THIS IS WHY I WASTED MY YOUTH: Any comic-book addict must read the item titled "Killing Monsters" by Virginia Postrel.

SHAPE UP OR... Fouad Ajami, in his usual poetic way, tells the Palestinians to break with their destructive nostalgia. He also points out the essential truth of Oslo
For nearly a decade, under the Clinton presidency, and the unwritten rules of the peace of Oslo, the regime of Yasser Arafat was granted undue indulgence. The man winked at terror, aided and abetted and committed it, but he was Pax Americana's man, and he was seen as the best of a bad lot. It was either Arafat or the deluge, we were told.
But it was Arafat and the deluge. We couldn't have a democratic Palestine, the logic had it; we had better settle for a stable Palestine. The bargain did not work. Arafat was skilled at taking the furies and the failures of his regime, as well as the wrath of his people, and diverting it, away from himself, toward Israel and its American benefactor. He had young men and young women aplenty willing to commit terrible deeds: He would feed this cult of "martyrdom," the merciless suicide bombers, and now and then, under duress, issue tepid condemnations of terror that he himself had exalted and called forth.

SOMEONE GETS IT: Ari Shavit has some intriguing thoughts on the Bush speech in Ha-aretz, arguing that Bush is applying his distaste for the "soft bigotry of low expectations" against the Palestinians.

A PICTURE WORTH NO WORDS: Further evidence of the psychotic death cult possessing the Palestinians.

ANOTHER EDITION OF "BE CAREFUL FOR WHAT YOU ASK FOR"? The Supreme Court has found school vouchers to be constitutional.
I've been a long-time supporter of vouchers, for a ariety of reasons. But, as Prof. Reynolds points out, there is an undeniable likelihood that vouchers will be used to support students' attendance at schools like jihad-loving madrassas.
Jonathan Rauch has pointed out some likely yet unforseen consequences of a wide adoption of school vouchers:

[V]oucher schools won't be unregulated. Taxpayers will demand to know why their money should support any schools that lack certified teachers, that reject affirmative action, that have leaky roofs, that produce low test scores, that duck testing altogether, that ignore special education, that teach only in English, that provide no counseling, that expel students without due process, that turn away too many applicants, that teach goofy curriculums, that shortchange girls' sports, that skimp on antidrug education, that ban gay clubs, that allow gay clubs, that teach too much about sex, or that teach too little about sex.
The public is accustomed to holding schools politically accountable, and to thinking of quality schooling as a right; it will apply both principles to voucher schools, much as it already applies them to health maintenance organizations, and may soon apply them to pharmaceutical companies. Some schools, especially religious ones, will hold out by shunning government money. But their number and market share will dwindle, as billions of taxpayer dollars pour into voucher schools. Over time, the character of American private education will change. Eventually, most private schools may look less like private schools and more like privately owned public utilities.
The qualification is that there would be more competition in education than exists today. Voucher money would seed thousands of new private schools, and public schools would be more competitive. In fact, competition would pressure ossified public schools to cut red tape, even as politics pressured private schools to spin more of it. Because public schools enroll almost 90 percent of the country's pupils, the net effect would almost certainly be positive.
If you happen to be a New Democrat, say, or some other variety of government-friendly pragmatist, vouchers are a great idea. Increased competition in the education sector as a whole will delight you, and the increased regulation of private schools won't bother you much. The Right's unalloyed enthusiasm for vouchers is a bit harder to justify. Conservatives want to get the state out of public education; they may succeed at getting the state into private education. Twenty years from now, they may be slapping their foreheads and saying, "What were we thinking when we crusaded to hook private schools on public money?" And the teachers unions, which by then may have extended many of today's anticompetitive public school rules to the private realm, may be saying, "Boy, were we ever lucky we lost that fight. Now all schools are public."

I think Rauch is correct. It's impossible to take government money and hold out indefinitely against strings, and in general, the trend towards greater federal governmental involvement in education is very strong.

MEGAN MCARDLE IS READY TO GET MARRIED: I think it's apparent from this entertaining and informative post on the WorldCom disaster:

One of the driving forces at the end of the nineties was that most research analysts were rather like fiancees. They had developed unrealistic expectations of the future based on the very short, and unusually rosy, period through which they had just lived. In the case of the equity analysts, they had begun to feel that they were entitled to see beautifully rising earnings each and ever quarter even though it was clear that if one extrapolated their expectations into the not-so-distant future, Toys 'R Us would be producing more revenue than the entire US economy. Much like a fiancee who is told that she should not expect her prospective groom to indefinitely continue to give up his best friend's superbowl party in order to escort her to the mall, research analysts got very cranky when they were told that their dreams of infinitely expandable earnings might be a tad unrealistic.
Like prospective grooms, CEO's were very anxious to please the equity analysts, because they were very afraid that if they didn't meet expectations, their beloved would start throwing the wedding china at someone's head.

Suitors are directed to her site.

THIS IS NOT A JOKE: Michael Dukakis' fantasy has finally come true.
UPDATE: Eugene Volokh defends the 9th Circuit's reasoning, but predicts it will probably be struck down nonetheless by the Supreme Court.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Walter Dellinger half-jokingly points out the ramifications of the decision:
Article VII of the Constitution itself—which makes the document operative as a proposal for ratification—concludes "done in Convention … the Seventeenth Day of September in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and Eighty seven … ." If "Year of Our Lord," like "under God," can make something unconstitutional, then the Constitution itself is unconstitutional and the court's decision a nullity. In fact, without the Constitution, the 9th Circuit doesn't legally exist.

PARTIALLY ON VACATION: Joshua Marshall checks in from vacation to object to the Bush speech, comparing it to "cheap donuts."
Marshall states:
The highlight, the shot in the arm, of this exercise is supposed to be the US endorsement of a Palestinian state, or rather a provisional state.
That comment presupposes that the purpose of the speech was to give the Palestinians a "shot in the arm." While the editorial boards of the New York Times and the Washington Post persist in that misunderstanding, the rest of the speech served strong notice to the contrary. The speech was much more akin to an intervention, with the aim of forcing the Palestinians to confront the hopelessness of the current path. Hopelessness is the key. In the words of Joe Katzman, "until the Palestinians lose all hope, they must not be allowed to have it."
Marshall also says:
The rub to the proposal is that the Palestinians can have their state - or rather their provisional state - only if they get rid of their current leadership. So they can rule themselves if they choose leaders acceptable to the United States and/or the Israelis. Not to be knee-jerk about this, but isn't that almost the definition of colonialism, the antithesis of what it means to have your own state? The essence of sovereignty or statehood is that you pick your own leaders.
I think Marshall would agree that a Palestinian state under current leadership would be, to put it mildly, a danger to Israel and to the interests of the United States. Were that state to be in existence, Israel and/or the US would be justified in invading it and terminating its sovereignty when faced with such a threat. I don't see why preventing such a state from coming into being is worse, whether you call it "colonialism" or "self-defense." Sovereignty is not an absolute right; it can be infringed when a nation poses a threat to its neighbors, and may forfeit its right to exist when it poses a threat to the existence of another.
Marshall's retort would probably be this sentence from his piece:
But that's the law of power and violence. And that law more or less gives the Palestinians free rein to continue their own campaign of unbridled violence.
No, it doesn't.
Leaving aside the relevance of comparative morality (i.e., if there is a contest for survival betwen two entities, and only one of them has a deliberate policy of murdering innocent civilians, the choice of which one to support is not especially difficult), the existence of a Palestinian state has never been predicated on violence. Just the opposite - two words: Camp David. The Palestinian's turn to violence was in rejection of a peaceful alternative, and no "law" permits violence in the face of such an alternative.
I don't think Marshall meant everything I'm accusing him of, but his piece lends itself to that interpretation.
Take it up again when you get back from hiatus.

BUSH TO ARAFAT: "DROP DEAD": I was fortunate enough to hear President Bush's magisterial speech while driving home yesterday.
I think the President's speech was the best one on the subject since...since the statement of "Whatever decision Minister Dayan makes, I wish him good luck" (or similar words to such effect), allegedly made by then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to Israeli emissaries seeking assurances that the U.S. would not intervene if Israel would pre-emptively launch what became the Six-Day War. I cannot think of any public addresses that compare to it; certainly the amount of recognized realities in the speech far exceeded the recommended dosage for the digestive system of your average State Department official. But this site has a long-standing belief that free-riding is the best policy. Accordingly, in lieu of an extended exposition on the subject, I direct you to the following:
1-3: Steven Den Beste, who has outdone himself again in three separate posts: an overview, a discussion of the ramifications for the Arab world generally, and an argument why the speech should be viewed as an ultimatum paving the way for a larger war. I think the last piece may be more wishful thinking than intended policy, but let's hope it's true.
(As an aside - why is that something to be hoped for? Well, just to pick one example, is there another way to change a region with these types of kindergarten graduations? Tal G. provides an English translation of an article on the affair, along with a link to the Hebrew original.)
4-7: Start your Joe Katzman reading with this analysis of Palestinian strategy. (Unfortunately, the Stratfor piece referenced in the article is no longer freely available.)
Continue with this scenario as to how the current conflict could widen into something much, much bigger. Then see this piece about the abyss towards which the Palestinians and most other Arab states are careening, as well as this one.
8: This Stratfor item, freely available for now, discusses the ramifications of the speech for Saudi Arabia and the larger fight against Al Qaeda. It is a good summary of the Saudi motives behind their promotion of the Palestinian cause and attempted dissuasion of the U.S. from an invasion of Iraq.
9: David Brooks has a good short summary.
10: In Ha-aretz, David Landau got off the best soundbite: "Yasser Arafat, the seemingly immortal leader of the Palestinian national movement, was politically assassinated Monday by President George W. Bush."

I RULE! I won't be able to post again until Monday night. But in the meantime, you may amuse yourselves by reading the first (as far as I know) "Warblogger Watch" nasty takedown of yours truly. The post to which they refer now looks even better. I may respond to them in greater detail when I return.

BACK AGAIN: Sorry for the lack of posts. There's so much I want to write regarding the recent orgy of terrorism that the Palestinians have unleashed on Israel. I have finally been moved to finsh - more or less - the following post which I've been working on for a long time. Much more in the morning.

THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME, OR BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU ASK FOR: Will a Palestinian state actually serve U.S. interests? It seems to me that the assumptions to that effect fall away if you think things through about how things will occur in the real world, as opposed to the fantasy world of a campus protest rally or a U.N. conference. Here’s why:
1) How will a Palestinian state come about?
Massive U.S. intervention and sponsorship. The intifada of the last two years has destroyed any trust between the two sides, and the reversion of the Europeans and the U.N. to their conventional role as abettors of genocide has ruined their chances of playing any constructive role (other than staying in Israeli hotels, as the tourism industry has collapsed). The new Palestinian state will be labeled “Made in the U.S.A.”
2) Will the Palestinians get everything they want in their state?
Given that polls suggest that they want the elimination of Israel, not likely. Even under their stated goals of 100% of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, any Palestinian state likely to come into being in the next few years would involve some or all of the following:
A) Israeli annexation of some of the larger settlements close to the Green Line (if you think Ma’ale Adumim or Efrat are going to be dismantled, think again) – thus, less than 100% of the West Bank being given to the Palestinians;
B) An extremely minimal “right of return,” if any, that leaves Arafat in the position of having to tell the refugees “no, you can’t go back to the house in Jaffa which you fled over 50 years ago.”;
C) Official demilitarization (which will be flouted, but that’s another issue), lack of power over airspace, and other such limitations on what most nations rightfully consider perks of statehood.
Also, the new state is likely to be an economic basket case for a while after its formation (especially if Arafat and his Merry Kleptomaniacs are in a position to access any of the international aid money). Its proximity to and economic dependence on Israel, and the fact that Palestinians have a reputation as being among the most entrepreneurial of the Arab peoples, would bode well for its economic well-being in the future, there is no question that it will take a while for the state to be economically viable.
3) How will the Palestinians rationalize the fact that their state does not match their expectations (fantasies)?
Presumably – and likely stoked by Arafat, if he is still in charge, as a defense against charges of “sellout” – by focusing on what they did not get and resolving not to forget about it, that such things will be gotten in the future. The Palestinians have shown that they can remember with the best of them.
In a typical negotiation, having one side say “we’ll get’em next time” might be encouraged as a way to get that side to agree to an imperfect deal this time. That is because in a typical situation, that party will usually either (a) try to win the points “next time” in a semi-respectable fashion, or (b) the immediacy of the unmet concerns will dissipate as the party focuses on dealing with what was achieved. Will either be true in this case?
4) What will be the result of that rationalization?
Two complementary results:
A) The Palestinians will be mightily disappointed, and will blame those they deem responsible.
B) Since they got what they did get after a two-year orgy of murder – the Hizbullah-in-Lebanon strategy having worked again – they will be sorely tempted to think that pushing further will yield the rest of what they want.
The Palestinians could focus on trying to make their situation better. Or they can focus on blaming the parties they deem responsible for taking away their dreams. Undoubtedly there will be some of the former, but there is 50 years’ worth of precedent that says an awful lot of energy will be focused on the latter.
According to Michael Isikoff in Newsweek (to which I can no longer find a link), supposedly Bill Clinton’s Camp David proposals included a requirement for all parties to declare that the settlement was a final resolution of all their disputes, and that neither party had any remaining claims. (The idea was also pushed by Charles Krauthammer at the time.) Clinton understood that if the Palestinians were to be allowed to pocket their gains and simultaneously retain claims to whatever they had supposedly “compromised” away, then the settlement would only set the stage for future conflict. Can you see the State Department allowing this future point to get in the way of a deal in the present? I didn’t think so, either.
Aside #1: The tendency to focus on the negative will be amplified by a permutation of what Mickey Kaus has called the “Feiler Faster Thesis” – that the ramifications of news and information get processed much faster today than in less technologically advanced times. In this case, the new Palestine’s failure to immediately thrive economically will be treated as a disaster – even if its growth & development were to be impressive in historical terms, as it may be with its proximity to Israel and all the international aid that will slosh around. Combine that with an inertial media that will be slow to give up reporting stories about the Palestinians’ misery, and you have a recipe for a nascent nation that will continue its habit of accentuating the negative.)
Aside #2: I’m not going to get into the likelihood that the Arab nations will work to undermine the possibility of a thriving Palestinian polity, which is strong – read the chapter of Fouad Ajami’s The Dream Palace of the Arabs titled “The Orphaned Peace” if you don’t believe me; you’ll never look at the “Saudi peace proposal” the same way again.
To recap: The formation of a Palestinian state, in anything resembling the manner which seems most likely at present will mean that U.S. will be seen as responsible for a situation which simultaneously makes the Palestinians feel betrayed and encourages them to hope for getting everything they want if they just push harder.
So:
5) What will be the near-term result of creating a Palestinian state under anything resembling current conditions?
Undoubtedly, the Palestinians will be encouraged to launch more terrorism against Israel. Regardless of how unsympathetic to Israel the State Department seems sometimes, I can’t imagine how even they would deem that situation to serve America’s interests in the region.
More importantly, since (as far as the Palestinians are concerned) the U.S. will have become a “betrayer” of Palestinian interests, and with the efficacy of terrorism having been proven, the Palestinians will also have great incentive to use terrorism directly against America.
In sum: The creation of a Palestinian state under current conditions will lead to increased terrorism – certainly against Israel and quite probably against America.

A PALESTINIAN FAMILY: Today's NY Times has a chilling account (and equally chilling photo) of another mother who only wants the best for her son:

Just what the Israelis were up against was suggested by a videotape, released by the militant group Hamas, which claimed responsibility for the attack, showing the Palestinian killed in the clash, 23-year-old Muhammad al-Abed.
He is seen holding hands with his mother, Naima al-Abed, then gently kissing her on the head, and placing his green fighter's headband with an Islamic inscription over her white scarf. "I am not losing you because you are going to paradise," the mother tells her son on the tape. "Our message to the Israeli occupiers and killers is that this is our land. And our sons that we love are no more dear to us than our land. Their blood will redeem it."

FROM THE HISTORIAN'S MOUTH: Here's an excellent interview with Michael Oren, the author of Six Days of War, a new history of the Six-Day War.

THE FACE OF (FUTURE) BATTLE: I'm late to this story, but if anyone hasn't already seen it, you must read - sitting down and on an empty stomach - about the incarnation of evil, in the form of the "people" who are responsible for this girl. If reading the account doesn't give you enough nightmares, Steven Den Beste has a picture of the girl.

I COULDN'T HAVE SAID IT BETTER MYSELF, VOL. II: The Professor cites an outstanding (and long!) article by David White in New Zealand on the clash of civilizations embodied in the war on terrorism. It's too long to excerpt, but it's great. Print it out and read it over lunch.

I COULDN'T HAVE SAID IT BETTER MYSELF: It's good when someone like William Safire makes most of the arguments I would have made against a "provisional" Palestinian state, only more eloquently:

1. Statehood, even if qualified as provisional or interim, confers a degree of sovereignty. That means control of borders, the ability to make treaties, and to import arms from Iraq and by sea from Iran.
2. Partial statehood would give Arafat control of an airport. A plane loaded with fuel or explosives could hit a major Tel Aviv building within three minutes, too quickly for Israeli jets to scramble. Ritual condemnation would follow.
3. Any form of statehood would limit Israel's ability to search out bomb factories and arrest terrorist leaders. What is now a tolerable sweep into disputed territory would be denounced in the U.N. as invasion pure and simple. That would trigger European economic boycotts and draw Arab allies into a wider war.
Why, then, offer Arafat's autocracy this pre-emptive prize? State Department Arabists claim it would show "movement" away from solid Bush support for Israel and, in the still-dovish Shimon Peres's phrase, offer a "political horizon" to Palestinians. But some of us see recognition of an unreformed P.L.O. as offering a taste of triumph to jihadists from Netanya to New York.

...What about Mubarak's "timetable" for full statehood, with a down payment of the 40 percent of the West Bank and Gaza now under Palestinian control, including almost all the Arab population? That is similar to the territorial timetable dreamily agreed to at Oslo, which assumed that regular concessions of land would lead to mutual trust and peace. Instead, Israel's calibrated concessions led to Arafat's insatiable demands and ultimately to war. A timetable for a state of Palestine would become a deadline for Israeli negotiators.

A friend recently joked that the Bush Doctrine has been altered as follows: for every terrorist regime toppled by the U.S., a new one must be created in its place.

UPDATE: The editors of Newsday object from the opposite perspective:

There is something absurd about the idea of declaring a provisional state before a defining its borders and resolving the fate of Jewish settlements existing within them. Even the symbolic usefulness of such a declaration would evaporate in the heat of the profound issues that would need to be settled to make it work.
And what does "provisional" mean? That it might be dissolved if things don't work out? That's a recipe for Palestinian rage. The only sensible provision - and one on which Bush and Sharon justifiably insist - is that no meaningful negotiations on a Palestinian state can even start unless suicide bombings and other forms of violence end. On that, everyone must agree. Bush is right, for now, to focus U.S. efforts on pragmatic ways of reducing violence and pressing the Palestinian Authority for reforms.

Adding together the Safire and Newsday criticisms, you see the following: The ill effects of a "provisional" Palestinian state will persist, while the benefits will evaporate quickly. Another winner from the State Department.

DEPARTMENT OF INTERNATIONAL INSECURITY: Is Colin Powell merely playing the good cop (as far as the international community & media are concerned) or does he actually believe the BS he is shoveling? I used to think that it was primarily the former (see this article for a good summary of why) but based on Ari Fleischer's criticism of the idea for a "provisional" Palestinian state, I'm not so sure.
Regarding the idea, I find it hard to see any benefit to it. Will it make negotiatins over the shape of the new entity less intractable? No. Will it encourage intransigence on the part of the Palestinians? Almost certainly. And if (when) negotiations fail and the Palestinians resume terrorism (assuming they stop for the negotiations), will the state be "cancelled?" I didn't think so either.
Much more on the subject later.

WORTH THE WAIT? Sorry for the absence of posts. Here's today's must-read: a speech by Charles Krauthammer on the Messianic roots and failings of the "peace process." You can also follow a link on the page to listen to the speech in streaming media. (Via Charles Johnson.)

MORE ON GREAT MOMENTS IN 9/11 PREVENTION: Mark Steyn is even better than usual in demolishing the clueless loan officer who encountered Mohammed Atta before 9/11:

Ms. Bryant has come forward now because she thinks "it's very vital that the Americans realize that when these people come to the United States, they don't have a big 'T' on their forehead." No, indeed. In some cases, they have a big "T-E-R-R-O-R-I-S-T" flashing in neon off the end of their nose. Ten days ago, I pointed out that these fellows made virtually no effort to blend in. They weren't in "deep cover," they were barely covered at all. Atta was the brains of the operation, and he did a marginally better job of it than Leslie Nielsen would have. His one great insight into Western culture was his assumption that he could get a government grant to take out the Pentagon. Yet no matter how dumb he was, officialdom was always dumber.
"If they watch this interview and they see the type of questions that Atta asked me," Ms. Bryant told ABC News, "then perhaps they will recognize a terrorist, and make the call that I didn't make." Meanwhile, here are some signs to look for:
1) He threatens to cut your throat.
2) He talks about the destruction of prominent landmarks.
3) He enquires about security at said landmarks.
4) He hails Osama bin Laden as a great leader.
...The good news is we're up against idiots. The bad news is we're also up against the suppler idiocies of current Western orthodoxy. Thus, the U.S. government's new plans to photograph and fingerprint visitors from countries "believed to harbour terrorists" have already been attacked by Mary Robinson, the UN Human Rights honcho who's never met an Arab dictator she didn't like. Islamists want to kill us in the name of Islam. Regrettable, but there it is. If we pretend otherwise, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Canadian Islamic Congress and the Islamic Society of Britain might be nice to us. But, speaking personally, I can't say I care. If Islamic lobby groups throughout the Western world really want to hitch their star to a bunch of psychopathic morons, good luck to them. It's a free country. Hey, we'll even give you a government grant to tell us how racist we are.

ENDING THE CONFLICT? Here's a poll indicating that a majority of Palestinians see the elimination of Israel as the goal of the intifada.

SPORTS-FAN MANIFESTO: A fabulous list by Eric McErlain. I agree with everything except #20.

WHAT IS AND WHAT SHOULD BE: A great prescription from Strategy Page for the ultimate shape of the war on terrorism. I think this piece is more prescriptive than descriptive of current U.S. thinking:
President Bush indicated in a recent speech that all governments which continue to use terrorism as instruments of state policy, if only to deflect their own people's anger away from themselves towards us, will be forcibly replaced. He did not, however, mention what will happen when replacing a government won't improve the situation, which will usually be the case with failed/failing states.
Their fate will be extinction. I.e., failed and failing states which have served as terrorist sanctuaries will be conquered and occupied by a friendly country (us if necessary) with the means and ruthlessness to root out terrorist infrastructure.
This is a fundamental change in the post World War II order. Borders will change and whole countries cease to exist. The world will be rearranged to further our domestic security, and we will act preemptively rather than waiting for attack. These are logical and necessary implications of America's new policy, i.e., we'll get there eventually despite claiming the contrary now. Great events and major policy changes by Great Powers are dynamic instead of static. They create new environments which foster further changes.
The author is accurately facing the great unanswered question of conventional U.S. thinking - it's one thing to say that we cannot live with the current government of Iraq, for example, but what if the domestic alternatives aren't any better? One option is the current paralysis affecting the U.S. vis-a-vis Arafat; that is not feasible when the U.S. is the direct target. The alternative is for America to act like an empire with regard to such states. It won't be pretty, but what's the alternative?
Regarding the priorities of the war:
The extent of Iraq's biological weapons threat cannot be known until after its conquest, but Iraqi intelligence agents with quasi-mythical abilities, using anthrax spores of the quality used last fall, could theoretically kill several million Americans. A Pakistani nuke in terrorist hands could kill 80,000 - 100,000 Americans, while a fizzly ex Soviet nuke might kill several thousand.
This huge disparity in potential harm dictates the magnitude and order of action. Iraq's immediate conquest has the highest priority. Elimination of Pakistan's nuclear threat need not take a military form. We should, however, immediately start formulating strategies towards that end.
Threat elimination next in priority starts with terrorist-supporting states possessing chemical weapons - Iran, Syria-Lebanon and Libya. Iran's regime might not last the year even if we do nothing, and will almost certainly be overthrown by its pro-American people when we conquer Iraq. Libya recently offered a billion dollars compensation for the Lockerbie bombing to buy its way off this list. Syria's regime continues to support Lebanese terrorists so it must be destroyed, possibly with Turkish and/or Israeli proxies.
Then we must eliminate Saudi Arabia's regime as it is the chief source of Islamic terrorist funding. That might not be enough, though, as Saudi culture has an Islamic extremist base of several centuries' standing. Elimination of Saudi terrorist funding will likely require that its people be denied the physical means, i.e., the U.S. will control Saudi oil-producing areas and use the revenue to fund America's new empire.
Don't tell the State Department, but people in the U.S. are now considering such overt imperialism much more seriously. Why, Bill Kristol has even admitted as much in public to a European audience!

EVERYTHING YOU NEVER WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT "DIRTY BOMBS" AND AL-QAEDA'S CAPABILITIES: An indispensable primer from Joe Katzman, regarding the ramifications of yesterday's arrest. Also, William Saletan has an excellent description of the consequences of the all-too-likely panic that would ensue.
In his chapter on nuclear power from the book A Moment On the Earth, Gregg Easterbrook refers to the debate over nuclear power as "trans-rational," where the logical factors concerning the subject are "not just ignored, but actively shunned." The risks of most radiation exposure are much less than people think, and the anti-nuclear power advocates (with their allies in the media) have encouraged such hysterical thinking over the last few decades. If a "dirty bomb" is detonated, we may see the consequences of enocuraging such untruthfulness.
(This is not a recommendation to build more nuclear power plants; they make very little financial sense because of the costs and time required to build - not to mention their current role as potential terrorist targets. As Easterbrook wrote: "Nuclear power was supposed to be dangerous, dirty and cheap. Instead, it is safe, clean, and expensive.")
(Note: All Easterbrook quotes are from memory - the book had a lot of good quotes that are easy to remember. If I have not rendered a quote with 100% accuracy, I will correct it when I get home and can retrieve my copy of the book.)
UPDATE: More on the same from Strategy Page.

"WAS THERE EVER A TIME WHEN PEOPLE WITH WHOM YOU DISAGREED WERE SO GLORIOUSLY STUPID?" James Lileks asks the question in a Bleat too funny to excerpt. New Yorkers will appreciate another aspect of the piece: the frighteningly accurate description of the local real-estate market.

ABOUT TIME: Charles Johnson has the scoop: the European Union has stopped funding the Palestinian Authority in response to the lawsuit of a terrorism victim. Who said lawsuits have no beneficial consequences?
UPDATES: This Ha'aretz piece (via Tal G.) has more details; it does not mention the lawsuit, attributing the decision to Israel's persuasive skills (or, more likely, evidence that became to much for even the EU to ignore). Also, this report idnicates that the suspension of funding is only anticipated to last until June 19. If that is correct (far from certain; the Ha'aretz piece does not say so and it may be more reliable than the Arutz Sheva report), it's too bad; being cut of from the EU's largesse could be the killing-blow to the PA.

A LARGE OCEAN MAKES CRUSTY NEIGHBORS: I've been meaning to write about this fabulous article by Robert Kagan for a while now. Kagan describes the differences between the American and European approaches to the war on terrorism. It's a serious piece, and he is more willing to give credit to the European position than he usually is. As previously noted, the European skepicism of military force is not based on crude calculation of interests, but in a powerful form of idealism - but one which ignores certain inconvenient realities. Steven Den Beste explains what those realities are.

DUELING AMBULANCES: Try this juxtaposition on for size; I don't think it's one the New York Times will be using as a story basis anytime soon.
First, check out this moving story about Israeli teenage girls who volunteer for ambulance duty in Jerusalem, and how they deal with having to respond to terrorist attacks on a regular basis.
Second, check out this account of a Palestinian terrorist who tried to escape detection by traveling in an ambulance.

TALK ABOUT HINDSIGHT: This story beggars belief on many different levels - such as the sheer idiocy of the official: If what she's saying is true, she literally wouldn't know a terorrist if one threatened to slit her throat.
On the other hand, it is reassuring on two levels:
1) It shows that Al-Qaeda is not made up of geniuses - trying to recruit a government official you just met into Al Qaeda? Seriously?
2) I'd like to think that many people who would've been similarly oblivious before 9/11 would not be so now, so that any such slip-ups would be noticed & reported before thousands die.
We can hope.

THE FOUR SINS OF THE JOURNALISTS: Tal G. notes the transcript of an address given by the editor of Ha'aretz to the World Editors' Forum in Belgium. It begins with this:

First, the good news: Abu Ali's nine children are alive and well - as well as children can be among the ruins of the Jenin refugee camp. Please deliver this news to all of your friends who may have read, a few weeks ago, Abu Ali's mournful declaration: "All my nine children are buried beneath the ruins." Abu Ali's photograph was spread across a double page in a very distinguished and influential European magazine, under the title: "The survivors tell their story."
Israeli tanks and bulldozers had entered the camp, Abu Ali recalled. He went out to fill his car, telling his nine children to meet him at a nearby intersection. But the Israeli forces blocked his way back, and it was a week, he told the reporter, before he could return to the ruins of what had been his home. "It smells of death here," he is quoted as saying. "I am sure all my children are buried beneath the rubble. Come back in a week and you will see their corpses."
The reporter and his editors did not wait a week and published the tentative story as is. They were not satisfied with the extent of the tragedy that they could see with their eyes and legitimately depict in their copy. The desire to hype the story blunted their healthy journalistic instincts to doubt and double-check any story before publishing it.
While preparing this address, I made some inquiries about Abu Ali's case. First, final numbers indicate that three children and four women were killed during the fighting in the Jenin refugee camp. Second, Abu Ali's children were not among them. And third, the magazine did not bother to tell its readers of this relatively happy end to its story. Perhaps because they are tired of writing editor's notes on Middle East stories.
The past 20 months of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have created a real crisis of values for journalism. I believe I can compress the enormous volume of coverage and comment into four fundamental sins: obsessiveness, prejudice, condescension and ignorance. The story of Abu Ali conveniently exemplifies all four.

OLDIE BUT GOODIE: I just found an old post from Alex Whitlock which still remains true:

In 2000, Barak offered more than what most Israelis were willing to concede and it was rejected by the Palestinians. Barak himself was electorally deposed for his efforts and replaced with someone considerably less diplomatic. In 2002, a plan proposed by Saudi Arabia was rejected by both the Israelis and Palestinians as insufficient. These circles just don't meet. So even leaving aside whose demands are more reasonable, war at this point is inevitable.
"But still," voices cry out, "we must try something. We cannot let the violence and bloodshed continue." Carried with this plea is the implied, but not often expressed and therefore rarely challenged, question of "what harm can there be in trying?"
Again, leaving out the moral implications who is right and wrong, there is procedurally much harm to be done in trying. Israel's actions are, for the most part, a top-down operation. If Sharon orders an attack, it's carried out. If Sharon orders his men to pull back, they do. If they do not, it is within Sharon's power to relieve them of their duties. Sharon, as the head of a state and commander of an army, is held accountable for his actions.
Palestinian actions, on the other hand, are considerably more de-centrilized. The fighters on the Palestinian side are not soldiers in a hierarchal army. They are instead an independent network of agents who take orders from several locations. Therefore, it is possible that even if Arafat is truly a peace-loving individual, he is powerless to stop the actions of Hamas and similar independent entities. Therefore, to the extent that Arafat does want peace, he is incapable and therefore not always accountable for the actions of his people. That means that to effectively create peace, we would not only need the approval of Arafat, but we would also need the approval of the leaders of each and every one of the independent entities that has declared Israel its mortal enemy. In the past, we have generally left it to Arafat to get his people in line and he has been unable, or unwilling, to do so. Indeed, Hamas and Hizbollah have claimed that nothing short of the elimination of Israel would satisfy them.
That, to say the least, is unacceptable to the Israelis. Therefore, by asking Israel to step down and being incapable of making the Palestinians step down, we are creating a strategic environment very favorable to Palestine. So even by trying to be objective and to not take sides, we are de facto taking the side of the Palestinians. It is within our rights to do so if we choose, but we are unable to expect the Israelis to simultaneously accept our opposing position and do as we ask them to.

NOT A BANG, BUT A WHIMPER: The Israelis have pulled out of Ramallah.Steven Den Beste explains why their current tactics vis-a-vis Arafat are probably mistaken:

What they said to him tonight was this:
We are no longer interested in public displays of horror at the bombings and empty denunciations of them. Offers of arrests and imprisonment of the attackers in Palestinian revolving-door prisons do not wash. The only thing we will accept will be a cessation of attacks, so from now on when we suffer, you will also suffer personally, Chairman Arafat. We're going to visit you wherever you are after every attack from now on and shell the place. We won't be directly trying to kill you, but we're not going to try very hard not to, either, and one of these times you're going to get your wish and become a martyr. But if indeed that is not your wish, then the only way to prevent it is to actually stop the bombings. Nothing less will do. You're playing Russian Roulette now, and every bombing attack on us from now on represents a chance that you'll hit the jackpot and get your 72 virgins.
It isn't going to work. Those who are planning the bombing don't give a shit what Arafat says, or whether he's harmed. That's the reality: Arafat only controls some of the bombers. The only way he actually can stop the attacks is to start a Palestinian civil war by committing his forces to a real attempt to suppress Hamas and Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah.
...And in the mean time, this represents yet another attempt by Israel to attempt to deal with Arafat. It still places Arafat at the center of the stage, as the one essential man in the diplomatic circus. It embraces the fallacious idea that it is still possible to accomplish something by communicating with Arafat, even if the communication is delivered with tank gunfire.
Tonight was "diplomacy by other means" but it was still an attempt to deal diplomatically with Arafat. No progress will be made until Arafat is actually off the stage, one way or another.

Den Beste also makes the best case for killing Arafat, at long last.

APPEASEMENT AT FOGGY BOTTOM: The State Department is rumored to have a draft "political horizon" which goes even beyond the Clinton plan, calling for the evacuation of all settlements in return for a declaration that Palestinian refugees will not be settled within Israel. (Even the Clinton plan called for the retention of a few settlements close to the Green Line, such as Ma'ale Adumim and the Etzion bloc.)
Tal G. in Jerusalem has an appropriate response:

I find that offensive.... if the Palestinians violate more agreements and murder more civilians, will the State Dept. then sweeten the deal even more?
Arafat's response to the draft will be: "Yes, except for the part about the refugees. ... and except for any other obligation on the Palestinian side. You can't ask a people to give up their rights after all."

THOUGHTS WORTHY OF AN INS BUREAUCRAT: Some comments on the latest intellectual disaster passing for a New York Times editorial. Today's effort is an attempted banishment of John Ashcroft's proposal to have entrants into the U.S. from certain countries register with and regularly report to the government.

Congress recently passed legislation to address these weaknesses, but past Congressional mandates have paid few dividends. Border security remains porous, and there has been little effort, despite repeated promises, to provide consular officials around the world who make the crucial rulings on visa applications with access to law enforcement and intelligence databases. State Department officers overseas, for instance, did not know that some of the Sept. 11 hijackers had overstayed previous visas to America, let alone that the C.I.A. knew one of them had connections to Al Qaeda.

All the more reason to focus the government's resources on a target narrower than the set consisting of every entrant into the U.S. - such as, for example, the demographic group disproportionally likely to contain terrorists.

Similarly, the immigration service's desire to keep better track of foreign students studying in the United States has been thwarted by delays over the years and by objections from universities. The values and practices of American universities need not be undermined by reforms in the way they maintain records about foreign students.

Just wondering...why do universities get a draft exemption from the war against terror? I could take a cheap shot at how the "values and practices of American universities" include having Hamas supporters deliver commencement addresses at Harvard, but this blog is above such cheap shots. Of course it is.
Seriously, if the universities' reluctance to cooperate with immigration authorities have the effect of abetting terrorism, then there is no reason why that reluctance shouldn't come under scrutiny. The Times' editors need only look at the searing piece it recently published on those caught in the World Trade Center for a reminder of why we - even universities - need to revisit our old "values and practices."

These and other lapses will not be remedied by the wholesale fingerprinting of tens of thousands of Muslim and Middle Eastern visa holders. Indeed, set against the immigration service's fundamental needs, this seems like a desperation move from a Justice Department that has failed through both Democratic and Republican administrations to manage the I.N.S. adequately and fix its chronic problems.

Desperate times call for desparate measures...seriously, the Times' editors have just described the deep-seated rot at the immigration authorities. Perhaps, when faced with the people trying to kill untold thousands of Americans, who are disproportionally from certain countries and unlikely to wait until the immigration services' "fundamental needs" are met, the government might be justified in a patchwork measure that might actually keep out many such people?

There is nothing wrong with asking long-term foreign visitors to demonstrate at intervals that they are doing what they said they would do when they applied for visas. But fingerprinting and registering people from certain suspect countries will provide only an illusion of security and subject many innocent visitors to the kind of intrusive checks that Americans traveling abroad would find offensive if applied to them.
The war on terrorism requires overhauling the visa and immigration system for everyone, not just Muslim or Arab visitors. As he goes about the necessary business of tightening border security, Mr. Ashcroft should address basic problems rather than settling for quick but ultimately ineffective solutions.

Here is the crux of the Times' arguments: a refusal to admit that special scrutiny of entrants from "certain suspect countries" can ever be justified. It is an argument against the principle of profiling, evidence be damned - and even if, as Eugene Volokh points out, the basis for such profiling is as blessed in U.S. legal sources as possible. For the Times' editors, the government can do nothing to keep terrorists out of the country if such efforts are specifically focused on where the terrorists are most likely to be found - in other words, if such efforts are those which are most likely to succeed. Only in the Times' universe is the risk of a generalization greater than the risk of terrorism.
UPDATE: As long as we're on the subject of "the values and practices of American universities," check out this article by Nicholas Confessore about how lobbyists for foreign students eviscerated a system that would have worked in tracking foreign students. Thanks to Josh Marshall, who has covered this story extensively (also see here).
Marshall points out that another real problem is the Bush administration's unwillingness to engage interests deeply embedded in the federal bureaucracies (pick your three-letter word: FBI, CIA, INS). All true - I've been very pro-immigration myself, with two caveats: 1) that should not be incompatible with a properly functioning (reconstituted) INS equivalent, set up to monitor certain basics and enforce when necessary, and 2) 9/11 showed that security concerns should be given greater emphasis than was previously the case, even if some openness is compromised. Neither proposition sounds earth-shattering, I know, but each seem to escape too many. Contra the Times' editors, the likely problem is that the Bush administration is not going far enough.
ANOTHER UPDATE: OK, perhaps this is a reminder why I've tried to give up writing this stuff late at night. Reading the editorial again, it appears that the Times is in fact advocating reforms in how the universities report information about foreign students, in its usual high-minded way. My bad; the Times may in fact be advocating the drafting of the universities in the war on terror after all. (Is it too much to expect them to come out and actually say so? Of course.) Based on the rest of the editorial, though, I assume that the Times' editors would be against having universities report information about foreign students based on their country of origin, so the larger point still stands.

AN APPROPRIATE RESPONSE: Hirsch Goodman, an editor of the Jerusalem Report who has been a persistent critic of Sharon and Netanyahu, had the following exchange with a Norweigan radio host while the battle of Jenin was raging:

"How," I was asked, "is the Israeli media covering the massacre in Jenin?""Are you so sure there is a massacre in Jenin?" I replied.
"Of course I’m sure, I read it here in our morning papers and see it on television: Hundreds have been killed. It’s a massacre."
"You think Israeli troops would commit a massacre?" I asked.
"It looks like it," he responded.
"Are we on air live?"
"Yes," he said.
"Well f... you," I said.

Regarding the Norweigan boycott of Israeli products in reaction to the non-existent "massacre," Goodman states:

The Europeans, and the European press in particular, owe Israel an apology. They lied. There was no massacre in Jenin. There was probably less collateral damage in almost two weeks of fighting in dense urban areas than in one day of NATO bombardment of Belgrade. It took 18 months of violence and almost 500 killed, two-thirds of them civilians, before Israel went into Jenin. The allies did not wait that long before they reduced Milosevic’s Yugoslavia to rubble.
So if there is going to be a boycott, perhaps Jewish caterers should stop serving Norwegian salmon and Danish herring and Belgian chocolates and French champagne, and Jewish tourists choose other destinations for their vacation this year. As for those Germans who seemed only too happy to start Jew-bashing again, perhaps there is still some work to be done on that Holocaust thing. Remember?

MORE STATEMENTS OF THE OBVIOUS: From today's Jerusalem Post editorial:

The urgent task is not to define the political horizon but the opposite: All talk of horizons, all conference preparations, all envoy missions, all time line preparations should simply stop. Because if they do not stop, the message is that the more Israelis are murdered, the more the world will run around looking for something to give the Palestinians so that they will stop.
The lesson of the failure of the 2000 Camp David summit and the subsequent Palestinian terror offensive is that peace cannot be achieved by satisfying Palestinian grievances. Camp David was the ultimate experiment in providing a political horizon. It failed. It failed because there is no fixed set of Palestinian demands short of Israel's destruction.
This does not mean there can never be peace with the Palestinians. Egypt and Jordan also had unlimited grievances, and potentially still do, but they made peace for lack of better alternative. In the pivotal case of Egypt, peace came not, as many argue, because Egypt was able to restore its honor from the trouncing it received in 1967, but because the 1973 war was once again a massive military defeat.
In other words, the real "political horizon" is the elimination of an alternative to making peace. This is what the current war with the Palestinians is about, and the sooner we win it, the sooner the clouds blocking the political horizon will disappear.

THIS AGAIN? Israeli troops are surounding Arafat's offices in Ramallah again.
I hope the Israelis aren't going to surround his offices and hope Arafat surrenders, or drops dead of a heart attack, or that the U.N. will pass a resolution allowing his exile. The lesson of his last siege, I think, is that if you're going to go after the guy, don't flinch. Otherwise, don't bother with him; just concentrate on actions which may actually have a practical impact - i.e., killing and arresting terrorists. Don't make the guy a martyr again unless you're willing to go all the way.
I still have a fantasy of missiles simultaneously going through the windows of Arafat, Sheik Yassin and the head of Hizbullah. (If that's the plan, perhaps the Israelis should wait for some "peace advocates" to rejoin Arafat and share his fate.)

LET'S SEE THE U.N. DO SOMETHING USEFUL: In the New Republic, Hillel Neuer proposes sending U.N. peacekeepers to Israel to act as human shields for the victims of terror rather than for the terrorists:

Throughout their post-Camp David jihad, Arafat's gunmen have repeatedly hid behind civilians, stashed weapons in mosques, and smuggled explosives through Red Crescent ambulances. Why, they even boast of it--not to our Western ears, of course, but to AL-JAZEERA and the Arab press. (For English transcripts, see www.memri.org.) How long before homicide bombers, bound for Tel Aviv to explode student cafés or Passover seders, would don blue helmets and drive white jeeps marked with black lettering reading "U.N."?
And we've seen this sort of behavior before. A year-and-a-half ago in Lebanon, after Israel's withdrawal was certified by Kofi Annan as complete, Hezbollah gunmen abducted and murdered three Israeli soldiers by posing as a U.N. border patrol. Found inside the abandoned Hezbollah vehicles, next to weapons and explosives, were U.N. insignia, uniforms, and license plates.
But it's not only the peacekeepers' passive potential to harm Israel that makes them so attractive to Jerusalem's enemies. More pernicious is the United Nations' active mischief. History demonstrates that these missions--typically conceived by the same unholy Euro-Arab axis that decided it was a good idea to award certified terror-sponsor Syria with membership on (and now the presidency of) the U.N. Security Council--are invariably biased against the Jewish state.
Consider the actions of Terje Larsen, the United Nations' Mideast mandarin. When asked last June by Israel's defense minister about a U.N.-filmed video of the Hezbollah abduction, an indignant Larsen tore into his counterpart, emphatically denying existence of any cassette. A week later the United Nations in New York acknowledged that, um, yes, there was a video. And more recently, Larsen--who has never quite managed to raise his voice against Hezbollah's mockery of international humanitarian law, nor against the Palestinian murder and maiming of thousands of Israeli civilians--pronounced himself "horrified" by Israel's anti-terror operation in Jenin. All this from a U.N. man who says he is "profoundly a friend of Israel." Imagine the views of his many colleagues who are profoundly not.
...So if the world wants to send monitors, by all means let them come. Let them come in droves. Let thousands come and circulate randomly among Israelis in all the country's blood-stained public places--Jerusalem's cafés, Netanya's hotels, Haifa's buses. In Jerusalem, let Larsen and friends eat pizza at Sbarro's, let Kofi and crew have coffee at Caffit. Have the monitors wear plainclothes and work shifts set by the Israelis. And then, throughout Israel, ask them to live as Israelis do.
Human bombs? Meet human shields. If Arafat and Hamas wanted to kill more Israelis, they'd have to risk killing representatives of their beloved international patron. Chances are they wouldn't do it. And if they did? Well, then the international community might finally come to understand just how dastardly the Palestinian terrorists really are--and allow Israel to exercise its legitimate right to self-defense.

OUR FRIENDS THE FRENCH: Jeff Goldstein cites a report in the New York Observer regarding the French edition of Saul Bellow's book Ravelstein, based on the life of Allan Bloom. Apparently, the cover of the French edition of the book contains a picture of a man which resembles classic anti-Jewish caricatures. The Observer story has a picture of the cover; judge for yourselves.

WELL-SAID: On today's addition to the list of suicide bombings in Israel since the second intifada began, the following statements from Ha'aretz seem appropriate:

Based on what's being said both within the PA and by other Palestinian public figures, it seems that the condemnations and disgust with the suicide attackers are a genuine reflection of the immediate mood. But that is still a long way from the moment when the Israeli public will be persuaded that the Palestinian people and its leaders are indeed turning their back on the terrorist ways nurtured over the past years. Many now speak of the need to foil such attacks and prevent them, but that's not enough if a large segment of the Palestinian public continues to glorify terrorism and sanctify its perpetrators.
As long as the terror groups are not denounced and real pressure is not applied to end their activities, the people of Israel will find it difficult to take seriously condemnations by the PA. Security reforms in the PA are a necessary step for making the war on terror more efficient, but Palestinian public opinion also needs to change. Even those who believe that it's not Israel's business to reorganize the PA, have the right to expect that the PA be a responsible, representative organization that can be a true partner for political dialogue.

SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER: I know I'm late to the party, but this needs to be noted. Nicholas Kristof's most recent column contained a shocking amount of good sense:

As we gather around F.B.I. headquarters sharpening our machetes and watching the buzzards circle overhead, let's be frank: There's a whiff of hypocrisy in the air.
One reason aggressive agents were restrained as they tried to go after Zacarias Moussaoui is that liberals like myself — and the news media caldron in which I toil and trouble — have regularly excoriated law enforcement authorities for taking shortcuts and engaging in racial profiling. As long as we're pointing fingers, we should peer into the mirror.
The timidity of bureau headquarters is indefensible. But it reflected not just myopic careerism but also an environment (that we who care about civil liberties helped create) in which officials were afraid of being assailed as insensitive storm troopers.
So it's time for civil libertarians to examine themselves with the same rigor with which we are prone to examine others. The bottom line is that Mr. Moussaoui was thrown in jail — thank God — not because there was evidence he had committed a crime but because he was a young Arab man who behaved suspiciously and fit our stereotypes about terrorists.
...The Moussaoui case neatly exposes intellectual dishonesty on all sides. The Bush administration has engaged in widespread detentions of Muslims, twisting the law to keep them behind bars while denying that civil liberties have been abused. That's nonsense: the administration has wallowed in precisely the kind of hysterical wartime infringement of civil liberties that history always ends up judging harshly.
Yet civil libertarians are also dishonest in refusing to acknowledge the trade-off between public security and individual freedom. It would be admirable to insist on keeping our hands off potential terrorists until there is evidence that they have broken the law — but only if one frankly acknowledges that the price is a greater risk of terrorism.
...We must also relax a taboo, racial profiling, for one of the lessons of the Moussaoui case is that it sometimes works.
Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta bars airport security screenings based on religion or ethnicity. That's why aging nuns are plucked out of airport lines for inspections of their denture bags, why women with underwire bras are sometimes subjected to humiliating inspections after the metal detector goes off. But let's be realistic: Young Arab men are more likely to ram planes into nuclear power plants than are little old ladies, and as such they should be more vigorously searched — though with no less courtesy. El Al, the Israeli airline, has the world's most effective air security system, and it's all about racial profiling.
...As risks change, we who care about civil liberties need to realign balances between security and freedom. It is a wrenching, odious task, but we liberals need to learn from 9/11 just as much as the F.B.I. does.

While these thoughts to not qualify as "news" to many of us, it is safe to assume that they are considered shocking in the context of the NYT's editorial pages. Accordingly, Kristof truly deserves credit for telling his editors and many of his readers what they do not want to hear.

SPEAKING OF COLLEGE TUITION: Peter Scheer cites the following:

In a study of admission and financial-aid decisions at Williams College from 1988 to 2001, economists Gordon Winston and Catherine Hill found that the real cost of tuition stayed essentially constant across all income groups.
Middle-income families paid a discounted tuition of $10,794 in 1988 (in year 2000 constant dollars); the same families in 2001 paid $11,024, an increase of just 2 percent in 13 years. Low-income families actually experienced a reduction in tuition, from a 1988 net of $7,667 to $5,907 in 2000. Only families paying the sticker price saw a big increase in tuition in real terms. But even their tuition cost represented about the same share of family income in 2001 as in 1988, according to Winston and Hill.

I have not been able to find an online copy of this study, but the report raises one obvious question: how does this study account for debts incurred by the student via student loans? The description in the article of "discounted tuition" is not encouraging:

Thirty years ago, most students at private colleges paid full tuition. Today, only one-quarter do. The rest receive financial aid in the form of scholarships and loans. These discounts are substantial: 50 percent, on average, at the elite private colleges—the 25 most selective and best-endowed private colleges and universities, including the Ivies—even higher at many less-selective private colleges. In other words, most students at good private colleges pay only half the list price or less.

And what do the students who receive loans pay after they graduate? Is that cost included in the study's calculations of "discounted tuition" paid in a given year? If not, the comparison may be extremely misleading. If the percentage of aid consisting of loans increased over the period covered in the study (which I believe is the case), then the increased future costs would need to be picked up in the comparison.

HEALTH-CARE SMACKDOWN - OR, WE REPORT, YOU DECIDE: Ted Barlow advocates a single-payer system for the U.S. His arguments are blasted by Megan McArdle at great length (and it spills over into the comments on that post.) It seems to me that even if Barlow's arguments are right, they ignore the collateral costs described by McArdle.
A different idea for health-care reinvention was outlined a couple of years ago by Matthew Miller in this Atlantic article. Miller essentially proposed ending the market-distorting tax exemption for health insurance with vouchers generous enough to enable individuals to buy good insurance policies. I am not sure how Miller's proposed system would provide a voucher that was generous enough without giving insurance companies the ability to jack their costs up on the government's tab. (For an analogy, the availability of government aid for college has enabled colleges to charge more tuition than they otherwise would have. That's not an argument that such aid should not exist, but it is an argument that the benefits of such aid are more limited than they appear.)