DID I SAY "SCALIA?" I MEANT, "SOUTER":

Giuliani-Appointed Judges Tend to Lean to the Left (Ben Smith, February 28, 2007, Politico)

When Rudy Giuliani faces Republicans concerned about his support of gay rights and legal abortion, he reassures them that he is a conservative on the decisions that matter most.

"I would want judges who are strict constructionists because I am," he told South Carolina Republicans last month. "Those are the kinds of justices I would appoint -- Scalia, Alito and Roberts."

But most of Giuliani's judicial appointments during his eight years as mayor of New York were hardly in the model of Chief Justice John Roberts or Samuel Alito -- much less aggressive conservatives in the mold of Antonin Scalia.

A Politico review of the 75 judges Giuliani appointed to three of New York state's lower courts found that Democrats outnumbered Republicans by more than 8 to 1. One of his appointments was an officer of the International Association of Lesbian and Gay Judges. Another ruled that the state law banning liquor sales on Sundays was unconstitutional because it was insufficiently secular.

A third, an abortion-rights supporter, later made it to the federal bench in part because New York Sen. Charles E. Schumer, a liberal Democrat, said he liked her ideology.

Cumulatively, Giuilani's record was enough to win applause from people like Kelli Conlin, the head of NARAL Pro-Choice New York, the state's leading abortion-rights group. "They were decent, moderate people," she said.

MIGHT HELP IF THEY DIDN'T FILL THE SAME PRESCRIPTION THREE TIMES...:

Alzheimer's patients overpaying for drugs (JENNY HOPE, 28th February 2007, Daily Mail)

QUITE IRRELEVANT:

This Spring America's Target Is Not Iran But Pakistan (Abid Mustafa, 01 March, 2007, Countercurrents.org)

The rising NATO causalities spurred the EU, especially Britain to expose Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan. This forced the Bush administration to gradually withdraw its support for the peace deals. By now Pakistan was also struggling to gain control of the Pushtoon resistance. British influence in the religious seminaries, amongst the scholars and in the tribal areas, foiled Pakistan's attempt to create a monolithic Taleban army that Pakistan could use effectively. Beyond Quetta and some parts of tribal areas the new Taliban failed to make impact.

It is not the first time the EU has been at odds with the US over Afghanistan. European countries have consistently refused to deploy a significant numbers of troops assist NATO efforts in Afghanistan. In his speech at the AEI, President Bush lamented at European countries for their failings. He said, "For NATO to succeed, member nations must provide commanders on the ground with the troops and the equipment they need to do their jobs.As well, allies must lift restrictions on the forces they do provide so NATO commanders have the flexibility they need to defeat the enemy wherever the enemy may make a stand." The EU's reluctance to contribute to NATO's mission in war torn Afghanistan can only be explained by its desire to see America fail in Afghanistan. But at the same time the EU does not want to see Islam returning to Afghanistan-a political conundrum it has been unable to solve.

The additional US and UK soldiers sent to be bolster NATO troops in Afghanistan fall way short of the numbers required to confront the Pushtoon resistance. The troop numbers have been further exacerbated by America's distrust of the Afghan army- the army has been intentionally deprived of heavy weaponry-rendering almost useless in any upcoming battle. All of this means that the US will have to bear the brunt of the fighting. This comes as a huge blow- US forces are over stretched in Iraq and there are not enough troops to send to Afghanistan. The situation is rapidly deteriorating in Afghanistan. The assassination attempt on Dick Cheney clearly highlights America's predicament.

To redress this situation America has again turned to Musharraf to prepare for a mini war in the tribal belt and Southern Afghanistan. Negroponte's remarks about Al Qaeda regrouping in Pakistan and the recent US intelligence assessments echoing similar findings are intended to prepare opinion both at home and abroad for this war. It is expected that Pakistan will provide the bulk of the troops for this offensive, while NATO will utilise the American build up in the Gulf to conduct air strikes and limited ground operations.

America knows full well that she will not be able to crush the Pushtun resistance and that Musharraf may not survive. But the US has no choice-it is make or break for the US in Afghanistan and the calculus of Musharraf survival is irrelevant.

BLOOD LUST:

Justice for Darfur (Angelina Jolie, February 28, 2007, Washington Post)

Until the killers and their sponsors are prosecuted and punished, violence will continue on a massive scale. Ending it may well require military action. But accountability can also come from international tribunals, measuring the perpetrators against international standards of justice. [...]

As the prosecutions unfold, I hope the international community will intervene, right away, to protect the people of Darfur and prevent further violence. The refugees don't need more resolutions or statements of concern. They need follow-through on past promises of action.

There has been a groundswell of public support for action. People may disagree on how to intervene -- airstrikes, sending troops, sanctions, divestment -- but we all should agree that the slaughter must be stopped and the perpetrators brought to justice.

In my five years with UNHCR, I have visited more than 20 refugee camps in Sierra Leone, Congo, Kosovo and elsewhere. I have met families uprooted by conflict and lobbied governments to help them. Years later, I have found myself at the same camps, hearing the same stories and seeing the same lack of clean water, medicine, security and hope.

It has become clear to me that there will be no enduring peace without justice. History shows that there will be another Darfur, another exodus, in a vicious cycle of bloodshed and retribution. But an international court finally exists. It will be as strong as the support we give it. This might be the moment we stop the cycle of violence and end our tolerance for crimes against humanity.

What the worst people in the world fear most is justice. That's what we should deliver.

CASEY JONES, YOU BETTER WATCH YOUR SPEED:

Some in Iran denounce Ahmadinejad stance (IranMania.com, February 27, 2007)

On Monday, the US, the four other permanent members of the Security Council and Germany met in London to consider further sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program, after Tehran rejected UN demands it halt its uranium enrichment program.

On the eve of the gathering, Ahmadinejad struck a defiant tone. He told a group of clerics that Iran's nuclear ambitions were unstoppable. "The train of the Iranian nation is without brakes and a rear gear ... We dismantled the reverse gear and brakes of the train and threw them away some time ago," he said.

Those comments brought a hail of condemnations in Iran on Monday, not only from reformists who have long opposed Ahmadinejad, but also from conservatives who once backed him but now see his fiery rhetoric as needlessly provoking the West into confrontation.

"Why are you speaking a language that causes a person to be ashamed?" wrote the reformist daily Etemad-e-Melli, or National Confidence.

"A train's brakes are needed to reach its destination safely," it said. "You represent the voters of the great Iranian nation. Speak equal to the name and dignity of this nation."

The conservative daily Resalat chided Ahmadinejad, saying "neither weakness nor unnecessarily offensive language is acceptable in foreign policy."

"Our foreign policy must reflect the ancient Iranian civilization and rich Islamic culture of the Iranian nation. Therefore, delicacy ... rich diplomatic language and non-primitive policies must be part of a calculated combination to work," it said.

Ahmadinejad's critics have grown more vocal ever since his allies suffered a humiliating defeat in local elections in December. That vote was swept by reformists and anti-Ahmadinejad conservatives who said the president has spent too much time castigating the West and neglected dealing with Iran's faltering economy.

A WELL-EARNED CONTEMPT, NO?:

Cheney's Rules for the Press (Dan Froomkin, February 28, 2007, washingtonpost.com)

After nine days of almost completely ignoring the small pool of reporters who diligently followed him around through seven countries, Vice President Cheney yesterday finally agreed to a short group interview. But only on one condition: The reporters would have to agree not to tell anyone that the person they talked to was him.

Cheney's insistence on being identified as a "senior administration official" -- even when the transcript shows he spoke in the first person -- is in some ways laughably trivial.

But in other ways, the vice president's decision to extort reporters into a ridiculous agreement reflects the contempt Cheney has for the press corps.

CERTAINLY HAD VILLAINS THOUGH:

Over There: America's Unsung Heroes (MARK MOYAR, February 28, 2007, NY Sun)

Neil Sheehan began his Pulitzer-Prize winning book "A Bright Shining Lie" by pronouncing the Vietnam War "a war without heroes." In the rest of the book, the Americans in Vietnam largely came across as fools, liars, criminals, or a combination thereof, with the exception of Mr. Sheehan and his fellow journalists, who were depicted as brave unmaskers of ineptitude and absurdity. Sheehan ignored the real heroism of many brave Americans -- such as Marvin Shields, Carlos McAfee, Antonio Smaldone, and Steven L. Bennett, to name but a few -- and many military victories, for American triumphs did not square with his claims about the war. He badly distorted press involvement in the war so that he and his colleagues, particularly David Halberstam and Stanley Karnow, could dodge the blame they deserved for promoting the disastrous coup against the South Vietnamese government in November 1963.

The Vietnam-era journalists began a tradition that today's press consistently upholds. We hear very little from most large press outlets about American heroes in Iraq and Afghanistan, men like James Coffman Jr., Danny Dietz, and Christopher Adlesperger, or about our military successes there. Instead of associating such names with these wars, Americans associate the words they hear most often from the press, like Abu Ghraib and Haditha. As in Vietnam, too, the shunning of heroes does not extend to the press's coverage of itself. Awards to journalists, both those who have spent time in Iraq and Afghanistan and those who have not, are considered worthy of lengthy news stories.

Publicizing American heroism and success is essential today for two reasons. First, it permits a nuanced view of Iraq and Afghanistan, one which cannot be discerned from the daily stories of sectarian murders and the photos of American troops who have just been killed. Second, American troops and the American people become more courageous and resolute when they hear of their countrymen's military heroism and success, past and present. In earlier times, Americans ingrained their traditions of heroism and victory into the country's youth through historical instruction. Today's history textbooks largely ignore America's military past, a reflection of the anti-military prejudices, lack of military experience, and cosmopolitanism that pervade the intelligentsia.

Most Americans outside of academia and the mainstream press, on the other hand, still understand the importance of military tradition, and they crave stories about valorous Americans at war. We are fortunate, therefore, to have "Don't Tread on Me: A 400-Year History of America at War, From Indian Fighting to Terrorist Hunting" (Crown, 464 pages, $27.50) to satisfy that yearning. In witty and irreverent prose, author H.W. Crocker III provides a broad survey of America's martial history, starting at the arrival of the first English colonists and ending with the present wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Among the great military men whom Mr. Crocker profiles are some who remain widely known because they later became president (Jackson, Taylor, Theodore Roosevelt), or because their renown is too enormous to hide (Douglas MacArthur, George Patton). But most are men whose fame has been dimmed by the neglect of the cultural elites.

JUST KEEP WINNING:

US troops in Philippines defy old stereotype: In southern islands, the US has helped the Philippine Army for more than five years to stem Muslim insurgency. (Simon Montlake, 3/01/07, The Christian Science Monitor)

One measure of the US approach can be found on Basilan, where US troops first deployed in 2002. At the time, the extremist group Abu Sayyaf had turned the island, a 30-minute ferry ride from Zamboanga, into a no-go zone with a string of abductions, bombings, and beheadings.

Commander Steve Kelley, a naval engineering reservist, says it was a tough mission. "It wasn't a warm welcome," he recalls. But humanitarian projects, including the construction of an 80- kilometer (50-mile) coastal road and a series of mobile clinics, won residents over. "It was a huge turnaround," he says. Local officials say the improved security has restored normalcy.

PURPLEY:

Color it cauliflower: Diverse selection puts nutty flavor back in favor (Amy Scattergood, 2/28/07, Los Angeles Times)

Long neglected and even maligned, cauliflower is back in fashion, thanks not only to appealing colored varieties showing up in farmers markets and grocery stores, but also to chefs who have rediscovered the vegetable's subtle charms.

The many-lobed vegetable is spotlighted for its nuanced flavors and rich nutty notes in such dishes as cauliflower panna cotta with beluga caviar, sea urchin with lobster gelee and cauliflower cream, and cauliflower risotto with carpaccio of cauliflower and chocolate jelly.

Vivid colors -- purple Graffiti, orange Cheddar and stunning green Romanesco cauliflowers -- add to the attraction. The newly popular varieties are a mixture of heirloom varieties, naturally occurring accidents and the hybrids grown from them.

Perhaps the most dramatic with its conical florets is the heirloom Romanesco, a near-perfect example of a naturally occurring fractal: a fragmented geometric shape composed of smaller parts that are copies of the whole.

The new cauliflower colors not only liven up the plate visually but also are significant indicators of flavor and health benefits.

Purple cauliflower, which gets its deep lavender color from anthocyanins, the antioxidant in red wine, has a milder flavor than white cauliflower -- it's sweeter, nuttier and without the bitterness sometimes found in its white cousin. Steamed, simmered or roasted, it retains its lavender beauty, especially with a little lemon or vinegar splashed on before cooking (though some purple varieties can turn green if overcooked).

1 tablespoon butter
1 leek, white part only, thinly sliced ( 1/2 cup)
3 medium purple potatoes, peeled and quartered (about 1 1/2 cups)
Florets from 2 small heads purple cauliflower (3 1/2 cups)
4 cups whole milk
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1/8 teaspoon white pepper
Walnut oil for garnish

In a medium saucepan, melt butter over medium-low heat, add leeks and cook until soft, about 5 minutes. Add potatoes, cauliflower, milk and salt, and bring to a simmer. Cover and simmer on low heat until vegetables are soft, about 25 minutes. Do not boil.

Remove saucepan from the heat, cool slightly and puree vegetables in a blender, with an immersion blender or in a food mill. If using an immersion blender, cover with a towel to avoid splattering. Season to taste with white pepper.

If serving warm, reheat gently and serve with a drizzle of walnut oil. If serving cold, chill in the refrigerator before serving (also with walnut oil).

A SIMPLE MATTER OF RACIAL HYGIENE:

Ukip may split over suspension of MEP (Tania Branigan, February 28, 2007, Guardian Unlimited)

At least three of Ukip's 10 MEPs are on the verge of walking out of the party, in yet another blow for the beleaguered organisation, the Guardian has learned.

The pending split comes amid increasing discontentment about Nigel Farage's leadership and is prompted by the United Kingdom Independence party's decision to suspend an MEP this morning after the European Anti-Fraud Office said it was investigating his use of European parliament money.

The party faced further embarrassment this afternoon as it became embroiled in a row with a disabled would-be candidate. [...]

It was revealed this afternoon that the party had told a man he could not be a full Ukip candidate because he was disabled.

QUITTING CLINTON'S WAR TOO?:

Britain plans to withdraw its 600 troops from Bosnia (The Associated Press, February 28, 2007)

Who lost the Balkans?

SOMETIMES LIFE THROWS THE CURVES:

White's rock quarry could net pitcher billions (Associated Press, 2/28/07)

Matt White, a journeyman pitcher trying to make the Los Angeles Dodgers, could become baseball's first billionaire player.

It has nothing to do with his arm. He owns a rock quarry in western Massachusetts.

White, who has appeared in seven big league games in nine professional seasons, paid $50,000 three years ago to buy 50 acres of land from an elderly aunt who needed the money to pay for a nursing home.

While clearing out a couple acres to build a home, he discovered stone ledges in the ground, prompting him to have the property surveyed.

A geologist estimated there were 24 million tons of the stone on his land. The stone is being sold for upward of $100 per ton, meaning there's well over $2 billion worth of material used for sidewalks, patios and the like.

THE BEST WAY HE COULD SERVE THE PARTY:

Some push for Huckabee to run for Senate, not president (Aaron Blake, 2/28/07, The Hill)

Though his long-shot presidential campaign is still in its early stages, some wish former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee would drop his national aspirations and return home to wage what they see as a vital campaign against Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Ark.) in 2008 instead.

Arkansas is often listed among the top Republican pickup opportunities in the country, but Huckabee is the only Republican who matches up to Pryor and there are no comparable alternatives, observers say.

Although those close to Huckabee chalk up the Senate talk to overanxious bloggers and speculation, some see Huckabee-for-Senate as a real possibility and most Republicans make it clear they would welcome him home.

One state GOP source familiar with Huckabee's campaign said a Senate bid could indeed materialize and that it's something Huckabee has considered and analyzed.

TOO INEFFICIENT TO MATTER:

Egyptians look to God, not government, for help (Michael Slackman, February 28, 2007 , NY Times)

Cairo is home to 15 million and often described as the center of the Arab world, an incubator of culture and ideas. But it is also a collection of villages, a ruralized metropolis where people live by their wits and devices, cut off from the authorities, the law and often each other.

That social reality does not just speak to the quality and style of life for millions of Egyptians. It also plays a role in the nation's style of governance.

The fisherman on the Nile, the shepherd in the road and residents of so- called informal communities say their experiences navigating city life have taught them the same lessons: the government is not there to better their lives; advancement is based on connections and bribes; the central authority is at best a benign force to be avoided.

"Everything is from God," said Mezar, the fisherman, who was speaking practically, not theologically. "There is no such thing as government. The government is one thing and we are something else. What am I going to get from the government?"

Cairo has been the capital of Egypt for more than 1,000 years, and sits where the dry sands of the desert lead to the fertile Nile Delta. Egyptian officials like to say that this is where modern bureaucracy was invented, where the mechanics of governance first took shape.

While the Egyptian government is the country's largest employer, it is by all accounts an utterly unreliable source of help for the average citizen. That combination, social scientists say, helps seed the playing field for a system that has stifled political opposition and allowed a small group to remain in power for decades.

One brick in the foundation of single-party rule has been public resignation. There is no widespread expectation that the authorities will give the common man a voice, and so there is rarely any outrage when they do not. The fisherman, the shepherd and Fathy all said that the most they could hope for from the government was that it stay out of their lives.

"We hope God keeps the municipality away from us," Sayed said as he sat in a wooden chair, surveying his fetid flock of goats and sheep with headlights streaming by.

Such a feeling of separation is one reason that the leadership has been able to clamp down on opposition political activities without incurring widespread public wrath, political analysts say.

"People see the government as something quite foreign or removed from their lives," said Diane Singerman, a professor in government at the American University in Washington who has written extensively about Cairo. "Commuters to the city, or poor peddlers and working people, do not see the government as particularly interested in their lives, and they also see politics as quite elite and risky and something to stay away from."

BUSH/WYDEN:

Better Health Through Politics: Ron Wyden's smart plan (Jacob Weisberg, Feb. 28, 2007, Slate)

The action at the moment is all in the big space between the status quo and single-payer. President Bush started the conversation in his January State of the Union address, in which he proposed capping the tax deductibility of employer-provided plans and creating a new tax deduction for individuals. By turning the health-care tax deduction into a kind of voucher, Bush would discipline spending and allow more individuals to afford insurance. His proposal didn't deserve the scorn heaped on it by leading Democrats. A paper from the liberal Tax Policy Center calls the president's proposal "in some respects ... innovative and a step in the right direction." But Bush is thinking too small. His plan risks undermining the current employer-based system without replacing it, and fails to grapple in a serious way with the problem of the uninsured. [...]

Ron Wyden, the Democratic senator from Oregon, would directly sever that link. Wyden is a politically savvy wonk, who in drafting the bill he recently introduced has tried to learn from previous Democratic mistakes. He recently told me he had read The System, David Broder and Haynes Johnson's massive tome on the failure of the Clinton health-care reform plan, no less than five times. (Apparently, Starbucks now offers an intravenous drip.) Wyden's bill is 166 pages against Hillary's 1364, and he thinks he can pare it further. When he was getting started, Wyden drew a grid of the major interest groups and made sure there were plusses as well as minuses for each in his bill. He has support from CEOs, labor leaders, and even one maverick health-insurance executive. And instead of trying to flatten the opposition, as the Clintons did in 1994, Wyden is courting Republicans. He recently got five of the most conservative men in the Senate to join him and four other Democrats as co-signers of a letter to Bush responding to the White House proposal. The letter endorses the principles of universal coverage and cost containment, and proposes that they all work together on a compromise

Under Wyden's plan, employers would no longer provide health coverage, as they have since World War II. Instead, they'd convert the current cost of coverage into additional salary for employees. Individuals would use this money to buy insurance, which they would be required to have. Private insurance plans would compete on features and price but would have to offer benefits at least equivalent to the Blue Cross "standard" option. Signing up for insurance would be as easy as ticking off a box on your tax return. In most cases, insurance premiums would be withheld from paychecks, as they are now.

Eliminating employers as an additional payer would encourage consumers to use health care more efficiently. Getting rid of the employer tax deduction, which costs a whopping $200 billion a year, would free up funds to subsidize insurance up to 400 percent of the poverty line, which is $82,000 for a family of four. The Lewin Group, an independent consulting firm, has estimated that Wyden's plan would reduce overall national spending on health care by $1.5 trillion over the next 10 years and that it would save the government money through great administrative efficiency and competition.

Can Wyden and his allies market this kind of bill as an advance for competition and choice, which it is?

WHAT OTHER PURPOSE HAS IT EVER SERVED?:

Europe's Runaway Prosecutions (David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey, February 28, 2007, Washington Post)

The United States has used extraordinary renditions as part of the war on terrorism, but the continuing value of this tactic, particularly in Europe, is questionable. One of the primary European objections to the concept of a "war" on terrorism is the fear that U.S. forces will treat Europe as a battlefield.

THE OTHER EVANGELICALS:

Another front on the Sunni-Shiite war (Olivier Guitta, 2/28/07, The Examiner)

While the media focuses on the aggressive Iranian expansion in the whole Middle East, another insidious campaign is being orchestrated by Iran to control the region. Proselytizing is the new name of the game.

And since, through this Iranian-sponsored operation, Sunnis have been converting to Shiism in significant numbers, Sunni states are starting to react. That could well open a new front in the Sunni-Shiite war.

Of all Sunni countries, Saudi Arabia is the one feeling the most threatened by this new wave of Shiite proselytizing. "If it's not to export the revolution like in the time of the Khomeini regime, Shiism exportation, as we see it today is still unacceptable" noted Saudi Social Affairs Minister Abdel Mohsen al Hakas.

Interestingly, Saudi King Abdullah went further in a recent interview with the Kuwaiti daily Al Seyassah when he accused Shiites of trying to convert Sunnis and added that he knew exactly who was behind this campaign, clearly pointing his finger at Tehran.

ME-TOO:

The Tehran Option: Democrats criticize Bush's Iran policy, but theirs is almost identical (Shmuel Rosner, Feb. 27, 2007, Slate)

The pro-dialogue argument is an understandable and obvious one. In fact, it's the only option if you're looking for a solution that hasn't already been tried. Democrats keep calling for coalition-building, but the Bush administration can claim that it has already done that through U.N. Security Council resolutions. The Democrats also keep calling for more diplomacy, but the administration repeats again and again that it is committed to a "diplomatic solution." Since every poll shows that the public will always support "direct dialogue," whatever that means, the Democrats are wise to focus on this option, which also has the benefit of being a recommendation of the Iraq Study Group.

"Can we not speak of the interests of others, work to establish a sustained dialogue, and seek to benefit the people of Iran and the region?" asks the new Web site stopIranWar.com, sponsored by Gen. Wesley Clark. "We have tools available to us to engage them," Edwards said in Iowa two weeks ago. What benefits the Democrats on the issue of engagement is that most people aren't interested in details. No talks are happening--so it must be that the administration doesn't want any. But is that really true? "What we need to do is to engage Iran on the basis of the international community's standard," said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice this week. This standard is "that they need to stop their enrichment and reprocessing capabilities" for the talks to begin.

Do you hear any Democrats suggesting that this condition should be removed from the table? Do they want the United States to talk to Iran while the centrifuges in Natanz are producing enriched uranium? I couldn't find any such suggestion. What one does hear from the Democrats is a general, noncommittal assertion of the need to talk. For the past year or so, this has been administration policy, but only if the Iranians will freeze their enrichment activities. On Monday, David Ignatius reported that this policy will be moderated even further. "The Bush administration has agreed to sit around a negotiating table with official representatives of Iran and Syria next month--as part of a planned regional conference in Baghdad to discuss ways to stabilize Iraq."

If the Democrats' policy propositions seem like the one the administration is implementing, talk about the future is even more similar--but once again, political masquerading covers it in a lot of anti-Bush rhetoric.

MORE:
Will Surge Hurt US More Than Sanctions Hurt Iran? (Trita Parsi, Feb 26, 2007, IPS)

Over the past few months, Iran's hard-line president has suffered several political defeats at home. The most important of these were the Dec. 15 municipal elections last year where candidates allied with the president fared miserably, while centrist conservatives close to former President Hashemi Rafsanjani -- a key rival of Ahmadinejad -- made significant gains.

Ahmadinejad's defeat, coupled with increased criticism against him at home over his economic policies and his failure to evade U.N. Security Council Sanctions, have left Washington with the impression that its efforts to squeeze Iran's access to international finance has borne fruit at a surprising rate.

Washington's euphoria over this perceived success has been used as an argument with its European allies that the pressure is working and that if only Europe joins the U.S., Iran will eventually be brought down to its knees.

This argument is likely to be repeated today when the U.S., Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany meet to discuss how to respond to Iran's refusal to suspend its uranium enrichment activities, as requested by U.N. Security Council Resolution 1737.

But Washington's reading of developments in Iran is severely flawed. Most importantly, there is likely no significant causality between the U.S.'s recently imposed unilateral financial sanctions and Ahmadinejad's dwindling popularity.

The George W. Bush administration seems to be confusing its sanctions policies with Ahmadinejad's incompetent economic policies. The push-back against Ahmadinejad has, according to observers of Iran's domestic political scene, far more to do with his failed economic policies and his populist promises, which have created exaggerated expectations among the Iranian populace, than with Tehran's nuclear posturing or Washington's financial sanctions.

A key trigger of the anti-Ahmadinejad sentiments has been rising inflation, which has been caused by an influx of liquidity into the Iranian economy rather than a shortage of it.

A FIGHT THE RIGHT DIDN'T EVEN KNOW IT WON:

Call to Expand Union Rights Could Derail Antiterror Bill (ERIC LIPTON, 2/28/07, NY Times)

Democrats in Congress are pushing to extend union protection to 43,000 federal airport security workers, reviving a debate that stalled the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and could now derail broad antiterrorism legislation.

The proposal has provoked opposition from Senate Republicans and the Bush administration. It is the latest in a series of labor-related fights in Washington as Democrats try to use their new majority to push long-delayed proposals that benefit rank-and-file workers, like increasing the minimum wage.

White House officials made clear on Tuesday that President Bush was prepared to veto a bill that enacted recommendations of the Sept. 11 Commission if the provision granting Transportation Security Administration workers collective bargaining rights was not removed.

NOW IF ONLY WE COULD DO SOMETHING ABOUT THE LAZY NATIVES...:

Immigrants boost pay, not prison populations, new studies show: Immigrants are less likely to go to prison than U.S.-born residents of the same ethnic group and they boost pay for natives, research says (Teresa Watanabe, February 28, 2007, LA Times)

Two new studies by California researchers counter negative perceptions that immigrants increase crime and job competition, showing that they are incarcerated at far lower rates than native-born citizens and actually help boost their wages.

A study released Tuesday by the Public Policy Institute of California found that immigrants who arrived in the state between 1990 and 2004 increased wages for native workers by an average 4%.

UC Davis economist Giovanni Peri, who conducted the study, said the benefits were shared by all native-born workers, from high school dropouts to college graduates, because immigrants generally perform complementary rather than competitive work.

As immigrants filled lower-skilled jobs, they pushed natives up the economic ladder into employment that required more English or know-how of the U.S. system, he said.

"The big message is that there is no big loss from immigration," Peri said. "There are gains, and these are enjoyed by a much bigger share of the population than is commonly believed."

Another study released Monday by the Washington-based Immigration Policy Center showed that immigrant men ages 18 to 39 had an incarceration rate five times lower than native-born citizens in every ethnic group examined.

JUST ANOTHER DYING NATION FREELOADING OFF THE U.S.:

The myth of Canada as peacekeeper: Despite high-minded policy statements and public perception, Canada's global role (Michael Valpy, 2/28/07, Globe and Mail)

It's so hard to square mythology with reality. While 70 per cent of Canadians consider military peacekeeping a defining characteristic of their country, Canada has turned down so many United Nations' requests to join peacekeeping missions during the past decade that the UN has stopped asking.

In 1991, Canada contributed more than 10 per cent of all peacekeeping troops to the UN. Sixteen years later, its contribution is less than 0.1 per cent.

On this month's fifth anniversary of Canadian troops being sent to Afghanistan and one year after assuming responsibility for the counterinsurgency campaign -- a war by any other name -- in Kandahar province, one of the country's biggest unanswered questions is: What is Canadian military policy? It's certainly not to be the global leader in peacekeeping the country once was.

DEMOCRATS JUST NEED TO NOMINATE A CONSERVATIVE CHRISTIAN:

Democrats Need W.Va., Ark. to Swing Back Their Way (David Mark, February 27, 2007, Politico)

West Virginia and Arkansas may be the most unnatural states to have twice backed President Bush. [...]

West Virginia, with its five electoral votes, and Arkansas, with its six, represent the sort of states a Democratic candidate would need to win for the party to regain the White House. As Democratic strategists survey the national political landscape more than 20 months before the November 2008 election, West Virginia and Arkansas are at the top of states that must be pried away from Republicans.

The key to victory there, analysts suggest, is in trotting out a candidate who would appeal to those states' largely rural constituencies, while maintaining support from Democratic coastal elites. That's the sort of political balancing act President Bill Clinton executed in his 1992 and 1996 victories, which included support from several Southern states.

"If the Democrats present a candidate who can have some personal or cultural affinity, at least on a limited basis, in states like West Virginia and Arkansas, they can carry it," said Al Cross, director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues and a longtime observer of Southern politics as a columnist for the Courier-Journal of Louisville, Ky.

West Virginia has proved a vexing electoral problem for Democrats in the past two presidential elections. In 2000, voters there backed Bush over Al Gore 52 percent to 46 percent, and gave the incumbent president an even more comfortable margin of victory, 56 percent to 43 percent, in his reelection win over John F. Kerry.

WHICH IS WHY SOVEREIGNTY SHOULD HAVE BEEN TRANSFERRED IN SUMMER 2003:

The Next Steps in Iraqi Economic Reform (Austin Bay, 2/28/07, Real Clear Politics)

The "oil reform" program in Iraq is long overdue, but the Iraqi government also deserves kudos for the effort. Democracy is often a slow, muddled and tedious operation (look at the U.S. Congress).

Until Iraq's democratically elected parliament was seated and the government selected, Iraq lacked "full sovereignty." Any "permanent oil reform" implemented by the Coalition Provisional Authority or an interim Iraqi government would have been portrayed as inherently illegitimate. The new bargain has its flaws (what legislation doesn't?), but illegitimacy isn't among them. The Iraqis have worked through the snarl on their own.

Implementing the new program will strengthen the national government while giving all regions an economic stake in its political success.

SKY, PIRATE:

The sky is the limit for Bucs' McCutchen (Dawn Klemish, 2/28/07, MLB.com)

As the youngest in an already baby-faced Pirates clubhouse, it'd surely be forgivable if Andrew McCutchen were a little timid. Instead of standing in the shadows, though, the 20-year-old is making leaps.

Excuse him if he's not playing scared any more, but the age gap is nothing new. In high school, McCutchen routinely played on the older travel baseball teams. Last year, he became the youngest ever to grace Double-A Altoona's lineup. And now, as McCutchen is rolling in his second year of big-league camp, Pirates player development director Brian Graham said the sky's the limit.

"We do anticipate [McCutchen] playing in Altoona, and it's just a matter of performing," said Graham. "We're not sending him there to work on jumps in the outfield or hitting breaking balls, we're sending him there to get experience and perform. His performance is going to dictate how fast he moves."

If the past is any indication of what's to come, there's already a buzz that McCutchen could receive a September callup to Pittsburgh.

PICK YOUR POISON:

French left fears repeat of 2002 fiasco as Bayrou support grows (John Lichfield, 28 February 2007, Independent)

The centrist candidate François Bayrou is within striking distance of an upset victory over the Socialist hopeful Ségolène Royal in the first round of the French presidential elections, according to an opinion poll published yesterday.

However, the surge of support for M. Bayrou is unusually "soft", according to pollsters. The French electorate is always difficult to poll and seems to be in an especially skittish mood this year. Other recent polls have suggested that support for Mme Royal is strengthening.

With just under eight weeks to go before the first round of the election on 22 April, more than half of the voters have still to choose a firm favourite. This is an unusually high figure, even for the notoriously volatile French electorate.

HOW OFTEN DOES ABJECT SURRENDER EMBARRASS YOUR FOE?:

Democrats Back Away From War Fund Plan (ANNE FLAHERTY, February 27, 2007, The Associated Press)

House Democratic leaders are backing away from a plan to scale back U.S. involvement in the Iraq war by using Congress' most powerful tool _ withholding money in the budget.

Instead, party officials said Tuesday, leaders are weighing a proposal that would attempt to embarrass Bush into abandoning his war strategy.

ONE OF THESE THINGS IS NOT LIKE THE OTHERS:

In shift, US to join Iran, Syria in talks about Iraq (Glenn Kessler, February 28, 2007, Washington Post)

The United States agreed yesterday to join high-level talks with Iran and Syria on the future of Iraq, an abrupt shift in policy that opens the door to diplomatic dealings the White House had shunned in recent months despite mounting criticism.

The move was announced by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in testimony on Capitol Hill, after Iraq said it had invited neighboring states, the United States, and other nations to a pair of regional conferences.

"I would note that the Iraqi government has invited all of its neighbors, including Syria and Iran, to attend both of these regional meetings," Rice told the Senate Appropriations Committee. "We hope that all governments will seize this opportunity to improve the relations with Iraq and to work for peace and stability in the region."

Tehran today gave a guarded welcome to a newly-announced US plan to invite Iran, Syria and others to discuss ways to stablise Iraq.

"We are reviewing the proposal," Ali Larijani, the head of Iran's supreme national security council was quoted as saying by a state TV website.

"We support solving problems of Iraq by all means and we will attend the conference if it is expedient," he said. "We believe Iraq's security is related to all its neighbouring countries, and they have to help settle the situation."

EVERY...:

Republicans Set to Block Jefferson's Appointment to Homeland Security Panel (Patrick O'Connor, February 28, 2007, Politico)

Republicans plan to force a floor vote on Rep. William Jefferson's move to the Homeland Security Committee in an unprecedented maneuver to force Democrats to go on the record supporting their embattled colleague who is the target of a federal bribery investigation.

House Minority Whip Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) pledged to call for a recorded vote on the House floor when Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) introduces a resolution to make the Jefferson move official.

Pelosi removed Jefferson from the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee in response to Justice Department allegations that the Louisiana Democrat had accepted $100,000 in bribes and stored $90,000 of them in his freezer. The speaker then gave Jefferson a seat on the Homeland Security, and Democrats agreed to the change in a closed-door caucus in February.

"The idea that Homeland Security is less important than the tax-writing committee is ludicrous," Blunt said Wednesday.

O. W. HOLMES WAS RIGHT:

Can the Term "Guys" Refer to Women and Girls? (Heather Gehlert, 2/28/07, AlterNet)

Going out to eat with my father is always a tense affair. For the five or ten minutes it takes from the time the host or hostess seats us to the time our server comes to take our order, I sit quietly, feeling anxious and wondering how our waiter or waitress will greet us.

Will she say, "How are you all doing today?" Or, "What can I get you folks to drink?" If we're near our hometown in the rural Midwest, there is a good chance she'll say the latter, but, more often than not, we hear: "Hi, my name is Jamie, and I'll be taking care of you guys today. Our specials this afternoon are smoked salmon, parmesan-crusted tilapia ..."

"Excuse me," my dad cuts in, his eyes narrowing to a glare, "but I only see one guy here."

My stomach drops and I stare at the table in front of me, trying not to roll my eyes. The lecture never takes more than a minute, but it's still excruciating.

On rare occasion, a waiter or waitress will argue back, saying "guys" is a gender-neutral term. But, most of the time, he or she just stands very still, jaw dropped, looking stunned.

Because this exchange never leads to a thoughtful discussion of gender and language, I long ago dismissed it as one of my dad's quirks -- a one-person tirade to laugh at and let go of. Besides, one of my father's biggest heroes is Bill O'Reilly -- not exactly a portrait of feminist ideals.

Yet, for whatever reason, now that my dad and I live in different states and I see him only once or twice a year, I'm noticing how often men and women use the phrase " you guys" to refer to both sexes. It happens in restaurants, at council meetings -- even in grade-school classrooms.

And so, a voice in the back of my head is starting to say, Maybe he has a point. Maybe this isn't an arbitrary battle over an arbitrary word.

GOD BLESS THE MIDDAY SUN:

To the ends of the earth: An awfully big adventurer: Even at 62, there is no stopping Sir Ranulph Fiennes. His latest challenge is to climb the fearsome north face of the Eiger - despite suffering from vertigo. (Paul Vallely, 28 February 2007, Independent)

There is something splendidly barmy about Sir Ranulph Twistleton-Wykeham Fiennes, the aristocratic British explorer who can, it is said, trace his lineage back to Charlemagne.

He was, after all, expelled from the SAS, where he had specialised in demolition, for blowing up an ugly concrete dam built by a US film company in what is reputedly the prettiest village in England because it had blocked a rather fine trout stream.

And he is the man who regularly doubled back while running the New York marathon so he could finish at the same time as his slower partner. Yet such exploits are only the icing on this particularly English fruitcake.

ONE STEP AT A TIME:

KAZAKHSTAN PLANS POLITICAL REFORM (Joanna Lillis 2/26/07, EurasiaNet)

A proposal to reorganize Kazakhstan's political system would reconfigure the legislature, while enhancing its powers. Ultimately, however, the executive branch would retain a preponderance of power.

Kazakhstan's State Democracy Commission wound up nearly a year of work on February 19, making non-binding recommendations on political reform. President Nursultan Nazarbayev chaired the session, welcoming the proposals � but stressing that there was no question of Kazakhstan turning away from a powerful presidency. "Society has learnt an important lesson, realizing that powerful authorities and democracy are not polar opposites," he told delegates.

The commission � comprising leading administration officials, MPs, political activists and NGO representatives - was established in March 2006 in connection with Kazakhstan's overall effort to promote political and economic modernization. [For additional information see the Eurasia Insight archive]. The commission's biggest proposed changes concern parliament. One would alter the election format for the lower house, the Mazhilis, by boosting the number of deputies elected on party lists to 50 percent, with the rest elected to single-seat constituencies. In the current system, 10 are elected on party lists and 67 to single-seat constituencies.

Nazarbayev called for a clear choice between a majority system and proportional representation. He spoke out against expanding the number of Mazhilis seats, calling for a "compact and professional parliament." However, he supported a bid to expand the upper house by reserving a quota in the Senate for the Assembly of Peoples of Kazakhstan, which brings together the leaders of Kazakhstan's ethnic minorities and is composed largely of delegates loyal to Nazarbayev.

The president also backed proposals to hand some of his powers to parliament, including the right to nominate members to the Constitutional Court, the Central Electoral Commission and the Audit Committee. Parliament may also gain oversight over the budget and input in the formation of the government.

PRESIDENT WHO?:

RAFSANJANI PRESSES POLITICAL OFFENSIVE AGAINST PRESIDENT, STRESSING MODERATION (Kamal Nazer Yasin 2/21/07, EurasiaNet)

Some experts suggest Rafsanjani achieved his primary goal during the February 8-9 visit to Qom -- lining up the support of a critical mass of the country's spiritual leadership. "Qom spread the red carpet and [Rafsanjani] was clearly basking [in the spotlight]," said the Tehran political scientist. "His hosts were competing with each other to shower him with praise."

In Qom, Rafsanjani held private meetings with grand ayatollahs spanning the spiritual spectrum -- from ultra-conservative to the reformists. Clearly absent from the list of Rafsanjani's interlocutors was the name of his theological nemesis, the controversial Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi, who is closely aligned with the presidential camp.

While Rafsanjani's talks with the grand ayatollahs occurred behind closed doors, newspaper reports made it clear that these influential clerics endorsed Rafsanjani's views. For example, reform-minded Grand Ayatollah Yousef Sanei was quoted as telling Rafsanjani, "Your fortitude, faith and courage are exemplary. ... Your popularity with the public and among most factional heads exerts extra pressure on you to navigate the country and the state through the turbulent waters ahead."

The reception offered Rafsanjani in early February in Qom was markedly different from that which he received during a visit he made last May, when he was jeered by young followers of Mesbah Yazdi and forced to cut short a speech. A change in attitude on the part of many grand ayatollahs in the way they perceive Ahmadinejad seems to have played a large role in enhancing Rafsanjani's status in Qom.

"Government-Seminary relations can be described as frosty at the moment," a well-respected religious scholar told EurasiaNet on condition of anonymity. "Some key figures in the Qom religious establishment have serious misgivings about the present government."

"Most knowledgeable clergymen are unhappy with the diminution of the [influence] of the clergy in society, and they believe this government is doing nothing to remedy [the situation]." According to the religious scholar, Qom's grand ayatollahs reportedly have declined to meet with the president in the last few months.

WALL? DOH!:

A breach in the church-state wall: A case before the US Supreme Court could deal a sharp blow to the separation of church and state (Andrew B. Coan, 2/28/07, CS Monitor)

The plaintiffs are ordinary citizens who object to their federal tax dollars being used to fund the president's program for "faith-based and community initiatives." [...]

[A[t this stage, the Bush administration is asking the court to throw the case out on grounds that ordinary taxpayers have no legal interest in how the executive branch spends public money.

It seems like the kind of dry, legalistic dispute that only a lawyer could love. But the appearance is deceiving. If the court grants the administration's request, it will eliminate what is often the only effective mechanism for challenging financial support of religion by the executive branch. The effect would be to grant the president and his staff, as well as the vast federal bureaucracy, a license to preach.

AW, THEY JUST WANT THE AFRICA SEAT ON THE RECONFIGURED SECURITY COUNCIL:

Contrary to global trends, Nigerians love America:The US's image has declined worldwide since 2000, even among its allies, but polls in Nigeria show climbing approval rates. (Sarah Simpson, 2/28/07, The Christian Science Monitor)

Some 72 percent of Nigerians say that the US is having a mainly positive effect in the world, according to a BBC World Service poll released last month.

A 2006 poll by the US-based Pew Global Attitudes Project reveals that 62 percent of Nigerians have a positive opinion of the US, up from 46 percent in 2000.

WHICH IS HOW THE BLOGOSPHERE, BELTWAY, & MSM DECREASE INSIGHT:

Meetings make us dumber, study shows: Brainstorming sessions backfire when group thinking clouds decisions (Abigail W. Leonard, Feb 22, 2007, Live Science)

People have a harder time coming up with alternative solutions to a problem when they are part of a group, new research suggests.

Scientists exposed study participants to one brand of soft drink then asked them to think of alternative brands. Alone, they came up with significantly more products than when they were grouped with two others.

WHO'S GONNA RIDE IN THESE THIRD WORLD DEATHTRAPS?:

Strike threats loom ahead of Airbus restructuring plan (David Robertson, 2/28/07, Times of London)

Airbus, the troubled European aircraft manufacturer, will announce its restructuring plans today amid political posturing and industrial action.

Trade unions said yesterday that job losses and factory closures could spark Europe-wide strikes.

Workers at one Airbus plant outside Paris spontaneously downed tools and walked out yesterday at the threat that their facility could close.

FORGET THE HONUS WAGNER CARD:

Joke is on Jeter!: President and Mantle pop up on Topps' gag baseball card (ANTHONY McCARRON, 2/27/07, NY DAILY NEWS)

It's hard to Topps this one: The card company has issued a Derek Jeter baseball card with a smiling President Bush in the stands.

But there's something very wrong with that picture: Bush wasn't really at the game that day.

A not-so-careful analysis of the card makes it clear that Bush was digitally superimposed - his right arm extended in a waving motion and his left arm seemingly missing.

The mischievous elves at Topps then played another version of Where's Waldo - sticking a picture of Mickey Mantle in the dugout.

The Mick is depicted in uniform, holding a bat as though he were back from the dead and preparing to pinch hit.

TOO BAD HE WANTS TO GOVERN A REPUBLIC OF LIBERTY:

Giuliani: 'Party of Freedom' Will Define Republicans (RUSSELL BERMAN, February 27, 2007, NY Sun)

Mayor Giuliani is calling on the Republican Party to redefine itself as "the party of freedom," focusing on lower taxes, school choice, and a health care system rooted in free market principles.

Delivering a policy-driven overview of his presidential platform yesterday, Mr. Giuliani outlined the agenda in a Washington speech before a conservative think tank that sought to make clear distinctions between his vision and that of the Democrats, if not his rivals for the Republican nomination in 2008. The former New York mayor's proposed redefinition of the Republican platform would signal a shift away from any focus on social issues, on which Mr. Giuliani is much less ideologically aligned with the party.

IT NEVER CEASES TO AMAZE...:

Iran: Détente, Not Regime Change (Ray Takeyh, 2/27/07, Foreign Affairs)

In order to develop a smarter Iran policy, U.S. leaders must first accept certain distasteful facts -- such as Iran's ascendance as a regional power and the endurance of its regime -- and then ask how these can be accommodated. Despite its incendiary rhetoric and flamboyant claims, the Islamic Republic is not Nazi Germany. It is an opportunistic power seeking to assert predominance in its immediate neighborhood without recourse to war. Acknowledging that Iran is a rising power, the United States should open talks with a view to creating a framework to regulate Iran's influence, displaying a willingness to coexist with Iran while limiting its excesses. In other words, Washington should embrace a policy of détente.

Iran is a radical player in the world of states, to be sure, but we should not overstate its power. We should not fall for the Persian bluff. It is important that we do all we can to thwart Iran's nuclear ambitions and to checkmate it in arenas that count, but we should always remember that this is a society swimming against the tide of history and confronting the limits of its capabilities. There is an Iranian role in Iraq, but it should not be exaggerated. It is not true that the Iraqi political class marches to the Iranian drummer. It is well known that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki spent his years of exile in Syria and kept his distance from the Iranians. "Iraq is a cemetery of dreams," a thoughtful Iraqi observed to me of his country. "Iranian dreams, no less than American dreams perhaps." Iraqis are a tough breed, and the notion that they are eager to take their country into a Persian dominion is unconvincing. The Iranians dwell virtually alone in the House of Islam, separated by language and culture, marked by their Shiism.

Then there are the troubles that count-the disabilities at home. Iran's deranged president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, came into power promising to put Iran's oil wealth "on the dinner table." But the Iranian economy is on the ropes. Hyperinflation, the drying up of international credit lines, and the astounding growth in energy consumption in Iran are bringing the country to the edge of crisis. The price of bread and meat and basic commodities has risen by as much as 25 percent. To tranquilize the realm, gasoline is subsidized well below its cost, and domestic consumption now accounts for a stunning 40 percent of Iran's oil production. Dire predictions now hold that the country will be unable to export much oil a decade from now.

The true believers will proclaim that revolutionary purity trumps all, but worldly needs and affairs ultimately prevail. A society that spends $20 billion a year to subsidize the price of energy, electricity, and gasoline will in the end have to contend with the wrath and disappointment of its people. There is swagger in Iran, and there is menace, for its rulers are without scruples. Terrorism, for them, is always an option. But theirs is a vulnerable and brittle society. There is no need to "engage" them and bail them out as they stumble. The regime should be harassed, contained, and held to account. We may not have to wait two centuries to pronounce on the fate of this revolution. The swagger abroad and the rot at home: It is a trajectory we are all too familiar with by now.

LIKE THUMBELINA:

Pelosi Falls Short On Election Promises (Daniel W. Reilly and Jim VandeHei, February 27, 2007, Politico)

[House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi vowed that five-day workweeks would be a hallmark of a harder-working Democratic majority. So far, the House has logged only one. Lawmakers plan to clock three days this week.

The speaker has denied Republicans a vote on their proposals during congressional debates -- a tactic she previously declared oppressive and promised to end. Pelosi has opened the floor to a Republican alternative just once.

Pelosi set a high standard for herself when she pledged to make this "the most ethical Congress in history" -- a boast that was the political equivalent of leading with her chin. And some critics have been happy to hit it.

She is drawing fire for putting Rep. William Jefferson (D-La.), who had $90,000 in alleged bribe money in his freezer, on the Homeland Security Committee. And The Washington Post reported during the weekend that she is helping chairmen raise money from donors with business before their committees.

OBLIGATORY TALIBAN COMPARISON?:

Cheney Unfazed (John D. McKinnon, 2/27/07, Wall Street Journal)

Vice President Dick Cheney responded to a suicide bomber in Afghanistan much the same way he responds to most of the attacks he undergoes daily in Washington: with few words and not much apparent concern.

IT'S JUST A QUESTION OF HOW BIG A MARGIN:

Presidential Predicting: The good news for Republicans. (Bruce Bartlett, 2/27/07, National Review)

[L]et's first look at which states voted for George W. Bush in both 2000 and 2004, and those that went for both Al Gore and John Kerry. This will give us a good guide to each party's base.

Starting with Bush, we see that he carried all of these states twice: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming. They have 274 electoral votes, with 270 needed to win.

Gore and Kerry carried all of these states: California, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, and Wisconsin. These have 248 electoral votes.

In 2000, Iowa and New Mexico went for Gore and switched to Bush in 2004. New Hampshire went for Bush in 2000, but went for Kerry in 2004. These three states are the only ones that changed party, and the vote shift was very small. In 2000, Gore won Iowa with 48.54 percent of the vote to 48.22 percent for Bush; in 2004, Bush won the state with 49.9 percent to Kerry's 49.23 percent.

A similar story is told in New Hampshire and New Mexico. Bush carried the Granite State with 48.07 percent of the vote to 46.8 percent for Gore in 2000; in 2004, Kerry got 50.24 percent to 48.87 percent for Bush. New Mexico gave Gore 47.91 percent of the vote in 2000 to Bush's 47.85 percent. In 2004, Bush took the Land of Enchantment with 49.84 percent to 49.05 percent for Kerry.

EVEN THE INEVITABLE USUALLY DOESN'T HAPPEN THAT FAST:

No compromise with extremists (Matthew Mainen, February 27, 2007, International Herald Tribune)_

The United States is currently pressuring the newly instated Somali government to reach out to "moderate" leaders of the Islamic Courts Union, the extremist regime that was disposed of by Ethiopian troops in the beginning of the year. Such a move, the Bush administration believes, will help create a more stable environment and end the 16 years of anarchy that has plagued Somalia.

IT'S KIND OF FLATTERING:

Supersized Barry: Shadows afterword details Bonds' freakish growth (Tom Verducci, February 27, 2007, Sports Illustrated)

[Game of Shadows] is released this week in a paperback edition with a new afterword, the most important constant in the 12-month wake of Shadows is this: Bonds has not challenged a single fact in the book. It stands as an encyclopedia of this doping era in general and of Bonds' massive doping regimen in specifics. [...]

You hear all that noise from the Bonds camp and yet most conspicuous is the silence on challenging the facts of the case. Shadows succeeded because it couched nothing and stood unchallenged. My favorite fact: the authors detail in their afterword the freakish growth of Bonds' body parts in his years with the Giants: from size 42 to a size 52 jersey; from size 10 1/2 to size 13 cleats; and from a size 7 1/8 to size 7 1/4 cap, even though he had taken to shaving his head.

"The changes in his foot and head size," they write, "were of special interest: medical experts said overuse of human growth hormone could cause an adult's extremities to begin growing, aping the symptoms of the glandular disorder acromegaly."

MERE TECHNOLOGY:

An Early Environmentalist, Embracing New 'Heresies' (JOHN TIERNEY, 2/27/07, NY Times)

[Stewart Brand] divides environmentalists into romantics and scientists, the two cultures he's been straddling and blending since the 1960s. [...]

He is now promoting environmental heresies, as he called them in Technology Review. He sees genetic engineering as a tool for environmental protection: crops designed to grow on less land with less pesticide; new microbes that protect ecosystems against invasive species, produce new fuels and maybe sequester carbon.

He thinks the fears of genetically engineered bugs causing disaster are as overstated as the counterculture's fears of computers turning into Big Brother. "Starting in the 1960s, hackers turned computers from organizational control machines into individual freedom machines," he told Conservation magazine last year. "Where are the green biotech hackers?"

He's also looking for green nuclear engineers, and says he feels guilty that he and his fellow environmentalists created so much fear of nuclear power. Alternative energy and conservation are fine steps to reduce carbon emissions, he says, but now nuclear power is a proven technology working on a scale to make a serious difference.

"There were legitimate reasons to worry about nuclear power, but now that we know about the threat of climate change, we have to put the risks in perspective," he says. "Sure, nuclear waste is a problem, but the great thing about it is you know where it is and you can guard it. The bad thing about coal waste is that you don't know where it is and you don't know what it's doing. The carbon dioxide is in everybody's atmosphere."

Mr. Brand predicts that his heresies will become accepted in the next decade as the scientific minority in the environmental movement persuades the romantic majority. He still considers himself a member of both factions, just as in the days of the Merry Pranksters, but he's been shifting toward the minority.

"My trend has been toward more rational and less romantic as the decades go by," he says. "I keep seeing the harm done by religious romanticism, the terrible conservatism of romanticism, the ingrained pessimism of romanticism. It builds in a certain immunity to the scientific frame of mind."

WE DON'T SWEAR IN THE HYPOTHETICAL NATIONAL LEADER:

POLL: McCain the most popular presidential candidate nationwide (Keating Holland, 2/07/00, CNN)

Arizona Sen. John McCain is now the most popular presidential candidate among likely voters nationwide, and for the first time, McCain has more support than George W. Bush in hypothetical match-ups against Al Gore, according to a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll released Monday.

The poll, conducted February 4-6, consisted of interviews with 1,018 Americans -- including 386 registered Democrats and 401 registered Republicans.

If the election were held today, 58 percent of all likely voters would choose McCain and 36 percent would pick Gore. In the same scenario, Bush would beat Gore by a smaller 53 percent to 44 percent margin. McCain also possesses a larger lead than Bush over former New Jersey Sen. Bill Bradley. [...]

More bad news for Bush: nearly two-thirds of all registered Republicans say that they would prefer a candidate who is not tied to the party's leaders. That indicates that Bush's ace-in-the-hole -- endorsements and organizational support from officeholders around the country -- could be used against him.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DEXTER:

Dexter Gordon's work as the first bebop tenor player can be heard in a collection of his recordings for Savoy in the late '40's released under the title Dexter Rides Again. His mature style is captured in a series of LP's he made for Blue Note in the 1960's, including Our Man in Paris and A Swinging Affair. Following a long stay in Europe, he made a triumphal return to the States in the mid '70's, captured on the albums Live at the Village Vanguard and Manhattan Symphony. And, of course, he was nominated for an Oscar for his role as Dale Turner in 'Round Midnight. For casual fans, the best way to describe Dex is that when you imagine the sound of a jazz saxophone in your head, the sound you hear is probably Dexter Gordon.

A NOVEL DEFENSE:

Illiterary criticism: If you can't stand Henry James, if Flaubert seems rubbish and Wordsworth simply 'a pile of arse', maybe that's your problem, not theirs. (Stephen Moss, February 26, 2007, The Guardian)

Sam Jordison doesn't think much of Henry James, and told us so on this site recently without any Jamesian syntactical beating about the bush. "Wading through his books seems to me to be the literary equivalent of wearing a very stiff and uncomfortable shirt simply in order to attend an endless speech given by a dull and pompous old headmaster," said the Hammerer of Henry, though the critique was weakened somewhat by his assertion that he had read only three of his novels and by his disappointment in finding that The Turn of the Screw was not "fun".

If Jordison wants straightforward early James, might I recommend The Portrait of a Lady and Washington Square? Then perhaps he could move on to the stodgier, often hard-to-assimilate later James - The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl. No one who has any serious interest in the evolution of the novel can afford to ignore these books, and James's oh-so-painful efforts to exactly represent human thought and emotion, every shade of it, in prose. It will exhaust you: James said his ideal reader would get through just five pages a day; you will lose his thread in the way you do with Proust's labyrinthine sentences; but you will surely appreciate the art and the ambition.

THEIR DEBT MADE THE BRITS A GREAT NATION:

Of Rivals: a review of That Sweet Enemy: The French and the British from the Sun King to the Present by Robert Tombs (Benjamin Schwarz, The Atlantic)

Sometime intimate foes, sometime bitter allies, France and Britain have for centuries largely defined themselves in relation to each other. This remarkably inventive, stylish, and audacious work traces the history of that infernal couple, from the seventeenth century to the present. Probing national culture and sensibility as well as war, diplomacy, and finance, the authors (husband and wife -- he's a Cambridge don who has written a pathbreaking study of the Paris Commune; she's a French-born historian of Britain who works at the Foreign Office) assay the entire 300-plus years in their nearly 800-page history, but they focus on what scholars call the "Second Hundred Years' War": the period of intermittent conflict between 1689 and 1815, which started when William III summoned a "Grand Alliance" to thwart the Sun King's bid for European mastery and ended with Wellington's defeat of Napoleon, a defeat that permanently blunted and diverted France's power and international ambitions.

These were struggles on an appalling scale: The years between 1688 and the Peace of Utrecht in 1713 claimed the lives of some 2 million combatants; the death toll in Marlborough's victory at the Battle of Malplaquet, in 1709, matched that of the first day of the Somme; the Napoleonic Wars cost France 1.4 million men and Britain some 200,000. They were also of a global scope: During the Seven Years' War (which Winston Churchill called the true "first world war"), French and British soldiers fought each other in the Ohio Valley, on the Mediterranean, and on the plains of Plassey, in India, among other places. And hence they were phenomenally expensive: Just maintaining Nelson's flagship, the HMS Victory, over its lifespan cost as much as "the annual budget of a small state"; owing to the wars against France, Britain raised taxes by 1,600 percent between 1689 and 1815, and government borrowing increased by 24,000 percent.

Synthesizing a generation of scholarship on the rise of the "military-fiscal state," by such historians as John Brewer, Paul Langford, and N. A. M. Rodger, the Tombses breezily explicate how, in a somewhat circular process, Britain's naval contest with France -- which Rodger has called "the largest, longest, most complex and expensive project ever undertaken by the British state and society" -- demanded a transformation in public finance, which in turn spurred the commercial and industrial revolutions that would propel Britain to its economic and geopolitical ascendancy.

IF ONLY YOU COULD CONVINCE A BILLION PEOPLE TO BE PATIENT UNTIL THE SUN EXPLODES:

Democracy up to 100 years away, China's Premier says (SCOTT MCDONALD, 2/27/07, Associated Press

Communist leaders have no plans to allow democracy in the near future because they must focus on economic development before political reform, China's No. 3 leader said in comments published Tuesday.

Democracy will emerge once a "mature socialist system" develops but that might not happen for up to 100 years, Premier Wen Jiabao wrote in an article in the People's Daily, the main Communist Party newspaper.

For now, China must focus on "sustained rapid growth of productive forces ... to finally secure fairness and social justice that lies within the essence of socialism," Mr. Wen wrote.

The Premier said the country is "still far from advancing out of the primary stage of socialism. We must adhere to the party's basic guidelines of the primary stage of socialism for 100 years."

'08 IN A NUTSHELL:

Document shows Romney's strategies: Plan addresses faith, rivals, shift on issues (Scott Helman, February 27, 2007, Boston Globe)

Here are some views of Mitt Romney causing concern inside his campaign: His hair looks too perfect, he's not a tough war time leader, and he has earned a reputation as "Slick Dancing Mitt" or "Flip-Flop Mitt."

Romney and his advisers have identified those perceptions as threats to his bid for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, according to an exhaustive internal campaign document obtained by the Globe.

The 77-slide PowerPoint presentation offers a revealing look at Romney's pursuit of the White House, outlining a plan for branding himself, framing his competitors, and allaying voter concerns about his record, his Mormon faith, and his shifts on key issues like abortion.

Dated Dec. 11, the blueprint is wide-ranging and analyzes in detail the strengths and weaknesses of Romney and his two main Republican rivals, Senator John McCain of Arizona and Rudolph W. Giuliani, former mayor of New York. The plan, which top Romney strategist Alex Castellanos helped to draft, charts a course for Romney to emerge as the nominee, but acknowledges that the "electorate is not where it needs to be for us to succeed." [...]

The plan, for instance, indicates that Romney will define himself in part by focusing on and highlighting enemies and adversaries, such common political targets as "jihadism," the "Washington establishment," and taxes, but also Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, "European-style socialism," and, specifically, France. Even Massachusetts, where Romney has lived for almost 40 years, is listed as one of those "bogeymen," alongside liberalism and Hollywood values.

Indeed, a page titled "Primal Code for Brand Romney" said that Romney should define himself as a foil to Bay State Democrats such as Senators Edward M. Kennedy and John Kerry and former governor Michael Dukakis. Romney should position himself as "the anti-Kerry," the presentation says. But elsewhere in the plan, it's clear that Romney and his aides are aware he's open to the same charge that helped derail Kerry's presidential campaign in 2004: that he is a flip-flopper who has changed positions out of political expediency.

Because he is attempting to capture the conservative vote, Romney is facing persistent questions about his relatively recent shifts to more conservative positions on issues such as abortion, gay rights, and gun control. One page of the plan cites Kerry and says Romney doesn't want to spend 2007 facing skepticism about his conservative message.

The blueprint also describes political assets and vulnerabilities of McCain and Giuliani, who lead Romney in the polls.

McCain is described as a war hero and maverick with a compelling narrative and a reputation for wit, authenticity, and straight talk. But he's also seen as "too Washington," "too close to [Democratic] Left," an "uncertain, erratic, unreliable leader in uncertain times." "Does he fit The Big Chair?" the document asks. The plan calls McCain, 70, a "mature brand" and raises questions about whether he could handle the rigors of leading the free world.

Giuliani is called an outside-the-Beltway rock star and truth teller who earned the nation's trust for his leadership of New York City's response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. But he is described as a one-dimensional Lone Ranger whose social views -- he supports abortion rights and civil unions for gay couples -- could destroy the "GOP brand." "We can't disqualify Dems like Hillary on social issues ever again" if Giuliani is the nominee, the document states.

The plan also touches on what it calls Giuliani's ethical issues, including his relationship with Bernard Kerik , former New York police commissioner who withdrew from consideration to become US homeland security secretary amid allegations of improprieties. It raises Giuliani's "personal political liabilities," an apparent reference to his three marriages and bitter public divorce from his second wife, Donna Hanover.

IT'S ALMOST LIKE THEY THINK REPEATING A LIE OFTEN ENOUGH WILL MAKE IT TRUE:

Testing the line between despotism and a free society (Scot Lehigh, February 27, 2007, Boston Globe)

HABEAS CORPUS is now headed back to the US Supreme Court, in a case that will prove a fundamental test of US justice.

Will the Roberts court uphold one of the oldest and most basic rights in the US Constitution -- that of a prisoner to go to court to challenge his imprisonment?

The issue could also test the courage of the new Congress. Will the Democratic majority wage a determined fight to re-establish what has been a basic guarantee of procedural rights?

GOLD MEDALIST:

Richard S. Prather: Creator of the private eye Shell Scott: Richard Scott Prather, crime novelist: born Santa Ana, California 9 September 1921; married 1945 Tina Hager (died 2004); died Sedona, Arizona 1[4] February 2007 (Independent, 27 February 2007)

The mystery writer Richard S. Prather will forever be associated with one of the top-selling, hard-hitting and raciest paperback lines of the years after the Second World War: Fawcett Gold Medal Books ("The Gold Medal seal on this book," read the helpful back-cover strapline, "means it has never been published as a book before").

Prather was discovered by Gold Medal's legendary editor Bill Lengel, who spent the early 1950s building up a team of writers who virtually created a hardboiled house style for the line: David Goodis, Charlie Williams, Vin Packer (i.e. Marijane Meaker), John D. Macdonald, Bruno Fischer, Richard Himmel. Prather threw in his job as a clerk at a US Air Force base to become a self- employed writer on the strength of Lengel's enthusiastic reception of The Case of the Vanishing Beauty, which duly appeared in Gold Medal's lists in the line's first 12 months, in 1950.

Thereafter he pounded out over 20 fast and furious - and often very funny - novel-length yarns for Lengel, from 1950 through to the early 1960s, sometimes producing two or three books in a single year. His annus mirabilis was 1952, in which he produced two thrillers for Fawcett, two for Lion Books (one, The Peddler, as by "Douglas Ring"), one for Graphic (Pattern for Murder, as by "David Knight"), and Dagger of Flesh for Falcon Books.

Although his early books were only mildly amusing, Prather soon settled into a groove of hilarious near-parody of the hardboiled genre itself, although he could still throw off the odd startlingly vicious little tale - such as The Peddler, a novel about the Mob which pulled no punches and provided few laughs.

Prather's series character was the private eye Shell (short for Sheldon) Scott (Prather's own middle name), a guy, to quote his creator, "with an eye for the broads and the frails", a talent for mangling the English language, and a glow-in-the-dark white-hair crew-cut, whose adventures, as the years went by, just grew wackier and more hilariously bizarre. Strip for Murder (1955) has Scott at large in a nudist colony, at one stage fronting a hundred nudists at their vigorous morning callisthenics, and finally escaping from the bad guys, au naturel, in a hot-air balloon sailing over downtown Los Angeles. It cannot be said that Prather did not give his readers their full 25-centsworth.

MORE:
Another Giant Falls (J. Kingston Pierce, 2/16/07, Rapsheet)

NORWEGIAN WOULD:

Iraqis agree to share oil money in win for U.S. (AP< February 27, 2007)

The Iraqi Cabinet approved a draft law Monday to manage the country's vast oil industry and distribute its wealth among the population -- a major breakthrough in U.S. efforts to press the country's Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish groups to reach agreements to achieve stability.

''I very much hope the main political groups will rise to the occasion'' and approve the bill in parliament, Deputy Prime Minister Barham Saleh, a Kurd, said.

Iraq has some of the world's largest petroleum reserves, and supporters hope the legislation will encourage major oil companies to invest billions -- if security improves.

When it comes to oil--and investing--it's easy to overlook Norway. While political and social upheavals in major oil producers--Venezuela, Nigeria, Russia, the Persian Gulf--dominate headlines, Norway since 1971 has quietly been pumping massive quantities of crude from the icy waters of the North Sea. Today, Norway is the world's third-largest oil exporter, behind only Saudi Arabia and Russia, and the seventh-largest oil producer. The Norwegians have proven that oil doesn't have to be an obstacle to stability and long-term growth. [...]

Iraq is on the verge of finding out whether it will succumb to the curse or defeat it. Norway offers an interesting model for the Iraqis to consider. Assuming things ever calm down, Iraq will decide how to use the nation's oil wealth to benefit its putative owners--the long-suffering Iraqi people. More than a year ago, Steven Clemons of the New America Foundation suggested that Iraq duplicate the Alaska Permanent Fund. Established in the 1970s, the fund guarantees that at least a quarter of all oil revenues received by the state be invested on behalf of the state's hardy residents. It has grown into a huge, highly diversified mutual fund. According to its September 2004 report, the APF has about $28 billion in assets. Each year, it pays out dividends to qualified residents--$919.84 per person. And in many ways, it's a classically American approach--built on a concept of individual ownership and intended to spur demand and consumption. Last year, the fund injected about $581 million into the state's economy.

Norway has pursued a classically Scandinavian solution. It has viewed oil revenues as a temporary, collectively owned windfall that, instead of spurring consumption today, can be used to insulate the country from the storms of the global economy and provide a thick, goose-down cushion for the distant day when the oil wells run dry.

Less than 20 years after they started producing oil, the Norwegians realized their geological good luck would only be temporary. In 1990, the nation's parliament set up the Petroleum Fund of Norway to function as a fiscal shock absorber. Run under the auspices of the country's central bank, the fund, like the Alaska Fund, converts petrodollars into stocks and bonds. But instead of paying dividends, it uses revenues and appreciation to ensure the equitable distribution of wealth across generations.

Here's how it works. Cash flow from the government's petroleum activities--the state owns 81 percent of the aptly named Statoil--is funneled into the fund. Last year, the total came to 91.9 billion kroner (about $14 billion). The fund then hires external managers to invest, generally using low-cost indexing strategies. It's conservatively managed--more bonds than stocks, and investments divided equally between Europe and the rest of the world.

ARE PEOPLE WHO CAN'T COUNT REALLY GOING TO DO ALL THIS STUFF?:

Perfect timing: Can natural family planning really be as effective as the pill? New research suggests that it is, says Sarah Ebner - once you have learned the ropes (Sarah Ebner, February 27, 2007, The Guardian)

Good news has emerged this month for those who want an effective method of contraception that does not involve hormones, injections or intrauterine devices. New research, published in the journal Human Reproduction, has found that the sympto-thermal method (STM) of family planning is just as effective as the pill. STM uses two indicators - body temperature and changes in cervical mucus - to identify the most fertile phase of a woman's menstrual cycle. "This puts contraception under a woman's control," says Toni Belfield of the Family Planning Association. "It's easy to learn, it can enhance a relationship, and it's easy to stop if a woman decides she does want to become pregnant." [...]

Professor Petra Frank-Hermann, from the University of Heidelberg, led the new research. "For a contraceptive method to be rated as highly as the hormonal pill, there should be less than one pregnancy per 100 women per year when the method is used correctly," she says. "The pregnancy rate for women who correctly used the STM method in our study was 0.4%, which can be interpreted as one pregnancy occurring per 250 women per year. Therefore, we maintain that the effectiveness of STM is comparable to the effectiveness of modern contraceptive methods such as oral contraceptives."

Of course, natural family planning is nothing new, and has often been used by those who oppose contraception on religious grounds. But the so-called "rhythm method" - which simply involved counting the days of the menstrual cycle - has long caused despair in family planning circles.

"It went out with the ark," says Belfield.

ALONG THE AXIS:

The great Japan-Mongolia love affair (Hisane Masaki, 2/28/07, Asia Times)

Japan rolled out the red carpet for Mongolian President Nambaryn Enkhbayar when, at Tokyo's invitation, he arrived on Monday for a five-day visit for talks with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and a luncheon hosted by Emperor Akihito in his honor at the Imperial Palace.

Ostensibly, the Mongolian leader's visit is to mark the 35th anniversary of the two countries' establishing diplomatic relations in February 1972. But Tokyo has another particular reason to extend the greatest possible hospitality to him. Only a month ago, Tokyo received a much-appreciated diplomatic present from Ulan Bator.

Abe and Enkhbayar agreed in a telephone conversation on January 24 that Japan will seek a non-permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council for a two-year term starting in 2009 in lieu of Mongolia. Enkhbayar conveyed to Abe Mongolia's decision to withdraw its bid for a seat to let Japan run for the post.

TRAIN IN VAIN:

Iranian Leaders Criticize President (ALI AKBAR DAREINI, 2/26/07, The Associated Press)

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad faced a new round of sharp criticism at home Monday after he said Iran's nuclear program is an unstoppable train without brakes. Reformers and conservatives said such tough talk only inflames the West as it considers further sanctions.

The criticism came even as new signs have arisen that Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is growing discontented with Ahmadinejad, whom he is believed to have supported in 2005 presidential elections.

Last week, Khamenei voiced rare criticism of the domestic performance of Ahmadinejad's government, and the president was notably absent when a group of Cabinet members and vice presidents met with Khamenei, who has the final word in all political affairs in Iran, including the nuclear issue.

MORE (via Kevin Whited):
Persian Shrug (EDWARD N. LUTTWAK, February 27, 2007, Wall Street Journal)

Back in the 1970s, détente with the Soviet Union was criticized on the grounds that it actually propped up a regime in irreversible decline, and whose power could be confronted successfully. In the 1980s, the critics of that détente led by Ronald Reagan had their opportunity to challenge the Soviet Union, which did not outlast the decade.

There is every reason to believe that history is about to repeat itself. Iran does not resemble the Soviet Union in any other way and certainly does not have even a fraction of its military power, but it too is a multinational state in an age when nations are everywhere asserting their separate identities. In arguing that there is universal support for the nuclear program, regime spokesmen and even many Persians in exile speak of Iran as a unitary state inhabited by "Iranians" who are very nationalistic, even if they oppose the ayatollahs.

None of this remotely corresponds to Iran's ethnic realities. Persians only account for half the population, and the other half includes many different nationalities increasingly resentful of Persian cultural imperialism.

Kurds account for some 7% of the population, and their nationalism is Kurdish and not Persian, having been much strengthened by the successful example of virtual Kurdish independence in Iraq. Their demands for autonomy have become sufficiently forceful to start an insurgency. The same is true of two smaller nationalities that are even more violently disaffected with frequent fire-fights and bombings: the Arabs and the Baluch, which account for another 3% of the population. But the largest of Iran's subject nationalities are the Azeris. While many have been assimilated, at least 20 million still speak an entirely different Turkic language, and increasingly form the core of a united Azeri nation that extends beyond western Iran to include the former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan.

The religious extremism of Iran's regime creates its own divisions. The bloody persecution of the Bahais, the new persecution of the Sufis and the institutional subjection of Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians have attracted greater attention, but the ill-treatment of the 9% of the population that is Sunni is more important politically: In Tehran where more than a million Sunnis live, there is no Sunni mosque as there is in Rome, Tel Aviv and Washington, D.C.

If Iran's economy were more successful, ethnic divisions and even religious resentments would matter less. As it is, with at least 20% unemployment and an annual inflation rate of some 30%, Iran's economy is scarcely a unifying force, especially because most of its minorities are distinctly poorer than the dominant Persians.

Viewed from the inside, Iran is hardly the formidable power that some see on the outside.

THEY DON'T HEART FJUCKBY:

Fjuckby name stays the same (The Local, 27th February 2007)

The pilloried residents of Fjuckby have been left with little option but to endure their village's unfortunate name after the Institute of Language and Folklore rejected calls for a name change.

Fjuckby is saddled with the dual misfortune of containing both the rude Swedish word 'juck' and its more internationally recognisable English equivalent.

EVERYTHING WILL BE DIFFERENT....:

Redraw congressional districts: Democrats don't mind redistricting reform as long as their congressional majority stays put. But that leaves district drawing open to corruption. (LA Times, February 27, 2007)

THE DRIVE TO GET California politicians out of the business of selecting their own voters by shaping their own districts may be derailed by the speakership of Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco). Although not long ago it was Republicans who didn't want to risk losing any of their California seats, it's now Pelosi and nervous Democrats who are threatening to scuttle badly needed reform by putting their own interests first.

SERVING THE SENTENCE WOULD BE UNUSUAL...:

Justices Decline Case on 200-Year Sentence for Man Who Possessed Child Pornography (LINDA GREENHOUSE, 2/27/07, NY Times)

An Arizona man who received a 200-year prison sentence for possessing 20 pornographic images of children failed Monday to persuade the Supreme Court to consider whether the sentence was unconstitutionally excessive.

SOUNDS LIKE THEY'RE AGREED THAT THE EXECUTIVE COMMANDS THE WAR:

Democrats Battle Over Policy on Iraq: Lawmakers Debate Whether to Exercise Power of the Purse (DAVID ROGERS, February 27, 2007, Wall Street Journal)

In the wake of their election losses in November, Republicans have their own divisions over the president's policy. But Democrats face greater pressure, and the debate exposes internal politics and warring personalities, especially in the House.

After proposing restrictions on the funds, the bill's manager, Rep. John Murtha (D., Pa.), has been pummeled by Republicans and fellow Democrats eager to bring him down a peg or two. His friendship with Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) and past rivalry with Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D., Md.) adds spice to the story. And fearing the entire bill could collapse, House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey (D., Wis.) has sanctioned the drafting of waivers to the Murtha-backed provisions that would restore more flexibility to the administration.

"They want to end the war, but they want to fund the war," said Mr. Murtha, frustrated by his party's reluctance to exert its power over spending.

Rep. Rahm Emanuel, the Democratic caucus chairman, is cautious about crossing this line and argues any conditions on funding should focus on the Iraq government, not U.S. forces. "Congress has the job of oversight and holding the administration accountable, but the war is owned and managed from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue," the Illinois Democrat said.

TWO WEEKS ago, Congress made clear its opposition to President Bush's plan to send more US troops to Iraq.

Opposing the surge is only a first step. There needs to be a radical change in course in Iraq. The pressure is building on Congress -- especially Republicans -- to act if the president will not.

The best next step is to revisit the authorization Congress granted Bush in 2002 to use force in Iraq.

FROM WOODY TO PLASTIC MAN:

On the mend, with a mission: In 'To Iraq and Back,' Bob Woodruff talks about the limited care for soldiers suffering from brain injuries (Matea Gold, February 27, 2007, LA Times)

He occasionally searches for a word and has limited vision in the right corners of his eyes. But aside from some red scars that pocket his face, there are few outward signs that 13 months ago part of Bob Woodruff's skull was blown off by a roadside bomb in Iraq.

"I feel so lucky in so many ways," the ABC correspondent said Monday, seated in an airy conference room in the network's Manhattan headquarters. "I see what my family has gone through and I realize how difficult it has been."

In "To Iraq and Back: Bob Woodruff Reports," an hourlong documentary airing at 10 tonight on ABC, Woodruff tells the story of his recovery from the explosion that seriously wounded him and cameraman Doug Vogt. It's his first time on the air since an improvised explosive device hit the Iraqi personnel carrier they were riding in north of Baghdad in January 2006, just weeks after he and colleague Elizabeth Vargas had begun their short-lived pairing as co-anchors of the evening news.

The bomb shattered Woodruff's left shoulder and pelted his body with shrapnel, including a half-dollar-sized rock that pierced his neck, barely missing a key artery. In the immediate days after the explosion, he came close to death several times. The 45-year-old father of four was in a medically induced coma for 36 days.

When he woke up at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., Woodruff didn't remember his brothers' names -- or even the existence of his two youngest daughters. He couldn't read or write or recall basic vocabulary. In one scene in the documentary, his three daughters huddle next to him on his bed, coaching him how to say "belt buckle."

A year later, it's difficult to believe he's the same man whose skull was flattened on one side.

OF DIM BULBS:

Light-bulb industry at a "tipping point" (TOBY STERLING, 2/27/07, The Associated Press)

European light-bulb makers are close to an agreement in principle to work together on phasing out energy-wasting incandescent bulbs for the consumer market, the chief executive of Royal Philips Electronics' lighting division said Monday.

Philips is the largest lighting maker globally, followed by Siemens, known for the Osram-Sylvania brands. General Electric, whose founder Thomas Edison patented the incandescent bulb in 1880, is biggest in the United States.

In a telephone interview, Theo van Deursen said "the tipping point is very close, to be frank, for the [European] lighting industry" to agree on a phase-out of incandescent bulbs in the home. He said an announcement from a group of major producers could come as early as this week.

PLEASE, MITCH, NOT AGAIN...:

Democrats back away from Iraq plan (JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS, 2/26/07, Associated Press)

Democratic leaders backed away from aggressive plans to limit President Bush's war authority, the latest sign of divisions within their ranks over how to proceed.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (news, bio, voting record), D-Nev., said Monday he wanted to delay votes on a measure that would repeal the 2002 war authorization and narrow the mission in
Iraq.

MAYOR WHO?:

Battle Lines Drawn for Key S.C. Republican Primary (Jonathan Martin, February 26, 2007, Politico)

It is impossible to understand South Carolina Republican politics without knowing about these rival campaign consultants, who seem to loom over the GOP here as much as any elected officials. Both are veterans of the South Carolina political wars, having worked in the Republican vineyards for decades. Their clients include many of the top politicians in the state, most notably both U.S. senators, other statewide officeholders and a raft of legislators.

In conversations with Republican politicians and operatives here in South Carolina, it is almost imperative to preface a conversation by asking whether they are a "Quinn person" or a "Tompkins person." In a state that knows something about civil war, this modern political battle pits Republican brother versus brother.

All this would be little more than inside baseball, of scant interest to anybody outside a five-mile radius of the gracious, copper-domed capitol here, were it not for one important fact that South Carolina Republicans delight in reminding visitors: Forget about snowy Iowa and frosty New Hampshire -- no GOP presidential contender has won his party's nomination without winning the South Carolina primary. So it was in 2000 when then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush bounced back from a thumping in New Hampshire at the hands of John McCain with a hard-fought victory in South Carolina over the Arizonan. The lead consultants in that bare-knuckle contest: Richard Quinn with McCain and Warren Tompkins for Bush.

Now, seven years later, there seems to be a reprisal of that now-infamous primary in the offing. McCain is back in the running and retains the services of Quinn and his team. Tompkins and his people are with former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. One difference, however, is that this time around, some of the people who lined up with Tompkins and Bush in 2000 are backing the man they worked against that year rather than Romney. McCain has garnered endorsements from numerous elected officials, donors and activists who were in Bush's corner last time.

"We are not focused on the endorsement game," says Terry Sullivan, Romney's South Carolina director and Tompkins' business partner, dismissing McCain's strategy of rolling out a steady stream of Bush converts.

SWEET SIXTEEN:

AUDIO: The Sixteen perform Tavener, Tallis (Saint Paul Sunday, 4/09/06)

Music for Passiontide: This Sunday, the first following Ash Wednesday, Harry Christophers will lead the Sixteen in a program of polyphonic Renaissance music for which the British ensemble is beloved the world over: haunting choral works of Thomas Tallis, William Byrd, Antonio Lotti, and Tomas Luis de Victoria. All are rooted in Passiontide and anchored by one of the most beloved of all Renaissance choral works--Gregorio Allegri's soaring Miserere. A young Mozart first transcribed the Miserere by ear after hearing it sung inside the Vatican, which at the time closely guarded the music as its sole property and, with Mozart, knew it to be a timeless musical treasure. [...]

MUSIC PLAYED IN THE PROGRAM

* Antonio Lotti: Crucifixus a 8 (text from the Creed)
* Thomas Tallis: In ieunio et fletu (In Fasting and Weeping)
* Thomas Tallis: If ye love me
* Thomas Tallis: Salvator mundi (Antiphon for Good Friday)
* Gregorio Allegri: Miserere (Psalm 51 - Ash Wednesday)
* Thomas Tallis: Suscipe quaeso
* Tomas Luis de Victoria: O vos omnes (Responsory at Matins for Holy Saturday)
* William Byrd: Ave verum corpus (Passiontide)
* Tomas de Victoria (Vere languores)
* John Tavener: Hymn to the Mother of God

EVERYT...:

Democrats may try to curb 527s (Alexander Bolton, 2/26/07, The Hill)

Senate Democrats are considering placing curbs on soft-money 527 groups amid evidence that they are beginning to lose the political advantage these largely unregulated funds have given them over Republicans.

This is a move Democrats had strenuously opposed during the last Congress, when they were believed to benefit from the lion's share of 527 money, but now there is evidence that more of the money from these groups, named for a clause in the tax code, is flowing to the GOP.

CLOSET? HE SEEMS PRETTY OPEN ABOUT IT:

Is George Bush a Closet Green? (Lloyd Alter, Toronto, 02.19.07, Tree Hugger)

Only your dispassionate Canadian correspondent could write this without colour or favour, but is it possible that George Bush is a secret Green? Evidently his Crawford Winter White House has 25,000 gallons of rainwater storage, gray water collection from sinks and showers for irrigation, passive solar, geothermal heating and cooling. "By marketplace standards, the house is startlingly small," says David Heymann, the architect of the 4,000-square-foot home. "Clients of similar ilk are building 16-to-20,000-square-foot houses." Furthermore for thermal mass the walls are clad in "discards of a local stone called Leuders limestone, which is quarried in the area."

INCREMENTALISM:

Russia's bid for 'competitive' elections: Ahead of March polls, a new Kremlin-backed party aims to woo left-wing voters away from independent parties (Fred Weir, 2/27/07, The Christian Science Monitor)

As 14 Russian regions prepare to hold local elections slated for March 11, the country's electoral system appears to have the healthy glow of democracy. Two Kremlin-backed parties, Fair Russia and United Russia, are competing smoothly against each other in the full glare of media coverage. [...]

Fair Russia, a self-described left-wing party, says its goal is to displace the opposition Communists. The centrist United Russia, established five years ago to "support President Vladimir Putin," already controls a majority of seats in the State Duma and many local legislatures. Experts say that there are also plans to create a Kremlin-friendly liberal party, to be named Free Russia, tasked with squeezing out the independent Yabloko party and the Union of Right Forces.

Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn warns in the preface to a newly republished article that Russia is still struggling with challenges similar to those of the revolutionary turmoil of 1917 that led to the demise of the czarist empire.

The article - which will appear tomorrow in the influential government daily Rossiyskaya Gazeta - analyzes the roots of the February revolution 90 years ago that forced the abdication of the last czar, Nicholas II, and helped pave the way for the Bolsheviks.

"It's all the more bitter that a quarter of a century later, some of these conclusions are still applicable to the alarming disorder of today," Solzhenitsyn wrote in a preface to the article first written in the early 1980s.

Solzhenitsyn's wife, Natalya, said it should serve as a reminder to Russia's political class about the dangers stemming from the huge gap between the rich and the poor, and the stark contrast in lifestyle and moral attitudes in the glitzy Russian capital compared to the far less prosperous provinces. [...]

Returning to Russia in 1994 to find a country in deep disarray, Solzhenitsyn's dismal view of 1990s Russia, along with his nationalism and hope for a resurgence of his country, has aligned him with President Vladimir Putin, who has presented his time in office as a period of recovery following economic and social turmoil at home and weakness on the world stage that Russia suffered after the 1991 Soviet collapse.

The 88-year-old has appeared infrequently in public in recent years, and he is believed to be ailing. In rare print or broadcast interviews, he has lamented the state of Russian politics and the government, but also has praised Putin despite the president's KGB background.

His wife said yesterday that Solzhenitsyn had a high opinion of the Kremlin's increasingly assertive foreign policy.

"He believes that many right steps have been taken in the foreign policy field, and Russia has regained its weight," Natalya Solzhenitsyn said.

SECULARISM IS ANTIHUMAN ENOUGH:

Chinese county reins in birth-rate - without a one-child limit: Yicheng's birthrate is lower than China's national average, but without the unpopular population-control policy in place (Peter Ford, 2/27/07, The Christian Science Monitor)

For the past 21 years, the citizens of Yicheng County, in the mining province of Shanxi, have been exempt from the "one-child policy" on which the Chinese government has founded its bid to keep a lid on its vast population. They have been allowed to have two children. Yet Yicheng's birth-rate is lower than the national average.

"If the whole country had adopted the Yicheng policy from the start, we could have kept China's population under 1.2 billion," below the official target for 2000, says Tan Kejian, of Shanxi's provincial Academy of Social Sciences. "And this policy was much easier for peasants to accept."

BROWN VS GREEN:

Tory donations outstrip other parties combined (Ben Russell, 27 February 2007, Independent)

Labour remains more than £23m in debt and has still to repay millions of pounds in loans linked to the cash-for-honours affair, accounts have revealed.

The funding gap between Labour and the Conservatives has widened, with the Tories reporting donations of £5.3m in the final three months of last year - more than Labour and the Liberal Democrats combined.

Even if only cash donations are taken into account, the Conservatives' £17.5 million amounts to more than Labour's £11.7 million and the Lib Dems' £2.7 million combined.

Conservative income from donations even topped the amount taken in 2005, the year of the General Election - usually the focus of any party's fundraising efforts - and amounted to several times the total normally taken in a non-election year.

The figures reflect the revival of Tory fortunes under Mr Cameron's leadership as polls begin to suggest he may be in with a chance of returning the party to power. And they indicate that the Conservatives - who are due to move to a new home near to Labour's old HQ on Millbank - are already in the process of creating the foundations for a war-chest to fight the election expected in 2009 or 2010.

The Conservatives have opened an 11-point lead over Labour, enough to give David Cameron an overall Commons majority of 100, according to the latest monthly opinion poll for The Independent.

The survey by CommunicateResearch suggests Mr Cameron's drive to rebrand his party is attracting floating voters and firming up the support of natural Tories. It is the Tories' highest rating from CommunicateResearch since the company began political polling in August 2004.

The findings will add to the jitters of Labour backbenchers who fear the party is on the slide during Tony Blair's final months and worry that Gordon Brown, his most likely successor, will struggle to turn round such a big deficit. "We are just treading water and wasting time," one Labour MP said last night.

David Cameron has become the green challenger. His party's events feature tie-less informality and earth tones and much grave talk about the need for "organic" attitudes. Confronted with things like youthful crime, which used to bring out the authoritarian beast in his party's traditionalist ranks, Cameron speaks soothingly of root causes and compassion. He has publicly regretted the way in which his party was too late in seeing the virtues of Nelson Mandela. Most astonishingly of all, he is running against Tony Blair (or rather, against Blair's heir-presumptive, Gordon Brown) as the candidate who wants to refashion Britain's relationship with Washington in such a way as to take distance from the American alliance. The press conference at which Cameron announced this new initiative was held on Sept. 11 last, as if to emphasize that the American Embassy could no longer take Tory sympathy for granted. And Cameron has appointed William Hague, a former leader of the party, as his spokesman on foreign affairs. Hague takes every opportunity to criticize the Blair administration for its slavish endorsement of George Bush and to promise that a Conservative government cannot be counted upon for Republican military expeditions.

Twenty or even 10 years ago, it would have been inconceivable that the historic left-right divide in British politics could have taken this form. Old leftist friends of mine from the 1960s are now on Labor's front bench and staunchly defend the overthrow of Saddam Hussein as a part of the noble anti-fascist tradition, while dyed-in-the-wool reactionaries are warning against American hubris. I keep having to pinch myself.

ALL ABOUT PERSPECTIVE:

Iraq War Sticker Shock: An iconoclastic economist discusses how the White House cooked the books on its march to war (Koshlan Mayer-Blackwell, February 21 , 2007, Mother Jones)

Joseph Stiglitz has never shied away from using his platform as a Nobel Prize winner in Economics to point out policy follies in high places. In 2002, after he had left a post as the World Bank's chief economist, he published the bestseller Globalization and Its Discontents, in which he took the International Monetary Fund and the Treasury Department to task for their overzealous approach to privatization in Russia and their one-size-fits-all response to the East Asian financial crisis. Now an economics professor and director of the Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia University, Stiglitz remains an outspoken critic of subsidies and other trade practices that hurt less developed countries.

Last year, Stiglitz received renewed attention for a paper [PDF], co-written with Harvard professor of public finance Linda Bilmes that projected that the total economic costs of the Iraq War would exceed a trillion dollars. [...]

MJ: You predicted that the total cost of the Iraq war would top a trillion dollars. Can you put a number like that into perspective?

JS: That was last year. I think it is clear from what has happened since then that a trillion dollars was a vast underestimate. We are talking at least between one and two trillion dollars now. To put that into perspective, President Bush went to the American people at the beginning of his second term, saying that we have a major crisis with our Social Security system. For somewhere between a half and quarter of the cost of the war in Iraq you could have fixed all the problems associated with Social Security for the next 75 years and still have had a lot left over. Put in another way: We are now spending something like $10 billion a month--$120 billion dollars a year--on Iraq. The amount the entire world gives in foreign aid, on an annual basis, is about half that.

KEEP RECRUITING...:

The Mysterious Mullah Omar: Tracing the elusive footsteps of the Taliban's Supreme Leader--and bracing for what may be their bloodiest drive yet (Sami Yousafzai and Ron Moreau, 3/05/07, Newsweek)

Mullah Omar has emerged from the shadows, his field officers say, and with his inspiration they're planning a military push against U.S.-led forces like never before. NEWSWEEK has viewed a new recruiting video in which the Taliban's most notoriously cruel commander, the one-legged Mullah Dadullah Akhund, addresses an audience of some 400 men who are described as trained suicide bombers, ready to die on his order. "Our suicide bombers are countless," he says in a videotaped response to questions from NEWSWEEK. "Hundreds have already registered their names, and hundreds more are on the waiting list." Those claims, while impossible to verify, can't be discounted, either. In an interview that aired on Al-Jazeera last week, Dadullah claimed to have more than 6,000 armed guerrillas in underground hideouts and other staging areas, awaiting the moment to strike. "The attack is imminent," he told the Arabic TV channel.

Western forces are certainly bracing for one. Thousands of reinforcements have deployed to Afghanistan, bringing the Coalition's total armed strength to nearly 50,000, including 15,500 Americans in NATO's ranks and 11,000 others under direct U.S. command. NATO's chief spokes-man in Kabul, Col. Tom Collins, says his force intends to head off the militants' assault with pre-emptive attacks against Taliban strongholds and sanctuaries in Helmand and Uruzgan provinces. The Coalition, with its enormous superiority in firepower, sees no way the Taliban can capture and hold any significant target. "They may hold a small place for days," Collins allows, "but they'll get run out at a high cost." An estimated 3,000 Taliban fighters died in last year's engagements alone.

THINK OF FRANCE AS THE PEQUOD:

Brinksmanship at Airbus (Thomas Lifson, 2/26/07, Real Clear Politics)

With only 10 aircraft on order, the additional cost of producing a freighter version of the A380 may be greater than any possible financial benefit to Airbus for completing the engineering, tooling, and other costs involved in modifying the passenger version for freight use. Airbus desperately needs both engineering talent and money to work on the twin jet A350XWB next-generation composite technology airliner, to compete with Boeing in the largest market segment for jumbo jets. If it decides to concentrate its resources where the payoff is greater, that might be a rational business decision.

Moreover, if the UPS delivery slots are vacated, it frees them up to be used by passenger airline customers, whose own orders would be less delayed as a result. This could lessen the penalty payments Airbus must make to these airlines, adding to financial benefits of a cancellation.

The freighter version of the A380 faces a difficult market ahead anyway. Because of its double deck configuration, it is best suited to comparatively lightweight package service of the sort UPS and Fedex specialize in. It cannot carry high density heavy cargo as well as the various 747 freighter models (including the forthcoming 747-8F stretch version). Boeing has already sold more than 50 copies of the 747-8F before it even takes to the air.

However, if Airbus finally admits defeat and cancels the A380 freighter, this might set a precedent for cancelling the entire A380 project, something that has so far been regarded as absolutely unthinkable in political terms. However, a freighter cancellation might also throw a scare into Airbus workers and labor unions, targets of another sort of brinksmanship.

Brinksmanship with the Unions

Perhaps the most dramatic news to leak out of Airbus over the weekend following the Franco-German summit was notice that Airbus might ask its workers to put in a 40 hour week, instead of the 35 hours per week they have been working. For no extra pay. Via Reuters:

Airbus is considering extending its workweek to 40 hours from 35 hours without compensation as part of the European planemaker's restructuring plans, German magazine Focus reported.

The reported proposal is likely to ring alarm bells in France, where a 35-hour work week was introduced by a Socialist government in 2000 and remains a potentially divisive issue ahead of April-June presidential and legislative elections.

"Management apparently is talking to unions about longer hours: 40 instead of 35 per week are envisaged," Focus reported in its Monday edition.

EADS unit Airbus declined comment and union representatives could not be reached.

French and German labor laws probably would have to be changed to permit a 40 hour week, but indications are that this could well happen.

Socialist presidential candidate Segolene Royal has promised to review the 35-hour work week with the aim of "reducing negative consequences for workers and employees."

Conservative candidate Nicolas Sarkozy says the 35-hour week should be retained but viewed as a minimum, not a maximum, with people free to work more or longer if they want.

Retreating on the 35 hour work week would itself be a humiliating retreat for France and Germany, which have taken pride in their more civilized approach than the savage Americans. No doubt, vicious American competition would be blamed, but one wonders if other sectors of the French and German labor force would welcome such an increase in work at no additional compensation, just because their political leaders backed a grandiose airliner. Once Airbus is allowed to inhumanely exploit its laborers in this way, what greedy capitalist could fail to demand the same from his own laborers?

MORE:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,468624,00.html>Germany's Airbus Disadvantage (Dinah Deckstein, Konstantin von Hammerstein, Wolfgang Reuter and Janko Tietz, 2/26/07, Der Spiegel)

LEAVE US HEAR NO MORE CHATTER ABOUT NATURAL SELECTION PRESSURES (via Glenn Dryfoos):

Olympic Champion Gardner Survives Plane Crash (AP, February 26, 2007)

Olympic wrestling champion Rulon Gardner lost a toe to frostbite after being stranded in the wilderness, impaled himself with an arrow and was involved in a serious motorcycle accident.

In his latest escape from death, he survived a plane crash over the weekend into the aptly named Good Hope Bay on the Utah-Arizona border. [...]

Gardner and two Utah brothers were rescued by a fisherman Sunday after swimming more than an hour in 44-degree water and spending the night without shelter. [...]

"It takes only about 30 minutes for someone swimming in 44-degree water to start suffering the effects of hypothermia, so the fact that they swam in it for an hour, not to mention surviving the plane crash and the night without fire or shelter, is pretty amazing," said Steven Luckesen, a district ranger at Glen Canyon National Recreation Area. "If these guys were a cat with nine lives, they just used up three of them." [...]

In 2002, he became stranded while snowmobiling in the Wyoming and lost a toe. Then in 2004, he was struck by an automobile while riding a motorcycle. Back in third grade, he punctured his abdomen with an arrow at a class show-and-tell.

The lesson, Gardner said, is "hopefully teach people to be smarter about the choices they make."

COMING SOON TO A THEATER NEAR YOU: CAPTAIN OZONE VS. THE SUN, STARRING AL GORE:

Sun's Output Increasing in Possible Trend Fueling Global Warming (Robert Roy Britt, 20 March 2003, Space.com)

In what could be the simplest explanation for one component of global warming, a new study shows the Sun's radiation has increased by .05 percent per decade since the late 1970s. [...]

The Sun's increasing output has only been monitored with precision since satellite technology allowed necessary observations. Willson is not sure if the trend extends further back in time, but other studies suggest it does.

"This trend is important because, if sustained over many decades, it could cause significant climate change," Willson said.

IT'S EASY TO AVOID SELECTION, IMPOSSIBLE TO AVOID TELEOLOGY (via Brian Boys):

Ants 'Hate Each Other' But Work Together (Abigail W. Leonard, 2/22/07, LiveScience)

Different ant species can coexist because, as the saying goes, where one is weak another is strong.

In what researchers describe as "un-peaceful coexistence," multiple ant species stake out the same territory and compete for the same food, but no single species wins out since some are better at finding resources and others better at guarding them. [...]

The take-away message is not that utopian co-existence is possible, since after all, said Adler, "these species hate each other." It is more about understanding the natural limits of organisms: No single species wins every time, because it is impossible to be well adapted to do everything. From an evolutionary perspective, he explained, "there are limits to how well you can design something."

Humans, he added, are the only species that seem to be able to break these constraints--owing to our intelligence, not physical capabilities.

THE DEFENSE OF CIVILIZATION:

'Civilization' and Its Contents: A video game for the ages (Victorino Matus, 02/26/2007, Weekly Standard)

Delinquency aside, given the amount of time some people spend on the games, especially on their employers' computers, you have to wonder if that $10 billion in sales isn't more than wiped out by the loss in productivity.

Was Higinbotham right? Should we have pulled the plug? Maybe. But then we wouldn't have games like Civilization, the thinking man's Grand Theft Auto, the video game version of a classical education. Yes, there is the potential for violence, on a global scale no less. But really the game is more of a grandiose chessboard than a combat zone. Here's how it works.

Let's say you are "Caesar of the Romans," presiding over a tiny tribe at the dawn of time. You send out settlers to found cities across the continent and discover resources like horses and iron, and luxury goods such as wine and silk. The governors of your cities ask you what they should build--barracks, a temple, a marketplace? At the same time you must decide what your scientists should study--developing the wheel is always a good first step. As your nation begins to take shape, you will inevitably run into other civilizations, such as Egypt and Carthage, or maybe even the Germans and the French. All of these other powers (regardless of when they existed in real history) originate at the same time as yours, circa 4,000 B.C. And from ancient times up to the present and beyond, it is a race to see which of the various civilizations becomes culturally or militarily dominant.

And you don't always have to rule Rome either. You could be Genghis Khan of the Mongols. Or Isabella of Spain. Each civilization has its characteristic strengths and weaknesses. For example, if you control the Japanese, when your scientists discover the chivalric code, you are able to create ruthless Samurai warriors. The trick, as always, is timing. You may think the key to the game is to be the founder of American civilization, and get busy building F-15 fighter jets. But it will take millennia (a few hundred turns, in game time) for your scientists to get up to speed. First, they will need to study physics and engineering, not to mention combustion. Meanwhile, the Greeks almost immediately produce their hoplite--the most fearsome infantryman of the ancient world.

The most addictive aspect of the game is its turn-based system: When you are finished issuing orders for the management of your cities and deploying your troops, you hit the spacebar, allowing the computer to play out the moves of the other civilizations. A few seconds later, it is your turn again. It may take 20 turns to build a great wonder like the Hanging Gardens or 12 turns to learn fission. Every time you hit that spacebar, you get closer to your objective. The tagline for Civilization is "You won't stop playing until you want to stop playing."

Sound appealing? Since the first version of Civilization came out in 1991, about 8 million units have been sold. The current edition, Civilization IV, has sold more
than 3 million copies worldwide in the last two years. [...]

Civilization followed on the heels of Meier's Railroad Tycoon, which was released in 1990, and the smashing success of Will Wright's SimCity. Both are considered the earliest of the so-called "God games," in which all-powerful players focus primarily on building rather than destroying.

MORE:
The Dawkins Confusion: Naturalism ad absurdum (Alvin Plantinga, March/April 2007, Books & Culture)

Now despite the fact that this book is mainly philosophy, Dawkins is not a philosopher (he's a biologist). Even taking this into account, however, much of the philosophy he purveys is at best jejune. You might say that some of his forays into philosophy are at best sophomoric, but that would be unfair to sophomores; the fact is (grade inflation aside), many of his arguments would receive a failing grade in a sophomore philosophy class. This, combined with the arrogant, smarter-than-thou tone of the book, can be annoying. I shall put irritation aside, however and do my best to take Dawkins' main argument seriously.

Chapter 3, "Why There Almost Certainly is No God," is the heart of the book. Well, why does Dawkins think there almost certainly isn't any such person as God? It's because, he says, the existence of God is monumentally improbable. How improbable? The astronomer Fred Hoyle famously claimed that the probability of life arising on earth (by purely natural means, without special divine aid) is less than the probability that a flight-worthy Boeing 747 should be assembled by a hurricane roaring through a junkyard. Dawkins appears to think the probability of the existence of God is in that same neighborhood--so small as to be negligible for all practical (and most impractical) purposes. Why does he think so?

Here Dawkins doesn't appeal to the usual anti-theistic arguments--the argument from evil, for example, or the claim that it's impossible that there be a being with the attributes believers ascribe to God.2 So why does he think theism is enormously improbable? The answer: if there were such a person as God, he would have to be enormously complex, and the more complex something is, the less probable it is: "However statistically improbable the entity you seek to explain by invoking a designer, the designer himself has got to be at least as improbable. God is the Ultimate Boeing 747." The basic idea is that anything that knows and can do what God knows and can do would have to be incredibly complex. In particular, anything that can create or design something must be at least as complex as the thing it can design or create. Putting it another way, Dawkins says a designer must contain at least as much information as what it creates or designs, and information is inversely related to probability. Therefore, he thinks, God would have to be monumentally complex, hence astronomically improbable; thus it is almost certain that God does not exist.

But why does Dawkins think God is complex? And why does he think that the more complex something is, the less probable it is? Before looking more closely into his reasoning, I'd like to digress for a moment; this claim of improbability can help us understand something otherwise very perplexing about Dawkins' argument in his earlier and influential book, The Blind Watchmaker. There he argues that the scientific theory of evolution shows that our world has not been designed--by God or anyone else. This thought is trumpeted by the subtitle of the book: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design.

How so? Suppose the evidence of evolution suggests that all living creatures have evolved from some elementary form of life: how does that show that the universe is without design? Well, if the universe has not been designed, then the process of evolution is unguided, unorchestrated, by any intelligent being; it is, as Dawkins suggests, blind. So his claim is that the evidence of evolution reveals that evolution is unplanned, unguided, unorchestrated by any intelligent being.

But how could the evidence of evolution reveal a thing like that? After all, couldn't it be that God has directed and overseen the process of evolution? What makes Dawkins think evolution is unguided? What he does in The Blind Watchmaker, fundamentally, is three things. First, he recounts in vivid and arresting detail some of the fascinating anatomical details of certain living creatures and their incredibly complex and ingenious ways of making a living; this is the sort of thing Dawkins does best. Second, he tries to refute arguments for the conclusion that blind, unguided evolution could not have produced certain of these wonders of the living world--the mammalian eye, for example, or the wing. Third, he makes suggestions as to how these and other organic systems could have developed by unguided evolution.

Suppose he's successful with these three things: how would that show that the universe is without design? How does the main argument go from there? His detailed arguments are all for the conclusion that it is biologically possible that these various organs and systems should have come to be by unguided Darwinian mechanisms (and some of what he says here is of considerable interest). What is truly remarkable, however, is the form of what seems to be the main argument. The premise he argues for is something like this:

1. We know of no irrefutable objections to its being biologically possible that all of life has come to be by way of unguided Darwinian processes;

and Dawkins supports that premise by trying to refute objections to its being biologically possible that life has come to be that way. His conclusion, however, is

2. All of life has come to be by way of unguided Darwinian processes.

It's worth meditating, if only for a moment, on the striking distance, here, between premise and conclusion. The premise tells us, substantially, that there are no irrefutable objections to its being possible that unguided evolution has produced all of the wonders of the living world; the conclusion is that it is true that unguided evolution has indeed produced all of those wonders. The argument form seems to be something like

We know of no irrefutable objections to its being possible that p;
Therefore
p is true.

Philosophers sometimes propound invalid arguments (I've propounded a few myself); few of those arguments display the truly colossal distance between premise and conclusion sported by this one. I come into the departmental office and announce to the chairman that the dean has just authorized a $50,000 raise for me; naturally he wants to know why I think so. I tell him that we know of no irrefutable objections to its being possible that the dean has done that. My guess is he'd gently suggest that it is high time for me to retire.

Here is where that alleged massive improbability of theism is relevant. If theism is false, then (apart from certain weird suggestions we can safely ignore) evolution is unguided. But it is extremely likely, Dawkins thinks, that theism is false. Hence it is extremely likely that evolution is unguided--in which case to establish it as true, he seems to think, all that is needed is to refute those claims that it is impossible. So perhaps we can think about his Blind Watchmaker argument as follows: he is really employing as an additional if unexpressed premise his idea that the existence of God is enormously unlikely. If so, then the argument doesn't seem quite so magnificently invalid. (It is still invalid, however, even if not quite so magnificently--you can't establish something as a fact by showing that objections to its possibility fail, and adding that it is very probable.)

Now suppose we return to Dawkins' argument for the claim that theism is monumentally improbable. As you recall, the reason Dawkins gives is that God would have to be enormously complex, and hence enormously improbable ("God, or any intelligent, decision-making calculating agent, is complex, which is another way of saying improbable"). What can be said for this argument?

Not much. First, is God complex? According to much classical theology (Thomas Aquinas, for example) God is simple, and simple in a very strong sense, so that in him there is no distinction of thing and property, actuality and potentiality, essence and existence, and the like. Some of the discussions of divine simplicity get pretty complicated, not to say arcane.3 (It isn't only Catholic theology that declares God simple; according to the Belgic Confession, a splendid expression of Reformed Christianity, God is "a single and simple spiritual being.") So first, according to classical theology, God is simple, not complex.4 More remarkable, perhaps, is that according to Dawkins' own definition of complexity, God is not complex. According to his definition (set out in The Blind Watchmaker), something is complex if it has parts that are "arranged in a way that is unlikely to have arisen by chance alone." But of course God is a spirit, not a material object at all, and hence has no parts.5 A fortiori (as philosophers like to say) God doesn't have parts arranged in ways unlikely to have arisen by chance. Therefore, given the definition of complexity Dawkins himself proposes, God is not complex.

So first, it is far from obvious that God is complex. But second, suppose we concede, at least for purposes of argument, that God is complex. Perhaps we think the more a being knows, the more complex it is; God, being omniscient, would then be highly complex. Perhaps so; still, why does Dawkins think it follows that God would be improbable? Given materialism and the idea that the ultimate objects in our universe are the elementary particles of physics, perhaps a being that knew a great deal would be improbable--how could those particles get arranged in such a way as to constitute a being with all that knowledge? Of course we aren't given materialism. Dawkins is arguing that theism is improbable; it would be dialectically deficient in excelsis to argue this by appealing to materialism as a premise. Of course it is unlikely that there is such a person as God if materialism is true; in fact materialism logically entails that there is no such person as God; but it would be obviously question-begging to argue that theism is improbable because materialism is true.

So why think God must be improbable? According to classical theism, God is a necessary being; it is not so much as possible that there should be no such person as God; he exists in all possible worlds. But if God is a necessary being, if he exists in all possible worlds, then the probability that he exists, of course, is 1, and the probability that he does not exist is 0. Far from its being improbable that he exists, his existence is maximally probable. So if Dawkins proposes that God's existence is improbable, he owes us an argument for the conclusion that there is no necessary being with the attributes of God--an argument that doesn't just start from the premise that materialism is true. Neither he nor anyone else has provided even a decent argument along these lines; Dawkins doesn't even seem to be aware that he needs an argument of that sort.

BECAUSE WE WANT TO, NOT BECAUSE WE NEED TO:

Why the Economy Is Weathering Oil's Swings: A return to peak price levels would hamper U.S. GDP, but overall the economy needs less oil to be productive (David Wyss and Beth Ann Bovino, 2/26/07, Business Week)

Although there has long been talk of energy shortages looming, such worries are misplaced. There's plenty of energy on and in the planet Earth. What's in short supply is cheap crude oil.

The Energy Information Agency (EIA) of the U.S. Energy Dept. estimates that there are 6 trillion barrels of conventional petroleum in the world. Of that, however, 5 trillion are concentrated in areas that are either difficult to tap (offshore or in the Arctic), politically unstable (the Middle East, Nigeria), or environmentally sensitive.

Among other forms of fossil fuels, nonconventional oil sources--such as tar sands and shale oil--could contain another 3 trillion barrels, and reserves in North America could exceed Saudi Arabia's crude reserves. Natural gas deposits probably exceed oil deposits; proven reserves are at about a 65-year supply at current production levels, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

Estimated coal reserves are at a 155-year supply at current production levels. Although such quantities seem abundant, estimates are highly uncertain. In addition, these other fossil fuels are more expensive to use than conventional petroleum, which provides energy in a form that is relatively easy to extract, transport, and burn. [...]

[O]il has dropped to 36% of the world energy supply in 2003 from 44% in 1971, with most of the drop offset by increased use of natural gas and nuclear power. This indicates that even if oil supplies become scarce, energy will still be available.

EVERYT...:

House's travel rules limited (Tim Dillon, 2/26/07, USA TODAY)

Lawmakers have continued to take trips paid for by outside groups since the House voted last month to restrict who can pay for such travel.

House travel records show that 19 members since Jan. 5 have accepted airfare, meals and lodging from special interests, including groups that employ lobbyists. The records were compiled by the non-partisan PoliticalMoneyLine.

The trips demonstrate that lawmakers "are trying to see what they are going to get away with," said Melanie Sloan, executive director of the liberal-leaning watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

THE UNSPEAKABLE TOAST THE UNWATCHABLE:

And the Loser Is...: The movie-going audience, who is ignored by the Academy, and the telecast audience, who is subjected to an overlong, overwrought Oscars show (Ronald Grover, 2/26/07, Business Week)

Anyone who watched last night's Oscar telecast no doubt came away with one of several conclusions. First, Al Gore, whose environmental documentary An Inconvenient Truth won an Academy Award, is the most popular guy in Hollywood these days. Or maybe that ABC found a new, more boring way than usual to spread out what could be a two-hour ceremony into something almost interminable. But I came away with some new-found respect for Will Ferrell, or the guy who wrote the words to the song he performed with Jack Black. "You're the saddest guy of all," the comedian warbled about big-budget action stars. "Your movies make money but they'll never call your name."

O.K. so The Departed took home the Oscar for the best film of 2006. But was it? Maybe, but that's only because the level of competition was so very low. But, as usual, when the green-eyeshade guys at PricewaterhouseCoopers tabulate up the winners often has more to do with which film, actor, or director has the backing of those working in the industry. Should we trust a bunch of folks with vested interests, far-too-insider views and maybe a little too much riding on the results? Can these people really judge what film would be Best Picture for the Folks Who Watch Them?

MORE:
The Broadcast: Long and Longer (Tom Shales, February 26, 2007, Washington Post)

Alternately (and sometimes simultaneously) a bore and a horror, the 79th annual Academy Awards, televised live from Los Angeles on ABC, had a few bright spots to keep weary viewers propping their eyes open as midnight approached -- even if they had never heard of, much less seen, many of the nominated films.

Ellen DeGeneres was a tepid host at last night's Academy Awards. With her wry, rambling, hemming-and-hawing style, she wanted to put everyone at ease; but instead, she put us to sleep. She took a rice-cake approach to her monologue -- it was airy, bland, and a little crunchy, as she focused on the diversity of the audience. "If there weren't blacks, Jews, and gays," she said to applause, "there would be no Oscars."

Alas, DeGeneres had less comic impact than one or two glimpses of Jack Nicholson, who'd shaved his head in solidarity with Britney Spears. He looked like the genie from a very high-proof bottle. When DeGeneres went into the audience and offered a script to Martin Scorsese, she wanted us to laugh, but we cringed as Mark Wahlberg sat right behind them. Moments earlier, Wahlberg had lost his supporting-actor contest.

And so the night proceeded with the same meandering tone as DeGeneres, inching toward nothing in particular.

HAVING won the Oscar for best picture, "The Departed" will always, from here to eternity, have an aura of distinction, like a suave white-haired gent gliding into the Governors Ball in his tuxedo.

But once the hoopla dies -- and in Hollywood, hoopla dies pretty quickly -- a thornier question will surface: What will we think of "The Departed" 30 years from now? Will it be considered a classic like "Lawrence of Arabia" or a musty heirloom like "My Fair Lady"?

Last night's Best Picture winner came with a "made-in-Boston" label and a Dropkick Murphys theme song.

Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg also presented six-time Academy Award nominee Martin Scorsese with his first Oscar for Best Director. A deeply moved Forest Whitaker accepted the Best Actor statuette for "The Last King of Scotland." Whitaker's fellow nominee, Peter O'Toole ("Venus"), was shut out of his eighth contest, making him the most-nominated actor not to win. Odds-on favorite Helen Mirren took home the Best Actress award for "The Queen."

"The Departed" picked up four prizes, including Film Editing by Scorsese regular Thelma Schoonmaker and Best Adapted Screenplay by the Boston-born writer William Monahan.

An air of uncertainty hung over last night's 79th Annual Academy Awards, the sense that anything could happen. And it did, when Alan Arkin was named Best Supporting Actor for his foul-mouthed, drug-addicted grandfather in "Little Miss Sunshine."

OVER THE WALL:

Immigrants who wire money get help from the Fed: Directo a Mexico lets customers without Social Security numbers wire money at little cost (Molly Hennessy-Fiske, February 26, 2007, LA Times)

Dubbed Directo a Mexico, the Federal Reserve-sponsored service allows customers without Social Security numbers to wire money through the Fed system to Mexico's central bank at little cost. In September, the Fed expanded the remittance program by allowing immigrants, legal or not, to open accounts at participating banks and credit unions in the U.S. or Mexico. About 27,000 transfers are made through the program each month.

CHEER UP, CHARLY:

Retarded mice get smarter with drug: Down syndrome researchers see promise in PTZ, or pentylenetetrazole (Denise Gellene, February 26, 2007, LA Times)

Lab mice with the mental retardation of Down syndrome got smarter after being fed a drug that strengthened brain circuits involved in learning and memory, researchers reported Sunday.

After receiving once-daily doses of pentylenetetrazole, or PTZ, for 17 days, the mice could recognize objects and navigate mazes as well as normal mice did, researchers said. The improvements lasted up to two months after the drug was discontinued, according to the report in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

Scientists said the study opened a promising avenue for research in a field that had seen little success.

OUTSOURCING ISN'T ALWAYS THE BEST OPTION:

Cheney Warns Pakistan to Act on Terror (DAVID E. SANGER and MARK MAZZETTI, 2/26/07, NY Times)

Vice President Dick Cheney made an unannounced trip to Pakistan on Monday to deliver what officials in Washington described as an unusually tough message to Gen. Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan, warning him that the newly Democratic Congress could cut aid to his country unless his forces become far more aggressive in hunting down operatives with Al Qaeda.

Mr. Cheney's trip was shrouded in secrecy, and he was on the ground for only a few hours, sharing a private lunch with the Pakistani leader at his palace. Notably, Mr. Cheney traveled with the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Steve Kappes, an indication that the conversation with the Pakistani president likely included discussion of American intelligence agency contentions that Al Qaeda camps have been reconstituted along the border of Afghanistan.

The decision to send Mr. Cheney secretly to Pakistan came after the White House concluded that General Musharraf is failing to live up to commitments he made to Mr. Bush during a visit here in September.

SHIFTING JOEMENTUM:

The Choice on Iraq (JOSEPH LIEBERMAN, February 26, 2007, Opinion Journal)

Two months into the 110th Congress, Washington has never been more bitterly divided over our mission in Iraq. The Senate and House of Representatives are bracing for parliamentary trench warfare--trapped in an escalating dynamic of division and confrontation that will neither resolve the tough challenges we face in Iraq nor strengthen our nation against its terrorist enemies around the world.

What is remarkable about this state of affairs in Washington is just how removed it is from what is actually happening in Iraq. There, the battle of Baghdad is now under way. A new commander, Gen. David Petraeus, has taken command, having been confirmed by the Senate, 81-0, just a few weeks ago. And a new strategy is being put into action, with thousands of additional American soldiers streaming into the Iraqi capital.

Congress thus faces a choice in the weeks and months ahead. Will we allow our actions to be driven by the changing conditions on the ground in Iraq--or by the unchanging political and ideological positions long ago staked out in Washington? What ultimately matters more to us: the real fight over there, or the political fight over here?

MORE:
Rice says Congress shouldn't micromanage war: Bush won't let himself be constrained, the secretary of State says. (Molly Hennessy-Fiske, February 26, 2007, LA Times)

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice spoke out Sunday against efforts in Congress to limit the role of U.S. forces in Iraq, saying President Bush would not allow himself to be constrained by such a "micromanagement of military affairs."

Asked whether Bush would abide by a binding resolution, now being drafted by Democratic leaders, that would include the start of troop withdrawal from Iraq, Rice told "Fox News Sunday" such a measure would hinder his efforts to support the "flexibility of our commanders to do what they think they need to do on the ground."

"I can't imagine a circumstance in which it's a good thing that their flexibility is constrained by people sitting here in Washington, sitting in the Congress, trying to micromanage this war," Rice said.

As Congress returns this week from the year's first recess, authorization repeal is supposed to be attached to the bill containing homeland security recommendations by the 9/11 commission. But Sen. Norm Coleman, who has become prominent among Republican critics of Bush's war policy, told me from his home state of Minnesota that he would oppose the de-authorization and predicted no more than two Republican senators would vote for it.

One of those two Republican senators would have to be Chuck Hagel, who has fearlessly critiqued Bush war policy. But he told me from Nebraska that he would not be inclined to support repeal. If Hagel is lost, Democrats might fall short of the 50 senators necessary for passage, much less the 60 senators necessary to close off debate. [...]

After checking with anti-war Republicans on recess last week, I found that several who had favored a non-binding resolution rejecting Bush's policy are loath to give Democrats an Iraq-get-out-of-jail-free-card. An exception was Sen. Gordon Smith of Oregon, who indicated he might favor de-authorization but never would cut off funds. However, Coleman told me: "I don't see us going back and rewriting history." Similarly, Hagel said: "We are not going back and rewind every decision we made."

YET "CONSERVATIVES" HATE HIM:

Look to the states, America (Neal Peirce, 2/26/07, Seattle Times)

If you're wondering where American governance is headed, don't look to Washington -- look to the states.

We're into one of those classic times, repeated through our history, when the federal government retrenches, trying to cut taxes, leaving decisions to the private sector.

The Democrats controlling Congress may prefer a more activist course, but the Bush administration's program of deep tax cuts and its preference for military over domestic spending will leave its mark for years to come. Even a Democratic president, should one be elected, would be restrained by the deep debt run up by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and by Bush-era deficit spending.

But check the states.

THE DRAGON ALSO SETS:

A Japanese lesson for China: Officials in the U.S. and China can learn from Japan's boom and bust in the 1980s and '90s (Lawrence H. Summers, February 26, 2007, LA Times)

A RISING Asian power is an export juggernaut and enjoys prodigious growth fueled by high savings and investment rates. Its rapidly modernizing industries threaten an ever greater swath of industry in Europe and the United States. Its formidable central bank reserves and burgeoning account surplus lead to claims that its exchange rate is being unfairly manipulated. Its financial system is bank-centric, heavily regulated in favor of domestic institutions and closely tied to government and industry. Rapid productivity growth holds down prices, but its asset values rise sharply.

Key congressional leaders in Washington demand radical action to contain the economic threat. Diplomats warn that public bashing is unproductive but make clear that economic issues are a crucial part of the bilateral relationship. Delegations of senior U.S. officials engage in "dialogue" with their counterparts about the many aspects of their economic policies that promote imbalances, warning of the congressional demons who stand ready to act if "results" are not achieved quickly.

All of this describes what is happening in China, and with our relationship with Beijing, today. It also describes the Japanese economy in the late 1980s and early 1990s, before its lost decade of deflation and considerable deterioration in global prestige. Although there are obvious differences, notably China's much lower level of development, the similarities are striking enough to invite an effort to draw some lessons from the Japanese experience.

NOT THAT MICROSOFT HAS EVEN INNOVATED:

How to Keep America Competitive (Bill Gates, February 25, 2007, Washington Post)

American competitiveness also requires immigration reforms that reflect the importance of highly skilled foreign-born employees. Demand for specialized technical skills has long exceeded the supply of native-born workers with advanced degrees, and scientists and engineers from other countries fill this gap.

This issue has reached a crisis point. Computer science employment is growing by nearly 100,000 jobs annually. But at the same time studies show that there is a dramatic decline in the number of students graduating with computer science degrees.

The United States provides 65,000 temporary H-1B visas each year to make up this shortfall -- not nearly enough to fill open technical positions.

Permanent residency regulations compound this problem. Temporary employees wait five years or longer for a green card. During that time they can't change jobs, which limits their opportunities to contribute to their employer's success and overall economic growth.

Last year, reform on this issue stalled as Congress struggled to address border security and undocumented immigration. As lawmakers grapple with those important issues once again, I urge them to support changes to the H-1B visa program that allow American businesses to hire foreign-born scientists and engineers when they can't find the homegrown talent they need. This program has strong wage protections for U.S. workers: Like other companies, Microsoft pays H-1B and U.S. employees the same high levels -- levels that exceed the government's prevailing wage.

Reforming the green card program to make it easier to retain highly skilled professionals is also necessary. These employees are vital to U.S. competitiveness, and we should welcome their contribution to U.S. economic growth.

We should also encourage foreign students to stay here after they graduate. Half of this country's doctoral candidates in computer science come from abroad. It's not in our national interest to educate them here but send them home when they've completed their studies.

During the past 30 years, U.S. innovation has been the catalyst for the digital information revolution. If the United States is to remain a global economic leader, we must foster an environment that enables a new generation to dream up innovations, regardless of where they were born. Talent in this country is not the problem -- the issue is political will.

IN A REPUBLIC REGIME CHANGE IS EASY:

Nuclear diplomacy and Iran: Seeking the next step (Economist.com, 2/24/07)

For a start, economic pressure may begin to tell, despite the boon in revenues from high oil prices. The non-oil sectors continue to perform poorly. An Iranian parliamentary committee reported late last year that sanctions on Iran's oil exports, if ever imposed, would force the country to "modify its national priorities, and to devote the bulk of its resources to preventing major social upheaval". No one proposes oil sanctions, not least because these would hurt the world economy too. But the parliamentary report shows that Iran is aware of its own vulnerabilities. And non-oil sanctions, notably unilateral financial pressure from America and other Western countries, may already be having an impact, deterring investors and putting up the cost of funding an assortment of activities, including in the energy sector.

In turn there are some signs of political divisions within Iran. Some newspapers have recently dared to start criticising the president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, for his controversial comments over the Holocaust, Israel's right to exist and other topics which have helped make Iran look more of a pariah. Urban-dwellers, especially, are uncomfortable about international isolation. Ms Rice would love to exploit internal splits. She has said she hoped to convince "those who are reasonable in Iran" to suspend enrichment and return to talks. The trouble is, it may be difficult to tell which reasonable-sounding Iranians really speak for the regime.

If outside powers preserve a relatively united front--for example at a meeting of senior diplomats in London on February 26th--perhaps the pressure will really begin to tell. Despite splits over Iraq, the big European powers have stood together with America over this confrontation. Russia's and China's recalcitrance over sanctions may not bode well, but even that may not be permanent. If Iran both remains stubborn externally and looks wobbly internally, the two might decide that a gentle racheting up of pressure might help achieve the goal they say they want--defanging of Iran's nuclear programme without sparking a third regional war.

INSIDE THE BELTWAY IS BLUE AMERICA:

GOP is abandoning Bush? Not quite (Richard Benedetto, 2/26/07, USA Today)

The Washington punditocracy has proclaimed far and wide that Republicans, disenchanted with the war in Iraq, are abandoning President Bush in droves, leaving him the lamest of lame ducks. However, the latest USA TODAY/Gallup Poll suggests Bush might not be as wounded as he appears -- at least not among his party faithful.

The Feb. 9-11 poll puts Bush's job approval at 37%, but among people who identify themselves as Republican or leaning Republican, his approval rating is 76%.

Thus, despite bad news from Baghdad and carefully crafted hand-wringing by high-profile GOP war critics in Congress such as Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, three of four Republicans in the country are hanging in there with the president.

The poll also shows that rank-and-file Republicans have higher regard for the president than they do Republicans in Congress. They gave GOP lawmakers a 63% job-approval rating, 13 points below Bush's. And 72% of Republicans do not think Bush made a mistake sending U.S. troops to Iraq.

So if congressional Republicans figure the key to re-election in 2008 is taking a hard line against Bush on Iraq, they could be dead wrong. They might lure some independents, but they risk alienating their GOP base. To win, you need solid support from your base plus independents, not independents alone.

Conventional wisdom also says the presidential ambitions of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., could be derailed by his strong support for the war. This poll, however, shows that his stance could be a plus among the base.

SISSIFICATION:

Teens Can Multitask, But What Are Costs?: Ability to Analyze May Be Affected, Experts Worry (Lori Aratani, 2/26/07, Washington Post)

The students who do it say multitasking makes them feel more productive and less stressed. Researchers aren't sure what the long-term impact will be because no studies have probed its effect on teenage development. But some fear that the penchant for flitting from task to task could have serious consequences on young people's ability to focus and develop analytical skills.

There is special concern for teenagers because parts of their brain are still developing, said Jordan Grafman, chief of cognitive neuroscience at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.

"Introducing multitasking in younger kids in my opinion can be detrimental," he said. "One of the biggest problems about multitasking is that it's almost impossible to gain a depth of knowledge of any of the tasks you do while you're multitasking. And if it becomes normal to do, you'll likely be satisfied with very surface-level investigation and knowledge."

SOMETIMES THE INTERNET LIVES UP TO ITS HYPE:

The $103,000,000 mechanics of Daisuke Matsuzaka (Carlos Gomez, February 26, 2007, Hardball Times)

I will let the smarter folks here at THT get into statistical projections of Daisuke Matsuzaka. Instead, I would like to focus on Matsuzaka's mechanics from a scout's point of view.

Specifically, I'd like to address the mechanical issues that will play a role in how Matsuzaka's career turns out:

1) How efficient is he with his mechanics?
2) Will he keep his velocity/stuff throughout his career?
3) What about potential injury risks?

Without saying anything further, here is a clip of Daisuke Matsuzaka at the World Baseball Classic.

SO MUCH FOR EGALITIE:

Capitalism on the kibbutz: Many Israeli collectives shunning system of financial equality (Matthew Kalman, February 26, 2007, Boston Globe)

[L]ast week, [Yoya] Shapiro joined 320 fellow kibbutzniks in a vote that finally ended the financial equality among members that was a cornerstone of the ideology hewn during those early years of agricultural labor.

With that decision, Deganya joined a growing number of the nation's 270 kibbutzim in adopting many of the trappings of free-market capitalism, including differential wages and the ability to own private property. The vote ended nearly a century in which members worked according to their ability and received food, goods, clothes, and services according to their needs. Under the new system, kibbutz members keep their salaries, but pay taxes into a fund for common services such as health, education, and cultural events, as well as a support fund for poorer members.

As of December 2006, 61 percent of kibbutzim were paying differential salaries to their members and more than 20 percent had decided to transfer ownership of kibbutz houses from the collective to the members who live in them.

IF DAWKINS ACTUALLY UNDERSTOOD DARWINISM...:

Catholics in England Boosted by Migrants: Influx of Devout From New E.U. Countries Swells Attendance, Transforms Church (Mary Jordan, 2/26/07, Washington Post)

In the past few years, roughly the same number of Catholics and Anglicans have been attending Sunday services in any given week -- about a million each, according to spokesmen for both churches. But now, "ethnic congregations are exploding," said Francis Davis, author of a new report by the Von Hugel Institute at Cambridge University on the phenomenal influx of Catholic immigrants.

Davis said that as many as 500,000 Catholic immigrants, many of them very devout, are causing Catholic church attendance "to take off." One London church was down to 20 members when it introduced Masses in Portuguese, and suddenly about 1,400 people were attending Sunday Mass, Davis said.

Arun Kataria, a spokesman for the Church of England, said that weekly participation at services is only one way to measure the strength of a church. He said that 26 million people in England are baptized Anglicans, compared with 4.2 million baptized Catholics, and that the number of Anglican worshipers is holding steady. Of the many immigrants coming to Britain, he said, most tend to live in cities and have not affected the religious makeup of the countryside.

Kataria said that although "clearly a great many immigrants are coming in," not all of them are flocking to Catholic churches.

But many are.

"The face of London is changing, and with it, the church," said Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, the leader of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, when he addressed the topic recently. He said immigrants were filling 90 percent of low-paid jobs, working as cleaners, builders and caterers, and he estimated that they make up almost a third of the city's workforce. "A very high proportion -- notably from Central and Eastern Europe -- are practicing Catholics," he said.

Murphy-O'Connor said it was a challenge for the church to fulfill the needs of immigrants, some of whom end up homeless and exploited. Last May, he said from the pulpit that he backed a government amnesty for long-term illegal residents, prompting an estimated 2,000 immigrants in the cathedral to burst into applause.

Migration is also swelling the ranks of Catholics in Northern Ireland, where the Catholic minority has long been feuding with the Protestant majority. Three decades of armed conflict, largely pitting Catholics against Protestants, cost more than 3,600 lives before a cease-fire was negotiated. Projections now show that immigration, along with higher birthrates among Catholics, may soon leave the population of Northern Ireland evenly divided between the two faiths.

The religious makeup of the province's police force has been a major hurdle in cementing peace. Northern Irish Catholics for decades have mistrusted and boycotted the police, a Protestant-majority force that Catholics viewed as biased against them. Officials have been trying to recruit more Catholics, and last month they got an unexpected boost when 1,000 Poles signed up -- nearly all of them Catholic immigrants.

The influx of new immigrants is generally traced to 2004, when the European Union expanded from 15 countries to 25. That meant workers from the new member countries -- eight of them in Eastern Europe -- were legally allowed to work in the United Kingdom. Poland, which is more than 90 percent Catholic, has by far the largest population of the new E.U. countries.

Official British government statistics show that about 490,000 migrants, 300,000 of them Poles, have arrived since 2004. Polish authorities estimate that the number of Polish workers here is far higher, about double the official figure, at 600,000. Thousands of Polish migrants continue to arrive at London bus stations and airports every week.

"It is very, very good, but sometimes it can be difficult" to have so many parishioners, said Tadeusz Wyszomirski, a parish priest at Our Lady Mother of the Church in west London.

Even though he recently added a seventh Sunday Mass -- all of them are in Polish -- the large church with grand stained-glass windows still overflows at most services. Some people kneel in the aisles, others stand outside even in London's cold winter rain. Crowds also flock to the church's three daily Masses in Polish on weekdays.

"I hope it continues to grow," he said. But the five priests are very busy, he added, trying to keep up with all the weddings, baptisms and home visits to the sick.

URBANIZATION WAS A MISTAKE:

Mental health problems worse in cities (The Local, 26th February 2007)

Swedish city-dwellers have more psychological problems than people living in other parts of the country.

The results of a survey carried out by the Swedish National Institute of Public Health also show men and women in northern Sweden reporting an improvement in their mental wellbeing.

Stress, uneasiness, worry and anxiety are all more common in towns than in the countryside. And the symptoms are more widespread among women than men.

CAN'T KEEP A GOOD MAN DOWN:

Bob Woodruff Returns to ABC News to Report His Story (6ABC.com)

In his first on-air reporting since being severely injured by a roadside bomb in Iraq last January, ABC News Anchor Bob Woodruff will tell the incredible story of his severe wounding and amazing but painstaking recovery over the past year. Through interviews with the ABC News team and soldiers with him on that fateful patrol, as well as the military and civilian medical teams who saved his life, we learn about Woodruff's journey from the battlefield in Iraq to Germany and finally home to the United States. "To Iraq and back: Bob Woodruff Reports" will air TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 27 (10:00-11:00 p.m., ET) on the ABC Television Network.

In this special primetime documentary, Woodruff's wife, Lee, will talk for the first time about the gravity of her husband's medical condition and the impact on their family.

OUR IGNORANCE OF THEM IS THEIR MAIN STRENGTH:

Voters Remain In Neutral As Presidential Campaign Moves Into High Gear (Pew Research, February 23, 2007)

The 2008 presidential campaign has kicked off earlier than usual with more candidates than usual, but many people appear not to have noticed. Americans are no more likely to say they have given the presidential campaign much thought than they did in December, and just small minorities can name a candidate they might support.

The public's lack of engagement in the campaign is reflected in how people are reacting to the large slates of potential candidates in both parties. Of the announced and highly probable candidates, only a few in each party are widely familiar. The results of in-depth questions suggest that the images of even the well-known candidates are fairly thin. [...]

Specific impressions of the leading candidates generally reflect either the national roles they have played or the visible aspects of their backgrounds: Hillary Clinton as the wife of former President Bill Clinton; John McCain as a Vietnam POW; Rudy Giuliani as a mayor and 9/11 figure; and John Edwards as a lawyer and former vice presidential candidate.

Barack Obama is an exception to this pattern. When people are asked what comes to mind when they think of Obama, a lack of history predominates; words like "inexperienced," "young," and "new" are frequently mentioned.

THERE IS NO IRAN:

US funds terror groups to sow chaos in Iran (William Lowther and Colin Freeman, 25/02/2007, Sunday Telegraph)

In a move that reflects Washington's growing concern with the failure of diplomatic initiatives, CIA officials are understood to be helping opposition militias among the numerous ethnic minority groups clustered in Iran's border regions. [...]

Such incidents have been carried out by the Kurds in the west, the Azeris in the north-west, the Ahwazi Arabs in the south-west, and the Baluchis in the south-east. Non-Persians make up nearly 40 per cent of Iran's 69 million population, with around 16 million Azeris, seven million Kurds, five million Ahwazis and one million Baluchis. Most Baluchis live over the border in Pakistan.

Funding for their separatist causes comes directly from the CIA's classified budget but is now "no great secret", according to one former high-ranking CIA official in Washington who spoke anonymously to The Sunday Telegraph.

His claims were backed by Fred Burton, a former US state department counter-terrorism agent, who said: "The latest attacks inside Iran fall in line with US efforts to supply and train Iran's ethnic minorities to destabilise the Iranian regime."

In a rare public criticism of Pakistan, the Tehran Times commented last week that an exclusive Islamabad-Washington nexus is at work manipulating the Afghan situation. The daily, which reflects official Iranian thinking, spelled out something that others perhaps knew already but were afraid to talk about publicly. [...]

The Iranian outburst was, conceivably, prompted by the spurt of trans-border terrorism inside Iran's Sistan-Balochistan province, which borders Pakistan. Ten days ago, a militant group called Jundallah killed 11 members of Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards in an attack in the city center of Zahedan. Iranian state media reported that the attack was part of US plans to provoke ethnic and religious violence in Iran. Balochs are Sunnis numbering about 1.5 million out of Iran's 70 million predominantly Shi'ite population.

Iranian Interior Minister Mostafa Pour-Mohammadi alleged that in the recent past, US intelligence operatives in Afghanistan had been meeting and coordinating with Iranian militants, apart from encouraging the smuggling of drugs into Iran from Afghanistan. He said the US operatives were working to create Shi'ite-Sunni strife within Iran.

BACK WHEN THERE WAS A BRITAIN:

The long march across China (and a very British hero): Compassion in conflict George Hogg took 60 orphans on a perilous winter trek across war-torn China to save them from the advancing Japanese. His remarkable story has been turned into a film, which threatens to reopen old wounds. (Clifford Coonan, 26 February 2007, Independent)

The story of how a young Englishman, George Hogg, took 60 orphans on a journey of hundreds of miles to safety across war-ravaged China in the winter of 1944 is one of the more remarkable tales of the Second World War.

In the town of Shandan, in Gansu province on the Mongolian border, Hogg and his friend and mentor, the New Zealand philanthropist Rewi Alley, are remembered with a statue and affection, but Hogg is little known outside China. This is all set to change with a new film called The Children of Huang Shi currently being made by the Canadian-born director Roger Spottiswoode.

With Japanese forces snapping at their heels as they made their western advance across China in 1944, and with the help of Mao Zedong's Communist guerrillas, Hogg escorted the boys across 688 miles of treacherous mountainous terrain in north-western China to a temple town in Shandan. Just one year later, Hogg contracted tetanus after he injured his toe playing basketball with the students. With no medicines to stop lockjaw, he died aged 29.

His Chinese odyssey is just one small part of this remarkable Englishman's life, which encompassed the most radical changes the Middle Kingdom had seen for thousands of years.

THE RATTLING GROWS LOUDER:

Report: 3 Gulf states agree to IAF overflights en route to Iran (Yoav Stern and Yossi Melman, 2/25/07, Haaretz)

Three Arab states in the Persian Gulf would be willing to allow the Israel Air force to enter their airspace in order to reach Iran in case of an attack on its nuclear facilities, the Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Siyasa reported on Sunday.

According to the report, a diplomat from one of the gulf states visiting Washington on Saturday said the three states, Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates, have told the United States that they would not object to Israel using their airspace, despite their fear of an Iranian response.

Al-Siyasa further reported that NATO leaders are urging Turkey to open its airspace for an Attack on Iran as well and to also open its airports and borders in case of a ground attack.

HE'S NOT REALLY HOPING FOR ACCOMODATION WITH EVIL, IT'S JUST THE PC THING TO CLAIM:

Faith: Britain's new cultural divide is not between Christian and Muslim, Hindu and Jew. It is between those who have faith and those who do not. Stuart Jeffries reports on the vicious and uncompromising battle between believers and non-believers (Stuart Jeffries, February 26, 2007, The Guardian)

Another reason for secularist rage at people of faith, one might think, is exasperation on the part of militant atheists that religion has not died out as they hoped. "It has taken centuries and centuries to wrestle away from the churches the levers of power," says Grayling.

Tamimi contends that this was not quite what happened. Rather, he suggests that Christians were complicit in their marginalisation from power. "Christians did that to themselves - they allowed religion to move to the private sphere. That would be intolerable for Muslims." Why? "Partly because secularism doesn't mean the same for Muslims from the Middle East. The story of secularism in the Middle East is not one of democracy, as we are always told it was in the west. Instead, it is associated with tyranny - with Ataturk in Turkey, for instance. Islam is compatible with democracy, but not with this secular fundamentalism we are witnessing."

Grayling contends that during the late 20th century, Islam became more militant and assertive and this has changed British society radically. "In Britain we have seen Muslims burn Salman Rushdie's book. And to an extent other religions wanted to get a bit of the action - hence the protests against Jerry Springer: the Opera." When Stewart Lee, one of the writers of Jerry Springer, was interviewed amid protests against the allegedly blasphemous work being screened on TV, he suggested that Islamic culture had been more careful in protecting itself than Christian culture: "In the west, Christianity relinquished the right to be protective of its icons the day Virgin Mary snow globes were put up for sale at the Vatican. But in Islamic culture it is very different. To use a corporate image, Islam has always been a lot more conscientious about protecting its brand." Now other religions are becoming more publicly conscientious.

One example of this growing conscientiousness is a recent paper for the new public theology think-tank Theos, in which Nick Spencer concluded that in the 21st century, liberal humanism would face a challenge from an "old man" - God. "The feeble and slightly embarrassing old man who had been pacing about the house quietly mumbling to himself suddenly wanted to participate in family conversation and, what's more, to be taken seriously." Indeed, in Britain's ethically repellent consumerist society, even some atheists might consider it would be good to hear from the old man again, if only to provide a moral framework beyond shopping.

The refrain of Christians like Spencer is that unless religion is a part of public-policy debates, then society will be impoverished. Last November the Archbishop of Canterbury gave a lecture in which he distinguished between programmatic and procedural secularism. The former meant that in the public domain, everybody had to silence their fundamental convictions and debate in a value-free atmosphere of public neutrality. For Williams, this was a hopeless way of carrying on public discourse in a bewildering society that embraced not only many faiths but many anti-faith positions, and in which real disputes over very different values needed to take place. Better was procedural secularism, which promised that different groups could at least converse with each other in public discussions over sensitive questions of value and policy. This would involve, said Williams, "a crowded and argumentative public square that acknowledges the authority of a legal mediator or broker whose job it is to balance and manage real difference".

It is an idea similar to one set out by Yahya Birt, research fellow at The Islamic Foundation. "One form of secularism suggests that religion should be kept in the private sphere. That's Dawkins' position. Another form, expressed by philosophers suc has Isaiah Berlin and John Gray, is to do with establishing a modus vivendi. It accepts that you come to the public debate with baggage that will inform your arguments. In this, the government tries to find common ground and the best possible consensus, which can only work if we share enough to behave civilly. Of course, there will be real clashes over issues such as gay adoption, but it's not clear to me that that's a problem per se."

What should such a public square be like? It might not be Menckian, but it could be based on respectful understanding of others' most cherished beliefs, argues Spencer: "We should be more willing to treat other value systems as coherent, reasonable and even valuable rather than as primitive or grotesque mutations of liberal humanism to which every sane person adheres." It is, at least, a hope, albeit one, given our current climate, in which it would be foolish to place too much faith.

MORE:
Brother and sister fight for right to continue their incestuous affair (Tony Paterson, 26 February 2007, Independent)

"We want the law which makes incest a crime to be abolished," said Mr Stübing - who faces the prospect of another jail term for continuing his relationship with his sister. "We do not feel guilty about what has happened between us," both added in a joint statement.

The couple's case has sparked wide controversy. Many of Germany's European neighbours, such as Belgium, Holland, and France, do not treat incest as a criminal offence.

Several German doctors have implied that the ruling is necessary to prevent illnesses caused by inbreeding. However, a growing number of politicians and legal experts have called for the law - which formed part of the "racial hygiene" policies of the Nazi era - to be scrapped.

"We are dealing with a piece of legislation which dates back to the last century and which no longer makes any sense," said Jerzy Montag, a spokesman for Germany's Green party.

THE QUESTION IS WHY SHOULD WE SAVE THEM...AGAIN:

Europe warms to US missile shield: Concerns about Iran have reduced opposition to US plans to extend its 'star wars' defense system (Jeffrey White, 2/26/07, The Christian Science Monitor)

Despite Russia's mounting opposition, the Czech Republic, Poland, and - as of Friday - Britain have all expressed serious interest in hosting parts of the shield. Other countries traditionally cool to the idea have been notably quiet. The trigger: concern about a nuclear Iran.

"This is all a result of Iran," says Tim Williams, a European security analyst at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies in London. "Governments see that Iranian missiles can hit Europe, and suddenly they are very worried about the threat from ballistic missiles. They have to look at missile defenses."

IT'S A MORAL ISSUE, NOT A FISCAL ONE:

Social Security: a contrarian view: New York actuary David Langer advocates making benefits much more generous, instead of cutting back (David R. Francis, 2/26/07, CS Monitor)

Because of their long-term nature, these forecasts are shaky. They hang on assumptions of interest rates, human longevity, economic growth, immigration, population, etc., that can't really be known with precision today.

Langer figures the optimistic projection is most likely to be true. It shows a small surplus in the trust fund at the end of 75 years. After looking at the annual trustees' reports from 1992 to 2002, he finds this cheery forecast the most accurate in predicting - so far - the future level of the fund's assets.

EVENTUALLY THE CALIPH WILL BE A TOCQUEVILLIAN TOO:

The other Islamic revolution (Shahram Akbarzadeh, 2/20/07, Eureka Street)

Islam is going through a quiet revolution in the West. This is not a revolution of blood and gunfire, but one of deep thought and radical ideas. Like all other revolutions in history, the final outcome is not predetermined. But there are very hopeful signs about its success.

This quiet revolution is carried out by ordinary men and women who happen to be Muslim, but are otherwise undistinguishable from the rest of the community. They live their daily lives according to a set of revolutionary, though not necessarily novel, ideals of being genuine citizens and true Muslims. Most do not consider this to be anything extraordinary. Herein lies the enormous force of this revolution. It does not depend on a cadres of dedicated revolutionaries, but on the everyday practices of ordinary people.

The guiding principles of combining Muslim faith and citizenship in a secular democracy are pretty basic. Muslims living in Australia, for example, do not have to turn their backs to religion in order to be good citizens. Quite the contrary: they turn to the essentials of their faith to fulfil their citizenship. The essentials of Islam, as those of other Abrahamic religions, are justice, fairness and equity. Although many cultural practices have been traditionally ascribed to Islam in different parts of the Muslim world, in essence, the core values are constant and consistent with the values that govern liberal democracies.

The reality of migration to Western secular societies for the first generation, and the experiences of the following generations of Muslims in Australia and elsewhere, have freed Islam from its cultural shackles. As Muslim intellectuals in Europe and North America have noted, the migration of Muslims from traditionally Muslim societies to secular liberal societies has allowed them to return to the essential kernel of their faith. This is made possible because the governing principles of the West, that draws on Judo-Christian ethical foundations, and of Islam substantially overlap.

Some observers have repeatedly called for an Islamic reformation- by which they mean accepting the separation of church and state. In reality, this reformation is already underway in the daily practices of Muslims who quietly observe social and legal codes of behaviour. They see no contradiction between performing their public duties and believing in Allah.

FORGET THE TREE, HUG YOURSELF:

The fake morality of Al Gore's convenient lie (Scott Stephens, 20 February 2007, Online Opinion)

For many people, it is fine to indulge moderate green sympathies, but only once the effects of climate change touch us directly, and only up to the point that we have to pay some personal cost. George Megalogenis has made a particularly chilling observation regarding such self-serving environmentalism in his book, The Longest Decade:

Even support for the environment, the ultimate expression of altruism, can be traced back to house prices. Labor pollsters Hawker Britton found in early 2004 that concerns for green issues were greater in those suburbs where property was more expensive. In other words, the ordinary Australian who favours protecting the environment can source his or her green values to the selfish calculation that more development in their neighbourhood equals less trees equals poorer views equals lower house prices.

Perhaps even the slick advocacy of Al Gore's pop environmentalism is, in the end, the convenient lie of our time: a way of baptising lives that are already excessive, self-seeking and idolatrous with a sickly green tinge; of not changing our consumption habits, but feeling much better about them (rather like drinking Diet Coke).

Given the similar function of religion in our culture, maybe Michael Crichton wasn't too far off the mark when he called environmentalism "the religion of choice for urban atheists".

NICE NOT TO HAVE THE FILIBUSTER, EH, MATE?:

Howard's workplace and welfare reforms and Australian values (Fred Argy, 26 February 2007, Online Opinion)

In his first three terms of office, John Howard resisted pressures to radicalise his reform agenda. He had to. There was no obvious economic rationale for a shift in gear, the public mood was still less than fully receptive to big reform leaps and he lacked Senate control.

By the end of 2005, all that had changed. First, wider public awareness of the prospective ageing of the population (hyped up more than a little by government and media), coupled with evidence of relatively low workforce participation rates in Australia (especially among those aged 25 to 54), provided a stronger economic and fiscal rationale for governments to address Australia's "hidden unemployment" problem.

Second, by 2005, community values had become less friendly to egalitarian policies in the workplace - reflecting such changes as the fracturing of worker solidarity, the growing equity investment culture (which aligned workers' interests more closely with those of companies), the cumulative effects of globalisation in encouraging competitive individualism and the increasing community hostility to government hand-outs for able-bodied people in the buoyant economic conditions.

Third, and most importantly, the Coalition gained control of the Senate in 2004 - removing one big hurdle to radical reform.

In this new political and cultural environment, Howard was able to give freer rein to his ideological propensities - especially his dislike of trade unionism and worker protection regulation.

WorkChoices became operational in April 2006. In essence, it involves a shift from regulated awards and collective bargaining to individual contracts, and a marked strengthening of managerial powers over the deployment and remuneration of staff (for example, hiring and firing, penalty rates, working times and access to foreign guest workers).

At the same time, the Howard Government has made welfare less accessible and more conditional, with much tougher penalties imposed for compliance failures (including "no-payment" for up to eight weeks), and it extended the new rules to many sole parents and people with disabilities, who will now be forced to look for part-time, low-skilled work.

The fear of losing eligibility to welfare benefits will also make it more difficult for employed workers to exit from unsatisfactory jobs or, if retrenched, to reject lower-paid jobs. The net effect of the changes in the welfare system will be to further increase the potential market power of employers relative to vulnerable employees. [...]

In terms of its impact on the distribution of market power, Howard's WorkChoices and welfare-to-work agenda should be seen as a fundamental break with the past. By markedly clawing back collective bargaining (even when wanted by nearly 100 per cent of employees), by greatly increasing managerial autonomy, by transforming what was an indirect power to make labour laws (through an independent arbiter) into a direct power under the control of the Executive, by completely disempowering many workers and by fundamentally redefining the right to welfare, Howard has taken a big step towards (and even in some respects beyond) the US social model and retreated much further from Australia's consensus-based "wage-earners welfare state".

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A Tax-Cutting Democrat: Bill Richardson's New Mexico record (Jennifer Rubin, 03/05/2007, Weekly Standard)

In July 2006 the Wall Street Journal touted New Mexico's governor Bill Richardson as a man who "embraced tax cutting and benefited politically." The Journal quoted Richardson approvingly for advising his party that "we have to be the party of growth and the American dream, not the party of redistribution." Which party is Richardson talking about? The Democrats.

Indeed, the former U.N. ambassador and secretary of energy stands out as the only Democratic presidential candidate who has successfully enacted tax cuts and other pro-growth economic policies. When asked about the importance of tax cuts, Richardson says: "Cutting taxes and creating tax credits can be essential to creating jobs and a strong economy." One of his first measures after he was elected governor in 2002 was to cut New Mexico's top income tax rate from 8.2 percent to 4.9 percent over five years. "This was our way of declaring to the world that New Mexico is open for business," Richardson told the Journal in 2005. Echoing what conservatives have been saying for decades, he explained: "After all, businesses move to states where taxes are falling, not rising." At the midpoint of his first term, Richardson earned a "B" rating on the CATO Institute's 2004 Fiscal Report Card on America's Governors. Two years later, CATO explained the rating this way: "His income tax cuts were indeed substantial. The top marginal income tax rate has dropped a remarkable 35 percent as a result of Richardson's actions and is still the largest income tax rate cut in the nation over the past few years."

Richardson seems to relish his tax-cutting image. Reacting to a four-star rating for his pro-growth policies from Inc. magazine in October 2006, Richardson boasted in a press release: "New Mexico is a national leader in job growth, we have invested in better schools and improved access to health care and--most importantly for the business community--we have cut taxes year after year." In his 2007 state of the state address, Richardson continued to advertise his tax cutting credentials, declaring that New Mexico was a state "where tax rates go down, while salaries go up." Most recently, at the winter meeting of the Democratic National Committee, Richardson reminded his audience that he "first passed a specific tax credit for creating good paying jobs" and was responsible for a host of other tax cuts and credits that helped "local companies that showed great promise for success and job creation."

REINING IN THE MOONBAT:

Iran's hints suggest chance for diplomacy (Abbas Milani, February 25, 2007, Sacramento Bee)

After a meeting with the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the leader's chief foreign policy adviser, Ali Akbar Velayati, declared last week that suspending uranium enrichment is not a red line for the regime -- in other words, the mullahs might be ready to agree to some kind of a suspension.

Another powerful insider, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, said much the same thing in a different setting, while a third high-ranking official acknowledged that the Islamic Republic is seriously considering a proposal by President Vladimir Putin of Russia to suspend enrichment at least long enough to start serious negotiations with the United Nations.

There have also been indications that the Iranians are willing to accept a compromise plan presented by Mohamed El Baradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency. That plan calls for the suspension of all major enrichment activities but allows the regime to save face by keeping a handful of centrifuges in operation.

The mullahs are keen on damage control on another front as well.

After his meeting with Ayatollah Khamenei, Velayati announced that the Holocaust is a fact of history and chastised those who question its reality. Ali Larijani, Iran's chief nuclear negotiator, also declared the Holocaust a "historical matter" to be discussed by scholars (and not, he implied, by ignorant politicians). In short, there is a new willingness among the Iranian political elite to avoid the rhetoric of confrontation and to negotiate.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has pledged to drive ahead privatization in Iran following recent orders by the Supreme Leader to accelerate the slow opening-up of the country's economy to the private sector.

"The government is determined to open all avenues and unscrew every bolt to implement article 44 of the constitution," Ahmadinejad told a meeting of leaders from the engineering sector. [...]

Ayatollah Khamenei had on Monday described the actions undertaken to implement article 44 as unsatisfactory, saying that not enough attention was being paid to "creating a major evolution in the country's economy."

"Those that are hostile to these policies are those who are going to lose their interests and influence," he said.

WAS HE EVEN ELIGIBLE TO RUN FOR PRESIDENT?:

Romney Family Tree Has Polygamy Branch (JENNIFER DOBNER and GLEN JOHNSON, 2/24/07, Associated Press)

Romney's father, former Michigan Gov. George Romney, was born in Chihuahua, Mexico, where Mormons fled in the 1800s to escape religious persecution and U.S. laws forbidding polygamy. He and his family did not return to the United States until 1912, more than two decades after the church issued "The Manifesto" banning polygamy.

TEACH THE CHILDREN WELL (via The Mother Judd):

For Sale by Teenager: Lightly Used Gadget. Cheap (EVE TAHMINCIOGLU, 2/18/07, NY Times)

MANY of today's teenagers are sitting on a growing pile of consumer electronics -- items like MP3 players and laptops. And as they acquire the latest models, more of them are realizing that they can turn their older gadgets into cold hard cash.

Consider Greg Stoft, 18, who lives with his parents in Fremont, Calif. He wanted to buy a $45 skateboard, but he doesn't work and his parents recently decided to tighten the purse strings, he said. To get the money, he decided to sell his used iPod Nano on Craigslist, the free online bulletin board.

The ad said: "White ipod nano, 4GB, no bad scratches. I don't need it anymore." He posted it one evening early this month with a price of $90 and by the next morning he had sold it for $70. "It was easy," he said.

Not a bad return on investment, considering that the Nano was a gift from his parents, who were fine with him selling it, he said. And he is not worried about going without: his parents bought him a new video iPod this last Christmas for around $300.

"It's the first time I ever sold anything like that, but lots of kids I know sell their iPods and stuff," he said. "I thought: Why shouldn't I do it?"

Mr. Stoft is among a growing group of teenagers who are creating their own slice of capitalism, one sale at a time.

THE SHARPEST KNIFE IN THEIR DRAWER?:

Murtha Stumbles on Iraq Funding Curbs: Democrats Were Ill-Prepared for Unplanned Disclosure, Republican Attacks (Jonathan Weisman and Lyndsey Layton, 2/25/07, Washington Post)

[A] botched launch by the plan's author, Rep. John P. Murtha (Pa.), has united Republicans and divided Democrats, sending the latter back to the drawing board just a week before scheduled legislative action, a score of House Democratic lawmakers said last week.

"If this is going to be legislation that's crafted in such a way that holds back resources from our troops, that is a non-starter, an absolute non-starter," declared Rep. Jim Matheson (Utah), a leader of the conservative Blue Dog Democrats.

Murtha's credentials as a Marine combat veteran, a critic of the war and close ally of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) were supposed to make him an unassailable spokesman for Democratic war policy. Instead, he has become a lightning rod for criticism from Republicans and members of his own party.

IN FACT, 10 MILLION IS NEAR THE CUT-OFF FOR MOST SUCCESSFUL NATIONS:

Radically rethinking L.A. County: The 10-million-strong county has outgrown its government (LA Times, February 25, 2007)

[L]os Angeles County, with its five supervisors each representing 2 million people, has become nearly ungovernable with its outdated structure. The one thing supervisors excel at is repelling challengers to their seats. The last time an incumbent was voted out of office, astonishingly, was in 1980, when Mike Antonovich defeated Baxter Ward. So whose fault is it today when patients are mistreated at the former King/Drew Medical Center and voters refuse to hold their supervisor accountable? Is it the voters' fault? Or is there something wrong with the structure?

Consider the dysfunctional relationship between the county and city of Los Angeles, whose budget is a third the size of the county's. A city program to crack down on gang crime means that the county supervisors and sheriff will have to find more room in the jails, more money for prosecutors, more funding for deputy public defenders, more space in the probation system. A ward of the county's juvenile hall system will run a gantlet of potentially worthy services: mental health, foster care, education -- but all of it provided by different agencies, funded by different budgets, headed by leaders not answerable to the same single executive. The opportunities for waste, suspicion and failure are endless.

The county government -- at least the design of its leadership structure -- remains moored to the pretense that its mission is simply to act as an outpost of the state. Hence, there are only five supervisors exercising quasi-executive, quasi-legislative authority. There is no one really in charge, exercising full executive authority.

The county government can do better. But to do better, it needs to be reshaped. The supervisors are taking a necessary first step, preparing to ask voters to turn the chief administrator into an actual executive with the power to hire and fire department chiefs. It's a step short of a move that Supervisor Zev Yaroslavksy has pushed -- creating an elected county executive -- and a majority of Yaroslavsky's colleagues agreed to go forward only after realizing that no one, for any amount of money, had the qualifications and the desire to replace retiring Chief Administrative Officer David Janssen. But it's a move in the right direction.

For decades, committees of civic do-gooders and deep-thinking academic experts have drafted reports on how to fix things. Those reports have sat on shelves, gathering dust. Now that county supervisors have begun to grapple with their limitations and embrace plans for a more powerful executive, it's time to decide what might work better for the county's residents. Break the county into three? Merge it with the city? Demand more local control over tax revenue?

Democracy may be sacrosanct, but its current format in Los Angeles County isn't.

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Golden State may be blinded by its luster: California slipping in rate of growth and in job creation (Joel Kotkin, February 25, 2007, SF Chronicle)

The state rate of GDP growth over the past decade has been strong, ranking fourth in the nation, but California has been losing ground in the new millennium. In 2004-05, it fell to 17th, behind not only fast-growing Arizona and Nevada but also Oregon, Washington and rival "nation-state" Texas.

Job creation has been even less impressive. In the Bay Area and Los Angeles, it can only be considered mediocre or worse. If not for the strong performance of the interior counties of the state -- what Bill Frey and I call the "Third California" -- the state already would be rightly considered a laggard when it comes to creating employment.

More disturbing, as California's population has grown -- largely from immigration -- per-capita income growth has weakened. From the 1930s to as late as the 1980s, Californians generally got richer faster than other Americans. In 1946, Gunther reported, Californians enjoyed the highest living standards and the third-highest per-capita income in the country.

Today, California ranks 12th in per-capita income. And it's losing ground: Between 1999 and 2004, California's per-capita income growth ranked a miserable 40th among the states. [...]

Parallel to these developments, California is losing its once broad middle class, the traditional source of its political ballast and much of its entrepreneurial genius. Outmigration from the state is growing and, contrary to the notions of some sophisticates, it's not just the rubes and roughhouses who are leaving.

Indeed, an analysis of the most recent migration numbers shows a disturbing trend: an increasing out-migration of educated people from California's largest metropolitan areas. Back in the 1990s, this was mostly a Los Angeles phenomena, but since 2000, the Bay Area appears to be suffering a high per-capita outflow of educated people.

A look at data from the 2004-05 American community survey, these emigrants include many workers in technology, arts, finance, science, management, high-end sales and medicine -- the creative class. Perhaps the only saving grace is that some migrants are still staying in California, largely in the Sacramento and Inland Empire regions.

This middle class flight is likely driven by two things: greater opportunities outside the state and the cost of housing in-state.

NOT RESTING ON THEIR LAUREATES:

Timorese independence leader declares bid for presidency (The Associated Press, February 25, 2007)

The Nobel laureate and prime minister of East Timor, José Ramos-Horta, told a cheering crowd in his hometown Sunday that he would stand in presidential elections in April, vowing to help return peace and stability to the troubled nation.

Ramos-Horta, who shared a Nobel Peace Prize for leading nonviolent resistance to Indonesian rule, said in his candidacy speech that he went through "weeks of reflection and hesitation" before deciding to run during the worst crisis since East Timor became independent from Jakarta in 1999.

"We laid down the arms after the fight against the occupation, but now our fight is for our future," he said, speaking in the local Tetum language. "In this new fight, each Timorese citizen has the responsibility to serve their country."

THE SALAFISTS WON'T LEAD THE REFORMATION:

THE REDIRECTION: Is the Administration's new policy benefitting our enemies in the war on terrorism? (SEYMOUR M. HERSH, 2007-03-05, The New Yorker)

In the past few months, as the situation in Iraq has deteriorated, the Bush Administration, in both its public diplomacy and its covert operations, has significantly shifted its Middle East strategy. The "redirection," as some inside the White House have called the new strategy, has brought the United States closer to an open confrontation with Iran and, in parts of the region, propelled it into a widening sectarian conflict between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.

To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia's government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.

One contradictory aspect of the new strategy is that, in Iraq, most of the insurgent violence directed at the American military has come from Sunni forces, and not from Shiites. But, from the Administration's perspective, the most profound--and unintended--strategic consequence of the Iraq war is the empowerment of Iran. Its President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has made defiant pronouncements about the destruction of Israel and his country's right to pursue its nuclear program, and last week its supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said on state television that "realities in the region show that the arrogant front, headed by the U.S. and its allies, will be the principal loser in the region."

After the revolution of 1979 brought a religious government to power, the United States broke with Iran and cultivated closer relations with the leaders of Sunni Arab states such as Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. That calculation became more complex after the September 11th attacks, especially with regard to the Saudis. Al Qaeda is Sunni, and many of its operatives came from extremist religious circles inside Saudi Arabia. Before the invasion of Iraq, in 2003, Administration officials, influenced by neoconservative ideologues, assumed that a Shiite government there could provide a pro-American balance to Sunni extremists, since Iraq's Shiite majority had been oppressed under Saddam Hussein. They ignored warnings from the intelligence community about the ties between Iraqi Shiite leaders and Iran, where some had lived in exile for years. Now, to the distress of the White House, Iran has forged a close relationship with the Shiite-dominated government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.

The new American policy, in its broad outlines, has been discussed publicly. In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in January, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that there is "a new strategic alignment in the Middle East," separating "reformers" and "extremists"; she pointed to the Sunni states as centers of moderation, and said that Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah were "on the other side of that divide." (Syria's Sunni majority is dominated by the Alawi sect.) Iran and Syria, she said, "have made their choice and their choice is to destabilize."

Some of the core tactics of the redirection are not public, however. The clandestine operations have been kept secret, in some cases, by leaving the execution or the funding to the Saudis, or by finding other ways to work around the normal congressional appropriations process, current and former officials close to the Administration said.

A senior member of the House Appropriations Committee told me that he had heard about the new strategy, but felt that he and his colleagues had not been adequately briefed. "We haven't got any of this," he said. "We ask for anything going on, and they say there's nothing. And when we ask specific questions they say, 'We're going to get back to you.' It's so frustrating."

The key players behind the redirection are Vice-President Dick Cheney, the deputy national-security adviser Elliott Abrams, the departing Ambassador to Iraq (and nominee for United Nations Ambassador), Zalmay Khalilzad, and Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi national-security adviser. While Rice has been deeply involved in shaping the public policy, former and current officials said that the clandestine side has been guided by Cheney. (Cheney's office and the White House declined to comment for this story; the Pentagon did not respond to specific queries but said, "The United States is not planning to go to war with Iran.")

The policy shift has brought Saudi Arabia and Israel into a new strategic embrace, largely because both countries see Iran as an existential threat. They have been involved in direct talks, and the Saudis, who believe that greater stability in Israel and Palestine will give Iran less leverage in the region, have become more involved in Arab-Israeli negotiations.

The new strategy "is a major shift in American policy--it's a sea change," a U.S. government consultant with close ties to Israel said. The Sunni states "were petrified of a Shiite resurgence, and there was growing resentment with our gambling on the moderate Shiites in Iraq," he said. "We cannot reverse the Shiite gain in Iraq, but we can contain it."

"It seems there has been a debate inside the government over what's the biggest danger--Iran or Sunni radicals," Vali Nasr, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, who has written widely on Shiites, Iran, and Iraq, told me. "The Saudis and some in the Administration have been arguing that the biggest threat is Iran and the Sunni radicals are the lesser enemies. This is a victory for the Saudi line."

Martin Indyk, a senior State Department official in the Clinton Administration who also served as Ambassador to Israel, said that "the Middle East is heading into a serious Sunni-Shiite Cold War." Indyk, who is the director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, added that, in his opinion, it was not clear whether the White House was fully aware of the strategic implications of its new policy. "The White House is not just doubling the bet in Iraq," he said. "It's doubling the bet across the region. This could get very complicated. Everything is upside down." [...]

On a warm, clear night early last December, in a bombed-out suburb a few miles south of downtown Beirut, I got a preview of how the Administration's new strategy might play out in Lebanon. Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, who has been in hiding, had agreed to an interview. Security arrangements for the meeting were secretive and elaborate. I was driven, in the back seat of a darkened car, to a damaged underground garage somewhere in Beirut, searched with a handheld scanner, placed in a second car to be driven to yet another bomb-scarred underground garage, and transferred again. Last summer, it was reported that Israel was trying to kill Nasrallah, but the extraordinary precautions were not due only to that threat. Nasrallah's aides told me that they believe he is a prime target of fellow-Arabs, primarily Jordanian intelligence operatives, as well as Sunni jihadists who they believe are affiliated with Al Qaeda. (The government consultant and a retired four-star general said that Jordanian intelligence, with support from the U.S. and Israel, had been trying to infiltrate Shiite groups, to work against Hezbollah. Jordan's King Abdullah II has warned that a Shiite government in Iraq that was close to Iran would lead to the emergence of a Shiite crescent.) This is something of an ironic turn: Nasrallah's battle with Israel last summer turned him--a Shiite--into the most popular and influential figure among Sunnis and Shiites throughout the region. In recent months, however, he has increasingly been seen by many Sunnis not as a symbol of Arab unity but as a participant in a sectarian war.

Nasrallah, dressed, as usual, in religious garb, was waiting for me in an unremarkable apartment. One of his advisers said that he was not likely to remain there overnight; he has been on the move since his decision, last July, to order the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid set off the thirty-three-day war. Nasrallah has since said publicly--and repeated to me--that he misjudged the Israeli response. "We just wanted to capture prisoners for exchange purposes," he told me. "We never wanted to drag the region into war."

Nasrallah accused the Bush Administration of working with Israel to deliberately instigate fitna, an Arabic word that is used to mean "insurrection and fragmentation within Islam." "In my opinion, there is a huge campaign through the media throughout the world to put each side up against the other," he said. "I believe that all this is being run by American and Israeli intelligence." (He did not provide any specific evidence for this.) He said that the U.S. war in Iraq had increased sectarian tensions, but argued that Hezbollah had tried to prevent them from spreading into Lebanon. (Sunni-Shiite confrontations increased, along with violence, in the weeks after we talked.)

Nasrallah said he believed that President Bush's goal was "the drawing of a new map for the region. They want the partition of Iraq. Iraq is not on the edge of a civil war--there is a civil war. There is ethnic and sectarian cleansing. The daily killing and displacement which is taking place in Iraq aims at achieving three Iraqi parts, which will be sectarian and ethnically pure as a prelude to the partition of Iraq. Within one or two years at the most, there will be total Sunni areas, total Shiite areas, and total Kurdish areas. Even in Baghdad, there is a fear that it might be divided into two areas, one Sunni and one Shiite."

He went on, "I can say that President Bush is lying when he says he does not want Iraq to be partitioned. All the facts occurring now on the ground make you swear he is dragging Iraq to partition. And a day will come when he will say, 'I cannot do anything, since the Iraqis want the partition of their country and I honor the wishes of the people of Iraq.' "

Nasrallah said he believed that America also wanted to bring about the partition of Lebanon and of Syria. In Syria, he said, the result would be to push the country "into chaos and internal battles like in Iraq." In Lebanon, "There will be a Sunni state, an Alawi state, a Christian state, and a Druze state." But, he said, "I do not know if there will be a Shiite state." Nasrallah told me that he suspected that one aim of the Israeli bombing of Lebanon last summer was "the destruction of Shiite areas and the displacement of Shiites from Lebanon. The idea was to have the Shiites of Lebanon and Syria flee to southern Iraq," which is dominated by Shiites. "I am not sure, but I smell this," he told me.

Partition would leave Israel surrounded by "small tranquil states," he said. "I can assure you that the Saudi kingdom will also be divided, and the issue will reach to North African states. There will be small ethnic and confessional states," he said. "In other words, Israel will be the most important and the strongest state in a region that has been partitioned into ethnic and confessional states that are in agreement with each other. This is the new Middle East."

In fact, the Bush Administration has adamantly resisted talk of partitioning Iraq, and its public stances suggest that the White House sees a future Lebanon that is intact, with a weak, disarmed Hezbollah playing, at most, a minor political role. There is also no evidence to support Nasrallah's belief that the Israelis were seeking to drive the Shiites into southern Iraq. Nevertheless, Nasrallah's vision of a larger sectarian conflict in which the United States is implicated suggests a possible consequence of the White House's new strategy.

In the interview, Nasrallah made mollifying gestures and promises that would likely be met with skepticism by his opponents. "If the United States says that discussions with the likes of us can be useful and influential in determining American policy in the region, we have no objection to talks or meetings," he said. "But, if their aim through this meeting is to impose their policy on us, it will be a waste of time." He said that the Hezbollah militia, unless attacked, would operate only within the borders of Lebanon, and pledged to disarm it when the Lebanese Army was able to stand up. Nasrallah said that he had no interest in initiating another war with Israel. However, he added that he was anticipating, and preparing for, another Israeli attack, later this year.

Nasrallah further insisted that the street demonstrations in Beirut would continue until the Siniora government fell or met his coalition's political demands. "Practically speaking, this government cannot rule," he told me. "It might issue orders, but the majority of the Lebanese people will not abide and will not recognize the legitimacy of this government. Siniora remains in office because of international support, but this does not mean that Siniora can rule Lebanon."

President Bush's repeated praise of the Siniora government, Nasrallah said, "is the best service to the Lebanese opposition he can give, because it weakens their position vis-à-vis the Lebanese people and the Arab and Islamic populations. They are betting on us getting tired. We did not get tired during the war, so how could we get tired in a demonstration?"

There is sharp division inside and outside the Bush Administration about how best to deal with Nasrallah, and whether he could, in fact, be a partner in a political settlement. The outgoing director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte, in a farewell briefing to the Senate Intelligence Committee, in January, said that Hezbollah "lies at the center of Iran's terrorist strategy. . . . It could decide to conduct attacks against U.S. interests in the event it feels its survival or that of Iran is threatened. . . . Lebanese Hezbollah sees itself as Tehran's partner."

In 2002, Richard Armitage, then the Deputy Secretary of State, called Hezbollah "the A-team" of terrorists. In a recent interview, however, Armitage acknowledged that the issue has become somewhat more complicated. Nasrallah, Armitage told me, has emerged as "a political force of some note, with a political role to play inside Lebanon if he chooses to do so." In terms of public relations and political gamesmanship, Armitage said, Nasrallah "is the smartest man in the Middle East." But, he added, Nasrallah "has got to make it clear that he wants to play an appropriate role as the loyal opposition. For me, there's still a blood debt to pay"--a reference to the murdered colonel and the Marine barracks bombing.

Robert Baer, a former longtime C.I.A. agent in Lebanon, has been a severe critic of Hezbollah and has warned of its links to Iranian-sponsored terrorism. But now, he told me, "we've got Sunni Arabs preparing for cataclysmic conflict, and we will need somebody to protect the Christians in Lebanon. It used to be the French and the United States who would do it, and now it's going to be Nasrallah and the Shiites.

"The most important story in the Middle East is the growth of Nasrallah from a street guy to a leader--from a terrorist to a statesman," Baer added. "The dog that didn't bark this summer"--during the war with Israel--"is Shiite terrorism." Baer was referring to fears that Nasrallah, in addition to firing rockets into Israel and kidnapping its soldiers, might set in motion a wave of terror attacks on Israeli and American targets around the world. "He could have pulled the trigger, but he did not," Baer said.

MORE:
The Surge (Peter W. Galbraith, 3/15/07, NY Review of Books)

As everyone except Bush seems to understand, Iraq's Shiite-led government has no intention of transforming itself into an inclusive government of national unity. The parties that lead Iraq define themselves--and the state they now control--by their Shiite identity. For them, Saddam's overthrow and their electoral victory is a triumph for Islam's minority sect that has been 1,300 years in the making and a matter of historic justice. They are not going to abandon this achievement for the sake of a particular Iraqi identity urged by an American president.

Sunni Arabs are implacably opposed to an Iraq ruled by Shiites who want to define their country by the religion of the majority. Most see the current Iraqi government as alien and disloyal to the Iraq the Sunni Arabs built. (On the gallows, Saddam spoke for many Sunni Arabs when he warned against the Americans and "the Persians," by which he clearly meant Iraq's Shiite rulers.) The Sunni Arabs will not be reconciled with what they see as small measures, such as a guaranteed share of petroleum, a relaxation of de-Baathification laws, or constitutional amendments. They object to the very things that are quintessential to the claims of the Shiites, namely Shiite rule and the Shiite character of the new Iraq.

Bush's strategy depends on the Iraqi police and army eventually taking over from US forces. Somehow the President imagines that Iraq's army and police are exempt from the country's sectarian and ethnic divisions. In reality, both the army and police are as polarized as the country itself. US training will not make these forces neutral guarantors of public security but will make them more effective killers in Iraq's civil war. It is hard to see how this is in the US interest. The execution of Saddam--in which, as Iraqi officials subsequently admitted, members of Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army participated--illustrated just how pervasive is the militia penetration of Iraq's security services. Since the advocates of the President's surge strategy have had no idea about how to make Iraq's police and army committed to an inclusive Iraq, they simply pretend the problem does not exist.

At best, Bush's new strategy will be a costly postponement of the day of reckoning with failure. But it is also a reckless escalation of the military mission in Iraq that could leave US forces fighting a powerful new enemy with only marginally more troops than are now engaged in fighting the Sunni insurgency. The strategy also risks extending Iraq's civil war to the hitherto peaceful Kurdish regions, with no corresponding gain for security in the Arab parts of the country.

Until now, US forces in Iraq have been fighting, almost exclusively, the Sunni Arab insurgency. Bush's new plan calls for the US military to initiate operations against the Mahdi Army (and related militias) as well, a measure that could mean US forces will become embroiled in all-out urban warfare throughout Baghdad, a city of more than five million. In addition, the Mahdi Army has members throughout southern Iraq, in the Diyala Governorate northeast of Baghdad, and in Kirkuk. While many Shiites do not support al-Sadr (the Mahdi Army has had armed clashes with the Badr Organization belonging to the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution, or SCIRI, one of the two main Shiite parties), the Mahdi Army is a formidable force comprising as many as 60,000 armed men.[2] With Bush ratcheting up the rhetoric against Iran, the Iranian government may see a broad-based Shiite uprising against the coalition as its best insurance against a US military strike. It has every incentive to encourage--and assist--the Mahdi Army in organizing such an uprising. Iran has sufficient influence with Iraqi Shiite groups--including SCIRI--to ensure at least their neutrality in a clash with the Mahdi Army.

"There is movement behind the scenes," a European diplomat who closely follows Iran told me last week. "The Iranians are nervous and want to get engaged." Details of a confidential Iranian proposal that has been circulating in Brussels and Tehran for four months support the view that there could be an opening on the Iranian front despite the angry rhetoric from Iran triggered by last week's new indictment of its nuclear ambitions by the International Atomic Energy Agency. [...]

The change on North Korea is described by former administration officials as a strategic decision by the president to start "to pry the lid off" of that starving, tyrannized remnant of the Cold War by offering Pyongyang a path for peaceful change. Cooperation in the six-party negotiations would also help stabilize China's relations with Japan and the United States, in this view.

The president reportedly surprised Chinese President Hu Jintao during their lunch at the White House last April by suggesting that, if the nuclear impasse could be resolved, the time was right for a formal peace treaty to end the Korean conflict. And when North Korea defied Chinese "advice" by conducting a nuclear test in October, China became more engaged in pulling Pyongyang back to the negotiating table. [...]

Last autumn, Iran's Ali Larijani told European Union negotiator Javier Solana that Iran could accept the Russian-E.U. proposal for an international consortium to enrich and reprocess nuclear fuel for Iran -- if the enrichment and reprocessing were done on Iranian soil.

A diplomatic device known as a nonpaper (so its existence can be denied) and dated Oct. 1, 2006, describes a "gentlemen's agreement" by the two diplomats to use the proposal "to help open the way to negotiations." When I telephoned him in Berlin last week, Solana affably but deftly warded off questions about the nonpaper, then added: "Nothing has been agreed. Nothing has been put forward in formal terms."

Muqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shiite cleric and founder of the Mahdi Army militia, discovered recently that two of his commanders had created DVDs of their men killing Sunnis in Baghdad.

Documents suggested that they had received money from Iran.

So he suspended them and stripped them of power, said two Mahdi leaders in Sadr City, the heart of al-Sadr's support here in the capital.

But did he do so as part of his cooperation with the new security plan for Baghdad, which aims to quell the sectarian violence tormenting the city? Because his men had been disloyal, taking orders from Iran, whose support he values but whose control he fights? Or was it just for show -- the act of an image-conscious leader who grasped the risk of graphic videos and ties to Tehran and wanted to stave off direct U.S. action against him?

President George W. Bush has decided to send an unusually tough message to one of his most important allies, President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan, warning him that the newly Democratic Congress could cut aid to his country unless his forces became far more aggressive in hunting down operatives with Al Qaeda, senior administration officials say.

The decision came after the White House concluded that Musharraf is failing to live up to commitments he made to Bush during a visit here in September. Musharraf insisted then, both in private and public, that a peace deal he struck with tribal leaders in one of the country's most lawless border areas would not diminish the hunt for the leaders of Al Qaeda and the Taliban or their training camps.

Now, American intelligence officials have concluded that the terrorist infrastructure is being rebuilt, and that while Pakistan has attacked some camps, its overall effort has flagged.

Tony Blair's backing for the Iraq war will be honoured by history in the same way as Churchill's decision to fight Hitler, Iraq's former prime minister has told The Sunday Telegraph.

In remarks that will be a welcome fillip to Mr Blair, Ibrahim al-Jaafari said that getting rid of Saddam Hussein would be a legacy that future generations of Britons would be "proud of".

Mr Jaafari spoke out at the end of a week in which Mr Blair faced some of his toughest criticism yet over his decision to back George W Bush and join in the 2003 invasion.

LEST JIMMY CARTER PROVE RIGHT:

The other Israelis: Emboldened by the Palestinian struggle, an emerging movement in Israel wants full equality for the country's Arab citizens. But that would mean redefining the nature of the Jewish state (David B. Green, February 25, 2007, Boston Globe)

When you think of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, what's likely to come to mind are the intifada, Hamas and Fatah, the West Bank and Gaza, road maps and roadblocks, and a story that seems to have no end. But there is another Israeli-Palestinian conflict, one just as old and as vexing, and no less a "time bomb" if not addressed: that between Israel and its own Arab citizens.

The establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 left some 700,000 Palestinian Arabs refugees, but another 160,000 stayed put and became Israeli citizens. Today, Israel's Arab community numbers 1.2 million, constituting nearly a fifth of the country's population. By all material measures -- income, education level, unemployment -- they lag far behind the Jewish population, but they are also denied certain privileges guaranteed by law to the Jews. The Law of Return, for example, gives Jews from anywhere in the world, or their descendants or spouses, the right to show up and claim Israeli citizenship.

Israel's Declaration of Independence promises "complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex." But the reality, as the Palestinian-Israeli historian Adel Mana'a told me, is that "I'm a 'subtenant' here, even though I was the 'owner' before the Jews came."

Members of the Arab population have clashed violently with authorities in the past, most notably in October 2000, when angry demonstrations within Arab communities in the Galilee resulted in the deaths of 12 Arab citizens and one Palestinian from the territories -- all but one, who was killed by Jewish rioters, were shot by the police.

Overall, however, relations between the Jewish majority and Arab minority have been peaceful, if tense, over the state's 59-year history. Israeli-Arab involvement in Palestinian terrorist activity, for example, or espionage against the state, has been minimal. This may explain why the situation has received little attention, even in Israel.

But that is changing. With a growing boldness and facility with the language and tools of human-rights activism, a new generation of Israeli Palestinian jurists and intellectuals, in the past few months alone, have come out with several formal proposals that would redefine their status within Israeli society -- that would, in fact, redefine the nature of the "Jewish state" itself.

WHEN YOU HATE THE CLINTONS ENOUGH TO MUFF THE STORY:

Geffen's beef with Clintons is former president's decisions on pardons (ROBERT NOVAK, 2/25/07, Sun-Times)

Democratic sources believe that the harsh response by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential campaign to criticism by Hollywood producer David Geffen stems from an overreaction by Bill Clinton to any attack on his pardon policy as president.

Geffen sniped at the Clintons in his interview with New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd because President Clinton had pardoned financial contributor Marc Rich instead of American Indian activist Leonard Peltier.

AND THEY'RE WORRIED ABOUT IRENE NEMIROVSKY?:

Independent Jewish Voices can carry on talking to themselves. I don't want to know: Its fantasy of itself as a doughty band confronting the might of official bias is self-indulgent (Howard Jacobson, 10 February 2007, Independent)

How is it that people you admire individually look considerably less admirable the minute they become signatories to a public letter? Why is it that a list of prominent names embracing a cause - any cause - invariably adds up to less than its constituent parts, that what was beautiful as a single bloom looks preposterous in a bunch? I am only pretending not to know the answer. The answer smacks you in the face. It is because you have admired them individually for their individuality, and the minute they sign up to something, they agree to think alike.

The particular consensus of folly I'm referring to - which contains people I know and like personally as well as people whose work I would go so far as to say I revere - calls itself, oxymoronically, Independent Jewish Voices and has been declaring its guiding principles left, right and centre, though mainly left, all week. These principles bear, of course, on the Middle East and are, on the face of it, unexceptionable. Human rights indivisible, Palestinians and Israelis have same right to peaceful and secure lives, no justification for racism, etc etc. To which your response, like mine, will be: There needs no letter, come from Stephen Fry and Janet Suzman, to tell us this.

Ask what more specific need Independent Jewish Voices serves, however, and you get the small print. The IJV, as I fear we now have to call it, since it appears to be seeking a quasi-formal legitimacy, is a response to a conviction that "the broad spectrum of opinion among the Jewish population of this country is not reflected by those institutions which claim authority to represent the Jewish community as a whole".

One's ears prick to talk of a "broad spectrum of opinion" in a manifesto since that usually means "whatever the manifestees happen to think". In this case, whatever they happen to think is wrong with Israel and the unquestioning support it receives from English Jews. From which you could be excused supposing the IJV to be a voice crying in the wilderness, a David taking on the Goliath of pro-Israel orthodoxy.

In fact the exact opposite is the case. In so far as there is an orthodoxy regarding Israel in this country, the IJV with its "ashamed" and "disgusted" signatories is indubitably it.

HAS ANY MAJOR LEAGUER EVER HAD A SLIDER/SCREWBALL COMBO?:

Dice-K shows what's up: Matsuzaka dazzles in first live hitters stint (Jeff Horrigan, February 25, 2007, Boston Herald)

It seemed to matter little to Daisuke Matsuzaka that catcher Jason Varitek was telling hitters which pitch was about to be thrown yesterday when the Red Sox' newest star threw to batters for the first time since coming from the Seibu Lions.

As is the case in all live batting practice sessions, the catcher tipped off Jacoby Ellsbury, Kevin Cash, Bobby Scales and Luis Jimenez on whether Matsuzaka was to throw a fastball, curveball, slider or changeup.

For the most part, the youngsters still couldn't get a bat on the ball. [...]

Matsuzaka threw 44 pitches, including 20 out of the stretch and two pitchouts, and only had two hit well. Cash lined a fastball off the left-center field wall on a hop, while Ellsbury lashed an opposite-field hit down the left field line on a changeup.

"The thing I noticed most was his slider," Ellsbury said. "I knew it was coming and I still missed by six inches."

FROM UGLY:

Chemical equation (JIM DeROGATIS, 2/25/07, Chicago Sun-Times)

To fully appreciate glam/goth pop-punk chart-toppers My Chemical Romance, it helps to understand where the band's leader grew up. Belleville, N.J., is a run-down blue-collar suburb sandwiched between Newark, which still hasn't recovered from the riots of 1968, and Jersey City, one of the ugliest and most corrupt burgs in America.

I know: I grew up there, too, not far from the Pulaski Skyway, which connects Jersey City and Newark. Tony Soprano drives over this elevated highway during the opening of every episode of HBO's mob series; it runs past tank farms and chemical factories and spans the PJP Landfill, which for decades had the distinction of being the only toxic site on the federal Superfund cleanup list that was actually on fire.

When you'd drive over the Pulaski Skyway at night -- as Gerard Way and his brother Mikey did when they were old enough to go to rock shows in Manhattan, a mere 10 miles but an entire universe away -- you could see the conflagrations smoldering underground. It looked like Dante's "Inferno" -- or a visual evocation of the music of My Chemical Romance. The quintet's 29-year-old vocalist wholeheartedly agrees.

"You know what's funny?" Gerard Way says, laughing. "Somebody that's from there will have a certain understanding of the band -- a very specific understanding that other people just won't have."

THE ONE THAT MATTERS:

India: Bush's forgotten triumph (Bill Emmott, 2/25/.07, Times of London)

In Bush's case, although foreign policy has been dominated by Afghanistan and Iraq, it may prove that his most important strategic move was the nuclear pact between the United States and India signed a year ago. [...]

In the West people have been obsessed by the threat from China, mainly to their jobs but also to their leadership in the world, and in the past few years have begun to add India to their concerns. If "the world is flat", in Tom Friedman's phrase, then even white-collar jobs can migrate to these enormous, low-cost producers. By the middle of this century Goldman Sachs forecasts that both China and India will have overtaken us all in economic output. They are a threat, so western thinking goes.

We can debate whether those forecasts make sense, or whether the political systems of either country will survive economic transformation. Yet this too is to miss the real point. China's growth is setting off a new power game in Asia that will in turn affect the world. And the country that feels most threatened by that growth and that game is not Britain, America or France. It is India.

If you talk to Indian military folk, or recently retired top diplomats freed from the restraints of office, the message is clear. India feels increasingly encircled by China's foreign policy and by its economic development.

China's vast hunger for energy and other natural resources has led it, as was noted copiously during President Hu Jintao's recent tour of Africa, to make investments and friendships, lubricated by aid grants and cheap loans, with resources producers in Africa and the Middle East. India has been doing the same, albeit on a smaller scale. But this trend has also brought Chinese influence into the Indian Ocean.

Chinese engineers are building a deep-water port at Gwadar in Pakistan and are working on a harbour in southern Sri Lanka. China has installed surveillance equipment on the Coco Islands off the coast of Burma, islands that India gave to Burma in the 1950s. China has been selling arms to Bangladesh and to Nepal. It has a contingent of troops in Sudan protecting its investments there. Pipelines and roads are planned across Burma and perhaps Bangladesh to enable China to reduce its dependence on the narrow shipping route through the Malacca Straits that connects the Indian Ocean to the South China Sea.

On his African tour, Hu also found time to visit the Seychelles, where he went neither for resources nor snorkelling. In due course China would like its naval ships to be able to call in on ports there.

None of this is directly hostile to India. It is all a logical extension of China's economic growth. But it makes India feel vulnerable, makes it sure it needs to make countermoves to maintain its position in its own neighbourhood and to guarantee its own access to natural resources, and makes it sure it needs to maintain its naval superiority over the Chinese fleet.

It also convinces Indian policy makers of the vital need for India's own economic growth to be sustained or even accelerated, in order to avoid being dominated by its already richer neighbour. And it means that India needs friends.

That is why Bush's nuclear pact with India makes such strong strategic sense. Having been estranged from India during the cold war, thanks to India's decision to build trade and military ties with the Soviet Union, America had been edging closer to India during the 1990s, and India had been encouraging that process. India doesn't want formal alliances, it doesn't want to confront China, and it doesn't want to close off its options. But it does need nuclear energy and it does want a close friendship with the world's superpower. The nuclear pact has given it both.

YOU CAN'T FIRE US, WE QUIT!:

Cargo A380 may be ditched: UPS pact 'a recipe for cancellation' (MARY SCHLANGENSTEIN, 2/24/07, BLOOMBERG NEWS)

United Parcel Service Inc., the world's largest package shipper, and plane maker Airbus said Friday that they have agreed that either company can cancel an order this year for 10 A380 freighters after repeated production delays.

UPS will decide whether to retain the $2.8 billion order after getting new delivery dates from Airbus, UPS spokesman Mark Giuffre said in an interview. The companies declined to provide details of the accord.

Airbus' ability to void the order heightens chances that the manufacturer may scrap the troubled cargo version of the world's largest commercial jet amid cost overruns and customer cancellations. Atlanta-based UPS is now the only buyer for the A380 freighter.

"Two out of three customers cancel or convert orders, not a lot of market demand, engineers needed elsewhere. That's a recipe for cancellation," said Richard Aboulafia, vice president of Teal Group, a Fairfax, Va.-based aerospace consulting firm.

GOTTA TRY RED AMERICA:

Hatred of America unites the world (Niall Ferguson, 25/02/2007, Sunday Telegraph)

Being hated is no fun. Few of us are like those pantomime villains who glory in the hisses and boos of an audience. And few people hate being hated more than Americans. I wish I had a dollar for every time I've been asked the plaintive question: "Why do they hate us?" and another for each of the different answers I've heard. It's because of our foreign policy. It's because of their extremism. It's because of our arrogance. It's because of their inferiority complex. Americans really hate not knowing why they're hated.

IF THE PAST TWO CENTURIES ARE ANY INDICATOR, GOD WON'T:

God help France if it falls for the charms of Ms Royal: The man who did her calculations was so shocked he resigned (Chris Walker, 25 February 2007, Independent)

In 1979, the British were 20 per cent poorer than the French, as measured by GDP per head. We are now 5 per cent richer, and the outlook is for that gap to widen further. The general economic background is a major part of this - the French economy has crawled along at a growth rate that has averaged half that of the UK's in recent years. Unemployment is stubbornly high, and even after a recent recovery, remains nearly twice the UK's.

All this despite the extraordinary act of generational theft that is being committed daily by the French pension system, which is funding current consumption by inadequately providing for the future. Not to mention incredibly high government spending - 43 per cent of GDP, while national debt is now equivalent to 70 per cent.

Income tax and national insurance, too, are frighteningly high. The average rate for individuals is some 45.3 per cent, compared with 41 per cent across the EU. The top marginal rate was, until recently, nearly 70 per cent, leading to the classic brain drain that Britain suffered in the 1970s. Johnny Hallyday was a recent high-profile departure for Switzerland, and over 300,000 have chosen exile in the UK alone. The rate of exodus appears to be accelerating. This in itself leads to ever-lower tax take for the Treasury.

This is the situation after years of right-wing leadership that has clearly failed to tackle the ensuing crisis. Time for "France's Blair"?

Ségolène Royal's famous "100 Point Plan" seems more like "100 Ways to Make Things Worse".

AS THEY STAND UP WE CAN STAND DOWN:

Shiite Protests Send Message (ROBERT H. REID, 2/24/07, AP)

Thousands of Shiites on Saturday protested the U.S. detention of the son of Iraq's most powerful Shiite politician, and the country's Kurdish president deplored the "uncivilized" behavior of the American soldiers responsible.

The real message of the demonstrations: Don't push the Shiites too far either over concessions to the Sunnis or ties to Iran .

PJ PODMASTER:

ed Driscoll interviews Austin Bay and Adam Bellow in the latest podcast from Pajamas Media.

DON'T TELL THE NEOCONS (via Kevin Whited ):

Baghdad 'Surge' Returns Chalabi To Center Stage: Political Survivor Gets
Post as Public Liaison; Does Bigger Role Loom? (YOCHI J. DREAZEN, February 23, 2007, Wall Street Journal)

In his latest remarkable political reincarnation, onetime U.S. favorite Ahmed Chalabi has secured a position inside the Iraqi government that could help determine whether the Bush administration's new push to secure Baghdad succeeds.

In a new post created earlier this year, Mr. Chalabi will serve as an intermediary between Baghdad residents and the Iraqi and U.S. security forces mounting an aggressive counterinsurgency campaign across the city. The position is meant to help Iraqis arrange reimbursement for damage to their cars and homes caused by the security sweeps in the hope of maintaining public support for the strategy.

Mr. Chalabi's writ is supposed to be limited mainly to security, according to aides to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, but he is already speaking ambitiously about playing a larger role in economic, health and reconstruction efforts as well. In his new capacity, Mr. Chalabi answers directly to Mr. Maliki and is already taking part in weekly planning meetings with senior American officials such as Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. military commander in Iraq.

DEFENDING WHAT THEY DESIRE:

Former ACLU Chapter President Arrested for Child Pornography (JACK DATE, Feb. 23, 2007, ABC News)

Federal agents arrested Charles Rust-Tierney, the former president of the Virginia chapter of the ACLU, Friday in Arlington for allegedly possessing child pornography. [...]

The videos described in the complaint depict graphic forcible intercourse with prepubescent females. One if the girls is described in court documents as being "seen and heard crying", another is described as being "bound by rope." [...]

Rust Tierney coaches various youth sports teams in and around Arlington, Virginia, according to court documents.

In the past, Rust-Tierney had argued against restricting Internet access in public libraries in Virginia, writing, "Recognizing that individuals will continue to behave responsibly and appropriately while in the library, the default should be maximum, unrestricted access to the valuable resources of the Internet."

IT'S NOT LIKE THEY HAVE ANY PRIDE LEFT TO INJURE:

Gay men seek 'female cancer' jab (Michelle Roberts, 2/23/07, BBC News)

Homosexual men are requesting a controversial "sex disease" vaccine designed to prevent a female cancer.

Gardasil protects against the most common of sexually transmitted infections, human papillomavirus (HPV), which can cause cervical cancer.

But HPV also causes genital warts and anal and penile cancer, and men argue the jab would guard against these.

IF ONLY JESSE WOULD BACK HIM:

David Geffen as Sister Souljah (Craig Crawford, Feb. 22, 2007, CQ Politics)

Aside from their ties to the recording industry, Hollywood biggie David Geffen could not be any less like hip-hop artist Sister Souljah. But you have to wonder whether Sen. Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign operatives are trying to turn Geffen into their foil for appealing to centrist voters, in the way that Sister Souljah was for Bill Clinton in his 1992 bid for the White House. [...]

Now, the Hillary Clinton camp is blasting Geffen -- a supporter of Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, a leading rival to Clinton for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination -- for telling New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd that while "everybody in politics lies," Bill and Hillary Clinton "do it with such ease, it's troubling."

Given the Clintons' longstanding coziness with Hollywood's elite film stars and celebrity executives -- including Geffen at one time -- provoking a public feud with one of those types might just help buttress Clinton's pitch to middle-class voters.

Just as her husband's attack against an African-American activist's comments 15 years ago helped ease suspicions among moderate voters that he was too cozy with liberal extremists.

LUCKILY FDR WASN'T AROUND TO INTERVENE:

Extremist gangs clash in central Gothenburg (The Local, 24th February 2007)

Two rival gangs clashed on Kungsgatan in central Gothenburg at lunchtime on Saturday. Around 20 people, who were masked and bearing baseball bats and iron rods, were involved in the brawl.

According to police in the city, a number of members of an extreme right wing organisation were handing out flyers on the street when they were approached by left wing activists.

FAITH IN PRESCRIPTION:

A Conservative Conservationist?: Why the Right Needs to Get Invested in the Search for Climate Change Solutions (Mark Sanford, February 23, 2007, Washington Post)

When George W. Bush, The Post and the insurance giant Lloyd's of London agree on something, it's obvious a new wind is blowing. The climate change debate is here to stay, and as America warms to the idea of environmental conservation on a grander scale, it's vital that conservatives change the debate before government regulation expands yet again and personal freedom is pushed closer toward extinction.

The fact is, I'm a conservative and a conservationist -- and that's okay. [...]

I believe conservatives have a window of opportunity, but that window is closing fast.

First, conservatives must reframe the environmental discussion by replacing the political left's scare tactics with conservative principles such as responsibility and stewardship. Stewardship -- the idea that we need to take care of what we've been given -- simply makes sense. It makes dollars as well, for the simple reason that our economy is founded on natural resources, from tourism and manufacturing to real estate and agriculture. Here in South Carolina, conservation easements are springing up across the state as landowners see the dual benefit of preserving the environment and protecting their pocketbooks.

Second, conservatives must reclaim lost ground from far-left interest groups by showing how environmental conservation is as much about expanding economic opportunity as it is about saving whales or replanting rain forests. When corporations such as BP and Shell America pursue alternative energy sources, they not only cut carbon emissions but help cut our petroleum dependency on OPEC nations. When South Carolina restaurants recycle their oyster shells, they not only restore shellfish habitat but take a job off local governments' plates and ensure continuing revenue streams for local fishermen.

Third, conservatives must respond to climate change with innovation, not regulation. This means encouraging private research and implementation of more eco-friendly construction, more energy-efficient workplaces and more sustainable ways of going about life -- all of which cuts costs and protects God's creation. It means looking past the question of whether your car's exhaust melts polar ice caps and instead treating our environment as an investment our future depends on.

A new light is about to burn more brightly: the stubby, squiggly fluorescent bulb. Environmentalists love it, Wal-Mart is promoting it and Australia is eyeing it as an easy way to save energy and curb global warming.

Now, California lawmakers are giving it some wattage by considering a ban on the sale of old-fashioned incandescent bulbs beginning in 2012.

The proposed switch represents a revolution in a lampshade, because incandescents account for 95% of light bulb sales. Replacing each descendant of Thomas A. Edison's invention with a low-energy, long-lasting, compact fluorescent bulb would slash electricity consumption by 75%, proponents say.

Retired aerospace engineer Frank Vincent is sold. "I use them. It saves me energy and it saves me money on that energy," said Vincent, 63, who was shopping Friday at a Wal-Mart store on Crenshaw Boulevard.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has thrown considerable marketing might behind the newfangled bulbs, urging its 100 million customers to buy at least one. The world's largest retailer says that would collectively save them $3 billion over the bulbs' life.

NOT THE BEST, BUT THE BEST EXAMPLE OF THEIR THOUGHT PROCESSES (via H.D. Miller):

The Literary Tenor of the Times (Mark Helprin, Winter 2006, Claremont Review of Books)

Unable as usual to resist the absurd, the New York Times recently attempted to find and certify the best work of American fiction that appeared in the last quarter-century, and perhaps to dilute their unconscious embarrassment published a list of the runners-up. Asked to serve on the enormous panel of solons they had assembled for the purpose, I declined on the grounds that neither I nor just about anyone else has a sufficiently wide or deep knowledge of all that has been written in the period, and that even if we had, such a determination is impossible, especially at the hands of literary people who have intellectual debtors and creditors, protégés, and favorites (including, not least, themselves). [...]

[T]he literary tenor of the times is saturated above all with nihilism and its outrider, contempt; followed by politicization and its outrider, conformity. The first pair of abominations serves to dissolve the supple, living flesh of civilization--whether in blunt Leninist political combat hidden in the folds of academic relativism, or in the unbridled Satanic ravings of popular culture that society has lost the courage to dismiss outright. And the second pair of abominations serves to cast what remains after the dissolution into a slipshod orthodoxy as gray, hard, and dead as concrete. [...]

One seldom encounters pure nihilism, for just as anarchists are usually very well-organized, most of what passes for nihilism is a compromise with advocacy. Present literary forms may spurn the individual, emotion, beauty, sacrifice, love, and truth, but they energetically embrace the collective, coldness of feeling, ugliness, self-assertion, contempt, and disbelief. And why? Simply because the acolytes of modernism are terribly and justly afraid. They fear that if they do not display their cynicism they will be taken for fools. They fear that if they commit to and uphold something outside the puppet channels of orthodoxy they will be mocked, that if they are open they will be attacked, that if they appreciate that which is simple and good they will foolishly have overlooked its occult corruptions, that if they stand they will be struck down, that if they love they will lose, and that if they live they will die.

As surely they will. And others of their fears are legitimate as well, so they withdraw from engagement and risk into what they believe is the safety of cynicism and mockery. The sum of their engagement is to show that they are disengaged, and they have built an elaborate edifice, which now casts a shadow over every facet of civilization, for the purpose of representing their cowardice as wisdom. Mainly to protect themselves, they write coldly, cruelly, and as if nothing matters.

But life is short, and things do matter, often more than the human heart can bear. This is an elemental truth that neither temporarily victorious nihilism, nor fashion, nor cowardice can long suppress, which is why the literary tenor of the times cannot and will not last. And which is one reason among many why one must not accept its dictates or write according to its conventions. These must and will fall, for they are subject to constant pressure as generation after generation rises in unprompted affirmation of human nature. And though perhaps none living may see the change, it is an honor to predict and await it.

N.B.: Friend Miller's favorite line is actually this one:

"For example, in affirming his courage, Norman Mailer--everything he has done has been to affirm his courage, which perhaps one should not condemn in a man who bears such a strong physical resemblance to Mamie Eisenhower--pronounces that he has been a leftist all his life, something that in Manhattan and Brooklyn Heights may not be quite as dangerous as he hallucinates."

IT'S NOT ABOUT THE MONEY BUT THE HERESY:

Vilsack, First Democrat In, Is Quickly Out: Former Iowa Governor Cites Financial Demands in Ending Bid for Presidency (Dan Balz, 2/24/07, Washington Post)

Former Iowa governor Tom Vilsack, the first Democrat to announce a 2008 candidacy for the White House, abruptly dropped out of the race yesterday, a victim of the prodigious fundraising demands of an early-starting campaign and the star appeal of rivals Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.).

"This process has become to a great extent about money -- a lot of money," Vilsack said at a news conference in Des Moines yesterday. "And it is clear to me that we would not be able to continue to raise money in the amounts necessary to sustain not just a campaign in Iowa and New Hampshire but a campaign across this country. So it is money and only money that is the reason that we are leaving today."

WHO DIDN'T WEAR A 7 3/8THs WHEN THEY WERE A BABY?:

Nats' Fruto Is 'a Baby With a Big Arm' (Barry Svrluga, 2/24/07, Washington Post)

Every year at every baseball training site from Florida to Arizona, someone appears as a potential spring fling, a dance partner who instantly merits a second or third date. He dazzles at introductions, teases with his talent, makes the men who run baseball clubs wonder if he could be part of a long-term relationship.

Such is the case with one Emiliano Fruto, or, as he was known to his former teammates in Seattle, "Cabeza Grande," what with his 7 3/8 -inch hat that only partially covers a massive forehead. But here, at the Washington Nationals' camp, it isn't Fruto's head or his legendary ability to juggle a soccer ball or the fact that he can outrun most of his fellow pitchers in a sprint that has folks intrigued. It is simply what caught the eye of Bob Boone, the club's director of player development, during a scouting trip last year.

"He's a baby," Boone said, "with a big arm."

JUST A PATHOLOGY:

Argentina's Soccer Gangs Test Limits of Public Tolerance (Monte Reel, February 24, 2007, Washington Post)

Even by the standards of Argentina, where people like to joke that soccer is less a pastime than a pathology, a recent surge of fan violence has been exceptional.

In the past two weeks, local stadiums have erupted in mass fights -- some of them all-out brawls injuring dozens of fans -- an average of every other day.

EVERYTHING WILL BE DIFFERENT...:

Democrats Offer Up Chairmen For Donors: Party's Campaigns Had Faulted GOP For 'Selling Access' (Jeffrey H. Birnbaum and John Solomon, February 24, 2007, Washington Post)

Eager to shore up their fragile House and Senate majorities, congressional Democrats have enlisted their committee chairmen in an early blitz to bring millions of dollars into the party's coffers, culminating in a late-March event featuring House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and 10 of the powerful panel chairs.

In the next 10 days alone, Democratic fundraisers will feature the chairmen of the House's financial services panel and the House and Senate tax-writing committees. Senate Democrats also plan a fundraising reception during a major gathering of Native Americans in the capital Tuesday evening, an event hosted by lobbyists and the political action committee for tribal casinos, including those Jack Abramoff was paid to represent.

Critics deride the aggressive fundraising push as the kind of business as usual that voters rejected at the ballot box last November -- particularly the practice of giving interest groups access to committee chairmen in exchange for sizable donations -- but Democrats are unapologetic.

CRANKING UP THE NEXT MITCHSLAP:

McConnell Threatens to Block Bid to Repeal War Resolution: Republican Wants to Force Vote on Guaranteeing Funding for Troops (Shailagh Murray, February 24, 2007, Washington Post)

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) warned yesterday that a new Democratic effort to repeal the 2002 Iraq war resolution would meet the same fate as two previous efforts to limit President Bush's authority: blocked by procedural obstacles, unless Democrats relent to GOP terms.

Speaking to reporters by conference call from his Louisville home, McConnell compared the latest Democratic move to "trying to unring a bell." He warned that Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus, the U.S. military commander in Iraq, would "have to surround himself with lawyers" to comply with the new resolution that senior Democrats are drafting.

WHICH IS WHY WE HID MOOKIE FOR THE DURATION:

U.S. sorry after detaining powerful Shiite pol's son (BRIAN MURPHY, 2/24/07, Chicago Sun-Times)

U.S. troops detained the eldest son of Iraq's most influential Shiite politician for nearly 12 hours Friday as he crossed back from Iran -- the same route Washington thinks is used to keep powerful Shiite militias flush with weapons and aid.

Even though the U.S. ambassador issued a rapid apology, the decision to hold Amar al-Hakim, 35, risks touching off a backlash from Shiite leaders at a time when their cooperation is needed most to keep a major security sweep through Baghdad from unraveling.

WHERE THE QUID MEETS THE PRO QUO:

Obama's neighbor causing a stir (CHRIS FUSCO AND DAVE MCKINNEY, February 24, 2007, Chicago Sun-Times)

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has a new neighbor.

It's no longer the wife of indicted political fund-raiser Tony Rezko.

It's a Rezko lawyer.

And the lawyer's plan to build a six-unit condominium building south of Obama's house is already sparking opposition in Obama's historic South Side neighborhood dominated by single-family homes.

Rita Rezko sold the corner lot to a firm owned by her husband's longtime business attorney, Michael J. Sreenan, late last year, newly filed property records show.

The parcel is smaller than the one she originally purchased because Obama bought a 10-foot-wide strip in January 2006 -- giving the senator a bigger buffer between his house and any potential development next door.

TOO PRAGMATIC FOR THE AV CLUB:

Mission to the Moon: How We'll Go Back -- and Stay This Time: With the iconic Space Shuttle nearing retirement, the pressure is on NASA to design a new manned vehicle -- one that will deliver us safely to the lunar surface by 2020 before building a lasting lunar base. From ensuring a safe launch to getting the vehicle back on the ground, here's an inside look at some of the toughest challenges Orion's engineers are now confronting. (David Noland, March 2007, Popular Mechanics)

Not long after the inaugural launch of Endeavour (the fifth and final shuttle) in 1992, NASA began contemplating a new generation of manned spacecraft. The agency selected Lockheed Martin to design the X-33 single-stage-to-orbit space plane in 1996; it was abandoned five years later because of technical difficulties. The agency then considered the less ambitious Orbital Space Plane, or OSP. But the second shuttle disaster, the loss of Columbia in 2003, forced NASA to rethink its entire manned space program. It dropped the OSP and suggested another concept: the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV).

After reviewing an initial round of proposals, NASA announced the basic design parameters in September 2005. Many space buffs were disappointed. Instead of Lockheed Martin's proposal for a sleek, high-tech space plane, first previewed in PM's June 2005 issue, the agency decided to build its new spacecraft with off-the-shelf technology. The squat "spam-in-the-can" capsule that NASA unveiled was at first glance a dead ringer for the 1960s-era Apollo spacecraft. Even the launch vehicles were to be pieced together using warmed-over components from both the current shuttle and the Apollo-era Saturn boosters.

By relying on existing technology, the design would allow for more efficient construction, narrowing the gap between the shuttle's retirement in 2010 and the next manned flight. But it also stirred a hot debate within the aerospace community. "NASA's attitude seems to be that Apollo worked, so let's just redo Apollo," says Charles Lurio, a Boston space consultant. Burt Rutan, the mastermind behind the rocket SpaceShipOne, likened the new CEV to an archeological dig. "To get to Mars and the moons of Saturn, we need breakthroughs. But the way NASA's doing it, we won't be learning anything new."

Scott Horowitz, NASA's associate administrator for Exploration Systems, defends the agency's approach. "Sure, we'd love to have antimatter warp drive," he says. "But I suspect that would be kind of expensive. Unfortunately, we just don't have the money for huge technological breakthroughs. We've got to do the best we can within our constraints of performance, cost and schedule."

The result, as NASA boss Michael Griffin puts it, is "Apollo on steroids" -- a new-and-improved version of what was, as even critics must acknowledge, mankind's greatest technological feat. Recently dubbed Orion, the CEV will share Apollo's conical form, but be one and a half times as wide (16.5 ft.) and have more than double the habitable internal volume (361 cu. ft.)­, allowing it to carry six astronauts to the space station and four to the moon.

Orion also will boast a number of new tricks, such as hands-off autodocking and the ability to autonomously loiter in lunar orbit for up to six months. Its dual-fault tolerant avionics, based on those of the Boeing 787, will be able to sustain two computer failures and still return the vehicle to Earth. The avionics also will have open architecture, which means they can be easily updated and modified.

Although the CEV concept has been percolating for well over a year, the real design work -- putting detailed flesh on NASA's basic frame -- is only just beginning at the agency and at Lockheed Martin, NASA's prime contractor. Engineers face a bewildering array of decisions, a complex matrix of tradeoffs among cost, weight, time, safety and mission. "We're struggling mightily to figure out the ramifications of all these requirements," says Bill Johns, Lockheed Martin's chief engineer for Orion. "It's a huge coordination problem that keeps me awake at night."

From ensuring a safe launch to getting the vehicle back on the ground, here's an inside look at some of the toughest challenges Orion's engineers are now confronting.

FROM THE GREEN BOOK TO SMITH'S:

Michael Porter on Libya's Potential: The Harvard professor talks about the country's "dependency economy" and his work to promote reform (Business Week, 2/23/07)

How much support will you get from Muammar Qaddafi?

Qaddafi at some point decided the Libyan people could not live in a country isolated from the rest of the world. And opening up is more in line with his objectives and values.

Qaddafi's Green Book talks about self-reliance and a bottoms-up society. Instead, Libya has grown into a dependency economy. Most people have jobs given by the government. The typical Libyan is paid twice as much in subsidies as salary. Qaddafi made the decision to move in a different direction.

What is Seif, Muammar Qaddafi's son, like?

I have gotten to know Seif quite well. He was a doctoral candidate at the London School of Economics, where he studied with some of the best professors. He's very much oriented toward making Libya a member of the modern world community.

Why are you working with Libya?

I didn't take this on because this is a big economy. It was very important, very symbolic. If this can be successful, then other countries will be able to change.

WHICH IS WHY THEY CALL THEMSELVES PROGRESSIVES:

"Raise unemployment pay to get Swedes off sick leave" (The Local, 24th February 2007)

Many Swedes remain on long term sick leave even when they are capable of returning to work because they are worried about becoming unemployed - where they will earn less than their sick pay.

An official inquiry into Sweden's social insurance system has concluded that initial unemployment benefits should rise, at least to the level of sick pay, to encourage people to move from one system to the other.

SPEAKING OF NOT BEING ABOUT THE HUNTING:

Cheney Remark Rankles Pelosi: Vice President Says He's Not Questioning Her Patriotism (Michael Abramowitz, 2/24/07, Washington Post)

"She accused me of questioning her patriotism," Cheney said. "I didn't question her patriotism. I questioned her judgment."

"Al-Qaeda functions on the basis that they think they can break our will. That's their fundamental underlying strategy: that if they can kill enough Americans or cause enough havoc, create enough chaos in Iraq, then we'll quit and go home," Cheney added. "And my statement was that if we adopt the Pelosi policy, that then we will validate the strategy of al-Qaeda. I said it, and I meant it."

NO PAPERCLIPS FOR THEM:

Iraqi allies, U.S. split on Baathist policy: Baghdad is blocking a reform that Washington considers crucial to its strategy for reining in violence (Paul Richter, February 24, 2007, LA Times)

Serious new divisions have emerged between the Bush administration and its Iraqi allies over the Baghdad government's refusal to enact a reform that the White House considers crucial to its new strategy for bringing the country's violence under control.

In spite of a commitment by Iraq's prime minister to its passage, legislation that would ease rules barring former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party from government service has been blocked by the country's Shiite-dominated parliament.

U.S. officials repeatedly have expressed confidence that Prime Minister Nouri Maliki would work for passage of "de-Baathification" reform. However, they have begun to express disappointment over the Iraqi stalemate, saying that the reform remains a top political priority and is essential to convince the country's Sunni minority that it can receive fair treatment in the new system.

One U.S. official said the reform, far from advancing as promised, was "moving backward" and "almost dead in the water."

SOMETIMES YOU JUST HAVE TO ACCEPT THAT YOU'RE WINNING:

N. Korea invites U.N. nuclear monitor: Pyongyang says it will discuss shutting down its weapons program (Bob Drogin, 2/24/07, LA Times)

In a fresh sign of easing tensions, North Korean officials Friday invited the chief of the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency to visit Pyongyang next month to develop plans aimed at dismantling the nation's nuclear weapons program, officials said here.

Mohamed ElBaradei, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said he hoped to discuss the "shutdown and eventual abandonment" of the plutonium-producing reactor facility at Yongbyon, ending its ability to produce fuel for additional nuclear weapons. [...]

"I see this as a step toward the denuclearization of the North Korean peninsula," ElBaradei told reporters in a joint briefing with U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who is visiting Vienna. A spokeswoman said ElBaradei probably would visit in the second week of March.

The White House, which is eager to see North Korea disarm, applauded the invitation as a sign of progress. "It's a positive sign," said White House spokesman Tony Fratto. "It shows that we're beginning to execute the terms of the agreement."

FINALLY A FIGHT THEY CAN WIN! WELL, HALF OF THEM...:

Congressional Democrats Wrestle Over How to Force Bush to Alter Iraq Policy (SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and JOHN M. BRODER, 2/24/07, NY Times)

Congressional Democrats, divided over how to press President Bush to alter his policy in Iraq, are wrestling over whether to use the power of the purse to wind down the war, and they seem headed for a confrontation among themselves, possibly as early as next week, over a proposal to revoke the 2002 resolution authorizing the war.

NO WONDER HE DIDN'T WANT A COFFIN:

Lothar-Guenther Buchheim, author of 'Das Boot,' dies at 89 (Melissa Eddy, 2/24/07, Associated Press)

German author and art collector Lothar-Guenther Buchheim, who was best known for his autobiographical novel "Das Boot," has died, his museum and the office of the governor of Bavaria said Friday. He was 89. [...]

Buchheim was acclaimed for his works of fiction and nonfiction, including several about his World War II patrol aboard the German submarine U-96 in the Atlantic Ocean in 1941. He crafted that experience into the novel "Das Boot," or "The Boat," which was published in 1973 and carried an underlying anti-war message.

In 1981, the book was turned into an acclaimed German film starring Juergen Prochnow that detailed the hopelessness of war and its effect on the crew of a submarine who spent much of their time beneath the surface amid the cramped confines of their boat.

AND BY HOUSE STANDARDS SHE'S NOT THAT UNINFORMED:

Bachmann on Iran: "There's already an agreement made. [Iran is] going to get half of Iraq and that is going to be a terrorist safe haven zone." (Eric Black, 2/23/07, Minneapolis Star-Tribune)

U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann claims to know of a plan, already worked out with a line drawn on the map, for the partition of Iraq in which Iran will control half of the country and set it up as a "a terrorist safe haven zone" and a staging area for attacks around the Middle East and on the United States. [...]

"Iran is the trouble maker, trying to tip over apple carts all over Baghdad right now because they want America to pull out. And do you know why? It's because they've already decided that they're going to partition Iraq.

And half of Iraq, the western, northern portion of Iraq, is going to be called.... the Iraq State of Islam, something like that. And I'm sorry, I don't have the official name, but it's meant to be the training ground for the terrorists. There's already an agreement made.

They are going to get half of Iraq and that is going to be a terrorist safe haven zone where they can go ahead and bring about more terrorist attacks in the Middle East region and then to come against the United States because we are their avowed enemy."

IF ONLY HE'D PREVAILED:

Lawrence of Arabia was really a Zionist, historian claims (Donald Macintyre, 24 February 2007, Independent)

It appears to be revisionism on a grand scale. Popular imagination, fed on Peter O'Toole's portrayal in David Lean's film classic Lawrence of Arabia, will have a hard time absorbing the startling assertion by the historian Sir Martin Gilbert that its hero was in fact a "serious Zionist" who believed in a "Jewish state from the Mediterranean shore to the River Jordan". [...]

Sir Martin revealed last night that a series of minutes written by Lawrence, which he uncovered in the National Archive, demonstrated his sympathy with the Zionist cause. Working for Churchill in 1921, for example, he clearly identified "the area of Palestine from the Mediterranean to Jordan" as the "Jewish National Home".

While the discoveries overturn many popular assumptions about Lawrence in Britain and much of the Arab world, they will come as less of a surprise to prominent historians here.

Norman Rose of the Hebrew University, and a leading expert on the history of Zionism in Britain, leaves little room for doubt about Lawrence's admiration for Chaim Weizmann in his biography of the Belarus-born Zionist who became a British citizen in 1910, was the leading lobbyist for the 1917 Balfour declaration pledging a Jewish homeland, and the first President of Israel.

The biography quotes Lawrence as telling the Archbishop of Jerusalem, a sceptic about Weizmann, that the Zionist leader "is a great man whose boots neither you nor I are fit to black". When Weizmann finally settled in Palestine in 1934, and told his friend Lewis Namier that he regretted not having done so a decade earlier, Namier could not resist replying that Lawrence had remarked to him of Weizmann that "one does not build the National Home by living in a villa in Addison Road". This was hardly, to put it mildly, the sentiment of an anti-Zionist.

Lawrence, who had played a leading part in co-ordinating the Arab revolt against the Turks to serve British interests, mediated and translated at the post war Jewish-Arab accord between the future King Feisal of Iraq and Weizmann, which allowed for "large-scale immigration" of Jews to Palestine and implementation of the Balfour declaration in return for the Arab state promised ­ and then reneged on ­ by the British.

Professor Rose said yesterday: "I am no expert on Lawrence, but this was when many people did not see a contradiction between a Jewish National Home and Arab independence."

NEVERMIND WHETHER HE KNOWS, WHY SHOULD HE CARE?:

Does Bush Know What Neocon Means?: That isn't a rhetorical question. (Timothy Noah, Feb. 23, 2007, Slate)

[C]ockburn continues:

Notwithstanding this episode, Bush 43 still sometimes drew on his father's wide knowledge of the world. Though he refused to read newspapers, he was aware of criticism that his administration had been excessively beholden to a particular clique, and wanted to know more about them. One day during that holiday, according to friends of the family, 43 asked his father, "What's a neocon?"

"Do you want names, or a description?" answered 41.

"Description."

"Well," said the former president of the United States, "I'll give it to you in one word: Israel."

Let's set aside the question of whether it's fair to describe neocons as caring only about Israel. (My own view is that it would have been unfair, and possibly anti-Semitic, 20 years ago, but that the neocon agenda has since dwindled to such an extent that by now it's an acceptable shorthand, if slightly risqué.) Instead, let's focus on the anecdote's suggestion that as recently as two and a half years ago, the president of the United States didn't know what neocon meant.

Can this possibly be true?

WE'RE NOT SETTLING FOR .500:

Pitching offers promise for Bucs (Justice B. Hill, 2/23/07, MLB.com)

Manager Jim Tracy can look at the second half of 2006 and see plenty of promise for what might be ahead for his Pirates in '07.

In that second half of last season, the Pirates played above .500 ball, which was a stark contrast to the 30-60 record his young club posted during the first half. Tracy views that second-half success as a strong foundation for optimism. [...]

Much of that consistency was simply the byproduct of a young pitching staff maturing, he said. Zach Duke, Ian Snell, Paul Maholm and Tom Gorzelanny have a combined 134 starts in the big leagues, a total offseason pickup Tony Armas Jr. (155) has logged alone.

Tracy said that any of the team's young arms should know he can step into a start and put a tourniquet on the wound. That knowledge will, he said, better help the Pirates play baseball at above .500 rather than below it.

MORE:
Kolb seeks more than spot: Former All-Star closer eyes pivotal role in bullpen (Dejan Kovacevic, 2/24/07, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)

Above all, the team is of the mind that Kolb does have, as he put it, a chance to reclaim his outstanding form of 2003-04 with the Milwaukee Brewers, when he nailed 60 of 67 saves with a 2.55 ERA and pitched in the All-Star Game.

This despite the two lackluster years that followed: He had a 5.93 ERA with the Atlanta Braves in 2005 and lost the closer's job, then a 4.84 ERA back in Milwaukee last season.

"I've seen this guy in a couple different locations, and the one thing I can tell you is that there's nothing wrong with that arm," Pirates manager Jim Tracy said. "Somewhere between the first stint in Milwaukee and his time in Atlanta, command became an issue. Now, the key for us is to figure out why."

To that end, pitching coach Jim Colborn and bullpen coach Bobby Cuellar are spending extra time with Kolb to solidify his mechanics.

"He seems to be very receptive, too," Tracy said. "I'll tell you: This could be one of those diamond-in-the-rough types that really pays dividends for you."

Kolb is no less optimistic, mostly because he rediscovered some consistency in the second half of last season: His ERA after the All-Star break was 2.75 in 19 2/3 innings, and that included a run of 14 consecutive scoreless appearances in July and August.

He credited Brewers manager Ned Yost for returning him to late-inning usage.

"More opportunities, better situations," Kolb said. "Early in the year, I was being used anywhere. I think I got into the third inning a couple of times. But, by the end of the year, I was back toward the end of the game again. That's where my adrenaline is. That's where my feel for the game is."

And his feel by season's end?

"I feel like I got a little bit of my '04 season back. Now, I'm just looking to continue what happened in those couple of months."

Even if Kolb makes the Pirates' roster, it apparently would take some doing to get back to the late innings. Salomon Torres is the closer, and management has made clear that Matt Capps and John Grabow -- unquestioned pieces of the team's future -- will get first crack at setup duty.

"I just want to pitch toward the end of the game, whether that's as a setup guy or closer or whatever," Kolb said. "Obviously, they've got Torres here to close. I've pitched against him for a long time now, and I know he's got the stuff to do it. And I'll help him out with anything he needs. I'll be there for him. I'm here to help these guys out and get back to the form I used to have."