HOW MUCH FANFARE DOES A RETURN TO NORMALCY REQUIRE?:

Legislating Violations of the Constitution (Erwin Chemerinsky, September 30, 2006, washingtonpost.com)

With little public attention or even notice, the House of Representatives has passed a bill that undermines enforcement of the First Amendment's separation of church and state. The Public Expression of Religion Act - H.R. 2679 - provides that attorneys who successfully challenge government actions as violating the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment shall not be entitled to recover attorneys fees. The bill has only one purpose: to prevent suits challenging unconstitutional government actions advancing religion.

A federal statute, 42 United States Code section 1988, provides that attorneys are entitled to recover compensation for their fees if they successfully represent a plaintiff asserting a violation of his or her constitutional or civil rights. [...]

The attorneys' fees statute has worked well for almost 30 years.

THE ANGLOSPHERIC CAT AMIDST THE ANTI-SEMITIC PIGEONS:

Harper's defence of Israel sparks political flap (Allan Woods, 9/30/06, CanWest News Service)

Prime Minister Stephen Harper sparked a diplomatic flap Friday on one of his first outings among world leaders after he stood in the way of attempts at the Francophonie summit to craft a pointed political statement on this summer's war between Israel and Hezbollah.

Harper found himself fighting against what French President Jacques Chirac called "a great majority'' of the 53 member states at the conference when he took a stand against a statement of sympathy for the civilians in Lebanon because it made no mention of the Israeli civilians displaced, injured or killed in the month-long war.

WELL, I SURE AS HECK SUPPORT SMACKING YOURS...:

In Many Public Schools, the Paddle Is No Relic (RICK LYMAN, 9/30/06, NY Times)

Over most of the country and in all but a few major metropolitan areas, corporal punishment has been on a gradual but steady decline since the 1970’s, and 28 states have banned it. But the practice remains alive, particularly in rural parts of the South and the lower Midwest, where it is not only legal, but also widely practiced.

In a handful of districts, like the one here in Everman, there have been recent moves to reinstate it, some successful, more not. In Delaware, a bill to rescind that state’s ban on paddling never got through the legislature. But in Pike County, Ohio, corporal punishment was reinstated last year. And in southeast Mississippi, the Laurel school board voted in August to reinstate a corporal punishment policy, passing one that bars men from paddling women, but does not require parental consent, as many other policies do.

The most recent federal statistics show that during the 2002-3 school year, more than 300,000 American schoolchildren were disciplined with corporal punishment, usually one or more blows with a thick wooden paddle. Sometimes holes were cut in the paddle to make the beating more painful. Of those students, 70 percent were in five Southern states: Texas, Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama and Arkansas.

Often the battle over corporal punishment is being fought on the edges of Southern cities, where suburban growth pushes newcomers from across the country into rural and religiously conservative communities. In these areas, educators say, corporal punishment is far more accepted, resulting in clashing attitudes about child-rearing and using the rod.

The majority of parents believes smacking is an acceptable way to discipline children, according to the latest research, which also uncovers widespread confusion about the law.

The number of those in favour of smacking was higher among adults without children, 80 per cent of whom said they would support smacking as a punishment if necessary.

The number of those in favour of smacking was higher among adults without children

Among parents, the proportion who said they smacked their children fell, but only to 67 per cent. [...]

Parents aged 35-54 were most likely to have smacked their children, with nearly three-quarters – 74 per cent – saying they had done so, said the research. The vast majority of adults opposed moves for an outright ban.

WHICH IS WHY NBC WON'T BE CRUCIFYING MADONNA:

The prophet motive: U.S. faithful form rich market (BARRIE MCKENNA, 9/25/06, Globe & Mail)

It's Sunday and you have a little fender-bender in the church parking lot. No problem if you have FaithGuard -- an insurance policy targeted at the nearly 150 million Americans who regularly go to church. There's no deductible as long as you're driving to your place of worship.

FaithGuard is the inspiration of GuideOne Mutual Insurance Co. of Des Moines, Iowa, one of the countless new ways Corporate America is targeting the swelling population of Evangelical Christians.

"There are risks in this, from an insurance point of view," acknowledged GuideOne president and chief executive officer Jim Wallace. "But if you can appeal to someone's way of life, you can make a real bond that will help the business stick."

It seems to be working. Guide-One has sold 60,000 FaithGuard policies since it launched the free add-on to its regular auto insurance coverage last year, many of them sold directly to parishioners at church.

Forget the image of the dusty old Christian book store. The business of selling to Christians has reached a whole new plane. And nothing, and everything, is sacred. Corporate America is finding religion -- in music, movies, radio stations, banks, biblical theme parks, anti-abortion mutual funds, health clubs, and even faith-based towns.

"If you can target zip codes, you can target Christians," remarked Alan Wolfe, a political science professor at Boston College and director of the Boisi Center on Religion and American Public Life.

IT'S NOT JUST TREES THAT ARE THE PROBLEM (via Mike Daley):

Wildlife Waste Is Major Water Polluter, Studies Say (David A. Fahrenthold, 9/29/06, Washington Post)

Does a bear leave its waste in the woods?

Of course. So do geese, deer, muskrats, raccoons and other wild animals. And now, such states as Virginia and Maryland have determined that this plays a significant role in water pollution.

Scientists have run high-tech tests on harmful bacteria in local rivers and streams and found that many of the germs -- and in the Potomac and Anacostia rivers, a majority of them-- come from wildlife dung. The strange proposition that nature is apparently polluting itself has created a serious conundrum for government officials charged with cleaning up the rivers.

Part of the problem lies with the unnaturally high populations of deer, geese and raccoons living in modern suburbs and depositing their waste there. But officials say it would be nearly impossible, and wildly unpopular, to kill or relocate enough animals to make a dent in even that segment of the pollution.

EVEN MORE LIKE US:

Who’s Afraid of Shinzo Abe? (YOSHIHISA KOMORI, September 30, 2006, NY Times)

LAST Tuesday, Japan’s Parliament elected Shinzo Abe as its youngest prime minister since World War II. Some critics in Japan have called him a “hawkish nationalist,” but in fact, he — like the nearly 80 percent of Japanese also born after the war — has merely been shaped by democracy.

Mr. Abe in particular was also influenced by the course of Japan’s alliance with America.

YOU'RE A FAILURE, PLEASE RELEASE MY COMRADES...:

Zawahiri Attacks Bush in New Video Posted on Web (AP, September 29, 2006)

The deputy leader of Al Qaeda called President Bush a failure and a liar in the war on terror in a video statement released Friday, and he compared Pope Benedict XVI to the 11th century pontiff who launched the First Crusade. [...]

Al-Zawahiri also criticized Bush for continuing to imprison Al Qaeda leaders in prisons, including Al Qaeda No. 3 Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged Sept. 11 mastermind who was captured in Pakistan in March 2003.

STATUTES CONFORM TO THE CONSTITUTION, THEY DON'T CHANGE IT:

Detainee Bill Shifts Power to President (SCOTT SHANE and ADAM LIPTAK, 9/30/06, NY Times)

With the final passage through Congress of the detainee treatment bill, President Bush on Friday achieved a signal victory, shoring up with legislation his determined conduct of the campaign against terrorism in the face of challenges from critics and the courts.

Rather than reining in the formidable presidential powers Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have asserted since Sept. 11, 2001, the law gives some of those powers a solid statutory foundation. In effect it allows the president to identify enemies, imprison them indefinitely and interrogate them — albeit with a ban on the harshest treatment — beyond the reach of the full court reviews traditionally afforded criminal defendants and ordinary prisoners.

Taken as a whole, the law will give the president more power over terrorism suspects than he had before the Supreme Court decision this summer in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that undercut more than four years of White House policy.

MORE:
Pirates of the Mediterranean (ROBERT HARRIS, 9/30/06, NY Times)

IN the autumn of 68 B.C. the world’s only military superpower was dealt a profound psychological blow by a daring terrorist attack on its very heart. Rome’s port at Ostia was set on fire, the consular war fleet destroyed, and two prominent senators, together with their bodyguards and staff, kidnapped.

The incident, dramatic though it was, has not attracted much attention from modern historians. But history is mutable. An event that was merely a footnote five years ago has now, in our post-9/11 world, assumed a fresh and ominous significance. For in the panicky aftermath of the attack, the Roman people made decisions that set them on the path to the destruction of their Constitution, their democracy and their liberty. One cannot help wondering if history is repeating itself. [...]

Those of us who are not Americans can only look on in wonder at the similar ease with which the ancient rights and liberties of the individual are being surrendered in the United States in the wake of 9/11. The vote by the Senate on Thursday to suspend the right of habeas corpus for terrorism detainees, denying them their right to challenge their detention in court; the careful wording about torture, which forbids only the inducement of “serious” physical and mental suffering to obtain information; the admissibility of evidence obtained in the United States without a search warrant; the licensing of the president to declare a legal resident of the United States an enemy combatant — all this represents an historic shift in the balance of power between the citizen and the executive.

KNICK-KNACK-PADDYWHACK, THROW THE RIGHT A BONE:

With Senate Vote, Congress Passes Border Fence Bill (Jonathan Weisman, September 30, 2006, Washington Post)

The Senate gave final approval last night to legislation authorizing the construction of 700 miles of double-layered fencing on the U.S.-Mexico border, shelving President Bush's vision of a comprehensive overhaul of U.S. immigration laws in favor of a vast barrier.

The measure was pushed hard by House Republican leaders, who badly wanted to pass a piece of legislation that would make good on their promises to get tough on illegal immigrants, despite warnings from critics that a multibillion-dollar fence would do little to address the underlying economic, social and law enforcement problems, or to prevent others from slipping across the border.

IN ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT, SMALLER AND MORE ISOLATED IS BETTER (via Tom Morin):

Could Puno and Guantanamo Be The Next Hong Kongs? (Alvaro Vargas Llosa, August 9, 2006, Independent Institute)

Puno, a poor region in southeastern Peru, could become an economic powerhouse and stem the politics of resentment that is invading the Andes—if the government would allow a real free-enterprise zone to be established. Likewise, Guantanamo could erode Cuba's communism in the way West Berlin eroded East Berlin's communism if the U.S. authorities gave Cubans an opportunity to turn the controversial naval base into a new economic Hong Kong.

The Andean region, where authoritarian populism is ripe, needs a quick economic success story. Social resentment has already produced two Andean presidents—Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Bolivia's Evo Morales—and came within an inch of producing a third one, Ollanta Humala in Peru. The way to erode these movements that play the ethnic and the ideological card against globalization is to permit free enterprise.

Puno is 60 times bigger than Hong Kong. Unlike the rocky Chinese territory, it has agriculture, livestock, silver, copper, the highest navigable lake in the world and a mythology going back to the origin of the Incas. Peru's successive regimes have kept that region poor by using political tools to prevent local entrepreneurship from flourishing. Today, 80 percent of the population is impoverished. Puno would be even poorer were it not for 20,000 people who smuggle products from neighboring Bolivia and resell them across the country. [...]

President Alan Garcia, who took office last month, says he supports plans for Puno’s free-enterprise zone. If he truly does, he should go beyond the law that was passed by Congress and his recent decree expanding its purview. The law frees industrial and agricultural activities, but keeps many commercial restrictions that affect small businesses and current smugglers of consumer products and other goods from Bolivia. If special interests elsewhere in the nation are affected by free commerce in Puno, then that is a great argument to get rid of commercial barriers the way the Baltic country of Estonia did in 1992—which touched off an economic boom.

Guantanamo is another interesting prospect.

PSSSST, MR. REED, YOU'RE A REPUBLICAN...:

Masterclass Theatre: From Tony Blair, the best political memo on how to win in 2008 (Bruce Reed, Sept. 29, 2006, Slate)

Anyone who wants to find out how to win the next campaign should read Tony Blair's farewell address to the Labour Conference earlier this week in Manchester. Although largely overlooked here in the American press, Blair's swan song is the best political speech of 2006—and the best political memo for 2008.

The British press hailed Blair's performance as "a masterclass in the art of political speaking." It was even harder to top as political theater. For weeks, Labour had been battered by all-out civil war between supporters of Blair and his likely successor, Gordon Brown, who lives over the shop at 10 Downing Street and has waited a decade to take over the family business. On Tuesday, Brown's party conference speech was drowned out by unconfirmed reports that Blair's wife Cherie had walked out in the middle and called the man a liar. When Blair took the podium the next day, he not only gave Brown a ringing endorsement, but delivered one of the great stand-by-your-spouse lines of all time: "At least I don't have to worry about her running off with the bloke next door."

Blair devoted part of his speech to how much New Labour has transformed Britain's economy and politics over the past decade. "The core vote of this Party today is not the heartlands, the inner city, not any sectional interest or lobby," he said. "Our core vote is the country." But Blair expressed more interest in New Labour's future. Far from offering the stale incumbent mantra of "stay the course," his plea was just the opposite—to apply the same tough-minded rigor of reform and change to today's challenges that enabled New Labour to take office in the first place.

MORE (via Mike Daley):
We'll keep the stars and stripes flying here: If we end up with a Cameron v Brown personality contest, the Americanisation of our politics will be complete (Gerard Baker, 9/29/06, Times of London)

IT WAS FITTING that Bill Clinton should make an appearance at the public obsequies of the Blair era this week. The Blair project was wrapped from the first in layers of American packaging. The Clintonisation of the party, with its image rebranding and focus-group vocabulary, was hated initially by the Labour traditionalists who loved the cleansing futility of defeat more than the soiling exigencies of victory.

They came around. But soon, in their critical minds, to the Americanisation of campaigning was added the presidentialisation of British government, as Mr Blair replaced time-consuming encumbrances such as the Cabinet with personal enhancements such as his own aircraft.

The ease with which the Prime Minister segued from the Clinton years to the Bush era — with its fateful consequences for him — only underlined the extent to which Mr Blair seemed unhealthily fixated on the US.

NATO! GOOD GAWD Y’ALL, WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR?

Nato unable to find Afghanistan reinforcements (Richard Beeston, The Times, September 29th, 2006)

NATO yesterday failed to find any volunteers to contribute 2,500 reinforcements that are needed for combat duty in Afghanistan.

After two days of talks in Portoroz, Slovenia, defence ministers from the 26-nation alliance said that nobody had produced the reserve force, first requested by Nato commanders more than three weeks ago.

Des Browne, the Defence Secretary, asked Nato colleagues to “step up to the plate” to help American, British, Canadian and Dutch forces currently engaged in fierce fighting with the Taleban in southern Afghanistan.

“There was no offer of more troops. There were some encouraging signs but it is unlikely anything will be decided until our next meeting in Riga in November,” said a British official at the talks.

Unlike Iraq, Afghanistan is a NATO launched and run war, but except for a small Dutch contingent all the fighting is being done by the usual Anglospheric suspects. The Europeans have shown a marked preference for directing traffic in Kabul and other “nation-building” exercises. Originally conceived as a very specific response to a very specific threat, NATO has morphed into a vague and wispy expression of what little harmony remains between Europe and North America--sort of a UN for democracies--at least in North American eyes. For most of Europe, however, it remains an outfit designed solely to protect them from themselves (Bosnia, come on down!) and a vehicle for containing American foreign policy without spending much on defense. Why do North Americans remain so attached to an alliance that obliges them legally to fight for Latvia or Hungary when the Europeans are perfectly happy to sit back and watch a successful war turn around for lack of muscle?

Perhaps one reason why we are so slow to see things clearly is that an assignment to NATO in Brussels is one of the most pleasant and lucrative boondoggles available to the American and Canadian military and one assumes there is no shortage of lengthy policy analyses touting NATO’s key strategic importance flowing back across the Atlantic.

HOW YA GONNA GET AMERICANS TO FLY BRAZILIAN?:

Search planes find wreckage of Brazilian passenger airliner (CNN, 9/30/06)

Search planes scouring the dense Amazon rainforest in Brazil have found the wreckage of the Boeing 737-800 airliner that disappeared with at least 145 people on board, a Gol Airlines spokesman said Saturday. [...]

The plane was heading from Manaus to Brasilia, and was set to land at 6:12 p.m. before going on to Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paolo, a spokesman for Brazilian civil aviation said. [...]

Federal aviation officials on Saturday backed away from local media reports that the plane had collided with a smaller corporate jet, saying it was impossible to confirm, AP reported. [...]

Gol is the fastest-growing airline in South America and was launched in January 2001 as the first low-fare airline in Brazil.

JOEMENTUM

Senator Joseph Lieberman, Independent Democrat: The PajamasMedia Video Interview
(PoliticsCentral, 9/29/2006)

But, you know, I want to go back. Your question surprised me and it’s an interesting one. So, I’d say, I remain a Democrat but disappointed not to have been nominated by my party and believing that, as much as I am a Democrat, that being a Democrat is not my highest loyalty. My party is not my highest loyalty. My highest loyalty is to the people of the State of Connecticut who were good enough to elect me. It’s to the country.

OBLIGATORY NAZI REFERENCE:

REVIEW: of V for Vendetta (David Edelstein, New York Magazine)

With even retired Supreme Court justice (and Reagan appointee) Sandra Day O’Connor warning of the “beginnings” of a dictatorship, it’s the perfect moment for the ridiculous but riotously enjoyable revolutionary comic-book thriller V for Vendetta—which will doubtless outrage conservatives and unnerve fuddy-duddys but liberate the rest of us with its magisterial irresponsibility. [...]

Whatever else it is, V for Vendetta is not frivolous. The Wachowskis—one of whom is reportedly in the midst of a sex change—introduce a lesbian martyr to make a plaintive case for the right to be what one is.

John Hurt (who once played Winston Smith in a version of 1984!) is the country’s Fascist chancellor, Sutler, who’s largely seen on monitors bullying his underlings, among them a pasty Stephen Rea as a plodding, good-hearted inspector. This part of the movie might have seemed fresher if Sutler weren’t such an old-fashioned Hitler type; he might have, for instance, folksily counseled his countrymen to put food on their children or accidentally shot an acquaintance in the face. But even without the nudge-nudge parallels, V for Vendetta’s Pop Art mixture of revolutionary symbols from history, literature, and painting feels gladdeningly subversive.

What's really stunning though is that, even after 9-11, the makers of the film seem to take seriously the idea that something good can come of "destroying a building" and that, as Mr. Edelstein hints (once he's done comparing our President and Vice President to Hitler), the sole purpose of the "revolution" would appear to be making England safe for sexual aberrance. You can see why a transsexual would think that, but what interest can the folks who march towards Parliament at the end of the movie have in anarchy?

TAKING A PAGE FROM GERRY STUDDS'S BOOK:

Foley Resigns From Congress Over E-Mails (DAVID ESPO and JIM KUHNHENN, 9/29/06, Associated Press)

Rep. Mark Foley, R-Fla., resigned from Congress on Friday, effective immediately, in the wake of questions about e-mails he wrote a former teenage male page. [...]

In 2003, Foley faced questions about his sexual orientation as he prepared to run for Sen. Bob Graham's seat. At a news conference in May of that year, he said he would not comment on rumors he was gay. He later decided not to seek the Senate seat to care for his parents.

THE #@*% DOESN’T EVEN WANT TO STAY GOOD FRIENDS

Marriage a `shared failure,' Domi says (Toronto Star, September 29th, 2006)

Former Maple Leaf Tie Domi broke days of silence about his divorce saying he had not spoken until now to spare his three children "any added spectacle."

Without mentioning Liberal MPP Belinda Stronach, the woman accused of being his mistress and the reason cited in the divorce application by his estranged wife Leanne, Domi said he was speaking "this one time to correct the public record." "Our marital challenges are not a recent development," Domi said, adding that problems in his marriage, a "shared failure," date back to 1999. "Since then, we have worked hard on our marriage but, sadly, it has been a struggle," he said in a statement released yesterday.

Papers filed in court by Leanne Domi allege Domi and Stronach were having an affair. Stronach has refused to comment saying a sexist double standard lies behind lurid media reports.

Wow, it’s not easy to pack so many boilerplate shibboleths about modern divorce into three short paragraphs. For those who need a translation, what Mr. Domi is saying is it’s really all his wife’s fault for driving him into the arms of another and we would all do exactly the same if we had to live through the hell he has been with her. Furthermore, she is a poor and uncaring mother for having the bad taste to complain to anyone about it. Ms. Stronach is lamenting the fact that the world is hard on sluts.

HOW'D WE DEFEAT THE NAZIS WITHOUT BECOMING NAZIS?:

The relevance of Sun Tzu: a review of The Art of War translated by John Minford (Dmitry Shlapentokh, 9/30/06, Asia Times)

The army is an integral part of society as a whole, and this is one of the basic premises of Sun Tzu's holistic approach to society as a whole. A profound change in the spirit of the armed forces would require the same profound changes in US society.

An army of well-paid and well-cared-for troops whose attachment to the cause transcends the limits of a mercenary paycheck cannot be created by flag-waving statements that "united we stand" and propaganda shows where selected brave servicemen and -women announce to TV viewers that they are thankful for the honor given to them: to fight and, if need be, die for the defense of liberty. The creation of armies whose soldiers are ready for a war that could last for generations requires a dramatic increase in benefits and remuneration for those who fight and for their immediate families.

This would require a massive redistribution of wealth. It would mean the end of the perks of various societal bodies irrespective of whether they are supported by the left or the right, and, of course, massive intervention by the state in all aspects of life. This society, if it were to emerge, would come to resemble Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia or China - or at least the Oriental monarchies such as the one in which Sun Tzu lived.

Of course no arguments or even problems most Americans would see as manageable would be able to push the United States away from the operational model by which it has lived throughout most of its history. Change at the very core of society would need not just tolerable discomfort but massive and acute pain, which would demonstrate the futility of all the old medicine.

HOW'S THAT CAUSE CELEBRE GOING?:

'The operation is on!' Iraq's Sunni tribes fight Al-Qaeda (Paul Schemm, 9/29/06, AFP)

Western Iraq's powerful sheikhs have launched an offensive against foreign Al-Qaeda extremists on their territory, they have said, in an important victory for the US-backed government.

"The operation is on!" said Sheikh Abdel Sattar Baziya, head of the Abu Risha clan and chair of the Anbar province tribal council.

"The sons of Anbar's tribes today captured three Saudis, two Syrians and three Iraqi teenagers and turned them over to police," he told AFP Friday.

YOU'RE SOAKING IN IT:

Oil falls sharply, despite Nigeria, Venezuela cuts (Randy Fabi, 9/29/06, Reuters)

Oil prices fell more than a dollar on Friday as traders questioned whether planned output cuts by OPEC members Nigeria and Venezuela would be enough to stem a two-month slide in prices. [...]

"People are waiting for evidence that the market is beginning to tighten or that actual cuts are being instigated, rather than just talk before prices can be bid up again," said London-based oil analyst Geoff Pyne.

"There is still plenty of oil around at the moment."

JUST IN CASE HE WASN'T AMERICAN ENOUGH BEFORE:

Blair pinched speech from The Grapes of Wrath (GORDON RAYNER, 27th September 2006, Daily Mail)

Mr Blair has confided to friends that he drew inspiration for his big sign-off from a favourite passage of John Steinbeck's 1939 classic The Grapes of Wrath.

The Premier ended his last conference speech by telling delegates: 'Whatever you do, I'm always with you. Head and heart. Next year I won't be making this speech. But in the years to come, wherever I am, whatever I do, I'm with you. Wishing you well, wanting you to win.'

He later admitted he had borrowed heavily from a speech by Tom Joad, the central character of Steinbeck's Pulitzer prize-winning novel about the Great Depression.

THE GRAY LADY VISITS BIZARRO AMERICA:

Democrats See Strength in Bucking Bush (CARL HULSE, 9/29/06, NY Times)

The Democratic vote in the Senate on Thursday against legislation governing the treatment of terrorism suspects showed that party leaders believe that President Bush’s power to wield national security as a political issue is seriously diminished.

The most vivid example of the Democratic assessment came from the party’s many presidential hopefuls in the Senate. [...]

Over all, 32 Democrats voted against the measure while 12, including some of those in the most difficult re-election fights, backed it.

ISN'T FRANCOPHONIE REDUNDANT?:

Harper stands firm at Francophonie (DANIEL LEBLANC, 9/29/06, Globe and Mail)

Prime Minister Stephen Harper blocked a last-minute resolution at the Francophonie summit on Friday that would have recognized only Lebanon's suffering during this summer's conflict in the Middle East.

Mr. Harper said an institution like la Francophonie could not recognize suffering based on the nationality of its victims, and he called for recognition of the conflict's effect on Israeli residents.

The resolution was proposed by Egypt at the last minute of the annual meeting of French-speaking nations.

ORDINARINESS:

Many Rights in U.S. Legal System Absent in New Bill (R. Jeffrey Smith, September 29, 2006, Washington Post)

President Bush's argument that the government requires extraordinary power to respond to the unusual threat of terrorism helped him win final support for a system of military trials with highly truncated defendant's rights. The United States used similar trials on just four occasions: during the country's revolution, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War and World War II.

HAD ENOUGH?:

Michigan woes fuel GOP election hopes (Charles Hurt, 9/29/06, THE WASHINGTON TIMES)

[Oakland County Sheriff Michael] Bouchard often tells voters on the campaign trail that Mrs. Stabenow is a "nice" lady but that they're not running in a nice-lady contest. He then rattles off reasons why he thinks she should be replaced.

He tells people that Mrs. Stabenow voted to grant Social Security benefits to illegal aliens, is one of the biggest pork-barrel spenders in Washington and has authored only one successful bill in Congress: a law to rename a federal building in Detroit.

Last month, Mr. Bouchard toured the state in a moving van to highlight the exodus of Michigan residents leaving the state in search of jobs. The flight is so bad, Mr. Bouchard said in an interview with The Washington Times, that when his neighbors put their house on the market, they had to wait more than a week before a "for sale" sign was available.

On his tour, he promised to curb federal spending, reduce "regulatory burdens" on small businesses and make tax cuts permanent.

Mrs. Stabenow, he says, has spent six years in Washington with little to show for it. She has authored 68 bills, according to records kept by the Library of Congress, and only one has been approved by the Senate. The bill, S.1285, renamed a building in Detroit the "Rosa Parks Federal Building" in honor of the civil rights activist. [...]

Despite her successes, even Mrs. Stabenow's staunchest supporters are somewhat at a loss to name her accomplishments as a U.S. senator.

A survey by The Washington Times of delegates who attended the state Democratic convention in Detroit in August found no one who could list any specific successes.

Larry Lewis of Detroit said, "She's done an outstanding job."

Asked to name any accomplishments, Mr. Lewis replied: "I don't have her record in front of me. I couldn't go over it verbatim."

Thelma Murrell of Southgate said: "Off the top of my head, I can't name them. But she does a great deal of things for us. It's not just caring; she really does help."

Carol Poenisch of Northville couldn't name any legislative victories for Mrs. Stabenow, but applauded her efforts to stop Canadian trucks from hauling tons of garbage across the border and dumping it in U.S. landfills. It's an issue that has dogged Michigan politicians for years.

Just last month, Mrs. Stabenow issued a press release boasting that she and other Democrats in the state had reached a deal with Canadian officials "to stop shipments of municipal solid waste to Michigan over the next four years."

But Canada's environment ministry officials weren't losing much sleep over the deal they cut with Mrs. Stabenow. They told local reporters that it does nothing to curb industrial and commercial waste, which makes up more than half of the 4 million metric tons of Canadian trash hauled into Michigan each year.

Moreover, they said the relatively generous deal was prompted by fears that bipartisan legislation moving through Congress would end all trash shipments by year's end.

"Our garbage trucks could have been turned back from the border as early as January 2007," Ontario's environment ministry spokeswoman, Kate Jordan, told the Detroit News. "We needed to find a solution to avert that."

Indeed, that legislation was approved by the House a few days later. But it's not likely to go anywhere soon because the Senate version of the bill — introduced by Mrs. Stabenow — has languished for more than a year in the chamber's Environmental and Public Works Committee.

And, as part of her deal with Canadian officials, Mrs. Stabenow agreed to drop any efforts to get tougher legislation through Congress for the next four years.

NOTICE NO ONE'S CRITICIZING THE SOX FOR LETTING PETEY WALK ANYMORE?:

For Teams Still In the Hunt, It's Been Unsettling (Dave Sheinin, September 29, 2006, Washington Post)

With one weekend left in baseball's regular season, almost nothing about the playoffs is certain except for this: Next week, two of the four first-round series will open in New York, with the Yankees and Mets hosting and with the Statue of Liberty beckoning to all who harbor World Series dreams: "Bring me your flawed, your sputtering, your huddled, injured masses who yearn to spew champagne all over one another."

Indeed, scanning the lists of teams who, entering yesterday's play, had already clinched playoff spots (the Yankees, Mets, Oakland Athletics, Detroit Tigers and Minnesota Twins) and the list of those still in contention with three games to play (St. Louis Cardinals, Houston Astros, Cincinnati Reds, San Diego Padres, Los Angeles Dodgers and Philadelphia Phillies), one would be hard-pressed to identify a single team without serious flaws and serious questions.

MORE:
Mets get thrown for colossal loss (Mike Lupica, 9/29/06, NY Daily News)

Bringing his right arm to Shea Stadium was the start of everything. Now Pedro Martinez limps away from the Mets because his leg gives out on him. The Mets signed him for four seasons and figured they'd take three years of him being even close to what he was with Boston, where he was once one of the great righthanded pitchers of all time, a pitcher who didn't give up two runs a game sometimes, in an era in which all these sluggers with their steroid-aided muscles were hitting balls out of sight. Now, halfway into that contract, the Mets don't have him for the most important season they have had in a long time, the one that starts next week.

Memo to Terrell Owens: If you have any of that extra-strength pain medication
left over, please ship it to St. Louis.

In mass quantities.

The heat is really on, and so is the hurt. By the time the first 19 Milwaukee
hitters had stepped in at Busch Stadium Thursday to tee off on Jason Marquis,
the Cardinals already were down 8-0 and crashing to a 9-4 loss.

The Brewers needed only 19 hitters to douse Albert Pujols' home-run
pyrotechnics from Wednesday.

How hot are the Dodgers?

They are so hot that, on Wednesday night, one of their best players was on fire.

``Literally,'' Derek Lowe said.

``Craziest thing I've ever seen,'' Manager Grady Little said.

In the top of the fifth inning, Lowe was standing in the corner of the dugout preparing to step into the on-deck circle.

Next to his right leg was a large space heater.

Lowe was so intent on watching the game that he didn't feel the heat or smell the smoke.

Then teammate Matt Kemp saw his polyester pants leg burning and cried out.

``He said, `Dude, you're on fire,' '' Lowe recalled.

THE ARROGANCE OF POWERLESSNESS:

Menendez's Firing of Staffer Buoys New Jersey GOP Hopes (Shailagh Murray, 9/29/06, Washington Post)

Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) severed ties with a longtime campaign associate who was taped seeking a political favor on his behalf, the latest of several ethics-related incidents to shadow Menendez as he seeks a full Senate term in November.

According to yesterday's editions of the Newark Star-Ledger and the Philadelphia Inquirer, the associate, Donald Scarinci, was a Menendez childhood friend who became the senator's closest political adviser and a top fundraiser. In a transcript of the recording reviewed by the newspapers, Scarinci asked a client, a Hudson County psychiatrist who held lucrative local contracts, to hire another physician as a favor to Menendez. The psychiatrist, Oscar Sandoval, secretly taped the conversation, which took place in 1999, when Menendez was a House member.

Gov. Jon S. Corzine (D) appointed Menendez in January to complete the governor's Senate term. The Scarinci story follows the disclosure of a federal review of a lease arrangement between Menendez and a Hudson County nonprofit organization.

The revelations have fueled Republican hopes that the New Jersey seat could flip to the GOP column in November.

WHO'S MORE DISAPPOINTED THAT THE PROGRAM WORKS SO WELL...

Medicare drug premiums steady (Richard Wolf, 9/29/06, USA TODAY)

Average monthly premiums will hold steady next year under Medicare's prescription-drug program as competing insurers offer a range of new coverage options.

The average premium will be less than $24. Prices for the least expensive plans — as cheap as $1.87 in some parts of the country — will rise for the program's second year. Medicare officials will unveil details about 2007 plan offerings Friday. [...]

"The word seems to be pretty much price stability," says John Rother of the AARP, the nation's largest seniors organization.

DOES ANYBODY EDIT USA TODAY?:

Term should indicate new justices' influence (Joan Biskupic, 9/28/06, USA TODAY)

The Supreme Court will begin its annual term Monday with a schedule that includes cases on abortion rights, school integration and global warming, topics that will test the impact of the court's two new conservative members.

Such disputes, and a slate of business cases, could offer significant clues on how Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito will influence the law. Both have roots in Ronald Reagan's administration and were touted by President Bush as reliable conservatives.

Roberts replaced another conservative, the late William Rehnquist. Alito succeeded the retired Sandra Day O'Connor, a moderate justice who was at the court's ideological center. As her views evolved over her quarter-century tenure, O'Connor became the key vote on a divided, nine-member court. By voting with the court's four liberals, she helped to ensure abortion rights and the use of affirmative action in college admissions.

That's why the new cases could be poignant signs of how the court has changed with Alito on the bench instead of O'Connor. Alito's record as a lower court judge suggests he would be less open to abortion and affirmative action than she was.

NO WONDER THE LEFT OPPOSES THE LIBERATION:

Parents, kids both welcome reopening of private schools (Zaid Sabah, 9/28/06, USA TODAY)

Under Saddam Hussein, all Iraqi children attended government-run schools that taught a standardized, state-approved curriculum.

Now, private schools that provide specialized programs and less-crowded classrooms are beginning to open in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq.

"In the pre-Saddam Hussein era, private schools were common in the country. But after 1979 (when Saddam became president), these schools were banned," says Ibrahim Abed Wali, manager of the private teaching sector of Iraq's Education Ministry.

TEN? BUSH/ROVER WERE AIMING FOR 100:

Oliver Stone takes a blast at Bush (AP, 9/28/06)

Filmmaker Oliver Stone blasted President Bush Thursday, saying he has "set America back 10 years." Stone added that he is "ashamed for my country" over the war in Iraq and the U.S. policies in response to the attacks of Sept. 11.

YOUR SPECKLED TROUT WANT YOU!

Great Lakes machine guns raise ire in Canada (Margaret Philp, The Globe and Mail, September 28th, 2006)

The United States Coast Guard has started to patrol the Great Lakes with machine guns mounted on their vessels and is conducting live-ammunition training drills on the U.S. side to prepare officers to combat terrorists flooding across the border from Canada by boat.

The automatic-weapon drills started earlier this year but came to light only in the past two weeks after information about the Coast Guard's move to create 34 permanent live-fire training zones in the Great Lakes was published in the U.S. federal register.[...]

The high-powered drills have, however, stunned environmentalists, boaters and mayors in cities dotting the lakes in both countries who are outraged that the U.S. government would jeopardize the safety of pleasure boaters and commercial fishermen who could stray into the line of fire. Just as infuriating, they say, is the risk of lead exposure to fish and the more than 40 million people who draw drinking water from the Great Lakes.[...]

Others are raising alarms about the impact of tens of thousands of bullets made from lead, which has been linked to brain-development and behaviour problems in children. In recent years there have been efforts to reduce lead in the lakes, including the banning of lead paint and a more recent campaign asking fishermen to replace lead sinkers.

“We've spent years removing lead from the Great Lakes,” said Mary Muter, a long-time cottager and vice-president of the Georgian Bay Association, a coalition of cottage owners and boaters. “As a Canadian, these are binational waters and this is just offensive.”

These modern Canadian nationalists are just so embarrassing. You hand them slam dunk proof that the Rapacious Yankee Trader is plotting a secret invasion and the twits just prattle on about ADHD and mineral levels in fish.

SOMEONE WANTS TO BE PM AGAIN PRETTY BADLY:

Bibi encourages Olmert to meet Abbas (GIL HOFFMAN, 9/28/06, THE JERUSALEM POST)

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert received a surprising endorsement on Thursday for his plan to meet in upcoming days with Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas: Opposition leader Binyamin Netanyahu feels the same way.

Olmert told Army Radio he would meet with Abbas regardless of whether kidnapped Cpl. Gilad Shalit was released, because Abbas supported releasing Shalit.

Netanyahu told the radio station that if he were prime minister, he would also meet with Abbas.

"The dramatic change that has occurred is the development of an alliance of extremists against the alliance of moderates to which we belong," he said. "I would try to create a diplomatic process that would initiate an alliance between us and the Palestinians, but for this to happen, Hamas must fall." [...]

Netanyahu's rivals in the Likud accused him of shifting leftward for political reasons.

"Netanyahu's presentation of the terrorist Abu Mazen [Abbas] as a moderate is a repeat of his handshake with former Palestinian Authority chairman Yasser Arafat," the Likud's Manhigut Yehudit forum said. "That handshake destroyed the nationalist camp and gave legitimacy to the Oslo process. Now again, when everyone knows there is no partner and the survival of Israel is at stake, Netanyahu is giving a certificate of kashrut to the enemy."

DOES NO ONE CARE ENOUGH TO MAKE HIM GET HELP?:

T.O. cans talkative trainer (CHRISTIAN RED, 9/29/06, NY DAILY NEWS)

After completing his first full workout since breaking his right ring finger on Sept. 17, Owens finished the day by firing his longtime personal trainer, James (Buddy) Primm, after the 55-year-old Primm told the Dallas Morning News details of Owens' personal life - that Owens' fiancée had recently ended their three-year relationship and that Owens was upset he had missed his son's seventh birthday on Monday. Both the son and the ex-fiancée live in California.

Primm had suggested to the Morning News that both events may have been the cause for Owens to be upset. But Primm just wound up causing Owens to get more upset, and lost his job in the process.

"He shouldn't have said anything about my personal life - period. Now I really have to be guarded as far as who I talk to. If I can't trust my own trainer, I can't trust nobody," Owens told the Dallas paper.

Cutting ties with Primm was the latest bizarre development in the last 48 hours.

WELL, WE CAN AT LEAST SAY THAT DEMOCRATS ARE COMPROMISED:

a href=http://www.slate.com/default.aspx?id=2150495>The Blind Leading the Willing: A compromise between those who don't care and those who don't want to know. (Dahlia Lithwick, Sept. 27, 2006, Slate)

Is it still called a compromise when the president gets everything he wanted?

A major detainee bill hurtling down the HOV lane in Congress today would determine the extent to which the president can define and authorize torture. The urgency to pass this legislation has nothing to do with a new need to interrogate alleged enemy combatants. The urgency is about an election.

Last time Congress rubber-stamped a major terrorism-related law no one had bothered to read in the first place, we got the Patriot Act.

ONE VICTORY AFTER ANOTHER:

Senate OKs detainee interrogation bill (ANNE PLUMMER FLAHERTY, 9/28/06, Associated Press)

The Senate on Thursday endorsed President Bush's plans to prosecute and interrogate terror suspects, all but sealing congressional approval for legislation that Republicans intend to use on the campaign trail to assert their toughness on terrorism.

The 65-34 vote means the bill could reach the president's desk by week's end.

SOMETIMES LAWLESSNESS WORKS IN YOUR FAVOR:

Afghanistan's good news: seeds of economic progress (Karl F. Inderfurth, 9/29/06, CS Monitor)

During his visit to Washington, Karzai met with a group of leading US CEOs. In Kabul, the Afghanistan Investment Support Agency has been set up as a one-stop-shop for the promotion, registration, and licensing of new investments - making Afghanistan, according to a 2005 World Bank survey, one of the world's leaders in the speed needed for business ventures to get started.

Next month, the Afghan government will sponsor its second annual business promotion road show in the US and Canada.

A FINANCE QUESTION:

Dow Ends Up 29 After Reaching Milestone (Ellen Simon, 9/28/06, AP)

The Dow Jones industrial average reached a milestone Thursday in Wall Street's nearly seven-year recovery from corporate upheaval, economic recession and terrorism, briefly trading above its record high close of 11,722.98 set on Jan. 14, 2000.

REFORM REQUIRES BREAKING LABOR:

Union blocks foreign healthcare plan: Despite opposition, other companies are looking to send workers abroad for medical treatment (Patrik Jonsson, 0/29/06, The Christian Science Monitor)

The planned journey to New Delhi by Mr. Garrett, a Leicester, N.C., resident wasn't just about fixing his aching left shoulder. His employer, Blue Ridge Paper Products of Canton, N.C., wanted to send a message to American hospitals: Control costs or we'll give our insured workers the option of going overseas for quality, but low-cost care.

Garrett, who belongs to the United Steelworkers, would have been the first union member to go overseas for medical care. But after his pioneering trip became public, the union stepped in and threatened to file an injunction to stop it.

BECAUSE THEY AREN'T ZIONISTS?:

Saudis in Quiet Talks To Revive Arab Peace Bid: Riyadh’s Envoy Lobbies U.S. Jews As Israeli Leaders Warm to Effort (Marc Perelman, Sep 29, 2006, The Forward)

[I]n New York the Saudis were lobbying the American Jewish community. The longtime Saudi foreign minister, Prince Faisal-al Saud, held a September 22 meeting with five prominent Jewish communal leaders, during which he stressed the need to jumpstart the Israeli-Palestinian process by reviving the so-called Saudi Initiative of 2002. The initiative offered Arab normalization with Israel in exchange for a two-state solution based on the pre-1967 armistice line. The offer, which was endorsed by the Arab League, was rejected by then-Prime minister Ariel Sharon, mainly because of objections to the vague language about the right of return of Palestinian refugees and the return to the 1967 line

“It was a very worthwhile meeting; we were encouraged by the tone and what we heard on the Palestinian issue and on Iran,” said David Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Committee. Harris was one of the five Jewish participants in the one-hour meeting with prince Faisal and the Saudi ambassador to the United States, Prince Turki. The other participants were Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League; Jack Rosen, president of the American Jewish Congress; real estate mogul and publisher Mortimer Zuckerman, and Robert Lifton, a former president of AJCongress and a founder of the Israel Policy Forum, who was involved in the 2002 Saudi plan. [...]

The day before his meeting with Jewish officials, Faisal said that Arab countries had reached a “very significant” consensus after the recent war in Lebanon on the need for a new start in the Middle East peace process. He urged Palestinian leaders to settle on a united stance toward Israel and to clarify whether they accept the Arab League peace initiative, which offers Israel full normalization of relations with the Arab world in return for a withdrawal to the June 1967 line and a just and agreed-upon solution to the refugee problem on the basis of U.N. Resolution 194.

THE TOP 12 ARE PRETTY GOOD:

Bloggers Select The Greatest Figures In American History (Version 2) (John Hawkins, 9/28/06, Right Wing News)

Out of all the titans in American history -- Presidents and generals, inventors and entrepreneurs, reformers and revolutionaries -- have you ever wondered who the best of the best were? Well, RWN decided, for the first time in more than 3 years, to email more than 225 right-of-center bloggers to get their opinions.

CRAMMING FOR HIS GLOBAL TEST:

Free For All (Peter Beinart, 09.28.06, New Republic)

In 1991, the sociologist Orlando Patterson published a book titled Freedom in the Making of Western Culture. Our understanding of freedom, he argued, comes from the Greeks. But, for many Greeks, freedom was intimately connected to slavery: Unless you dominated others, you weren't really free. (Southern slaveholders made a similar argument.) Patterson called this "sovereignal freedom," which he defined as "the power to act as one pleases, regardless of the wishes of others." And he contrasted it with "personal freedom"--the right to act as one pleases while respecting the rights of others to do the same. [...]

Sixty years ago, when the United States supplanted Great Britain as the greatest power on earth, American leaders argued that the age of imperialism was ending. Freedom meant self-determination for formerly subjugated peoples (including peoples subjugated by the ussr). And self-determination for the weak meant limits on the power of the strong. As Harry Truman said in a speech to the then-fledgling United Nations, "All of us must recognize--it doesn't matter how great our strength is--that we must deny ourselves the license to always do whatever we want."

This sentiment, to be sure, was sometimes honored in the breach. But it disposed the United States to a generally positive view of international institutions and international law. When the United States embraced civil rights at home, it rejected the argument for sovereignal freedom that white Southerners had been making since slavery. And, when the United States committed itself to international standards on human rights, it rejected the argument for sovereignal freedom implicit in the imperialism of the past.

Did that prevent Third World nationalists from calling the United States a neo-empire that purchased its growing freedom and prosperity at the expense of others? Not at all. But it furnished Americans with counterarguments. Human rights and self-determination, leaders like Truman insisted, were not merely masks for U.S. domination; they were principles that restrained the United States as well.

That argument never convinced everyone. But it convinced many more people than it does today. In the Bush era, as even a thoughtful neoconservative like Robert Kagan has acknowledged, "America, for the first time since World War II, is suffering a crisis of international legitimacy." And it is that crisis on which men like Ahmadinejad and Chávez feed.

Combating Ahmadinejad and Chávez does not require abandoning the language of freedom. To the contrary, it requires rescuing it--by recognizing that, unless freedom imposes restraints on the United States as well as on other nations, it will sound to many in the postcolonial world like domination.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

IT MIGHT CLARIFY FOLKS' THINKING...

Infidel Documents: Intelligence, jihadists and the Iraq war debate (FOUAD AJAMI, September 28, 2006, Opinion Journal)

It was inevitable that the Arabs would regard this American project in Iraq through the prism of their own experience. We upended an order of power in Baghdad, dominated as it had been by the Sunni Arabs; and we emancipated the Shiite stepchildren of the Arab world, as well as the Kurds. Our innocence was astounding. We sinned against the order of the universe, but called on the region to celebrate, to bless our work. More to the point, we set the Shia on their own course. We did for them what they could not have done on their own. For our part, we were ambivalent about the coming of age of the Shia. We had battled radical Shiism in Iran and in Lebanon in the 1980s. The symbols of Shiism we associated with political violence--radical mullahs, martyrology, suicide bombers. True, in the interim, we had had a war--undeclared, but still a war--with Sunni jihadists. But there lingered in us an aversion to radical Shiism, an understandable residue of the campaign that Ayatollah Khomeini had waged against American power in the '80s. We were susceptible as well to the representations made to us by rulers in the Sunni-ruled states about the dangers of radical Shiism.

The case against the war makes much of Iran's new power in Iraq. To the war critics, President Bush has midwifed a second Islamic republic in Iraq, next door to Iran. But Iran cannot run away with Iraq, and talk of an ascendant Iran in Iraqi affairs is overblown. We belittle the Iraqi Shiites--their sense of home, and of a tradition so thoroughly Iraqi and Arab--when we write them off as instruments of Iran. Inevitably, there is Iranian money in Iraq, and there are agents, but this is the logic of the 900-mile Iranian-Iraqi border.

True, in the long years of Tikriti/Saddamist dominion, Shiite political men persecuted by the regime sought sanctuary in Iran; a political party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, and its military arm, the Badr Brigade, rose in those years with Iranian patronage. But the Iraqi exiles are not uniform in their attitudes toward Iran. Exile was hard, and the Iranian hosts were given to arrogance and paternalism. Iraqi exiles were subordinated to the strategic needs of the Iranian regime. Much is made, and appropriately, of the way the Americans who prosecuted the first Gulf War called for rebellions by the Shiites (and the Kurds), only to walk away in indifference as the Saddam regime struck back with vengeance. But the Iranians, too, averted their gaze from the slaughter. States are merciless, the Persian state no exception to that rule.

We should not try to impose more order and consensus on the world of Shiite Iraq than is warranted by the facts. In recent days a great faultline within the Shiites could be seen: The leader of the Supreme Council for the Revolution in Iraq, Sayyid Abdulaziz al-Hakim, has launched a big campaign for an autonomous Shiite federated unit that would take in the overwhelmingly Shiite provinces in the south and the middle Euphrates, but this project has triggered the furious opposition of Hakim's nemesis, the young cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. Hakim's bid was transparent. He sought to be the uncrowned king of a Shiite polity. But he was rebuffed. Sadr was joined in opposition to that scheme by the Daawa Party of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, by the Virtue Party, and by those secular Shiites who had come into the national assembly with former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi. A bitter struggle now plays out in the Shiite provinces between the operatives of the Badr Brigade and Sadr's Mahdi Army. The fight is draped in religious colors--but it is about the spoils of power.

The truculence of the Sunni Arabs has brought forth the Shiite vengeance that a steady campaign of anti-Shiite terror was bound to trigger. Sunni elements have come into the government, but only partly so. President Jalal Talabani put it well when he said that there are elements in Iraq that partake of government in the daytime, and of terror at night. This is as true of the Sunni Arabs as it is of the Shiites. The (Sunni) insurgents were relentless: In the most recent of events, they have taken terror deep into Sadr City. The results were predictable: The death squads of the Mahdi Army struck back.

It is idle to debate whether Iraq is in a state of civil war. The semantics are tendentious, and in the end irrelevant. There is mayhem, to be sure, but Iraq has arrived at a rough balance of terror. The Sunni Arabs now know, as they had never before, that their tyranny is broken for good. And the most recent reports from Anbar province speak of a determination of the Sunni tribes to be done with the Arab jihadists.

It is not a rhetorical flourish to say that the burden of rescuing Iraq lies with its leaders. No script had America staying indefinitely, fighting Iraq's wars, securing Iraq's peace. The best we can do for Iraq is grant it time to develop the military and political capabilities that would secure it against insurgencies at home and subversion from across its borders.

MY MATH'S NOT SO HOT, BUT...:

'Fertility gap' helps explain political divide (Dennis Cauchon, 9/28/06, USA TODAY)

House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, a Catholic mother of five from San Francisco, has fewer children in her district than any other member of Congress: 87,727.

Rep. Chris Cannon, R-Utah, a Mormon father of eight, represents the most children: 278,398.

These two extremes reflect a stark demographic divide between the congressional districts controlled by the major political parties. [...]

GOP Congress members represent 39.2 million children younger than 18, about 7 million more than Democrats. Republicans average 7,000 more children per district.

GEEZ, IN MA. ALL YOU'D GET IS AN ANNIVERSARY CARD:

Man who lived with corpse gets 25 years (ASSOCIATED PRESS. September 28, 2006)

THERE IS NO ELITE...BESIDES ME, OF COURSE:

From Far Left to Libertarian (Arnold Kling, 28 Sep 2006, TCS)

The question of how I became a libertarian ultimately is a question about how I changed my mental model of the political system from one of "good guys vs. villains" to one of the importance of limited government, individual liberty, and personal responsibility. I travelled the route from Far Left to libertarian. I think that quite a few libertarians have travelled that route, and yet I cannot think of anyone who has gone the other direction. This leads me to suspect that:

1. Far Leftists and libertarianism have much in common.
2. Libertarians know something that Far Leftists do not.

What I believe that Far Leftists and libertarians have in common includes:

1. A passion for social and political issues. I grew up in a household where the dinner conversation often was politics. Far Leftists and libertarians both care more than the average person about what goes on in public policy.

2. Frustration with political incumbents. Far Leftists and libertarians both have a tendency to exaggerate the flaws in Presidents while in office and to overstate the virtues of past leaders. For example, Presidents Clinton and Kennedy are much more popular with the Far Left today than when they were in office. Similarly, during his Administration, President Reagan was considered a disappointment by libertarians.

3. Anti-elitism. Both Far Leftists and libertarians are willing to reject what they see as elitist views among politicians and political pundits.

ALL ANTI-IMMIGRATION, ALL THE TIME:

NEO-NAZI TV: Putting the "National" in National News: Germany's right-wing NPD party used to shy away from the Internet. But now it has discovered the benefits of the new technology -- and created its own online news show. The party has big plans for its own "critical news" show. (Matthias Gebauer, 9/28/06, Der Spiegel)

The news segments gave a glimpse of the world through the eyes of the NPD. The show's producers reported on stories that, in the jargon of the NPD, are ignored or suppressed by the media of the "System." One news item featured the head of Germany's Federal Agency for Civic Education -- a foundation created in 1952 and intended to promote awareness of the democratic values enshrined in the German constitution -- apparently insulting all Germans from the country's central regions as ignorant dolts. Meanwhile, in former East Germany, foreigners continue to attack German nationals. And a report from Cologne described a neighborhood that wanted to get rid of its non-German citizens. The far-right menu of news stories was garnished with praise for a Tehran exhibition that writes off the Holocaust as a myth.

THEY WERE RELIABLE RIGHT UP TO THE POINT WHERE THEY DISAGREED WITH ME:

'The Guardian' at the crossroads (Alan Dershowitz, Sep. 27, 2006, THE JERUSALEM POST)

The Guardian, which used to be a liberal British newspaper, has become the full-fledged Pravda of the British hard Left, especially when it comes to its one-sided bashing of Israel. Like Pravda, it will not publish alternative points of view, even when the alternative point of view seeks to correct willful mis-statements of fact. It's gotten to the point where a reader simply cannot trust the credibility of the reporting.

LARRY DAVID NATION:

Boys told no standing to urinate (World Net Daily, September 28, 2006)

It's an entirely new definition of "Standing Room Only." Or perhaps a new measure of "equality" has arrived.

Whatever it is, it has sparked a huge political debate at a school in Kristiansand, Norway, according to Aftenposten.

The trigger for the explosion of opinion? A decision in the local district that schoolboys must sit on toilet seats when urinating, not stand.

A PARTY DEPENDENT ON ATOMIZATION:

Marriage gap could sway elections: Residents' status often predicts district's vote (Dennis Cauchon, 9/28/06, USA TODAY)

The wedding band could be crucial in this fall's congressional elections, according to a USA TODAY analysis of 2005 Census data.

House districts held by Republicans are full of married people. Democratic districts are stacked with people who have never married. This “marriage gap” could play a role in the Nov. 7 congressional elections. Democrats need a net gain of 15 seats to take control of the House of Representatives.

Twenty-seven of the 38 Republican-held districts with seats considered vulnerable by independent political analysts have fewer married people than found in the average GOP district. The USA TODAY analysis also shows that:

•Republicans control 49 of the 50 districts with the highest rates of married people.

•Democrats represent all 50 districts that have the highest rates of adults who have never married.

The political tug-of-war is between people who are married and those who have never been.

MORE:
On the Use That the Americans Make of Association in Civil Life: An excerpt from Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville (Edited, translated and with an introduction by Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop)

I do not wish to speak of those political associations with the aid of which men seek to defend themselves against the despotic action of a majority or against the encroachments of royal power. I have already treated this subject elsewhere. It is clear that if each citizen, as he becomes individually weaker and consequently more incapable in isolation of preserving his freedom, does not learn the art of uniting with those like him to defend it, tyranny will necessarily grow with equality.

Here it is a question only of the associations that are formed in civil life and which have an object that is in no way political.

The political associations that exist in the United States form only a detail in the midst of the immense picture that the sum of associations presents there.

Americans of all ages, all conditions, all minds constantly unite. Not only do they have commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but they also have a thousand other kinds: religious, moral, grave, futile, very general and very particular, immense and very small; Americans use associations to give fêtes, to found seminaries, to build inns, to raise churches, to distribute books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they create hospitals, prisons, schools. Finally, if it is a question of bringing to light a truth or developing a sentiment with the support of a great example, they associate. Everywhere that, at the head of a new undertaking, you see the government in France and a great lord in England, count on it that you will perceive an association in the United States.

In America I encountered sorts of associations of which, I confess, I had no idea, and I often admired the infinite art with which the inhabitants of the United States managed to fix a common goal to the efforts of many men and to get them to advance to it freely.

I have since traveled through England, from which the Americans took some of their laws and many of their usages, and it appeared to me that there they were very far from making as constant and as skilled a use of association.

It often happens that the English execute very great things in isolation, whereas there is scarcely an undertaking so small that Americans do not unite for it. It is evident that the former consider association as a powerful means of action; but the latter seem to see in it the sole means they have of acting.

Thus the most democratic country on earth is found to be, above all, the one where men in our day have most perfected the art of pursuing the object of their common desires in common and have applied this new science to the most objects. Does this result from an accident or could it be that there in fact exists a necessary relation between associations and equality?

Aristocratic societies always include within them, in the midst of a multitude of individuals who can do nothing by themselves, a few very powerful and very wealthy citizens; each of these can execute great undertakings by himself.

In aristocratic societies men have no need to unite to act because they are kept very much together.

Each wealthy and powerful citizen in them forms as it were the head of a permanent and obligatory association that is composed of all those he holds in dependence to him, whom he makes cooperate in the execution of his designs.

In democratic peoples, on the contrary, all citizens are independent and weak; they can do almost nothing by themselves, and none of them can oblige those like themselves to lend them their cooperation. They therefore all fall into impotence if they do not learn to aid each other freely.

If men who live in democratic countries had neither the right nor the taste to unite in political goals, their independence would run great risks, but they could preserve their wealth and their enlightenment for a long time; whereas if they did not acquire the practice of associating with each other in ordinary life, civilization itself would be in peril. A people among whom particular persons lost the power of doing great things in isolation, without acquiring the ability to produce them in common, would soon return to barbarism.

Unhappily, the same social state that renders associations so necessary to democratic peoples renders them more difficult for them than for all others.

When several members of an aristocracy want to associate with each other they easily succeed in doing so. As each of them brings great force to society, the number of members can be very few, and, when the members are few in number, it is very easy for them to know each other, to understand each other, and to establish fixed rules.

The same facility is not found in democratic nations, where it is always necessary that those associating be very numerous in order that the association have some power.

I know that there are many of my contemporaries whom this does not embarrass. They judge that as citizens become weaker and more incapable, it is necessary to render the government more skillful and more active in order that society be able to execute what individuals can no longer do. They believe they have answered everything in saying that. But I think they are mistaken.

A government could take the place of some of the greatest American associations, and within the Union several particular states already have attempted it. But what political power would ever be in a state to suffice for the innumerable multitude of small undertakings that American citizens execute every day with the aid of an association?

It is easy to foresee that the time is approaching when a man by himself alone will be less and less in a state to produce the things that are the most common and the most necessary to his life. The task of the social power will therefore constantly increase, and its very efforts will make it vaster each day. The more it puts itself in place of associations, the more particular persons, losing the idea of associating with each other, will need it to come to their aid: these are causes and effects that generate each other without rest. Will the public administration in the end direct all the industries for which an isolated citizen cannot suffice? and if there finally comes a moment when, as a consequence of the extreme division of landed property, the land is partitioned infinitely, so that it can no longer be cultivated except by associations of laborers, will the head of the government have to leave the helm of state to come hold the plow?

The morality and intelligence of a democratic people would risk no fewer dangers than its business and its industry if the government came to take the place of associations everywhere.

Sentiments and ideas renew themselves, the heart is enlarged, and the human mind is developed only by the reciprocal action of men upon one another.

I have shown that this action is almost nonexistent in a democratic country. It is therefore necessary to create it artificially there. And this is what associations alone can do.

When the members of an aristocracy adopt a new idea or conceive a novel sentiment, they place it in a way next to themselves on the great stage they are on, and in thus exposing it to the view of the crowd, they easily introduce it into the minds or hearts of all those who surround them.

In democratic countries, only the social power is naturally in a state to act like this, but it is easy to see that its action is always insufficient and often dangerous.

A government can no more suffice on its own to maintain and renew the circulation of sentiments and ideas in a great people than to conduct all its industrial undertakings. As soon as it tries to leave the political sphere to project itself on this new track, it will exercise an insupportable tyranny even without wishing to; for a government knows only how to dictate precise rules; it imposes the sentiments and the ideas that it favors, and it is always hard to distinguish its counsels from its orders.

This will be still worse if it believes itself really interested in having nothing stir. It will then hold itself motionless and let itself be numbed by a voluntary somnolence.

It is therefore necessary that it not act alone.

In democratic peoples, associations must take the place of the powerful particular persons whom equality of conditions has made disappear.

As soon as several of the inhabitants of the United States have conceived a sentiment or an idea that they want to produce in the world, they seek each other out; and when they have found each other, they unite. From then on, they are no longer isolated men, but a power one sees from afar, whose actions serve as an example; a power that speaks, and to which one listens.

The first time I heard it said in the United States that a hundred thousand men publicly engaged not to make use of strong liquors, the thing appeared to me more amusing than serious, and at first I did not see well why such temperate citizens were not content to drink water within their families.

In the end I understood that those hundred thousand Americans, frightened by the progress that drunkenness was making around them, wanted to provide their patronage to sobriety. They had acted precisely like a great lord who would dress himself very plainly in order to inspire the scorn of luxury in simple citizens. It is to be believed that if those hundred thousand men had lived in France, each of them would have addressed himself individually to the government, begging it to oversee the cabarets all over the realm.

There is nothing, according to me, that deserves more to attract our regard than the intellectual and moral associations of America. We easily perceive the political and industrial associations of the Americans, but the others escape us; and if we discover them, we understand them badly because we have almost never seen anything analogous. One ought however to recognize that they are as necessary as the first to the American people, and perhaps more so.

In democratic countries the science of association is the mother science; the progress of all the others depends on the progress of that one.

Among the laws that rule human societies there is one that seems more precise and clearer than all the others. In order that men remain civilized or become so, the art of associating must be developed and perfected among them in the same ratio as equality of conditions increases.

AN EXCERPT FROM BURGER KING’S STATEMENT OF DEFENSE

Town planning blamed for obesity (BBC, September 28th, 2006)

Poor town planning which limits opportunities for children to take exercise has been blamed for fuelling an increase in obesity.

Leading US paediatrician Professor Richard Jackson called for a rethink in the way towns and cities are developed. [...]

He said humans were so adaptable that they quickly adjusted to the environment in which they found themselves.

However, while this was an advantage in evolutionary terms, it spelled bad news when that environment provided little opportunity for exercise.

Humans were designed to keep active, he said, and they were not designed for the modern, sedentary lifestyle that had become the norm.

Just think of all the new outfits fatty can sue now.

OPENED THIS BIG BOX AND ALL I FOUND INSIDE WAS JOBS AND SAVINGS....:

Illinois: Wal-Mart Reaches Chicago (LIBBY SANDER, 9/28/06, NY Times)

Wal-Mart opened its first store in Chicago, a little more than two weeks after Mayor Richard M. Daley vetoed an ordinance requiring all “big-box” stores to pay their employees $10 an hour by 2010. More than 15,000 people applied to work at the 142,000-square-foot store, which is in the economically depressed Austin section on the West Side. Wal-Mart officials estimated that the store would produce 490 jobs.

THE ANTI-WOEBEGON:

As 2 Bushes Try to Fix Schools, Tools Differ (SAM DILLON, 9/28/06, NY Times)

Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida has long played the dutiful younger brother.

Well before President Bush signed his No Child Left Behind law, Jeb Bush poured his own ideas into a school improvement program for Florida.

Over the years since, Governor Bush has mostly held his tongue about the president’s very different law, even as detractors of all stripes have attacked it.

But in recent weeks — perhaps seeking to cement his legacy as a school-policy expert as he prepares to leave office — Governor Bush has been speaking out about the federal law, mixing dollops of praise with measured criticisms — and taking an occasional potshot. He has been caustic, for instance, about the requirement that 100 percent of the nation’s students be proficient in reading and math by 2014.

“I mean perfection is not going to happen,” Mr. Bush said Sept. 12 at a news conference in Orlando, arguing that achievement targets are important but that unrealistic ones discourage educators. “We’re all imperfect under God’s watchful eye, and it’s impossible to achieve it.”

FIRST YOU HAVE TO BREAK THE UNIONS:

Brown angry as unions deal blow to NHS plans: Row goes on after delegates reject use of private contractors (Patrick Wintour, John Carvel and David Hencke, September 28, 2006, The Guardian)

At one point in the stormy meeting of the party's national executive, Mr Brown urged the unions to be serious and put on a show of unity to the party and the country. He said the government would not back down over its plan to hand the NHS Logistics contract to a German company.

His aides said later he was angry the unions were unwilling to respond to the compromises offered by the leadership. At one point he rounded on the Transport and General Workers Union for making crazy demands on other issues.

Mr Brown's intervention swung just enough votes to ensure that the national executive voted 16 to 15 to support the government's use of private contractors in the NHS, a position then rejected by the conference.

The chancellor's stance suggests he would be unwilling to tack to the left to win the votes of union members in a leadership election, prompting some union leaders to complain in Manchester yesterday that there was no real difference between Mr Brown and Mr Blair.

REPUBLICAN DARWINISM:

Anybody But McCain (JOHN BATCHELOR, September 28, 2006, NY Sun)

John McCain of Arizona has won the Anybody-But role for the Republican nomination in 2008. Is this good or bad news for Team McCain? It is a tradition in the Grand Old Party that choosing a nominee, especially to succeed a sitting Republican president, means that the party must perform a romantic opera that requires certain roles to be filled by credible performers. The lead role is that of Anybody But, which the 2008 election has now filled. Equally critical is the role of Who-Can-Stop-Him? which is filled this year with a lean, hungry triumvirate of Rudy Giuliani of New York, Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, and Bill Frist of Tennessee. The junior roles are called What-Abouts? which best have a regional balance: George Pataki of New York, Newt Gingrich of Georgia, Dick Armey of Texas, and Condoleeza Rice of California.

Republican history suggests that the Anybody-But role will be the nominee — from Blaine in 1884 to Taft in 1908, Nixon in 1960, and Mr. Bush in 1988 — and that all of the booms for the competing candidates know this as they plunge into the contest. No blame attaches to supporting a Who Can Stopper or a What Abouter, since the party expects you will eventually join the Anybody Buts. The Republican Party is the most successful third party in history just because it understands and enjoys these periodic tantrums in which the party faithful scrap with each other far more passionately than with the eventual Democratic opponent. The Republicans call them contests of ideas, but this is self-admiration, because there is only one idea in the Republican Party — liberty — and no party member is more equal in that debate. The tantrums are best seen as routine Big Manhood: Choose your Big Man and fight to control the party's money, which is the same as controlling the party.

FORTUNATELY, THE REVOLUTION DOESN'T DEPEND ON THE STUPID PARTY UNDERSTANDING IT:

Revisions to Savings Rules Proposed (Michelle Singletary, September 28, 2006, Washington Post)

The Pension Protection Act of 2006, signed recently by President Bush, made it easier for companies to force employees to save for their retirement. I used the word "force" but I don't mean it in a negative way. After all, traditional pensions, known as defined-benefit plans, are about as rare as a belt on many a teenager's pants. Both are left hanging.

For the most part, workers are signing up for the defined-contribution plans that replaced them, electing to take pretax dollars and invest them in various investment options, including 401(k)s. But there are still holdouts. About one-third of eligible workers do not participate in defined-contribution plans, according to the Labor Department.

To encourage workers to save, some employers decided to automatically sign up workers. The theory is that once you enroll employees in a 401(k), most won't make the effort to stop the contributions.

Some companies, however, worrying that they may be sued for such a paternalistic move, have balked at creating an automatic enrollment system.

That's where the new law comes in. Chiefly, the law amends the Employee Retirement Income Security Act to shield fiduciaries of individual account plans when certain default investment alternatives are selected for workers. After all, if you're automatically enrolling people, then you have to invest their money somewhere.

ERISA would essentially provide fiduciaries relief from liability for the investment outcomes.

DEALING FROM WEAKNESS:

Olmert to meet with Abbas soon (AP, 9/28/06)

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said in interviews broadcast Thursday that he hopes to meet with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in coming days for what would be their first real talks since he came to power. [...]

Olmert said he hoped a meeting with Abbas would lead to broader peace talks and ultimately a deal to end the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

Peace talks have been frozen for years. Israel cut off contacts with the Palestinian Cabinet after the election of Hamas, which calls for Israel's destruction. However, Israel has said it would maintain ties with Abbas, of the more moderate Fatah Party, who was elected separately last year. Abbas has been trying to pressure Hamas to soften its stance.

If no peace deal can be worked out, Olmert said in the interviews he would carry out his plan to unilaterally withdraw from most of the West Bank while strengthening Israel's hold over large settlement blocs. However, Olmert's aides have said he has abandoned the plan following his plunge in popularity after the war in Lebanon, which killed more than 150 Israelis and more than 850 Lebanese.

Recent polls showed that less than a quarter of Israelis were happy with Olmert's job performance and nearly 70% disapproved of his actions as prime minister.

Olmert presented Israel's performance in the war as a clear victory — an assessment disputed by many in Israel and Lebanon — and said he did not foresee another violent conflict beyond minor border skirmishes between Israel and Hezbollah in the near future.

HISTORY ACCORDING TO THE QUEEN OF HEARTS

While we’re at it (Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, First Things, June,/July, 2006) (Scroll down)

It becomes wearying to point out that the Inquisition of the thirteenth century resulted in the deaths of about three people per year; that the Spanish Inquisition of the late fifteenth century was a matter of crown policy and was significantly moderated by the Church; that at the time rulers thought that religious uniformity was necessary to the safety of the state; and that the same assumption in England, where there was no Inquisition, resulted in numerous deaths of both Protestants and Catholics. The Inquisition in its various forms over three hundred years accounted for fewer deaths—about three thousand in all, according to modern scholars—than the number of people killed on any given afternoon under the fanatically anti-religious regimes of Stalin and Hitler. Yet in the hysterical polemics about the threat of an American theocracy, the Inquisition is right up there with the Gulag Archipelago and the Holocaust. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying the Inquisition was a good thing. The pertinent fact, however, is that secular rulers believed heresy was a threat to the state and were determined to stamp it out. The Church, mainly in the form of the Dominicans, was enlisted to conduct legal inquiry (inquisitio) into whether an accused person was really guilty of heresy. Most of those charged were acquitted, and those who recanted their heresy were given penances of the same kind as those imposed in the Sacrament of Penance, such as fasting, pilgrimage, or the wearing of distinctive crosses on their clothes. Unlike other penances, those imposed by the Inquisition were legally enforceable. Should the Church have stepped in to moderate and bring under control the determination of rulers to stamp out heresy? Today almost everybody would say no. It is, however, no more than a chronological conceit of superior righteousness to claim that the answer was self-evident at the time. For St. Thomas More against Protestants, Queen Elizabeth against Catholics, and Ferdinand and Isabella against Jews and Muslims, there was no doubt that religious uniformity was essential to the well-being of the state. If an argument can be made that it was the case then, it is certainly not the case now.

Arguing about history with a leftist or libertarian is, as Fr. Neuhaus says, often wearisome. They are just so fiercely glued to the ideological principle that the modern is superior to the past by definition at all times and in all ways (and just wait for the future!). If you point to a problem such as substance abuse or STD’s as an incident of modern culture, you will be quickly assured there is little to worry about as it was much worse sometime somewhere in the 19th century. (One is thankful the folks of the 19th century weren’t so smug and sanquine about their superiority to the 14th century.) If you try to engage them in the idea that maybe, just maybe, the unspeakable slaughters and genocides of the last hundred years have something to do with modern thinking, you are waved aside brusquely so they can talk about a real outrage like Galileo’s trial. But the most charming conceit by far is the notion that pre-Enlightenment secular leaders were proto-human rights activists struggling to throw off an oppressive theocracy in the name of freedom and independent scientific inquiry.

A dispassionate reading of Western history reveals to all but the most ideologically hidebound that were it not for the Church (es) there would have been no universities, scientific inquiry, fair trials, abolitionist movement, rights for women, limited government, international law, rules of warfare, protection for serfs, aboriginal rights, and many, many other rather important things. There would, however, have been lots of torture and some really great parties.

C’MON, THAT WAS JUST SPIN

An Almost-Chosen People (Paul Johnson, First Things, June/July, 2006)

It is important to grasp that American society embraced the principles of voluntarism and tolerance in faith in a spirit not of secularism but of piety. Almost unconsciously the consensus grew that voluntary adherence to one faith, and tolerance of all others, was the foundation of true religion. In this respect English and American society bifurcated as early as the 1650s. While England was debating whether to have a Presbyterian or a Congregationalist settlement, and then in practice getting an Anglican one, the former governor of Massachusetts, Sir Henry Vane, was expounding the principles of civil and religious liberty, arguing that they were inseparable and that freedom of religious belief was essential to the maintenance of a Christian society: “By virtue then of this supreme law, sealed and confirmed in the blood of Christ unto all men...all magistrates are to fear and forebear intermeddling with giving rule or imposing in those matters.” This document, and the sentiments it articulated, were more instrumental in determining the spirit of the American Constitution in religious matters than were the writings of the Enlightenment.

It is probably true that the American Revolution was in essence the political and military expression of a religious movement. Certainly those who inspired it and carried it through believed they were doing God’s will. Its emotional dynamic was the Great Awakening, which began in the 1730s. The man who first preached it, Jonathan Edwards, believed strongly that there was no real difference between a political and a religious emotion, both of which were God directed. The right kind of politics were, to his way of thinking, no more than realized eschatology. He said he saw no reason why God should not “establish a constitution” whereby human creatures should cooperate with him and all might know that the hour was coming when God “shall take the kingdom”; he looked for “the dawn of that glorious day.”

Edwards saw religion as the essential unifying force in American society, and that force was personified in his evangelical successor George Whitefield. Until this time America was a series of very different states with little contact with each other, often with stronger links to Europe than to their neighbors. Religious evangelism was the first continental phenomenon, transcending differences between the colonies, dissolving state boundaries, and introducing truly national figures. Whitefield was the first American celebrity, as well known in New Hampshire as in Georgia. His form of religious ecumenicalism preceded and shaped political unity. It popularized the real ethic of the American Revolution, which was not so much political as social and religious—the beliefs and standards and attitudes that the great majority of the American people had in common. It was a Christian and to a great extent a Protestant ethic, infinitely more important than the purely dogmatic variations of the sects.[...]

Even those most strongly influenced by the secular spirit of the Enlightenment acknowledged the centrality of the religious spirit in giving birth to America. As John Adams put it in 1818, “The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. [It] was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments of their duties and obligations.” He saw religion, indeed, as the foundation of the American civic spirit: “One great advantage of the Christian religion is that it brings the great principle of the law of nature and nations, love your neighbour as yourself, and do to others as you would that others do to you, to the knowledge, belief and veneration of the whole people. Children, servants, women and men are all professors in the science of public as well as private morality....The duties and rights of the man and the citizen are thus taught from early infancy.”

The United States of America was not, therefore, a secular state; it might more accurately be described as a moral and ethical society without a state religion. Clearly, those who created it saw it as an entity, to use Lincoln’s later phrase, “under God.” The Declaration of Independence in its first paragraph invokes “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” as the entitlement of the American people to choose separation, and it insists that men have the right to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” because they are so “endowed by their Creator.” The authors appeal, in their conclusion, to “the Supreme judge of the world” and express their confidence in “the Protection of Divine Providence.”

An observant outsider can’t help but notice that one thing that unites all Americans is their fealty to the ideals of the Revolution and the principles of the Founders. The difference seems to be between those who think they meant what they said and those who hold that it was all just a feint for popular consumption in their goal of emulating France, which would have happened had the glorious experiment not been hijacked by an oppressive alliance of big business and privileged religion within a few weeks of Yorktown.

SEE HOW EASY IT IS WHEN THERE'S NO OPPOSITION PARTY:

House OKs terrorism detainee bill in victory for Bush (Anne Plummer Flaherty, September 27, 2006, ASSOCIATED PRESS)

The House approved legislation Wednesday giving the Bush administration authority to interrogate and prosecute terrorism detainees, moving the president to the edge of a pre-election victory with a key piece of his anti-terror plan.

The 253-168 vote in the House came shortly after senators agreed to limit debate on their own nearly identical bill, all but assuring its passage on Thursday.

HOW'S THAT CAUSE CELEBRE WORKING OUT FOR YOU?:

All Iraqi Ethnic Groups Overwhelmingly Reject al Qaeda (World Public Opinion, September 27, 2006)

Al Qaeda is exceedingly unpopular among the Iraqi people.

Overall 94 percent have an unfavorable view of al Qaeda, with 82 percent expressing a very unfavorable view. Of all organizations and individuals assessed in this poll, it received the most negative ratings. The Shias and Kurds show similarly intense levels of opposition, with 95 percent and 93 percent respectively saying they have very unfavorable views. The Sunnis are also quite negative, but with less intensity. Seventy-seven percent express an unfavorable view, but only 38 percent are very unfavorable. [...]

Some observers fear that with the ascension of Shias to a dominant role in Iraq, there is potential for the formation of an alliance between Iraq and Shia-dominated Iran. In this poll, though, Shias show only mildly positive attitudes toward Iran, while Kurds and Sunnis are quite negative. Asked whether Iran is having a mostly positive or negative influence on the situation in Iraq, just 45 percent of Shias say it is having a positive influence (negative 28%, neutral 27%), while Iran’s influence is viewed a mostly negative by large majorities of Kurds (71%) and Sunnis (94%).

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad does a bit better among Shias, with 64 percent having a very (28%) or somewhat (36%) favorable view. But Kurds have a largely unfavorable view (very 43%, somewhat 34%) and the Sunnis an exceedingly unfavorable view (very 80%, somewhat 17%).

While some have expressed fears of Syria being a link in an emerging Shia crescent (though very few Syrians are Shia), public opinion in Iraq would hardly be the cement. Most Shias (68%) think Syria is having a negative influence on Iraq’s situation, as do most Kurds (63%). Sunnis are only mildly positive, with 41 percent having a favorable view (17% negative, 43% neutral).

Hezbollah elicits highly polarized views. An overwhelming 91 percent of Shias have a very (50%) or somewhat favorable (41%) view of Hezbollah, while an equally large 93 percent of Kurds have a very (64%) or somewhat (29%) unfavorable view. Sunnis are also fairly negative, with 59 percent having a very (10%) or somewhat (49%) unfavorable view.

MORE:
Talking with the Saudis (THE JERUSALEM POST, Sep. 26, 2006)

An increasingly belligerent Iran, with growing military capabilities, is a menace to both Jerusalem and Riyadh.

Encouraging signs that the Saudis are willing to speak out about a Muslim country threatening regional stability, irrespective of Israel's position in the conflict, deserve recognition.

Indeed, even as Olmert denied having met with the Saudi king, he rightly praised his government's criticism of Hizbullah, the Shi'ite militia that receives weapons and spiritual guidance from Iran, for provoking this summer's bloody war. As two countries with some influence in the United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia could work together diplomatically to encourage US leadership regarding Iran.

NOTHING COSTS MORE THAN IT USED TO:

Airfares stay low, for better and for worse: Passengers benefit, but the industry is running on empty (Alexandra Marks, 9/28/06, The Christian Science Monitor)

[O]ther factors have held sway: the recent fall in the price of oil, a slowing economy, and the low-cost carriers' ever-growing share of the marketplace. That combination has prompted some other aviation analysts to predict that instead of rising, airfares could go into a sudden free fall.

"We've got what looks like a perfect storm coming for prices to plummet, at least in the short term," says Mr. Mitchell.

BUSH GETS TO CHOOSE HIS REALITY:

Excerpts of secret report released (9/26/06, Reuters)

The war in Iraq has bred deep resentment in the Muslim world and provided Islamist militants with a "cause celebre" that allowed the global movement to cultivate supporters, according to excerpts of a secret intelligence report released on Tuesday. [...]

[T]he declassified section, which contained 10 judgments about global terrorism including one on Iraq, reached no sweeping conclusion about the war's ultimate effect on global terrorism.

Here's a toughie: Is it the bureaucracy or the media that is actually this confused?

WE ARE THE MISKITO (*) THIS TIME:

How White House Warmongers Learned to Love Empire (Joshua Holland, September 27, 2006, AlterNet)

Long before President Bush articulated his Middle East doctrine, an earlier Republican administration argued that a different region was so corrupt, so in need of reform, and was saddled with such oppressive and backward rulers that bringing about stability and the potential for prosperity for its citizens was beyond the realm of politics or diplomacy.

Ronald Reagan smilingly asserted that only U.S.-backed violence and American-style nation building could give the benighted people of Central America a chance to join the modern world.

He followed the claim with his infamous "dirty wars," and his administration framed the bloodshed in the loftiest and most idealistic terms. The Reagan administration launched an intensive public relations campaign to convince Americans that the tens of thousands of civilian deaths that resulted were regrettable but necessary, not only because of the United States' mission to promote human rights and democracy around the world but also in order to defeat terrorism.

Clearly, there are differences between Reagan's wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua two decades ago and Bush's debacle in Iraq today.

(*) Remarks at a Joint German-American Military Ceremony at Bitburg Air Base in the Federal Republic of Germany (Ronald W. Reagan, May 5, 1985)

Four decades ago we waged a great war to lift the darkness of evil from the world, to let men and women in this country and in every country live in the sunshine of liberty. Our victory was great, and the Federal Republic, Italy, and Japan are now in the community of free nations. But the struggle for freedom is not complete, for today much of the world is still cast in totalitarian darkness.

Twenty-two years ago President John F. Kennedy went to the Berlin Wall and proclaimed that he, too, was a Berliner. Well, today freedom-loving people around the world must say: I am a Berliner. I am a Jew in a world still threatened by anti-Semitism. I am an Afghan, and I am a prisoner of the Gulag. I am a refugee in a crowded boat foundering off the coast of Vietnam. I am a Laotian, a Cambodian, a Cuban, and a Miskito Indian in Nicaragua. I, too, am a potential victim of totalitarianism.

The one lesson of World War II, the one lesson of nazism, is that freedom must always be stronger than totalitarianism and that good must always be stronger than evil. The moral measure of our two nations will be found in the resolve we show to preserve liberty, to protect life, and to honor and cherish all God's children.

That is why the free, democratic Federal Republic of Germany is such a profound and hopeful testament to the human spirit. We cannot undo the crimes and wars of yesterday nor call back the millions back to life, but we can give meaning to the past by learning its lessons and making a better future. We can let our pain drive us to greater efforts to heal humanity's suffering.

GOTTA COOK UP SOMETHING TO REPLACE THE MOTHS AND FINCHES:

Why Darwinism is doomed (Jonathan Wells, 9/27/06, World Net Daily)

On Aug. 17, the pro-Darwin magazine Nature reported that scientists had just found the "brain evolution gene." There is circumstantial evidence that this gene may be involved in brain development in embryos, and it is surprisingly different in humans and chimpanzees. According to Nature, the gene may thus harbor "the secret of what makes humans different from our nearest primate relatives."

Three things are remarkable about this report. [...]

Third, the only thing scientists demonstrated in this case was a correlation between a genetic difference and brain size. Every scientist knows, however, that correlation is not the same as causation. Among elementary school children, reading ability is correlated with shoe size, but this is because young schoolchildren with small feet have not yet learned to read – not because larger feet cause a student to read better or because reading makes the feet grow. Similarly, a genetic difference between humans and chimps cannot tell us anything about what caused differences in their brains unless we know what the gene actually does. In this case, as Nature reports, "what the gene does is a mystery."

So after 150 years, Darwinists are still looking for evidence – any evidence, no matter how skimpy – to justify their speculations. The latest hype over the "brain evolution gene" unwittingly reveals just how underwhelming the evidence for their view really is.

The truth is Darwinism is not a scientific theory, but a materialistic creation myth masquerading as science. It is first and foremost a weapon against religion – especially traditional Christianity. Evidence is brought in afterwards, as window dressing.

HOW DO WE SLEEP WHEN OUR BUBBLE'S BURSTING?:

New home sales up... (Chris Isidore, 9/27/06, CNNMoney.com)

Meanwhile, the folks who've been holding off on buying a house are making a killing in the market and the Fed's about to start cutting rates. Just wait'll immigration amnesty adds tens of millions of new home buyers....

WELCOME TO WASP ISLAND:

The World's Most Competitive Countries (Paul Maidment, 09.27.06, Forbes)

Being a small European country with snow is conducive to economic growth. More correlation than causality, no doubt, but the three countries topping the World Economic Forum’s latest Global Competitiveness Report are Switzerland, Finland and Sweden--habitual winners all.

Denmark, Singapore, the U.S., Japan, Germany, the Netherlands and the U.K. round out the top ten. OK, forget the snow, size and location. Soundly run government, being business-friendly and plowing back money into innovation, education and public health are more of what really matter. [...]

Switzerland wins its No. 1 ranking (up from what would have been fourth last year on the new methodology) because of high scores for the quality of its institutions, efficient markets and high levels of technological innovation. The country has a well-developed infrastructure for scientific research, intellectual property protections are strong, and its companies spend generously on R&D. [...]

The U.S., which would have ranked at the top last year on the new methodology (although it was second on the old one), continues to score well for being business-friendly, having efficient markets, and for its world-class technology development. But the overall score was pulled down to sixth this year, by its budget and trade deficits. Any disorderly adjustment of such macroeconomic imbalances, the WEF warns, risks knocking the U.S. further down the ranks.

Nordic countries, with Finland (2nd), Sweden (3rd) and Denmark (4th) all among the top ten most competitive economies, have been running budget surpluses and have lower levels of public indebtedness, on average, than the rest of Europe. Prudent fiscal policies have let governments invest heavily in education, infrastructure and the maintenance of a broad array of social services.

Finland, Denmark and Iceland have the best institutions in the world (ranked 1, 2 and 3, respectively) and, together with Sweden and Norway, hold top ten ranks for health and primary education. Finland, Denmark and Sweden also occupy the top three positions for higher education and training.

A well-schooled workforce has helped Nordic companies become global powerhouses. Sixty-four companies from Nordic countries make the Forbes 2000 list of the world’s biggest public companies, such as Finland’s Nokia (nyse: NOK - news - people ), Denmark’s TDC Group, and Sweden’s LM Ericsson (nasdaq: ERICY - news - people ).

The top of the Growth Competitiveness Index rankings is remarkably stable, even allowing for the change in methodology. The Netherlands (up from 11th to ninth) pushed out Taiwan (eighth to 13th)--the only change in the top ten. Of the top 15, only one country, Israel, which scored highly on the education, technology and innovation criteria this year, would have been outside the top 20 last year. Good habits become self-reinforcing and self-rewarding.

But while the Nordic countries continued to fare well, Old Europe is another story. Its big economies appear to be losing their competitive edge, with Britain slipping one place to tenth, Germany falling two places to eighth, France down four places to 18th and Italy moving four places lower to 42nd.

Other losers included Russia (62nd, down from 53rd), where the private sector has serious misgivings about the independence of the judiciary and the administration of justice, the WEF says. Property rights are weak and getting weaker. Russia’s ranking in this indicator during the last two years has suffered a precipitous decline, from 88th in 2004 to 114th in 2006, among the worst in the world.

China fell from 48th to 54th. Buoyant growth coupled with low inflation, one of the highest savings rates and manageable levels of public debt meant the country scored well on macroeconomic measures. But the WEF sees the largely state-controlled banking sector as a structural weakness.

China also scored poorly on penetration rates for the latest technologies and secondary and tertiary school enrollment rates. By far the most worrisome development, the WEF says, is a marked drop in the quality of China's institutions, with poor scores across all 15 institutional indicators, and spanning both public and private institutions.

India moved up two places to 43 on the list. It scored well for innovation, use of technology and rates of technology transfer. But insufficient health services and education and poor infrastructure are limiting a more equitable distribution of the benefits of India’s high growth rates, the WEF finds. Meanwhile, the country’s public sector deficit is one of the highest in the world.

Countries in sub-Saharan Africa dominate the bottom of the list. These are mostly places where official corruption is rife, the rule of law weak, and press freedoms and other civil liberties even weaker, while political unrest often deteriorates to the point of civil unrest or war. Capital that is the lifeblood of business does not linger in such places, assuming it has arrived in the first place.

NO RUSH AT ALL:

Rush to Error: Congress should not allow itself to be pushed into approving a flawed plan for holding terrorist suspects. (Washington Post, September 27, 2006)

AFTER BARELY three weeks of debate, the Senate today will take up a momentous piece of legislation that would set new legal rules for the detention, interrogation and trial of accused terrorists. We have argued that the only remedy to the mess made by the Bush administration in holding hundreds of detainees without charge at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere since 2001 was congressional action. Yet rather than carefully weigh the issues, Congress has allowed itself to be stampeded into a vote on hastily written but far-reaching legal provisions, in a preelection climate in which dissenters risk being labeled as soft on terrorism.

As we have said before, there is no need for Congress to act immediately. No terrorist suspects are being held in the CIA detention "program" that President Bush has so vigorously defended. Justice for the al-Qaeda suspects he has delivered to Guantanamo has already been delayed for years by the administration's actions and can wait a few more months.

KARL KNOWS WHAT WE DON'T:

The Washington Times on GOP Optimism (Jay Cost, 25 Sep 2006, RCP)

The Washington Times offered an article today about improving GOP prospects that, to me anyway, seemed long on conclusions and short on evidence...

The Times is certainly a right-leaning paper. But right-leaning news outlets, beyond talk radio at least, do not seem to me to be historically guilty of being pollyannaish about the Republicans (I think the left-leaning ones like The New York Times are typically pollannaish about Democratic prospects, which in turn actually damages Democratic prospects). So -- the Times is clearly picking up on a vibe that the GOP elites seem to feel, but do not really justify it well at all. This means one of either two things (or possibly a mixture of both): (a) there is no justification to the vibe, and modified GOP expectations will yield disappointment on November 8; (b) there is some justification to the vibe, but the data that is driving this expectation is not yet publicly available.

ANYTHING'S AN IMPROVEMENT ON COD:

Swedish Mexican Food, Straight From the U.S. (Gregory Rodriguez, September 24, 2006, LA Times)

I wasn't fully prepared for the Swedish taco craze. For one thing, there don't seem to be too many Mexicans here.

You see, here — as in other parts of Europe — Mexican food was not brought over by Mexicans at all. Rather, it was introduced by American TV shows and movies. That explains why there's a "Gringo Special" on the menu at the Taco Bar, a Swedish fast-food chain, and why nearly all the Mexican products in the grocery stores — "Taco Sauce," "Taco Spice Mix" and "Guacamole Dip" — are labeled in English. [...]

[A]ccording to a recent market research study, Sweden is now the highest per capita consumer of Mexican food in Europe. That's why in 2001, the Nordfalks spice company changed its name to Santa Maria, after its most successful brand.

"I would wager that every family in Sweden has tacos at least once a month, and maybe a third eats them every week," Anne Skoogh, a local food blogger, told me. "It's a Friday night come-home-from-work-relax-thing," she said. "It's really popular."

Having spent a year of high school as an exchange student in Long Beach, Skoogh says Taco Bell is one of the things she misses most about life in the States. She says Swedes are under no illusion that the items they so enjoy bear any resemblance to the food most Mexicans eat. "People here don't think of tacos as Mexican as much as they think they are American," she said, "probably because their only concept of Mexico comes from American movies. I think the products are in English because the makers want you to feel that this is cool, new and American."

WOULD HAVE BEEN MORE USEFUL TO LINE LAB RATS' CAGES WITH THE MONEY:

Cranky? It may benefit you in long run (Joe Burris, 9/27/06, The Baltimore Sun)

Are you a forty-something grouch who's first to shout invectives in a slow-moving checkout lane? A youngster who mocks your dad's counsel? A graduate student known for driving your professor crazy with sardonic verbiage?

Take hope: Today, you might be dismissed as a smart-aleck. In your old age, you might be viewed as smarter than average.

Or at least that's what Jacqueline Bichsel suggests.

Bichsel, a psychology professor at Morgan State in Baltimore, recently co-authored a study that invites the conclusion that upon reaching 60, disagreeable people maintain a higher level of intelligence than more easy-going seniors.

"These individuals have a higher vocabulary," she said. "They have a better use of words, a better knowledge of facts."

It also suggests that those dismissed as grumpy old men and women are often smarter in some ways than the young.

LIKE GEORGE BLUTH STAGING BOY FIGHTS:

Blair 'sets up' a heavyweight Reid-Brown bout (JAMES KIRKUP AND GERRI PEEV , 9/27/06, The Scotsman)

TONY Blair yesterday began his long goodbye to Labour, raising the prospect of a succession battle between Gordon Brown and John Reid and warning that success at the next election depends on continuing his programme of reform.

In his last party conference speech as leader, Mr Blair mounted an unyielding defence of his record, insisting that he had been right to invade Iraq and Afghanistan, right to shake up public services, right to enact controversial anti-terrorism laws and, above all, right to drag Labour to the political centre-ground.

He was rewarded with a seven-minute ovation. Some delegates wept, others waved placards praising "the best prime minister ever". Even longstanding critics admitted that the speech was a virtuoso display and some Labour MPs said it outshone the Chancellor's less spectacular address on Monday and undermined Mr Brown's claim to the top job.

Although he observed a recent peace deal with the Chancellor by praising "a remarkable man, a remarkable servant to this country", Mr Blair yesterday stopped short of endorsing Mr Brown as his chosen successor.

The Prime Minister even used a joke to tacitly admit the frosty relations between his wife, Cherie, and Mr Brown. "I don't have to worry about her running off with the bloke next door," he quipped, leaving Mr Brown visibly startled for a second.

YOU MEAN, LIKE NOT WEARING FURS?:

Released part of intel study notes new threats (Bill Nichols and David Jackson, 9/26/06, USA TODAY)

The Iraq war has become the "cause célèbre" for Islamic militants, breeding resentment in Muslim nations and cultivating supporters worldwide, according to portions of a secret intelligence study the Bush administration released Tuesday.

MORE:
As War Over Leak Grips Washington, Al Qaeda Quails (ELI LAKE, September 27, 2006, NY Sun)

On a day when much of the capital's attention was focused on leaked excerpts of an intelligence estimate report that suggested the Iraq war was creating more jihadists, the military quietly released an intercepted letter from Al Qaeda complaining that the terrorist organization was losing ground in Iraq.

The letter, found in the headquarters of Al Qaeda's leader in Iraq, Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi, after he was killed on June 7, was sent to Zarqawi by a senior Al Qaeda leader who signs his name simply "Atiyah." He complains that Al Qaeda is weak both in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region and in Iraq. [...]

"Know that we, like all the Mujahidin, are still weak," he wrote in the letter dated December 11, 2005. "We are in the stage of weakness and a state of paucity. We have not yet reached a level of stability. We have no alternative but to not squander any element of the foundations of strength, or any helper or supporter."

That assessment from Al Qaeda is in stark contrast to the key findings of a declassified national intelligence assessment released to the public by President Bush yesterday.

UH, GUYS, THE QUEST FOR THE HOLY GRAIL WAS ABOUT FAITH

Is there a gay gene? (Jim Ritter, Chicago Sun-Times, September 26th, 2006)

One of the great mysteries of human sexuality is what causes some men to be gay.

Scientists have rejected earlier notions that homosexuality is a mental illness. The thinking now is that sexual orientation is determined by roughly 40 percent genetic factors and 60 percent environmental factors.

And now researchers at Evanston Northwestern Healthcare Research Institute are hoping to identify one or more genes that help determine sexual orientation.

The Molecular Genetic Study of Sexual Orientation is recruiting 1,000 pairs of gay brothers to donate blood samples for DNA analysis.

"We hope our study will dispel mythologies and ignorance about homosexuality," said Dr. Alan Sanders, a Northwestern University psychiatrist who is directing the five-year study.

If science can show that homosexuality is a biological trait, like eye color, the public likely would be more accepting of gays, said Timothy Murphy, a University of Illinois at Chicago bioethicist and paid consultant to the study.

They don’t even pretend anymore, do they?

WHATEVER, DUDE

Love in the Age of Neuroscience (Mickey Craig and Jon Fennell, The New Atlantis, Fall, 2005)

More importantly, the teaching of Dupont University is precisely that the soul and the moral dimension of being are illusions. In the past, the university (at its best and in principle) sought to cultivate the human soul toward completion or excellence. The modern university, as Wolfe portrays it, denies that there are truthful distinctions between higher and lower; it teaches that the soul is not real, and that perfection of the soul is thus a thing of the past.

The setting of I Am Charlotte Simmons is truly “postmodern”—a world dominated by Nietzsche and neuroscience, a world which has jettisoned the moral imagination of the past. Not only is God dead, but so is reason, once understood as the characteristic that distinguishes man from the rest of nature. We now understand ourselves by studying the behavior of other animals, rather than understanding the behavior of other animals in light of human reason and human difference. We learn that it is embarrassing for any educated person to be considered religious or even moral. Darwin’s key insight that man is just another animal, now updated with the tools and discoveries of modern biology, has liberated us from two Kingdoms of Darkness. Post-faith and post-reason, we can now turn to neuroscience to understand the human condition, a path that leads to or simply ratifies the governing nihilism of the students, both the ambitious and apathetic alike.[...]

I Am Charlotte Simmons is an indictment of the primary centers of higher education in America today. These institutions do not well serve the real longings and earnest ambitions of the young people who flock to them, at great cost and with great expectations, year after year. Instead of pointing students to a world that is higher than where they came from, the university reinforces and expands the nihilism and political correctness that they are taught in public schools, imbibe from popular culture, and bring with them as routine common sense when they arrive on campus. Of course, these two ideologies are largely incompatible: nihilism celebrates strength (or apathy) without illusion; political correctness promulgates illusions in the name of sensitivity. But both ideologies are the result of collapsing and rejecting any distinction between higher and lower, between nobility and ignobility, between the higher learning and the flight from reason.

This tragic miseducation of the young has two kinds of consequences. The first is personal. As the new pope declared to the conclave that elected him, “We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires.” This sounds very much like the world of Dupont. But of more immediate importance is what the new pope added: People who live in a world “emptied of God” suffer from “leaden loneliness and inner boredom.” Given the vacuum resulting from the evaporation of all that is higher, it is hardly surprising that Charlotte feels so alone, that she is desperately driven to “hook-up” with others in whatever way she can, and that she inevitably finds the result of doing so to be wholly unsatisfying. Compared to the inhabitants and products of Dupont University, the oft-maligned other-directed “gray flannel suits” of the 1950s were deep. In their case, there was at least a genuine self that was presumably denied and repressed.

The second cost imposed by the teachings of Dupont is political. The American experiment depends on a self-governing citizenry. This self-governance is a form of moderation in which the individual restrains personal desire and ambition in light of something higher than himself. This is as true of citizens as it is of leaders. Such voluntary restraint—a function of a soul that respects, loves, and admires something higher—is absent at Dupont, where everyone wishes to be the master of all. The individual in the world described by Wolfe is limited only to the degree his will is thwarted by another equally unrestrained “playa.” There is nothing moral about this interaction, for there is nothing beyond individual will by which one’s actions may be judged. The metamorphosis of Charlotte takes her beyond all virtue; it represents a paradigmatic instance of adaptation in the interests of survival in a changing environment. By constituting the environment requiring such adaptation, and by requiring the abandonment of self-governance (while making it impossible), Dupont has not only harmed the young student, it has betrayed the American Republic.

If Wolfe’s description of Dupont accurately portrays the character of our elite universities, then the dissolution of the American way of life is nearly complete. Our ancient faith is no longer a vibrant and effective part of the education of future leaders. Our ability to perpetuate our culture and our constitutional soul will wither alongside our belief in the soul itself. As Lincoln understood, once it loses its ancient faith, the Republic cannot long endure. Perhaps our situation is not as dire as the metamorphosis of Charlotte Simmons makes it seem. But if the portrayal is right, only time will tell whether Wolfe’s diagnosis of our condition can help effect a recovery.

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THE BRIGHT MANAGER:

Cards' Lead in NL Central Just 1 1/2 Games (R.B. FALLSTROM, 9/27/06, The Associated Press)

Ronnie Belliard homered twice and had three RBIs for the Cardinals, who also got a two-run single from Jim Edmonds in his first start in a month after being sidelined with post-concussion syndrome. It didn't prevent them from losing their seventh in a row because Carpenter (15-8) failed to protect a three-run lead.

St. Louis appeared to have all but clinched the division title with a seven-game lead and 13 games to go. But the Cardinals' skid has coincided with a winning streak for the Houston Astros, who beat Pittsburgh 7-4 Tuesday night for their seventh victory in a row.

"We're not OK because we can't make enough happen to win a game," La Russa said. "But we're still alive, so we understand that also."

TALK TO US IN FORTY YEARS:

A Star Trying to Hide in Plain Sight (KELEFA SANNEH, 9/27/06, NY Times)

[Jack] White isn’t the kind of guy who can slip unnoticed into a proficient four-piece band. He still has that ferocious, catlike scream; he still has that tendency to push a song off-kilter with a thunderous, wobbly guitar solo; he still looks like a star, even when (as in nearly every Raconteurs photograph) he’s trying hard to blend into the background. On Monday the band members acknowledged Mr. White’s overwhelming presence by pointedly declining to acknowledge it. [...]

Their best-known song, “Steady, as She Goes,” is one of the year’s biggest alt-rock hits; it topped Billboard’s modern-rock chart earlier this year. And they saved it for the encore, where it provided one of the night’s most memorable images. Mr. White and Mr. Benson shared a microphone near the end, leaning into each other as the song’s jaunty bass line went around and around.

“Broken Boy Soldiers” is an album that doesn’t cover its tracks: “Hands” has a vocal harmony that recalls the prog-rock classic “I’ve Seen All Good People,” by Yes; “Level” begins with some synthesizer notes that evoke the new-wave pioneer Gary Numan (and also, perhaps accidentally, Korn); “Together” swipes a melodic phrase from Elton John’s “Rocket Man”; and “Steady, as She Goes” shares that jaunty bass line with the Joe Jackson hit “Is She Really Going Out With Him?”

It’s a warm, well-made album, but not an especially memorable one.

THE PERFECT EXPRESSION OF RATIONALISM...:

Moving Beyond String Theory (Mark Anderson, Sep, 26, 2006, Wired)

This fall, Columbia University mathematician Peter Woit has published a critique of string theory (Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory), pointing out that in more than three decades, string theory still has yet to make a single prediction that can be verified in the lab or through the lens of a telescope. If all scientific disciplines maintained such fluffy and forgiving standards, Woit argues, science would devolve into little more than medieval disputations about angels and heads of pins. [...]

Oxford University mathematical physicist Roger Penrose, author of The Road to Reality, invented a mathematical tool called "twisters."

Smolin and Penrose take a look at the diverging paths beyond string theory.

Twistor String Theory. This retooling of string theory uses Penrose's twistors, which reduce the number of dimensions in the theory to the familiar four -- three spatial dimensions plus time. Twistors are by definition four-dimensional objects that locate not a position in space and time but rather a network of possible causal relationships between space-time events. Depicting a particle such as an electron as occupying a definite x, y, z and t gives a false sense of definiteness: Space and time are fuzzy at quantum scales. But cause and effect are not, and cause and effect are effectively what twistor space maps.

"What's rather striking about this twistor string approach is that it really is four dimensions," said Penrose just after a conference on twistor string theory. "So my objections (about string theory's extra hidden dimensions) essentially evaporate."

Pros: The mathematical beauty of string theory remains mostly unassailed, while the universe gets its four dimensions. Actual predictions for future particle accelerator experiments may yet emerge.

Cons: It's still unclear what this "theory" is...

YELLOWCAKE CHRONICLES CONTINUED:

Dubya labels his own intelligence info 'naive' (RICHARD SISK, 9/27/06, NY DAILY NEWS)

President Bush criticized his own intelligence agencies yesterday as "naive" for saying the Iraq war was spreading terror worldwide and rallying new recruits for Al Qaeda.

In heated remarks, Bush said, "I think it's a mistake for people to believe that going on the offense against people that want to do harm to the American people makes us less safe."

"To suggest that if we weren't in Iraq we would see a rosier scenario, with fewer extremists joining the radical movement, requires us to ignore 20 years of experience" of terror attacks, Bush said. "I think it is naive."

Bush ordered excerpts of the highly classified National Intelligence Estimate to be made public yesterday because he implied they would support his argument.

RIGHT IN ROBERTS'S WHEELHOUSE:

Court to hear case over politics, union fees (Chris Borowski, 9/27/06, Medill News Service)

The Supreme Court agreed Tuesday to hear a Washington state case that will decide whether labor unions can spend bargaining fees from nonmembers on political causes without their explicit permission. [...]

The so-called paycheck-protection law, ruled unconstitutional by the state court, was passed by 73 percent of Washington's voters in a 1992 initiative. [...]

Opponents of the union said they were pleased the U.S. Supreme Court would take on the case.

"This is a good indication of how the Supreme Court will likely rule," said Mike Reitz of the Evergreen Freedom Foundation, a think tank that played a key role in pushing the case against WEA. "No one should be forced to pay for political causes they do not support."

A ruling against the WEA would have wider negative repercussions for labor organizations by weakening their ability to fund political activities, said Professor Daniel Jacoby, chair of the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies at the University of Washington.

The Supreme Court is expected to hear the case in January.

HAVE YOU THANKED THE GANG TODAY? (via Kevin Whited):

Super-bad Bush nominees get a needless day in court (CRAGG HINES, 9/27/06, Houston Chronicle)

At least Arlen Specter is a man of his word. He kept his deal with the devil.

To forestall conservatives from challenging his accession as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee when the current term began, the Pennsylvania Republican essentially promised to give all of President Bush's judicial nominees a hearing, regardless of how bad some were certain to be.

In fastidious maintenance of that pledge, Specter scraped the bottom of the barrel Tuesday and paraded before the committee the only two Bush nominees to be rated "not qualified" by the American Bar Association this year. [...]

[L]o and behold, amid this legislative whirlwind Specter found time to convene a meeting of the full committee to consider judicial nominees that the nation's major group of lawyers has concluded do not belong on the federal bench. [...]

After two separate ABA inquiries into [Michael B. ] Wallace's nomination earlier this year, the bar committee came up with the same conclusion: Wallace, while of the "highest professional competence," lacks a judicial temperament and a commitment to equal justice.

BUY THE VOTE:

DeVos Weathers Counterattack (THOMAS BRAY, September 27, 2006, NY Sun)

With the help of $15 million or so in advertising, much of it fueled by his personal fortune, Michigan GOP gubernatorial candidate Dick DeVos is in a statistical dead heat with incumbent Democratic Governor Jennifer Granholm in the polls. [...]

[T]he DeVos campaign continues to stress the need for fundamental change in the Michigan economic climate, starting with elimination of the state's detested Single Business Tax. Ms. Granholm crows about her success in bringing a Google office to Ann Arbor and several Japanese auto operations to other areas of Michigan. But the number of jobs she claims to have "created" is a drop in the bucket compared to the 100,000 or so jobs Michigan has lost since she took office in 2002.

Likewise, her proposals to pour more money into education have aroused little enthusiasm — perhaps because during her tenure Michigan's K through12 system has continued to deliver mediocre results at best while costing taxpayers far more per teacher than in other states. As if to reinforce the image of a labor movement with its head in the sand, the Detroit teachers recently went on strike to demand higher pay even as students were fleeing the city in droves — some 30,000 students in just the last year, according to official statistics.

Mr. DeVos could still blow the opportunity he has created for himself. But the Granholm campaign has seemed lackluster at best. Meanwhile, local GOP activists are muttering about a Vice President DeVos in 2008, and national Republicans are excited by the prospect of a re-energized state party that could help the GOP reclaim the Michigan electoral vote in 2008 after three straight losses to Democratic presidential candidates.

In short, the Michigan GOP seems both unified and motivated to achieve the once-unthinkable, the defeat of an incumbent not so long ago hailed as a Democratic superstar.

NO "SEEMS" ABOUT IT (via Mike Daley):

Free speech is truth's best hope: Forthrightness requires thick skins, but the benefits are clear and wide-ranging (James Allan, September 26, 2006, The Australian)

Left-wing political parties need to rediscover humour (which at present seems to me to be almost exclusively the preserve of the Right). They need to jettison the reflexive fear of offending sacred cows (could they even say that?) and impinging upon shibboleths. They need to demand thicker skins of their supporters.

BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS:

Bush hosts dinner to end bitter feud between key allies in war on terror (Francis Harris in Washington and Harry Mount in New York, 27/09/2006, Daily Telegraph)

President George W Bush was struggling last night to calm fierce and increasingly personal exchanges between the leaders of Pakistan and Afghanistan, key allies in America's war on terror.

With tensions rising between President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan and President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, Mr Bush asked both to dinner at the White House this evening in an attempt to help defuse a damaging row.

"You know, it will be interesting for me to watch the body language of these two leaders to determine how tense things are," Mr Bush said with a smile, after a meeting with Mr Karzai.

THROWDOWN:

Showman Blair steals the spotlight from Brown (George Jones, 27/09/2006, Daily Telegraph)

Tony Blair set Gordon Brown the challenge yesterday of matching his own political courage, leadership skills and personal rapport with the voters if he is to achieve his ambition of becoming prime minister.

As he paid an emotional and highly personal farewell to the Labour Party conference, Mr Blair paid tribute to the Chancellor's role in helping him create New Labour, but stopped well short of anointing him as his successor.

He warned Labour activists — who gave him a standing ovation at the start and end of his final conference speech as leader — that the party would lose power if it retreated to a "comfort zone" and abandoned his policies after he was gone. [...]

In a packed conference hall in Manchester some delegates were close to tears as Mr Blair delivered one of the most dazzling speeches of his career, much of which he had written himself.

There was a sense of the end of an era, with nostalgic party activists coming to terms with losing a leader who had delivered a record three general election victories.

The bookmakers reacted by lengthening rather than shortening the odds on Labour winning a fourth term, claiming that Mr Blair would be a hard act to follow and the door was now wide open to a "refreshed" Conservative Party led by David Cameron.

DEFLATION DOESN'T GO AWAY JUST BECAUSE YOU MISJUDGE IT:

Dow Closes at Second Highest Level Ever (Tim Paradis, 9/26/06, AP)

Wall Street surged higher Tuesday, carrying the Dow Jones industrials to their second-best close ever as positive economic data further buoyed a growing sense of optimism among investors. The Dow closed just 53 points away from its record high close. [...]

Jack Albin, chief investment officer with Harris Private Bank, said the market's advance reflects widespread investor enthusiasm and a realization that the Federal Reserve might have room to ease short-term interest rates. He pointed to low inflation and the recent nearly 20 percent pullback in oil prices.

"The Fed has a lot more elbow room to lower rates. The Fed could maybe even lower this year."

MAY AS WELL IMITATE SUCCESS:

Abe Is Elected Japanese Prime Minister (MARTIN FACKLER, 9/26/06, NY Times)

Members of Mr. Abe’s staff have said these aides will have their own staff of experts and researchers, allowing them to draw up policy directly without relying on ministry bureaucrats. [...]

In particular, the security advisor will eventually have a staff of several dozen, with the announced aim of creating a Japanese-version of the U.S. National Security Council. This has led many here to comment that Mr. Abe was trying to make the traditionally weak prime minister’s office look more like a seat of strong executive power.

“Mr. Abe is definitely trying to build something that looks like the White House,” said Tomoaki Iwai, a professor of politics at Nihon University.

After winning leadership of the ruling party last week, Mr. Abe reportedly spent several days holed up in his country retreat near Mt. Fuji, deciding whom to include in his new Cabinet.

Mr. Iwai and others said Mr. Abe’s choices reflected a hawkish bent to the new administration. Most were also in their 50s, a decade younger than many Cabinets in the past.

One of the most watched appointments was to the new post of national security advisor. This went to Yuriko Koike, a 54-year-old former television news reporter who has been a vocal supporter of economic sanctions on North Korea since it admitted kidnapping Japanese citizens two decades ago.

Another was the selection of Eriko Yamatani to the post of education advisor. A 56-year-old former reporter for the Sankei Shimbun, a right-wing daily, Ms. Yamatani has been a vocal critic of sexual education and teaching of "excessive" gender equality in schools. The incoming state minister in charge of gender equality, Sanae Takaichi, was another social conservative who opposed allowing women to legally keep their maiden name after marriage.

The choice of Mr. Shiozaki as chief Cabinet secretary, Japan’s equivalent of the White House chief of staff, was widely viewed as a move to strengthen Mr. Abe's personal control. Mr. Shiozaki, 55, is a Harvard-trained former central banker and close ally of Mr. Abe who is widely respected among younger Liberal Democratic lawmakers.

In contrast, the new Cabinet featured no political heavy-weights in top economic posts, reflecting what some economists and political scientists said was a shift in priorities toward foreign policy and national security.

HE COULD MISS AS MANY AS THREE GAMES...:

Top Uruguayan Soccer Player Loses Leg (The Associated Press, September 25, 2006)

The shattered right leg of top Uruguayan soccer player Dario Silva was amputated after he was thrown from his car in a highway accident, hospital officials said Monday.

A CREDIT TO CADDIES:

Golf legend Nelson dies (BRAD TOWNSEND and BILL NICHOLS, 9/26/06, The Dallas Morning News)

Nelson amassed 18 victories during the 1945 season. During one stretch that year, he won 11 consecutive starts, a run that dwarfs golf's next-best streak, six. Another record Nelson always called his most satisfying was the 113 consecutive cuts he made during the 1940s – a feat unmatched until Tiger Woods surpassed him en route to a new record of 142.

Nelson won five major championships: The 1937 and 1942 Masters, the 1940 and 1945 PGA Championships and the 1939 U.S. Open.

Even his swing was the stuff of legend. As wood-shafted golf clubs were being converted to steel, he was the first notable player to incorporate his feet and legs for extra power. He is widely credited as being the father of the modern swing, to the extent that the U.S. Golf Association's club-testing apparatus is called the "Iron Byron."

But to peers, friends and even fans who met him in passing, Nelson the person transcended the golf legend. That may be his most towering attainment of all.

"Byron is an icon of golf," said eight-time major champion Tom Watson, Nelson's longtime friend and protégé. "But more important, he was a good man, in the true sense of the word." [...]

Nelson once said his willingness to help young players probably stemmed from an exchange following the 1930 Texas Open in San Antonio.

An amateur at the time, Nelson had teamed with a Scottish pro named Bobby Cruickshank to finish second in the pro-am competition. Afterward, a proud Nelson figured he had a compliment coming from Cruickshank.

"Laddie, if you don't learn how to grip the club right," Cruickshank told him, "you'll never make a good player."

"Thank you, very much," responded Nelson. He returned home to Fort Worth and revamped his grip. Like many caddies-turned-players at the time, he had his left hand too far over the top of the club and tended to hook the ball to get more roll.

Nelson studied and copied Harry Vardon’s overlapping grip and, of course, became one of golf's greatest players...

BUT NANCY PELOSI SAYS WE LIVE IN HOOVERVILLE?:

Consumer confidence rebounds in September (Greg Robb, Sep 26, 2006, MarketWatch)

The consumer confidence index rose to 104.5 in September from a revised nine-month low of 100.2 in August.

The rebound was stronger than expected. Economists had forecast that the index would increase to 102.7 from the initial August reading of 99.6, according to a survey conducted by MarketWatch.

Moreover, consumers' outlook for the next six months was less pessimistic in September, the Conference Board's survey showed.

Stocks moved higher immediately after the confidence report was released.

NOW THAT'S WHAT WE CALL PROGRESS (via Tom Morin):

NASA Study Finds World Warmth Edging Ancient Levels (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Sep. 25, 2006)

A new study by NASA scientists finds that the world's temperature is reaching a level that has not been seen in thousands of years.

BUT, BUT... WE HAVE THE MAXIM GUN

The Apathy of Defeat (Mark Steyn, Western Standard, September 25th, 2006

Bernard Lewis, the West's pre-eminent scholar of Islam, worked for British intelligence through the grimmest hours of the Second World War. "In 1940, we knew who we were, we knew who the enemy was, we knew the dangers and the issues," he told The Wall Street Journal a few months ago. "It is different today. We don't know who we are, we don't know the issues, and we still do not understand the nature of the enemy."

That first is the most important: it's not just that "we don't know who we are" but that cultural relativism strips the question of its basic legitimacy. In Britain, they used to say that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, the sort of line it's easy to mock as a lot of Victorian hooey. But it contains an important truth. This present conflict will be won (if at all) in the kindergarten classes of America's grade schools, and Canada's, and Britain's and Europe's. Because the resolve necessary to win a war can't be put on and taken off like a suit of armour. It has to be bred in the bone, and sustained by the broader institutions of society. And the typical western education, even when it's not telling you that your country's principal legacy is racism and oppression, teaches history in a vacuum--random facts, a few approved figures, but no overarching heroic narrative. And, if the past isn't worth defending, why should the future be?

Which brings me back to where we came in: are we gonna win or lose? I'd say right now the best bet for much of the world is a slow ongoing incremental defeat, the kind most folks don't notice until it's too late. That's to say, in 20 years' time many relatively pleasant parts of the planet are going to be a lot less pleasant. That doesn't mean "Islamofascism" or "radical Islam" or even just plain "Islam" is going to win. But it's interesting that big-shot analysts in Moscow and Beijing have concluded that, just as Hizb'allah is a useful proxy for Iran, so the broader jihad can be a useful (if unwitting) proxy for Russia and China. I doubt that will work out too well for them in the long run, but they're not wrong to conclude that a civilization's overwhelming military dominance, economic dominance and technological dominance count for naught if it's ideologically insecure. The issue is self-defence. If you're a genuine cultural relativist--if you really believe our society is no better or worse than any other--you're about to get the opportunity not just to talk the talk but to walk the walk. Good luck.

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IF ONLY PROGRESSIVES SHARED THE VALUES OF THE PURITAN NATION:

12 Traps That Keep Progressives From Winning (George Lakoff, September 26, 2006, AlterNet

Richard Wirthlin, chief strategist for former president Ronald Reagan, made a discovery in 1980 that profoundly changed American politics. As a pollster, he was taught that people vote for candidates on the basis of the candidates' positions on issues. But his initial polls for Reagan revealed something fascinating: Voters who didn't agree with Reagan on the issues still wanted to vote for him.

Mystified, Wirthlin studied the matter further. He discovered just what made people want to vote for Reagan. Reagan talked about values rather than issues. Communicating values mattered more than specific policy positions. Reagan connected with people; he communicated well. Reagan also appeared authentic -- he seemed to believe what he said. And because he talked about his values, connected with people and appeared authentic, they felt they could trust him. For these four reasons -- values, connection, authenticity and trust -- voters identified with Reagan; they felt he was one of them. It was not because all of his values matched theirs exactly. It was not because he was from their socioeconomic class or subculture. It was because they believed in the integrity of his connection with them as well as the connection between his worldview and his actions.

Whatever we may think of Reagan, this has been a winning formula for conservatives for the past quarter century. Progressives need to learn from it. Politics is about values; it is about communication; it is about voters trusting a candidate to do what is right; it is about believing in, and identifying with, a candidate's worldview. And it is about symbolism. Issues are secondary -- not irrelevant or unimportant, but secondary. A position on issues should follow from one's values, and the choice of issues and policies should symbolize those values.

One misunderstanding, common among progressive circles, is that the Reagan and George W. Bush elections were about "personality" rather than anything substantive. Nothing is more substantive than a candidate's moral worldview -- and whether he or she authentically abides by it.

LOTS OF TORII COMEBACKS THESE DAYS:

Twins' Remarkable Run Leads to Playoffs (DAVE CAMPBELL, 9/26/06,
The Associated Press)

With his blue shirt soaked to the skin and champagne and beer dripping off his goggles, Torii Hunter led a toast in a circle of his teammates. Colored bottles raised, the Twins cheered their spot in the playoffs but made clear they're still pushing for the division title.

"It ain't done yet!" Hunter yelled.

Minnesota capped a remarkable turnaround by clinching a wild-card spot Monday night, beating the Kansas City Royals 8-1 behind home runs from Hunter and Justin Morneau.

Boof Bonser came up with another strong start to help the Twins reach the playoffs for the fourth time in five years -- a feat that certainly looked unlikely when they were 25-33 in early June.

ALL THEY WANT IS WHAT IRAN WANTS...

Wiretap Bill Moves Closer to Passage: After Changes, Senate Holdouts Pledge Support (Jonathan Weisman, 9/26/06, Washington Post)

Last-minute changes to legislation authorizing the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping program have won the support of three balking Senate Republicans, improving the chances that a bill expanding the Bush administration's surveillance authority will pass Congress this week.

The Senate Judiciary Committee approved a bill this month that would allow, but not require, the administration to submit its warrantless wiretapping program to a secret national security court for constitutional review. But three Republicans who last year helped delay the renewal of the USA Patriot Act -- Sens. Larry E. Craig (Idaho), John E. Sununu (N.H.) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) -- combined forces again to express strong misgivings about the bill's implications for civil liberties.

The senators announced yesterday that those concerns had been met by three changes to the bill, although critics said the changes would not have the impact that the lawmakers claimed.

HAVEN'T SEEN HIM THAT MADE SINCE HE LIED ABOUT MONICA (via Glenn Dryfoos):

Clinton Doth Protest Too Much: The ex-president's tirade on Fox News reveals a politician insisting on a legacy he doesn't deserve (Andrew Klavan, September 26, 2006, LA Times)

THERE'S NO LIMIT to what a man can do," President Reagan used to say, " Â… if he doesn't care who gets the credit."

Former President Clinton's motto seems to be a little different: "There's no limit to how much credit a man can get, if he doesn't care what he's actually done."

Reagan came to office after the Jimmy Carter catastrophe. He pulled the American economy out of a graveyard spin, restored the country's military and its confidence and helped bring one of the most oppressive empires on Earth to the brink of collapse. But in those days, my children, there was no Internet, no Fox News, no Rush Limbaugh — the media was almost all Colmes and precious little Hannity — and if you got your news from the New York Times, say, or CBS, you would've thought the country was being run by a miserly, warmongering idiot instead of the greatest president of the century's second half.

And yet even after his two terms were over, when left-wing news sources sourly continued to portray his administration solely in terms of its faults, as nothing but a big deficit and the Iran-Contra scandal, I cannot remember Reagan ever "defending his legacy" with anything more than a quip and a smile.

Compare and contrast Clinton.

WORKS, DOESN'T IT?:

Barrel of theories for gas-price slide (BRAD FOSS, 9/26/06, The Associated Press)

According to a new Gallup poll, 42 percent of respondents agreed with the statement that the Bush administration "deliberately manipulated the price of gasoline so that it would decrease before this fall's elections."

Fifty-three percent did not believe in this conspiracy theory, while 5 percent said they had no opinion.

Almost two-thirds of those who suspect President Bush intervened to bring down energy prices before Election Day are registered Democrats, according to Gallup.

IRAQ MATTERS TO EXACTLY THE EXTENT IT CAN PUMP ENOUGH OIL TO LOWER PRICES:

GOP's uptick just in time for Election Day (Ralph Z. Hallow, 9/26/06,
THE WASHINGTON TIMES)

A 58 percent majority of Democratic insiders polled by National Journal, as well as an overwhelming 94 percent of Republican insiders, say the Republican National Committee is doing a better job for November than the Democratic National Committee. [...]

So far this year, there has been no indication of a Democratic surge. In 36 of 39 primaries, the Democratic turnout has been lower than the average of the past 20 years. Only Connecticut, North Dakota and Vermont had higher-than-average Democratic turnouts this year.

Republicans are doing a better job than Democrats of communicating with their core voters, says Mr. Zogby.

"I think Republicans are talking in an effective way to their base, which is particularly concerned about terrorism," says Mr. Zogby. "But Democrats, whose base wants to hear how we get out of Iraq, simply dance around the answer. Democrats are acting like John Kerry in 2004, trying to appeal to swing voters in yet another election in which there are no swing voters."

Oil prices retreated Tuesday after an overnight rally lifted crude futures by almost US$1 a barrel on worries that the recent drop in prices could prompt OPEC to cut production. Natural gas hit a new three-year low.

WHICH IS WHY THE LONG WAR IS UNLOSEABLE:

Musharraf 'war-gamed' U.S., concluded Pakistan would lose (PAUL KORING, 9/26/06, Globe and Mail)

Pakistan's military ruler, Pervez Musharraf, says he contemplated war with the United States in 2001 but opted instead to forsake the Taliban and become President George W. Bush's ally.

"I war-gamed the United States as an adversary," the Pakistani leader wrote in his martially titled memoirs In the Line of Fire, published yesterday. It apparently didn't take the general, then an international pariah for having staged a coup to toppled his country's democratic government, very long to conclude that Pakistan would lose.

"The answer was a resounding no," he wrote, having concluded that the world's most powerful military would wipe out his forces, destroy his nuclear weapons, wreak havoc on Pakistan's threadbare infrastructure, help India seize disputed Kashmir and then turn to his archrival in New Delhi for the support and bases it needed to topple Afghanistan's Taliban regime.

THE ONE BENEFIT OF PARLIAMENTARY GOVERNMENT:

Ottawa's $2-billion hit list: Liberal programs long loathed by Tories get axe despite government's big surplus (STEVEN CHASE, 9/26/06, Globe and Mail

Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government tightened federal purse strings by $2-billion yesterday -- slashing spending hated by many Conservatives, such as medicinal marijuana research -- even as Ottawa disclosed that its coffers are bulging with another near-record budget surplus.

Last year's surplus was $13.2-billion, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty announced yesterday -- the third highest in recent years. He said it will all go to reduce the national debt, signing an oversized cheque to that end at a press conference that resembled an election campaign event. [...]

The Tories used yesterday's spending cuts to put their own stamp on the federal government, slashing programs loathed by rock-ribbed Conservatives but cherished by previous Liberal regimes.

MORE:
How far will this free marketeer go? (KONRAD YAKABUSKI, 9/26/06, Globe and Mail)

Lobbyists from Canada's archrival telephone and cable companies seeking insight into Industry Minister Maxime Bernier's thinking would do well do brush up on the writings of Bernier idol Frédéric Bastiat.

In particular, they should read the 19th-century French economist's tongue-in-cheek Petition from the Candle Makers, a satirical take on interest-group politics in which France's candle industry lobbies the government for protection from “unfair competition” from the sun.

These days, Mr. Bernier is inundated with petitions from all directions seeking to influence the tenor of a major, market-oriented reform of Canada's $33-billion telecommunications sector that the minister intends to unveil this fall.

But despite their pleadings, Mr. Bernier remains focused on Bastiat's cardinal rule: Economic policy should always put the consumer first.

GO GET 'EM, TIGER:

Olmert denies talking with Saudi king (Michael Freund, Herb Keinon and JPost staff, 9/26/06, THE JERUSALEM POST)

Both Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and a senior Saudi government official denied in interviews with The Jerusalem Post on Monday reports that Olmert met recently with a senior member of the Saudi family, perhaps even the Saudi king himself.

Olmert characterized the reports as "speculation, imagination, things that are beyond the limits."

Nevertheless, he did praise the Saudis for the positive role they have played in the region recently. "When you examine their performance over the last couple of months, you see something that you haven't seen in the past," Olmert said. "More sense of responsibility, and a greater degree of readiness to stand up and speak up against Shi'ite extremists like Hizbullah."

IT'S NOT TIL YOU READ THE LAWS THAT YOU REALIZE HOW MUCH THIS ADMINISTRATION WINS:

Detainee Measure to Have Fewer Restrictions (R. Jeffrey Smith, September 26, 2006, Washington Post)

Republican lawmakers and the White House agreed over the weekend to alter new legislation on military commissions to allow the United States to detain and try a wider range of foreign nationals than an earlier version of the bill permitted, according to government sources.

Lawmakers and administration officials announced last week that they had reached accord on the plan for the detention and military trials of suspected terrorists, and it is scheduled for a vote this week. But in recent days the Bush administration and its House allies successfully pressed for a less restrictive description of how the government could designate civilians as "unlawful enemy combatants," the sources said yesterday. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of negotiations over the bill.

THE STATE AS ARISTOCRACY:

Stricter Voting Laws Carve Latest Partisan Divide (JOYCE PURNICK, 9/26/06, NY Times)

Republicans say the laws are needed to combat fraud, especially among illegal immigrants. Democrats say there is minimal fraud, if any, and accuse Republicans of suppressing the votes of those least likely to have the required documentation — minorities, the poor and the elderly — who tend to vote for Democrats.

In tight races, Democrats say, the loss of votes could matter in November.

DEAL DONE:

Etta Baker, 93, Blues Guitarist, Dies (AP, 9/26/06)

The American bluesman Taj Mahal, who recorded an album with Ms. Baker in 2004, was among those who found inspiration from her rhythmic finger-picking.

“I came upon that record in the 60’s,” Taj Mahal said. “It didn’t have any pictures so I had no idea who she was until I got to meet her years later. But man, that chord in ‘Railroad Bill,’ that was just the chord. It just cut right through me.”

Ms. Baker was raised in a musical family in western North Carolina. She made her first mark in music in 1956, when she appeared on a compilation album called “Instrumental Music of the Southern Appalachians.” The recording influenced the growing folk revival, especially her versions of “Railroad Bill” and “One-Dime Blues.”

She worked for 26 years at a textile mill in Morganton before quitting at 60 to pursue a career as a musician.

A TASTE OF CHERIE:

Labour's idea of a truce... Brown a 'liar' (JAMES KIRKUP, 9/26/06, The Scotsman)

Four words attributed to Mrs Blair shortly after noon yesterday blew apart the carefully stage-managed launch of Mr Brown's public campaign for the Labour leadership.

Mr Brown was delivering a considered, even conciliatory speech to the Labour Party conference, effectively making a carefully crafted peace offering: the speech had praise for Mr Blair, warm name-checks for almost the entire Cabinet and even a tacit admission that Mr Brown himself bore some responsibility for a decade and more of Labour in-fighting.

The intention was to allay growing Labour doubts about the Chancellor's character, to assure the country he is not a bitter, sulking plotter but a leader of humility, warmth and honesty.

Tackling his partnership with Mr Blair head-on, Mr Brown opened up by admitting that his "differences" with the Prime Minister have "distracted" the government, something he said he regretted. But, overall, he told delegates: "It has been a privilege to work with and for the most successful ever Labour leader and Labour Prime Minister."

At that point, Mrs Blair - watching the speech on a television outside the auditorium of Manchester's G-Mex centre - was allegedly overheard by a US television producer saying: "Well, that's a lie." She then walked out of the conference complex.

TORQUE BACK:

Talking About Peace (HILLEL HALKIN, September 26, 2006, NY Sun)

With the war in Lebanon scarcely over, Israel now faces a new "peace offensive" from Syria. Its initial reaction has been as inept as was its handling of the war against Hezbollah.

"We want peace — peace with Israel," proclaims Bashar Al-Assad from Damascus. "The conditions for peace talks are not yet propitious," replies Ehud Olmert from Jerusalem. This is a less than brilliant response. Prime Minister Olmert might as well have said in plain words, "Peace may be a concern of the Syrians, but Israelis couldn't care less about it."

Now in a certain sense, this is true. When Syria speaks of peace negotiations with Israel, it is speaking, as it has always done, of an agreement that would involve a total Israeli withdrawal from all of the Golan Heights. In fact, it is speaking of a more than total withdrawal, since it also is demanding a small sliver of pre-1967 Israel along the shore of the Sea of Galilee, which its troops were in occupation of before the Six-Day War. In such a peace, Israel indeed has no interest.

And yet though it is perfectly true that, practically speaking, negotiations with Syria are pointless as long as the Syrians stick to this position, it is a diplomatic blunder of the first order for Israel to stress its disinclination to negotiate. To let the Syrians portray themselves as the side eager for peace, and Israel as the side indifferent to it, is to give Syria a victory it does not deserve.

What should the Israeli position be? The next time Prime Minister Olmert is asked about the Syrian overture, he might try responding this way: [...]

JUST LET US KEEP A LITTLE PRIDE:

Iran close to nuclear suspension (Bill Gertz, September 26, 2006, THE WASHINGTON TIMES)

Iran is close to an agreement that would include a suspension of uranium enrichment but wants the deal to include a provision that the temporary halt be kept secret, according to Bush administration officials.

LIFE, LIBERTY AND THE PURSUIT OF RUDENESS

Free speech is truth's best hope (James Allan, The Australian, September 26th, 2006)

Why allow people to speak words and draw pictures and convey thoughts that others find deeply offensive?

John Stuart Mill's answer was that truth had a better chance of emerging where virtually all speech, even words perceived to be offensive, insulting and, yes, false, was allowed.

It is not just that constraints on speech can be manipulated by those in power to protect their own privileged positions, though they clearly can be and regularly are.

We all know that there is nothing handier to those in power than to forbid all criticisms of oneself. But the point is wider than that.

As the great US Supreme Court judge O.W. Holmes more or less put it: "We don't really know what the true position is. Whatever it is, though, it has a better chance of emerging in the marketplace of competing ideas where everything is open to criticism, even offensive criticism."

In other words, the short-term costs of forcing people to have a thick skin will carry with them long-term benefits that are huge.

People will have their ideas and beliefs and prejudices exposed to potential attack from all sides. Those who can withstand such widespread attack are more likely to approximate truth.

It is more than passing strange to see the same people who deny there is such a thing as truth go on to assert it will emerge from a cacophony of folks yelling out their ignorance and insulting prejudices. People who argue this way are always oblivious to their underlying unstated assumption that offensive speech will always remain on the margins and be drowned out by a sensible majority. However, it is one thing to celebrate tolerating a few wacky Nazis marching through a Chicago suburb, quite another when half a million of them are marching on Washington.

Free speech is to be cherished because it is an incident of democracy and individual freedom, not a pathway to truth. It sits on a bedrock of shared ideas of civility, respect and common sense among the majority and may quickly become menacing if that bedrock crumbles. It is true that societies without a good measure of it are oppressive, but the notion that free speech by itself is a certain route to liberty and prosperity is ahistorical drivel.

JERRY SPRINGER’S MENTOR

Freud's light on the neurosis of the mighty (The Manchester Guardian, September 25th, 1939)

Freud's first fundamental belief is that every event in the mind can be described and explained in mental terms: the other, loaded as it is with complex philosophical implications, can only be mentioned.

It is that determinism applies as rigidly to the mind as to the body. For Freud the word chance had no meaning, except in the scientist's sense. In his view, the wildest dreams, the most obscure delusions, the most trivial forgetting are as much a matter of cause and effect as an eclipse of the sun.

He believed that the dream was the functional nervous disorder in miniature, that in it indirect satisfaction was obtained during sleep for mental trends which in waking life were unsatisfied or repressed.

But the system of analysis or dissection of dreams which Freud created must be carefully distinguished (and it seldom is) from the interpretation of dreams which he proposed.

By reminding us that so-called free association is not free at all but is ruled by laws, Freud again contributed to knowledge. For Freud the dominant factor in human life was the sex instinct. He meant by the word sexuality very much more than the narrow meaning often put upon it.

But in fairness it should be recorded that he probably meant something much more related to our popular conception of it than some of his apologists would have us believe.

As with Marx and Darwin, the key to understanding Freud is not found in arguments as to whether he was right or wrong. He had many valid insights, although they were not nearly as original as his disciples claim. His genius and his evil lay in taking those insights about human nature and using them to craft a comprehensive, systematic theory of behaviour based upon scientific rationalism that sought to exclude all other knowledge and experience, as science is wont to do. The result has been untold havoc, the least of which is our collective subservience to a huge and powerful caring profession that doesn't care and about a billion self-help books all saying the same thing.

SEE, WE TOLD YOU THEY ARE ON THEIR LAST LEGS

The shadow cast by a mega-mosque (Philip Johnston, The Telegraph, September 25th, 2006)

When Abu Izzadeen, the firebrand Islamist militant, berated John Reid last week for "daring" to visit a Muslim area, the Home Secretary bridled, as did many others, at his suggestion that part of London was off limits for a British minister of the Crown.

There was nowhere in this country from which anyone should be excluded, Mr Reid said; nowhere that could be called exclusively Muslim. He was speaking just a couple of Tube stops from West Ham, close to the site for the 2012 Olympic stadium, where a huge row is about to erupt over plans to construct a mosque. However, this is not any old mosque built to serve the local community. It will be the largest place of worship in Europe, a gigantic three-storey Islamic centre, with schools and other facilities, able to hold at least 40,000 worshippers and up to 70,000 if necessary.

It will be called the London Markaz and it is intended to be a significant Islamic landmark whose prominence and stature will be enhanced by its proximity to the Olympic site. When television viewers around the world see aerial views of the stadium during the opening ceremony in six years' time, the most prominent religious building in the camera shot will not be one of the city's iconic churches that have shaped the nation's history, such as St Paul's Cathedral or Westminster Abbey, but the mega-mosque.

Some days one fears that the real useful idiots in the West are not the moral relativists and multiculturalists on the left, but rather the smug conservatives who cite selective history and isolated passages from the Koran to prove Islam is on the verge of collapse and can’t possibly survive in a modern technological world.

USED TO BE SELF-EVIDENT (via Mike Daley)

That They May Have Life: A Statement of Evangelicals and Catholics Together (First Things, October 2006)

We are grateful that as Christians, Evangelicals and Catholics together, we can speak with one voice on a matter of paramount urgency for our society and the world. We address this statement to all who confess Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior and to all people of goodwill who share our concern for a more just and humane social order.

Recent years have witnessed a new pattern of convergence and cooperation between Evangelicals and Catholics. We are grateful that the project known as “Evangelicals and Catholics Together” (ECT) has played a part in this development—a development that has occasioned both controversy and high hopes within our respective communities. In the public life of our country, the changing relationship between Evangelicals and Catholics has also occasioned curiosity, anxiety, and even alarm.

This convergence has implications for our culture and civil order. In the present statement we intend, however briefly and inadequately, to make the case for what is commonly called “a culture of life”—and to do so in a way that invites public deliberation and engages questions of public policy. Our primary purpose, however, is to explain to our communities why we believe that support for a culture of life is an integral part of Christian faith and therefore a morally unavoidable imperative of Christian discipleship.

To those who do not identify with our communities, or with any Christian community, we respectfully suggest that it is in our mutual interest that they try to understand better the reasons and convictions that have recruited so many millions of their fellow citizens to the cause of the culture of life. Greater understanding does not necessarily lead to agreement, but it at least makes possible a more civil engagement of our disagreements.

The present moment in American public life is frequently described in terms of “culture wars,” and there is some merit in that description. We need not and must not, however, resign ourselves to unremitting warfare. A culture is composed of many parts, but different cultures are distinguished by different understandings of reality, of the meaning of life and death, of rights and duties, of rights and wrongs.

There is what is called a Judeo-Christian worldview, a worldview that was crucial to the formation of our civilization and is, we believe, clearly reflected in the convictions that inspired the American founding. To speak of American culture today is to speak of a culture marked by different worldviews in conflict. So severe is the conflict, also in the political realm, that many despair of finding any commonalities by which warfare can be replaced, or at least tempered, by civil discourse.

We refuse to join in that despair. We refuse to despair because we share with those who oppose us a common humanity. We also share a common interest in sustaining the American experiment in its aspiration to be a free, just, and virtuous society. In our common humanity, we share a Godgiven capacity to reason, to argue, to deliberate, to persuade, and to discover moral truths regarding questions related to the right ordering of our life together. As members of the community of Christians, we are obliged to bear an uncompromising witness to our faith. As members of this civil order, we are also obliged to engage respectfully those who do not share our faith. In this statement, we intend to do both.

Between Evangelicals and Catholics there have been long-standing differences on the capacities of human reason. To put it too briefly, Evangelicals (and the Protestant traditions more generally) have accented that human reason has been deeply corrupted by sin. Catholics, on the other hand, while recognizing that human reason has been severely wounded by sin and is in need of healing, have held a higher estimate of reason’s capacity to discern truth, including moral truth. We, as Evangelicals and Catholics together, affirm that the knowledge of God necessary for eternal salvation cannot be attained by human reason alone apart from Divine revelation and the Holy Spirit’s gift of faith’s response to Jesus Christ the only Savior. (These questions are addressed in more detail in our 1998 statement, “The Gift of Salvation.”)

We also affirm together that human reason, despite the consequences of sin, has the capacity for discerning, deliberating, and deciding the questions pertinent to the civil order. Some Evangelicals attribute this capacity of reason to “common grace,” as distinct from “saving grace.” Catholics typically speak of the “natural law,” meaning moral law that is knowable in principle by all human beings, even if it is denied by many (Romans 1 and 2). Thus do we, as Evangelicals and Catholics together, firmly reject the claim that disagreements over the culture of life represent a conflict between faith and reason. Both faith and reason are the gift of the one God. Since all truth has its source in Him, all truth is ultimately one, although our human perception of the fullness of truth is partial and inadequate (1 Corinthians 13:12). Thus do we invite those who disagree, including those who do not share the gift of faith in Christ, to join with us in attempting to move beyond “culture wars” to a reasonable deliberation of the right ordering of our life together.

As Christians, we are informed, inspired, and sustained by our faith in a commitment to a culture of life, which includes the protection and care of the unborn, the severely disabled, the dependent elderly, and the dying. The culture of life encompasses also the poor, the marginalized, and those who, for whatever reason, are vulnerable to neglect or exploitation by others. This is not a uniquely Christian commitment. Disagreement on our obligations to those in need should not be viewed as a conflict between Christians and non-Christians.

We are sadly aware that many who identify themselves as Christians do not share our understanding of a culture of life. It is not the case that we wish to “impose” our moral convictions on our fellow citizens or, as some recklessly charge, to establish a “theocracy.” Our intention is not to impose but to propose, educate, and persuade, in the hope that, through free deliberation and decision, our society will be turned toward a more consistent respect for the inestimable gift that is human life.

This statement and the questions addressed are emphatically public in nature. Christianity—its scriptures, doctrine, intellectual tradition, and institutions of communal allegiance and mission—are part of our common history. Christianity claims at least the nominal adherence of the great majority in our society. To be a Christian is a personal but not a private decision. To be a Christian is to be associated with a historical movement bearing public witness to universal moral truths.

Such truths are not accepted by all in our society, nor is there complete agreement about their meaning and implications among all who do accept them. But the assertion of these truths, including their significance for public policy, is part of, and in no way to be excluded from, genuinely public discourse. Whatever is meant by “the separation of church and state,” it cannot mean the separation of public life and public policy from the deepest convictions, including moral convictions, of the great majority of a nation’s citizens.

As Christian truth claims are public, so also are the questions pertinent to a culture of life. There is no more inescapably public and political question than who belongs to the polis of which we are part. The contention over abortion, for instance, is not about when human life begins. That is a biological and medical question about which there is no reasonable dispute. The moral and political dispute is over which human beings, at whatever state of development or decline, possess rights that we are bound to respect. The question is this: Who belongs to the community for which we accept public responsibility?

In what follows we hope to make the case that the defense of the humanum is made imperative by the Christian understanding of reality. Our position with respect to questions such as abortion, euthanasia, assisted suicide, and the creation and destruction of 19 embryos for research purposes is integral to that understanding of reality. Every human life is, from conception, created by God and is infinitely precious in His sight. The fulfillment of human life is, by the grace of God, “life and life abundant” through faith in Jesus Christ, who said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6).

We believe it is of utmost importance that everyone involved in the public discussion of these questions understand the unbreakable connection between a Christian worldview and the defense of human life. We can no more abandon our contention for a culture of life than we can abandon our allegiance to the lordship of Christ, for our contention is inseparably part of that allegiance.

At the same time, we contend that the public policies pertinent to the defense of the humanum are supported by reasons that are accessible to all and should be convincing to all. The term “humanism” is frequently employed in opposition to Christian faith, as in the phrase “secular humanism.” We propose a deeper and richer humanism that is firmly grounded in the bedrock of scriptural truth, that is elaborated in the history of Christian thought, that is in accord with clear reason, that honors the best in our civilization’s tradition, and that holds the promise of a future more worthy of the dignity of the human person who is the object of God’s infinite love and care. This more authentic humanism is in no way alien to Christianity. There is in world history no teaching more radically humanistic than the claim that God became a human being in order that human beings might participate in the life of God, now and forever. [...]

Every human life is intended by God from eternity for eternity. Human life is sacred because it is the creation of God, the Lord of life. “For you did form my inward parts, you knit me together in my mother’s womb” (Psalm 139:13). Nature shares in the consequences of sin and innumerable lives are lost before they have an opportunity to develop in the womb, as many die in disasters such as famine, earthquakes, and hurricanes. Mortality is the common denominator of all life on earth. We are morally responsible, however, for the protection and care of life created in the image and likeness of God. The commandment “You shall not kill” is the negatively stated minimum of what we owe to our fellow human beings.

The direct and intentional taking of innocent human life in abortion, euthanasia, assisted suicide, and embryonic research is rightly understood as murder. In the exceedingly rare instance of direct threat to the life of the mother, saving her life may entail the death of the unborn child. Such rare and tragic instances are in sharpest contrast to the unlimited abortion license created by the Supreme Court, resulting in more than forty million deaths since 1973.

The blindness of so many to this moral atrocity has many sources but is finally to be traced to the seductive ways of evil advanced by Satan. Jesus says, “He was a murderer from the beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies” (John 8:44).

The direct and intentional taking of innocent human life may be attended by what is believed to be compassion, especially in the case of the dependent and debilitated aged. While we can sympathize with those who view their own life or the life of another as a burden and not a gift, and while, by the grace of God, there can be repentance and forgiveness for those who are guilty of committing great evil, there can be no moral justification for murder. We are determined to employ every legal means available to protect, in law and in life, the innocent and vulnerable members of the human community.

IT'S NOT THE FIRST ELECTION THAT MAKES YOU THIRD WAY:

Japan's unorthodox reformer steps down (Bennett Richardson, 9/26/06, The Christian Science Monitor)

Japanese banks have been overhauled, employment has recovered, and the economy is in its second-longest expansion since World War II. Land prices are rising more than 10 percent a year in central Tokyo, the number of marriages is up, and the old factional style of politics that hamstrung effective decisionmaking in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) is increasingly a thing of the past.

On the flip side, Koizumi's more muscular foreign policy and his visits to a shrine dedicated to the nation's war dead have lost Japan much goodwill around Asia. Wage disparities have increased, regional economies are still struggling, and a population decline has yet to be reversed.

CAN'T BEAT THE THING WITH NOTHING:

Among 'the Disciple Generation,' fervor and diversity: A 'nonbelieving' journalist spends time with the young and evangelical (Jane Lampman, 9/26/06, CS Monitor)

Welcome to the Evangelical youth movement. Or what Lauren Sandler calls "the Disciple Generation" - an ever-growing population of young Evangelicals, ages 15 to 35, "who are equally obsessed with Christ and with culture as a means to an Evangelical end."

Formerly a reporter for National Public Radio, Ms. Sandler had encountered many Christian groups during her travels. But as Evangelicals became more influential in politics, she set out to scout in depth the evolving youth movement. What she found surprised and disturbed her, an avowed secularist and nonbeliever who was barely 30 herself.

Yet this is not a total bash book. Despite her obvious misgivings, Sandler acknowledges a certain admiration, even warmth, for many of the young men and women she encountered along the way.

Take her experience at a small group meeting in Colorado Springs, home to the Air Force Academy and New Life Church, whose ambition is to usher in the Second Coming.

“In spite of all the loathsome warmongering, Gordon (the Bible study leader) and his reverent community have convinced me that in their own way they are capable of translating Jesus' legacy of agape into their daily lives,” she writes. “Tonight they demonstrated the simple concept that powers and sustains this movement: They have shown me the kindness of strangers.”

She does not let her side off the hook, either.

“Until secular America strengthens its own front lines by developing strong communities and a culture that uplifts rather than invalidates, this army will have no viable opponent,” she writes. “It aims to destroy everything that it is not. Maintain no illusion: They are wide awake. They are ready.”

MORE:
-Lauren Sandler: Exploring How Youth Gets Righteous (Donna Freitas, 8/9/2006, Religion BookLine)

"I always wanted to see something seize my generation," said Lauren Sandler, author of Righteous: Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth Movement (Viking, Sept.), when asked what inspired her road trip to some of the more extreme and young evangelical communities in America. She added, "I just never imagined it would be this."

Sandler expressed surprise over the fact that, when given the choice, many in this generation of Americans have chosen fundamentalist Christianity as their defining touchstone, rather than, say, the anti-war protests of the 1960s.

A career journalist, Sandler has reported from places far and wide, including the front lines of Iraq in 2003. An atheist herself, she never expected to travel the country in search of fervent Christian teens and twenty-somethings. "When I was originally given the assignment at NPR to produce a series on religion in America, I rolled my eyes. Religion was not something that interested me," Sandler said. "I went through my own conversion in terms of my fascination with the topic."

What prompted the change of heart? "The people I met showed me that the need for what they have—the rigid structure of the lifestyle, the intense community—is deep among this generation," said Sandler. "They want an alternative to mainstream culture, and they believe they are the true radicals out there. So Christianity spreads by being cool."

Rock For Life finds its biggest constituency at Christian rock festivals every summer, a dozen gigantic Jesuspaloozas across the nation, drawing more than a half-million people combined--festivals with names like Kingdombound, Alive and Sonshine, which director Bob Poe began two decades ago. Back then, Christian rock was a marginal genre. In the early 1980s he'd host seven or eight bands for a small crowd. "That's all the Christian world had to offer," he says. "Now we have 125 bands and turn away more than twice that many." As evangelism has spread ferociously throughout the country in the past several years, the Christian music industry has flourished in tandem.

The Christian rock festival has become the superchurch for the thrashing masses and the ultimate mobilizing force for antiabortionists. Says Bryan Kemper, "It's one thing to hear a message in a church, a message at school, to hear a message in an institution where you're supposed to hear a message that isn't coming from you, it's coming from a quote-unquote authority. The whole concert scene is supposed to go, 'Let go.' We're bringing a message there where people have guards down, where people are open to listen. In school, kids' guards are up, at a concert they're open to a lot of stuff. It's on their turf. It's their own identity. And music is such a huge part of every kid's life--music connects almost everybody--when you have that passion in the music, the singer says, 'Hey, stand up for this, look into this,' it causes kids to look into it and stand up like nothing else." [...]

It's moving, actually, to be surrounded by a mass of kids dressed in the accessories of anger and marginalization, scowling their teen scowls, and hear the opposite of what you'd expect at a secular gig--a voice, Murray's in this case, shouting to the crowd, "If you want to talk to any guy in this band about what's going on with you, come up. We can help." And then to see guys with tattoos, guys with downcast eyes peering from their black sweatshirt hoods approach band member after band member, saying, "My friend brought me, and he thought I could talk to you," a bizarre twist on the cool-posturing punk shows I'd occasionally check out in high school. To watch a community of people form before your eyes, reaching out to each other, connecting through music and performance to each other and to a shared vision, committing to the political causes they identify as joined with that vision--it's the active community of a liberal utopian's dream.

That is, if you squint so you can't see those Rock For Life shirts. If you can block out the repetition of "Jesus" and "Lord" from the songs and conversations. This, of course, is impossible. Even though "religion" is a dirty word to these instruction-fearing believers (as Murray says, "We're against religion--our God is a God of freedom, not one of religion who won't let you have tattoos"), it's the only reason this scene works. And that's the reason politics so effortlessly becomes a part of the scene. It's the nature and extraordinary effectiveness of evangelical Christianity--the whole-life, whole-belief experience. So whether you're praying in church or at a club, or screaming on a stage or at the doors of an abortion clinic, it's all just an articulation of the oft-repeated "way we live." Is it a political movement? Not in the usual sense. But it is a massive and exponentially self-replicating cultural movement that binds itself inherently to politics.

It's hard to imagine that anytime soon a secular rock band might, as John Lennon said, be bigger than Jesus.

Jay Bakker, prodigal son of Jim and Tammy Faye, has a call on the other line. It's his tattoo artist, phoning to talk to him about freshening up one of his carefully inked arms. Bakker's oft photographed snarl through his lip pierce has rendered him the it-boy popularizer of a long-burgeoning phenomenon: devil music for the Lord. "It used to be 'You're saved now, burn all your albums,' but that's changed," says Bakker. "Now we're refusing to do that. We're saying we'll make the music we want, but we'll make it to glorify God."

From hardcore punk to hip-hop, die-hard young Christians have turned to what were once the most heathen niches of pop culture to express their faith, minister to marginalized cohorts, and spiritually seduce new groupies. New York-area ensembles offer up heavy bass to the heavenly boss, in churches and clubs from the South Bronx to suburban Long Island, stopping off at mainstream

venues in between. Summertime is prime time for rocking and holy rolling: The Jersey shore will be dotted with shows all season long; Rapfest—the big local event for religious rapscallions—will be born again in August; and this weekend will see the annual punk and indie Cornerstone gathering resurrected on Long Island. "Now all over America you can go to, say, a hardcore festival, usually an atheist scene, and hear about Jesus and realize you don't have to give up everything," Bakker says. "You don't have to comb your hair and put on a suit. You can be all you are—tattoos and all—and God will accept you for that."

Kosher reggae for the masses?: Matisyahu's music has religious theme that rings with youth (JEFF DIAMANT, Aug. 26, 2006, Religion News Service

Moshe Herson seemed perplexed. Never before had the 72-year-old Orthodox rabbi been asked to listen to reggae to see whether he could hear Talmudic overtones.

Of course, until three months ago, no Hasidic Jew had ever been crowned Best New Entertainer at the International Reggae and World Music Awards.

So one recent morning in his office, Herson, dean of the Rabbinical College of America, listened on a borrowed iPod to the 27-year-old Hasidic music sensation known as Matisyahu, whose mix of reggae, rap and rock has won gold status for two recent albums, "Live at Stubb's" and "Youth."

Orthodox youth generally avoid pop music, but since 2004, Matisyahu's religious-themed reggae has become familiar to many young people across the Orthodox world, which includes the leafy campus of the rabbinical college.

Matisyahu is part of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement of Judaism. He wears black religious garb while performing. And his songs, which have sold more than a million albums, draw lyrics from prayers, psalms and Jewish themes on God, messianism and nationhood.

Herson had never heard the music. But as Matisyahu's popularity has surged, Herson -- like most Lubavitch Jews -- has come to know who the singer is.

"He seems to have transcended the Jewish community," Herson said.

THE WESTERN POLITICAL DIVIDE IN A NUTSHELL:

Reflections on the Revolution in France (Edmund Burke, 1790)

You will observe that from Magna Charta to the Declaration of Right it has been the uniform policy of our constitution to claim and assert our liberties as an entailed inheritance derived to us from our forefathers, and to be transmitted to our posterity — as an estate specially belonging to the people of this kingdom, without any reference whatever to any other more general or prior right. By this means our constitution preserves a unity in so great a diversity of its parts. We have an inheritable crown, an inheritable peerage, and a House of Commons and a people inheriting privileges, franchises, and liberties from a long line of ancestors.

This policy appears to me to be the result of profound reflection, or rather the happy effect of following nature, which is wisdom without reflection, and above it. A spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish temper and confined views. People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors. Besides, the people of England well know that the idea of inheritance furnishes a sure principle of conservation and a sure principle of transmission, without at all excluding a principle of improvement. It leaves acquisition free, but it secures what it acquires. Whatever advantages are obtained by a state proceeding on these maxims are locked fast as in a sort of family settlement, grasped as in a kind of mortmain forever. By a constitutional policy, working after the pattern of nature, we receive, we hold, we transmit our government and our privileges in the same manner in which we enjoy and transmit our property and our lives. The institutions of policy, the goods of fortune, the gifts of providence are handed down to us, and from us, in the same course and order. Our political system is placed in a just correspondence and symmetry with the order of the world and with the mode of existence decreed to a permanent body composed of transitory parts, wherein, by the disposition of a stupendous wisdom, molding together the great mysterious incorporation of the human race, the whole, at one time, is never old or middle-aged or young, but, in a condition of unchangeable constancy, moves on through the varied tenor of perpetual decay, fall, renovation, and progression. Thus, by preserving the method of nature in the conduct of the state, in what we improve we are never wholly new; in what we retain we are never wholly obsolete. By adhering in this manner and on those principles to our forefathers, we are guided not by the superstition of antiquarians, but by the spirit of philosophic analogy. In this choice of inheritance we have given to our frame of polity the image of a relation in blood, binding up the constitution of our country with our dearest domestic ties, adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of our family affections, keeping inseparable and cherishing with the warmth of all their combined and mutually reflected charities our state, our hearths, our sepulchres, and our altars.

Through the same plan of a conformity to nature in our artificial institutions, and by calling in the aid of her unerring and powerful instincts to fortify the fallible and feeble contrivances of our reason, we have derived several other, and those no small, benefits from considering our liberties in the light of an inheritance. Always acting as if in the presence of canonized forefathers, the spirit of freedom, leading in itself to misrule and excess, is tempered with an awful gravity. This idea of a liberal descent inspires us with a sense of habitual native dignity which prevents that upstart insolence almost inevitably adhering to and disgracing those who are the first acquirers of any distinction. By this means our liberty becomes a noble freedom.

It carries an imposing and majestic aspect. It has a pedigree and illustrating ancestors. It has its bearings and its ensigns armorial. It has its gallery of portraits, its monumental inscriptions, its records, evidences, and titles. We procure reverence to our civil institutions on the principle upon which nature teaches us to revere individual men: on account of their age and on account of those from whom they are descended. All your sophisters cannot produce anything better adapted to preserve a rational and manly freedom than the course that we have pursued, who have chosen our nature rather than our speculations, our breasts rather than our inventions, for the great conservatories and magazines of our rights and privileges. [...]

WE KNOW, AND WHAT IS BETTER, we feel inwardly, that religion is the basis of civil society and the source of all good and of all comfort. In England we are so convinced of this, that there is no rust of superstition with which the accumulated absurdity of the human mind might have crusted it over in the course of ages, that ninety-nine in a hundred of the people of England would not prefer to impiety. We shall never be such fools as to call in an enemy to the substance of any system to remove its corruptions, to supply its defects, or to perfect its construction. If our religious tenets should ever want a further elucidation, we shall not call on atheism to explain them. We shall not light up our temple from that unhallowed fire. It will be illuminated with other lights. It will be perfumed with other incense than the infectious stuff which is imported by the smugglers of adulterated metaphysics. If our ecclesiastical establishment should want a revision, it is not avarice or rapacity, public or private, that we shall employ for the audit, or receipt, or application of its consecrated revenue. Violently condemning neither the Greek nor the Armenian, nor, since heats are subsided, the Roman system of religion, we prefer the Protestant, not because we think it has less of the Christian religion in it, but because, in our judgment, it has more. We are Protestants, not from indifference, but from zeal.

We know, and it is our pride to know, that man is by his constitution a religious animal; that atheism is against, not only our reason, but our instincts; and that it cannot prevail long.

Here liberalism:

Government is not made in virtue of natural rights, which may and do exist in total independence of it, and exist in much greater clearness and in a much greater degree of abstract perfection; but their abstract perfection is their practical defect. By having a right to everything they want everything. Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. Men have a right that these wants should be provided for by this wisdom. Among these wants is to be reckoned the want, out of civil society, of a sufficient restraint upon their passions. Society requires not only that the passions of individuals should be subjected, but that even in the mass and body, as well as in the individuals, the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection. This can only be done by a power out of themselves, and not, in the exercise of its function, subject to that will and to those passions which it is its office to bridle and subdue. In this sense the restraints on men, as well as their liberties, are to be reckoned among their rights. But as the liberties and the restrictions vary with times and circumstances and admit to infinite modifications, they cannot be settled upon any abstract rule; and nothing is so foolish as to discuss them upon that principle.

The moment you abate anything from the full rights of men, each to govern himself, and suffer any artificial, positive limitation upon those rights, from that moment the whole organization of government becomes a consideration of convenience. This it is which makes the constitution of a state and the due distribution of its powers a matter of the most delicate and complicated skill. It requires a deep knowledge of human nature and human necessities, and of the things which facilitate or obstruct the various ends which are to be pursued by the mechanism of civil institutions. The state is to have recruits to its strength, and remedies to its distempers. What is the use of discussing a man's abstract right to food or medicine? The question is upon the method of procuring and administering them. In that deliberation I shall always advise to call in the aid of the farmer and the physician rather than the professor of metaphysics.

The science of constructing a commonwealth, or renovating it, or reforming it, is, like every other experimental science, not to be taught a priori. Nor is it a short experience that can instruct us in that practical science, because the real effects of moral causes are not always immediate; but that which in the first instance is prejudicial may be excellent in its remoter operation, and its excellence may arise even from the ill effects it produces in the beginning. The reverse also happens: and very plausible schemes, with very pleasing commencements, have often shameful and lamentable conclusions. In states there are often some obscure and almost latent causes, things which appear at first view of little moment, on which a very great part of its prosperity or adversity may most essentially depend. The science of government being therefore so practical in itself and intended for such practical purposes — a matter which requires experience, and even more experience than any person can gain in his whole life, however sagacious and observing he may be — it is with infinite caution that any man ought to venture upon pulling down an edifice which has answered in any tolerable degree for ages the common purposes of society, or on building it up again without having models and patterns of approved utility before his eyes.

These metaphysic rights entering into common life, like rays of light which pierce into a dense medium, are by the laws of nature refracted from their straight line. Indeed, in the gross and complicated mass of human passions and concerns the primitive rights of men undergo such a variety of refractions and reflections that it becomes absurd to talk of them as if they continued in the simplicity of their original direction. The nature of man is intricate; the objects of society are of the greatest possible complexity; and, therefore, no simple disposition or direction of power can be suitable either to man's nature or to the quality of his affairs. When I hear the simplicity of contrivance aimed at and boasted of in any new political constitutions, I am at no loss to decide that the artificers are grossly ignorant of their trade or totally negligent of their duty. The simple governments are fundamentally defective, to say no worse of them. If you were to contemplate society in but one point of view, all these simple modes of polity are infinitely captivating. In effect each would answer its single end much more perfectly than the more complex is able to attain all its complex purposes. But it is better that the whole should be imperfectly and anomalously answered than that, while some parts are provided for with great exactness, others might be totally neglected or perhaps materially injured by the over-care of a favorite member.

The pretended rights of these theorists are all extremes; and in proportion as they are metaphysically true, they are morally and politically false. The rights of men are in a sort of middle, incapable of definition, but not impossible to be discerned. The rights of men in governments are their advantages; and these are often in balances between differences of good, in compromises sometimes between good and evil, and sometimes between evil and evil. Political reason is a computing principle: adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing, morally and not metaphysically or mathematically, true moral denominations.

CRANK UP THE iPOD:

Ed Driscoll has a podcast up at Tech Central Station in which he interviews Bruce
Frohnen, the co-editor of, "American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia."

MORE:
Intercollegiate Studies Institute

I CAN TESTIFY TO THE FOLLOWING THOUGH...

Bacardi Denies 151-Proof Rum Caused Bar Burn Injuries (AP< September 25, 2006)

Bacardi said its 151-proof rum was not the cause of burns suffered by three women who sued the spirits company and alleged that their injuries were caused when a bottle used to pour shots turned into a "flame thrower."

DON'T LUMP ME WITH THEM, HE LAMENTED:

Seeing Red: A response to George Will (Thomas B. Edsall, 09.25.06, New Republic)

George Will's column has taught me several new rhetorical tricks. The first is how to use verbs to distort and impugn. In a column last week about my book Building Red America, Will wrote (emphases mine): "The GOP," Edsall laments, 'has achieved a gradual erosion of the popular consensus behind the major progressive and social-egalitarian movements of the twentieth century."

This artful sentence labels me as a mindless, knee-jerk liberal. In fact, I argue that the left has not come to terms with the fact of eroding support for the liberal agenda. That may or may not be lamentable, but my book leaves the emoting to others. Will writes:

Edsall complains that conservatives pursue an agenda that does not have the public's "decisive support." Whatever that means, liberals such as Edsall are ineligible to make that complaint. They increasingly have abandoned persuasion and legislation and resorted to litigation and judicial fiats to advance an agenda the public finds unpersuasive.

Again, I don't complain about the fact that the public is closely divided on the conservative agenda and on many key issues; I report that division as fact, something very few people--left, right, or center--disagree with.

But verbs aren't the only tool at Will's disposal; he also deploys distortion admirably: To him, I have "abandoned persuasion and legislation and resorted to litigation and judicial fiats" to get what I want. In fact, I agree with the criticism of liberalism as overly court-dependent. Building Red America cites many of the rulings that have protected the liberal agenda from Election Day feedback, and I have written elsewhere with Michael A. Fletcher that "After losing control of the White House when Bush took office in 2001, Democrats and liberals have largely turned to the courts as a last resort." My book is nothing, however, if not an exercise in persuasion. [...]

Then, there's misdirection. Will lumps me in with those on the left who claim that the GOP and conservatives have played a bait-and-switch game on the white working and middle classes, getting their votes with a culturally conservative agenda and then using the power of office to reward the rich. Sadly for him, this is false: I explicitly disagree with major pillars of that theory--made most famously by Thomas Frank in What's the Matter with Kansas?. Instead, I argue that many of the cultural issues have significant economic implications for working and middle class families, who see condom distribution in the public schools, challenges to authority (patriarchal and otherwise), the explosion in the number of divorces, the rejection of traditional religious values, and assertions of the "right" to self-expression and self-fulfillment as threatening qualities--restraint, postponed gratification, and devotion to family--that engender economic success.

BEING PC MEANS NEVER FACING A RECKONING:

Day of reckoning for DDT foes? (Steven Milloy, September 25, 2006, Washington Times)

Overlooked in all the hoopla over the announcement is the terrible toll in human lives (tens of millions dead, mostly pregnant women and children under age 5), illness (billions sickened) and poverty (more than $1 trillion in lost GDP in sub-Saharan Africa alone) caused by the tragic, decades-long ban. [...]

Rachel Carson kicked off DDT hysteria with her pseudoscientific 1962 book, "Silent Spring." Miss Carson materially misrepresented DDT science in order to advance her anti-pesticide agenda. Today she is hailed as having launched the global environmental movement. A Pennsylvania state office building, Maryland elementary school, Pittsburgh bridge and a Maryland state park are named for her. The Smithsonian Institution commemorates her work against DDT. She was even honored with a 1981 U.S. postage stamp. Next year will be the 100th anniversary of her birth. Many celebrations are planned.

It's quite a tribute for someone who was so dead wrong. At the very least, her name should be removed from public property and there should be no government-sponsored honors of Miss Carson.

The Audubon Society was a leader in the attack on DDT, including falsely accusing DDT defenders (who won a libel suit) of lying. Not wanting to jeopardize its nonprofit tax status, the Audubon Society formed the Environmental Defense Fund (now simply known as Environmental Defense) in 1967 to spearhead its anti-DDT efforts. Today the National Audubon Society takes in more than $100 million yearly and has assets worth more than $200 million. Environmental Defense takes in more than $65 million yearly with a net worth exceeding $73 million.

In a February 25, 1971, media release, the president of the Sierra Club said his organization wanted "a ban, not just a curb" on DDT, "even in the tropical countries where DDT has kept malaria under control. Today the Sierra Club rakes in more than $90 million per year and has more than $50 million in assets.

Business are often held liable and forced to pay monetary damages for defective products and false statements. Why shouldn't the National Audubon Society, Environmental Defense, Sierra Club and other anti-DDT activist groups be held liable for the harm caused by their recklessly defective activism?

MORE:
WHO calls for more DDT use vs. malaria (LAURAN NEERGAARD, 9/15/06, AP)

A small number of malaria-plagued countries already use DDT, backed by a 2001 United Nations treaty that set out strict rules to prevent environmental contamination. But the influential WHO's long-awaited announcement makes clear that it will push indoor spraying with a number of insecticides — and that DDT will be a top choice because when used properly it's safe, effective and cheap.

"We must take a position based on the science and the data," said Dr. Arata Kochi, the WHO's malaria chief. "One of the best tools we have against malaria is indoor residual house spraying. Of the dozen insecticides WHO has approved as safe for house spraying, the most effective is DDT."

"It's a big change," said biologist Amir Attaran of Canada's University of Ottawa, who has long pushed for the guidelines and described a recent draft. "There has been a lot of resistance to using insecticides to control malaria, and one insecticide especially. ... That will have to be re-evaluated by a lot of people."

The U.S. government already has decided to pay for DDT and other indoor insecticide use as part of
President Bush's $1.2 billion, five-year initiative to control malaria in Africa.

In Kenya alone, 34,000 young children a year perish from malaria, says Health Minister Charity Ngilu. Uganda suffers 100,000 deaths annually, notes Minister of Health Dr. Stephen Malinga – the equivalent of a jetliner with 275 people slamming into its Rwenzori Mountains every day.

Africa has 400 million cases of acute malaria per year; up to 2 million die. Countless millions are too sick to work or go to school, countless millions more must stay home to care for them, and meager family savings are exhausted on anti-malaria drugs.

The disease costs Kenya 170 million working days and billions of dollars annually. It is a major reason that few tourists and investors go to Africa, and that the sub-Sahara region remains one of the poorest on Earth.

Instead of improving, in recent decades the disease rates have worsened. A principal reason, as epidemiologist Robert Desowitz observed, has been insecticide-resistant mosquitoes lethally combined with insecticide-resistant health authorities, who insisted on politically correct policies, instead of proven, practical solutions.

Indeed, since the US banned DDT in 1972, despite an independent commission finding that it was safe for people and most wildlife, malaria has killed an estimated 50 million people. Opponents have focused relentlessly on the alleged risks of using DDT--while ignoring the undeniable tragedies the chemical could prevent.

DDT is no “silver bullet,” nor is it appropriate in all places or cases. However, it is a critical element of many successful malaria control programs. Sprayed just twice a year on the inside walls of homes, it keeps 90% of mosquitoes from even entering, irritates those that do come in so they don’t bite, and kills any that land. No other chemical, at any price, does that.

DDT, to give that chemical its more familiar name, works miracles against diseases that are spread by insects. During the Second World War, vast quantities of the stuff were dusted over troops and concentration-camp survivors to kill the body lice that spread typhus. Later, DDT was used widely in Latin America to beat back dengue and yellow fever. But the chemical's noblest calling is to combat malarial mosquitoes. In the early 20th century, Dunklin County, Missouri, had a higher rate of malarial mortality than Freetown, Sierra Leone. Between 1947 and 1949, DDT was sprayed on the internal walls of nearly 5 million American houses, and at the end of that process malaria had ceased to pose a significant threat in the United States.

DDT also helped to eliminate malaria in Europe and parts of Asia, and in 1970 the National Academy of Sciences estimated that the chemical had prevented 500 million deaths. And yet, despite that astounding number, DDT has all but disappeared from the malaria arsenal. Some 500 million people still get the disease annually, and at least 1 million die, but the World Health Organization refuses to recommend DDT spraying. The U.S. government's development programs don't purchase any of the chemical. In June President Bush made a great show of announcing a new five-year push against malaria; DDT appears to play no part in his plans.

But the worst culprit is the European Union. It not only refuses to fund DDT spraying: In the case of at least one country, it has also threatened to punish DDT use with import restrictions.

That country is Uganda, which suffered a crippling 12 million cases of malaria in a population of 27 million in 2003. The Ugandans know perfectly well that DDT can help them: As Roger Bate of the American Enterprise Institute recently testified to Congress, DDT spraying in one part of the country in 1959 and 1960 reduced the prevalence of malaria from 22 percent to less than 1 percent. Ugandans also know the record in South Africa, where the cessation of DDT spraying in 1996 allowed the number of malaria cases to multiply tenfold and where the resumption of spraying in 2000 helped to bring the caseload down by almost 80 percent.

So the Ugandans, not unreasonably, would like to use DDT. But in February the European Union waved an anti-scientific flag at them. The Europeans said Uganda might need to institute a new food monitoring program to assuage the health concerns of their consumers, even though hundreds of millions have been exposed to DDT without generating any solid evidence that the chemical harms people. The E.U. proposal might constitute an impossible administrative burden on a poor country. Anti-malaria campaigners say that other African governments are wary of even considering DDT, having seen what Uganda has gone through.

Why does Europe impede Uganda's fight against malaria? The standard answer starts with "Silent Spring," the book that helped launch the environmental movement in the 1960s and that painted a scary picture of DDT's potential impact on the food chain. But this is only half right. The book's overblown claims led to the banning of DDT in the United States in 1972 and its disappearance from aid-funded programs thereafter. But "Silent Spring" was really about the dangers of large-scale agricultural use of DDT, not the limited spraying of houses. Today mainstream environmental groups concede that in the context of malarial countries, the certain health benefits of anti-malarial spraying may outweigh the speculative environmental risks.

ANOTHER YEAR OF GOP CONTROL, ANOTHER TAX CUT...:

Stop Taxing Inflation (PHILIP KERPEN, September 25, 2006, NY Sun)

The old fight over indexing the basis for the capital gains tax is starting up again, and this is shaping up to be the best chance ever to finally end the unfair tax on inflationary gains. Legislation sponsored by Reps. Mike Pence of Indiana and Eric Cantor of Virginia, H.R. 6057, would use the Gross Domestic Product implicit price deflator to index the capital gains tax basis for inflation, ending one of the most egregious practices of our tax system. Perhaps more encouraging, it may be possible for the president to introduce indexing administratively, without the passage of any legislation. [...]

The Pence-Cantor bill would be an excellent vehicle for finally ending the inflation tax, but if Congress fails to act, the president should instruct the Treasury Department to index the capital gains tax basis for inflation administratively. The Internal Revenue Code defines a capital gain as the value of an asset when it is sold less its cost, but "cost" is not defined in the code. A regulation interpreting cost in real economic terms would almost certainly pass the reasonableness standard that courts would use in reviewing Treasury Department discretion in the matter.

It has been a decade since the Contract-with-America Republicans led the last major push for this reform, and since then many of the young, enthusiastic House staffers who were in that fight have moved on to positions of influence in the Treasury Department. Thus, the stage may finally be set for ending this long-running battle with a pro-growth victory.

AT THIS RATE, TOM DELAY MAY BE RE-ELECTED....:

Oil drops below $60 a barrel (AP, 9/25/06)

Oil prices fell below $60 a barrel on Monday amid signs of growing petroleum inventories and after BP said it had permission to restart the eastern half of Alaska's Prudhoe Bay oil field.

"Hedge funds and investors have been bailing out because geopolitical tensions have eased and they also realize that inventories are high during this period of seasonally weak demand at the end of summer," said Victor Shum, an energy analyst with Purvin & Gertz.

Light, sweet crude for November delivery fell 80 cents to $59.75 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange by afternoon in Europe. November Brent crude on London's ICE Futures exchange dropped 94 cents to $59.47 a barrel.

Natural gas futures on the Nymex fell nearly 17 cents to $4.460 per 1,000 cubic feet — after its lowest close last week since Sept. 10, 2004. Gasoline futures slid 2 cents to $1.4503 per gallon, while October heating oil futures declined a cent to $1.6350 a gallon.

ECONOMIC EFFICIENCY AS ENVIRONMENTALISM:

Wal-Mart grows 'green' strategies (Mindy Fetterman, 9/25/2006, USA Today)

[M]any environmentalists are ecstatic. Wal-Mart is a very big rock to throw into the pro-environment pond, and its ripples, they say, will be felt across the globe.

"Wal-Mart is a huge player, and they have enormous clout," says Scott Burns of the World Wildlife Fund, which has 10 employees working with Wal-Mart on several projects, including sustainability of fisheries. "They're sending a very powerful signal that already is having effects on the way people produce products for them."

Wal-Mart says it will:

• Slash gasoline use by its trucking fleet, one of the largest in the USA, and use more hybrid trucks to increase efficiency by 25% over the next three years and double it within 10 years. That will save $310 million a year by 2015, the company says.

• Buy 100% of its wild-caught salmon and frozen fish for the North American market only from fisheries that are certified as "sustainable" by the non-profit Marine Stewardship Council within three to five years. That designation means areas of the ocean aren't fished in ways that destroy fish populations.

• Cut energy use at its more than 7,000 stores worldwide by 30% and cut greenhouse-gas emissions at existing stores by 20% in seven years. Wal-Mart is the largest private electricity user in the USA.

• Reduce solid waste from U.S. stores by 25% within three years.

The company, second-largest in revenue in the world behind ExxonMobil, has vowed to invest $500 million a year in energy-saving technologies.

It has built test lab stores in Aurora, Colo., and McKinney, Texas, where it is experimenting with everything from wind power to permeable asphalt that lets rainwater seep through parking lots to help refill groundwater aquifers. It wants to build stores that produce 30% fewer greenhouse emissions in the next four years.

And it has reached out to environmental groups, many of which were once highly critical of the company; Wal-Mart has made them part of its in-house planning.

MORE:
GM developing home hydrogen refueling device (Chris Woodyard, 9/25/06, USA TODAY)

General Motors is building a prototype for a home hydrogen refueling unit in hope of selling fuel-cell cars by 2011.

The unit, which would make hydrogen using either electricity or sunlight, would help sidestep one of the most vexing problems surrounding the creation of the pollution-free, alternative-power cars: how to persuade oil companies to invest in expensive new hydrogen stations that would compete with their core product, gasoline.

The automaker's goal is an affordable, compact unit that would allow customers to fill their cars overnight in their own garages, says GM spokesman Scott Fosgard.

GM would join Honda, which has already created a model for a home refueling hydrogen unit.

GOTTA FEEL SORRY FOR ALAN TRAMMELL:

Tigers Clinch Playoff Berth (The Associated Press, September 25, 2006)

Brandon Inge was there at the low point, when the Detroit Tigers set an AL record for losses by going 43-119 in 2003. Detroit fought off its late-season slump and clinched its first playoff berth since 1987, scoring nine runs in the second inning Sunday and coasting to an 11-4 victory over the Kansas City Royals.

"I've been waiting for this," said Inge, who was given a champagne shampoo by teammates. "You don't think about this in spring training, and then something like this happens." [...]

Enjoying a turnaround season under new manager Jim Leyland, Detroit assured itself of no worse than the AL wild-card berth and headed into the final week of the season with a 1 1/2-game lead in the AL Central over second-place Minnesota.

The Tigers, who regained the best record in the major leagues at 94-62, went ahead early for the second straight day, following up on Saturday's 10-run first.

"It is really overwhelming," said Tigers owner Michael Ilitch, who bought the team in 1992. "It is probably one of the highlights of my life. In the final outs, we were all holding our breath. After the final out, I did a lot of hugging."

Verlander allowed two runs and six hits in six innings, extending Kansas City's losing streak to six.

"Those guys out there in the clubhouse made me pretty smart," Leyland said. "I don't take the credit. I think I've been a beneficiary of catching them at the right time."

PRETEND IT'S SEPARATE:

Officials: Barghouti will not be freed (JPost.com, Sep. 24, 2006)

Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas announced on Sunday that as part of any deal for the release of kidnapped IDF Cpl. Gilad Shalit the PA would demand that Tanzim leader Marwan Barghouti be freed. According to Israel Radio, the PA would also demand that Ahmad Sa'adat, who planned the murder of former minister Rehavam Ze'evi, be released.

Abbas spoke in an interview to an Egyptian station, and also said that the Egyptian government was in charge of negotiating a prisoner exchange agreement.

Officials in the prime minister's office said in response to Abbas' announcement that Israel's position on Barghouti and Sa'adat was unchanged, and that they would not be released.

THEY'RE JUST BETTER PREPARED FOR DISAPPOINTMENT:

Corzine's gambit: Dems fear pick to fill Sen. seat big blunder (Ben Smith, 9/25/06, NY Daily News)

New Jersey Democrats are privately expressing buyers' remorse over Gov. Jon Corzine's decision to appoint then-Rep. Robert Menendez to an open Senate seat last year.

Public polls show a tight race between Menendez and Republican Tom Kean Jr., despite a national mood that favors Democrats. And the polls suggest most voters haven't yet focused on a federal investigation that touches on Menendez's personal finances.

Some now worry that New Jersey could be a rare exception in an election that seems poised to bring Democrats back to power in at least one house of Congress. "There's the feeling that Jon Corzine's now blown it twice. He blew it in ‘04 as chairman of the DSCC [Democratic Senate Campaign Committee], and now he may have blown it again," said a Democrat who was involved in the process by which Menendez was selected.

WHY DO THEY CALL THEM INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES?:

FBI Is Casting A Wider Net in Anthrax Attacks (Allan Lengel and Joby Warrick, 9/25/06, Washington Post)

Five years after the anthrax attacks that killed five people, the FBI is now convinced that the lethal powder sent to the Senate was far less sophisticated than originally believed, widening the pool of possible suspects in a frustratingly slow investigation.

The finding, which resulted from countless scientific tests at numerous laboratories, appears to undermine the widely held belief that the attack was carried out by a government scientist or someone with access to a U.S. biodefense lab.

What was initially described as a near-military-grade biological weapon was ultimately found to have had a more ordinary pedigree, containing no additives and no signs of special processing to make the anthrax bacteria more deadly, law enforcement officials confirmed. In addition, the strain of anthrax used in the attacks has turned out to be more common than was initially believed, the officials said.

As a result, after a very public focus on government scientists as the likely source of the attacks, the FBI is today casting a far wider net, as investigators face the daunting prospect of an almost endless list of possible suspects in scores of countries around the globe. [...]

Specifically, law enforcement authorities have refuted the widely reported claim that the anthrax spores had been "weaponized" -- specially treated or processed to allow them to disperse more easily. They also have rejected reports that the powder was milled, or ground, to create finer particles that can penetrate deeply into the lungs. Such processing or additives might have suggested that the maker had access to the recipes of biological weapons made by the United States in the 1950s and 1960s.

In fact, the anthrax powder used in the 2001 attacks had no additives, writes Douglas J. Beecher, a scientist in the FBI laboratory's Hazardous Materials Response Unit, in an article in the science journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology.

"A widely circulated misconception is that the spores were produced using additives and sophisticated engineering supposedly akin to military weapons production," Beecher writes in the journal's August edition, in what is believed to be the most expansive public comment on the nature of the powder by any FBI official. "The idea is usually the basis for implying that the powders were inordinately dangerous compared to spores alone."

The FBI would not allow Beecher to be interviewed about his article. But other scientists familiar with the forensic investigation echoed his description. Whoever made the powder produced a deadly project of exceptional purity and quality -- up to a trillion spores per gram -- but used none of the tricks known to military bioweapons scientists to increase the lethality of the product. Officials stressed that the terrorist would have had to have considerable skills in microbiology and access to equipment.

"It wasn't weaponized. It was just nicely cleaned up," said one knowledgeable scientist who spoke on the condition he not be identified by name because the investigation is continuing. "Whoever did it was proud of their biology. They grew the spores, spun them down, cleaned up the debris. But there were no additives."

Moreover, scientists say, the particular strain of anthrax used in the attacks has turned to out to be a less significant clue than first believed. The highly virulent Ames strain was first isolated in the United States and was the basis for the anthrax weapons formerly created by the United States. The use of the Ames strain in the 2001 attack was initially seen as a strong clue linking the terrorist to the U.S. biodefense network.

But the more the FBI investigated, the more ubiquitous the Ames strain seemed, appearing in labs around the world including nations of the former Soviet Union.

"Ames was available in the Soviet Union," said former Soviet bioweapons scientist Sergei Popov, now a biodefense expert at George Mason University. "It could have come from anywhere in the world."

I'M THE EMIR OF CORDOBA AND I APPROVE THIS MESSAGE:

Muslims must apologise for conquest: Aznar: Former Spanish PM defends Pope (9/24/06, Agence France-Presse)

Former Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar on Friday defended Pope Benedict XVI’s comments about Islam, saying the pontiff had no need to apologise and asking why Muslims never did, according to newspaper reports published on Saturday.

“Why do we always have to say sorry and they never do?” Mr Aznar told a conference in the United States.

“It is interesting to note that while a lot of people in the world are asking the pope to apologise for his speech, I have never heard a Muslim say sorry for having conquered Spain and occupying it for eight centuries.” [...]

“I support Ferdinand and Isabella,” he proclaimed, in reference to the medieval Catholic monarchs who drove Muslims out of Spain in 1492.

Word is, the Spaniards are gearing up for a tough election fight, as the League of Ferdinand and Isabella tries to fend off the resurgent Patriotic Union of al-Andalus. The winner gets Madrid. The loser gets beheaded.

TRICKY GORDON?:

Poll blow for Brown as Blair refuses to back him (George Jones, 25/09/2006, Daily Telegraph)

Gordon Brown's hopes of being acclaimed as Tony Blair's successor at this week's Labour conference are severely dented today by a poll for The Daily Telegraph showing a sharp fall in the number of voters who think he would be a good prime minister.

The Chancellor, who will today stake his claim to No 10 by promising to govern from the centre and not retreat from New Labour, lags behind David Cameron, the Tory leader, and even Mr Blair as the voters' preferred choice. [...]

While he is seen as decisive and effective, public confidence in him as the next prime minister is on the slide. Earlier in the year, 36 per cent of voters thought he would prove to be a good prime minister. That figure has fallen to 27 per cent, while the proportion thinking he would probably fail as prime minister has risen from 33 per cent to 44.

The Conservative leader has a five-point lead over Mr Brown as "the best prime minister" and Mr Blair was well ahead of him when the public was asked to choose between them.

The poll shows that Mr Brown has considerable work to do to improve his image. He is seen as a highly divisive and partisan figure, even "morose and introverted".

MORE:
Brown to stake all on Middle England (Philip Webster, 9/25/06, Times of London)

GORDON BROWN will lay claim to the Labour crown today by reassuring Middle England voters that his Government will never retreat from reform but entrench its place in the Centre.

The Chancellor, making the most important speech of his life at the Labour conference in Manchester, intends to set out his political philosophy and his personal manifesto to become Labour’s sixth Prime Minister and create a “new Britain”.

In the face of polls casting doubt on his electability and fears that he may take Labour to the left, Mr Brown will promise to change the way that Britain is governed, ushering in a “new politics” to make Government more accountable to Parliament and public, while carrying forward new Labour’s modernisation crusade in an even more radical way. He will talk of a ten-year programme to meet Britain’s challenges.

WHEN EVEN SWEDES HAVE JOBS...:

Brisk reforms expected from Reinfeldt (The Local, 24th September 2006)

Sweden's next prime minister, newly-elected Fredrik Reinfeldt, is expected to undertake brisk economic reforms he vowed to implement once in office, namely job creation, tax cuts and privatisations, analysts say. [...]

"They have a very ambitious plan for opening up the labour market with several economic incentives to get people into the labour market in the short term," SEB bank chief economist Klas Eklund told AFP.

The Alliance has proposed to cut taxes for low income earners, provide subsidies to companies that hire jobless workers, and reduce generous unemployment benefits to encourage people to go to work.

Some 50,000 jobs could be created in two or three years, said HÃ¥kan Frisen, head of economic research at SEB.

"If you have these three factors together, you could actually boost the labour market quite a lot," Eklund added.

HOW HARD IS IT TO SPELL 10W-40?:

The US doesn't need more college grads (George C. Leef, 9/25/06, CS Monitor)

There are lots of American students who are eager to learn and proceed to master skills that aid them in their careers. But government and private support already get almost all of these passionate pupils into college. The trouble is that many other students enter college with no enthusiasm for learning. Boosting college participation would mean recruiting still more of these disengaged students. Increasing their numbers will not give us a more skilled workforce; it will just put more downward pressure on academic standards. [...]

In reality, although we may have entered the so-called "knowledge economy," the true backbone of the economy will continue to consist of low- and medium-skilled jobs. Take a look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics's 10 fastest growing occupations between 2004 and 2014, and you'll find that six of the 10 professions do not require a four-year degree, and four of these call for no academic degree at all.

BLACKS ARE NATURALLY RED, NOT BLUE:

Americans and the God question (The Monitor's View, 9/25/06,CS Monitor)

About 5 percent of the 1,721 respondents were atheists, but the rest had a view of God that fit one of four basic "types": [...]

The study found that even people within the same denomination hold different concepts of God - which may explain schisms over dogma. Evangelicals and black Protestants, however, hold the most uniform views (a majority sees God as authoritarian).

HAD ENOUGH?:

This winter, cost of heating homes is forecast to drop: A homeowner could save as much as $250 on heating bills over last year (Ron Scherer, 9/25/06, The Christian Science Monitor)

Since last year at this time, the price of natural gas at the wellhead has plunged 47 percent, and the wholesale price of home heating oil is down 20 percent. If prices were to remain close to these levels - and if the winter is not overly cold - homeowners could save as much as $250 compared with last year, some energy analysts estimate.

"This is the equivalent of a major tax cut - almost the same as right after 9/11 when the government sent checks to everybody," says Dennis Jacobe, chief economist for the Gallup Organization in Washington. "What's nice is that it particularly helps middle- and lower-income people who were hurt the most when prices were soaring."

A NATION WITH A NORMAL MILITARY:

After the war, Hizbullah reevaluates: The Lebanese guerrillas admit they can't return to the south but defiantly reject calls to disarm (Nicholas Blanford, 9/25/06, The Christian Science Monitor)

The new situation here represents a third phase in Hizbullah's long struggle against Israel from south Lebanon. Between 1985 and 2000, Hizbullah was engaged in a campaign of resistance against Israeli forces occupying a strip of south Lebanon. After Israel's withdrawal in May 2000, Hizbullah began launching attacks against Israeli positions in the Shebaa Farms, a remote mountainside along Lebanon's southeast border. [...]

One possibility, analysts say, is to link Hizbullah's military wing more closely to the Lebanese Army, now deployed in strength in south Lebanon.

TEMPLE OF THE BRIGHTS

The lessons I learned at CBC (Robert Fulford, National Post, September 23rd, 2006)

In their own quiet way, CBC people have become a remarkable cult, the proprietors of a vast reservoir of smugness they are incapable of recognizing as such. For generations, they have been constructing a body of impregnable, self-regenerating opinion. As employees they are pre-selected and their views are pre-recorded, like most of their programs. A single rule governs all personnel selection: Like hires like. That principle, followed for seven decades, produces seamless intellectual agreement in all corners of the staff. Occasionally a few oddballs somehow slip through the screening process. They are allowed to hold unofficial views, providing they have the good sense not to express them. Otherwise, the CBC encourages everyone to speak up.

CBC producers glory in what Wordsworth called "smooth and solemnized complacencies." They believe in universal one-tier medicare, feminism, the Kyoto accord, employment equity and the United Nations. They consider Israel an embarrassing upstart state and remain unimpressed by its accomplishments. They hate the Bush administration but they are routinely anti-American even when someone more agreeable occupies the White House. They don't much like business. In their view the free market causes more trouble than it's worth, and globalization is another word for evil. They believe unions are usually on the right side (even if they think their own unions are led by idiots). They have learned that there is one side to every question.

Much of this will sound like caricature to those who are unfamiliar with life in the CBC. Surely it can't be that bad? But those who get close to it often come away with similar observations. Their prejudices naturally affect their programs, as many viewers and listeners notice. One of my readers wrote to me: "The CBC has conditioned me to expect an anti-business, anti-American view on just about every conceivable issue."

But citizens who complain to management receive CBC-justifying letters that inevitably explain that the CBC is consistently fair. These letters are so long and tedious that they fill with glue, perhaps fatally, the mind of anyone who reads them. I think of this process as Death by Ombud. Its purpose is to ensure that the citizen in question will never, ever write a letter of protest again.

We understand a standard job interview at the CBC consists of two questions: “What contribution do you feel you can make to our organization?” and “What’s the matter with Kansas?”.

NOW THAT’S WHAT WE CALL ANCESTOR WORSHIP

Darwin's paradise in peril (Robin McKie, The Observer, September 24th, 2006)

n 1995, Godfrey Merlen, director of the environment group WorldAid, visited Isabela, an island in the Galapagos. What he saw horrified him.

Hundreds of goats were chewing their way across its grasslands and were denuding the once-lush terrain, transforming it into patchy grassland. 'It was total chaos,' said Merlen in the journal Science

Merlen's discovery sent shock waves through the environmental movement. For years, it had struggled to save these magical equatorial islands, home to some of the world's most exotic animals, from destruction caused by feral animals such as goats, pigs, cats and rats.

Now it seemed the place where Charles Darwin made his key discoveries in his path to outlining the idea of natural selection was about to be destroyed. One of the planet's most precious wild places was fighting for its life: its giant tortoises; its marine iguanas, the world's only sea-going reptiles; and its colonies of blue-footed boobies, flightless cormorants and albatrosses, all under threat of extinction.

The development galvanised environmentalists and led to the setting up of an £10m rescue programme to fight invasive species. Last week, campaigners announced the first major victory: the islands of Isabela, Santiago and Pinta were now officially goat-free, it was revealed - an act of species-cleansing that had required the killing of 140,000 goats.

'This is a phenomenal victory,' said Roslyn Cameron, of the Charles Darwin Research Station. Not only had a major threat to the islands' wildlife been eradicated, the project had established key methodologies for dealing with other feral pests, she added.

To rid themselves of the goats, sharp shooters were hired, packs of tracker dogs were imported from New Zealand, helicopters were used to ferry marksmen into the remote hearts of islands, while 'Judas' goats - sterilised females, plied with hormones - were used to entice solitary male goats towards hunters and their doom.

The resulting victory has been a major boost to environmentalists' morale...

Granted most of us wouldn’t hestiate to pop a goat or two to save Grandad, but gosh, even the ancient Hebrews thought one goat at a time on occasion was enough to propitiate the Deity at His angriest. Remember this the next time a Darwinist tells you it’s all strictly based on rational science and that there is absolutely no connection with the idea that it is morally acceptable to exterminate one species so that another may flourish.

SEINFELDIAN:

Wary Democrats drawing provisional bead on Dean (CRAGG HINES, 9/24/06, Houston Chronicle)

It's beginning to dawn on Democrats that they may not win control of the House or Senate in the November elections, so a pre-emptive blame game has begun. And the designated fall guy is Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee. [...]

Although Democrats remained at least strongly competitive in public polls last week, new reports revealed the Republican National Committee with more than three times as much cash on hand as the DNC at the beginning of September — $39 million vs. $11 million.

Separate Democratic finance operations in the House and Senate are competitive or lead their Republican counterpart. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee began September with $29.8 million on hand, as against the $18.6 million for the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

Dean's best explanation for his on-hand shortfall is that he has already spent millions in what he views as seed money to rebuild state party organizations, an expenditure that he believes will pay off not only in November but also in years to come, including in the 2008 presidential campaign.

That line of argument carries little immediate weight with Democratic leaders in the House and Senate. Reviewing Dean's tenure at the DNC, a House Democratic strategist said: "They don't have a problem fund-raising, but their burn rate is extremely high."

House and Senate Democratic campaign leaders now face urgent pleas from candidates in swing states and districts for last-minute infusions of funds. These are needed not only to finance television ads but also to match Republican turnout efforts that rest on several years of steady voter identification and motivation.

This Republican "ground game" was most evident and effective in the narrow re-election of President Bush two years ago, particularly in such close-run state contests as Ohio.

They've become a completely reactionary party, opposed to reform of the Welfare State, opposed to tax cuts, opposed to liberalizing the Middle East, opposed to limits on abortion, etc., etc., etc.... For the most part they've had sense enough not to mention any of these positions openly, but that's left them talking only about "corruption," which no one cares about, and hoping for the economy to tank. Instead gas prices are plunging this fall and consumers notice that rather quickly.

They're a party about nothing in a country where people believe in certain things.

MORE:
THE HATE TRAP (CRAIG CHARNEY, September 24, 2006, NY Post)

THE leftist and liberal throng who cheered Ven ezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez at a Harlem church Thursday, a day after he called President Bush "the devil," are just the latest sign of a real problem for the Democratic Party and the nation: Bush-hate is now the opiate of the party's base.

A recent Fox News poll gets at the disturbing truth: A majority of Democrats say they want to see the president fail. Such deep hatred is bad news for the country at a time when America needs to bridge the partisan divide. It's also bad news for the Democrats, who risk repeating the Republicans' mistakes of a decade ago, driving away the centrists they need to regain power or going too far if they do manage to win.

Fox's question was revealing: "Regardless of how you voted in the presidential election, would you say you want President Bush to succeed or not?" Democrats said "not," 51 percent to 40 percent - where the public at large wanted success by almost two to one. [...]

Hate is a fatal response in American politics. It leads to irrational, sectarian, and self-defeating behavior. Republicans, their base consumed by hatred for then-President Bill Clinton, showed this in 1998. Their impeachment drive pushed Clinton's polls into the stratosphere, yielding unprecedented mid-term gains for the Democrats.

In today's polarized environment, Democratic candidates feel pressure to respond to their angry voters to avoid the fate of centrist Senator Joseph Lieberman. He lost his Connecticut primary to a blog-powered anti-war newcomer, Ned Lamont. But the positions such candidates take may leave them out of the mainstream and unelectable. Lamont is discovering this in his general election rematch with Lieberman, who is running as an independent.

Some say a little anger is needed to fire up the Democratic base. Reality check: the Democratic base is just two-fifths of the electorate and liberals number just one voter in five. Yet the independent and moderate voters the Democrats must win over to regain a majority are repelled by candidates who pander to rageful supporters with tunnel vision.

WHILE my assignment was to write about Minnesota’s important Senate race, I think there’s more to be learned right now from the far closer contest in Minnesota’s Sixth Congressional District, which borders Minneapolis-St. Paul to the east, north and west. The race, between Michele Bachmann, the Republican, and Patty Wetterling, the Democrat, has revealed a Bush-era national trend now visible locally.

That is, we are facing a choice between a “conservative” who wants to institute radical reforms and a “progressive” who wishes largely to maintain the status quo. In Minnesota’s Sixth District, liberalism is the new conservatism.

AS THE DERANGED LEFT MORPHS INTO THE DERANGED RIGHT:

A Bad Bargain (NY Times, 9/22/06)

Even before the compromises began to emerge, the overall bill prepared by the three senators had fatal flaws. It allows the president to declare any foreigner, anywhere, an “illegal enemy combatant” using a dangerously broad definition, and detain him without any trial. It not only fails to deal with the fact that many of the Guantánamo detainees are not terrorists and will never be charged, but it also chokes off any judicial review.

The Democrats have largely stood silent and allowed the trio of Republicans to do the lifting. It’s time for them to either try to fix this bill or delay it until after the election. The American people expect their leaders to clean up this mess without endangering U.S. troops, eviscerating American standards of justice, or further harming the nation’s severely damaged reputation.

You worthless passel of cowards. They're laughing at you. You know that, right?

The national Democratic Party is no longer worth the cement needed to sink it to the bottom of the sea. For an entire week, it allowed a debate on changing the soul of the country to be conducted intramurally between the Torture Porn and Useful Idiot wings of the Republican Party, the latter best exemplified by John McCain, who keeps fashioning his apparently fathomless ambition into a pair of clown shoes with which he can do the monkey dance across the national stage.

WHEN THE OBLIGATORY NAZI REFERENCES RETURN YOU KNOW WE'RE WINNING:

Taking Aim: a review of PRETENSIONS TO EMPIRE: Notes on the Criminal Folly of the Bush Administration By Lewis H. Lapham (JENNIFER SENIOR, 9/24/06, NY Times Book Review)

[Lewis Lapham, t]he editor emeritus of Harper’s Magazine and its Notebook columnist for more than 25 years, Lapham compares the Bush administration to a “criminal syndicate” and Condoleezza Rice to a “capo.” He likens the United States to “a well-ordered police state” and the policies of its Air Force to those of Torquemada and Osama bin Laden. He calls Bush “a liar,” “a televangelist,” “a wastrel” and (ultimately) “a criminal — known to be armed and shown to be dangerous.”

Well. At least his point of view is unambiguous. But unless you agree with it 100 percent — and are content to see almost no original reporting or analysis in support of these claims — you may feel less inclined to throttle Lapham’s targets than to throttle Lapham himself. For this book is all about Lewis Lapham: the breathtaking lyricism of his voice, the breadth of his remarkable erudition. He goes across the street and around the corner to confirm the worst stereotypes about liberals — that they’re condescending, twee, surpassingly smug. “What I find surprising is the lack of objection,” he writes of the misguided American public. “The opinion polls show four of every five respondents saying that they gladly would give up as many of their civil rights and liberties as might be needed to pay the ransom for their illusory safety.” Wouldn’t Lapham be a more interesting columnist if he took this finding seriously? And analyzed it, perhaps, giving it its due? (Though later he generously allows that not every Idahoan and Nebraskan “is as dumb as Donald Rumsfeld,” based on his “reading of the national character in the library of American history and biography and a fairly extensive acquaintance with the novels of Melville, Twain, Howells, James, Wharton, Dreiser, Faulkner, Cather, Anderson, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, O’Hara and Roth.” Idahoans and Nebraskans, rejoice.)

People who are serious about politics don’t just preen. They report, explain, explore contradictions, struggle with ideas, maybe even propose suggestions. If they do none of these things, they’re simply heckling, and if the best Lapham can do is come up with 50 inventive new ways to call Bush an imbecilic oligarch, that’s all he’s doing: heckling. Like his worst counterparts on the right, he compares those he doesn’t like to fanatics, as when he refers to David Frum and Richard Perle as “Mufti Frum” and “Mullah Perle,” adding, “Provide them with a beard, a turban and a copy of the Koran, and I expect that they wouldn’t have much trouble stoning to death a woman discovered in adultery with a cameraman from CBS News.” Possibly, but provide Lapham with a blond wig, stiletto pumps and a copy of “The Fountainhead,” and I suspect he wouldn’t look much different from Ann Coulter. He’s just another talk-radio host, really — only this time by way of Yale and Mensa.

There’s one column that’s conspicuously absent from this collection, and that’s the one from September 2004, which included a brief account of the Republican National Convention. Lapham wrote it as if the convention had already happened, ruefully reflecting on the content and sharing with readers a question that occurred to him as he listened; unfortunately, the magazine arrived on subscribers’ doorsteps before the convention had even taken place, forcing Lapham to admit that the scene was a fiction. He apologized, but pointed out that political conventions are drearily scripted anyway — he basically knew what was going to be said. By this logic, though, I could have chosen not to read “Pretensions to Empire” before reviewing it, since I already knew Lapham’s sensibility, just as he claims to know the Republicans’. But I dutifully read the whole book. And I discovered, with some ironic poignancy, that Lapham did have a point: some people never acquire any more nuance as they go.

PRAGMATIC MEANING CONSERVATIVE:

The Netroots Hit Their Limits: Liberal online activists are finding you can't move elections with just modems and IM (PERRY BACON JR., 9/24/06, TIME)

You've heard the story: the Netroots, the Democratic Party's equivalent of a punk garage band—edgy, loud and antiauthoritarian—are suddenly on the verge of the big time. The gang of liberal bloggers and online activists who helped raise millions of dollars for Howard Dean's presidential campaign two years ago are now said to be Democratic kingmakers. Last month in Connecticut, they fanned anti-incumbent and antiwar flames and were widely credited with the primary defeat of Senator Joe Lieberman, leading him to run as an independent. After they relentlessly derided Senator Hillary Clinton as calculating, overly cautious and lacking true liberal bona fides, she hired an adviser just to deal with them and even demanded that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld resign. Coincidence? Moderate Democrats say it with remorse, conservatives with glee, but the conventional wisdom is bipartisan: progressive bloggers are pushing the Democratic Party so far to the left that it will have no chance of capturing the presidency in 2008.

Or maybe the Netroots aren't all that. Make no mistake, these online activists are having a profound impact on the Democrats and on politics in general. But the phenomenon is in its infancy. Compared with established interest groups like organized labor and conservative Christians, the Netroots play a small role in national politics. Even their most ardent players now recognize that you can't create a true movement using nothing but modems and instant messaging. "The Netroots cannot elect someone alone," says Matt Stoller, a blogger at the popular group site MyDD. [...]

No one recognizes the Netroots' limits more than the activists themselves, which is why they are changing their tactics. First of all, they're becoming pragmatic about policy goals. There's little demand from the Netroots for Democrats to support gay marriage, for example, even though 91% of the people who gave money to or worked on Dean's campaign back it, according to a 2005 Pew poll. "We're not asking anyone to commit political suicide," says Eli Pariser, executive director of MoveOn. If the Democrats win the House, it will be on the strength of moderate candidates in places like Indiana, many of whom don't support one of MoveOn's top priorities, a timetable for withdrawal of troops from Iraq. And the bloggers are actively supporting and giving money to many of these more centrist candidates. Virginia Senate candidate Jim Webb was encouraged to run and has received more than $280,000 from the Netroots, even though he served in the Reagan Administration as Navy Secretary and was a Republican until recently.

NEVER TOO SOON TO FORGE THE NEXT SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP (via Mike Daley):

Cameron's chance to convince the country (Iain Martin, 24/09/2006, Daily Telegraph)

One team is looking backward, the other is looking forward. The contrast could not be better for David Cameron. Alongside Tony Blair at the Labour Party conference in Manchester will be a former American President who makes the Prime Minister look like an amateur when it comes to sentimentality and showbiz shmaltz. The sense that Manchester is a full-stop at the end of an era of "progressive politics" is summed up by Blair having his old friend Bill Clinton on hand to help him say goodbye. Next weekend, however, Cameron is due to share a platform with the Republican front-runner in the race to be the next man in the Oval Office.

Cameron strategists plan to make as much as possible of the presence of Senator John McCain at their conference. He will be welcomed next Saturday by Cameron himself, then, on Sunday, they will both appear on the BBC's Andrew Marr programme: interviewed separately, but seated alongside each other at the end of the show. Then, later the same day, they will make their speeches.

The abiding image, his advisers hope, will be of the trim 68-year-old Senator and the prime ministerial frontrunner looking like men who can do business together.

MORE:
Poll brings pain for Democrats (DAVID YEPSEN, September 24, 2006, Des Moines Register)

Today's Iowa Poll of the 2008 race for president in the Hawkeye state ought to make Republicans happy and cause a pause on the Democratic side.

It's particularly bad news for Gov. Tom Vilsack and Sen. Hillary Clinton, two Democrats gearing up for that contest.

We asked likely Iowa voters what they'd do in some hypothetical 2008 matchups in the state. The two GOP front-runners, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Arizona Sen. John McCain, beat the Democratic front-runners - Clinton, former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards and Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry.

(Giuliani beats Clinton 56-37; Edwards, 51-43; and Kerry, 53-40. McCain defeats Clinton 54-37; Edwards, 47-46; and Kerry, 53-39.)

THAR, SHE BLOWS! (via Qiao Yang):

The Airbus Fiasco (Thomas Lifson, 9/23/06, Real Clear Politics)

As a supreme symbol of Europe's prowess in aerospace, indeed in modern technology itself, the A 380 superjumbo jet, is melting down. No longer the embodiment of European cooperation and unity, its third announced delivery delay reveals internal chaos, bickering, finger-pointing and recrimination within Airbus and its parent EADS.

The whalejet, as it is known to some, has morphed from queen of the air into drama queen of the air. [...]

Airbus and its parent EADS are the product of mergers done in the name of European unity, intended to produce a giant that could compete with the likes of Boeing and Lockheed-Martin in both civil aviation and defense. State shareholders and "launch aid" funding make it beholden to political interests, not markets alone, in its decision-making. It is often cited as a "social enterprise" of the European model, not merely interested in profits, but in public service and the welfare of its employees.

Such muddled thinking has produced results that are currently serving nobody. Except maybe sales executives of rival Boeing, chalking up more and more orders for the 787 Dreamliner, a smaller, more efficient, longer range competitor, offering passengers the option of avoiding crowded hub airports and time consuming changes of plane, and flying nonstop to their destination.

The confusing, even contradictory reactions of A 380 customers to the third announcement of a delay, as reported in the world press, are a sign of the hardball negotiations underway. Billions of dollars are at stake, but in aviation, nobody wants to undermine passenger confidence, so direct expressions of dismay and votes of no confidence are as rare as French military triumphs in the last two centuries.

WE ARE DEVO:

Brown vows to change way Britain is governed (Patrick Hennessy, 24/09/2006, Sunday Telegraph)

Gordon Brown today commits himself to a "new politics" and a change in the way that Britain is governed, in a radical personal manifesto for the leadership of the Labour Party.

The Chancellor believes that the Government "still has lessons to learn", more than nine years after Tony Blair entered Downing Street, and must be more accountable to both Parliament and the public. [...]

The Chancellor spoke to The Sunday Telegraph on a whistle-stop trip to New York last week. He indicated that he would sweep away Mr Blair's "sofa" style of government, in which decisions are taken by a small clique of advisers, and the spin and sleaze rows that have dogged the Prime Minister's time in office.

In their place would come a return to Cabinet government, a greater role for Parliament and a wholesale devolution of powers in providing public services that are likely to see politicians losing day-to-day control in a wide range of areas, including the NHS.

The plans could also see the abolition of an entire ministry, the Department for Trade and Industry.

His officials later suggested that Mr Brown was also studying plans to give Britain its first written constitution, a document that would enshrine the roles of monarchy, government, parliament and judiciary, as well as the legal rights of citizens.

DOESN'T MATTER WHAT YOU CALL IT:

Hamas Says It's Serious on Power Share (IBRAHIM BARZAK, 9/24/06, Associated Press)

[Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas] signaled a willingness to compromise Sunday.

"We are going to resume talks on the formation of a national coalition government," he said in a statement. "We have serious intentions to make it succeed, and we hope that the talks will resume soon."

Haniyeh and Abbas were to meet in Gaza on Monday or Tuesday.

Despite their differences, Hamas and Abbas appear to have little choice but to govern together.

Hamas needs Fatah to win international recognition and restore foreign aid. Abbas could fire the current government and install a new one, but would then require the approval of parliament, which is controlled by Hamas. Early elections are seen as an unpopular option, and there are no guarantees Fatah would win.

Defense Minister Amir Peretz said Saturday that if Hamas were to recognize Israel and agree to abide by agreements previously accepted by the Palestinian Authority, he would urge the government to negotiate directly with Hamas.

Speaking in a Rosh Hashana interview with Israel Radio Saturday, Peretz said that if Hamas met these conditions, a Palestinian unity government was not needed as a prerequisite to talks.

Peretz added that it was necessary to "wait and see what the unity government's basic priniciples and orientation will be."

"What difference does it make what the government is called? If Hamas were to recognize Israel's right to exist, I would recommend direct talks with Hamas," Peretz said.

The defense minister said a Palestinian unity government should be judged on the basis of whether it intends to take the path of negotiations with Israel, or continue on the path of terrorism.

HAD ENOUGH?:

Democrats' edge erased in new poll (Donald Lambro, September 24, 2006, THE WASHINGTON TIMES)

The Democrats' yearlong lead among likely voters has evaporated, strengthening Republican chances of holding majority control in the House, according to the Gallup Poll.

Gallup's latest survey of voters who say they will go to the polls Nov. 7 showed the contest is a "dead heat" between those who say they will vote Republican (48 percent) and those who say they intend to support Democrats (48 percent). The poll of 1,003 adults was conducted Sept. 15-17.

MORE:
Democrats set to air ads in bid to derail Steele (Jon Ward, September 24, 2006, THE WASHINGTON TIMES)

Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele's assertive campaign for U.S. Senate since the Sept. 12 primary has prompted national Democrats to start running attack ads sooner than they had planned.

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee originally bought $1 million worth of TV time for the two weeks leading up to the Nov. 7 general election, then decided to start running ads Tuesday, according to the Steele campaign.

"This is a clear indication of the national Democratic Party bosses' scramble to maintain control over Maryland," said Michael Leavitt, campaign manager for Mr. Steele, a Republican.

THE SKILLS ARE MORE USEFUL ANYWAY:

Failing pupils to learn trades at new schools (EDDIE BARNES, 9/24/06, Scotland on Sunday)

TENS of thousands of Scottish pupils will be removed from traditional academic classes to learn trades under a controversial plan to be unveiled by Jack McConnell today.

The First Minister wants pupils aged 14 and over who are failing academically to attend 'Skills Academies', where they will be taught how to become plumbers, electricians, joiners and other skilled workers.

As many as a 100 such academies are to be created, based either at further education colleges or on school premises.

The move is a radical attempt to deal with the thousands of demotivated school-leavers who head into the workplace without either qualifications or job skills.

McConnell, in an astonishingly blunt outburst, declared there was no point in such youngsters sitting through French lessons when they can't speak English properly.

NUMBERS GAME

Iraqi parties agree to federalism bill (QASSIM ABDUL-ZAHRA, 9/24/06, Associated Press)

Iraq's fractious ethnic and religious parliamentary groups agreed Sunday to open debate on a contentious Shiite-proposed draft legislation that will allow the creation of federal regions in Iraq, politicians said.

The agreement came after a compromise was reached with Sunni Arabs on setting up a parliamentary committee to amend Iraq's constitution, a key demand by the minority. [...]

The federalism bill calls for setting up a system to allow the creation of autonomous regions in the predominantly Shiite south, much like the self-ruling Kurdish region in northern Iraq. Sunni Arabs have said they fear the legislation will split Iraq apart and fuel sectarian bloodshed.

The Kurdish north and Shiite south hold Iraq's oil fields, while the predominantly Sunni Arab areas are mostly desert.

FASHION FOR STRAIGHT MEN:

Big is beautiful on the Milan catwalk: After London row over 0-0 models, size 16s step out (Barbara McMahon, September 24, 2006, Observer)

Milan Fashion week kicked off with another band of glamorous models sashaying down the runway, yet there was one notable difference: they had flesh on their bones. With the row over too-thin models rumbling on, it was ironic that the opening show in the famously chic Italian fashion capital featured clothes for the fuller-figured.

Size 14 and 16 models strutted their stuff at the Elena Miro fashion show, displaying busts, hips and bottoms with abandon. Curves were confidently on show and body mass indices, the measure of body fat based on height and weight and the rating that has caused so much controversy in the past week, were clearly not an issue. [...]

The fashion label caters for women whose sizes range from 12 to 26, but, according to Miroglio, its core customer will be in the 16-18 range. 'We like to think that we design for real women,' he added. 'They're feminine and sexy and they will show a lot of decollete. We don't think our customers should miss out on fashion just because they are not the standard sizes.'

THE PUPPET STAYS IN THE OPERA:

Madama Butterfly Is Ready for Her Close-Up (MATTHEW GUREWITSCH, 9/24/06, NY Times)

At 52 [Anthony Minghella, the Oscar-winning director of “The English Patient,] claims to have the metabolism of a tortoise, meaning that he moves slowly. Decades ago, when he first to came to London as a young playwright, his friend and landlord David Parry, a conductor, was already pressuring Mr. Minghella to put his mind to opera. Nearly a year ago Mr. Parry got his wish when the English National Opera in London unveiled the Minghella “Butterfly.” (Mr. Parry conducted. Monday night, James Levine will do the honors. All later Met performances are to be conducted by Asher Fisch.)

The timing of the project fell just right for Mr. Gelb, who as president of the Sony Classical label released the soundtrack of Mr. Minghella’s film “The Talented Mr. Ripley” in 1999.

“When I was appointed in the fall of 2004,” Mr. Gelb said recently in his incompletely renovated office, “Anthony sent me an e-mail congratulating me. I wrote back saying, ‘When will you do your first opera with us?’ And he wrote back, ‘I am doing my first opera.’ ”

As it happened, Mr. Minghella had started down this same road with the London company before, only to withdraw in dismay at the realities of opera casting.

“In the movies I would have been auditioning Japanese teenagers,” he said, “but no teenager can sing ‘Butterfly.’ ” Yet, as he came to realize, the inherent make-believe of opera leaves the door wide open for theatrical invention. In the boldest stroke of his production, he cast the silent role of Trouble, Butterfly’s little son by Pinkerton, with a bunraku-style puppet, manipulated in plain sight of the audience by three operators from the experimental puppet troupe Blind Summit Theater.

This is Mr. Minghella’s solution to a problem many viewers might suppose does not even exist. Played the old-fashioned way for more than a century, Trouble’s scenes have always seemed as close to surefire as it gets. To the director Mark Lamos, whose “Butterfly” has been affecting audiences at the New York City Opera for many seasons, the boy’s entrance is one of the greatest in all of drama.

“If you don’t already know the story,” Mr. Lamos said recently, “it’s completely unexpected. He stands for Butterfly’s innocence as much as for the mistake that caused him. He’s a paradigm for his parents’ relationship, as most children are. But if he’s too little, he’s too cute and steals the audience’s attention in spite of themselves. If he’s too old, he’s not believable. Casting him takes great care. If he’s good and he’s carefully staged, it’s heartbreaking.”

Mr. Minghella was determined to evoke the heartbreak by other means.

“Once you give up your 15-year-old native Japanese Butterfly,” he said, “why cling to the 2-year-old child? Ask any Butterfly. Once the boy is onstage, the performance is all about managing the kid. A child can’t inhabit the part of a Eurasian orphan at the start of the 20th century. At best he can navigate his way around the stage.

“It’s as if you were doing ‘Henry V,’ and suddenly a real horse came onstage in a battle scene. The horse would invalidate the whole premise of the prologue, which invites the audience to use its imagination. What we want to say to the audience is: ‘Come with us. Let’s pretend together.’ ”

Wasn’t that, pretty much, the message of the theater guru Peter Brook’s classic manifesto “The Empty Space”? Yes, and it is a text Mr. Minghella reveres.

By all accounts audiences have responded warmly to the bunraku Trouble, and so have sopranos, though Ms. Gallardo-Domâs admits that her first reaction, seeing the production in London, was shock.

“It’s a big change not to have a baby, a boy, a human being,” she said. “But it amazed me to see how strong a presence the puppet is. And when I began work at the Met, from the first moment that I met my puppet son, we immediately had a relationship: Butterfly, the boy and the three puppeteers. Whatever my feelings are, the puppet interprets them, articulates them. He gives me concentration.”

As opera is a fusion of many arts, directing opera sums up all Mr. Minghella has learned in other disciplines. At the same time, he finds in this new line of work an unaccustomed freedom.

“I’m an interpreter in this context, not the creator,” he said. “The blessing is that I don’t have to know it all. I can bring in experts. Film requires one eye, one vision. You have to make a decision every three seconds. In theater the group carries the load. It’s not necessary to do everybody’s job, and there’s no pleasure in that.”

Now that he has taken the plunge into opera, chances are, there will be more.

ONE BUILT WITH STRAW, THE OTHER WITH BRICKS:

Former Washington Post senior political reporter, Thomas Edsall, with an extremely candid look at mainstream media (The Hugh Hewitt Show, 9-21-06)

HH: Welcome to the program now Thomas Edsall, whose new book, Building Red America, has turned a lot of heads. He's got an article in the New Republic this week. I'm going to focus on the book. Thomas Edsall, welcome to the Hugh Hewitt Show. [...]

HH: I know, but national politics. Local politics is different. I think it’s in the selection of stories, stories not pursued. I mean, right now, the canard is oh, I covered the impeachment of Bill Clinton, liberal Democrats who are newsroom types tell me. I say, well, you have to. That’s a story you can’t…it’s like not seeing the iceberg, and taking the Titanic down. But in the agenda setting stuff…let me approach it this way. Is there any big name political reporter, and you know them all, Thomas Edsall. That’s why your book, Building Red America, is getting read left and right. Are there any of them who are conservative?

TE: Big name political reporter?

HH: Right.

TE: Jim Vandehei of the Washington Post.

HH: Think he’s voted for Republicans for president?

TE: Yes, I think he has. I don’t know, because he’s never told me. But I would think he has.

HH: And so, of those sorts…and he’s a very fine reporter.

TE: He is.

HH: He probably is a Republican. But given that number of reporters out there, is it ten to one Democrat to Republican? Twenty to one Democrat to Republican?

TE: It’s probably in the range of 15-25:1 Democrat.

HH: Can the mainstream media ever be fair as a result?

TE: Well, you know, you’re asking, I think, a wrong question. I think the problem is that there is a real difficulty on the part of the mainstream media being sympathetic, or empathetic, whatever the word would be, to the kind of thinking that goes into conservative approaches to issues. I think the religious right has been treated as sort of an alien world…

MORE:

NEWSDAY UNION
DONATED TO POLS (AP, September 24, 2006)

The union representing Newsday's reporters and editors violated its own ethics by contributing money to politicians covered by the daily, the paper reported yesterday.

$40'LL BE FINE:

Experts look for the floor on oil prices (KRISTEN HAYS, 9/22/06, Houston Chronicle)

An oil economist who accurately predicted two years ago that oil would reach $70 a barrel has reversed course, saying recent steep declines could foreshadow a sell-off to $20 or less.

"Nobody in the government sector who thinks about policy thinks it can happen. That's the greatest danger," said Philip Verleger, an independent economist who heads PK Verleger in Aspen, Colo. [...]

The overall consensus among analysts suggests that the factors behind the drop don't suggest a free-fall.

The Morgan Stanley report said the run-up to nearly $80 a barrel coincided with political tensions in Lebanon, Nigeria and Iran, as well as fears that hurricanes could once again batter the Gulf Coast oil business during the peak summer driving season.

But prices fell as those worries ebbed and the U.S. Energy Department said gasoline and heating oil stockpiles were up.

Another factor in the price slide has been commodity investors, skittish over the decline, who are pausing, taking profits or fleeing, Merrill Lynch & Co. analyst John Herrlin Jr. said in a report this week.

"In reality, many made investment suppositions predicated on scarcity or supply disruption that didn't occur. Now the markets have to adjust to 'the unwinding,' " he wrote.

AT LEAST DAVID IRVING OPPPOSES CFC's... (via Tom Morin):

Global cooling effect (Terence Corcoran, September 16, 2006, National Post)

News that the Conservatives might be taking a more cautious approach to Kyoto and climate change could not come at a more appropriate time. The science behind the idea of man-made global warming, always theoretical and often speculative, appears set to receive another blow. A report in New Scientist magazine yesterday chronicles the work of a crew of scientists who forecast a new wave of global cooling brought on by a decline in activity in the sun. [...]

Dramatic global temperature fluctuations, as New Scientist reports, are the norm. A Little Ice Age struck Europe in the 17th century. New Yorkers once walked from Manhattan to Staten Island across a frozen harbour. About 200 years earlier, New Scientist reminds us, a sharp downturn in temperatures turned fertile Greenland into Arctic wasteland.

These and other temperature swings corresponded with changing solar activity. "It's a boom-bust system, and I expect a crash soon," says Nigel Weiss, a solar physicist at the University of Cambridge. Scientists cannot say precisely how big the coming cooling will be, but it could at minimum be enough to offset the current theoretical impact of man-made global warming. Sam Solanki, of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany, says declining solar activity could drop global temperatures by 0.2 degrees Celsius. "It might not sound like much," says New Scientist writer Stuart Clark, "but this temperature reversal would be as big as the most optimistic estimate of the results of restricting greenhouse-gas emissions until 2050 in line with the Kyoto protocol." [...]

Another scientist tracking the sun, one among many, was Theodor Landscheidt, the late and renowned German solar expert and forecaster. "Analysis of the sun's varying activity in the last two millennia indicates that contrary to the IPCC's speculation about man-made global warming as high as 5.8 degrees Centigrade within the next 100 years, a long period of cool climate with its coldest phase around 2030 is to be expected."

Worth noting here is Timothy Ball, the former University of Manitoba climatologist and frequent contributor to the idea that official government science is ignoring the role of the sun and that global cooling may be looming, not warming. Mr. Ball, for his thoughts, has become the victim of a slanderous campaign by David Suzuki and his associate, Vancouver public relations guru James Hoggan. They charge Mr. Ball with being a climate change "denier" -- as if it were akin to denying the Holocaust.