THE ANGEL OF DEATH IN TWO COUNTRIES:Joe Sheehan has a good article on Jeffrey Loria and how he has run two teams into the ground. In the piece, he summarizes the facts regarding the Marlins and their profitability problems:

The 1997 championship team that was dismantled is held up as an example of how teams in "small markets" can't be successful, even though we know that the reason the team looked unprofitable is that the stadium was assigned all the revenue generated by the Marlins' games there. At the time, Wayne Huizenga owned both entities, so this was just another example of the shell games MLB teams play with their finances.
Years later, those same conditions are in place: the Marlins remain a victim of Huizenga's greed, appearing to bleed red ink while making money for the man who lied his way through 1997, then threw a tantrum when he didn't get his own publicly-funded stadium.
The Marlins' problem isn't Pro Player Stadium; the Marlins' problem is their lease with slumlord Huizenga, which makes it virtually impossible for them to make money there. That's not a ballpark issue, it's a negotiating one. It has nothing to do with markets, or player salaries, or competitive balance, or any other damn thing. It's simply an arrangement that never should have been allowed to occur, and for which the baseball fans of south Florida have suffered.
If MLB cared at all about anything but lowering labor costs and getting taxpayer dollars, they would have addressed this in 1998, when the Marlins were sold. They don't, of course, and the problems the Fish face are exactly the same, four years and one owner later.

TALK ABOUT SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL: In honor of the opening of "Attack of the Clones," Jonathan Last argues for the superiority of the Empire over the Rebel Alliance. I like his point about the meritocracy of the Empire versus the genetic roaylism of the Jedi Knights.

CIA (OR FBI) = CYA: Apparently President Bush was warned before 9/11 that Al Qaeda was planning to hijack airplanes. I cannot believe how little has changed on the domestic front since that date. Glenn Reynolds has a selection of opinions on the subject.

ROBERT THE POSEUR: Responding to Robert Wright's superficial treatments of game theory as applied to the Israeli-Palestinian war gets tiresome after a while. (I've tried it a couple of times already, and it doesn't seem to have worked.) So instead, check out this infinitely more sophisticated treatment of exactly the same topic by Douglas Turnbull.

ECCLESIASTES 7:10: Robert Samuelson argues against drawing apocalyptic conclusions from Americans' ignorance of history:

I reject the alarmist notion that ignorance threatens our social cohesion or democracy by cutting us off from the roots that define the American experience.
If that were so, we would have foundered long ago. Perhaps there was some golden age when most Americans knew their history. It seems unlikely, but without good survey data before the 1930s, we cannot know. Since then, we do know; we're dummies.
"Our comparisons of recent surveys with polls from the 1940s and 1950s suggest that there's been no overall increase in knowledge despite enormous increases in education," says political scientist Scott Keeter, co-author with Michael X. Delli Carpini of "What Americans Know About Politics and Why It Matters." A 1986 poll found that only 49 percent of Americans knew that the United States was the only country to have used nuclear weapons in war. In a 1989 survey, only 63 percent correctly identified Franklin Delano Roosevelt as a Democrat. Ugh.
To blame inept schools and lazy students is to miss the larger cultural failing. I grew up in the 1950s. My parents didn't discuss the Great Depression, which was history only two decades old, let alone the Revolution or Civil War. They probably were typical.
... The "greatest generation" knew why it was fighting, even though it was as ignorant of history as its children and grandchildren, perhaps more so. In 1943, a Gallup poll found that about 30 percent had never heard of the Bill of Rights and fewer than 23 percent could identify it as the first 10 amendments to the Constitution; the rest were confused about what it was.
In 1942, Elmo Roper -- a pioneer in opinion surveys -- wrote (in his pre-politically correct prose): "A great many of us make two mistakes in our judgment of the common man. We overestimate the amount of information he has; we underestimate his intelligence. . . . During my eight years of asking the common man questions about what he thinks and what he wants I have often been surprised . . . that he has less information than we think he should have. . . . But I have more often been surprised . . . that, despite his lack of information, the common man's native intelligence generally brings him to a sound conclusion."

As a history-obsessive who once considered pursuing an academic career in the field, I think that Samuelson is absolutely right about the (lack of) consequences of Americans' ignorance. And the stats cited by Samuelson regarding the knowledge of the "greatest generation" illustrates one of the most important lessons of history: Nostalgia is for the weak-minded. Nine times out of ten, the sentiment of "things were so much better back [insert time of speaker's childhood]" is wrong, and the tenth time is usually overstated.

IN DEFENSE OF MY PROFESSION: Catholic blogger Mark Shea publishes a letter from an attorneyarguing that the Catholic Church should be thinking more, not less, like lawyers.

THE ANACHRONISM: Writing on Pim Fortuyn, David Brooks carves up the moral fastidiousness of the press, calling it a "Victorian gentleman:"

After each event, the Victorian gent struggles to find the correct emotional response. Once the correct emotion has been discerned, it is repeated and recirculated with a pious self-assurance familiar to 19th-century drawing rooms. All data that support the correct emotion are emphasized, while all that do not are ignored.
...In the parlors of polite society, social tolerance sits side by side with multiculturalism. They are two pastries on the platter of polite opinion. But Fortuyn was socially tolerant, even libertine, and it was for that reason he felt he could not be a multiculturalist.
The Victorian gent does have a strategy when confronted with this clash of Good Opinions. Insulation. Retreat to the high-minded tolerance of your suburb and social circle, and leave it to other poor buggers to actually live with the intolerant extremists. That is to say, champion multiculturalism from the enlightened venue of leafy London or Cambridge, and force the bastards in Israel or the neighborhoods to actually confront the practical consequences of your ideas.
But Fortuyn was a nationalist. The Victorian gent disapproves of nationalism, since it is a primitive passion, like excessive religious belief. But nationalism is actually a form of unselfishness, which takes one out of one's immediate circle and induces one to love and care about one's countrymen. In America, a nation of immigrants, nationalism takes one form. In France, the land of the blood and soil patrie, nationalism takes another form. In Holland, the land of pot bars, nationalism takes another form yet, Mr. Fortuyn's.
Fortuyn forcefully confronted the great contradiction in enlightened opinion. He argued that given the realities of the situation, one had to build a wall around one's tolerance, and restrict the flow of people who refused to join the culture of openness. He proposed reducing immigration flows and stepping up assimilation programs.
One can argue about the merits of his platform. One can argue whether Islam is really as intolerant as Fortuyn made it out to be or even whether this intolerance toward homosexuality and euthanasia is a good thing. But what is interesting from our point of view is that the Victorian gent that is the Western press corps could not even allow Pim Fortuyn to exist.
With the unselfconscious instinct for self-preservation that has always been the great strength of Victorianism, whether in its original form or today, the gent had to depict Fortuyn as something other than what he was. The gent had to depict him as a cliche, a far-right bogeyman. To acknowledge the existence of the real Fortuyn would be to acknowledge the rift between tolerance and multiculturalism. To do that would be to explore what this rift means--what it means in the Middle East and at home.
That exploration is impermissible. It is beyond the bounds of polite discussion. Hence, it does not exist.
Pim Fortuyn is dead. In fact, he never existed.

UPDATE: I should have mentioned this, but while Brooks' description of the contemporary media is dead-on, his Victorian analogy is based on stereotype rather than fact. The real Victorians mixe it up in politics far more overtly and honestly. Check out this letter to Andrew Sullivan, which sets the record staright.
I've always thought the Victorians have gotten a bad intellectual and moral rap..

AN OASIS: Jonathan Chait has an absolutely fabulous article in Slate explaining why the Israeli incursion into the West Bank was successful, and why the media cannot admit it. Here are some excepts:

Last week a suicide bomber killed 15 Israelis outside of Tel Aviv. Here is how a New York Times editorial reacted: "But as was sadly demonstrated again yesterday, no amount of military action can stop the suicidal madness. That can only happen if there is Palestinian moderation, Israeli restraint and progress toward an equitable settlement."
You have probably read sentiments along these lines so many times that this reasoning sounds sensible. But it's complete nonsense. First of all, the bomber came from the radical group Hamas, which openly rejects any peace with Israel and tends to strike anytime progress toward peace appears imminent. So, far from deterring suicide bombings by Hamas, an "equitable settlement" would likely have provoked more. Second, prior to Israel's offensive in the West Bank, suicide bombers were striking at nearly a once-a-day rate. Since then, they've struck at a rate closer to once a month. Third, last week's attacker came from the one location (the Gaza Strip) that Israel didn't target. Imagine if the government gave flu shots to residents of every state except New York. If a flu epidemic then hit New York, would it demonstrate that flu shots can't stop the flu?
When intelligent people (like the Times editors) believe something so wildly wrong, it's usually because they're in the grip of a theory that helps them to ignore real-world evidence. In this case, the theory is that Palestinians resort to terrorism out of despair. The corollary to this theory is that all Israeli military action will inevitably backfire since it simply makes Palestinians more desperate and angry. For those who believe this—a group consisting of most liberal newspaper editors, the foreign policy establishment, and virtually the entire outside world­—the case against Israeli military action (such as the recent one in the West Bank) is simply an a priori truth.

Most notable is the following:

For the sake of argument, though, let's suppose that Israeli military crackdowns did increase the number of Palestinians willing to engage in suicide bombing. It still wouldn't necessarily follow that crackdowns lead to more bombings. Why not? Because the number of suicide attacks depends upon more factors than simply the number of willing martyrs. Successful suicide bombings require plenty of other ingredients: the capacity to get past Israeli security (which necessitates training and, probably, fake identification); the ability to fashion hidden explosive devices; and the explosives themselves. Yes, some bombers use homemade ingredients, but they're far less effective than the professional-grade stuff—such as the explosives that the Palestinian Authority imported from Iran. The choke-point in the production line is almost certainly not the number of volunteers. It's the other ingredients. And it's those ingredients Israel has tried to cut off, by arresting or killing terrorist leaders, seizing bomb-making equipment, and sealing off its borders.
Of course, this isn't a perfect defense. But the other strategy—placating the Palestinians to the point where none of them are willing to serve as suicide bombers—is almost certainly worse. Even if an Israeli charm offensive could convince an overwhelming majority of Palestinians to reject suicide bombing, even a tiny minority of holdouts—say 100 or 200 volunteers a year out of a population of nearly 4 million—could sustain a massive terror campaign. Trying to protect Israel from suicide bombers by dampening Palestinian despair rather than fighting terrorism directly, then, is sort of like safeguarding your house by trying to give every potential burglar in town a well-paying job rather than installing an alarm.

This is all true, and almost completely ignored.

UPDATE: A great Charles Krauthammer article makes almost the same points:

There is no military solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. So says -- to take an almost random sample -- The Post (March 26), Sandy Berger (March 29), George Mitchell (April 1), Colin Powell and Kofi Annan (April 10), Colin Powell again (April 21).
...It is wrong.
After the Passover massacre, Israel launched its offensive into Palestinian territory. The most dramatic effect has been a reduction in terrorism. It is no accident that while Israel suffered seven suicide bombings in the seven days of Passover, there has been but one successful suicide bombing in the past month. There will surely be others. But the frenzied wave of terror that pushed Israel over the edge has been stopped.
Why is the level of terror down? Because terror does have an infrastructure, and attacking and degrading it makes it harder for terrorists to operate, as the United States proved in Afghanistan. During Israel's offensive, hundreds of bomb makers, gunmen and trainers were captured. Others are on the run. Huge caches of illegal weapons and explosives were seized or destroyed. Can they be replaced? Perhaps, but it will take time. It took Arafat eight years to build this arsenal. He will not be able to replace it in a day.
More important, Arafat's forces were everywhere defeated. As the only functioning military authority on the West Bank today, the Israeli army can now make lightning raids, relatively unmolested, to prevent terrorist operations. For eight years, Palestinian terrorism had the protection (and, in many cases, the active assistance) of Arafat's Palestinian Authority. That sanctuary is no longer.
...Arafat assumed that Israel was losing the will to fight back with anything more than pinpricks -- and more important, that even if Israel did strike back, the world (i.e., the United States) would stop it.
He was wrong. He has now suffered a serious defeat.
Just days ago, it was conventional wisdom that the Israeli operation had backfired because it had dramatically boosted Arafat's popularity. This was nonsense from the beginning, the usual mistaking of victimhood for power. In fact, Arafat was practically scorned by his people when he ventured out for what he thought would be his triumphal post-Ramallah tour. The crowds were sparse, the people indifferent and he did not even venture into the Jenin camp, knowing that he would be heckled, jeered and possibly worse.
Why? Because he lost. His security services have been shattered. He can no longer protect the terrorist shock troops. He is shorn and he knows it.
Why do you think the United States is now talking about "reforming" Arafat out of the leadership of the Palestinian Authority? Why are Arab leaders privately endorsing such reform? A sudden conversion to constitutionalism? Operation Defensive Shield left Arafat gravely weakened. Arab leaders are not sentimental.
The fire will cease in the Middle East not when a piece of parchment is signed (remember Oslo?) but when the Palestinians conclude that they are no longer winning, that the Israelis are not going to give up and go away, as they did from Lebanon. Israel's offensive has begun to restore the deterrent that Israel forfeited with its unceasing concessions under Oslo and its precipitous withdrawal from Lebanon.

THE UNBIASED MEDIA: Here is a story about the photographer for the L.A. Times who made her way into the Church of the Nativity. Apparently she has a history of getting involved in her stories.

IN THEIR WORST NIGHTMARES: A chilling account of what the U.S. was considering in World War II if the atomic bombs did not force the Japanese to surrender. It illustrates what we are capable of if faced with a true existential threat. It is also true that the massive imbalance of power in the world today means that the U.S. is unlikely to be faced with such an existential threat and thus is unlikely to have to resort to such actions. When you hear anti-globalists bemoaning the fact that the U.S. is so much more powerful than the rest of the world, keep that in mind.

OUR TOLERANT CAMPUSES: Meryl Yourish has a horrifying description of an anti-Jewish riot at San Francisco State University. Joe Katzman has some good suggestions on how to respond.

THE OBVERSE OF CONSPIRACY THEORIES: From a link by Steven Den Beste, an outstanding piece from Thomas H. Lipscomb arguing that the confinement and release of Arafat is part of an elaborate plan by the U.S. and Israelis to destroy the effectiveness of Arafat and the Palestinian intifada.
If you assume that results with which you agree are the product of an elaborate plan, you run the risk of the same oversimplifications of reality as those who see consipracies in everything. In this case, I think "muddling through" is a more likely explanation for the Bush Administration's actions than a detailed plan. But Lipscomb is right about many of the effects of the Israeli incursion - especially relating to Iraq. Whatever objections the Stae Department may have had at the time, the Administration probably appreciates that it will be much harder for the Palestinians to strategically escalate the violence and attempt to wring leverage out of their supposed ability to delay or prevent military action against Iraq.

A GOOD INSIDE SHOT: As much as I rip the NY Times, they deserve plenty of credit for this week's cover story in the Magazine: a profile of an Israeli squad operating in the West Bank during Operation Defensive Shield. The actions of this squad are the best antidote to a U.N.-style compulsion to find war crimes in anything Israeli soldiers do.

THEY KNOW NOT WHAT THEY DO: Professor Reynolds has an interesting discussion with his readers about how smart or dumb Al Qaeda is, and how lethal and ruthless the U.S. will be if the "clash of civilizations" sought by Al Qaeda actually ensues.

I THOUGHT IT WOULD BE BETTER: A.O. Scott trashes "Attack of the Clones." Fans may hope that institutional incentives have affected his review: it was rumored that Janet Maslin's positive review of the previous installment helped cost her the job as the Times' movie critic.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: From Tom Segev, a left-wing Israeli journalist:

The Zionist movement worked for 30 years to lay Israel's national infrastructure, and when David Ben-Gurion declared its independence, the state already existed de facto. Arafat, too, symbolized and organized the national struggle of his people, but in contrast to the leaders of the Zionist movement, he neglected almost entirely the civilian infrastructure of the state he wants to establish. So we have to take with a large grain of salt the contention that Operation Defensive Shield brought about the destruction of the Palestinian Authority's civilian infrastructure: there wasn't a great deal to destroy. Arafat did not bring a national administration with him from Tunisia, and in the eight years that have passed since he was allowed to return, he surrounded himself with a relatively small oligarchy of salaried individuals, many if not all of them in uniform and bearing arms. His government is corrupt and despotic. The majority of Palestinians did not benefit in any way from his return or from the peace process; in many cases their life took a turn for the worse.

THE "INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY:" James Lileks has a great take-down of the United Nations.
He also disses the Palestinians' incessant and fictitious claims of "massacres:"

In the long run, it really doesn’t pay to inflate your losses. You become the Boy Who Cried War-Crimes. If every action is a massacre, an atrocity, a sin against civilization, and the world “community” responds to every military feint as though you’d Groznied the joint to dust and dental fragments, then eventually your adversary has no incentive to exercise restraint. I’m not saying Israel will, or should, do a Dresden on the Gaza Strip. But if they will be hated and chastised no matter what they do, what holds them back from a truly ruthless extirpation of their enemy? Will the Norwegian unionists double their searches of produce trucks, looking for Jewish cabbages as well as carrots? Will the UN pass condemning resolutions printed in really big red letters on heavier paper? Will the Vatican envoy stand on a ladder so he can hold Arafat’s hand even higher? Will demonstrators in Berlin strap six pieces of fake dynamite around their daughters’ waists instead of three?

THE FACTS ARE UNPLEASANT THINGS: Richard Cohen really dislikes Ariel Sharon, and thinks that the bombing in Rishon le-Tzion has destroyed his credibility.
Why?
[I]n saying the bombing proved "the true intentions of the person leading the Palestinian Authority," he was insisting on what most of the world -- anyone with a TV set, that is -- suspects cannot be true.
...It's hardly possible that he gave an order -- even in the most complex code -- while a prisoner.
...What about since? Still, not likely. Unless the vaunted Israeli intelligence services have become inept, I would assume that they had Arafat under surveillance the entire time. I assume his phone is tapped. I assume his car is bugged. If he had a pacemaker, I assume the Israelis could turn it off.
It is, of course, remotely possible that Arafat either gave the order for the bombing or looked the other way. But Sharon did not make such a case. He offered no proof -- nothing to overcome our skepticism.
It's probably true that Arafat wouldn't have minded Hamas waiting a few more days before resuming their lives' work. But in terms of "looking the other way" - how about letting Hamas roam free, calling for "millions of martyrs" and calling the Israelis "terrorists, pigs and Nazis?"
It's not, mind you, that I don't believe Arafat is a terrorist and has in the past either initiated or acquiesced in suicide bombings. It's rather that this time Sharon seems only to be rounding up the usual suspects.
Maybe we should wait until Sharon actually does something before deciding whether or not he is "rounding up the usual suspects." If he were to send forces into Gaza to attack the strongholds of Hamas, that would be aimed at different suspects than Operation Defensive Shield, which was mainly aimed at the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade. Nuances, anyone? I forgot - this is Sharon we're talking about.
Nonetheless, Arafat had nothing to gain by permitting a suicide bombing at this time. He must know how Sharon will retaliate. He must know that Sharon is perfectly capable of snatching him and sending him back into exile. At a minimum, Sharon could destroy whatever the Palestinian Authority has left -- and that ain't much.
He must also know that Sharon has been dying to do so for a while, and has been prevented from doing so by the U.S., egged on by the Europeans and Arab countries. Why would he expect one more suicide bombing to change that? He has already survived innumerable "last chances;" what's another one? (Via InstaPundit, here's the best summary of the situation.)
These bombings make everyone crazed. The rending of flesh, the unspeakable horror of bodies vaporized, make us all a little nuts. But we cannot let go of what we know. Suicide bombings are virtually nonexistent when Israel and the Palestinian Authority cooperate on security matters. A meaningful peace process discourages terrorism.
That is intuitive. But is it true?
Take a look at this chronolgy of suicide bombings from 1994-1997
when there was a "meaningful peace process." (And Netanyahu can't be blamed, because only the attacks from 1997 took place during his term. Hmm..there were fewer attacks in that year than in any of the three preceding ones. Must be a coincidence....)

THE QUESTION NEVER ASKED: James Klurfeld has the precise answer for those who see Sharon as the root of all evil in the Mideast:

Yes, in the past, Sharon has shown himself to be a man of terrible excess. He often had to be rescued by his military superiors, especially the late Moshe Dayan. Dayan understood and used Sharon's talents as a warrior. But he also understood that Sharon often did not know when to stop. Sharon's invasion of Lebanon is only the most well-known example.
But too many people have projected Sharon's past behavior onto Israel's recent military operation to end terrorist attacks on its civilian population. The military incursion into Palestinian cities was not a Sharon operation; it was an operation of the entire Israel Defense Forces that was supported by the widest possible political spectrum in Israel. If dovish Shimon Peres were prime minister, he would have done no differently.
A government's first responsibility is to protect the safety and welfare of its citizens from outside attack. Israel - and Sharon - waited months before responding militarily to the Palestinian suicide attacks. Sharon did not send in the troops after a discotheque with dozens of teenagers was blown up last summer. He did not respond with Israel's military might all through the fall and winter as suicide bombings became the order of the day. It wasn't until the Passover massacre in Netanya that Israel, not just Sharon, said enough and turned to the tanks and bulldozers. What nation would have done differently? What nation would have waited that long?
Now the question about Sharon is what he will do next. Does he have a plan? Does he understand that the settlements, many of which he built himself, have become an obstacle to peace? These are the issues that President George W. Bush explored with Sharon this week in Washington. Clearly, the resumption of suicide bombings inside Israel Tuesday plays into his proclivity for confrontation.
But there is a further question that Sharon himself asks and for which there is no easy answer. That is, does he really have a partner with which to negotiate? The assumption behind the peace process, from Jimmy Carter at Camp David in 1978 to the Oslo Accords in 1993 to Bill Clinton at Camp David in the summer of 2000, was that the Palestinians would end the conflict if the right peace offer was made. But when former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak made that offer, or at least something very close to it, Arafat not only rejected it but turned to violence in violation of his solemn pledge on the White House lawn.
I was surprised and disappointed, as were many others who believed in the peace process. Sharon was not. His reading of Arafat might have been the correct one from the beginning.
And, if that is true, what does that say about the anti-Sharon crowd?

THE LEFT GETS A SCALP: I haven't yet written on the assassination of maverick Dutch politician
Pim Fortuyn, in large part because I never heard of him until a couple of months ago. From what I've been reading, though, I agree with Mickey Kaus that his murder is far, far more important than the mainstream U.S. papers seem to believe.
There's plenty of good stuff written about Fortuyn: Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Reynolds have plenty of items, as does - believe it or not - former MTV VJ Adam Curry, now living in Amsterdam (I think I remember his hair.) Rod Dreher also has an excellent piece on the ramifications of the killing.
One historical parallel has jumped out at me from the beginning, and not just because everything on this blog revolves around Israel: the 1995 murder of Yitzchak Rabin. I was in Israel at the time and remember the atmosphere well: Rabin's political opponents constantly delegitimized him and his positions, and either called him "traitor" or winked at those who did. Rabbis in yeshivot (including, allegedly, one in the yeshiva I was attending at the time, though I didn't know him) endorsed willful misinterpretations of old Jewish law to deem Rabin worthy of death (thus showing the greatest possible disrespect for the system to which their lives were supposedly devoted), and then were shocked, shocked when Yigal Amir took them seriously.
On the Continent, the political and media establishment desperately tried to shoehorn him into the same group as Le Pen and Haider, thus deeming him unworthy of debate. (This post is a good summary of the de-legitimizing that Fortuyn was subjected to.) The U.S. media has generally followed this pattern, for various reasons.
It appears that someone took that rhetoric seriously. I'm surprised that no one else has drawn the Rabin parallel.
Now, I don't want to go overboard in blaming the European politicians and media; the main person to blame is obviously the killer, and I don't want to diminish his responsibility in any way. But you'd think that some reassessment would be in order, and that overheated rhetoric would be toned down. Will it happen? I don't think so either.

DON'T SAVE THE IRA - OR, WHAT IS "GLOBAL REACH?" I had never put forth the effort required to learn about the issues underlying the conflict in Northern Ireland, and thus my thoughts on the matter were limited to incohate feelings of "terrorism bad - peace good."
In the immediate aftermath of September 11, I thought it might be a good idea for Britian, with the U.S.' encouragement, to mount a campaign to utterly exterminate the IRA. It wasn't that I thought the IRA had anything to do with September 11. Rather, irrelevance to September 11 was the point; in a war on terrorism, it would help to make the point that white European terrorists were just as worthy of destruction as Islamic fundamentalists. As Charles Krauthammer said regarding the inclusion of north Korea in Bush's "axis of evil," it would have been the "equivalent of strip-searching an 80-year-old Irish nun at airport security: It is our defense against ethnic profiling." Not long after September 11, though, there were signs that the IRA had been scared straight, quite unlike the Palestinians.
Now it appears that the IRA has resumed their activities which make them subject to President Bush's declaration of war against "terrorist groups of global reach."
Apparently they have been training Colombian and Palestinian terrorists in the fine arts of bomb-making.

THERE'S ALWAYS ROOM AT GUANTANAMO: How perversely funny is this? 13 of the worst terrorists holed up in the Church of the Nativity cannot find a country willing to take them in. Kind of makes you wonder why Israel is expected to let them roam free...

A WEEKLY TONIC: After tragedies like yesterday's massacre of 15 people in a pool hall in Rishon le-Tzion, you get tired of reading the same old claptrap from those who refuse to acknowledge reality. It is good to find someone unafraid of acknowledging the ramifications of such tragedies, like Michael Kelly:

[V]arious senior Bush administration officials were taking to the newspapers and the Sunday public affairs talk shows to pressure Sharon to, as Secretary of State Colin Powell delicately put it, "recognize who the Palestinian people look to as their leader," no matter "how disappointed we've been with him over time."
Yes, we have been a little disappointed, haven't we? You give a fellow a perfectly good peace process, not to mention the Nobel Peace Prize; award him much of the land he demands and a $90 million monthly budget; let him build an armed force on Israeli territory; and, finally (as America's former top negotiator, Dennis Ross, recently revealed in a remarkable Fox News interview), get both the president of the United States and the prime minister of Israel to promise him all of Gaza and nearly all of the West Bank as an independent and joined Palestinian state, with a right of Palestinian return to that state, plus a multibillion-dollar reparations fund -- and what does he do? He goes to war against you. Yes, a disappointment to us all.

FIRST, LET'S KILL ALL THE REPORTERS (WARNING: THAT WAS NOT MEANT SERIOUSLY): As long as we're criticizing the NY Times, The Idler has a damning analysis of the Times' coverage of the Palestinian terrorist attacks in March and April.
Second, from Charles Johnson, Daniel Gordon has a chilling account of a trip through Jenin with some notable journalists.

THIS IS (UNFORTUNATELY) MORE LIKE IT: I was at the annual Salute to Israel parade in Manhattan yesterday, an event far more heavily attended than in recent years. It was a good experience; considering the circumstances, the crowd was in reasonably good cheer.
I also noted a counter-demonstration over two blocks at the beginning of the parade route, strategically placed for maximum TV coverage. The parade began at 11:00 A.M. By the time we left at about 2:30, the counter-demonstration had largely petered out.
The editors of the New York Times seem to have missed the parade.
In describing media coverage of the Washington rally for Israel last month, James Lileks wrote:

To those of us who followed the story via mainstream press reports and blog updates, the story of the rally was the rally itself - its size, its tenor, the quickness with which it was assembled, and the lack of foaming hatred. Was Wolfie’s boo-fest the most distinguishing characteristic? No - unless you believe that conflict determines the story’s angle. And most reporters think that’s the case - not because they agree with the dissenters, but because they’ve been trained to look for the story in the dissent. Thus if a rally of 100,00 people is largely peaceful but has a brief skirmish with police at the margins as the crowd disperses, the headline and lede graf will be “Arrests mar hopes for peaceful rally.”
It’s the stupidest rule of journalism, and one of the most devoutly believed: The detail that contradicts the general impression often contains the truth of the event.

On today's front page, the Times had a large photo of the rally, but not just any picture.
The photo was taken behind the pro-Palestinian rally, and taking up most of the foreground is a poster which says "End Israel's Occupation in Palestine."
The Israel portion of the parade is only visible in the backround.
What makes the picture nonsensical is the caption:
"On Parade for Israel
Hundreds of thousands of people lined Fifth Avenue in Manhattan yesterday for a parade commemorating Israel's 54th anniversary. The boisterous but peaceful event also drew several hundred protestors."
So - the caption for the photo provides the (wholly appropriate) context; the protestors numbered several hundred while the parade participants were thousands of times that number. In other words, the caption completely subverts the story told by the photo.
In its own way, this mismatch between photo and caption is the true successor to the idiotic headline which inspired a contest last week.
Other papers are flagrantly biased and leave it at that, omitting any contrary facts. The Times' special talent, in my opinion, is in its skill at describing the facts which undercut its chosen positions while simultaneously refusing to face the ramifications of those facts.
UPDATE: Obviously, this post got results.
The Times issued the following correction under the heading "Editor's Note:"

An article yesterday about a parade in Manhattan marking Israel's 54th anniversary reported that 100,000 people had registered to march and hundreds of thousands more lined Fifth Avenue in support. The article also said that anti-Israel protesters numbered in the hundreds.
A front-page photograph, however, showed the parade in the background, with anti-Israel protesters prominent in the foreground, holding a placard that read, "End Israeli Occupation of Palestine." Inside the newspaper, a photo of a pro-Israel marcher was outweighed by a larger picture of protesters, one waving a sign that likened Zionism to Nazism.
Although the editors' intent in each case was to note the presence of opposing sides, the effect was disproportionate. In fairness the total picture presentation should have better reflected The Times's reporting on the scope of the event, including the disparity in the turnouts.
Nevermind...

FIRST, GOOD NEWS FROM THE TIMES: Nicholas Kristof has a shockingly good column today, noting, among other things, that poverty is not a "root cause" of terrorism:

...Osama bin Laden's tricycle was probably gold-plated, and we all know that the 9/11 hijackers came from privileged backgrounds. Look at ETA in Spain, Red Brigades in Italy, Aum Shinrikyo in Japan, the I.R.A. in Ireland or Timothy McVeigh: they suggest middle-class alienation rather than third-world deprivation.

ABOLISH THE STATE DEPARTMENT: I'm almost serious. Not content to be the U.S.' representatives in the League of Appeasement, it now seems like the State Department has been actively working aganist President Bush's policy of "regime change" in Iraq.
First, Jim Hoagland describes how the State Department is working overtime to undercut the Iraqi National Congress so as to claim that there is no viable alternative to Saddam:

Unable to dissuade Congress and the White House from backing the only Iraqi opposition group with a record of fighting against Saddam Hussein and for democracy in Iraq, the State Department is now trying to strangle the Iraqi National Congress with red tape provided by State's inspector general's office.
The tip of an ugly struggle between the INC and the State Department's Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs surfaced this week when the opposition group was forced to shut down satellite television broadcasting into Iraq. The rebels had plunged $2 million in debt broadcasting propaganda against the Iraqi regime after State cut off funding in February in a dispute over accounting procedures.
This was no isolated event: The INC television shutdown came immediately after the White House rebuffed Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage's effort to funnel $5 million to the Middle East Institute, a Washington think tank working to promote rival Iraqi groups. Armitage had failed to notice that Ned Walker, the head of the institute, had publicly scorned President Bush's "axis of evil" metaphor as "ridiculous."
...The funding cutoff to the INC, an amazingly detailed and fussy set of audits that the inspector general's office was instructed to perform on the Iraqi group, and State's abrupt cancellation of the Walker grant are matters of public record. Armitage's urgent telephone call to Henry Hyde to get the chairman of the House International Relations Committee to let the Walker grant go ahead -- despite serious questions the astute Republican legislator had -- is confirmed by State and Hyde's office. The White House role? I trust my sources.
State Deparment animus toward the Iraqi National Congress -- much of it generated by old and festering quarrels between the group's leaders and the CIA over toppling Saddam Hussein -- is also an established reality. Since Congress passed the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998 to force the Clinton administration to fund the INC as the core of an effective Iraqi opposition, the Near East bureau has worked to undo the intent of the legislation while avoiding responsibility for doing so.
Enlisting the weight of Armitage's office and the inspector general's staff conveniently accomplishes both goals, INC leaders charge. Well, they would say that, wouldn't they? But their suspicions are shared by some officials at the State Department who have witnessed the trial by auditing and persecution by leaks to the press that the Iraqi group has endured.
"I have never seen a group we are told to help treated the way the INC has been treated," says an authoritative source. "Any group trying to run an espionage and guerrilla campaign is going to have accounting problems, of course. This kind of find-every-flaw approach only happens when there is pressure from the top to change an outcome."

In a previous column, Hoagland assessed the State Department's attitude by putting his words into Sharon's mouth:

You think I just fell off the cabbage truck? You think I don't know what is going on in Washington? That I don't see the serious and widening differences between Powell and the White House on fighting the war on terrorism? It is a priority for State, the priority for Bush.
What was it Henry Kissinger told me about the State Department? That it would never frontally fight a big policy decreed by the White House but would undo that policy one small decision at a time? That means that protecting a Musharraf or a Mubarak -- or an Arafat -- becomes the purpose of today's decision, rather than advancing the long-term goal of going after the killers and fanatics that these "leaders" protect or encourage. Improving relations with China, with Russia, with Crown Prince Abdullah, that's the important business of foreign policy that State is eager to get back to.

If that isn't bad enough, Joshua Marshall has the following scoop regarding Cheney's trip to the Middle East:

This evening I was talking to a very knowledgeable insider on Middle Eastern affairs, and he said that the State Department had sent out word to folks in the region to give Cheney an earful. Among other things, said my source: "[Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs] Bill Burns met with a prominent Arab ambassador here and he told him, 'Don't tell me your views on Iraq. When he goes there you guys tell him.' So this is the vice president going to the region to hear Arab views and he came back and reported to the president 'The Arabs are not on our side.' They set him up. They set him up."

I'm not sure where bureaucratic warfare morphs into treason, but that seems pretty close.

MORE GOOD STUFF FROM THE POST: Charles Krauthammer has another excellent column regarding the truth of Jenin, and the ramifications of the world's indifference to it. Citing a list of recent Palestinian terrorist attacks, he notes:

These are massacres -- actual, recent massacres. Massacres for which the evidence is hard. Massacres for which the perpetrators claimed credit. Where was the Security Council? Where was the Kofi Annan commission? Where was the world?
The United Nations' excuse will be that these murders were perpetrated not by states but by groups. But this is nonsense. The Palestinian Authority is a recognized government. The links of its top leadership to these murders is precisely the kind of question that warrants investigation. Yet the very idea that the United Nations would investigate Palestinian massacres is absurd.
The fact that such an undertaking is unimaginable is what has made the past several months so deeply, despairingly troubling. The despair comes from the bewilderment of living in a world of monstrous moral inversion.
...Palestinian apologists wave away this double standard with the magic mantra of "occupation."
More nonsense. Twenty-one months ago, Israel offered a total end to the occupation, ceding 100 percent of Gaza and 97 percent of the West Bank to the first Palestinian state ever. The Palestinians turned that down and took up the suicide bomb. By the Orwellian logic of today, the Palestinians are justified in perpetrating one massacre after another to end an occupation that Israel offered to remove almost two years ago.
For the "international community," as embodied by the United Nations, such inverted moral logic is the norm. This is what it must have been like living in the false consciousness of Soviet communism, where everyone had to publicly and constantly pretend to believe the official lies, all the while knowing they were lies. This is what it must have been like living in the 1930s, as the necessities of appeasement created a gradual inversion of right and wrong -- the Czechs, for example, pilloried by official opinion in Britain and France for selfishly standing in the way of peace at Munich.

Why can't the New York Times have any such clarity on its editorial pages?

THE POST IS SMOKIN' (BUT NOT INHALIN'): The Washington Post has a great editorial on the ghastly prospect of a Bill Clinton talk show.

IN DEFENSE OF MUDDLING: The irreplaceable Jonathan Rauch describes why muddling through the Middle East crisis is the best policy for now:
There are moments that call for emergency action and a clear and unified government policy. The terrorist attack on America was such a moment. The current crisis in the Middle East is not. In the Middle East, now is the time for muddling through, extemporizing, and sowing a certain amount of constructive confusion. Now is the time to zig and zag. Now is the time, above all, not to be panicked by doomsayers.
He also outlines the problems that would be raised by introducing American "peacekeepers" on a large scale, which most advocates of that policy ignore:

The day American and other foreign forces landed in Palestine, any militant with a dime's worth of sense would know exactly what to do: Test the peacekeepers by attacking Israel with suicide bombers, rockets, mortars, or whatever works. Something like that, recall, happened in southern Lebanon in the early 1980s, when Palestinian militants exchanged blows with Israel over the heads of a United Nations peacekeeping force. (The U.N. force, by the way, is still there and has suffered 245 fatalities to date.)
If peacekeepers allowed Israel to respond militarily to strikes from Palestine, the war would be on again, this time with hapless peacekeepers diving for cover in the middle. On the other hand, if the peacekeepers restrained the Israelis, they would effectively shield the aggressors, as foreign forces ended up doing in Bosnia.
In any case, surely the only way to hold off an Israeli response would be for the peacekeepers to promise to hunt down the bombers themselves. If they kept that promise, they would turn the Israeli-Palestinian military conflict into an American-Palestinian military conflict -- an outcome that Osama bin Laden would dearly love. More likely, they would squabble about what to do, taking halfhearted measures and creating an endless "coalition crisis." The militants would love that, too. After a while, Israel would get fed up and roll its tanks to the border, causing a diplomatic or even military showdown between Israel and the peacekeepers. By this point, the militants would be beside themselves with glee.

Robert Kagan made similar arguments in a recent article.
I think that Rauch is on to something in his dismissal of the talk of "emergency." Much of the urgency, in my opinion, exists in the minds of those in the media, on the Israeli left, in the U.N. and State Department - who were looking forward to a once-in-a-lifetime peace settlement and are instead confronted with the prospect of returning to what passed for a quotidian situation in the region, of constant-but-manageable hostility with no imminent prospects of resolution. They are panicked over the death of hope. But hope for something which does not exist is mere fantasy, which is a poor basis for policy. And it blinds the "hopeful" to the real point, which is that the event which was most likely to stop the death spiral of the region was Ariel Sharon sending Israeli troops into the West Bank.

THEY SHOOT THE CORPSES, DON'T THEY? Apparently the Palestinians have beenstaging fake funerals in Jenin.

A BETTER WAY FOR THE U.N. TO SPEND ITS TIME: Yossi Klein Halevi outlines what the U.N. should try investigating for a change.

THOSE SIMPLISTIC, VIOLENT EUROPEANS: Yet another great piece by Mark Steyn on the contrast between American and European reactions to September 11:

Well, sure enough, the crude, xenophobic rednecks did assert themselves. But not in America — in Europe. Muslims kill thousands of Americans in America, and there’s a big anti-Muslim backlash ...in France! Oh, and also Denmark, the Netherlands, Portugal and those other provinces of the land of sophistication where explicitly Islamophobic parties are now a significant part of the political calculus. What d’you reckon Le Pen’ll get this weekend? Just his 17 per cent base? Maybe 20? And how many voters will stay home? France’s domestic intelligence agency has apparently advised the government that Le Pen will pull at least 30 per cent. That seems rather high for a chap BBC announcers, demonstrating their famous impartiality, describe as ‘virulent’. There can’t, surely, be that many French electors willing to vote for M. Le Virulent, can there? I mean, this isn’t Mississippi, is it?
For the Europhiles in the US media, the events of recent weeks are bewildering. It’s barely two months since they were reporting approvingly every snotty crack by Chris Patten and Hubert Vedrine and regretting that Washington was so out of step with Europe. But then the synagogue attacks became too frequent to ignore, and M. Le Pen whupped Jospin’s sorry ass, and frankly, if you can pick only one place to be out of step with, Europe’s an excellent choice. Like the man almost said, I do smell destabilising violence in the wings. In fear, the Continent, to my mind, has always proved mean-spirited and violent. M. Le Pen is certainly ‘mean-spirited’; the synagogue burners and kosher-butcher shooter-uppers and Jewish schoolbus stoners are certainly violent. And somehow, when Messrs Patten and Vedrine were deploring American ‘simplisme’, it never occurred to us that their idea of sophistication was a culture in which the most interesting political question is which strain of anti-Semitism — anti-Jew or anti-Arab or anti-both — is more potent.
...Almost every ‘American’ nightmare the elites warn against is, in fact, an already well-established European reality: downmarket TV, xenophobic electorates, Wild West lawlessness.
...Muslims killed thousands of Americans, but America doesn’t have anti-Muslim political parties — just a goofy President who hosts a month of Ramadan knees-ups at the White House and enjoins schoolkids to get an Islamic penpal. America has millions of Muslims, but they don’t firebomb synagogues and beat up Jews, and, if they did, the police wouldn’t turn a blind eye. Meanwhile, France has a presidential candidate who makes oven jokes, a foreign minister who believes in the international Jewish conspiracy, and a number-one bestseller which claims the plane that crashed into the Pentagon never existed. But look on the bright side: Europe may be ‘mean-spirited and violent’, but at least it’s not American.

BLACK IS NOT WHITE: James Lileks has another phenomenal piece today on, among other things, why those who compare Sharon to Hitler are saying far more about their lack of moral and intellectual capacity than about the Middle East:
Aphorism #1: Nothing is ever black and white, but if the other side says it is, then you’d better operate on that principle.
...When the citizens of Israel are told daily by their press and TV that the Arabs are subhumans who must be destroyed, then Sharon will be like Hitler. When Arabs must wear crescents on their shirts, Sharon will be Hitler. When stadiums full of Jews bay for the blood of the Arabs, and pour out in a torchlight parade to kick and beat and shave the beards of devout Muslims, Sharon will be Hitler. When the organizing principles of the Jewish state are war against neighbors, territorial conquest and the extirpation or subjugation of all non-Jewish peoples, the Sharon will be Hitler. When the mosques are burned and the minarets toppled and the babies thrown in the air and speared on bayonet point, Sharon will be Hitler.
As it stands, there is not an Arab member of the Knesset who even worries that the door to his office will have its locks changed overnight.
...What makes the Sharon = Hitler construction so unforgivable isn’t just the dilution of the true horror of Nazism. The very idea suggests that its possessor has succumbed to moral imbecility. Hitler was devoted to the destruction of the Jews. Not the subjugation of a people for a political purpose, but the destruction of an entire race. And who preaches that today? I was listening this morning to a talk show host broadcasting from Israel, and he was noting what he saw on Israeli TV, and Palestinian TV. (Did Hitler allow an all-Jewish radio station to broadcast in Berlin in the 40s? Just asking.) The Palestinian TV had an interview with a psychiatrist about what to do if your child wants to be a martyr. He was generally against the idea, but the show was interrupted by ads featuring Arafat shouting Martyrdom! Martyrdom! Martyrdom! (The anti-globo folks would prefer this to an ad for Coke, I guarantee you.)
...There was the murder of the five-year old girl by Palestinian operatives. Shot to death in her bed. Shot to death in her Mickey Mouse sheets. Shot to death by a man who could look a child in the face and rejoice in her shattered skull. I know there are some people who believe that Israeli soldiers intentionally kill children, and that killing five-year olds is Israeli state policy. Believe what you want. Just find me the Israeli paper that celebrates this action. Find me the wall poster that salutes this brave soldier. Sing me the song that glorifies this murder as an active of devotion to G-d. Then tell me this:
Who is the greater threat to this child pictured below? It’s either the nation that withdrew from the Sinai, withdrew from Lebanon, admits Islamic Movement politicians to its deliberative body and would gladly make peace with any nation not sworn to destroy it - or it’s the culture that hangs the grenade around the necks of its children.
You decide. Let us pretend, for the sake of argument, that it’s actually a case of black and white.

BRUCE BANNER WAS ALWAYS A WIMP: Via InstaPundit, Meryl Yourish sets out the "Stan Lee Solution" to the Middle East crisis, starring the Incredible Hulk. I think her proposals are more realisitc than anything floated by the State Department on the topic.

WHY NOT TO BE AN ACADEMIC: Check out this hilarious post by Tony Woodlief about his experiences getting his Ph.D.

MY ALMA MATER SLIPPED UP IN ITS HIRING: A visiting professor at Columbia Law School makes some points which seem obvious, but I never expected to hear them expressed by a member of the faculty there:

Nothing the UN has done in recent memory justified a shift in earlier attitudes. On the contrary, in the past year the UN sponsored a vicious antiSemitic World Conference "Against" Racism in Durban that wrongly characterized the "plight of the Palestinian people" as one of racial persecution, fanned the flames of anti-Semitism and provoked irrational passions that undermined both the cause of peace and of human dignity.
...Seeking to rid itself of a serious image image problem in view of its highly selective interest in terrorism, the Security Council last fall adopted Resolution 1373. It called upon member states to report back about action they had taken to combat terrorism. Defining terrorism was omitted. Reports poured in - more than 150 by now - and those from Arab states repeatedly invoke the Arab Terrorism Convention. It says armed struggle "by whatever means . . . against foreign occupation and aggression for liberation and self-determination" is not an offense [while excluding any such action directed at Arab states]. Those reports are being considered by the council's Counter Terrorism Committee, which is making sure no posssible queries or criticism of this distinction leak out.
Not that such criticism will ever be forthcoming. Syria - one of the nations the American State Department has designated as a state sponsor of international terrorism - is on the Security Council wreaking havoc. The council is now a platform for continuous advocacy of terrorism as a strategy of this state's political interests. These interests, shared by the rest of the Organization of Islamic Conference, were sufficiently powerful at the UN to defeat in January the adoption of a Comprehensive Convention Against Terrorism. The OIC is holding out for a license to kill Israelis.
The Security Council call for a Jenin investigation, and continuing efforts at the council to draw fire away from Palestinian terrorism, is part of familiar UN strategy. For years, the UN has been the Palestinians' personal, well-financed advocate. There are hugely disproportionate numbers of UN resolutions on Israel (19 in the 2001 General Assembly, eight in the 2002 Human Rights Commission) while allegations of human-rights violations anywhere else are routinely ignored. Nothing ever on China or Syria, for instance. There are myriad reports over decades on Israel by three UN bodies and by an entire UN division dedicated to Palestinian rights. All of this goes on while Israelis are kept on the outside as the only UN state not permitted to stand for election to the full range of UN bodies.
In the din, the UN endgame has been obvious for years. The UN has the answers: Jerusalem belongs to Yasser Arafat, as General Assembly resolutions have proclaimed. Enormous numbers of Palestinian refugees should be able to return so as to destroy the Jewish character of the state of Israel, according to the UN Durban Declaration - now metastasizing its way through the entire anti-racism program of the UN. And these "solutions" should be imposed by international intervention under UN auspices.
...In short, the UN turns the war on terrorism, and the meaning of human rights, on its head. Suicide bombing is right. Self-defense is wrong.

For a more usual reflection of how Columbia Law School responds to the war on terrorism, see these reflections from the most recent alumni magazine. While the fora took place not long after 9/11, the reactions haven't aged well.

ANOTHER NOBEL PEACE PRIZE WINNER SPEAKS OUT: Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the 1984 winner, recently compared Israel's policies towards the Palestinians to apartheid, saying that he saw "the humiliation of the Palestinians at checkpoints and roadblocks, suffering like us when young white police officers prevented us from moving about."
He also blamed the "Jewish lobby:"

People are scared in this country, to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful - very powerful. Well, so what?
The apartheid government was very powerful, but today it no longer exists.
Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Pinochet, Milosevic, and Idi Amin were all powerful, but in the end they bit the dust.

Damian Penny provides an accurate rejoinder:

Think about that for a second: Archbishop Desmond Tutu compared the "Jewish lobby" to Hitler, Stalin and Idi Amin. And like many Palestinian sympathizers, he's upset about the "humiliating" checkpoints and roadblocks set up by the Israelis. Might I make the radical suggestion that the Israelis wouldn't need roadblocks if the Palestinians weren't sending so many suicide killers?
Apartheid was based on racism. Israel's security policies are based on the fact that the Israelis are surrounded by 300 million people who want to kill them. Are you incapable of telling the difference, or do you simply not care?