He has his calmer moments, of course, and when he confines himself to zoology, his field of expertise, he is capable of writing in a lucid manner. In A Devil’s Chaplain he presents himself as philosopher, social critic, and moralist, expounding on themes that are favorites of his: science and reason; the world of facts versus religion; superstition and wishful thinking.

His title is taken from a letter of Charles Darwin’s in which he exclaims to a friend, “What a book a Devil’s Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low and horridly cruel works of nature.” Dawkins suggests that if Darwin had “decided to extend the list of melancholy adjectives,” he would probably have added to it “selfish” and “blind.” It is this view of nature that lies at the heart of the philosophy, morality, and social criticism that Dawkins presents here. For him, the great foundational truth is that the universe and the life it has spawned are without any ultimate purpose: the revelation given to the Devil’s Chaplain is one of cosmic futility. What gospel, then, will a Devil’s Chaplain preach?

Or to put it another way, what are “Darwinism’s moral implications”? Dawkins poses this question in his title essay, which was written to introduce this collection, and cites two early and opposite responses to Darwinian evolutionary theory, those of George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells. In the preface to Back to Methuselah, Shaw wrote of Darwinian evolution:

When its whole significance dawns on you, your heart sinks into a heap of sand within you. There is a hideous fatalism about it, a ghastly and damnable reduction of beauty and intelligence, of strength and purpose, of honor and aspiration.

Wells, however, seemed to revel in the ruthlessness of nature, writing in his scientific utopian fantasy The New Republic:

And how will the New Republic treat the inferior races? How will it deal with the black? . . . the yellow man? . . . the Jew? . . . those swarms of black, and brown, and dirty-white, and yellow people, who do not come into the new needs of efficiency? Well, the world is a world, and not a charitable institution, and I take it they will have to go. . . . And the ethical system of these men of the New Republic, the ethical system which will dominate the world state, will be shaped primarily to favor the procreation of what is fine and efficient and beautiful in humanity—beautiful and strong bodies, clear and powerful minds. . . . And the method that nature has followed hitherto in the shaping of the world, whereby weakness was prevented from propagating weakness . . . is death. . . . The men of the New Republic . . . will have an ideal that will make the killing worth the while.

What is Dawkins’ own response? Scientifically he cannot follow Shaw, who retreated, he says, into “a confused idea of Lamarckian evolution,” and morally he cannot follow Wells, whose vision he properly calls “blood-chilling.” Rather, Dawkins says, we must accept Darwinism as true science but must rebel against its moral implications: “[A]t the same time as I support Darwinism as a scientist, I am a passionate anti-Darwinian when it comes to politics and how we should conduct our human affairs.”

HE'LL NEVER INVADE IRAQ...:

Sudan Says It Will Try to Meet UN Demands on Darfur (Nima Elbagir, 7/31/04, Reuters)

Sudan will try to comply with a U.N. resolution threatening sanctions if it does not disarm marauding militia in Darfur, a Sudanese envoy said Saturday, backing down from an initial rejection of the vote.

France said its soldiers based in Chad would help to bring aid and security to refugees flooding across the border from the western region blighted by months of fighting.

The U.N. Security Council adopted a U.S.-drafted resolution Friday which threatened to clamp sanctions on Sudan in 30 days if it failed to stop attacks by Janjaweed militia and bring them to justice.

"Sudan is not happy with the (U.N.) Security Council resolution, but we will comply with it to the best of our ability," Osman Al Said, Sudan's ambassador to the African Union, told a news conference in Ethiopia.

"Because should we fail to do so, we know our enemies would not hesitate to take other measures against our country."

WHAT ARE THE STEEL BUGS SUPPOSED TO WHINE ABOUT?:

Brazilian Minister Says Trade Talks Set for Success (Reuters, 7/31/04)

Talks to get stalled global trade talks back on track are likely to end successfully, Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim said Saturday.

"I think that the momentum is such that it is difficult not to conclude (successfully)," he told reporters at the World Trade Organization's headquarters in Geneva.

Key WTO members struck deals earlier Saturday on a package of farm trade proposals including the eventual elimination of farm export subsidies, and an accord on wording for an agreement covering industrial goods trade.

"This is the beginning of the end for (farm) subsidies. Export subsidies will be eliminated first," Amorim said.

BABBLE ON BY BUS:

'Believe' tour off to a bumpy start: Kerry's 21-state trip gets a mixed reception during its first day out (JULIE MASON, 7/31/04, Houston Chronicle)

A sparse crowd showed up at a morning rally in Boston to begin the 21-state tour. On board were the Kerry family, the Edwards family and an entourage.

Kerry admitted he was dragging. "I am longing to have my head hit a pillow," he said.

Highways were blocked from Boston to Scranton as the campaign's 10 buses and support vehicles lumbered westward.

In Newburg, N.Y., they made an unscheduled stop to celebrate John and Elizabeth Edwards' 27th anniversary.

The couple observed their anniversary tradition of a meal at Wendy's, a nod to their early married days when it was all they could afford.

Kerry joined them inside and spied a table of Marines. But when he struck up a conversation, the Marines answered tersely and expressed irritation.

"He imposed on us and I disagree with him coming over here to shake our hands," said one, who did not give his name.

THE NAZIS OR THE COMMIES?:

The teenagers who held off the Nazis (NEAL ASCHERSON, 7/31/04, The Scotsman)

THE Warsaw uprising began at exactly five o’clock on a summer afternoon: 1 August, 1944, 60 years ago tomorrow.

Only the German occupiers were taken by surprise when the hour struck and the shooting by the young fighters began.

It was to be the greatest and most tragic urban insurrection in European history. Nobody could foresee that it would last for 63 terrible days and nights, that it would cost something like 200,000 lives and that the Nazis would deliberately destroy all of central Warsaw.

For most Poles, the uprising is still thought of as a glorious patriotic sacrifice, the proudest memory in Poland’s modern history. But a minority take a more critical view and think the insurrection was a mistake.

The military assessment by the Home Army leaders was hopelessly optimistic, they say. And the political calculations that lay behind the uprising were unrealistic.

In 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union had invaded and partitioned Poland, wiping the state off the map. An exile government appeared in London, taking command of the Home Army resistance movement within German-occupied Poland.

But it was not only German tyranny that concerned the London government. After 1941, when Stalin joined the Allied coalition against Hitler, the Poles began to ask themselves what "liberation" under Soviet control would mean.

The only hope was that Warsaw could liberate itself. Then the Russians would be met by a free and democratic Polish government installed in its own capital.

FIRE MARSHALL PLAN:

Firehouse Rot: John Kerry's cheapest shot. (Christopher Hitchens, July 30, 2004, Slate)

[I]n the last few weeks I have been registering one of the sourest and nastiest and cheapest notes to have been struck for some time. In a recent article about anti-Bush volunteers going door-to-door in Pennsylvania, often made up of campaigners from the Service Employees International Union, or SEIU—one of the country's largest labor unions—the New York Times cited a leaflet they were distributing, which said that the president was spending money in Iraq that could be better used at home. The mayor of San Francisco, Gavin Newsom, recently made the same point, proclaiming repeatedly that the Bay Area was being starved of funds that were being showered on Iraqis. (He obviously doesn't remember the line of his city's most famous columnist, the late Herb Caen, who referred to San Francisco as "Baghdad by the Bay.") These are only two public instances of what's become quite a general whispering campaign. And then on Thursday night, Sen. Kerry quite needlessly proposed a contradiction between "opening firehouses in Baghdad and shutting them in the United States of America." Talk about a false alternative. To borrow the current sappy language of "making us safer": Who would feel more secure if they knew that we weren't spending any tax dollars on Iraqi firehouses?

There is something absolutely charmless and self-regarding about this pitch, and I wish I could hear a senior Democrat disowning it. It is no better, in point of its domestic tone and appeal, than the rumor of the welfare mother stopping her Cadillac to get vodka on food stamps. In point of its international implications, it also suggests the most vulgar form of isolationism, not to say insularity.

RUNNING FROM WHAT YOU ARE:

Courting 'the People': To Cross Ideological Blocs, Kerry Says Little (George F. Will, July 30, 2004, Washington Post)

The process of picking presidential nominees has been democratized. The proliferation of primaries has removed the process from the supposedly unclean hands of elected officials and party bosses. Bosses were always important and often decisive when they had machines to boss -- until about 40 years ago. As recently as the late 1960s, the governor of Pennsylvania controlled 40,000 patronage jobs. Twenty years later there were 2,000.

Today it is possible for remarkably few voters -- representing only themselves, unlike the officeholders and bosses of the bad old days -- to be decisive. John Kerry won the nomination in a sprint that lasted 29 days -- from the Iowa caucuses to the Wisconsin primary. Effectively, he was picked by the approximately 135,000 people -- 0.06 percent of Americans of voting age -- who supported him in Iowa and New Hampshire.

The convention actually was a useful laying-on of hands -- the uniquely clean hands of the great unwashed, "the people" from around the nation. Or at least a fair sampling of the current composition of the activist base of the world's oldest party. For example, about one in 10 delegates was a teacher, including 415 members of the two big teachers unions.

Kerry's platform is a 37-page flinch. It turns a perpetual chimera, "energy independence," into a promise, but it flinches from suggesting a tax on gasoline consumption or drilling anywhere that might annoy Democrats, which means . . . anywhere. His platform advocates "rigorous new incentives and tests for new teachers." Notice: only new teachers. Of today's teacher-certification tests, the Wall Street Journal reports that "someone with about a 10th-grade education could pass them."

George W. Bush's scarlet sin against the environment supposedly was his turn away from the Kyoto agreement on global warming, by which the world agreed that Americans should pay most of the costs. But the two paragraphs that Kerry's platform devotes to "[i]nternational leadership to protect the global environment" mentions neither "global warming" nor Kyoto.

That is how a Massachusetts Democrat runs for president when he knows that four of the past five Democrats elected president were from Southern or border states (including Harry Truman from Missouri).

A GENTLEMAN'S "C" FROM THE DEAN:

A Speech Without Risk (David S. Broder, August 1, 2004, Washington Post)

Students of political rhetoric generally agree on the elements that make for a successful convention acceptance speech. Over the years, the best of them have had some or all of these ingredients: a fresh and powerful personal narrative, strong ideas, memorable phrases and a rhythm that builds to an emotional climax.

John Kerry's acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention on Thursday night fell short in all these respects.

WHY DOES CABANA BOY WANT HISTORIANS TO SLIT THEIR WRISTS?:

Kerry's Isolationism (Robert Kagan, August 1, 2004, Washington Post)

Someday, when the passions of this election have subsided, historians and analysts of American foreign policy may fasten on a remarkable passage in John Kerry's nomination speech. "As president," Kerry declared, "I will bring back this nation's time-honored tradition: The United States of America never goes to war because we want to; we only go to war because we have to. That is the standard of our nation." The statement received thunderous applause at the convention and, no doubt, the nodding approval of many Americans of all political leanings who watched on television.

Only American diplomatic historians may have contemplated suicide as they reflected on their failure to have the smallest influence on Americans' understanding of their own nation's history. And perhaps foreign audiences tuning in may have paused in their exultation over a possible Kerry victory in November to reflect with wonder on the incurable self-righteousness and nationalist innocence the Democratic candidate displayed. Who but an American politician, they might ask, could look back across the past 200 years and insist that the United States had never gone to war except when it "had to"?

The United States has sent forces into combat dozens of times over the past century and a half, and only twice, in World War II and in Afghanistan, has it arguably done so because it "had to."

NOT COMPREHENSIVE, BARELY COMPREHENSIBLE:

The Trouble with Libertarianism (Edward Feser, 07/20/2004, Tech Central Station)

"Libertarianism" is usually defined as the view in political philosophy that the only legitimate function of a government is to protect its citizens from force, fraud, theft, and breach of contract, and that it otherwise ought not to interfere with its citizens' dealings with one another, either to make them more economically equal or to make them more morally virtuous. Most libertarian theorists emphasize that their position is not intended to be a complete system of ethics, but merely a doctrine about the proper scope of state power: their claim is not that either egalitarian views about the distribution of wealth or traditional attitudes about sexuality, drug use, and the like are necessarily incorrect, but only that such moral views ought not to guide public policy. A libertarian society is in their view compatible with any particular moral or religious outlook one might be committed to, and this is taken to be one of its great strengths: people of all persuasions in a pluralistic society can have reason to support a libertarian polity, precisely because it does not favor any particular persuasion over another. A libertarian society is, it is claimed, genuinely neutral between diverse moral and religious worldviews.

In this respect, as in others, libertarians take their creed to be superior to that political philosophy that most prides itself on its purported tolerance and neutrality, namely egalitarian liberalism. The liberal philosopher John Rawls characterized the various moral and religious worldviews represented in modern pluralistic societies as "comprehensive doctrines," and he argued that his own brand of liberalism was compatible with all reasonable comprehensive doctrines. Libertarians have objected that the details of Rawls's theory so incorporate his social and economic egalitarianism into what he counts as "reasonable" that his claim to neutrality between actually existing worldviews is disingenuous; for Rawlsians are ultimately prepared to apply that honorific only to those comprehensive doctrines compatible with an extensive regime of anti-discrimination laws, forced income redistribution, and whatever other consequences are taken to follow from Rawls's famous "difference principle" (which holds that no inequalities can be permitted in a just society unless they benefit its least well-off members). The "comprehensive doctrines" of moral traditionalists and individualist free spirits alike, doctrines having millions of adherents, end up being effectively written off as "unreasonable" from the egalitarian liberal point of view. Libertarianism is truly neutral where Rawls and other liberals only pretend to be.

Or so it seems. I want to suggest, however, that many libertarians are - no doubt unwittingly - guilty of the very same sort of disingenuousness as Rawls. For it simply isn't true that libertarianism is neutral between various moral and religious worldviews, notwithstanding that most libertarians would like to believe (indeed do believe) that it is. The reason, as it turns out, is that there is no such thing as "libertarianism" in the first place: it would be more accurate to speak in the plural of "libertarianisms," a variety of doctrines each often described as "libertarian," but having no common core, and each of which tends in either theory or practice to favor some moral worldviews to the exclusion of others. It also turns out that the illusion that there is such a thing as "libertarianism" - a basic set of beliefs and values that all so-called "libertarians" have in common - is the source of the illusion that a libertarian society would be a truly neutral one. When one gets clear on exactly which version of libertarianism one is talking about, it will be seen that what one is talking about is a doctrine with substantial moral commitments, commitments which cannot fail to promote some worldviews and to push others into the margins of social life.

To see that this is so, we need only look at some specific and paradigmatic examples of libertarian political theories, and there is no more appropriate place to start than at the beginning, with the early classical liberal (as opposed to modern, egalitarian liberal) political thinkers whom libertarians typically regard as their intellectual forebears. Take John Locke (1632-1704), who famously argued that the primary function of a government was to protect the property rights of its citizens, with the most fundamental property right being that of self-ownership. That we own ourselves entails, in Locke's view, that we own our labor and its fruits, and this in turn entails that we can (with certain qualifications) come to own whatever previously unowned natural resources we "mix" our labor with. Self-ownership thus grounds the right to private property, and with it the basic rights that determine the proper scope and functions of state power.

But what grounds the right of self-ownership itself? The answer, according to Locke, was that it derives from God. [...]

This commitment to a particular moral view of the world was typical of the early classical liberals. Adam Smith (1723-1790) favored modern liberal capitalist society precisely because of what he took to be its moral advantages: it provided an unprecedented degree of material well-being for the masses, and it promoted such bourgeois virtues as sobriety, moderation, and diligence. Moreover, because in Smith's view capitalist society failed to promote certain other virtues (namely martial and aristocratic ones), and even tended positively to undermine some of them (insofar as consumerism and the hyper-specialization entailed by the division of labor oriented men's minds away from learning), there was an urgent need for government to foster institutions outside the market - a professional military and publicly financed education, for example - that would make up for its deficiencies.

We must face the disturbing dilemma that modern liberal democracy needs God, but God is not as liberal or as democratic as we would like Him to be.

LOOKIN' FOR LOVE IN ALL THE WRONG PLACES:

Alas for Kerry, the days of transatlantic amity are gone (Niall Ferguson, 31/07/2004, Daily Telegraph)

The key point was in the paragraph on Iraq. "We need a president," declared Kerry, "who has the credibility to bring our allies to our side and share the burden, reduce the cost to American taxpayers, and reduce the risk to American soldiers. That's the right way to get the job done and bring our troops home. Here is the reality: that won't happen until we have a president who restores America's respect and leadership – so we don't have to go it alone in the world. And we need to rebuild our alliances…"

In other words, a Kerry administration would set about mending fences with allies who are not currently on America's side - which means most of continental Europe - in order to reduce and ultimately wind up America's commitments in Iraq.

Significantly, Kerry mentioned Europe at the top of his speech, recalling the time when his diplomat father was stationed there. Was I just dreaming, or did he say he had "unforgettable memories of being a kid mesmerised by the British, French and American troops" he saw? Did he really say French? (Rewind the tape. Yes, he did. Boy, do his speechwriters know how to lose votes.)

Well, here's another reality for you, Mr Kerry. Even if you are elected in November, and even if the European leaders do fawn over you in a way not seen since the days of JFK, I don't expect much in the way of burden-sharing, least of all from the French. Sure, with you in the White House, Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroder would spout all sorts of fine words about restoring transatlantic harmony. But I would be quite astonished if practical support, whether in the form of money or men, were to be forthcoming.

This is not a fashionable view, least of all in academic circles. A clear majority of those who think, write and talk about international relations for a living take the view that the transatlantic alliance system can and must be restored.

THE NAMSTER AND THE HAMSTER:

Licorice Speaks (COLIN McENROE, 7/31/04, NY Times)

My name is Licorice, and I am a hamster.

I have never shared my story before because, frankly, sometimes all a hamster has is his privacy. Thursday night, however, Alexandra Kerry described the circumstances of my rescue by her father after I had fallen off a pier in Massachusetts.

I have come forward now to set the record straight.

I was the hamster of Alexandra's sister, Vanessa, and she, on balance, was a good person, although a bit of a tickler. On this occasion, as the family gathered on the pier to depart for a vacation, somebody - I'm not saying it was Alexandra; I'm not saying it was on purpose - "bumped" my cage, and the next thing I knew, I was in the water and sinking fast.

I saw my whole life pass before my eyes. My life has not been all that interesting, so it wasn't exactly like watching "The Godfather I and II." I mean, I'm a hamster. I could see a bright light, but I seemed to be on a wheel that rotated as I ran, so I never got any closer. But I was aware of a shining, all-loving divine rodent presence telling me: "It's not time yet. You have more to do on earth."

"Like what?" I asked, but I could already feel myself back in my body, could feel strong hands yanking open my cage and pulling me upward to safety.

Yes, it was John Kerry. Help was on the way. Yes, he did perform CPR. Yes, he did perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. There is no doubt that I owe him my life. On the other hand, the water went up to his chest, O.K.? I mean, this wasn't exactly PT-109.

WRONG POLICY:

The Faulty Premise of Pre-emption: Libya's dismantled weapons program is not evidence that a policy of pre-emptive strikes works. (GEOFF D. PORTER, 7/31/04, NY Times)

The Bush administration took a new approach to North Korea this month: it suggested that Kim Jong Il follow the example set by Muammar el-Qaddafi. John R. Bolton, undersecretary of state for arms control, urged North Korea to follow Libya's "strategic choice" and voluntarily dismantle its nuclear weapons programs.

But if this approach is based on the assumption that Libya acted to avoid a pre-emptive attack, then its premise is flawed. The United States' pre-emptive invasion of Iraq did not play a large role in bringing about Libya's rapprochement. Contrary to the Bush administration's assertions, Libya's dismantled weapons program is not evidence that a policy of pre-emptive strikes works, and it is disingenuous to argue that it will produce the same results in North Korea.

COCKTAIL PARTIES WOULD BE SO MUCH EASIER IF I WERE A DEMOCRAT AGAIN:

All Things to All People (DAVID BROOKS, 7/31/04, NY Times)

There were so many military men at the Democratic convention I almost expected John Kerry to mount the stage in full body armor and recite the war speech from "Henry V." As it is, he called for bulking up the military, doubling the size of the Special Forces and crushing the terrorists. He hit Bush from the right, and when he got around to bashing the Saudis, I thought I'd wandered into a big meeting of The Weekly Standard editorial board. [...]

Around the arena I spotted some of the people most often talked about as senior officials in a Kerry administration: Richard Holbrooke, Biden, Rand Beers and Dick Gephardt. On the international economy side: Roger Altman, Steve Rattner, John Spratt. On Thursday night I saw Mr. Sober and Serious himself, Robert Rubin, sitting next to Teresa. These are tough centrists from the Washington-Wall Street axis who would be heroes in any crisis.

And so I dared to dream. Maybe the Democratic Party is going to recapture the security policy credibility it had during the Truman and Kennedy years. Maybe this display of McCainiac muscular moderation is not just a costume drama, but the real deal. Maybe hope is really on the way!

I should never have gone back and read the speech again. I should never have gone back on Friday morning, in the unforgiving light of day, and re-examined the words Kerry had so forcefully uttered the night before.

What an incoherent disaster.

NAMSTER DANCE:

Apocalypse Kerry (Lawrence F. Kaplan, 07.30.04, New Republic)

A few weeks back, a colleague of mine at TNR joked that the Kerry campaign should create a miniature river in the FleetCenter, in which the candidate and his "band of brothers" could wend their way toward the podium in a swift boat. Then came news that the Kerry campaign had actually hunted for a Vietnam-era swift boat to plunk down in the convention center. Alas, none was found, and Kerry had to settle for a water taxi ride with his boat mates. In the end, it didn't really matter. No one who watched his acceptance speech last night could have missed the fact that, yes, John Kerry served heroically in Vietnam. Easier to miss was that, as a guide to what sort of approach to national security Kerry will enshrine in official policy--presumably the whole point of the exercise--last night's martial imagery and rhetoric told us nothing at all. Or, rather, worse than nothing.

There were, in fact, three Vietnams haunting the convention hall last night. One was on the stage, which, with its "band of brothers" and "greatest generation" tributes, somehow attached World War II nostalgia to our national tragedy in Vietnam. The second was in the audience, where nine out of ten delegates view the war in Iraq through the prism of their views of that earlier conflict--that is, they would just as soon bolt--and where Kerry's Vietnam service seems to be regarded as some sort of anthropological (and heaven-sent) oddity. The final Vietnam was in John Kerry's words, which blended the stage and audience versions into some approximation of the candidate's own views about the war. None of it furthered the cause of rational discourse.

THE SENATOR HAS A PAST TO REPUDIATE:

Strong and Wrong ... The Democratic Convention of 2004 (Jonathan Schell, July 30, 2004, The Nation)

"During the Vietnam War, many young men, including the current President, the Vice President and me, could have gone to Vietnam and didn't. John Kerry came from a privileged background. He could have avoided going, too. But instead he said, 'Send me.'

"When they sent those Swift Boats up the river in Vietnam... John Kerry said, 'Send me.'

"And then when America needed to extricate itself from that misbegotten and disastrous war, Kerry donned his uniform once again, and said, 'Send me'; and he led veterans to an encampment on the Washington Mall, where, in defiance of the Nixon Justice Department, they conducted the most stirring and effective of the protests, that forced an end to the war.

"And then, on my watch, when it was time to heal the wounds of war and normalize relations with Vietnam...John Kerry said, 'Send me.'"

So spoke President Clinton at the Democratic Convention--except that he did not deliver the third paragraph about Kerry's protest; I made that up. The speech cries out for the inclusion of Kerry's glorious moment of antiwar leadership; and its absence is as palpable as one of those erasures from photographs of high Soviet officials after Stalin had sent them to the gulag. Clinton's message was plain.

Military courage in war is honored; civil courage in opposing a disastrous war is not honored. Even thirty years later, it cannot be mentioned by a former President who himself opposed the Vietnam War.

ALL MASS KILLINNGS ARE NOT CREATED EQUAL:

Wrong Definition For a War (Caleb Carr, July 28, 2004, Washington Post)

Terrorism, as defined by military historians, has been a constant, ugly feature of warfare, an aberrant tactic akin to slavery, piracy and genocide. One of the reasons that some of us argued throughout the 1990s for undertaking of genuine war on terrorism (involving the military in addition to intelligence and law enforcement) was the notion that we might finally declare the tactic -- like those other aberrant belligerent methods -- to be out of bounds, for the armed forces of civilized nations and non-state organizations alike.

It's true that both slavery and piracy are still practiced, but only in remote corners of the world; certainly genocide is still with us, but its employment is now cause for immediate sanction and forceful reaction (theoretically, at any rate) by the United Nations. Banning such tactics and actively stamping out their practice has been the work of some of the great political and military minds and leaders of the past two centuries. Now it is time -- past time, really -- for terrorism to take its place as a similarly proscribed and anachronistic practice.

But first we must agree on an internationally acceptable definition. Certainly terrorism must include the deliberate victimization of civilians for political purposes as a principal feature -- anything else would be a logical absurdity. And yet there are powerful voices, in this country and elsewhere, that argue against such a definition. They don't want to lose the weapon of terror -- and they don't want to admit to having used it in the past. Should the United States assent to such a specific definition of terrorism, for example, it would have to admit that its fire-bombings of German and Japanese cities during World War II represented effective terrorism. On the other hand, few Muslim nations want to go up against the power of organized terrorist groups by declaring them de jure as well as de facto outlaws.

In the intellectual arena, meanwhile, the fatuous logic that "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter" keeps left-leaning intellectuals away from the cause of definition. And so its promulgation continues to elude the world, even as we have embarked on a war against the phenomenon itself.

TAUNTING:

Bush Announces 20 Recess Appointments (Associated Press, July 30, 2004)

President Bush on Friday announced his intention to make 20 appointments during the congressional recess, including a new chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, a manufacturing czar and three ambassadors.

DIVISION OF LABOR:

Muslim Nations Want Fewer Coalition Troops (BARRY SCHWEID, July 30, 2004, AP)

Muslim countries being sounded out by Saudi Arabia about sending troops to Iraq want a sizable reduction in U.S. and other coalition troops as part of any agreement.

As troops drawn from Muslim countries, most or all from outside the Middle East, took up positions in Iraq, there would be a parallel exodus of coalition soldiers, a senior Saudi official said Friday.

The Muslim force would serve in the name of the United Nations and would supplement U.S. and other coalition troops by protecting U.N. officials and helping Iraqi security personnel patrol Iraq's borders to slow the infiltration of foreign fighters.

For months, the Bush administration has been unable to persuade any Muslim countries to commit troops to Iraq. The main obstacle was the perception that Arab or other Muslim governments would be contributing to a U.S. occupation of Arab Iraq.

The Saudis, who privately dismiss any allegation that the United States wants a long-term presence as an occupying force in Iraq, are trying to counter that argument. A corresponding reduction in U.S. and other coalition forces as Muslim troops arrived would help the Saudis make their case.

THOUSANDS OF ADVISERS BUT NO FRIENDS:

The Last Refuge: The Democratic nominee has shunned substance for patriotic atmospherics. Will it work? (William Kristol, 08/09/2004, Weekly Standard)

UNWILLING TO ARTICULATE a serious policy agenda, unable to explain why his record qualifies him to be president, John Kerry fled Thursday night to the refuge of patriotism.

Kerry's convention speech was in some respects competent, in some respects pedestrian, in some respects bizarre. But it sure was patriotic. And perhaps to good political effect. After all, the American people are patriotic. Over the last quarter century, they have often suspected that elements of the Democratic party are not as patriotic as they are--or not patriotic in the same uncomplicated, straightforward way. In the peaceful 1990s, this suspicion did little damage to Democratic presidential candidates. But the 1990s ended on September 11, 2001. Now we are at war. So John Kerry wrapped the flag tightly around himself in his acceptance speech in order to convince Americans doubtful about President Bush that they could safely go ahead and vote to remove him, and put Kerry in charge.

This strategy may not work. But it is not stupid. What, after all, were Kerry's alternatives?

CLEARING A SPOT FOR DICK CHENEY:

Weary Ridge May Step Down (CBS News, July 30, 2004)

Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge is considering stepping down after the November election, telling colleagues he is worn out from the massive reorganization of government and needs to earn money in the private sector to put his teenage children through college, officials said.

Ridge will not make a final decision until he talks to President George W. Bush later this year and is focused on thwarting the terror attacks that officials fear al Qaeda will attempt before November, Assistant Homeland Secretary Susan Neely said.

"Secretary Ridge is focused entirely on the job the president has asked him to do," Neely said Wednesday.

Several senior Homeland Security officials told The Associated Press that Ridge has indicated in recent weeks he probably will resign after the election, even if Bush wins. They spoke only on condition of anonymity, citing the delicate nature of describing private conversations with their boss.

MAYBE HE IS NIXON:

Kerry's Economic Remedy Won't Be Revealed Before Election (Nathan Burchfiel, July 30, 2004, CNSNews.com)

A top economic advisor to Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry said the public won't hear Kerry's financial plans until after he's elected - if he's elected.

In the Aug. 2 cover story of "Business Week," former Clinton administration treasury secretary Robert Rubin said, "I don't think you can make proposals to try to dig out of this hole until you've gotten elected ... If you start to put out proposals now, they would be vigorously attacked and they would in effect become tainted so they couldn't be used."

NOT AN ALLY FILES:

Fistful of troubles for Chirac (JONATHAN FENBY, 7/31/04, The Japan Times)

Ever since French President Charles de Gaulle vetoed Britain's entry into the European Common Market and took his country out of the integrated military structure of the NATO alliance, France has had a reputation as a country that knows how to say "no" -- a reputation greatly bolstered by President Jacques Chirac's opposition to the war in Iraq.

That stance earned Paris plaudits from other governments that opposed the American-led invasion notably its neighbor and close partner, Germany. But now there are signs that Chirac risks painting himself into an isolated corner, both abroad and at home. That could have important consequences for Europe and the wider international community given France's global role if it results in a weakened presidency for the next three years.

Underlying Chirac's foreign policy is his desire to establish a group of nations that will counterbalance American power, with France at their head in a re-creation of de Gaulle's dream of giving his nation a major global role by positioning it between the great power blocs in the 1960s.

Chirac's problem is that, while such a grouping may come into being on specific issues -- such as Iraq or the Kyoto Protocol -- it lacks longer-term consistency or form as governments take different views on other matters. Countries like China or Russia may find France a useful partner in some areas, but are not going to accept the leadership of Paris in international affairs, or in their dealings with Washington.

Meetings at G-8 summits and during the anniversary celebrations of the 1944 D-Day landings in Normandy this summer have done nothing to ease the tension between Paris and Washington over Iraq. Chirac, who pushed the sale of French nuclear-power technology to Baghdad when he was prime minister in the mid-1970s, has opposed NATO troops playing a role, and has taken a tough position on writing off Iraqi debts incurred under ousted President Saddam Hussein.

This month, he broadened out his opposition to America by attacking Washington's policy on combating HIV-AIDS as a form of protectionism for U.S. pharmaceutical companies. In the field of popular culture, France is taking a hard line to stop increased imports of Hollywood films and American music in order to protect its domestic artists. France is also a leading champion of Boeing rival Airbus.

However, America is not Chirac's only target.

WHAT IF THE RIGHT'S RIGHT (via Ed Driscoll):

The Case for George W. Bush: i.e., what if he's right? (Tom Junod, Aug 01 '04, Esquire)

It happened again this morning. I saw a picture of our president—my president—and my feelings about him were instantly rekindled. The picture was taken after his speech to the graduating seniors at the Air Force Academy. He was wearing a dark suit, a light-blue tie, and a white shirt. His unsmiling visage was grim and purposeful, in pointed contrast to the face of the elaborately uniformed cadet standing next to him, which was lit up with a cocky grin. Indeed, as something more than a frozen moment—as a political statement—the picture might have served, and been intended to serve, as a tableau of the resolve necessary to lift this nation out of this steep and terrible time. The cadet represented the best of what America has to offer, all devil-may-care enthusiasm and willingness to serve. The president, his hair starting to whiten, might have represented something even more essential: the kind of brave and, in his case, literally unblinking leadership that generates enough moral capital to summon the young to war. Although one man was essentially being asked to stake his life on the wisdom of the other, both were melded in an attitude of common purpose, and so both struck a common pose. With the cadet bent slightly forward and the commander in chief leaning slightly back, each man cocked his right arm and made a muscle. They flexed! I didn't know anything about the cadet. About President George W. Bush, though, I felt the satisfaction of absolute certainty, and so uttered the words as essential to my morning as my cup of Kenyan and my dose of high-minded outrage on the editorial page of the Times : "What an a**hole."

Ah. That feels better. George W. Bush is an a**hole, isn't he? Moreover, he's the first president who seems merely that, at least in my lifetime. From Kennedy to Clinton, there is not a single president who would have been capable of striking such a pose after concluding a speech about a war in which hundreds of Americans and thousands of Iraqis are being killed. There is not a single president for whom such a pose would seem entirely characteristic—not a single president who might be tempted to confuse a beefcakey photo opportunity with an expression of national purpose. He has always struck me as a small man, or at least as a man too small for the task at hand, and therefore a man doomed to address the discrepancy between his soul and his situation with displays of political muscle that succeed only in drawing attention to his diminution. He not only has led us into war, he seems to get off on war, and it's the greedy pleasure he so clearly gets from flexing his biceps or from squaring his shoulders and setting his jaw or from landing a plane on an aircraft carrier—the greedy pleasure the war president finds in playacting his own attitudes of belligerence—that permitted me the greedy pleasure of hating him.

Then I read the text of the speech he gave and was thrown from one kind of certainty—the comfortable kind—into another. He was speaking, as he always does, of the moral underpinnings of our mission in Iraq. He was comparing, as he always does, the challenge that we face, in the evil of global terrorism, to the challenge our fathers and grandfathers faced, in the evil of fascism. He was insisting, as he always does, that the evil of global terrorism is exactly that, an evil—one of almost transcendent dimension that quite simply must be met, lest we be remembered for not meeting it . . . lest we allow it to be our judge. I agreed with most of what he said, as I often do when he's defining matters of principle. No, more than that, I thought that he was defining principles that desperately needed defining, with a clarity that those of my own political stripe demonstrate only when they're decrying either his policies or his character. He was making a moral proposition upon which he was basing his entire presidency—or said he was basing his entire presidency—and I found myself in the strange position of buying into the proposition without buying into the presidency, of buying into the words while rejecting, utterly, the man who spoke them. There is, of course, an easy answer for this seeming moral schizophrenia: the distance between the principles and the policy, between the mission and "Mission Accomplished," between the war on terror and the war in Iraq. Still, I have to admit to feeling a little uncertain of my disdain for this president when forced to contemplate the principle that might animate his determination to stay the course in a war that very well may be the end of him politically. I have to admit that when I listen to him speak, with his unbending certainty, I sometimes hear an echo of the same nagging question I ask myself after I hear a preacher declaim the agonies of hellfire or an insurance agent enumerate the cold odds of the actuarial tables. Namely: What if he's right?

As easy as it is to say that we can't abide the president because of the gulf between what he espouses and what he actually does , what haunts me is the possibility that we can't abide him because of us—because of the gulf between his will and our willingness. What haunts me is the possibility that we have become so accustomed to ambiguity and inaction in the face of evil that we find his call for decisive action an insult to our sense of nuance and proportion.

MORE:
Remarks by the President at the United States Air Force Academy Graduation Ceremony (Falcon Stadium, United States Air Force Academy, 6/02/04)

Each of you receiving a commission today in the United States military will also carry the hopes of free people everywhere. (Applause.) As your generation assumes its own duties during a global conflict that will define your careers, you will be called upon to take brave action and serve with honor. In some ways, this struggle we're in is unique. In other ways, it resembles the great clashes of the last century -- between those who put their trust in tyrants and those who put their trust in liberty. Our goal, the goal of this generation, is the same: We will secure our nation and defend the peace through the forward march of freedom.

President George W. Bush salutes a graduating cadet at the United States Air Force Academy Graduation Ceremony in Colorado Springs, Colorado, June 2, 2004. White House photo by Eric Draper. Like the Second World War, our present conflict began with a ruthless, surprise attack on the United States. We will not forget that treachery, and we will accept nothing less than victory over the enemy.

Like the murderous ideologies of the 20th century, the ideology of terrorism reaches across boarders, and seeks recruits in every country. So we're fighting these enemies wherever they hide across the earth.

Like other totalitarian movements, the terrorists seek to impose a grim vision in which dissent is crushed, and every man and woman must think and live in colorless conformity. So to the oppressed peoples everywhere, we are offering the great alternative of human liberty.

Like enemies of the past, the terrorists underestimate the strength of free peoples. The terrorists believe that free societies are essentially corrupt and decadent, and with a few hard blows will collapse in weakness and in panic. The enemy has learned that America is strong and determined, because of the steady resolve of our citizens, and because of the skill and strength of the Army, Navy, Marines, Coast Guard and the United States Air Force. (Applause.)

And like the aggressive ideologies that rose up in the early 1900s, our enemies have clearly and proudly stated their intentions: Here are the words of al Qaeda's self-described military spokesman in Europe, on a tape claiming responsibility for the Madrid bombings. He said, "We choose death, while you choose life. If you do not stop your injustices, more and more blood will flow and these attacks will seem very small compared to what can occur in what you call terrorism."

Here are the words of another al Qaeda spokesman, Suleiman Abu Gheith. Last year, in an article published on an al Qaeda website, he said, "We have the right to kill four million Americans -- two million of them children -- and to exile twice as many and wound and cripple hundreds of thousands. Furthermore, it is our right to fight them with chemical and biological weapons."

In all these threats, we hear the echoes of other enemies in other times -- that same swagger and demented logic of the fanatic. Like their kind in the past, these murderers have left scars and suffering. And like their kind in the past, they will flame and fail and suffer defeat by free men and women. (Applause.)

The enemies of freedom are opposed by a great and growing alliance. Nations that won the Cold War, nations once behind an Iron Curtain, and nations on every continent see this threat clearly. We're cooperating at every level of our military, law enforcement and intelligence to meet the danger. The war on terror is civilization's fight. And, as in the struggles of the last century, civilized nations are waging this fight together.

President George W. Bush celebrates with a graduating Air Force Cadet during the United States Air Force Academy Graduation Ceremony in Colorado Springs, Colorado, June 2, 2004. White House photo by Eric Draper. The terrorists of our day are, in some ways, unlike the enemies of the past. The terrorist ideology has not yet taken control of a great power like Germany or the Soviet Union. And so the terrorists have adopted a strategy different from the gathering of vast and standing armies. They seek, instead, to demoralize free nations with dramatic acts of murder. They seek to wear down our resolve and will by killing the innocent and spreading fear and anarchy. And they seek weapons of mass destruction, so they can threaten or attack even the most powerful nations.

Fighting this kind of enemy is a complex mission that will require all your skill and resourcefulness. Our enemies have no capital or nation-state to defend. They share a vision and operate as a network of dozens of violent extremist groups around the world, striking separately and in concert. Al Qaeda is the vanguard of these loosely affiliated groups, and we estimate that over the years many thousands of recruits have passed through its training camps. Al Qaeda has been wounded by losing nearly two-thirds of its known leadership, and most of its important sanctuaries. Yet many of the terrorists it trained are still active in hidden cells or in other groups. Home-grown extremists, incited by al Qaeda's example, are at work in many nations.

And since September the 11th, we've seen terrorist violence in an arc from Morocco to Spain to Turkey to Russia to Uzbekistan to Pakistan to India to Thailand to Indonesia. Yet the center of the conflict, the platform for their global expansion, the region they seek to remake in their image, is the broader Middle East.

Just as events in Europe determined the outcome of the Cold War, events in the Middle East will set the course of our current struggle. If that region is abandoned to dictators and terrorists, it will be a constant source of violence andd alarm, exporting killers of increasing destructive power to attack America and other free nations. If that region grows in democracy and prosperity and hope, the terrorist movement will lose its sponsors, lose its recruits, and lose the festering grievances that keep terrorists in business. The stakes of this struggle are high. The security and peace of our country are at stake, and success in this struggle is our only option. (Applause.)

This is the great challenge of our time, the storm in which we fly. History is once again witnessing a great clash. This is not a clash of civilizations. The civilization of Islam, with its humane traditions of learning and tolerance, has no place for this violent sect of killers and aspiring tyrants. This is not a clash of religions. The faith of Islam teaches moral responsibility that enobles men and women, and forbids the shedding of innocent blood. Instead, this is a clash of political visions.

In the terrorists' vision of the world, the Middle East must fall under the rule of radical governments, moderate Arab states must be overthrown, nonbelievers must be expelled from Muslim lands, and the harshest practice of extremist rule must be universally enforced. In this vision, books are burned, terrorists are sheltered, women are whipped, and children are schooled in hatred and murder and suicide.

Our vision is completely different. We believe that every person has a right to think and pray and live in obedience to God and conscience, not in frightened submission to despots. (Applause.) We believe that societies find their greatness by encouraging the creative gifts of their people, not in controlling their lives and feeding their resentments. And we have confidence that people share this vision of dignity and freedom in every culture because liberty is not the invention of Western culture, liberty is the deepest need and hope of all humanity. The vast majority of men and women in Muslim societies reject the domination of extremists like Osama bin Laden. They're looking to the world's free nations to support them in their struggle against the violent minority who want to impose a future of darkness across the Middle East. We will not abandon them to the designs of evil men. We will stand with the people of that region as they seek their future in freedom. (Applause.)

We bring more than a vision to this conflict -- we bring a strategy that will lead to victory. And that strategy has four commitments:

First, we are using every available tool to dismantle, disrupt and destroy terrorists and their organizations. With all the skill of our law enforcement, all the stealth of our special forces, and all the global reach of our air power, we will strike the terrorists before they can strike our people. The best way to protect America is to stay on the offensive. (Applause.)

Secondly, we are denying terrorists places of sanctuary or support. The power of terrorists is multiplied when they have safe havens to gather and train recruits. Terrorist havens are found within states that have difficulty controlling areas of their own territory. So we're helping governments like the Philippines and Kenya to enforce anti-terrorist laws, through information sharing and joint training.

President George W. Bush delivers remarks at the United States Air Force Academy Graduation Ceremony in Colorado Springs, Colorado, June 2, 2004. White House photo by Eric Draper. Terrorists also find support and safe haven within outlaw regimes. So I have set a clear doctrine that the sponsors of terror will be held equally accountable for the acts of terrorists. (Applause.) Regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan learned that providing support and sanctuary to terrorists carries with it enormous costs -- while Libya has discovered that abandoning the pursuit of weapons of mass murder has opened a better path to relations with the free world.

Terrorists find their ultimate support and sanctuary when they gain control of governments and countries. We saw the terrible harm that terrorists did by taking effective control over the government of Afghanistan -- a terrorist victory that led directly to the attacks of September the 11th. And terrorists have similar designs on Iraq, on Pakistan, on Saudi Arabia and many other regional governments they regard as illegitimate. We can only imagine the scale of terrorist crimes were they to gain control of states with weapons of mass murder or vast oil revenues. So we will not retreat. We will prevent the emergence of terrorist-controlled states.

Third, we are using all elements of our national power to deny terrorists the chemical, biological and nuclear weapons they seek. Because this global threat requires a global response, we are working to strengthen international institutions charged with opposing proliferation. We are working with regional powers and international partners to confront the threats of North Korea and Iran. We have joined with 14 other nations in the Proliferation Security Initiative to interdict -- on sea, on land, or in the air -- shipments of weapons of mass destruction, components to build those weapons, and the means to deliver them. Our country must never allow mass murderers to gain hold of weapons of mass destruction. We will lead the world and keep unrelenting pressure on the enemy. (Applause.)

Fourth and finally, we are denying the terrorists the ideological victories they seek by working for freedom and reform in the broader Middle East. Fighting terror is not just a matter of killing or capturing terrorists. To stop the flow of recruits into terrorist movement, young people in the region must see a real and hopeful alternative -- a society that rewards their talent and turns their energies to constructive purpose. And here the vision of freedom has great advantages. Terrorists incite young men and women to strap bombs on their bodies and dedicate their deaths to the death of others. Free societies inspire young men and women to work, and achieve, and dedicate their lives to the life of their country. And in the long run, I have great faith that the appeal of freedom and life is stronger than the lure of hatred and death.

Freedom's advance in the Middle East will have another very practical effect. The terrorist movement feeds on the appearance of inevitability. It claims to rise on the currents of history, using past America withdrawals from Somalia and Beirut to sustain this myth and to gain new followers. The success of free and stable governments in Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere will shatter the myth and discredit the radicals. (Applause.) And as the entire region sees the promise of freedom in its midst, the terrorist ideology will become more and more irrelevant, until that day when it is viewed with contempt or ignored altogether. (Applause.)

For decades, free nations tolerated oppression in the Middle East for the sake of stability. In practice, this approach brought little stability, and much oppression. So I have changed this policy. In the short-term, we will work with every government in the Middle East dedicated to destroying the terrorist networks. In the longer-term, we will expect a higher standard of reform and democracy from our friends in the region. (Applause.) Democracy and reform will make those nations stronger and more stable, and make the world more secure by undermining terrorism at it source. Democratic institutions in the Middle East will not grow overnight; in America, they grew over generations. Yet the nations of the Middle East will find, as we have found, the only path to true progress is the path of freedom and justice and democracy. (Applause.)

America is pursuing our forward strategy for freedom in the broader Middle East in many ways. Voices in that region are increasingly demanding reform and democratic change. So we are working with courageous leaders like President Karzai of Afghanistan, who is ushering in a new era of freedom for the Afghan people. We're taking aside reformers, and we're standing for human rights and political freedom, often at great personal risk. We're encouraging economic opportunity and the rule of law and government reform and the expansion of liberty throughout the region.

And we're working toward the goal of a Palestinian state living side by side with Israel in peace. (Applause.) Prime Minister Sharon's plan to remove all settlements from Gaza and several from the West Bank is a courageous step toward peace. (Applause.) His decision provides an historic moment of opportunity to begin building a future Palestinian state. This initiative can stimulate progress toward peace by setting the parties back on the road map, the most reliable guide to ending the occupation that began in 1967. This success will require reform-minded Palestinians to step forward and lead and meet their road map obligations. And the United States of America stands ready to help those dedicated to peace, those willing to fight violence, find a new state so we can realize peace in the greater Middle East. (Applause.)

Some who call themselves "realists" question whether the spread of democracy in the Middle East should be any concern of ours. But the realists in this case have lost contact with a fundamental reality. America has always been less secure when freedom is in retreat. America is always more secure when freedom is on the march.

All our commitments in the Middle East -- all of the four commitments of our strategy -- are now being tested in Iraq. We have removed a state-sponsor of terror with a history of using weapons of mass destruction. And the whole world is better off with Saddam Hussein sitting in a prison cell. (Applause.) We now face al Qaeda associates like the terrorist Zarqawi, who seek to hijack the future of that nation. We are fighting enemies who want us to retreat, and leave Iraq to tyranny, so they can claim an ideological victory over America. They would use that victory to gather new strength, and take their violence directly to America and to our friends.

Yet our coalition is determined, and the Iraqi people have made clear: Iraq will remain in the camp of free nations.

THAT PAKISTAN?:

Capture of suspected embassy bomber may weaken al-Qaeda (Sydney Morning Herald, July 31, 2004)

The arrest in Pakistan of a key al-Qaeda suspect in the 1998 East Africa US embassy bombings may hamper the terror network's activities even if it failed to bring Osama bin Laden hunters any closer to their prey, analysts said yesterday.

Tanzanian-born Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani was captured on Sunday at a house in eastern Pakistan after a fierce eight-hour shootout.

With him were his Uzbek wife, two other women, six children and four men including a pair of South Africans.

"It certainly is a significant arrest," Singapore-based al-Qaeda expert Rohan Gunaratna said, adding Ghailani had long been involved in the network's operational planning.

"He is one of the most important leaders of al-Qaeda involved in operational planning for a long time."

HEADS OR TAILS?:

Hopes Now Outpace Stem Cell Science (GINA KOLATA, 7/29/04, NY Times)

When Ron Reagan gave his speech on stem cell research before the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday night, medical researchers were taking careful note. It was just so important to them that he get the details right, that he make no mistakes on the science and that they glean any tricks they could on how to get their message about the importance of stem cell research across.

But for all the promise, and for all the fervent hopes of patients and their families that cures from stem cells will come soon, researchers say many questions in basic science remain to be answered. And experts with ethical objections to the destruction of human embryos for such research say they oppose paying for the work with public money. Scientists know the emotional, and ethical, sides in the stem cell debate. The cells are from human embryos.

Many scientists hope eventually to make customized stem cells for patients by starting the cloning process, making an embryo that is genetically identical to the patient, but interrupting the clone's development when it was a few days old and extracting its stem cells. Such research can be an ethical tinderbox, they realize. They also feel frustrated and hobbled by the current restrictions on research with human embryonic stem cells. If they want federal money, scientists must agree to use only cells derived from embryos dating from before Aug. 9, 2001. Many hope for a real policy change. [...]

Everyone wants to help patients, said Dr. John Kilner, an ethicist who directs the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity. The question, however, is, At what ethical cost?

"The core ethical problem is that this research requires destroying human beings at the embryonic stage," he said. "It is a human embryo, it is not dirt or soil or some other materials and it is not just some cells. There are so many examples in history where people say, 'As long as we can convince ourselves that these beings are not fully persons then what we want to do is O.K.' "

He sees the questions as "an end-means thing." Proponents of the research are holding up lofty goals and dismissing the means to achieve them. Dr. Kilner says there are many who share his ethical qualms.

"We're talking about federal support here,'' he said. "It is inappropriate to require the entire populace to support something that a significant proportion considers to be such an ethical violation."

HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTIONISM:

U.N. Calls for Sudan to Halt Attacks by Militias (WARREN HOGE, 7/30/04, NY Times)

The Security Council passed a resolution today that threatens the Sudanese government with punitive measures if it does not disarm and prosecute Arab militias who have forced black Africans off their land in the Darfur region through a campaign of killing, rape and pillage.

The vote on the United States-crafted resolution was 13 to 0 with China and Pakistan abstaining. [...]

John C. Danforth, the American ambassador to the United Nations and a former Bush administration special envoy to Sudan, told the council that it had long been his hope to see Sudan emerge as a "model of ethnic reconciliation."

"The last thing we wanted to do was lay the groundwork for sanctions," he said. "But the government of Sudan has left us no choice."

"It has done the unthinkable. It has fostered an armed attack on its own civilian population. It has created a humanitarian disaster. So the resolution we have just adopted is our necessary response if we are to save the people of Darfur."

The measure, cosponsored by Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Chile and Romania, also places an immediate arms embargo on all fighters in Darfur and calls on the government to end all restrictions on relief workers and equipment in the area.

Pakistan and China said they abstained out of concern that Sudan was not given enough time to live up to its commitments and that outside action would be complicating rather than helpful.

STILL MASSAGING THE BASE:

Dems fear Bush's gains with Jewish voters: A few votes within key group could swing the election (Tom Curry, July 30, 2004, MSNBC)

The source of that unease: the sense that Bush, due to his removal of Saddam Hussein, his resolve in fighting Islamic terrorists, and his robust support for Israel’s government led by Ariel Sharon, is gaining ground among those Jewish voters who place their highest priority on Israel’s survival.

Jonathan Sarna, professor of Jewish history at Brandeis University and an expert on Jewish voting patterns, said, “In the years since Sept. 11, paradoxically, America has become much more like Israel in the world. Israelis used to be the only ones worried about terror. Now Americans worry about terror. Whenever I go to Washington, it reminds me, when I get searched, of what it is like in Jerusalem. Even anti-Americanism sounds suspiciously like anti-Semitism in terms of the language being used. … There is a real identity between America and Israel, and, in some ways, traditional Jews, especially, like that identity.”

Kerry has argued that U.S. policy needs to be more attentive to and respectful of European leaders.

But, Sarna said, Jews are “a little concerned about this notion of ‘We’re going to make friends again with Europe.’ A lot of Jews wonder whether those are the kinds of friends we want, when you listen to what’s going on in much of Europe, and how they stigmatize Israel.”

FORGETTING OUR DISGRACE:

Poles remember an uprising as the world starts to forget (Jan Cienski, July 30 2004, Financial Times)

Poland is preparing tomark one of the most important days in its history: the Warsaw uprising against the Germans 60 years ago this Sunday.

The uprising was doomed by German counterattacks that killed 190,000 civilians, by the Soviet Union's refusal to send its nearby armies to join the fight and by America's and Britain's inability or reluctance to help. Warsaw fought alone.

Today, Poland is more or less alone in commemorating a rising all too often confused elsewhere with the 1943 uprising in Warsaw's Jewish ghetto.

Historian Norman Davies, author of Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw, says: "We like to see the success stories of the war and the idea that one of our allies lost its entire capital city through the failure of the coalition to work together is not welcome news."

THE FIX REALLY WAS IN!:

Report: Zarqawi captured on Syrian-Iraq border (Al-Jazeera, 7/30/2004)

Reports in Kuwait on Friday said a man assumed to be Al Qaeda leader in Iraq, Abu Musab Zarqawi has been captured near the Syrian border.

The report claimed that the man was captured during a joint operation by U.S. occupation forces and Iraqi police, Al Siyasah newspaper, quoting Iraqi sources, said Friday.

It also said that the suspect was caught in a white shirt and jeans, and he gave no resistance when he realized his hideout was besieged, according to Iraqi police.

The U.S. and Iraqi investigators are trying to identify the captive and has sent his DNA sample for testing, the unconfirmed report indicated.

MR. WHIPLASH TRAPPED IN THE BACKLASH:

The lame protests of the Democratic Convention (Dahlia Lithwick, July 29, 2004, Slate)

It's taken a day, but people are starting to admit that Edwards may not have knocked it out of the park yesterday, despite the fawning headlines from this morning. With some embarrassment, we begin to confess to one another that he just didn't do it for us. Last night, Edwards was like someone John Kerry had just rescued from Dawson's Creek. Gorgeous and eloquent and can segue from joy to pain in 60 seconds. But I simply didn't buy it last night, much as I wanted to.

MORE:
Kerry Speech Leaves Out Protest Role (CALVIN WOODWARD, 7/30/04, Associated Press)

John Kerry skipped past his role in the Vietnam protest movement that brought him to prominence when he talked of his younger days fighting for his country and ignored that conflict when praising the American tradition of going to war only "because we have to."

Kerry once famously called the Vietnam War "the biggest nothing in history," and says he is still proud of his anti-war activism when he came back. But in the text of his televised speech at the Democratic National Convention, he emphasized his war record and offered mere clues to his protesting past.

A video introduction shown at the convention before the broadcast networks began carrying his speech included a clip of the young Kerry, in military garb, testifying to Congress against the war in 1971.

And his speech made passing reference to his generation's marches for "civil rights, for voting rights, for the environment, for women, and for peace."

Kerry short-handed a few telling policy details in other parts of his speech.

He declared, for example, that "we value health care that's affordable and accessible for all Americans" and called that care "a right for all Americans."

But his plan, while aimed at expanding coverage and reducing premiums, does not ensure coverage for all. His campaign says the plan would extend coverage to an additional 27 million people, which would leave more than 10 million without health insurance.

He rhetorically asked, "What does it mean when 25 percent of the children in Harlem have asthma because of air pollution? America can do better. And help is on the way."

A study by Harlem Hospital Center last year found 25 percent of the children in a 24-block area of Harlem had the disease. But blaming all of that on air pollution as part of a case against the Bush administration is not supported by the study.

Apart from genetic factors, the study found that the asthmatic children were about 50 percent more likely to live with a smoker. Pollen, dust, animal dander, cockroaches and cold air were thought to be among the contributing causes, along with urban air pollution.

On equipping the military, he said, "You don't value families if you force them to take up a collection to buy body armor for a son or daughter in the service." He's had a long-running dustup with Republicans who criticize him for voting against an $87 billion package for Iraq and Afghanistan that included money for thousands of extra sets of body armor.

OUR GEOCENTRIC UNIVERSE:

Earth-like planets may be more rare than thought: In cosmic terms, our solar system could be special after all. (Philip Ball, 7/26/04, Nature)

We could be alone in the Universe after all. The discovery during the past decade of over a hundred planets around other stars has encouraged many scientists to think that habitable planets like ours might be common. But a recent study tells them to think again.

Martin Beer of the University of Leicester, UK, and co-workers argue that our Solar System may be highly unusual, compared with the planetary systems of other stars. In a preprint published on Arxiv1, they point out that the alien planets we have seen so far could have been formed by a completely different process from the one that formed ours. If that is so, says Beer, "there won't necessarily be lots of other Earths up there".

FORKWORTHY:

A Challenge to the GOP on Values, Security (Dan Balz, July 30, 2004, Washington Post)

There were notable omissions in Kerry's speech...that raise questions about the course he and his party have chosen for the campaign. Like other speakers during the four nights of the convention, Kerry only briefly touched on Iraq, the issue that has shaped and dominated this presidential campaign, divided the Democratic Party and at times bedeviled his own candidacy. At a time when many Americans are looking for an exit strategy and may wonder whether Kerry has a plan for Iraq that is different from Bush's, he offered only the assurance that he knows how to get it right.

Nor did Kerry or running mate John Edwards use their speeches this week to confront their opponents directly or persuasively argue the case for turning out the administration. His advisers believe the public already is looking to replace Bush and needs only to find a level of comfort with Kerry to change presidents. They may be correct, but that too is a gamble, for there will be no better opportunity to make that case before the fall debates.

Rarely has an acceptance speech at a political convention come with so much hype and drama -- as well as nervousness within a candidate's own party about his capacity to rise to the moment. Even Kerry's closest allies recognized that after 18 months on the campaign trail, he remains an incomplete portrait to many voters.

For all his attributes, Kerry has never been known as a charismatic politician and rarely has he demonstrated a great gift for political oratory. His acceptance speech is not likely to change that reputation. He tried to make himself more human and more appealing, with memories of his parents, stories of his childhood and references to his wife and children. Ultimately, however, he appeared willing to cede the battle over personality and likeability to Bush...

WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL CONVENTION AND A DEAD CAT:

Zogby: Zero Bounce for Kerry (NewsMax, 7/30/04)

A Zogby poll taken while the four-day Democratic convention was under way shows that the Kerry-Edwards ticket has failed to add even a single percentage point to its support.

STILL THE REAGAN RECOVERY:

US 2001 Slump May Not Have Been Recession at All (Tim Ahmann, 7/30/04, Reuters)

Not only was the U.S. recession in 2001 the shallowest on record, it may not have been one at all -- at least in the classic sense of two straight quarterly declines, new government data show.

In annual revisions to U.S. gross domestic product numbers released on Friday that could fuel a politically charged debate, the Commerce Department rewrote the history of the recent downturn by revising away a decline in the second quarter of 2001.

The new figures, which reflect more complete source data, show economic activity peaked in the second quarter of 2001, not the fourth quarter of 2000.

Measured from the new peak, the economy shrank just 0.4 percent, keeping the recession as measured by GDP the mildest on record. The 1969-1970 recessionary period, in which the economy contracted 0.6 percent, comes in a close second.

The National Bureau of Economic Research, the unofficial but accepted arbiter of U.S. recessions, has said the downturn began in March 2001 and ended in November of that year.

However, the White House has argued that the economy peaked earlier and has contended President Bush inherited the recession from his predecessor, President Bill Clinton.

Now, some might argue there was no recession at all.

"If I were describing this, I'd say it's essentially a flat period," said Brent Moulton, who is in charge of compiling the GDP data at the department's Bureau of Economic Analysis.

ADD ANOTHER POSITIVE QUARTER TO THE FAIR MODEL:

U.S. Economy Grew at a 3% Rate in Second Quarter After 4.5% (Bloomberg, 7/30/04)

The U.S. economy grew at a 3 percent annual rate from April through June, slower than the prior three months and less than forecast, as rising energy prices led to the weakest rate of consumer spending in three years.

The rise in gross domestic product, the value of all goods and services produced, followed a 4.5 percent pace in the first quarter that was faster than the previously reported 3.9 percent rate, the Commerce Department said in Washington. The GDP price deflator used to adjust the figures rose at a 3.2 percent annual rate, the most since the 2001 first quarter.

Consumer spending slowed as gasoline prices that held above $2 a gallon on average crimped sales at retailers such as Wal- Mart Stores Inc. Companies, more confident about the expansion, rebuilt inventories and bought more equipment.

"We're in the process of throttling back to cruising speed, but we're still flying along at a pretty good pace,'' said Joel Naroff, president of Naroff Economic Advisors in Holland, Pennsylvania, before the report. ``I think we'll have very strong business investment in the second half. That's the key factor that will power growth.'' [...]

Adjusted for inflation, GDP totaled $10.8 trillion at an annual rate. Unadjusted for the change in prices, it totaled $11.6 trillion, rising at a 6.3 percent annual rate after 7.4 percent in the first quarter.

CIRCULAR FILE:

The Rush to Reorganize (David Ignatius, July 30, 2004, Washington Post)

here's something dispiriting about the knee-jerk endorsement of the commission's proposals. The ink was barely dry on the 567-page report when Kerry gave it his blanket endorsement. Hoping to bind himself even more tightly to the commission's image of national unity, Kerry then proposed extending its life by 18 months.

Kerry's support for government by commission is hardly reassuring. The country needs a president who will take control of anti-terrorism policy, sift good proposals from bad and steer a steady course away from the maelstrom in which the United States finds itself.

Sadly, Kerry's me-too approach to the Sept. 11 commission is of a piece with his bland flag-waving on foreign policy in general. America is a nation at war. Yet we have no sense, even after Kerry has been nominated, of just what policies he would pursue in Iraq and the Middle East. There's a three-alarm blaze outside and he's telling us he supports the fire department.

The Bush administration's effort to wrap itself in the bipartisan flag of the commission is even more outrageous. Do the administration's spin controllers think the country has forgotten that the president refused to allow his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, to testify before the panel until forced to do so by public outcry? Do they think people won't actually read the report and see its devastating account of the administration's failure to mobilize for the al Qaeda threat?

BRING CABANA BOY HOME:

The World According to Kerry: His foreign-policy goals aren't radically different from Bush's, but his plans for achieving them differ considerably (Stan Crock, 7/29/04, Business Week)

When Senator John Kerry and Richard C. Holbrooke chat about foreign policy, Iraq and Afghanistan predictably top the agenda. But Holbrooke, an investment banker, ex-diplomat, and now a Kerry adviser, says their talk often turns to another topic that's seared into their consciousness: Vietnam. In the 1960s, Kerry was a young U.S. Navy officer there, and Holbrooke was a rising star in the Foreign Service posted to Saigon. The conflict was a crucible that forged both men's worldviews -- an experience that can't help but color Kerry's foreign policy if he wins in November.

THEIR BLAIR:

Barack Obama: A Republican Soul Trapped Inside a Democrat’s Body (Lucas Morel, July 2004, Ashbrook)

With unity as the mandate for the Democratic Convention, a little known State Senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, took the ball and ran so far with it that this listener thought he was witnessing Obama’s conversion to the Grand Old Party. Remove all the references to John Kerry, along with the not-so-veiled digs against Bush, and the remaining speech would have fired up a Republican audience.

Touting his home state as "the land of Lincoln," praising the Declaration of Independence as "the true genius of America," and repeatedly affirming that Americans "don’t expect government to solve all their problems," Obama sounded less like the Democratic Party and more like the current president. Even his comments on education, which emphasized parental responsibility and higher student expectations, were right out of Bush’s playbook. Add his concern that Americans couple their devotion to individualism with a belief that "I am my brother’s keeper," and Obama looked like a cheerleader for compassionate conservatism.

That Obama spent most of his speech singing the glories of America must have shocked the Democratic elite. Instead of mouthing the multicultural platitudes of Jesse Jackson’s Democratic Party, Obama pledged allegiance to "one American family." He went so far as to exclaim, "There’s not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America—there is the United States of America." Jackson stood up and applauded at all the right moments, but he was clearly sitting down and harrumphing on the inside.

WELCOME TO PAMPLONA, BETTER GET OUT OF THE WAY:

Wall Street's World-Class Worrywarts (Amey Stone, 7/30/04, Business Week)

Investors have been worrying all summer, and they aren't likely to stop anytime soon, even though U.S. economic fundamentals look near perfect. Growth is strong (but not too strong), inflation remains low, corporations are raking in the dough, and consumer confidence is up.

Indeed, consensus estimates for the preliminary second-quarter gross domestic product (GDP) figure, due out on July 30, are for solid 3.8% growth, although economists at research firm Action Economics are looking for 4%. Second-quarter earnings for companies in the S&P 500-stock index are averaging 24% higher than last year -- the fourth consecutive quarter of 20%-plus gains.

There's more: Corporate America is now benefiting from the largest annual increase in profits since 1984 and is enjoying "extraordinarily ample amounts of liquidity," noted Moody's Investors Service in a July 27 report, in which it estimated the broad equity market was 20% to 30% undervalued.

So why all the worry? In a nutshell: Investors think growth has already peaked. From here, many expect earnings increases to slow, consumer spending to weaken, and housing markets to teeter as interest rates rise along with inflation. As for second-quarter GDP, "the number would have to be pretty dramatically out of line for the market to react," says Zachary Karabell, senior economic analyst at Fred Alger Management, adding, "I don't believe the market is trading on macroeconomics right now."

THE FIGHTING 51ST:

Successful missile test heralds new strategic superiority for Israel (AFP, Jul 30, 2004)

Israel's successful test-firing of its Arrow II anti-missile missile in the United States goes well beyond technological prowess as it grants the Jewish state a new strategic and defensive asset in the volatile Mideast region, media and officials said Friday.

"Bull's eye", "Arrow strikes" trumpeted the headlines in the mass-circulation dailies Yediot Aharonot and Maariv, with both papers highlighting that during this seventh successful test a real Scud missile rather a substitute Black Sparrow had been used.

Some six minutes after the 11-meter-long (38 feet), seven-ton Scud was launched at a height of dozens of kilometers above the Pacific Ocean, it was intercepted and destroyed by the Arrow II, or Hetz in Hebrew, which traveled nine times faster than the speed of sound, the papers said.

The test was carried out jointly with the US Missile Defense Agency at the Point Magu Sea Range in California.

WHY NOT TAKE ALL OF ME?:

Buzzwords and cheap shots (Jeff Jacoby, July 30, 2004, Boston Globe)

His political career wasn't the only thing missing from Kerry's speech.

"This is the most important election of our lifetime," he said. "The stakes are high. We are a nation at war -- a global war on terror against an enemy unlike any we have ever known before." And with that, he launched right into a discussion of -- what? The nature of that unprecedented enemy? The threat from radical Islam? His strategy for victory? No: After raising the specter of an enemy "unlike any we have ever known before," Kerry promptly started talking about -- jobs. Coming less than three years after 9/11, this is the most important election of our lifetime. But why that is, Kerry has yet to say.

He spoke of his empathy for the young grunts "carrying an M-16 in a dangerous place" and about his respect for "all who serve in our armed forces today." Couldn't he have spared a few words to salute those troops for their two great achievements of recent years -- the toppling of vicious tyrannies in Afghanistan and Iraq?

A: The only thing he's ever done in his life, so far as we can tell, is serve honorably in Vietnam.

B: However, he thinks that war was evil and he a war criminal.

C: He thinks has to project a sufficiently powerful image that we'll hire him to fight this war.

D: However, he opposes it, almost equating it to Vietnam.

When you add all that up he's implicitly (sometimes explicitly) denigrating his own service to the cause of freedom and that of our current military, while asking to lead them (and us). No wonder he looked like Richard Nixon last night--this is one tortured dude.

A SEMI-SENSIBLE EDUCATION PROF?:

GATTACA CALLING?: High achievement comes from hard work, not from our genetic make-up, says a professor of education. (Richard Bailey, 7/30/04, sp!ked)

Imagine the scene. It is the future, and scientists have learned how to 'read' human DNA with such accuracy that they are able to predict our future health, as well as the careers that will be most suited to our abilities. The genetically elite are identified early and groomed for lives of leadership and brilliance. The biologically impoverished are relegated to the performance of the most menial tasks.

This was the premise of a Hollywood movie, Gattaca, released in 1997. The film's name comes from the initials of the four DNA bases of our genetic code: guanine, adenine, cytosine and thymine.

Despite the remarkable advances made by genetics, we are still a long way from realising the power of Gattaca's science. Indeed, there are strong reasons to suspect that we will never be in such a position. Nevertheless, Gattaca's fiction has a certain potency because its core assumption, that we can know an individual's 'true nature' and potential, is implicitly held by many people and exhibited in many settings, most frequently and clearly in education.

I work in Kent where we have our very own version of Gattaca - the 11 Plus, which consists of a series of examinations capable, apparently, of not just measuring a student's academic ability, but also predicting their likely career trajectory. IQ testing is another example, as are certain forms of education geared towards the 'gifted and talented'.

So prevalent is the Gattaca myth that it seems to underpin most educational theories and practices, from Plato's desire to use his academy to separate the elite from the rest, to educational theorist Howard Gardner's portrayal of multiple intelligences, and the fashionable nonsense of personalised learning styles. The UK government's recent five-year plan for education had an emphasis on 'personalised learning', and aimed to offer specialist school provision to all students, whether they be, in the words of one minister, 'sporty', 'artistic' or 'academic'. (Presumably, through some feat of genetic or social engineering, the government will arrange for all sporty children to live near a sports college and all arty children to live next to an arts college.)

These ideas are presented in attractive and palatable ways that suggest warm feelings of inclusion and the celebration of diversity. But ultimately, they divide the world up into different 'types' of people, whose abilities are 'given', and simply mature over the lifespan. Are you a visual thinker, or auditory? Do you have musical or existential intelligence? Are you 'sporty' or 'academic'?

Although the Gattaca myth has a certain appeal, it is also nonsense.

THE HARD EXPECTATIONS OF NO BIGOTRY:

Hispanic students lead gains in reading, math (ROSALIND ROSSI, July 30, 2004, Chicago Sun-Times)

Almost every grade showed statewide gains this year in reading and math -- the two subjects under increased pressure due to the new federal No Child Left Behind law, new data released Thursday showed.

To a large degree, Hispanics fueled the increases, posting generally bigger gains than blacks or whites on state tests taken in April.

"We are particularly encouraged not only at how well our students are doing, but to the extent that the achievement gap . . . is narrowing,'' state Education Supt. Robert Schiller said in releasing preliminary results of the Illinois Standards Achievement Tests (ISAT) and the Prairie State Achievement Exams (PSAE).

Preliminary results showed that across Illinois, more than a third of students still are not meeting state standards -- roughly the equivalent of hitting grade level -- in most subjects and most grades. Some of the worst scores were in eighth- and 11th-grade math, where only 54 percent and 53 percent of students, respectively, passed state muster.

But generally, the trend was sweeping upward from last year among all races. Some Hispanic gains were huge, such as a jump of 11.7 percentage points in fifth-grade math and of 10.7 points in fourth-grade science.

Statewide, among 18 tests taken, the only downturn was in 11th-grade math, which dipped fractionally, and in fourth- and seventh-grade social science.

"I can't remember a year when there's been so many gains,'' said Barbara Radner, director of DePaul University's Center for Urban Education and member of a state No Child Left Behind task force. "The only place where we seem to be slipping is social studies, and they are dumping [tests in] it."

"No Child Left Behind tells schools to do a better job or we'll shut you down,'' said Radner, who has been an NCLB critic. "They got the message.''

WE WERE GROWN-UPS ONCE:

Cruiser Sunk, 1,196 Casualties; Took Atom Bomb Cargo to Guam (NY Times, 8/14,1945)

The American heavy cruiser Indianapolis was sunk by enemy action in the Philippine Sea with 1,196 casualties, every man aboard, the Navy announced today.

The 9,950-ton ship left San Francisco on July 16 on a special high-speed run to deliver essential atomic bomb materials to Guam. The cargo was delivered. The cruiser was lost after having left Guam.

The sinking, which took one of the Navy's heaviest tolls of lives since Pearl Harbor, was disclosed a few minutes before President Truman announced Japan's surrender.

Casualties included five Navy dead, including one officer; 845 Navy missing, including sixty-three officers; 307 Navy wounded, including fifteen officers; thirty Marine missing, including two officers, and nine enlisted Marine wounded. Next of kin have been notified.

The skipper, Capt. Charles B. McVay 3d, 47, of Washington, was wounded.

KOOKY?:

THUNDERBIRDS / *1/2 (PG) (ROGER EBERT, 7/30/04, Chicago Sun-Times)

I run into Bill Paxton and Ben Kingsley occasionally, and have found them to be nice people. As actors, they are in the first rank. It's easy to talk to them, and so the next time I run into one of them, I think I'll just go ahead and ask what in the h-e-double-hockey-stick they were thinking of when they signed up for "Thunderbirds." My bet is that Paxton will grin sheepishly and Kingsley will twinkle knowingly, and they'll both say the movie looked like fun, and gently steer the conversation toward other titles. "A Simple Plan," say, or "House of Sand and Fog."

This is a movie made for an audience that does not exist, at least in the land of North American multiplexes: Fans of a British TV puppet show that ran from 1964 to 1966. "While its failure to secure a U.S. network sale caused the show to be canceled after 32 episodes," writes David Rooney in Variety, "the 'Supermarionation' series still endures in reruns and on DVD for funky sci-fi geeks and pop culture nostalgists." I quote Rooney because I had never heard of the series and, let's face it, neither have you. Still, I doubt that "funky" describes the sub-set of geeks and nostalgists who like it. The word "kooky" comes to mind, as in "kooky yo-yos."

ONLY NIXON CAN GO TO CHINA:

"We have it in our power to change the world again. But only if we're true to our ideals – and that starts by telling the truth to the American people. That is my first pledge to you tonight. As President, I will restore trust and credibility to the White House."

What makes this line of attack especially odd is that a majority of voters trust the President while the same can not be said of Mr. Kerry.

THE REACTIONARY PARTY:

"We believe in the family value expressed in one of the oldest Commandments: "Honor thy father and thy mother." As President, I will not privatize Social Security. I will not cut benefits. And together, we will make sure that senior citizens never have to cut their pills in half because they can't afford life-saving medicine.

And that is the choice in this election."

This is the scariest aspect of the Kerry candidacy, that doesn't even pay lip service to the Third Way. As his life seems stuck in the 60s, so too does his vision of welfare. At least Bill Clinton ran as a New Democrat even if he didn't generally govern as one--and his own rhetoric made it impossible for him to weasel out of Welfare Reform. Mr. Kerry is a far more retrograde, almost Johnsonesque, figure.

George W. Bush should take privatization--which is very popular with the American people--and ram it down the Senator's throat.

HE KNOWS DIFFERENT FAMILIES THAN WE DO?

"Our plan will cut the deficit in half in four years by ending tax giveaways that are nothing more than corporate welfare – and will make government live by the rule that every family has to follow: pay as you go."

Has anyone ever met an American under the age of say 60--who wasn't filthy stinkin' rich--who had no debt?

CARTERESQUE:

Glitch delays release of balloons after Kerry speech (AP, 7/30/04)

"Go balloons," said convention producer Don Mischer, instructing the balloon droppers. "Go balloons. Go balloons!" His voice was becoming increasingly frantic — and it was going out over CNN.

"I don't see anything happening," he said angrily. Unknown to him, CNN was running his name and title across the bottom of the screen.

Long minutes after the place was supposed to be a blizzard of balloons and confetti, Mischer was still shouting that it wasn't happening, at least it wasn't right. Viewers saw a lot of balloons, in fact, and Kerry, family members and delegates happily batted them around. But nothing like the 100,000 that had been supposed to cascade down.

At one point Mischer used a profanity to rebuke his balloon-dropping crew. CNN was still broadcasting his voice.

WHERE WAS JOHN?:

THE BAGEL CANDIDACY (DICK MORRIS, July 30, 2004, NY Post)

Last time I checked, Sen. John Kerry was 60 years old. But to listen to his speech last night at the Democratic National Convention, you would think he was still in his 20s.

He opened up his talk with a lengthy and evocative description of his childhood and what it was like growing up in divided Berlin. He told us of the "goose bumps" he remembers getting when the band struck up "Stars and Stripes Forever."

Then, after this long rendition of his childhood, he tells us at length what it was like to serve in Vietnam for the four months that he was there. So far, so good.

But then he spent only about one minute talking about what he has done since.

Beyond a brief allusion to his efforts for crime victims and to prosecute crimes against women as an assistant district attorney, his support for Clinton's plan for extra cops and a balanced budget and a reference to his work with John McCain on the POW and MIA issue in Vietnam, that's it.

What did this man do as an adult? What happened during his service as Michael Dukakis' lieutenant-governor in Massachusetts and in his 20 years in the United States Senate?

What bills did he introduce? What initiatives did he sponsor? Which investigations did he lead? What amendments bear his name? What great debates did he participate in?

What did he do for his constituents in Massachusetts? What businesses did he persuade to come to the Bay State? Which elderly did he help get their Social Security benefits? What injustices did he correct?

Kerry's biography ends at 24.

I ask you to judge me by my record: As a young prosecutor, I fought for victim's rights and made prosecuting violence against women a priority. When I came to the Senate, I broke with many in my own party to vote for a balanced budget, because I thought it was the right thing to do. I fought to put a 100,000 cops on the street.

And then I reached across the aisle to work with John McCain, to find the truth about our POW's and missing in action, and to finally make peace with Vietnam.

LIKE A PTSD PSA:

Senator John Kerry's Remarks to the Democratic National Convention (7/29/04)

[...] We have it in our power to change the world again. But only if we're true to our ideals – and that starts by telling the truth to the American people. That is my first pledge to you tonight. As President, I will restore trust and credibility to the White House.

I ask you to judge me by my record: As a young prosecutor, I fought for victim's rights and made prosecuting violence against women a priority. When I came to the Senate, I broke with many in my own party to vote for a balanced budget, because I thought it was the right thing to do. I fought to put a 100,000 cops on the street.

And then I reached across the aisle to work with John McCain, to find the truth about our POW's and missing in action, and to finally make peace with Vietnam.

I will be a commander in chief who will never mislead us into war. I will have a Vice President who will not conduct secret meetings with polluters to rewrite our environmental laws. I will have a Secretary of Defense who will listen to the best advice of our military leaders. And I will appoint an Attorney General who actually upholds the Constitution of the United States.

My fellow Americans, this is the most important election of our lifetime. The stakes are high. We are a nation at war – a global war on terror against an enemy unlike any we have ever known before. And here at home, 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.

We're told that outsourcing jobs is good for America. We're told that new jobs that pay $9,000 less than the jobs that have been lost is the best we can do. They say this is the best economy we've ever had. And they say that anyone who thinks otherwise is a pessimist. Well, here is our answer: There is nothing more pessimistic than saying America can't do better.

We can do better and we will. We're the optimists. For us, this is a country of the future. We're the can do people. And let's not forget what we did in the 1990s. We balanced the budget. We paid down the debt. We created 23 million new jobs. We lifted millions out of poverty and we lifted the standard of living for the middle class. We just need to believe in ourselves – and we can do it again.

So tonight, in the city where America's freedom began, only a few blocks from where the sons and daughters of liberty gave birth to our nation – here tonight, on behalf of a new birth of freedom – on behalf of the middle class who deserve a champion, and those struggling to join it who deserve a fair shot – for the brave men and women in uniform who risk their lives every day and the families who pray for their return – for all those who believe our best days are ahead of us – for all of you – with great faith in the American people, I accept your nomination for President of the United States.

I am proud that at my side will be a running mate whose life is the story of the American dream and who's worked every day to make that dream real for all Americans – Senator John Edwards of North Carolina. And his wonderful wife Elizabeth and their family. This son of a mill worker is ready to lead – and next January, Americans will be proud to have a fighter for the middle class to succeed Dick Cheney as Vice President of the United States.

And what can I say about Teresa? She has the strongest moral compass of anyone I know. She's down to earth, nurturing, courageous, wise and smart. She speaks her mind and she speaks the truth, and I love her for that, too. And that's why America will embrace her as the next First Lady of the United States.

For Teresa and me, no matter what the future holds or the past has given us, nothing will ever mean as much as our children. We love them not just for who they are and what they've become, but for being themselves, making us laugh, holding our feet to the fire, and never letting me get away with anything. Thank you, Andre, Alex, Chris, Vanessa, and John.

And in this journey, I am accompanied by an extraordinary band of brothers led by that American hero, a patriot named Max Cleland. Our band of brothers doesn't march together because of who we are as veterans, but because of what we learned as soldiers. We fought for this nation because we loved it and we came back with the deep belief that every day is extra. We may be a little older now, we may be a little grayer, but we still know how to fight for our country.

And standing with us in that fight are those who shared with me the long season of the primary campaign: Carol Moseley Braun, General Wesley Clark, Howard Dean, Dick Gephardt, Bob Graham, Dennis Kucinich, Joe Lieberman and Al Sharpton.

To all of you, I say thank you for teaching me and testing me – but mostly, we say thank you for standing up for our country and giving us the unity to move America forward.

My fellow Americans, the world tonight is very different from the world of four years ago. But I believe the American people are more than equal to the challenge.

Remember the hours after September 11th, when we came together as one to answer the attack against our homeland. We drew strength when our firefighters ran up the stairs and risked their lives, so that others might live. When rescuers rushed into smoke and fire at the Pentagon. When the men and women of Flight 93 sacrificed themselves to save our nation's Capitol. When flags were hanging from front porches all across America, and strangers became friends. It was the worst day we have ever seen, but it brought out the best in all of us.

I am proud that after September 11th all our people rallied to President Bush's call for unity to meet the danger. There were no Democrats. There were no Republicans. There were only Americans. How we wish it had stayed that way.

Now I know there are those who criticize me for seeing complexities – and I do – because some issues just aren't all that simple. Saying there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq doesn't make it so. Saying we can fight a war on the cheap doesn’t make it so. And proclaiming mission accomplished certainly doesn't make it so.

As President, I will ask hard questions and demand hard evidence. I will immediately reform the intelligence system – so policy is guided by facts, and facts are never distorted by politics. And as President, I will bring back this nation's time-honored tradition: the United States of America never goes to war because we want to, we only go to war because we have to.

I know what kids go through when they are carrying an M-16 in a dangerous place and they can't tell friend from foe. I know what they go through when they're out on patrol at night and they don't know what's coming around the next bend. I know what it's like to write letters home telling your family that everything's all right when you're not sure that's true.

As President, I will wage this war with the lessons I learned in war. Before you go to battle, you have to be able to look a parent in the eye and truthfully say: "I tried everything possible to avoid sending your son or daughter into harm's way. But we had no choice. We had to protect the American people, fundamental American values from a threat that was real and imminent." So lesson one, this is the only justification for going to war.

And on my first day in office, I will send a message to every man and woman in our armed forces: You will never be asked to fight a war without a plan to win the peace.

I know what we have to do in Iraq. We need a President who has the credibility to bring our allies to our side and share the burden, reduce the cost to American taxpayers, and reduce the risk to American soldiers. That's the right way to get the job done and bring our troops home.

Here is the reality: that won't happen until we have a president who restores America's respect and leadership -- so we don't have to go it alone in the world.

And we need to rebuild our alliances, so we can get the terrorists before they get us.

I defended this country as a young man and I will defend it as President. Let there be no mistake: I will never hesitate to use force when it is required. Any attack will be met with a swift and certain response. I will never give any nation or international institution a veto over our national security. And I will build a stronger American military.

We will add 40,000 active duty troops – not in Iraq, but to strengthen American forces that are now overstretched, overextended, and under pressure. We will double our special forces to conduct anti-terrorist operations. We will provide our troops with the newest weapons and technology to save their lives – and win the battle. And we will end the backdoor draft of National Guard and reservists.

To all who serve in our armed forces today, I say, help is on the way.

As President, I will fight a smarter, more effective war on terror. We will deploy every tool in our arsenal: our economic as well as our military might; our principles as well as our firepower.

In these dangerous days there is a right way and a wrong way to be strong. Strength is more than tough words. After decades of experience in national security, I know the reach of our power and I know the power of our ideals.

We need to make America once again a beacon in the world. We need to be looked up to and not just feared.

We need to lead a global effort against nuclear proliferation – to keep the most dangerous weapons in the world out of the most dangerous hands in the world.

We need a strong military and we need to lead strong alliances. And then, with confidence and determination, we will be able to tell the terrorists: You will lose and we will win. The future doesn't belong to fear; it belongs to freedom.

And the front lines of this battle are not just far away – they're right here on our shores, at our airports, and potentially in any town or city. Today, our national security begins with homeland security. The 9-11 Commission has given us a path to follow, endorsed by Democrats, Republicans, and the 9-11 families. As President, I will not evade or equivocate; I will immediately implement the recommendations of that commission. We shouldn't be letting ninety-five percent of container ships come into our ports without ever being physically inspected. We shouldn't be leaving our nuclear and chemical plants without enough protection. And we shouldn't be opening firehouses in Baghdad and closing them down in the United States of America.

And tonight, we have an important message for those who question the patriotism of Americans who offer a better direction for our country. Before wrapping themselves in the flag and shutting their eyes and ears to the truth, they should remember what America is really all about. They should remember the great idea of freedom for which so many have given their lives. Our purpose now is to reclaim democracy itself. We are here to affirm that when Americans stand up and speak their minds and say America can do better, that is not a challenge to patriotism; it is the heart and soul of patriotism.

You see that flag up there. We call her Old Glory. The stars and stripes forever. I fought under that flag, as did so many of you here and all across our country. That flag flew from the gun turret right behind my head. It was shot through and through and tattered, but it never ceased to wave in the wind. It draped the caskets of men I served with and friends I grew up with. For us, that flag is the most powerful symbol of who we are and what we believe in. Our strength. Our diversity. Our love of country. All that makes America both great and good.

That flag doesn't belong to any president. It doesn't belong to any ideology and it doesn't belong to any political party. It belongs to all the American people.

My fellow citizens, elections are about choices. And choices are about values. In the end, it's not just policies and programs that matter; the president who sits at that desk must be guided by principle.

For four years, we've heard a lot of talk about values. But values spoken without actions taken are just slogans. Values are not just words. They're what we live by. They're about the causes we champion and the people we fight for. And it is time for those who talk about family values to start valuing families.

You don't value families by kicking kids out of after school programs and taking cops off our streets, so that Enron can get another tax break.

We believe in the family value of caring for our children and protecting the neighborhoods where they walk and play.

And that is the choice in this election.

You don't value families by denying real prescription drug coverage to seniors, so big drug companies can get another windfall.

We believe in the family value expressed in one of the oldest Commandments: "Honor thy father and thy mother." As President, I will not privatize Social Security. I will not cut benefits. And together, we will make sure that senior citizens never have to cut their pills in half because they can't afford life-saving medicine.

And that is the choice in this election.

You don't value families if you force them to take up a collection to buy body armor for a son or daughter in the service, if you deny veterans health care, or if you tell middle class families to wait for a tax cut, so that the wealthiest among us can get even more.

We believe in the value of doing what's right for everyone in the American family.

And that is the choice in this election.

We believe that what matters most is not narrow appeals masquerading as values, but the shared values that show the true face of America. Not narrow appeals that divide us, but shared values that unite us. Family and faith. Hard work and responsibility. Opportunity for all – so that every child, every parent, every worker has an equal shot at living up to their God-given potential.

What does it mean in America today when Dave McCune, a steel worker I met in Canton, Ohio, saw his job sent overseas and the equipment in his factory literally unbolted, crated up, and shipped thousands of miles away along with that job? What does it mean when workers I've met had to train their foreign replacements?

America can do better. So tonight we say: help is on the way.

What does it mean when Mary Ann Knowles, a woman with breast cancer I met in New Hampshire, had to keep working day after day right through her chemotherapy, no matter how sick she felt, because she was terrified of losing her family's health insurance.

America can do better. And help is on the way.

What does it mean when Deborah Kromins from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania works and saves all her life only to find out that her pension has disappeared into thin air – and the executive who looted it has bailed out on a golden parachute?

America can do better. And help is on the way.

What does it mean when twenty five percent of the children in Harlem have asthma because of air pollution?

America can do better. And help is on the way.

What does it mean when people are huddled in blankets in the cold, sleeping in Lafayette Park on the doorstep of the White House itself – and the number of families living in poverty has risen by three million in the last four years?

America can do better. And help is on the way.

And so we come here tonight to ask: Where is the conscience of our country?

I'll tell you where it is: it's in rural and small town America; it's in urban neighborhoods and suburban main streets; it's alive in the people I've met in every part of this land. It's bursting in the hearts of Americans who are determined to give our country back its values and its truth.

We value jobs that pay you more not less than you earned before. We value jobs where, when you put in a week's work, you can actually pay your bills, provide for your children, and lift up the quality of your life. We value an America where the middle class is not being squeezed, but doing better.

So here is our economic plan to build a stronger America:

First, new incentives to revitalize manufacturing.

Second, investment in technology and innovation that will create the good-paying jobs of the future.

Third, close the tax loopholes that reward companies for shipping our jobs overseas. Instead, we will reward companies that create and keep good paying jobs where they belong – in the good old U.S.A.

We value an America that exports products, not jobs – and we believe American workers should never have to subsidize the loss of their own job.

Next, we will trade and compete in the world. But our plan calls for a fair playing field – because if you give the American worker a fair playing field, there's nobody in the world the American worker can't compete against.

And we're going to return to fiscal responsibility because it is the foundation of our economic strength. Our plan will cut the deficit in half in four years by ending tax giveaways that are nothing more than corporate welfare – and will make government live by the rule that every family has to follow: pay as you go.

And let me tell you what we won't do: we won't raise taxes on the middle class. You've heard a lot of false charges about this in recent months. So let me say straight out what I will do as President: I will cut middle class taxes. I will reduce the tax burden on small business. And I will roll back the tax cuts for the wealthiest individuals who make over $200,000 a year, so we can invest in job creation, health care and education.

Our education plan for a stronger America sets high standards and demands accountability from parents, teachers, and schools. It provides for smaller class sizes and treats teachers like the professionals they are. And it gives a tax credit to families for each and every year of college.

When I was a prosecutor, I met young kids who were in trouble, abandoned by adults. And as President, I am determined that we stop being a nation content to spend $50,000 a year to keep a young person in prison for the rest of their life – when we could invest $10,000 to give them Head Start, Early Start, Smart Start, the best possible start in life.

And we value health care that's affordable and accessible for all Americans.

Since 2000, four million people have lost their health insurance. Millions more are struggling to afford it.

You know what's happening. Your premiums, your co-payments, your deductibles have all gone through the roof.

Our health care plan for a stronger America cracks down on the waste, greed, and abuse in our health care system and will save families up to $1,000 a year on their premiums. You'll get to pick your own doctor – and patients and doctors, not insurance company bureaucrats, will make medical decisions. Under our plan, Medicare will negotiate lower drug prices for seniors. And all Americans will be able to buy less expensive prescription drugs from countries like Canada.

The story of people struggling for health care is the story of so many Americans. But you know what, it's not the story of senators and members of Congress. Because we give ourselves great health care and you get the bill. Well, I'm here to say, your family's health care is just as important as any politician's in Washington, D.C.

And when I'm President, America will stop being the only advanced nation in the world which fails to understand that health care is not a privilege for the wealthy, the connected, and the elected – it is a right for all Americans.

We value an America that controls its own destiny because it's finally and forever independent of Mideast oil. What does it mean for our economy and our national security when we only have three percent of the world's oil reserves, yet we rely on foreign countries for fifty-three percent of what we consume?

I want an America that relies on its own ingenuity and innovation – not the Saudi royal family.

And our energy plan for a stronger America will invest in new technologies and alternative fuels and the cars of the future -- so that no young American in uniform will ever be held hostage to our dependence on oil from the Middle East.

I've told you about our plans for the economy, for education, for health care, for energy independence. I want you to know more about them. So now I'm going to say something that Franklin Roosevelt could never have said in his acceptance speech: go to johnkerry.com.

I want to address these next words directly to President George W. Bush: In the weeks ahead, let's be optimists, not just opponents. Let's build unity in the American family, not angry division. Let's honor this nation's diversity; let's respect one another; and let's never misuse for political purposes the most precious document in American history, the Constitution of the United States.

My friends, the high road may be harder, but it leads to a better place. And that's why Republicans and Democrats must make this election a contest of big ideas, not small-minded attacks. This is our time to reject the kind of politics calculated to divide race from race, group from group, region from region. Maybe some just see us divided into red states and blue states, but I see us as one America – red, white, and blue. And when I am President, the government I lead will enlist people of talent, Republicans as well as Democrats, to find the common ground – so that no one who has something to contribute will be left on the sidelines.

And let me say it plainly: in that cause, and in this campaign, we welcome people of faith. America is not us and them. I think of what Ron Reagan said of his father a few weeks ago, and I want to say this to you tonight: I don't wear my own faith on my sleeve. But faith has given me values and hope to live by, from Vietnam to this day, from Sunday to Sunday. I don't want to claim that God is on our side. As Abraham Lincoln told us, I want to pray humbly that we are on God's side. And whatever our faith, one belief should bind us all: The measure of our character is our willingness to give of ourselves for others and for our country.

These aren't Democratic values. These aren't Republican values. They're American values. We believe in them. They're who we are. And if we honor them, if we believe in ourselves, we can build an America that's stronger at home and respected in the world.

So much promise stretches before us. Americans have always reached for the impossible, looked to the next horizon, and asked: What if?

Two young bicycle mechanics from Dayton asked what if this airplane could take off at Kitty Hawk? It did that and changed the world forever. A young president asked what if we could go to the moon in ten years? And now we're exploring the solar system and the stars themselves. A young generation of entrepreneurs asked, what if we could take all the information in a library and put it on a little chip the size of a fingernail? We did and that too changed the world forever.

And now it's our time to ask: What if?

What if we find a breakthrough to cure Parkinson's, diabetes, Alzheimer's and AIDs? What if we have a president who believes in science, so we can unleash the wonders of discovery like stem cell research to treat illness and save millions of lives?

What if we do what adults should do – and make sure all our children are safe in the afternoons after school? And what if we have a leadership that's as good as the American dream – so that bigotry and hatred never again steal the hope and future of any American?

I learned a lot about these values on that gunboat patrolling the Mekong Delta with young Americans who came from places as different as Iowa and Oregon, Arkansas, Florida and California. No one cared where we went to school. No one cared about our race or our backgrounds. We were literally all in the same boat. We looked out, one for the other – and we still do.

That is the kind of America I will lead as President – an America where we are all in the same boat.

Never has there been a more urgent moment for Americans to step up and define ourselves. I will work my heart out. But, my fellow citizens, the outcome is in your hands more than mine.

It is time to reach for the next dream. It is time to look to the next horizon. For America, the hope is there. The sun is rising. Our best days are still to come.

Second, at this point in his career it's pointless to look for the Senator to relax and connect with people, but the rush in which he delivered the whole speech, the relentless breathlessness, and the sweat, all made him seem kind of frantic. C-SPAN did something clever, showing George W. Bush's speech in 2000 right after the Senator finished--the contrast of the confident, folksy, measured delivery of the President made for a stark contrast with Mr. Kerry's gerbil on crack routine.

Worst of all though, Senator Kerry's speech was incoherent as rhetoric. This may be the unavoidable result of the conflict between his career and his candidacy--and it is said that he wrote much of it himself, so his internal conflicts would be on display--but its various parts just don't fit together at all. In the opening section he gives us the whole song and dance about his patriotic war service and love of country, but never mentions that he made his national reputation by opposing his country and the patriotic war. [Indeed, other than a very brief reference to working with John McCain on POW issues and a few mentions of his brief career as a prosecutor, the John Kerry he presented the nation apparently went straight from Vietnam to Iowa in 2003.] Then while trying to project his strength and commitment to a powerful America he never mentions that he supported the wars that liberated Afghanistan and Iraq, instead making it sound as if he'd withdraw the troops from the latter. He doesn't mention the war he opposed, because he needs to play up having fought in it. Nor does he mention having supported the war we're in, because now he needs to play up opposing it. That may work for folks who know nothing about him, but for anyone else it seems like rats gnawed holes in the speech because he's leaving out so many salient facts.

Then there's the bit about: "as President, I will bring back this nation's time-honored tradition: the United States of America never goes to war because we want to, we only go to war because we have to." Tradition? What war did we ever have to fight, with the possible exception of the War of 1812?

But the point at which this "I'm a warrior/I'm a pacifist" thing gets truly weird is in the following passage:

I learned a lot about these values on that gunboat patrolling the Mekong Delta with young Americans who came from places as different as Iowa and Oregon, Arkansas, Florida and California. No one cared where we went to school. No one cared about our race or our backgrounds. We were literally all in the same boat. We looked out, one for the other – and we still do.

That is the kind of America I will lead as President – an America where we are all in the same boat.

Finally, as a kind of icing on the badly battered cake, since he hasn't been following any overarching themes, which might give structure to the speech, nor presenting a set of ideas and a plan that he would govern by, when he does periodically drop a specific in it's something that's driven wholly by the politics of the moment, some picayune point that only makes sense to insiders:

* I will appoint an Attorney General who actually upholds the Constitution of the United States.

* The 9-11 Commission has given us a path to follow, endorsed by Democrats, Republicans, and the 9-11 families. As President, I will not evade or equivocate; I will immediately implement the recommendations of that commission.

* I want an America that relies on its own ingenuity and innovation – not the Saudi royal family.

* What if we find a breakthrough to cure Parkinson's, diabetes, Alzheimer's and AIDs? What if we have a president who believes in science, so we can unleash the wonders of discovery like stem cell research to treat illness and save millions of lives?

There's a dig at Enron in there somewhere too and for folks at the Convention these are the kinds of things they want to hear, but anyone watching at home had to be bewildered: What happened to the Constitution? What did which Commission propose? The Sau'dis; where did they come from? Would stem-cells be in there if Ron Reagan hadn't spoken at the Convention? This is a descent from mumbo-jumbo into trivia.

By all accounts, Mr. Kerry has two tasks he has to succeed in if he's to have a chance at winning this fall: he has to convince a dubious public that they want to see someone with his rather cold and aloof personality on their tv screen at supper every night for the next four years; and he has to explain to a country that rightly fears NorthEastern liberals that his program is different than those of his predecessors on the Democratic Left. A frenzied speech devoid of specifics and obsessed with life in the Mekong Delta 36 years ago can't have helped in either task.

Mr. Kerry seems to assume that this is an election like 1980 and 1992, where the American people are so fed up with the sitting president that any credible alternative will do. The folks in the Boston Garden undoubtedly feel that way, but polls show that President Bush still has about a 50% approval rating. Jimmy Carter, by contrast, hit 21% at one point in 1980. This is not an electorate that has given up on Mr. Bush by any stretch of the imagination. But they might be willing to at least listen to someone who could offer them a bit less tumult than we've had since election day 2000. All Mr. Kerry offered tonight was platitudes delivered by a character out of The Deer Hunter or Coming Home. That's not going to get it done.

MORE:
Missed Opportunity (Washington Post, July 30, 2004)

AL GORE AND George W. Bush accepted their parties' 2000 nominations for the presidency with an optimism fueled by seeming prosperity at home and apparent security in a post-Cold War world. In accepting the Democratic nomination last night, John F. Kerry spoke to a far more anxious America, one that has weathered a recession and, more important, entered what the nominee called "a global war on terror against an enemy unlike we've ever known before." Mr. Kerry therefore sought above all to make the case that he could be trusted to lead a nation at war, and rightly so; he and Mr. Bush must be judged first and foremost on those grounds. But on that basis, though Mr. Kerry spoke confidently and eloquently, his speech was a disappointment.

Mr. Kerry talked movingly of how his combat experience would temper his decision making: "I know what kids go through when they are carrying an M-16 in a dangerous place and they can't tell friend from foe." The responsibility of sending troops into danger should weigh on a commander in chief. But so must the responsibility of protecting the nation against a shadowy foe not easily deterred by traditional means. Mr. Kerry last night elided the charged question of whether, as president, he would have gone to war in Iraq. He offered not a word to celebrate the freeing of Afghans from the Taliban, or Iraqis from Saddam Hussein, and not a word about helping either nation toward democracy.

In Iraq, Mr. Kerry said, "We need a president who has the credibility to bring our allies to our side and share the burden. . . . That's the right way to get the job done and bring our troops home." But what is "the job"? He didn't say. Mr. Kerry could have spoken the difficult truth that U.S. troops will be needed in Iraq for a long time. He could have reaffirmed his commitment to completing the task of helping build democracy. Instead, he chose words that seemed designed to give the impression that he could engineer a quick and painless exit.

In a new campaign speech that presages an August advertising blitz, President Bush asserts that America has "turned the corner" and depicts himself as an incumbent who delivers.

"When it comes to choosing a president, results matter," Bush declares in an excerpt from a speech his campaign disclosed today. The sentence echoes a 2000 campaign slogan that termed Bush a "reformer with results." It is also an implied dig at Democratic nominee John F. Kerry's 19-year record in the Senate, which Republicans call undistinguished.

In another excerpt meant to show Bush's optimism, the president says: "We have turned the corner, and we are not turning back."

Ending a week of self-imposed silence, President Bush on Friday will kick off a monthlong campaign blitz highlighting his plans for a second term.

The burst of activity leading into the Republican convention Aug. 29-Sept. 2 signals Bush's determination to counter any boost that his opponent, John Kerry, gets from this week's Democratic convention. Bush, who followed tradition by keeping a low profile during the Democratic gathering in Boston, will be much more active in coming weeks.

White House and campaign aides said he also would be more explicit about his plans for a second term. One item Bush will highlight is his proposal to overhaul Social Security by giving younger workers the option of investing a portion of their payroll taxes in the stock market.

FOR REASONS he might like to explain, John Kerry last night raced through an acceptance speech that was way too long for a time slot he knew about for weeks.

Desperate to stay within the broadcast networks' paltry 60 minutes, Kerry stepped on his best thoughts and lines and blurred important proposals and distinctions, committing the sin of interfering with his own ability to communicate with an electorate eager to learn much more about President Bush's opponent.

At a Democratic convention planned to showcase a candidate and his basic approach to two huge situations -- a bogged-down military adventure in Iraq and a fragile economy -- Kerry obscured his presentation in a blizzard of hard-to-follow verbiage dictated by the clock.

Perhaps the public will let him off the hook, but the fact remains that Kerry essentially blew an opportunity he may not get again until the debates with Bush this fall. He and his advisers can and will argue that the cold facts of economic and foreign policy life will dominate political opinion in the weeks ahead; nevertheless, a golden opportunity slipped away.

DON'T DISTRACT ME WITH THE DEAD:

The real reasons Bush went to war (John Chapman, July 28, 2004, The Guardian)

There were only two credible reasons for invading Iraq: control over oil and preservation of the dollar as the world's reserve currency. Yet the government has kept silent on these factors, instead treating us to the intriguing distractions of the Hutton and Butler reports.

THE YEAR THE SENATOR WON THE PENNANT:

The Right Stuff: DEMOCRATS SOUND LIKE REPUBLICANS CIRCA 2000. (Daniel W. Drezner, 07.29.04, New Republic)

After John Kerry sewed up the Democratic presidential nomination, there was much fretting about whether he would need to tack left in order to appease the Deaniacs and Naderites. The Fahrenheit 9/11 phenomenon fueled this concern. In the run-up to this week's convention, a spate of new analyses came out regarding the growing power of left-wing special interests, and whether they even wanted Kerry to win in November. But after three days of the convention, one Kerry campaign tactic comes through loud and clear: The Democrats will be attacking Bush from the right as well as the left. Indeed, some of the rhetoric deployed sounds awfully familiar to that used by a presidential candidate four years ago--George W. Bush.

A key plank of Bush's 2000 campaign was "restoring honor and dignity" to the White House. The Democrats seem bound and determined to top that. On Tuesday, Barack Obama sounded like he was channeling Bill Cosby at various points in his speech: "Go into any inner city neighborhood, and folks will tell you that government alone can't teach kids to learn--they know that parents have to parent, that children can't achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white." In last night's speech, John Edwards praised the values of "faith, family, responsibility, and equality of opportunity." As Andrew Sullivan has pointed out this week, these are conservative tropes.

It's on foreign and defense related issues, however, where the echoes of the Bush 2000 campaign come through loud and clear. Four years ago, Bush articulated a realist foreign policy platform, based on a strong and well-funded military. Kerry has gone out of his way in interviews and profiles to articulate his realist bona fides--contrary to my expectations from this past spring.

BOSTON MASSACRE:

Dems' New Slogan: No Teacher Left Behind (Ann Coulter, July 28, 2004)

The traditional greeting at the Democratic National Convention is, "Where do you teach?" On rare occasions, the greeting is modified to, "Where does your husband teach?" or "Where does your gay lover teach?" (Democrats could save a lot of money by holding the Democratic National Convention and the National Education Association Convention at the same time.)

The Democrats keep loudly proclaiming that Republicans represent only extremely white rich people, while the Democrats represent all Americans. (Bar bet: Among the four major candidates for president and vice president this year, who has the smallest net worth? Answer: George Bush.)

If the Democrats are a fair cross-section of America, then I guess we can stop worrying about class size. As a friend of mine points out, if the Democratic delegates represent America, then the teacher-student ratio in this country is, at worst, one teacher for every three students. And since the teachers unions don't include private or parochial school teachers, we're looking at a teacher-student ratio of about one teacher for every one student.

Democrats are representative of the nation only if the nation we're talking about is Brazil. For Democrats, there is only the maid and millionaires. There are no Americans in the middle. To the extent Democrats are forced to recognize working-class white men, they call them "fascists."

To thunderous applause here in the American Taliban, billionaire Teresa Heinz Kerry said she looks forward to a day when "women who have earned the right to be opinionated will be called smart and informed -- just as men are." It's no wonder Democrats weren't interested in liberating Afghanistan and Iraq from woman-hating Islamicist fanatics: They think real oppression of women consists of people calling Teresa "opinionated" right here in the USA.

How did Teresa "earn" the right to be opinionated again? By marrying inherited wealth? She also boasted that the Heinz family charity, John Kerry, "earned his medals the old-fashioned way." A couple of sponges on another man's wealth might want to steer clear of using the word "earn" so much.

WHAT DO YOU EXPECT FROM MIKE TV?:

Kerry's Spielbergian Nominating Film: "A Remarkable Promise"; Here's What's In It (Joe Hagan, 7/29/04, NY Observer)

On Wednesday, the right-wing Webmeister Matt Drudge revealed excerpts from a book entitled Unfit for Command : Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry, which claimed that Mr. Kerry "reenacted" battle scenes in Vietnam with a Super 8 camera he bought at the PX in Cam Ranh Bay.

But while Mr. Moll had access to the two-hours of the Senator’s personal Vietnam footage, shot by both Mr. Kerry and members of his crew and now preserved on video, Mr. Moll shot most of the film himself, doing his own sit-down interviews and following Mr. Kerry with a camera crew during the July 4th weekend.

Mr. Moll said he was unaware that "reenacted" film footage existed. None of the footage he saw, he said, included "reenacted" battle scenes, nor had he suspected that he was watching any while poring through it. "Absolutely not," he said. "I saw the footage. I don’t get it. I hadn’t heard of that until an hour ago."

Mr. Moll said he used the footage while telling the story of Mr. Kerry saving the life of fellow Vietnam veteran Jim Rassmann. "When Jim Rassman is talking about how John Kerry saved his life," he said, "I’m using some of that footage. It shows the swift boat and various shots of the swift boat, and some firing like you see in the water. Bullets in the water."

"It’s just illustrative," he added, saying the bullets in the water were not from the actual event. There is also footage of Mr. Kerry, in slow motion, walking through a village in full gear, helmet on his head, rifle in his hand, shot by, one assumes, a fellow crewmember.

"I would have used archival footage," he said, "but it was a pleasant surprise that he had taken his own footage while in Vietnam."

ONE FREE TRADE DEAL AFTER ANOTHER:

WTO Accord Outlook Improves as U.S., EU, Brazil Agree (Bloomberg, 7/29/04)

The U.S., European Union, Australia, Brazil and India agreed for the first time on cuts in farm aid by industrial nations, raising the chances they will rescue a round of global trade talks they aim to complete next year.

The World Trade Organization's 147 members, meeting in Geneva, have given themselves until midnight tomorrow to settle on a plan for a trade accord slashing tariffs and export subsidies. The U.S., EU, Brazil, Australia and India represent a cross- section of rich, developing and poor farming nations.

"If there was no meeting of minds among the five, it would be next to impossible to see how you could have a meeting of minds among the broader conference,'' said John Weekes, a senior policy adviser at law firm Sidley Austin Brown & Wood and former Canadian ambassador to the WTO. "There's some room for optimism, but time is so short.''

The World Bank says a trade accord could add $500 billion to the world economy, help pull 140 million people out of poverty and add $350 billion to developing countries' annual incomes by 2015 by allowing them to increase production and exports. Executives from companies including Microsoft Corp. and Nestle SA urged leaders to back the talks at a June meeting in Marrakech.

STEPPING ON YOUR OWN:

Clueless Democrats Trot Out Hollywood: The party doesn't get it: Most voters hate what those people stand for. (Thomas Frank, July 29, 2004, LA Times)

The Democrats are today a party that has trouble rallying its historical working-class constituency, losing more and more of its base every four years to some novel culture-war issue invented by the wily Republicans: blasphemous art, Ten Commandments monuments in courthouses, the dire threat of gay marriage. Behind their success stands a stereotype, a vision of liberals as an elite, a collection of snobs alternately permissive and moralistic, an upper class that believes it is more sophisticated and tasteful than average people.

It is a pernicious doctrine, and yet there is a grain of truth to it. A grain of truth that get- togethers like this one — where minor stars swap righteousness with lobbyists, politicians and local venture capitalists — magnify into life-sized lessons in liberal elitism.

Now, it is an article of faith among American intellectuals that Hollywood movies are populist products; that they are uncomplicated translations of the public's desires into attractive images; that stars are stars because we love them; and that countries like France that resist Hollywood movies do so because they are snobs, dedicated to some daft mission civilatrice in which they will bring culture — in the form of arty, disjointed black-and-white films — to the masses. Masses, that is, who yearn in their hearts for nothing but more Hollywood fare.

If this were true, the problems of the Democratic Party would be over. After all, as this party makes clear, when Hollywood stars decide to get out there and do their patriotic duty and stump for the candidate of their choice, the candidates they support are usually Democrats.

But somehow it never seems to help. Somehow this glitzy world of risque dresses, pseudo-transgressive stylings and velvet ropes (i.e., the things that make up "creativity") has precisely the opposite effect on a huge swath of the American public. They hate it, and they hate everything that Hollywood has come to stand for. After all, Hollywood stars are as close as America comes to an aristocracy, and being instructed on how to be kinder and better people by pseudo-rebellious aristocrats can't help but rub people the wrong way.

CHIRP:

Francis Crick: 1916 - 2004: DNA code-breaker dies at 88. (Helen Pilcher, 7/29/04, Nature)

"We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid (DNA). This structure has novel features which are of considerable biological interest."

So began Francis Crick and James Watson in their ground-breaking Nature paper, published 51 years ago. The paper describes the structure of DNA. The discovery was to change the face of modern-day science and medicine.

Sadly, Francis Crick died yesterday after a long battle with colon cancer. He passed away at Thornton Hospital in La Jolla, California.

NEVER AGAIN?:

'We Want to Make a Light Baby': Arab Militiamen in Sudan Said to Use Rape as Weapon of Ethnic Cleansing (Emily Wax, June 30, 2004, Washington Post)

At first light on Sunday, three young women walked into a scrubby field just outside their refugee camp in West Darfur. They had gone out to collect straw for their family's donkeys. They recalled thinking that the Arab militiamen who were attacking African tribes at night would still be asleep. But six men grabbed them, yelling Arabic slurs such as "zurga" and "abid," meaning "black" and "slave." Then the men raped them, beat them and left them on the ground, they said.

"They grabbed my donkey and my straw and said, 'Black girl, you are too dark. You are like a dog. We want to make a light baby,' " said Sawela Suliman, 22, showing slashes from where a whip had struck her thighs as her father held up a police and health report with details of the attack. "They said, 'You get out of this area and leave the child when it's made.' "

Suliman's father, a tall, proud man dressed in a flowing white robe, cried as she described the rape. It was not an isolated incident, according to human rights officials and aid workers in this region of western Sudan, where 1.2 million Africans have been driven from their lands by government-backed Arab militias, tribal fighters known as Janjaweed.

Interviews with two dozen women at camps, schools and health centers in two provincial capitals in Darfur yielded consistent reports that the Janjaweed were carrying out waves of attacks targeting African women. The victims and others said the rapes seemed to be a systematic campaign to humiliate the women, their husbands and fathers, and to weaken tribal ethnic lines. In Sudan, as in many Arab cultures, a child's ethnicity is attached to the ethnicity of the father.

"The pattern is so clear because they are doing it in such a massive way and always saying the same thing," said an international aid worker who is involved in health care. She and other international aid officials spoke on condition of anonymity, saying they feared reprisals or delays of permits that might hamper their operations.

She showed a list of victims from Rokero, a town outside of Jebel Marra in central Darfur where 400 women said they were raped by the Janjaweed. "It's systematic," the aid worker said. "Everyone knows how the father carries the lineage in the culture. They want more Arab babies to take the land. The scary thing is that I don't think we realize the extent of how widespread this is yet."

Another international aid worker, a high-ranking official, said: "These rapes are built on tribal tensions and orchestrated to create a dynamic where the African tribal groups are destroyed. It's hard to believe that they tell them they want to make Arab babies, but it's true. It's systematic, and these cases are what made me believe that it is part of ethnic cleansing and that they are doing it in a massive way."

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell flew to the capital, Khartoum, on Tuesday to pressure the government to take steps to ease the humanitarian crisis in Darfur. U.S. officials said Powell may threaten to seek action by the United Nations if the Sudanese government blocks aid and continues supporting the Janjaweed. U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan is due to arrive on Khartoum this week.

The crisis in Darfur is a result of long-simmering ethnic tensions between nomadic cattle and camel herders, who view themselves as Arabs, and the more sedentary farmers, who see their ancestry as African. In February 2003, activists from three of Darfur's African tribes started a rebellion against the government, which is dominated by an Arab elite.

Riding on horseback and camel, the Janjaweed, many of them teenagers or young adults, burned villages, stole and destroyed grain supplies and animals and raped women, according to refugees and U.N. and human rights investigators. The government used helicopter gunships and aging Russian planes to bomb the area, the U.N. and human rights representatives said. The U.S. government has said it is investigating the killings of an estimated 30,000 people in Darfur and the displacement of the more than 1 million people from their tribal lands to determine whether the violence should be classified as genocide.

The New York-based organization Human Rights Watch said in a June 22 report that it investigated "the use of rape by both Janjaweed and Sudanese soldiers against women from the three African ethnic groups targeted in the 'ethnic cleansing' campaign in Darfur." It added, "The rapes are often accompanied by dehumanizing epithets, stressing the ethnic nature of the joint government-Janjaweed campaign. The rapists use the terms 'slaves' and 'black slaves' to refer to the women, who are mostly from the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa ethnic groups."

MORE:
African Union ready to send peacekeepers to Darfur (Sydney Morning Herald, July 30, 2004)

The prospect of foreign troops being sent to Darfur has moved closer after the African Union announced it was planning to send peacekeepers to Sudan.

But the Khartoum regime rejected outside military presence and vowed it would fight if it was attacked.

The African Union, a regional grouping of the continent's 53 countries, has broken with the tradition of solidarity between African governments by criticising human rights abuses in Darfur, where up to 1 million people have been displaced and about 50,000 killed.

Its observer team has already documented numerous atrocities, including the burning alive of villagers by Arab gunmen from the Janjaweed militia.

But the African Union's Peace and Security Council went further on Wednesday by asking the organisation's chairman to prepare a "comprehensive plan" that would "enhance the effectiveness" of its mission in Darfur.

"This includes the possibility of turning the mission into a full-fledged peacekeeping mission, with the requisite mandate and size," an official statement added.

The statement also brings the deployment of Western troops closer. African armies are poorly equipped and would almost certainly need foreign assistance.

BE NOT AFRAID:

Big Bang!: Digital convergence is finally happening -- and that means new opportunities for upstarts and challenges for tech icons (Stephen Baker and Heather GreenWith Bruce Einhorn in Hong Kong, Moon Ihlwan in Seoul, Andy Reinhardt in Paris, Jay Greene in Seattle, and Cliff Edwards in San Mateo, Calif, 6/21/04, Business Week)

What's this, A digital role-playing game? There's Dell Inc. (DELL ) selling flat-screen TVs. Microsoft Corp. (MSFT ) execs are unveiling a system to compete with the iPod that plays movies as well as music. And Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO ) is hawking a Wi-Fi boombox you can carry out by the pool. Nearly everyone, it seems, is venturing far from their specialties. And it's not just tech companies. TV manufacturers in Japan and cell-phone makers in Korea are jerry-rigging their products with microprocessors and software, racing to turn them into a new generation of digit-gobbling, network-ready contraptions.

For nearly two decades, industry sages have heralded the coming age of converging digital technology. But it remained an empty slogan. Now, thanks to faster chips, broader bandwidth, and a common Internet standard, technologies are quickly merging. The market for personal digital assistants, so hot in the late '90s, is vanishing as customers get the same functions in a cell phone -- often with a camera to boot. The latest televisions from Royal Philips Electronics (PHG ) and Sony Corp. (SNE ) have enough computing firepower to grab streaming video off the Net. "Convergence is finally really happening," says Gottfried Dutiné, an executive vice-president at Philips. "Digitalization is creating products that can't be categorized as tech or consumer electronics. The walls are coming down."

That sets up a collision of three massive industries. In one corner stands the $1.1 trillion computer and software biz, with its American leaders. In another is the $225 billion consumer-electronics sector, with its strong Asian roots and a host of aggressive new Chinese players. The third camp is the $2.2 trillion communications industry, a behemoth that extends from wireless powerhouses in Asia and Europe to the networking stars of Silicon Valley. All three groups will have a hand in building the digital wonders that are headed our way. But none of these industries, much less a single company, can put all the pieces together. They all need help. For this they venture into adjoining territories, where they forge new partnerships and take on new rivals.

The result is a Big Bang of convergence, and it's likely to produce the biggest explosion of innovation since the dawn of the Internet.

HIS LAST DAY AS A SENATOR:

C-SPAN Highlights

Tonight
* Democratic National Convention (8pm) - LIVE
* Sen. Kerry Accepts Nomination
* Speakers Include: Madeleine Albright, Fmr. Sec. of State, Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-CT)
* Alexandra & Vanessa Kerry, Daughters of John Kerry

When he accepts the Democratic presidential nomination tonight, John Kerry needs to give the nation a clearer idea of how his choices would have differed from President Bush's - particularly when it comes to the war in Iraq. The nation deserves to be told whether Mr. Kerry would have voted to authorize the invasion if he had known that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction.

On the plus side, the Kerry team has stolen a page from the Bush playbook and lowered expectations so far that if he doesn't make you want to Elvis your tv he'll seem Churchillian. But it's asking an awful lot of a man who's devoid of human warmth, nevermind charisma, to create a connection with the few viewers who'll be tuned in. He needs a dramatic gimmick and he needs it very badly if he's going to dominate the headlines through at least the weekend. He seems steadfastly opposed to offering any coherent policies and the old "I'll go to Iraq" won't work now that we've already turned over sovereignty. There's really only one option left: he'll announce his resignation from the Senate, casting it as self-confidence in his inevitable victory and dedicating himself full time to the campaign to save America from the forces of darkness.

It's a brilliant move, giving people their first impression of him as confident, bold, aggressive, and optimistic. It's surprising enough that the media will buzz about it for a few days and be forced to show that Convention clip, if no other, on the Sunday shows. (Oh, and it helps that the MA legislature is overriding Governor Mitt Romney's veto of their bill tomorrow which forbids him from naming a replacement.) It's a done deal.

MORE:
-The Heaviest Load Is for Kerry Alone (Ronald Brownstein, July 29, 2004, LA Times)

For three days, Democrats have built a frame for their nominee. Now, John F. Kerry has to fill in the picture.

From the Rev. David Alston, a Kerry crewmate in Vietnam, to vice presidential nominee John Edwards and a procession of retired generals Wednesday night, Democrats have systematically portrayed their candidate as principled, politically courageous, optimistic, forward-looking and, above all, tough and decisive enough to protect America in a turbulent time.

But many analysts agree that praise may quickly fade in voters' minds unless they see those qualities in Kerry when he stands before them, alone, in his acceptance speech tonight.

Late one night in September 2002, Senate Democrats were bitterly debating whether to authorize war with Iraq. Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) had been agonizing over the issue, but now was urging colleagues to support a compromise that would still give President Bush much of the power he sought. Liberals were steamed.

"Why would you trust the president?" asked Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.).

Despite such objections, Kerry two weeks later voted for the congressional resolution paving the way for the war. And no issue has dogged him more than that single vote, which has come under fire from the left and the right.

Many Democrats have criticized him for supporting the war. Republicans have accused him of changing his position for political gain.

A look at how Kerry made up his mind on the war vote indicates that he was conflicted before he cast his vote. The concerns that apparently plague him — the questions he asked at public hearings, the caveats and reservations he voiced on the Senate floor before casting his vote — reflected his ambivalence as well as his ambition. And that ambivalence sowed the seeds of Kerry's future shifts on the issue, including his vote a year later against a bill providing $87 billion in aid that went mainly to Iraq.

IT WAS not hard to find Democrats in Boston this week who were willing to admit, strictly in private of course, to doubts about John Kerry. The great fear hanging over an otherwise jubilant convention was that the Party of the People had managed to nominate the least people-friendly New Englander since Michael Dukakis. (Mr Dukakis, incidentally, was strangely not invited to take the microphone at the Fleet Centre, despite living nearby, and despite having once been Mr Kerry's boss.) [...]

Mr Edwards brings strikingly different qualities to the Democratic ticket from his boss—natural talent rather than storied experience and southern charm rather than Yankee gravitas—and, as an added bonus, he makes Mr Kerry lighten up in his company. Mr Edwards is also matched against a vice-president who is widely reviled as a symbol of everything distasteful about this administration, from blinkered ideology to crony capitalism.

But is the Wunderkind really so wonderful? Though a love-struck media may now want to strew more rose petals in his path, he has two big vulnerabilities that the Republicans will be sure to exploit. The first has to do with things he has done; the second, more serious, has to do with the things he hasn't.

Mr Edwards has had two successful but controversial careers: first as trial lawyer and then as an economic populist. Republican attempts to paint him as an ambulance-chaser may be a little crude: Mr Edwards's clients included plenty of children who were horrifically harmed by corporate negligence. But they are right to say the country's tort litigation system is a monster. The litigation industry consumes some $230 billion a year—or $3,000 for every family of four—in higher prices and insurance premiums. The industry also adds to the soaring costs of health care because of “defensive” tests and procedures. (Mr Edwards made some of his fortune suing obstetricians.)

Mr Edwards's presence on the ticket gives the Republicans a chance to make tort reform a highlight of their campaign, which business will appreciate. [...]

The bigger problem for Mr Edwards is the list of things he hasn't done. First, his public service adds up to only six years in the Senate; there, his record for attending roll calls (partly spoiled by campaigning) has been poor, and he has no serious legislation to his name.

The impression of a young man in a hurry is compounded by the fact he got the presidential bug so early. [...]

This lack of experience is particularly striking in foreign affairs, where his resumé is as short as Mr Cheney's is long.

JUST LIKE US:

U-M Detroit Arab American Study portrays a complex population (University of Michigan News Service, 7/29/04)

Fifteen percent of Arabs and Chaldeans in the Detroit area say they personally have had a "bad experience" after the Sept. 11 attacks because of their ethnicity, according to preliminary results from a University of Michigan study.

These experiences include verbal insults, workplace discrimination, targeting by law enforcement or airport security, vandalism, and, in rare cases, vehicular and physical assault. But a greater proportion (one-third) have received expressions of support from non-Arabs.

A majority of the representative sample of Detroit-area Arabs and Chaldeans surveyed by the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR) favor increased law enforcement and intelligence agency surveillance to ensure U.S. homeland security. But only 17 percent—compared with 49 percent of a representative sample of the general population in the area—support increased surveillance that targets Arab Americans.

The general population believes Arab Americans need to do more to fight terrorism, while nearly 75 percent of Arabs and Chaldeans say they are doing all they can. Just 36 percent, compared with 53 percent of the general population, believe that U.S. involvement in the Middle East is contributing to the region's stability.

In this landmark study of one of the oldest, largest and most visible Arab-American communities in the nation, researchers interviewed 1,016 Arabs and Chaldeans and 508 members of the general population in Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties. The Detroit Arab American Study, funded primarily by the Russell Sage Foundation, is a collaboration between the U-M's ISR, the University of Michigan-Dearborn and an advisory panel of community representatives from more than 20 secular, religious and social service organizations. [...]

One popular misconception the new findings correct involves the community's religious affiliations, according to researcher Ronald Stockton of the U-M-Dearborn Center for Arab American Studies. "The majority of this population is Christian—about 58 percent—and 42 percent are Muslim," Stockton said. [...]

• Arabs and Chaldeans express more confidence in the American legal system and in local police than the general Detroit-area population, but are much more concerned about whether people accused of terrorism will receive fair trials.

THE GIFT OF THE GIPPER:

ESR Reagan Contest

Enter Stage Right, in conjunction with NBC News and Special Ops Media, is giving away copies of NBC News Presents: Ronald Reagan to three lucky readers. All you have to do is answer three questions correctly about The Gipper to be entered into the draw. Only one entry per email address. The draw will take place on August 4, 2004. Good luck!

IT'S NOT THE DECLINE, BUT THE NOT CARING THAT MATTERS:

Love of Leisure, and Europe's Reasons (KATRIN BENNHOLD, 7/29/04, International Herald Tribune)

This image of a casual Western European work ethic tends to be viewed with just short of scorn by the world's other wealthy economies. As Europeans like the Ditlevs happily continue to trade income for a slice of leisure time that would be unthinkable in the United States or Asia, the gloomy headlines about Europe's economic future multiply.

Europe, the standard criticism goes, has not matched the American expansion for most of the last decade and has even fallen behind Japan in recent quarters. Its citizens are on average almost 30 percent poorer than their counterparts on the other side of the Atlantic, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group of 30 countries committed to democracy and the market economy. Potential growth in the next decade risks being stuck at 2 percent - one percentage point below that of the United States.

Is Europe, with the shortest workweeks and longest holidays in the world, doomed to lag behind, a victim of its penchant for more leisure and a too generous welfare state?

One response: If the answer is yes, then so what?

THANKS, OSAMA:

Saudis trying to create security force for Iraq (GEORGE GEDDA, July 29, 2004, Chicago Sun-Times)

With American support, Saudi Arabia is taking the lead in trying to form a Muslim security force to help Iraq overcome its 15-month-old insurgency, U.S. and Saudi officials said Wednesday.

Secretary of State Colin Powell discussed the issue with top Saudi officials after a stop in Egypt and had it on his agenda for today's talks with Iraq's prime minister, Ayad Allawi, in Jiddah.

''We're taking this initiative because we want to help the Iraqi people reclaim their sovereignty as quickly as possible, because there is a tremendous desire in the Arab and Muslim worlds to help Iraq and because instability in Iraq has a negative impact on Saudi Arabia,'' said Adel al-Jubeir, a top Saudi government foreign policy adviser.

Details on the force were scant, but a major Saudi concern in recent weeks has been the infiltration of militants from Iraq.

Powell's spokesman, Richard Boucher, said, ''We discussed some ideas tonight with the Saudis that they have been discussing with others about how to facilitate the deployment of troops from Muslim countries. The goal is to help Iraqis establish security. It's a goal that they support, that we support, and we'll keep talking to them about it.''

THERE'S ROOM ON THE RIGHT:

Emil to Mike: Join GOP (SCOTT FORNEK, July 29, 2004, Chicago Sun-Times)

The infighting and back-biting among Illinois Democrats boiled over Wednesday as state Senate President Emil Jones angrily suggested that House Speaker Michael J. Madigan -- the state party chairman -- was at the wrong national convention.

"Is the speaker planning on going to New York for the Republican convention?" Jones asked reporters.

It was Madigan's first full day at the Democratic National Convention, and just about everybody else's third, a late arrival that had already raised eyebrows and grumbles among some in the delegation.

But Jones was hurling questions about party loyalty -- not punctuality. The Far South Side legislative leader repeatedly suggested his Southwest Side counterpart was abandoning core Democratic values by siding with Republicans against Jones and Gov. Blagojevich in the budget battle that wrapped up last week in Springfield.

"I am for a Democratic governor," Jones said. "I'm for a Democratic president. That's where I stand -- the values and principles and things that we stand for."

Jones refused to say whether he believed Madigan should step down as state party chairman, but said to hold the post while building coalitions with Republicans over Democrats "just doesn't sound right.

WE'LL ALWAYS HAVE PARTS-PLUS:

Robots Help Japan Care For Its Elderly (Popular Mechanics, June 2004)

Borrowing an idea from the auto industry, Japanese nursing homes have begun experimenting with using robots to help care for the elderly. At one nursing home run by Matsushita Electric, a package of sensors is placed inside a teddy bear. From time to time, the bear asks its human companion a question. Then, judging by the response time, it decides whether a nursing assistant should be called. One of the most labor-intensive nursing home tasks is bathing frail residents. For this job, Sanyo Electric has introduced what is essentially a robot bathtub. Costing about $50,000, it closes around a patient who is seated in a wheelchair. The wash and rinse cycles operate automatically. A nurse's aide takes care of washing hair and toweling the resident off. Japan's need for elder-care robots is partially driven by a falloff in its national birthrate, which has left the country with too few young to care for the old.

REALITY GOES OFF-MESSAGE:

Medicare discount cards living up to their hype: A study found that Medicare drug discount cards deliver on promised savings, but confusion is keeping enrollment down. (MARK SHERMAN, 7/29/04, Associated Press)

Buttressing Bush administration assertions, the new Medicare drug discount cards offer savings off retail prescription prices, an independent analysis released Wednesday said. [...]

The administration has said Medicare beneficiaries with no drug insurance would save an average of 25 percent off their drug bills because the privately marketed cards would use bulk purchasing power to negotiate discounts.

The analysis said the best prices for 10 popular medicines, including cholesterol-reducing Lipitor, Fosamax for osteoporosis and the painkiller Celebrex, were nearly 25 percent less than the retail price when purchased at a pharmacy.

Using mail-order services, the drug cards were up to a third cheaper than the retail pharmacy prices.

EMPOWER THE PEOPLE:

Outside the (Lock) Box (PAUL RYAN, July 19, 2004, Wall Street Journal)

This week I am introducing new legislation that empowers workers with the freedom to choose a large personal account option for Social Security, with no benefit cuts or tax increases of any sort, now or in the future. Through these large personal accounts, the bill would increase future retirement benefits and cut future taxes for all workers. This bill has already been scored by the chief actuary of Social Security as achieving full and permanent solvency for the program.

The bill would allow workers to shift to their personal accounts 10 percentage points of the current 12.4% Social Security payroll tax on the first $10,000 of wages each year, and five percentage points on all taxable wages above that. With this progressive account structure, on average, workers would be shifting 6.4 percentage points of the 12.4% tax to their accounts.

Workers choose investments by picking funds managed by major private investment firms, from a list officially approved for this purpose and regulated for safety and soundness, similar to how the Thrift Savings Plan for federal employees operates.

Benefits payable from the tax-free accounts would substitute for a portion of Social Security benefits based on the degree to which workers exercised the account option over their careers. Workers exercising the personal accounts would receive traditional Social Security benefits based on the past taxes they have already paid into the program, in addition to the money from their personal accounts.

The plan maintains a strong safety net, as the accounts are backed by a federal guarantee that workers would receive at least as much as Social Security promises under current law. The plan is voluntary. Anyone who chooses to stay in traditional Social Security would receive the benefits promised under current law. Survivors and disability benefits would continue as under the current system.

The proposal achieves solvency without benefit cuts or tax increases because so much of Social Security's benefit obligations are ultimately shifted to the accounts. In fact, the official score of the chief actuary shows that ultimately, instead of increasing the payroll tax to over 20%, as would be needed to pay promised benefits under the current system, the tax would be reduced to 4.2%, enough to pay for all of the continuing disability and survivors benefits. This would be the largest tax cut in U.S. history.

Moreover, at standard, long-term, market-investment returns, the accounts would produce substantially more in benefits for working people across the board than Social Security now promises, let alone what it can pay.

LET THE SUN SHINE IN:

White House Debates Recommendation to Disclose Intelligence Budgets: DOUGLAS JEHL
In implementing the 9/11 panel's recommendation, the White House would have to contend with resistance from the intelligence agencies.

Of the 40 main recommendations spelled out in the Sept. 11 report, one of the few that the White House could carry out immediately would be to lift the veil of secrecy on how much the government spends on intelligence.

But as the White House debates whether to embrace that idea, it must contend with years of resistance by intelligence agencies that have long warned that making that budget public could aid American foes. Only twice before, in 1997 and 1998, has the top-line budget number been declassified.

Advocates of greater disclosure now nevertheless have begun to hope that the commission report might turn the tide.

"This will give cover to a lot of timid people, and there's nothing like cover in Washington,'' said Senator Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican and former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee who long ago broke ranks with other members of his party to call for making the overall budget public.

The current level of secrecy, the commission wrote, "practically defies public comprehension'' in that "even the most basic information about how much money is actually allocated to or within the intelligence community and most of its key components is actually shrouded from public view.''

To help "judge priorities and foster accountability'' among intelligence agencies, the commission argued that the White House should make public not only the overall budget number, but the top-line figure for each of the 15 intelligence agencies, including the National Security Agency and the National Reconnaissance Agency. The overall number is now widely understood to be about $40 billion, and even a more detailed agency-by-agency breakdown, the commission argued, could be achieved without providing details that could aid American foes.

THREE CHEERS FOR THE SIMPLE

The Public Square (Richard John Neuhaus, First Things, June 2004)

The Origins of the Final Solution, Alternatives to Hitler, and Day of No Return have in common the great merit of helping us understand how people could do the unspeakable things they did. And the latter two have the additional merit of illuminating how people could and did say No to great evil. One is reminded of the words of John Paul II in the encyclical Veritatis Splendor that, if one is prepared to die rather than to do wrong, one is never in the position of having to do wrong. Most people do not think of themselves as heroes and heroines, and yet, when the time of decision is forced upon them, many turn out to be exactly that. That is the truth so compellingly told in the 1988 classic, The Altruistic Personality, a study by Sam and Pearl Oliner of hundreds of people who rescued Jews during the Holocaust. The rescuers were typically not intellectuals or philo-Semites or people given to political activism. They were to all appearances very ordinary people, usually devoutly religious people, who knew that some things must not be done and who put their lives in the way of the doing of such things. Academics have a way of explaining history in terms of large and impersonal dynamics. But living history is the moral drama of people making decisions day by day. As for those who do great wrong, it is not true that to understand all is to forgive all. But to understand, at least in part, is to be strengthened in the knowledge of our own capacity for both good and evil—and of our radical dependence on the One who, despite His understanding all, forgives the penitent. The truly penitent know that complexification is the enemy of forgiveness.

One of the hallmarks of modern barbarism is the increasing tendency to see the moral and political issues that confront us as all terribly complex. This is not just a product of a formal belief in moral relativism. Many today evince a profound psychological need to wallow in complexities and subtleties that they know full well are beyond them and seem threatened, rather then reassured, by the notion that things are simpler than they may appear and are well within their grasp.

Please excuse the self-reference, but at a dinner party the other night, the hostess was gushing about Fahrenheit 911 and how she didn’t know what to do with “all that information”. She freely admitted much of it was undoubtedly wrong or distorted. It troubled her not at all that she didn’t know what was true and what wasn’t and she showed no interest in trying to find out. What was clearly attracting her like a magnet were the infinite complexities of the story and she was mightily offended that the President didn’t see them. Otherwise, she had no opinion and didn’t see the need for one.

It is likewise in much of our personal lives. When a couple separates, few will condemn or take sides anymore. They imagine a Russian novel of dark psychological plots and sub-plots over many years and tell themselves that “you never know what is going on in another marriage”, even though the break-up was clearly caused by one of the few objectively recognizable and drearily familiar misdeeds that have always killed marriages. No self-respecting woman has an abortion without assuring one and all that it was preceded by weeks of torturous angst and was “the most difficult decision of my life”.

In politics, this phenomenon, as much as statism or progressive thinking, is why anti-Semitism is growing, why Europe cannot change course, why the UN achieves nothing, why the family is in disarray and why so many social challenges seem beyond us. Too many of us are simply frozen in moral uncertainty and retreat into a destructive pseudo-sophistication that protects us from the need to take a stand.. The notion that life’s choices are all so complicated that they merit endless study, reflection and expertise leaves us impotent, tongue-tied and unable to recognize most blatant evils staring us in the face A society that cannot recognize right and wrong and move quickly to protect one and combat the other is a society in decline.

LIKE COMPARING APPLES AND APPLES:

THE MORALITY OF INTERVENTION: The people of Sudan are paying a high price for the Iraq
War, which blurred the line between humanitarian intervention and moral crusade. (Ian Williams, 7/29/04, AlterNet)

The civil war in Sudan has claimed more than 50,000 lives in Darfur, while a million more have been driven from their homes, caught in the crossfire of the bloody conflict between the Sudanese government and ethnic minority rebels.

The need for immediate action is clear. But because of the Iraq War, it may never be taken.

Under pressure from human rights groups, both Britain and the United States have joined Kofi Annan in proposing a UN resolution that calls for economic sanctions and travel restrictions. It is an exercise in futility – the kind that paved the way for widespread massacres in Rwanda and Srebrenica. What is urgently needed now is a credible threat of a military intervention, which was all that was required to preempt genocide in the past.

The sad truth is that the lack of action on Sudan is in no small part a result of George Bush and Tony Blair's not-so-excellent adventures in desert. A study published on Wednesday by the Foreign Policy Center, a British think-tank, unequivocally laid the blame for the unfolding genocide on the Iraq war. The report criticizes Britain and the United States for backing "quiet diplomacy, " a response it characterizes as "utterly inappropriate." Its author Greg Austin told The Independent, "The commitment of the U.S. and the U.K. in Iraq and the use of military force in Iraq pushed them away from considering any sort of military option."

The invasion of Iraq also diminished the prospects for an international consensus for action in Sudan, and too vigorous a push by the U.S. will achieve little except to stiffen resistance. Fears of blurring the line between humanitarian intervention and moral crusade seem all the more pressing because of the Bush/Blair war machine, which has done its best to sell the one as the other.

While Britain and Australia have both expressed readiness to commit troops, it is almost impossible for Muslim nations in the Security Council such as Algeria and Pakistan to agree to U.S. led action against an Arab League member like Sudan. The Arab world's tolerance for the atrocities committed by their rulers is indeed a cause for despair.

* European indifference

* Arab/Muslim complicity

* Opposition from the Realist gang

* The Anglosphere leading the lonely crusade

* A serious response bogging down at the UN

* Complications because of past Western inaction

* The ultimate realization that only America and its military can reorder the situation and save lives

WHAT FOREST?:

How the History of the American Revolution Has Changed (PAULINE MAIER, History News Network)

In the past few decades, historical research has shifted by and large from political to social and then cultural history. Some of the most dramatic additions to historical knowledge have come in the history of slavery, including the slave trade, in African American history; in women's history; and in the study of Native Americans. [...]

When I began teaching in the late 1960s, my course on colonial America--really British colonial America--focused in good part on the 'new social history,' particularly the demographic studies of communities first in New England, then the Chesapeake. In 1972, Alfred Crosby's Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 appeared, awakening widespread consciousness of the demographic catastrophe among Native Americans that followed their first encounters with Europeans, and of the possible connections between New World foods and population growth in other parts of the world. Already some fine studies were available on the origins of American slavery; others studied that institution from a cross-cultural perspective. To be sure, I discussed other topics such as religion and the structure of politics and political institutions in British North America.

Even so, when I later taught the American Revolution, the traditional successor course to Colonial America, the difference was like night and day. The old Progressive interpretation of the Revolution, which stressed social conflict and elite manipulation of the masses, lay in tatters. Scholars were taking the ideas of the Revolution seriously, tracing their origins and revealing their impact on the evolution of political institutions. To be sure, any course on the Revolution has to include a discussion of pre-revolutionary American society and of the Revolution's social impact. I cannot, for example, imagine teaching the Revolution without citing Jack Greene's Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture, and particularly his emphasis on the 'extraordinarily large number of families of independent middling status' in the British North American colonies. They were, he wrote, 'proportionately substantially more numerous than in any other contemporary Western society.'

Still, by and large the study of colonial America was social; of the Revolution, political and ideological.

Three-plus decades later, colonial American history remains strikingly different from the study of the American Revolution, but for different reasons. Historians of early America are now more than ever anxious to avoid earlier emphases on the British settlers of North America, the teleology implicit in studying only those colonies that would later become the United States, and what Harvard's Joyce Chaplin referred to in the March 2003 Journal of American History as 'that persistent myth, American exceptionalism.' The most prominent participants in the American Revolution were white men of European descent who founded the American Republic believing that accomplishment marked a break from the patterns of European history and so was by nature exceptionalist. It is no surprise then that, as Chaplin notes, many particularly noteworthy examples of recent post-colonial scholarship focus on the 'early national' rather than the revolutionary period. David Waldstreicher's study of public celebrations, Joanne Freeman's book on honor in the politics of the 1790s, and Jill Lepore's A Is for American are examples.

What is colonial history today? There is no one answer. Alan Taylor's American Colonies suggests one conception of the field. The book discusses the Spanish, French, Dutch, and Swedish North American colonies, along with those of Britain and the Russian colonization of Alaska. Taylor also devotes considerable space to Native American societies that do not qualify as colonies, but were deeply affected by the arrival of Europeans and--for the Plains Indians in particular--the Spanish 'repatriation' of the horse to its North American homeland. Taylor's book does not end, like traditional colonial history, in 1763 or 1776, but extends into the nineteenth century, when an 'imperial' United States took over the Hispanic West. Clearly the book does not avoid the sin of teleology: the only reason to study Alaska is that it would eventually become part of the United States. But then the book was written as part of the Penguin History of the United States.

The American Revolution does not have a prominent place in Taylor's book. Consider the opening sentences of its final paragraph:

. . . the dominant colonial power on the Pacific rim became the United States, the hypercommercial nation founded by the Americans who won their independence from the British by revolution and war in the years 1775-83. Far from ending with the American Revolution, colonialism persisted in North America, but from a new base on the Atlantic seaboard.

I spend half a term on events to which he gives half a sentence. To be fair, earlier in the book he devotes another page and a quarter to the Revolution, a fraction of what he devotes to the Plains Indians. There he notes that the Americans' 'empire of liberty' was for whites only and demanded the 'systematic dispossession of native peoples and, until the Civil War . . . the perpetuation of black slavery. . . .' The 'new American empire' also 'provided military assistance to subdue Indians and Hispanics across the continent to the Pacific.' In short, here the Revolution marks only a moment in which a onetime colony became a colonizer. That has little to do with the Revolution as the founding. It is simply a different story, one with little relevance for the one I teach, which focuses on the revolutionary origins of American government.

THE TIMES WANTS TO SAVE YOU FROM AVOIDING TAXES:

I.R.S. Says Americans' Income Shrank for 2 Consecutive Years (DAVID CAY JOHNSTON, 7/29/04, NY Times)

The overall income Americans reported to the government shrank for two consecutive years after the Internet stock market bubble burst in 2000, the first time that has effectively happened since the modern tax system was introduced during World War II, newly disclosed information from the Internal Revenue Service shows.

The total adjusted gross income on tax returns fell 5.1 percent, to just over $6 trillion in 2002, the most recent year for which data is available, from $6.35 trillion in 2000. Because of population growth, average incomes declined even more, by 5.7 percent.

Adjusted for inflation, the income of all Americans fell 9.2 percent from 2000 to 2002, according to the new I.R.S. data.

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. Earlier government economic statistics provided general evidence that incomes suffered in the first years of the decade, but the full impact of the blow and what groups it fell hardest on were not known until the I.R.S. made available on its Web site the detailed information from tax returns.

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.

In the past, overall personal income rose from one year to the next with relentless monotony, the growth rate changing in response to fluctuations in economic activity but almost never falling.

WHO KNEW THE EUROS WERE SO EASILY SHOCKED:

Arabs shock Europeans, refuse to condemn anti-Semitism (Shlomo Shamir, 7/28/04, Ha'aretz)

Arab states at the United Nations are trying to foil a proposal to raise a vote condemning anti-Semitism in the General Assembly this September.
At a closed meeting held recently in New York, UN ambassadors from Arab and EU countries met and the Arabs made clear that they do not accept the initiative for the UN General Assembly to condemn anti-Semitism.

The blunt language used by the Arabs describing their opposition, and their plans to use diplomatic means to prevent the resolution from reaching a vote, shocked the Europeans, said a UN source.

YOUR MORNING SMILE

The Public Square (Richard John Neuhaus, First Things, June, 2004)

The New York Times reports that John Kerry became “combative” with reporters when asked about critics who say he does not follow Catholic teaching on questions such as abortion and same-sex unions. “Who are they?” he demanded. “Name them. Are they the same legislators who vote for the death penalty, which is in contravention of Catholic teaching?” He went on to explain: “I’m not a church spokesman. I’m a legislator running for president. My oath is to uphold the Constitution of the United States in my public life. My oath privately between me and God was defined in the Catholic Church by Pius XXIII and Pope Paul VI in the Vatican II, which allows for freedom of conscience for Catholics with respect to these choices, and that is exactly where I am.” We had better tread lightly here. We’re dealing with the inner sanctum of the conscience. This is a man who apparently has taken a private oath under the tutelage of a pope of whom most of us have never heard. Rumor has it that members of the very secretive Society of Pius XXIII are taught to be so careful about not imposing their religion that, just to be safe, they do not impose it upon themselves. It has also been said that “Pius XXIII” is a pseudonym used by Father Robert Drinan, a Jesuit who has contrived a moral rationale widely employed by Catholic politicians inconvenienced by Catholic teaching. I have no idea whether such rumors are true, but I have a strong hunch that during the course of this campaign we may be learning a great deal about Catholicism that nobody knew before.

TEMPORARY TEAMWORK FOR DISCRETE PURPOSES:

Mr. Multilateral (Bryan Preston, 07/29/2004, Tech Central Station)

It is playing a key role in curbing and caging North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il. It played a key role in disarming Libya, discovering and rolling up the Pakistani A.Q. Khan nuclear smuggling network, and has become a framework for international military and police exercises organized by the United States. Its membership includes most of the world's largest economic powers, most of the world's largest military powers, and most of the most influential states on earth. The United States, Japan, the United Kingdom, Russia, the Netherlands, France, Australia and Germany are among its 15 member states, and it is one of the pillars of the Bush administration's strategy to both win the war on terrorism and halt the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. As an organization set up to perform a mission that the United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency have jointly failed, halting the spread of nuclear weapons, it has the potential of becoming an alternative to the UN itself in coming decades. Notably, all of its members to date are democracies.

But thanks to the media and Democrats who insist on portraying the Bush administration as "unilateral," you have probably never heard of it.

Called the Proliferation Security Initiative, this results-oriented alliance is now just over a year old. The work of the much maligned Under Secretary of State for Arms Proliferation and International Security John Bolton, PSI is already a great success in bringing nations that disagreed bitterly over the Iraq war together under one flag to deal with larger weapons proliferation issues, especially those relating to the Korean Peninsula.

THE NORTHERNMOST AFRICAN COLONY (via Mike Daley):

France 'forming ethnic ghettoes' (Caroline Wyatt, 7/06/04, BBC)

Many French city suburbs are becoming ethnic ghettoes, a report has warned.

The study by the French domestic intelligence services found many areas were populated by poor, young French of north African immigrant backgrounds.

The report, leaked to Le Monde newspaper, found at least half of the 630 suburbs it looked at had already become separate ethnic communities.

The report warned the ghettoes, cut off from mainstream French society, could encourage radical Islam to take root.

IT'S PAT:

Deep Throat suspect found dead in hotel (Dan Glaister, July 29, 2004, The Guardian)

One of the longest-running mysteries of American politics may soon be resolved after it was announced yesterday that the man many suspect of being Deep Throat in the Watergate scandal had died.

Fred LaRue, known as the "bagman" because he delivered payments to ensure the silence of participants in the Watergate break-in, was found dead in a hotel room in Biloxi, Mississippi. He was 75.

The two Washington Post reporters who broke the Watergate story, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, have maintained that they would only reveal the identity of Deep Throat once he was dead.

MORE:
Student study identifies Deep Throat (The Signpost, April 28, 2003)

Attempting to solve one of America's greatest political mysteries, student investigators at the University of Illinois have concluded that former White House lawyer Fred Fielding is Deep Throat, the secret source who broke the Watergate scandal wide open.

Some of the students and their teacher, William Gaines, named Fielding as their choice for Deep Throat at a news conference at the Watergate Hotel.

Fielding and Bob Woodward, who first reported the Watergate story with fellow Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein, did not respond to telephone inquiries. In the past, Gaines said, Fielding has denied he was Deep Throat, the nickname Woodward gave to the anonymous source who provided damaging details of the break-in by Republican operatives and the Nixon administration's efforts to cover it up.

In their project, which lasted four years, the students from the university's Urbana-Champaign campus and Gaines cited six specific instances of closely held inside information that Fielding knew and Deep Throat provided. These included the involvement of Nixon White House operative Howard Hunt in the burglary and Nixon aide John Ehrlichman's instructions to White House counsel John Dean to throw a briefcase containing incriminating information about political tricks into the Potomac River.

Chatterbox is looking at a January 1981 clipping from the Washington Post headlined, "Nixon Ex-Aide Named Counsel to Reagan." The ex-aide in question was Fred Fielding, whom William Gaines and his journalism class at the University of Illinois have identified as Deep Throat, Bob Woodward's famous Watergate source. Deep Throat's identity is known only to Woodward; his co-author, Carl Bernstein; their editor, Ben Bradlee; and Throat. (Serious Deep Throat scholars always call Deep Throat "Throat.") Bradlee once famously claimed that you could discover Deep Throat's identity by feeding all known information about him into a computer. Taking that as a challenge, Gaines more or less did so. The computer named Fielding.

In the past, Chatterbox has expressed skepticism toward Gaines' project. The students' initial speculation that Deep Throat was Pat Buchanan was patently ridiculous. The case for Buchanan on paper is better than you might think, but had they looked up from their printouts and observed Buchanan's near-pathological commitment to personal loyalty, they would have understood how poorly cast he was for the role. (Buchanan's own Deep Throat candidate is Lowell Weicker, a bizarre choice that mainly reflects Buchanan's unwillingness to accuse any former White House comrade of behavior that he considers beneath contempt.) Chatterbox also felt the students (in concert with former Nixon White House counsel and Deep Throat sleuth John Dean) had dismissed the "G-man" Theory—the idea, most forcefully argued in the Atlantic by Jim Mann, that Deep Throat had to work at the FBI—rather too hastily and with far too little evidence.

But during the past year, Chatterbox has been rethinking his commitment to the G-man Theory in light of two pieces of evidence. The first is Dean's and the Gaines group's observation that a November 1973 Woodward and Bernstein Post story was sourced anonymously to "White House sources." That's significant because in All the President's Men, Woodward and Bernstein say that Deep Throat was a source on this story. That would make Deep Throat a White House aide, wouldn't it? The second troubling piece of evidence, flagged by Brown political scientist Darrel M. West, was a Playboy interview that J. Anthony Lukas conducted with Woodward in 1989. In that interview, Woodward flatly denied that Deep Throat was someone in the "intelligence community." On first considering these two inconvenient facts, Chatterbox argued that they didn't put the G-man Theory out of business. Over time, though, Chatterbox has been more inclined to think that they do.

WE NOMINATED WHO?:

Kerry must inspire or lose faithful forever (Joshua Chaffin, July 29 2004, Financial Times)

Mr Kerry has had, at best, mixed success on the road. Joe Keenan, a 43-year-old appliance salesman, scanned the crowd at a John Kerry rally in Sioux City, Iowa, and then paused for a moment to measure the depth of their support.

"I don't know if they're pro-Kerry or anti-Bush," Mr Keenan finally concluded. "They're all waiting to see what Kerry does at the convention. They've got to know him better."

Polls show that nearly a third of American voters still do not believe they have a sense of Mr Kerry as a person, even if they may have heard repeatedly about his decorated service in Vietnam, or his legislative accomplishments.

Even some Democrats who were volunteering for the Kerry campaign on its barnstorming trip across the country this week quietly confided that they were drawn to other party figures such as Howard Dean.

At times, Mr Kerry overcame his reputation for lacklustre public speaking to conjure an affecting, even passionate performance. "I was in the anyone-but-Bush-camp, but the more I see him, the more I like him," said Marion Leary, an events producer, who attended a rally in Philadelphia on Tuesday. "I didn't get the wooden thing at all."

On other occasions, Mr Kerry appeared to bore people. His most disappointing stop may have been Saturday in Sioux City. The crowd, many of them senior citizens, was forced to wait under the prairie sun for hours - first for the late-running senator, then during a meandering speech from his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry. As he pointed at supporters in the crowd, flashing the same surprised-but- elated smile again and again, Mr Kerry appeared like a comic aping a disingenuous politician.

When he droned on about values, opportunity and other poll-tested political phrases, the older people in the crowd wilted.

Tellingly, despite Mr Kerry being one of the biggest figures to touch down in Sioux City since the explorers Lewis and Clark, the name on most people's lips there was that of his running mate, John Edwards.

"Where's John?" someone shouted from the crowd at one point, interrupting Mr Kerry.

Mr Keenan conceded that his wife was disappointed not to meet the vice-presidential candidate. "She was upset that Edwards wasn't here. He's the sex appeal."

Indeed, Mr Edwards' Clintonian magnetism appears to have drawn a sharp contrast with Mr Kerry throughout the country.

"I think Kerry's biggest problem is he hasn't defined himself, whereas the more you listen to Edwards, he has, and he does," said Andrew Meyer, 31, a stockbroker from Portsmouth, Virginia.

WELCOME BACK, DONNIE:

'Donnie' has come back in a big way (Michael Ordoña, July 25, 2004, LA Times)

Rewind to 2000. The low-budget time-travel drama "Donnie Darko" had an underwhelming initial release, garnering warm critical notices but grossing less than $600,000. "Darko" did help to launch the career of Jake Gyllenhaal, whose low-key performance as the troubled protagonist struck a chord with fans.

Years later, midnight showings and DVD sales earned the movie a cult following and now a new life, as Kelly used a power much like Donnie's to alter his film, adding 20 minutes of footage.

Will the changes spoil the film's mystery? Gyllenhaal doesn't think so. "Richard's intent was always to put enough ambiguities in it so people would be forced to answer the questions themselves."

COOKIN' AIN'T ROCKET SCIENCE, SWEETIE:

Nation has big appetite for food television (Corie Brown, 7/21/04, Los Angeles Times)

Rachael Ray is a food television phenomenon.

A perky, 35-year-old home cook with no professional credentials, she has such good chemistry with the camera that her "30 Minute Meals" is the Food Network's top-rated show. It's particularly appealing to Madison Avenue's favored demographic, impressionable younger adults, ages 18 to 49.

Ray personifies everything people love about food TV: She's charismatic, accessible and upbeat, and she never stops moving. She also represents what rankles members of the food world's intelligentsia: There's no attempt at culinary excellence.

"Food Network has made a decision to go after the lowest common denominator audience," says Darra Goldstein, editor of the scholarly quarterly Gastronomica and a professor at Williams College in Williamstown, Mass. "Even with this audience, there is so much more that could be done."

THE BLUE BATTLEGROUND:

Kerry Support Soft in New Jersey (FDU Public Mind, 7/28/04)

With just a small lead at this point, Kerry still has some work to do in New Jersey. According to the most recent Fairleigh Dickinson University poll, the Democratic challenger is ahead of George W. Bush in New Jersey by just 45%-43% with another 10% undecided.

"John Kerry has been relying on George W. Bush to give people a reason to vote for the Democratic ticket," said Bruce Larson, professor of political science at Fairleigh Dickinson University and survey analyst for PublicMind. "While Bush's troubles have surely rallied the Democratic base and some Democratic-leaning independents, Kerry will solidify his position in New Jersey only when he gives voters a reason to vote for him rather than just against George Bush."

Among Bush supporters, 80% say they are voting for the President rather than against his opponent. But among Kerry voters, only a third (32%) say they are voting for the Senator from Massachusetts while two-thirds say they are voting against George W. Bush. "New Jersey voters still don't know Kerry very well," added Larson. "The Democratic National Convention this week will give him the opportunity to tell voters here his story."

THIS PORRIDGE IS TOO HOT:

Recession Watch (John Maudlin, 07/27/2004, Gold-Eagle.com)

Recessions are not things to be feared, if you are ready for them. It is just a different type of swell with different types of waves and breaks. You can ride that wave with the right type of board. Of course, experience helps, or at the very least good instructor is needed.

Even in a serious recession, life will carry on. Employment will be over 90%. Most of us will go about our business, adjusting to the ebb and flows. They are not typically long affairs and a rebound will always follow.

Recessions, the Austrian economists tell us, are necessary. They allow us to hit the reset button, curbing the excesses of the previous boom. Weak companies are replaced by the strong, debt is reduced, and entrepreneurs and business people everywhere are forced to become creative. [...]

In 2000, it was not consumers, but businesses that began to cut back their investment spending, and there was simply too much capacity and we had a business spending recession. Quick intervention by the Fed made home mortgages lower, which helped prop up a housing market. Remember, unemployment barely went above 6%, and along with normal population growth and increased use of sub-prime mortgages kept the demand for housing hot.
Because Bush tax cuts (not one, but three and all quite significant) put more money in the hands of consumers, and because low mortgage rates allowed home owners to refinance their homes, not only lowering their mortgage payments but allowing them to take cash out and spend it, consumer spending grew more or less steadily. I cannot find another example of a recession in which those occurred.

Coupled with government deficits, which are also (temporarily) a stimulus, the last recession was the mildest in post WW2 history. As I have noted, the "doctors" put the country on steroids, and the patient recovered. But there were a few noticeable side effects. Personal debt, which is normally reduced during a recession, has soared to levels never seen, both on a relative and absolute basis. Government deficits are again soaring. As consumer spending did not retreat the trade deficit did not come into balance. Since housing did not slow down, housing prices have risen by 20-30% over trend in the last five years.
Now, when we enter the next recession, the medicine cabinet, while not entirely empty, has been severely depleted. There will be no more tax cuts. Indeed, if Kerry wins, there is a guaranteed tax increase as the Bush tax cuts will be phased out. Rates are already low. Maybe, though I currently doubt it, the Fed will be able to get short term rates back to 3.5%. That means only about 2% or so of realistically effective rate cuts. That is not much in the Fed's tool box to fight a recession. Yes, they could "move out the yield curve" and force long term rates lower, but at some point, too many steroids will cause even more problems down the road.

Can consumers load up on even more debt? Probably not enough to make as much of a difference as in the last few years. Indeed, real wages are starting to drop.

EDITOR'S NOTE:
This is, of course, terrible nonsense from a site that hawks gold (buying which is a good way to lose your shirt), but Brother Duquette has been putting up a terrible fuss so we humored him. Stay tuned for Harry and Jeff explaining how the peppered moth changed their lives.

NONSENSICAL EVEN BY THE STANDARDS OF A PARTY PLATFORM:

REPORT OF THE PLATFORM COMMITTEE: Strong at Home, Respected in the World: The Democratic Platform for America

As a first step, we must create a stable and secure environment in Iraq. To do this right, we must truly internationalize both politically and militarily: we cannot depend on a US-only presence. Other nations have a vital interest in the outcome, and we must bring them in to commit troops and resources.

THE HITS JUST KEEP ON COMIN':

C-SPAN Highlights

Tonight
* Democratic National Convention (8pm) - LIVE
* Sen. Edwards Accepts Nomination
* Speakers Include: Cate Edwards, Elizabeth Edwards
* Gov. Bill Richardson (D-NM), Gov. Jennifer Granholm (D-MI)

SHOULDN'T THAT BE "KERRY'S ILLOGICAL SHUFFLE"?:

Kerry's Illogical Stand on Abortion (Crispin Sartwell, July 28, 2004, LA Times)

Here's John Kerry's position on abortion. He's personally opposed to it, and as a matter of faith he believes that life begins at conception. But he's unwilling to impose that faith on women who may not share it. It should be a matter of individual conscience, he says.

This position, I submit, is a self-serving and obvious absurdity.

Murder, let us agree, is the intentional killing of a human being in the absence of excusing conditions such as self-defense by the killer or overwhelming suffering on the part of the killed. Clearly, by his own definition, Kerry believes abortion is murder.

If there should be a law against anything, most Americans would agree, it's murder. Radical anarchists might differ — they might say that murder, and any other act, should be a matter merely of individual conscience and not of law. But I think we can assume that that is not Kerry's position.

The other part of Kerry's argument is that because his position rests on faith — rather than on reason or science or unanimous agreement — he is unwilling to impose it on others, and he believes it would be a violation of the separation of church and state to do so.

But that doesn't stand the test of logic either; no human values, whether encoded into law or not, rest on science or reason or unanimous agreement. All human values rest on faith.

OH, NO, WE'VE LOST PAT BUCHANAN AND HIS FOLLOWER:

The Right Wing's Deep, Dark Secret: Some hope for a Bush loss, and here's why. (John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, July 28, 2004, LA Times)

One of the secrets of conservative America is how often it has welcomed Republican defeats. In 1976, many conservatives saw the trouncing of the moderate Gerald Ford as a way of clearing the path for the ideologically pure Ronald Reagan in 1980. In November 1992, George H.W. Bush's defeat provoked celebrations not just in Little Rock, where the Clintonites danced around to Fleetwood Mac, but also in some corners of conservative America.

"Oh yeah, man, it was fabulous," recalled Tom DeLay, the hard-line congressman from Sugar Land, Texas, who had feared another "four years of misery" fighting the urge to cross his party's too-liberal leader. At the Heritage Foundation, a group of right-wingers called the Third Generation conducted a bizarre rite involving a plastic head of the deposed president on a platter decorated with blood-red crepe paper.

There is no chance that Republicans would welcome the son's defeat in the same way they rejoiced at the father's. George W. is much more conservative than George H.W., and he has gone out of his way to throw red meat to each faction of the right: tax cuts for the anti-government conservatives, opposition to gay marriage and abortion for the social conservatives and the invasion of Iraq for the neoconservatives. Still, there are five good reasons why, in a few years, some on the right might look on a John Kerry victory as a blessing in disguise.

George Bush is a revolutionary figure, dedicated to remaking conservatism and the Republican Party. The far Right should oppose him. They're just toothless.

NOTHING WRONG WITH BUGGERY ON THE BRINY SO LONG AS YOU CHASE SKIRTS ON LAND (via b boys)::

Homosexual Activity Among Animals Stirs Debate (James Owen, 7/23/04, National Geographic News)

Zoologists are discovering that homosexual and bisexual activity is not unknown within the animal kingdom. [...]

Already, cases of animal homosexuality have been cited in successful court cases brought against states like Texas, where gay sex was, until recently, illegal.

Yet scientists say we should be wary of referring to animals when considering what's acceptable in human society. For instance, infanticide, as practiced by lions and many other animals, isn't something people, gay or straight, generally approve of in humans.

So how far can we go in using animals to help us understand human homosexuality? Robin Dunbar is a professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Liverpool, England. "The bottom line is that anything that happens in other primates, and particularly other apes, is likely to have strong evolutionary continuity with what happens in humans," he said.

Dunbar says the bonobo's use of homosexual activity for social bonding is a possible example, adding, "One of the main arguments for human homosexual behavior is that it helps bond male groups together, particularly where a group of individuals are dependent on each other, as they might be in hunting or warfare."

For instance, the Spartans, in ancient Greece, encouraged homosexuality among their elite troops. "They had the not unreasonable belief that individuals would stick by and make all efforts to rescue other individuals if they had a lover relationship," Dunbar added.

REPLACE CNN:

US-Funded Alhurra Television Wins Over Viewers In Iraq (SPX, Jul 20, 2004

A new survey of Iraq conducted by Oxford Research International shows that 61 percent of Iraqi adults had watched the new US-funded Arabic language TV channel Alhurra (Arabic for "The Free One") in the previous week. Since it launched on February 14, 2004, Alhurra has quickly established itself as an important resource for Iraqis to get their news - 19 percent of those surveyed cited Alhurra as one of their top three sources of information.

Of those people who watch Alhurra, 64 percent found the news to be 'very' or 'somewhat' reliable. The results are based on face-to-face interviews with adults (over the age of 15) in Iraq between May 19 and June 14, 2004, four months after Alhurra first aired.

Alhurra is the latest and most technologically advanced television organization to enter the crowded Middle East satellite television market. The satellite channel is a 24-hour news and information network broadcast entirely in Arabic. It can be seen in 22 countries throughout the region via Arabsat and Nilesat, the same satellite systems used by all major Arabic channels.

In April 2004, a second channel was added called Alhurra Iraq specifically for Iraqi audiences. The new channel was available by satellite during the time of the survey.

SELF-MARGINALIZED MINORITIES:

White evangelicals flocking to GOP (Ralph Z. Hallow, 7/26/04, THE WASHINGTON TIMES)

The party of John Kerry and John Edwards is improving its standing with minorities, but losing ground to President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney among white evangelicals, a new survey found.

Those findings are bad news for Democrats assembled in Boston for their national convention, because white evangelicals and born-again Christians far outnumber blacks and Hispanic combined.

"White evangelicals and born-again Christians are 26 percent of all registered voters — that's quite a big chunk — and the survey shows they are quite happy with Republicans," said Adam Clymer, political director of the University of Pennsylvania's National Annenberg Election Survey, which polled 3,715 registered voters nationwide July 1 to 21, with a margin of error of 1 percentage point.

"Whatever percentage the turnout of your voters, if you get another 1 percent of evangelicals and born-agains, that's a lot more votes," Mr. Clymer said. "It makes a lot more difference than getting an additional 1 percent of blacks or Hispanics."

FORTUNATELY, SHE'S MORE COURAGEOUS THAN THEIR GOVERNMENT:

Burnham to testify in Philippines, friends say (ROY WENZL, 7/27/04, The Wichita Eagle)

Gracia Burnham, the missionary from Rose Hill who survived abduction by terrorists in the Philippines jungle, has returned to the Philippines to testify against people involved with her kidnapping, friends said.

Burnham survived more than a year in the jungle, but saw her husband, Martin, killed during a June 2002 rescue by the Philippines army. Gracia Burnham was wounded in the leg.

The Abu Sayyaf terrorists who abducted her have been linked to al-Qaida.

THERE HAD TO BE LESS LAST NIGHT:

A 'no' vote with their remotes (Richard Huff, July 28, 2004, NY Daily News)

Bill Clinton may have been eloquent, but not a lot of people heard him.

The former President's speech before the Democratic National Convention on Monday night was watched in a paltry 14.1 million homes, according to Nielsen Media Research.

That's down from the 15.38 million homes average for the Democratic convention in 2000.

More startling is the number of people who tuned out when the coverage began Monday on the major broadcast networks.

For example, in the hour before the convention, CBS averaged 11.8 million viewers with a rerun of "CSI: Miami."

But for the hour of political coverage - starting at 10 p.m. - CBS averaged a measly 4.55million viewers. And CBS was the most-watched of the Big Three broadcasters during the convention.

WELL, THE FROGS FEEL SAFER:

Bush Using Drugs to Control Depression, Erratic Behavior (TERESA HAMPTON, Jul 28, 2004, Capitol Hill Blue)

President George W. Bush is taking powerful anti-depressant drugs to control his erratic behavior, depression and paranoia, Capitol Hill Blue has learned.

The prescription drugs, administered by Col. Richard J. Tubb, the White House physician, can impair the President’s mental faculties and decrease both his physical capabilities and his ability to respond to a crisis, administration aides admit privately.

“It’s a double-edged sword,” says one aide. “We can’t have him flying off the handle at the slightest provocation but we also need a President who is alert mentally.”

Tubb prescribed the anti-depressants after a clearly-upset Bush stormed off stage on July 8, refusing to answer reporters' questions about his relationship with indicted Enron executive Kenneth J. Lay. [...]

Although GOP loyalists dismissed the reports an anti-Bush propaganda, the reports were later confirmed by prominent George Washington University psychiatrist Dr. Justin Frank in his book Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President. Dr. Frank diagnosed the President as a “paranoid meglomaniac” and “untreated alcoholic” whose “lifelong streak of sadism, ranging from childhood pranks (using firecrackers to explode frogs) to insulting journalists, gloating over state executions and pumping his hand gleefully before the bombing of Baghdad” showcase Bush’s instabilities.

“I was really very unsettled by him and I started watching everything he did and reading what he wrote and watching him on videotape. I felt he was disturbed,” Dr. Frank said. “He fits the profile of a former drinker whose alcoholism has been arrested but not treated.”

Dr. Frank’s conclusions have been praised by other prominent psychiatrists, including Dr. James Grotstein, Professor at UCLA Medical Center, and Dr. Irvin Yalom, MD, Professor Emeritus at Stanford University Medical School.

The doctors also worry about the wisdom of giving powerful anti-depressant drugs to a person with a history of chemical dependency. Bush is an admitted alcoholic, although he never sought treatment in a formal program, and stories about his cocaine use as a younger man haunted his campaigns for Texas governor and his first campaign for President.

“President Bush is an untreated alcoholic with paranoid and megalomaniac tendencies,” Dr. Frank adds.

SOFT? HOW ABOUT FLACCID:

Iran increases defiance over nukes: EU trio to resume talks with Iran as report says Tehran is trying to buy nuclear "booster". (Matthew Clark, 7/28/04, csmonitor.com)

Iran is stepping up its defiant tone heading into talks with Britain, France, and Germany that diplomats say will begin in Paris Thursday.

IF EVERYTHING KEEPS COSTING LESS HOW DO THEY MEASURE IT COSTING MORE?:

Dollar stores gaining popularity across the U.S.: SHOPPERS COME FROM DIFFERENT INCOME LEVELS (Michele Chandler, 7/28/04, San Jose Mercury News)

Rock-bottom price tags are drawing more people than ever to dollar stores, from the caviar crowd to the working class.

Surveys show more than one-third of U.S. households shop monthly at a dollar store, where items sell for $1 or less. Some regular customers are in the top income level of $100,000 or more.

With their selection of goods priced at about $1, dollar variety stores appeal heavily to people on a budget. But increasingly, dollar stores are drawing those with a bit more spending money, too.

Freelance photographer Joe Espinoza recently loaded up on picture frames at a Dollar Tree store in San Jose while his teenage daughter Chanel checked out aisles brimming with baby powder, cat litter, sunglasses, shampoo, socks, gift wrap and even Bibles -- and each for $1.

``They're the same exact brands you find other places, just cheaper,'' said Chanel Espinoza, clutching a pack of hair clips and a greeting card. Her father, who also works as a buyer at Lockheed Martin, hits dollar stores around the Bay Area every week, snapping up everything from shampoo to salami and spending at least $40 each visit.

FROM OPPOSABLE DIGITS TO OPPOSING THE WAR (via Robert Schwartz)

GOP Produces Video of Kerry on Iraq (WILL LESTER, 7/28/04, AP)

Republicans think they've found the ideal person to explain in detail the Democratic presidential candidate's evolving position on the war in Iraq - John Kerry himself.

Using video clips of Kerry discussing Iraq on various talk shows, the Republican National Committee has put together an 11-minute video that traces how Kerry struggled with the issue of Iraq through 2003 and early 2004 as he competed for - and finally won - the Democratic presidential nomination.

Republicans plan to publicly unveil the video Wednesday morning and send it by e-mail to about 8 million supporters. GOP officials also are pondering how to make the video, produced by Laura Crawford of the Texas firm Crawford Creative, available to the general public.

In the video clips, Kerry gradually shifts from harsh anti-Saddam Hussein rhetoric in 2001 and 2002 to more cautious comments about Iraq in late 2003 and then to anti-war comments by early 2004.

More:
It's online here.

DENIED HER RIGHTS:

Speedy coma recovery defies grim outlook: `I THINK WE'RE WATCHING A MIRACLE,' HUSBAND SAYS (Connie Skipitares, 7/28/04, San Jose Mercury News)

At first there was a faint smile and the gentle squeeze of a hand. Loved ones didn't dare to believe that Tara Eichinger Berendes might be coming out of the coma she had been in since a head-on car crash in Utah on June 1.

But then she began whispering little words to her husband, Josh.

On Tuesday, the 20-year-old newlywed continued to stun doctors and those around her when, with the help of physical therapists at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center, she briefly stood on her own.

That capped what friends and relatives are calling a miraculous turn of events during the past several days.

MORE CATHOLIC AND MORE CATHOLICS IS A WINNING COMBO:

Nation's Catholics have largely evolved into conservatives (Jimmy Patterson, 07/28/2004, The Midland Reporter-Telegram)

In 1960 America elected John F. Kennedy, its first Catholic president, largely behind the strength of the Roman Catholic voting block, which voted for him by 83 percent.

But in the 40-plus years since, Catholics have become increasingly conservative in their politics. Coincidence or not, in almost the same time span, since 1968, Democrats have occupied the White House for just 12 years; Republicans have wrested occupancy of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. for two-thirds of the lifetime of a 36-year-old American voter who was born in one of the country's most tumultuous years.

During much of the same time period, Pope John Paul II, one of Rome's most conservative, beloved and controversial leaders ever, has been head of the world's largest Christian church.

Bishop Michael Pfeifer, of the Diocese of San Angelo attributed the change in Catholic voting trends to the changing times.

"Back in the 1960s, if we look at the cultural pattern, there was a new spirit of freedom," Pfeifer said. "There were a lot of new things happening. Yet at the same there was a lot of breakaway from established principles and values."

Pfeifer said today, people are "more Catholic and better Catholics than in the 1960s."

"Back then, there was a lot of experimentation in culture, but today there's a shift back to being more principled and people being more in tune with the basic principles of the church."

OKLAHOMA...OKAY:

Coburn wins Okla. Senate primary (Ron Jenkins, July 28, 2004, Associated Press)

Former three-term congressman Tom Coburn won the Republican nomination yesterday for the seat of Senator Don Nickles.

Nickles, a Republican, is retiring after 24 years in the Senate.

Coburn trounced former Oklahoma City mayor Kirk Humphreys after a bruising and expensive three-candidate race marked by allegations of backstabbing and shady land deals.

Coburn will meet Democratic Representative Brad Carson in November in a race that could play a big role in who controls the Senate.

A UNITER, NOT A DIVIDER:

Bush Has Threatened to Use the Veto 40 Times, but Never Has--What's Up? (Nicolas Heidorn, 7/26/04, History News Network)

In a matter of months, George Walker Bush, 43rd President of the United States, could go down in history as the first full-term president in 175 years not to have exercised his constitutional veto power.

That’s quite a feat considering his father, Bush Sr., vetoed 44 bills in his one term in office. His successor, Bill Clinton, vetoed 37 bills in his eight years—a little under par for recent presidents: Reagan vetoed 78, Carter 31, Ford 66, and Nixon vetoed 43 bills before being impeached.

In fact, only seven presidents in U.S. history have not used the veto. The last was James Garfield, sworn in March 4, 1881, who served less than a year in office before being assassinated by a disgruntled lawyer. In all, four of the seven veto-free presidents, Garfield, William Harrison, Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore, did not complete an entire term. And, the very last president to serve a full term without using a veto was John Quincy Adams, the sixth president.

So why is it that George Bush, one of the most politically controversial U.S. presidents, hasn’t used his veto power?

NO ACCOUNT:

List Kerry as absent on school accountability (USA Today, 7/14/04)

Bridget Dean, principal of Barrister Elementary School in Baltimore's impoverished Pigtown neighborhood, has something to say to critics who claim the federal school-accountability law is too harsh and unfair to poor and minority students: You're wrong.

Tough love, Dean says, is how Barrister catapulted off the state's "watch list" of troubled schools. In two years, reading scores more than doubled, and math scores nearly doubled. Dean's formula: Use curriculums proven by research and embrace unpopular testing that prods all students to learn. Dean credits the strategies of the federal No Child Left Behind law, which President Bush championed, for the success of her students.

But the law could face an uncertain future if Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry wins the White House. One of his key supporters, the 2.7-million-member National Education Association (NEA), opposes the law. In fact, the teachers union's president, Reg Weaver, has declared war on it. [...]

[K]erry has downplayed accountability on the stump. Perhaps that's because many educators who back him dislike key principles that make the law effective:

Stressing race and income. In the past, weak performances by poor and minority students were masked by schools' average scores of more affluent students. Basing accountability on race and income forces educators to put more effort into teaching students who have been long ignored.

Switching to proven curriculums. Many teachers have complained about the adoption of highly scripted reading programs such as those used by Dean's school, saying they are too rote. Yet they produce successful readers in high-poverty schools.

Keeping accountability focused on academics. The NEA says standardized math and reading tests to measure education achievements produce "one size fits all" accountability. Still, academic testing remains the best way to assess progress.

There's pride in Pigtown over Barrister's accomplishments. Kerry can show he's with the school in more than spirit.

BEING SHOCKED AND APPALLED IS NOT A FOREIGN POLICY

Arab states refuse to slam anti-Semitism (Shlomo Shamir, Haaretz, July 28th, 2004)

Arab states at the UN are trying to foil a proposal to raise a vote condemning anti-Semitism in the General Assembly this September.

At a closed meeting held recently in New York, UN ambassadors from Arab and EU countries met and the Arabs made clear that they do not accept the initiative for the UN General Assembly to condemn anti-Semitism.

The blunt language used by the Arabs describing their opposition, and their plans to use diplomatic means to prevent the resolution from reaching a vote, shocked the Europeans, said a UN source.

Shocked indeed. The obscenity is not the Arab position, but that Europe stands impotent in the face of it.

TRUE LIBERTY :

Book XI: Of the Laws Which Establish Political Liberty, with Regard to the Constitution (THE SPIRIT OF LAWS, Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu)

1. A general Idea. I make a distinction between the laws that establish political liberty, as it relates to the constitution, and those by which it is established, as it relates to the citizen. The former shall be the subject of this book; the latter I shall examine in the next.

2. Different Significations of the word Liberty. There is no word that admits of more various significations, and has made more varied impressions on the human mind, than that of liberty. Some have taken it as a means of deposing a person on whom they had conferred a tyrannical authority; others for the power of choosing a superior whom they are obliged to obey; others for the right of bearing arms, and of being thereby enabled to use violence; others, in fine, for the privilege of being governed by a native of their own country, or by their own laws.1 A certain nation for a long time thought liberty consisted in the privilege of wearing a long beard.2 Some have annexed this name to one form of government exclusive of others: those who had a republican taste applied it to this species of polity; those who liked a monarchical state gave it to monarchy.3 Thus they have all applied the name of liberty to the government most suitable to their own customs and inclinations: and as in republics the people have not so constant and so present a view of the causes of their misery, and as the magistrates seem to act only in conformity to the laws, hence liberty is generally said to reside in republics, and to be banished from monarchies. In fine, as in democracies the people seem to act almost as they please, this sort of government has been deemed the most free, and the power of the people has been confounded with their liberty.

3. In what Liberty consists. It is true that in democracies the people seem to act as they please; but political liberty does not consist in an unlimited freedom. In governments, that is, in societies directed by laws, liberty can consist only in the power of doing what we ought to will, and in not being constrained to do what we ought not to will.

We must have continually present to our minds the difference between independence and liberty. Liberty is a right of doing whatever the laws permit, and if a citizen could do what they forbid he would be no longer possessed of liberty, because all his fellow-citizens would have the same power.

ANOTHER CONTRACT ITEM:

TAKING THE ULTIMATE PENALTY OFF THE TABLE: John Kerry's stand on the death penalty -- that there shouldn't be one -- is now the Democratic Party's platform. (John Nichols, The Nation)

The Democratic party platform that will be adopted this week includes one particularly significant change from the platforms adopted by the party conventions of 1992, 1996 and 2000. During the platform-writing process, the drafting committee quietly removed the section of the document that endorsed capital punishment. Thus, for the first time since the 1980s, Democrats will not be campaigning on a pro-death penalty program.

Why the change?

Simply put, on the question of execution, John Kerry is a very different Democrat from Bill Clinton and Al Gore. Clinton and Gore, while surely aware that capital punishment is an ineffective and racially and economically biased vehicle for fighting crime, were willing to embrace it as a political tool. When he was running for the presidency in 1992, then Governor Clinton even rushed back to Arkansas during the 1992 campaign to oversee the execution of a mentally-retarded inmate.

With Clinton and Gore steering the party's policies, Democratic platforms explicitly and frequently endorsed capital punishment.

But Clinton and Gore are no longer at the helm. And, as of tonight, the party will no longer be on record as supporting the death penalty. Asked about the removal of the pro-capital punishment language, U.S. Representative Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., the chair of the committee that drafted the document, explained that, "It's a reflection of John Kerry."

Kerry, who is often accused by his Republican critics of flip-flopping, is made of firmer stuff than most politicians when it comes to the issue of capital punishment. He opposes executions in virtually all cases – making an exception only after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, when he said he would consider supporting capital punishment, in limited cases, for foreign terrorists.

TOM TANCREDO WON'T WASH YOUR DISHES:

A perennial predicament: Cape firms, with few local takers for low-wage jobs in summer, stymied in bid to increase worker visas (Diane E. Lewis, July 28, 2004, Boston Globe)

Steve Hurley says that he hires the same crew of Jamaicans for his Cape Cod inn each year because they work harder, and Americans don't want his low-wage jobs anyway.

"We hired college students, and they'd come in drunk, or they wouldn't show up," said Hurley, 42, who runs the Hyannis Holiday Motel with his 77-year-old father. "Every week it was something. They would find a waitressing job and run off for a few extra cents, or cleaning wasn't their forte, or they would stay, but come Labor Day, they were gone."

Despite relatively high unemployment, Hurley and other firms on the Cape and Islands are backing legislation that would increase the number of unskilled foreign workers allowed in the country.

Bills in Congress, one sponsored by Senator Edward M. Kennedy, would exempt some workers from a cap imposed on the number allowed under a program called the H-2B visa, or raise the cap.

The bills are languishing, victims of anti-immigration fervor spurred by growing concerns over the outsourcing to other countries of information technology, software, telemarketing, and other jobs.

THE SECOND CONTRACT:

Kansas group monitors sermons (AP, 7/27/04)

A recent Sunday found Tina Kolm changing her morning routine. Instead of attending a Unitarian Universalist service, she was at the Lenexa Christian Center, paying close attention to a conservative minister's sermon about the importance of amending the U.S. Constitution to ban gay marriage.

Kolm is one of about 100 volunteers for the Mainstream Coalition, a group monitoring the political activities of local pastors and churches.

The coalition, based in suburban Kansas City, Kan., says it wants to make sure clergy adhere to federal tax guidelines restricting political activity by nonprofit groups, and it's taking such efforts to a new level.

TALK ABOUT NUANCED:

Democrats hope a buzzword will leave Bush smarting: Subtle and provocative, 'wisdom' is all the rage among DNC speakers (Don Aucoin, July 28, 2004, Boston Globe)

If John Kerry seems leery of the L word, seeking to avoid being saddled with the "liberal" label that helped doom the presidential candidacies of fellow Bay Staters Ted Kennedy and Mike Dukakis, he appears to have no problem with the W word.

It has nothing to do with President Bush's middle initial. The word is "wisdom," and it is getting a workout at this week's Democratic National Convention, along with its musclebound wingman, the word "strength."

Speaker after speaker, from former President Bill Clinton to former Vice President Al Gore, has extolled Kerry's wisdom. It's enough to make you wonder whether the Democrats are nominating Socrates rather than the junior senator from Massachusetts.
It's a pretty good indication of what a hothouse a convention is when your people think "Wisdom" is the key to victory. This is especially the case since Mr. Kerry doesn't fare very well on the wisdom test:

WHY EXCEPTIONAL:

Belief in hell boosts economic growth (Alister Bull, 7/27/04, Reuters)

Economists searching for reasons why some nations are richer than others have found that those with a wide belief in hell are less corrupt and more prosperous, according to a report by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis in the United States.

Researchers at the regional Federal Reserve bank acknowledged the importance of productivity and investment in the economic process but looked at some recent unconventional efforts to explain differences in national prosperity.

The St Louis Fed drew on work by outside economists who studied 35 countries, including the United States, European nations, Japan, India and Turkey and found that religion shed some useful light.

"In countries where where large percentages of the population believe in hell, there seems to be less corruption and a higher standard of living," the St. Louis Fed said in its July quarterly review.

For instance, 71 percent of the U.S. population believe in hell and the country boasts the world's highest per capita income, according to the 2003 United Nations Human Development Report and 1990-1993 World Values Survey.

Ireland, not far behind the United States in terms of income, likewise has a healthy fear of a nether world with 53 percent of the population acknowledging hell's existence.

11,000 = 50:

Consumer Confidence Soars, Housing Strong (Mark Felsenthal, July 27, , 2004, Reuters)

U.S. consumer confidence surged to a two-year high this month on hiring hopes while new home sales in June posted a smaller decline than expected, according to two reports on Tuesday that signaled the economy may be picking up after a brief hiatus.

The Conference Board, a private forecasting group, said its consumer sentiment gauge climbed in July for the fourth straight month to 106.1 from an upwardly revised 102.8 in June, outpacing Wall Street forecasts.

"These are strong numbers. I have no doubt they indicate continuity for the economic expansion, and are a prelude to a second half that is stronger than the first half," said David Littmann, chief economist at Comerica Bank.

Stock markets and the dollar rallied on the buoyant data, while investors dumped safe-haven Treasuries.

The Dow Jones Industrials (DJI) rose 123 points, or 1.2 percent, to 10,085, its biggest gain since early June. The dollar rose to five-week highs against the euro.

U.S. Treasury securities prices slid, as the reports contributed to the biggest two-day sell-off in nearly three months.

JUST ONE DROP:

Author 'chilled' to learn Harry's half-blood status has Nazi parallels (IAN JOHNSTON, 7/28/04, The Scotsman)

JK ROWLING made the "chilling" discovery that villains in her books used the same twisted logic as the Nazis when she visited a Holocaust museum, the author has revealed.

Ms Rowling was asked by a fan to explain why some people in the stories - including the hero Harry Potter - are referred to as "half-blood" wizards.

She replied that the terms "half-blood" and "pure-blood" were used by prejudiced characters such as the evil Lucius Malfoy and the Death Eaters, servants of arch-villain Lord Voldemort.

Ms Rowling said she had invented the idea that some wizards were not considered to be "pure", and realised the similarities with the Nazis’ beliefs only afterwards when she visited a museum dedicated to the Holocaust, in which six million Jewish people died.

Her decision to talk about such a sensitive issue was welcomed by an education officer at The Jewish Museum, who said the stories could be used to help children deal with racism in the playground

WHAT ABOUT APPLE PIE?:

Keynote Address by Barack Obama, Democratic U.S. Senate candidate from Illinois (Democratic National Convention, 07/27/04)

On behalf of the great state of Illinois, crossroads of a nation, land of Lincoln, let me express my deep gratitude for the privilege of addressing this convention. Tonight is a particular honor for me because, let's face it, my presence on this stage is pretty unlikely. My father was a foreign student, born and raised in a small village in Kenya. He grew up herding goats, went to school in a tin-roof shack. His father, my grandfather, was a cook, a domestic servant.

But my grandfather had larger dreams for his son. Through hard work and perseverance my father got a scholarship to study in a magical place: America, which stood as a beacon of freedom and opportunity to so many who had come before. While studying here, my father met my mother. She was born in a town on the other side of the world, in Kansas. Her father worked on oil rigs and farms through most of the Depression. The day after Pearl Harbor he signed up for duty, joined Patton's army and marched across Europe. Back home, my grandmother raised their baby and went to work on a bomber assembly line. After the war, they studied on the GI Bill, bought a house through FHA, and moved west in search of opportunity.

And they, too, had big dreams for their daughter, a common dream, born of two continents. My parents shared not only an improbable love; they shared an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation. They would give me an African name, Barack, or "blessed," believing that in a tolerant America your name is no barrier to success. They imagined me going to the best schools in the land, even though they weren't rich, because in a generous America you don't have to be rich to achieve your potential. They are both passed away now. Yet, I know that, on this night, they look down on me with pride.

I stand here today, grateful for the diversity of my heritage, aware that my parents' dreams live on in my precious daughters. I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story, that I owe a debt to all of those who came before me, and that, in no other country on earth, is my story even possible. Tonight, we gather to affirm the greatness of our nation, not because of the height of our skyscrapers, or the power of our military, or the size of our economy. Our pride is based on a very simple premise, summed up in a declaration made over two hundred years ago, "We hold these truths to he self-evident, that all men are created equal. That they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. That among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

That is the true genius of America, a faith in the simple dreams of its people, the insistence on small miracles. That we can tuck in our children at night and know they are fed and clothed and safe from harm. That we can say what we think, write what we think, without hearing a sudden knock on the door. That we can have an idea and start our own business without paying a bribe or hiring somebody's son. That we can participate in the political process without fear of retribution, and that our votes will he counted — or at least, most of the time.

This year, in this election, we are called to reaffirm our values and commitments, to hold them against a hard reality and see how we are measuring up, to the legacy of our forbearers, and the promise of future generations. And fellow Americans — Democrats, Republicans, Independents — I say to you tonight: we have more work to do. More to do for the workers I met in Galesburg, Illinois, who are losing their union jobs at the Maytag plant that's moving to Mexico, and now are having to compete with their own children for jobs that pay seven bucks an hour. More to do for the father I met who was losing his job and choking back tears, wondering how he would pay $4,500 a month for the drugs his son needs without the health benefits he counted on. More to do for the young woman in East St. Louis, and thousands more like her, who has the grades, has the drive, has the will, but doesn't have the money to go to college.

Don't get me wrong. The people I meet in small towns and big cities, in diners and office parks, they don't expect government to solve all their problems. They know they have to work hard to get ahead and they want to. Go into the collar counties around Chicago, and people will tell you they don't want their tax money wasted by a welfare agency or the Pentagon. Go into any inner city neighborhood, and folks will tell you that government alone can't teach kids to learn. They know that parents have to parent, that children can't achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white. No, people don't expect government to solve all their problems. But they sense, deep in their bones, that with just a change in priorities, we can make sure that every child in America has a decent shot at life, and that the doors of opportunity remain open to all. They know we can do better. And they want that choice.

In this election, we offer that choice. Our party has chosen a man to lead us who embodies the best this country has to offer. That man is John Kerry. John Kerry understands the ideals of community, faith, and sacrifice, because they've defined his life. From his heroic service in Vietnam to his years as prosecutor and lieutenant governor, through two decades in the United States Senate, he has devoted himself to this country. Again and again, we've seen him make tough choices when easier ones were available. His values and his record affirm what is best in us.

John Kerry believes in an America where hard work is rewarded. So instead of offering tax breaks to companies shipping jobs overseas, he'll offer them to companies creating jobs here at home. John Kerry believes in an America where all Americans can afford the same health coverage our politicians in Washington have for themselves. John Kerry believes in energy independence, so we aren't held hostage to the profits of oil companies or the sabotage of foreign oil fields. John Kerry believes in the constitutional freedoms that have made our country the envy of the world, and he will never sacrifice our basic liberties nor use faith as a wedge to divide us. And John Kerry believes that in a dangerous world, war must be an option, but it should never he the first option.

A while back, I met a young man named Shamus at the VFW Hall in East Moline, Illinois. He was a good-looking kid, six-two or six-three, clear-eyed, with an easy smile. He told me he'd joined the Marines and was heading to Iraq the following week. As I listened to him explain why he'd enlisted, his absolute faith in our country and its leaders, his devotion to duty and service, I thought this young man was all any of us might hope for in a child. But then I asked myself: Are we serving Shamus as well as he was serving us? I thought of more than 900 service men and women, sons and daughters, husbands and wives, friends and neighbors, who will not be returning to their hometowns. I thought of families I had met who were struggling to get by without a loved one's full income, or whose loved ones had returned with a limb missing or with nerves shattered, but who still lacked long-term health benefits because they were reservists. When we send our young men and women into harm's way, we have a solemn obligation not to fudge the numbers or shade the truth about why they're going, to care for their families while they're gone, to tend to the soldiers upon their return, and to never ever go to war without enough troops to win the war, secure the peace, and earn the respect of the world.

Now let me be clear. We have real enemies in the world. These enemies must be found. They must be pursued and they must be defeated. John Kerry knows this. And just as Lieutenant Kerry did not hesitate to risk his life to protect the men who served with him in Vietnam, President Kerry will not hesitate one moment to use our military might to keep America safe and secure. John Kerry believes in America. And he knows it's not enough for just some of us to prosper. For alongside our famous individualism, there's another ingredient in the American saga.

A belief that we are connected as one people. If there's a child on the south side of Chicago who can't read, that matters to me, even if it's not my child. If there's a senior citizen somewhere who can't pay for her prescription and has to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it's not my grandmother. If there's an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties. It's that fundamental belief — I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper — that makes this country work. It's what allows us to pursue our individual dreams, yet still come together as a single American family. "E pluribus unum." Out of many, one.

Yet even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there's not a liberal America and a conservative America — there's the United States of America. There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America. The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I've got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and have gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and patriots who supported it. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.

In the end, that's what this election is about. Do we participate in a politics of cynicism or a politics of hope? John Kerry calls on us to hope. John Edwards calls on us to hope. I'm not talking about blind optimism here — the almost willful ignorance that thinks unemployment will go away if we just don't talk about it, or the health care crisis will solve itself if we just ignore it. No, I'm talking about something more substantial. It's the hope of slaves sitting around a fire singing freedom songs; the hope of immigrants setting out for distant shores; the hope of a young naval lieutenant bravely patrolling the Mekong Delta; the hope of a millworker's son who dares to defy the odds; the hope of a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him, too. The audacity of hope!

In the end, that is God's greatest gift to us, the bedrock of this nation; the belief in things not seen; the belief that there are better days ahead. I believe we can give our middle class relief and provide working families with a road to opportunity. I believe we can provide jobs to the jobless, homes to the homeless, and reclaim young people in cities across America from violence and despair. I believe that as we stand on the crossroads of history, we can make the right choices, and meet the challenges that face us. America!

Tonight, if you feel the same energy I do, the same urgency I do, the same passion I do, the same hopefulness I do — if we do what we must do, then I have no doubt that all across the country, from Florida to Oregon, from Washington to Maine, the people will rise up in November, and John Kerry will be sworn in as president, and John Edwards will be sworn in as vice president, and this country will reclaim its promise, and out of this long political darkness a brighter day will come. Thank you and God bless you.

MORE:
-Barack Obama, Man of Faith (Nicholas Stix, July 26, 2004, The Illinois Leader)

TRYING TO DRINK THEMSELVES SOBER:

OECD slates eurozone for 'lack of dynamism' (Scheherazade Daneshkhu, July 27 2004, Financial Times)

Membership of a single currency has failed to inject dynamism into the economies of the eurozone or to raise their long-term growth rate, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development said on Tuesday.
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In its most critical report on the eurozone's economic performance, the Paris-based body said the first five years of European monetary union had been "more challenging than expected".

The eurozone had been "disappointing" in its lack of resilience to shocks, and its income gap against the OECD's best-performing countries remained large and widening.

WE'RE NOT THE DISEASE, WE'RE THE CURE:

American Exceptionalism: A Disease of Conceit (RON JACOBS, 7/21/04, CounterPunch)

[T]he underlying cause for the US antiwar movement's current stasis is that most of its adherents believe in one of this country's basic tenets-a tenet that is ultimately religious in nature. For lack of a more descriptive phrase, we'll call this phenomenon American exceptionalism. On a basic political level, this phenomenon is the belief that, for some reason (America's system of democracy, or maybe its economic superiority), the United States system is not subject to the same contradictions and influences as those of the rest of the world. This belief in American superiority finds its foundation in some of our culture's basic religious and cultural constructs. It's there in the first settlers' belief that they were conducting a special errand into the wilderness to construct a city on a hill in the name of their heavenly father and every single president and wannabe always implores this same heavenly father to "bless America" at the end of every one of his speeches. This is no accident.

It is this belief that gave the Pilgrims their heavenly go-ahead to murder Pequot women and children and it was this belief that gave General Custer his approval to kill as many Sioux as he could. It made the mass murder of Korean and Vietnamese civilians acceptable to the soldiers at No Gun Ri and My Lai and exonerated the officers who tried to hide those and many other war crimes from the world. It gives George Bush the only rationale he needs to continue his crusade against the part of the world that stands in the way of the more mercenary men and women behind his throne as they pursue their project for a new American century. And, most importantly for us, it informs a goodly number of decent Americans in their tentative opposition to those men and women. Consequently, while they may oppose George Bush's approach to Washington's war on the world, they do not necessarily disagree with its goals.

OKAY, MAYBE HE CAN'T CARRY D.C.:

Confidence challenges Democrats (CNN/Money, July 27, 2004)

Steady consumer confidence may pose a challenge for Democrats as Americans' views on the economic environment have risen sharply from where they stood just six weeks ago.

The ABC/Money magazine Consumer Comfort index stands at -7 on its scale of +100 to -100, slightly ahead of its long-term -9 average.

Americans' improved perceptions of the economy make it more difficult for the Democrats to challenge President Bush on his economic record. In a separate ABC News/Washington Post poll, registered voters were evenly divided on whom they trust more to handle the economy, Bush or Democratic challenger John Kerry.

TAKE OUT A CONTRACT:

Go for wedge issues, Gingrich tells lawmakers (Jonathan E. Kaplan, 7/26/04, The Hill)

Former Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) has advised Republicans to focus this year’s presidential campaign on a few “wedge issues” in an effort to paint Sens. John Kerry and John Edwards as an out-of-the-mainstream ticket.

One GOP lawmaker told The Hill that Gingrich encouraged Republicans to pick issues such as school prayer, strengthening work requirements for welfare recipients and barring the United Nations from monitoring U.S. elections, which all polled at higher than an 80 percent rating.

“There’s a consensus developing among activists that new issues are emerging where [the polling] is decidedly with us,” the lawmaker said. “We can show a contrast.”

Gingrich spelled out his views at a meeting last week organized by House GOP Conference Chairwoman Deborah Pryce (R-Ohio), the fourth-ranking member of the GOP House leadership.

Lawmakers who attended Wednesday’s session expressed excitement about Gingrich’s policy proposals and political tactics.

THE PLAGUE OF OPEN BORDERS:

Surprise refugee arrival in Korea: More than 200 North Koreans reached South Korea from Vietnam Tuesday. 220 more are on the way. (Robert Marquand, 7/28/04, CS Monitor)

Kim Jong-il should hire Tom Tancredo to teach him how to run a really tight ship.

THE INALIENABLE RIGHT TO BITCH ABOUT HOW HARD OUR EASY LIVES ARE:

Pressure of the American Dream (Robert J. Samuelson, July 26, 2004, Washington Post)

We'll hear a lot of complaining about the "middle-class squeeze" in this election, but the squeeze is as American as the Constitution. We live in an ambitious and striving society. Most Americans hope to get ahead. They work hard. They like to spend what they earn -- and they also compete compulsively to show how well they've done. As a result, anxiety and angst become a permanent way of life, even when the economy is doing fairly well. Enough is never enough. [...]

On average Americans are the best-housed people in history. Since 1973 the median size of new homes has jumped almost 40 percent, from 1,525 square feet to 2,114 square feet in 2002. Meanwhile, average household size has fallen almost 20 percent, from 3.14 people to 2.58 in 2002. (There are more singles, fewer children and more elderly couples.) Americans have bigger homes for smaller families. Now 36 percent of new homes have four bedrooms or more; in 1987 that was 23 percent. And everyone needs a bathroom. In 1971, 15 percent of new homes had 2.5 bathrooms or more; by 2003, 56 percent did.

No matter. Most Americans want more. The National Association of Home Builders (whose Web site provides all this data) surveys homeowner preferences. It finds that 64 percent want to "trade up" and only 14 percent would "trade down." Even among those 65 and over, 39 percent would trade up, compared with 28 percent who would trade down. On average, homeowners want houses almost 30 percent larger than at present; 44 percent want four bedrooms or more.

Housing dominates most family budgets; therefore, the quest for bigger homes underpins the middle-class "squeeze." But government won't do anything about it. Homeownership is the essence of the American dream. Indeed, various federal subsidies promote the demand for more -- and bigger -- homes.

Still, it's understandable that John Kerry likes the "squeeze" theme. The appeal is widespread, precisely because so many people feel -- or fear -- it. Kerry can also offer superficial solutions: new tax write-offs for college tuition; new subsidies for health insurance; promises to cut dependence on costly foreign oil. Similar solutions have been offered before and, had they worked, wouldn't be needed again. The other advantage of focusing on the middle class is that it distracts from dealing with the poor. Here, Kerry has made some proposals (particularly for health insurance), but his emphasis remains on the bigger political target.

The truth is that abolishing the middle-class squeeze is an impossible and undesirable task. Suppose the demand for bigger homes was suppressed. The urge to get ahead would pop up in other areas of aggressive consumption. As the upper-middle class indulges new tastes, it raises the bar for the middle- and lower-middle classes. The only way to stop this competitive cycle is to persuade Americans to be less ambitious. Why would anyone want to do that?

YOU MEAN THEY NEED MORE THAN "NOT BUSH"?:

Voters want more specifics from Kerry: Poll shows Democratic candidate losing ground to Bush (Richard Morin and Claudia Deane, July 27, 2004, Washington Post)

A majority of voters say they know little about John F. Kerry's positions on key issues and want the Democratic presidential candidate to detail specific plans for handling the economy, Iraq and the war on terrorism when he addresses the Democratic National Convention and a nationally televised audience on Thursday, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

The survey suggests that the stakes for Kerry and the Democrats as they began their convention in Boston could not be higher. In barely a month, Kerry has lost ground to President Bush on every top voting issue in this year's election.

A growing proportion of voters say Bush and not Kerry is the candidate who most closely shares their values, and four in 10 believe the Democrat is "too liberal." Bush has even narrowed the gap on which candidate better understands their problems, an area in which Kerry has led.

The poll suggests that negative ads by the Bush-Cheney campaign that have been airing since early March, as well as attacks by Republican officials, have been increasingly successful in planting the image of Kerry as an unreliable leader who flip-flops on the issues -- perceptions that Democrats will work hard to reverse at their convention.

MIKE TV FOR PRESIDENT:

GROAN AND BEAR IT:

Accepting the limits of reason: Walking the Tightrope of Reason: The Precarious Life of a Rational Animal By Robert Fogelin (Kenneth Baker, September 21, 2003, SF Chronicle)

People who shake their heads in despair over the course of recent events understandably deplore their fellow citizens' apparent reluctance to think. But thinking can create problems of its own.

Philosophers have known this for millennia and psychologists somewhat less long, but few have described better than Dartmouth professor of philosophy Robert Fogelin the peculiar poise that reasoning requires.

In Walking the Tightrope of Reason, Fogelin sustains the difficult balancing act of addressing colleagues and nonspecialist readers with equal clarity.

He defends philosophy against the popular misconception of its irrelevance and against the postmodernists' tendency to run it into a ditch of skepticism.

The overconfidence in reason known as rationalism has placed upon logic and mathematics, law and morality, demands for consistency and completeness that can never be satisfied. Such efforts run aground on the human condition, Fogelin believes.

The basic problem: panic at the discovery that reason not only has its limits but tends to generate phantom problems all by itself.

He deftly traces the genesis and diagnosis of these problems and inklings of relief from them to Descartes, Kant, Hume and Wittgenstein.

"Philosophizing about knowledge arises naturally out of the enterprise of forming beliefs in the most responsible way possible," Fogelin writes. "It seems unacceptable that philosophy's demand for rigor could be the source of intellectual disaster. So even though skeptical scenarios have unsolvability written on their faces, the idea persists that there must be some philosophical way to eliminate the skeptical problems they generate. I find success in this direction wholly unlikely."

THINGS WE NEVER THOUGHT WE'D SAY...:

C-SPAN Highlights

Tonight
* Democratic National Convention (8pm) - LIVE
* Speakers Include: Sen. Tom Daschle (SD), Howard Dean
* Rep. Dick Gephardt (MO), IL Senate Candidate Barack Obama
* Teresa Heinz Kerry, Sen. Ted Kennedy (MA)

HISTORY ISN'T SUPPOSED TO END THIS EASILY:

Early Steps, Maybe, Toward a Democracy in Iraq: Roughly 1,000 delegates will hold a national conference in Baghdad in the next week to vote on a 100-seat transitional council. (IAN FISHER, 7/27/04, NY Times)

Whether democracy is really coming to Iraq, or whether it is even possible here, seemed of no immediate concern to Dr. Ahmad Abu-Raghif, a physician in Baghdad. He was game anyway.

He showed up at a university hall here on Sunday with a good haircut, a blue suit and a big smile: the outfit of the office-seeker worldwide. He buttonholed 50 people, he said, at the grass-roots caucus, making the pitch for their votes.

"I explained myself to a lot of people," Dr. Abu-Raghif, 37, said before the voting began. "I have a Ph.D. I am a city council member. And I think I am a good candidate to win." Plus he had personal connections, which never hurt.

"Some of them are my patients," he confided.

His Western-style vote-corralling is part of what may become the birth of democracy in Iraq, something that never really existed here. As with much in Iraq since the American invasion, the experiment is at once inspiring and troubled, full of potential but not at all assured of success.

Caucuses like the one Dr. Abu-Raghif attended have been convening around Iraq to select roughly 1,000 delegates, who will hold a national conference in Baghdad in the next week.

The concrete goal of the conference is to vote - openly and freely - on a 100-seat transitional council that will oversee the government of Iyad Allawi, the interim prime minister, until national elections are held in January. But the conference is also meant to function as an opportunity for a national dialogue, in which for the first time since the fall of Saddam Hussein, Iraqis from all religions, regions and political and ethnic groups begin to discuss the way forward.

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Indonesia: Democracy, Islam do mix (John Hughes, 7/28/04, CS Monitor)

Cynics in the West argue that Islam and democracy don't mix.

Democracy can't work in a Muslim country like Afghanistan, they say, because of the dictatorial grip of the warlords. It won't work in Iraq because the country is in chaos. It won't work in Egypt, or Saudi Arabia, or the rest of the Arab world because of autocratic rulers and Muslim extremists.

Such critics in the US conveniently dismiss the presence of some 4 million to 7 million Muslims in their land who remain true to their religion but thrive under democracy and revere it. But even in predominantly Muslim nations there are examples of burgeoning democracy.

One such nation - the largest Muslim country in the world - is Indonesia. Its 216 million people have survived colonialism under the Dutch, a slide toward communism under Sukarno, an abortive coup attempt that led to a nationwide bloodletting, years of corrupt dictatorship under Suharto, violent separatist upheavals and religious tensions, and a flurry of Al Qaeda-style terrorism.

By all measures, Indonesia should be an international basket case, difficult terrain for democracy. Yet with all its past turmoil, it is moving purposely through a complicated election process in which the once tender shoots of democracy are blooming healthily.

TO PARAPHRASE LBJ... (via Governor Breck):

When Punchline Trumps Honesty: There's more McCarthy than Murrow in the work of Michael Moore (SCOTT SIMON, July 27, 2004, Opinion Journal)

Michael Moore has won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and may win an Oscar for the kind of work that got Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair, and Jack Kelly fired.

Trying to track the unproven innuendoes and conspiracies in a Michael Moore film or book is as futile as trying to count the flatulence jokes in one by Adam Sandler. Some journalists and critics have acted as if his wrenching of facts is no more serious than a movie continuity problem, like showing a 1963 Chevy in 1956 Santa Monica.

A documentary film doesn't have to be fair and balanced, to coin a phrase. But it ought to make an attempt to be accurate.

SORRY, HONEY, I DIDN'T HEAR YOU...:

Male Songbird Responds to Mate Only When He's the Third Wheel (Scientific American, 7/22/04)

Like a stereotypical husband who pretends not to hear his wife berating him, some male songbirds show no signs of recognizing the call of their long-term mate in laboratory settings. But recent work with these animals finds that they can, in fact, differentiate their mate's voice but will react to it only in certain social situations.

Zebra finches are monogamous songbirds from Australia that fly in large flocks. As a result, couples routinely lose visual contact of each other and use calls to keep in touch. Whereas the female zebra finch clearly responds to the sound of her partner, the reciprocal behavior had not been observed in the male.

SOFT POWER

Iran starts atom tests in defiance of EU deal (Anton La Guardia, The Daily Telegraph, July 27th, 2004)

Iran has broken the seals on nuclear equipment monitored by United Nations inspectors and is once again building and testing machines that could make fissile material for nuclear weapons.

Teheran's move, revealed to The Daily Telegraph yesterday by western sources, breaks a deal with European countries under which Iran suspended "all uranium enrichment activity".

It will also exacerbate fears that the regional power is determined to make an atomic bomb within a few years. [...]

America has in recent weeks renewed its call for Iran to be referred to the UN Security Council for possible sanctions.

However, diplomats said senior officials from the "EU-3" - Britain, France and Germany - would try to coax Teheran back to the path of co-operation at a secret meeting in Paris on Thursday.[...]

British officials say they have no illusions about Iran's intentions, but have hitherto advocated patient diplomacy.

They want to allow inspectors to keep working to "box in" the Iranians to the point where they either give up nuclear weapons ambitions or commit such a blatant violation that the West can win international support for sanctions.

"Iran has resumed research and testing, and every day that passes means it gets closer to mastering the technology," said one western source.

"If the Europeans think they can outfox the Iranians in the carpet bazaar, they are deeply mistaken."

Once again, the West dreams of how it can "shame" renegade regimes into responsible behaviour. The longer this goes on, the harder it may be for the Iranian opposition to overcome the surge of nationalist resentment at the constant feckless carping at Teheran. National pride may provide a shot in the arm for the regime, just as it did in Serbia.

TRY GRADUAL AND LOGICAL:

ONE HELLHOLE UNDER GOD: Why the Republican Party suddenly cares about Sudan—or at least pretends to. (Christopher Lord, 7/27/04, NY Press)

Of all the unlikely places for America to be getting involved in another war, western Sudan has particularly little going for it. Unless you count a few million potential candidates for the Christian missionary business, there's little to interest outside entrepreneurs. What the country has in extraordinary abundance of is problems. And thanks to a surprising chain of events, it looks as though some of these problems now belong to the United States, too. [...]

[T]he antislavery idea was not quite enough to reach mainstream white churchgoers, key members of the Bush II voter base. Hence, oversimplification number two: The war in Sudan was essentially about the persecution of Christians by Muslims.

This "de-blacked" message made white evangelicals and Republican politicians comfortable, so on March 22, 2001, Republican Dick Armey, at that time House Majority Leader and ally of the evangelicals, said of Sudan: "It is the only place in the world in which religious genocide is taking place. People are being tortured, mutilated and killed solely because of their Christian faith."

The religion-driven interest in Africa led directly to the bizarre spectacle in Kampala last year, when mystified Ugandans listened to George W. tell them that God sent him there. In fact, he wasn't talking to them at all, but to Christian voters back home. Church groups, in this case white church groups, had also begun organizing around the issue of an abstinence-based AIDS policy in Africa. Without this link to his fundamentalist base, Bush would be unlikely to ever mention the continent.

But like slavery, the persecution of Christians is a side issue in Sudan, where some estimates put Christians as outnumbered two- or three-to-one by those with traditional beliefs in spirits and magic, and people now counted as Christians are recent converts, the targets of European and American missionary campaigns (and in many cases still believers in traditional spirituality). Even by evangelical standards, there are some weird versions of Christianity on offer. The notoriously brutal Lord's Resistance Army, for instance, a Ugandan group also operating in southern Sudan, claims to want a society based on the Ten Commandments—and abducts children to be soldiers.

The Muslim/anti-Muslim explanation falls apart further when you consider that there are Christians in the south, and Muslims in the north. Many American activists are attracted to the fact that the Sudan People's Liberation Movement are Christians. While this group is the main opponent of the government in the south of the country, in Darfur the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) is avowedly Muslim, and the other main opposition group, the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SLM/A) has a message of equality of religions under the law.

Fact is, the issue of self-determination for the south has been a contentious issue since the years before its independence in 1956, and it seems to cut straight across religious lines. Khartoum has been trying to run a centralized state, while the rebel leaders in the south of the country have wanted either to secede or achieve local power-sharing.

Against this shifting background, the Bush administration last month decided to get more actively involved. Colin Powell was the natural person to lead the charge. After Somalia, there was no question of military involvement, but the State Department threw its weight behind the idea of peaceful negotiations.

This surprised the Sudanese. America, after all, had stood by while a number of other African countries melted down. Why pick on them? As far as they're concerned, they're trying to stop their state from falling apart.

Once they realized what was happening—that they were on the receiving end of televised visits from leading American evangelists—the Khartoum government denounced the American religious right for interfering in Sudanese affairs.

"Fears are rising that if American evangelicals continue to focus exclusively on the religious dimensions of the Sudanese war, there could be a backlash from Islamic fundamentalists, thus intensifying the conflict," wrote Matthias Muindi of Arab American News in May 2001. "Analysts, mainstream Church officials, and aid workers are worried that the stance taken by the Christian Right might jeopardize relief operations and precipitate a humanitarian crisis in Sudan."

This is a pretty good description of what's happened over the last three years. In the words of a December 2002 State Department report on religious freedom: "The U.S. Government has made it clear to the [Sudanese] Government that the problem of religious freedom is one of the key impediments to an improvement in the relationship between the two countries. High-level U.S. officials and U.S. Missions to international forums have raised consistently the issue of religious freedom with both the Government and the public."

The "Peace Envoy" sent by the Bush administration in 2002 to oversee their Sudan engagement was none other than retired Senator John "Saint Jack" Danforth, who last month replaced John Negroponte as Ambassador to the U.N. Danforth is an ordained Episcopalian minister who has described himself as "a warrior doing battle for the Lord."

On paper, the U.S.-led diplomatic effort has seen modest success, with a ceasefire declared in April and a power-sharing agreement between the government and the rebels accepted in principle by both sides.

HEY LOOK, MA, NO NEW TAXES:

State budget deal reached: SIDES END BITTER STALEMATE WITHOUT RAISING TAXES (Ann E. Marimow and Kate Folmar, 7/26/04, San Jose Mercury News)

Arnold Schwarzenegger and legislative leaders struck a budget deal late Monday on a $100 billion-plus spending plan, ending the partisan stalemate that had stymied the rookie governor for nearly a month. [...]

Schwarzenegger stuck to his anti-tax promise and, to appease Republicans, scrapped plans to raise fees on the timber industry. Still, college students and their parents will be asked to pay 14 percent more in student fees.

SLIGHTLY OFF MESSAGE:

SEIU Chief Says the Democrats Lack Fresh Ideas: Stern Asserts That a Kerry Win Could Set Back Efforts to Reform the Party (David S. Broder, July 27, 2004, Washington Post)

Breaking sharply with the enforced harmony of the Democratic National Convention, the president of the largest AFL-CIO union said Monday that both organized labor and the Democratic Party might be better off in the long run if Sen. John F. Kerry loses the election.

Andrew L. Stern, the head of the 1.6 million-member Service Employees International Union (SEIU), said in an interview with The Washington Post that both the party and its longtime ally, the labor movement, are "in deep crisis," devoid of new ideas and working with archaic structures.

Stern argued that Kerry's election might stifle needed reform within the party and the labor movement. [...]

Stern made it clear that his complaints long preceded Kerry's nomination. He said that when Clinton was president, he demonstrated how little he cared for the Democratic Party. Calling the former president "the greatest fundraiser of his time," Stern asked: "If you think the Democratic Party is valuable, why would you leave it bankrupt?" Other elected officials are equally indifferent to the party, he said, adding that if Kerry is elected "he would smother" any effort to give it more intellectual heft and organizational muscle.

PARALYSIS? IF ONLY THEY COULD STAY PUT:

Is Europe Suffering From Productivity Paralysis?: If it doesn't boost spending on tech, Europe will fall further behind (David Fairlamb in Frankfurt and Andy Reinhardt in Paris, with Laura Cohn in London, 8/02/04, Business Week)

Why can't Europe be more productive? That's a question investors, executives, and politicians are asking with increasing urgency. Boosting labor productivity is the key to creating higher profits, improving living standards, and keeping prices stable. For decades after World War II, Europe kept pace or even surpassed the U.S. in productivity growth. But since 1995, Europe has trailed America in this vital metric.

The gap is even widening. This year the U.S. should record productivity gains of 3.3%, according to Eurostat, the statistical agency of the European Union. That's almost twice the rate of France and Germany and well above the British rate (yes, even dynamic Britain is struggling in this area). Europe now has an hourly output per worker some 20% below American levels.

The productivity numbers have become so alarming that European Central Bank boss Jean-Claude Trichet warned about the problem in a July 1 speech. The Dutch, who have seen their once-robust economy stumble, are getting worried. "Future economic growth will require a substantial increase in our productivity," says Economic Affairs Minister Laurens Jan Brinkhorst. Patricia Hewitt, the British Secretary of State for Trade & Industry, has made improving productivity a top priority: It's the only way Britain can close a still-considerable gap in living standards between British workers and their U.S. counterparts.

But what exactly is wrong? The short answer is that Europe is not seeing the same productivity bang from information technology that the U.S. has enjoyed over the past decade. The long answer is that uniquely European factors -- from stiff job-protection codes to hidden barriers against competition -- amplify the problem. There is no simple fix.

THE BLASE BASE (via Kevin Whited):

Black voters may stay home if campaigns don't step up (DeWayne Hickman, 7/26/04, USA Today)

While black voters favor Kerry over Bush by an 8-to-1 margin, only 27% say they're "enthusiastic" about the Massachusetts senator's candidacy, and 58% say they're merely "satisfied." These lukewarm attitudes open up the possibility that some may ultimately decide to sit out this election.

Their lack of enthusiasm for Kerry is mind-boggling. Nearly two-thirds of the poll's respondents say they believe Kerry shares their priorities and 85% say they disapprove of the job Bush is doing.

In essence, black voters are turned off by Bush, but are not turned on by Kerry — and I suspect there is little either man personally can do to reverse these numbers. They need help from others who have a long-established standing among black voters.

Kerry is leaning heavily on members of the Congressional Black Caucus to get blacks to the polls, but the BET/CBS poll suggests he should be knocking on the Rev. Jesse Jackson's door.

Jackson, who once described himself as "a tree shaker, not a jelly maker" because of his penchant for getting in and out of racial hot spots, has a pied piper's appeal with black voters. He won millions of black votes in his 1984 and 1988 campaigns for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination. Not surprisingly, the poll's respondents ranked him as "the most important national leader in the black community today."

If Kerry wants to get black voters excited about his campaign, his campaign needs to get excited about Jackson.

WE DEMAND HEALTH WARNINGS ON RUNNING SHOES

Longer lives mean hip surgery is booming (Gabrielle Giroday, Globe and Mail, July 27th, 2004)

There has been a 19-per-cent increase in the total number of hip replacements done since 1994-95, as well as a higher incidence of repeats. Of all hip replacement surgeries, 11.3 per cent are repeats, meaning there are more sufferers than ever who've made multiple voyages to the operating room in their quest for a pain-free existence. Mrs. Doucette, an active swimmer, runner and stretcher, struggled with what she called "terminal low-grade pain" for most of her adult life.

At 50, sick of limited mobility and her inability to golf or use a Nautilus machine, she opted for a gruelling process where both hip joints were replaced, eight months apart.

The upshot? Mrs. Doucette could finally go about her classroom duties as a Scarborough, Ont., high-school math teacher without fear of continually increasing pain.

"Hip replacement is going up because people are living longer and know what can be done," Dr. Hugh Cameron, a hip and knee specialist at Toronto's Sunnybrook and Women's College Orthopaedic and Arthritic Institute, said.

Dr. Cameron has done hip surgery on more than 3,000 clients, and could remember volumes of patients from their early 20s to mid-60s who will be facing at least two major hip replacements in their lifetimes.

"If you get a hip replacement earlier in your life, you're going to face another one sooner or later. The more active you are, the faster the lining of the new hip wears," Dr. Cameron said.

Dr. John Antoniou, assistant professor of orthopedic surgery at Montreal's McGill medical school, concurs. "We're seeing an increase in the second and third time 'round surgery due to implants wearing down. With people staying alive and active longer, we can hope with the newer generation of implants that longevity will increase," he said.

THE STUPIDITY OF ARTISTS IS UNIVERSAL:

Collette urges Latham to reject deal (The Age, July 27, 2004)

Actor Toni Collette has called on Labor leader Mark Latham to prove he has "balls" by rejecting the government's proposed Free Trade Agreement with the US.

"I think if Mark Latham said no to the FTA and got in, people would stand up and applaud him for just having the balls to be a visionary and not feel as though he is having to answer to somebody," Collette said in Sydney while promoting her latest film - Connie and Carla.

"If he is going to be a leader, he has to show that he can lead - that would be my fantasy."

OBLIGATORY PHASCIST REFERENCE:

US: Patriotic pride and fear (Ritt Goldstein, 7/08/04, Asia Times)

While some critics of US President George W Bush have charged that his administration is pursuing policies of madness, such a charge is clinically incorrect, but it may convey an extraordinarily disturbing reality. Both an eminent psychologist and a noted political scientist perceive a particularly virulent social pathogen as the basis for much of the present global strife, with Washington at the center of the epidemic.

"It certainly seems that the world is going mad," Canadian psychologist Dr Daniel Burston told Asia Times Online, quickly noting that an increasing retreat into "social phantasy systems" would be more accurate. Burston - whose work has been acclaimed in the mainstream media - noted that famed social psychologist Erich Fromm had written on "socially patterned defects" that enabled large groups of people to adjust themselves comfortably to a system that, humanly speaking, is "fundamentally at odds with our basic existential and human needs". Burston observed that this resulted in "deficiencies, or traits, or attitudes which don't generate internal conflict when, in fact, they should".

He saw the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal as raising a number of questions, noting that "there seems very little doubt that it was sanctioned from above". Burston labeled the guards' behavior as "sadistic".

Fromm, in his 1941 classic Escape from Freedom , wrote: "A person can be entirely dominated by his sadistic strivings and consciously believe that he is motivated only by his sense of duty." And on June 23, the Associated Press (AP) reported that an August 2002 US Justice Department memo "argues that torture - and even the deliberate killing - of prisoners in the terror war could be justified", with torture being redefined as "only actions that cause severe pain akin to organ failure".

AP also reported that the Justice Department had now "backed away" from the memo.

Burston named Nazi exterminator Adolf Eichmann as representing the "prototypical example" of what the phenomenon of "socially patterned defects" can engender.

THE LOONEY TUNES LESSON FOR THE MIDDLE KINGDOM:

The Chinese audit that went nowhere (Wang Chu, 7/28/04, Asia Times)

Since it took office in March 2003, the reformist administration of President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao has encountered the age-old challenge that has always confronted leaders of conviction and vision: inefficient enforcement of the law - and disdain for the rule of law.

Some China observers attribute the problem to two major causes: first, officialdom itself has only a feeble notion of the rule of law, what it means and that no one should be above it; second, fierce resistance emanates from powerful in-groups, common in both central and local governments and dedicated to protecting their vested interests in power and financial gain.

It has been more than a month since June 23, when China's National Audit Office released its comprehensive 2003 audit report, unearthing malfeasance and inefficiencies across the board in the governmental establishment. As yet, few problem departments have made any positive responses to the report. None has issued an open statement of apology or acknowledgement of responsibility nor has any promised to rectify its work in the future.

50-0 FILES (via AWW)

Consumer confidence surges: Survey shows better employment outlook lifts attitude to highest point in two years. (CNN/Money, July 27, 2004)

The Conference Board's latest reading on consumer confidence posted a much stronger gain than expected in July, lifted by gains in the employment outlook.

The survey released Tuesday put its index at 106.1, up from a June reading that was revised up to 102.8. Economists surveyed by Briefing.com forecast a the index would reach 102.0 in July, which would have been up slightly from June's original 101.9 reading.

July marked the fourth straight month of gains for the index and put it at the highest level since June 2002.

THE 51ST:

Nuclear Israel: Belling the cat (Ehsan Ahrari, Asia Times)

In an era of intense global support for nuclear non-proliferation, Israel's unspoken possession of a nuclear arsenal - euphemistically known as an outcome of its policy of "strategic ambiguity" - is coming under increased criticism and limelight. Mohammad ElBaradei, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) - the United Nations' nuclear watchdog - visited Israel on Tuesday to talk to the government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon about making the Middle East a nuclear-free zone. Even though a spokesman of that agency denied that ElBaradei's mission was to ask the Jewish state to unravel its nuclear-weapons program, one is hard pressed to know how else that region would ever become a nuclear-free zone. According to the unclassified estimates of the US intelligence community of the late 1990s, Israel possesses between 75 and 130 nuclear weapons.

If one were looking for a gaping example of US nuclear non-proliferation policy double standards, that it lets Israel continue to modernize its nuclear arsenal without even a word of criticism would fit the bill.

HE CAN'T EVEN GIVE A STRAIGHT ANSWER TO A SPORTS QUESTION (via Glenn Dryfoos):

10 Burning Questions for John Kerry (Jeff Merron, ESPN.com)

1. What's been your favorite sports moment as a fan?

Oh, God, there've been so many it's hard to pick just one. Bobby Orr in [the] 1972 Stanley Cup playoffs. Adam Vinatieri, last-minute kick, Super Bowl. The famous snow game with the Raiders. The most recent [Super Bowl] victory, which I watched in Fargo, North Dakota, on a cold night.

Lance Armstrong. The extraordinary last-minute victory of Greg LeMond when he won it the third time. [LeMond's "last-minute" victory, when he came from behind to beat Frenchman Laurent Fignon by eight seconds, came in LeMond's second Tour victory, in 1989.]

Great Olympic moments, I can pick so many. Franz Klammer winning the Olympic gold medal in skiing when he was recovering from a near-disastrous fall, going all-out, breakneck speed. Tiger Woods. I don't know, I like a lot of different sports. Different sports, different great events. McEnroe and Jimmy Connors facing off. There's just so many.

Obviously one of the greatest sporting moments ever witnessed, I thought, was the Miracle on Ice. I mean, the Miracle Team in '80. I remember watching the 1960 one, too, which was huge. I remember that very distinctly. The Cleary brothers -- it was a great year.

Anytime you watch Wayne Gretzky or Jaromir Jagr and some of the great U.S.-Russian hockey games of the past ... big, open, wide skating, stick-handling, passing -- beautiful game.

RESTORING THE CONSTITUTION:

Flag Amendment Restores a 200 Year Old Tradition (John Fonte, American Outlook)

[T]he flag amendment does not reverse 200 years of constitutional tradition, amend the Bill of Rights, or restrict free speech. On the contrary, the amendment restores traditional legal practice. As Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote in his Johnson dissent: "Both Congress and the states [for years] have enacted numerous laws regulating the misuse of the American flag." At the time of the Supreme Court's Johnson decision, all the states except Alaska and Wyoming had laws on the books prohibiting flag burning. Moreover, Congress had passed the Uniform Flag Act of 1917 that stated, "No person shall publicly mutilate, deface, defile…" an American flag. Furthermore, the regulation of the misuse of the flag was made uniform and incorporated into the federal U.S. Code (18 U.S.C. 700a).

In short, there is no sense in which the proposed flag amendment reverses a "200-year old constitutional tradition" and "amends the Bill of Rights." Indeed, any "amending" of the 1789 Bill of Rights occurred in 1989, when the U.S Supreme Court, by a 5 to 4 vote decided that the legal protection of the American flag that "had existed for 200 years was now mysteriously unconstitutional," in the words of Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona.

The other main charge against the flag amendment-that it restricts freedom of speech-is also unfounded. In fact, it is particularly significant that the proposed constitutional amendment does not prohibit or restrict free speech or the articulation of any ideas.

As Chief Justice Rehnquist noted in his dissent, the flag burner Gregory Johnson was free to "make any verbal denunciation of the flag that he wished." Rehnquist pointed out that Johnson did lead a march chanting "Red, white, and blue, we spit on you," for which he was not (and could not) be prosecuted. The Chief Justice also noted that under traditional (pre-1989) law, Johnson was "left with" both "a full panoply" of non-verbal "symbols" and with "every conceivable form of verbal expression."

The proposed flag amendment is not concerned with speech, but with conduct. It simply states, "The Congress shall have the power to prohibit the physical desecration of the flag of the United States." This has been the traditional and commonsense practice of America's constitutional democracy for 200 years (supported by such civil libertarians as Earl Warren, Hugo Black and Abe Fortas.) Even a 1974 Supreme Court case (Smith v. Goguen) that permitted a protestor to wear a flag patch on the seat of his pants stated unequivocally as part of the majority decision that, "nothing prevents a legislature from defining with substantial specificity what constitutes forbidden treatment of United States flags."

Our democratic republic is based on two core principles: self-government ("government by consent of the governed") and limited government (in which governmental power is limited because all citizens possesses "inalienable natural rights"). Those inalienable natural rights have traditionally included freedom of the press, speech, religion, and assembly, but until 1989 few dreamed that they included the "right" to physically desecrate the American flag, the symbolic representation of American liberty. There is not, never was, and never should be, such a "right" under our Constitution and Bill of Rights.

IT TOOK FOUR OF THEM TO FIGURE IT OUT?:

Where Do They Stand? (SARAH BINDER, THOMAS MANN, ALAN MURPHY and PAUL SAHRE, 7/26/04, NY Times)

Most campaigns feature efforts by the candidates to characterize their opponent as being out of the mainstream - as an extreme liberal or as part of the far right. The current presidential campaign is no exception.

Thus far, most of the ideological fire has been directed at the Kerry-Edwards ticket. The Bush campaign has gotten particularly good mileage out of a National Journal analysis of roll call voting in 2003 that ranked John Kerry of Massachusetts as the No. 1 liberal in the Senate and John Edwards of North Carolina as the fourth-most-liberal senator.

Yet the senators' ratings are misleading because of the large number of votes each man missed. Mr. Kerry, for example, attended so few votes on social and foreign policy that his composite score in 2003 was based only on economic policy. Even then he was not the single most liberal senator on economic issues; it was a distinction he shared with six other senators, including Bob Graham of Florida.

So where do the Democratic nominees really fit along the left-right spectrum? Well, you get a different answer if your calculations are based on nearly all votes cast by the candidates in their Senate careers. Using this measure, we have arrayed Mr. Kerry and Mr. Edwards from left to right in the above figure based on their voting history in the Senate. For comparison's sake, we also have included Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, John McCain of Arizona, and the parties' median senators. We even have scores for President Bush (from his announced positions on roll call votes while president) and Vice President Dick Cheney (based on the votes he cast when he represented Wyoming in the House of Representatives from 1979 through 1988).

Assertions that the Democrats' presumptive nominees are extreme liberals fall flat. True, Mr. Kerry's voting history places him to the left of today's median Senate Democrat (Tom Daschle of South Dakota). But he is closer to the center of the Democratic Party than he is to the most liberal senators, including Mr. Kennedy. John Edwards falls just to the right of the median Democrat. In fact, he is nearly indistinguishable from Mr. Lieberman, the Democrats' vice presidential candidate in 2000.

On the other side of the partisan divide, Mr. Bush - like Mr. Kerry - is more extreme than his party's median senator (Richard Shelby of Alabama). He is also noticeably more conservative than his primary challenger in 2000, John McCain.

THEY WIN WITH WALLACE, LOSE WITH McGOVERN:

Loony Over Labels (Michael Kinsley, July 25, 2004, Washington Post)

It is an odd notion that the Democratic Party is about to flicker out and, like Tinker Bell, can be saved only if all the delegates chant, "We do believe in moderation. We do. We do." An especially irritating variant, usually from conservative commentators, holds piously that the Democratic Party must save itself because two parties are essential to democracy or because competition is good for the Republicans.

These themes have reverberated around Democratic conventions since the first post-McGovernite election year of 1976. By now the word "McGovernite," never exactly filled with schismatic drama and romance, must be about as meaningful to the average voter as "Shachtmanite" or "Albigensian." George McGovern, children, was a senator from South Dakota (a region of the upper west side of Manhattan in the geographical mythology of Democratic Party critics) and the Democratic presidential candidate in 1972. He was, and is, a left-liberal. The Republican offering that year was Richard Nixon (with Spiro Agnew for dessert), but it is the Democrats who have been apologizing for their choice ever since.

You would not know from the Democrats' three decades of defensiveness about themselves and the label liberal that the Democratic candidate got more votes than the Republican one in each of the past three presidential elections. Another way of putting this is that the candidate the world labeled a liberal, whether he admitted it or not, got more votes than the candidate who proudly labeled himself a conservative.

FIRST ORDER, THEN FREEDOM:

U.S. 'Correctional Population' Hits New High (FOX BUTTERFIELD, 7/26/04, NY Times)

The number of Americans under the control of the criminal justice system grew by 130,700 last year to reach a new high of nearly 6.9 million, according to a Justice Department report released today.

The total includes people in jail and prison as well as those on probation and parole. This is about 3.2 percent of the adult population in the United States, the report said.

ISN'T THE MAN WHO BURIED SOCIALISM AUTOMATICALLY GREAT?:

Not too great. Just too greatly liked: a review of Blair By Anthony Seldon (The Economist)

[S]ome of the verdicts which Mr Seldon reaches about his subject should be seen as more provisional than the author suggests. It is still not clear whether Mr Blair's efforts to modernise Britain's creaking public services will be seen as a partial success or as proof that the whole enterprise was doomed from the outset without more radical reforms and a different approach to funding. Similarly, despite the currently fashionable consensus that Iraq has been an unmitigated disaster, it is conceivable that by the time Mr Blair quits the scene the decisions that he took in the run-up to war will appear in a better light than now.

Mr Seldon's conclusions about Mr Blair's place in history occupy only a small part of this weighty book, but they are important because they set what precedes them in an almost elegiac light. His judgment that Mr Blair, while not a bad prime minister, cannot claim a place in a first rank that includes Asquith, Attlee, Churchill and Thatcher, is both hard to disagree with and unlikely to alter. But whereas Mr Seldon appears to see this as an almost tragic denouement, an example of limitless promise, if not betrayed, at least unfulfilled, this is both too harsh and too grand.

At least three of the four “greats” of the last century had mandates to remake Britain as a different place. For all the size of Mr Blair's majorities in 1997 and 2001, he was elected as an ameliorator rather than what the management consultants call a “change agent”.

HIGHLIGHTS?:

C-SPAN Highlights

Tonight
* Democratic National Convention (8pm) - LIVE
* Speakers Include: Fmr. Presidents Jimmy Carter & Bill Clinton
* Former V.P. Al Gore, DNC Chairman Terry McAuliffe
* Rep. Tubbs Jones (D-OH) & Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD)

KISSINGER'S GET:

How to Lose the War on Terror: A CIA bin Laden expert’s lament: One of the striking things about the Iraq War is the extent to which American foreign-affairs professionals—intelligence analysts, diplomats, and high-ranking military officers—recognize it is a tragically misguided venture. (The American Conservative, 8/02/04)

Those in the crowd who are old enough: imagine it's 1980 and someone tells you that you'll live long enough to see the day when Pat Buchanan boasts of being on the side of the "foreign-affairs professionals," or, as he called them then: "The striped-pants cookie-pushers."

THEY KNOW THEY LOST, WHY CAN'T WE FIGURE OUT WE WON:

Educate All Children: Adequate and equitable funding is required for schools to provide qualified teachers, small classes and up-to-date facilities (Barbara Miner, July 22, 2004, In These Times)

The right to a free, public education is enshrined in the constitutions of all 50 states. That right is under attack by the Bush administration and its allies.

Using the club of its shamelessly misnamed No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), the Bush agenda punishes and sets up public schools for failure while promoting privatization schemes that funnel dollars to for-profit and religiously based programs.

MORE THAN WE NEED, LESS THAN WE WANT:

THREE LITTLE WORDS (Mark Steyn, July 12th 2004, National Review)

At dinner in Paris a couple of years ago, I was asked about “this American sickness with guns”.

“Americans have guns,” I said, “because a lot of Americans like having guns.”

My host scoffed. “A lot of people here would like to have guns, too. But they don’t.”

“Exactly,” I said.

IF ALL YOU HAVE TO OFFER IS HATE YOU'D BETTER AT LEAST SERVE IT UP:

Kerry's angry base (Robert Novak, July 26, 2004, Townhall)

What makes this Democratic National Convention look like the most unified such assemblage in the party's fractious history is a universal loathing for George W. Bush. That is the very emotion that John Kerry's high command recognizes it must avoid playing to as the presidential nominee is presented to the nation this week.

One of Sen. Kerry's closest and most influential advisers put it to me this way over the weekend: "We can turn this convention into a nonstop Bush-bashing rally, and everybody will be happy. But we already have those votes. If we do that, we end up with 42 percent of the vote and lose the election."

This situation points to needle-threading that will be necessary in Boston this week.

THE GAME ITSELF IS A SNORE, BUT MAN, THOSE PENALTY SHOOTOUTS...

Soccer referee wanted for shooting coach, players (Fox SportsWorld, July 26th, 2004)

Police were searching Monday for a referee accused of fatally shooting a coach on the field in a dispute during a weekend soccer game.

Two players from the visiting Marcelle team were injured during the attack Saturday in the Eastern Cape coastal town of Kenton-on-Sea, police spokeswoman Mali Govender said. She declined to identify the suspect or the victims.

"The referee awarded a penalty against the visiting team during a friendly match and then players stormed the field," Govender said. "It looks as if the referee had the firearm on his person and fired at the players first before hitting the coach in the chest."

The coach from Ekuphumuleni died at the scene, she said. The referee fled.

Comments

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THE TRUTH HURTS:

Downer under fire (CRAIG CLARKE, 27jul04, The Advertiser)

DIPLOMATIC rift has opened, after Foreign Affairs Minister Alexander Downer blamed terror threats against Australia on the withdrawal of Spanish and Filipino forces from Iraq.

The Philippines yesterday slammed Mr Downer as "narrow-minded", while the Spanish Government has branded his remarks as "totally unacceptable".

Mr Downer stood by his comments and said Australia would not withdraw its troops, even to spare the life of a kidnapped Australian.

The international spat was sparked by threats from Islamic terrorists to use car bombs to attack Australia unless it withdraws troops from Iraq.

ASIO was still trying to verify the threats, posted on the Internet by the Tawhid Islamic Group, which claims links with al-Qaida.

Mr Downer said the withdrawal of Spain and the Philippines from the US-led coalition had encouraged more kidnappings in Iraq.

N.A.I.I.A.B.S.P.P.B.R.W.I.P.M.A.M.A.S.S.I.O.G.W.B.F.F.R.O.D.E.P.J.B.A.R.A.M.M.S.S. Kerry in '04!:

A Letter to The Black Caucus from A Black Woman Living in South Central (Donna J. Warren, July 22, 2004, CommonDreams.org)

'We respect your right to run Mr. Nader, now withdraw.'
- Elijah Cummings, chair of the Congressional Black Caucus of the United States House of Representatives.

To Representative Cummings and members of the Black Caucus,

You demanded Independent Candidates Ralph Nader and Peter Camejo withdraw from the presidential race in favor of NAFTA approving, Iraq invading, Afghanistan bombing, Sudanese pharmaceutical plant bombing, right-wing Israeli prime minister and murderer Ariel Sharon supporting; impeachment of George W. Bush for the forced removal of democratically elected President Jean Bertrand Aristide refusing, and mandatory minimum sentencing supporting - John Kerry.

REASONABILITY:

Stocks Keep Falling, But Key P-E Models Say They're Cheap (Ken Hoover, 7/23/04, Investor's Business Daily)

Corporate profits are hitting record highs while the stock market is down for the year. That can mean only one thing: stocks are getting cheaper.

The 12-month trailing P-E ratio for the S&P 500 hit 17.7 on Friday, the lowest since 1996. That's based on S&P's estimate of $16.21 a share for the quarter ending June 30, which is up from a $15.87 preliminary reading for the quarter ending March 31.

The valuation on the S&P 500 isn't a historical low, but it's well below the highs of the bubble years, when it soared above 25. It hit 45 in 2002 as earnings were sinking.

In fact, the S&P's P-E ratio, based on operating earnings, is below the average of 20 going back to 1988, but still above the average of 15.6 going back to 1935.

"It's hard to characterize the market as cheap," said Nick Bohnsack, an analyst for International Strategy and Investment. "We think stocks are fairly priced."

SHE MORE THAN MADE UP FOR IT (via Glenn Dryfoos):

An untold chapter in the life of Celia Cruz (CAROL ROSENBERG, 7/25/04, Miami Herald)

The year was 1955, Dwight D. Eisenhower was president, and Celia Cruz, 29, was a star on the stage and airwaves with Cuba's celebrated Sonora Matancera band. And, at the U.S. Embassy in Havana, she was banned from visiting the United States as a suspected communist.

In fact, the singer known affectionately as Celia to generations of Cuban exiles was at least twice refused an artist's visa to visit America in the 1950s, according to a recently declassified U.S. document that described her as a ``well-known communist singer and stage star.''

It was an era before Fidel Castro was in power, a time when McCarthyism and the Red scare bred a Hollywood blacklist. The U.S. Congress was consumed by communism, and federal agents were hunting communists, real and imagined, in government and show business.

The Herald discovered the previously unknown chapter of Cruz's life, the nearly decadelong struggle to clear her name, after receiving her once-classified FBI file through the Freedom of Information Act.

Her biographies do not mention the episode, and the people tending to her estate, including her husband of 41 years, said she never spoke of it.

''She never told me about that. She never talked about politics,'' said her widower Pedro Knight. The alleged activities predate their relationship, to a time in her teens and 20s.

''It would've been a hard thing because, especially afterward, she was identified so much as a symbol of anti-Castroism,'' said Alejandro de la Fuente, a history professor at the University of Pittsburgh who specializes in race relations in Cuba.

Back then, ''it was not unusual at all for artists and intellectuals to have some sort of contact with the Communist Party,'' he said. ``It was a progressive, liberal force at the time. There was nothing to be ashamed of at the time. That changed in the late 1940s, after the end of World War II.'' [...]

[T]hroughout her life, Cruz kept that chapter secret. Even as late as 1961, six months after the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion, Cruz was aware of her record. In Mexico with Sonora Matancera, she sought a U.S. visa to play the Hollywood Palladium.

''SUBJECT EXPRESSED DESIRE CLEAR NAME,'' said a confidential Oct. 11, 1961, telegram from the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City. ``PLEASE FORWARD ANY DEROGATORY INFORMATION DEPARTMENT MAY HAVE SO EMBASSY CAN INITIATE DEFECTOR STATUS ACTION.''

A security source, cited by the embassy, ``BELIEVES SUBJECT COMPLETELY ANTI-COMMUNIST AND ENDORSES REQUEST.''

In exile, Cruz settled in the New York City area -- never moving to politically volatile Miami. She married her Sonora trumpeter, Knight, and reinvented herself from La Guarachera de Cuba to The Queen of Salsa, symbolizing her wider Latino appeal.

She recorded and toured relentlessly. She appeared in American films and Mexican soap operas, once as a santera, and for 20 years made an annual pilgrimage to Miami to sing on a Spanish-language TV telethon for the League Against Cancer, the disease that killed her last year.

OOMPHLESS IN BOSTON:

Is 'oomph' an oops for Obama? (SCOTT FORNEK, 7/26/04, Chicago Sun-Times)

Keynote speaker Barack Obama of Illinois began his week at the Democratic National Convention on Sunday with a simple goal for the week:

"Don't screw up," Obama said.

And the U.S. Senate nominee is confident he didn't do that -- despite a mini-flap that developed over a remark Obama made to a writer for the Atlantic Monthly.

In the issue of the magazine due out today, the state senator from Hyde Park will be quoted saying, "Sometimes [Massachusetts Sen. John] Kerry just doesn't have that oomph."

IT'LL BE OUR LITTLE SECRET:

Al-Jazeera TV network is asked to remove sign (JOHN HENRY, 7/26/04, Houston Chronicle)

When John Kerry glances around the convention hall in Boston this week, his eye will be drawn to brightly lit television network signs — ABC News, NBC, CNN, CBS, and banners for Hearst-Argyle and Belo.

Missing from the lineup is Al-Jazeera, the controversial Arab-language TV network that often is first to carry news involving al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden.

The Qatar-based network, which has 16 staff members assigned to the convention, was directed by convention officials to remove its sign. If it had remained, Al-Jazeera's sign would have been seen by millions of television fans looming over the shoulder of convention speakers.

IT'S NOT THE MEDDLING THEY MIND< BUT WHICH SIDE WE MEDDLED FOR:

One step forward, two steps back: Dr. Ivan Eland is a senior fellow and director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at The Independent Institute and an outspoken critic of the Bush administration's war on terrorism. In this exclusive interview with Enter Stage Right Dr. Eland responds to the report of the 9/11 Commission. (Steven Martinovich, July 26, 2004, Enter Stage Right)

ESR: Many experts have argued that America's foreign policy is merely the hook that Islamists hang their coat on, that the real cause of friction is the Islamist dream of a world under the control of a caliphate. How would you respond?

IE: I haven't heard many experts argue this. A few neoconservative experts have. Even if this were the goal of the Islamists, they don't have the resources to be the worldwide threat that the Soviet Union was. They are very poor (compared to the U.S.) and from poor countries. Destroying skyscrapers in a hit-and-run attack is one thing, taking over the globe, or even the Islamic world, would be impossible for them. Bin Laden came home from Afghanistan after fighting one set of "infidels" in a Moslem land and saw another "infidel" (the United States) with a military presence in the land of the Moslem holy sites (Saudi Arabia). Islamic radicals get particularly perturbed when they perceive that an infidel is trying to take over a Moslem land. So the American propping up of the corrupt Saudi monarchy is what originally set bin Laden off. If neoconservative doubt what bin Laden says makes him mad, then they should read the opinion polls in the Islamic world. U.S. meddling is the root of the general hostility, which spawns anti-U.S. terrorism.

KNOWING YOUR ALLIES:

The war after the war (Steven Martinovich, July 26, 2004, Enter Stage Right)

Karl ZinsmeisterKarl Zinsmeister, editor in chief of The American Enterprise since 1994, makes no bones about his unequivocal support for the war against Saddam Hussein and the U.S. military in general. In his 2003 effort entitled Boots on the Ground: A Month with the 82nd Airborne in the Battle for Iraq, he informs the reader that he has taught his children "to think of military jet noise as 'the sound of freedom.'") It's not surprising then that in his follow up -- Dawn Over Baghdad: How the U.S. Military is Using Bullets and Ballots to Remake Iraq -- Zinsmeister is pretty optimistic about the future of Iraq despite the ongoing strife the news is saturated with every evening and filled with praise for the difficult job the Coalition has been tasked with. In an exclusive interview with ESR Zinsmeister discusses his new book and what's going on in Iraq. [...]

KZ: I am very frustrated with the reporting from Iraq; that's why I felt I had to write Dawn, to give a fuller picture. It's not that the bombings and so forth that we see aren't happening -- the reporting is "accurate." It just isn't complete. There is another whole set of stories out there -- deeper, slower, but ultimately more important stories about the evolution of Iraqi society, ordinary Iraqi opinion, changes in the position of the terrorists, etc. That's all left out of the "what's in flames today?" style of reporting that is dominating today's coverage in the establishment media.

I write about the big, glacial changes taking place under the radar, the stuff, I believe, that historians will really care about -- much more than today's blowups -- when they look back 10 or 50 years from now. Dawn Over Baghdad is a detailed human-interest story, describing exactly what I saw inside Iraqi homes and businesses and on the streets, and the picture it draws is much less gloomy than most of what we're getting on our TV screens and in our newspapers at present.

ESR: Why do you feel the media is only concentrating on the troublesome aspects of post-war Iraq and ignoring all the positive developments?

KZ: Lots of reasons. The easiest, laziest, and most sensation-generating kind of reporting is simply to stick a camera at something that's blown up. The fact that 99 other things haven't blown up may be much more significant in the long run, but it takes a lot more creativity and time to tell that story, and most reporters in Iraq today live sequestered in the Green Zone hotels, and only blast out in their SUV bubbles for 2-3 hours to cover the aftermath of an attack. They get no perspective. They see none of the successes. They notice little of the progress over time.

I'm not a hotel-style reporter; I'm a backpack reporter. My two new books on Iraq, Boots On the Ground, and Dawn Over Baghdad, grew out of weeks spent walking the streets on combat patrols, observing in city council meetings, meeting with radical imams, watching interrogations of prisoners and secret military intelligence briefings at the company level.

The unbalanced politics of the establishment press corps are also a problem. A whole host of studies stretching from two decades ago to literally last month show that the elite press corps is Democrat over Republican/liberal over conservative/dovish over hawkish by about ten to one. In a war that has taken on intense partisan colorations like this one, that causes problems of portrayal. We ought to have much more ideological balance in the ranks of our press corps.

Yet another problem is the yawning cultural gulf that separates most reporters from soldiers. They just don't "get" military men and military work, and often have a hard time portraying them in an easy, straightforward, sympathetic, and accurate way.

ESR: What are some of those positive developments that the media has given such little time to?

KZ: Just one little example I like to cite: We hear, ad nauseum, in the media about the electrical blackouts in Baghdad. But you're never given the perspective you need to understand what's really going on.

The reality is, more electricity is being generated in Iraq today than even before the war. So why the blackouts? Two reasons:

1) Saddam shamelessly hogged most of the country's power to his capital, shunting 57 per cent of all Iraqi electricity to Baghdad, while the provinces were starved for juice. Today, power is distributed fairly to all population centers, and Baghdad gets 28 per cent of the national total. That means occasional shortages in some previously privileged neighborhoods, but Iraqis as a whole are better off.

2) Iraq is in the midst of a consumption bloom. The economy is growing at about 60 per cent, and there are suddenly a million new phones in the country, a third of the population has bought a satellite TV, a million cars have been imported, washing machines, air conditioners, and other devices never before available are proliferating. Most of those things have to be plugged in, and as a result the demand for electricity is rising even faster than supply is going up. Does that cause problems? Yes, but it's a "nice" problem, not evidence that "nothing ever gets fixed by those boob Americans."

But here's the really big story the major media have missed: The critical almost-never-reported reality is that the massive middle of Iraqi society -- the silent majority of Shiites who are going to run this country -- have stuck with us over the last year, through many travails. Contrary to what you'd guess from the headlines, there is no mass revolt in Iraq. The latest military intelligence is that there are a grand total of about 20,000 terrorist fighters operating in the country. That works out to one for every 1,270 Iraqis. Just to put that in perspective, one out of every 305 Americans is a Hindu -- so insurgents in Iraq are four times less common than Hindus are in our population.

Can 20,000 sadistic men cause a lot of mayhem? Absolutely, I've spent three months dodging bullets and IEDs on the streets of Iraq myself, and have no illusions about this. And it's a fact that many Iraqis are so afraid of the insurgents they are reluctant to cooperate with reconstruction. But fearing the guerillas and supporting them are two very different things, and the essential point is that we are not now in the midst of a general uprising, some bottomless guerilla pit where most Iraqis are fighting us.

MARKETS REQUIRE RULES:

Censored: Ever since Janet Jackson bared her breast on network TV, US popular culture has been under siege from the sweeping forces of the Christian Right. With the Presidential election looming, a bitter war is being waged in the Land of the Free to decide what people should be allowed to watch and hear (Lawrence Donegan, 7/25/04, The Observer)

Ironically, the push for more controls on what is shown is coming largely from right-wing, religious politicians and organisations who have long argued that market forces should prevail in every aspect of society: education, healthcare, social services - everything except broadcasting, it seems.

But irony and self-doubt have never been part of the Christian Conservative lexicon, especially now that they are in a position of influence. The groups who want tougher restrictions on broadcasters are more organised now - thanks in large part to the internet - and have the support of the White House, argues Mark Crispin Miller, professor of culture and communication at New York University. 'We have always had angry people in this country who loathe mass culture and who are vigilant against any works of art they deem to be anti-Christian,' he says. 'Unfortunately, we now have an openly theocratic government which is encouraging these people and providing a political climate that is allowing them to thrive.'

Miller cites a number of government decisions as examples of this new orthodoxy, from the withdrawal of funding for organisations that promote birth control in the Third World, to the withdrawal of public money used to finance captioning of the 1960s TV comedy Bewitched, for the hard of hearing ('...because it's about witchcraft,' he says).

In a week when the singer Linda Ronstadt was thrown out of a Las Vegas hotel for expressing support for the filmmaker Michael Moore, it's hard to argue against the notion that America is becoming more intolerant. Yet organisations like the Parent Television Council argue - as did the hotel manager who banished Ronstadt - that they are simply speaking for the 'silent majority'.

MAKE FUN OF IDEAS, WIN VALUABLE PRIZES:

-REVIEW: of Two Stars for Peace: The Case for Using U.S. Statehood to Achieve Lasting Peace in the Middle East by Martine Rothblatt

United States Constitution

Article IV

Section. 3.

Clause 1: New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union...

Section. 4.

The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence.

Martine Rothblatt's Two Stars for Peace is a powerful and cogent argument for Israelis and Palestinians to secure their mutual futures by petitioning the United States Congress to become the 51st and 52nd American states. The author treats every angle of the Middle Eastern muddle and answers every objection, including those that Americans might have to taking in these troubled neighbors.

The advantages to the two parties seem obvious: the U.S., the world's singular hyperpower, would become the guarantor of peace between the parties, the arbiter of border disputes, the defender of both from outside enemies, etc. For America the advantages may appear less obvious, but they're compelling: the quieting of one of the globe's worst trouble spots; the incorporation of Israel's extraordinary military into the American armed services, while simultaneously allowing Israel to give up its own nukes; addition of both highly educated and well-trained Israelis and a significant number of disproportionately young Palestinian workers to pay into Social Security; etc. There are many elements here of a win-win-win solution.

What though of the disadvantages to the three? Are they great enough to spike the idea? For the United States it would certainly mean taking on a troublesome situation, but we're already involved whether we want to be or not. It's not as if we can walk away from Israel, even if we wanted to, and the terrorists will leave us alone. And when peace does come we're going to have to transfer money to the parties just as we did when Israel and Egypt reached a peace deal. This conflict is already our baby. Anything that helps solve it would seem to outweigh the accompanying problems.

For Israel the surrender of sovereignty does seem to run counter to Zionism. A Jewish state within the United States is different than a sovereign and independent state. However, if the premise of Zionism is that a state is necessary to protect the Jewish people and only a Jewish state can, then this appears to be wrong. America has been uniquely accommodating to and accepting of Jews--indeed, there are more Jews in America already than in Israel--and America is uniquely capable of defending Jews and the Holy Land from potential enemies. Moreover, for religiously conservative Jews, the surrender of independence would bring Israel back into conformity with Biblical prophecy, which ties true statehood to the Messiah's coming.

This leaves only the Palestinians and they seem likely to be the sticking point. It's easy to imagine that the end of their fifty year struggle for statehood they'd view United Stateshood as too small a prize compared to independence. This would be a function of emotion rather than reason, but no less formidable an obstacle on that account. The thing that might tilt the balance here is the prospect of rapid economic development. Given that the poorest state of America have higher GDP per capita than most of the nations of Europe, one could hope that Palestinians might see the advantage of being one of 52 rather than one on its own.

Suffice it to say this is a novel solution to what has been a devilish problem. It probably makes too much sense to ever happen, but as Martine Rothblatt lays out the case it's hard to argue against it from a purely common sense perspective. And, Lord knows, if there's any area of the world that could use some new thinking it's surely the Middle East.

Brother Cohen has agreed to referee and we'll give a copy of the book (or another from our stockpile) to whoever makes the best argument about why the idea wouldn't work better than the alternatives.

N.B.: "I don't want a bunch of Jews and/or Arabs as fellow citizens" isn't actually an argument.

THE PETRO-CURSE:

Norway work ethic slips on oil-coated slope (Lizette Alvarez, July 26, 2004, NY Times)

Before the oil boom, when Norway was mostly poor and isolated, it survived on hard work and self-reliance, two sturdy Scandinavian virtues.

Now, with the country still bulging from three decades of oil money, Norway is discovering that sudden wealth comes with complications: The country's bedrock work ethic is caving in. Norwegians now stay home from work at the highest rate in Europe, outdoing even the former titleholder, Sweden.

"We have become a nation of whiners," said Finn Bergesen Jr., director general of the Confederation of Norwegian Business and Industry, Norway's largest trade organization. "Everything is wrong, yet we are living in the best country in the world. People complain and complain - because we have everything."

On an average day, about 25 percent of Norway's workers are absent from work, because they have called in sick, are undergoing rehabilitation or are on long-term disability. The rate is especially high among government employees, who account for half the work force.

IT IS WITH GREAT PRIDE THAT GERMANY CASTS ITS FIRST VETO FOR...

Blame the UN cheerleaders (Mark Steyn, The Australian, July 26th, 2004)

I see the next decade's "Never again" story is here. Just as we all agreed the 1994 Rwandan genocide should never be allowed to happen again, so - in a year or two - we'll all be agreed that another 2004 Sudanese genocide should never be allowed to happen again.

But right now it is happening, and you can't help wondering where all the great humanitarians are. Alas, Sudan doesn't seem to have much appeal to them, lacking as it does the crucial Bush angle and affording little opportunity for use of words such as "neocons" and "Halliburton".

In the Fairfax press, Robert Manne is still too busy fighting the last war - "Iraq is the greatest disaster in the recent history of US foreign policy. Nothing is more important than to try to understand how this catastrophe occurred." And if that means rehashing the same old column backwards and sideways for another two years - WMD, Andrew Wilkie, neocons, Cheney - he's prepared to do it.

There's an old, cynical formula for the prominence accorded different disasters by American editors. It runs something like: one dead American equals 10 dead Israelis equals 100 dead Russians equals 1000 dead Africans. But, to the average progressive columnist in the Western world, what matters is who killed you. 30,000 dead Sudanese don't equal one Iraqi prisoner being led around Abu Ghraib on a dog collar. But the minute the Yanks go in and accidentally blow up a schoolhouse, injuring an eight-year-old girl, the Mannes of the world will discover a sudden interest in Africa.

Manne's big gripe about Iraq seems to be that it was an "unnecessary, unlawful and unjust war". Each to his own. The Steyn Doctrine, such as it is, is that there's never a bad reason to take out a thug regime. Unfortunately for the beleaguered villagers of Darfur, the Americans so far are playing by Manne's rules. The USAF could target and bomb the Janjaweed as effectively as they did the Taliban.

But then the Not In Our Name crowd would get their knickers in a twist and everyone would complain that it's unlawful unless it's authorised by the UN. The problem is, by the time you've gone through the UN, everyone's dead.

No sane person watching the Sudan horrors unfold over the past few months could believe there is any widespread interest in saving these wretched people.

FREUDIAN SLIP?

Germany plays Iraq card in bid for UN veto role (The Straits Times, July 26th, 2004)

Germany hopes to cash in on its outspoken opposition to the Iraq war to win a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, but regional rivalries and resistance in Washington could stymie the bid.

Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer wrapped up a 10-day tour last Friday that was aimed at wooing Asia's powerhouses to back a veto-wielding seat for Germany as part of a major United Nations reform drive.

Mr Fischer, who is also Germany's Vice-Chancellor, did win a firm commitment from India - in exchange for supporting New Delhi's own bid for a permanent berth in New York.

But China, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh - unofficial spokesman for the world's poorest nations - were all non-committal during Mr Fischer's whistle-stop tour, citing complex power politics in their own backyards.

Mr Fischer argued that last year's diplomatic nightmare, in which the world was painfully split over Washington's decision to topple Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, was a key reason to pursue 'efficient multilateralism' at the UN.

At the same time, Berlin believes its leadership of the anti-war front alongside France and Russia - both among the five permanent members of the Security Council - dramatically boosted its profile on the world stage.

Why would a country with a discredited past, an anaemic military and a population steadfastly opposed to foreign adventures covet a leading role in global collective security? Perhaps the answer lies in the title of this article. The progressive world and the dangerous regimes it supports have come to see the UN as a protector of the status quo and a brake on the spread of democracy and constitutional liberalism. That makes Germany the perfect candidate.

THE VIEW IS BLURRY FROM THE MARGINS:

The triumph of the East: Islam really does want to conquer the world. That’s because Muslims, unlike many Christians, actually believe they are right, and that their religion is the path to salvation for all (Anthony Browne, The Spectator)

Of course, Christianity has been just as much a conquering religion. Spanish armies ruthlessly destroyed ancient civilisations in Central and South America to spread the message of love. Christians colonised the Americas and Australia, committing genocide as they went, while missionaries such as Livingstone converted most of Africa.

But the difference is that Christendom has — by and large — stopped conquering and converting, and indeed in Europe simply stopped believing. Even President Bush’s most trenchant critics don’t believe he conquered Afghanistan and Iraq to spread the word of Jesus. It is ironic that by deposing Saddam, who ran the most secular of Arab regimes, the US actually transferred power to the imams.

NO, I'M NOT A DEMOCRAT:

Senate Hopefuls Are Convention No-Shows: Some Fear Being Tied to Democratic Ticket (Charles Babington, July 26, 2004, Washington Post)

In the eight Senate races seen as virtual tossups, the Democratic nominees or front-runners from North Carolina, Oklahoma and Alaska are skipping Boston altogether. Inez Tenenbaum, the Senate nominee in South Carolina, mingled with her state's delegation Sunday night but goes home Monday, when the four-day convention begins.

Rep. Chris John, the Democrat's top contender for a Senate seat in Louisiana -- and a "super delegate" by virtue of being a House member -- will be here Monday and Tuesday. Senate Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle of South Dakota and Senate candidate Betty Castor of Florida will attend Monday through Wednesday, but not Thursday.

The only Democrat in a tossup Senate race who plans to be at the convention Thursday is Ken Salazar of Colorado, who will arrive Wednesday.

The story is similar among House candidates. Of the "Texas Five" -- five House Democrats seriously threatened by their state's redistricting -- only Rep. Charles W. Stenholm will appear in Boston. He is jetting in for a dinner Tuesday that will honor him and other prominent players in agriculture -- Stenholm is the ranking Democrat on the House Agriculture Committee -- and then he is going right back to his west Texas district.

ISOLATED, NUANCED, DULL, AND ANTI-AMERICAN:

Who is John Kerry?: A mystery man to most Americans, Mr Kerry offers them the chance of a respite, a pause to take a closer look at themselves (The Economist, Jul 22nd 2004)

[A]ccording to a poll for The Economist by YouGov, almost half of American voters say that they still have no idea of who he is or what he stands for.

Next week, Democrats flock to his home town, Boston, for their party's convention with one overriding aim: to rescue their stealth candidate from his obscurity, define him more clearly and sell him to voters. It will not be easy.

Mr Kerry's politics are still undefined. Republicans say he is the Senate's most left-wing member, an archetypal “Massachusetts liberal”. Yet he has been close to the Democratic Leadership Council, the party's moderate, pro-business wing, for years. He has spent almost two decades in the Senate yet has no major items of legislation to his name: his time was spent investigating government abuses rather than making law.

His personality is ill-defined, too. Despite millions of dollars of biographic advertising, he does not connect with voters. He is an aloof Boston Brahmin. Other American aristocrats became successful politicians by reinventing themselves, some as an average Joe (George W. Bush), others as stars (John Kennedy), others as unapologetic sons of privilege (Teddy Roosevelt). Mr Kerry is none of these.

Even his friends and allies provide few clues to his personality. During his 19 years in the Senate, he has established few political friendships: he is close personally to John McCain, a fellow Vietnam vet, but their legislative records are far apart. His campaign team is neither a close-knit group of friends and advisers from his home state (like President Bush's), nor hired Washington hands (like Al Gore's when he ran for the presidency in 2000), nor a coterie of former advisers to ex-President Bill Clinton. Instead it consists of all three. They circle him like out-of-work actors round a casting director, wary of each other and greedy for his attention. By his friends, ye shall not know him. [...]

His stump speeches are eye-crossingly dull. [...]

For Mr Bush, America is always a force for good. The world, in his view, will benefit from the exercise of American power. At home, the country will thrive if entrepreneurial spirits are given free rein. The job of the president is to act on those principles. For Mr Kerry, the task is more downbeat and complex: to use the power of government to temper America's failings as well as to buttress its strengths.

It is not, in some ways, a compelling vision...

THE NEXT MIRACLE (via Tom Morin):

Africa Can Seize Share of IT Outsourcing Market (ECT News Syndication Desk, 07/18/04)

With the rising cost of local production and labor in developed countries like the United States, many companies, especially in the IT arena are looking to the developed world for answers -- and finding them. Countries like India have successfully positioned themselves as niche providers of outsourced labor in IT and are reaping the benefits. And, as analysts continue to predict a growth in this type of outsourcing, the opportunity is ripe for other developing countries to tap into this lucrative market. The question is: Can Africa capture a share of the offshore IT market? [...]

India has managed to create a niche for itself in this area, but it has not happened overnight. Amar Vakil, CEO of Lintas, a US-based management-consulting firm, and founder of the Foreign Investment Promotion Council, explains that there are specific factors that have enabled India to position itself in such a manner. These factors are predominantly a skilled workforce and appropriate infrastructure.

"Twenty to 25 years ago, India was an underdeveloped country. There was a brain drain of skilled labor to developed countries, where, for example there was a need for engineers," says Vakil. "Ten to 15 years ago, people like me, with similar backgrounds, decided to move back to India and there was a huge impetus from government to build world class communications networks. Government started dabbling with public-private partnerships, which now, after 10 or so years are proving very effective."

While this may not be easy to replicate, Vakil believes there are lessons to be learned from India and other countries like the Philippines which have attracted a strong outsource base. "The playing field is level. It is not India's game at all," he says. Although India was one of the first to position itself in this way, "there is an opportunity for other countries to tap into this potential".

Where India focused on information technology and software development, African countries wanting to tap into this opportunity will need to look at IP-enabled services.

Everdream founder and vice-president, Lyndon Rive, agrees that Africa can move into this arena. "Third world countries are getting educated enough to offer IT support, making them an untapped resource," he says. Everdream provides hosted IT software applications and services that protect, manage and support personal computers at medium and large organizations.

In fact, Rive says, many companies are moving away from India as the place to outsource, because of the labor churn that is taking place in India. And African countries have a whole lot going for them.

WINNING THE DRUG WAR (via Tom Morin):

Children to get jabs against drug addiction: Ministers consider vaccination scheme. Heroin, cocaine and nicotine targeted (Sophie Goodchild and Steve Bloomfield, 25 July 2004, Independent)

A radical scheme to vaccinate children against future drug addiction is being considered by ministers, The Independent on Sunday can reveal.

Under the plans, doctors would immunise children at risk of becoming smokers or drug users with an injection. The scheme could operate in a similar way to the current nationwide measles, mumps and rubella vaccination programme.

Childhood immunisation would provide adults with protection from the euphoria that is experienced by users, making drugs such as heroin and cocaine pointless to take. Such vaccinations are being developed by pharmaceutical companies and are due to hit the market within two years.

THE CAMPAIGN HASN'T EVEN STARTED (via Kevin Whited):

Adviser predicts unpleasant race (Jack Douglas Jr., Maria Recio and John Moritz, 7/25/04,
Dallas-Fort Worth Star-Telegram)

Karen Hughes, the presidential adviser and confidante, was in Fort Worth last week, helping raise campaign cash for U.S. Rep. Kay Granger. She predicted a "very unpleasant campaign" between President Bush and presumptive Democratic challenger John Kerry.

"There are people out there who really hate the president," Hughes told Republican supporters at the fund-raiser at the Maddox-Muse Building downtown.

To help out, Hughes said she plans to join the president full time on the campaign trail beginning Aug. 15.

Right now there's muttering about how the President hasn't outlined his agenda for the second term...yadda, yadda, yadda. But Mr. Bush knows that folks will be paying attention to his convention speech in a way they aren't paying attention to his typical stump speeches and it makes no sense to steal his own thunder. Folk may gripe that he's condensing his campaign down to just two months, but he knows that for most of us that's far too long, not too short.

And if you're looking for proof that he's not yet begun to fight, the fact that he's not even making Ms Hughes come back to work until August 15 suggests just how unhurried is his approach.

THIS LAND IS MY LAND (From Samizdata)

A funny animation. Enjoy.

SLOW LEARNERS:

US raising stakes over Darfur crisis: Some observers see the declaration of genocide as the first step toward putting US or UN 'boots on the ground.' (Abraham McLaughlin, 7/26/04, CS Monitor)

The US is poised to ratchet up efforts to halt the ethnic cleansing in Sudan's western Darfur region.

This week Washington is expected to introduce a UN Security Council resolution that threatens sanctions against Sudan if it doesn't disarm Arab militias who have been attacking, raping, and killing black villagers in Darfur. This comes after Congress took the extraordinary step Thursday of declaring Darfur's crisis a "genocide" - and pushing the White House to follow suit. Some observers see the declaration of genocide as the first step toward putting US or UN "boots on the ground." An American legal team is here now doing tent-to-tent surveys of Sudanese refugees to determine if genocide occurred.

The crisis is far from over. Officials with the UN refugee agency and other groups are preparing for an influx of 200,000 more refugees here, including people like Um Fahara Muhammad, a recent arrival in Chad. After months of hiding in Sudan's dry riverbeds from Arab militias, she says she and her four children were eating only bits of camel food. So they made an eight-day dash for the border, arriving in Chad around July 11. About 200 new refugees a week come to this border town - one sign Darfur's mayhem hasn't abated.

"At the current level of pressure, Sudan's government will only go so far," says John Prendergast of the International Crisis Group in Washington. The new US steps may be what is needed to get Khartoum to rein in the militias, he says. But short of added pressure, they won't, "because they don't believe Washington or the UN Security Council have the political backbone to take it any further."

THE STORY ISN'T ABOUT IRAQ:

Iraqi bishop: Western media 'backward-looking' (WorldNetDaily.com, July 24, 2004)

A bishop in Iraq's Chaldean church says the Western media has missed completely the story of the country's successes since the end of the Saddam regime, focusing instead on the "dark side."

"The Western press has been unjust towards Iraq. It has focused only on the dark side, on terrorism, killings, car bombs, the cruel images of decapitation, said Monsignor Rabban Al Qas, Chaldaean bishop of Amadiyah in northern Iraq, according to AsiaNews.

The "backward-looking press," for example, has not shown that "despite the political upheaval, the uncertainties and lack of security, schools reopened. Whether primary, high and secondary schools, or universities, the normal academic year ended as one would expect."

Under Saddam, Qas said, "there was only poverty." But now "the economy is slowly reviving thanks to what the government and the Americans are doing."

MORE GOERING THAN RIEFENSTAHL:

Poles call 9/11 film 'propaganda' (BBC, 7/24/04)

Polish MPs opposed to the war have urged people to see Moore's film Michael Moore's contentious film Fahrenheit 9/11 has opened in Poland, with some film critics likening it to totalitarian propaganda.

Gazeta Wyborcza reviewer Jacek Szczerba called the film a "foul pamphlet".

He said it was too biased to be called a documentary and was similar to work by Nazi propaganda director Leni Riefenstahl.

GOOD MONEY AFTER BAD:

A failure of imagination (Marc Erikson, 7/24/04, Asia Times)

The 9-11 Commission's report, made public this Thursday after being in the works for 20 months, had 46 more pages than the Senate's, but proves no more illuminating. The bipartisan panel (five Republicans, five Democrats) has revived the tired old proposal of creating the position of a cabinet-level official to oversee the nation's 15 or so intelligence agencies. To what effect or avail is anyone's guess. The report's one memorable phrase is that, "across the government, there were failures of imagination ..." Now, imagine that!

Meanwhile, Democratic presidential candidate Senator John Kerry has also gotten into the act. Apparently taking his cue from the 9-11 panel, he advocates the creation of a director to oversee all facets of US intelligence, wants to double spending for foreign clandestine operations, and calls for accelerating Federal Bureau of Investigation changes in handling of domestic intelligence.

While the Senate report for the most part is more boring than informative, it does contain some snippets worth noting, mainly Conclusion 6 (last sentence): "Most, if not all, of these problems [with prewar intelligence on Iraq] stem from a broken corporate culture and poor management, and will not be solved by additional funding and personnel" (my emphasis).

Senator Kerry may want to take note - as should the innumerable "former Central Intelligence Agency operative" talking heads on US television programs bewailing the (alleged) gross inadequacy in numbers of US human-intelligence resources (case officers, agents). The Senate report - rightly - points out that, "if an [intelligence] officer willing and able to take such an assignment [undercover activity in prewar Iraq] really is 'rare' at the CIA [as the Senate committee was told], the problem is less a question of resources than a need for dramatic changes in a risk averse corporate culture".

Well, indeed. And risk aversion is hardly the only point at issue. Risk aversion, whether in economic behavior (investing) or the intelligence trade, is a sign of intellectual calcification and of lack of creativity, self-confidence and moral conviction, and can't be fixed by throwing money or warm bodies at it. Much as in business, it's unconventional initiative informed by superior knowledge and insight, a contrarian attitude, and the ability to spring surprises and act decisively that succeed in intelligence.

GIVING WILLY LOMAN A RUN FOR HIS MONEY:

DAMAGE CONTROL: Voters need to believe that John Kerry can put the country back on track. (PHILIP GOUREVITCH, 2004-07-19, The New Yorker)

During the loneliest days of his campaign for the Democratic Presidential nomination, last December, when he was trailing Al Sharpton in some polls and reporters covering the race were placing bets that he’d drop out before the first voters were heard from in the Iowa caucuses, Senator John Kerry came to New York to address the Council on Foreign Relations. It was hard, then, to find anyone outside his immediate family who would speak with unaverted eyes of the likelihood of a Kerry comeback. Even among the Democrats in his audience, which was packed with soberly tailored politicians, diplomats, military officers, and captains of finance, industry, philanthropy, and think tanks, there was a sense of near-certitude—for some delightful, for others grim—that Howard Dean was unstoppable. As a governor, Dean had been spared having to take sides when the resolution authorizing President George W. Bush to invade Iraq was passed in both houses of Congress, in October of 2002, and he’d made himself a scourge to his rivals in the primary race who voted for it. He called them “Bush Lite.” Kerry’s deeply recessed eyes, small as an elephant’s, appeared more than usually narrowed in those days, and his smile, too, had tightened into the sort of skeptical wince that a cartoon dad displays to signal his endurance of adolescent noise. But he didn’t waste a word on Dean when he addressed the council.

Kerry had stayed up late for several nights, crafting his speech, and it was as succinct and cogent a summation of his case against the President as he has offered to date. “Simply put,” Kerry declared, “the Bush Administration has pursued the most arrogant, inept, reckless, and ideological foreign policy in modern history”:

In the wake of the September 11th terrorist attacks, the world rallied to the common cause of fighting terrorism. But President Bush has squandered that historic moment. . . . He rushed into battle—and he went almost alone. . . . I believed a year ago and I believe now that we had to hold Saddam Hussein accountable and that we needed to lead in that effort. But this Administration did it in the worst possible way: without the United Nations, without our allies, without a plan to win the peace. So we are left asking: How is it possible to liberate a country, depose a ruthless dictator who at least in the past had weapons of mass destruction, and convert a preordained success into a diplomatic fiasco? How is it possible to do what the Bush Administration has done in Iraq: win a great military victory yet make America weaker?

Kerry called on the Administration to “swallow its pride” and do what it should have done in the first place: bring in the U.N. and the “international community” to help America succeed instead of inviting failure alone.

THE HIGHWAY LEADS RIGHT:

Blair: my way or it’s the highway (James Cusick and Douglas Fraser, 7/25/04, Sunday Herald)

Five more years of even newer New Labour. That was the dream, and for some the nightmare, described yesterday by Tony Blair as he sounded the final death knell for old Labour.

The Prime Minister, emboldened by his latest escape from the conclusion of the Butler Report, used the national policy forum in Coventry to effectively demand from his party the ultimate in loyalty. His message was stark and stern. They had to “give up the luxury of criticism” and do it his way, the New Labour way. The alternative? He said there was none.

Blair, already offering his party an apology for what is to come during the next five years, said there was no choice. “I know that just occasionally we all wish it didn’t have to be like this. That we could have won as we were, that we could have governed without so many tough choices, that we could win again in a more confined and safe way. Unfortunately it is not true.”

Blair’s do-it-my-way message will have shocked many on the left who still believe a Labour government could deliver a socialist agenda.

HOW CAN YOU NOT HATE THE MAN WHO'S STRANGLING YOU (via Tom Morin):

Hatred or Hope?: America should not let loathing chart their political destiny. (Michael Novak, 7/23/04, National Review)

When one looks at Bush, and then at the hatred nurtured for him, it is very hard to grasp the connection. Why? Why do they hate him so?

There is something so innocent, direct, fresh-faced, open, Tom Sawyerish in George Bush's manner — something so western, Christian, decent, even kind. And there is such candor in his eyes and behavior that the ferocity of the hatred aimed at him seems completely out of proportion. The hatred is a suit that ill fits him.

Nevertheless, George W. Bush has been re-conceived and re-wrought into everything that the sophisticated Leftist absolutely hates about Americana: Its innocence. Its boyishness. Its Christianity. Its unpretentiousness. Its heedlessness of all the shibboleths the Left most highly values.

And, in addition, the president exercises unsuspected political skills. The man has actually won most of the political fights he's taken on. And he has turned the country in a far more Reaganite direction than anyone ever imagined under that anodyne term, "compassionate conservatism."

Personalizing Social Security? Cutting the teachers' unions out of total control of the schools? Supplanting the governmental plantation with private charitable initiatives, which actually show better success rates than the welfare state? The handwriting is on the wall, piercing through the dreams of the big-government Left, foretelling the end of the social-democratic illusion.

How did this hick have the nerve to be so radical in government — he who so barely won the election of 2000? (Stole it, the most bitter partisans still say, despite all the studies disproving it.) How did he have the nerve?

For some sense of just how revolutionary, check out this one, No Angels: Justifying the welfare state by demand is a sure way to keep it around forever. (Jonah Goldberg, 7/23/04, National Review)

Wade Horn, assistant secretary of Health and Human Services, responded to an item I posted in the Corner a few weeks ago. I wrote:

YUCK, YUCK, YUCK George W. Bush once again says absurd things about the role of government (nod to Andrew Sullivan):

"[T]he role of government is to stand there and say, 'We're going to help you.' The job of the federal government is to fund the providers who are actually making a difference."

He was talking about giving federal aid to couples with marriage counseling and the like. I know I've said this before, but if Bill Clinton had proposed spending piles of money on marriage counseling — other than for himself — conservatives would have screamed bloody murder about liberal social engineering and whatnot. Now, this might be a good policy compared to others, but it isn't a policy someone who believes in limited government would advocate. And beyond the specifics of the policy itself, it is not the role of the government to say "we're going to help you" — unless, say, the Chinese Red Army is encircling your town.

Horn's full response is here but the important part is this:

All good conservatives want smaller government. To achieve that end, we need a plan. Merely wishing it were so is not a plan. The fact is that children (and adults) living in healthy and stable marriages are less in need of government services. By offering marriage-education services — on a purely voluntary basis — to interested couples whereby they can develop the knowledge and skills necessary to form and sustain healthy marriages, we will help reduce the need for more intrusive government interventions later on.

Granted, this is new work. Nobody knows for sure whether it will succeed. But one thing is certain: Unless we can reverse the decline of marriage, demand for an ever-expanding welfare state will continue. The president's Healthy Marriage Initiative is no panacea, but it's a step in the right direction. [...]

[T]his is pretty much the first time I've heard this argument from the administration, never mind from a rank-and-file conservative. What I have heard are statements like the one above from President Bush in which he talks about how the government must leap when people are hurting and so forth.

And in a sense, Horn is making the exact same case as Bush. In his letter he says that without remedying the declining state of marriage, the "need" and the "demand" for an "ever-expanding welfare state" will increase or continue. According to this formulation — combined with the president's — the role of the government is to provide whatever services are "demanded" of it. And these services need not be demanded by a majority of voters but merely by that fraction of the whole that feels the "need" for them. After all, it was President Bush who said last Labor Day, "We have a responsibility that when somebody hurts, government has got to move."

I understand that Horn is on the side of the angels, but I hope he can see how radical a reformulation of conservative dogma this really is. The doctrine of limited government holds that government is, well, limited — that governmental neglect at the federal level is in fact benign. Conservative dogma holds that the people cannot develop the habits of the heart necessary to take care of themselves if they are being taken care of by the government. Moreover, a government that provides services simply because they are demanded is a government that reserves the right to take as much of my property and wealth as it deems necessary to meet the demands of somebody else.

I generally dislike arguments that warn of socialism these days. But if government is obliged to meet the demands of every needy person, what countervailing principle is there to protect the "un-needy" from a government in search of evermore resources to "help" the needy? Surely this limitation is more than pragmatic. Surely there's a principle that says there are some things the government can't do even if those things would be good and would help people. Or is the only limitation on government the boundaries of what it can get away with at a given moment?

In a sense, Horn has turned the "if men were angels" formulation on its head. We used to believe that since men are not angels, limited government is necessary. Now it seems to be that until men are made into angels — and by our own hand — unlimited government is required. After all, flawed men will make demands on the government when they are hurting and until those flaws and those pains are remedied, their demands must stir the government "to move."

Compassionate conservatism, like The Third Way or New Democratism, proceeds from a certain assumption that seems nearly undeniable in rational terms, though far Right and far Left must deny it for emotional reasons: the fact that the people demand a social safety net is not going away, however, the statist experiments of the 20th century rather conclusively demonstrate that unless market forces are brought to bear to the greatest extent possible that net can not survive not does it ultimately benefit people. The radical goal of the Left/Right synthesis then is essentially to trick people into providing for their own social security. This will demand something unacceptable to the Right: that government mandate to everyone that they participate in a wide variety of personal savings programs and that basic services be provided in order to prepare them for suufficiently productive lives that they can fund their own futures. It demands something equally unacceptable of the Left: that government welfare programs change from redistrubutionist to predominantly self-funded.

This does leave conservatism as Mr. Goldberg conceives it in tatters, but it is conservative in the most profound way: if successful it will giove every citizen, or the great bulk, a fiercely vested interest in the stability and productivity of his own society. Traditional conservatism has a reverence for property, but its greast flaw is that there are too few property holders for a democratic society to be much interested in protecting them. Make everyone a property holder and you make everyone conservative.

MORE:

It is far easier, as Burke and every other conservative has known, to instill a sense of the value of order in each citizen, and to encourage his sense of the true values of liberty when he has an overriding sense of holding a 'stake in society'.

HOW COULD THE GRAY LADY NOT BE IN THE BAG FOR THE FEMALE PARTY (via Matt Murphy):

Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper? (DANIEL OKRENT, 7/25/04, NY Times)

OF course it is.

The fattest file on my hard drive is jammed with letters from the disappointed, the dismayed and the irate who find in this newspaper a liberal bias that infects not just political coverage but a range of issues from abortion to zoology to the appointment of an admitted Democrat to be its watchdog. (That would be me.) By contrast, readers who attack The Times from the left - and there are plenty - generally confine their complaints to the paper's coverage of electoral politics and foreign policy.

I'll get to the politics-and-policy issues this fall (I want to watch the campaign coverage before I conclude anything), but for now my concern is the flammable stuff that ignites the right. These are the social issues: gay rights, gun control, abortion and environmental regulation, among others. And if you think The Times plays it down the middle on any of them, you've been reading the paper with your eyes closed.

But if you're examining the paper's coverage of these subjects from a perspective that is neither urban nor Northeastern nor culturally seen-it-all; if you are among the groups The Times treats as strange objects to be examined on a laboratory slide (devout Catholics, gun owners, Orthodox Jews, Texans); if your value system wouldn't wear well on a composite New York Times journalist, then a walk through this paper can make you feel you're traveling in a strange and forbidding world.

[...]

Times publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. doesn't think this walk through The Times is a tour of liberalism. He prefers to call the paper's viewpoint "urban." He says that the tumultuous, polyglot metropolitan environment The Times occupies means "We're less easily shocked," and that the paper reflects "a value system that recognizes the power of flexibility."

He's right; living in New York makes a lot of people think that way, and a lot of people who think that way find their way to New York (me, for one). The Times has chosen to be an unashamed product of the city whose name it bears, a condition magnified by the been-there-done-that irony afflicting too many journalists. Articles containing the word "postmodern" have appeared in The Times an average of four times a week this year - true fact! - and if that doesn't reflect a Manhattan sensibility, I'm Noam Chomsky.

But it's one thing to make the paper's pages a congenial home for editorial polemicists, conceptual artists, the fashion-forward or other like-minded souls (European papers, aligned with specific political parties, have been doing it for centuries), and quite another to tell only the side of the story your co-religionists wish to hear. I don't think it's intentional when The Times does this. But negligence doesn't have to be intentional.

THE EXCEPTIONAL NATION:

US Offers Citizenship To 7000 Ahiska Muslims: Several Ahiska Muslims packing to leave for the US (Damir Ahmed, July24, 2004, IslamOnline.net)

The United States has agreed to grant citizenship to 7, 000Ahiska Muslims who will be settled in Pennsylvania, reported a Russian newspaper on Friday, July23 .

The first 11 -strong batch of the Ahiska Muslims, living in the Russian province of Krasnodar, left for Geneva on Thursday, July22 , before flying to Philadelphia, reported Novie Izvestia. [...]

Earlier, Chingiz Neiman-zade, chairman of Vatan, a Meskheti Turks association based in Georgia, said the United States had offered to accept the Ahiska Muslims living in Krasnodar as immigrants.

"On February16 , the International Migration Organization began an information program in Krasnodar to explain the terms for the resettlement of the Ahiska Muslims in the U.S.," he told Chicago Tribune on Thursday, July22 .

"The immigrants will be provided with housing and furniture, they will be helped to learn the English language and to complete formalities needed for residence in the US, which is especially important, and have been promised life-long welfare allowances for pensioners and the disabled."

Ahiska Muslims were happy with the American offer.

"This decision marks a great change in our life", said Tepeshon Swanidze, leader of the Ahiska Muslim community in Russia.

"We thank the US administration for its humanitarian decision", he added.

THE UNEXPUNGABLE STAIN:

'Rising '44': Betraying Warsaw: RISING '44: The Battle for Warsaw By Norman Davies (CARLO D'ESTE, NY Times Book Review)

AUGUST 2004 will mark the 60th anniversary of the Warsaw uprising, when 40,000 members of the Polish underground Home Army spilled into the streets to liberate the city from its Nazi occupiers. The revolt was inspired in part by the belief that the Red Army would come to the aid of the rebels. Russian units had advanced to the eastern bank of the Vistula River and were within supporting distance of the Warsaw fighters, but once Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky, commander of the First Belarussian Front, declined to intervene, the Germans were freed not only to suppress the uprising but also to carry out appalling reprisals. Stalin would later dismiss the rebellion as the act of ''a gang of criminals.''

Norman Davies, a fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford, is the foremost historian of modern Poland. Of his previous books, ''God's Playground: A History of Poland'' is widely regarded as a landmark account. This new work, ''Rising '44,'' draws on a wealth of original material. Yet Davies says he is frustrated at how disappointingly little is available from either Russian or British archives. While Russian unwillingness to release documents (except selectively) is well known, there is no accounting for why 95 percent of the records of the British intelligence services during World War II have remained closed, with little prospect of their being opened in the future. The British penchant for secrecy 60 years after these events hardly seems justified, particularly since a vast majority of the participants are no longer alive.

In any case, ''Rising '44'' is much more than the story of the Warsaw uprising. It is one of the most savage indictments of Allied malfeasance yet leveled by a historian. Unsparing in his depictions of the slaughter of the Polish fighters and the destruction of their capital, Davies challenges the popular assumption that World War II was entirely the triumph of good over evil.

YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK