AN HONEST TO GOODNESS MIRACLE WORKED BY THE THIN BLUE LINE:

New York Cops: Still the Finest (Heather Mac Donald, Summer 2006, City Journal)

New York City has shattered criminology’s central myth, but criminologists remain in denial. Policing, they still insist, can do little to lower crime. Economic inequality, demographic trends, changing drug-use patterns—these determine crime levels, they say, not police tactics. Nevertheless, since 1994, New York City has enjoyed a crime drop unmatched in the rest of the country—indeed, unparalleled in history—and only Gotham’s revolutionary style of policing can explain it. Yet rather than flooding the city to study this paradigm-breaking phenomenon, most criminologists are busy looking the other way.

The dimensions of New York’s crime rout are breathtaking. From 1990 to 2000, four of the seven major felonies—homicide, robbery, burglary, and auto theft—dropped over 70 percent. Crime fell across the country during this period, but in New York it plummeted at twice the national average. By 2000, New York’s crime profile looked more like that of a small suburb than a big city, notes University of California sociologist Frank Zimring, whose forthcoming The Great American Crime Decline is the only major study so far that acknowledges the significance of the city’s crime turnaround. Gotham’s homicide rate in 2000 was half that of the big-city average; its robbery rate, which started out 50 percent higher than that of other big cities in 1990, was 10 percent below the average.

The national crime decline flattened out as the new century began. Some cities that were darlings of the media and the criminologists in the nineties have seen sharp increases in murder. Boston, lauded by the New York Times and others as the kinder, gentler corrective to New York’s allegedly overaggressive policing approach, has suffered its highest murder rate in a decade this year. Milwaukee and Memphis had double-digit homicide spikes in 2005. Philadelphia, Houston, San Francisco, and Kansas City are also seeing their nineties crime gains erode.

Not New York. From 2000 to 2005, the city’s crime rate fell another 30 percent. New York’s twenty-first-century experience is distinctive in the breadth and the depth of the continued decline. Even San Diego, the other favorite un–New York policing success story of the nineties, has not kept up with New York. While Gotham’s crime rate clocked in at 71 percent below its 1990 level in 2004, San Diego mustered a 55 percent decline. “Something qualitatively different is going on in New York,” says Zimring.

88:

The great jazz pianist, Hank Jones, turns 88 today...a fitting number for a piano player. Hank was the older brother of renowned jazzmen Thad (trumpet) and Elvin (drums), both of who predeceased their less-famous, but no less talented, big brother.

Jones was born in Pontiac, Michigan, and came out of a Detroit jazz scene than within a few years spawned such other influential players as Tommy Flanagan, Kenny Burrell, Milt Jackson and Pepper Adams. I heard Hank play on New Years Eve a few years ago, and he was still at the top of his game.

A few albums I recommend are Joe Lovano's recent Joyous Encounter, Live at Maybeck Recital Hall and Legends with Benny Carter. ( Of course, anything by his long-time working trio, The Great Jazz Trio (with Elvin on drums and Richard Davis on bass), is worth checking out.

He has a new album, Hank and Frank with Frank Wess, but I haven't heard it yet.

WE DO IRAN, ISRAEL DOES SYRIA AND IRAQ GETS SPLIT IN HALF:

When the devil dislikes the stink of brimstone (Spengler, 1 August 2006, Asia Times)

It's a bit like the devil disliking the stench of sulfur, but Iran's leaders now complain that the United States has thrown the Middle East into chaos in order to reshape the region. That is a man-bites-camel story. With the exception of the late Yasser Arafat, no one has wielded the weapon of instability with greater skill than Iran. Israel's disproportionate response to the July 12 Hezbollah provocation changed the rules of the game in the region. Whether the players have the presence of mind to exploit the new rules remains an open question...

Israel's strongest move on the chessboard would be a massive armored incursion into Lebanon to crush Hezbollah combined with limited strikes against Syria...

Washington's best move would be an ultimatum to Tehran with a deadline for dismantling its nuclear-weapons program, followed by aerial attacks in the event of non-compliance. Rather than engage the regime of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria, Washington should take the opportunity to destabilize it. Rather than attempt to hold together its Frankenstein monster in Iraq, it should partition the country...

THIS YANKEE IS TAKING THE SOUTH BY STORM:

RUDY, THE FRONT-RUNNER Cruising ahead of McCain (Ryan Sager, 25 July 2006, NY Post)

It's early in the game yet, but it's becoming undeniable: Rudy Giuliani will run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008 - as the clear front-runner...

But McCain would trounce Rudy in those states if people knew about his positions on abortion and gay rights (and his marital history), right? Wrong again. Strategic Vision CEO David Johnson told me of some "push polling" in Florida and Georgia - where his firm told voters about Rudy's positions and marital problems and about McCain's support for campaign-finance reform and working with Democrats against President Bush.

The effect on Rudy's numbers, Johnson said, "underwhelmed" his expectations significantly, merely putting the two candidates into a statistical dead heat - not launching the more conventionally conservative (at least on issues like abortion) McCain into the lead. "Some people who identify themselves as strong conservatives, even when we did do the push-poll questions in Georgia and Florida, were still more willing to go with Giuliani," Johnson said. "Strong, Christian conservatives."...

What about McCain's "crossover appeal"? Isn't he a better shot against Hillary? Nope. Pretty much every poll taken on the matter shows Rudy beating Sen. Clinton by a much bigger margin than McCain would. In May, a Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll showed Rudy with a nationwide nine-point lead over her; McCain, only a statistically insignificant 4 points. (And, in "blue" New York, where both Rudy and Hillary are known best, McCain loses to Hillary, as expected, while Rudy beats her in one of the most liberal states in the country - a state with 31 electoral votes.)...

"A lot of people don't particularly like McCain," Dr. Eddie Floyd, finance co-chairman of Bush's 2000 and '04 campaigns in South Carolina, told me the other day. He and other South Carolina GOP activists met with Giuliani recently. "We were very, very impressed with the mayor," he said. "When he explained his positions, they were not as far off as you would think."

JUSTICE ROBERTS: THE RIGHT MAN FOR THE JOB

Silence in the Court! Why are liberals urging that the Supreme Court do next to nothing? (Dahlia Lithwick, 24 July 2006, Slate)

It has become something of a vogue among liberal legal academics to draw an intellectual Maginot line between themselves and the landmark Supreme Court decisions of the 1960s and '70s. There is a deep sense of something—is it shame?—informing their views of those reckless Warren Court do-gooders and their well-meaning, slobbering efforts to protect women, minorities, and criminal defendants...

There is no sharper critic of the Supreme Court than the New Republic's Jeffrey Rosen, and there is no finer ambassador between the planet of legal academia and that of the popular media. That's why Rosen's newest offering, The Most Democratic Branch, is so radical. Following in the wake of Radicals in Robes, a call to judicial "minimalism" by University of Chicago Law School's brilliant Cass Sunstein, it gives both a body and a voice to all this progressive uneasiness. First, Rosen channels some of the most agonized liberal legal scholarship (Roe v. Wade was both badly decided and terrible for progressives; Brown v. Board of Education wasn't really all that central to the project of desegregation). Then he ties it all up with this neat prescriptive bow: Supreme Court justices, in order to do justice, should do almost nothing at all...

Rosen rejects the "romantic myth" of "antidemocratic courts protecting vulnerable minorities against tyrannical majorities." He contends that "the least effective decisions have been those in which courts unilaterally try to strike down laws in the name of a constitutional principle that is being actively and intensely contested by a majority of the American people." And then he urges that if the courts want to maintain "democratic legitimacy" they must become safe, cautious; forever lagging one step behind Congress and the public-opinion polls...

MORE (via Eugene Volokh):

ANTI-HERO (Richard A. Posner, 24 February 2003, The New Republic)

I met justice William Douglas, the longest-serving member of the Supreme Court, when I was clerking for Justice William Brennan. Douglas struck me as cold and brusque but charismatic--the most charismatic judge (well, the only charismatic judge) on the Court. Little did I know that this elderly gentleman (he was sixty-four when I was a law clerk) was having sex with his soon-to-be third wife in his Supreme Court office, that he was being stalked by his justifiably suspicious soon-to-be ex-wife, and that on one occasion he had to hide the wife-to-be in his closet in order to prevent the current wife from discovering her. This is just one of the gamy bits in Bruce Allen Murphy's riveting biography of one of the most unwholesome figures in modern American political history, a field with many contenders. Murphy explains that he had expected the biography to take six years to complete but that it actually took almost fifteen. For Douglas turned out to be a liar to rival Baron Munchausen, and a great deal o0f patient digging was required to reconstruct his true life story. One of his typical lies, not only repeated in a judicial opinion but inscribed on his tombstone in Arlington National Cemetery, was that he had been a soldier in World War I. Douglas was never in the Armed Forces. The lie metastasized: a book about Arlington National Cemetery, published in 1986, reports: "Refusing to allow his polio to keep him from fighting for his nation during World War I, Douglas enlisted in the United States Army and fought in Europe." He never had polio, either...

From my account, Murphy's book may seem a hatchet job, with its mountain of often prurient detail about Douglas's personal life and character. Not so. Murphy displays no animus toward Douglas. He does not try to extenuate Douglas's failings as a human being, or to excuse them, or even to explain them, but he greatly admires Douglas's civil liberties decisions, and (without his actually saying so) this admiration leads him to forgive Douglas's flaws of character. The only time his realism regarding Douglas's character falters is when he is discussing Felix Frankfurter. His portrayal of Frankfurter is relentlessly and excessively critical; he sees Frankfurter exclusively through Douglas's hostile eyes...

Murphy is right to separate the personal from the judicial. One can be a bad person and a good judge, just as one can be a good person and a bad judge. With biography and reportage becoming ever more candid and penetrating, we now know that a high percentage of successful and creative people are psychologically warped and morally challenged; and anyway, as Machiavelli recognized long ago, personal morality and political morality are not the same thing. Douglas was not a good judge (I will come back to this point), but this was not because he was a woman-chaser, a heavy drinker, a liar, and so on. It was because he did not like the job.

AFTER THIS, I'M ALMOST OPTIMISTIC ABOUT NOVEMBER:

Simmering Rage Within the GOP (David S. Broder, 27 July 2006, The Washington Post)

My weekend visitor was one of the founders of the postwar Republican Party in the South, one of those stubborn men who challenged the Democratic rule in his one-party state. He was conservative enough that in the great struggle for the 1952 nomination, his sympathies were with Sen. Robert Taft of Ohio, not Dwight D. Eisenhower.

He has lived long enough to see Republicans elected as senator and governor of his state and to see a Republican from the Sun Belt behemoth of Texas capture the White House. His profession won't let him speak with his name attached, but he is sadly disillusioned...

WHY WON'T BUSH AND BLAIR LET US DIE IN PEACE?

The tall story we Europeans now tell ourselves about Israel (Charles Moore, 29 July 2006, UK Daily Telegraph)

You could criticise Israel's recent attack for many things. Some argue that it is disproportionate, or too indiscriminate. Others think that it is ill-planned militarily. Others hold that it will give more power to extremists in the Arab world, and will hamper a wider peace settlement. These are all reasonable, though not necessarily correct positions to hold. But European discourse on the subject seems to have been overwhelmed by something else - a narrative, told most powerfully by the way television pictures are selected, that makes Israel out as a senseless, imperialist, mass-murdering, racist bully.

Not only is this analysis wrong - if the Israelis are such imperialists, why did they withdraw from Lebanon for six years, only returning when threatened once again? How many genocidal regimes do you know that have a free press and free elections? - it is also morally imbecilic...

It is as if, having relinquished power, we Europeans now wish our own powerlessness upon the rest of the world.

REAL AMERICANS DON'T DO NUANCE

Pause Celebre (Trevor Butterworth, 17 September 2005, Financial Times)

"You're kidding," said Ann Keatings, an applied linguist, as she absorbed the news I had brought from the US, where I have lived for the past 12 years: Americans see the semicolon as punctuation's axis of evil. Or at least many of them do. "But I like semicolons," she protested, "they allow a writer to go further." Trevor McGuinness, a business manager, was equally incredulous. "Hazlitt," he said, smacking the table indignantly, "look at Hazlitt!" Had midnight been closer and the bottle emptier, we might have taken him literally; but the point still floated within the grasp of sober minds: if so great a prose stylist as William Hazlitt had embraced the semicolon, then surely we could too?...

Big deal or not, there is really only one use of the semicolon that is "more or less mandated", says Ben Yagoda, professor of English at the University of Delaware and author of About Town, a monumental account of The New Yorker magazine (whose history is marked by fractious debates over the placement of commas). And that is to separate series elements containing commas (for example, "The cities represented were Albany, New York; Wilmington, Delaware; and Selma, Alabama). The other principal uses, says Yagoda, are discretionary: "That is I might, with total grammatical correctness and without changing my meaning in the slightest, choose any one of the following: 1. 'The book under review is utter hogwash; and that is why it is worth examining.' 2. 'The book under review is utter hogwash, and that is why it is worth examining.' 3. 'The book under review is utter hogwash; that is why it is worth examining.' 4. 'The book under review is utter hogwash. That is why it is worth examining.'" Deciding which of the four to choose is strictly a matter of sound and rhythm, says Yagoda - that is to say, personal style. "Writers who like (consciously or unconsciously) to stop and pause, and/or who are under the influence of Hemingway, choose 4. Those who like balanced rhythms might choose 3. Those aiming for a 'transparent' style might choose 2. And those who are a little bit enamoured with the sound of their own voice might choose 1."...

Style, as F.L. Lucas observed through pages larded with semicolons, "is a means by which a human being gains contact with others; it is personality clothed in words, character embodied in speech." And surely there is something brutish in being assaulted by wave after wave of fact through prose that has the unyielding rhythm and cadence of a machine gun. That, in the end, is what rattled everyone in Termon House on New Year's Eve: the storm rolling in from the west was figurative; the hyperpower at the gate was full of passionate intensity, and it did not do nuance.

THAT BITCH:

'The Putting of First Things First': The revival of the romance of the antiwar left is a potential disaster for the Democrats. It's what gave the world Richard Nixon in 1968. (Jonathan Alter, 8/07/06, Newsweek)

The same Democrats who are justifiably angry with Lieberman for not holding Bush accountable are harming efforts to, well, hold Bush accountable.

Lieberman's problems began long before he was kissed by President Bush at last year's State of the Union. With his Senate seat safe, he didn't have to fight in 2000. He went easier on Dick Cheney in their vice presidential debate than he did a few weeks back against fellow Democrat Lamont. During the Florida recount, he made a point of favoring military absentee ballots likely to be Republican. Lieberman has voted 90 percent of the time with the Democrats—but his first impulse is often to find fault with them. His 2004 run for the White House was better known for its attacks on fellow Democrats than on the incumbent. He approved of Washington intervention in the Terri Schiavo case. On Iraq, he buys the GOP argument that equates criticism of the commander in chief with hurting the troops, which means no real oversight. (Has he forgotten the Truman Committee during World War II?) The duty of the opposition is to oppose. [...]

The bloggers who have noisily intervened deny they're interested in ideological purity. They point to their support in Senate races for pro-life candidates. But on Iraq, the liberal blogs brook no dissent. Not that it matters in Connecticut. If Lamont wins, only the laziest analysts can attribute it to the Netroots. Daily Kos is not exactly Topic A in the diners and union halls of the Nutmeg State.

But if the blogs aren't a force on the ground, they are becoming a powerful factor in directing the passions (and pocketbooks) of far-flung Democratic activists. They're helping fuel a collective version of what shrinks call "projection," where the anger of Democrats at Bush is projected on a handy target, in this case Lieberman. But in doing so, they have neglected what FDR called "the putting of first things first." Job one for Democrats is identifying which Republican House incumbents are vulnerable in their own states and directing all available energy against them. Savaging fellow Democrats (except those who cannot win) should come after taking control, not before.

MAKING THE PLANES RUN ON TIME:

Somalia Has 1st Commercial Flight in Years: Somalia Has First Commercial Flight in Decade; Prime Minister Survives No-Confidence Vote (MOHAMED SHEIKH, 7/31/06, The Associated Press)

The first commercial flight in a decade departed Mogadishu's newly reopened international airport Sunday, demonstrating how Islamic militants have pacified the once-anarchic capital and much of southern Somalia.

Local airlines had been operating from private airstrips outside the capital.

Now, Islamic militiamen are guarding the airport for commercial passengers, said Sheik Muqtar Robow, deputy defense chief for the Islamic group.

"This is a historic flight for me," passenger Hawa Abdi Hussein said before boarding the Somalia-based Jubba Airways plane to the United Arab Emirates. "I think we at last gained peace and security."

WHAT'S A WORD FOR LESS THAN GENEROUS?

Romney apologizes for use of expression: To some, `tar baby' is racial pejorative (David Abel, Boston Globe, 7/31/06)

Governor Mitt Romney yesterday apologized for using the expression "tar baby" -- a phrase some consider a racial epithet -- among comments he made at a political gathering in Iowa over the weekend.

"The governor was describing a sticky situation," said Eric Fehrnstrom, the governor's spokesman. ``He was unaware that some people find the term objectionable, and he's sorry if anyone was offended."...

"The best thing for me to do politically is stay away from the Big Dig -- just get as far away from that tar baby as I possibly can," he said in answer to a question from the audience.

The expression "tar baby" has had different meanings over the years.

A definition from Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary traces the expression to the tar baby that trapped Br'er Rabbit in an Uncle Remus story by Joel Chandler Harris, which became popular in the 19th century. The dictionary now defines the expression as "something from which it is nearly impossible to extricate oneself."

But it also has been used as a pejorative term for dark-skinned blacks....

As for Romney's use of the expression, Pastor William E. Dickerson of the Greater Love Tabernacle in Dorchester called it ``a poor choice of words."

"There are some words that we should eradicate from our vocabulary, so we don't use them inappropriately," he said. "Saying someone is a 'tar baby' is like calling them the black sheep of the family. Kids with darker skin were often teased, and they would cringe at hearing it. That's why we should avoid it, especially a public servant."

A CRUSADE, NOT AN EMPIRE:

America: a democracy and an empire (HIROAKI SATO, 7/31/06, Japan Times)

In April 1789, Washington became president of the U.S. in New York City, the first capital of the newly formed union, but evidently he wasn't happy with the place. So, "was I to commence my career of life anew," he wrote, he would propose a tract of land on the Potomac River as the site for "the seat of the Empire."

When you think of it, the concept of the new land as empire may not really have been a conceit. The U.S. was born of the final phase of the Seven Years' War, the clash for global hegemony between the greatest European powers of the day, Britain and France. Washington fought in it on the British side, naturally.

As soon as the republic got its act together, it started territorial expansion. One bit of irony in this regard is that John Quincy Adams, who in 1821 famously proclaimed his nation would not go overseas to spread the gospel of democracy ("She goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy"), helped create two years later the Monroe Doctrine, which would lead to some of the more destructive interventions in the belief that South America was the backyard of the U.S.

In 1845, journalist John O'Sullivan declared it was "the common duty of Patriotism" to strive for "the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent." He did this to support the annexation of Texas even as he lined up California for the next step in his overspreading plan for America. The American-initiated war with Mexico had started a year before.

Only eight years later, Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry would be sent to Japan to pry the country open under the threat of guns. Little wonder that Edgar Allan Poe, in one of his last stories, "The Domain of Arnheim," casually called the U.S. "the empire."

In 1935, the editors of Fortune magazine took it upon themselves to tell their readers what the U.S. has been all about. "It is generally supposed that the American military ideal is peace," they wrote. "But for this high-school classic, the U.S. Army, since 1776, has filched more square miles of the earth by sheer military conquest than any army in the world, except only that of Great Britain. And as between Great Britain and the U.S. it has been a close race, Britain having conquered something over 3,500,000 square miles (9 million square km) since that date, and the U.S. (if one includes wresting the Louisiana Purchase from the Indians) something over 3,100,000."

This observation necessarily reminds me of the American writer Helen Mears' 1948 book, "Mirror for Americans." Mears, who was briefly in Japan on the U.S. commission to advise the Japanese government on labor issues after the war, was as clear-eyed as the Fortune editors. The central pretext for the Occupation was the proposition that the Japanese were "inherently militaristic and expansionist," but the West's postwar condemnation of Japan as a warmonger nonpareil was, Mears wrote, "a perfect illustration of respectable people smashing their own glass houses."

NO NEED TO WORRY ABOUT BOMBERS...:

Schools told it's no longer necessary to teach right from wrong (David Charter, 7/31/06, Times of London)

SCHOOLS would no longer be required to teach children the difference between right and wrong under plans to revise the core aims of the National Curriculum.

Instead, under a new wording that reflects a world of relative rather than absolute values, teachers would be asked to encourage pupils to develop “secure values and beliefs”.

The draft also purges references to promoting leadership skills and deletes the requirement to teach children about Britain’s cultural heritage.

Ministers have asked for the curriculum’s aims to be slimmed down to give schools more flexibility in the way they teach pupils aged 11 to 14.

THE END WON'T BE SKIPPING STATES:

A baffling ballot paper is the only hitch in first free election (Jonathan Clayton in Kinshasa and Tristan McConnell in Bukavu, 7/31/06, Times of London)

In scenes repeated across this huge, impoverished country, millions of people waited patiently to vote in the first free elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo in more than forty years, an event organised by the United Nations and monitored by thousands of international observers.

In the far eastern province of South Kivu, the scene of some of the latest war’s worst fighting, eager voters braved the morning chill to join queues outside rural polling stations. About four million people died in the 1998-2003 civil war, making it the world’s costliest conflict since the Second World War.

At Tubimbi primary school the sun rising over the surrounding hills illuminated hundreds of villagers standing in neat lines, the women wrapped in brightly coloured printed fabric, babies strapped to their backs. Pascalina Faida, 18, had queued since 4am. She said: “I want my country to be better and to be peaceful so I will vote.”

SLOW IS GOOD, WHEN INEVITABLE:

First Saudi tabloid survives closure and arrest (Andrew Hammond, July 24, 2006, Reuters)

The fact that he still has a newspaper to edit is proof enough to Khalaf Alharbi that the ceiling of freedom in ultraconservative Saudi Arabia is rising.

His mischievous tabloid Shams, Arabic for Sun, has endured suspension, the arrest of one of its journalists and the carping of Islamist hard-liners who say it embodies the Westernized future they fear Saudi Arabia will face if liberals get their way.

But with a daily print-run of nearly 70,000, and recent permission to print inside the oil-producing kingdom instead of in neighboring Bahrain, Alharbi says the paper for young people aims to set a new standard after its first turbulent six months. [...]

Saudi Arabia is one of the world's most conservative societies, an absolute monarchy which governs through a strict interpretation of sharia, Islamic law. When King Abdullah came to power last year, he promised progress on a range of political, social and economic reforms.

The appearance of Saudi Arabia's first tabloid last December has been seen as another sign of slow, but inevitable, change.

The paper has published sensational features about forced marriage for young girls, premarital relationships, unemployment among women, an official ban on school sports for girls and arbitrary detention by police.

And it managed to survive its most daring act of all -- publishing some of the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad that provoked a global outcry among Muslims earlier this year.

The paper was shut down after running the caricatures, but the Ministry of Information, seen as a progressive force in Saudi Arabia under Minister Iyad Madani, allowed it to return a few weeks later, under its new editor Alharbi, a short-story author who had previously written in Gulf newspapers.

INVITE PITCH:

‘Bingo’ is special to Jones: Actor thinks movie about black ballplayers was misunderstood. (RAYMOND DOSWELL, Jul. 30, 2006, The Kansas City Star)

[T[he role that started [James Earl Jones's] run of baseball films was Leon Carter — the intellectual, nonconformist, power-hitting catcher in “The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings,” which debuted 30 years ago.

In a phone interview from an office near his upstate New York home, Jones, 75, reflected on the irony of acting in films such as “Bingo Long” and “The Great White Hope,” where he plays a prizefighter.

“I’m 6-1 and know nothing about sports,” Jones said. “I’m flat-footed. I couldn’t hit a ball. I had to fake hitting a ball.”

As a child, his exposure to baseball came from listening to a radio connected to a car battery. His grandfather was a fan of Kansas City Monarchs pitcher Satchel Paige.

“(Paige) was an icon in our family,” Jones said. “It had something to do with style, I think, too, which I think we tried to capture in ‘Bingo Long.’ ”

“Bingo Long” came to the screen when young Hollywood producer Rob Cohen convinced Motown Records founder Barry Gordy to invest in rights and writers fees to turn author William Brashler’s gritty baseball novel, of the same title, into a feature film. Brashler fictionalized segregated America in 1939 through the lens of a rebellious black exhibition baseball team. They work through various misadventures — battling bad luck and racism with athletic skill and humor — while barnstorming the country to escape an oppressive owner from the Negro Leagues.

Since the late 1800s, there had been a tradition of players or teams who added vaudevillelike antics to their performances. The All-Stars on screen were patterned more after the Indianapolis Clowns of the later Negro Leagues than the Kansas City Monarchs or the Homestead Grays, who played straight baseball. The cast of “Bingo Long” even featured some old Clowns players.

“They took the game of baseball seriously, but they took life lightly and they would entertain people,” Jones said about the All-Stars. “They’d use midgets, they’d use one-armed players. They would do anything to draw a crowd.”

But the film wasn’t a big box-office draw, and later that summer it had to compete against another baseball movie, “The Bad News Bears.” The negative critiques of “Bingo Long” were disappointing to Jones.

“Even the liberal press was upset because Cohen and his group of actors spent all their time and money making a ‘comedy’ when you had a great tragedy you could tell about the Negro players,” Jones said. “Well, we didn’t set out to make a tragedy, but that’s what they wanted in that year.”

RESPONSIBILITY SOCIETY:

The Insanity Defense Goes Back on Trial (MORRIS B. HOFFMAN and STEPHEN J. MORSE, 7/30/06, NY Times)

For centuries we have had a rough idea of the categories of people whom we should not hold criminally responsible. Early cases labeled them “the juvenile, possessed or insane.” The idea was that only people capable of understanding and abiding by the rules of the social contract may justly be declared criminally responsible for their breaches. Someone who genuinely believes he has heard God’s voice command him to kill another does not deserve blame and punishment, because he lacks the ability to reason about the moral quality of his action. [...]

Once we agree that there may be some small percentage of people whose moral cognition is seriously disordered, how can the law identify those people in a way that will not allow the materialism of science to expand the definitions of excusing conditions to include all criminals? That is, if paranoid schizophrenia can provide part of the basis to excuse some criminal acts, why not bipolar disorder, or being angry, or having a bad day, or just being a jerk? After all, a large number of factors over which we have no rational control cause each of us to be the way we are.

The short answer is that we should recognize that the criteria for responsibility — intentionality and moral capacity — are social and legal concepts, not scientific, medical or psychiatric ones. Neither behavioral science nor neuroscience has demonstrated that we are automatons who lack the capacity for rational moral evaluation, even though we sometimes don’t use it. Some people suffer from mental disorder and some do not; some people form intentions and some do not. Most people are responsible, but some are not.

Punishing the deserving wrongdoers among us — those who intentionally violate the criminal law and are cognitively unimpaired — takes people seriously as moral agents and lies at the heart of what being civilized is all about. But being civilized also means not punishing those whom we deem morally impaired by mental disorder. Convicting and punishing a defendant who genuinely believed that God commanded him to kill is not unscientific, it is immoral and unjust.

We should be skeptical about claims of non-responsibility. But, if insanity-defense tests are interpreted sensibly to excuse people who genuinely lacked the ability to reason morally at the time of the crime, and expert testimony is treated with appropriate caution, the criminal justice system can reasonably decide whom to blame and punish.

NOTHING TO OFFER BUT HATE ITSELF:

Lieberman's Eroding Base: Many Democratic Faithful Support a Political Newcomer Rather Than the Senator Who Has Not Toed Party Line (Shailagh Murray, 7/30/06, Washington Post)

[A]n insurgency fueled by liberal anger over the senator's support for the Iraq war, coupled with an agile, well-financed campaign by Lamont that capitalizes on that discontent, is threatening to topple Lieberman in the Aug. 8 Connecticut Democratic primary. If he loses, Lieberman is likely to run as an independent in November, drawing on his popularity with Republicans and unaffiliated voters. Yet the stunning turnabout is a cautionary tale of how quickly a political career can unravel. [...]

In an editorial published today, the New York Times endorsed Lamont over Lieberman, arguing that the senator had offered the nation a "warped version of bipartisanship" by supporting Bush on national security.

Lieberman is accustomed to the rough and tumble of politics, and can be combative in his own defense, as he showed during a recent debate. But he said he has been jarred by the intensity of Democratic anger toward Bush -- and, by extension, toward him. Liberal bloggers have called Lieberman a "liar" and a "weasel."

"It's not just opposition to Bush," he said. "The hatred is so deep."

A PERFECT TIME FOR HAMAS TO CAVE:

Hezbollah fight shifts spotlight from Gaza (Joshua Mitnick, 7/30/06, THE WASHINGTON TIMES)

To the chagrin of many Palestinians, a resolution to the Gaza clashes often is linked to a cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hezbollah.

"The Palestinians have to prove that they are not in the same basket and that they should not be punished for the Lebanese cause," said Omar Shaban, a Gaza-based political analyst.

"We have our own political agenda. We need a political solution. What is going on in Lebanon is different. Hezbollah has no political agenda. Lebanon is not occupied by Israel."

AMERICAN MUSIC:

The life of a talent-spotter who left his mark on both jazz and rock-and-roll. (Jonathan Yardley, July 30, 2006, Washington Post)

Late in the evening of July 7, 1957, Count Basie and his orchestra took the stage to wrap up that year's Newport Jazz Festival. The all-black band was introduced by a tall, skinny, crew-cut white guy with a voice so plummy as to border on unintentional self-parody. I was there and remember it vividly, but anybody can hear it on the album "Basie at Newport," and to this day almost everybody is likely to agree that the contrast between the Manhattanite voice and the down-home Kansas City band is just about too exquisitely hilarious to be true.

But it was, and is, no joke. The speaker was John Hammond, and he deserved to be there. Though little-known beyond the innermost circles of American popular music, Hammond was a man of almost incalculable influence on that music. Twenty years earlier, after hearing the Basie band on the radio -- the band was celebrated in Kansas City but otherwise obscure -- Hammond had driven to Missouri from New York specifically to offer his services as producer, booker and just about everything else, not for the money it might make for him but because he believed Basie and his band deserved and must be presented to a larger audience. For this Basie remained grateful ever after, which is why he was no doubt delighted to be led onstage in Newport by his old benefactor and friend.

It could be said that Hammond spent almost his entire life leading musicians onstage. Born in December 1910 into a wealthy New York family -- his mother was a Vanderbilt -- Hammond rarely had more than fleeting financial worries throughout his 76-year life and was free to concentrate his very considerable energies on the two causes with which he was obsessed: American popular music, jazz most particularly, and civil rights for African Americans. As a boy he was steered toward classical music by his mother, but he was far more interested in the music sung and played by the servants, many of whom were black. Dunstan Prial writes:

"As Hammond observed in his memoirs, as well as in numerous interviews, he sensed from an early age that there was a reason this music was as deeply passionate as it was. It was uniquely American music, written by and played for people who had known the harsher realities of life firsthand. In particular, it was music by and for people whose skin color kept them perpetually at the bottom rung of American society. Listening to this music helped awaken Hammond to the vast class differences that separated him from the servants in the basement."

Hammond was barely out of knee-pants before he started venturing to Harlem, where musicians and nightclub operators seem to have adopted him as an odd but agreeable mascot.

WHY CONSERVATIVES ARE DEMOCRATS AND LIBERALS AREN'T

Fridays with Florence: Gay Marriage — a Dead Cert (Florence King, National Review, 6/3/96) (reprinted at NRO, 3/26/04)

The major brainwashing, soon to begin, will proceed as follows.

Magazines will run cover stories that thinking Americans — all 17 of us — recognize as that brand of persuasion called "nibbled to death by a duck." Time does "Debating Same-Sex Marriage" and Newsweek does "Rethinking Gay Marriage." Lofty opinion journals weigh in with "A Symposium on," "In Defense of," and "Voices from," while Parade does "If They Say 'I Do' . . . Will We Say 'You Can't?'" Cover art consists of a pair of wedding rings sporting identical biological signs: two arrow-shooting circles for men, two mirror-handle circles for women. We will start seeing these logos in our sleep.

Next, the pundits. Molly Ivins writes "Bubba, Hold Yore Peace." Ellen Goodman waxes earnest about tradition versus change in "Something Old, Something New," Ruth Shalit writes something borrowed, and Richard Cohen, Victim America's identifier-in-chief, does a column called "We're All Single." Arianna Huffington will figure out a compassionate way to be against gay marriage, but most conservatives stand to fare badly in this debate. Will Durant wrote, "When religion submits to reason it begins to die." In a media-saturated society teeming with talk-show producers casting dragnets over think tanks, proponents of gay marriage win merely by being scheduled. By contrast, the conservative instinctively recoils from analyzing eternal verities. He may know the words to legal arguments such as "the need to show a compelling state interest, etc." but he doesn't know the tune. In the final analysis he believes in the sanctity of marriage "just because."

In the end, though, she is too pessimistic, as misanthropes tend to be when making predictions about America. Not that she is wrong about conservatives' inability to argue with liberals on the liberals' terms. But, where ever Americans get to vote on their inchoate understanding of the world, gay marriage is stymied. Naturally, the left wants these decisions taken away from the forum in which they lose -- the voting booth -- and sent to the forum in which they win -- the media and the courts. Voting, however, is slowly but surely making the even the courts uncongenial. The liberals have been reduced to seeking victory in a handful of state courts, and even there they have lost. It is likely no coincidence that judges never face the electorate in the only state where the left has won on gay marriage and that, in that state, the left is trying its best to make sure that gay marriage never makes the ballot.

So the left is, more and more, turning to a new tactic. We are all agreed Americans must be free from any governmental compulsion to belong to a specific religion, or even to believe in any god at all. Now the left argues that no policy is legitimate if it is supported by a religious impulse. This is a complete break from the past, when all the great campaigns for American progress -- independence, abolition, robust militarism, temperance and civil rights -- were expressly and unabashedly religious.

This nonsense has already made in-roads. In its Lawrence decision striking down anti-sodomy laws and in the Goodridge decision requiring gay marriage, the Supreme Court and the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court have held that morality is not, in and of itself, a rational basis for any law. On the one hand, this might seem clearly true -- morality makes no pretense of rationality. On the other hand, "rational" is in this instance a term of art and no law is within the power of the state unless rationally related to a legitimate state end. In other words, it is beyond the scope of the legislature or, at least at the state level, the people to adopt a law simply because it is moral. The law is now expressly amoral.

That rationality requires the law to be amoral is, to the conservative, non-sense. Taken as a whole, only the moral society is rational. An amoral society would be an impoverished dictatorship; if no person could trust another and neither the citizen nor the government could rely on the other, civil society would be dead. The best we could hope for would be tribalism or sectarianism such as we've seen in Lebanon and Somalia. The same result would come if the legislature weren't prohibited, by the people, from passing immoral laws. In a successful society, morality is both a necessary and sufficient basis for law. That is the only rational conclusion that can be drawn, regardless of whether every jot and tittle of our moral code can be justified rationally.

WHEN CARETAKERS ARE EXECUTIONERS A BEATING OR TWO SEEMS REASONABLE:

Secrets & lies: The case of Brooke Astor highlights concerns of elder abuse in the city (GINA SALAMONE, 7/30/06, NY Daily News)

Accusations that Brooke Astor is being mistreated by her son, acting as her caretaker, have shocked New Yorkers, but the beloved philanthropist's situation is far from unique.

Up to 50,000 seniors in the city are believed to be suffering through some form of abuse each year, according to the Department for the Aging. And most of these cases are never brought to light.

One woman, who we'll call Beth to protect her identity, was physically attacked for two years and psychologically abused for five years by a live-in family member. It was only after he put her in the hospital that she decided it had to stop.

He punched her all over her body on that occasion, and she nearly passed out from the blows.

"Up until that time I hadn't told anybody," Beth says. "Then I realized either I did something about it or he was going to kill me - by mistake. And I don't want to die."

THE GOSPEL OF ST. PEAT (via Tom Corcoran):

Ancient Book of Psalms Unearthed in Irish Bog (Shawn Pogatchnik, July 26, 2006, Associated Press)

Irish archaeologists Tuesday heralded the discovery of an ancient book of psalms by a construction worker who spotted something while working in a bog.

The approximately 20-page book has been dated to 800-1000 A.D. Trinity College manuscripts expert Bernard Meehan said it was the first discovery of an Irish early medieval document in two centuries.

"This is really a miracle find," said Pat Wallace, director of the National Museum of Ireland.

"There's two sets of odds that make this discovery really way out. First of all, it's unlikely that something this fragile could survive being buried in a bog at all, and then for it to be unearthed and spotted before it was destroyed is incalculably more amazing."

MY, WHAT A SMALL BEAK YOU HAVE, GRANDMA:

So Big and Healthy Grandpa Wouldn’t Even Know You (GINA KOLATA, 7/30/06, NY Times)

The Keller family illustrates what may prove to be one of the most striking shifts in human existence — a change from small, relatively weak and sickly people to humans who are so big and robust that their ancestors seem almost unrecognizable.

New research from around the world has begun to reveal a picture of humans today that is so different from what it was in the past that scientists say they are startled. Over the past 100 years, says one researcher, Robert W. Fogel of the University of Chicago, humans in the industrialized world have undergone “a form of evolution that is unique not only to humankind, but unique among the 7,000 or so generations of humans who have ever inhabited the earth.”

The difference does not involve changes in genes, as far as is known, but changes in the human form. It shows up in several ways, from those that are well known and almost taken for granted, like greater heights and longer lives, to ones that are emerging only from comparisons of health records.

The biggest surprise emerging from the new studies is that many chronic ailments like heart disease, lung disease and arthritis are occurring an average of 10 to 25 years later than they used to. There is also less disability among older people today, according to a federal study that directly measures it. And that is not just because medical treatments like cataract surgery keep people functioning. Human bodies are simply not breaking down the way they did before.

Even the human mind seems improved. The average I.Q. has been increasing for decades, and at least one study found that a person’s chances of having dementia in old age appeared to have fallen in recent years.

The proposed reasons are as unexpected as the changes themselves. Improved medical care is only part of the explanation; studies suggest that the effects seem to have been set in motion by events early in life, even in the womb, that show up in middle and old age.

“What happens before the age of 2 has a permanent, lasting effect on your health, and that includes aging,” said Dr. David J. P. Barker, a professor of medicine at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland and a professor of epidemiology at the University of Southampton in England.

Each event can touch off others. Less cardiovascular disease, for example, can mean less dementia in old age. The reason is that cardiovascular disease can precipitate mini-strokes, which can cause dementia. Cardiovascular disease is also a suspected risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease.

The effects are not just in the United States. Large and careful studies from Finland, Britain, France, Sweden and the Netherlands all confirm that the same things have happened there; they are also beginning to show up in the underdeveloped world.

Of course, there were people in previous generations who lived long and healthy lives, and there are people today whose lives are cut short by disease or who suffer for years with chronic ailments. But on average, the changes, researchers say, are huge.

Even more obvious differences surprise scientists by the extent of the change.

IF IT'S A QUESTION OF REPUBLICAN LIBERTY, THEY'RE TOAST:

Gay-marriage advocates grapple with their next course of action (Lornet Turnbull, 7/30/06, Seattle Times)

Like civil-rights crusaders of the 1960s, champions of gay rights have long looked to the courts to grant them what they believed they couldn't get elsewhere.

Judges, they believed, are charged with righting historic wrongs and delivering pure justice in a way voters with their own biases and the lawmakers beholden to them often would not.

And, indeed, the landmark civil-rights rulings of the past century bear them out: Brown v. Board of Education, which ordered school desegregation, and Loving v. Virginia, which later struck down laws banning interracial marriages.

But a string of recent court decisions, including last week's 5-4 Washington Supreme Court ruling that upheld the state's ban on same-sex marriages, suggests the judicial path may have failed them and that justices who have found themselves pilloried as activists will not deliver full salvation for gays after all.

Taken together, the decisions represent a body of case law that might make following Massachusetts' lead in allowing same-sex marriage that much more difficult for the handful of states still weighing the question.

Gays are demanding that we violate those religious tenets, privilege immorality and forget about our ideals.

BURYING ELEPHANTS:

The Iranian elephant in the room: Whether or not Tehran actually ordered its Hezbollah allies to attack Israel, the Shiite regime is a major player in the conflict. Too bad Washington refuses to negotiate. (OLIVIA WARD, Jul. 30, 2006, Toronto Star)

Whatever the nature of Iran's involvement in the current crisis, says Ali Ansari, an associate professor at University of St. Andrews in Scotland, the major questions are whether it will be the winner or loser when the crisis is over and whether the shaky balance of power in the Middle East will be disturbed.

"Hezbollah was always Iran's deterrent force against Israel," says Ansari, author of Confronting Iran: The Failure of American Foreign Policy and the Next Great Conflict in the Middle East.

"If Hezbollah is strengthened by the conflict, Iran will come out of it better and the Sunnis in the region will be terrified. But if Israel weakens Hezbollah, Iran could also be strategically weakened."

In spite of its public belligerence, Ansari says, Tehran wants to present itself as a peacemaker.

Holding talks with Washington might help defuse both the Lebanon crisis and the nuclear standoff, but the Bush administration has declared Iran part of the "axis of evil" and refuses all contact with its government.

"The problem with Iran goes much deeper than the current crises," says Ansari.

"It has to do with decades of suspicion and misconceptions between Washington and Tehran.

"Now, there is an absurd situation with senior diplomats saying Iran and Syria are responsible for the conflict in Lebanon, but refusing to talk to either of them.

Ansari argues that Iran's image in the region has been inflated by Western blunders rather than by Tehran's shrewdness.

"Iran's successes are the result of our incompetence," he says. " It is the elephant in the room, but not for the reasons we think."

WHAT'S ONE MORE REBUILD:

THE FALL, RISE & FALL OF BEIRUT: The latest bombing of Beirut comes at a time when the ancient city has finally emerged from the rubble of a 15-year civil war. The regeneration has been a stunning success, guided by a certainty, clarity and almost poetic sensibility (CHRISTOPHER HUME, 7/30/06, TORONTO STAR)

That conflict, which lasted from 1975 to 1990, was a time of astounding self-destruction. But the reconstruction that followed is widely regarded as one of the great examples of urban regeneration. It is familiar to planners and planning students around the world as a process that worked wonders, a model for the rest of the world.

It was often referred to in these parts when the Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corp. was being set up; experts said it offered many lessons for this city.

One of its most ardent admirers is Toronto urban designer Tony Coombes. He spent several years in Beirut during the mid- to late-1990s as an adviser to Solidere, the corporation created in 1994 by the Lebanese government to oversee the rebuilding of central Beirut.

The mandate and structure of Solidere — which is still in operation, or was until the Israeli onslaught — has been much studied. It was the key to the success of Beirut's revival.

As Coombes explains it, Solidere acquired the land in the central district of Beirut and issued shares to owners and tenants on the basis of their property holdings. Three tribunals were created to ensure that those involved received what to which they were rightfully entitled. Another stipulation was that no one person or business could own more than 10 per cent of Solidere shares.

The intention was to enable Solidere to set rules, makes business deals, establish design guidelines and work directly with developers. Shareholder dividends were paid from funds raised selling land to developers.

As Coombes recalls, the time he spent in Beirut was one of uncertainty: "The electricity could go off at any time and the phones didn't necessarily work. The central district had been destroyed. No one was living there but squatters."

"Solidere was an extraordinary response to an extreme situation," he says. "It was essentially an invention of the great prime minister, Rafik Hariri, who himself put money into the company."

A self-made billionaire who twice served as prime minister of Lebanon, Hariri was assassinated on Feb. 14, 2005. His death, for which many held Syria responsible, inspired a grassroots democratic movement that toppled the government and saw Syrian forces leaving Lebanon after 26 years of occupation.

The reconstruction of Beirut continued throughout those anxious days. According to Coombes, the process itself created a small army of administrators, architects, designers, builders and artisans to carry on the work.

Says Coombes: "It became one of the great urban reconstruction companies in the world. It was a tour de force, a heroic act, one of the most astonishing examples of city-building of the last 50 years."

Solidere even managed to transform the vast landfill site in the old harbour into a new public space.

LED, TED:

Roberts and Alito Misled Us (Edward M. Kennedy, July 30, 2006, Washington Post)

[T]he careful, bipartisan process of years past -- like so many checks and balances rooted in our Constitution -- has been badly broken by the current Bush administration. The result has been the confirmation of two justices, John G. Roberts Jr. and Samuel A. Alito Jr., whose voting record on the court reflects not the neutral, modest judicial philosophy they promised the Judiciary Committee, but an activist's embrace of the administration's political and ideological agenda.

Now that the votes are in from their first term, we can see plainly the agenda that Roberts and Alito sought to conceal from the committee. Our new justices consistently voted to erode civil liberties, decrease the rights of minorities and limit environmental protections. At the same time, they voted to expand the power of the president, reduce restrictions on abusive police tactics and approve federal intrusion into issues traditionally governed by state law.

The confirmation process became broken because the Bush administration learned the wrong lesson from the failed Bork nomination and decided it could still nominate extremists as long as their views were hidden.

THEIR RESPONSE WOULD DESTROY THEM:

N. Korea missile didn't go as far as Japan estimated (Japan Times, 7/29/06)

The United States has told Japan that the Taepodong-2 missile fired July 5 by North Korea exploded in midair within 1.5 km of the launchpad, not 400 to 600 km away as the Japanese government had initially estimated, sources said Saturday.

Japan had earlier estimated the missile reached well into the Sea of Japan.

According to the sources, U.S. satellite information suggests the Taepodong-2 exploded in midair above a northeastern region of North Korea...

SIC TRANSIT COPERNICUS:

Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness (Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner)

Try summarizing the implications of quantum theory, and what you get sounds mystical.

Let's try a rough summary anyway. To account for the demonstrated facts, quantum theory tells us that an observation of one object can instantaneously influence the behavior of another greatly distant object--even if no physical force connects the two. Einstein rejected such influences as "spooky interactions," but they have now been demonstrated to exist. Quantum theory also tells us that observing an object to be someplace causes it to be there. For example, according to quantum theory, an object can be in two, or many, places at once--even far distant places. Its existence at the particular place it happens to be found becomes an actuality only upon its (conscious) observation.

This seems to deny the existence of a physically real world independent of our observation of it. You can see why Einstein was troubled.

Erwin Schrodinger, a founder of modern quantum theory, told his now famous cat story to illustrate that since the quantum theory applies to the large as well as the small, the theory is saying something absurd. Schrodinger's cat, according to quantum theory, could be simultaneously dead and alive--until your observation causes it to be either dead or alive. Moreover, finding the cat dead would create a history of it developing rigor mortis; finding it alive would create a history of its developing hunger--backward in time.

Anyone who takes the implications of quantum theory seriously would presumably agree that you can't accept it with equanimity. Niels Bohr, the theory's principal interpreter, tells us: "Anyone not shocked by quantum mechanics has not understood it."

MAYBE HE IS RUNNING

The McCains and War: Like Father, Like Son (Massimo Calabresi, Time.com, 7/29/06)

Exclusive: Vietnam hero and Senator John McCain has unyieldingly backed the Iraq war. Now son Jimmy is heading to boot camp and, maybe, to battle

This September, Senator John McCain's youngest son, Jimmy, 18, will report to a U.S. Marine Corps depot near Camp Pendleton in San Diego. After three months of boot camp and a month of specialized training, he will be ready to deploy. Depending on the unit he joins, he could be in Iraq as early as this time next year, and his chances of seeing combat at some point are high.

ISN'T MIKE SCIOSCIA SUPPOSED TO BE SMART?:

Why don't you just have Carrasco walk Ortiz & pitch to Manny?

EGOIST NATIONS:

We've often recommended the excellent Commissario Guido Brunetti series by Donna Leon and there's an especially good passage in Death in a Strange Country. Despite a somewhat anti-American tone and a plot that tries
to compare the U.S. Military to the Mafia and the corrupt Italian bureaucracy, Ms Leon eventually has Guido approach his father-in-law, a powerful Count, and ask his help in getting an illegal toxic waste site dealt with. The Count agrees, but reluctantly:

"Don't you care about any of this?" he asked, unable to keep the passion from his voice. [...]

"Yes, I care about it, Guido, but not in the same way you do. You have managed to retain remnants of optimism, even in the midst of the work you do. I have none. Not for myself, nor for my future, and not for this country or its future. [...]

We are a nation of egoists. It is our glory, but it will be our destruction, for none of us can be made to concern ourselves about something as abstract as 'the common good.' The best of us can rise to feeling concern for our families, but as a nation we are incapable of more."

MORE:
The Egotism; or Bosom Serpent (Nathaniel Hawthorne)

All persons chronically diseased are egotists, whether the disease be of the mind or body; whether it be sin, sorrow, or merely the more tolerable calamity of some endless pain, or mischief among the cords of mortal life. Such individuals are made acutely conscious of a self, by the torture in which it dwells. Self, therefore, grows to be so prominent an object with them that they cannot but present it to the face of every casual passer-by.

HAVE YOU DONE ENOUGH DAMAGE?:

U.S. Economy Cools As Consumers Pull Back (Nell Henderson, 7/29/06, Washington Post)

Despite higher prices and slower growth, "there are no clear signs that the economy is close to a recession," said Eugenio J. Alemán, senior economist for Wells Fargo Economics, noting low unemployment and evidence that "the real estate market is slowing down but not collapsing."

Stocks and bonds rallied yesterday on hopes that slower economic growth will encourage Federal Reserve policymakers to stop raising interest rates soon, after two years of steady hikes aimed at keeping a lid on prices.

After the GDP report was released yesterday, traders in futures contracts bet that Fed policymakers will leave their benchmark short-term interest rate unchanged at 5.25 percent at their next meeting, Aug. 8, which would mark the first meeting since June 2004 without a hike. On Thursday, the markets saw the outcome of the next meeting as roughly a tossup.

Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke indicated to Congress last week that he and his colleagues are counting on a cooler economy to weaken price pressures over the next 18 months -- a sign that they don't plan to raise interest rates high enough to cause a sharper slowdown this year. Their report to Congress showed that they expect the economy to grow at about a 2.5 percent annual rate for the rest of the year and then rebound to a pace around 3.2 percent next year.

COUCHABLE:

Watch Ann Go Whoosh!: Analyzing La Coulter (FLORENCE KING, 8/07/06, National Review)

Wondering what life in America would be like if Coulter used a stiletto instead of a sledgehammer is a tempting but futile excursion into dreamland. Suppose, for example, she was confronted, like Jennie Churchill, with a pompous young man who boasted that his financйe’s virtue was “priced above rubies.” Without missing a beat, Jennie said, “Try diamonds.” But if the young man said the same thing to Coulter?

“The godless liberals are trying to link Pat Robertson to Charles Taylor’s diamond-smuggling cartel in Liberia while they cry crocodile tears over the poor starving Africans they’re helping to starve by conniving with radical ANC goons trained by Winnie Mandela who controls every mine in South Africa, all because they hate Robertson’s Christian beliefs so much they’ll be cheering and dancing in the streets if Taylor and the God-hating Marxists succeed in smearing him!”

If Coulter lacks Jennie Churchill’s sophisticated wit, neither does she show any trace of Dorothy Parker’s lethal impishness. Parker’s assessment of her dependent husband — “Alan will always land on somebody’s feet” — would probably leave her cold. Not because she didn’t get it, but because it is so perfectly epigrammatic that there is no way to “mischaracterize” it, to use Coulter’s favorite fighting word; it can be quoted in context, out of context, or out of the blue without losing a thing.

Wit keeps sexual repartee from being offensive; the sharper the wit, the cleaner the joke. Challenged to use the word horticulture in a sentence, Parker immediately shot back, “You can lead a horticulture but you can’t make her think.” Her opinion of the current crop of debutantes: “If they were laid end to end I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.” The English adventuress who broke her leg in the middle of her divorce trial: “She probably did it sliding down a barrister.”

HAMMERING THE NAILS IN HIMSELF:

Mel gives cops hell: Report: Drunken Gibson threatens officer in rant (MICHELLE CARUSO, 7/29/06, NY DAILY NEWS)

Gibson, 50, was pulled over for speeding at 3:10 a.m. on the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, Calif., cops said. The Oscar-winning "Braveheart" star and director was driving 80 mph when he was snared by a radar trap, sheriff's deputies said. The speed limit in that area is 45 mph to 55 mph.

Gibson failed both alcohol breath and field sobriety tests, deputies said. His blood-alcohol level was .12, Deputy Anthony Moore said. The legal limit is .08 in California.

According to the incident report obtained by TMZ.com, the Road Warrior embarked on a belligerent, anti-Semitic outburst when he realized he had been busted.

"F-----g Jews. The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world," Mee's report quotes him as saying.

"Are you a Jew?" Gibson asked the deputy, according to the report.

The actor also berated the deputy, threatening, "You motherf----r. I'm going to f--- you," according to Mee's report.

The actor also told the cop he "owns Malibu" and would spend all his money "to get even with me," Mee said in his report.

TMZ quoted a law enforcement source as saying Gibson noticed a female sergeant on the scene and yelled at her, "What do you think you're looking at, sugar t--s?"

MORE:
But he took responsibility well, Mel Gibson apologizes for DUI arrest (SANDY COHEN, 7/29/06, AP)

Mel Gibson issued a lengthy statement Saturday apologizing for his drunk driving arrest and saying he has battled alcoholism throughout his life.

The actor and "The Passion of the Christ" director also apologized for what he said were "despicable" statements he made to the deputies who arrested him early Friday on Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu.

"I acted like a person completely out of control when I was arrested," he said in a statement issued by his publicist. "I disgraced myself and my family with my behavior and for that I am truly sorry. I have battled with the disease of alcoholism for all of my adult life and profoundly regret my horrific relapse."

QUITE AMERICAN...:

Report: Cuban baseball players defect in Colombia (ESPN.com, 7/28/06)

Two more Cuban baseball players have reportedly defected.

Three days after three Cubans defected to the Dominican Republic, Yulieski Gurriel and Eduardo Paret defected to the Colombian city of Cartagena, the local press reported Friday.

"One of the members of the Cuban team who deserted is star second baseman Yulieski Gourriel, considered as one of the best in the world at his position," The Bogota Times reported Friday. "It appears that his next destination would the New York Yankees.

THAT IS THE PARADIGM (via Raoul Ortega):

Carlessness (Philip Dawdy, 7/27/06, Seattle Weekly)

This week, our paper has a cover story about bicycling in Seattle, and especially about commuting by bike. I mention this because a little over a year ago I decided to go carless and try to do the good prog-liberal thing and see how it worked out. [...]

I am here to tell you at the liberal paradigm is, in this respect, an abysmal failure. Or at least it was for me.

My social life went down the tubes. If a friend of mine lived outside of Capitol Hill, downtown, Belltown, the ID, or Pioneer Square, I was screwed. I have a lot of friends who don't live in those places, and suddenly I wasn't being invited to pop over to a friend's house for impromptu barbeques and parties. That sucked. And if I needed to run an errand to, say, Best Buy at Northgate, it would take an hour-plus in each direction to get there—and with Metro's schedules, don't try that in the evening. Besides, you cannot carry more than a couple of shopping bags on Metro.

Not having a car got in the way of work, as well. I am the kind of reporter who prefers to meet people in person, if possible, and I suddenly had to resort to doing a lot of phone interviews unless I did a lot of planning for taking transit—and giving up half an afternoon for a half-hour interview. There were also public meetings I wasn't able to attend, either, all of a sudden—unless they happened to be downtown or somewhere close by.

WHY WASTE ALL THAT PROTEIN?:

Burying the elephant (CURTIS RUSH, 7/29/06, Toronto Star)

So, how do you bury an 8,500-pound elephant?

Not easily, as you might suspect.

Patsy, the 40-year-old African elephant who had arthritis so bad it was tough for her to walk, was put to sleep Monday night, and buried in an unmarked grave Tuesday at a remote location at the Toronto Zoo.

There were several logistical issues in burying Patsy.

WHY WON'T THE UNWASHED LISTEN TO THEIR BETTERS?:

The 'Baby Bump' Is So Hot Right Now (Ellen Goodman, July 29, 2006, Truthdig)

So how did this fixation on celebrity babies, this upbeat bump beat, happen just as we are being told that parenthood is onerous and grueling and that parents are overworked and overwhelmed?

Readers of Star, In Touch, OK! and US Weekly probably did not pick up the latest lament about parenting at their supermarket checkout. It was offered by Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, co-director of the National Marriage Project and still best known for siding with Dan Quayle in his spat over single motherhood with Murphy Brown. Now, she's painted a disheartening picture of parenthood as "a conspicuous source of anxiety and distress.'' She then points to a demographic and cultural culprit. (full report / summary)

Parenting, writes Whitehead, takes up a shorter amount of the expanding life cycle these days, somewhere between a child-free youth and a child-free empty nest. So the culture that once thought of adulthood and parenthood as synonymous now portrays child-raising as an unsatisfying timeout from the fun.

"If the popular culture were the only source of knowledge about American parenthood,'' she says, "one would quickly conclude that being a parent is one of the least esteemed and most undesirable roles in the society.'' She describes a society that is "indifferent at best, and hostile, at worst, to those who are caring for the next generation.''

But if the popular culture casts parenthood as grim, who's feeding the pro-natalist message to its audience?

JUST ANOTHER POLITICAL PARTY:

Hezbollah Politicians Back Peace Package (SAM F. GHATTAS, 7/28/06, AP)

Hezbollah politicians, while expressing reservations, have joined their critics in the government in agreeing to a peace package that includes strengthening an international force in south Lebanon and disarming the guerrillas, the government said.

The agreement - reached after a heated six-hour Cabinet meeting - was the first time that Hezbollah has signed onto a proposal for ending the crisis that includes the deploying of international forces.

MORE:
Shiite Pilgrimage Leads to Church: On Perilous Border, Lebanese Christians Take In Muslims (Anthony Shadid, 7/29/06, Washington Post)

The word went out -- there was refuge in a Christian village -- and thousands came.

In a pilgrimage of fear, Shiite Muslims from the towns most ravaged along the Lebanese border fled for Rmeish, a hilltop hamlet along a road where Israeli shells fell, at times, every 15 seconds Friday. Here, they escaped to a church, and at the church, a basement lit by soft shafts of sunlight. In it were the wretched of this war: children with dirty feet and a pregnant woman who feared giving birth in squalor, an 85-year-old man whose donkey, his sole possession, was killed by a bomb and hundreds of others among the at least 10,000 who arrived in Rmeish, some drinking from a fetid pool and walking the streets in search of food and goodwill.

"The safety of God," said Heidar Issa, one of those here. "That's what we were counting on."

In a country fractured by faith, torn asunder by 15 years of civil war, they found refuge among the Lebanese Christians they once fought. Their politics often diverged -- over support for Hezbollah, their views of today's conflict -- but they shared a plight. And in a common misery wrought by war, less than a mile from the Israeli border, there was fleeting coexistence rather than talk of strife.

SWEET MYSTERY OF LIFE:

Circus peanuts: one of life's sweet mysteries (John Seewer, July 29, 2006, ASSOCIATED PRESS)

Steve Kerr pulled apart the freshly made circus peanut and pressed his thumbs into its spongy, orange center.

Not too moist or too rigid -- just right. "It's all about feel," he said.

He wasn't tempted to taste it, though.

"I'm not a big fan," conceded Mr. Kerr, vice president of operations for Spangler Candy Co., one of the few remaining makers of circus peanuts.

The marshmallow confection is as controversial as it gets when it comes to candy. What makes the circus peanut so intriguing and sparks debate among candy connoisseurs is that the treat is a mystery on many levels.

"People can't wrap their brains around why it's sweet and get really confused by the flavor," said Beth Kimmerle, author of "Candy: The Sweet History."

Though they are orange and look like peanuts, they taste like banana. And they are chewier than a traditional marshmallow. Even those who like circus peanuts can't agree whether they are better soft and fresh or stale and hard after sitting out for a week.

THE SMART PARTY?:

Minimum Wage Hike Passed By House: GOP Bill Also Cuts Estate Tax (Jonathan Weisman, 7/29/06, Washington Post)

The House last night voted to boost the minimum wage for the first time in nearly a decade while also permanently slashing the estate tax, a coupling that GOP leaders calculated might garner enough Senate support to become law.

House lawmakers also approved the biggest overhaul of the nation's pension laws in 30 years.

In the rush to bolster their party's accomplishments before leaving today on a five-week summer break, House Republican leaders effectively took a gamble. If the Senate follows the House and passes legislation shoring up the pension system, raising the minimum wage, permanently cutting the estate tax, and extending such measures as a research-and-development tax credit, Republicans can say they departed for the summer in a flourish of accomplishments.

AN AMERICAN MAN:

Landis says his testosterone is naturally high (AP, 7/28/06)

His voice steady and his tone defiant, Floyd Landis told the world he would clear his name of allegations he cheated to win the Tour de France and prove he deserved the victory in cycling's signature event.

In his first public appearance since a positive test for high testosterone cast his title into doubt, the American cyclist said his body's natural metabolism - not doping of any kind - caused the result, and that he would soon have the test results to prove it.

"We will explain to the world why this is not a doping case but a natural occurrence," Landis said during a surprise press conference in the Spanish capital.

THE MILITARY WOULD BE A BARGAIN IF THIS WAS ALL IT DID (Via Ann Althouse)

The Political Economy of Beef: Oppression of Cows and Other Devalued Groups in Latin America Schedule Information

Abstract:

The focus of this paper is the effects of raising cows for “beef,” and the accompanying increase in the production of feed crops, in Latin America. It is suggested that the practice of “beef”-eating, a practice primarily of the elite and of the masses in affluent nations, has been promoted in the last century by large transnational corporations and protected by Latin American governments, with the support of the United States government and its military apparatus. Countless other animals and humans have been killed, and many others displaced, impoverished and exploited, as the profitable but devastating “hamburger culture” expands in the 21st century.

DUDE'S GOT ISSUES:

Army Dismisses Gay Arabic Linguist (DUNCAN MANSFIELD, 7/28/06, Associated Press)

SURELY THERE'S NO ONE DELUDED ENOUGH....

Campaign Finance Effort Resumes, Without McCain (JOSH GERSTEIN, July 28, 2006, NY Sun)

The elided surnames of the four men, "McCain-Feingold-Shays-Meehan," have become synonymous with so-called campaign finance reform, but Senator McCain, a Republican of Arizona, is conspicuously absent from the latest effort. [...]

A longtime advocate for campaign finance restrictions, Meredith McGehee, said she believed Mr. McCain's decision stemmed from a desire to avoid criticism if he decides to forgo public financing during the Republican nominating contest.

"He does not want to be caught in a position where he can be accused, rightly or wrongly, of hypocrisy," Ms. McGehee, policy director at the Campaign Legal Center, said. She said Mr. McCain has pledged to abide by other campaign legislation he has proposed, even before it is enacted.

"I don't think he wants to lock himself into living by a bill, with a public financing system that's pretty broken,"she said.

Mr. Shays told The New York Sun that he could not speak for Mr. McCain, but could not advise him to agree to public financing under the current rules. "It doesn't really make sense to," the congressman said. "If Senator McCain or anyone else was looking to run for president, I wouldn't be recommending they stay on the system right now."

IF ONLY SHI'ITES WEREN'T JUST LIKE US:

Boosting Extremists With Bombs: Hezbollah's popularity rises, dimming the prospects for democracy (Dilip Hiro, 25 July 2006, YaleGlobal)

To understand how and why Hezbollah has loomed so large on the Israeli radar, take a quick canter down the history lane. By all accounts, Muslims now make up two thirds of the Lebanese population, with Christians half as numerous. But such is the “confessional democracy” – established by France as the Mandate Power, modified after the 1975-1990 civil war and buttressed by the Cedar Revolution of 2005 – that Muslims and Christians have an equal share of seats in the 128-member parliament.

While Shiites are three fifths of the Muslim population, they are entitled to two fifths of the Muslim seats. Among high officials, Maronite Catholics are entitled to the presidency, elected by the parliament; Sunni Muslims to the premiership; and Shiite Muslims merely to the parliamentary speaker. [...]

After the end of the Lebanese civil war in October 1990, Hezbollah fighters moved to the area adjacent to the Israeli-occupied southern Lebanon.

In late 1991 a three-way swap – involving 450 Lebanese and Palestinian prisoners, seven dead or captured Israeli soldiers, and the remaining Western hostages – ended this phase of Hezbollah’s hostage-taking.

Steadily, Hezbollah increased attacks on the Israeli and its surrogate south Lebanon army targets, pushing the total to 1,200 in 1998. Unable to withstand the pressure, Israel withdraw unconditionally from southern Lebanon in May 2000, except from the disputed Shebaa Farms, as required by the UN Security Council resolution 509 of June 1982.

This boosted the standing of Hezbollah, led since 1992 by Hassan Nasrallah following the assassination of his predecessor Abbas Musawi by the Israelis. By then, Hezbollah had contested three general elections and established a parliamentary presence, with enough political clout to resist surrendering arms.

EVEN THE AUTOPHILES LEARN TO LOVE THE WHIP:

Commuting Is a Drag (on the Economy) (Laura Rowley, July 28, 2006, Yahoo)

[Ron] Rogers is one of the 3.4 million workers that the Census Bureau has dubbed "extreme commuters." At least 2 percent of Americans wake up to a commute of 90 minutes or more one way. Not surprisingly, most of these workers live near major metropolitan centers: New York, New Jersey, Maryland, California, and Washington, D.C., have the most workers with extreme commutes.

The number of super-commuters nationwide has skyrocketed 95 percent since 1990, as workers hang on to lucrative jobs in city centers but move farther and farther afield in search of better housing, low crime, and good schools.

Unfortunately, commuting is a bitter pill that rarely gets easier to swallow. Researchers have found that people have the capacity for "hedonic adaptation" -- in laymen's terms, the ability to adjust to extreme circumstances, both happy and unhappy.

For instance, classic studies of lottery winners and paralyzed accident victims found only small differences in life satisfaction between these groups and control subjects. But certain experiences -- living near a noisy highway, for example -- become more aggravating over time, something scientists call "sensitization." Commuting falls into this category.

A 2004 study by two economists at the University of Zurich found that people tend to overestimate what they'll get by commuting long distances -- i.e., a bigger paycheck, a more prestigious position, the ability to buy more stuff -- and underestimate what it will cost them in stress, health, and loss of connection to family and friends. [...]

[Another] study suggests that our unwillingness to sacrifice our social lives at the office, combined with our love affair with cars, costs $3.9 billion in fuel and time annually.

J-I-N-G-O:

Pander and Run (Peter Beinart, July 28, 2006, washington Post)

It's jingoism with a liberal face.

The latest example came this week when Democratic senators and House members demanded that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki either retract his criticisms of Israel or forfeit his chance to address Congress. Great idea. Maliki -- who runs a government propped up by U.S. troops -- is desperate to show Iraqis that he is not Washington's puppet. And the United States desperately needs him to succeed because, unless he gains political credibility at home, his government will have no hope of surviving on its own.

Maliki took a small step in that direction this week when he articulated a view of the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict quite different from that of the Bush administration. His views were hardly surprising: Iraq is not only a majority-Arab country; it is a majority-Shiite Arab country. And in a democracy, leaders usually reflect public opinion. Maliki's forthright disagreement with the United States was a sign of political strength, one the Bush administration wisely indulged.

But not congressional Democrats. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid demanded that Maliki eat his words or be disinvited from addressing Congress. "Your failure to condemn Hezbollah's aggression and recognize Israel's right to defend itself raise serious questions about whether Iraq under your leadership can play a constructive role in resolving the current crisis and bringing stability to the Middle East," wrote Reid and fellow Democratic Sens. Richard J. Durbin and Charles E. Schumer on July 24.

How, exactly, publicly humiliating Maliki and making him look like an American and Israeli stooge would enhance his "leadership" was never explained in the missive. But of course Reid's letter wasn't really about strengthening the Iraqi government at all; that's George W. Bush's problem. It was about appearing more pro-Israel than the White House and thus pandering to Jewish voters.

Reid's letter is not an anomaly; it is part of a pattern.

THE THREAT THAT WASN'T:

'Nazi aircraft carrier' located (BBC, 7/28/06)

The Polish navy says it is almost certain that it has located the wreck of Nazi Germany's only aircraft carrier, the Graf Zeppelin.

BETTER DEAD THAN BROWN!:

Town Battling Illegal Immigration Is Emptier Now (JILL P. CAPUZZO, 7/28/06, NY Times)

The downtown streets of this working-class town — usually filled with many of the immigrants who have made this place home — were unusually empty the day after the Township Council approved an ordinance banning employers and landlords from hiring or housing illegal immigrants. [...]

“They’re jealous of the Brazilians because they’re hard workers and they live well,” said Celeste Martiniano, a Portuguese-American who owns the Pavilion Barbecue restaurant here. [...]

Before Brazilian immigrants began moving here in the last five years or so, Ms. Martiniano said, the downtown business district, once a bustling shopping area, had been in decline. But the new ordinance, she said, “this is going to kill the town.”

For the last 25 years, Ms. Martiniano has lived in this Burlington County town of 8,000 residents, where as many as 2,000 to 3,000 immigrants live today. Business has been good since the opening of her restaurant two years ago, largely because of the growing Brazilian population. But on this day, there were no takers for the chicken legs spinning on spits over open flames.

Ms. Martiniano said that immigrants here were scared in the aftermath of the vote, and that those who have been most vocal against immigrants “are not working and have nothing better to do.”

Ingrid Reinhold said that the new ordinance smacked of discrimination. She and her husband, Gustav, own three businesses along Scott Street: a music store that features mostly Latin music, a Brazilian cafe that is undergoing renovations, and a bustling Western Union office, where many of the immigrants can stay in contact with relatives back home. Down the block is another Brazilian restaurant and a Brazilian nail salon. The yellow and green Brazilian flag is pasted to many shop windows.

“Three years ago this was a dead town,” said Ms. Reinhold, who was born in Ecuador. “Now you see all the stores are open, the people are out. If they do this, it’s going to be like it was before.”

Standing in front of his recording studio next door, Ed Robins talked about the Wednesday Council meeting. Describing the meeting’s adversarial atmosphere among members in the audience, Mr. Robins said “it reminded me of being on Jerry Springer.”

Although his business depends very little on the town’s growing immigrant population, Mr. Robins also worried about the ordinance’s impact on the business district and real estate values, which he said have increased with the influx of Brazilians.

“As a community, we should have drawn everybody together, including the illegals and approached it intelligently, rather than taking this small town and ripping it apart,” Mr. Robins said.

Certainly, the Brazilians are not the only immigrant population to call Riverside home. This town on the Delaware River was originally settled by Germans in 1851, followed by Poles, Italians and Irish in the early 20th century. Once a thriving industrial town, the immigrants provided much of the workforce for the textile mills of Riverside, once the country’s leading manufacturer of men’s hosiery, and the Philadelphia Watchcase Company, headquartered here until it closed its doors in 1956.

After the factories closed, the movie theater burned down and many shoppers migrated to nearby malls. Its new distinction, recognized at one point by the Guinness Book of World Records, was having the most bars and liquor licenses in a mile-square town.

Many of those bars remain, and in some of them there is talk about what needs to be done to slow the tide of immigration.

COCO NO MO?:

Brewers trade Lee to Rangers, get Cordero (Keith Law, 7/28/06, ESPN Insider)

The Milwaukee Brewers are trading slugger Carlos Lee to the Texas Rangers as part of a multiplayer deal, ESPN.com learned Friday.

The Brewers are sending Lee, minor league outfield prospect Nelson Cruz to the Rangers for relief pitcher Francisco Cordero and outfielders Kevin Mench and Laynce Nix.

WHICH 60% OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE WANT THEY GET:

G.O.P. Nears Vote to Increase U.S. Wage (CARL HULSE, 7/28/06, NY Times)

House Republicans were still assembling a proposal Thursday night. But the momentum had clearly shifted in favor of considering an increase of at least $2 in the $5.15 an hour minimum wage, despite strong resistance from conservative Republicans and the party’s allies in the business community. [...]

Democrats have been trying to highlight the issue for months, accusing Republicans of blocking an increase while allowing Congressional pay to rise steadily.

YOU MEAN THE BRAZILIANS DIDN'T INNOVATE THESE?:

Very light jet takes big step skyward (The Associated Press, 7/28/06)

A new fleet of very light jets that could redefine the way Americans travel received preliminary certification Thursday from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

It's the first step in getting 2,500 of the planes skyward to help reduce congestion at major airports, Acting Transportation Secretary Maria Cino said.

The FAA granted Eclipse Aviation of Albuquerque, N.M., the certification for the Eclipse 500, a cheaper and faster type of flying SUV, during a ceremony at the Experimental Aircraft Association's 54th annual AirVenture fly-in in Oshkosh.

Vern Raburn, a former Microsoft executive, is president of Eclipse Aviation, a venture that is backed by Bill Gates. He said the company expects to receive the final FAA approval by Aug. 30, allowing its first 50 new jets to be delivered to customers this year.

AREN'T THE ROBOTS SUPPOSED TO CARE FOR THEM?

The Face of Poverty Ages In Rapidly Graying Japan (Anthony Faiola, 7/28/06, Washington Post)

As the world's most rapidly graying nation struggles to cope with the exploding costs of its aging population, it is cutting back its famed safety net of universal health care, generous pensions and welfare benefits for seniors of all social classes. But those already living on the margins are being hit the hardest.

Over the past decade, the number of indigent seniors nationwide skyrocketed by 183 percent to about half a million people, Welfare Ministry statistics show. Most of them are victims of the protracted recession that Japan endured in the '90s, and many have been abandoned by children bucking the Japanese tradition of living with one's elderly parents.

The creation of a new underclass of the down, out and old in Japan -- a country that long prided itself on being a "one-class society" -- is giving public housing complexes the feel of poor retirement communities. Almost one in every two people on welfare in Japan is now 65 or older, the government here reports. By comparison, roughly one in 10 welfare recipients in the United States are senior citizens, according to U.S. government statistics.

The homeless population expanded rapidly during the recession years and now numbers about 30,000, according to advocacy groups. An official survey in 2003 put the average age of the homeless at 56. The government requires seniors to have a fixed address to receive welfare, so many on the streets are getting no support.

Now the Japanese economy -- the world's second-largest -- is in the midst of a buoyant recovery. But the country is moving toward a more American-style system of senior services by shifting the burden of care from the government to the elderly themselves.

"The government talks about how we need to be more independent and care for ourselves now," said Kakizaki. "But we are old. How are we supposed to become independent at our age? How can they even ask us to?"

MY NAME IS PALE HOSE AND I'M AN OZZIEHOLIC:

Fixing the Sox: A 7-step solution (JOE COWLEY, July 28, 2006, Chicago Sun-Times)

The White Sox are no strangers to forcing their fans to the ledges of buildings. It happened last season, when a seemingly unconquerable 15-game division lead in August melted to just 1-1/2 games by late September.

The result? A World Series championship.

While avoiding one of the biggest chokes in baseball history would seem like a huge obstacle overcome, the Sox apparently enjoy doing things the hard way.

One season later, they're at it again. A team with arguably more talent than last season's went into the All-Star break trailing red-hot Detroit by just two games in the American League Central, while looking to be a sure thing for at least the wild card.

Two weeks later, Sox fans are back on the ledges, looking for answers.

While the problems are many, not one is beyond repair.

A SECULAR, NOT A CHURCH:

The Church in Spain Is Sick, but It’s not Zapatero’s Fault: The sickness is the loss of faith among the people, and the poor instructors are above all the progressive theologians. The accusation comes from the Spanish bishops. In a document coordinated with Rome, as a model for other episcopates (Sandro Magister, July 28, 2006, Chiesa)

The document is in the form of a “pastoral instruction,” and is entitled “Theology and secularization in Spain, forty years after the end of Vatican Council II.” It is the outcome of three years of work, and was prepared by the commission for the doctrine of the faith of the Spanish bishops’ conference. But then it was examined by all of the bishops, who in two voting sessions, in November and then in March of this year, approved it by a margin of over two thirds. The bishops most active in promoting the document included the two most “Ratzingerian” cardinals of Spain, Antonio Cañizares Lovera, of Toledo, and Antonio María Rouco Varela, of Madrid, together with one of the latter’s auxiliary bishops, Eugenio Romero Pose, president of the doctrinal commission.

What prompted the instruction, and what are its aims? In an interview with “Il Regno,” Romero Pose said that with this document the Spanish bishops intend to indicate “both the sickness and the cure.”

The sickness is “the secularization within the Church”: a widespread loss of faith caused in part by “theological propositions that have in common a deformed presentation of the mystery of Christ.”

The cure is precisely that of restoring life to the profession of faith: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matthew 16:16), in the four areas where it is most seriously undermined today:

– the interpretation of Scripture,
– Jesus Christ as the only savior of all men,
– the Church as the Body of Christ,
– moral life.

The instruction is organized under these four main headings. In each section, the document first presents the features of correct Christological doctrine, and then denounces the theologies that deform it.

It denounces the theologies, not the theologians. The instruction does not target particular authors, but limits itself to denouncing erroneous tendencies. [...]

In Spain, the instruction could be the basis for the Church’s return to doctrinal order.

BUILD WELL, WE'LL WAIT:

Best bet -- Red Sox should keep their top prospects (Steve Buckley, 7/28/06, Boston Herald)

If the Sox don’t make a huge acquisition by the trading deadline (or some kind of August waiver deal) and if they get beaten out of a playoff spot, a lot of people around here will be screaming.

But if Epstein is as smart as we all keep saying he is, then at this very moment he’s trying to steer the Red Sox toward a playoff spot without trading away the likes of Jon Lester, Craig Hansen, Manny Delcarmen and an array of promising kids who haven’t even tasted their first cup of big league coffee.

For the first time in recent memory, the Red Sox have a well-stocked farm system. Outfielder Jacoby Ellsbury, drafted only last year, already is at Double-A Portland. Outfielder David Murphy, who struggled early last year at Portland, is hitting well at Triple-A Pawtucket. Right-hander Edgar Martinez, a converted catcher, is opening eyes at Portland. Infielder Dustin Pedroia, currently at the Pawtucket Finishing School, could be a Sox starter next year.

Can you imagine a 2007 Red Sox roster that includes Jonathan Papelbon, Lester, Hansen, Delcarmen, Pedroia and Murphy? If they turn out to be as good as we all think they will be - and Papelbon already is a top performer - the Red Sox could emerge with the kind of payroll flexibility that could turn them into a powerhouse over the next five or six seasons.

With so many young kids on the roster, the Red Sox will have the financial resources to sign whatever big-ticket player they need to either solidify the starting rotation or add another powerful bat to the lineup.

CONVICTIONS ARE SCARY:

Jewish voters dis Bush: Israel’s defender deserves better (Virginia Buckingham, July 25, 2006, Boston Herald)

Why aren’t Jewish voters rock-solid behind the first president who has made eradicating terror as big a priority for the United States as it has long been for Israel?

SHUT HIM DOWN FOR A FEW WEEKS IN AUGUST:

GM's dilemma: Are Tigers good enough to win it all without trade? (Danny Knobler, July 27, 2006, Booth Newspapers)

One veteran major-league scout who has seen all 30 teams play this season said the other day that he'd give three teams an equal shot in October: the Boston Red Sox, the New York Mets and the Tigers.

But other scouts who have watched the Tigers over the last several weeks have come to the same conclusion that many Tiger officials have. If you add Alfonso Soriano or Carlos Lee to this team, then you'd really have a good chance in the playoffs.

The Tigers don't seem to want to deal for spare parts. They don't want to tweak the roster. If they're going to make a move, they want it to be the big one, the one that puts them over the top.

General manager Dave Dombrowski has to be careful. Dombrowski and his staff (don't forget to credit ex-scouting director Greg Smith) have built this organization to the point where the Tigers could be good for several years to come.

A pitching rotation anchored by Jeremy Bonderman and Justin Verlander (both 23 years old) and a bullpen led by Joel Zumaya (still 21), with more pitching on the way (Humberto Sanchez, Jair Jurrjens, Andrew Miller), should give the Tigers more than just a one-year joyride.

Dombrowski would almost certainly part with Sanchez in a deal for Soriano or Lee (although he'd never admit it until a deal was done). There has to be some concern that the Tigers would again be trading a John Smoltz for a Doyle Alexander (Smoltz was less accomplished in 1987 than Sanchez is now), but the difference is that the Tigers have a young rotation in the big leagues, with multiple pitching prospects lined up behind Sanchez.

AND THE SS'S BETTER:

Lowell putting up gold numbers with the glove (Gordon Edes, July 28, 2006, Boston Globe)

[Eric] Chavez has made just two errors and leads AL third basemen with a fielding percentage of .992, but Lowell is right behind him at .986, with just four errors, and he's handled 49 more chances (295-246). Lowell made three errors in a one-week span (April 21-28), then made an error almost a month later (May 24), but hasn't made one since, his errorless streak at 54 entering this weekend.

Last season, Lowell made just six errors for the Marlins, matching the NL record for fewest errors by a third baseman who had played at least 135 games.

This season, Lowell threatens to obliterate the Red Sox record for fielding percentage by a third baseman, set by Rico Petrocelli in 1971 with a .976 fielding percentage (11 errors in 156 games).

O. G.:

Salsa pioneer still hearkens to a rebel beat (JORDAN LEVIN, 7/28/06, MiamiHerald.com)

They were rough, untrained kids from the slums, improvising streetwise rhymes, horrifying the musical and social establishment with their vulgarity and menace. They mixed traditional Cuban and Puerto Rican music with rock, funk, R&B, jazz, and a jumble of Latin American genres to come up with a new kind of Latin music that spoke for a new generation of Latinos growing up in the United States.

Before reggaeton, before Latin alternative, there was New York salsa. And one of the men who created it and changed the course of Latin music is Willie Colon, who plays the West Dade club La Covacha Saturday night.

He says it will be his last tour after 43 years of performing. Maybe.

''I had planned to stop touring in November,'' Colon, now 57, said recently from his office in midtown Manhattan. But we've gotten so many calls to please just come here.''

After a lifetime of musical revolution, it's hard to stop. [...]

Colon's grandmother worked in a sweatshop, but she managed to buy her 11-year-old grandson a trumpet. Colon started playing on the street with his buddies, passing the hat and picking up enough change to inspire him to continue in music.

By 13, he was playing in a professional wedding band. At 14, he switched to trombone. But he couldn't get an audition for the high school band. The frustration drove him to drop out. ``I became self-righteously indignant and just said screw them. I said I'm gonna make it on my own.''

It was a classic start to what usually turns into a road to nowhere. But for Colon it launched him into what would soon become an incredibly vibrant and creative music scene.

Latin music was about to come out of a fallow period in the mid-1960s. The mambo heyday, cut off from Cuban music and musicians after the revolution of 1959, was over, as was an early-'60s craze for a Latin/funk hybrid called boogaloo. But in the late '60s and early '70s, something new began to percolate: Cuban and Puerto Rican music mixed with jazz, R&B, and rock, with a wild improvisational edge and the driving energy of New York City.

It was called salsa, a term that old school Latin musicians often hated but gave a catchy ring to a style that pushed social and musical boundaries. The civil rights movement was inspiring the Young Lords and a movement for Puerto Rican rights. Black jazz musicians would sit in with the Latin musicians at clubs all over town.

Musically and politically, salsa was hot.

''You could compare it a lot to rap and reggaeton,'' says Colon. ``It was rebellious music. We were watching Martin Luther King walking into Selma and the dogs and water cannons. The music wasn't explicitly political yet, but the music was a magnet that would bring people together.''

Ed Morales, Latin music critic for New York Newsday and author of The Latin Beat, a history of Latin music, says the salsa scene's rough-and-ready vibe spoke to the exploding population of Puerto Ricans in a city that was rapidly becoming a much tougher place.

''It coincided with the formation of these hardcore urban slums,'' Morales says. 'The audience was mainly the people from the barrios. Willie said we invented gangster rap, and he sort of has a point. There's a lot of that transforming the elegant energy of the mambo dance halls to `this is the hood.' ''

Colon quickly became one of salsa's stars, largely because of his partnership with Hector Lavoe, a Puerto Rican country kid with an outsize voice and genius for improvisation. They recorded some of the biggest hits of the genre for Fania Records, the label for the burgeoning genre.

Records like El Malo (The Bad Guy, released when Colon was only 17) and Lo Mato -- Si No Compra Este LP (I'll Kill Him -- If You Don't Buy This Record, with a photo of Colon holding a gun to a man's head) featured a swaggering bad-guy image -- but laced with the substance of Lavoe's gorgeous voice and Colon's gift for musical innovation.

OUR IDENTITY WAS CHOSEN FOR US:

Illusions of identity: Amartya Sen discusses his new book, in which he claims that the British approach to multiculturalism has undermined individual freedom: a review of Identity and Violence by Amartya Sen (Kenan Malik, August 2006, Prospect)

At the heart of the book is an argument against what Sen calls the communitarian view of identity—the belief that identity is something to be "discovered" rather than chosen. "There is a certain way of being human that is my way," the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor wrote in his much-discussed essay "The Politics of Recognition." "I am called upon to live my life in this way." But who does the calling? Seemingly the identity itself. For Taylor, as for many communitarians, identity appears to come first, with the human actor following in its shadow. Or, as the philosopher John Gray has put it, identities are "a matter of fate, not choice."

Sen will have none of it. "There are two issues here," he says when I meet him at King's College, Cambridge, where he was master until returning to Harvard two years ago. "First, the recognition that identities are robustly plural and the importance of one identity need not obliterate another. And second, that a person has to make choices about what relative importance to attach, in a particular context, to their divergent loyalties and identities. The individual belongs to many different groups and it's up to him or her to decide which of those groups he or she would like to give priority to." We are multitudes and we can choose among our multitudes.

Sen is particularly critical of the ways in which communitarian notions of identity have found their way into social policy, especially through the ideas of multiculturalism, and in so doing have diminished the scope for individual freedom. "I am not opposed to multiculturalism," he says. "But I am opposed to the way it has been interpreted. There are two basically distinct approaches to multiculturalism. One concentrates on the promotion of diversity as a value in itself. The other focuses on the freedom of reasoning and decision-making, and celebrates cultural diversity to the extent that it is freely chosen. The way that British authorities have interpreted multiculturalism has very much undermined individual freedom. A British Muslim is not asked to act within the civil society or the political arena but as a Muslim. His British identity has to be mediated by his community."

MORE:
The Dictatorship of Relativism (Most Reverend Robert C. Morlino – Bishop of Madison, April 7, 2006, National Catholic Prayer Breakfast)

Since I was asked to address the topic "The Dictatorship of Relativism" it behooves me to return to the original text from which that very important phrase emanated. In his homily at the mass "Pro Eligendo Romano Pontifice" celebrated in St. Peters Archbasilica on April 18th, 2005, the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, spoke as follows:

"whereas relativism, that is, letting oneself be "tossed here and there, carried about by every wind of doctrine", seems the only attitude that can cope with modern times. We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one's own ego and desires. We, however, have a different goal: the Son of God, the true man. He is the measure of true humanism."

In the space of just a few sentences, Pope Benedict connects the dots in terms of relativism as a divorce from God and friendship with Christ, and truth as attained in the most fully human way, only within the context of this friendship. Thus, Pope Benedict takes us back to the insights of the encyclical, Fides et Ratio of John Paul the Great – the desire written by the Creator in every human heart for the truth and for the fullness of love, can only be satisfied in Christ.

Those among you who know me will not find it surprising that my remarks this morning express three points. First I would like to, unpack, if you will, the metaphor of the then Cardinal Ratzinger, articulated as "The Dictatorship of Relativism". I would note that just this past January, Pope Benedict spoke of policies which promote contraception and abortion as "a dogma of hedonism" which opens the door to the culture of death. The second comment regarding a dogma of hedonism leading to a culture of death certainly explicates the metaphor "Dictatorship of Relativism" as we shall see.

The first question we might ask as we unpack the metaphor "the Dictatorship of Relativism" is "Who are the members of the junta who govern this dictatorship?" As one who is called to Holy Orders, and thus to refrain even from the appearance of offering partisan political comments, it would be best for me to refrain from naming the key players. However, we all know that the mass media are generally accomplices to those who govern the Dictatorship of Relativism; they are generally not innocent bystanders or detached journalists who report in an objective way – willing cooperators in this dictatorship are also those who live their lives according to polling results, frequently sponsored by the mass media.

We might also ask "What are the principal enforcement mechanisms of the Dictatorship of Relativism, what weapons are contained in the arsenal of these dictators?" The first is inconsistency in civil law and practice, inconsistency being just another instance of relativism. This inconsistency is especially neuralgic because the civil law is our teacher. We have the very same individuals protesting against warrantless surveillance of possible terrorists' activities, and then in the northwest, affirming warrantless surveillance of people's garbage containers to ensure that no recyclables are to be found. On the one hand warrantless surveillance with regard to possible terrorism is politically incorrect while warrantless surveillance of personal garbage is politically correct. The polls determine what is politically correct and thus the same people find themselves caught in a clear inconsistency in the context of a culture which never even thinks to question it. Polls rarely divulge information which reaches beyond the trivial and transitory but truth is neither trivial nor transitory. Those who claim otherwise promote the Dictatorship of Relativism.

A second example of this inconsistency has to do with killing of a mother who is carrying a child. In certain instances the murderer is charged with the death of two human beings, both mother and child. However, if a woman exercises her alleged reproductive rights and has an abortion, the law clearly determines that no crime of murder has been committed. Thus, a human life is precious when someone thinks it is, be it a parent or be it a civil court, and when that life is deemed not to be human or otherwise be without value, then it is expendable. This kind of gross inconsistency is not questioned in our society but is taken for granted with serenity, sad to say.

In addition to inconsistency in the civil law and practice, the second weapon in the arsenal of those who would dictate relativism to the rest of us consists in a series of linguistic redefinitions, euphemisms, and other anomalies. Language, as the philosopher Heidegger said, "is the house of being". If our language is contorted and deconstructed through euphemisms, redefinitions and other anomalies then, the being housed by language becomes indeterminate, there are no fixed meanings, that is relativism pushed to its pinnacle, nihilism itself. Allow me to take a brief excursion into these redefinitions, euphemisms, and anomalies.

In the first case, our society speaks of openness and tolerance as almost supreme virtues but to be open means precisely to be closed to the objective truth. If one would claim the existence of objective truth, one is considered closed and arrogant, rather than open and tolerant. So go the language games. The euphemistic approach is perhaps best captured by the words "late-term abortion." This term covers up the fact that a partially born human being is brutally murdered in the process of being born. It is always interesting to hear the commentators talk about late-term abortions, adding that these are sometimes called partial-birth abortions by anti-abortion activists. If one were to watch a video of this procedure taking place would one more likely describe it as a late-term abortion or a partial-birth abortion?

We also have the euphemism – discard, used when speaking of the fate of frozen embryos which are "superfluous" and "left-over" as part of the process of in-vitro fertilization. We never speak of the destruction of innocent human beings whose fate has become absurd and who are completely under the domination of other human beings. We say that these human beings are discarded, like the one last sticky note on our notepad that might just as soon be discarded, as we take out a fresh pad for our use. There are many language games being played. Supreme Court justices we're told, should be uniters not dividers, when it comes to Roe v. Wade. How ironic, since Roe v. Wade has become our great source of division. Now to be a uniter means to uphold that which divided us in the first place.

Pro-choice. I've never heard anyone defend a pro-choice position with regard to bank robbery. The only time this expression is used without reference to what we're pro-choice about is when the most innocent and helpless human being is at stake. Pro-choice is synonymous with pro- abortion because no one speaks of pro-choice in any other context. Pro-choice is a euphemism that causes us to forget the baby.

The word "transparency" it seems to me, is being used so that we no longer even hear the word "truth" in our public dialogue and conversation. We already have a very good word for transparency: truth and truthfulness. Why is it the agenda of some to rid our language of the usage of the word, truth? Talk about the Dictatorship of Relativism! When the term "prochoice" won the day in our cultural, linguistic usage we temporarily lost the battle to protect the most innocent and most helpless human lives. Language games, euphemisms, redefinitions are very dangerous. We are at the point where, because of in-vitro fertilization, surrogate motherhood and what flows from that, we are no longer sure what the words "father" and "mother" mean. In some cases, there is the genetic mother, the gestational mother, and the mother who actually raises the child to adulthood. There are at least three mothers. When we move to the redefinition of marriage, as including other options than "one husband – one wife – one lifetime – with openness to children", we find ourselves in very troubling waters indeed. The Dictatorship of Relativism gains strength from the outrageous manipulation of language, and if we are to overcome this dictatorship with true democracy, we're going to have to regain control of the use of language so as to point to the objective truth. Certain Catholic legislators recently received a correction from our Bishops' Conference when they attempted to promote a redefinition of primacy of conscience as a line item veto with regard to elements of the Ten Commandments and the teachings of the Church, another example of surrender to the Dictatorship of Relativism.

Let me move on to the second point which, thank God, can be made more briefly. The opposite of dictatorship is democracy. The Dictatorship of Relativism leads to secularism as a state imposed religion. Only in the context of relativism and deconstructionalism can secularism flourish. Religions, generally, make claims to objective truth. To impose secularism as the state religion one must rule out as outrageous the concept of objective truth, which is precisely what the Dictatorship of Relativism seeks to accomplish. Opposition to the Dictatorship of Relativism involves the right relationship of church and state as taught by the Second Vatican Council and repeated by Pope Benedict XVI in his recent encyclical Deus Caritas Est – God is Love. The relationship between church and state involves three simple rules. First, the state is never to force anyone to practice a particular religion. Secondly, the state is never to prevent anyone from practicing a particular religion. And third, generally the state should favor the practice of religion, because religious experience includes a moral code according to which people restrain themselves so that restraint by the state becomes less necessary. Thus if the state wishes to encourage democracy and needs less to intervene in the lives of individuals, one key to this strengthening of the sphere of freedom, this strengthening of democracy, is the favoring of religion by the state. Secularism founded upon relativism and deconstructionalism, should never be imposed as a state religion.

The third and last point is, "what should our response be as we seek to protect democracy and combat the Dictatorship of Relativism?" Our response is not to seek the embodiment of distinctive Catholic convictions in civil law. We should not be seeking to pass civil laws requiring belief in the Trinity or attendance at Sunday Mass or fasting from meat during the Fridays of Lent. Our response should be to seek the embodiment of natural law in the civil law. Natural law is that law written on the human heart which can be known by every human being through reason alone. There are three propositions of the natural law that need our attention and promotion precisely as such, that is to say, as natural law not as distinctively Christian or Catholic doctrine. The first is the existence of God. The founding documents of our country made reference to nature and to nature's God because there are a variety of ways through which reason arrives at the conclusion that the Creator God exists. There are arguments that are more experientially based, there are arguments that are more abstract, but there are valid arguments which prove the existence of God. They are arguments of philosophy or logic; they are not arguments of science. Nothing is more narrow than to claim that the only real truth is scientific truth. This claim serves the cause of relativism because scientific truth develops through paradigm change whereas objective truth does not. Objective truth is not subject to paradigm change; its substance never needs to be updated. It is good when science advances through paradigm change. But to grant the claim that scientific truth is the highest form of truth is to hand over the day to those who lead the Dictatorship of Relativism.

The second proposition of the natural law teaches us that every human being has a priceless and unique dignity. So many modern and contemporary philosophers have arrived quite apart from religious faith at the conviction that a person is an end in him or herself and never a means to an end. Persons are never to be manipulated or treated as things by other persons. To live in peace in a just society is impossible apart from the conviction arrived at by reason alone, that every person is an end in himself or herself and never to be used as a means. The third proposition of the natural law teaches us, as we reflect on the desire of every human being for social relationships and intimacy, and on human anatomy – that marriage means a one-flesh communion of "one husband – one wife – for one lifetime – with openness to children". Artificial contraception and abortion are not behaviors which someone has a right to choose. To be sure, one is able to choose them but there is no right to do so. One has a right to marry or not to marry. Within marriage, one has a right to acts of marital intimacy and by mutual agreement, husband and wife also have a right to refrain from those acts for a just cause. Husband and wife do not have a right to a child - a child is a human being, a human being is not a thing, people have rights to things, and they never have rights to human beings. So there is no right to a child, there is no right to abortion, there is no right to artificial contraception. There is a right to marry or not. There is a right to the acts proper to marriage. That is a scandalously brief overview of the natural law.

In closing, let me say that we must reclaim the proper use of language if we are to combat the dictatorship of relativism. Instead of hearing "pro-choice" all over the place, we need to promote the use of "natural law" all over the place or better some equivalent, that is a more catchy sound- bite. Some of you might well be gifted to articulate that sound-bite. We need to insist that the existence of God, the dignity of every human being, and the definition of marriage are not catholic curiosities that we are trying to force on the rest of the world, but the dictates of reason - of the natural law itself. Language has been used to lead us into the Dictatorship of Relativism, the dogma of hedonism, and the culture of death. But Jesus Christ is Risen from the dead and the Church is alive with the truth of Christ and the truth of the natural law. Let us live with joy and with hope, proclaiming the truth of Christ with love for all, but especially for our time and our culture, proclaiming with love and a smile the truth of the natural law.

When you and I were first created, that is, when the Lord created your soul and mine, we glimpsed, just for a moment, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And as soon as our souls took flesh, when we were conceived in our mother's womb, because we were not immaculately conceived like our Blessed Mother but conceived as heirs of the sin of Adam, we experienced a kind of amnesia and forgetfulness of that glimpse which we have had of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. When we listen to the voice of reason within us, that word, that meaning, is an echo of the Eternal Word Whom we saw and heard at the moment of the creation of our soul. The law of reason within us when given unrestricted range cannot arrive at any other truth in the end than the truth of Jesus Christ. He is Risen, His victory is ours. The challenges are difficult but we have every reason, the reason who is Christ Himself, never to give in to discouragement. Our faith in which alone our reason finds total fulfillment, that faith is our sure victory. Thank you for listening to me. God bless you all! Praised be Jesus Christ!

FOLKS JUST WANT TO CHOOSE WHO GOVERNS:

Congolese hopeful as they head to polls: The Democratic Republic of Congo votes Sunday in its first free presidential election in 46 years (Tristan McConnell, 7/28/06, The Christian Science Monitor)

Yet, despite the monumental logistical challenges - and early claims of irregularities, sporadic violence, and opposition boycotts - most Congolese voters, especially in the country's war-torn east, have an optimistic outlook.

ALL QUIET ON THE EASTERN FRONT:

Report: Nasrallah is in Damascus (ASSOCIATED PRESS, 7/27/06)

A top Iranian envoy was in Syria on Thursday for talks on the Israeli-Hizbullah conflict in a meeting that brought together the guerrilla organization's two key sponsors, according to Iranian news reports. A Kuwaiti newspaper reported that Hizbullah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah was taking part in the session.

Kuwait's Al-Siyassah newspaper, known for its opposition to the Syrian regime, said the meeting was designed to discuss ways to maintain supplies to Hezbollah fighters with "Iranian arms flowing through Syrian territories."

Al-Siyassah said it learned of the meeting from "well-informed Syrian sources" it did not identify. According to the newspaper, Nasrallah was moving through Damascus with Syrian guards in an intelligence agency car. He was dressed in civilian clothes, not his normal clerical garb.

AT THE POINT WHERE THEY ALLOW STAND-OFFS THEY'RE DONE:

Chinese rule-of-law activist becomes a case in point (Robert Marquand, 7/28/06 The Christian Science Monitor)

"This is justice in the Chinese countryside, not like Zhang Yimou's candied film version," says Jerome Cohen of New York University, who is assisting Chen. "There are no kind, avuncular public security officers or judges to mete out justice. They can instead be found surrounding his house. No local lawyer has been willing to help, and Beijing lawyers who have sought to defend Chen have been repeatedly beaten."

Chen's challenge to country justice makes him a kind of Rosa Parks of China. His standoff with Linyi authorities and Mayor Li Qun, who served briefly as assistant to the mayor of New Haven Conn., has captured the imagination of legal reformers here and top foreign legal eagles - raising the question of whether law in China is a tool for control or is evolving into a system to adjudicate justice.

APPEASEMENT WOULD HAVE BEEN SMARTER POLICY:

Israeli strikes may boost Hizbullah base: Hizbullah support tops 80 percent among Lebanese factions. (Nicholas Blanford, 7/28/06, CS Monitor)

The ferocity of Israel's onslaught in southern Lebanon and Hizbullah's stubborn battles against Israeli ground forces may be working in the militant group's favor. [...]

The stakes are high for Hizbullah, but it seems it can count on an unprecedented swell of public support that cuts across sectarian lines.According to a poll released by the Beirut Center for Research and Information, 87 percent of Lebanese support Hizbullah's fight with Israel, a rise of 29 percent on a similar poll conducted in February. More striking, however, is the level of support for Hizbullah's resistance from non-Shiite communities. Eighty percent of Christians polled supported Hizbullah along with 80 percent of Druze and 89 percent of Sunnis.

MORE:
Israel and Lebanon: a long and bitter entanglement: Does the latest conflict fit historical trends or is this something different? (Dan Murphy, 7/28/06, The Christian Science Monitor)

Arab militants strike across the border from southern Lebanon, provoking a massive Israeli response, with thousands of soldiers pouring into Lebanese territory and airstrikes pounding enemy positions.

The Israeli prime minister says the only objectives of the invasion are to "root out the evil weed" of terrorism. Israel will protect itself by pushing militants beyond the Litani River and establishing a buffer zone along the border. The Israeli incursion is also described as "limited." And though Israel says its strikes are carefully targeted against militants, at least 100,000 Lebanese civilians flee their homes and hundreds die.

That was 1978.

The president has used Al Qaeda to gin up the threat from Iraq, just as he is now conflating Hizbullah and Hamas with Al Qaeda as "terrorists" of the same ilk. Actually these groups had little connection to one another—or at least they didn't until America decided to make itself their common enemy. Al Qaeda was always, in truth, the only "terrorist group of global reach" in the world—which is how Bush accurately defined things back in that long-ago fall of 2001. Both Hizbullah and Hamas had publicly disavowed any interest in backing Osama bin Laden's goals. Al Qaeda was Sunni, Hizbullah is Shiite. Even within the Muslim world these groups had scant support, although Hamas and Hizbullah had a lot more than Al Qaeda did because they were providing social services in Lebanon and Gaza.

How does this affect current events in the Mideast? In strategic terms, the U.S. endorsement of Israel's retaliation against Hizbullah had some merit at the start, within limits: a Lebanon with an armed Hizbullah in its midst was never going to graduate to real democracy. The Israeli action is also, in a way, a proxy war against Iran and its nuclear program. Reducing Iran's influence in the region by degrading the power of its principal means of terror (and therefore of retaliation) is in America's interest, as well. This is the unspoken logic both of the fierce Israeli assault and Bush's fierce defense of it: "In the back of everyone's head is Iran looming as a threat over the region," says one Israeli official.

But with each errant bomb that kills more Lebanese children, the U.S. position becomes less defensible. By walking in lockstep with the Israelis, we Americans make it impossible for Muslims not to see us as an enemy. And every Muslim official knows, even if Bush does not, that Hizbullah is not identical with Iran but is a client of it, in a relationship not unlike that of the United States and Israel. By making Israel's war our own we ensure that the Lebanese group and the Tehran mullahs will be even closer allies in the future. We place the Muslims whom we desperately need as allies, like Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, in an impossible position. Maliki, a Shiite, can no longer stand with Bush, as he showed during his tense visit to Washington this week.

And at cafes and around kitchen tables throughout the Arab world, good-hearted Muslims can no longer defend America against their more hate-filled brethren. They have fallen silent; they have no arguments left. "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity," as the poet Yeats memorably put it.

IN CASE THERE WAS ANY DOUBT ABOUT THE PARTY OF DEATH STUFF:

Widower of Terry Schiavo to campaign for Lamont on Friday (AP, July 27, 2006)

The husband of Terri Schiavo will campaign tomorrow for businessman Ned Lamont, who is challenging U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman in a primary.

THE DEMOCRATIC ALLIES:

Why Not Involve Iran in Effort To Establish Order in Mideast? (Abbas Maleki, July 21, 2006, The Forward)

If you look at the performance of Iran's Islamic Republic, it is clear despite all of the difficulties it has faced — the problems, the turmoil and the wars all around Iran — the system has survived. This is not accidental; rather, it shows that the Iranian system has checks and balances — think tanks and consultative bodies, as well as other structures and processes for rational decision-making — that permit the system to achieve optimum results.

If it is true that Iran is a major player in the turbulent areas of the Middle East and in the energy market, then why can we not use the influence of such a country to help establish regional order and solve global crises?

The major global crises the world is facing can be divided into three categories: terrorism, nuclear and energy. [...]

Insurgencies can be classified into two categories. The first is those groups that Iran and the United States agree to be terrorist organizations. These include Al Qaeda, the Taliban, Hizb-ul Tahrir in Central Asia, Sepah Sahabeh in Pakistan, and the Mujahedeen-e Khalq. The elimination of terrorism by these groups suits Iran, and so Iran is ready to cooperate in the areas of media relations, social affairs, intelligence and perhaps even military strikes. Iran has vast amounts of intelligence and information on these groups, having monitored their activities and their predecessors's going as far back as several decades.

The second form of insurgencies includes those groups about which the United States and Iran can have a legitimate disagreement over their characterization as terrorist organizations. These include Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

However, even with this category Iran could be a key to moderating their activities, because Iran has some influence over these groups. [...]

Regarding the nuclear issue, Iran is seeking a face-saving resolution that maintains a minimum degree of access to nuclear technology inside Iran. The incentives proposed to Iran by the "5+1 group" — the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, plus Germany — are exactly the sort of things that Iran's economy and industries need. Iran simply wants to see better-defined and better-clarified terms in the incentive offer, something that is not very hard for the other side to provide. Addressing Iran's nuclear concerns can only strengthen the Non-Proliferation Treaty and ease the way for new steps to be taken together in the global effort against the threats posed by nuclear weapons and nuclear stockpiles.

Finally, regarding the energy issue it should be noted Iran has the second-largest proven oil and gas reserves in the world. There are still vast regions in Iran with oil potential that have not been studied in the past because of political conditions or technology limitations.

Iran's energy capabilities on oil, gas, pipelines, electrical power plants and its access to neighboring countries are unique.

AND THEY WONDER WHY THE CHINESE BUY UP AMERICAN SECURITIES? (via Robert Duquette):

China's economy is out of control: China is growing so fast -- using cheap money to build steel mills, highways and textile factories it doesn't need – that the coming crash grows uglier by the day (Jim Jubak, 7/27/06, MSN Money Central)

In a train wreck, there comes the moment when it's no longer possible to avert disaster. Pull the brakes as hard as you can, the momentum of the train is so great that disaster is unavoidable.

I fear that China's economy passed that point of no return in the second quarter of 2006.

Today, I'm going to tell you why I think China's economy is headed for a train wreck. Not tomorrow, but in the reasonably near future. I'd say 2009. [...]

The government seems extremely reluctant to tackle the root causes of these bubbles. Despite the People's Bank of China's April increase in the benchmark one-year interest rates to 5.85% -- the first rate increase in 18 months -- interest rates for borrowing are still ridiculously low. Companies can borrow at an after-inflation rate of about 3.5%.

On the other hand, the People's Bank left the one-year interest rate that depositors get paid at 2.25%. That worked to bolster the profits of the big Chinese banks that the government is interested in taking public with Western investors as major buyers. It also created a massive disincentive for companies to save their cash. Instead, companies are reinvesting their cash, adding to the growth of fixed assets and to capacity gluts in some industries. According to the World Bank, retained corporate earnings accounted for more than half of new investment last year. That's about double the ratio in the United States.

Such corporate reinvestment has completely negated government efforts to shift more of China's national economy from investment and exports to buying by consumers. In 2005, the investment and export share of the economy actually increased and the consumer share fell to an all-time low of just 38% of GDP, according to the Institute for International Economics. And this corporate investment in fixed assets is largely unaffected by any changes in banking regulations or bank interest rates.

An increase in the value of the yuan against the dollar would damp corporate profits, slow the speed of investment in fixed assets and reduce speculative inflows from overseas investors who anticipate a yuan appreciation. Hiking the one-year benchmark interest rate again and again, and raising the interest rates paid to depositors would have similar effects. But such actions would also slow the economy and reduce the number of jobs that the economy is creating. China needs GDP growth north of 7% a year just to stay even with the number of new job seekers thrown up by its massive population every year. Reducing unemployment and underemployment -- categories that take in about 40% of the Chinese population by some counts -- requires even faster growth.

A significant portion of China's small ruling inner circle has fought efforts to attack the problem at the source to a standstill. Commerce Minister Bo Xilai, for example, has complained that any appreciation in the yuan will cripple profits in marginal industries such as textiles, where the profit margin is just 3%. A purely rational economic analysis would say that if Chinese textile makers can't compete after the yuan is appropriately revalued, then the least-efficient companies in the sector should go out of business and the jobs should flow to countries, perhaps Vietnam, where lower labor costs would allow textile makers to make a profit.

That would mean shipping jobs out of China, however, and advocating that is political death in a country that needs to create 20 million jobs a year to keep the population governable by the Communist regime.

DAMASKIN VILLAGE:

Syria's military flatters to deceive (Richard M Bennett, 7/28/06, Asia Times)

While it is still largely true that the Syrian military remains one of the largest and best-trained forces in the Arab world, it has significantly lost every major conflict with Israel since 1948. Its combat strength has deteriorated dramatically over the past 15 years as its equipment has become increasingly obsolescent, poorly maintained and short of spare parts.

The collapse of the Soviet Union created immense problems of resupply for the Syrians, and the slowdown experienced by the Syrian economy resulted in a further downgrading of the military's combat efficiency.

MAYBE IT'S JUST HIGH COMPARED TO FRENCHMEN?:

Tour De France Winner Flunks Drug Test (AP, July 27, 2006)

Tour de France champion Floyd Landis tested positive for high levels of testosterone during the race, his Phonak team said Thursday.

The statement came a day after the UCI, cycling's governing body, said an unidentified rider had failed a drug test during the Tour.

The Swiss-based Phonak said in a statement on it Web site that it was notified by the UCI Wednesday that Landis' sample showed "an unusual level of testosterone/epitestosterone" when he was tested after stage 17 of the race last Thursday.

"The team management and the rider were both totally surprised of this physiological result," the statement said.

Phonak said Landis would ask for analysis of his backup "B" sample "to prove either that this result is coming from a natural process or that this is resulting from a mistake."

F TROOP BACK TO NORMAL (via Mike Daley):

Theocracy, Theocracy, Theocracy (Ross Douthat, August/September 2006, First Things)

To understand what, precisely, the anti-theocrats think has gone so wrong, it’s necessary to understand what they mean by the term theocracy. This is no easy task. The word is often used to connote government by a specific institutional faith—Shia imams in Iran, say, or Wahhabi clerics in Afghanistan—with the clergy writing laws and a temple guard enforcing them. But the clout of institutional religion is at low ebb in American politics. No prelate wields the kind of authority that Catholic bishops once enjoyed over urban voters, no denomination can claim the kind of influence that once belonged to the old WASP mainline, and the evangelical Protestantism that figures so prominently in anti-theocracy tracts is distinguished precisely by its lack of any centralized ecclesiastical government.

Occasionally, the anti-theocrats flirt with the possibility that one institutional church or another might pose a threat to the democratic order. In American Theocracy, for instance, Kevin Phillips waxes paranoid about the Southern Baptist Convention’s role as the “state church” of the South, and he tallies, darkly, the number of Baptists who have insinuated themselves into the highest levels of American government. But for the most part, the sum of all secular fears is slightly—but only slightly—more plausible than a Southern Baptist caesaropapism. The real danger, the anti-theocrats suggest, is an ecumenical theocracy that would install a right-wing Mere Christianity as its established religion, subject unbelievers to discrimination, and enshrine the Mosaic code as the law of the land.

BY HIS SNARLIN' SHALL YOU KNOW HIS SURRENDER:

Administration and Critics, in Senate Testimony, Clash Over Eavesdropping Compromise (ERIC LICHTBLAU, 7/27/06, NY Times)

[C]ritics attacked the agreement Wednesday as abdication to the White House. Mr. Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who heads the Judiciary Committee, appeared particularly stung at the hearing when a civil liberties advocate, James X. Dempsey, told him he would prefer to see no legislation at all, allowing the National Security Agency to continue wiretapping Americans without warrants, than Congressional approval of procedures outside the scope of the 1978 law that created the secret court.

In agreeing to that court’s review of the N.S.A. program, the White House had insisted that the bill include language implicitly recognizing the president’s “constitutional authority” to collect foreign intelligence beyond the provisions of the 1978 law. Mr. Dempsey, policy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, said at the hearing that he appreciated Mr. Specter’s efforts to bring the N.S.A. program under judicial review but that “the price you paid for that simple concession is far too high.”

The proposal, he said, “would turn the clock back to an era of unchecked presidential power, warrantless domestic surveillance and constitutional uncertainty.”

Mr. Specter grew testy over the attack, saying President Bush’s agreement to submit the program to the intelligence court was no simple concession.

“Have you ever gotten a concession from a president?” he demanded of Mr. Dempsey.
"No? Well, that makes two of us."

This whole issue is a demonstration of the central fact of the Bush presidency--he's never won more completely than when his foes think they have.

---

MOM KNOWS BEST (via Bryan Francoeur):

'Jeopardy' Champ Rips Show (AP, 7/25/06)

"Jeopardy!" ace Ken Jennings, who won $2.5 million during his 74-game winning streak, has a few unkind words to say about the show — and dapper host Alex Trebek.

"I know, I know, the old folks love him," Jennings writes in a recent posting, titled "Dear Jeopardy!" on his Web site.

"Nobody knows he died in that fiery truck crash a few years back and was immediately replaced with the Trebektron 4000 (I see your engineers still can't get the mustache right, by the way)."

Jennings also takes aim at the show's "effete, left-coast" categories and "same-old" format.

SYMPATHY FOR THE DEMONIZED:

Travelling hopefully: ON THE ROAD TO KANDAHAR by Jason Burke (AMIR TAHERI, Times of London)

In this fast-paced narrative of a decade of travelling and living in half a dozen Muslim countries, Burke endeavours to share that fascination and sympathy. For the most part, he succeeds. His main concern is to show the diversity of Islam and to reject attempts by the West to turn Islam into a monolithic “other”. Muslims number 1,300m and are a majority in 57 countries. They are divided into six doctrinal schools and hundreds of sub-schools. Burke’s brisk reportage shows that being a Muslim in Pakistan is not the same as being one in neighbouring Afghanistan, let alone Bosnia or Morocco. That diversity, however, has not prevented Islamism from masquerading as the sole representative of the faith. Islamism is a political movement that, in its different versions, is seeking world conquest.

REDEFINING SKULL (via The Swaddling Duck):

Warrant issued after dancer skips her court date in body-parts case (TOM HAYDON AND SULEMAN DIN, July 27, 2006, Newark Star-Ledger)

Linda Kay, a dancer at Hott 22, an all-nude juice bar on Route 22 in Union, was arrested about 1:15 p.m. Friday when officers investigating a report of a man threatening to kill himself went to the Diana Drive house in South Plainfield.

Police didn't find any man there, but they did find found a jaggedly severed hand in a mason jar of formaldehyde on Kay's dresser in her basement bedroom.

Officers also found six human skulls in another bedroom. Authorities said they suspect the skulls were purchased online, but police they were included as part of the criminal charge until they complete an investigation into how Kay obtained them. The Middlesex County Medical Examiner's Office was attempting to get fingerprints from the severed hand. [...]

Daniel Russo, owner of Hott 22, said reports about Kay have been good for business.

"We've gotten a lot of calls. Guys are asking if the skull girl is dancing tonight," Russo said. "It's too much. It's pretty funny."

HOWARD WHO?

A gas chamber in Manchester: a review of KALOOKI NIGHTS
by Howard Jacobson (A. C. Grayling, Times of London)

IN THIS AGE OF LAZY reviewing, facile judgment and inflated rhetoric, how is one to convey news of the arrival of a work of genius? This powerful, troubling, moving, profound novel is nothing less. Its architecture — more accurately: its engineering, the construction of it — is a feat of brilliance, so sustained and accurate is it; and yet this is the least of its merits. What really steals one’s breath away is its sharpness and depth of insight — a sharpness that flays, and a depth almost too vertiginous to describe — and the remorseless tragedy it unfolds, even as it makes one laugh aloud, sometimes in shock. It is the most intelligent and important novel to appear in this country in years.

Howard Jacobson’s gifts as a novelist of the first rank, not just in England but in English, are well known. He is a master of the language, whose piercing eye makes him the most excoriating as well as the wittiest of writers. Equally to the point, he is one of that small group of authors whose superiority to the average seems to put him well beyond the competence of Booker and Whitbread judges; it is as if winning any such prize would be a diminution of his stature, for he is in a different league, and this novel proves it.

The thread of the novel is its narrator’s effort to discover why a childhood friend from their Manchester Jewish community has murdered his parents by gassing them. By itself this theme is enough to jerk one’s attention to the highest pitch — consider the two awful impossibilities it combines: Jewish parenticide, and by gassing — but of course there can be no addressing such a theme without also addressing what presses behind it, namely, Jewish history’s 5,000 years of bitterness. Comprehending so speaking an individual Jewish tragedy has to involve comprehending the tragedy of the Jews — in both senses of comprehend — and that is what Jacobson essays here.

“Five thousand years of bitterness” is what the narrator, a professional cartoonist and refugee from the self-made shtetl of Manchester immigrant Jews, calls his magnum opus, a graphic (again, in both senses) history of his people. He had started it with his Orthodox Jewish friend, the later murderer, when they were at school together and first grappling with the fact of Jewish besiegement. Genius sees the universal and the particular in each other, and Jacobson’s genius leads him to anatomise the terrible relationship between Jews and Gentiles in the narrator’s unsuccessful (and wickedly funny) marriages to Gentile women, and in the spindle on which the murder turns, another attempt to bridge that fraught divide.

This is a novel of debate, and it is extraordinary how Jacobson achieves every point of view, every possible nuance of attack and defence on the question of the essence of Jewishness — its endurance, the implacable enmities it has suffered, its self-inflicted wounds and obsessions, its unutterable sorrows.

INNOVATION TRUMPS REGULATION:

U.S. outdoes Canada in cutting toxic pollution Canadian Press, 7/27/06)

U.S. manufacturing facilities cut their releases of toxics by 21 per cent between 1998 and 2003, while Canadian manufacturers cut releases by 10 per cent.

TOO ZIONIST?:

The Bolton Nomination, Act II: Bush Presses Anew for Confirmation of Controversial Envoy (Colum Lynch, 7/27/06, Washington Post)

U.N. Ambassador John R. Bolton's blunt diplomatic style has made him a political rock star among conservative Republicans who relish his routine exposure of U.N. foibles and criticism of its bureaucrats.

But international diplomats, including several from countries closely allied with the United States, complain that he has furthered U.S. isolation here and undercut U.S.-backed efforts to reform the sprawling bureaucracy of the United Nations. [...]

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee begins hearings Thursday on whether to make Bolton's temporary appointment, which will expire in January, permanent. His appearance in Washington, where Democratic leaders have vowed to oppose Bolton, is expected to be as polarizing as his presence at U.N. headquarters.

Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) said, "Mr. Bolton's performance at the U.N. only confirms my conviction that he's the wrong person for this job." He suggested that Democrats may filibuster a Senate vote unless the Bush administration releases documents Biden believes detail Bolton's use of National Security Agency intercepts involving U.S. citizens. [...]

Israel's U.N. envoy, Dan Gillerman, said Bolton's arrival has been a "breath of fresh air at Turtle Bay precisely because he's not your typical diplomat."

"I'm certainly not going to tell the Senate or House of Representatives how to vote, but if John Bolton were to be confirmed by the Israeli Knesset, he would get all 120 votes," Gillerman said.

PAGING MICHAEL BELLISLES....:

400-year-old pistol found on site of first American colonists (RICHARD LUSCOMBE, 7/26/06, The Scotsman)

ARCHAEOLOGISTS have uncovered a rare but perfectly preserved early 17th-century Scottish pistol at the historic former British colony known as the birthplace of the United States, making the firearm one of the oldest artefacts of European origin ever discovered in North America.

The weapon probably belonged to one of the first settlers to arrive at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, and was recovered from a well at the site with several other "hugely significant" artefacts.

THUS THE BASEMENT RULE (via Bryan Francoeur):

Sun kills 60,000 a year, WHO says (Reuters, 7/26/06)

As many as 60,000 people a year die from too much sun, mostly from malignant skin cancer, the World Health Organization has reported.

It found that 48,000 deaths every year are caused by malignant melanomas, and 12,000 by other kinds of skin cancer. About 90 percent of such cancers are caused by ultraviolet light from the sun.

Radiation from the sun also causes often serious sunburn, skin aging, eye cataracts, pterygium -- a fleshy growth on the surface of the eye, cold sores and other ills, according to the report, the first to detail the global effects of sun exposure.

THE PERFECT ELECTORAL ENVIRONMENT FOR DEMOCRATS?:

Conservative revival is bad news for Lib Dems (Julian Glover, July 27, 2006, The Guardian)

As MPs start their two-month break from the Commons, the Lib Dems emerge as the main losers in a poll which also sees the Conservatives on a 13-year high, equalling their best Guardian/ICM rating since Black Wednesday in 1992.

Only 17% of voters said they would back the Lib Dems in an immediate general election, down four points on a month, and six points below the party's rating a year ago when it was led by Charles Kennedy. [...]

[T]his month's poll puts Labour up three points, to 35%, narrowing the gap on the Conservatives, who climb two points to 39%.

That is close to the 40% rating which Conservatives believe could allow them to challenge for power in a general election. The Conservatives last scored 39% in a Guardian/ICM poll in January 1993, as they recovered briefly before a decade-long collapse in public support.

ANYTHING BUT THE TROUGHS:

Flush with cash? BoSox toilet may fill your needs (Gayle Fee and Laura Raposa, July 27, 2006, Boston Herald)

How would you like to pee where Roger Clemens, Johnny Damon and heck yes, even Bill Buckner peed???? Well then, here’s your dream come true!

Lelands, the New York sports memorabilia auction house, is selling the potty that stood inside the home dugout. The very bowels of Fenway Park, so to speak.

The prize piece of porcelain “got up close and very personal with the likes of Boggs, Ramirez, Damon and Pedro,” the auction catalogue brags.

The possibly Cursed crapper was installed just prior to the doomed 1986 season and was ripped out during the clubhouse renovations in 2004 - taking its bad john juju with it! Lelands said it got the one-of-a-kind artifact from the construction crew that renovated the old ballyard. [...]

“Last year we sold the urinal from the Cardinals clubhouse to a St. Louis area urologist for over $2,100. He put it in his office,” said auction house spokesguy Doug Drotman. “The Cardinals fans are pretty rabid about their team but there are not many more avid collectors than Red Sox fans.”

And, as Lelands points out, this is the throne that “caught Clemens.”

The hardball loo is up for grabs at www.lelands.com for 30 days.

AND THEN THE WHITE SOX STARTED PLAYING REAL TEAMS....:

Chicago's Struggles Alter AL Landscape (STEVEN GOLDMAN, July 27, 2006, NY Sun)

[W]ith the White Sox ice cold and the Yankees hot, the wild card safety valve is again open.

Chicago's tailspin began just before the All-Star break, when the Red Sox beat their hosiery counterparts in two of three contests. Beginning with that series, the White Sox have gone 4–11. Over that same span, the Yankees have gone 10–5 and a comeback kids-style Minnesota Twins team has gone 12–4. On July 6, the Sox held a wild-card lead of seven games.As of yesterday afternoon's loss to the Twins, it's gone.

Chicago's failure has been systemic, though it was pitching that went down harder. Left-handed ace Mark Buehrle has been so bad for so long that the soundness of his arm must be questioned.With another disastrous start yesterday, Buehrle has been pasted in five consecutive starts, going 0–5 with a 12.15 ERA. During the July slide, Freddy Garcia's July ERA is 5.76. Javier Vazquez's is 6.48. Overall, the staff's ERA during the slide has been 5.44.

Given hot hitting, a team might be able to survive that kind of pitching.The Sox haven't had it. Though their power production has remained steady, with 27 home runs and a .455 slugging percentage over the last 15 games, the team's onbase average is just .305. Key offenders include Paul Konerko, whose on-base average is just .281 (though he has hit four home runs in 57 at bats) and A.J. Pierzynski, who is batting .176 AVG/.208 OBA/.294 SLG. As a result, the Sox have scored just under four runs a game. When the pitching staff is allowing more than five runs a game at the same time, it takes an awful lot of luck to win.

THE MORE YOU LEARN THE MORE RIGHT THE ANCIENTS WERE (via jd watson):

Alone in the Universe (Iain Murray, The American Enterprise)

As a long-time devotee of science fiction, I have always been excited by the possibility that mankind might encounter extraterrestrial life. But I have always tried to apply the rules of logic and reason to those prospects. And it is becoming increasingly clear to me, and others, that merely wanting to believe is not enough.

As our observation methods have improved, we've learned that somewhere on the order of 20-50 percent of all stars have planets orbiting them. We have no idea whether life-friendly planets are common, or what the chances are that life, much less intelligent life, exists on such planets, but if we assume that there is nothing special about our own solar system, we come up with some pretty optimistic numbers. Astronomers Frank Drake and Carl Sagan suggested that there could be 10 million civilizations as advanced as or more advanced than us in the galaxy today.

Such a theory, however, begs an important question, one raised by Italian physicist Enrico Fermi way back in 1950. He turned to his lunch partners at Los Alamos, who included Edward Teller, and asked simply, "Where is everybody?" If intelligent, communicating life is common, why haven't we seen evidence of it? After all, if the formation of civilizations has been fairly constant through the long life of the universe, then there should have been billions of them by now.

... We are therefore led to the uncomfortable conclusion that there may be something wrong with the assumption that life can exist in numerous other places. Perhaps our solar system is not average at all. Perhaps life-friendly planets are rare. ... It is quite possible, then, that we are the only civilization around at the moment. ... For life as we know it, we are today left with the unpalatable but rational conclusion that instead of Carl Sagan's millions of civilizations, there is a very good chance we are the only one. The latest decade's discoveries and arguments do not mean that we are alone for certain, but they are probabilities that point strongly in that direction.

MORE:
Puckish (Brothers Judd, 7/30/2003)

HE OUTLASTED THEM IN THE END (via t):

The Novel Moscow Feared: The precursor to "1984" wasn't published in its author's land until 1988. (JOHN J. MILLER, July 26, 2006, Opinion Journal)

Authors sometimes gripe about the long wait between the completion of a book and its publication. Perhaps the sad case of the Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin will help them put things in perspective: He finished his novel "We" in 1921, but it didn't appear in print in his native land until 1988.

The problem wasn't that Zamyatin and his manuscript were obscure or unknown. Rather, it was that they offended communist censors, who correctly understood "We" to be a savage critique of the totalitarianism that was starting to take shape in the years following the Russian Revolution.

They managed to suppress "We" inside the Soviet Union, but they weren't able to keep it from making a deep impression elsewhere: Two of the most iconic novels in the English language--"Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley and "1984" by George Orwell--owe an enormous debt to Zamyatin.

That's because "We" is the ur-text of science-fiction dystopias: It described an Orwellian society almost three decades before Orwell invented his own version. Although the book has never been especially hard to find in the U.S.--editions have been in print since 1924--it will now become even more readily available, thanks to Natasha Randall's new translation, published this month by the Modern Library.

Orwell actually had a tough time tracking down the novel for himself.

RACING TO GATTACA (via Lisa Fleischman):

Confessions of a "Genetic Outlaw": A new method for screening embryos for disease may provide more reason to brand some people dissidents for bringing their kids into the world (Elizabeth R. Schiltz, 7/20/06, Business Week)

From time to time, we are all confronted with the disconnect between how we see ourselves and how others see us. I've always seen myself as a responsible, law-abiding citizen. I recycle, I vote, I don't drive a Hummer. But I've come to realize that many in the scientific and medical community view me as grossly irresponsible. Indeed, in the words of Bob Edwards, the scientist who facilitated the birth of England's first test-tube baby, I am a "sinner." A recent book even branded me a "genetic outlaw." My transgression? I am one of the dwindling number of women who receive a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome and choose not to terminate our pregnancies. [...]

Scientists are beginning to tell me precisely how much dissident acts like not aborting my son cost society. A study published in 2000 in the American Journal of Medical Genetics concluded that the average lifetime cost of each "new case" of Down syndrome is $451,000. This study differentiated the lifetime costs of various types of prenatally diagnosed disabilities leading to abortions in one hospital in Michigan. For reasons I can't fathom, Down syndrome turns out to be the most expensive by far. In contrast, the lifetime costs of conditions like spina bifida ($294,000) and cleft lip or palate ($101,000) seem almost negligible.

This study was offered to quantify the cost of banning "second trimester elective terminations for prenatally diagnosed abnormalities." Imagine the public outrage that would greet the publication of a study calculating the cost of not terminating pregnancies if it were broken down into a category such as family income. Although most of our civil rights laws now include "disability" in the litany of prohibited bases for discrimination—along with race, gender, and ethnic origin—our enlightened liberal commitment to diversity appears to go only so far. While we are willing to mandate accommodation to make jobs or public transportation accessible to a person with spina bifida, the social cost of accommodating her birth is increasingly being seen as exceeding her worth.

EUGENICS BY DEFAULT. This emerging public consensus in favor of eugenics is not the product of any sort of reasoned debate. There has been no referendum, no debate in Congress, no move to amend the Constitution. It's emerging from the collective force of countless decisions by loving and caring mothers and fathers, in consultation with conscientious medical professionals who are using the truly miraculous and astonishing discoveries of brilliant scientists plunging deeper and deeper into the mysteries of life. These people are not intentionally practicing eugenics in order to create a perfect master race. They are simply trying to alleviate potential suffering and protect the quality of the lives they are bringing into the world.

But it is time for us to acknowledge the collective effect of these private decisions. Do we truly endorse the implicit message we are sending to our disabled brothers and sisters—that our commitment to diversity does not extend to genetic diversity? We need to confront the disconnect between how we see ourselves—as an enlightened, liberal society committed to fully integrating people with disabilities in all sectors of life—and how people living with the disabilities we would identify for extinction must see us.

JUSTICE IS SERVED:

Jury finds Yates not guilty in drownings (ANGELA K. BROWN, 7/26/06, Associated Press)

In a dramatic turnaround from her first murder trial, Andrea Yates was found not guilty by reason of insanity Wednesday in the drowning of her children in the bathtub.

The 42-year-old woman will be committed to a state mental hospital and held until she is no longer deemed a threat. If she had been convicted of murder, she would have been sentenced to life in prison.

MORE:
Andrea Yates: More To The Story: As a judge formally sentences the convicted murderer, TIME's Timothy Roche examines the role of a key prosecution witness (TIMOTHY ROCHE , 3/18/02, TIME)

In Texas, the law on insanity defenses is among the most restrictive in the nation. So narrow are the nuances of the state's centuries-old law that it was not enough for Yates' defense lawyers to simply prove that she twice attempted suicide, had been hospitalized four times for psychiatric care and nursed a psychosis before the drownings clearly documented in thousands of pages of medical records. No, Andrea's motives may have been delusional, but if she were able to distinguish right from wrong — good from evil — while committing the crime, jurors had little choice but to reject her plea of not guilty by reason of insanity and convict her.

To reach their verdict, jurors seemed to rely heavily on the persuasive testimony of a famous forensic psychiatrist, Park Dietz, who was paid $500 an hour by prosecutors to dispute claims that Andrea Yates was insane under the Texas law. Now, TIME has learned, questions are surfacing about the reliability of the state's key witness who has admitted that he mixed up facts that prosecutors wound up emphasizing to the jury. Dietz also has told TIME that he opposes the very law that he helped prosecutors apply to Yates and jurors used to deny her insanity defense. [...]

While defense lawyers called several expert witnesses who had different opinions about Andrea's actual diagnosis, each told jurors she obviously had been psychotic and delusional at the time. After her arrest, jail psychiatrist Melissa Ferguson testified, Andrea was put on medications that enabled her to finally talk about the visions and voices that she says guided her actions. It was only after she was placed in a jail cell, naked, on suicide watch that Andrea spoke of the Satan inside her and the only was to be rid of him: She had to be executed. And she had to kill the children, as Satan demanded, to get the death penalty.

Andrea tried to explain. "It was the seventh deadly sin. My children weren't righteous. They stumbled because I was evil. The way I was raising them they could never be saved," she told the jail psychiatrist. "They were doomed to perish in the fires of hell."

Jurors took notes as Rusty testified about his life with Andrea, whom he had met when they were both 25 years old and living in the same apartment complex in Houston. He told them how their family had grown, and how they had moved from a house in suburbia to a camping trailer to a bus converted into a motor home, where Andrea focused on raising the toddlers. After the birth of their fourth child, Luke, in 1999, Andrea tried twice to commit suicide. She was hospitalized both times and was diagnosed with postpartum depression and psychosis.

The couple and their four sons moved from the bus into their house on Beachcomber Lane in a Houston suburb. She recovered while using Haldol, but eventually stopped taking the medication. Against the advice of her psychiatrist, Andrea soon became pregnant again with their fifth child, Mary. Within months, following the death of her ailing father, her psychosis returned. Instead of taking her back to the same doctor who'd treated her before, Rusty told jurors that he and Andrea went to the Devereux-Texas Treatment Network, where Mohammed Saeed became Andrea's psychiatrist. Rusty testified that he never knew that Andrea had visions and voices; he said he never knew she had considered killing the children. Neither did Dr. Saeed, even though the delusions could have been found in medical records from 1999. Andrea would not talk or eat.

After only slight improvement, Andrea was released from Devereux. A month later, she had another episode. Rusty took her back to Devereux. Again, she was released. Dr. Saeed reluctantly prescribed Haldol, the same drug that worked in a drug cocktail for her in 1999. But after a few weeks, he took her off the drug, citing his concerns about side effects. (For more on Saeed's response, see our previous examination of the Yates trial.) Though Andrea's condition seemed to be worsening two days before the drownings, when her husband drove her to Saeed's office, Rusty testified, the doctor refused to try Haldol longer or return her to the hospital. Rusty was frustrated, he told the jury, and he didn't know what else to do.

OBLIGATORY NAZI REFERENCE:

Cartoonist likens Olmert to Nazi (MICHAEL FREUND, 7/26/06, Jerusalem Post)

Invoking a scene from the film Schindler's List, one of Norway's largest newspapers recently published a political cartoon comparing Prime Minster Ehud Olmert to the infamous commander of a Nazi death camp who indiscriminately murdered Jews by firing at them at random from his balcony.

The caricature by political cartoonist Finn Graff appeared on July 10 in the Oslo daily Dagbladet. It has prompted outrage among the country's small Jewish community and led the Simon Weisenthal Center to submit a protest to the Norwegian government.

HAD ENOUGH?:

Prosecutors Look at UWM Project, Meeting (Todd Richmond, 7/26/06, AP)

Gov. Jim Doyle brushed off word that state and federal investigators are considering launching two more probes of his administration Wednesday, dismissing the news as typical political fodder during a heated campaign season.

Department of Justice spokesman Mike Bauer said prosecutors are reviewing how a firm that donated to Doyle won a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee building contract and whether a campaign fundraiser for Doyle arranged a meeting between a lawyer seeking state business and Doyle's top state aide in his office. [...]

A decision to investigate the UW-Milwaukee affair and the meeting would mean more problems for Doyle, who faces U.S. Rep. Mark Green, R-Green Bay, in the November general election.

Doyle's administration already is under investigation over a state travel contract that went to a company whose executives gave to his campaign and whether campaign donations from employees of two utilities factored into state regulators' decision to allow the sale of the utilities' nuclear power plant. [...]

Bauer said the prosecutors are reviewing for possible investigation a complaint from a developer called Prism over how Doyle's administration handled the bidding process for the $68.7 million UW-Milwaukee project. Prism lost out on a bid to turn a university building into student housing and retail space.

THE ROUT IS ON:

Gay-marriage ruling could rock Supreme Court races (DAVID AMMONS, July 26, 2006, AP)

The deeply divided Washington Supreme Court's decision to retain the state ban on gay marriage may roil the already volatile court elections this fall.

Chief Justice Gerry Alexander, who is under attack from the right and from the building industry and others, joined the shaky 5-4 majority. That puts him on the side of public opinion, according to the polls, but might alienate some of his progressive backers, analysts said Wednesday. Alexander is opposed by attorney John Groen.

Two other justices up for re-election this fall, Susan Owens and Tom Chambers, were among the four dissenters and would have thrown out the state's gay-marriage ban, called the Defense of Marriage Act.

Owens already was considered vulnerable and faces a strong challenge from state Sen. Stephen Johnson, R-Kent. Chambers is considered a safe bet for re-election and the case isn't expected to hurt him much.

WHAT'S LEFT OF FEMINISM...:

Senate Removes Abortion Option for Young Girls (CARL HULSE, 7/26/06, NY Times)

The Senate passed legislation Tuesday that would make it a federal crime to help an under-age girl escape parental notification laws by crossing state lines to obtain an abortion.

The bill was approved on a 65-to-34 vote, with 14 Democrats joining 51 Republicans in favor.

SOCCER CHANTS?:

CITIZEN MCCAIN: As the 2008 presidential race approaches, New York voters ponder the possibility of a McCain White House (JOHN DESIO, 7/26/06, New York Press)

At the end of March, the Arizona Senator was the keynote speaker at a packed-to-the-rafters rally for immigration reform in the heavily-Irish Woodlawn section of The Bronx. The greeting McCain received from the crowd—Republicans, Democrats and Independents all together—was not what you would expect to hear for a politician, but for a rock star.

They sang, they cheered, they even engaged in some traditional soccer chants for McCain. The crowd exploded for McCain when he walked into the room, and only stopped when he asked them to. Otherwise, they might have cheered all night.

That reaction illustrates just why McCain can do what no Republican presidential candidate has done since Ronald Reagan and win New York in 2008, so claims Charlie Szrom, director of the national movement to draft McCain for president in 2008 (www.mccainmovement.com). Headed into his senior year at Indiana University, Szrom formed the “Draft McCain” movement in April as a way to drum up support for the Senator’s likely presidential run. The all-volunteer group boasts members in 31 states including New York and regional coordinators in 11 of those states. Szrom says he hopes to have a New York director in the very near future.

“We’re fans of McCain, and we want to do something to put the man we feel is best suited for it into the White House in 2008,” said Szrom, adding that unlike most politicians, McCain does not guide his career on polling data, but makes pragmatic decisions on what he feels best serves the country and his own deep convictions. That practical streak will help McCain in New York, said Szrom, noting that one of the most liberal states in the union have handed Republican Governor George Pataki three straight victories, and that the largest liberal city in the United States has elected Republicans for mayor—Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg—four consecutive times. “New York is a great state for McCain,” said Szrom.

Victories by Pataki, Giuliani and Bloomberg are typically used as evidence by Republicans that their party is alive and well in New York. For Szrom, it represents the high level of sophistication of the average state voter.

“Voters in New York are more focused on issues, on what a candidate can offer, not just on their party line,” said Szrom. “John McCain appeals to a broad spectrum of voters, and he’ll appeal to New Yorkers in 2008.”

MOST JUSTIFIED:

Israeli 'Doves' Say Response Is Legitimate: Support for Campaign Bridges Political Divides (John Ward Anderson, 7/26/06, Washington Post)

Two weeks into a war that began after a cross-border Hezbollah raid captured two Israeli soldiers, Israelis have shown extraordinary unanimity in backing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's military campaign to inflict a punishing and perhaps lethal blow to the militant Shiite group, despite a rain of rockets into northern Israel and hundreds of civilian deaths and widespread bombing destruction in Lebanon.

This singularity of purpose, which bridges Israel's weary center, dovish left and hawkish right in a way rarely seen here, is all the more striking coming just six years after Israel's unilateral withdrawal from the self-declared security zone it held in Lebanon for nearly two decades, ending a painful experience that inflicted deep wounds on the national psyche and might have made some wary of reentering the Lebanese morass.

"Lebanon was Israel's Vietnam, and when we went there in 1982, it was really a march of folly, it was wrong morally, it was wrong strategically, and we paid dearly for that grave mistake," said Ari Shavit, a dovish columnist for Haaretz newspaper, referring to the full-scale invasion masterminded by then-Defense Minister Ariel Sharon to drive out the Palestine Liberation Organization.

But today is different, he said, "because Israeli is not the aggressor marching into another land." Rather, the current campaign "is an old-fashioned war where we are right, and we were attacked for no reason whatsoever. This is probably the most justified war in our history."

In a survey published Friday by Israel's Maariv newspaper, 95 percent of those sampled said that attacks against Hezbollah were justified, and 90 percent said that fighting should continue until Hezbollah was pushed away from Israel's northern border.

THIS IS A SINKING SHIP:

Twins creep closer to slumping Sox (Andrew Seligman, 7/26/06, The Associated Press)

The way Johan Santana sees it, this is how it's going to be the rest of the season — the Minnesota Twins and the Chicago White Sox locked in step.

At the moment, they're teams headed in different directions.

Santana outpitched Jose Contreras, and Jason Bartlett hit a three-run homer as the surging Twins pulled one game behind slumping Chicago with a 4-3 victory on Tuesday night. [...]

The Twins have won 33 of their last 41, while the White Sox suffered their 11th loss in 14 games. Chicago is 7 ½ games behind first-place Detroit in the AL Central, and the Twins are another game out in third. And the White Sox lead the New York Yankees by one-half game in the wild-card race, with Minnesota right behind.

POPULISM IS THE POLITE TERM :

Web, Lieberman and the Netroots (ARI MELBER, July 25, 2006, The Nation)

As progressive bloggers focus on ousting Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman from office for his alleged disloyalty to Democrats, in Virginia, another candidate who embodied the Republican cause has infiltrated the Democratic Party. But ironically, the bloggers support this former Reagan official.

Jim Webb, a Vietnam combat veteran who served as Secretary of the Navy under President Reagan, is not only the new darling of the national netroots in his challenge to Republican incumbent George Allen; he was recruited to run for office by Internet activists. Webb, an iconoclastic, progun, prochoice, antiwar, libertarian, economic populist from a rural military family, recently declared his membership in the Democratic Party. In a summer campaign season punctuated by talk of purges and ideological purity, online enthusiasm for Webb's candidacy tells a different story about blog activism, raising fundamental questions about the netroots' emerging electoral strategy.

MORE:
Hatred-politics endanger Lieberman race (Morton Kondracke, 7/25/06, Whittier Daily News)

If former Greenwich Selectman Ned Lamont beats Lieberman in the Democratic primary, it will represent a signal victory for the MoveOn.org- Michael Moore-DailyKos left wing of the Democratic Party and for vicious name-calling as a political tactic.

The Democratic Party already is handicapped by the fact that its liberal base amounts to just 20 percent of the electorate, while the Republicans' conservative base is 33 percent, according to decades of polling. Both parties must appeal to the remaining 47 percent who describe themselves as "moderate"- which Democrats can't do if the left triumphs.

But the left is ascendant. MoveOn's preferred 2000 presidential candidate, Howard Dean, is now chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and the party's leaders in Congress, Sen. Harry Reid, Nev., and Rep. Nancy Pelosi, give every evidence of being influenced by the left-leaning blogosphere's obsessive hatred of President Bush.

Reid and Pelosi press conferences are dominated by Bush-bashing and virtually empty of positive proposals. Even so, mainstream Democrats are under constant Weblog pressure to "take on" Bush and routinely get attacked for being too accommodating.

Lieberman is a target primarily because he supports the Iraq war, but also because he rejects Bush-hatred and often cooperates with Republicans, even though he votes with his party 80 percent of the time.

When fellow Senate Democrats Joseph Biden, Del.; Ken Salazar, Colo.; and Barbara Boxer; endorsed Lieberman, the liberal blog Democrats.com featured this warning:

"If they read progressive blogs at all - and by now one would assume they do - \ certainly know that the Democratic `base' hates Lieberman and will be furious at his defenders."

The blogger, Bob Fertik, asked, "So why are these senators kissing Lieberman's ass/ring?" He speculated that one reason was that Lieberman could help them raise money, "in particular conservative Jewish money" and noted that "ideologically, Lieberman practically owns the `Democratic sellout' brand," which he warned Biden and Salazar to avoid.

Even before the current Middle East conflict, Lieberman was subjected to anti-Semitic attacks on liberal blogs DailyKos and Huffington Post. One commentary declared, "Ned Lamont needs to beat Lieberman to a pulp in the debate and define what it means to be an American who is NOT beholden to the Israeli lobby."

CORRUPTION BY LEGISLATIVE HISTORY

Snookering Stevens: A justice gets duped (Ramesh Ponnuru, NRO, 7/25/06)

In deciding how to read the amendment [limiting the Court's jurisdiction over cases like Hamdan], Justice Stevens, writing for the Court, looked at senators’ statements, among other things. Here he encountered a problem: The senators disagreed. Senators Lindsey Graham and Jon Kyl, the Republican authors of the amendment, thought that it applied to pending cases. Other senators, notably Democrat Carl Levin, did not.

Stevens handles the problem in footnote 10. The statements by Kyl and Graham, he writes, “appear to have been inserted into the Congressional Record after the Senate debate. . . . All statements made during the debate itself support Senator Levin’s understanding” (emphasis in original).

But Stevens has it wrong. None of the statements he cites — on either side of the issue — was made during floor debate in the Senate. All of them were submitted for the record after the debate (but before the vote on the act).

THE FLOOD OF NEW ILLEGALS ACT OF 2006 (Via Tom Maguire)

Raise Wages, Not Walls (Michael Dukakis and Daniel J.B. Mitchell, NY Times, 7/25/06)

There is a simpler alternative. If we are really serious about turning back the tide of illegal immigration, we should start by raising the minimum wage from $5.15 per hour to something closer to $8. The Massachusetts legislature recently voted to raise the state minimum to $8 and California may soon set its minimum even higher. Once the minimum wage has been significantly increased, we can begin vigorously enforcing the wage law and other basic labor standards.

Millions of illegal immigrants work for minimum and even sub-minimum wages in workplaces that don’t come close to meeting health and safety standards. It is nonsense to say, as President Bush did recently, that these jobs are filled by illegal immigrants because Americans won’t do them. Before we had mass illegal immigration in this country, hotel beds were made, office floors were cleaned, restaurant dishes were washed and crops were picked — by Americans.

THE UNANSWERABLE ARGUMENT IN FAVOR OF THE ISRAELI RESPONSE

Hezbollah Says Israeli Response a Surprise (Scheherezade Faramarzi, AP, 7/25/06)

"The truth is _ let me say this clearly _ we didn't even expect (this) response.... that (Israel) would exploit this operation for this big war against us," said Komati.

He said Hezbollah had expected "the usual, limited response" from Israel to the July 12 cross-border raid, in which three Israelis were killed.

WEREN'T THE KRAUTS, POLACKS AND WOPS BAD ENOUGH?:

Chorizo is the new Racing Sausage (Don Walker, 7/25/06, JS Online Blogs)

Chorizo, a tasty Mexican sausage, will join fellow meaty friends Hot Dog, Bratwurst, Polish and Italian as the newest member of the Klement's Famous Racing Sausages team at Miller Park.

Chorizo, who will be adorned with a sombrero and decked out in red, green and white, will be formally introduced on Thursday at a press conference at Miller Park.

OOPS, JOE, THERE'S A HITCH IN YOUR TALE...:

Case Closed: The truth about the Iraqi-Niger "yellowcake" nexus. (Christopher Hitchens, July 25, 2006, Slate)

I shall quote here, with his permission, from a letter I have received from Ambassador Rolf Ekeus. Ambassador Ekeus, currently high commissioner for national minority questions for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, is a founder of the renowned Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, has been Sweden's envoy both to the United Nations and the United States, and won great acclaim for his effective defanging of Iraq when he was the first chairman of UNSCOM after the first Gulf War in 1992. (When it was proposed 10 years later that the U.N. inspectors be sent back to Iraq, Kofi Annan actually renominated Ekeus for the job but was overruled by France and Russia, who wanted the more conciliatory Hans Blix.) Ekeus writes to me as follows, having known Zahawie in a professional capacity and having read the posting, apparently from him, in Slate's "Fray":

One of my colleagues remembers Zahawie as Iraq's delegate to the IAEA General Conference during the years 1982-84. One item on the agenda was the diplomatic and political fall-out of Israel's destruction of the Osirak reactor (a centerpiece of Iraq's nuclear weapons ambitions). Zahawie in his response [to Slate] appears to confirm that he was Iraq's delegate, though not the Permanent delegate, to the IAEA (the General Conference) and therefore clearly not foreign to the nuclear issues, especially as he was the under-secretary of the foreign ministry selected by Baghdad to represent Iraq on the most sensitive issue, the question of Iraq's nuclear weapons ambitions. His participation as leader of the Iraqi delegation to the 1995 Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference merely confirms his standing as Iraq's top negotiator on nuclear weapons issues. [italics mine]

He confirms that he was Iraq's ambassador to the Vatican, a not unimportant position given that all Iraq's [other] embassies in the West lacked senior or ambassadorial leadership and that all Western embassies in Iraq were closed. His modesty in this case is puzzling if you don't take into account that a resident ambassador in Rome was ideally placed to undertake discreet and sensitive missions, especially as he was fully plugged into the intricacies of nuclear-weapons diplomacy.

Zahawie furthermore confirms his trip to Niger. The question remains, why Iraq's top man on nuclear weapons diplomacy and negotiations would travel to Niger: with all respect, not the dream-place for a connoisseur of Mozart and Italian bel canto, though no longer of Wagner.

(Ambassador Ekeus' allusion in that last sentence is to Zahawie's affecting claim that he was posted to Rome in virtual semiretirement and mainly for the music. This is as credible as his claim, made to Hassan Fattah—then of Time magazine—that when he visited Niger he did not know that it exported yellowcake—which is famously just about the only thing that it does export.)

Let me now introduce a second corroborative witness, whose acknowledged expertise in the field is hardly less than that of Ekeus...

ODDLY PRO-POLE AND PRO-POPE?:

In EU's new states, a return to nationalism (Richard Bernstein, July 25, 2006, The New York Times)

One villager, Wieslaw Cygan, who teaches in a technical college, is one of the 48 people here who voted for the League for Polish Families, a political party once deemed to occupy the Polish rightist fringe that is now part of the governing coalition.

"I would like to see a new political party," Cygan said in his tidy home, sparsely decorated with the kind of religious and landscape paintings in fashion across much of Central and Eastern Europe. "I call it a People's Democratic Christian Conservative Party that would be Catholic and patriotic," he said.

The labels that Cygan attaches to his dream party suggest the struggle for identity that is going on in deeply Catholic and rural Poland and in some ways rippling across other formerly Communist countries in Europe. Now that they are firmly embedded in the European Union and the Western alliance, they seem to feel an urge to reassert older, more traditional parts of themselves.

Indeed, nearly 17 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and two years after Poland and other former Soviet bloc states joined the European Union, it is a surprising time in Europe. On the very heels of what could certainly be deemed a historic achievement, the defeat of Communist dictatorship and the merging of Eastern and Western Europe into a 25-member club of peaceful, secure and solidly democratic countries, Europe is in a strange and sour mood.

AT PEACE WITH THEIR FATHERS' CONVICTIONS:

Praying for Hummus, Getting Hamas: In the 1990s, Israelis sincerely thought that peace was just around the corner. Now, the Middle East is torn apart by war. A former Israeli peace activist explains why he has laid down his olive branch and is prepared to grab for his rifle. (Zeev Avrahami, July 25, 2006, Der Spiegel)

The war in Lebanon 24 years ago turned Israel upside down: A high-ranking officer refused his orders to invade Beirut and thousands of Israelis protested against the war while soldiers were still fighting and dying. After years of being the world's darlings, international public opinion suddenly turned against us. And then there were the horrors of Sabra and Shatila. There were no glorious photo albums after this war, no heroes. It was Israel's Vietnam. [...]

The growing opposition of my generation was our first major contribution to shaping Israeli society and to adding the next layer to our young nation. The first generation of Israelis built the country, fought its war of independence and developed the infrastructure of a nation-state. The second generation fought glorious wars helping establish a Jewish post-Holocaust identity. We, who were born in the mid-1960s and the beginning of the 70s, called for the normalization of Israel. We wanted Israel to become a country like any other; we wanted borders, both geographical and ethical. The war we fought was the one against the convictions of our parents' generation.

As my generation matured -- and began taking its place in the Israeli economic, cultural and political establishment -- we triggered a great change in Israeli public opinion. Ours was the generation that pushed -- both with votes and with lifestyle -- for talks with the Palestinians and for peace agreements with Arafat and Jordan. The young generation that came after us instigated the pull-out from Lebanon in 2000, and pushed for a final agreement with the Palestinians. In the last election, for the first time in Israeli history, three politicians who did not rise up through the ranks of the Israeli army were elected to our government's highest posts: Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had been the mayor of Jerusalem, Foreign Minister Zipi Livni is a lawyer and Defense Minister Amir Peretz was a union leader. We wanted our government to focus on welfare issues, invest in education and civil rights.

Deep down, of course, we knew that was wishful thinking. My generation, after all -- which had largely missed the last heroic war in 1967 and which was born into the reality of Israel as an occupier -- also helped make Ariel Sharon prime minister in 2001. Sharon's reputation then was not only stained by the Lebanon war, but he was also the living symbol for the settlement project; it was Sharon, as minister of infrastructure and agriculture, who devoted huge amounts of money to the expansion of the settlements. His election signalled a change: There was a waning belief that peace with the Palestinians was possible and a desire for a strong leader as Israel braced for the next war.

Like an experienced shepherd, Sharon sensed exactly which way the herd wanted to go. After his election, he led Israel into confrontation with the Palestinians -- the Second Intifada. He also forced Israelis to take the next step, that of turning their backs on their Palestinian neighbors. For my generation, this represented a huge defeat, and we felt betrayed when the younger generation agreed to Sharon's policy. It is this betrayal -- and this complete rejection of the idea of peace with the Palestinians -- which fills me with sadness when I follow the news today.

The anger, though, is not far behind. When the rockets from Gaza began falling on southern Israel, my former peace activism became but a distant memory. The recent killings and kidnappings of soldiers on the Gaza and Lebanese borders sent us back to our past and into our closets: Once again, we Israelis are looking for our uniforms.

Today, I am convinced that Israel is fighting a justified war. Far from being an "optional war," this conflict was forced upon us. There is a feeling that every positive step taken in recent years has been answered by punishment. Now we are prepared to do whatever it takes to turn Israel into a safe place, even if this means invading Lebanon once again. We also want to sip coffee and play backgammon. We've had enough of rockets from the north and south and suicide bombers from everywhere. We also want to lead a normal life, just like the people in New York, Berlin or Rome who don't have to look up every time a stranger enters their favorite cafe.

We pulled out of Gaza and we have no desire to be pulled back in. We want to go to work, study, raise a family, enjoy the beach, and eat hummus as we watch with delight how the Palestinians use the money they get from around the world to build their own infrastructure, to create jobs allowing them to go to the beach, raise families, and eat hummus. We prayed for hummus and instead we got Hamas.

THE CONGRESSIONAL GOP SHOULD OFFER VOTES ON ABOUT HALF OF IT:

Democrats' Plan Focuses on Middle Class: Sen. Clinton Presents Domestic Agenda Featuring Tax Breaks and Tuition Help (Dan Balz, 7/25/06, Washington Post)

The American Dream Initiative includes proposals that DLC President Bruce Reed said would cost $450 billion to $500 billion over 10 years. He said the cost could be offset by eliminating corporate subsidies in the tax code, cutting out 100,000 unnecessary federal contractors and making a more aggressive effort to identify and collect taxes now going uncollected by the Internal Revenue Service. The initiative also calls for a return to pay-as-you-go budget rules in Washington, which means that all spending on new programs must be offset by cuts elsewhere.

The centerpiece proposal would provide additional support for college costs, with the goal of increasing the number of college graduates by 1 million a year by 2015. The proposal includes $150 billion in block grants for states to ease rising tuition costs and a consolidated tax credit for students. To qualify, states and universities would have to limit tuition increases to the rate of inflation.

Other ideas include requirements for employers to establish retirement accounts for all workers and a refundable tax credit for savers; "baby bonds" that would create a government-funded savings account of $500 for every child born in the United States; a refundable tax credit to help provide the down payment on housing; universal health care for children; and benefits for small businesses to lower the cost of providing health insurance to workers.

The DLC often has put itself at odds with the party's liberal wing, but the new agenda was designed to create a unified message for the Democrats, although congressional leaders also have put forth a party agenda. The DLC document bears the imprint of several other progressive organizations, and DLC founder Al From said he believed that it represented "a set of ideas around which Democrats of all stripes can rally as we head into the fall election."

JUST ANOTHER POLITICAL PARTY:

Gaza groups ready to deal on cease-fire, release of Shalit (Avi Issacharoff, 7/25/06, Haaretz)

All groups in Gaza, including Hamas, would now accept a cease-fire deal with Israel which would include releasing Gilad Shalit, according to the Palestinian Agriculture Minister, who also heads the coordinating committee of Palestinian organizations there.

Ibrahim Al-Naja said the factions were ready to stop the Qassam rocket fire if Israel's ceased all military moves against the Palestinian factions in Gaza. They are also ready to release Shalit in exchange for guaranteeing the future release of Palestinian prisoners.

Hamas leaders did not confirm this report on Monday, but if it is true, then this is the first time that Hamas has indicated its acceptance of the Egyptian proposal to solve the crisis.

MANNISH BOY:

Ex-president takes step into Connecticut's fray (Peter S. Canellos, July 25, 2006, Boston Globe)

Should national Democrats back Lieberman in big numbers, they would stand accused of abandoning the party's core antiwar voters. However, if leading Democrats supported Lamont, and if Lieberman were to win, there would be no end to the havoc a bruised and resentful Lieberman could wreak on his party. If control of the Senate were at stake, Lieberman could choose to vote with the Republicans. [...]

A few weeks ago, Clinton bemoaned the fact that Democrats were warring among themselves over the Iraq issue. ``If we allow our differences over what to do now in Iraq to divide us instead of focusing on replacing Republicans in Congress, that's the nuttiest strategy I've ever heard in my life," he said.

Clinton knows that if national Democrats abandon Lieberman, Republicans will argue that Democrats are the captives of the angry, antiwar left. He also knows that the party's leading presidential aspirants -- especially Hillary Clinton -- can't embrace Lieberman without alienating the increasingly influential liberal blogosphere. A former president can get away with such things far more easily than current contenders can.

NO ONE WAS SUPPOSED TO GET HURT...:

The Last Full Measure (Steven Malanga, Summer 2006, City Journal)

From Lookout Point at Eagle Rock Reservation in West Orange, New Jersey, you see some of the most spectacular views in the New York metropolitan area. No wonder that early settlers used it as a surveying station and that in the Revolutionary War, Washington’s army set up a post there to chart British movements. Today, the point reveals an unobstructed view of New York’s skyline 15 miles away—which is why Essex County officials chose it as the site for a September 11 memorial. Opened barely a year after 9/11, the $1.2 million, privately financed memorial features a bronze sculpture of an American eagle in flight, inscriptions of the names of all those who died on 9/11, and individual tributes to rescue workers. In its first year, the site attracted some 75,000 visitors, and it continues to draw thousands seeking to remember the dead, to contemplate the heroic acts and sacrifices of that day, and to recall the Manhattan skyline back when the Twin Towers graced it.

The impressive Eagle Rock memorial is one of dozens that have gone up in and around the New York metropolitan area since 9/11, even as controversy and fecklessness have paralyzed efforts to create a memorial on the grounds of the former World Trade Center itself. At Ground Zero, the projected cost of the proposed memorial ballooned to a staggering $1 billion, even though no construction ever began. The commission formed to build the memorial, in utter disarray, has fallen far short of fund-raising goals, prompting the recent resignation of its head and the sharp downsizing of its plans. The monument’s proposed design—dubbed by its creators Reflecting Absence—has faced intense criticism for its vacuity, fastidiously rejecting any tribute to the heroism of the day or the rock-solid American values that the terrorists attacked.

No such paralysis seems to have encumbered the dozens of commissions that local governments and ordinary citizens set up around the tristate area to honor the dead and remember the day. Though the terrorist attacks were a tragedy for the entire nation, they hit home most acutely in the scores of commuter towns within 100 miles of New York City, where many World Trade Center workers lived. Those communities have responded with a wide array of memorials.

Most are modest in scope and cost, but they are often inspired and poignant. Some serve as gravestones for local victims who have no known resting place. Others commemorate the valor that Americans exhibited on 9/11, especially New York’s rescue workers. By contrast, the World Trade Center site will have no unique memorial to the sacrifices of the city’s firefighters and police. In an age when many memorials, like Reflecting Absence, are abstract gestures that avoid invoking anything except loss—and not even directly but in a glass darkly—some of these local monuments are throwbacks, robust statements of American ideals, rendered in an unapologetically realistic style that might dismay postmodern critics but that successfully translates our common feelings about September 11 into concrete form. Deeply moving, a tour of these memorials also reminds us of the gigantic failure that has left Ground Zero little more than an opening in the earth.

One thing that comes through in visiting these memorials is just how much people miss the Twin Towers.

WAGES OF TOLERANCE:

On the Benefits of Social Stigmas: REMOVING ROAD SIGNS CAN BE DANGEROUS (David C. Stolinsky, December 1997, Oxford Review)

For a generation now we have been busy removing crucial signs from the winding and dangerous road of life. Hoping to be nonjudgmental, wishing to increase freedom, believing even that we were being compassionate, we have almost systematically deprived the young and inexperienced of much of the benefit of our experience. Life holds as many sharp curves, steep grades, and hazardous intersections as ever, but we have conspired to render them unmarked.

For example, we removed most of the signs that warned teenagers of the dangers of premature sex and pregnancy. When I went to school in the 1950s, only one girl became pregnant in six years of junior and senior high. Pregnant girls had to leave school and go live with relatives or attend Continuation School, where returning dropouts went. There was stigma attached to unmarried pregnancy. This was hard on pregnant girls, but because of it there were far fewer of them.

There was little sex education then, but there also was little teenage pregnancy. Pregnancy rates rose as sex education increased, but this unhappy fact has not dampened our enthusiasm for sex education. Indeed, we are convinced that high teen pregnancy rates mean that even more sex education is needed.

Past generations would not have dreamed of rewarding pregnant teenagers with government checks, with which they could afford their own apartments. Pregnant girls had to live with relatives, which was difficult, or at homes for unwed mothers, which was embarrassing. The responsible boy was usually given a very hard time by his family, if not the court. In some states, birth certificates bore a notation that the baby was illegitimate. Stigmatizing a child seems unjust, but the effect was to add to the mother's stigma. There were, in short, penalties rather than rewards.

Moreover, abortion was unsafe, illegal, and rare. Some women were killed or injured by illegal abortions -- a terrible price to pay. But maybe that's one reason why there were so few abortions.

RED MAYOR VS. REDLINING:

Daley calls big-box ordinance 'redlining' (FRAN SPIELMAN, July 25, 2006, Chicago Sun-Times)

Mayor Daley on Monday denounced as "redlining" a proposal to establish wage and benefit standards for Wal-Mart and other retailing giants and suggested that aldermen who don't want big-box stores simply "opt out."

Daley played the race card, flanked by some of Chicago's most influential black ministers, two days before a City Council showdown on an ordinance that could change the economic landscape in Chicago.

"This is going to hurt the minority community. . . . You talk about redlining. This is basically redlining. . . . This deals with economic development in the African-American community," Daley told a City Hall news conference.

"No one would ever bring that up in the suburban area. We're not talking about the Near North Side. . . . We're not talking about Wrigleyville. We're not talking about any of those [white] communities. We're talking about the West Side and the South Side. . . . For us to say, 'No, we don't want these stores,' that puts Chicago more on the map [as anti-business] than foie gras. That says, 'We don't want development.' ''

A STATE IN ALL BUT NAME:

Why Hezbollah won't be easy to defeat: Islamic group is deeply entrenched and enjoys grassroots support (OLIVIA WARD, 7/25/06, Toronto Star)

"I was going to university in 1982, but I believed that defending my land was a sacred duty," the wheelchair-bound Wahabi said in an interview before the current war. "Israel had invaded our country and my brother was killed in the fighting. It was not a difficult decision for me to go and fight too," he said, referring to Israel's offensive to root out Palestinian guerrillas attacking it from Lebanon.

But Wahabi's fighting career ended six years later when he was shot through the neck by an Israeli sniper. Quadriplegic, and deeply depressed, he lived in isolation in his parents' flat.

However, Hezbollah's loyalty to its supporters is as legendary as its ruthlessness toward its enemies. Its informal "marriage agency" for disabled guerrillas introduced him to Kamila, a striking young woman who shared his Shiite sense of sacrifice. It was, she said, "a love match."

With Hezbollah's medical aid, the union produced four healthy children, housed in an apartment tended by a paid nurse's aide. The family was confident the children would receive the best education until they were self-supporting.

The Wahabis' home now lies in one of the worst-hit areas of Lebanon as Hezbollah continues its rocket barrage into Israel and Israeli bombs pound Lebanon's towns and cities.

But the network of community support that Hezbollah (which means Party of God) has built during the past 15 years with its financial, medical, educational and housing services has paid dividends.

Although the group's military training programs have dwindled since the civil war ended in 1990, and it is estimated to have no more than 500 to 600 crack troops, it can call on tens of thousands of reservists whose will and loyalty are assured. They are joined by dedicated young people who have grown up under Hezbollah's paternal social wing.

"If we're at peace with Israel I can live with that," said Mustapha Naji, now 15, supported and educated by Hezbollah after his father was killed fighting Israeli forces near his village in southern Lebanon. "If they take aggressive action in Lebanon, I'm ready to fight."

MORE (via Marisa):
U.S. Wants Force To Block Arms Shipments (Ori Nir, July 21, 2006, The Forward)

During a briefing with senior officials at several major Jewish organizations, Deputy National Security Advisor Elliot Abrams reportedly said that a multinational force in Lebanon would have to be “combat ready,” authorized and appropriately equipped to engage Hezbollah militarily if needed. Such a force, he said, would also have to patrol not only Lebanon’s border with Israel but also Lebanon’s border with Syria, to prevent smuggling of weapons to Hezbollah. In addition, such a force would have to observe Lebanon’s sea and air ports to make sure that Iran is not rearming Hezbollah, Abrams reportedly said.

It is not clear whether Abrams’ position was shared by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, when she left Sunday on her Middle East shuttle mission in search of a resolution to the Israel-Hezbollah conflict. According to several Washington insiders who in recent days spoke with senior State Department officials and other U.S. policy makers, Abrams’ statements do seem to reflect the administration’s approach.

In several conversations with Jewish communal leaders, administration officials made clear that, once the current hostilities subside, they do not expect that the Lebanese army will be able to reign in Hezbollah. The army is not only weak, understaffed and poorly equipped, but also approximately 60% Shiite, senior administration officials said. There is no guarantee that Lebanese soldiers would be more loyal to their commanders than to Hezbollah, a Shiite group, and therefore there is a chance that when directed to confront their religious brethren, the troops would either seek a way out or flatly refuse to carry out their orders.

HE SOUNDS JUST LIKE AN AMERICAN PALEOCON:

Brown has moved as far to the right as Blair. So where do we turn now?: The concerns of the centre-left hold the key to the party's renewal, but they are being shut out of the debate (John Harris, July 25, 2006, The Guardian)

In the midst of the government's serial difficulties, one underlying story seems to have been missed. Blair may be on his way out - departing in "a year and a bit" according to an overheard Alastair Campbell - but for those of us who have spent the past decade standing at an ever-increasing distance from his government these are still grim times. If there were small shafts of light in the 2005 election campaign they now seem like something from another age: after the nosedive of the initially Blairite election effort and the PM's claim to have "listened and learned", we appear to be speeding into the unremittingly New Labour future we were promised in the first place - from trust schools to brazen healthcare privatisation, and on to John Reid's desperate 24-point crime plan.

Meanwhile, the figure on whom so many hopes are projected usually seems set on dashing them. Like most of my Labour friends, for reasons increasingly more emotional than rational, I cannot quite snuff out my faith in Gordon Brown, but the signs are hardly promising. No one expects any explicit words of dissent, but even when it comes to coded messages there is an uneasy silence - and from time to time there come pronouncements that seem to confirm the worst. Take, for example, the run of interviews at the end of last year, when Brown boasted - with the belligerent air of a school bully - about the blows he has landed on Labour orthodoxy: "I have introduced most of the private finance initiative, sold off air traffic control, made a controversial decision on the London Underground, set up the Gershon review to sack or make redundant 80,000 civil servants."

Flick through the recent Mansion House speech in which he announced his support for a renewal of Britain's nuclear armoury and you may start to feel very miserable indeed. Here, of course, he was playing to the City gallery, but his glowing mentions of "contestability and choice" in education, the necessity of seeking a "low-tax economy", and his obligation to make the flimsily regulated UK "more flexible" tapped into already familiar themes. As with Reid's latest wheeze, here was another reminder that nine years of Labour government have left the post-Thatcherite terms of trade depressingly intact. Brown and his associates talk a lot about the prospect of a progressive consensus, though it often seems a distant hope: if the commendable work done by the Treasury - not least when it comes to poverty - has either been hushed up or sat uncomfortably with much of the New Labour narrative, part of the explanation lies with the chancellor's own endorsement of priorities that would once have caused mainstream Labour hearts to sink.

UH-OH, WHAT DID HE DO?:

ESPN FIRES REYNOLDS (ANDREW MARCHAND, July 25, 2006, NY Post)

ESPN yesterday fired analyst Harold Reynolds from Baseball Tonight, sources told The Post. The reason was not immediately known.

"We are not going to comment," ESPN VP Josh Krulewitz said. [...]

Reynolds was known for a smooth style that usually was player friendly. He never found himself in too much controversy for what he said on the air. In fact, ESPN was so high on him he was expected to stay with the network through its just signed eight-year deal with MLB.

Now, after yesterday, Reynolds is no longer welcome in Bristol.

FAT CHANCE

Fat stem cells turn into muscle in US experiment (Maggie Fox, Reuters, 7/24/06)

The stem cells found in fat are known as multipotent stem cells. They can produce a variety of cell and tissue types, but are not as flexible as embryonic stem cells.

Last week, President George W. Bush vetoed a bill that would have broadened federal funding of human embryonic stem cell research, saying he preferred that researchers pursue so-called adult stem cells, such as those used at UCLA.

TEXTBOOK:

West Coast boppers - Power helps Beckett claim 13th win (Jeff Horrigan, July 25, 2006, Boston Herald)

Alex Gonzalez, Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz each clobbered home runs off Zito to support the near-dominant pitching of Josh Beckett, who became the first 13-game winner in the majors. Jonathan Papelbon wrapped up the win with a scoreless ninth to lower his ERA to 0.53, and the Sox maintained their 2 -game lead over the New York Yankees in the American League East.

MORE:
Tigers making habit of big first innings (TOM WITHERS, July 25, 2006, Chicago Sun-Times)

With a five-run first inning, the Tigers became the first team in 115 years to score at least five runs in the first at-bat of three consecutive games, and they held on for a 9-7 victory against the Cleveland Indians. The Tigers scored five runs in the first Saturday and six in the first Sunday against the Oakland Athletics.

According to the Elias Sports Bureau, the Tigers -- who opened a 71/2-game lead over the White Sox in the American League Central -- are the first team since the 1891 St. Louis Browns of the American Association to score five runs or more in the first inning three games in a row.

IT'S NOT THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR LOGIC

Peace prize winner 'could kill' Bush (Annabelle McDonald, The Australian, 7/25/06)

NOBEL peace laureate Betty Williams displayed a flash of her feisty Irish spirit yesterday, lashing out at US President George W. Bush during a speech to hundreds of schoolchildren....

"I have a very hard time with this word 'non-violence', because I don't believe that I am non-violent," said Ms Williams, 64.

"Right now, I would love to kill George Bush." Her young audience at the Brisbane City Hall clapped and cheered....

"My job is to tell you their stories," Ms Williams said of a recent [sic] trip to Iraq.

"We went to a hospital where there were 200 children; they were beautiful, all of them, but they had cancers that the doctors couldn't even recognise. From the first Gulf War, the mothers' wombs were infected.

"As I was leaving the hospital, I said to the doctor, 'How many of these babies do you think are going to live?'

"He looked me straight in the eye and said, 'None, not one'. They needed five different kinds of medication to treat the cancers that the children had, and the embargoes laid on by the United States and the United Nations only allowed them three."

HISTORY EXTENDS PAST YOUR OWN BIRTH:

Truly Inconvenient Truths: What we’re loath to talk about when we talk about Israel and Lebanon (Kurt Andersen, 8/08/06, New York)

Al Gore’s movie about global warming has a brilliant title: It flatters us—those of us who believe the scientific consensus about climate change—that we are clear-eyed and honest and brave enough to admit this “inconvenient truth” that the Bush administration and its reckless, craven, venal corporate allies refuse to admit. Yet the truth about greenhouse gases, although plenty scary, is really not so inconvenient: The blame for inaction is easy to lay on others, a solution seems possible, and that solution doesn’t look that onerous.

Whereas concerning the Middle East, there is for most of us no obvious overriding analysis, let alone fix. Concerning Israel and the Palestinian territories, all the truths tend to be truly, deeply, tragically inconvenient.

And the big one is this: Israel is a good and miraculous nation that deserves the support of civilized people, but the great unfortunate fact about its creation—being carved by the U.N. out of Arab land in 1947—cannot be ignored or wished away. We have no choice but to support Israel, even though the Israeli Defense Forces are killing civilians, dozens a day, in Lebanon. All of those deaths, one wants to believe, are unintentional, unavoidable mistakes. Yet as Richard Cohen wrote in his Washington Post column last week, “Israel itself is a mistake . . . an honest mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable [but which] has produced a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now.” Sixty years on, there can be no revising or reversing that mistake—and when the choice is Israel versus unaccommodating Islamist fanatics, we must be for Israel. Is there any more inconvenient truth?

WETS ONLY NEED APPLY:

Joe Lieberman’s War: The hawkish senator finds himself in an epic battle—with his own party (Meryl Gordon, 8/07/06, New York)

Nothing is working out as Lieberman expected. Although he’d assumed that, because of his support for the Iraq war, he’d face some opposition for reelection, he was unprepared for the backlash of anger against him and the groundswell of support for Lamont, a cable-TV mogul and political novice who has surged ahead in the polls thanks to his get-out-of-Iraq stance. The shoot-out in Connecticut has turned into a national political event—a referendum on the war and a fight for the soul of the Democratic Party, one that may put a safe Democratic Senate seat at risk and have implications for other nonconformist Democrats around the country. In this topsy-turvy race, Lamont, a wealthy great-grandson of J. P. Morgan’s business partner, has somehow seized the mantle as the “real” Democrat. Meanwhile, Lieberman is being heckled at campaign stops (“It’s getting scary,” one aide says. “They’re so angry”) and excoriated in the blogosphere, from state sites like My Left Nutmeg to the leading national Democratic outlet, Daily Kos, where Markos Moulitsas Zúniga posted after the debate, “For Lieberman it’s all about power, and he’ll be as vicious, as rude, as boorish and dishonest as he needs to be to cling to it.”

This kind of reception is an astonishing turnaround for a man whose selection as Al Gore’s running mate in 2000 was seen as brilliant political strategy. Lieberman caught the public’s fancy back then as a social progressive who believed in a muscular foreign policy and a moralist who could help distance Gore from Clinton’s Lewinsky scandal. But now, as the body count mounts in Iraq, he has been recast as a villain, Bush’s lackey and partner in crime.

ASYMMETRICALITY:

He Who Cast the First Stone Probably Didn't (DANIEL GILBERT, July 24, 2006, NY Times)

In virtually every human society, "He hit me first" provides an acceptable rationale for doing that which is otherwise forbidden. Both civil and religious law provide long lists of behaviors that are illegal or immoral -- unless they are responses in kind, in which case they are perfectly fine. [...]

The problem with the principle of even-numberedness is that people count differently. Every action has a cause and a consequence: something that led to it and something that followed from it. But research shows that while people think of their own actions as the consequences of what came before, they think of other people's actions as the causes of what came later.

In a study conducted by William Swann and colleagues at the University of Texas, pairs of volunteers played the roles of world leaders who were trying to decide whether to initiate a nuclear strike. The first volunteer was asked to make an opening statement, the second volunteer was asked to respond, the first volunteer was asked to respond to the second, and so on. At the end of the conversation, the volunteers were shown several of the statements that had been made and were asked to recall what had been said just before and just after each of them.

The results revealed an intriguing asymmetry: When volunteers were shown one of their own statements, they naturally remembered what had led them to say it. But when they were shown one of their conversation partner's statements, they naturally remembered how they had responded to it. In other words, volunteers remembered the causes of their own statements and the consequences of their partner's statements.

What seems like a grossly self-serving pattern of remembering is actually the product of two innocent facts. First, because our senses point outward, we can observe other people's actions but not our own. Second, because mental life is a private affair, we can observe our own thoughts but not the thoughts of others. Together, these facts suggest that our reasons for punching will always be more salient to us than the punches themselves -- but that the opposite will be true of other people's reasons and other people's punches.

TCS Daily Spotlight Interview John Lukacs (Audio): TCS Daily columnist Ed Driscoll speaks with historial John Lukacs on his latest book, "June 1941: Hitler and Stalin." (24 Jul 2006)

SIT BACK AND ENJOY IT:

Surveillance We Can Live With (Arlen Specter, July 24, 2006, Washington Post)

Critics complain that the bill acknowledges the president's inherent Article II power and does not insist on FISA's being the exclusive procedure for the authorization of wiretapping. They are wrong. The president's constitutional power either exists or does not exist, no matter what any statute may say. If the appellate court precedents cited above are correct, FISA is not the exclusive procedure. If the president's assertion of inherent executive authority meets the Fourth Amendment's "reasonableness" test, it provides an alternative legal basis for surveillance, however FISA may purport to limit presidential power. The bill does not accede to the president's claims of inherent presidential power; that is for the courts either to affirm or reject. It merely acknowledges them, to whatever extent they may exist.

WE'RE ALL INTELLIGENT DESIGNISTS NOW (via The Other Brother):

Fear of Snakes May Have Driven Pre-Human Evolution (Ker Than, 7/24/06, Fox News)

An evolutionary arms race between early snakes and mammals triggered the development of improved vision and large brains in primates, a radical new theory suggests. [...]

"Primates went a particular route," Isbell told LiveScience. "They focused on improving their vision to keep away from [snakes]. Other mammals couldn't do that."

KILLING THE WRONG PEOPLE:

Fight a democracy, kill the people (Spengler, 7/25/06, Asia Times)

Conventional armies can defeat guerrilla forces with broad popular support, for it is perfectly feasible to dismantle a people, destroy its morale, and if need be expel them. It has happened in history on occasions beyond count.

The British did it to the Scots Highlanders after the 1745 rising, and to the Acadians of Canada after the Seven Years' War; Ataturk did it to the Greeks of Asia Minor in 1922; and the Czechs did it to the Sudeten Germans after 1945. It seems to be happening again, as half or more of Lebanon's 1.2 million Shi'ites flee their homes. To de-fang Hezbollah implies the effective dissolution of the Shi'ite community, a third of whom live within Katyusha range of Israel. [...]

"Fight a dictatorship, and you must kill the regime; fight a democracy, and you must kill the people," I warned on January 31 (No true Scotsman starts a war), meaning that one turns a proud and militant folk into a deracinated rabble. Sometimes it is not necessary to kill a single individual to crush an entire people. When a warlike people rather would fight, eg the Chechens, the result is butchery.

Blame George W Bush for this grim necessity in Lebanon, where the refugee count already has reached 15-30% of the total population. In the name of Lebanese democracy, Washington brought Hezbollah into mainstream politics, and the newly legitimized Hezbollah in turn became the focus of life for Lebanon's 1.2 million Shi'ites. To uproot Hezbollah, one has to uproot the Shi'ite community.

MORE:
and certainly not via an antiseptic air war, U.S. doubts Israeli figures about damage of air war (Rowan Scarborough, July 22, 2006, THE WASHINGTON TIMES)

Israel is overstating the damage its air war has inflicted on the Hezbollah militia, which hides its weapons in tunnels and civilian neighborhoods throughout Lebanon, Bush administration and intelligence officials said yesterday.

LAUGHING IN THE SUN:

The Clash of Civilizations: A Novelist's Perspective (Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, 7/24/06, History News Network)

The naval Battle of Lepanto took place on 7 October 1571 when a galley fleet of the Holy League, a sometimes-flimsy coalition of the Papacy (under Pope Pius V), Spain, Venice, Genoa, Savoy, the Knights of Malta and others, defeated a force of Ottoman galleys. The 5-hour battle was fought at the northern edge of the Gulf of Patras, off western Greece, where the Ottoman forces sailing westwards from their naval station in Lepanto met the Holy League forces, which had come from Messina, in the morning of Sunday 7 October[1]. It was the final major naval battle in world history solely between rowing vessels.--Wikipedia

The challenge when writing historical fiction is to show the reader not what the people of the time in question did – that is known and readily accessible – but what they thought they were doing. Non-fiction may have a similar goal in mind, but it conveys its understanding of historical events by telling the reader about them. It may seem like a small difference, but it is not. As a novelist who has written a great deal of historical fiction, I am often caught up in trying to find ways to make a period’s view of itself comprehensible to the reader without resorting to the dreaded and boring expository lump. It is also an element I tend to search out early when I start putting a book together, for the matter of an era’s self-perception and context means the difference between solid historical fiction and costume drama.

So what does this have to do with my popular history book, Confrontation at Lepanto by one of my alter-egos, T. C. F. Hopkins? It came about as a kind of detour. I had written a portion-and-outline of a novel about the events leading up to Lepanto from the point of view of a number of different characters, and showing how the social climate in Europe and the Middle East were affected by the battle. My agent submitted it, and it went nowhere, not because it wasn’t exciting, but because almost none of the editors who saw the portion-and-outline knew anything about the battle and therefore assumed it was unimportant.

WHITE founts falling in the Courts of the sun,
And the Soldan of Byzantium is smiling as they run;
There is laughter like the fountains in that face of all men feared,
It stirs the forest darkness, the darkness of his beard;
It curls the blood-red crescent, the crescent of his lips; 5
For the inmost sea of all the earth is shaken with his ships.
They have dared the white republics up the capes of Italy,
They have dashed the Adriatic round the Lion of the Sea,
And the Pope has cast his arms abroad for agony and loss,
And called the kings of Christendom for swords about the Cross. 10
The cold queen of England is looking in the glass;
The shadow of the Valois is yawning at the Mass;
From evening isles fantastical rings faint the Spanish gun,
And the Lord upon the Golden Horn is laughing in the sun.

Dim drums throbbing, in the hills half heard, 15
Where only on a nameless throne a crownless prince has stirred,
Where, risen from a doubtful seat and half attainted stall,
The last knight of Europe takes weapons from the wall,
The last and lingering troubadour to whom the bird has sung,
That once went singing southward when all the world was young. 20
In that enormous silence, tiny and unafraid,
Comes up along a winding road the noise of the Crusade.
Strong gongs groaning as the guns boom far,
Don John of Austria is going to the war,
Stiff flags straining in the night-blasts cold 25
In the gloom black-purple, in the glint old-gold,
Torchlight crimson on the copper kettle-drums,
Then the tuckets, then the trumpets, then the cannon, and he comes.
Don John laughing in the brave beard curled,
Spurning of his stirrups like the thrones of all the world, 30
Holding his head up for a flag of all the free.
Love-light of Spain—hurrah!
Death-light of Africa!
Don John of Austria
Is riding to the sea. 35

Mahound is in his paradise above the evening star,
(Don John of Austria is going to the war.)
He moves a mighty turban on the timeless houri's knees,
His turban that is woven of the sunsets and the seas.
He shakes the peacock gardens as he rises from his ease, 40
And he strides among the tree-tops and is taller than the trees;
And his voice through all the garden is a thunder sent to bring
Black Azrael and Ariel and Ammon on the wing.
Giants and the Genii,
Multiplex of wing and eye, 45
Whose strong obedience broke the sky
When Solomon was king.

They rush in red and purple from the red clouds of the morn,
From the temples where the yellow gods shut up their eyes in scorn;
They rise in green robes roaring from the green hells of the sea 50
Where fallen skies and evil hues and eyeless creatures be,
On them the sea-valves cluster and the grey sea-forests curl,
Splashed with a splendid sickness, the sickness of the pearl;
They swell in sapphire smoke out of the blue cracks of the ground,—
They gather and they wonder and give worship to Mahound. 55
And he saith, "Break up the mountains where the hermit-folk can hide,
And sift the red and silver sands lest bone of saint abide,
And chase the Giaours flying night and day, not giving rest,
For that which was our trouble comes again out of the west.
We have set the seal of Solomon on all things under sun, 60
Of knowledge and of sorrow and endurance of things done.
But a noise is in the mountains, in the mountains, and I know
The voice that shook our palaces—four hundred years ago:
It is he that saith not 'Kismet'; it is he that knows not Fate;
It is Richard, it is Raymond, it is Godfrey at the gate! 65
It is he whose loss is laughter when he counts the wager worth,
Put down your feet upon him, that our peace be on the earth."
For he heard drums groaning and he heard guns jar,
(Don John of Austria is going to the war.)
Sudden and still—hurrah! 70
Bolt from Iberia!
Don John of Austria
Is gone by Alcalar.

St. Michaels on his Mountain in the sea-roads of the north
(Don John of Austria is girt and going forth.) 75
Where the grey seas glitter and the sharp tides shift
And the sea-folk labour and the red sails lift.
He shakes his lance of iron and he claps his wings of stone;
The noise is gone through Normandy; the noise is gone alone;
The North is full of tangled things and texts and aching eyes, 80
And dead is all the innocence of anger and surprise,
And Christian killeth Christian in a narrow dusty room,
And Christian dreadeth Christ that hath a newer face of doom,
And Christian hateth Mary that God kissed in Galilee,—
But Don John of Austria is riding to the sea. 85
Don John calling through the blast and the eclipse
Crying with the trumpet, with the trumpet of his lips,
Trumpet that sayeth ha!
Domino gloria!
Don John of Austria 90
Is shouting to the ships.

King Philip's in his closet with the Fleece about his neck
(Don John of Austria is armed upon the deck.)
The walls are hung with velvet that is black and soft as sin,
And little dwarfs creep out of it and little dwarfs creep in. 95
He holds a crystal phial that has colours like the moon,
He touches, and it tingles, and he trembles very soon,
And his face is as a fungus of a leprous white and grey
Like plants in the high houses that are shuttered from the day,
And death is in the phial and the end of noble work, 100
But Don John of Austria has fired upon the Turk.
Don John's hunting, and his hounds have bayed—
Booms away past Italy the rumour of his raid.
Gun upon gun, ha! ha!
Gun upon gun, hurrah! 105
Don John of Austria
Has loosed the cannonade.

The Pope was in his chapel before day or battle broke,
(Don John of Austria is hidden in the smoke.)
The hidden room in man's house where God sits all the year, 110
The secret window whence the world looks small and very dear.
He sees as in a mirror on the monstrous twilight sea
The crescent of his cruel ships whose name is mystery;
They fling great shadows foe-wards, making Cross and Castle dark,
They veil the plumèd lions on the galleys of St. Mark; 115
And above the ships are palaces of brown, black-bearded chiefs,
And below the ships are prisons, where with multitudinous griefs,
Christian captives sick and sunless, all a labouring race repines
Like a race in sunken cities, like a nation in the mines.
They are lost like slaves that sweat, and in the skies of morning hung 120
The stair-ways of the tallest gods when tyranny was young.
They are countless, voiceless, hopeless as those fallen or fleeing on
Before the high Kings' horses in the granite of Babylon.
And many a one grows witless in his quiet room in hell
Where a yellow face looks inward through the lattice of his cell, 125
And he finds his God forgotten, and he seeks no more a sign—
(But Don John of Austria has burst the battle-line!)
Don John pounding from the slaughter-painted poop,
Purpling all the ocean like a bloody pirate's sloop,
Scarlet running over on the silvers and the golds, 130
Breaking of the hatches up and bursting of the holds,
Thronging of the thousands up that labour under sea
White for bliss and blind for sun and stunned for liberty.

Vivat Hispania!
Domino Gloria! 135
Don John of Austria
Has set his people free!

Cervantes on his galley sets the sword back in the sheath
(Don John of Austria rides homeward with a wreath.)
And he sees across a weary land a straggling road in Spain, 140
Up which a lean and foolish knight for ever rides in vain,
And he smiles, but not as Sultans smile, and settles back the blade....
(But Don John of Austria rides home from the Crusade.)

THANK THE LORD:

Cuban regime feeling heat from Czechs: The Czechs are stepping up their efforts to aid the Cuban dissident movement, triggering an angry response from Havana (PABLO BACHELET, 7/24/06, MiamiHerald.com)

Once a subservient member of the Soviet bloc, the Czech Republic is now one of Fidel Castro's top foreign tormentors, providing material and moral support to dissidents, leading efforts to condemn the island's human-rights record in U.N. bodies and pushing a reluctant European Union to take a tougher stance on Castro.

Such actions have earned the tiny nation of 10 million vitriolic condemnations by the Castro government, the harassment of its diplomats in Havana and the gratitude of the Cuban-American community.

''The Czech Republic is at the heart of the U.S. efforts to secure multilateral support for precipitating a transition for democracy in Cuba,'' says Miami Republican Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. ``They've stuck to their principles every step of the way. Thank the Lord for the Czech Republic.''

THERE IS NO BRITAIN:

'New dawn' breaking for assembly (BBC, 7/24/06)

Legislation that will give the Welsh assembly more powers is facing its final hurdle.

Later on Monday, the House of Lords will debate the Government of Wales Bill, which will allow politicians in Cardiff Bay to make their own laws.

Welsh Secretary Peter Hain has called it a new dawn for devolution, but he also said the bill was on a knife-edge.

If peers do not accept the bill, it will run out of time and will have to be reintroduced in October.

The new legislation would be the biggest transfer of power since the assembly began sitting seven years ago.

It would give the assembly greater ability to pass laws without having to go through Parliament.

MORE:
Sectarian break-up of Iraq is now inevitable, admit officials (Patrick Cockburn, 24 July 2006, Independent uk)

The Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, meets Tony Blair in London today as violence in Iraq reaches a new crescendo and senior Iraqi officials say the break up of the country is inevitable.

A car bomb in a market in the Shia stronghold of Sadr City in Baghdad yesterday killed 34 people and wounded a further 60 and was followed by a second bomb in the same area two hours later that left a further eight dead. Another car bomb outside a court house in Kirkuk killed a further 20 and injured 70 people.

"Iraq as a political project is finished," a senior government official was quoted as saying, adding: "The parties have moved to plan B." He said that the Shia, Sunni and Kurdish parties were now looking at ways to divide Iraq between them and to decide the future of Baghdad, where there is a mixed population. "There is serious talk of Baghdad being divided into [Shia] east and [Sunni] west," he said.

A DISTRACTION THAT'S WORKING:

Hezbollah's Iranian War in Lebanon (Dr Walid Phares, 7/24/06, History News Network)

The “Waad al sadeq” operation

By early July 2006, Hezbollah’s preparations for the bloody return to the top were fulfilled. The organization had already accomplished its Lebanese tasks:

1) Elimination (direct or in conjunction with Syrian intelligence or Syrian Social Nationalists) of visible symbols of anti-Syrian leadership: Tueni, Qassir and Hawi, and attempts against others such as May Chidiac, as an intimidation lesson to all others.

2) Paralysis of PM Seniora’s cabinet from the inside and in cooperation with President Lahoud's networks on the outside.

3) Paralysis of the parliament in collaboration with speaker Berri and the Aoun bloc.

4) Dragging the political forces in the country in the so-called national dialogue on the weapons of Hezbollah, a major waste of time and marginalization of the 1559 stipulation

3) Intimidation of the Lebanese army command.

4) Attempts to divide the Lebanese Diaspora by implanting agents linked to the axis.

5) Reactivation of the pro-Syrian and Jihadist networks in Lebanon and within the Palestinian camps.

6) Distribution of weapons among allied militias

7) Finally and most importantly, completing the final steps in the deployment of a system of rockets and long range artillery batteries aimed at Israel.

Hezbollah

It is based on these domestic achievements in Lebanon and on strategic injunctions by its regional sponsors that Hezbollah decided to trigger its awaited Armageddon. What was the Hezbollah’s initial plan? The pro-Iranian militia had constructed a theory of invincibility based on the rationalization of a string of former successes against the United States and France in the 1980s, against Israel and the ex-South Lebanon Army in the 1990s, and its intimidation of the Cedars Revolution in 2005. In short, Nasrallah’s team was convinced of the following: A spectacular operation against Israeli military would

# Bring back the “struggle with Israel” to the forefront of Lebanese politics, thus cornering the Lebanese Government into capitulation on the Hariri and the disarmament matters.

# Lead to a harsh Israeli retaliation, good enough to attract world condemnation, but not strong enough to change realities in Lebanon.

The operation, dubbed “al-Waad al sadeq” (Faithful Promise) would signal the beginning of a series of skirmishes with Israel and a generalized assault on the Cedars Revolution and the Seniora cabinet, who were to be accused of treason and collusion with the Zionists.

With the crumbling of the Lebanese Government under the strikes by Hezbollah-Lahoud-Aoun, the pro-Syrian President would dismiss the Seniora cabinet, and in cahoots with pro-Syrian Berri, would disband the Parliament. A massive campaign of assassinations, arrests and exile would target the March 14 movement, followed by Terror-backed legislative elections, brining back a pro-Syrian Hezbollahi assembly and a radical Government.

The “putsch” would reestablish a Pro-Syrian-Iranian regime in Lebanon, and reconstruct a third wing to the Tehran-Damascus axis, reanimating the Arab-Israeli conflict, rejuvenating the Syrian dominance, isolating Jordan, reaching out to Hamas, crumbling Iraq, and unleashing Iran’s nuclear programs unchecked. The domino effects of Hezbollah’s “Waad al sadeq” are far from being even imagined by Western and Arab policy planners.

Plans and surprises

Nasrallah seemed to be in control of his strategy when he appeared in his press conference of victory. His back was safe since he has terrorized the Cedars Revolution’s movement, enlisted Aoun’s support (breaking Christian community unity), and pushed Sunni and Druze breakaways to challenge Jumblat and Hariri (the son). To his south, he was applauding Haniya’s Hamas “cabinet” for having already engaged the Israelis. To his east, Syria was mobilizing and waiting. In Iran, the “masters” were extending their strategic umbrella; and in Iraq, the Terror sapping of sectarian relations was on. All the brothers in Khumeini Jihadism were awaiting Hezbollah to break the chain of events from the Galilee. Nasrallah was at the forefront of a plan aiming at wrecking the rising democracy and the fledgling stability of the region. The stakes were really high for the “axis.”

But Hassan Nasrallah’s master plan failed. First the Lebanese Government, smelling the odors of conspiracy was quick to distance itself from the operation. “The Government was not informed by it nor does it endorse it,” stated the Seniora release. Second, Israel’s volte-face surprised Hezbollah and their allies. Why would the Olmert Government, declare a full war on an organization that classical armies cannot take out, thought the Tehran planners. Then came, the Arab position: Arabia, Egypt and Jordan, followed discretely by others didn’t extend their full support to the move. They certainly criticized Israel to the fullest of rhetoric, but didn’t praise the “Hizb.” On the international level, the Terror group “that-provide-services” didn’t fare better. The United States firmly extended its bipartisan support to UNSCR 1559; France and the rest of Europe stated the same –with their continental language- Russia wouldn’t side with Nasrallah against the world, and China has other priorities on its plate. Only Iran threatened to wage wars in the rescue of its most western army. Nasrallah fell into his own trap but decided to come up with a contingency plan.

Hezbollah’s Contingency plan

Not so different from Plan A, the objectives of Plan B have been readjusted. If Israel bombards Hezbollah’s infrastructure to the ground, Iranian oil will rebuild it. If Israel invades by land, it will find itself against a more aggressive Hezbollah than the one of the 1990s. Besides, Hezbollah will attempt nevertheless to go after the Seniora Government anyway. Calling on the “reserves,” Hezbollah enlisted President Lahoud and his son in law Defense Minister Elias Murr to drag the Lebanese Army in the War against Israel’s forces. And in collaboration with Aounist cadres (while the majority of his partisans are still stunned by the events), Hezbollah has unleashed an international campaign against the “inhumane aggression.” If things go well, Nasrallah expects Plan B to become Plan A, and a land advance by Israel would unleash a total offensive against the Government of Lebanon by pro-Iranian and Syrian forces. If Israel moves north to create a safe area against rockets, Hezbollah would move north to control the rest of Lebanon. The Syrian-Iranian axis will refuse UNSCR 1559, reject international initiatives for disarming the militias, and will make its stand in Lebanon, even if the Switzerland of the Middle East is to be reduced to rubbles. Assad wants to save his regime in Beirut, and Ahmedinijad wants to shield his bomb in the Bekaa: Alea Jacta Est, the dice are rolling.

MORE:
Bush hopes to turn Assad against Hizbollah (Patrick Bishop, 24/07/2006, Daily Telegraph)

Israel's attack has turned Hizbollah's fighters into heroes in the eyes of the Arab street. But in the palaces of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan, there is quiet rejoicing at the thought of the organisation finally getting its comeuppance.

The Sunni powers are worried by the rise of Shia influence in the region and the imperial yearnings of Iran - Hizbollah's patron and inspiration. A decisive Israeli military victory would be a welcome setback to Teheran's ambitions.

Now America is hoping to persuade its friends in the Arab world to deal a political blow to Hizbollah.

GOT MY LIBERTY:

Into the black: In Johnny Cash's last days, it took Rick Rubin's unlikely friendship to bring out his final statement (BRAD WHEELER, 7/24/06, Globe & Mail)

The world-shaker was winding down. He couldn't walk much, couldn't see much. His adored wife had died. All Johnny Cash had left was his voice, and some days he didn't even have that.

It was all he had left in him to churn out one of the best albums of his career.

Before he died in May, 2003, Cash laid down the vocals to 60 or so tracks. A dozen of them made their way on to the just-out American V: A Hundred Highways, the fifth release in a series of records produced by Rick Rubin, the serene bush-bearded enigma who owns his own imprint, American Recordings. The four previous discs all won Grammy Awards: American Recordings (1994); Unchained (1996); American III: Solitary Man (2000); and American IV: The Man Comes Around (2002). A sixth album, with material drawn from the same sessions as American V, is in the works.

Rubin (a vegetarian longhair who loves speed-metal, yoga and professional wrestling) and Cash (a deeply spiritual hell-raiser) began working on the fifth album the day after the fourth album was completed in 2002, with the pace accelerating with the death of June Carter Cash in the spring of 2003. "The schedule changed; it got more intense," Rubin recalls. "Johnny called me and told me, 'I need to work every single day.' "

THE ONLY PLACE YOU'LL FIND A CAMEL IS THE HOTEL IN EGYPT:

Marriott Hotels Ban Smoking In Rooms (Michael S. Rosenwald, 7/20/06, Washington Post)

Marriott International Inc., the nation's largest hotel chain, said yesterday that it will ban smoking in its nearly 400,000 hotel rooms in the United States and Canada, casting the decision as less about public health and more about taking care of the bottom line.

Two decades ago, about half the company's rooms were set aside for smokers, but demand has steadily dropped, with only 5 percent of customers now requesting smoking rooms. At the same time, complaints about cigarette odor have increased, and company officials have struggled to address the issue.

When a company with as many hotel rooms as Marriott takes the plunge, everybody else will follow.

DERANGING THE LANDSCAPE:

No More Joe: `Dead Wrong' On The War And Defense Of Bush, White House Excesses (Irving Stolberg, 7/23/06, Hartford Courant)

Joe Lieberman and I have been friends and colleagues for 38 years. We ran for and won seats in the Connecticut legislature as a team of reformers in 1970. He was my state senator and I was his state representative. He rose to Senate majority leader as I became speaker of the House. With others, we formed the Caucus of Connecticut Democrats, a progressive coalition, to further the causes of peace in Vietnam and justice at home.

I have supported him in every election he has had - until now. This year I am supporting Ned Lamont to unseat Joe. [...]

His blind support of the Iraq war, begun illegally and a continuing catastrophe, is monstrous.

And his defense of an incompetent president, a vice president who fits the dictionary definition of fascism and an extremist administration that has perpetrated torture, illegal eavesdropping and a general shredding of the Constitution is insulting to the people who elected him in the first place. [...]

His announcement that he will not support the winner of the Democratic primary but will seek election as an independent if he loses the primary seems to put self above principle. I thank Ned Lamont, a good and decent man, for giving the people of Connecticut a real choice. We need someone who will confront the Bush-Cheney evils of lies, manipulation and incompetence, which have done us so much harm at home and abroad.

This kind of hateful loopiness has become so routine that sometimes it pays to stand back for a moment and reflect on the situation: This is a mainstream figure -- a two-time former speaker of the Connecticut House of Representatives -- who tosses off words like "monstrous" and "fascism" to describe his political opponents. And every indication is that he means it.

WHAT DO YOU MEAN WE, WHITE MAN?

Kerry knocks Bush on handling of Mideast conflict (Valerie Olander, The Detroit News, 7/23/06)

U.S. Sen. John Kerry, D- Mass., who was in town Sunday to help Gov. Jennifer Granholm campaign for her re-election bid, took time to take a jab at the Bush administration for its lack of leadership in the Israeli-Lebanon conflict.

"If I was president, this wouldn't have happened," said Kerry during a noon stop at Honest John's bar and grill in Detroit's Cass Corridor.

Bush has been so concentrated on the war in Iraq that other Middle East tension arose as a result, he said....

Hezbollah guerillas should have been targeted with other terrorist organizations, such as al-Qaida and the Taliban, which operate in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Kerry said. However, Bush, has focused military strength on Iraq.

"This is about American security and Bush has failed. He has made it so much worse because of his lack of reality in going into Iraq.…We have to destroy Hezbollah," he said.

BECAUSE THERE'S NOTHING FRENCH THAT AMERICANIZATION DOESN'T IMPROVE:

US cyclist's win lends glow to embattled Tour de France: Floyd Landis made up an 8-minute deficit to capture victory in France's signature sporting event. (Susan Sachs, 7/24/06, The Christian Science Monitor)

The "maillot jaune," the treasured yellow jersey of the Tour de France, went to Floyd Landis, a fresh-faced American farm boy who rode past the pain of a hip injury to win the 23-day race through the summer-scorched French countryside. He clinched the victory with a final sprint on Sunday up the Champs Elysées in Paris.

His performance and gee-whiz charm helped put the glow back into this year's Tour after its gloomy start, when nine racers were disqualified for suspected doping.

QUACKERY WITH A PEDIGREE:

What if Black Holes Didn't Exist?: How an alternate theory of the universe exposes the 'war of words' that underlies modern cosmology. (Richard Morgan, July 21, 2006, Seed)

[George Chapline's] work reinvents black holes as so-called "dark energy stars," which are what is left over when matter transitions to dark energy as it passes a point of no return similar to a black hole's event horizon. That redefinition, if correct, would invalidate much of the intellectual framework of traditional black holes.

Chapline's ideas take inspiration from his colleague Robert Laughlin, a condensed matter physicist at Stanford University who won a Nobel for his work on quantum fluids.

Laughlin is quick to point out that the hubbub he and Chapline's ideas have caused "is a battle of words rather than a battle of science.

"In science, you decide whose theory is right (or wrong) by means of an experiment," he said, "not by polling experts."

Unfortunately for theoretical physicists, experimenting on the nature of the universe is not an easy undertaking. Revisionism of one sort or another is constantly occurring, due to the field's heavier-than-normal reliance on theories based on observation, extrapolation and imagination.

"In some ways our playground is too big," said Leonard Susskind, a theoretical particle physicist at Stanford and an outspoken critic of the Chapline-Laughlin theory.

"Practically speaking, much of our subject matter is inaccessible to direct experimentation," he continued. "It doesn't make the science any less valid...

Meanwhile, leave it to a baseball man to display the kind of humility foreign to modern science:

At the time of [Bill] James hiring, some observers predicted the Red Sox would be transformed into a team that relied on the computations of pasty, number-crunching geeks and completely ignored the tobacco-chewing wisdom of traditional scouts. James found this viewpoint comical. "I believe In a universe that is too complex for any of us to really understand," he says. "Each of us has an organized way of thinking about the world--a paradigm, if you will... But the problem is the real world is vastly more complicated than the image of it we carry around in our heads."

MEET THE FRIEDMANS

The Romance of Economics Milton and Rose Friedman: Dinner with Keynes? Yes. War with Iraq? They disagree. (TUNKU VARADARAJAN, 22 July 2006, The Wall Street Journal)

Is immigration, I asked--especially illegal immigration--good for the economy, or bad? "It's neither one nor the other," Mr. Friedman replied. "But it's good for freedom. In principle, you ought to have completely open immigration. But with the welfare state it's really not possible to do that. . . . She's an immigrant," he added, pointing to his wife. "She came in just before World War I." (Rose--smiling gently: "I was two years old.") "If there were no welfare state," he continued, "you could have open immigration, because everybody would be responsible for himself." Was he suggesting that one can't have immigration reform without welfare reform? "No, you can have immigration reform, but you can't have open immigration without largely the elimination of welfare.

"At the moment I oppose unlimited immigration. I think much of the opposition to immigration is of that kind--because it's a fundamental tenet of the American view that immigration is good, that there would be no United States if there had not been immigration. Of course, there are many things that are easier now for immigrants than there used to be. . . ."

Did he mean there was much less pressure to integrate now than there used to be? Milton: "I'm not sure that's true . . ." Rose (speaking simultaneously): "That's the unfortunate thing . . ." Milton: "But I don't think it's true . . ." Rose: "Oh, I think it is! That's one of the problems, when immigrants come across and want to remain Mexican." Milton: "Oh, but they came in the past and wanted to be Italian, and be Jewish . . ." Rose: "No they didn't. The ones that did went back."

Mrs. Friedman, I was learning, often had the last word.

ATLANTICIST HIGH:

Buckley: Bush Not A True Conservative: In Exclusive Interview, Buckley Criticizes President For Interventionist Policies (Thalia Assuras, July 22, 2006, CBS News)

Buckley finds himself parting ways with President Bush, whom he praises as a decisive leader but admonishes for having strayed from true conservative principles in his foreign policy.

In particular, Buckley views the three-and-a-half-year Iraq War as a failure.

ALL ROADS LEAD TO DAMASCUS:

Seven Qassam rockets land in western Negev; no injuries (Mijal Grinberg and Avi Issacharoff, 7/23/06, Haaretz)

According to reports Sunday, the Hamas leadership in Gaza is ready to halt Qassam fire as part of a cease-fire deal that would involve an end to IDF action in the Gaza Strip. Senior members of Fatah made similar claims Saturday.

The initiative, discussed by representatives of Palestinian organizations in Gaza over the past several days, also includes an agreement to set up a unity government.

The Egyptian-initiated plan consists of freeing abducted IDF soldier Gilad Shalit, a joint cease-fire and the cessation of IDF assassinations in the Gaza Strip. The release of Palestinian prisoners would be part of the deal, but come at a later stage.

It is not clear, however, whether the Hamas political leader in Damascus, Khaled Meshal, would agree to such a deal.

WHITE SOX, NOT BLUE JEANS:

Pitchers 'paying for every mistake' (TONI GINNETTI, 7/23/06, Chicago Sun-Times)

Pitching drove the White Sox through the 2005 season and to the World Series title. Now inconsistent pitching more than anything else has hindered the Sox of late.

"The staff knows they're struggling,'' manager Ozzie Guillen said. "They need to be a little more consistent. Everyone except Jose Contreras has had some problems. I don't have many complaints about the last few starts. It just seems they have one bad inning. A bloop hit here and there is part of the game. But it seems they're paying for every mistake.''

In the 22 games before their latest loss to the Texas Rangers on Saturday, Sox starters had a 6.29 ERA and ranked eighth overall in the American League this season with a 4.71 ERA after finishing second in the league last year with a 3.75 ERA.

BARKING, BUT WON'T HUNT:

Dogs are howling but nobody hears (Ted Byfield, 7/23/06, Calgary Sun)

The surest sign a society may truly be changing comes when it's discovered its old, tried and true incantations don't work any more.

I saw a lot of this back in the '60s, when frantic citations about "the traditional Canadian home and family," about our "reputation for sound government" and about our "moderation" were repeatedly uttered, but seemingly nowhere heard.

I saw it again in the '90s when the Klein government took office in Alberta and began sizable cuts in welfare and other provincial services. The usual pitiful photos appeared, with heart-rending stories attached, and everybody waited for Ralph to back down. He didn't. The media hype no longer worked.

I saw it again in the mid-'90s when big cuts to the CBC began, and the "Friends of Canadian Broadcasting" ran the customary full-page ads with the customary 500 or so names (Pierre Berton, Margaret Atwood and Patrick Watson in the lead), appealing for restoration of the traditionally big CBC budget. The silence in response was deafening.

Obviously, nobody but those within the CBC circle gave a damn. She might take a long time dying, but seemingly old Mother Corp was doomed.

Finally, and amusingly, I saw it again last week when Harper declared support for Israel, and implicitly for the Bush government.

THE FOOTING'S EASY ON SUCH A WELL WORN PATH:

Harper delivers: Liberals are in the hole and Canada is on a roll (Paul Jackson, 7/23/06, Calgary Sun)

Six months ago today every Canadian with even an ounce of patriotism in their veins put an end to the sleaze-driven, scandal-riddled Jean Chretien/Paul Martin era.

Assessing the past six months, and harking back across some four decades of political journalism, I have not seen an individual move as deftly into the prime minister's office as Stephen Harper, nor newly-installed members perform as well as those of the current Conservative cabinet.

A former MP -- and cabinet minister -- from Brian Mulroney's first term in office ventured even Mulroney's team hit a few initial bumps before finding its footing.

Harper and his team, he perceived, moved into office as if they had been skilled practitioners for years.

DEMOCRACIES SELF-CORRECT:

In Iran�s Streets, Aid to Hezbollah Stirs Resentment (MICHAEL SLACKMAN, 7/23/06, NY Times)

There is a huge amount of anger here about what is happening in Lebanon, but it is not all the result of Israeli bombs, missiles and artillery.

�Of course I am angry,�� said Hamid Akbari, 30, a deliveryman. �All our income is going to Palestine and Hezbollah.�

For decades, Iran has been Hezbollah�s prime patron, helping create it as a Shiite Muslim militia and then nurture it with money, expertise and weapons. But now that Hezbollah is in the midst of full-blown fighting with Israel, Iranian officials have been adamant in insisting that they had nothing to do with the events that set off the crisis.

Part of the reason may be fear, or concern, that the United States and Europe would punish Iran, if it were proved otherwise. But Iranian officials may have a wary eye on their public. In interviews in central Tehran Saturday, person after person said the same thing: Iran should worry about Iran�s problems and not be dragged down by others� battles.

�We Iranians have a saying,� said Ali Reza Moradi, 35, a portrait artist who works in a small booth downtown. �We should save our own house first and then save the mosque. A lot of people think this way. The government should help its people first, and then help the people in Lebanon.� [...]

Although Iran sits atop one of the largest known oil reserves, it cannot refine enough gasoline to meet its own needs � and so prices are rising. Mr. Ahmadinejad may have been elected on a populist economic message, but on the streets people report more pain, more unemployment and higher prices.

REALITY'S A STUBBORN MISTRESS:

CAN ISRAEL WIN? (RALPH PETERS, July 22, 2006, NY Post)

ISRAEL is losing this war. For a lifelong Israel supporter, that's a painful thing to write. But it's true. And the situation's worsening each day.

A U.S. government official put it to me this way: "Israel's got the clock, but Hezbollah's got the time." The sands of the hourglass favor the terrorists - every day they hold out and drop more rockets on Israel, Hezbollah scores a propaganda win.

All Hezbollah has to do to achieve victory is not to lose completely. But for Israel to emerge the acknowledged winner, it has to shatter Hezbollah. Yet Israeli miscalculations have left Hezbollah alive and kicking.

Israel has to pull itself together now, to send in ground troops in sufficient numbers, with fierce resolve to do what must be done: Root out Hezbollah fighters and kill them. This means Israel will suffer painful casualties - more today than if the Israeli Defense Force had gone in full blast at this fight's beginning.

The situation is grave. A perceived Hezbollah win will be a massive victory for terror, as well as a triumph for Iran and Syria.

The United States, Israel, the United Nations and the European Union have reluctantly concluded that despite punishing military attacks, Hezbollah is likely to survive as a political player in Lebanon, and Israel now says it is willing to accept the organization if it sheds its military wing and abandons extremism, according to several key officials.

"To the extent that it remains a political group, it will be acceptable to Israel," Israeli Ambassador Daniel Ayalon said yesterday in the strongest sign to date that the Israelis are rethinking the scope and ultimate goals of the campaign. "A political group means a party that is engaged in the political system in Lebanon, but without terrorism capabilities and fighting capabilities. That will be acceptable to Israel."

In a bid to contain Hezbollah, the United States is hoping to persuade Arab allies over the next week -- Saudi Arabia in talks today and Egypt and Jordan at an emergency meeting Wednesday in Rome -- to get Syria to stop arming, funding and facilitating Hezbollah's military operations, U.S. officials said.

THOMAS FRIEDMAN: IMMATURE THINKER

U.S. needs help from World of Order (Thomas Friedman, 22 July 2006, Deseret News)

Lebanon, alas, has not been able to produce the internal coherence to control Hezbollah and is not likely to soon. The only way this war is going to come to some stable conclusion anytime soon is if The World of Order — and I don't just mean "the West," but countries like Russia, China, India, Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia too — puts together an international force that can escort the Lebanese army to the Israeli border and remain on hand to protect it against Hezbollah...

I am not talking about a U.N. peacekeeping force. I am talking about an international force, like the one that liberated Kosovo, with robust rules of engagement, heavy weapons and troops from countries like France, Russia, India and China that Iran and its proxies will not want to fight...

Bush and Condoleezza Rice need to realize that Syria on its own is not going to press Hezbollah — in Bush's immortal words — to just "stop doing this s---." The Bush team needs to convene a coalition of The World of Order. If it won't, it should let others more capable do the job. We could start with the elder George Bush and Bill Clinton, whose talents could be used for more than just tsunami relief...

I'M GONNA NEED TO WIN A HATRACK:

Sox' slide can't be stopped (TONI GINNETTI , 7/22/06, Chicago Sun-Times)

The scoreboard is reflecting what White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen is seeing in his players -- a sinking record and sinking spirit. [...]

The Sox dropped one more game to the American League Central-leading Detroit Tigers, who now have a 61/2-game lead. But the Minnesota Twins are gaining, too, their eighth consecutive victory Friday putting them only three games behind the wild-card-leading Sox.

EAGER FOR THE PRESSURE:

Yo, Blair: the real meaning of the Tony 'n' George rap (Roland Watson, 7/22/06, Times of London)

The transcript: [...]

Someone asks Bush whether he wants someone to prepare his closing remarks for the end of the G8 summit.

Bush: No. Just gonna make it up. I'm not going to talk too damn long like the rest of them. Some of these guys talk too long. [...]

Blair, standing over Bush as the President eats, tries to engage on the stalled global trade negotiations.

Blair: On this trade thingy . . .

Indistinct

Some of the ensuing conversation is inaudible but Blair evidently wants Bush to make a statement on the talks.

Blair: Are you planning to say that here or not?

Bush: If you want me to.

Blair: Well, it's just that if the discussion arises . . .

Bush: I just want some movement.

Blair: Yeah.

Bush: Yesterday we didn't see much movement.

Blair: No, no, it may be that it's not, it may be that it's impossible.

Bush: I am prepared to say it.

Blair: But it's just I think that we need to be an opposition . . .

Bush: Who is introducing the trade?

Blair: Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor

Bush: Tell her to call me.

Blair: Yes.

Bush: Tell her to put me on the spot.

SOMETIMES ALL A FELLA NEEDS IS A GOOD CRY...:

Bolton's Nomination Revives After Senator Changes Mind (Charles Babington, July 22, 2006, Washington Post)

One senator's change of heart about John R. Bolton has rekindled efforts to win Senate confirmation for the interim U.N. ambassador, as Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) yesterday called for "swift action" on the nomination.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee has scheduled a hearing next week on Bolton, a sharp-tongued conservative whose aggressive style has earned him enemies as well as fans. On Thursday, Sen. George V. Voinovich (R-Ohio) said he no longer objects to confirming Bolton to the U.N. job for the remainder of the Bush administration.

PJ'S EVERYWHERE:

Blogger Media at the Forefront of the Middle East Coverage War (PRNewswire, 7/21/06)

Pajamas Media (PJM) is providing special extended coverage of the Middle East War in conjunction with its new initiative called Politics Central. Within the PJM Network of 90 bloggers are several in theater commenting on the war between Hamas, Hezbolla and Israel from a first hand perspective. Pajamas has also been providing a real time and continuous chronology of news events via its global editors and contributors. Within PJM's new Politics Central initiative, PJM is distributing exclusive podcast interviews that are longer and more in depth than typical cable news organizations are able to provide.

With full-time editors in Sydney, Barcelona and Los Angeles working with contributing bloggers worldwide in such places as Tel Aviv, Haifa, Baghdad and Washington, Pajamas Media has been offering round-the-clock battlefield reporting in tandem with the most thoughtful commentary from the global blogosphere and traditional sources. Under the guidance of Editor-in-Chief Gerard Van der Leun in Seattle, Pajamas Media mixes the best news and views from on-the-scene citizen journalists with seasoned professionals in an unprecedented manner.

A literal living chronology of the ongoing Israel-Hezbollah War has been created and made available on the Pajamas Media front page (http://www.pajamasmedia.com). "This chronology's intention is to give the public moment-to-moment access to the vicissitudes of the war and ultimately to provide historians with a record of the evolving struggle," says Pajamas' CEO Roger L. Simon.

In the early stages of the war, PJM wanted direct and exclusive coverage from the Middle East. With this Politics Central readers could actually hear what was going on from the people on the ground themselves.

"When we discovered a seventeen-year old -- Eugene -- blogging from a bunker in Haifa ('Live from an Israeli Bunker' @ http://www.israelibunker.blogspot.com), we jumped at the opportunity to do a podcast interview with him," said Simon. After Simon's podcast with Eugene was published on the Pajamas Media site, the young man from Haifa was immediately interviewed by the Washington Post, CNN and NBC, creating a virtual blog firestorm.

Pajamas Media's Politics Central is now planning other podcasts from the Middle East to appear in the next few days. Some of these will feature Arab bloggers talking with Israeli bloggers.

THE FRENCH WOULD AT LEAST HAV E TRADED THE INFO FOR CIGARETTES AND NYLONS:

Greenpeace publishes nuclear waste train timetable for UK (GERRI PEEV, 7/22/06, The Scotsman)

ENVIRONMENTAL campaigners yesterday revealed detailed timetables for the trains that carry nuclear waste across Britain, triggering alarm that terrorists could exploit the information.

The report, from Greenpeace, includes details of more than 1,000 nuclear transports through the UK every year, including journeys through the centre of Edinburgh and other Scottish population centres.

The organisation's actions follow an undercover sting by a tabloid newspaper, which exposed how easy it was to plant a fake bomb on a train in London carrying nuclear waste.

ME, ME. ME, I, I, I:

The Old World is getting older, putting Europe in a new bind (Veronika Oleksyn, 7/22/06, The Associated Press)

"What's the world coming to? It's all about work and money nowadays," says 86-year-old Elfriede Kobsa. "Yes, whatever happened to having a family and children?" says Elisabeth Nagl with a sigh.

Good question.

The statistics speak for themselves. By 2010 — just four years from now — there will be more 55- to 64-year-olds than 15- to 24-year-olds in the European Union, Austria's social affairs minister warns.

The growing number of older Europeans, coupled with low birth rates across the 25-nation bloc, is giving lawmakers a big headache. At issue is how to financially shoulder the burden of an aging society while staying competitive globally and finding workable incentives for people to have more babies.

"It's getting worse and worse. If things continue like this, no one is ever going to get to retire," said Roni Howath, 56, a former Vienna postal worker who retired early and now drives a cab from time to time to supplement his monthly pension.

GRACING US WITH HIS INTELLECT ONCE AGAIN:

Run, Newt, Run! Gingrich 2008? (Rich Lowry, 21 July 2006, National Review)

The casual TV viewer has probably noticed two things during the past few days — there’s a war in the Middle East, and Newt Gingrich is commenting on it...

The old conventional wisdom about Gingrich was that we wouldn’t have him to kick around anymore. The new conventional wisdom is that he’s back, and he’s doing the kicking. Ousted by his own party after its losses in the 1998 midterm elections, Gingrich has reestablished himself as a party leader through sheer intellectual energy. He has had something intelligent to say about literally every issue of the hour, from health care to Katrina to the war on terror. “He has helped himself immensely — he’s all over the place,” says former Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie...

Whatever happens, Gingrich stands to be the party’s most important intellectual table-setter. “Whoever wins,” says Gillespie, “is going to have spent a lot of time talking about what Newt was talking about.” There are worse places for the party to look for a renewed agenda...

THAT HORSE HAS DONE LEFT THE BARN:

The Judiciary Strikes Back: The government fails to kill off a court challenge to NSA snooping. (Patrick Radden Keefe, 19 July 2006, Slate)

Until Thursday, the NSA wiretapping scandal had gone remarkably well for the Bush administration...

But that all changed when a federal judge in San Francisco on Thursday issued a ruling on an obscure procedural point in a court case between the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights nonprofit, and AT&T. Judge Vaughn Walker rejected the government's claim that because of the doctrine of state secrets, traditionally used to prevent the introduction into court of specific evidence that might compromise national security, he should dismiss EFF's entire case against the phone company...

TAKING ANOTHER STAB AT THE OBLIGATORY NAZI REFERENCE:

Stabbed in the Back!: The past and future of a right-wing myth (Kevin Baker, 7/14/06, Harper's)

Every state must have its enemies. Great powers must have especially monstrous foes. Above all, these foes must arise from within, for national pride does not admit that a great nation can be defeated by any outside force. That is why, though its origins are elsewhere, the stab in the back has become the sustaining myth of modern American nationalism. Since the end of World War II it has been the device by which the American right wing has both revitalized itself and repeatedly avoided responsibility for its own worst blunders. Indeed, the right has distilled its tale of betrayal into a formula: Advocate some momentarily popular but reckless policy. Deny culpability when that policy is exposed as disastrous. Blame the disaster on internal enemies who hate America. Repeat, always making sure to increase the number of internal enemies.

As the United States staggers past the third anniversary of its misadventure in Iraq, the dagger is already poised, the myth is already being perpetuated. To understand just how this strategy is likely to unfold—and why this time it may well fail—we must return to the birth of a legend. [...]

On domestic issues as well as ones of foreign policy, from Ronald Reagan’s mythical “welfare queens” through George Wallace’s “pointy-headed intellectuals”; from Lee Atwater’s characterization of Democrats as anti-family, anti-life, anti-God, down through the open, deliberate attempts of Newt Gingrich and Karl Rove to constantly describe opponents in words that made them seem bizarre, deviant, and “out of the mainstream,” the entire vernacular of American politics has been altered since Vietnam. Culture war has become the organizing principle of the right, unalterably convinced as it is that conservatives are an embattled majority, one that must stand ever vigilant against its unnatural enemies—from the “gay agenda,” to the advocates of Darwinism, to the “war against Christmas” last year.

This has become such an ingrained part of the right wing’s belief system that the Bush Administration has now become the first government in our nation’s history to fight a major war without seeking any sort of national solidarity. [...]

Given this state of permanent culture war, it is not surprising that the Bush White House trotted out the stab-in-the-back myth when its Iraq project began to run out of steam early last summer. It was first given a spin, as usual, by the right’s media shock troops, and directed at both Democratic and renegade Republican lawmakers who had dared to criticize either the strategic conduct of the war or our treatment of detainees. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page opined, “Where the terrorists are gaining ground is in Washington, D.C.” and noted that General John Abizaid, of the U.S. Central Command, had said, “When my soldiers say to me and ask me the question whether or not they’ve got support from the American people or not, that worries me. And they’re starting to do that.”

Again, the link was made. Soldiers of the most powerful army in the history of the world would be actively endangered if they even wondered whether the folks at home were questioning their deployment. The right was looking for a target, and it got one when Sen. Dick Durbin (D., Ill.), appalled by an FBI report on the prisons for suspected terrorists at Guantánamo Bay, compared them to those run by “Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime—Pol Pot or others—that had no concern for human beings . . . ”

The right’s response was predictably swift and savage. The Power Line blogger Paul Mirengoff commented that the senator “slanders his own country. Normally that kind of slander is uttered only by revolutionaries seeking the violent overthrow of the government.” Rush Limbaugh harrumphed that “Dick Durbin has just identified who the Democrats are in the year 2005, particularly when it comes to American national security and when it comes to the U.S. military. These are the same people that say they support the troops. This is how they do it, huh? They give aid and comfort to the enemy.”

There is far too much nonsense in this essay to debunk all at once, but note that Mr. Baker apparently thinks that the goofier segments of leftist antiwar criticism actually have no impact on the morale of our soldiers and don't get picked up by people who would enjoy doing us harm. Back outside the confines of the Harper's magazine croissant crowd, Saddam Hussein is sounding remarkably like Air America:

Saddam pins war on Bush, pro-Israel lobby (Bassem Mroue, 7/21/06, AP)

Saddam Hussein said in a letter released Friday that President Bush and pro-Israel groups lied to Americans to justify the Iraq war, and he added that Iran "and its agents" helped facilitate the aggression.

Saddam also urged Americans to "save your country and leave Iraq" in a letter written in prison to the American people and released by his lawyers in Jordan.

"I see that officials of your administration are still lying to you and they still do not give you a true explanation for the reasons that motivated them to rush on the road of aggression against Iraq," Saddam wrote.

Saddam said seven years of U.N. inspections failed to find evidence that Iraq was still trying to build weapons of mass destruction.

"They also exploited the so-called war on terrorism which prevailed in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks" to claim a link between Iraq and al-Qaida, Saddam said. [...]

He said the loss of prestige was due to the "reckless behavior of your government, pushed by Zionism and influential centers of power which led to the commission of these crimes and scandals in order to attain certain interests which do not include the interest of the American people."

Saddam said most Americans could not question U.S. strategy before the war began because "the Zionist people within the (pro-Israel) lobby that was pushing for war" was "deceiving you so you were confused and lost the ability to see the truth as it was."

Now, Saddam said the American people must decide whether to "allow the killing machine to continue grinding the flesh of both the Iraqis and the Americans" or to act "decisively to stop it."

Replace "Zionism" with the typical autopilot ranting about neocons, and you're all set.

YOU CAN'T HIDE OUT THERE:

Yankees' Mussina rips struggling Rodriguez (CBC Sports, 21 Jul 2006)

"I don't know what's going on," said a pained Mussina. "I know he's played better. I know he's disappointed in the way he's playing. It's not him right now. We need him back the way he's supposed to be." [...]

"It's a play I should have made," said Rodriguez. "It got away. I just tried to throw it around the runner and kind of pulled it.

"I was a little hesitant. It was hit a little soft but I felt I h