THE WHOLE THING IS HILARIOUS...:

America's Age of Denial: If you told me on October 22, 1962 that America's most formidable enemy in 2008 would be Iran, I would have been flabbergasted." (Tom Engelhardt, July 31 , 2008, Mother Jones)

Thanks largely, however, to one man, Gorbachev, who consciously chose a path of non-violence, after four decades of nuclear standoff in a fully garrisoned MAD (mutually assured destruction) world—and to the amazement, even disbelief, of official Washington—the USSR simply disappeared, and almost totally peaceably at that.

AND YOU THOUGHT HE WAS CONFLICTED AFTER YOU FINISHED PRIMARY COLORS?:

Joe Klein on Neoconservatives and Iran (Jeffrey Goldberg, 29 Jul 2008, Atlantic)

Has profanity ever sounded more like a desperate need to seem macho? And don't we have a pretty standard name for people whose hatred is directed at Jews?

HAVING PRINTED THE MYTH...:

Obama's best strategy? Attack: McCain's 'maverick' myth and ties to Bush should be prime targets. (Jonathan Chait, July 31, 2008, LA Times)

Here's the likely rationale: The public, by a wide margin, wants a Democrat to win the presidency. So all Obama has to do is make himself acceptable and he'll win. Hence the focus on building up his own credentials rather than tearing down McCain.

Perhaps that sounds familiar. Let me refresh your memory: it was the John Kerry campaign strategy in 2004. Four years ago, the conventional wisdom had it that a majority of the voters would reject President Bush, so winning was just a matter of Kerry proving himself as an alternative. People "are looking for some change," one pollster put it at the time, "but the change has to be acceptable. John Kerry has to prove he is acceptable."

So rather than attack Bush, Kerry focused on defining himself. The Democratic National Convention was a model of civility and positive focus. The Republican National Convention, on the other hand, was a full-throated assault on Kerry. I don't need to remind you how it all turned out. [...]

To go on the attack, Obama doesn't need to engage in character assassination and baseless charges, as his opponent has done. All he needs to do is stop letting McCain paint a wildly distorted self-portrait.

WHAT SHALL WE DO WITH THE SURPLUS?:

America's $53 trillion jumbo loan: The next president and Congress must not let the national debt surprise the country the way the subprime crisis did. (The Monitor Editorial Board, August 1, 2008)

It's true that the $482 billion deficit chasm estimated for fiscal year 2009 doesn't look so deep when taken as a percentage of the overall economy – 3.3 percent of gross domestic product compared to the 1983 nadir of about 6 percent.

But this is just one "mortgage" that the federal government (i.e., taxpayers) must meet. It owes on all the deficits it has accumulated over the years (the national debt), and it has jumbo liabilities to come in the form of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

Adding all those liabilities together, the government has dug itself into a $53 trillion fiscal hole – the equivalent of $175,000 per person living in the United States.

AND THERE IS ZERO CHANCE...:

America's Politically Correct Recession (James Pethokoukis, 7/31/08, US News)

[I]n short, the past four quarters were 4.8 percent, -0.2 percent, 0.9 percent, and 1.9 percent (the last one possibly with a bullet). That certainly does not meet the rule-of-thumb recession definition—back-to-back negative quarters. Nor do those numbers meet the recession definition of the National Bureau of Economic Research unless the economy totally falls off a cliff from here on out.

But so what? Let's just come up with any definition we want to meet our political objectives or justify our recession predictions. Take a look at this howler from the economic consulting firm Global Insight. (Generally, I like its work very much.) According to Chief Economist Nariman Behravesh, "Based on these numbers, it is a safe bet that the domestic economy (excluding net exports) has been in recession since the end of last year."

Oh, that's right—exclude exports. It's not like the ability to sell your wares to the rest of the planet is important. The fact is, net exports had their strongest showing since 1980, adding 2.4 percentage points to real GDP growth. But ignoring inconvenient numbers is so much easier when the opposite reality would serve you so much better.

IT'S STUPID PARTY FOR A DIFFERENT REASON...:

The HSA Revolution That’s Already Here (John Berlau, 7/28/08, OpenMarkets.org)

The new book America’s Health Care Crisis Solved has been praised as providing a detailed, free-market solution for healthcare’s future. This it does, but what’s almost as fascinating about the book is its description of what is going on in the present, with consumer-driven health savings accounts (HSAs). Almost without notice, HSAs have grown dramatically and have solved for millions of Americans the problem of healthcare’s lack of portability.

First, some background. In the 2003 law that was rightly derided for massively expanding Medicare with a new prescription drug benefit was a separate section that let many more working-age people to take advantage of HSAs. This provision allowed any adult under 65 to open a savings account for medical expenses that receives much of the same special tax treatment as employer-based health care.

As a result of this change, you can qualify for an HSA by getting health insurance with at least an $1100 deductible for individuals or a $2100 deductible for families. So long as you don’t have another insurance policy, you can get a tax deduction for contributing up to $2900 for an individual or $5800 for a family to an HSA. Or your employer can contribute some or all of that amount. In either case, the money grows untaxed and can be withdrawn tax-free for health-care expenses.

And unlike the old flexible spending accounts, which you have to “use or lose” by the end of the year, an HSA can accumulate interest, dividends and capital gains year after year for 20, 30, or even 40 years until you reach the age of 65. And the same insurance policy remains in your hands regardless of whether you change jobs or become self-employed.

The book’s authors — insurance entrepreneur J. Patrick Rooney and longtime HSA advocate Dan Perrin — marshal impressive statistics to shatter critics’ myths that HSAs are only used by the young, wealthy and healthy. Citing statistics from eHealthInsurance.com, the authors note that more than 40 percent of HSA buyers had incomes lower than $50,000 a year, more than 50 percent were age 40 and older, and one-third had been previously uninsured.

And there has been a seven-fold increase to 3.2 million people with HSAs since just after the program began in 2004. In an interview with Open Market, co-author Perrin notes that, by contrast, it took several years to get to just one million individual retirement accounts after those were created.

In the interview, Perrin also credited HSAs with widespread innovations in the health care market. He says that the “minute clinics” that offer cheap and convenient medical services at Wal-Mart and other stores came about in part because of cost-conscious consumers with HSAs. When the government levels the health insurance playing field and consumers are spending their own health care dollars, market innovations arrive that make health care cheaper and better, just as other technologies and services have become cheaper and better when the consumer is in charge.

Much more could be done, Rooney and Perrin write, by the government, employers and insurance companies to make HSAs more accessible. HSA insurance premiums should be made tax-deductible, just as employer-provided insurance premiums are. But HSA have proven themselves as a way of dealing with the costs of U.S. healthcare by empowering patients, rather than empowering governments and limiting choices as socialized medicine does.

BUT DEMOCRACY IS A TIMEX:

Conservative Critics of Modernity: Can They Turn Back the Clock? (Robert P. Kraynak, Fall 2001, First Principles)

It is not easy to be a conservative in the modern world. In fact, it takes a high degree of moral courage, for conservatives are almost always on the defensive, fighting for causes that seem hopeless or lost because they go against the most powerful currents of the modern age.

In praising the courage of conservatives, I am referring primarily to cultural rather than to economic or political conservatives. The proponents of free-market capitalism and limited government that are today called conservatives (in the economic and political sense) actually enjoy a certain momentum in their favor so they need not think of themselves as defenders of lost causes. But cultural conservatives are different. They are die-hard adherents of religious, philosophical, and artistic traditions that are out of place in the modern world. They are like dinosaurs who inexplicably missed the mass extinction sixty-five million years ago. As creatures from another era, cultural conservatives were not made for modern civilization and do not fit into the universe of respectable opinion. This gives them the distinction of being the last genuine radicals, and usually makes them the most interesting figures in today’s intellectual circles. To these wonderful pre-historic creatures, I would like to offer some words of encouragement by sketching a broad picture of modern culture that indicates why History is not as overpowering as it sometimes seems to be and why, in the long run, traditional patterns of culture are favored by the natural order of things and even by divine providence.

Let me begin with a simple definition: Cultural conservatives are those daring thinkers who are willing to question the basic assumption of historical progress—the assumption that the modern world as it has developed over the last four hundred years in the West (and now around the globe) is superior in decisive respects to all the civilizations of the past. This question has been raised by many great cultural conservatives and answered in a variety of provocative ways.

One striking example is the Russian writer and former dissident, Alexander Solzhenitsyn; he is a cultural conservative who shocked his audience during the Harvard Commencement Address of 1978 by asking if Western civilization took a wrong turn at the time of the Renaissance when it replaced God-centered societies with Man-centered societies, producing a world of secular humanism that now appears to be spiritually exhausted. Another great thinker who could be classified as a cultural conservative is Leo Strauss whose scholarly writings are dedicated to reviving classical Greek philosophy as a genuine alternative to modern philosophy—a proposal that implies no real progress in philosophy has occurred since its peak 2,400 years ago.

Other cultural conservatives look to the Middle Ages as the high point of Western civilization: For example, Henry Adams, who preferred Gothic cathedrals dedicated to the Virgin Mary to the dynamo of the industrial revolution. Or traditional Catholics, who think that Latin Scholasticism is the peak of Christendom. Or Eastern Orthodox believers, who believe that monasticism and the centuries-old liturgy are the authentic sources of Christian spirituality. Orthodox Jews are also cultural conservatives because they believe that traditional Judaism, faithful to the divinely revealed Mosaic Law, is superior to Reform Judaism. And one should not forget America’s Southern Agrarians, including Richard Weaver, who held fast to the conviction that the Old South, despite the evil of slavery, represented a higher civilization than the more “progressive” industrial and commercial society of the North.

Reflecting on these examples, one may infer that cultural conservatives are driven by a profound dissatisfaction with the modern world and look to the pre-modern world for sources of inspiration, especially for models of lost greatness. The root of their dissatisfaction is the belief that modernity does not constitute unmixed “progress” over the past because the advances in freedom, material prosperity, and technology that we presently enjoy are offset by a decline in the highest aspirations of the human soul—in the aspirations for heroic virtue, spiritual perfection, philosophical truth, and artistic beauty. Seen in this light, modernity is not superior to past civilizations because it has ushered in an un-heroic age. It has sacrificed the highest achievements of culture for a more equitable and secure but more prosaic existence that, in the last analysis, is not justified because it has lowered the overall aim of life and debased the human spirit. [...]

To illustrate the way cultural conservatives might challenge the present order and recover enduring patterns of human nature, I would like to speculate about four idols of the modern age—democracy, women’s “liberation,” modern art, and modern science. Contrary to conventional wisdom, I doubt that these phenomena are as inevitable or as desirable as most people have been led to believe by the dogma of historical progress.

A DIVA-SIVE CAMPAIGN:

Nearly Half of U.S. Adults Now Applaud the Iraq Surge (Lydia Saad, 7/31/08, Gallup)

A new USA Today/Gallup poll finds nearly half of Americans saying the U.S. troop surge in Iraq, now over, has made the situation there better, up from 40% in February and just 22% a year ago. Accordingly, the percentage believing the surge "is not making much difference" has declined from 51% a year ago, and 38% in February, to just 32%.

Quinnipiac University’s latest swing-state polling suggests that Barack Obama’s foreign tour didn’t help him at home.

Since the last Quinnipiac poll six weeks ago, Republican presidential candidate John McCain has pulled within the poll’s margin of error in Florida and Ohio and halved Democratic candidate Obama’s lead in Pennsylvania. In both Florida and Ohio, 46% of likely voters supported Obama compared with 44% for McCain, while Obama leads McCain 49% to 42% in Pennsylvania, down from a 12-point lead in June.

The polling was conducted during and after Obama’s trip to Afghanistan, Iraq, elsewhere in the Middle East and to Europe.

MORE:
On the other hand, Friend Perlstein is quite right to note the overtones of Triumph of the Will. Obamism is, after all, pretty much just a cult of personality--though on issues of race and abortion and euthanasia and the like his views too bear comparison to the party of Applied Darwinism.

WELL, 40% DEAD (via Jorge Curioso):

The Death of Protestant America: A Political Theory of the Protestant Mainline (Joseph Bottum, August/September 2008, First Things).

America was Methodist, once upon a time—Methodist, or Baptist, or Presbyterian, or Congregationalist, or Episcopalian. A little light Unitarianism on one side, a lot of stern Calvinism on the other, and the Easter Parade running right down the middle: our annual Spring epiphany, crowned in bright new bonnets.

The average American these days would have ­trouble recalling the dogmas that once defined all the jarring sects, but their names remain at least half alive: a kind of verbal remembrance of the nation’s religious history, a taste on the tongue of native speakers. Think, for instance, of the old Anabaptist congregations—how a residual memory of America’s social geography still lingers in the words: the Hutterites, Mennonites, and Amish, set here and there on the checkerboard of the nation’s farmland. The Quakers in their quiet meeting­houses, the Shakers in their tiny communes, and the Pentecostals, born in the Azusa Street revivals, like blooms forced in the hothouse of the inner city.

And yet, even while we may remember the names of the old denominations, we tend to forget that it all made a kind of sense, back in the day, and it came with a kind of order. The genteel Episcopalians, high on the hill, and the all-over Baptists, down by the river. Oh, and the innumerable independent Bible churches, tangled out across the prairie like brambles: Through most of the nation’s history, these endless divisions and ­revisions of Protestantism renounced one another and sermonized against one another. They squabbled, sneered, and fought. But they had something in common, for all that. Together they formed a vague but vast unity. Together they formed America.

In truth, all the talk, from the eighteenth century on, of the United States as a religious nation was really just a make-nice way of saying it was a Christian nation—and even to call it a Christian nation was usually just a soft and ecumenical attempt to gloss over the obvious fact that the United States was, at its root, a Protestant nation. Catholics and Jews were tolerated, off and on, but “the destiny of America,” as Alexis de Tocqueville observed in 1835, was “embodied in the first Puritan who landed on those shores, just as the whole human race was represented by the first man.”

Even America’s much vaunted religious liberty was essentially a Protestant idea. However deistical and enlightened some of the Founding Fathers may have been, Deism and the Enlightenment provided little of the religious liberty they put in the Bill of Rights. The real cause was the rivalry of the Protestant churches: No denomination achieved victory as the nation’s legally established church, mostly because the Baptists fought it where they feared it would be the Episcopalians, and the Episcopalians fought it where they feared it would be the Congregationalists. The oddity of American religion produced the oddity of American religious ­freedom.

The greatest oddity, however, may be the fact that the United States nonetheless ended up with something very similar to the establishment of religion in the public life of the nation. The effect often proved little more than an agreement about morals: The endlessly proliferating American churches, Tocqueville concluded, “all differ in respect to the worship which is due to the Creator; but they all agree in respect to the duties which are due from man to man.” The agreement was sometimes merely an establishment of manners: “The clergy of all the different sects hold the same language,” he added. “Their opinions are in agreement with the laws, and the human mind flows onward, so to speak, in one undivided current.”

Morals and manners, however, count for a great deal in the public square, and, beyond all their differences, the diverse Protestant churches merged to give a general form and a general tone to the culture. Protestantism helped define the nation, operating as simultaneously the happy enabler and the unhappy conscience of the American republic—a single source for both national comfort and national unease.

We tend to remember the Mainline as the strong, unified denominations that emerged from the 1910s through the 1950s: Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans, and so on; their churches gently jostling one another along the pleasant, tree-lined streets of the typical American town. But the madly splintering sects that Tocqueville saw in the 1830s—they, too, are what we might stretch to call the Mainline, for even at its greatest, the undivided current of Protestantism never reached the ecclesial unity of a single church. It achieved, instead, a vocabulary: a way we had to understand ourselves outside our political struggles and economic exchanges.

Think of the American experiment as a three-legged stool, its stability found in each leg’s relation to the other legs. Democracy grants some participation in national identity, an outlet for the anxious desire of citizens to take part in history, but it always leans toward vulgarity and short-sightedness. Capitalism gives us other freedoms and outlets for ambition, but it, too, always threatens to topple over, eroding the virtues it needed for its own flourishing. Meanwhile, religion provides meaning and narrative, a channel for the hunger of human beings to reach beyond the vanities of the world, but it tilts, in turn, toward hegemony and conformity.

Through most of American history, these three legs of democracy, capitalism, and religion accommodated one another and, at the same time, pushed hard against one another. There’s a temptation to call Protestant Christianity the most accommodating religion ever known, but, again and again, the churches managed to withstand the politics and the economics of the age. Indeed, what made them good at accommodation was also what made them good at opposition: In the multiplicity of its denominations, Protestantism could influence the nation in churchly ways without actually being a church—without being a single source of religious authority constantly tempted to assume a central political and economic role.

The great fight to abolish slavery, or women’s suffrage, or the temperance struggle against the Demon Rum, or the civil-rights movement: Every so often, there would explode from the churches a moral and prophetic demand on the nation. But, looking back, we can now see that these showy campaigns were mostly a secondary effect of religion’s influence on America. Each was a check written on a bank account filled by the ordinary practice and belief of the Protestant denominations.

As it happens, the denominations were often engaged in what later generations would scorn as narrow sectarian debates: infant baptism, the consequences of the Fall, the saving significance of good works, the real presence of the Eucharist, the role of bishops. And yet, somehow, the more their concerns were narrow, the more their effects were broad. Perhaps precisely because they were aimed inward, the Protestant churches were able to radiate outward, giving a characteristic shape to the nation: the centrality of families, the pattern of marriages and funerals, the vague but widespread patriotism, the strong localism, and the ongoing sense of some providential purpose at work in the existence of the United States.

Which makes it all the stranger that, somewhere around 1975, the main stream of Protestantism ran dry. In truth, there are still plenty of Methodists around. Baptists and Presbyterians, too—Lutherans, Episcopalians, and all the rest; millions of believing Christians who remain serious and devout. For that matter, you can still find, ­soldiering on, some of the institutions they established in their Mainline glory days: the National Council of Churches, for instance, in its God Box up on New York City’s Riverside Drive, with the cornerstone laid, in a grand ceremony, by President Eisenhower in 1958. But those institutions are corpses, even if they don’t quite realize that they’re dead. The great confluence of Protestantism has dwindled to a trickle over the past thirty years, and the Great Church of America has come to an end.

And that leaves us in an odd situation, unlike any before. The death of the Mainline is the central historical fact of our time: the event that distinguishes the past several decades from every other ­period in American history. Almost every one of our current political and cultural oddities, our contradictions and obscurities, derives from this fact: The Mainline has lost the capacity to set, or even significantly influence, the national vocabulary or the national self-understanding.

The nation has passed through even harsher ­periods, of course. In 1843, for instance, the Antislavery Society adopted a resolution that famously read, “The compact which exists between the North and the South is a covenant with death and an agreement with hell.” But since the 1970s, we have faced a unique kind of political dilemma, in which no agreement can be reached even on the terms by which we will disagree with one ­another.

Notice, for instance, how quickly these days any attempt to speak in the old-fashioned voice of moral criticism turns sour and bitter—segueing into anti-Americanism, regardless of its intentions. Many Americans are profoundly patriotic, no doubt, and many Americans are profoundly critical of their country. We are left, however, with a great problem in combining the two, and that problem was bequeathed to us by the death of Protestant America—by the collapse of the churches that were once both the accommodating help and the criticizing prophet of the American ­experiment. [...]

In 1948, as he completed his draft of the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Canadian law professor John Humphrey went home and noted in his diary that what had been achieved was “something like the Christian morality without the tommyrot.”

That seems a nearly perfect phrase: Christian morality without the tommyrot. Humphrey meant, of course, all the unnecessary accretions of prayer and miracles and faith and sacraments and chapels. But the phrase might be the motto of all who answer surveys by saying they are “spiritual, but not religious.” It might be the motto of all who have a vague and unspoken—indeed, unspeakable—feeling that it is somehow more Christian not to be a Christian.

It might even be the motto of the Mainline churches today. Of course, without all that stuff about God and church, the morality proves to be empty: cups for us to fill with almost any meaning we want—which, in the actual give and take of public life, will almost always be political and economic meaning. In other words, having gotten rid of all the tommyrot, the liberal Protestant churches can at last agree in nearly every particular.

Unfortunately, they obtained their ecumenical unity at the price of abandoning most of the religious work that ecumenism was supposed to advance. Indeed, the churches’ desperate hunger to mean more in politics and economics had the perverse effect of making them less effective opponents to the political and economic pressures on the nation. They mattered more when they wanted to matter less.

Social nature abhors a social vacuum, and the past thirty years have seen many attempts to fill the place where Protestantism used to stand. ­Feminism in the 1980s, homosexuality in the 1990s, environmentalism today, the quadrennial presidential campaigns that promise to reunify the nation—the struggle against abortion, for that matter: Leave aside the question of whether these movements are right or wrong, helpful or unhelpful, and consider them purely as social phenomena. In their appearance on the public stage, these political movements have all posed themselves as partial Protestantisms, bastard Christianities, determined not merely to win elections but to be the platform by which all other platforms are judged.

Look at the fury, for instance, with which environmentalists now attack any disputing of global warming. Such movements seek converts, not supporters, and they respond to objections the way religions respond to heretics and heathens. Each of them wants to be the great vocabulary by which the nation understands itself. Each of them wants to be the new American religion, standing as the third great prop of the nation: the moral vocabulary by which we know ourselves.

Just as religion is damaged when the churches see themselves as political movements, so politics is damaged when political platforms act as though they were religions. And perhaps more than merely damaged. Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, the killing fields of Cambodia, the cultural revolution in China: We had terrible experiences in the twentieth century when political and economic theories succeeded in posing themselves as religions.

We’re not on the edge of something that frightening today. But the death of Protestant America really has weakened both Christianity and public life in the ­United States—for when the Mainline died, it took with it to the grave the vocabulary in which both criticism and support of the nation could be effective.

That vocabulary was incomplete in many ways, and the churches often failed to provide true Christian witness. But in its everyday practice, Protestantism nonetheless gave America something vital: a social unity and cultural definition that did not derive entirely from political arrangements and economic relations. And America gave Protestantism something in return: a chance to flourish without state interference, a freedom to fulfill the human desire for what lies beyond the material world.

Among conservative Christians, much attention is devoted to the question of whether the hole in public life can be filled by either Catholicism or the evangelical churches. I have my doubts. The evangelicals may have too little church organization, and the Catholics may have too much. Besides, both are minorities in the nation’s population, and they arrive at our current moment with a history of being outsiders—the objects of a long record of American suspicion, which hasn’t gone away despite the decline of the churches that gave the suspicion its modern form.

Perhaps some joining of Catholics and evangelicals, in morals and manners, could achieve the social unity in theological difference that characterized the old Mainline. But the vast intellectual resources of Catholicism still sound a little odd in the American ear, just as the enormous reservoir of evangelical faith has been unable, thus far, to provide a widely accepted moral rhetoric.

America was Methodist, once upon a time—or Baptist, or Presbyterian, or Congregationalist, or Episcopalian. Protestant, in other words. What can we call it today? Those churches simply don’t mean much any more. That’s a fact of some theological significance. It’s a fact of genuine sorrow, for that matter, as the aging members of the old denominations watch their congregations dwindle away: funeral after funeral, with far too few weddings and baptisms in between. But future historians, telling the story of our age, will begin with the public effect in the United States.

As he prepared to leave the presidency in 1796, George Washington famously warned, “Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.” Generally speaking, however, Americans tended not to worry much about the philosophical question of religion and nation. The whole theologico-political problem, which obsessed European philosophers, was gnawed at in the United States most by those who were least churched.

We all have to worry about it, now. Without the political theory that depended on the existence of the Protestant Mainline, what does it mean to support the nation? What does it mean to criticize it? The American experiment has always needed what Alexis de ­Tocqueville called the undivided current, and now that current has finally run dry.

K.I.S.S.:

Factors that Improve Online Experience (Sathish Menon and Michael Douma, Idea.org)

Executive summary

This report outlines key findings from surveys that explored factors that drive online experience as expressed by the three different subject groups – nonprofit organizations and cities, web designers and firms, and the general public. The survey’s major findings are:

* Designers underestimate the thresholds for an effective site. Respondents consider a site “effective” when visitors are satisfied with respect to enjoyment, can find information somewhat easily, and never get lost in the site. By at least one point on a five-point scale, visitors have higher expectations for effectiveness than do designers. Nonprofit organizations believe that effective sites do not have “information gaps between what visitors want and what the site provides” and that visitors are at least “somewhat satisfied” with their sites. Designers should give greater consideration to overall effectiveness, thereby reducing the chance of failure for a user to find the information they seek.

* Easy access to complete information is key to visitor enjoyment. All three survey groups believe that the ease with which visitors can find information and the ability to maintain orientation is critical to enjoyment. Both organizations and visitors believe that reducing the gap between what web sites provide and what visitors seek is critical to enjoyment. These variables explain 25% to 30% of the variance in visitor enjoyment; hence, ease of finding information is an important foundation for most sites.

* Good visual design and up-to-date information are critical. Over 80% of designers and organizations believe that good visual design is important. A healthy 50% of the visitors agree. Fully 80% of visitors and organizations believe that up-to-date information is very important. Only 60% of designers believe that to be the case. When budgeting for your project, don’t be overly seduced by fancy graphics and multimedia. Invest in strong, clear design and simple methods to quickly deliver current information to your visitors.

* Visitors want information fast. Web site visitors are looking for simple, accurate, fast, and easy to navigate web sites - preferably with links to information they seek. A significant number of comments revolved around the need for speedy access, including but not limited to download speed, in order to find the information visitors are looking for. Even in a broadband age, visitors value fast sites, both those that are fast loading and those that quickly deliver sought-after information.

* Visitors want a broad range of topics. Relative to designers and organizations, visitors more strongly believe that a broad range of topics is important. Visitors believe sites can be more effective by helping visitors find interesting information - even if they are not looking for it. Designers and content developers can provide ample sidebars that link to other recommended pages, and extensively cross-link to other pages based on keywords.

* Designers are overly optimistic about visitors’ ability to maintain orientation. In the survey, the ability to maintain orientation was defined as visitors’ ability to know “where they are, where they can go next, and which pages are related.” About 70% of designers believe that visitors are almost always able to maintain orientation. That drops to about 30% when non-profit organizations express their view. In contrast, only about 10% of visitors report being able to almost always maintain their orientation. Fewer than 5% report that they tend to get lost frequently. Said another way, your visitors don’t know your site as well as you do, so make sure it is obvious how to find information through meaningful menus, prompts, and not too much clutter.

* Visitors still need handholding. The study asked about hypothetically providing visitors with personal assistance using a site. About 70% of organizations and visitors believe that a personal guide would increase the effectiveness of a web site. Only about 50% of designers believe the same. Designers tend to overestimate the clarity of their designs.

* Visitors point to the lack of breadth and depth of site content as causing an “Information Gap.” Although over 90% of visitors say that they are able to find the information they are looking for, over 50% report that there is a gap between what they are looking for and what typical web sites provide, and 60% think that a personal guide would help them navigate web sites. The reported gap is negatively correlated to visitors’ ability to find information, and positively correlated to the need for a local search engine. This indicates that most web sites are unable to provide the breadth of information that visitors seek. Visitors often request broader and deeper information, when in fact they need to find existing information more easily.

HEY, SINCE THEY AREN'T HUMAN WHAT'S THE BIG DEAL:

Nurse gave wrong woman abortion (BBC, 7/18/08)

A nurse who gave a chemical abortion to a patient who had only come for a consultation has been cautioned.

Ann Downer, based at the Calthorpe Clinic in Edgbaston, Birmingham, failed to check the woman's personal details before giving her the drug.

The woman was recalled when Ms Downer realised her mistake but the drug had already taken effect.

The Nursing and Midwifery Council said she could keep her job but would have a caution on her record for three years.

WHICH IS WHY WE GIVE THEM RITALIN:

Pushover parents to blame for generation of children who 'lack discipline and moral boundaries', says teachers' leader (Laura Clark, 30th July 2008, Daily Mail)

A decline in parenting skills has created a generation of children without moral boundaries, a teachers' leader has said.

Philip Parkin warned that teachers are increasingly forced to discipline bad behaviour and take on the role of bringing up children because parents too often pander to their demands.

THE TRUMAN COMPARISON IS A SLANDER...:

A Truman for our times: The received wisdom is that President Bush has been a foreign policy disaster, and that America is threatened by the rise of Asia. Both claims are wrong—Bush has successfully rolled back jihadism, and the US will benefit from Asian growth (Edward Luttwak, August 2008, Prospect)

Until 9/11, Islamic militants, including violent jihadists of every sort, from al Qaeda to purely local outfits, enjoyed much public support—either overt or tacit—across most of the Muslim world. From Morocco to Indonesia, governments appeased militants at home while encouraging them to focus their violent activities abroad. Some, like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) funded both militant preachers and armed jihadists. The Saudis financed extremist schools in many countries, including the US and Britain, and had thousands of militant preachers on the payroll in addition to writing cheques for jihadists in the Caucasus, Pakistan and a dozen other places (although not to Osama bin Laden himself, their declared enemy). The UAE rulers who now talk only of their airlines and banks are reliably reported to have handed over sackfuls of cash to Osama in person, meeting him at Kandahar's airfield when flying in to hunt endangered species. Saudi Arabia and the UAE were also the only countries that joined Pakistan in recognising the Taliban as the legitimate rulers of Afghanistan. Other Muslim governments, notably Sudan, Syria and Yemen, helped jihadists by giving them passports and safe havens, while others still, including Indonesia, simply turned a blind eye to Islamist indoctrination and jihadist recruitment.

Other than the Algerian and Egyptian governments, every Muslim state preferred at least to coexist with militant preachers and jihadis in some way. Pakistan did much more than that; its Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, funded, armed and trained both the Taliban in Afghanistan and thousands of jihadists dedicated to killing Indian civilians, policemen and soldiers in Kashmir and beyond.

All this came to an abrupt end after 9/11. Sophisticates everywhere ridiculed the uncompromising Bush stance, "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists," as a cowboy stunt, but it was swiftly successful. Governments across the Muslim world quickly changed their conduct. Some moved energetically to close down local jihadist groups they had long tolerated, to silence extremist preachers and to keep out foreign jihadis they had previously welcomed. Others were initially in denial. The Saudis, in the person of interior minister Prince Nayef bin Abdul Aziz, started off by denying that the 9/11 terrorists were Arabs, let alone Saudis, while the UAE princes accused of giving cash to Bin Laden pretended they had never heard of him.

Denial did not last. As they saw American special forces and long-range bombers smashing the Taliban, the Saudis began to admit responsibility for having spread extremism through the thousands of schools and academies they financed at home and abroad. An agonising reappraisal of their own Wahhabi form of Islam continues. The Saudi king has convened an inter-faith conference of Muslims, Christians and Jews—a huge step given the Wahhabi prohibitions of any form of amity with non-Muslims. Inside the kingdom, only less extreme preachers now receive public support. Bin Laden had been the Saudis' enemy for years, but it was only after 9/11 that they began actively to hunt down his supporters and made their first moves to discourage rich Saudis from sending money to jihadists abroad. More than a thousand Saudis have been arrested, dozens have been killed while resisting arrest, and Saudi banks must now check if wire transfers are being sent to Muslim organisations on the terrorist list.

In different ways, other governments in Muslim countries all the way to Indonesia also took their stand with Bush and the US against the jihadists, even though jihad against the infidel is widely regarded as an Islamic duty. Suddenly, active Islamists and violent jihadists suffered a catastrophic loss of status. Instead of being admired, respected or at least tolerated, they had to hide, flee or give it up. Numbers started to shrink. The number of terrorist incidents outside the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq keeps going down, while madrassas almost everywhere have preferred toning down their teachings to being shut down. In Indonesia, the largest Muslim country, the dominant association of imams condemns all forms of violence without exception.

But it was in Pakistan that Bush forced the most dramatic reversal of policy. He had said that it was with us or against us, and he meant it. President Musharraf was given a stark choice: stand with the US to destroy the Taliban that Pakistan itself had created, or be destroyed. Musharraf made the right choice, shutting down the flow of arms to the Taliban, opening the Shahbaz airfield to US aircraft and giving blanket permission for US military overflights across Pakistan. Nothing will stop the North-West Frontier Province from being as violent as it has been since the days of Alexander the Great. Nothing can dissuade the Pashtuns from their twin passions for boys and guns. And naturally they approve of the Taliban on both counts. But at least the Pakistani state is no longer funding these pederasts. Musharraf also started to remove the bearded extremists who once practically ran Pakistan's ISI, starting with the chief, Mahmood Ahmed, who was replaced within a month of 11th September by the moderate Ehsanul Halqas. It has been less easy for Musharraf and his acolytes to identify and remove the more subtle smooth-shaven extremists in the ISI, who still support the renascent Taliban, but they tried hard enough to trigger at least one of the assassination attempts against Musharraf himself.

What happened in Pakistan within 24 hours of 9/11 was something the world had never seen before: the overnight transformation of the very core of a country's policy—the support of jihad—which derived from the national myth of Pakistan as the Muslim state par excellence. It was as if President Bush had sent an envoy to Italy to demand the outlawing of spaghetti al pomodoro—and succeeded.

Yet one hears well-informed people casually remark that Bush's war on terror has been a total failure. This is not just political prejudice; after all, the dog that does not bark is not heard. But one need not be Sherlock Holmes to recall that 11th September was meant to be the beginning of a global jihad, with a 12th September, 13th September, 14th September and so on.

Not that al Qaeda itself could do it—its one shot had been fired. But the destruction of the twin towers inspired thousands of young Muslims to go down to the local Islamist prayer hall to offer their services to jihadists. The Koran, after all, explicitly promises victory in all things to the believers, making Muslim weakness the source of agonising, if unspoken, doubts about the credibility of the faith itself. That is the true source of the resentment that no policy accommodations in the middle east could possibly assuage. And it was those doubts that induced not only the hapless Palestinians but even westernised, affluent, wine-drinking Tunisians to celebrate the television images of 9/11 with tears of joy, and that of course made Bin Laden the first pan-Islamic hero since Saladin.

The destruction of the twin towers was therefore the most powerful possible call to action. It was quite enough to trigger not just a Madrid, a London or a Glasgow attack, but many more in Europe alone. The main target, however, was bound to be the US itself, as well as American tourists, expatriates, business residents and, naturally, any troops anywhere.

Instead, the global jihadi mobilisation, triggered by post-9/11 enthusiasm for Osama bin Laden, was stopped before it could gain any momentum by all that Bush set in motion: the destruction of al Qaeda training bases in Afghanistan, the killing or capture of most of its operatives, and, most importantly, the conversion of Muslim governments from the support of jihad to its repression.

IF THEO CAN GET HERMIDA AND PROSPECTS I'LL BEAR HIS CHILD...:

Red Sox, Marlins, Pirates talk three-way trade (Ken Rosenthal, July 30, 2008, FoxSports.com)

In one proposed scenario, the Marlins would trade outfielder Jeremy Hermida and a prospect for Ramirez, and the Red Sox then would flip Hermida and prospects to the Pirates for left fielder Jason Bay and possibly left-handed reliever John Grabow.

The players in the deal, however, remain fluid, according to the source, who described the names as "not set."

Two prominent Marlins prospects who have been mentioned — Class AA right-hander Ryan Tucker and Class A outfielder Michael Stanton — will not be in the trade, Marlins sources said.

For Bay, the Pirates presumably would need to exceed the offer they received from the Braves last week — Class AAA outfielder Brandon Jones, Class AAA shortstop Brent Lillibridge and two pitchers in the low minors.

The Red Sox and Marlins have yet to notify the commissioner's office that they have a deal in place, two sources said. Approval from the commissioner is required for any trade that involves a cash transaction of more than $1 million.

This seems like nothing more than a three-way for the sake of complexity that Michael Lewis notes, in Moneyball, is characteristic of these baseball brights.

MUCH AS WE LOVE THE HATCHET MAN...:

Anne Armstrong, Presidential Adviser and Pioneering Politician, Dies at 80 (WILLIAM GRIMES, 7/31/08, NY Times)

Mrs. Armstrong was a prominent figure in Texas and national Republican Party politics when she was appointed counselor to Nixon in 1973. She was the first woman to be named to the cabinet-level position.

In that job, she became highly visible for her willingness to face hostile audiences as the Watergate scandal gathered force. She was, as a reporter for The New York Times described her then, the Nixon administration’s “best, brave front to the public.”

Under Nixon, Mrs. Armstrong created the White House Office of Women’s Programs to provide a liaison between the president and women’s groups. It sought to recruit female appointees to high-level government positions and to broaden opportunities for women in the federal government.

Mrs. Armstrong stayed on as counselor under Ford, who named her to the eight-member Council on Wage and Price Stability. She helped plan the United States bicentennial celebration and, for a time, seemed a likely contender to be Ford’s running mate in the 1976 election.

Instead, she was named ambassador to Britain, where with her breezy, energetic style and the mere fact of being a woman, she seemed to fascinate her host country. She held the post from 1976 to 1977.

HE'S JUST BEEN BETTER AT EVERYTHING:

For White House, Hiring Is Political (CHARLIE SAVAGE, 7/31/08, NY Times)

On May 17, 2005, the White House’s political affairs office sent an e-mail message to agencies throughout the executive branch directing them to find jobs for 108 people on a list of “priority candidates” who had “loyally served the president.”

“We simply want to place as many of our Bush loyalists as possible,” the White House emphasized in a follow-up message, according to a little-noticed passage of a Justice Department report released Monday about politicization in the department’s hiring of civil-service prosecutors and immigration officials.

The report, the subject of a Senate oversight hearing Wednesday, provided a window into how the administration sought to install politically like-minded officials in positions of government responsibility, and how the efforts at times crossed customary or legal limits.

Andrew Rudalevige, an associate professor of political science at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania who studies presidential power, said that while presidents of both parties over the last half-century had sought ways to impose greater political control over the federal bureaucracy, the Bush administration had gone further than any predecessor.

IS THAT HER PORNSTAR NAME?:

Scrabulous brothers launch new Facebook game: Wordscraper (Jemima Kiss, 7/31/08, guardian.co.uk)

The two brothers behind Scrabulous, the unofficial online version of Scrabble that has become a hit among among Facebook users, launched a new online word game last night - Wordscraper.

Developers Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla launched Wordscraper worldwide less than 48 hours after being forced to take their original creation, Scrabulous, offline in the US and Canada in response to a lawsuit from Hasbro.

The reason for Scrabulous' extreme makeover has its roots in some pretty gray legal matters: the real problem wasn't that it ripped off Scrabble, but that it ripped off Scrabble so blatantly. The colors of the board were the same, the list of rules led to a Wikipedia entry for Scrabble rules, and the two names were similar enough for Hasbro to cry foul.

On Wednesday I spoke to Pete Kinsella, a partner at the Faegre & Benson law firm who specializes in intellectual property, and he gave me his take on the gritty details. "Copyrights are not supposed to protect board games," Kinsella explained. "What copyrights protect is the expression of an idea rather than the idea itself."

Returning as Wordscraper is a way for its creators to keep the game running while avoiding legal complaints. In effect, it's just different enough.

"I think there's a very fine line to walk in this one, and the question is whether Scrabulous went over the line or not in mimicking the colors or everything else," Kinsella assessed (keep in mind that we had this conversation before the advent of Wordscraper), "or whether they could've designed a generic version of the game with the same points system and scoring system, and that would've fallen out of Hasbro's copyrights."

BREAKFAST SERIAL:

The Orwell Diaries (The Orwell Prize)

‘When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page’, wrote George Orwell, in his 1939 essay on Charles Dickens.

From 9th August 2008, you will be able to gather your own impression of Orwell’s face from reading his most strongly individual piece of writing: his diaries. The Orwell Prize is delighted to announce that, to mark the 70th anniversary of the diaries, each diary entry will be published on this blog exactly seventy years after it was written, allowing you to follow Orwell’s recuperation in Morocco, his return to the UK, and his opinions on the descent of Europe into war in real time. The diaries end in 1942, three years into the conflict.

What impression of Orwell will emerge? From his domestic diaries (which start on 9th August), it may be a largely unknown Orwell, whose great curiosity is focused on plants, animals, woodwork, and – above all – how many eggs his chickens have laid. From his political diaries (from 7th September), it may be the Orwell whose political observations and critical thinking have enthralled and inspired generations since his death in 1950. Whether writing about the Spanish Civil War or sloe gin, geraniums or Germany, Orwell’s perceptive eye and rebellion against the ‘gramophone mind’ he so despised are obvious.

Orwell wrote of what he saw in Dickens: ‘He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry — in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.’

What will you see in the Orwell diaries?

AT THE POINT WHERE YOU RETAIN THE DIVISION INTO 16 AGENCIES...:

Bush redefines roles of intelligence agencies (The Associated Press, July 31, 2008)

President Bush approved an order Wednesday that rewrites the rules governing spying by U.S. intelligence agencies, both domestically and abroad, and strengthens the authority of the national intelligence director, according to a U.S. official and government documents.

Executive Order 12333, which lays out the responsibilities of each of the 16 agencies, maintains the decades-old prohibitions on assassination and using unwitting human subjects for scientific experiments, according to a multimedia briefing given to Congress that was reviewed by the Associated Press.

...you've given up on their being useful. Shutter them all and open intelligence completely. The market does a better job than bureaucrats.

TWO ESPECIALLY GOOD READS IN THIS REGARD...:

What If Iraq Works?: There could be a promising future there (Victor Davis Hanson, 7/31/08, National Review)

These shifting realities may explain both the shrill pronouncements emanating from a worried Iran and its desire for diplomatic talks with American representatives.

Other rogue nations — North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba (not to mention al-Qaeda itself) — also do not, for all their bluster, think that or act as if an impotent U.S military is mired in defeat in Iraq.

Meanwhile, surrounding Arab countries may soon strengthen ties with Iraq. After all, military success creates friends as much as defeat loses them. In the past, Iraq’s neighbors worried either about Saddam Hussein’s aggression or subsequent Shiite/Sunni sectarianism. Now a constitutional Iraq offers them some reassurance that neither Iraqi conventional nor terrorist forces will attack.

None of this means that a secure future for Iraq is certain. After all, there are no constitutional oil-producing states in the Middle East. Instead, we usually see two pathologies: either a state like Iran, where petrodollars are recycled to fund terrorist groups and centrifuges; or the Gulf autocracies where vast profits result in artificial islands, indoor ski runs, and radical Islamic propaganda.

Iraq could still degenerate into one of those models. But for now, Iraq — with an elected government and a free press — is not investing its wealth in subsidizing terrorists outside its borders, establishing fundamentalist madrassas abroad, building centrifuges, or allowing a few thousand royal first cousins to squander its oil profits.

Iraq for the last 20 years was the worst place in the Middle East. The irony is that it may now have the most promising future in the entire region.

KNEW:

What Kansas Knows (Peter Ferrara, 7/30/2008, American Spectator)

Few outside the Democrat party understand what has just happened in the historic primary season that recently ended. But in those primaries, the party made a fundamental decision that marks a dramatic turning point in American politics.

Bill Clinton swept up the Democrats in 1992 based on the new politics of the Democrat Leadership Council (DLC), which he headed. The DLC sought to remake the Democrats based on recognition of what had then just happened in the real world of American politics. Reagan's Republicans had won three straight national elections, thrashing unreconstructed liberals like Mondale and Dukakis in landslides.

The DLC sought to accommodate what they saw as the valid components of the Reagan Revolution. The historic battle between capitalism and socialism was over, and capitalism had won. The Democrats had to modify their policies and their rhetoric to recognize that. Most importantly, they had to accommodate the essential vision that led to the political success of the Reagan Revolution -- the American people overwhelmingly favored the policies of economic growth over the policies of taxation and redistribution ("It's the economy, stupid").

This meant that Democrats had to build on, not reject, the essentials of free markets, and the realities of globalization. Democrats didn't have to swallow the whole libertarian agenda to succeed in this new environment. But they had to project an agenda that plausibly would advance economic growth, not ignore it and all of its possibilities and implications, or even actively undermine it. This became Bill Clinton's awkwardly expressed "Grow the Economy" theme, which was meant to imply that it was still the government that would be producing the economic growth through its wise policies, not the decentralized free market by itself.

This meant, in turn, that the Democrats were not going back to income tax rates of 70% and even 90% as in the heyday of the Left. They could still raise tax rates somewhat on "the rich," especially if they promised at the same time to cut taxes for the middle class, a central theme of Clinton's 1992 campaign that was completely forgotten after the election. But it was also time to recognize and embrace the realities of free trade, and the desirability and overwhelming popularity of welfare reform based on work requirements. It was also time to recognize and extend the successes of deregulation.

The Democrats went along with it because having lost 3 straight national elections, and 5 of the last 6, they were hungry for power. President Clinton stumbled out of the gate because he didn't initially lead with this vision that won him the election, but rather with Hillary's old 1930s warhorse vision of socialized medicine. That produced the historic Gingrich Revolution of 1994. The insight that made Clinton's presidency a success is that he then went along with the policies of the Gingrich congressional majorities, attacking and trimming only what could be projected as its excesses. The result was robust economic growth, and even a booming budget surplus, vindicating Clinton's DLC vision. Thus Clinton became the only Democrat since Roosevelt to serve two consecutive terms, with only one more Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, having accomplished that since Andrew Jackson.

BUT THE DEMOCRAT IDEOLOGUES, what Howard Dean later described as the Democrat wing of the Democrat party, hated and despised what they saw as Clinton's sellout.

YOU KNOW HE'S IN TROUBLE WHEN HE STARTS MAU-MAUING:

McCain Ad Compares Obama to Britney Spears (NY Sun, July 31, 2008)

Senator McCain's presidential campaign yesterday released a withering television ad comparing Senator Obama to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, suggesting the Democratic contender is little more than a vapid but widely recognized press concoction. Mr. Obama's campaign quickly responded with a commercial of its own, dismissing Mr. McCain's complaints as "baloney" and "baseless." Mr. McCain's ad, titled "Celeb" and set to air in 11 battleground states, intercuts images of Mr. Obama on his trip to Europe last week with video of Ms. Spears and Ms. Hilton — both better known for their childish off-screen antics. "He's the biggest celebrity in the world, but is he ready to lead?" the voiceover asks, noting the Illinois senator's opposition to offshore oil drilling and suggesting he would raise taxes if elected. "He doesn't seem to have anything positive to say about me, does he?" Mr. Obama said. "You need to ask John McCain what he's for, not just what he's against."

While campaigning in a traditionally Republican district, Sen. Barack Obama attempted to beat back rumors about him– telling the Springfield, Missouri crowd that Republicans and Sen. McCain are trying to make voters “scared” of him because they don’t have another strategy.

“Nobody thinks that Bush or McCain have a real answer for the challenges we face. So what they are going to try to do is make you scared of me,” Obama warned, “You know he's not patriotic enough. He's got a funny name. You know, he doesn't look like all of those other presidents on the dollar bills.”

McCain: My opponent is an inexperienced over-hyped transnationalist liberal.

Obama: Racist!

MORE:
McCain Tries to Define Obama as Out of Touch (JIM RUTENBERG, 7/31/08, NY Times)

Although Mr. Obama has been under an intense public spotlight for the last year, he is still relatively new on the national scene, and polls indicate that for all the enthusiasm he has generated among his supporters, many voters still have questions about him, providing Republicans an opening to shape his image in critical groups like white working-class voters between now and Election Day.

Mr. McCain’s campaign is now under the leadership of members of President Bush’s re-election campaign, including Steve Schmidt, the czar of the Bush war room that relentlessly painted his opponent, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, as effete, elite, and equivocal through a daily blitz of sound bites and Web videos that were carefully coordinated with Mr. Bush’s television advertisements.

The run of attacks against Mr. Obama over the last couple of weeks have been strikingly reminiscent of that drive, including the Bush team’s tactics of seeking to make campaigns referendums on its opponents — not a choice between two candidates — and attacking the opponent’s perceived strengths head-on. Central to the latest McCain drive is an attempt to use against Mr. Obama the huge crowds and excitement he has drawn, including on his foreign trip last week, by promoting a view of him as more interested in attention and adulation than in solving the problems facing American families.

There have been so many Ones. The human imagination seems inclined to think in terms of them: King Arthur, Superman, Anakin Skywalker (or Luke, depending on your cosmology), Bobby Kennedy, John Galt, the Who's Tommy, Frodo, Bob Dylan, Siegfried, Harry Potter, Mighty Mouse, Godot, Joe Gibbs, Storm, Wonder Woman.

The One is the one who has the Answer. He will fix a fallen world. He will bring . . . change we can believe in. [...]

Sometimes he seems to playfully encourage his image as the One. Before the New Hampshire primary, he joked to an audience, "I am going to try to be so persuasive in the next 20 minutes or so that a light is going to shine down from the ceiling. . . . You will experience an epiphany. You will say to yourself, 'I have to vote for Barack.' "

He told House Democrats this week, "This is the moment . . . that the world is waiting for," our colleague Dana Milbank reported.

Also this week, the Obama campaign sent out an e-mail in the name of Michelle Obama to invite folks to contribute money for a chance to be among 10 lucky supporters who will get to "go backstage with Barack" at the Democratic convention in Denver, as if he were that special kind of One: the rock star.

It wasn’t until the last week, however, that the narrative of Obama as a president-in-waiting – and perhaps getting impatient in that waiting - began reverberating beyond the e-mail inboxes of Washington operatives and journalists.

Perhaps one of the clearest indications emerged Tuesday from the world of late-night comedy, when David Letterman offered his “Top Ten Signs Barack Obama is Overconfident.” The examples included Obama proposing to change the name of Oklahoma to “Oklobama,” and measuring his head for Mount Rushmore.

IF THE ELDERS OF ZION CAN RUN THE WORLD, WHY CAN'T THEY DECIDE ON A SPOKESMAN?:

US: Neocon Flap Highlights Jewish Divide (Daniel Luban and Jim Lobe, Jul 30, 2008, IPS)

he fierceness of the controversy surrounding Klein, generally considered a political centrist, highlights the growing antagonism between neo-conservative hardliners and prominent U.S. Jews whose more moderate views are aligned more closely with those of the foreign policy establishment.

The controversy began Jun. 24, when Klein argued in a TIME blog post that the "fact that a great many Jewish neoconservatives -- people like [independent Democrat Sen.] Joe Lieberman and the crowd at Commentary -- plumped for this war [in Iraq], and now for an even more foolish assault on Iran, raised the question of divided loyalties."

Within a day, Abraham Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League, accused Klein of espousing "age-old anti-Semitic canards about a Jewish conspiracy to control and manipulate government".

ODD THAT THE UNICORN RIDER...:

Obama to House Dems: If Sanctions Fail, Israel Will Likely Strike Iran (Jake Tapper, July 30, 2008, Political Punch)

Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, met with House Democrats yesterday, talking about his trip abroad and his observations.

Obama told the caucus, according to an attendee, "Nobody said this to me directly but I get the feeling from my talks that if the sanctions don’t work Israel is going to strike Iran." Others in the room recall this as well.

UNCLE BEN'S PERVERTED RICE?:

Obama's Symbolic Importance (Jonathan Weisman, 7/29/08, WP: The Trail)

According to a witness, he was waxing lyrical about last week's trip to Europe, when he concluded, "this is the moment, as Nancy [Pelosi] noted, that the world is waiting for." [...]

"I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions," he said.

GOOD FASTBALL, GOOD SLIDER, HIS GOOGLY IS HIS OUT PITCH...:

Yeah, but can Brian Wilson play cricket? (Andrew Baggarly, July 30th, 2008, Extra Baggs)

Remember the spring training story about Brian Wilson going to India over the winter to teach a clinic on pitching? It was part of a contest to find a “million dollar arm” amid a country with more than a billion people.

Well, the top two finishers – Rinku Singh and Dinesh Kumar Patel — were at Dodger Stadium on Tuesday. They’re both teenagers from the Mumbai area. They’ve been in the U.S. for about 10 weeks and received instruction from former major leaguer Tom House. Singh won the first place prize of $100,000 but wasn’t able to throw three consecutive strikes at more than 95 mph to claim the $1 million grand jackpot. We’ll see if either pitcher progresses enough to earn a pro contract when their year of instruction is up. (Cleveland, perhaps?)

I thought it was interesting that both young men are javelin competitors; so was Felipe Alou, who was in the Pan Am Games for the Dominican Republic and headed for a career in medicine before he was offered a contract to play baseball.

BUT FOR THAT DUI IT WOULD BE EVERY ELECTION:

The "No-Bounce" Win and a Bit of History (Steve Lombardo, 7/29/08, Pollster.com)

With little in the way of new polling data--and the milestone of 100 days until Election Day passing--we decided to take a look at where the race stood at this time over the past five election cycles. While this was an unscientific review, we did try and choose the most representative polls (from reputable pollsters) that we could find. The trend from 1988 - 2004 shows that the GOP candidate tends to under-poll in the summer--with the exception, as you can see below, of the 2000 campaign. In each of the other four years, the Republican candidate had been polling significantly behind the Democrat at this point in the race. Each of those times, however, the Republican improved his position, gaining an average of 15 points relative to the Democrat.

That is a staggering number: equivalent to over 18 million votes based on 2004 turnout numbers. So Republicans have come back before--and McCain's campaign narrative does fit with the "comeback kid" storyline--but what this means for 2008 is difficult to say. It could tell us that Republican candidates tend to do better once the electorate is more focused on the issues and the candidates (similar to what we see in registered voter/likely voter screens, where likely voters--those paying more attention--tend to be slightly more inclined to vote for the Republican candidate), or it could simply be a coincidence based on a variety of external factors related to those particular races and polls. Either way, it's interesting to look at:

DON'T CARRY THE MESSAGE, CARRY THEM:

Bush Meets Chinese Democracy Activists: Pledges To Air Their Concerns on Trip to Beijing Olympics (ELI LAKE, July 30, 2008, NY Sun)

Before departing for Beijing for the Olympic Games, President Bush is signaling that he will raise concerns from Chinese human rights activists in his meetings with Chinese leaders.

Mr. Bush met yesterday with five Chinese exiles, including Harry Wu, the geologist who spent nearly 20 years in Chinese labor camps and later wrote about his native country's gulags, or the laogai. Also at the meeting was Wei Jingsheng, a man considered by many to be the father of China's democracy movement and the author of the essay "The Fifth Modernization." There was Robert Fu, a Christian minister and former prisoner who handed Mr. Bush a "prayer for China" wristband and urged the president to intercede on behalf of an underground church leader imprisoned in China named Zhang Rongliang, according to the Associated Press. The president also heard from Rebiya Kadeer, a former prisoner and advocate for the rights of China's Muslim Uighur community that seeks independence, and Sasha Gong, a former factory worker who now works for Radio Free Asia's Cantonese Service.

A White House spokeswoman, Dana Perino, said in a statement that Mr. Bush promised to take the message of the five activists to China's high officials next month during the Olympic ceremonies. "The president assured them that he will carry the message of freedom as he travels to Beijing for the games, just as he has regularly made this a priority in all of his meetings with Chinese officials. He told the activists that engagement with Chinese leaders gives him an opportunity to make the United States' position clear — human rights and religious freedom should not be denied to anyone."

PANIC IN GERUND PARK (via The Mother Judd):

Scrabulous Barred to North American Users (HEATHER TIMMONS, 7/30/08, NY Times)

“Boycott Hasbro!”

The rallying cry started early Tuesday after fans of Scrabulous, an online knockoff of the classic board game Scrabble, woke up to find that their game had been abruptly removed from Facebook.com, the social networking site.

To make matters worse, people who tried to download the official Hasbro version of Scrabble found that it did not work either. The authorized game had been the victim of “a malicious attack” on Tuesday morning, its developer said — an attack that came right on the heels of the sudden disappearance of Scrabulous.

TAKE THAT, MARK HELPRIN:

U.S. Reports Drop in Homeless Population
(RACHEL L. SWARNS, 7/29/08, NY Times)

The number of chronically homeless people living in the nation’s streets and shelters has dropped by about 30 percent — to 123,833 from 175,914 — between 2005 and 2007, Bush administration officials said on Tuesday. [...]

Dennis Culhane, a professor of social policy at the University of Pennsylvania and an author of this year’s report, acknowledged that “there are a lot of people in tough housing situations who don’t get counted.” He said the government needed a standard measure and asked communities to count people living in shelters and on the street.

He described the decline in chronic homelessness as “pretty remarkable.”

Mr. Culhane said that Congress and the Bush administration had pushed local communities to focus on finding solutions for the chronically homeless, who accounted for about half of the people living in the nation’s shelters in 2000. HUD has financed the development of between 10,000 and 12,000 new units of supported housing targeted for that population every year over the past four years, he said.

“It affirms the very significant change in policy shift that took place” over the last six years, said Mr. Culhane, who studies homelessness trends and policy, referring to the decline in the numbers of chronically homeless. “We’re moving in the right direction, without a doubt.”

THE GOP BETTER NOT BE BANKING ON OIL ANGER:

Oil falls below $121, lowest since May (Alex Lawler, 7/29/08, Reuters)

Oil fell more than $4 a barrel to below $121 on Tuesday, touching the lowest price since May, as signs of weakening demand outweighed a disruption to Nigerian oil output.

The drop also coincided with a firmer U.S. dollar, which may have reduced the appeal of commodities to some investors, and comments from OPEC's president that oil could fall to $70 or $80 in the long term.

WHILE HARRY GETS NAUGHT BUT GUANO:

Coburn gets best of Reid on 'omnibus' package (Martin Kady II, 7/28/08, Politico)

Sen. Tom Coburn is used to being a lonely "no" vote on overwhelming Senate votes, but on Monday afternoon, his GOP colleagues came to his defense.

Coburn (R-Okla.) prevailed in blocking a massive package of generally non-controversial bills that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid brought to the floor, angering Democrats and some Republicans while raising Coburn's status as a cult hero to fiscal conservatives. [...]

Coburn is notorious in the Senate for blocking all manner of routine bills that he says include wasteful spending, and has earned the nickname "Dr. No" for his holds on Senate bills.

Republicans stuck together in blocking this bill not because they oppose all of the programs, but because they have decided to block everything small and large this week until they get votes on stalled energy legislation.

The vote sent Reid into one of his trademark tirades on the Senate floor, as he basically accused Republicans of voting against people with strokes, people in wheelchairs and those suffering from Lou Gehrig's disease.

RIGHT AROUND NOW THE MOTHER JUDD IS LIKE POPEYE DOYLE IN FRENCH CONNECTION II:

'Scrabulous' disappears from Facebook after Hasbro suit (Caroline McCarthy, July 29, 2008, CNet)

Facebook users in the U.S. and Canada can no longer access Scrabulous, the faux-Scrabble game that quickly became one of the most popular applications on its developer platform.

It is not yet clear whether this was on the part of Facebook or independently on behalf of the Scrabulous creators.

The game's disappearance comes in the wake of a lawsuit filed last week by Hasbro, the game manufacturer that owns the rights to Scrabble in the United States and Canada. In the suit, Hasbro named as defendants the creators of Scrabulous--India-based brothers Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, and their company, RJ Softwares. The suit asked Facebook to pull the game, citing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and asked the Agarwallas to close their Scrabulous.com site.

That hasn't happened completely, though. Outside the U.S. and Canada, the rights to Scrabble are owned by game company Mattel, so Hasbro doesn't have jurisdiction there. Both game companies have released separate official Scrabble games for the Facebook platform. Meanwhile, the Scrabulous.com site, which existed before the Facebook application, is still working just fine.

FOR ALL THE NEW-YORKERISH PARANOIA...:

Captain McCain (R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., 7/29/2008, American Spectator)

Recently an Obama adviser told the New York Review of Books' Elizabeth Drew that "[h]is being a community organizer is the fundamental insight and philosophy of his campaign," whereupon Drew enthuses that this piece of 1960s nonsense is "a fresh, even revolutionary idea about how to govern." Note she is not talking about governing a Chicago slum but rather the United States of America. At times I wonder about Miss Drew's inability to slap her thigh and let out a hearty belly laugh. Something is wrong here.

It is in Obama's origins as a "community organizer" that we see how truly passe he is. He may be 14 years Hillary's junior, but his roots in radicalism are surprisingly similar to hers as an acolyte of Alinsky and a defender of Black Panthers both at the Yale Law School and at a left-wing (viz. Communist!) law firm. Spectator readers have been aware of Hillary's 1960s radicalism since the magazine's earliest reports in 1992. Now even mainstream journalists are reporting it (see the May 19, 2008 Washington Post) upon detecting hypocrisy in her attack on Obama's friendship with Bill Ayers. In the heady days of the 1960s Revolution That Never Came, Ayers was bombing government buildings, among them the Pentagon. Years later in Chicago, while serving with Obama in foundation work, Ayers was brazenly unrepentant. In fact, immediately after 9/11 he announced, "I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough." Hillary at least respects her supporters' intelligence enough to lie about her origins. Obama is sufficiently vain to think he can dupe his supporters by presenting his radical origins as progressive, not "the status quo in Washington." Well, he has hoodwinked Miss Drew. Perhaps mainstream media will be as slow in catching on to Obama as they were to catching on to Hillary.

OBVIOUSLY TO the keen political eye, Obama is a standard-issue left-liberal Democrat, with a resume very similar to the Clintons', albeit without the shattered integrity. Last year in The Clinton Crack-Up I predicted that the younger generation of Democrats would challenge Hillary's nomination and that 2008 would be the last battle between the left wing and the right wing of the historic 1960s generation. Ironically, though the younger generation has whipped Clinton, my prediction is being vindicated. The younger generation's 46-year-old candidate with the rants of the Rev. Wright and other antique radicals whistling in his ears is going to give the left-wing youth of the 1960s one more run against their right-wing rivals.

McCain, as the New York Times's Sam Tanenhaus recently observed, is a member of the 1950s generation but with a rebellious streak. Toughened and matured by Vietnam, he returned to America and, as we shall see, took on the Carter administration's neglect of the military. While doing so he fell in with senior movement conservatives such as Sen. John Tower and with young 1960s movement conservatives such as Dick Allen, later Ronald Reagan's national security adviser, Ed Feulner, later the head of the Heritage Foundation, and John Lehman, President Reagan's secretary of the navy. All support him today. With some anomalies, McCain's platform will be an amalgam of their work. My prediction that the 2008 presidential race will be the last great battle between the 1960s left and the 1960s right is holding up, though the standard-bearer from the left is by 1960s demographics wet behind the ears and the standard-bearer from the right is long in the tooth.

IT'S TOO EARLY FOR POLLS TO MEAN MUCH...:

McCain Gains on Obama in New Poll: USA Today/ Gallup Poll Suggests Obama's Trip May Have Energized Voters for McCain (Jill Lawrence, 7/29/08, USA TODAY)

It also reflected a jump in support for the U.S. troop increase in Iraq and a country evenly divided between withdrawing troops with and without a timetable. McCain pushed for the extra troops, and Obama opposed them. Obama wants a timetable, and McCain doesn't.

Obama was ahead 47%-44% among registered voters, down from a 6-percentage point lead he had last month. McCain led 49%-45% among likely voters, reversing a 5-point Obama lead among that group. In both cases, the margin of error is +/—4 points.

SURE, IT'S THE LEAST SIGNIFICANT MAJORITY IN CONGRESSIONAL HISTORY...:

Let's give "Blue Dogs" the boot: Pushing conservative Democrats out of Congress could help the party stand up to the GOP. (Glenn Greenwald, 7/28/08, Salon)

On key issue after key issue, it is the Bush White House and Republican caucus that have received virtually everything they wanted from Congress, while the base of the Democratic Party has received virtually nothing other than disappointment and an overt repudiation of its agenda. Since the American people gave them control of Congress, the Democrats in Congress have given the country the following:

Unlimited and unconditional funding for the Iraq war. Vast new warrantless eavesdropping powers and retroactive amnesty for their telecom donors -- measures the administration tried, but failed, to obtain from the GOP Congress. The ability to ignore congressional subpoenas with utter impunity. A resolution formally decreeing parts of the Iranian government to be a "terrorist organization." A failure to outlaw waterboarding, to apply the torture ban to the CIA, to restore the habeas corpus rights abolished by the Military Commissions Act of 2006, to impose the requirement of congressional approval before President Bush can attack Iran. Confirmation of highly controversial Bush nominees, including Michael Mukasey as attorney general even after he embraced the most radical Bush theories of executive power and repeatedly refused to say that waterboarding was torture.

Other than (arguably) the resignation of Alberto Gonzales as attorney general and a very modest increase in the minimum wage (enacted in the first month after Democrats took control of Congress), one is hard-pressed to identify a single event or issue since November 2006 that would have been meaningfully different had the GOP retained control of Congress. The Congress of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi has been every bit as passive, impotent and complicit as the Congress of Bill Frist and Denny Hastert was. Worse, in contrast to the Frist/Hastert-led Congress, which at least had the excuse that it enabled a wartime president from its own party while he enjoyed high approval ratings, the Reid/Pelosi Congress has capitulated to every presidential whim despite an "opposition party" president who is now one of the most unpopular in modern American history. It's difficult to imagine how even Reid and Pelosi themselves could contest the claim that the Democratic-led Congress, from the perspective of Democratic voters, has been a profound failure.

With those depressing facts assembled, the only question worth asking among those who are so dissatisfied with congressional Democrats is this: What can be done to change this conduct? As proved by the 2006 midterm elections -- which the Democrats dominated in a historically lopsided manner -- mindlessly electing more Democrats to Congress will not improve anything. Such uncritical support for the party is actually likely to have the opposite effect. It's axiomatic that rewarding politicians -- which is what will happen if congressional Democrats end up with more seats and greater control after 2008 than they had after 2006 -- only ensures that they will continue the same behavior. If, after spending two years accommodating one extremist policy after the next favored by the right, congressional Democrats become further entrenched in their power by winning even more seats, what would one expect them to do other than conclude that this approach works and therefore continue to pursue it?

If simply voting for more Democrats will achieve nothing in the way of meaningful change, what, if anything, will? At minimum, two steps are required to begin to influence Democratic leaders to change course: 1) Impose a real political price that they must pay when they capitulate to -- or actively embrace -- the right's agenda and ignore the political values of their base, and 2) decrease the power and influence of the conservative "Blue Dog" contingent within the Democratic caucus, who have proved excessively willing to accommodate the excesses of the Bush administration, by selecting their members for defeat and removing them from office. And that means running progressive challengers against them in primaries, or targeting them with critical ads, even if doing so, in isolated cases, risks the loss of a Democratic seat in Congress.

EVEN SETTING ASIDE THE FACT THAT DYING NATIONS DON'T SEEK NEW RESPONSIBILITIES...:

'The Hour of Europe' (ANNE APPLEBAUM, July 29, 2008, The Washington Post)

In a very real sense, 2009, not 1992, truly will be the "hour of Europe." By that, I mean that if the chancellor of Germany, the prime minister of Britain, and the president of France — backed by their counterparts in southern Europe, eastern Europe, and Scandinavia — were to walk into the White House on January 21 and propose serious, realistic, new contributions to, say, the war in Afghanistan, the reconstruction of Iraq, the nuclear negotiations with Iran, and perhaps even climate change, the White House would listen.

Or perhaps I should put it more strongly: Not only would the White House listen, either new administration, Democratic or Republican, would immediately offer the Europeans the "leadership" and "partnership" they so often say they desire.

Between the sinking housing market and the soaring price of food, the high price of fuel and low growth, the new president is going to have so much on his plate that a group of Europeans who appear from across the Atlantic announcing, say, a plan to fix southern Afghanistan, would be welcomed with open arms.

In fact, I'll wager I could find a dozen future members of either administration who would roll out the red carpet and greet them like envoys of a fellow superpower if they so desired.

Yet at the same time, I'd also wager that I could not find a dozen current members of any European government who have even thought about coming up with any ideas at all. This is the hour of Europe — but do the Europeans even know it?

Judging by the press and the popular reactions to Mr. Obama's visit there last week, they don't. Just about every account of the speech noted the dearth of applause for its single line encouraging European participation in world events: "America cannot do this alone ... the Afghan people need our troops and your troops" was not a crowd-pleaser. Neither was, "We can join in a new and global partnership" to fight terrorism.

Meanwhile, Germany's chancellor, Angela Merkel, spoke tartly of "the limits" of Germany's contributions to the Afghan cause, making it clear she didn't favor such upbeat talk, while another senior German worried that his colleagues "will have trouble meeting [Mr. Obama's] demand to assume more common responsibility."

DIVIDED LOYALTIES:

Our First Transnational President? (Rich Lowry, 7/29/08, Real Clear Politics)

In Berlin, Obama called himself, unironically, a "citizen of the world." The world, however, issues no passports, nor does it have citizens. The world in the way Citizen Obama imagines it -- as a global community to which we all belong -- doesn't exist. Only backpacking hippies, devotees of the Davos World Economic Forum and U.N. bureaucrats speak this way.

Berlin at times sounded as much like Obama's coming-out party as the candidate of a transnational progressivism -- in which global norms are more important than sovereign nations -- as his audition as commander-in-chief.

In Obama's telling, a triumph of American arms and will during the Cold War was transmuted into a victory of a united world. He railed against "walls" of all kinds, even though walls are useful in dividing hostile communities (see, most recently, Israel and Iraq) and, in the form of borders, are the most basic stuff of nationhood. He addressed "people of the world" and told them "this is our moment, this is our time," as if the impossibly disparate people of the world can ever have a common will.

NOT THAT WE AREN'T SYMPATHETIC TO THE TIBETANS...:

If President, McCain Wouldn’t Attend Opening Ceremony (Laura Meckler, 7/29/08, WSJ: Washington Wire)

Sen. John McCain says that if he were president, he wouldn’t attend the opening ceremonies of the Olympic games in Beijing, something President Bush plans to do. McCain, the Republican presidential candidate, cited China’s conflict with Tibet, which seeks autonomy.

“I don’t think I would, particularly in light of the Tibetan situation,” he said Monday when asked about it on CNN’s “Larry King Live.”

IF ONLY CONSUMERS WERE PAID LIKE BALLPLAYERS...:

All-Stars and Layoffs (BUZZ BISSINGER, 7/26/08, NY Times)

I am not sure why — maybe it was those peanuts going down like pellets of lead. But I found it difficult to square the finances of what was taking place here, All-Stars from the American and National Leagues collectively collecting $392 million in salaries for the 2008 season, juxtaposed with employees from the once-mythic carmaker about to get vivisected.

The news out of General Motors the same day as the game had been particularly grim, symbolically marking the end of the American economic empire as we know it. There was talk, so unimaginable as to be surreal given its once-seeming impregnability, that G.M. would eventually have to file for bankruptcy. Among the announced cutbacks: a 20 percent reduction in salaried-worker costs, elimination of health care for older white-collar retirees, and a suspension of the company’s annual stock dividend of $1 a share.

But it was what 74-year-old William Parker told The Times that got to me the most. He has cancer, and he had just been placed on a new drug costing $2,700 a month; with a leaner and meaner G.M. eager to satisfy the warlords of Wall Street, the company would now pay only $50 of what Mr. Parker so desperately needed. “I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do,” he told a reporter. “I’m fighting for my life here.” [...]

There were 64 players represented on American and National League rosters in the All-Star Game. For the American League, the aggregate 2008 salaries for its 32 players was about $215 million, or nearly $7 million a player, based on a database compiled by USA Today. For the National League roster the figure was slightly less, approximately $177 million, or $5.5 million per player. Taken together, the total figure in salaries comes in just shy of $400 million this season, or the rough equivalent of about 2,500 union autoworker jobs at G.M if you include wages and benefits.

“I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do. I’m fighting for my life here.”

At the top is Yankee third baseman Alex Rodriguez, who even without the benefit of Madonna’s company will make $28 million this season and could pay the yearly $32,400 cost of Mr. Parker’s cancer drug without even knowing the money was gone. The same goes for Yankee shortstop Derek Jeter, who has a 2008 salary of $21.6 million. Or Boston Red Sox outfielder Manny Ramirez at $18.9 million, or Ichiro Suzuki of the Seattle Mariners at $17.1 million, or Chicago Cubs pitcher Carlos Zambrano at $16 million, or Houston Astros shortstop Miguel Tejada at $14.8 million, or New York Mets reliever Billy Wagner at what I suppose is a lowly $10.5 million. On the other hand, given the 72 innings of work he has averaged over the past three seasons, that does come out to $145,833 an inning.

Take the salaries of these players and apply a 10 percent cut — half of what is being lopped off at G.M. — and you could easily save the 80 jobs that are being lost at The Chicago Tribune for a savings of $9 million. It’s a pie-in-the-sky suggestion.

OF COURSE, WE'RE SAFE, WE'RE IN WAZIRISTAN!:

Al-Qaeda chemical expert 'killed' (BBC, 7/28/08)

Reports from Pakistan say a leading al-Qaeda chemical weapons expert, Midhat Mursi al-Sayid Umar, has been killed in a missile strike.

Taleban officials in the tribal area of South Waziristan confirmed to the BBC that he was killed in a missile strike that left at least six people dead.

EXEMPLAR:

Commendable service (Paul Weyrich, July 28, 2008, Washington Times)

The administration of President George W. Bush is drawing to a close after nearly eight years in office. Therefore, it is time to assess who best fulfilled the promises made during the 2000 presidential campaign. In my opinion, that prize goes to Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, the only Cabinet official to see the Bush administration through from the beginning. [...]

The card-check program, which passed the House in this Congress but failed in the Senate, would do away with the secret ballot. Instead, union organizers would be able to put pressure upon workers to sign up. If a worker refused to vote for a union to organize his plant he could be put under all sorts of pressure to conform. Mrs. Chao clearly is concerned that this program will be enacted in the next Congress.

She told the Wall Street Journal, "The right to a private ballot election is a fundamental right in our American democracy and it should not be legislated away at the behest of special-interest groups." Mrs. Chao also is worried that a new union-friendly Congress will expand the Family Medical Leave Act, which guarantees that employees can take unpaid leave to care for an ill child or for other reasons, and they cannot be replaced while on leave. She also worries that Congress will extend from 60 to 90 days the time which employers must notify employees that they will be laid off. Nor does she like a comparable worth measure pushed by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, New York Democrat. It would force employers to pay the same wages for different occupations. She says the world envies the dynamism of the American economy and points to the flexibility we have in our economy. If all of these measures pass, she fears that flexibility would disappear, and with it would go the dynamic American economy.

If Mrs. Chao has her way, the 110th Congress, in its waning days, will combine and streamline some of the many training programs that overlap and duplicate one another. It is unlikely that effort will succeed in the short time remaining in this Congress. She says the Labor Department has $50 billion in different training programs, most of which never reaches workers. She would like to see that money converted into vouchers to permit workers to help them acquire job-training skills. Congress does not like vouchers for elementary and secondary education, so it is highly probable organized labor's senators would filibuster any such move.

Elaine Chao has achieved as much as she has as a workhorse rather than a show horse. Not that she is incapable of explaining in vibrant terms what she has accomplished. But mainly she has worked hard, making progress in inches rather than in long passes. The president certainly made the right choice in selecting Mrs. Chao. Future secretaries ought to emulate her example.

YUP, THAT'S WHAT AMERICANS ARE LOOKING FOR...

Bad in Berlin, Perfect in Paris ( (Roger Cohen, 7/28/08, NY Times)

[B]erlin is not his stage. After J.F.K.’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” and Reagan’s “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Obama could not invoke the new in a setting so replete with cold-war ghosts.

Everything was wrong: a Victory Column setting when he’s not yet victorious, a jejune weave from fighting Communism to fighting terrorism, and an accumulation of worthy platitudes. Presence was absence: the semiotics of yesterday’s world cascaded from America’s Homo Novus.

“This,” Obama told nuclear-energy hating Berliners, “is the moment when we must come together to save this planet. Let us resolve that we will not leave our children a world where the oceans rise and famine spreads and terrible storms devastate our lands.”

Yes, Barack, and let us build lovely castles in the sky that the locusts of infamy will never unravel. [...]

Paris is more his town and it showed.

WE ARE ALL DESIGNISTS NOW:

Darwin to the Rescue A group of scholars thinks evolutionary science can reinvigorate literary studies (BRITT PETERSON, 7/28/08, Chronicle Review)

In the face of any looming apocalypse, imagined or not, prophets abound. For the literary academy, which has been imagining its own demise for almost as long as it has been around, prophets seem always to look to science, with its soothing specificity and concreteness. As the modern discipline of literary criticism was forming in the early 20th century, scholars concentrated their efforts on philology, a study that was thought to be more systematic than pure literary analysis. When the New Critics made their debut in the 1920s and 30s, their goal was to give a quasi-scientific rigor to literary theory: to lay out in detail the formal attributes of a "good poem" and provide guidance as to how exactly one discovered them. Later the Canadian critic Northrop Frye, in his 1957 Anatomy of Criticism, famously queried: "What if criticism is a science as well as an art?" And some of the poststructuralist thought that began to filter into America from France in the 1960s took as its bedrock linguistic and psychoanalytic theory.

But very few pro-science activists suggested that literary scholars should actually work the way scientists do, using such methods as accumulating data and forming and testing hypotheses. Even Frye argued that, while the critic should understand the natural sciences, "he need waste no time in emulating their methods. I understand there is a Ph.D. thesis somewhere which displays a list of Hardy's novels in the order of the percentages of gloom they contain, but one does not feel that that sort of procedure should be encouraged."

Over the last decade or so, however, a cadre of literary scholars has begun to encourage exactly that sort of procedure, and recently they have become very loud about it. The most prominent (at least in the nonacademic media) are the Literary Darwinists, whose work emphasizes the discovery of the evolutionary patterns of behavior within literary texts — the Iliad in terms of dominance and aggression, or Jane Austen in terms of mating rituals — and sets itself firmly against 30 years of what they see as anti-scientific literary theories like poststructuralism and Marxism.

PART OF BEING THE SOVEREIGN...:

Q&A: 'Hamas Curbing Groups Firing Rockets': Interview with Mohamed Bassyouni, head of the Egyptian Shura Council's Foreign Relations Committee (Adam Morrow and Khaled Moussa al-Omrani, Jul 28, 2008, IPS)

Israel has kept its borders with the Hamas-run enclave hermetically sealed. Egypt, meanwhile, has kept its own border with the Gaza Strip closed, citing the absence of a formal border agreement. The precarious situation has led some critics to accuse Egypt of aiding Israel's ongoing siege of Gaza, which has resulted in untold hardships for the strip's roughly 1.5 million inhabitants.

IPS: Israel has repeatedly accused Palestinian resistance factions in the Gaza Strip of violating the truce by firing short-range rockets at targets in Israel. Is there any validity to these claims?

MB: Hamas is fully committed to following the terms of the ceasefire. But there are some smaller factions and individuals -- lacking direction and leadership -- that are not. Hamas has actually taken steps to detain those found firing missiles on Israel from the Gaza Strip.

There is a big difference between Hamas launching a missile salvo at targets in Israel and one of these rogue groups or individuals firing off a couple of rockets. Egypt has requested that Israel distinguish between the two and respect the terms of the tahdia in order to make progress on subsequent phases of the agreement.

THE RARE MISSTEP, BUT A BIG ONE:

Rights Issue Looms as Bush Heads to China: Diplomacy During Games Is Subject Of Intense Debate (Michael Abramowitz, 7/28/08, Washington Post)

With President Bush set to leave next week for the Olympics in Beijing, the White House is coming under increased pressure from lawmakers and advocacy groups to make a public statement of concern about the crackdown on human rights and freedom in China.

White House aides said it is likely that Bush, who has focused considerable attention to the cause of Chinese religious freedom, will worship at a church in Beijing during his trip, but they say the rest of his schedule remains in flux. What the president will do or say in Beijing is the subject of considerable debate within the administration, several officials said, but they expressed doubt that Bush would do much to embarrass the Chinese leadership during an event it considers something of a coming-out party for China as a world power.

Bush has repeatedly made clear his view that he is going to China as a sports fan and does not see the Olympics as a good opportunity to make political points.

SORRY, HONEY, THE WEDDING BAND HAD TO GO....:

Rings are real thing for top fantasy players (Cleveland Plain-Dealer, July 28, 2008)

First-place money is sweet. Trophies keep on giving.

But they don't mean a thing if your fantasy league ain't got that bling - as in 14-karat gold, cubic zirconia.

That's right, fantasy ballers. Jostens Inc., the Minneapolis firm that pumps out Heisman Trophies, college bowl rings, World Series and Super Bowl rings and school class rings by the thousands, also delivers fantasy-football rings - custom-made with the winner's name, league, year and the unmistak able heft and sheen of the boulderlike bands that the pros wear.

"Some people may think it's a bit ex treme," acknowl edged Jostens spokesman Rich Stoebe.

But fantasy junkies demanded, so the company delivered.

Jostens (jostens.com) handcrafts rings for fantasy football, baseball, basketball and hockey. Prices range from about $100 for the basic signet to $319 for the Deion Sanders of fantasy football: the Franchise IV.

TO LAUGH AT ME IS TO SCORN GOD:

Go Ahead, Laugh at Obama: Don’t listen to what they say. The presumptuous — er, presumptive — Democratic nominee is funny. (Byron York, 7/28/08, National Review)

And this was about a man who made up his own pretend presidential seal and motto, Vero Possumus; a man who, upon securing the Democratic nomination, said, “I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal”; a man who has on a number of occasions seemed to forget that he is not, or at least not yet, the President of the United States, who has misstated the number of states in his own country, who has forgotten on which committees he serves in the U.S. Senate. Professional comedians — and their audiences — couldn’t find anything funny about any of that?

Now, after Obama’s world tour, there are already cracks in the Times-imposed conventional wisdom. Confronted with something of an official ban on Obama humor, there is emerging a new strain of Obama humor — zings at the candidate’s hauteur, his presumptuousness, and, especially, his most zealous admirers in the press.

DEJA VU ALL OVER AGAIN:

McCain takes aim at Obama’s character (BEN SMITH & JONATHAN MARTIN, 7/28/08, Politico)

As Senator Barack Obama traveled overseas, the campaign against him appeared to take a decisive new turn with Senator John McCain zeroing in on his Democratic opponent’s character.

In a year when polls show an easy victory for a generic Democratic candidate, McCain has until now been loathe to employ the tack many strategists see as essential and which anonymous e-mailers and commenters with no apparent links to his campaign have been practicing since last summer: hitting Obama not on his record or his platform, but on his values and person.

The Democrat’s Achilles’ heel in this model is an inchoate sense among some voters that the new arrival on the national stage with the unusual biography—and who’s the first black nominee from either party—isn’t American enough.

EXCEPT THAT A 50" HDTV IS THE ONLY THING THAT MAKES IT WATCHABLE:

NFL, NBC Plan Kickoff of Free Football on Internet Sports World to See How Online Offering Affects Viewership (SAM SCHECHNER and MATTHEW FUTTERMAN, July 26, 2008, Wall Street Journal)

Football fans will soon be able to watch some of the biggest professional games on the Internet.

The National Football League and General Electric Co.'s NBC Sports will announce Monday that they plan to stream on the Web 17 regular-season games, mostly Sunday night matchups -- the first time the league has widely distributed complete games live on the Internet in the U.S.

THE ONLY WAY TO KILL CHARLIE MORE EFFECTIVE THAN THE SURGE...:

NATO Counter-Attack Kills Dozens of Insurgents in Afghan Battle (VOA News, 27 July 2008)

Afghan officials say up to 70 militants have been killed in a battle with NATO and government forces in eastern Afghanistan, near the Pakistani border.

The governor of Khost Province, Arsallah Jamal, says Afghan and NATO forces mounted a counterattack early Sunday after nearly 100 militants overwhelmed guards at a government center in the Spera district and killed two police officers.

...is the resurgence.

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BUT CAN HE SING IN A GADDA DA VITA IN CHARACTER?:

HAMAS VS. THE TERRORISTS:

Gaza Strip: Hamas crackdown on armed groups after deadly blast (al Bawaba, 27-07-2008)

Clashes broke out in Gaza City early on Sunday, injuring at least six people, as Hamas-run security forces pressed a territory-wide crackdown on rival Palestinian factions after a deadly bombing. The fighting erupted overnight when Hamas-run police units moved to arrest members of the Army of Islam, a small armed group believed to have links to Al-Qaeda.

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COOL HAND BARRY:

Sweet Nothings: A close reading of The Speech. (Andrew Ferguson, 08/04/2008, Weekly Standard)

[I]n the heart of Europe, before 200,000 breathless admirers, Obama pulled himself up to his full height, lifted his chin, unlimbered those eloquent hands, and said nothing at all.

Obama's "nothing" is sometimes interesting anyway; there are pointers in the vacuousness, as I saw when I read the full text on his campaign's website. He began the speech, as he often does, with a summary of his own life history, which elided into a history of the Cold War--mixing the two together, with his customary grandiosity. The history was nicely written up but not news. And the lesson he drew from it was, to be kind, idiosyncratic: The West's victory in the Cold War, he said, proved that "there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one."

This will come as a surprise to anyone who lived through the Cold War or has even read about it. The thing about wars, even cold ones, is that the world doesn't stand as one; that's why there's a war. And in the Cold War the Soviet side was as united as the West; more so, probably. Left out of Obama's history was any mention of the ferocious demonstrations against the United States in the streets of Paris and West Berlin during the 1960s and 1980s, when American presidents were routinely depicted as priapic cowboys and psychopaths. Probably a fair number of the older members of Obama's audience had been hoisting those banners themselves 25 years ago.

So if "standing as one" didn't win the Cold War, what did? Obama didn't stop to answer, since his own reading of history seems to deny the premise of the question. Instead he hustled on to the present moment. Now, he said, "we are called upon again." To do what? Presumably to stand as one all over again, in the face of "new promise and new peril." Included in the latter are terrorism, global warming, and nuclear proliferation. But those perils aren't the worst of it. "The greatest danger of all is to allow new walls to divide us from one another."

The sentence is the heart of the speech and an instance of Obama's big weakness--his preference for the rhetorical flourish over a realistic account of things as they are. Most politicians share the weakness, and the preference has proved wildly attractive to Obama's supporters. But think it through: "New walls to divide us" is just a metaphor, a trope. A trope can't be the "greatest danger of all." A terrorist setting off a nuclear bomb in London--that's a danger. A revolution in Islamabad--that's a danger. A figure of speech is just a figure of speech.

I DON'T DESPISE IT'S SYSTEM, IT'S JUST ANTI-HUMAN AND DOOMED...:

A Long Wait at the Gate to Greatness (John Pomfret, July 27, 2008, Washington Post)

[I]s China really going to be another superpower? I doubt it.

It's not that I'm a China-basher, like those who predict its collapse because they despise its system and assume that it will go the way of the Soviet Union. I first went to China in 1980 as a student, and I've followed its remarkable transformation over the past 28 years. I met my wife there and call it a second home. I'm hardly expecting China to implode. But its dream of dominating the century isn't going to become a reality anytime soon.

Too many constraints are built into the country's social, economic and political systems. For four big reasons -- dire demographics, an overrated economy, an environment under siege and an ideology that doesn't travel well -- China is more likely to remain the muscle-bound adolescent of the international system than to become the master of the world.

In the West, China is known as "the factory to the world," the land of unlimited labor where millions are eager to leave the hardscrabble countryside for a chance to tighten screws in microwaves or assemble Apple's latest gizmo. If the country is going to rise to superpowerdom, says conventional wisdom, it will do so on the back of its massive workforce.

But there's a hitch: China's demographics stink. No country is aging faster than the People's Republic, which is on track to become the first nation in the world to get old before it gets rich. Because of the Communist Party's notorious one-child-per-family policy, the average number of children born to a Chinese woman has dropped from 5.8 in the 1970s to 1.8 today -- below the rate of 2.1 that would keep the population stable. Meanwhile, life expectancy has shot up, from just 35 in 1949 to more than 73 today. Economists worry that as the working-age population shrinks, labor costs will rise, significantly eroding one of China's key competitive advantages.

Worse, Chinese demographers such as Li Jianmin of Nankai University now predict a crisis in dealing with China's elderly, a group that will balloon from 100 million people older than 60 today to 334 million by 2050, including a staggering 100 million age 80 or older. How will China care for them? With pensions? Fewer than 30 percent of China's urban dwellers have them, and none of the country's 700 million farmers do. And China's state-funded pension system makes Social Security look like Fort Knox. Nicholas Eberstadt, a demographer and economist at the American Enterprise Institute, calls China's demographic time bomb "a slow-motion humanitarian tragedy in the making" that will "probably require a rewrite of the narrative of the rising China."

HOW'S PUNTING TONY WORKING OUT FOR YOU?:

Labour considers 'suicide' election (Eddie Barnes, 7/27/08, Scotland on Sunday)

PANICKING Labour ministers are considering a 'suicide election' to give the party a fresh start under a new leader, following their humiliating defeat at the hands of the SNP in the Glasgow East by-election.

Senior figures disillusioned with Gordon Brown want a senior Cabinet minister to take over the party leadership and head immediately to the polls either this autumn or next spring, even if defeat is the likely option.

They believe such a move would be better than Brown clinging on to office until 2010 when, they fear, the party would face a wipe-out on the scale of that inflicted on the Tories by Labour in 1997.

THEN PROPOSE A POLICY INSTEAD OF PLAYING POLITICS:

Oil May Become GOP's 2008 Issue: Cost of Gas Touches a Chord With Voters (Michael D. Shear and Paul Kane, 7/27/08, Washington Post)

Four-dollar-a-gallon gas has done something that few Republicans thought possible just a few months ago: given them hope.

United behind a renewed push for offshore oil drilling, Republican members of Congress and the party's presumptive presidential nominee, Sen. John McCain, think they have found their best political issue of the 2008 campaign.

McCain strategists and GOP leaders on Capitol Hill say the issue, which polls suggest Americans favor by healthy margins, lets Republicans demonstrate their plans to address the anger over high gas prices as well as the broader economic distress that many voters feel.

Because most Democrats, including Sen. Barack Obama, are opposed to increased drilling, McCain and the GOP have already begun casting their rivals as unconcerned about gas prices and unwilling to wean the country from foreign oil.

NOTHING COSTS MORE THAN IT USED TO:

Flight’s First Fatal Trip (MATTHEW L. WALD, 7/27/08, NY Times)

The arc of safety improvements has been dramatic. Boeing, reaching back to the beginning of the jet age, found one fatal accident for every 30,000 commercial jet flights in 1959. By 2006, the rate for all airliner flights had dropped to one accident for every 4.2 million flights by Western-built commercial jets, according to the Flight Safety Foundation, a nonprofit research group. (Lieutenant Selfridge nonetheless stands at the head of a rather long queue. Boeing counted 26,454 deaths of people on commercial jets between 1959 and 2006, and an additional 934 on the ground.)

Still, an American’s chance of dying in a plane crash last year was one in 432,484, according to the National Safety Council, while the chance of dying in a car was one in 19,216. The lifetime risk? According to the council, one in 5,552 for planes, one in 247 for cars. The airplane risk is dominated by smaller planes, often flown by a single pilot who may not be a professional.

Crash rates in Europe are comparable to those in the United States, and Asia and the Pacific are rapidly improving. Latin America shows some gains. (But don’t ask about Africa, where there is minimal ground-based equipment, like navigation aids, weather reporting and radar, and where planes fly with more maintenance problems and are often overloaded.)

It is very hard today, for instance, if not impossible, to fly an American jetliner into a mountain, because satellites can tell a crew where the plane is even when visibility is zero. But it took the crash of a Boeing 757 flown by American Airlines, in December 1995, to prompt the Federal Aviation Administration and the airlines to make sure all airliners had the new equipment.

THERE IS NO CHINA:

Olympics threatened by Islamic separatists: Little-known Muslim group claims responsibility for a series of explosions in Chinese cities and warns that its next target will be the Beijing Games (Tania Branigan, July 27 2008, The Observer)

A Muslim separatist group yesterday claimed responsibility for a series of fatal explosions in several Chinese cities and threatened to target the Olympic Games, due to begin on 8 August.

Chinese officials dismissed video statements by spokesmen claiming to represent the little-known Turkestan Islamic Party, who warned that they would attack next month's Games and said they were to blame for the previous blasts. A US terrorism-monitoring firm published a transcript of their video.

The Chinese authorities have repeatedly alleged that extremists from the restive northwestern region of Xinjiang - known as East Turkestan by separatists among the Uighur Muslim population - were targeting the Olympics.

PLAYING TO TYPE:

John McCain slams Barack Obama for canceling on the troops (DON FREDERICK AND ANDREW MALCOLMJuly 27, 2008, LA Times)

The 30-second spot zings Obama for making time for a gym workout while in Germany last week, but removing from his itinerary a stop at the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center. The ad continues:

"Seems the Pentagon wouldn't allow him to bring cameras.

"John McCain is always there for our troops.

"McCain. Country first."

IT'S JULY...:

Challenges await Barack Obama at home: His overseas trip was a success, analysts from both parties agree. But rival John McCain is building an assault on the domestic issue of energy. (Doyle McManus and Michael Finnegan, 7/27/08, Los Angeles Times)

Barack Obama conquered the Middle East and Europe last week, but on Saturday he returned to face a more challenging battleground: middle America.

Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, wrapped up his weeklong overseas tour with a statement that -- for all the television coverage his travels from Afghanistan to Britain received -- he was eager to get back to domestic issues.

"We've been out of the country for a week," he told reporters outside the British prime minister's official residence at 10 Downing Street. "People are worried about gas prices. They're worried about home foreclosures."

TOUGH STUFF:

Johnny Griffin, 80, Jazz Saxophonist, Dies (BEN RATLIFF, 7/26/08, NY Times)

Mr. Griffin’s modest height earned him the nickname the Little Giant; his speed in bebop improvising marked him as the Fastest Gun in the West; a group he led with his fellow saxophonist Eddie (Lockjaw) Davis was informally called the Tough Tenor band, a designation that was eventually applied to a whole school of hard-bop tenor players. And in general, Mr. Griffin suffered from categorization. [...]

Johnny Griffin was born in Chicago on April 24, 1928, and grew up on the South Side. He attended DuSable High School, where he was taught by the famed high school band instructor Capt. Walter Dyett, whose other students included the singers Nat (King) Cole and Dinah Washington and the saxophonists Gene Ammons and Von Freeman.

Mr. Griffin’s career started in a hurry: at age 12, attending his grammar school graduation dance at the Parkway Ballroom in Chicago, he saw Ammons play in King Kolax’s big band and decided what his instrument would be. By 14 he was playing alto saxophone in a variety of situations, including a group called the Baby Band with schoolmates, and occasionally with the blues guitarist and singer T-Bone Walker. At 18, three days after his high school graduation, Mr. Griffin left Chicago to join Lionel Hampton’s big band, where he switched from alto to tenor. From then until 1951 he was based in New York City but mostly on the road.

By 1947 he was touring with the rhythm-and-blues band of the trumpeter Joe Morris, a fellow Chicagoan, with whom he made the first recordings for the Atlantic label. He entered the United States Army in 1951; stationed in Hawaii, he played in an Army band.

Mr. Griffin was of an impressionable age when Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie became forces in jazz. He heard them both with Billy Eckstine’s band in 1945 and, having first internalized the more balladlike saxophone sound earlier popularized by Johnny Hodges and Ben Webster, became entranced by the lightning-fast phrasing of bebop, as the new music of Parker and Gillespie was known. In general his style remained brisk but relaxed, his bebop playing salted with blues tonality.

Beyond the 1960s his skill and his musical eccentricity continued to deepen, and in later years he could play odd, asymmetrical phrases, bulging with blues honking and then tapering off into state-of-the-art bebop, filled with passing chords.

In the late 1940s he befriended the pianists Elmo Hope, Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk; he called these friendships his “postgraduate education.” After his Army service he went back to Chicago, where he worked with Monk for the first time, a job that altered his career. He became interested in Monk’s brightly melodic style of composition, and he ended up as a regular member of Monk’s quartet in New York in 1958. In 1967 he toured Europe with a Monk octet.

MORE:
from John Barrett Jr.

I was planning to play something off THE LITTLE GIANT on my show tomorrow, along with maybe one of his recordings with Monk and the Tough tenors band. I might also play Carla Bley's version of "Misterioso" off the THAT'S THE WAY I FEEL NOW Monk tribute, as both Griffin and guitarist Vernon Bullock (who died earlier this morning) appear on it. I'd like to do more, but it's also Hank Jones' 90th birthday on Thursday, so we're doing 90 minutes of his music. So much work preparing the stuff on this show, most of which comes from my collection ... and I wouldn't give it up for nothin'. Click the 'Listen Live' button at http://www.widr.org between 12 noon and 3PM EST and hear my nerdy self if you're so inclined.

AT LEAST WHEN JIMMY PADDED HIS RESUME...:

Obama's Narcissism (Jack Kelly, 7/26/08, Real Clear Politics)

In a news conference Wednesday in Sderot, an Israeli city subject to frequent rocket attacks by Palestinian terrorists, Sen. Barack Obama addressed the doubts many Israelis have about his commitment to their security.

"In terms of knowing my commitments, you don't have to just look at my words, you can look at my deeds," Mr. Obama said. "Just this past week, we passed out of the Senate Banking Committee, which is my committee, a bill to call for divestment from Iran, as a way of ratcheting up the pressure to ensure that they don't obtain a nuclear weapon."

Sen. Obama is not a member of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee. He had nothing to do with the advancement of the bill he referred to. [...]

"For him to fabricate the claim, out of whole cloth, that the Senate Banking Committee is his committee strikes me as another sign of Obama's megalomania," said Web logger John Hinderaker (Power Line). "That, plus more evidence that he is totally at sea without a teleprompter."

THEY FINALLY GOT A STATE...:

SPIEGEL INTERVIEW WITH AUTHOR LEON DE WINTER: 'The Europeans Are Chasing Illusions': Dutch author Leon de Winter talks with SPIEGEL about his new novel, which is set in 2024, the threats mounting against Israel and the assimilation of Muslims in Europe. (Der Spiegel, 7/25/08)
SPIEGEL: Mr. de Winter, your new book -- "The Right of Return" -- is a novel, but it actually describes a political vision. In the book, it is the year 2024, and Israel has shrunk to just a few square kilometers around Tel Aviv, which is surrounded by enemies. Are you simply playing with some ideas here or is this a serious prediction?

Leon de Winter: Both. Israel is menaced by two threats. On the one hand, by the hatred of its enemies, which today is primarily stirred up by Iran, and on the other hand, by the erosion spreading throughout Israeli society. There are three groups that have little in common: the Orthodox Jews, the Israeli Arabs and the secular Jews, who currently make up the majority of the population. But this majority is dwindling. The conflict between these three lifestyles is every bit as much of a threat -- if not even more dangerous -- to the existence of Israel as its outside menaces. [...]

SPIEGEL: This is not the first time that you have made skeptical remarks about Israel's future. This story sounds like the proclamation of a catastrophe.

De Winter: And that's what it is. [...]

SPIEGEL: Do you think the conflict in the Middle East can be resolved through negotiations, or will the strongest win out in the end?

De Winter: It will depend on who gives up first -- who won't be able to take it any longer because it costs too much: too much energy, too much time, too much blood. And that will be the secular Jews, who have no ideology, who merely want to live their lives.

SPIEGEL: In your vision, many Jews leave Israel and emigrate to Europe or America, where life is easier. In the real Israel, an increasing number of Jews are acquiring a second passport, but it doesn't look like they really want to leave. It's more a modern form of life insurance, just in case things go wrong.

De Winter: It's more than that. Immigration compensates for emigration because Russian Jews are still coming into the country. Nevertheless, take a look at Los Angeles or New York, where there are now large communities of ex-Israelis. And you even have them here in Holland. I wonder what will happen if it comes to a new conflict with Hezbollah. Very soon, the majority of Israelis will live within range of the rockets launched by Hezbollah and Hamas. Contrary to Islam, Judaism has a very weak tradition of martyrdom. In the end, we are powerless against a people who are prepared to sacrifice everything.
...and the fools made it a European one. In the long run, we may find out they were right to reject the Messiah 2,000 years ago, but we already know you can't build a healthy republic having rejected messianism sixty years ago.

FROM THE ARCHIVES: WONDERLAND:

Randy Pausch, 47; terminally ill professor inspired many with his 'last lecture': His speech at Carnegie Mellon University after a pancreatic cancer diagnosis became an Internet phenomenon and bestselling book.
By Valerie J. Nelson, July 26, 2008, LA Times)

Randy Pausch, a terminally ill professor whose earnest farewell lecture at Carnegie Mellon University became an Internet phenomenon and bestselling book that turned him into a symbol for living and dying well, died Friday. He was 47.

Pausch, a computer science professor and virtual-reality pioneer, died at his home in Chesapeake, Va., of complications from pancreatic cancer, the Pittsburgh university announced.

When Pausch agreed to give the talk, he was participating in a long-standing academic tradition that calls on professors to share their wisdom in a theoretical "last lecture." A month before the speech, the 46-year-old Pausch was told he had only months to live, a prognosis that heightened the poignancy of his address.

Delivered last September to about 400 students and colleagues, his message about how to make the most of life has been viewed by millions on the Internet. Pausch gave an abbreviated version of it on "Oprah" and expanded it into a best-selling book, "The Last Lecture," released in April.

Yet Pausch insisted that both the spoken and written words were designed for an audience of three: his children, then 5, 2 and 1.

ORIGINAL POST:
A Beloved Professor Delivers The Lecture of a Lifetime (Jeff Zaslow, September 20, 2007, Wall Street Journal)

It can be an intriguing hour, watching healthy professors consider their demise and ruminate over subjects dear to them. At the University of Northern Iowa, instructor Penny O'Connor recently titled her lecture "Get Over Yourself." At Cornell, Ellis Hanson, who teaches a course titled "Desire," spoke about sex and technology.

At Carnegie Mellon, however, Dr. Pausch's speech was more than just an academic exercise. The 46-year-old father of three has pancreatic cancer and expects to live for just a few months. His lecture, using images on a giant screen, turned out to be a rollicking and riveting journey through the lessons of his life.

He began by showing his CT scans, revealing 10 tumors on his liver. But after that, he talked about living. If anyone expected him to be morose, he said, "I'm sorry to disappoint you." He then dropped to the floor and did one-handed pushups.

Clicking through photos of himself as a boy, he talked about his childhood dreams: to win giant stuffed animals at carnivals, to walk in zero gravity, to design Disney rides, to write a World Book entry. By adulthood, he had achieved each goal. As proof, he had students carry out all the huge stuffed animals he'd won in his life, which he gave to audience members. After all, he doesn't need them anymore.

He paid tribute to his techie background. "I've experienced a deathbed conversion," he said, smiling. "I just bought a Macintosh." Flashing his rejection letters on the screen, he talked about setbacks in his career, repeating: "Brick walls are there for a reason. They let us prove how badly we want things." He encouraged us to be patient with others. "Wait long enough, and people will surprise and impress you." After showing photos of his childhood bedroom, decorated with mathematical notations he'd drawn on the walls, he said: "If your kids want to paint their bedrooms, as a favor to me, let 'em do it."

While displaying photos of his bosses and students over the years, he said that helping others fulfill their dreams is even more fun than achieving your own. He talked of requiring his students to create videogames without sex and violence. "You'd be surprised how many 19-year-old boys run out of ideas when you take those possibilities away," he said, but they all rose to the challenge.

He also saluted his parents, who let him make his childhood bedroom his domain, even if his wall etchings hurt the home's resale value. He knew his mom was proud of him when he got his Ph.D, he said, despite how she'd introduce him: "This is my son. He's a doctor, but not the kind who helps people."

He then spoke about his legacy. Considered one of the nation's foremost teachers of videogame and virtual-reality technology, he helped develop "Alice," a Carnegie Mellon software project that allows people to easily create 3-D animations. It had one million downloads in the past year, and usage is expected to soar.

"Like Moses, I get to see the Promised Land, but I don't get to step foot in it," Dr. Pausch said. "That's OK. I will live on in Alice."

[originally posted: 9/26/07]

MEANWHILE, HE'S COMEDY FODDER FOR CONSERVATIVES (via Ed Driscoll):

Whatever Happened to Liberal Humor? (Jason Maoz, 07.24.2008 , Commentary: Contentions)

While R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. and P.J. O’Rourke and Andrew Ferguson and Rush Limbaugh and a host of others were giving the lie to the caricature of conservatives as uptight Pecksniffs, the counterculture’s Politics of Rage was evolving into a more sedate, more deadly political correctness, effectively killing off liberal humor.

Once upon a happier time, liberals prided themselves on maintaining a certain detached bemusement. Recognizing - and lampooning - the foibles of even one’s own idols and icons was considered a sign of sophistication, bestowing on its practitioners, deservedly or not, an élan of witty bonhomie.

And it came to pass, in the eighth year of the reign of the evil Bush the Younger (The Ignorant), when the whole land from the Arabian desert to the shores of the Great Lakes had been laid barren, that a Child appeared in the wilderness.

The Child was blessed in looks and intellect. Scion of a simple family, offspring of a miraculous union, grandson of a typical white person and an African peasant. And yea, as he grew, the Child walked in the path of righteousness, with only the occasional detour into the odd weed and a little blow.

When he was twelve years old, they found him in the temple in the City of Chicago, arguing the finer points of community organisation with the Prophet Jeremiah and the Elders. And the Elders were astonished at what they heard and said among themselves: “Verily, who is this Child that he opens our hearts and minds to the audacity of hope?”

IF IT'S TV IT SHOULD BE FREE:

"The X-Files: I Want to Believe": This suspenseful, intimate movie reminds us why we've always believed in Mulder and Scully. (Stephanie Zacharek, Jul. 25, 2008, Salon)

It's hard to say if "The X-Files: I Want to Believe" is exactly the movie fans of the revered series -- which aired from 1993 to 2002 -- are hoping for. The relatively straightforward plot involves only minor trickery, and you don't need much previous knowledge of the "X-Files" universe to follow it. The director, Chris Carter, the creator of the original show, has dispensed with the convoluted mythology that bogged down the show in the last third of its run. "I Want to Believe" comes off like a solid -- if not great -- episode from one of the show's early seasons, a reasonably suspenseful story made by a director with a sturdy sense of how to tell a story.

Yet it's the very modesty of "I Want to Believe" that makes it so admirable. Carter doesn't try to meet or exceed fans' expectations so much as create an intimately scaled dramatic universe for his fiercely beloved characters, Dana Scully and Fox Mulder, to inhabit, circa 2008.

An earlier spin-off feature, subtitled "Fight the Future" and released at the show's height in 1998, roiled with the show's febrile matrix of extraterrestrial intrigue. In "I Want to Believe," the series's creator, Chris Carter, who directs from a script he wrote with a longtime show scenarist, Frank Spotnitz, puts his faith in a stand-alone story. It's essentially a Frankensteinian B-horror premise that gives its star duo the excuse to muse on whether they still believe.

Neither agent is officially in the spookiness racket anymore. Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) is putting her medical degree to work as a pediatric surgeon at a Catholic hospital. The FBI, stymied by the case of an agent's disappearance, enlists her to coax out Fox Mulder (David Duchovny). He's still in hiding from the military, as per the un-summarizable state of affairs left by the series finale way back when.

The case, introduced with a parallel-action opening belying years of finding fresh ways to begin episodes, is standard-issue: grisly murders (limbs and bodies found buried in the snow), tracked by an unsavory psychic (Billy Connolly as Father Joe, a pedophile ex-priest). Against the wintry backdrop of a whited-out countryside and occasionally Vancouver, Mulder and Scully trade references, regrets, and avowals, though she's also hesitant and preoccupied with a dying patient. Aggressively useless FBI investigators (headed up by Amanda Peet and Xzibit) festoon the proceedings with police manpower and insinuations.

The play of skepticism and headlong curiosity that first gave the pair their appeal is deadened by Scully's unease about the whole endeavor, and its romantic corollary is tossed off with an almost amusing casualness. Deprived of the paranoid pleasures of the show's "mythology," the writers serve up some Slavs engaged in involuntary body-part acquisition and stir up a vague Catholic menace via Father Joe and a hard-nosed priest administrator at Scully's hospital. (Contemporary markers include a dig at President Bush and a regrettable clue involving the Massachusetts marriage certificate of two male villains.)

Maybe this would be okay television, but like an unflattering close-up, this particular X-file loses its mystique when it is blown up to feature length.

SCHROEDINGER'S CAMPAIGN:

What's Not on Obama's Schedule (Jim Miklaszewski and Courtney Kube, 7/25/08, NBC: First Read)

A U.S. military official tells NBC News they were making preparations for Sen. Barack Obama to visit wounded troops at the Landstuhl Medical Center at Ramstein, Germany on Friday, but "for some reason the visit was called off."

One military official who was working on the Obama visit said because political candidates are prohibited from using military installations as campaign backdrops, Obama's representatives were told, "he could only bring two or three of his Senate staff member, no campaign officials or workers." In addition, "Obama could not bring any media. Only military photographers would be permitted to record Obama's visit."

The official said "We didn't know why" the request to visit the wounded troops was withdrawn. "He (Obama) was more than welcome. We were all ready for him."

REASON TAKES YOU TO A CERTAIN POINT, THEN IT'S A MATTER OF FAITH:

Rebel With a Cause:: Bobby Jindal's Spiritual Journey (ROBERT COSTA, July 25, 2008, Wall Street Journal)

Mr. Jindal, a convert to Roman Catholicism, is being mentioned as one of John McCain's top choices for the Republican vice-presidential nomination. And his strong religious faith is often cited as a potential bonus for the ticket.

Hinduism is a diverse religion, with varying interpretations. Mr. Jindal, speaking from his office in Baton Rouge this month, said his parents raised him "in a monotheistic home with a firm belief in a God with traditional values -- the same sort of values you find in the Ten Commandments and other mainstream religions." Recalling their religion as "not a faith that was necessarily tied to a particular historical scripture or revelation," Mr. Jindal said, his parents "made their faith their own."

It is rare for Hindus to convert to Christianity or any other religion. According to a survey released by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life earlier this year, eight in 10 American Hindus who were raised in the faith remain so as adults.

"I did not have an overnight epiphany like so many people do," said Mr. Jindal, calling his conversion a "very intellectual-based journey," where he studied countless religious texts. "Given my background and personality, that was an important part of the process." But, he notes, "I don't think you can 'read' yourself into faith. I had gotten to the point where I knew what history had to say about this person named Jesus and what he had done on Earth. . . . I think at some point you have to take a leap of faith."

As a teenager, Mr. Jindal said he sought out chaplains at nearby Louisiana State University as he grasped for a religious identity to call his own. During a youth group's Easter season musical production in 1987 at LSU's campus chapel, a black-and-white video of the Passion played during intermission. "I don't know why I was struck so hard at that moment," said Mr. Jindal. "There was nothing fascinating about this particular video. . . . But watching this depiction of an actor playing Jesus on the cross, it just hit me, harder than I'd ever been hit before," he said. "If that was really the son of God, and he really died for me, then I felt compelled to get on my knees and worship him."

"It was liberating," said Mr. Jindal about his moment.

THAT'S THE PROBLEM WITH WRITING TO DEADLINE ABOUT A CANDIDATE WITH NO CORE BELIEFS:

The Democrats & National Security (Samantha Power, 8/14/08, NY Review of
Books)

The performance and perception of recent presidents have had the greatest impact in shaping the public trust on national security. But other factors have given Republicans the edge over Democrats. The demographics of the US military are such that the officer corps and rank-and-file have traditionally leaned to the Republican side. Many US service members are observant Christians. During the last few years Democrats in political life have begun to embrace faith unselfconsciously, refusing to allow the Republican political establishment to usurp this terrain. Still, the military will likely continue to recruit a greater percentage of soldiers from red states in the South and middle America than from the coasts or major urban areas. With so many soldiers and officers counting themselves as Republicans, voters naturally associate the party with the country's primary symbol of security, those in uniform.

The Republican domestic agenda may also influence voters' perceptions about national security. The party that opposes strict gun control laws, seeks to crack down on illegal immigrants, wages a "war" on drugs, extols the "three strikes and you're out" approach to criminal sentencing, and has few qualms about capital punishment has been seen as "tougher," regardless of the effectiveness of these policies.

This faith in Republican toughness has had profound electoral consequences. Since 1968, with the single exception of the election of George W. Bush in 2000, Americans have chosen Republican presidents in times of perceived danger and Democrats in times of relative calm. [...]

Since Vietnam there has never been a more auspicious time for the Democratic Party to establish close relations with the US military. Building on Obama's October 2002 speech explaining his opposition to the war in Iraq, Democrats can continue to argue that Obama and his party will never do what the Republicans have done: send US service members to fight unnecessary wars. He will not stretch the US military and military families to their breaking points by extending tours of duty beyond what is tolerable.

WHAT THE OBAMA TRIP LOOKED LIKE FROM KANSAS:

THE DEEPER YOU LOOK, THE MORE YAWNING THE ABYSS:

It’s America, Obama: A modest dissent to the citizen of the world. (Victor Davis Hanson, 7//25/08, National Review)

What disturbed me about Barack Obama's Berlin speech were some reoccurring utopian assumptions about cause and effect — namely, that bad things happen almost as if by accident, and are to be addressed by faceless, universal forces of good will.

Unlike Obama, I would not speak to anyone as “a fellow citizen of the world,” but only as an ordinary American who wishes to do his best for the world, but with a much-appreciated American identity, and rather less with a commonality indistinguishable from those poor souls trapped in the Sudan, North Korea, Cuba, or Iran. Take away all particular national identity and we are empty shells mouthing mere platitudes, who believe in little and commit to even less. In this regard, postmodern, post-national Europe is not quite the ideal, but a warning of how good intentions can run amuck.

THE SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP:

Bush and Singh push nuclear deal (BBC, 7/25/08)

US President George W Bush has telephoned Indian PM Manmohan Singh to discuss the controversial civil nuclear deal between the two countries.

The White House said the two men talked of their determination to cement a major civilian nuclear energy agreement between their countries.

AND WHAT REASONABLE PERSON WOULD BELIEVE...:

New torture memo from 2002 is disclosed: Interrogators would be on safe ground if they had an 'honest belief' that suspects would suffer no 'prolonged mental harm,' the Justice Department told the CIA. (LA Times, July 25, 2008)

The Justice Department in 2002 told the CIA that its interrogators would be safe from prosecution for violations of anti-torture laws if they believed "in good faith" that harsh techniques used to break prisoners' will would not cause "prolonged mental harm."

That heavily censored memo -- obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union, which released it Thursday -- approved the CIA's harsh interrogation techniques method by method, but warned that if the circumstances changed, interrogators could run afoul of anti-torture laws.

"Although an honest belief need not be reasonable, such a belief is easier to establish where there is a reasonable basis for it," said the memo, dated Aug. 1, 2002, and signed by then-Assistant Atty. Gen. Jay Bybee, the Washington Post reported.

The memo was issued the same day he wrote a memo for then-White House Counsel Alberto R. Gonzales defining torture as "extreme acts" causing pain akin to death or organ failure.

AS HE WATCHED HIMSELF GAVOTTE:

Obama Sings the Song of Himself: A flat performance in Berlin. (John F. Cullinan, 7/25/08, National Review)

As always, there’s no lack of self-regard: “Now the world will watch and remember what we do here — what we do with this moment.” But there’s a complete absence of irony in a phrase that unconsciously recalls Lincoln’s modest prediction that “the world will little note or long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they” — the honored dead — “did here.”

You know, like the ones accusing George W. Bush of being insane for ordering the Surge, which the Left now claims it knew all along would succeed, or even for toppling the genocidal dictator in the first place.

MORE:
Pride (in the Name of Love): The Obama vision thing. (Kathleen Parker, 7/25/08, National Review)

Why is it so hard for Obama, knowing what he knows now, to say that he should have supported the surge?

To review Obama’s statements on the surge since it began is to understand why: pride.

Over and over again — even after Gen. David Petraeus reported in late 2007 that the surge was working — Obama said: It’s not working. It won’t work. It’s a mistake. He essentially was betting his presidential hopes on the surge’s failure.

But the surge did work — and the mistake is Obama’s.

Most Americans would have little trouble forgiving Obama for not believing the surge would be effective. It was a gamble, as are all strategies in war. Even with reports on the ground that locals seemed increasingly willing to rise up, there was reason enough by 2007 to doubt the wisdom of America’s commander in chief.

It is less easy to forgive the kind of wrongheaded stubbornness now on display. As recently as July 14, Obama wrote in a New York Times oped that “the same factors that led me to oppose the surge still hold true.” He mentioned the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, money spent in Iraq and said that the surge had failed to produce “political accommodation.”

Fine. But the larger, more important point is that the surge was necessary and successful. Those facts outweigh all other considerations past and present. Moreover, a recent U.S. embassy report stated that 15 of 18 benchmarks set by Congress for Iraq are being met in a “satisfactory” fashion.

Obama has fallen to pride in part because he has bought his own myth. By staking his future on a past of supernatural vision, he has made it difficult to admit human fault. The magic isn’t working anymore. And Obama, the visionary one, can’t even see what everyone else sees: He was wrong.

WHEN OBAMICANS FALL OUT OF LOVE:

Playing Innocent Abroad (David Brooks, 7/25/08, NY Times)

Obama’s tone was serious. But he pulled out his “this is our moment” rhetoric and offered visions of a world transformed. Obama speeches almost always have the same narrative arc. Some problem threatens. The odds are against the forces of righteousness. But then people of good faith unite and walls come tumbling down. Obama used the word “walls” 16 times in the Berlin speech, and in 11 of those cases, he was talking about walls coming down.

The Berlin blockade was thwarted because people came together. Apartheid ended because people came together and walls tumbled. Winning the cold war was the same: “People of the world,” Obama declared, “look at Berlin, where a wall came down, a continent came together and history proved there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one.”

When I first heard this sort of radically optimistic speech in Iowa, I have to confess my American soul was stirred. It seemed like the overture for a new yet quintessentially American campaign.

But now it is more than half a year on, and the post-partisanship of Iowa has given way to the post-nationalism of Berlin, and it turns out that the vague overture is the entire symphony. The golden rhetoric impresses less, the evasion of hard choices strikes one more.

When John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan went to Berlin, their rhetoric soared, but their optimism was grounded in the reality of politics, conflict and hard choices. Kennedy didn’t dream of the universal brotherhood of man. He drew lines that reflected hard realities: “There are some who say, in Europe and elsewhere, we can work with the Communists. Let them come to Berlin.” Reagan didn’t call for a kumbaya moment. He cited tough policies that sparked harsh political disagreements -- the deployment of US missiles in response to the Soviet SS-20s -- but still worked.

In Berlin, Obama made exactly one point with which it was possible to disagree. In the best paragraph of the speech, Obama called on Germans to send more troops to Afghanistan.

The argument will probably fall on deaf ears. The vast majority of Germans oppose that policy.

RIGHT TACK/WRONG TACK:

Obama's path to presidency is far from clear: The Democrat is winning fans on his trip abroad, but is struggling to gain real ground against McCain at home. Some key Clinton backers remain alienated (Peter Nicholas, 7/25/08, Los Angeles Times)

Fresh polls show that he has been unable to convert weeks of extensive media coverage into a widened lead. And some prominent Democrats whose support could boost his campaign are still not enthusiastic about his candidacy.

Several new surveys show that Obama is in a tight race or even losing ground to Republican John McCain, both nationally and in two important swing states, Colorado and Minnesota. One new poll offered a possible explanation for his troubles: A minority of voters see Obama as a familiar figure with whom they can identify.

Republicans are moving to exploit this vulnerability, trying to encourage unease among voters by building the impression that Obama's overseas trip and other actions show he has a sense of entitlement that suggests he believes the White House is already his. [...]

Many voters still seem to be puzzling over who Obama is, even after a race that has lasted a year and a half. By 58% to 47%, voters identity more with the values and background of McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, than with Obama, according to a newly released Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll.

Obama may also be slipping in some key states. He lost a narrow lead in Colorado, falling 5 percentage points in the past month, and now trails McCain 46% to 44%, a new Quinnipiac University poll found. In Minnesota, Obama fell 8 percentage points, though he still leads McCain 46% to 44%, the survey found. The polling spanned the five days before Obama went abroad and the first four days of his trip.

At a time when nearly three-quarters of Americans believe the nation is on the wrong track, the political climate would suggest that McCain, whose party controls the White House, might lag by large margins. Yet a national Fox News poll released Thursday showed that Obama's 4-point lead over McCain in June had shrunk to a single point. The new Journal/NBC poll showed Obama leading by 6 points, unchanged from the month before.

I'M READY FOR MY CLOSE-UP, MR. HELLFIRE:

Pakistan draws a bead on Baitullah (Syed Saleem Shahzad, 7/25/08, Asia Times)

He is reclusive like Taliban leader Mullah Omar and popular like al-Qaeda's Osama bin Laden, and he pledges his allegiance to both.

This is Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, whom the Pakistani security agencies have tried their best to engage, but he remains defiant, so much so that he is even suspected of being an agent for India's Research and Analysis intelligence agency.

Baitullah, who operates in the South Waziristan tribal area on the border with Afghanistan, has frequently fallen out with the Afghan Taliban for directing his jihadis against the Pakistani security forces rather than sending them to Afghanistan.

Initially, this pleased American and European intelligence agencies as he turned the tide from the Afghan battlefield to Pakistan. But now Baitullah is viewed with extreme suspicion as he has proved to be a man who always achieves what he sets out to do, and jihadis from around the world are flooding into his camps to be trained for global jihad. This in turn has allayed the fears of the Afghan Taliban, who realize they will be ensured a smooth supply of fighters to Afghanistan.

For these reasons, Baitullah is now a marked man.

IS HE RUNNING FOR THE EU PRESIDENCY? (via Matt Murphy):

Huge Crowds Left with Mixed Feelings (Mark Waffel and Josh Ward, 7/24/08, Der Spiegel)

"I want to be here for our 'Ich bin ein Berliner' speech," Julie Hagedorn, 38, a Canadian living with her German husband in Berlin told SPIEGEL ONLINE before the speech. "I want to hear it with my own ears when Obama says 'Ich bin ein Europäer (I am a European)."

This sentiment of hoping that the speech would signal the beginning of a new relationship and healing process between Europe and the United States was shared by many of those in the crowd. "This is a rare event," said Alla Samkova, 68, a native Muscovite who has been living in Berlin for 45 years. "In the end it doesn't matter what he says; it only matters that he's here."

Still others -- many others -- expressed joy at being able to get a far-off glimpse of the man promising so much change for the US and the world. "To put it cynically, it's always nice to see a country getting rid of its own junta, even if it elected it itself," said Carsten Winkler, 43, a native Berliner working in the solar industry.

SAY IT AIN'T SO, GORDO:

A stunning victory (Fraser Nelson, 7/25/08, The Spectator)

It’s official – the SNP has taken Glasgow East with a majority in what is, quite simply, a stunning victory. [And quite result for Cameron, he’s pushed the Liberal Democrats into third place, getting real traction in a constituency where Tory vote is normally no higher than staff members and blood relatives]. This is most momentous Scottish by-election since Hillhead in 1982. The SNP’s greatest victory since the Hamilton by-election which put it on the map in 1967. And a result which ha

Gordon Brown suffered his most severe byelection setback in a summer of electoral routs early this morning as the Scottish National party won a dramatic victory in the Glasgow East contest, taking the once staunch Labour seat with a majority of 365 votes.

ANYONE REMEMBER...:

Pine-Tarred and Feathered (Jim Kaplan, 7/24/08, SI.com)

Earlier in the season, Yankee third baseman Graig Nettles had noticed extensive pine tar on Brett's bat and informed Martin. They had waited for a propitious moment to complain. McClelland measured the bat against the 17-inch width of home plate and discovered pine tar up to 23 inches from the knob. Whereupon, he ruled the homer illegal and the batter out, thus ending the game with the Yankees winning, 4-3.

The scene that followed will be replayed as long as there is videotape. Bug-eyed with rage, accelerating from zero to 60 faster than any test car on the Bonneville Salt Flats, Brett charged out of the dugout with the 6'6" McLelland in his sights. Fortunately, another umpire, Joe Brinkman, interceded, and Brett was merely ejected rather than indicted for assault and battery or worse. The Royals appealed McClelland's ruling.

With the game over, at least temporarily, those of us who covered baseball and lived in the Big Apple had time to react and reflect. New York had always been home to the crazy and unexpected, and this was no different. For a city that had endured an economic crisis, the Son of Sam killings and the "Bronx is Burning" blackouts/riots of just a few years earlier, this zaniness was tame by comparison, though still familiar in Gotham City.

The personae were perfectly cast. Brett always seemed to be in the headlines. After batting .390 in 1980 for the highest average since Ted Williams' .406 in 1941, he had left Game 2 of the World Series with hemorrhoid pain and cheerfully endured minor surgery and endless ribbing ("Let's get to the bottom of this.") The future Hall of Famer would win batting titles in a record three decades and join the 3,000 hit club.

Billy Martin could hardly open his mouth without creating controversy. As a player, he had been traded from his beloved Yankees in 1957 following his role in the Copacabana nightclub rumble on his 29th birthday and years later was sued for breaking the jaw of an opposing pitcher. While managing five teams over 16 seasons including the Yankees five times, he slapped a traveling secretary and got fired at various stops for roughing up another pitcher, fighting with a marshmallow salesman and saying -- five years to the day before the Pine Tar Game -- of Yankees slugger Reggie Jackson and Watergate felon/team owner George Steinbrenner: "The two of them deserve each other -- one's a born liar, the other's convicted." Whatever his indiscretions off the field, Martin was a genius as a manager, winning five division titles, two pennants and a World Series. Hence the famous Sports Illustrated cover reading: "Baseball's Fiery Genius."

The pine-tar incident loomed so large -- and so weird -- that it made the front page of the New York Times. While American League President Lee MacPhail pondered the appeal, Times columnist Ira Berkow had some fun after the bat arrived at league headquarters:

Berkow: "Were there any fingerprints on it?"

(MacPhail's assistant) Bob Fishel: "I didn't see any."

Berkow: "Are there any now, after you held it?"

Fishel: "Not mine. I can tell you that. I held it by the ends."

Berkow: "As if you were eating corn on the cob?"

Fishel: "Sort of, but without the margarine."

Berkow: "Margerine?"

Fishel: "Butter's high in cholesterol."

POLS, PROFS, PUNDITS AND THE LIKE...:

Another Peek Inside the Brain of the Electorate (Libby Copeland, 7/24/08, Washington Post)

So a bunch of academics decides to revisit one of the defining books of modern American politics, a 1960 tome on the electorate. They spend years comparing interviews with voting-age Americans from 2000 and 2004 to what Americans said during elections in the 1950s. The academics' question: How much has the American voter changed over the past 50 years?

Their conclusion -- that the voter is pretty much the same dismally ill-informed creature he was back then -- continues a decades-long debate about whether Americans are as clueless as they sound.

Reader, before you send that outraged e-mail, consider that you may be an exception. You, of course, are endlessly fascinated by the debate over domestic wiretapping, but it's possible your neighbors think FISA is a hybrid vehicle. In fact, it's quite possible your neighbors are Republicans only because that's what their parents were, and ditto for the Democrats across the street. They couldn't even mumble a passable definition of "liberal" or "conservative."

"You could get depressed," says the University of Iowa's Michael Lewis-Beck, one of the political scientists who wrote "The American Voter Revisited," released last month and inspired by 1960's "The American Voter."

MORE:
In fact, the sole premise of the Obama candidacy is that you can tell he's different by looking at him, ‘This Is the Moment’: And now we are loved again? (Victor Davis Hanson, 7/25/08, National Review)

Besides the usual rock-star stuff that he excels at, Obama still does not do history well. He started, as in now usual, almost immediately by mentioning his race (“I know that I don’t look like the Americans who’ve previously spoken in this great city.”) But that simply was not true, given the fact that for the last seven years both American Secretaries of State — who have been the faces of American foreign policy in Europe — were African-American.

GRAY'S PAPAYA, A.K.A....:

Let me praise the humble hot dog (Larry Roberts, 7/24/08, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)

There are so many kinds of dogs and so many places to find them. You've got your white hots in Rochester, N.Y.; your New Jersey rippers (deepfried in oil until the dog splits); coneys in Detroit; Chicago dogs in, well, where else; and Italian dogs, resting in a hoagie roll and hidden by fried peppers and onions and potatoes in Newark, N.J.

I know that my family's eating habits have been directed by my desire to try every one possible. My son recently called to tell me about finding in Manhattan a deep-fried hot dog wrapped in bacon and topped with red kimchee puree, since he knew that I had chowed down on regular kimchee dogs in Toronto.

Oh, the tales of those dogs! Perhaps the best bonding experience I had with my father was the night I was standing on a stool behind the counter of his Dayton, Ohio, pharmacy, counting pills from a large bottle and putting them into small boxes. I won't tell you how young I was, but it was an early evening and he made a telephone call and moments later here came Pete, and I knew him only as Pete, the Greek owner of Pedro's Chili House next door. He had a plate with the smallest hot dogs I had ever seen, covered with his special soupy chili. It was my first experience with the affinity Ohio Greeks had with chili and an experience I would repeat in Dayton, Cincinnati and Toledo, where Rudy's, a Greek joint, did battle for my hot dog dollars with the legendary Tony Packo's Hungarian hot dogs -- of "M• A• S• H" fame.

Chili on frankfurters was something I had never seen in New York City, where my grandfather and I used to have lunch down the street from Willoughby Camera, where he worked on 32nd Street with a view of Madison Square Garden at one end and Leo's hot dogs at the other. What made Leo's palatable to my grandfather was that they were Hebrew National and definitely kosher. Topped with sauerkraut and bolstered by a cold drink of pineapple juice, they were a great way to visit with the man who got me into the photo business. Alas, like most of my New York, the storefront is now empty.

The next wave of pooch parlors includes Gray's Papaya, Papaya Dog and a burgeoning group of imitators. It's dogs and kraut and/or onion sauce and a choice of very sweet fruit drinks for less than $4. Of course, it used to be less than $3, but they still are a bargain.

CIRCLE THE BLACK HELICOPTERS:

Obama Echoes Reagan in Call for Global Unity (JENNIFER PARKER, July 24, 2008, ABC News)

"I come to Berlin as so many of my countrymen have come before. Tonight, I speak to you not as a candidate for president, but as a citizen -- a proud citizen of the United States, and a fellow citizen of the world," Obama said, standing before Berlin's famed Victory Column in Berlin. [...]

"People of Berlin – people of the world – this is our moment. This is our time," he said.

Note how differently Reagan cast himself, and us, in his Bitburg speech, as crusaders for the downtrodden rather than as one-worlders:

[T]oday freedom-loving people around the world must say: I am a Berliner. I am a Jew in a world still threatened by anti-Semitism. I am an Afghan, and I am a prisoner of the Gulag. I am a refugee in a crowded boat foundering off the coast of Vietnam. I am a Laotian, a Cambodian, a Cuban, and a Miskito Indian in Nicaragua. I, too, am a potential victim of totalitarianism.

MORE:
Obama’s Ego Trip: Will the candidate’s European progress backfire? (Nicholas Wapshott, 24 July 2008, City Journal)

There is little doubt that Europeans would overwhelmingly vote for Obama if given the chance. The Guardian reported last week that the British, who turned on Tony Blair after he tied himself to President Bush’s mast and who generally disapprove of the Iraq War, prefer Obama over John McCain by 53 percent to 11. (The remaining 36 percent expressed no opinion.) In Germany, according to the Telegraph, the figures are even more stark, with Obama attracting 67 percent support to McCain’s 6.

Part of Obama’s popularity has to do with Europe’s intense antipathy toward Bush. The president has made little effort to woo the Europeans over the last seven years, and he studiously ignored their leaders’ efforts, through the United Nations, to postpone the invasion of Iraq. [...]

The continent is considerably to the left of America, and its people are generally more liberal on such matters as abortion, the death penalty, and gun control. On all three issues, Obama has shown himself prepared to shift to more conservative positions in order to be more electable. If the Europeans have noticed this pragmatic change of tack, they have put it out of their minds. Further, Obama’s early and long-standing opposition to the Iraq War has made him a standard bearer for an anti-Americanism that is now rife throughout the European Union. Many Europeans see his unusual family background and his mixed ethnicity as confirmation of their belief that he is not quite wholly American—that he is even, perhaps, un-American.

HAY MARKET?

Oil price falls as speculators bale (David Uren | July 25, 2008, The Australian)

SPECULATORS are quitting their bets that oil prices will continue rising, sending the oil price tumbling below $US125 a barrel for the first time in six weeks and promising further relief at the bowser for Australian motorists. [...]

The oil price has fallen by 15 per cent from its record of $US147.50 a barrel set two weeks ago, with no sign that its decline has ended. [...]

Most of the world's oil is produced at a cost of less than $US60 a barrel.

BRIGHTS VS. SCHLUBS:

DNC organizers didn't pay fuel tax? What a gas! (The Denver Post, 07/23/2008)

So, let's get this straight: While the rest of us poor schlubs have been grimacing as we put $4 a gallon gas into our cars, local organizers of the Democratic National Convention have been pumping tax-free gas into theirs?

THE SCIENTIFIC MIND AT WORK...:

Science too slow on mobile phone cancer risk: expert (AP, 24th July 2008)

The head of a prominent cancer research institute issued an unprecedented warning, telling staff to limit mobile phone use because of the possible risk of cancer.

University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute director Ronald Herberman said it took long to get answers from science and people should take action now — especially when it comes to children.

Dr Herberman's warning is contrary to numerous US studies that don’t find a link between increased tumors and mobile phone use...

HOW'S BARRY'S "MAVERICK WAS RIGHT, I WAS WRONG," TOUR WORKING OUT?:

McCain Makes Significant Gains in Four Key Battleground States: Majority of Voters in Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin Favor Keeping Troops in Iraq, According to Quinnipiac-washingtonpost.com-Wall Street Journal Survey
(Chris Cillizza, 7/24/08, washingtonpost.com)

Republican John McCain has quickly closed the gap between himself and Democratic rival Sen. Barack Obama in several key battleground states even as the Arizona senator struggles to break through the wall-to-wall coverage of Obama's trip to Europe and the Middle East this week.

THE BASIC ECONOMICS OF BREAKING WINDOWS:

The Real Question: Should Oil Be Cheap?: Expensive oil hurts, but there's a business case to be made for a floor under the price of crude (John Carey, 7/23/08, Business Week)

[A]mite Foundry's resurgence is just one of countless examples of a deeper truth: Expensive energy, in many ways, is good. Why? When the price of oil goes up, people will use less, find substitutes, and develop new supplies. Those effects are just basic economics. Things are so painful now, many economists say, because of the past two decades of cheap oil. Prices stayed low in part because they didn't reflect the full cost of extras such as pollution, so there was little incentive to use energy more wisely. If those extras had been counted, the country would be better prepared for both today's soaring prices and the day that global oil production begins to decline.

That's why there is growing interest, from both the left and right, in a policy that uses taxes to put a floor under the price of oil. Above a certain level—say $90—there would be no tax. But if the world market price dropped below that, taxes would kick in to make U.S. users pay the target amount.

Expensive energy is a powerful medicine. It may hurt when taken, but it brings long-term cures for a host of ills. It compels companies and people to put fewer miles on the car, ditch the SUV, or install more efficient heating, as Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor did: The hospital saves $1 million annually with a system it installed two years ago. Higher costs are beginning to nudge America away from its traditional traffic-congested suburban sprawl to denser, less car-dependent communities. Utah has a government-sponsored bike-to-work program. "When the Republican governor of the reddest state in the union is promoting bicycling as a preferred mode of transportation, you know people are paying attention to the price signals," says Keith Bartholomew, professor of urban planning at the University of Utah.

These changes are saving lives—fewer traffic deaths—and improving health as people get out of their cars. A study from Washington University in St. Louis suggests that 8% of the rise in obesity since the 1980s was due to low gas prices, which led to less walking and biking and more restaurant meals. Silicon Valley engineer Andy King parked his Chevy Suburban in favor of a bike for commuting and says he has dropped 35 pounds since February. "It's good for my body and soul," King says.

High energy prices also water the flowers of innovation, making investments in alternatives pay off and juicing the search for more oil. [...]

With oil demand slowing and supplies headed up, prices are off more than $20 from their July 11 record of $147.27. "I don't think anyone believes prices that high were here to stay," says Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist A. Denny Ellerman.

Just as the low prices of the late 1980s and '90s undid some positive effects of expensive oil, the mere possibility that prices could fall is weakening the market forces pushing toward greater energy efficiency. What really drives behavior is not the actual price, but the perception of where costs will be over the long term.

HERE'S HOW IT WON'T END...:

Ending A War (James Brady, 07.24.08, Forbes)

No matter who wins in November, the war in Iraq will stop one day. But just how do you end a war? The so-called "forgotten war" in Korea ended at 10 p.m. on July 27, 1953--55 years ago on Sunday--with an uneasy truce that still holds half a century later.

THE J.V.:

McCain Camp's Fake Press Pass Lampoons Obama, Media (John Bentley, 7/22/08, CBS News)

John McCain’s campaign had a little fun at Barack Obama’s expense tonight, issuing a fake press pass to the McCain traveling press on the bus as we landed at the airport here. The front of the pass identifies the McCain press corps as the “JV Squad” and has the caption “Left Behind to Report in America.”

The reverse side features a Frenchman pouring a glass of wine with the same caption en francaise (“Laisse en arriere pour faire un rapport en Amerique”).

PEOPLE DON'T VOTE FOR THE GUY WHO DOESN'T SHARE THEIR VALUES:

WSJ/NBC Poll: Obama Maintains Lead Over McCain (Susan Davis, 7/24/08, WSJ: Washington Wire)

Barack Obama remains ahead of rival John McCain in the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll with a six-point advantage, 47%-41%. Obama’s lead is exactly the same as it was a month ago in the June WSJ/NBC poll. [...]

However, the Arizona Republican senator has an 11-percentage-point advantage over Obama when voters were asked which candidate’s background and set of values they identify with more—58% said that candidate was McCain, while 47% said Obama. In contrast, 34% said McCain does not represent their values, while 43% said Obama does not.

IN THE ANGLOSPHERE AT THE END OF HISTORY...:

Howard's migrant milestone to sink (George Megalogenis, July 24, 2008, The Australian)

THE Australia that John Howard left behind for Kevin Rudd is making babies, going to work, de-unionised and hooked on immigration. [...]

Trade union membership began its slide under the Hawke-Keating Labor government, and Howard's administration completed the process by reducing coverage to less than 20 per cent last year - a point of no return, demographically speaking.

Each party has done its bit to secure lower trade union membership. From 46 per cent of the workforce in 1986 to 30 per cent in 1997 following Labor's restructure of the economy, and down again to 19 per cent by last year.

Imagine the nation a decade from now. If what happened in the Howard era were repeated, trade union coverage would have clicked back to single digits.

The last outpost would be the bureaucracy. Trade union membership in the public sector fell from 55 per cent in 1997 to 44 per cent last year. So Howard didn't quite win the culture war here, and if Rudd wanted to throw comrades a bone, he could allowthem to re-unionise the bureaucracy.

The latest issue of Australian Social Trends, the bureau of statistics annual stocktake of people and policy concerns, contains one last irony for the Howard era.

The Coalition thought it was making political capital by forcing single mothers to go back to work. What it got was a backlash in lower-income electorates.

Yesterday's data, however, confirmed a sharp improvement in the employment rates for sole parents with dependent children over the course of Howard's final term - from 48 per cent in jobs in 2004 to 55 per cent last year.

Howard got single mums working again. But they didn't thank him, and helped deliver government to Labor.

WHICH IS FUNNIER...:

Cuba under Raúl: Creeping toward capitalism?: Since Raúl Castro took the helm in February, he's rolled out a series economic changes, including allowing Cubans to buy cellphones and giving farmers profit-incentives (Sara Miller Llana and Matthew Clark, 7/23/08, The Christian Science Monitor

The island nation's economy has struggled mightily since losing the support of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. Free-market reforms within a socialist system, like the kind embraced by China, had been rejected by Fidel Castro, who ruled for a half century. But there are signs that younger brother Raúl, who permanently replaced Fidel in February, may orchestrate a move toward a more capitalist economy.

Raúl's reputation as a pragmatist is unfurling expectations here that the era of asceticism and austerity is coming to a close. Major agricultural reforms have been unveiled. And in a speech earlier this month, he seemed to be preparing the populace for an economic shift.

AN OPEN LETTER FROM BRUNO BEHREND:

Dear Illinois Bloggers, Radio Hosts, and Citizens,

I don't know where you stand on the Illinois Constitutional Convention, but I will be debating Al Salvi on the issue live and streaming on the internet on Tuesday night (29th).

Whatever your opinion, I would argue that this is THE issue in IL (nearly everything else is pre-determined), and offers all Illinoisans a shot at an improved state.

I attached a flyer to this e-mail, and would love for the event to get some publicity. It will be broadcast LIVE from WKRS (1220 AM & www.wkrs.com) and podcast after the event, so your readers/listeners will have a chance to listen even if they miss it on Tuesday. Call-ins will be welcomed, so your readers/listeners may want to be part of the debate by calling in and asking questions.

If you have any questions, please e-mail me or call me. If you can attend, there is seating for 3-400, with FREE pizza and a cash bar.

Sincerely,

Bruno Behrend
Host - Extreme Wisdom Radio Show
Co-Author - Illinois Deserves Better; Co-Founder - Illinois Citizens Coalition
Listen Live - http://1220wkrs.com/pages/93518.php

(847) 343-4250

WHICH CLEARS UP THAT MYSTERY:

Harvard Law Reviewed: Kicking down doors. (Elise O’Shaughnessy June 1990, Vanity Fair)

The new president of the Harvard Law Review was somewhat taken aback by the deluge of media coverage that followed hard on the heels of his election. The New York Times ran a “First Black” headline, which probably won’t be the last time that label is affixed to Barack Obama. The twenty-eight-year-old law student says he wasn’t going to run for the office until a black friend talked him into it. “There’s a door to kick down,” the friend argued, “and you’re in a position to kick it down.”

Mr. Obama was elected after a meeting of the review's 80 editors that convened Sunday and lasted until early this morning, a participant said.

Until the 1970's the editors were picked on the basis of grades, and the president of the Law Review was the student with the highest academic rank. Among these were Elliot L. Richardson, the former Attorney General, and Irwin Griswold, a dean of the Harvard Law School and Solicitor General under Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon.

That system came under attack in the 1970's and was replaced by a program in which about half the editors are chosen for their grades and the other half are chosen by fellow students after a special writing competition. The new system, disputed when it began, was meant to help insure that minority students became editors of The Law Review.

Harvard, like a number of other top law schools, no longer ranks its law students for any purpose including a guide to recruiters.

WORKED FOR THE MAN IN BLACK, WHY NOT THE MAN IN RHINESTONES?:

You can listen to the whole album here

USUALLY THEY CONTAIN THE EMBARRASSING ERRORS TO THE EDITORIAL PAGE:

Newspaper misspells its name on front page (Daily Telegraph, 23 Jul 2008)

This Monday readers of New Hampshire’s Valley News were surprised to see the paper's name spelled "Valley Newss" on the front page masthead.

STRANGE HOW THE BRIGHTS...:

Shrimp-Like Fossil Confirms Antarctica Was Once Warmer (Michael Reilly, 7/23/08, Discovery News)

Windswept and frigid, Antarctica's Dry Valleys region is among the most inhospitable on Earth. But it wasn't always that way.

Scientists have discovered the fossil of a 14 million-year-old crustacean lurking in the sediments of an ancient lake. Together with well-preserved mosses, these tiny cousins of shrimp -- called Ostracods -- offer new evidence that the icy continent was once much warmer.

Led by Mark Williams of the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom, a team of researchers sifted through sediments left by the ancient Lake Boreas, looking for signs of Antarctica's climate history. What they found stunned them.

BLEW THAT ONE:

What Might Have Been: Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich were making progress on entitlement reform, until . . .: a review of The Pact: Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich and the Rivalry That Defined a Generation, by Steven M. Gillon (Fred Siegel, 18 July 2008, City Journal)

[I]t’s easy to forget that the 1990s were, relatively speaking, a decade of government reform. Governors like Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin pioneered welfare reform, while cerebral mayors like Steve Goldsmith of Indianapolis, John Norquist of Milwaukee, and Rudy Giuliani of New York tackled efficiency, urban design, and crime, respectively. Clinton and Gingrich were the comparable figures on the national stage. Unlike most of their fellow politicians on both sides of the aisle, they shared an intellectual interest in how to make government work.

The two men, bitter enemies who seemed to embody the never-ending hostilities of the 1960s, worked together to pass both national welfare reform and the North American Free Trade Agreement—impressive achievements, especially in the aftermath of the political spanking that Clinton had handed Gingrich in 1995, after the speaker tried, in effect, to govern from the House floor. By the end of 1997, their mutual hostilities notwithstanding, they were ready for a new and even greater collaboration. For the first time in 30 years, the federal government enjoyed a surplus. Standing at $70 billion then, the surplus was projected to grow to $4.5 trillion over the next 15 years. Here was a chance to address widely held fears, particularly prevalent among younger voters, that Social Security and Medicare were headed for insolvency. With Clinton’s second-term chief of staff, North Carolina businessman Erskine Bowles, serving as the indispensable intermediary, the two rivals began discussing how to tackle entitlement reform.

But news of cordial policy conversations between the leaders of the warring camps spread consternation among militants in both parties. Republican conservatives, led by Congressman Tom DeLay of Texas, thought Gingrich was going soft on Clinton and considered deposing him as speaker. Similarly, Congressman Dick Gephardt of Missouri, the Democratic minority leader, was suspicious of any compromises with Gingrich; Gephardt, like most liberals, was already alienated from Clinton because of the president’s support for NAFTA. Clinton and Gingrich each had to wonder if the other was leading him into a trap.

When they sat down face to face—appropriately enough, in the Treaty Room in the East Wing of the White House—the outlines of a deal were readily apparent, explained Clinton aide Bruce Reed, one of the many staffers Gillon interviewed. The president agreed that some measure of choice would have to be incorporated into the existing Social Security system in the form of privately managed individual retirement accounts. In return, the speaker agreed to drop his demand for new tax cuts. The two concurred that the retirement age for collecting full Social Security benefits would have to increase. Finally, they decided to form a commission led by Louisiana Democratic senator John Breaux, a man trusted by both sides, which would recommend ways to bring private-sector reforms to Medicare.

Clinton was to unveil the outlines of the plan on January 27, 1998, in his State of the Union speech. But on January 21, the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke, and American politics has never fully recovered from that disaster.

ALL YOU CAN BE CERTAIN OF...:

Is McCain inching towards Pawlenty? (Dana Bash, 7/23/08, CNN)

It's VP tea leaf reading season, and a Republican source who attended a small private meeting with John McCain Tuesday in New Hampshire tells CNN that the GOP candidate dropped a serious hint about Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty.

The Republican source said "out of the blue" McCain told the gathering that he thinks they are "really going to like" Pawlenty.

STEADY ON:

The Hold Steady performs in The Current studio (Mary Lucia, July 22, 2008, MPR: The Current)

Songs performed: "Constructive Summer," "Sequestered In Memphis," "Lord, I'm Discouraged," and "Cheyenne Sunrise."

TRIBESMEN AREN'T CITIZENS:

In Search of Realism (Joseph Loconte, July 23, 2008, First Things: On the Square)

As is well known, the Bush doctrine represents a remarkable about-face for an administration that initially swore off “nation-building.” Its repudiation of decades of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East—stability at the cost of freedom—has been no less astonishing. Nevertheless, despite its candor, the document leaves probing questions about America’s democracy agenda unanswered. Can a self-declared Islamic state, for example, support the political doctrines of equality, pluralism, and individual freedom? How can the United States promote democratic reform in societies that have little or no experience with these ideals?

Clues to some of the answers may be found in Florence, where Pocock’s story begins. In Florentine thought, he writes, there was “no ambiguity in the general assent that when men are not virtuous, the world becomes problematic and even unintelligible.” The problem, in other words, is located primarily in human nature—its naturally selfish will to power. “Republics existed to mobilize the intelligence and virtue of all citizens,” writes Pocock. “Their stability was dependent on their doing so and if they failed they became governments of a few, whose intelligence and virtue were doomed to decline by their finite and insufficient character.”

We might call this “republican realism”—the fact that self-government depends on citizens who are self-governing. The American Founders, down to the last man, held to this view as a core democratic doctrine. They worried that republican virtue might not exist in ample supply in the United States. “Even if every Athenian citizen had been a Socrates,” warned Madison in The Federalist, “every Athenian assembly would have been a mob.” Rice acknowledges the challenges facing emerging democracies. She admits that democratic development is “never fast or easy” and that “few nations begin the democratic journey with a democratic culture.” Instead, they must create and sustain it over time “through the hard, daily struggle to make good laws, build democratic institutions, tolerate differences, resolve them peacefully, and share power justly.”

What she doesn’t say, what the Bush administration has mostly failed to explain to the American people, is the fearsome difficulty—and the terrible frailty—of this task in states ravaged by despotic governments and religious extremism. How many Americans believed in late 2001, after the toppling of the Taliban in Afghanistan, that the nation today would remain threatened by the forces of tyranny and nihilism?

MORE:
Afghanistan Doesn't Need a 'Surge' (ANN MARLOWE, July 22, 2008, Wall Street Journal)

Afghanistan needs many things, but two more brigades of U.S. troops are not among them.

Barack Obama said: "We need more troops, more helicopters, better intelligence-gathering and more nonmilitary assistance to accomplish the mission there." Mr. Obama should have supported the surge in Iraq, but that doesn't mean that advocating one in Afghanistan makes sense.

Afghanistan's problems are not the same as Iraq's. Its people aren't recovering from a brutal, all-controlling tyranny, but from decades of chaos and centuries of bad government. Afghanistan, unlike Iraq, is largely illiterate and has a relatively undeveloped civil society. Afghan society still centers around the family and, for men, the mosque. Its society and traditions are still largely intact, in contrast to Iraq's fractured, urbanized and half-modernized population.

The Afghan insurgency has no broad popular base and doesn't mirror an obvious religious or ethnic fault line. It is also far more linked with Pakistani support than the Iraqi insurgency or militias were with Iran. Afghanistan needs a better president, judiciary and police force -- and a Pakistani government that is not playing footsie with the Taliban.

WHO DOES HE THINK HE IS, PHIL GRAMM?:

A Depression? Hardly (Robert J. Samuelson, July 23, 2008, Washington Post)

The Great Depression of the 1930s -- the last time the term rightly applied -- was industrial capitalism's worst calamity. U.S. unemployment peaked at 25 percent in 1933; it averaged 18 percent for the decade. From 1929 to 1933, 40 percent of U.S. banks failed. People lost deposits; businesses and consumers lost access to credit. Over the same period, wholesale prices dropped a third, driving farmers and firms into bankruptcy. Farm foreclosures, shantytowns (called "Hoovervilles," after the president) and bread lines followed.

This was a social as well as economic breakdown. Our present situation bears no resemblance to this. In June, unemployment was 5.5 percent, slightly below the average since 1960 of 5.8 percent. It's true that banks and investment banks -- Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, Wachovia -- have suffered large losses. But on the whole, the banking system seems fairly strong. Although profits in the first quarter of 2008 were down 46 percent from 2007, they totaled $19 billion even after $37 billion set aside for loan loss reserves. Overall corporate profits are still running at a near-record annual rate of $1.5 trillion.

As yet, the present economic slowdown does not even approach the harshest post-World War II slump. The back-to-back recessions of 1980 and 1981-82 (as dated by the National Bureau of Economic Research) constituted, for most people, one prolonged downturn. Unemployment peaked at 10.8 percent in late 1982. In 1981 and 1982, housing starts were down almost 50 percent from their 1978 peak. From 1979 to 1982, the economy stagnated; output lurched down, then up and then down. There had been nothing like that since the 1930s. [...]

The paradoxical thing about today's economy is its strength. No kidding. Consider all the hand grenades lobbed at it. Higher oil prices. The housing implosion. Large layoffs in affected industries: autos, airlines, construction, mortgage banking. The "credit squeeze" triggered by losses on "subprime" mortgages. Despite all that, the economy hasn't collapsed. It's merely weakened. Output in the first quarter of 2008 was actually 2.5 percent higher than a year earlier.

FUNNY HOW THE REALISTS ALWAYS FORGET HISTORICAL REALITY:

Wary of China, Russians look West (Dmitry Shlapentokh, 7/24/08, Asia Times)

[F]or those who interweave China's economy with other aspects of the country - what these Russians perceive as essential traits - they see China as a threat.

The main reason is one of demographics. Russia's 142 million population is declining, while China's 1.3 billion-plus is growing. Across Russia, one finds posters calling for bigger families and radio broadcasts that paint population decline as a catastrophic development that could lead to Russia's disintegration.

Russians fear a Chinese spillover into their eastern regions. They acknowledge that Chinese migrants are very hardworking and they could even transform Russia's vast tundra into rice paddies. But (white) Russians fear they will be absorbed into the Chinese multitude.

One of my interlocutors said she believed this was inevitable, and her only consolation was that by the time it happened she would not be alive.

The Russian view of the Chinese as hardworking and obedient to often ruthless masters fits the old image of peril from the East that has been historically associated with the Mongols/Tatars, the only people to have actually conquered Russia, in the 13th century.

In the late Boris Yeltsin and early Putin era, the image of the Mongols was recast due to the popularity of "Eurasianism" - the political/philosophical creed that regards Russians as a unique blend of Orthodox Slavs and Muslims of mostly Turkic origin. The Mongols were credited with forging this unique "symbiosis". Now, however, the old image of the Mongols is back, and they are seen as ruthless conquerors who brought Russia horrific suffering, regardless of any positive aspects of their rule. These Mongols are often associated with the Chinese, and Asians in general.

The implication of this lingering fear of the Chinese among the populace, even when their positive qualities, such as hard work, are acknowledged, is that Russia continues to be oriented toward the West, especially Europe. This despite concerns over an advancing North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the United States' planned missile defense system in Europe.

Russians regard Europe as much closer to them than the people of the East. Many hope that "Old" Europe - notably Germany and France - will recognize that economically, militarily and demographically, Russia is essential to them as a fellow Christian, Caucasian civilization that faces the same pressures from the East.

HERE'S A YUAN, CALL SOMEONE WHO CARES:

China’s Role In African Politics Appalling (Last Moyo, 7/17/08, The Zimbabwe Independent)

China’s Africa policy –– a document that describes the framework of its trade with Africa espoused by the communist government in January 2006 –– shows that China’s relationship with Africa in general and Zimbabwe in particular, is fraught with not only some head-swaying contradictions, but also a serious ethical and moral vacuum that exposes China to be shrewd, selfish, calculating, greedy and primitive because it prioritises its economic and political interests over ordinary people’s human rights in its dealings with African countries.

For example, regardless of Zimbabwe’s international isolation due to its human rights abuses, China continues to be Zimbabwe’s biggest investor strategically positioning itself to exploit our valuable natural resources to develop its ever burgeoning economy at the expense of the basic freedoms and entitlements of the ordinary citizens of Zimbabwe.

According to the Jamestown Foundation, a leading source of information about the inner workings of closed totalitarian societies, since the Zimbabwean crisis began in 2000, Chinese firms such as China International Water and Electric, National Aero-Technology Import and Export Corporation (Catic) and North Industries Corporation (Norinco) have clinched mouth-watering deals in mining, aviation, agriculture, defence and other sectors in an avowed all weather friendship with Mugabe’s regime. While some critics argue that China’s relentless support for Zimbabwe in the Security Council is based on the close historical ties dating back to the struggle for independence, it is now crystal clear to everybody that China has always pursued self-serving policies that are solely based on its economic and political considerations. If indeed –– as the available evidence seems to suggest –– China’s current policy position in Zimbabwe is primarily motivated by its economic greed, then Zimbabweans will have no reason not to believe the growing suspicion that the support for the liberation struggle in the seventies was simply based on China’s need to spread communism and create geopolitical alliances in the cold war and halt the spread of free market and liberal principles across Africa. The fact that ethics therefore may have played no part presents China as an opportunistic power whose development can be directly linked to the tears, pain and in some cases, blood of African men, women and children.

Bar owners around the Workers' Stadium in downtown Beijing say that public security officials are telling them not to let in "blacks" and Mongolians, and many of them have even had to sign a pledge.

ARE YOU WITH ABE OR DOROTHY?:

Hollywood's conservative underground 'Friends of Abe' group meets quietly (Amy Fagan, July 23, 2008, Washington Times)

A group of politically conservative and centrist Hollywood figures organized by actor Gary Sinise and others has been meeting quietly in restaurants and private homes, forming a loose-knit network of entertainers who share common beliefs like supporting U.S. troops and traditional American values. [...]

"A Friend of Abe is someone who has reverence for those who serve in our military and believes that American liberal democracy is a unique success, different from others, and it's worthy of the respect of our popular culture ... of Hollywood in particular," said screenwriter Lionel Chetwynd, who helped organize Friends of Abe luncheons when they began four years ago.

Mr. Chetwynd said Friends of Abe generally find themselves at odds with the rhetoric of their hard-left colleagues in Hollywood.

Craig Haffner, a producer who also attended the gatherings, said Friends of Abe is "not a political action group; people are gravitating to it because they love their country."

While the group is not organizing any political activities, some of its members are taking action into their own hands.

Actor Jon Voight, Mr. Boone, Mr. Chetwynd and Mr. Haffner have stepped forward and actively campaigned for Mr. McCain's presidential bid. Mr. Boone said he talked to McCain campaign staffers last week about how he and other stars can help. Supporters now are assembling a formal organization for Mr. McCain in Hollywood, a few of the leaders said.

Meanwhile, many want to produce more movie and theater projects with a positive American message and stronger emphasis on positive cultural values instead of films that paint America as "the great Satan," Mr. Boone said. Mr. Chetwynd said such efforts have been under way for several years, well before the Friends of Abe luncheons began.

USE:

Exposing Bush's historic abuse of power: Salon has uncovered new evidence of post-9/11 spying on Americans. Obtained documents point to a potential investigation of the White House that could rival Watergate. (Tim Shorrock, Jul. 23, 2008, Salon)

A prime area of inquiry for a sweeping new investigation would be the Bush administration's alleged use of a top-secret database to guide its domestic surveillance. Dating back to the 1980s and known to government insiders as "Main Core," the database reportedly collects and stores -- without warrants or court orders -- the names and detailed data of Americans considered to be threats to national security.

According to several former U.S. government officials with extensive knowledge of intelligence operations, Main Core in its current incarnation apparently contains a vast amount of personal data on Americans, including NSA intercepts of bank and credit card transactions and the results of surveillance efforts by the FBI, the CIA and other agencies. One former intelligence official described Main Core as "an emergency internal security database system" designed for use by the military in the event of a national catastrophe, a suspension of the Constitution or the imposition of martial law. Its name, he says, is derived from the fact that it contains "copies of the 'main core' or essence of each item of intelligence information on Americans produced by the FBI and the other agencies of the U.S. intelligence community."

Some of the former U.S. officials interviewed, although they have no direct knowledge of the issue, said they believe that Main Core may have been used by the NSA to determine who to spy on in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Moreover, the NSA's use of the database, they say, may have triggered the now-famous March 2004 confrontation between the White House and the Justice Department that nearly led Attorney General John Ashcroft, FBI director William Mueller and other top Justice officials to resign en masse.

The Justice Department officials who objected to the legal basis for the surveillance program -- former Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey and Jack Goldsmith, the former head of the Office of Legal Counsel -- testified before Congress last year about the 2004 showdown with the White House. Although they refused to discuss the highly classified details behind their concerns, the New York Times later reported that they were objecting to a program that "involved computer searches through massive electronic databases" containing "records of the phone calls and e-mail messages of millions of Americans."

According to William Hamilton, a former NSA intelligence officer who left the agency in the 1970s, that description sounded a lot like Main Core, which he first heard about in detail in 1992. Hamilton, who is the president of Inslaw Inc., a computer services firm with many clients in government and the private sector, says there are strong indications that the Bush administration's domestic surveillance operations use Main Core.

Hamilton's company Inslaw is widely respected in the law enforcement community for creating a program called the Prosecutors' Management Information System, or PROMIS. It keeps track of criminal investigations through a powerful search engine that can quickly access all stored data components of a case, from the name of the initial investigators to the telephone numbers of key suspects. PROMIS, also widely used in the insurance industry, can also sort through other databases fast, with results showing up almost instantly. "It operates just like Google," Hamilton told me in an interview in his Washington office in May.

Since the late 1980s, Inslaw has been involved in a legal dispute over its claim that Justice Department officials in the Reagan administration appropriated the PROMIS software. Hamilton claims that Reagan officials gave PROMIS to the NSA and the CIA, which then adapted the software -- and its outstanding ability to search other databases -- to manage intelligence operations and track financial transactions. Over the years, Hamilton has employed prominent lawyers to pursue the case, including Elliot Richardson, the former attorney general and secretary of defense who died in 1999, and C. Boyden Gray, the former White House counsel to President George H.W. Bush. The dispute has never been settled. But based on the long-running case, Hamilton says he believes U.S. intelligence uses PROMIS as the primary software for searching the Main Core database.

Hamilton was first told about the connection between PROMIS and Main Core in the spring of 1992 by a U.S. intelligence official, and again in 1995 by a former NSA official. In July 2001, Hamilton says, he discussed his case with retired Adm. Dan Murphy, a former military advisor to Elliot Richardson who later served under President George H.W. Bush as deputy director of the CIA. Murphy, who died shortly after his meeting with Hamilton, did not specifically mention Main Core. But he informed Hamilton that the NSA's use of PROMIS involved something "so seriously wrong that money alone cannot cure the problem," Hamilton told me. He added, "I believe in retrospect that Murphy was alluding to Main Core." Hamilton also provided copies of letters that Richardson and Gray sent to U.S. intelligence officials and the Justice Department on Inslaw's behalf alleging that the NSA and the CIA had appropriated PROMIS for intelligence use.

Hamilton says James B. Comey's congressional testimony in May 2007, in which he described a hospitalized John Ashcroft's dramatic standoff with senior Bush officials Alberto Gonzales and Andrew Card, was another illuminating moment. "It was then that we [at Inslaw] started hearing again about the Main Core derivative of PROMIS for spying on Americans," he told me.

Through a former senior Justice Department official with more than 25 years of government experience, Salon has learned of a high-level former national security official who reportedly has firsthand knowledge of the U.S. government's use of Main Core. The official worked as a senior intelligence analyst for a large domestic law enforcement agency inside the Bush White House. He would not agree to an interview. But according to the former Justice Department official, the former intelligence analyst told her that while stationed at the White House after the 9/11 attacks, one day he accidentally walked into a restricted room and came across a computer system that was logged on to what he recognized to be the Main Core database. When she mentioned the specific name of the top-secret system during their conversation, she recalled, "he turned white as a sheet."

An article in Radar magazine in May, citing three unnamed former government officials, reported that "8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect" and, in the event of a national emergency, "could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and even detention."

The alleged use of Main Core by the Bush administration for surveillance, if confirmed to be true, would indicate a much deeper level of secretive government intrusion into Americans' lives than has been previously known. With respect to civil liberties, says the ACLU's Steinhardt, it would be "pretty frightening stuff."

The Inslaw case also points to what may be an extensive role played by the NSA in financial spying inside the United States. According to reports over the years in the U.S. and foreign press, Inslaw's PROMIS software was embedded surreptitiously in systems sold to foreign and global banks as a way to give the NSA secret "backdoor" access to the electronic flow of money around the world.

In May, I interviewed Norman Bailey, a private financial consultant with years of government intelligence experience dating from the George W. Bush administration back to the Reagan administration. According to Bailey -- who from 2006 to 2007 headed a special unit within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence focused on financial intelligence on Cuba and Venezuela -- the NSA has been using its vast powers with signals intelligence to track financial transactions around the world since the early 1980s.

From 1982 to 1984, Bailey ran a top-secret program for President Reagan's National Security Council, called "Follow the Money," that used NSA signals intelligence to track loans from Western banks to the Soviet Union and its allies. PROMIS, he told me, was "the principal software element" used by the NSA and the Treasury Department then in their electronic surveillance programs tracking financial flows to the Soviet bloc, organized crime and terrorist groups. His admission is the first public acknowledgement by a former U.S. intelligence official that the NSA used the PROMIS software.

According to Bailey, the Reagan program marked a significant shift in resources from human spying to electronic surveillance, as a way to track money flows to suspected criminals and American enemies. "That was the beginning of the whole process," he said.

After 9/11, this capability was instantly seen within the U.S. government as a critical tool in the war on terror -- and apparently was deployed by the Bush administration inside the United States, in cases involving alleged terrorist supporters. One such case was that of the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation in Oregon, which was accused of having terrorist ties after the NSA, at the request of the Treasury Department, eavesdropped on the phone calls of Al-Haramain officials and their American lawyers. The charges against Al-Haramain were based primarily on secret evidence that the Bush administration refused to disclose in legal proceedings; Al-Haramain's lawyers argued in a lawsuit that was a violation of the defendants' due process rights.

According to Bailey, the NSA also likely would have used its technological capabilities to track the charity's financial activity. "The vast majority of financial movements of any significance take place electronically, so intercepts have become an extremely important element" in intelligence, he explained. "If the government suspects that a particular Muslim charitable organization is engaged in collecting funds to funnel to terrorists, the NSA would be asked to follow the money going into and out of the bank accounts of that charity." (The now-defunct Al-Haramain Foundation, although affiliated with a Saudi Arabian-based global charity, was founded and based in Ashland, Ore.)

The use of a powerful database and extensive watch lists, Bailey said, would make the NSA's job much easier. "The biggest problems with intercepts, quite frankly, is that the volumes of data, daily or even by the hour, are gigantic," he said. "Unless you have a very precise idea of what it is you're looking for, the NSA people or their counterparts [overseas] will just throw up their hands and say 'forget it.'"

LESS AND LESS GREEN EVERY DAY...:

City gives DNC host committee pass on gas tax (Daniel J. Chacon, 7/22/08, Rocky Mountain News)

The committee hosting the Democratic National Convention is using the city's gas pumps to fill up on fuel, avoiding state and federal highway taxes, officials said today.

THE HARD PART IS LAYING THE BOCCE COURT:

Homemade Limoncello (Recipe from Shelly Culver, 07/22/2008, Contra Costa Times)

2 pounds lemons

1 quart clear grain alcohol such as vodka

6 cups purified water

2½ cups granulated sugar

1. With a very fine grater, zest the lemons. Put zest and vodka in a tightly sealed jar or bottle large enough to accommodate at least a quart of liquid.

2. Place container in a cool, dark and dry place for at least 3 to 5 days. Shake the jar at least twice a day. Zest will turn white when flavoring is done. Strain the zest from the liquid through a fine sieve; discard the zest and set aside the flavored vodka.

3. Place 6 cups water in a saucepan over low heat and add sugar. Heat, stirring occasionally, until sugar dissolves and syrup is clear.

4. Cool syrup to room temperature and mix with lemon vodka. Strain the sweetened lemon vodka through several changes of coffee filters and store in tightly sealed bottles in the refrigerator. Chill and enjoy.

Fresh Corn Soup with Poblano Chilis (Recipe from Dr. Preston Maring, Kaiser Oakland, 07/22/2008, Contra Costa Times)

1 chili of choice

1 ounce queso fresco or feta cheese

2 tablespoons milk

3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

1 medium onion, minced

1 medium carrot, minced

2 garlic cloves, minced

2 teaspoons dried or 2 tablespoons fresh thyme

2 teaspoons dried basil or 2 tablespoons fresh basil, chopped

½ teaspoon crushed red chilis

5 cups corn kernels, approximately 10 ears (cut these off the cob in a large bowl)

1 quart chicken stock

Kosher salt

Freshly ground black pepper

2 tablespoon finely chopped cilantro

1. Skewer the chili. Blacken it over the stove top burner. Put it in a bowl and cover with plastic wrap to steam a little. When cool, rub off the skin with a paper towel or peel it off with your fingers. Mince the chili.

2. In a mini-processor or blender, puree the cheese and add milk until a creamlike consistency is achieved.

3. Heat the oil in a large pot over low heat. Add the onion, season with a little salt, cover and "sweat" until soft, about 5 minutes. ("Sweating" the veggies means cooking them so they get soft, but not brown and crunchy.
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The latter wouldn't be good in a yellow soup.)

4. Add the carrots, cover and sweat for another 5 minutes. Add garlic, herbs and crushed red chilis, then cover and sweat for 5 minutes. Add corn, season with salt, cover and sweat 5 minutes. Add chicken stock, bring to a boil, cover and simmer 5 minutes.

5. Puree in blender in batches for 3 minutes, remembering the safety tip of covering the lid with a towel to let the steam escape and prevent hot soup from spraying all over the kitchen. Return soup to the pot and season with salt and pepper.

5. Ladle soup into bowls, top with diced roasted chilis and cilantro. Drizzle with the cheese "cream" and serve. This is absolutely worth the effort.

FUNNY, BUT A TAD BITCHY:

THE DYING BLUES AND THE THRIVING REDS:

Demographic Trends Could Make It Harder for Obama and Democrats (Michael Barone, 7/22/08, US News)

[U]nder the new electoral vote distribution, Bush's 286-to-252 electoral vote margin in 2004 becomes 294-to-244. Bush would have lost in 2004 if Ohio had not gone his way; under the projected post-2010 apportionment, Bush would have won 276-to-262 if Ohio had not gone his way. The demographic trends reflected in these projections would not prevent Barack Obama from being elected this year and re-elected in 2012, but they would make it marginally more difficult. Demography, modestly, favors the Republicans, and more than modestly over the long haul; see my May 2007 article in the Wall Street Journal.

A MONEY-MAKING PROPOSITION (via Glenn Dryfoos):

Cost of Loan Bailout, if Needed, Could Be $25 Billion (DAVID M. HERSZENHORN, 7/23/08, NY Times)

The proposed government rescue of the nation’s two mortgage finance giants will appear on the federal budget as a $25 billion cost to taxpayers, the independent Congressional Budget Office said on Tuesday even though officials conceded that there was no way of really knowing what, if anything, a bailout would cost.

The budget office said there was a better than even chance that the rescue package would not be needed before the end of 2009 and would not cost taxpayers any money. [...]

Under generally accepted accounting principles, Mr. Orszag said that the net worth of the mortgage giants at the end of the first quarter of 2008 was about $55 billion. He also said that the companies held more than $80 billion in capital at the end of March and for regulatory purposes were considered to be "adequately capitalized" by the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

But on a fair value basis, the value of the mortgage companies’ assets exceeded their liabilities at the end of March by just $7 billion, a thin cushion considering liabilities at the time of $1.6 trillion, and an indication of why there have been numerous calls for the companies to raise additional capital.

DOESN'T THIS ALL HAVE TO BE ILLEGAL SOMEHOW?:

Identical twins marry, give birth to identical twins (Daily Telegraph, 7/22/08)

When identical twin sisters Diane and Darlene Nettemeier met identical twin brothers Craig and Mark Sanders a decade ago, they could never have guessed just how much of their lives would be based around perfect sets of two.

The sets of twins, from Texas, fell in love, went on a double date to Las Vegas, and won thousands of dollars at poker.

Sensing they were on a winning streak, they got engaged on the same day, married at a joint ceremony (officially "quarternary marriages"), and built a pair of homes, side by side.

Soon afterwards, despite a million-to-one odds, Diane and Craig went on to have identical twins of their own - Colby and Brady, now seven.

But the happy unions weren't all down to incredible odds - one decade after they started dating Craig, 44, and Diane, 37, are returning to the Twin Day festival in Twinsburg, Ohio, where they met in 1998.

THE PROBLEM THOUGH...:

Why India Will Beat China: An entrenched and vibrant democracy will ultimately drive India to outperform China socially and economically (William Nobrega , 7/22/08, Business Week)

The advantage comes in the form of an entrenched and vibrant democracy that will ultimately drive India to outperform China socially and economically. Messy, frustrating, and more often than not agonizingly slow, India's democracy would seem to be chaotic at the surface. But if you look deeper you will quickly see why the tortoise will win this race. Let's take a look at two of the major advantages that India's democracy provides:

• Property Rights: As India becomes urbanized many families will choose to sell or borrow against their land so that they can start businesses, buy apartments, or provide education opportunities for their children. India is at the beginning of a gradual migration that is being driven by the development of high-end manufacturing and other sunrise industries that will require a vast pool of semiskilled and skilled labor. This migration will create an increasingly urban India that is expected to attract more than 200 million rural inhabitants to urban centers by 2025, primarily in what are known as secondary or "B & C" cities.

This transition will facilitate the sale of land holdings by an estimated 30 million farmers and 170 million other individuals indirectly tied to the agricultural sector. The sale of these holdings is expected to generate more than $1 trillion in capital by 2025. This capital will have a multiplier effect on the Indian economy that could exceed $3 trillion. The development of the mortgage-backed security and asset-backed security markets, driven by financial institutions like Citigroup (C), will create the liquidity required to free up this capital.

China, by contrast, has no rural property rights. China's 750 million rural residents who lease land are at the mercy of the local and regional government as to what compensation they will receive, if any, when they are forced from the land as a result of development, infrastructure improvements, etc. Additionally they have no right to borrow against their lease, and as such they have no assets. In fact, the Chinese government's official figures state that more than 200,000 hectares of rural land are taken from rural residents every year with little or no compensation. According to some estimates, between 1992 and 2005 20 million farmers were evicted from agriculture due to land acquisition, and between 1996 and 2005 more than 21% of arable land in China has been put to non-agriculture use.

The result is not unexpected, with over 87,000 mass incidents (or riots) reported in 2005, a 50% increase from 2003. Many provincial governments in China have begun to use plainclothes policemen to beat, intimidate, or otherwise subdue any peasant that dares to oppose these land grabs. And, as would be expected, the beneficiaries from these policies are developers and corrupt government officials.

• Rule of Law: The rule of law is a fundamental cornerstone of any modern society. India has a legal system that has been in place for well over 100 years. This legal system is internationally respected and includes laws that protect intellectual property as well as physical property. The rule of law creates predictability and stability that allows entrepreneurial behavior to flourish. This is clearly evident in India, with more than 6,000 companies listed in the stock exchanges, compared to approximately 2,000 in China. More telling is the fact that of the 6,000 listed companies in India only approximately 100 are state-owned. This stands in stark contrast to China, where more than 1,200 of the 2,000 companies listed on the exchanges are state-owned.

Can there be any doubt as to where the next Microsoft (MSFT) or Intel (INTC) will be created? Certainly not China!

A BITTER PILL FOR COMMUNISTS EVERYWHERE:

India-U.S. Nuclear Deal Is in Sight: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh survives a no-confidence vote inside a raucous Parliament, paving the way for a nuclear pact with the U.S. (Mehul Srivastava and Nandini Lakshman, 7/22/08, Business Week)

The Indian government won a vote of confidence July 22, with 275 members of Parliament voting to support the coalition of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, vs. 256 who voted against. The victory opens the way for India to ratify a long-delayed nuclear accord with the U.S.

It was a hot, rumor-filled day in New Delhi as members of Parliament gathered for a vote of confidence tied to the controversial nuclear power deal with the U.S. Arriving at the Lok Sabha, the lower house of Parliament, deal advocate Singh flashed a victory sign as he was mobbed by journalists. With the government's survival likely coming down to just a few votes, ambulances carried ailing parliamentarians to stretchers and wheelchairs that were waiting to take them inside. Three members of Parliament even showed up with suitcases stuffed with $750,000 in cash that they claimed was bribe money offered to them to abstain rather than voting no.

Inside, critics of the nuclear deal, including Communist Party members who only recently left the ruling coalition over their opposition to the pact (BusinessWeek.com, 7/18/08), tried to shout down pro-government speakers. Among those they heckled was Finance Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram, who tried to cast the nuclear deal as not only important for India's economic expansion but also as a way to keep pace with the country's longtime rival to the north. "I don't want to be envious of China," he told Parliament over shouts of derision from opponents.

IN CASE OF REDEMPTION, BREAK GLASS:

Christopher Nolan’s Achievement: The Dark Knight (Thomas S. Hibbs, July 22, 2008, First Things: On the Square)

Beyond good and evil, The Joker is off the human scale. In preparation for the role, Ledger studied the voices of ventriloquist dummies aiming for a chilling effect in which the voice itself sounds “disembodied.” Ledger and Nolan looked at Francis Bacon paintings to try to capture the look of “human decay and corruption.” As in William Peter Blatty’s definitive depiction of demonic evil in The Exorcist, so too here—the demon’s target is us, to make us believe that we are “bestial, ugly, and not worthy of redemption.”

If there were a purpose, it would be akin to that pursued by Mr. Glass (Samuel Jackson) in Shyamalan’s Unbreakable, whose amoral destruction has as its goal the discovery of someone at the other end of the spectrum, his complement. As The Joker says to Batman, “Why would I want to kill you? What would I do without you? You complete me.” So he taunts Batman, “You’re just like me—a freak.”

The Joker espouses a nihilist philosophy concerning the arbitrariness of the code of morality in civilized society; it is but a thin veneer, a construct intended for our consolation. If you tear away at the surface, “civilized people will eat each other.” As The Joker puts it, “madness is like gravity; all it takes is a little push.” In a wonderfully comic take on a Nietzschean sentiment, he sums up his beliefs: “Whatever does not kill you makes you stranger.” His character also illustrates the parasitic status of evil and nihilism. A thoroughgoing nihilist could not muster the energy to destroy or create. As The Joker puts it at one point, he’s like the dog chasing a car; he has no idea what he would do if he caught it.

The Joker’s attempt to bring down the entire system of civilization has the scope and feel of terrorism; in fact, the film features many genuinely terrifying scenes. Here Nolan shares Shyamalan’s sense that true suspense and fear require restraint in the direct depiction of gore and the development of characters with whom the audience is sympathetic. In addition to Batman, there are a number of other admirable characters in The Dark Knight. In a film brimming with terrific performances, three stand out: Lieutenant and then Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman), the assistant D.A. Rachel (Maggie Gyllenhaal, replacing Katie Holmes from Batman Begins), and especially the fearless crime fighting D.A. Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), whose tragic undoing at the hands of The Joker is the “arc” upon which the plot pivots. These three illustrate the costs of defending the innocent and fighting against evil, the costs borne by those who would be decent in an indecent world. If in certain prominent instances in this film, the hopes of the audience for these characters are dashed, the film does not succumb to The Joker’s vision. It is not nihilistic; it is instead about the lingering and seemingly ineradicable longing for justice and goodness that pervades the film. As Batman put it in the original film, “Gotham is not beyond redemption.”

GREAT MOMENTS IN CADDYING...:

Oui Oui! French golfer causes a stir after taking a pee in bushes off the 6th fairway at the Open (Liz Hull, 18th July 2008, Daily Mail)

It is a problem which faces many a golfer caught short mid-way through a round.

But when Frenchman Benjamin Herbert encountered his own water hazard while playing at the British Open yesterday, he knew just what to do.

With little regard for the strict etiquette at the prestigious course, the 21-year-old promptly dropped his pants and spent a penny in the rough.

WHICH IS WHERE THE RIGHT IS EAGER TO ABANDON SOVEREIGNTY:

U.S. ready to cut farm aid to push WTO free trade deal (AP, 7/22/08)

"We are prepared to reduce our overall trade-distorting domestic support to $15 billion" a year, U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab said at a news conference at the World Trade Organization. [...]

Developing countries argue that sharp cuts in domestic agricultural subsidies by the United States and other rich countries hold the key to the successful conclusion of the ongoing free trade talks.

OBAMA ARRIVES WITH THE CARPET BAGGERS:

Relative Stability Brings Opportunities for Foreign Investors (Wolfgang Reuter and Bernhard Zand, 7/22/08, Der Spiegel)

With state coffers brimming with that kind of cash, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has decided to head for Berlin this week. He aims to convince foreign companies -- and particularly German firms -- to join the reconstruction effort. And his overtures toward German industry are "more than just a courtesy in the run-up to a state visit," says German-Iraqi surgeon and Hanover resident Hassan al-Haddad from Hanover. Maliki recently involved Haddad in a plan to build 10 hospitals back in Iraq, each with 400 beds. The prime minister has called on Haddad to "find a German company that can really tackle this project." Maliki and his team are working intensively to nurture the delicate upswing that is taking place in Iraq -- now that a measure of stability and security has returned to the country.

Iraq simply does not have the resources to rebuild on its own, and this has prompted the government to woo foreign companies and investors along with engineers, petroleum industry experts and doctors, like Haddad. Slowly but surely, European and American companies are beginning to trust the incipient peace, although it is often shattered by bombings, like the one last Tuesday that left 33 people dead near Baghdad.

Obama is seeing a vastly different Iraq than the one he saw when he last visited more than two years ago. Violence and American casualties are way down, and the streets of Baghdad are bustling again.

So far this month, five U.S. troops have been killed in combat, compared with 78 U.S. deaths last July. Attacks across the country are down more than 80 percent. Still, when asked if knowing what he knows now, he would support the surge, the senator said no.

"These kinds of hypotheticals are very difficult," he said. "Hindsight is 20/20. But I think that what I am absolutely convinced of is, at that time, we had to change the political debate because the view of the Bush administration at that time was one that I just disagreed with, and one that I continue to disagree with -- is to look narrowly at Iraq and not focus on these broader issues."

WHERE THE FISH ARE DYING TO GET INTO THE BARREL:

Plot to divide the Taliban foiled (Syed Saleem Shahzad, 7/22/08, Asia Times)

The story of the current infighting in the Taliban starts in the labyrinth of the regional war theater with the emergence of one Aminullah Peshawari, a well-respected Salafi academic whose influence spread from the Pakistani city of Peshawar in North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), the tribal areas of Mohmand and Bajaur to the Afghan provinces of Kunar and Nooristan.

Aminullah was a known anti-establishment figure and used to meet Osama bin Laden, but he was neither a militant nor operated any militant group. He was a credible anti-American voice in the region.

After the US invasion of Afghanistan and the defeat of the Taliban, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation started operations in Pakistan against al-Qaeda's sympathizers. The Pakistani security apparatus was aware that it had to play its cards very cleverly in its newfound role as a partner in the "war on terror". Pakistani officials thus approached Aminullah and warned him of possible arrest and of being sent to the US detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The noose was tightened so much that the respected Salafi academic was left with no choice but to blindly follow the footsteps of the Pakistani security agencies, which were desperate that he announce his support for the Laskhar-i-Taiba's commander in Mohmand Agency, Shah Khalid.

Previously, Khalid's group had been banned from operating inside Afghanistan because of his closeness with the Pakistani security agencies. Aminullah's support allowed Khalid to operate in the region freely. Both Aminullah and Khalid were now on the payroll of the ISI and Saudi intelligence.

Aminullah moved around with armed guards and a string of four-wheel drive vehicles in the city of Peshawar. The same protocol was given to Khalid. These sort of allowances and the money helped their networks thrive and they boasted of several successful operations in Afghanistan.

This month, North Waziristan's Gul Bahadur made public his differences with Baitullah Mehsud and summoned a meeting at which he (Gul) was appointed as the chief of Pakistani Taliban. Khalid emerged as one of Gul's main followers.

Other local Taliban and al-Qaeda commanders, however, suspected that Khalid had links to the state apparatus. A respected Taliban deputy commander in Nooristan province in Afghanistan and Kunar province's Mufti Yousuf advised Khalid to submit to the local discipline of the Taliban instead of operating a separate jihadi network. The advice went unheeded. As a result, tension mounted between Khalid and Omar Khalid, alias Abdul Wali, the regional commander installed by the Taliban.

As for Gul Bahadur in North Waziristan, the Taliban did not want to challenge him as he is a grandson of the legendary anti-British resistance fighter, Faqir of Ipi, and they were not sure he was an ISI proxy.

However, Omar Khalid suspected a few ISI-backed Taliban commanders in the Pakistani tribal areas would aim to take advantage of his and Gul Bahadur's differences, and Khalid was one of them, in addition to Haji Nazeer of South Waziristan.

So the decision was taken to confront the pure proxies of the ISI, Khalid being the first. He was advised by Omar Khalid to leave the area at once. Khalid agreed, and one of his comrades, Haji Namdar from Khyber Agency, provided him with a base in the agency. But last Tuesday, one of Khalid's men killed a deputy of Omar Khalid's group.

This situation in the most important strategic backyard of the Taliban, which guarantees them access to Nooristan and Kunar provinces across the border, was of major concern to Taliban leader Mullah Omar, who also wanted to clarify just who the ISI's contacts were.

Mullah Omar assigned two of the Taliban's most respected regional commanders to intervene. They were Ustad Yasir of the eastern Afghan province of Nangarhar and Pakistan's Khyber Agency, and Qari Ziaur Rahman of the Afghan provinces of Nooristan and Kunar and the Pakistani agencies of Mohmand and Bajaur.

These commanders arrived in Mohmand Agency on Friday, but on that day the Taliban's local commander had already begun fighting Khalid, conclusively beating him and capturing his network's arsenal and assets.

As a follow up, Mullah Omar's delegates, including Ustad Yasir and Qari Ziaur Rahman, issued a strict warning that such intra-Taliban bloodletting was not acceptable and that in the future all fighters would work under one umbrella with no stand-alone activities tolerated. This is a clear message to the rivals of Baitullah.

Meanwhile, the Pakistani government has tried to play the killing of Khalid and his fellow jihadis to its advantage. The bodies were taken to Peshawar in a procession arranged by various Salafi organizations. The highest political figure of a Salafi political party to have received direct patronage from Riyadh, Allama Sajid Mir, attended prayers in Peshawar and held a press conference in which he maintained that the majority of the Taliban were deviants, terminology generally used by the Saudi religious apparatus against al-Qaeda.

The Pakistani national press played up the incident under banner headlines of discord among the supporters of the Afghan battle against coalition forces.

Baitullah Mehsud hit back by announcing a deadline for NWFP's secular and liberal government, which signed a peace deal with the Taliban, to resign within five days or face the consequences. But at the same time the Taliban resumed operations in NWFP - a clear aggressive gesture against the state's writ.

The Taliban and al-Qaeda have come out of this sideshow in the tribal areas as strong as ever, and more recruits keep pouring in.

U.S.-led coalition and Afghan troops clashed with and called in airstrikes on Taliban militants in western Afghanistan, killing and wounding more than 25 insurgents, an Afghan official said Tuesday.

The joint force has been battling militants in Bala Buluk district of Farah province since Monday afternoon, said regional police spokesman Rauf Ahmadi.

Two police officers were wounded in the fighting, which also involved coalition airstrikes on the militants' positions, Ahmadi said. 1st Lt. Nathan Perry, a coalition spokesman, said that militants used two roadside bombs, small arms and rocket-propelled grenades to attack coalition patrols in Farah on Monday and Tuesday. No coalition troops were killed, but Perry would not say if any were wounded.

THE POINT OF THE SPEAR:

F-16 sale and Taiwan (Richard Halloran, July 22, 2008, Washington Times)

LUKE AIR FORCE BASE, Ariz.

The four F-16 fighter planes lined up with military precision, wingtip-to-wingtip on the ramp in the desert heat, jet engines throttled back while the ground crews ducked underneath to give them last-minute safety checks. Then, one by one, the pilots taxied to the runway, went to full throttle, and roared into the air for gunnery and bomb training.

At the top of their tails, the F-16s carried white tailbands inscribed "Gamblers," the nickname for the 21st Fighter Squadron of the Republic of China Air Force (ROCAF) on Taiwan. The Gamblers are posted permanently at this U.S. Air Force Base for advanced training because they don't have the air space or the target ranges on their island home.

Moreover, USAF fighter pilots, a breed not known for reticence, claim that Luke AFB provides the finest training in the supersonic F-16 in a world in which more than 4,000 of the fighters are flown in 25 air forces from Bahrain to Venezuela. The F-16s may be best known for the Israeli Air Force raid into Iraq that destroyed Saddam Hussein's nuclear reactor at Osirak in 1981. Every Israeli bomb hit the target. [...]

The F-16s under consideration now are models C and D with improved navigation, advanced missiles, and more powerful engines. They can attack in bad weather and at night and would pose a potential threat to the launch sites of 1,400 Chinese missiles aimed at Taiwan across the 120-mile-wide strait separating the island from the mainland.

SOMEONE ELSE HOPING OBAMA IS JFK:

Chavez says Venezuela needs Russia for protection (Associated Press, July 22, 2008)

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez called on Tuesday for a strategic alliance with Russia to protect the South American country from the United States.

SELF-REFERENCE ALERT:

The Disadvantages of an Elite Education: Our best universities have forgotten that the reason they exist is to make minds, not careers (William Deresiewicz, American Scholar)

The first disadvantage of an elite education, as I learned in my kitchen that day, is that it makes you incapable of talking to people who aren’t like you. Elite schools pride themselves on their diversity, but that diversity is almost entirely a matter of ethnicity and race. With respect to class, these schools are largely—indeed increasingly—homogeneous. Visit any elite campus in our great nation and you can thrill to the heartwarming spectacle of the children of white businesspeople and professionals studying and playing alongside the children of black, Asian, and Latino businesspeople and professionals. At the same time, because these schools tend to cultivate liberal attitudes, they leave their students in the paradoxical position of wanting to advocate on behalf of the working class while being unable to hold a simple conversation with anyone in it. Witness the last two Democratic presidential nominees, Al Gore and John Kerry: one each from Harvard and Yale, both earnest, decent, intelligent men, both utterly incapable of communicating with the larger electorate.

But it isn’t just a matter of class. My education taught me to believe that people who didn’t go to an Ivy League or equivalent school weren’t worth talking to, regardless of their class. I was given the unmistakable message that such people were beneath me. We were “the best and the brightest,” as these places love to say, and everyone else was, well, something else: less good, less bright. I learned to give that little nod of understanding, that slightly sympathetic “Oh,” when people told me they went to a less prestigious college. (If I’d gone to Harvard, I would have learned to say “in Boston” when I was asked where I went to school—the Cambridge version of noblesse oblige.) I never learned that there are smart people who don’t go to elite colleges, often precisely for reasons of class. I never learned that there are smart people who don’t go to college at all.

I also never learned that there are smart people who aren’t “smart.” The existence of multiple forms of intelligence has become a commonplace, but however much elite universities like to sprinkle their incoming classes with a few actors or violinists, they select for and develop one form of intelligence: the analytic. While this is broadly true of all universities, elite schools, precisely because their students (and faculty, and administrators) possess this one form of intelligence to such a high degree, are more apt to ignore the value of others. One naturally prizes what one most possesses and what most makes for one’s advantages. But social intelligence and emotional intelligence and creative ability, to name just three other forms, are not distributed preferentially among the educational elite. The “best” are the brightest only in one narrow sense. One needs to wander away from the educational elite to begin to discover this.

What about people who aren’t bright in any sense? I have a friend who went to an Ivy League college after graduating from a typically mediocre public high school. One of the values of going to such a school, she once said, is that it teaches you to relate to stupid people. Some people are smart in the elite-college way, some are smart in other ways, and some aren’t smart at all. It should be embarrassing not to know how to talk to any of them, if only because talking to people is the only real way of knowing them. Elite institutions are supposed to provide a humanistic education, but the first principle of humanism is Terence’s: “nothing human is alien to me.” The first disadvantage of an elite education is how very much of the human it alienates you from.

If you visit the campus today it looks like you're at an SUV dealer's lot.

A rather middle class institution has become a bastion for the wealthy. Where our parents were often teachers, salesmen, cops, etc., theirs are almost all doctors, lawyers and businesspeople.

And one of the ways the change in class composition really manifests itself is in the way they treat--or try to avoid treating--staff, security, local tradesmen, etc. They seem to think anyone who isn't in class with them--fellow student or prof--is pretty much a servant. It's like they're the Eloi, surrounded by Morlocks.

WORSE?:

Is there any empirical evidence that it's even bad? Isn't Phil Gramm right, that it's mostly just whining?

MORE:
We Can't Handle the Truth: The surest way to create a campaign controversy (Andrew Ferguson, 07/28/2008, Weekly Standard)

Former Texas senator Phil Gramm ran for president in 1996. He raised $20 million, spent nearly all of it, and won zero delegates. Political observers had long thought such a feat was impossible, and it remains astonishing even in hindsight. Recently we were reminded how he managed to pull it off.

Earlier this month, Gramm gave an interview to the Washington Times in which he asserted that the U.S. economy wasn't in a recession. We are, however, in a "mental recession," he said--a loss of consumer confidence, stoked by hysterical media reports, that threatens to tip the economy into a real recession.

This is all true. You could look it up: A recession is two consecutive quarters of economic contraction, and the economy didn't contract last quarter. But Gramm was pilloried for his factual statement. Before his interview with the Times, it was assumed (by professional assumers) that Gramm would be offered a high-ranking economic-policymaking job in a McCain administration, maybe even secretary of the Treasury; now assumers are assuming he'll never get such a cool job--especially after he made matters worse by insisting a day later that the fact he had asserted was, in fact, a fact: "Every word I said was true."

To which the general reaction was: So what?

FORTY YEARS LATE... (via Gene Brown):

China warns ExxonMobil to drop Vietnam deal: report (AFP, 7/20/08)

Diplomats in Washington have contacted senior figures in the world's largest oil firm to protest the deal, which they say could be a breach of Chinese sovereignty, the Sunday Morning Post reported citing unnamed sources close to the US firm.

"If it was simply a legal question it would be easy," one of the sources told the newspaper.

"Vietnam would probably prevail in international mediation. But it's political, too. China's concerns make the situation much more complicated for a company like Exxon... China is a very important player in the international oil industry."

THURBER CRINGED:

We’re Not Laughing at You, or With You (LEE SIEGEL, 7/21/08, NY Times)

When The New Yorker’s editor, David Remnick, defended the incendiary illustration in a statement invoking the spirit of satire as something “meant to bring things out into the open, to hold up a mirror to the absurd,” he was, it could be argued, mischaracterizing his subject. For satire has always taken as its target conventions, sentiments and injustices that are universally recognizable and complacently accepted, and not at all hidden phenomena that have to be roughly revealed.

Now, at first blush, we might say to ourselves: "Big deal, it's just an in-joke and the rest of us -- non-New Yorker readers -- weren't supposed to get it." But there are a number of problems, as hinted at here, The good humor man: Who invented jokes, and why do we laugh at them? Jim Holt discusses the history of funny. (James Hannaham, Jul. 21, 2008, Salon)

Which theory of the evolution of humor do you find most convincing?

Well, there are these three theories of humor. The Superiority Theory -- that you laugh when you realize that you're better than someone else, so nasty jokes, racist jokes, jokes about gays and cuckolds and drunkards and henpecked husbands conform to that theory. Then there's Freud's Release Theory, which says that jokes are about ventilating forbidden impulses. The setup gets the forbidden material past the censor, and the punch line liberates your forbidden impulses for a moment. All of the psychic energy you used to repress them gets released and you laugh, expressed in chest-heaving, spasmodic laughter.

But then there's the one that makes the most sense to me, the Incongruity Theory, that jokes are about the pure intellectual pleasure we take in yanking together things that seem utterly dissimilar and perceiving similarities. In the 17th century, "wit" simply meant intelligence. As the meaning evolved, it came to mean the ability to see resemblances between apparently dissimilar things. Today it means the ability to see, to perceive or to take pleasure in absurdities or incongruities. That's the highest form of humor. As jokes get funnier, they rely more on incongruity and less on hostility and superiority or on sex and naughtiness. [...]

I have a special fondness for those jokes that are jokes only in terms of form, where the setup makes you expect something clever, and instead the punch line is shockingly mundane, or crude. For instance, Why did the monkey fall out of the tree?

I don't know.

Because it was dead. Why can't Marilyn Monroe eat M&M's?

Why?

Because she's dead.

That conforms to the classic joke paradigm, though. You think there's a semi-serious query in the setup, and it dissolves into nothing, and there's that sort of tension -- even after you told me the one about the monkey being dead, I still tried to solve the Marilyn Monroe one, and laughed partly to cover up my own obtuseness.

That's another terrible thing about jokes, they function as a test for social inclusion. If you're among friends and someone tells a joke and you're the one who doesn't get it, you're doubly excluded -- first of all, you miss out on the fun of it, then everyone looks at you.

And you wonder why we say the Left exists to amuse us?

STARTING?:

Behind Afghanistan lies Pakistan: The US is wising up about Pakistan, where Al Qaeda and the Taliban find safe haven. (CS Monitor, July 21, 2008)

Thankfully, Washington is starting to pay more attention to this part of the world. Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama visited Afghanistan over the weekend, and last week, Republican candidate John McCain elevated the region's importance by speaking extensively about it. Both recognize the critical role that Pakistan plays.

Meanwhile, Gen. David Petraeus is talking with Pakistani officials about how to better wage a counterinsurgency in the tribal areas. And last week, the leaders of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee pushed a bipartisan bill that provides a far more balanced US approach to Pakistan.

SPLINTERING OFF THE COMMUNISTS IS JUST GRAVY:

Political Blocs Realign in India Ahead of Confidence Vote (SOMINI SENGUPTA, 7/21/08, NY Times)

The confidence vote, scheduled for late Tuesday and apparently extremely tight, pivots around India’s deepening strategic and commercial ties with the United States. It is the first time in the history of independent India that a foreign policy disagreement threatens to bring down a democratically elected government.

Mr. Singh, 75, spoke first. “Every single decision, every policy initiative we have taken,” he said, “was taken in the fullest confidence that we are doing so in the best interest of our people and our country.” Late evening, speaking to reporters outside parliament, he struck a note of confidence, saying he was certain of victory.

Mr. Singh’s Congress Party-led coalition took power in 2004 with support from four Communist parties. Their relationship grew increasingly embattled and snapped recently, when Mr. Singh said he would proceed with the nuclear agreement initiated by the United States.

The Communists, who opposed deepening relations with Washington, have since linked arms with Kumari Mayawati, the nation’s most powerful Dalit politician, as Indians on the lowest rungs of the caste ladder are also known. The two factions do not agree on many things, except both are bent on bringing down this government.

On Monday, Ms. Mayawati, 52, spoke against closer ties to the United States and in a bald political appeal to Muslim voters, alleged that Washington’s moves to isolate Iran would make life difficult for India. She warned Mr. Singh not to press ahead with the nuclear agreement as an issue of “personal honor.”

It was a radical departure for Ms. Mayawati, who in an interview only three weeks ago, said she did not know enough about the nuclear agreement to render an opinion.

YOU'RE FREE TO EXPRESS ANY OPINION WE AGREE WITH:

NYT wanted "timetables" in McCain op-ed (Jonathan Martin, 7/21/08, Politico)

The New York Times Op-Ed page editor, in rejecting John McCain's opinion piece on Iraq, explained that he wanted to hear more detail on the GOP candidate's plan for the country -- including information about "timetables."

McCain, of course, has steadfastly rejected any timeline for withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.

It would be terrific to have an article from Senator McCain that mirrors Senator Obama's piece," wrote David Shipley, the Op-Ed editor, in an email last Friday to a McCain aide that I've obtained in full. "To that end, the article would have to articulate, in concrete terms, how Senator McCain defines victory in Iraq. It would also have to lay out a clear plan for achieving victory -- with troops levels, timetables and measures for compelling the Iraqis to cooperate."

WHAT BETTER WAY TO DEMONSTRATE YOUR SECULARIZED CRED?:

The Protocols: An Introduction (Rachel Shukert, July 16, 2008, Jewcy)

Shortly before the beginning of seventh grade, when I entered the public school system for the first time after spending my earliest formative years at Nebraska’s only Jewish day school (student body: 37), my mother came to me with a warning. It wasn’t her intention to scare me, she explained, but she wanted to make sure I was prepared for some of the challenges that lay ahead.

“What challenges?” I asked. “What do you mean?” I wasn’t expecting the schoolwork to give me any trouble, and my grandmother had recently furnished me with several new back-to-school ensembles from the Limited that I was certain could at least partially smooth over my problem of not having any social skills.

My mother paused for a very long time before she spoke. “It’s possible that you may have to face some…anti-Semitism.” [...]

What my mother didn’t tell me is that they would mostly come from other Jews.

HELL HATH NO FURY...:

After 49 years, Charles Van Doren talks (Alex Beam, July 21, 2008, IHT)

Now 82, Van Doren is telling pretty much all, in an article scheduled for publication in next week's New Yorker. The classically educated Van Doren - St. John's College; Columbia; the Sorbonne - pulls no punches describing his Mephistophelian epiphany, when he first appeared on nationwide television in a show he knew was fixed.

"Papa, forgive me! Mama forgive me! Uncle Carl, forgive me!" he writes, referring to his famous uncle, Columbia professor Carl Van Doren. "I've remembered that moment for more than forty years."

Speaking from his home, Van Doren said he had no idea how people will react to his story. "I hope the reaction is positive, but it may be a disaster," he said. "I'm a little nervous about it, to tell you the truth."

Van Doren writes at some length about his dealings with Julian Krainin, a producer for WGBH's "American Experience" program. In 1991, Krainin almost lured Van Doren back onto television to participate in a PBS episode, "The Quiz Show Scandal." In his New Yorker article, Van Doren strongly implies that Krainin - "skilled in the art of journalistic seduction" - was less than honest in his dealings with him.

"He never conveyed that suspicion to me when I was dealing with him," Krainin said in a telephone interview. "He may want to portray himself more as a victim than an active operator."

In Van Doren's life, history did repeat itself. When Krainin co-produced "Quiz Show," the 1994 Robert Redford movie about the scandal, he sent Van Doren a $100,000 contract to sign on as a consultant.

Van Doren wanted to say yes, without realizing that this was 1956 all over again, except now it was Robert Redford offering him money. Van Doren's wife, Geraldine, saw the moment for what it was: Mephistopheles taking a second pass at her husband's soul.

Van Doren turned down Redford's money, and saw the movie in a theater like everyone else.

BELIEVE IT OR NOT, THIS ISN'T JUSTICE HOLMES'S THREE GENERATIONS OF IMBECILES:

Dead Left: a review of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism By Naomi Klein (Jonathan Chait, July 30, 2008, New Republic)

Her achievement, and it is no small feat, has been to revive economicism--and more grandiosely, materialism--as the central locus of left-wing politics.

From the time of Marx, and through the Depression, the left concerned itself primarily with economic inequality. The analysis of injustice in terms of class conflict and the forces of production was the canonical one. But the postwar boom--the authors of the Port Huron Statement famously described themselves as "bred in at least modest comfort"--turned the left's attention to foreign policy and national security in the Cold War, and to civil rights, and to feminism. By the 1980s, left-wing politics had withdrawn almost entirely into academia and other liberal enclaves, which it ruthlessly policed for any dissent from the verities of multiculturalist dogma and identity politics.

This evolution can be seen in Klein's own family. Her grandfather was a Marxist fired by Disney in 1941 for trying to organize animators. Her father fled the United States for Canada to avoid service in Vietnam, and joined Physicians for Social Responsibility. Her mother directed the anti-pornography film Not a Love Story. And Naomi Klein, like most campus leftists of the 1980s, directed her ideological energies toward the denouncing of various -isms within academia. (She later recalled, with admirable remorse, that she was known as "Miss P.C.") [...]

The Shock Doctrine has a single, uncomplicated explanation for everything that ails us. It identifies the fundamental driving force of the last three decades to be the worldwide spread of free-market absolutism as it was formulated by Milton Friedman and the department of economics at the University of Chicago. The free marketers, Klein argues, understand full well that the public does not support their policies, which she summarizes as "the elimination of the public sphere, total liberation for corporations and skeletal social spending." And so they have decided that the free-market program can be implemented only when the public has been disoriented by wars, coups, natural disasters, and the like. The "shock doctrine" is the conservative plan to implement pro-corporate policies through the imposition and exploitation of mass trauma. [...]

The notion that crises create fertile terrain for political change, far from being a ghoulish doctrine unique to free-market radicals, is a banal and ideologically universal fact. (Indeed, it began its dubious modern career in the orbit of Marxism, where it was known as "sharpening the contradictions.") Entrenched interests and public opinion tend to run against sweeping reform, good or bad, during times of peace and prosperity. Liberals could not have enacted the New Deal without the Great Depression. [...]

Klein locates the beginnings of the shock doctrine in Chile, where in 1973 a military coup led by Pinochet displaced a democratically elected socialist government, and implemented economic policies urged upon him by Friedman and other Chicago School free-marketers. Chile offers the closest example of a case study that fits Klein's thesis. But even here the facts do not fit quite as tightly as she would like. Through most of her narrative, Klein depicts Pinochet as a pure puppet of Friedman. "For the first year and a half," she writes, "Pinochet faithfully followed the Chicago rules." But a half-dozen pages later, while explaining away the impressive economic growth that followed under Pinochet, she writes that "it's clear that Chile never was the laboratory of 'pure' free markets that its cheerleaders claimed."

WHICH ARE MUCH BETTER NUMBERS...:

Poll: Half of U.S. says press pro-Obama (ALEXANDER BURNS, 7/21/08, Politico)

Half of Americans think the press is trying to help Sen. Barack Obama win the presidential election, according to a new poll by Rasmussen Reports.

In an automated survey of 1000 likely voters, Rasmussen found that 49 percent of respondents believed reporters would favor Obama in their coverage this fall, compared with just 14 percent who expected them to boost Sen. John McCain. The number of Americans who see pro-Obama bias in the press has increased by five percent in the last month.

According to Rasmussen’s numbers, less than a quarter of voters – 24 percent – now trust the press to report on the election without bias.

IT HELPS TO BE OLD ENOUGH...

Conservative Thinkers Think Again (PATRICIA COHEN, 7/20/08, NY Times)

For some on the right, the conservative decline is simply the result of veering away from the golden age of Ronald Reagan. Jonathan Rauch, a writer and a guest scholar at another Washington research organization, the Brookings Institution, said that many conservatives still believe that “Reagan got it right and the party has strayed too far.” He noted that the Heritage Foundation runs a feature on its Web site titled “What Would Reagan Do?”

TOO PROGRESSIVE:

Their Fair Share (Wall Street Journal, July 21, 2008)

[T]he latest IRS data have arrived on who paid what share of income taxes in 2006, and it's going to be hard for the rich to pay any more than they already do. The data show that the 2003 Bush tax cuts caused what may be the biggest increase in tax payments by the rich in American history.

The nearby chart shows that the top 1% of taxpayers, those who earn above $388,806, paid 40% of all income taxes in 2006, the highest share in at least 40 years.

The top 10% in income, those earning more than $108,904, paid 71%. Barack Obama says he's going to cut taxes for those at the bottom, but that's also going to be a challenge because Americans with an income below the median paid a record low 2.9% of all income taxes, while the top 50% paid 97.1%. Perhaps he thinks half the country should pay all the taxes to support the other half.

WELL, THEY ARE SURGEONS...:

Surgeons will get 'survival bonus' every time they save a patient's life (David Derbyshire, 21st July 2008, Daily Mail)

Britain's largest hospital trust is planning to pay doctors every time a patient survives the operating table or leaves hospital without picking up an infection.

HAVE WE REALLY WON THE WAR...:

Al Qaeda's Market Crash (Ralph Peters, 7/21/08, New York Post)

Yes, al Qaeda had little or no connection to Saddam Hussein's Iraq - but the terrorists chose to declare that country the main front in their struggle with the Great Satan. Bad investment: Their behavior there was so breathtakingly brutal that they alienated their fellow Muslims in record time.

Fighting enthusiastically beside the once-hated Americans, Iraq's Sunni Muslims turned on the terrorists with a vengeance. Al Qaeda's response? It kept on butchering innocent Muslims, Sunni and Shia alike. Iraq exposed al Qaeda as a fraud.

Where do Osama & Co. stand today? They're not welcome in a single Arab country. The Saudi royals not only cut off their funding, but cracked down hard within the kingdom. A few countries, such as Yemen, tolerate radicals out in the boonies - but they won't let al Qaeda in. Osama's reps couldn't even get extended-stay rooms in Somalia, beyond the borders of the Arab world.

And the Arab in the (dirty) street is chastened. Instead of delivering a triumph, al Qaeda brought disaster, killing far more Arabs through violence and strife than Israel has killed in all its wars. Nobody in the Arab world's buying al Qaeda shares at yesterday's premium - and only a last few suckers are buying at all.

Guess what? We won.

The partisan hacks who insisted that Iraq was a distraction from fighting al Qaeda have missed the situation's irony: Things are getting worse in Afghanistan and Pakistan not because our attention was elsewhere, but because al Qaeda has been driven from the Arab world, with nowhere else to go.

Al Qaeda isn't fighting to revive the Caliphate these days. It's fighting for its life.

Unwelcome even in Sudan or Syria, the Islamist fanatics have retreated to remote mountain villages and compounds on the Pakistani side of the Afghan border. That means Afghanistan's going to remain a difficult challenge for years to come - not a mission-impossible, but an aggravating one.

THERE'S A REASON THEY DON'T RELEASE BARRY'S SAT SCORES:

Obama Comes to the Aid of Late Night Writers (Jaime Sneider, July 21, 2008, Campaign Standard)

Last week, comedy writers for the late night shows bemoaned their inability to write jokes about Obama. Alas, there's nothing funny about the Great One--at least not in the minds of Harvard-educated white guys suffering from liberal guilt. In the off case they've been shamed into actually doing their jobs, they should check out this clip from the weekend. Obama said he expects to work with world leaders as president for the next 8 to 10 years.

IT'S NOT ABOUT WAR DOCTRINE...:

A battle over 'the next war': Many military officers are pushing back against Defense Secretary Gates' focus on preparing for more 'asymmetric' fighting rather than for a large, conventional conflict. (Julian E. Barnes and Peter Spiegel, 7/21/08, Los Angeles Times)

Air Force Maj. Gen. Charles J. Dunlap Jr. is not a fighter pilot, wing commander or war planner. But he is waging what many officers consider a crucial battle: ensuring that the U.S. military is ready for a major war.

Dunlap, like many officers across the military, believes the armed forces must prepare for a large-scale war against technologically sophisticated, well-equipped adversaries, rather than long-term ground conflicts like Iraq and Afghanistan.

First, however, they face an adversary much closer to home -- Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates.

For more than 30 years, the Pentagon establishment considered it an essential duty to prepare for a war of national survival. But under Gates, that focus has fallen from favor.

In public speeches and private meetings, Gates has chastised many commanders as ignoring wars in Iraq and Afghanistan while they plan for speculative future conflicts.

"We should not starve the forces at war today to prepare for a war that may never come," Gates said in a stinging address last month, one of a series he has delivered. Gates even has coined a term for what he sees as a military disorder: "next-war-itis."

MIGHT ISN'T RHETORICAL:

Dangers of 'the best military' (William J Astore, 7/22/08, Asia Times)

When did American troops become "warfighters" - members of "Generation Kill" - instead of citizen-soldiers? And when did we become so proud of declaring our military to be "the world's best"? These are neither frivolous nor rhetorical questions. Open up any national defense publication today and you can't miss the ads from defense contractors, all eagerly touting the ways they "serve" America's "warfighters." Listen to the politicians, and you'll hear the obligatory incantation about our military being "the world's best".

All this is, by now, so often repeated - so eagerly accepted - that few of us seem to recall how against the American grain it really is. If anything - and I saw this in studying German military history - it's far more in keeping with the bellicose traditions and bumptious rhetoric of Imperial Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm II than of an American republic that began its march to independence with patriotic Minutemen in revolt against King George.

So consider this a modest proposal from a retired citizen-airman: a small but meaningful act against the creeping militarism of the George W Bush years would be to collectively repudiate our "world's best warfighter" rhetoric and re-embrace instead a tradition of reluctant but resolute citizen-soldiers.

JUST RAISE THE TAX:

U.S. highway trust fund veers toward crisis: Count it among the victims of rising gas prices. Billions of dollars in road projects are at risk (Richard Simon, 7/21/08, Los Angeles Times)

Soaring gasoline prices are hurting Uncle Sam in the wallet too.

As motorists cut back on their driving and buy more fuel-efficient cars, the government is taking in less money from the federal gasoline tax.

The result: The principal source of funding for highway projects will soon hit a big financial pothole. The federal highway trust fund could be in the red by $3.2 billion or more next year.

The fund, set to finance about $40 billion in transportation projects next year, is increasingly strained. And the problem has taken on greater urgency as lawmakers face a backlog of projects to maintain the nation's aging interstate highway system and ease traffic congestion.

THAT'S FUNNY, BECAUSE...:

James Dobson might endorse John McCain: Barack Obama's 'radical positions on life, marriage and national security force me to reevaluate the candidacy of our only other choice,' the conservative Christian leader says. (Associated Press, July 21, 2008)

Conservative Christian leader James C. Dobson has softened his stance against Republican presidential hopeful John McCain, saying he could reverse his position and endorse the Arizona senator.

"I never thought I would hear myself saying this," Dobson said in a radio broadcast to air today. " . . . While I am not endorsing Sen. John McCain, the possibility is there that I might."

FORTUNATELY, CHRISTIANITY ISN'T A PARTICULAR FAITH:

Bible class OK'd for high schools (AP, July 21, 2008)

The Texas State Board of Education has given final approval to establishing Bible classes in public high schools, rejecting calls to draw specific teaching guidelines and warnings that it could lead to constitutional problems in the classroom.

The Legislature passed a law in 2007 allowing Bible courses to be offered as an elective. They are supposed to focus on the history and literature of the Bible without preaching or disparaging any faith. [...]

Supporters say schools will have all the constitutional guidance they need. The purpose of the classes is to teach biblical content and its context in modern society, including culture, art and public policy.

The adopted rule follows broad guidelines used for English and social studies classes. It says courses should follow applicable law and "all federal and state guidelines in maintaining religious neutrality and accommodating the diverse religious views, traditions, and perspectives of students in their school district."

Courses shall not "endorse, favor, or promote, or disfavor or show hostility toward, any particular religion or nonreligious faith or religious perspective," the rule says.

"I think that's pretty specific," said Jonathan Saenz of the conservative Free Market Foundation. "The constitutional safeguards are there."

Mark Chancey, associate professor in religious studies at Southern Methodist University, has studied Bible classes already offered in about 25 districts for the Texas Freedom Network.

The study found most of the courses were explicitly devotional with almost exclusively Christian, usually Protestant, perspectives.

HE IS WHO BARRY WANTS TO GROW UP TO BE:

From a heckler to a deal maker (David D. Kirkpatrick, July 21, 2008, NY Times)

McCain returned from the 2000 campaign with a new national reputation and a new political sophistication.

Over the next eight years, he mastered the art of political triangulation — variously teaming up with Lott against the president or the new Republican leaders, with Democrats against Republicans, and with the president against the Democrats — to become perhaps the chamber's most influential member.

"He was looked upon as the magic ingredient in any legislative deal; the addition of John McCain was going to greatly improve its chances of success," said Ross K. Baker, a Rutgers University political scientist who studies the Senate.

Former Senator Tom Daschle, the Democratic leader until 2004, agreed. With the possible exception of the two party leaders, he said, "I can't think of many senators more influential." Daschle said that McCain's power easily surpassed that of Lott's successor as leader, Bill Frist, because many senators discounted Frist as the White House's agent.

YOU'RE NEVER TO OLD TO CHUNDER:

Brilliant Harrington retains Open (Rob Hodgetts, 7/20/08, BBC Sport)

Padraig Harrington successfully defended his Open Championship title with a four-shot victory over Ian Poulter at Royal Birkdale. [...]

Veteran Greg Norman, 53, slipped back with a 77 to end joint third on nine over with Swede Henrik Stenson.

BUT WE WERE SUPPOSED TO BE INSCRUTABLE:

The Panda That Roared (RICHARD BERNSTEIN, 7/20/08, NY Times)

In the last few weeks the movie has provoked a deeper discussion, even a degree of soul-searching and critical self-examination of the sort that China, which has an amazing mix of ambition, self-confidence and insecurity, goes through from time to time.

The main question being asked is: How could Western filmmakers have used Chinese themes to create such a brilliant animated movie with such widespread appeal to the Chinese themselves?

Why, in other words, doesn’t China itself seem to be able to use its rich traditions to such brilliant cinematic and commercial effect?

“Besides borrowing a number of sequences from classic kung fu movies in China, the animated comedy grasped the essence of our culture,” Lu Chuan, a young Chinese movie director, wrote in a much noted commentary in China Daily.

“As a movie director, I cannot help wondering when China will be able to produce a movie of this caliber,” Mr. Lu said.

Or, as Wu Jiang, president of the China National Peking Opera Company, said, according to Reuters: “The film’s protagonist is China’s national treasure and all the elements are Chinese, but why didn’t we make such a film?”

YOU HAVE TO HAVE YOUR HEAD PLUNGED PRETTY DEEP IN...THE ATLANTIC...:

India the Key to U.S.-Pakistan Relationship (Jim Hoagland, 7/20/08, Real Clear Politics)

Pakistan has created the world's toughest foreign policy challenge. Its military and civilian governments have for decades profited from stirring tribal warfare in Afghanistan, then been too frightened of or complicit with their own fundamentalists to push for significant social change at home.

But Qureshi was persuasive when he outlined his determination to improve relations with India. His recent trips there convince him that the two nations must put aside hostility and help make each other rich: "We must capitalize on this opportunity."

India's growing economic power will leave its neighbor in the dust unless Pakistan becomes part of that prosperity. Pakistan's future will be determined by its relations with India, not by increased U.S. aid or maintaining its support for tribal war in Afghanistan.

FOR BROWN, READ CLINTON--FOR CAMERON, READ GINGRICH:

'Revolutionary' plans for welfare (BBC, 7/20/08)

Welfare reforms due to be unveiled - including abolition of the incapacity benefit system - will "transform lives", says minister James Purnell.

The work and pensions secretary said they would offer more help to return to work, but responsibility was "vital".

There are also plans to force long-term unemployed people to work for benefits, according to a draft leaked on Friday.

Tory leader David Cameron said it was "great" the government had taken up ideas recently proposed by his party.

He promised the government the support of Conservative MPs to get the measures in the Welfare Green Paper through Parliament if they faced a rebellion by Labour backbenchers.

AREN'T THE YOKELS OVER IT YET?:

Abortion, remarkably, remains an issue in U.S. politics (Albert R. Hunt, 7/20/08, Bloomberg News)

That abortion has such resonance in American politics is remarkable on several levels: It's not an issue of top-tier importance to voters, and very few elections anywhere have been determined by it. It's the province of a small clique - devout believers and political opportunists - on both sides.

By contrast, there are huge issues in the American presidential election, underscored by Obama's current trip to the Middle East and Europe.

TANGLED UP IN GREEN:

Democrats: It's not easy being green: Eco-friendly convention vexes caterers, organizers, spinners (Valerie Richardson, July 20, 2008, Washington Times)

Only three state delegations have agreed to eliminate entirely their carbon footprints by purchasing travel offsets, despite the pleas of convention organizers.

The heavily vegetarian "Lean 'N Green" menu has touched off a slew of gripes, ranging from caterers who can't find enough Colorado-grown organic vegetables to Denver City Council member Charlie Brown calling menu planners "the food police."

The biggest environmental disaster to befall the convention hit two weeks ago, when the Barack Obama campaign announced that the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee would make his acceptance speech at Invesco Field at Mile High stadium.

The decision to move to the stadium threw a Chernobyl-sized wrench into the sustainability plan. Switching the venue from the Pepsi Center, which seats fewer than 20,000, to Invesco, which holds 78,000, threatens to saddle the convention with the Shaquille O'Neal of carbon footprints.

Democratic officials have remained tight-lipped on the environmental impact of the move, saying they're still crunching the kilowatt numbers.

LET THEM GROW ARRUGULA:

Rise in food prices has Bolivian coca farmers planting rice (AP< 7/20/08)

Soaring food prices may yet achieve what the United States has spent millions of dollars trying to do: persuade Bolivian farmers to sow their fields with crops other than coca, cocaine's raw ingredient.

The unlikely advocate for change is the Bolivian president, Evo Morales, who as leader of a powerful coca growers' union fought U.S. crop-substitution programs for two decades. But rising grain prices and food shortages have made Morales reconsider, and he is now asking coca farmers to supplement their crops with rice and corn as a way of holding down coca production while helping to feed the poorest country in South America.

U.S. programs have often banned the planting of coca - a small, green leaf sacred to Andean peoples and the base ingredient of cocaine - as a condition for farmers to receive aid for trying new crops.

In his own twist on alternative development, Morales is willing to split the difference: Growers can maintain up to one "cato" of coca - about a tenth of a hectare, or a third of an acre - which earns them about 720 bolivianos, or $100, a month while they receive a loan to plant other products.

THE MAN SHOW:

Musial (Joe Posnanski, 7/18/08)

Stan Musial never got thrown out of a game. Never. Think about this for a moment. Musial played in 3,026 games in his career, or about as many as his contemporaries Joe DiMaggio and Johnny Pesky played combined. He played across different American eras — he played in the big leagues before bombs fell on Pearl Harbor, and he retired a few weeks before Kennedy was shot. He played when Jimmy Dorsey and Glenn Miller ruled the Top 40 charts, and he played when Elvis was thin, and he played when Chubby Checker twisted. He played before television, and after John Glenn orbited the earth. And he never once got thrown out of a baseball game. [...]

Joe Black used to tell a story — he was pitching against the Cardinals, and as usual the taunts were racial. “Don’t worry Stan,” someone in the Cardinals dugout shouted, “with that dark background on the mound you shouldn’t have any problem hitting the ball. Musial kicked at the dirt, spat, and faced Black like he had not heard anything. But after the game, Black was in the clubhouse, and suddenly he looked up and there was Stan Musial. “I’m sorry that happened,” Musial whispered. “But don’t you worry about it. You’re a great pitcher. You will win a lot of games.”

Chuck Connors, the Rifleman, used to tell a story — he was a struggling hitter for the Chicago Cubs in 1951. He asked teammates what he should do. They all told him the same thing: The only guy who can save you is Musial. So Connors went to Musial and asked for his help. Musial spent 30 minutes at the cage with an opposing player. “I was a bum of a hitter just not cut out for the majors,” Connors said. “But I will never forget Stan’s kindness. When he was finished watching me cut away at the ball, Stan slapped me on the back and told me to keep swinging.”

Ed Mickelson only got 37 at-bats in the Big Leagues, but he has a story too. Musial invited him to dinner — he was always doing that stuff — and there Mickelson explained that he felt so nervous playing ball, that he could hardly perform. Musial leaned over and said quietly, “Me too, kid. Me too. When you stop feeling nervous, it’s time to quit.”

Well, there are countless stories like that, stories about Musial’s common decency and the way he could make anyone around him feel like he was worth a million bucks.

“Musial treated me like I was the Pope,” Mickelson said, and he was still in awe more than 50 years later.

Those were the emotions Musial inspired in his time. He was so beloved in New York, that the Mets held a “Stan Musial Day.” In Chicago, he once finished first in a “favorite player” poll among Cubs fans, edging out Ernie Banks. Bill Clinton and Brooks Robinson, growing up about an hour apart in Arkansas, were inspired by him.

Of course, it was mostly the playing. Stan Musial banged out 3,630 hits even though he missed a year for the war. He hit .331 for his career, banged 1,377 extra base hits (only Hank Aaron and Barry Bonds have hit more), stretched out more than 900 doubles and triples (only Tris Speaker has more) and played in 24 All-Star Games. He had that quirky and unforgettable swing, that peek-a-boo stance, and he probably inspired more famous quotes by pitchers than any other hitter.

Preacher Roe (on how to pitch Musial): “I throw him four wide ones and try to pick him off first base.”

Carl Erskine (on how to pitch Musial): “I’ve had pretty good success with Stan by throwing him best pitch and
backing up third.”

Warren Spahn: “Once he timed your fastball, your infielders were in jeopardy.”

Don Newcombe: “I could have rolled the ball up there to Musial, and he would have pulled out a golf club and hit it out.”

And so on. Maybe pitchers felt in awe because there seemed no way to pitch him, no weaknesses in swing, fastballs up, curveballs away, forkballs in the dirt, he hit them all. In 1947, he had his most famous season, his season for the ages, .376 average, 46 doubles, 18 triples, 39 home runs, 135 runs, 131 RBIs. And yet, the thing about Musial, is that for more than 20 years he was pretty much always like that. Four other times he hit better than .350. Four other times he hit more than 46 doubles. He hit double digit triples eight times in all, he hit 30-plus homers five times, he walked more than twice as often as he struck out.

I suspect Musial can never be reflected in numbers because his resume is so all encompassing — it’s like Bob Costas said, he never hit in 56 straight games, and he did not hit 500 home runs (never hit 40 in a season), and he did not get 4,000 hits, and he did not hit .400 in any year. He was, instead, present, always, seventeen times in the Top 5 in batting average, sixteen times in the Top 5 in on-base percentage, thirteen times in the Top 5 in slugging percentage, nine times the league leader in runs created. To me, the best description of Musial through his stats is to say that 16 times in his career Musial hit 30 or more doubles. It might not make for a great movie. But all his baseball life Stan Musial hit baseballs into gaps and he ran hard out of the box.

SUCH IS THE NATURE OF THE REDEFINTION:

Sovereignty or Justice! (Diana Mukkaled, 7/19/08, Asharq Alawasat)

The claim that International Chief Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo is targeting Sudan’s sovereignty before even verifying Ocampo’s reasons for prosecuting Bashir is weak and primarily lacks professional sensitivity.

In the Arab media we find ourselves in a predicament, which it seems, will not be the last of its kind.

Targeting the president of an Arab republic with an indictment or serious charge such as that which has been leveled against al Bashir could be taken as the targeting of a country; however, it is targeting sovereignty with justice.

Confronting the indictment must be preceded by proving the injustice that surrounds it. But for sovereignty to precede justice, this is a violation of the rights of those groups and victims, estimated at tens of thousands, as they remain in their [refugee] camps with no real indications of when their ordeal will be dealt with.

WHY THE RICH ARE EVEN RICHER:

Cosmic Markdown: EPA Says Life Is Worth Less (David A. Fahrenthold, 7/18/08, Washington Post)

This value is routinely calculated by several agencies, each putting its own dollar figure on the worth of life -- not any particular person's life, just that of a generic American. The figure is then used to judge whether potentially lifesaving policy measures are really worth the cost.

A human life, based on an economic analysis grounded in observations of everyday Americans, typically turns out to be worth $5 million to $8 million -- about as much as a mega-mansion or a middle infielder.

AND BARRY AIN'T GOT NO 33 POINT LEAD...:

Ghosts of 1976 in Today's Campaign (Michael Barone, 7/17/08, Real Clear Politics)

Looking back over the last 40 years, the presidential campaign that most closely resembles this year's is the contest between Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter in 1976. The Republicans were the incumbent presidential party that year, as they are now, but the Democrats had a big advantage in party identification -- on the order of 49 percent to 26 percent then, far more than today.

The Republican president who had been elected and re-elected in the last two campaigns, Richard Nixon, had dismal favorability ratings, far lower than George W. Bush's. His name could scarcely be mentioned at the Republican National Convention. The Democratic nominee was a little-known outsider, with an appeal that was based on the idea that he could transcend the nation's racial divisions. Jimmy Carter, a governor from the Deep South, had placed a portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. in the state Capitol in Atlanta.

Ford's political situation then was far more parlous than McCain's today. An early summer Gallup poll showed him trailing Carter by 62 percent to 29 percent. He had barely limped through the primary contests against Ronald Reagan, who continued his campaign up through the mid-August national convention.

ONE OF THE MANY REASONS TO REGIME CHANGE DAMASCUS...:

Fundamentalism with nuances: a review of Hamas in Politics by Joeroen Gunning (Sreeram Chaulia, 7/17/08, Asia Times)

In the book's early chapters, Gunning parses through Hamas' political philosophy. One core belief in the movement is that a genuine Islamic state cannot be imposed by force but must be willed by a clear majority of the people. To achieve this endpoint, Hamas advocates "education" and "socialization" through a network of charities, mosques, orphanages and schools. Gunning notes the tension between respecting popular will and seeking to "prepare society" into wishing for an Islamic state. By presuming to know what is in the best interests of the masses, Hamas' vision carries the dangers of "forcing people to be free". (p 91)

Other paradoxes lie in Hamas' endorsement of "free will" for all human beings, but with the rider that they must submit themselves to God's will by obeying the sharia. Political leaders are expected to ensure that people behave in accordance with God's laws, but rulers have to first win the consent of the ruled through free nation-wide elections. Gunning remarks that Hamas' ideal political system is "neither a theocracy nor a democracy but a hybrid" that contains echoes of Western social contract theories. He contrasts it with the models of Takfiri jihadi outfits like al-Qaeda, which see no need for elected legislatures.

Breaking with the dominant theme in Islamic jurisprudence, Hamas refrains from insisting that legislators be qualified religious experts. The vast majority of its current municipal councilors and legislators are secular professionals. Hamas' proposed legislature in an Islamic state would have no authority to pass fatwas (rulings) and no automatic seating for religious scholars. The movement also rejects Iran-style vetting of candidates for elections by a religious tribunal.

Hamas' internal organizational structure is consistent with its ideology. The elected shura (council) is its highest legislative body. Not even charismatic leaders like Ahmad Yassin, Abd al-Rantisi or Khalid Mish'al can overturn the council's collective will. In Hamas' collegial leadership culture, grooming family members for political succession is condemned. Consensual leadership prevents splits in the organization but also militates against flexible decision making. [...]

Gunning's crucial deduction is that if elections are held regularly, Hamas is likely to pay heed to shifts in the popular mood and compromise on a few principles. For instance, Hamas' take on the status of women progressed over time from arch conservative to active encouragement of female political participation. In 2006, Hamas played down its "destruction of Israel" goals and did not field al-Qassam fighters as candidates to avoid alienating undecided voters wedded to a two-state solution. Concerns over losing mass popularity also constrained Hamas from elevating its skirmishes with Fatah into a civil war (fitnah).

Hamas' rhetorical opposition to the peace process with Israel has been implacable. However, it intermittently refrained from attacking Israeli targets in 1996 and again since early 2005. In February 2007, it went so far as to agree to "respect" past pacts between the PLO and Israel. Gunning explains these puzzling actions as not only tactical concessions to gain relief from Israel's targeted assassinations but also as deference to Palestinian public opinion.

Unlike during the 1990s, Hamas today cannot afford to be seen as blatantly contradicting the popular will, since its dependence on winning elections has increased. Its 2003, 2005 and 2008, its ceasefires with Israel were propelled by major shifts in public opinion in favor of halting violence. Yet, Gunning sees an unresolved internecine tug-of-war within Hamas between "pragmatists" (Gaza based politicians) and "absolutists" (paramilitary leaders and refugees). The latter category is not amenable to the vagaries of public opinion and is more steadfast on the vow of relentless jihad.

The 1996 waves of suicide bombings, for example, were spanners thrown by the "absolutist" external leadership to disrupt rapprochement between the "pragmatic" internal leadership and the PA. According to Gunning, the "pragmatists" need incentives to keep Hamas on the path of compromise, but Israel and the US have lately been doing everything that strengthens the "absolutists".

FLOCK OF DODOS:

Strike kills 2 Afghan tribal leaders, NATO says (Carlotta Gall, July 19, 2008, IHT)

American Special Forces troops and Afghan commandos killed two influential tribal leaders and a number of their followers in western Afghanistan in a joint airborne operation on Wednesday night, military officials said Thursday.

RATS! THERE GOES THE PRESSURE THAT COULD HAVE BEEN USED TO RATIONALIZE ENERGY POLICY (via Bryan Francoeur):

Oil falls again: Is the bubble bursting? (ADAM SCHRECK 07.18.08, AP)

[I]ndustry experts who just days ago thought there was more juice left in oil's meteoric run, are reconsidering.

"If this is not the bubble's implosion, than it's a reasonable facsimile," analyst and trader Stephen Schork said in his daily market commentary. "Time will tell. Nevertheless, for the time being we no longer care to hold a bullish view."

Light, sweet crude for August delivery fell 41 cents Friday to settle at $128.88 on the New York Mercantile Exchange - well below its trading record of more than $147 a week earlier.

The average price of a gallon of regular gas fell about a penny for the day, to $4.105, according to auto club AAA, the Oil Price Information Service and Wright Express. Diesel prices dipped three-tenths of a cent to $4.842 a gallon.

Some analysts said a nationwide average of $4 or even lower could be in the offing - almost unthinkable in a summer when there has seemed to be no relief at the pump - although they cautioned that there is no guarantee prices will stay low.

"We're going to see some relief from that relentless march higher," Kloza said.

NO ONE HAS EVER ENJOYED THE JOB MORE:

Keeping His Eye on the Ball (Dana Milbank, July 17, 2008, Washington Post)

Yesterday's T-ball game, the 19th of his presidency -- followed by a dinner last night in honor of Major League Baseball, the third of his presidency -- brought to at least 95 the number of sporting-related events he has participated in during his time in the White House. He has done no fewer than 18 such events so far this year -- already passing his previous record of 13 in both 2001 and 2007.

The 95 sports events (with hundreds of athletic teams) are more than double the number of Cabinet meetings Bush has held (45), more than quadruple the number of meetings he has had with Russia's Vladimir Putin (22). The 19 T-ball games he has held are more than twice the number of meetings he has had with China's Hu Jintao (nine). And the three dinners he has held in honor of professional baseball are nearly equal to the five state dinners he has hosted during his entire presidency.

IT LOOKS LIKE YOU BLEW THE PRESIDENTIAL SEAL*:

The Audacity of Vanity (Charles Krauthammer, 7/18/08, Real Clear Politics)

There's nothing new about narcissism in politics. Every senator looks in the mirror and sees a president. Nonetheless, has there ever been a presidential nominee with a wider gap between his estimation of himself and the sum total of his lifetime achievements?

Obama is a three-year senator without a single important legislative achievement to his name, a former Illinois state senator who voted "present" nearly 130 times. As president of the Harvard Law Review, as law professor and as legislator, has he ever produced a single notable piece of scholarship? Written a single memorable article? His most memorable work is a biography of his favorite subject: himself.

It is a subject upon which he can dilate effortlessly. In his victory speech upon winning the nomination, Obama declared it a great turning point in history -- "generations from now we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment" -- when, among other wonders, "the rise of the oceans began to slow." As economist Irwin Stelzer noted in his London Daily Telegraph column, "Moses made the waters recede, but he had help." Obama apparently works alone.

Obama may think he's King Canute, but the good king ordered the tides to halt precisely to refute sycophantic aides who suggested that he had such power. Obama has no such modesty.

After all, in the words of his own slogan, "we are the ones we've been waiting for," which, translating the royal "we," means: "I am the one we've been waiting for." Amazingly, he had a quasi-presidential seal with its own Latin inscription affixed to his podium, until general ridicule -- it was pointed out that he was not yet president -- induced him to take it down

He lectures us that instead of worrying about immigrants learning English, "you need to make sure your child can speak Spanish" -- a language Obama does not speak. He further admonishes us on how "embarrassing" it is that Europeans are multilingual but "we go over to Europe, and all we can say is, 'merci beaucoup.'" Obama speaks no French.

GO TELL THE SPARTANS:

A Cast of 300 Advises Obama on Foreign Policy (ELISABETH BUMILLER, 7/18/08, NY Times)

Every day around 8 a.m., foreign policy aides at Senator Barack Obama’s Chicago campaign headquarters send him two e-mails: a briefing on major world developments over the previous 24 hours and a set of questions, accompanied by suggested answers, that the candidate is likely to be asked about international relations during the day.

One recent Q. & A. asked, for example, whether Mr. Obama supported the decision by Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, to include a timetable for American troop withdrawal in any new security agreements with the United States. The answer, provided to Mr. Obama with bullet points, was yes — or “a genuine opportunity,” as he put it in a speech on Iraq this week.

Behind the e-mail messages is a tight-knit group of aides supported by a huge 300-person foreign policy campaign bureaucracy, organized like a mini State Department, to assist a candidate whose limited national security experience remains a concern to many voters.

I AM BECOME BLUTO, DESTROYER OF WORLD HISTORY:

Barrack Obama in West Lafayette, IN (7/16/08)

Throughout our history, America's confronted constantly evolving danger, from the oppression of an empire, to the lawlessness of the frontier, from the bomb that fell on Pearl Harbor, to the threat of nuclear annihilation. Americans have adapted to the threats posed by an ever-changing world.

WHERE'S THE BRUCE WHEN YOU NEED HIM?:

Scotland's hunger for independence proves annoying in England (Sarah Lyall, July 17, 2008, NY Times)

Stuck in a chronic sports slump, Britons are eternally searching for a home-grown tennis star with a fighting chance of winning Wimbledon. Their latest is 21-year-old Andy Murray, who this summer demonstrated traditional British come-from-behind pluck in advancing to the quarter finals. He finally lost to the eventual champion, Rafael Nadal.

But there was a small problem. Murray is Scottish, and fiercely so. Asked once who he planned to support in the World Cup soccer tournament, he replied: "Anyone but England."

And many English people found his recent behavior at Wimbledon - he emitted warlike whoops, bared his teeth and flexed his biceps in a provocative manner - more suited to a remake of "Braveheart" than to the gentle green courts of west London.

"Part of the reason some of us have found it difficult to like him is that he is so obviously Scottish," the columnist Stephen Glover said bluntly in The Daily Mail. Or, as Tony Parsons wrote in The Daily Mirror: "If the English can survive the attentions of the Luftwaffe, the IRA and Al Qaeda, then I quite fancy our chances against Andy Murray."

Their vehemence was surprising. The English usually tend to regard the Scots as their slightly prickly but relatively harmless and quashable northern cousins. But lately, there has been a newfound resentment in England that has mirrored a growing confidence and sense of nationalistic entitlement - a general flexing of the biceps - in Scotland. With relations at their uneasiest point in decades, there is even talk that unless the balance of power can somehow be renegotiated, the union is in danger of unraveling.

"This is about a shift in British attitudes," said Joyce McMillan, a columnist for The Scotsman newspaper. "We've always been seen as slightly exotic or decorative. But if we start on as if we were some kind of self-determining nation, it provokes a kind of atmosphere of hurt and anger, like 'Oh, what was wrong with the way we were ruling you? Why aren't you grateful?"'

THERE'S A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN DESTRUCTIVE AND SELF-DESTRUCTIVE:

The self-destructive gene: Al-Qaeda’s biggest weakness is its propensity to kill indiscriminately (The Economist, 7/17/08)

THE mangonel was the big gun of antiquity. But this siege engine, used to catapult rocks, burning objects or dead animals into fortified cities, troubled Islamic scholars. Some early authorities disallowed it on the ground that it was an indiscriminate weapon.

From the Crusades onwards it met with greater approval. Ibn al-Nahhas al-Dumyati, a classical writer on jihad who fought the Crusaders, ruled that mangonels could be used against the enemy “even if there are women and children among them, even if there are Muslim prisoners, merchants or those who have been granted safe conduct”.

Such opinions are cited today in religious rulings defending the September 11th attacks or arguing that weapons of mass destruction may be used against America. But Jihadists of al-Qaeda’s sort disregard long-standing injunctions against wanton slaughter. Worse, they claim the right to declare takfir, or apostasy among Muslims. When combined with a puritanical religious practice known as salafism—imitating the earliest Muslims, known as the salaf, and treating later Islamic practices with contempt—this creates an especially violent and intolerant kind of Muslim.

Salafi-takfiri jihadists cannot build political alliances; they regard even Hamas and Hizbullah, Israel’s main foes, as corrupted by politics. And once they start to spill blood, they become ever more indiscriminate: first they attack the “apostate” rulers or their foreign backers, then the ministers, then the security forces, then the civil servants, then anybody who objects to the violence, and so on. Those who recoil at the carnage, or object to the religious strictures imposed at gunpoint, are treated as apostates. At some point, though, local populations turn against their supposed champions.

NO, THAT IS JESUS, HE JUST THINKS HE'S BARACK OBAMA...:

The Iron Timetable (Washington Post, July 16, 2008)

At the time he first proposed his timetable, Mr. Obama argued -- wrongly, as it turned out -- that U.S. troops could not stop a sectarian civil war. He conceded that a withdrawal might be accompanied by a "spike" in violence. Now, he describes as "an achievable goal" that "we leave Iraq to a government that is taking responsibility for its future -- a government that prevents sectarian conflict and ensures that the al-Qaeda threat which has been beaten back by our troops does not reemerge." How will that "true success" be achieved? By the same pullout that Mr. Obama proposed when chaos in Iraq appeared to him inevitable.

Mr. Obama reiterated yesterday that he would consult with U.S. commanders and the Iraqi government and "make tactical adjustments as we implement this strategy." However, as Mr. McCain quickly pointed out, he delivered his speech before traveling to Iraq -- before his meetings with Gen. David H. Petraeus and the Iraqi leadership. American commanders will probably tell Mr. Obama that from a logistical standpoint, a 16-month withdrawal timetable will be difficult, if not impossible, to fulfill. Iraqis will say that a pullout that is not negotiated with the government and disregards the readiness of Iraqi troops will be a gift to al-Qaeda and other enemies. If Mr. Obama really intends to listen to such advisers, why would he lock in his position in advance?

"What's missing in our debate," Mr. Obama said yesterday, "is a discussion of the strategic consequences of Iraq." Indeed: The message that the Democrat sends is that he is ultimately indifferent to the war's outcome -- that Iraq "distracts us from every threat we face" and thus must be speedily evacuated regardless of the consequences. That's an irrational and ahistorical way to view a country at the strategic center of the Middle East, with some of the world's largest oil reserves.

REPRESENT:

Dierks Bentley, Country Crooner, On Mountain Stage (NPR.org, July 7, 2008, Mountain Stage)

In 1927, the Victor Talking Machine Company sent record producer Ralph Peer from New Jersey to Bristol to make what came to be known as the first commercial country music recordings. Peer captured the music on tape just a few blocks from where the now-restored Paramount stands. Bentley's concert was recorded in celebration of the 80th anniversary of those first recordings.

A native of Phoenix, Ariz., the country singer has cultivated a cult-like following, in part by playing on the road nearly 300 days a year. While researching country music for The Nashville Network by day and performing at night, Bentley signed a deal with Capitol Records. His 2003 self-titled debut showed a genuine love for artists like Merle Haggard and Waylon Jennings, and spawned the hit single "What Was I Thinkin'."

MORE:
-Dierks Bentley (MySpace)
-REVIEW ARCHIVES: Long Trip Alone by Dierks Bentley (Metacritic)
Bentley had them up and dancing (Erin Harde, 7/14/08, The Leader-Post)

Dierks Bentley demands a lot from his fans. If his Sunday evening performance at Craven was any indication, audience members had better be prepared to dance and sing -- in front of 23,500 people.

During an energetic and interactive 85-minute set under a hot sun and blue sky, Bentley worked up a lather as he raced around the stage, slapped hands and even hauled up one cowgirl to teach him how to dance. [...]

Bentley often showcased his musicians and easily chatted with them in between songs. The tight-knit group gathered close for one bluegrass ditty that featured a banjo and upright bass. Bentley also brought one guitarist out to the catwalk with him for "My Last Name," which Bentley preceded by thanking the men and women who serve in the military, including the men in his own family. "Bless Those Guys," he said after finishing the song.

WHICH MAKES THE UMMAH SMARTER THAN THE REALISTS:

How global events can affect the Muslim vote (B Raman, July 17, 2008, Rediff)

As the date for the vote of confidence government nears and the possibility of a premature general election looms large, a question often debated is the attitude of the Indian Muslims to the Indo-US nuclear deal. Do they regard it as anti-Muslim because of the perceived anti-Muslim policies of the administration of US President George W Bush? That is the question which has been raised again and again by the critics of the deal and of Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh.

In this connection, it would be pertinent to take note of the attitude of the Muslims in the Ummah as a whole since that could have an impact on the attitude of the Indian Muslims. The strongest criticism of India's developing relations with the US came from sections of the Muslims of the Ummah immediately after Bush's visit to India in March, 2006.

The criticism was not specific relating to the nuclear deal. It was more in relation to what they saw as India's co-operation with the US and Israel in the war against jihadi terrorism.

BECAUSE OBAMA IS THE SWAHILI FOR SMOOT:

The State of Play on Trade: Trade deals with Colombia, Korea, and Panama, all rife with political import, are stalled in Congress. In the meantime, some U.S. exports lag (Avi Salzman , 7/17/08, Business Week)

In its Decatur (Ill.) factory, Caterpillar (CAT) assembles a line of the heaviest-duty off-highway trucks, behemoths specialized for use in mining, quarry, and construction operations. One model, the $1.2 million, 163,089-lb. 777F truck, can hit a top speed of 40 mph even while carrying 100 tons of dirt, enough to fill 350 wheelbarrows. Caterpillar has seen a robust market in recent years for these monster trucks, but is worried that companies in other countries will start to eat away at that business. That's because Caterpillar's customers are saddled with an extra cost every time they buy one of the machines. When Caterpillar ships the truck to Colombia, a $180,000 tariff is assessed, even though nearly every product made in Colombia enters the U.S. duty-free.

A trade deal the Bush Administration negotiated with Colombia could change all that, eliminating tariffs on virtually all U.S. products. But the Colombia deal, as well as major agreements with Korea and Panama, has stalled in Congress. These agreements have become a potent issue in the Presidential campaign. Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) traveled to Colombia two weeks ago and expressed his support for the Colombia deal, while Senator Barack Obama (D-Ill.) has said he wants to reevaluate various trade deals, including the North American Free Trade Agreement, to increase protections for U.S. workers.

Caterpillar lobbyist Bill Lane says delays for deals like the one with Colombia will mean a loss of market share for U.S. companies. "Having a time-out on trade, it means ceding our competitive advantages," Lane says. "We don't want to find ourselves in a situation where Canadian goods get duty-free treatment but ours don't."

SERVES HIM RIGHT FOR TITLE NINING:

Top U.S. golfer left looking for an emergency caddy at the Open after his blonde wife decides the weather is well below par (Liz Hull, 17th July 2008, Daily Mail)
Whatever the reason for her absence, her 48-year-old husband had a face as black and thunderous as the skies when he stepped on to the first tee to begin his round at around 7.30am.

The American, whose wife is his regular caddy, was forced to find an emergency replacement at the 11th hour to take over her duties instead.

A source at the course said: 'The weather was awful and many commentators were joking that Brenda had simply refused to go out in the wind and rain.

'Rumours were rife that they'd had a furious row about it.

'Calcavecchia had a face like thunder when he arrived at the first tee.

'Brenda usually caddys for him and did so during his practice session on Wednesday. But when it came to playing the real thing yesterday she failed to show and he had to find a local lad to replace her.

'He can't have been to happy about it, the new caddy would have no idea of his game.

DID THAT NEW YORKER ARTIST EVEN KNOW HE'S A BLACK NATIONALIST, NOT A MUSLIM?:

Pew: Perceptions of Obama's Religion Affect Democrats More Than Republicans (Gary Andres, July 17, 2008, Campaign Standard)

The Pew study reveals nearly four out 10 (37 percent) are off in one way or another when it comes to knowing Obama’s religion. That 37 percent breaks down this way: 12 percent think he’s Muslim, 10 percent say they “don’t know and have heard different things,” and 15 percent answer they “don’t know and haven’t heard enough.” Given all the controversy about his church and his pastor earlier in the year, the lack of knowledge about his religion says a lot about the average American attention span on this issue.

The Pew survey also suggests the notion that Obama is Muslim hurts him among Democrats, but not Republicans. For example, of the Democrats who think he’s a Christian, Obama draws 90 percent support. But among those who say he is a Muslim, he only garners 62 percent--a gap of 28 points.

IS WINNING THE WoT REALLY A PARTISAN ISSUE?:

Trial of Guantanamo detainee can start, judge rules (Carol J. Williams, 7/17/08, Los Angeles Times)

The first trial of a Guantanamo prisoner since a war-crimes tribunal was created nearly seven years ago can begin Monday, a federal judge in Washington ruled Thursday.

Lawyers for Yemeni prisoner Salim Ahmed Hamdan had urged U.S. District Judge James Robertson to halt the trial, contending that the defendant, a former driver and body guard for Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, had the right to challenge the tribunal's constitutionality before his trial could go forward.

Robertson's ruling was a victory for the Bush administration, which has sought to speed up prosecution of terrorism suspects as the November election approaches.

FUDAMENTALISM IS ALWAYS RIGHT:

Oil's 3-day dip nears $16 (Kenneth Musante and Beth Braverman, 7/17/08, CNNMoney.com )

The decrease may mean that the market has finally realized that the fundamentals cannot sustain such large prices, said Peter Beutel, an oil analyst with Cameron Hanover.

THE ONE GOOD THING ABOUT TIGER BEING HURT...:

Tiger Woods is out of sight, but not out of mind at British Open (Christopher Clarey, July 16, 2008, IHT)

Tiger Woods is home in Florida with a postoperative left knee, coping with the disorienting fact that for the first time in nearly 12 years, he will miss a major championship and that is not expected back until next season.

"It would be interesting to see how he would play the course this year, wouldn't it?" asked Cooney, 34, who followed Woods when he won the Open at St. Andrews in 2005.

"Personally, I don't think the event is devalued without him here," Omara said. "The course is hard enough as it is, so whoever wins will deserve it. But you can bet that no matter who wins, Tiger's name will get brought up afterward. So it will be devalued in that sense."

Actually, there is no need to wait until after the victor's Claret Jug is awarded. Even in absentia, Woods remains the talk of the tournament, with nearly every interview session featuring at least one, and usually several, queries about the meaning of life after Woods.

"I just hope they taught the engraver how to put an asterisk on the trophy," cracked Geoff Ogilvy, the talented, agile-minded Australian, who is ranked third in the world. "Then everyone will know what the tournament was all about."

Since the website was down for a while yesterday and overnight we'll accept picks up until noon Thursday.

MIKE DUKAKIS MAY HAVE DRESSED SILLY...:

The Humor Deficit (Howard Kurtz, 7/17/08, Washington Post)

Barack Obama has committed the unpardonable sin of not giving us anything to laugh at.

I mean, what's with that guy? How dare he not serve as an object of our amusement?

Apparently, comics are treading lightly when it comes to St. Barack. There's a bit of racial sensitivity, for one thing. And the senator is not an easy target. He's eloquent, knows how to spell potato, doesn't toss around such phrases as "dead or alive" and is a strong family man. What exactly do you make fun of?

NO ONE'S EVER ENJOYED THE JOB MORE:

Bush hosts T-ball game, MLB players at dinner (AP, 7/16/08)

Bush presided over a Tee Ball game on the South Lawn, then hosted a social dinner Wednesday in honor of Major League Baseball for about 240 players, members of the National Baseball Hall of Fame, baseball officials and fans, administration officials and lawmakers.

The group, which included Baltimore Orioles first baseman Kevin Millar, eight-time MLB all-star pitcher John Smoltz and Hall of Famer Ryne Sandberg, dined on crab salad, rib-eye steaks and a dessert called "Peanuts and Cracker Jack."

Afterward, in his third White House performance, country musician Kenny Chesney sang about summertime, drinking wine from Dixie cups and seeing the world from the seat of an "old blue chair."

"It doesn't get better than this," Bush said after the performance in the Rose Garden. "Country music in the Rose Garden celebrating baseball."

Everything made this warm July afternoon feel and look like a special baseball day. A small stadium-like facility was constructed on the White House's South Lawn, not too far from where the President greeted the World Series champion Boston Red Sox just before the start of this season.

There was a field outlined on the grass. In addition, miniature grandstands were built down the left- and right-field lines, plus a set of bleachers in right-center field. The outfield fence -- with yellow topping all around -- made the field look like a miniature stadium. It was 80 feet to the left-field fence and 85 to right, but 110 to straightaway center.

"That's going to take a good poke," Greenberg told the crowd.

Greenberg drew a laugh with that, but he was right as just one ball in the two games played came close to the fence.

The first game pitted the Central versus the Eastern teams. Game Two brought together the Western and the Southern squads. Scores weren't kept, and the kids were encouraged to keep running all the time -- with broadcasters Mike and Mike treating it like a Major League broadcast by giving biographical information about each player when he or she stepped up to the plate and then calling the play like a real game.

Chesney got everyone's attention with his rendition of the National Anthem before the first contest. Then, during the break between the two games, the United States Postal Service unveiled a commemorative stamp for the 100th anniversary of the song "Take Me Out to the Ball Game," which Chesney then sang for the crowd.

The players also got some help from game commissioner Frank Robinson, filling in for Nolan Ryan, who was sick and couldn't attend. Players also got the chance to talk to base coaches like Smoltz, Millar, Sandberg and Monday.

Smoltz said participating in this event brought back some memories for the Atlanta pitcher, who said he's progressing well in the rehab from the right shoulder surgery that's sidelined him for the season.

"Seeing kids play a game that you do for a living, that I've prospered from and been able to do a lot of things [with], is pretty neat," Smoltz said. "It [makes] me remember my days of tee ball."

Sandberg said he had similar feelings and was impressed with what the event was all about.

"Being here at the White House, and really for what it represented, [it was great] to be part of that. It just speaks very well of what Little League means and how important it is. It was just fun for me to be here," Sandberg said. "They were having a blast. Just to take baseball back to that level and what it means to hit a baseball and to make it to first base -- it's a big deal."

REFORMATION FROM THE TOP:

In Mecca, a King Is Giving Lessons in Peace: A survey among pilgrims to the Muslim holy sites shows that they return home with sentiments of greater tolerance. Meanwhile, in Madrid, the Saudi king dialogues with Christians and Jews. Cardinal Tauran is there to represent the pope. An important document (Sandro Magister, 7/16/08, Chiesa)

[T]he Muslims who every year go as pilgrims from Pakistan to Mecca do not for this reason return more inclined to violence and more hostile toward the West and Christianity. The opposite happens. The pilgrimage instead increases sentiments of peace and tolerance, not only toward those of the same faith, but also toward non-Muslims.

About 2 million Muslims make the pilgrimage to Mecca each year, from the eighth day until the twelfth day of the last month of the Islamic lunar calendar. Their number is fixed in advance, and set in proportion to the populations of the various countries. In Pakistan, one must participate in a public lottery in order to be allowed to make the voyage. Those whose numbers are chosen will go to Mecca, the others will not.

The three scholars at Harvard – David Clingingsmith, Asim Ijaz Khwaja, and Michael Kremer – conducted the study on a twofold sample of Pakistani citizens: 800 who made the pilgrimage, and 800 who remained at home.

The survey reveals that the pilgrims are more devout when they return from Mecca. They pray more, they go to the mosque more often, they observe fasting more faithfully. They also tend to abandon the use of amulets and the practice of customs that are not genuinely Islamic.

Men's attitudes toward women also improve. On the pilgrimage, they find themselves side by side in equal numbers, carrying out the same rituals. And this has increased the number of those in favor of more education for girls, and their admission to professional life.

A positive impact is also shown from the encounter with Muslims from other countries with other ways of interpreting and living Islam, Shiite and Sunni. At their return from Mecca, many maintain that it is possible to live in harmony with everyone. And this sentiment is also extended to non-Muslims. Pilgrims to Mecca are clearly more willing than those who remain at home to consider the believers of other religions as worthy of equal respect.

On recourse to violence and hostility toward the West, pilgrims to Mecca are more inclined to peace than those who remain at home. When asked whether the goals for which Osama bin Laden is fighting are correct, the pilgrims answer no twice as often as the others. And when asked whether the methods used by Osama bin Laden are correct, the 'no's of the pilgrims are almost one third as numerous.

IN WHAT PARALLEL UNIVERSE...:

Dems rip Bush draft rule on abortion (Martin Kady II, 7/16/08, Politico: The Crypt)

Democrats are pouncing on a Bush administration proposal that would require medical practices and hospitals that receive federal aid to certify that they will not fire or refuse to hire doctors who refuse to offer abortion services and types of birth control.

The draft rule, first reported by The New York Times, is known as a "conscience clause" because it would allow nurses and doctors who have ethical or moral objections to abortion or birth control to refuse to prescribe or provide those services to patients. The rule proposes to cut off money to any grant recipient or hospital that refuses to hire doctors and nurses who object to abortion.

CYCLES DON'T BOTTOM AT TWICE THEIR NORMAL FLOOR:

The End of Oil's Boom?: A 10% correction over the past week could signal the end of a long bull run for crude oil (Moira Herbst, 7/16/08, Business Week)

Analysts say the two-day sell-off reflects the market's recognition of reduced demand in the U.S., even if longer-term trends remain bullish. Oil traders, it seems, may have finally noticed the public's reaction to high energy prices. "For a while the market heightened all bullish news and discounted anything bearish," says Joel Fingerman, president of FundamentalAnalytics.com, a Chicago-based energy consulting firm. "But people are giving up their Humvees and pickup trucks, and the market is starting to care."

Analysts say that while oil traders have been betting on surging demand from developing countries such as India and China, reduced demand in the U.S. is now sending bearish signals the markets can't ignore. Moreover, Energy Dept. data released July 16 showed a 3 million barrel jump in U.S. crude inventories, to 296.9 million barrels; analysts had expected a decline. Moreover, U.S. demand for energy products has fallen 2% from the same period last summer, according to a four-week average federal regulators release weekly. "I think this is a precursor to a much bigger sell-off," says Peter Beutel, president of Cameron Hanover, an energy risk-management firm in New Canaan, Conn. "It's very possible we have seen the worst this [price surge] is going to do to us. The tide is starting to change."

Fingerman points to the 5% drop in U.S. gasoline demand from the same time a year ago as evidence of a "structural shift in the car economy."

Edward L. Morse, Lehman Brothers' (LEH) chief energy economist, says the oil bubble (he dubs it Oil Dot-com) will burst by New Year's. Not only that, he predicts a plunge to about $93 a barrel. Pretty audacious as prognostications go, at a time when Goldman Sachs (GS) foresees $200 a barrel. To that Morse just replies that he's the one talking sense. "We are trying to keep our heads in a wild market," he says.

Morse is the most prominent oil contrarian on Wall Street. Before joining Lehman two years ago, he taught international monetary policy at Princeton University, was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for international energy policy in the Carter Administration, co-founded consultants PFC Energy, and was publisher of Petroleum Intelligence Weekly. "He likes to be a provocateur," says Frank Verrastro, director of energy at the Center for Strategic & International Studies in Washington, who served with Morse under Carter. Morse has made bold predictions that Russian oil would weaken Saudi Arabia's predominance (bad call) and that scarce production capacity would drive prices up (bingo).

The 66-year-old Morse gives several reasons for being bearish. First, oil has long been cyclical. Why should the pendulum stop now? Second, Morse thinks China's go-for-broke industrial economy is slowing, leading to a "radical" reduction in its oil demand after the summer. Third, he foresees a big buildup in oil inventories this fall and, longer term, a greater flow of crude as new deepwater drilling rigs reach equipment-starved producers in the Gulf of Mexico. Finally, 13 million barrels a day of new refinery capacity will be available by 2013, making hard-to-process crudes more marketable.

IT DOESN'T MATTER IN THE LONG RUN...:

'Netroots' reassess their candidate (Katharine Q. Seelye, July 17, 2008, NY Times)

The convention, formerly YearlyKos and now Netroots Nation, or NN08, bills itself as "the most concentrated gathering of progressive bloggers to date." About 2,000 bloggers, activists, officeholders, vendors and others are expected to attend, with 200 members of the mainstream news media tracking them (yes, roughly one old-media type for every 10 new-media hipsters).

The convention comes as some in the netroots are questioning Senator Barack Obama's commitment to their values and whether their faith in him as a different kind of politician was misplaced. Most of the discontent stems from Obama's vote to give legal immunity to the telecommunications companies that participated in the Bush administration's program of wiretapping without warrants, after he had said he would vote to block it. [...]

[W]hile the Obama campaign has shown prowess organizing and raising staggering sums online, the candidate's relationship with the netroots has been tentative. Straw polling last year showed the netroots preferred John Edwards over Obama as the Democrats' nominee.

Part of the problem stems from a difference in style. The netroots can be reflexively confrontational and demand ideological purity.

Obama took issue with those tactics in 2005, writing in a memorandum that candidates who wanted to win the trust of voters could not demonize those who disagreed with them or always be ideologically pure.

"To the degree that we brook no dissent within the Democratic Party, and demand fealty to the one, 'true' progressive vision for the country," Obama wrote, "we risk the very thoughtfulness and openness to new ideas that are required to move this country forward."

Markos Moulitsas is confident that the soul rests firmly on his side - the "netroots."

He will make that case Friday when he discusses the party's future with Democratic Leadership Council Chairman Harold E. Ford Jr. They will square off at the Netroots Nation conference inspired by Mr. Moulitsas' Daily Kos blog, carrying out the second part of a pact forged last summer on NBC's "Meet the Press."

A video promo posted at DailyKos.com depicts the panel discussion as a "Texas Shootout," though the dialogue was civil when Mr. Moulitsas attended the DLC's annual meeting last month.

Mr. Ford argues that for Democrats "to win and do well, it will take a merging of both factions, every part of the party." Mr. Moulitsas, however, insists that Democrats need to hold intraparty primary battles to purge candidates and elect "better" politicians.

TO BE CONSERVATIVE AND/OR TO BE FUNNY...:

McCain's humor often backfires (BEN SMITH, 7/17/08, Politico)

Rooted in a time before there was political correctness, and before there was the South Park backlash against political correctness, McCain's wisecracking persona is cutting at times, self-deprecating at others, and always amused by the political process swirling around him. Even in his pursuit of the White House, the candidate has - sometimes to the dismay of his handlers - managed to keep his sense of humor.

As he campaigns through the densest media thicket in American history, it's become clear that McCain hasn't acquired the layer of polish that produced, for instance, Ronald Reagan's gentle, oft-repeated jokes and Bill Clinton's colorful, folksy yarns.

McCain's humor, by contrast, makes him the political counterpart of the radio host Don Imus (whom he has defended): It's sharp, unrehearsed, and at times, way, way over the line. This cycle, he's drawn winces, and worse, for everything from a joking reference to domestic violence to a now-notorious little ditty about bombing Iran. Earlier in his political career, the Arizona press reported that he'd cracked a rape joke that would now probably end any politician's career, a joke his aides then and now say he doesn't recall making.

To McCain's friends and supporters, the humor is a mark of his authenticity. To his detractors, some of the jokes are offensive and out of touch with contemporary mores.

A THOROUGHLY MODERN MCCARTHYITE?:

GREAT BLACK HOPE: a rejection of Obama at the polls this fall could bring lefty riots—or worse. (Russ Smith, 7/16/08, NY Press)

[I]f Obama loses (unlikely, but not out of the question), especially by a small margin, there’s sure to be a firestorm from the Left that will make the Florida recount of 2000 seem like a student- council election. Obama, of course, is seen as—finally!—the president who will return the United States to the halcyon 1,000 days of Camelot when John F. Kennedy brought to the White House not only “vigah” but a sense of optimism.

Never mind that had Richard Nixon, with the shift of a few hundred thousand votes in key states, won the 1960 election there would’ve been disappointment among his supporters but no great surprise. It doesn’t matter that Kennedy was a hawk, a fiscal conservative and, as a surrogate for his father’s dashed ambitions, a rather grubby politician. All that changed when he was assassinated; and ever since then Democrats have tried in vain to recreate his (largely retrospective) charismatic leadership.

In my discussions with friends under the age of 30—including one of my kids—who are enthusiastically plumping for Obama, they continuously compare the “post-racial” candidate to the Kennedy brothers (the inspirational ones, not Teddy), exclaiming that a new dawn is coming to America. I find this fairly comical—although keeping those thoughts private, since I already have a list of professional enemies that could fill the Manhattan white pages—since what they know about the 1960s is gleaned from lefty professors or nostalgic parents.

IMPORTING THE SUPERIOR CULTURE:

A Confusion of Tongues: Why Britain struggles to assimilate immigrants (Theodore Dalrymple, Spring 2008, City Journal)

Acting recently as an expert witness in a murder trial, I became aware of a small legal problem caused by the increasingly multicultural nature of our society. According to English law, a man is guilty of murder if he kills someone with the intention either to kill or to injure seriously. But he is guilty of the lesser crime of manslaughter if he has been sufficiently provoked or if his state of mind at the time was abnormal enough to reduce his responsibility. The legal test here is a comparison with the supposedly ordinary man—the man on the Clapham omnibus, as the legal cliché has it. Would that ordinary person feel provoked under similar circumstances? Was the accused’s state of mind at the time of the killing very different from that of an average man?

But who is that ordinary man nowadays, now that he might come from any of a hundred countries? The accused in this instance was a foreign-born Sikh who had married, and killed, a native-born woman of the same minority. The defense argued—unsuccessfully—that an ordinary man of the defendant’s traditional culture would have found the wife’s repeated infidelity particularly wounding and would therefore have acted in the same way.

DOES IT REALLY MATTER WHAT HAT YOU'RE WEARING...:

Cracking Code Pink: Why does the peace movement have to dress and act like an irritating children's birthday party? (Cintra Wilson, 7/16/08, Salon)

Code Pink welcomes anybody "willing to be outrageous for peace." But despite its emphasis on "joy and humor," its ruckus-raising techniques often cause me and my liberal community, who tend to agree with its politics, to regard them with distaste and embarrassment. Why did these shrieking middle-aged women in pink novelty hats believe this manner of protest was going to be effective in Congress, let alone in an almost completely co-opted media climate that seems hellbent on ignoring them?

PRESUMABLY NONE INCLUDE DIALECT (via The Mother Judd):

Obama releases list of approved jokes about himself (Andy Borowitz, 7/16/08, Jewish World Review)

A traveling salesman knocks on the door of a farmhouse, and much to his surprise, Barack Obama answers the door. The salesman says, "I was expecting the farmer's daughter." Barack Obama replies, "She's not here. The farm was foreclosed on because of subprime loans that are making a mockery of the American Dream."

A horse walks into a bar. The bartender says, "Why the long face?" Barack Obama replies, "His jockey just lost his health insurance, which should be the right of all Americans."

IS THERE A WORST KEPT POLITICAL SECRET...:

Doves Outnumber Hawks in Jewish Community (Daniel Luban, 7/16/08, IPS)

A new poll suggests that U.S. Jews hold views about the Middle East that are considerably more dovish than frequently acknowledged, with large majorities favouring diplomacy with Iran, supporting a two-state solution in Israel/Palestine, and advocating U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. [...]

[S]upport for Israel was not particularly high on the priority list of respondents. Only 8 percent described Israel as one of the two most important issues for them in the upcoming election, placing it seventh on the list of issues; far more important were the economy (55 percent) and the war in Iraq (33 percent).

CARE AND FEEDING OF THE YOKELS:

'Idiot's Veto' not worth the cost (ROGER SIMON, 7/16/08, Politico)

This week, the New Yorker magazine published a cover depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as dangerous radicals. In the cover illustration, they are standing in the Oval Office giving each other a fist bump. He is wearing a turban and she is wearing an Afro and has an AK-47 slung over her shoulder. They are burning an American flag in the fireplace and a picture of Osama bin Laden is hanging on the wall.

The New Yorker was kidding. It was satirizing those people who hold stupid misconceptions about the Obamas.

WHILE the New Yorker's Obama cover should have run its course as a news story by now, I will apologetically continue its relevance just long enough to note that Timothy Egan hits the nail on the head in a New York Times op-ed today as to what we can take away from this tempest in a teapot. Namely, that all the ruckus came from high-minded blue-staters who were deathly afraid that those nit-wits living in places where people still drive pick-up trucks would be too thick-necked and thick-headed to get the joke. But it turns out voters can actually think analytically without shopping at Whole Foods. Mr Egan investigates in Missoula, Montana, a town known for fly-fishing and taciturn manly-men and not too far from that red-state where Dick Cheney hunts and fishes. He concludes that "they get it as well. Irony, it turns out, does cross the Hudson River."

COME AT ME:

Facebook face-off: Scrabble vs. Scrabulous (Rafe Needleman – July 16, 2008, Webware)

What's a seven-letter word for, "So long, Scrabulous?" [...]

In conjunction with Electronic Arts, that official Hasbro Scrabble app is now up, in beta. How does it compare to Scrabulous? Pretty well. Too well, actually. While Scrabulous fans will see no reason to switch to the official Scrabble app, newcomers to the game on Facebook (like me), will find Scrabble easier to get into, easier to use, and just as competitive and fun.

The two apps have a lot in common. Both let you quickly and easily invite people from your list of friends. Both let you manage multiple games. Both keep track of games scores and multiple-game ratings. Both have useful features that let you shuffle the tiles in your rack, chat with your competitors, look up valid two-letter words and access a Scrabble-official word look-up feature.

Scrabble's game interface is more intuitive than Scrabulous, and it looks nicer, too. The screen automatically redraws when an opponent makes a move or leaves a message; Scrabulous requires a manual refresh. This is not a big deal if you're playing a drawn-out asynchronous game with a correspondent, but if you want to play in real-time with someone it's a drag to use Scrabulous.

THE CHURCH OF ME:

Self-Interest Is Bad?: Enough with the hectoring (Andrew Ferguson, 07/21/2008, Weekly Standard)

Oh, terrific. Now we have two of them--two presidential candidates, presumptive nominees of their respective parties, who insist they will not rest until they have inspired all of us stick-in-the-mud Americans to reach celestial heights of personal fulfillment by committing ourselves to a life of service. Service to what? Service to .  .  . something or other. The phrase that both John McCain and Barack Obama use is a "cause higher than yourself" or "greater than self" or alternatively a "cause greater than your own self-interest." Whatever the precise wording--for now, let's just use an unpronounceable acronym, CGTYOSI--we'll be hearing it a lot till November. [...]

Whoever wins the White House, the heart sinks to imagine the rhetorical tone of the next administration, thanks to John McCain's regret over his years as a rebellious midshipman and Barack Obama's vanity over the years he spent berating slumlords on the South Side of Chicago. For four long years the rest of us will be hectored about pursuing a cause greater than our self-interest, with the unavoidable implication that as we go through the day getting our kids out of bed, packing their lunches, helping them with homework, dragging ourselves to our jobs, enduring an hour's commute, so we can make enough money to meet our mortgage, attending PTA meetings, feeding the dog, going to church, mowing our neighbor's lawn while he's on vacation, planning a birthday party, saying a prayer for a sick friend, picking up a six-pack for our brother-in-law on the way home, writing a check to the Red Cross, shopping for an old roommate's wedding gift, pretending to listen to the tedious beefs of a co-worker, telephoning an aging aunt, and otherwise doing what it is we need to do to make our lives mean something, we are merely pursuing what our two presidential candidates consider our selfish interest. Because we haven't joined one of their national service programs.

For now, of course, each of the two men, McCain and Obama, points to himself as an exemplar of service--even as he avoids his family, neglects his job, and hands his everyday obligations over to poorly paid subordinates, all so he can fulfill his lifelong ambition of becoming the most powerful and celebrated man in the world. What do you know: They think their self-interest is a cause greater than their self-interest. Funny how that happens.

THE CHOICE IS BETWEEN REVOLUTION OR REPUBLIC:

Pious Populist: Understanding the rise of Iran's president (Abbas Milani, Nov/Dec 2007, Boston Review)

The unwieldy social and ideological coalition that brought Khomeini to power shared nothing but enmity for the Shah. With his departure, those differences emerged with full force. While religious activists like Ahmadinejad embraced Khomeini’s theocratic project, the technocratic middle classes hoped to use Khomeini against the Shah and then create a secular, democratic republic. The urban poor joined the coalition when Khomeini and his allies promised them economic benefits—free houses and free electricity, more wages, and less pressure from the government and their own bosses. No sooner had the Shah departed than the network of religious organizations, with a mosque in nearly every town and neighborhood, began quickly to dominate the revolution: in late 1979 the country voted in a referendum to become an Islamic Republic.

In the immediate aftermath of the revolution, and as a direct result of clerical dominance, Iran experienced an Islamic version of the Reign of Terror, resulting ever since in cycles of violence. Iran is something of an ethnic and religious quilt. At least a quarter of its 70-plus million people speak Turkish. Another six or seven million are of Kurdish origin. Yet another two to three million speak Arabic, and at least a million are Baluchis, who live in an area bordering Pakistan. During the Pahlavi era, the Shah and his father mimicked the Ataturk model (which banned Turkey’s Kurds from speaking Kurdish) and tried to solve Iran’s ethnic difficulties by enforcing a unified “Persian identity” and making it illegal for ethno-linguistic minorities to speak or teach their native languages.

When the central government appeared vulnerable after the revolution, simmering ethnic grievances erupted. In Iran’s Kurdish region, civil war broke out, leaving thousands dead. (The only job Ahmadinejad held before becoming mayor of Tehran was in the mid 1990s, when he was named the governor of Ardibil, which was populated predominantly by Turkish-speaking Iranians.)

Moreover, the regime’s attempt to impose its understanding of Islamic traditions—from mandating headscarves to banning unveiled women from television or films—created social strife in the country’s modernized cities. Some of the new strictures produced comical results: Hollywood films were shown with the women eliminated from every scene. Or “illicit” affairs between unmarried lovers were written out of scripts and replaced with more chaste relations, such as that of brother and sister.

Ayatollah Khomeini also began a massive purge of the military, which he suspected of harboring royalist tendencies. The Iranian air force, in particular, was decimated. After the government claimed to have aborted a coup attempt by a group of pilots, three hundred pilots were reportedly executed by firing squad. A new force, called the Revolutionary Guards of the Islamic Republic and composed of devout young men, often from the countryside, was created to safeguard the revolution and its leaders. Ahmadinejad would join them soon after the war with Iraq began in 1980. Their conservative cultural ethos and rancor against secular intellectuals and the middle class gradually emerged as the regime’s social paradigm. The regime began a massive policy of nationalizing and confiscating factories and banks owned by the elite of the Shah’s rule.

The bureaucracy no less than the military was purged. By harassing women who refused to wear the veil and pressuring men who did not display piety and devotion in their appearance, the regime facilitated the largest emigration in Iran’s history. The long war with Iraq, together with Saddam’s decision to bomb defenseless cities like Tehran, would accelerate this process. Those who left tended to be the more educated middle classes. Today at least two million—by some estimates, four million—live in exile.

In November 1979, with the country engulfed in military conflicts with ethnic minorities and clashes with the central government, and with many cities beset by strikes and student unrest, a new crisis emerged when radical Islamic students, encouraged and supported by the secular left, took over the American embassy in Tehran. In early planning for the takeover, the organizers asked the Islamic Student Association of each university to send two representatives to a clandestine plenary meeting. As scholars Alireza Haghighi and Victoria Tahmasebi have reported, Ahmadinejad, then an engineering student, was one of two delegates from the College of Science and Technology. When he heard of the plans, he demurred; he wanted them to first seek a fatwa from Ayatollah Khomeini. But the organizers wanted to give their leader “plausible deniability.” A few weeks later, when it emerged that Khomeini was bent on turning the hostage crisis into political theater to consolidate his own power, Ahmadinejad tried to join the student leadership committee. This time he was told he was not welcome. The episode became particularly important when, years later in the days after Ahmadinejad’s election as president, some of the former American hostages claimed that Ahmadinejad had been their guard, even their interrogator. All evidence, including an investigation by the CIA, has indicated that the allegations were untrue.

Khomeini used the hostage crisis—and the preoccupation with the embassy takeover in Iran, the United States, and much of the West—to pass a draconian constitution that placed virtually all power in the hands of an unelected ayatollah. He had come to power officially promising a democratic republic, though his own doctrine of the rule of the judges had circulated widely among his followers. From exile in Paris (where he went after Saddam Hussein expelled him from Iraq in 1978), he had said that no clergy would hold office when the revolution won power. But once back in Iran and empowered by the revolution, he placed virtually all power in his own hands and claimed a legitimacy founded on divine right, not popular will. If anyone dared remind him of his democratic promises, he resorted to an important concept of Shi’ism called tagiyeh. Much like Jesuitical equivocation, tagiyeh allows the pious to prevaricate in the service of preserving the faith or leading the faithful. (Khomeini was also a great admirer of Plato, and his doctrine of the guardianship of the jurist (velayat-e faqih) bears striking resemblance to Plato’s ideal of a republic ruled by a philosopher king, just as his idea of tagiyeh is similar to Plato’s idea of the noble lie.)

In Iran, as scholar Arash Naraghi has shown, Khomeini has even tinkered with his own theory of the rule of the jurist. Initially, according to his interpretation of the law, the purpose of such a government was to implement Shari’ah (religious law.) When faced with the practical problems of running a modern polity based on religious laws that were a thousand years old, however, Khomeini offered a new variant of his theory. Now, the ultimate goal of Islamic government is the preservation of the state itself, and all rules of Shari’ah, even the pillars of faith, are subject to change, depending on the interests of the state. In the new version the state is everything, and Shari’ah is but its tool.

As a nod to the democratic aspirations of the movement that had brought him to power, Ayatollah Khomeini allowed constitutional provisions for a powerless, but elected, presidency and a unicameral parliament. But even these weak institutions were circumscribed by the power of unelected mullahs. An appointed institution called the Council of Experts, composed of clerics and experts in Shari’ah, had veto power over all laws it deemed inimical to the letter or spirit of Islam. Initially of uncertain significance, it turned out to be a key factor in the clergy’s control of the county. During the presidency of the reformist Khatami (1997–2005), for example, the Council of Experts rejected more than two hundred laws passed by parliament in a two-year legislative term. The same council has also claimed for itself the right to veto candidates for any election in the country. In one election for the parliament (or Majlis), they rejected more than three thousand candidates, most of them supporters of Khatami-style reform. [...]

[A]hmadinejad’s meteoric rise was soon followed by a no less spectacular fall from grace. One problem was that Ayatollah Khamenei and other leaders of the Islamic Republic came quickly to see that Ahmadinejad and his verbal outbursts were becoming a serious liability. Nothing was more emblematic of this problem than his vocal anti-Semitism, which, like much else in his vision, was not acquired casually but has roots in his experiences during the early days of the revolution.

Soon after the creation of the Islamic Republic, a series of lectures and discussions were held in Tehran led by a stridently conservative cleric, Mohammad Taghi Mesbah-Yazdi, and a philosophy professor named Ahmad Fardid. A student of German philosophy and a disciple of Heidegger, Fardid believed that Freemasons and Jews have for the past century conspired together to dominate the world. When Ayatollah Khomeini won power Fardid abandoned his sycophantic royalism and became not just a devout Moslem, but a passionate advocate of the rule of mullahs as the necessary and anointed prelude to the return of the Hidden Messiah. Together with Mesbah-Yazdi—Ahmadinejad’s religious mentor—Fardid forged key elements of an Islamic pseudo-fascist ideology founded on a sour brew of anti-Semitism, Heideggerian philosophy, and Khomeini’s theory of the guardianship of the jurist.

Whatever their sources, Ahmadinejad’s anti-Semitic comments were—according to a widely held view in Iran—a key reason for the two U.N. resolutions against Iran.

His domestic policies have been comparably disastrous. For much of the past quarter of a century, the Islamic Republic of Iran—having emerged from the authoritarianism of the Pahlavi dynasty—faced a number of fundamental choices about basic social and economic organization: state planning vs. market coordination; private property vs. public ownership; technocracy vs. piety as a measure of public service; women as subordinate vs. women as equal citizens; export of revolution vs. consolidation of power at home; nuclear power and a full fuel cycle vs. accommodating the international community; fundamentalism vs. acceptance of eclectic new ideas and changing interpretations of the canon; and finally, East vs. West.

In navigating these positions, Ahmadinejad has often embraced ideas and practices that are now widely rejected elsewhere. He has shown little affection for the private sector, advocates statism and a more highly planned economy, and has all but destroyed private banking in Iran. He initially defended some rights for women, such as their ability to watch soccer games at public stadiums, but backed off in the face of stiff opposition from the traditional clergy. And although he has been consistent in his advocacy for the poor—he increased the minimum wage by sixty percent and ordered the establishment of a “Love Fund” to help poor young men defray the cost of marriage—his policies often seem ill-conceived. His casual comment that the stock market is a form of gambling and should be banned led to a massive sell off and a steep fall in stock prices. He has a penchant for throwing money at any problem. One policy, for example, gave low-interest loans to small businesses willing to hire new employees, in an attempt to create jobs and stem inflationary pressures. But because his administration failed to exercise oversight, the loans were used by employers for purposes other than job creation. According to some members of parliament, similar failures of oversight explain the disappearance of hundreds of millions of dollars of governmental funds. Ahmadinejad’s government has not only spent the entire windfall revenue from oil price increases, but he nearly depleted the currency fund set up to protect the government when the price of oil falls. As always the poor—now a quarter of the country’s population—bear the brunt of these disastrous inflationary policies.

In international relations, Ahmadinejad’s faltering program has had three key components. The first is the idea of exporting the Islamic Revolution and creating a “Shia revolutionary arc” in the Muslim world. Like Trotsky, who rejected the idea of socialism in one country, Ahmadinejad believes that Iran’s Islamic Revolution will survive only if it helps lead other Muslims in the fight against a weak and declining West. In recent months, he has talked more ambitiously about Muslims generally, and not only about Shias.

The second component of his program is the idea that the Islamic regime can maintain its dignity and achieve its goals only if it stands firm on plans for a nuclear weapons program. For Ahmadinejad, Khatami and his chief negotiator on the nuclear issue, Rouhani, committed treason when they agreed to suspend the nuclear program. A few days after Iran announced that it had enriched uranium successfully, Ahmadinejad and his allies declared that “the West can do nothing,” adding that Iran must push forward aggressively with all aspects of the program. Shortly after Putin’s recent and historic visit to Iran, Ahmadinejad made two incredible claims in a televised interview: first, that Iran has won the public-opinion battle around the world over the legitimacy of its nuclear program, and that the West might soon give up its opposition to Iran’s nuclear program; and second, still more incredibly, that “Iran is now one of the nine nuclear powers in the world” and that the other eight must begin to share their global power with Iran.

The third component of Ahmadinejad’s foreign policy is intimately linked with the second, and is referred to by the Iranian policy establishment as the “Asia Look.” According to this notion, Iran’s future no longer rests with the declining West but with the ascendant East—particularly China and India. Multi-billion-dollar oil and gas agreements with both countries, and negotiations for the construction of a new pipeline connecting Iran to India through Pakistan and eventually to China, would allow Iran to have a rapidly growing market for the country’s oil and gas. Moreover, both China and India have nuclear technologies they could share with Iran and, based on their past behavior, neither is likely to “meddle” in Iranian domestic affairs, particularly on issues of human rights and democracy. Ahmadinejad is further convinced that Russia (with its new, more muscular foreign policy and its desire to embarrass the United States) and China (with its insatiable appetite for energy) would never allow the passage of a U.N. resolution against Iran.

* * *

The failure of nearly every aspect of Ahmadinejad’s program—including his failure to fight corruption or improve the economic plight of the poor—has caused his domestic popularity to decline sharply.

STATISTS WAR ON THE FAMILY FOR THE SAME REASON...:

Why Some Terrorists Make the Choice to Leave al Qaeda (Alex Kingsbury, July 16, 2008, US News)

Learning the answers to why some terrorists abandon their brethren, says one terrorism expert, is critical to understanding the "radicalization cycle."

The failure of the terrorist group to provide for its members, for instance, or a failure to meet the expectations of recruits might be key to splintering cells from the inside. "It appears that terrorist cell members who maintain contact with friends and family outside the organization are more likely to withdraw," terrorism expert Michael Jacobson writes in an upcoming paper published in the journal of the Combating Terrorism Center at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. "Perhaps in part in recognition of this, [9/11 hijacker Mohamed] Atta had forbidden the 18 other hijackers in the United States from contacting their families to say goodbye."

IT'S NOT ABOUT LOVING APES...:

Monkey Business: Spain apes the Declaration of Independence. (Wesley J. Smith, 07/21/2008, Weekly Standard)

[W]hy grant apes rights? After all, if the Spanish parliament deems these animals insufficiently protected, it can enact more stringent protections, as other countries have. But improving the treatment of apes--of which there are few in Spain--is not really the game that is afoot. Rather, as Pozas chortled after the environment committee of the Spanish parliament passed the resolutions committing Spain to the Great Ape Project, this precedent will be the "spear point" that breaks the "species barrier."

And why break the species barrier? Why, to destroy the unique status of man and thus initiate a wholesale transformation of Western civilization.

Specifically, by including animals in the "community of equals" and in effect declaring apes to be persons, the Great Ape Project would break the spine of Judeo-Christian moral philosophy, which holds that humans enjoy equal and incalculable moral worth, regardless of our respective capacities, age, and state of health. Once man is demoted to merely another animal in the forest, universal human rights will have to be tossed out and new criteria devised to determine which human/animal lives matter and which individuals can be treated like, well, animals.

Singer and Cavalieri put it this way in the introduction to The Great Ape Project: Equality Beyond Humanity, the collection of essays they edited in 1993, with contributions by noted opponents of a human-centric ethics such as primatologist Jane Goodall and Ingrid Newkirk of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals:

Our request comes at a special moment in history. Never before has our dominion over other animals been so pervasive and systematic. Yet this is also the moment when, within that very Western civilization that has so inexorably extended this dominion, a rational ethic has emerged challenging the moral significance of membership of our own species. This challenge seeks equal consideration for the interests of all animals, human and nonhuman.

Should that come to pass, the ancien régime (as they view it) based on the sanctity and equality of human life would crumble. In its place would emerge a society sufficiently hedonistic to eschew moralizing about personal behavior (Singer has defended bestiality), but also humbled to the point where people would willingly sacrifice our own flourishing "for the animals" or to "save the planet" and utilitarian enough to countenance ridding ourselves of unwanted human ballast (Singer is the world's foremost proponent of infanticide). Thus, in the world that would rise from the ashes of human exceptionalism, moral value would be subjective and rights temporary, depending on the extent of each animal's individual capacities at the time of measuring.

Most important in the minds of many proponents of the Great Ape Project, religion--above all, orthodox theistic religions that view humankind as at the center of Creation--would be sapped of its remaining vitality. Pozas's spear point is aimed right between the ribs of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, all three of which are loathed by the materialists who have brought the Great Ape Project to the brink of its first triumph.

Thus, no one should be surprised that Richard Dawkins, bitter proselytizer for atheism, has been a strong supporter of the Great Ape Project from its inception.