Megan is offended that NY City and State is putting up $220 million towards the Yankees' new stadium. So much so that she declares:

I'm feeling more affection for the Nationals by the minute.

I understand Megan's aversion to spending public money on sports stadiums (especially as most studies find that municipalities don't get much economic bang for the public buck), but this is almost as short-sighted and impractical as....voting for Ron Paul or something. First, the Nationals are themselves one of the worst offenders in recent years when it comes to extorting public money for their stadium - a city council revolt led DC to cap their outlays at "only" $611 million for the Nationals' new stadium. And it's not as if DC is that much more flush, or has fewer social problems, than NYC.

For better or worse, most new stadiums built over the past 20 years or so have been built whollly or mostly with public money (though the trend has been decreasing in recent years). By (very, very low) relative standards, New York has gotten off relatively easily with the new stadiums for the Yankees and Mets - neither project would crack any top-10 list of municipal stadium boondoggles.

And while the Nationals are on the way up, I still expect that New York will earn a better return on its investment than DC - at least on the field.

Here's Jim Cramer on his friend Eliot Spitzer:

Very touching and sad.

(Via Felix Salmon.)

Laura wonders how Silda Wall Spitzer can attend press conferences with her hopefully-soon-to-be-ex-husband:

Why do political wives stand by their man? Why do they stoically stand next to their husbands at the podium as the dirtbags admit to sleeping with prostitutes and young men? Most women I know would morph into Loretta Bobbitt in a similar situation rather than Silda Spitzer.

Silda is urging Eliot to stay in office. At this point, I would be throwing his clothes out of the window of their 5th Avenue apartment and letting them rain down on the reporters below.

I can think of many reasons why Mrs. Spitzer would at least try to put up a brave front in public.

The first problem is, Laura is approaching this like a normal person. There is nothing normal about a political family. I just blogged about this. Let's quote Andrew Ferguson:

But does "super type-A personality" really describe the kind of person who runs for president nowadays? It's not pleasant to think of the life they lead, these Americans who would be president, from the first hints of dawn to well past midnight, this life of endless demands, this succession of superficial sociability, in which you smile and smile and pop your eyes wide open in delighted wonder at the ever-shifting kaleidoscope of faces and places that circles before you, and you haven't the time or leisure to settle on a single one. Charming countryside, pretty little towns, sprawling centers of commerce and industry fly by and you haven't a moment to enjoy them or learn their tales. You rush to meet hundreds of people a day and never have a meaningful exchange of words with any of them.

From the backseats of freezing cars and vans you're hustled into overheated coffee shops and those packed school gymnasiums with the stink rising to the rafters and then the oppressive hush of corporate meeting rooms, where your nose starts to run and a film of sweat forms under your wool pullover, and you press the outstretched hands that carry every bacterial pathogen known to epidemiology. You open your mouth and you release the same cloud of words you recited yesterday and the day before. And in the Q&A, when you stop to listen, you hear the same questions and complaints from yesterday, the same mewling and blame-shifting, all imploring you to do the impossible and through some undefined action make the lives of these unhappy citizens somehow edifying, uplifting, and worth living. And you always promise you will do that; you have no choice but to tell this kind of lie.

There's no rest, because there's not a moment to waste: The handful of minutes away from the kaleidoscope are spent chatting with the scorpions of the press, the ill-dressed, ill-mannered reporters from the prints and the pretty, preening peacocks of TV, each of them either a know-it-all or a cynic or a dope, take your pick, and each of whom, for professional and other reasons, will deploy all his energies and cleverness to the task of trapping you into a misstatement or ungenerous remark or expression of irritation so he can convey to his editors and the world that--at last!--you've made a gaffe; and if you won't make a gaffe then he will convey to his editors and the world how "scripted" and "over rehearsed" you sound; kind of slick, almost robotic, inauthentic.

When the scorps are dismissed, in the seconds before you pass from the freezing van to the overheated gym or boardroom, a sycophant whose name you can't remember hands you a cell phone that connects you to a rich man whose face you dimly recall from another boardroom last summer and you beg him to give you money, or more often--considering the grinding pressure you feel for cash, always for cash--you beg him to assemble a circle of other rich men that he can beg on your behalf, and when you sign off you don't have time to be grateful. There will be more calls before dinner and after dinner, and dinner is a cold thigh of chicken in a sump of clotted gravy served from a steam table in a freezing cinderblock banquet room at the Lions Club, and a hundred pairs of eyes fix themselves on you--a celebrity, someone they've seen on TV--as you dribble the gravy on your shirtfront. And after you release the same words and hear the same complaints you go to bed in a Hampton Suites for five hours of sleep on starchy sheets with dimly visible stains whose origins are impossible to discern, and from the corner the digital display on the microwave flashes 12:00 12:00 12:00 . . .

And you do all this so you can wake up the next morning and do it again. Because you like it.

The man or woman who seeks out such a life and enjoys its discomforts is not normal. Not crazy necessarily, but not normal, and probably, when the chips are down, not to be trusted, especially when the purpose of it all is to acquire power over other people (also called, in the delicate language of contemporary politics, "public service" or "getting things done on behalf of the American people").

This. Is. Not. Normal. And no candidate can long undertake this kind of effort with an unsupportive family - either the candidacy goes or the family does. A spouse that supports this kind of effort is buying into a pressurized lifestyle that outsiders can barely understand, much less relate to. (Michelle Cottle's profile of Michelle Obama in this week's TNR is also worth reading along these lines.) Remember Elizabeth Edwards' insistence that her husband redouble his campaign efforts in light of her cancer's recurrence? That type of commitment to the husband's political career is closely related to what drives a political wife to attend a press conference regarding that which any other couple would try with all their might to keep private. Dean Barnett, no friend to Democrats, understood this:

I CAN'T TELL YOU HOW BAD I FEEL FOR ELIZABETH AND JOHN EDWARDS. I'm familiar with the body-blow of a sudden diagnosis that turns your world upside down. It's incredible - you walk into a doctor's office and within a span of minutes you find out your life will never be the same. In the back of your mind you nourish the hopes of miracle cures or that you might be like that guy in Dubuque who got the same diagnosis but oddly enough lived forever, but the reality of the situation sits there in your mind. You can't shake it - it just won't leave.

But you try to carry on. I think I may know some of what the Edwards are feeling. They've been running for the White House for seven years now. And make no mistake - as Hugh points out in his book, running for president is a family affair. It's more than a dream and an ambition for them. It's a big part of what defines their lives.

So they walked out of that doctor's office refusing to let her disease take their lives away. Some people are calling their decision courageous; others find it puzzling. Having been in a situation analogous to theirs, I think I have some understanding and I know I have some sympathy. They're working through all of this. Their first instinct is not to surrender. That's good, and it's what you would have expected. People who seek the presidency aren't the types who give up or even compromise easily.

Whether high-level politics selects for people capable of this level of commitment or causes it - likely both - the end result is that families committed to politics at this level simply cannot, and do not, react in ways that would seem "normal" to outsiders. The pressure (which after a certain amount of habituation, becomes more internal than external) to keep up the public facade is overwhelming in a way that outsiders can barely imagine.

I still think this is one of the underrated reasons for the recent increase in political dynasties: they're the only ones who think of the lifestyle as normal, which confers a major competitive advantage in and of itself.

I don't really know any politicians, but some of my best friends are rabbis or rabbis' wives. For pulpit rabbis (and I am sure the same is true for other religions' clergy families), the pressure to be "on" and present the appropriate public face 24/7 to the community also can be pretty overwhelming, and the entire family is enlisted into this project by necessity. It is part of what you sign up for, if you're the wife - and the kids learn quickly that they have no choice (yes, many wonderful rebellions are inspired by this realization). If you think that political wives can be resentful (as shown by certain lines attributed to Mmes. Spitzer and Obama over the years), trust me on this one: you have NEVER had a candid conversation with a pulpit rabbi's wife.

Finally, there is one point that isn't restricted to political or rabbinic families. When everything is falling apart around you, it is natural to seize at any part of the situation that you can control. It wouldn't surprise me if women in Mrs. Spitzer's situation try to keep up an "appropriate" public facade purely as an attempt to control what they can, to hold the husband-induced chaos at bay in at least one way. I don't think anyone can criticize a woman for this reaction.

Some time ago, Matt Yglesias drew up a list of substantive items that weren't getting enough attention in the Democratic primary. Two of his items caught my eye. First,

Federal Reserve: Are Clinton or Obama happy with the past 25 or so years of conservative Republican leadership at the Fed or would they like to take things in a new direction?

I had a couple of thoughts on this item:

1) I wonder - does Paul Volcker count as part of the "past 25 years or so of conservative Republican leadership?" Most Fed-watchers would draw a bright line between pre-and-post Volcker eras, and see primarily continuity between his reign and that of undisputed conservative Alan Greenspan. The wrinkle is that Volcker is a lifelong Democrat who recently endorsed Barack Obama.

2) More importantly, the one thing that has been made clear through the current economic turmoil and the Fed's current tough spot is that while there are debates about the role of the Fed at a given time, they don't usually break down easily along partisan lines. For example, if Paul Krugman (a born blogger whose day job is something to which he is far less suited) has disagreed with anything Ben Bernanke has done in the current crisis, I've missed it. A number of Republican economists, by contrast, have accused Bernanke of loosening credit too much too fast. And even Greenspan was far less dogmatic in his actions as Fed chairman than one would assume from his biography or reading his memoir. So it's far from evident that (a) the phrase "conservative Republican leadership at the Fed" is a meaningful description of what has happened at the Fed over the last 25 years, or (b) that a Democratic President who wanted to take things in a new direction at the Fed would succeed in doing so (unless he or she appoints some pure hack).

Second from Matt's list:

Judiciary: Assuming a Democratic Senate allows for relatively easy confirmations, do Clinton or Obama intend to continue appointing 1990s-style moderates, or would we see a return to the liberal jurisprudence of a Thurgood Marshall?

I also have two thoughts about this one:

1) When Ruth Bader Ginsburg was appointed to the Supreme Court, Bill Clinton called her the "Thurgood Marshall of gender equity law." Yet on the Court, she has been generally considered fairly moderate. So you never know, even if a judicial candidate is the closest thing to Marshall.

2) This deserves a post unto itself...but let's just come out and say it. When Clarence Thomas was appointed to the Court to fill Marshall's seat, most people scorned his chances of ever matching the record of Marshall. Well, Thomas has been a far, far superior Justice to Marshall, using any possible criterion (such as influence on the Court and the development of the law generally, skill of opinions, etc.) other than the crudest form of results-oriented judging I am quite confident (as confident as I can be without actually going to the trouble of asking anyone)that many, many respectably liberal legal academics would agree with that assessment (especially if they could do so off the record).

To clarify: this only refers to the two men's records as Justices of the Supreme Court and not their legal accomplishments as a whole; Marshall is surely a more important figure based on his civil rights record. But I view Marshall as a legal parallel to James Madison - a man of monumental impact whose least important role was his service as President.

May be updated as things develop....

1) Fred Siegel has some very complimentary things to say about our soon-to-be-incoming governor, David Paterson:

Paterson, an avowed liberal, is an engaging man, willing to listen to people he disagrees with. I had dinner with him several times at B. Smith - and despite our policy differences, I found him easy to discuss matters with and willing to debate the issues.

A longtime minority member of the state Senate before becoming lieutenant governor, he'd bring to the governor's office the legislative perspective and understanding of how the capital works that Gov. Steamroller has so notably lacked.

He even gets along well with Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno; he just might be able to bring a welcome spirit of openness to Albany.

Not incidentally, he is the son of Basil Paterson - one of Harlem's famed Gang of Five, along with Rep. Charles Rangel, former Mayor David Dinkins, Assembly Ways & Means Chairman Denny Farrell and Harlem clubhouse boss Percy Sutton. The group has long run Harlem's political scene.

Basil was New York City's first black deputy mayor - as well as the first black candidate for statewide elected office (lieutenant governor) in New York, and under Gov. Hugh Carey the first black secretary of state. He once held the same state Senate seat his son would later in effect be given by the Harlem leadership after its then-occupant died in office.

But, while his father may have effectively anointed him a state senator, David has kept an arms-length over the years from the Gang of Five - repeatedly running for office even as his father endorsed opposing candidates, and taking some taboo positions, including prominent support for vouchers and school choice.

Mickey Kaus, control yourself!

2) Laura wants to know more about the Emperor's Club. Slate complies.

3) Daniel Drezner recently postulated the existence of a "Noam Scheiber effect," based on his history of carefully reporting the dynamics of the Dean and Obama presidential campaigns immediately before said campaigns imploded encountered temporary difficulties.

Well, in 2005, Scheiber wrote a lengthy and positive profile of Elliot Spitzer for the NYT Magazine, speculating that his record as NY Attorney General prefigured a template that Democrats could use for recapturing national power. I think we can now chalk up another data point for the Scheiber effect.

Memo to Franklin Foer: Wouldn't Scheiber be the ideal candidate to write an in-depth profile of the Boston Red Sox in connection with the upcoming season?

4) HA! (Via Andrew Sullivan.)

5) This is funnier.

6) And this line is funniest.

It looks like we can talk about Elliot Spitzer's political career in the past tense, as he has been linked to a prostitution ring.

It's too bad his political fall wasn't linked to his performance as governor, not to mention his perfection of the shakedown artist act while he served as NY State's attorney general. But we'll take what we can get.

UPDATE: Speculation is that Spitzer will resign. Perhaps he can start a consulting firm with Jim McGreevey. Maybe Rudy will join as well.

FURTHER UPDATE: Assuming Spitzer resigns, this would make quite the trifecta for the tristate area, between him, McGreevey and Connecticut's John Rowland (albeit the latter went to jail for old-fashioned corruption rather than anything spicier). Is it something in the local water?

ONE MORE UPDATE: Slate's XX Factor blog is all over this one - just keep scrolling; too many good posts to link.

LAST UPDATE: This is the best headline of the whole story; almost believable. The pretend story is pretty good too:

Discovering that the exclusive international ring of prostitutes known as the "Emperor's Club" charged up to $5,500 an hour for their services, New York governor Eliot Spitzer vowed to put an end to this price gouging practice.

Four people alleged to have run the "Emperor's Club" were charged with conspiracy to violate federal prostitution statutes, while two of them were also charged with laundering more than $1 million in illegal proceeds.

"That kind of excessive compensation is simply outrageous. Prostitution is allegedly a victimless crime,” Spitzer said in a press conference that took place only in our imaginations. “But now we see that its customers can become its victims.”

Spitzer added it was especially shameful that one of the most trusted names in prostitution had engaged in this shocking betrayal and rank greed.

I REALLY MEAN IT THIS TIME: This ABC News story (via TPM) has more details on what Spitzer could be charged with. I hadn't thought that merely being a "client" would get Spitzer indicted, and that is in fact not the case: he may be charged with "structuring" transactions so s to avoid mandatory bank reporting laws.

According to a friend who knows more about this area than I do, if Spitzer gets charged under the money laundering statutes, the end of his political career will be the least of his problems:

The Sentencing Guidelines on money laundering were unbelievably draconian last I checked, and that was before the Patriot Act. Like, 20 year sentence bad.

The most important takeaway from the ABC News story is that this isn't merely a bad break for Spitzer: he wasn't merely a name in an escort service's "black book" that leaked after the service got busted, as often happens in Hollywood. Apparently, his suspicious money transfers were what instigated the entire investigation:

The federal investigation of a New York prostitution ring was triggered by Gov. Eliot Spitzer's suspicious money transfers, initially leading agents to believe Spitzer was hiding bribes, according to federal officials.

It was only months later that the IRS and the FBI determined that Spitzer wasn't hiding bribes but payments to a company called QAT, what prosecutors say is a prostitution operation operating under the name of the Emperors Club.

..."We had no interest at all in the prostitution ring until the thing with Spitzer led us to learn about it," said one Justice Department official.

Spitzer, who made his name by bringing high-profile cases against many of New York's financial giants, is likely to be prosecuted under a relatively obscure statute called "structuring," according to a Justice Department official.

It doesn't appear that this will end with Spitzer's resignation and disgrace. If this ever went to trial...the NY tabloids will have a field day.

Since when has George McGovern taken up a fellowship at the Cato Institute? I'm not sure there is a better explanation for this op-ed.

...Reihan Salam is breaking new ground in dramatizing roles based on real-life famous figures. His interpretation of Hillary Clinton is more subtle, evocative and true to life than any of the above actors' recent Oscar-winning performances:

I should have something substantive to say about the Democratic primary race and today's primaries, and may later today.

But for now, I listen to journalists and pundits complaining about the lengthier-than-expected primary season and respond: "More, please." Why hurry? November is a long way off.

Right now, I want to see the equivalent of a Game 7 of the World Series between two teams in which I have no rooting interest that goes deep into extra innings, in which rosters fall apart and players' assigned roles totally fall by the wayside - preferably one in which the preceding game also went into extra innings. (Closest real-life examples: Game 5 of the 2004 ALCS, Game 6 of the 1999 NLCS, Game 7 of the 2003 ALCS.) We can even speculate about a brokered convention, which is the equivalent of a position player coming in to pitch.

In other words, merits be damned: Go Hillary!

This is one of the funniest things ever written about Canada.

Sigh.

Did John McCain really have to throw a bone to the discredited mercury-mongers? A further data point that you shouldn't let your kids grow up to be Presidential candidates.

I'd like to believe that Megan is right and that McCain pandered out of a combination of ignorance and not wanting to tell a potential voter that her firmest beliefs about her child's autism are without basis. There may be more to it than that (or to the idea that McCain's science adviser is Don Imus). McCain does have a minor history with the mercury types: specifically, he has met with representatives of an organization dedicated to pushing the mercury connection (not that there's anything wrong with meeting with them) and sent a letter (together with Sen Lieberman) to Ted Kennedy (and the Republican ranking member) asking themto hold hearings on the topic.

(Note that this same organization sent letters to certain of the other Presidential candidates asking them to respond to various autism-related questions. The staffs of Senators Biden, Edwards and Obama (see the January 2, 2008 section) made sure that they didn't buy into the mercury/vaccine claims.)

That being said, McCain does not have much of a record on pushing the thimerosal issue (quite unlike the lunatic Dan Burton in the House). (Writing a letter to a fellow Senator is a reliable way of getting noisy constituents to shut up and keep the campaign contributions coming.) His campaign website has nothing on the topic (unlike Barack Obama's). Absent further developments, there is little reason to think that McCain would push the issue or that he really knows or cares much about it. But I do wish someone would set him straight.

I also liked Jonathan Kulick's lovely retort.

UPDATE: Arthur Allen has more on how McCain is connected to the mercury militia. Allen also notes that "McCain isn't known to have any familiarity with vaccine safety issues."

Don't tell the children.

A longer version of that sentence below the fold:

This article seems uniquely inappropriate for the point it is making as to the importance and uses of Presidential charisma. Not that its assessments of FDR or Obama necessarily are wrong, but the main anecdote seems to make precisely the opposite points.

Specifically, bank runs (as shown in It's a Wonderful Life) are indeed a self-perpetuating crisis of confidence, and can stop as suddenly as they start once confidence is restored that claims on the bank will be honored. A great Presidential speech, such as the one given by FDR, can be useful in creating such confidence. But it helps even more if it can be conclusively demonstrated that such claims would, in fact, be honored. And that is exactly what Congress did prior to FDR's speech, in creating federal deposit insurance [UPDATE - I erred here, see below].

The article doesn't deny that the Congressional action helped, but it gives most of the credit (via the Robert Caro quote) to FDR's speech and then uses that assignment of credit to build an argument as to the uses and limits of Presidential charisma generally. That seems strange to me, given that the specific problem of bank runs (a) is more susceptible to matters of confidence than most other issues (does anyone think that more confidence in our health care system would solve its problems?) and (b) were solved by a legislative action that did more to guarantee the necessary confidence than any Presidential speech possibly could.

Maybe it was a "you had to be there" moment. But those of us who weren't there often have a leg up in analyzing such moments, for that very reason.

UPDATE: It also would have helped to get the facts straight. The "legislation securing the banks" cited by the article's author was not the creation of federal deposit insurance, as I erroneously stated, but the Emergency Banking Act, which infused enough capital into the banking system to avert the crisis. I think the general points remain true, namely that (a) FDR's famous speech only came after legislation fixing the problem (albeit not in as permanent a fashion as the FDIC) and thus may be given more credit than it deserves, and (b) bank panics are more susceptible to these type of fixes, making them of limited utility for assessing the usefulness of Presidential charisma. But I did err, and thanks to commenter Spencer for pointing it out.

Various must-reads on the (hopefully ending) NYC transit strike:

- Joel Kotkin and Harry Siegel in TNR, detailing how state and city governments (and more importantly, their tax bases) have become little more than funding vehicles for public-sector unions:

...During the past 30 years, public-employee unions have largely won the battle for urban political power by default. Other traditional power centers--neighborhood associations, small business organizations, reform groups--have over time receded from urban politics. Businesses, after all, can always go elsewhere, either to the suburbs or overseas; frustrated individuals often get worn down, electing to move on or give up. Public sector unions, by contrast, have remained powerful, withstanding occasional assaults by reformist mayors of both parties.

Democrats are usually seen as the beneficiaries of this situation, since they often receive cash and organizational backing from unions. But there is a downside to this support, which the current strike illustrates. City councils in New York, Los Angeles, and most other major cities are dominated by Democrats. Most council elections in New York, for example, are determined in the Democratic primary, which consistently sees low voter turnout. (In 2003, turnout in the city council primaries was 11 percent.) This magnifies the power of unions--since a handful of highly organized voters can easily sway an election--and makes Democratic politicians more or less beholden to the wishes of public employees. New York, where several prominent council members have already expressed support for the transit workers' union, may be the most obvious example of this problem; but it is hardly the only city afflicted.

- Noah Millman, simultaneously embracing Reaganism and Leninism (while willing to put much of his money where his blog is):

...I wish Mayor Bloomberg would fire every single transit worker and break the union. But (a) I don't think he (nor, I suspect, anyone else) has the clear authority to do so, and (b) he'd never do it if he did have the authority; he's a cautious, centrist, consensus managerial type. That's still a whole lot better than Pataki; Bloomberg has done much less to actually sell out the city's economic interests that Pataki has the state's. But he's no Ronald Reagan.

...I am normally highly resistant to Leninist "the worser the better" logic, but in this case we really do need to highten the contradictions. The sooner NYC and our other major cities and blue states realize that their contracts with public sector unions are absolutely unsustainable, the better for everyone. For that reason, I would say that the Bush Administration tax proposal I most strongly favor is also the proposal that would most hurt New Yorkers, and would cost me personally a great deal of money every year: eliminate the deduction for state and local income taxes.

As an aside, he is right about Pataki: it might be useful to remind those liberals who blame the party affiliation of Pataki and Bloomberg for the strike how Pataki won re-election by signing the state treasury over to Local 1099.

- Ryan Sager on the class war being waged in NYC right now - by the transit union against workers who make less than the average TWU member, who (probably) are more likely to live in the outer boros than in Manhattan or suburbia and thus have the most difficulty bypassing the strike by walking or taking Metro-North or the LIRR:

...[T]here is a class confrontation of a kind going on � but it's not between rich and poor. It's between the working class and what might be called the government-worker class.

As one commenter wrote in to the TWU: "Get with reality . . . 90+% of people in this area will never be able to retire by 55 . . . pensions across America are going to default. Sad state of America, yes, but unfortunately the rest of us are in the same boat."

- This springtime City Journal piece I've linked to before about how to save the NYC subways also has some resonance now:

When today�s TWU leaders fight the MTA, they�re still carrying the banner for a whole anti-capitalist philosophy. Members see any concession not as a necessary compromise but as an unforgivable sellout to a sworn enemy. As the New York Times reported after the 2002 contract settlement, some workers had wanted to strike just to tell their children and grandchildren �that they fought the good fight, as did many transit workers who walked out in 1966 and 1980.� Of course, under New York law, it is illegal for public-service employees to strike. But that doesn�t stop the TWU from periodically forcing Gotham�s taxpayers and private-sector businesses to incur millions of dollars in emergency-planning costs when the TWU threatens to break the law and strike anyway, as it threatened three years ago.

Sound familiar?

Ms. Gelinas also has been promulgating the pro-privatization-and-competition line here (advocating that, in the event of a strike, the city and state take actions far tougher than they actually have), here (advocating privatization of the buses) and here (advocating using other buses to break the strike).

One recent thought about the NYC transit strike, that came to me while standing on a Metro-North train with several thousand fellow New Yorkers (and we were certainly the lucky ones). Caution: rampant, unverified and uncredentialed speculation ahead:

Don't defined-benefit pension plans and stock options, each as they were formerly ladled out, have something fundamental in common? In each case, companies and/or governments handed them out relatively freely, in part because of various accounting and/or regulatory reasons that enabled the grantor to underestimate the benefit's true cost - stock options weren't required to be expensed until recently, and various regulations make it easy for companies to underfund their pension plans. (True, the cost of pension plans also has been heavily affected by the same demographic forces bankrupting Social Security: increasing life expectancy and the massive slowdown in the increase of workers relative to the Baby Boom generation.)

And as we're finding out with respect to pensions, reflecting the true cost of the benefit make it that much less likely that any such benefits will be offered in the future, absent massive changes in the costs - something that understandably does not make workers happy. It is too soon to gauge the impact of the new rules requiring the expensing of stock options, but it will probably (and justifiably so) make it that much harder for companies to hand options out like candy, as opposed to the practice in the 90s.

Anyone else have any thoughts or actual knowledge of those issues, as opposed to the above random speculation?

Comes from John Derbyshire, about the role of the judiciary (though it could be applied to any number of questions):

Do I want big decisions about the shape of society made by a bunch of self-important lefty law-school grads, their brains all addled with 1960s-ish flapdoodle about rights and penumbras? Or would I prefer to have it done by a crew of not-very-successful, not-very-bright small-town lawyers whose pockets are stuffed with cash from teachers� unions, chicken-processing magnates, Saudi princes, and Mexican drug lords?

A tough question indeed.

Here's an interesting piece about why the obscene concentration of obscene wealth in NYC is good for the city and its inhabitants:

For literally centuries, New Yorkers have complained about the effects of extreme wealth on the city. Many would, of course, prefer an egalitarian paradise where the working man has a window on Central Park, too. But such utopian notions obscure what is, in fact, a very successful aspect of New York. The historical record clearly shows that when the very rich lose interest in living in a city, the dominoes tumble. Look at Philadelphia or Cleveland.

...So love them or hate them�we�d better learn to live with the rich. They�re not going away. If 9/11 couldn�t scare them off, one has to wonder what will. The very rich may be carving out more space for themselves. But in this highly uncertain economy, that�s something of a blessing, not an unmitigated curse. The ultimate definition of a city�s health is the ability to attract people, companies, and industries that can choose to be anywhere in the world. �You can argue about the dangers of having an economy at the beck and call of the very rich,� says economist Ken Goldstein. �But it basically comes down to this: It�s better than the alternative.�

Read the whole thing.

No time for anything thoughtful tonight, so chew on this outstanding piece about the NYC subways. This should be a mandatory part of the platform of any successful candidate for Mayor or Governor. I'm sure it won't be.

Please do read this extraordinary piece by Megan McArdle. It's ostensibly about the policy implications of gay marriage, but it is really about different ways of looking at and understanding the world. It defies excerpts; just go read it (even at the cost of - gasp - printing it out ) consider and ponder accordingly.

I've been thinking about the implications in light of what's been written in the blog referenced in the immediately prior post, and I don't like the results. And that's all I'm going to say for now.

(Ve ha-mayvin yavin.)

I've been working around the clock for the last few weeks, coupled with assorted holiday preparations and family issues - so there's been no blogging. But this calls for a break in the silence.

I've been following, though not blogging about, the immolation of CBS' and Dan Rather's credibility through the faked memos about President Bush's National Guard service. (All hail Powerline for uncovering the story.)

The NYT has been conspicuously absent from the front lines of this story, but they've more than made up for it with this headline. Click on it before the editors come to their senses.

A couple of years ago, this blog "sponsored" a contest inspired by a wonderful NYT headline that was a seemingly perfect combination of utter stupidity and anti-Bush spin.

I never named a winner in that contest. We have one now.

P.S. In case they change the headline, this is what it says at this time:

"Memos on Bush Are Fake but Accurate, Typist Says"

Can anyone more technically proficient than I save a screenshot?

Sorry for the not-unexpected lag in blogging - I've been working around the clock so everyone else can take off for Labor Day (er, and because I'll be off a lot soon for the upcoming Jewish holidays).

A few quick hits.

1) I turned the TV on thinking that the President's acceptance speech would be ending. Instead, he had just started talking about the war. Another great speech. I don't have time to ruminate on substance, so here's a stylistic point. President Clinton was and is, by all accounts, one of the great extemporaneous speakers of our time, and Bush is...not. Yet (except for a famous speech he gave in a Baptist church early in his presidency), Clinton's prepared speeches were almost uniformly pedestrian, while Bush has delivered a surprising number of outstanding speeches (even after adjusting for the "soft bigotry of low expectations" of which Bush takes such great advantage). And it's not just a consequence of 9/11; Bush's 2000 acceptance speech and his inauguration address compare very favorably with any of Clinton's parallels. Why the difference? I have an idea, but it'll wait for now.

2) I still think that Bush would have done well to steal some lines from Noah Millman's draft (that he prepared for free!). Had Bush used the "nuanced" line, it would've brought down the house and made the pundits swoon even more than they did, despite their best efforts. His staff almost certainly raided some blogs for the excerpt from the 1946 NYT editorial.

3) Best wishes to President Clinton and his family for a speedy recovery. If this report is true, the people who booed should be ashamed of themselves. [UPDATE: the AP report in question seems to have been retracted.]

4) I have a serious moral opposition to horse-race blogging, for reasons that I'll explain later. But let's do it just this once. A new TIME poll is out showing Bush opening up an 11-point lead over Kerry. The poll was conducted from 8/30-9/2; it doesn't specify whether any of the respondents were polled after Bush's speech last night.

Just one drink, I tell you...

(And thanks, Mickey!)

P.S. I think this piece is subscription-only, but please do check out Noam Scheiber's piece in this week's TNR about the Bush campaign's outreach to Orthodox Jews. Here are some excerpts:

The political benefit of an event targeted at haredi, or ultra-Orthodox, Jews in New York is not immediately obvious. After all, New York is a blue state, and winning every Brooklyn Orthodox vote isn't going to dent the Democratic tally here. But Jeff Ballabon, a 41-year-old Orthodox Jew and Bush Pioneer who helped organize the Brooklyn trip and the earlier briefing, argues that the events will resonate outside New York because haredim in different parts of the country are tightly connected. "They all read the same national papers," says Ballabon. "And ninety-five percent of them are published in New York. ... The Orthodox press for many is the primary source of news." The logic applies to non-haredi, modern Orthodox Jews as well. At the Bush campaign press briefing earlier in the day, Tevi Troy, an Orthodox Jewish campaign official, emphasizes that the assembled leaders, a mixture of haredi and modern Orthodox Jews, are "plugged into other cities"--"you know, people in Detroit, St. Louis, Philadelphia, Cleveland." He encourages them to "talk to your friends in other cities and tell them what the president is about."

And what's the main message?

The underbelly of the Bush campaign's pitch to these voters is the idea that, even if John Kerry, who gets a stellar rating from AIPAC, is a reliable supporter of Israel, and even if he says he'd prosecute the war on terrorism aggressively, there are structural forces within the Democratic Party that make a Kerry administration dangerous. At just about every Jewish-themed event I attended this week--and there were multiple events each day--someone has drawn attention to the rise of the antiwar, anti-Israel left within the Democratic Party. Usually, the conversation begins with Michael Moore, who has left a long trail of anti-Israel comments, continues on to MoveOn.org and former supporters of Howard Dean, and ends with the observation that, in recent years, it has been the far left of the Democratic Party, not the far right of the Republican Party, that has been awol on votes in Congress regarding Israel. "That's going to be a major theme going into the stretch run," says one Republican strategist. "The point is, who do you surround yourself with? ... [With the Kerry] campaign, the focus is on Michael Moore, Jimmy Carter." One Jewish Republican close to the White House, who occasionally serves as a Bush campaign surrogate, told me he makes this pitch explicitly. "Even if Kerry means everything he says about Israel," he tells Jewish audiences, "the question is whether his constituency--today's Democratic Party--would really let him go there."

This is a trenchant argument. I've seen no evidence that Kerry, while in the Senate, showed any sign of independent thought on matters relating to Israel. And in his case, that was a good thing: he went along with the pro-Israel bipartisan consensus of Northeastern members of both houses. But as President, he might be subject to different pressures - not just from the Michael Moore wing of the party, but perhaps more importantly from many allies with whom he's ostensibly trying to mend fences (most notably, an unnamed country whose name has more than four letters and begins with "F") and whose policies and preferences can be characterized, on a good day, as "throw Israel to the wolves." Love him or hate him, who wouldn't agree that Bush is capable of (for Bush fans) resisting pressure to change course / (for Bush haters) prone to refusing to change his mind? Kerry, to put it mildly, does not give the same impression.

Here's an interesting NYT piece on how classes in elementary and high school are using weblogs as learning aids (not "teaching" aids, as the blog experience lends itself to greater interactivity and collaboration):

Teachers say that the interactivity of blogs allowed them to give students feedback much more quickly than before.

...Sometimes, the long reach of the Web has turned bloggers into modern-day pen pals, allowing students to collaborate easily with their peers in other classes or even other countries. Some social studies classes at Hunterdon Central Regional High School in Flemington, for instance, are using a blog to study the Holocaust with high school students in Krakow, Poland.

I get very uncomfortable whenever I'm around too many people who agree with me. The only way I know to dispel the discomfort is to play devil's advocate. Put me in a room full of Bush supporters, and I'll be making the case for Kerry in no time.

Apropos of nothing in particular, I finally had an epiphany about that tendency. It's not any praiseworthy instinct towards critical thinking or even a healthy contrarianism. (Contrarianism is generally overrated, as it leads too easily to mindlessness of its own.) Rather, it's a misguided superiority complex, manifesting itself as a disrespect for other's views and beliefs.

I'll try to do better. So from now on, if people want to try to make the case for Bush, I won't stop them.

Here's a terribly dispiriting piece (registration required) by James Pinkerton about the prospects for further progress - specifically, the lack of such - in the fight against AIDS. The factors he cites are ones I hadn't thought of before, but they unfortunately seem accurate:

Activists say the drug companies have underfunded R&D. But the truth is that the drug makers have spent tens of billions of dollars on fighting AIDS. Now, however, they are quietly pulling back. Why? Because they no longer see profits ahead. The drug companies are being pressured into basically giving away their existing anti-AIDS meds in Third World countries, home to 95% of the 38 million people infected with the virus.

In this new environment, when funding streams correlate with victim streams, the vision of a cure as a goal yields instead to perpetuation as a goal.

Read the whole thing, and weep. (Thanks to Mickey Kaus for the pointer.)

I was writing a long baseball post, but my computer crashed and ate it. It will go up on Saturday night.

For now, check out this draft of the speech President Bush should deliver at the GOP convention, courtesy of the most neglected blog around, Noah Millman's Gideon's Blog.

Newly-housed Laura, formerly a resident of Apartment 11D in the Heights, asks a question from her new suburban location (say hello to my grandmother in said location):

What makes for a good weblog? Is it sharp, witty political commentary or insightful life stories?

Truly, this is a Mars-Venus question, where the answer is wholly dictated by your mindset.

One type of reader (let's call them, for no particular reason, "men") looks to blogs for useful commentary and links on specific issues. (Let's call those preferred blogs "political blogs.") These readers aren't opposed to the revelation of the blogger's personal details per se, but wouldn't really see the point unless such details are relevant in some way to the issue at hand.

Another type of reader (let's call them...I don't know..."women") might look to blogs to, in Allison Kaplan Sommer's felicitous description (quoted by Laura), "really get a feel for what it is like to be someone else, living a different life and opening ourselves to their experience." (Let's call those blogs "personal blogs.")

Of course, most people probably partake of both mindsets at some points, but I think it's safe to say that many people probably gravitate towards one kind more than the other. But there's no reason to say that personal blogs are necessarily better than political blogs at fulfilling their professed aim, or at meeting their customers' wishes. Allison's statement that personal blogs are "the very best blogs" is nothing more than a value judgment, based on a pre-existing mindset. To those of us [blessed/cursed] with a different mindset, Allison's mindset - the notion that "really get[ting] a feel for what it is like to be someone else" is preferable to the most thought-provoking and informative commentary on a given issue - is close to incomprehensible.

I respect the ability of those who can write the best personal blogs; I know how difficult it can be to render feelings as words. But at the same time, can't you argue that our ability to "really get a feel for what it is like to be someone else" is necessarily limited, in a way that intellectual comprehension of arguments or commentary is not? Communication of feelings and empathy are necessary components of interpersonal relationships, but does blogging have to partake of those elements to be successful? Answering "yes" tells you more about the assumptions you bring to the computer than about the nature of blogging.

Mindles H. Dreck has a very important post on recent trends in corporate regulation spawned by the last few year's scandals. Go read the whole thing, and also follow the links in the post - especially these posts on regulatory capture, and this gem about the ways professional service firms and securities firms try to play "pass-the-liability."

Though I'm an interested party (as an attorney), I believe that Mindles is incorrect when he predicts the imminent death of attorney-client privilege, for reasons he implies in his post: while the confidentiality of attorney-client communications are threatened by court decisions threatening privilige in certain situations, a more fundamental problem is the potential adversarial relationship contemplated by the attorney conduct rules under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. While legal academics such as Eugene Volokh or Glenn Reynolds (it's too late for me to find the link, but I remember they were in favor of the idea. Or at least one of them was. Maybe.) or non-lawyers think it sounds self-evident, they ignore the realities of practice: once a new risk is introduced, it takes a while for the players to allocate the risks amongst themselves (as Mindles says, it's a game of pass-the-parcel) and communication is hampered while the players try to protect their own interests. These types of calculations are exactly the opposite of what is supposed to characterize the attorney-client relationship. The rules threaten to undermine the representation that lawyers are supposed to provide on a normal basis. And I don't think that will stand as a matter of practice. (And while beleagured clients might want to go after the trial bar, they will also want to retain the protected services of their own counsel - and it's pretty hard to subvert one side's privilege without harming the other's.)

Alternatively, it's possible that the attorney conduct regulations will have little effect, as a widely-held opinion of the NY securities bar (from my tiny corner of it) is that the SEC does not have the jurisdiction to regulate the attorney-client relationship. But if the best defense of a regulation is that it will be ignored, that's not much of a compliment.

I'm not a huge fan of Adam Gopnik, but in his most recent New Yorker piece (a review of a book on Times Square) he makes some very important points:

There are, of course, people who miss the old Times Square, its picturesque squalor and violence and misery and exploitation. ... Which just proves, as with the old maxim about belief, that people who refuse to be sentimental about the normal things don’t end up being sentimental about nothing; they end up being sentimental about anything, shedding tears about muggings and the shards of crack vials glittering like diamonds in the gutter.

One of my pet peeves in the media - bloggers included - are those who wax nostalgic for the "old Times Square," a stand-in for the pre-Giuliani city -sometimes otherwise phrased as "when the city had character," or "vitality," or some other intangible quality that ignores the massive amount of crime, breakdown and despair that were part of the "character" or "vitality" for anyone who actually lived in the city at the time. Even normally sensible people like Apt. 11D's Laura sometimes fall victim to this syndrome of inappropriate nostalgia. (And she's a Washington Heights resident - some areas of which, as I know from my sojourns to the inconveniently situated Yeshiva University, could still use a second helping of the Giuliani treatment.) Yes, gentrifying neighborhoods mean out-of-sight real estate prices, with the discomforting turnover. But it beats the hell out of landlords inviting drug dealers and arsonists to their properties to force out rent-controlled tenants, as was common in the 1970s. And blackouts from that era weren't nearly as fun as last summer's.

Nostalgia is often advertised as a sign of maturity and perspective. As often as not, it's exactly the opposite.

Check out an unsurprisingly good piece from Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker about the development of the bete noire of good urbanites everywhere - shopping malls.

It's a wide-ranging piece, but the most interesting element is Gladwell's focus on the tax code as the unsung hero or villain of the spread of malls: apparently the accelerated depreciation schedule put into the code in the 1950s made it efficient to overbuild malls. Everything old is new again, as similar incentives in the Reagan tax cuts of the 1980s contributed to overbuilding of office towers.

The story is further evidence of how small changes in, or features of, the tax code have monumental impact. Pick your favorite example: the role of the mortgage deduction in inflating the price of housing (and while I haven't seen any studies of the issue, it wouldn't shock me if the Clinton doubling of the amount of tax-free gain from the sale of a home has played a role in the housing bubble we may be facing), the quirk that exempts the donor of appreciated property from capital gains taxes, or the historical accident of exempting employers' health-insurance premiums that has helped produce (probably more than anything else) the wonderful state of health care in this country. The first example is probably the mos timportant, as it illustrates both the distortions of such tax-code changes and the diffculty of getting such quirks out once they've been absorbed into the economy (let's have a show of hands for who wants to destroy the real estate sector!). If there's a moral to the story, it's "don't go down that road." But it's a little late for that advice, so the second-best advice is probably to go to the drugstore at your friendly neighborhood mall and buy some aspirin.

I've griped a bit about the self-absorption of the baby boomer generation, but I'd never go so far as to start a blog devoted to the topic. But fortunately, not everyone has such scruples.

I hereby bring you...Boomer Deathwatch (whose tag line is "Because one day, they'll all be dead.")

If Mom & Dad are reading this: I'd never look at such a terrible, terrible site. Not too often, anyway.

Link through the non-boomer Laura _______ of Apt. 11D.

Mark Kleiman, in writing about two TNR individual endorsements of Wesley Clark, discovers a general principle:

I have noticed that, on this topic and others, essays that support the position I have already taken are consistently more cogently argued, and better supported by the facts, than essays opposing that position. What more evidence could one want that I was right in the first place?

You know, I was wondering the same thing...

The New Republic recently endorsed Joe Lieberman for the Democratic Presidential nomination. Many no doubt assumed the endorsement was dictated by very specific powers-that-be (who may be known by the initials M.P.), and those suspicions seem borne out - in a very enlightened way! - by an online debate between TNR staffers about the wisdom of the endorsement.

Many good arguments are made by all, but I was flabbergasted by the following statement by Christopher Orr. In arguing against the editorial decision to ascribe great weight to Lieberman's stances on the Iraq war and free trade, the unfortunate Mr. Orr asked:

How exactly is it that support for the Iraq war and free trade are now seen as TNR litmus tests but opposition to corporate malfeasance and irresponsible tax breaks for the rich aren't?

Let's try to explain this clearly:

A candidate's attitude towards the Iraq war* is (at least in the minds of many, many voters, and not without good reason) a good proxy for that candidate's attitude towards the war on terrorism and more generally towards matters of national security. And preventing Americans from being murdered in large numbers by murderous fanatics just might be - work with me on this! - more important than "opposition to corporate malfeasance and irresponsible tax breaks for the rich."

* (This is also the case regarding free trade, albeit to a much, much lesser extent - so I won't contest the point.)

Now, it is certainly debatable whether one's views on the Iraq war should truly be taken as a valid proxy for the war on terrorism, or even national security more generally. The TNR editorial in question understood that and argued in favor of that correlation (well, in my opinion - but more on that in another post). The point is that if you assume the correlation (or even any relationship between the two), Orr's question is as fatuous as I made it sound in the prior paragraph. And even if you don't agree that there is any relationship between the two positions (as Jonathan Chait argued earlier in the same debate), Orr's question is nonsensical on its face ("How exactly" did the Iraq war become a litmus test? Read the editorial - it tells you how!).
And finally, even if you opposed the Iraq war, shouldn't that be close to a litmus test in and of itself, per Howard Dean's fans - isn't an unnecessary war a very important thing to oppose? Or is Orr's attitude that Democrats should let bygones be bygones over a war, but supporting capital-gains tax cuts should be unforgiveable? What does that tell you about the priority of national security? (In this respect, Howard Dean takes national-security matters far more seriously than many of his rivals.)

In any event, Orr's question could barely be a more perfect illustration of the difficulties Democrats face in November. The biggest divide in American politics now isn't between Republicans and Democrats. It's between those who believe that the current environment forces matters of national security to the top of any list of priorities, and those who do not. And if you don't, that fact will come across.

And based on current polls, any Democratic candidate who does not agree with the primary position of national security will face a nearly insurmountable obstacle in November - which makes it all the more amusing that Orr would argue against TNR's selection of Lieberman based in part on concerns of electoral viability (and not just in the primary).

Jonathan Chait and Peter Beinart clearly understand all of this: perhaps they need to sit Mr. Orr down for an intervention.

Check out the text of this lecture from Michael Crichton. It's more substantive than any of his novels:

Let's think back to people in 1900 in, say, New York. If they worried about people in 2000, what would they worry about? Probably: Where would people get enough horses? And what would they do about all the horseshit? Horse pollution was bad in 1900, think how much worse it would be a century later, with so many more people riding horses?

I remind you that in the lifetime of most scientists now living, we have already had an example of dire predictions set aside by new technology. I refer to the green revolution. In 1960, Paul Ehrlich said, "The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergoe famines-hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death." Ten years later, he predicted four billion people would die during the 1980s, including 65 million Americans. The mass starvation that was predicted never occurred, and it now seems it isn't ever going to happen. Nor is the population explosion going to reach the numbers predicted even ten years ago. In 1990, climate modelers anticipated a world population of 11 billion by 2100. Today, some people think the correct number will be 7 billion and falling. But nobody knows for sure.

Read the whole thing. (Link via Tim Blair.)

In a pice for the Sunday Times of London, Andrew Sullivan defends the Bush record about as well as it can be defended against the slurs of the British sophisticates.

The virtues of procrastination have been revealed again: I was about to write a post about how I thought the lack of activity with the Valerie Plame story since its revelation, along with certain other revelations, had persuaded me that there was probably less to the story than the Bush-haters would have liked.

Maybe not.

I still find it hard to believe that the administration would combine such high levels of illegality and incompetence. But if everything in the Washington Post story is true (and that still is a big "if"), then I agree with every word of this Daniel Drezner post. In fact, I might take some precautions and make a donation to the Lieberman campaign (not that it will make a difference), just in case.

For more, follow the links in the Drezner post.

I still have a lot of trouble believing that the worst-case (or best-case, depending on your orientation) is true; wouldn't it have been easier, and less traceable, to hire a plane to sky-write Plame's status above Capitol Hill? But a year ago, it would've seemed even less likely that Saddam Hussein would've destroyed his chemical or biological weapons without telling anyone about it. So who knows?

A while ago, I was writing a long post about Social Security and the payroll tax that funds it, and why a) the Republicans had success pushing for giving individuals the power to direct their Social Security contriubtions and b) why the intermittent calls to remove the cap on SS payroll taxes are invariably a confession of ignorance as to how SS works. But my computer crashed midway through the post and I never got back to it.

Well, Megan McArdle cites an outstanding piece by Jacob Levy that discusses the subject in passing, more concisely than my would-be-efforts. He touches on all the important points:

If the payroll tax is just a tax, not something special like an insurance premium or forced savings-- that is, if it ought to be counted in a way that is detached from Social Security payouts at the other end-- then the tax system is barely progressive, and could be tipped into being regressive overall. If the payroll tax is not just a tax but something special that should be counted alongside the ostensible benefits it ostensibly purchases, then this is not true. The payroll tax is the largest share of the tax burden for (I believe this is right) most Americans. It is proportional-- but only on earned income, and only up to a certain income cap. So it makes a big difference in the overall calculations-- and how we count it makes a big difference.

I think that the payroll tax is just a tax, and that Social Security is just a spending program. But that's not the official position; and it's not ordinarily the position of those who support a continued state system of Social Security. Hence the desire to take Social Security off-budget, to treat its surplus as different from other state funds, and so on. Hence the unwillingness to means-test Social Security-- in order to preserve the illusion of social insurance "bought" with one's "premiums." Hence the unwillingness to lift the income cap on the payroll tax-- because then we'd either have to allow benefits paid to the richest retirees to skyrocket, or we'd have to admit that one's taxes don't really purchase one's own benefits. In other words, I want to concede that the payroll tax is just a tax, making the tax system as a whole borderline-regressive-- and then to insist on the consequences that follow from that. But I dislike any attempt to have it both ways-- to treat the payroll tax as just a tax for purposes of calculating regressivity, but to treat it as something quite different when it comes to discussing Social Security as a program.

(Emphases added.)

I can't count the number of editorials and opinion pieces over the years bemoaning the regressivity of SS taxes and advocating either cuts in the taxes paid or doing away with the income caps. Those pieces never (as far as I've seen) even address the ostensible relationship between tax contributions and future benefits that is at the heart of the way Social Security is sold to the population. The problem is exactly as Levy discusses: assuming the caps are raised or abolished, what "return" should the taxpayers get on contributions made into the system at the new income levels? If it is anything above zero, then a) you haven't helped the long-term sustainability of the system at all and b) eventual SS payouts will then be accordingly tilted in favor fo those who have made such large contributions - i.e., in favor of the "rich." Currently, the distribution of SS payouts is pretty progressive, and that is due to the income caps on contributions; abolishing those caps will make the distribution of SS payouts track the distribution of income and taxes paid in the country - i.e., not progressive at all.

On the other hand, if the "return" on such elevated contributions is zero, then you've just officially abandoned the "illusion of social insurance 'bought' with one's 'premiums.'", in Levy's words. In that case, SS is nothing but a (very effective) redistributive program - why not go about it more efficiently and means-test? Most liberals are horrified at the thought, as it goes counter to one of the main tenents of what Jonathan Cohn and Ed Haislmaier recently called the "Unreformed Church of Social Insurance of the Strict Observance." As Cohn described the rationale for that stricture in connection with a proposed prescription drug benefit:

In the real world, universal programs thrive while means-tested programs barely survive, if at all. As a case study, simply look at Medicare and Medicaid, enacted at the same time. Because Medicaid benefits only the poor, it lacks a constituency with sufficient political clout to protect it from cuts whenever Washington or the states start trimming budgets. Those cuts inevitably leave people on Medicaid without medical access, either because it doesn't cover particular populations--leaving them uninsured--or pays such atrociously low fees that many medical providers refuse it--leaving those with coverage without doctors to see.

So I guess you can count me as a member of the Church. I indeed think a Medicare drug benefit should be universal, because I fear anything else won't survive long politically.

The argument is professed with even greater devotion with respect to Social Security.

So if you're wondering why you read so many pieces bemoaning the inequality of capping the income subject to Social Security taxes and never hear of anything done about it, it's because - not for the first time! - there is a fundamental disconnect between the popular description of the problem and the underlying facts of the matter.

Glenn Reynolds, by way of Clayton Cramer, cites a curious statement by Gray Davis:

"My vision is to make the most diverse state on earth, and we have people from every planet on the earth in this state. We have the sons and daughters of every, of people from every planet, of every country on earth," he said.
(Emphasis added.)

Now, this may be a simple slip of the tongue or confirmation of California's... unique characteristics. I think it's something entirely different - the answer to a difficult problem with our economic statistics.

In its current survey of the world economy, the Economist describes America's burgeoning current-account deficit, but also notes a problem with its calculation (subscription required):

Some of the recent rise may be a statistical quirk. According to official numbers, the world as a whole runs a current-account deficit with itself, and one that has risen sharply since 1997. Since the world does not, as yet, trade with Mars, the numbers must be wrong, so some of America's current-account deficit may be more apparent than real. But not all of the recent rise, or even most of it, can be explained this way.
(Emphasis added.)

Are they really sure that there is no extraterrestrial trade? Perhaps the Economist's correspondent should've stopped in Sacramento while researching the survey. And the hopefully-soon-to-be-former Governor Davis may be bucking for a job as Commerce Secretary in a Dean Administration (though the extraterrestrial trade expertise may be more relevant for a Kucinich Administration).

It belongs to Dahlia Lithwick:

There's really only one way to read the panel's decision from Monday. It's a sauce-for-the-gander exercise in payback. Pure and simple. The panel not only refused to accept the Supremes' admonition that the nation would not be fooled again; it refused even to address it. Applying Bush v. Gore again and again in the unanimous opinion, the judges told the high court that it has no power to declare a case a one-ride ticket and defied the court to step in again to tell them otherwise. (The court isn't likely to step in, as many have now noted, because they cannot win if they do. By getting involved, they risk either looking corrupt and partisan if they reverse the decision or permitting the courts to legislate things like the distances between polling places and the pant-length for elections workers for all eternity.)

Reading the opinion, you can almost hear the panel saying: "Hey, let's not just halt this recall, let's have a little fun with the thing!" The opinion includes a fond historical nod to voting with fava beans and the wry observation that punch cards are "intractably afflicted with technologic dyscalculia." It's tough to count the number of times the judges gleefully point out that the secretary of state is barred from defending the punch-card machines because he is already subject to a consent decree holding that they suck.

For more substantive commentary, check out law professor Rick Hansen, whose amicus brief helped inspire the 9th Circuit's decision, and his nemesis (on this subject) Mickey Kaus. Each has a myriad of links on the subject.

Via Robert Musil, the Econopundit has some fascinating guesstimates of the impact of the effort to rebuild Iraq on the US economy.
Good stuff.

Last week, Megan McArdle had some intriguing thoughts on the working mother/ child-care conundrum.
I have some not-particularly-related points on the matter. There is some argument that the tax and regulatory regime re: child care favors institutional arragements (i.e. day care) over individual ones (i.e. in-home care) - and not just in requiring a social security number to ward off illegal immigrants.
Speaking from personal experience, if you want to have a nanny and do everything above-board, you have to do an awful lot of things that most individuals aren't used to doing. The SS tax withholding is the famous (Zoe Baird) one, and one of the easier ones to do (though you have to remember to file parallel forms with the Social Security Administration, not just the IRS - and the IRS' current publication on the matter mentions if you look hard enough).
Actually, even that isn't as easy as it sounds, because you have a choice of (a) persuading the nanny to take less up-front than she would get in cash (because you're withholding at least your half of Social Security, and let's say that many prospectivee nannies aren't always interested in taking less upfront for the sake of a future Social Security benefit) or (b) paying her that much more to make up the difference.
And less publicized but more difficult are the things you have to do on the state level - aside from whatever tax requirements there are, you need (in NY State at least) to register as an employer, pay into workman's comp, take out disability insurance and some other things I'm forgetting. And in doing those things, you have to puzzle through forms not really drafted for individuals and deal with the occasional bureaucrat who can't understand why an individual is actually bothering to comply with these requirements.
With day care, all you need to do is write a check.
You see why a massively high percentage of people who hire nannies end up paying them in cash.
It's not as if I have a good answer for the issue - I'm not interested in arguing that household employees should have no protections or rights, and I wouldn't believe it even if I felt like arguing the point. But some simplification is probably in order.

Congratulations to David Brooks on his first day as a columnist for the New York Times.
This occasion deserves a toast. So I'm heading out to meet someone at Brooks' beloved Starbucks for a few minutes (really) while mulling over these words a wise author wrote some time ago:

If our intellectual is successful, she will be offered a column. This seems like the pinnacle, but while a dozen people get riches and fame from column writing, thousands do it in wretched slavery - compelled like circus animals to be entertaining once or twice a week. The ones who succeed in that line of work have a superb knowledge of one thing: their own minds. They know what they think and they have immense confidence in their own judgments. This is not as simple as it sounds, for most people don't become aware of their own opinions until someone else has put them into words. But a columnist can read an article on brain surgery for 20 minutes and then go off and give a lecture to a conference of brain surgeons on what is wrong with their profession.

Let's wish Brooks all the self-confidence he needs. (And can you imagine a group therapy session with all the NYT columnists complaining about their "wretched slavery?" I'd love to hear Paul Krugman's complaints; imagine what he'd be like when he really gets upset...)

The Atlantic Monthly has not yet lost quality in the wake of Michael Kelly's resignation and subsequent death. Two outstanding pieces from this month's issue are available online.
First, check out James Fallows' assessment of Rupert Murdoch and his business empire. While the piece is long and meanders a bit, it is a very sober assessment of the scope and ramifications of the Murdoch phenomenon:

The political component in Murdoch's media operation is larger than people inside the company admit�and perhaps larger than they believe. But it is smaller than most people who dread Murdoch's influence assume. He is principally a businessman, of conventional business-conservative views, who vents those views when possible but not when they interfere with any important corporate goal....The main political significance of a Murdoch era is that more of the press will become more openly partisan than it has been in many years.

(For a shorter profile with a similar perspective, check out this old Slate piece.)
In the same issue, Caitlin Flanagan has a classic appreciation of housewives and Erma Bombeck, which is worth reading along with her semi-paean to 50s-style marriages from several months ago.

Which big-time blogger authored this piece in the Economist about the U.S.' budget deficit?
And as long as we're on the subject, check out this Paul Samuelson piece about future spending ahead:

Growing older will alert baby boomers to other inconvenient government policies that they may well try to alter. Consider:
• Nursing homes: By 2020 the 85-and-over population is expected to rise 54 percent to 6.8 million. Nursing home spending will explode. At present, the government covers only about 60 percent of the costs, mostly through Medicaid -- a program that requires that people become virtually impoverished before qualifying. Will there be a push for more generous coverage? Seems likely.
• Retirement savings: In 2001 workers had an estimated $2.3 trillion in individual retirement accounts and $2.1 trillion in 401(k)-type pensions. On withdrawal, most of this money faces ordinary tax rates. Will baby boomers clamor for preferential tax rates? Seems likely.
Who will pay for all this generosity? Our children, and their children. Under present policies, Social Security and Medicare spending will rise about 75 percent by 2030, projects the Congressional Budget Office. Our children will pay higher taxes, face higher budget deficits or receive fewer other government services. New retiree benefits or tax preferences increase the burden. There are questions of generational justice; high taxes or deficits may also hurt economic growth.
What we have needed -- and have not gotten -- is a rewriting of the generational compact, reflecting new social realities (longer life expectancies, more retirees, more private retirement savings). No president has addressed the issues candidly and risked the resulting unpopularity. We ought to be discussing how much people should pay for their retirement and what the public safety net should cover. But there's been no demand, especially among baby boomers, for candor.
The press amplifies the indifference. Somehow the mainstream press -- led by baby boomers -- regards new retirement benefits as "progressive" and dissociates them from higher future taxes or deficits. Coverage of the drug benefit has virtually ignored the issue of long-term costs. Experts at the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute have strongly criticized the congressional plans. Their views have received scant attention. Press skepticism focuses on the stinginess of the new benefit. Reflecting journalistic conformity, The Post and the New York Times both ran front-page stories on June 26 in which retirees complained that the yet-to-be-passed drug benefit was inadequate.

According to TIME magazine, Al Gore has been proceeding with plans to start a liberal cable network to counteract the pernicious influence of FOX News, among few others.
John Podhoretz has scooped the rest of the media on the proposed schedule for the network. Here is part of it:

* Live at Five with Eric Alterman: 5 p.m.

The Red Tribe uses underhanded tactics to defeat the Blue Tribe.

This lineup should surpass the ratings of the "Big 3" networks.

Anne Applebaum, about to become a New Yorker, has had two outstanding columns in the last week.
First, today's column has one of the most devastating and accurate disses of Manhattan that I've ever read:

In fact, what makes me nervous about Manhattan nowadays is not the criminals, who have faded back into the Bronx, but the people who replaced them: clever people, accomplished people, well-educated people -- and people who agree about almost everything.
I first became aware of this phenomenon some years ago when in New York at a dinner party given by a publisher. Seated around the table was a cluster of minor literary and publishing types, chatting about this and that, all making light fun of that summer's Republican convention, which had just ended. A European visitor at the table was listening, brows knitted. Finally he spoke up. "But what's wrong with Bob Dole?" he asked. "He seems like a perfectly nice man to me."
What's wrong with Bob Dole?: All conversation stopped (and I am not making this up). Everyone stared at the clueless European, who was too naive to know that it isn't polite to say anything positive about any Republican, even a moderate Republican -- even a moderate Republican heading for a massive defeat at the hands of a Democrat.
It wouldn't happen in Washington, or at least it wouldn't happen quite that way. Washington is partisan, there's no denying it. But part of the partisanship comes from the awareness, even the hyper-awareness, of the existence of another point of view. The memoirs of Sidney Blumenthal and Hillary Clinton are fiercely defensive precisely because they know what the other side is going to say in response. Republican rhetoric gets sharper here than it does anywhere else, precisely because the rhetoricians know exactly what the response is going to be. Of course you can go to a dinner party in Washington and hear people profess shock and horror at the words of an out-of-place Republican, or indeed a lone Democrat. But that's because they disagree, not because they've never met one of the other species in polite company.

I think just about every conservative in the greater NYC area can relate to what I used to call the "Giant Panda" reaction: when a group of people, having just become aware of the exotic species in their midst, react with the strange mixture of curiosity and condescension: "I've heard such species exist, but I never expected to actually meet one!" Then there's the "Misplaced Compliment" variation, where the reaction is a stammering "But..but you're nice and smart ... you don't seem like a fascist!" Anyway, her comparison of Manhattan to Washington is well-taken.
Applebaum also had a great and chilling piece last week, which I am surprised did not get more attention in the blogosphere:

"Do you see any parallels between the security state that George Bush has created in America since 9/11 and the Gulag?" For a moment, the question struck me dumb. It had been put by a BBC radio interviewer, and we were on the air. It seemed impolitic to say, "What a ridiculous question," and I was too surprised to laugh. Finally I mumbled something about not having noticed that great a difference between daily life in George Bush's America and daily life in Bill Clinton's America, and left it at that. What I should have done was point out, tartly, that access to information is still far freer in America than it is in Britain, that immigrants are far better treated in America than in Britain, and that democracy remains a more open affair in America than in Britain. One always thinks of these things too late.
Yet in the days that followed, I did, rather surprisingly, have the opportunity to try out a few more answers. I was in London because a book I wrote about Soviet concentration camps had just been published there. For some, it seemed, the combination of that subject and my nationality offered the perfect opportunity to discuss the viciousness of contemporary American society. Several times I was asked if Guantanamo Bay should be considered a concentration camp. One reviewer, after saying a few neutral words about my book, complained that "the author has missed an opportunity to condemn human rights violations in her own country." Another interviewer asked whether people in America are often arrested for insulting the president on the Internet.
...
Partly, though, it reflects something I first noticed two years ago and am still at a loss to explain fully. This is the animus that George W. Bush personally inspires among what the British, among others, call the "chattering classes," in Europe as elsewhere. Recently, a Pew Research Center poll gave statistical backing to a phenomenon that many have observed anecdotally. Much of the world -- and Europe is no exception -- has a love-hate relationship with America. They consume our mass culture but simultaneously resent the impact of that mass culture on their own. They watch our television programs but are wary of importing them. On a host of issues, ranging from beliefs about the death penalty to preferred brands of sneakers, Europeans and Americans are actually growing closer, and the much-vaunted "values gap" is growing narrower. Yet when asked about it, Europeans often focus on what drives us apart.
Somehow -- and the Pew results support this too -- Bush has come to stand for the hate part of the love-hate relationship, symbolizing the downside of mass culture and the pushy side of our foreign policy, rather than the economic freedom and political openness that many admire. Largely this is because Bush, as a fully paid-up conservative, is at odds with Europe's left-leaning political elites, most of whom hate not only him but also the things with which he is associated, rightly or wrongly, such as a freer rein for the private sector. What they hate, in other words, is his domestic policy, more than his foreign policy.
Hatred of Bush has, in turn, slanted the reporting in the European press. Huge amounts of attention were given to the reports, after the fall of Baghdad, of the looting of the Iraqi state museum, which played into negative stereotypes (anti-culture Americans!). Far less attention has been paid to subsequent discoveries of the museum's treasures, hidden in vaults, safe from looters. Much was made a year or two ago of the administration's apparent lack of interest in Middle East peace (warmongering Americans!). By contrast, there has been relatively little interest in the president's recent trip to the Middle East, which has been widely dismissed as a cynical maneuver.
(Emphases added.)

European elites holding such attitudes need to ask themselves if they are encouraging and exacerbating the dismissive attitudes of the Bush administration towards their countries. (Hint: yes.)

I haven't yet read Eric Alterman's book What Liberal Media, but Jonah Goldberg's review raises a noteworthy point:

Sure, conservatives have built a parallel media structure. No secret there, even if Mr. Alterman makes it sound like it is one. (If we've spent billions, though, I feel cheated. Most of what I see operates on a shoestring.)
But back up a step: Why did conservatives feel a need to set up parallel media channels, with all the effort that entailed? Because the existing structures--elite newsrooms, plus the academic, publishing and entertainment industries that intertwine with the news business--are so hostile to conservative views that the only way to compete in the public debate was to set up shop across the street.
...But anyway, why is it dangerous to democracy if conservatives who view the media as too far left try to pull them back? That sounds like healthy democratic activism in action. Besides, Mr. Alterman's doing the same thing, trying to move the media left. So what is the big deal?

For another day: what this has to do with the blogosphere. (A lot, I think.)

God bless the New York Times. Without it, we may not have had the opportunity to read this delicious saga of high-class hypocrisy:

...Walter Cronkite, America's �minence grise, has issued a dire warning from his second home on Martha's Vineyard. ''I'm very concerned about a private developer's plan to build an industrial energy complex across 24 square miles of publicly owned land,'' Cronkite intoned in a radio and television ad recently broadcast across the Cape.
The industrial energy complex in question is a wind farm. And the publicly owned land is really water -- Nantucket Sound, which separates the Cape from Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket. That is where a Boston-based company called Cape Wind Associates hopes to build America's first offshore wind farm. At a cost in excess of $700 million, Cape Wind plans to spread 130 windmills, spaced a third to a half of a mile apart, across a shoal less than seven miles off the coast of Hyannis. Embedded in the ocean floor, each turbine would tower higher than the top of the Statue of Liberty's torch, its three 161-foot blades churning at 16 revolutions per minute. The wind forest promises to provide Cape Codders, on average, with 75 percent of their electricity, 1.8 percent of the total electrical needs of New England, without emitting a single microgram of greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide or mercury and without burning a single barrel of Middle Eastern oil.
The nation's leading environmental groups can barely control their enthusiasm. ''We're bullish on wind,'' says Kert Davies, research director of Greenpeace USA. ''Everybody has to ante up in the fight.''
But like residents of dozens of communities where other wind-farm projects have been proposed, many Cape Codders have put aside their larger environmental sensitivities and are demanding that their home be exempt from such projects. As Cronkite puts it, ''Our national treasures should be off limits to industrialization.''

It gets better:

This is not, like most anticorporate sagas, a David and Goliath tale. Despite the alliance's portrayal of Cape Wind as an ''energy giant,'' nothing about Jim Gordon suggests evil capitalist or environmental rapist. During his 25 years in the energy business, he has never fallen afoul of the Environmental Protection Agency and has even won the admiration of notoriously feisty Greens. ''Jim Gordon is the real thing,'' says Kert Davies of Greenpeace. ''There aren't many entrepreneurs out there willing to take risks to clean up the environment.''
The members of the alliance's board are similarly miscast in their self-assigned roles as small-town folk fighting corporate greed. Over the past several years, Wayne Kurker infuriated many Cape environmentalists when he expanded his Hyannis Marina by erecting corrugated metal hangars along the harbor. And the group's president, Doug Yearley, is a former C.E.O. of Phelps Dodge, one of the world's leading copper-mining companies. The alliance's lobbyist, John O'Brien, is a principal in a Boston firm that represents Exelon Generation, one of the largest fossil-fuel generating companies in the United States. Its Washington attorney is Guy Martin, a former assistant secretary of the interior. And, of course, there is the high-profile support of Robert Kennedy Jr.
''I am all for wind power,'' Kennedy insisted in a debate with Gordon on Boston's NPR affiliate. ''The costs . . . on the people of this region are so huge, . . . the diminishment to property values, the diminishment to marinas, to businesses. . . . People go to the Cape because they want to connect themselves with the history and the culture. They want to see the same scenes the Pilgrims saw when they landed at Plymouth Rock.'' (It should be pointed out that the Pilgrims never saw Nantucket Sound, and if they had, they wouldn't have spied the Kennedy compound.)

Read the whole thing, of course.

Click here for the exclusive report. (Link via Instapundit.)

Andrew Sullivan has recently published a couple of interesting pieces in places other than his blog.
First is an article about how Hillary Clinton is expertly positioning herself for a 2008 presidential run:

...[T]he former first lady has been showing signs of ramping up her steely, long-term political ambitions. Republicans are alternately salivating at the prospect and dreading it. Hillary mobilizes the Republican base more effectively than an evangelical rally on an aircraft carrier. But she's also a canny politician, like her husband. And there's always the slight chance that she could prevail.
...She and her husband already exercise strong control over the party, through their cheesy henchman, Terry McAuliffe, who is still party chair despite the Democrats' pathetic showing in last November's Congressional elections. What better strategy than to stay above the fray, while a bunch of ragged and raw aspirants squabble into a loss in November 2008? And so far, alas, the Democratic field looks particularly forlorn.
...So Hillary bides her time, waiting for the kill. She's probably hoping that in a few years' time, her capacity to polarize the country will have abated. Such a hope is probably ill-founded. There's a large swathe of Americans who would rather see Jacques Chirac elected American president than Hillary Rodham Clinton. But the same could have been said about Richard Nixon in the late 1960s, and he still won. So could she. With luck. And in time. And so far, she's been playing her hand very very smoothly.

I think there is little doubt that if Bush is re-elected in 2004, Hillary will run in 2008. Josh Marshall has argued that she has little chance of winning. His points are well taken, but he gives surprisingly short shrift (especially given how connected he is to political tacticians) to an obvious counterargument: that Hillary's power to mobilize the Republican base may turn out to be a Democratic advantage. As shown during her husband's presidency, a divisive figure who stokes rage in the opposition can drive them into self-defeating practices, either through spluttering incoherence or tactical extremism. And we're seeing it during this presidency as well (go to his 5/7 article).
In fact, this bipartisan phenomenon should have a name attached to it. Call it the "Death-Ray Theory of Politics": The ability to drive your opponents stark raving bonkers is a major strategic asset. At a certain point, you can't say that Presidents Clinton or Bush are merely lucky to have such incoherent opponents. As Branch Rickey said, "Luck is the residue of design."
And as long as we're on the subject of those driven mad by President Clinton, check out Sullivan's review of Sidney Blumenthal's book The Clinton Wars. I have no intention of reading Blumenthal's book, but from the reviews I've read it seems unlikely that the book is anywhere near as insightful as Sullivan's review:

...It has the tone and manner and piety of one of those "Lives of the Saints" books most Catholic school kids were once forced to read at some point or other. It’s not a memoir, or a history. It’s a Gospel. Its facts are assembled, as the facts in the Gospels were assembled, for one purpose only: to affirm the faith, to rally the flock, to spread the further glory of the Church. It’s an allegory of eternal good and evil—a passion narrative with a scriptural past and a resurrection at the end, the first-person narrative of one saint who prevailed.
That saint is Bill Clinton. Of all the characters who have graced the office of the Presidency, Sidney picks William Jefferson Clinton as the moral exemplar. There is not a scintilla of a clue anywhere in this book that Mr. Blumenthal sees even a trace of irony in this selection.
...Mr. Clinton is and was a fascinatingly complex, flawed, intelligent, charismatic human being. Few people got as close to him as Sidney did—at moments of extreme tension and drama. The potential for a real and vivid portrait of the man is great. And yet the picture we get of Mr. Clinton from this book is strangely blank. No foibles; no expletives; no tears; no wit; not a single memorable phrase; not even a fresh insight into the man’s psycho-sexual compulsions. That’s what happens when the religious temperament prevails. The need to prove not just that Mr. Clinton’s opponents were evil, wrong, dumb, malign, gob-smackingly corrupt and duplicitous in every single respect, but that the President was noble, grand, progressive, epic and world-historical must, by its very nature, obscure nuance. Nuance, after all, could lead to doubt; and doubt to error; and error to damnation. And beyond damnation, there’s always the danger of becoming a Republican.

Read the whole thing.

Many people love to view George W. Bush�s actions through the prism of his father�s experiences. Many also argue that the Bush administration�s actions are primarily motivated by the desire to do the opposite of the Clinton administration on any given topic. What if there was a neat theorem which combined both theses, in a way which (to my knowledge) nobody in the mainstream media has noted? I think one exists, and it's one which should work for both Bush supporters and opponents.
Here�s my proposed Grand Unified Theory of the George W. Bush Administration:�
�Our opponents aren�t going to support us, whatever we do. Screw �em � there�s no point in meeting them halfway.�
I � Lessons from the Father
George H.W. Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act and a massively revamped and expanded Clean Air Act. He wooed reporters as if he actually enjoyed it. Most notably, he warmed the hearts of every Democratic member of Congress and raised taxes, publicly breaking his vow to the contrary.
And it didn�t do him any good, politically speaking. The Democrats lost no opportunity to bash him even in those areas where he had shown the most accommodation. He was called a disaster for the environment, a claim flagrantly at issue with his administration�s record. Despite his capitulation to the Democrats� demands for higher taxes, he was consistently blamed for not doing more to resuscitate the economy. (And as an aside, I haven�t seen too many Democrats who credit Clinton�s tax increases for lowering the deficit and creating the lower interest rates that fueled the �90s boom give any credit for those outcomes to George H.W. Bush�s larger tax increases.) While one could not reasonably have expected the Democrats to go easy on an incumbent in an election year, the mainstream press largely went along with those claims and added their own spin: that he was too out of touch with the country. His schmoozing of reporters was for naught.
People have wondered why George W. Bush is content to push his agenda through Congress with barely an attempt to convince opposing legislators, especially since his practice as governor of Texas was so different. Some have also wondered why the Bush administration campaigned mercilessly against Democrats who supported parts of his agenda. Perhaps the experience of 1992 can provide an answer to those questions; unlike Texas, where Democratic legislators might support the re-election of a conciliatory Republican Governor, Washington Democrats could be expected to offer little succor at election time, regardless of how conciliatory their opposing number in the executive branch had been.
II � Lessons from the Bill
Many have noted that one of Bill Clinton�s signature traits was his belief that everyone could be convinced to support him, if he could only talk to and debate them long enough.
It seems clear that George W. Bush, due to his religious beliefs / habits resulting from giving up drinking, has a more militantly modest outlook: he is a clear believer in the recognizing the difference between what he can change and what he cannot. It wouldn�t surprise me if Bush sees Clinton�s inability to concede that some people are beyond his persuasive powers as a moral failing, as much as the more obvious foibles.
Bush�s viewpoint is probably reinforced by the fact that the results of Clinton�s indiscriminate attempts at persuasion were, obviously, mixed � especially in international relations. As pointed out by a charter member of the �neoconservative cabal,� Robert Kagan:

Although transatlantic tensions are now widely assumed to have begun with the inauguration of George W. Bush in January 2001, they were already evident during the Clinton administration and may even be traced back to the administration of George H.W. Bush. By 1992, mutual recriminations were rife over Bosnia, where the United States refused to act and Europe could not act. It was during the Clinton years that Europeans began complaining about being lectured by the �hectoring hegemon.� This was also the period in which V�drine coined the term hyperpuissance to describe an American behemoth too worryingly powerful to be designated merely a superpower. (Perhaps he was responding to then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright�s insistence that the United States was the world�s �indispensable nation.�) It was also during the 1990s that the transatlantic disagreement over American plans for missile defense emerged and many Europeans began grumbling about the American propensity to choose force and punishment over diplomacy and persuasion.
The Clinton administration, meanwhile, though relatively timid and restrained itself, grew angry and impatient with European timidity, especially the unwillingness to confront Saddam Hussein. The split in the alliance over Iraq didn�t begin with the 2000 election but in 1997, when the Clinton administration tried to increase the pressure on Baghdad and found itself at odds with France and (to a lesser extent) Great Britain in the United Nations Security Council. Even the war in Kosovo was marked by nervousness among some allies � especially Italy, Greece, and Germany � that the United States was too uncompromisingly militaristic in its approach. And while Europeans and Americans ultimately stood together in the confrontation with Belgrade, the Kosovo war produced in Europe less satisfaction at the successful prosecution of the war than unease at America�s apparent omnipotence. That apprehension would only increase in the wake of American military action after September 11, 2001.

Combine the deep fault-lines in interests exposed by the Clinton administration with the popular image of George W. Bush as a gun-toting provincial Christian fundamentalist (which pre-dated his inauguration, much less anything he actually did in office), and it is easy to see how Bush concluded that he never stood a chance with much of Europe.
It is also entirely possible that Bush noticed how in the previous decade, America had gone to war three times to protect Muslims and pushed Israel to the negotiating table with, and to make concessions to, the Palestinians (at Madrid in 1992, at Wye in 1998 and at Camp David in 2000) � events which bought America approximately 2.5 seconds� worth of goodwill in much of the Arab and Muslim world. Is it any wonder that the Bush administration has been appropriately skeptical of European and Arab claims that particular policy changes (signing Kyoto, pushing Israel to make more concessions to the Palestinians, etc.) would suddenly solve all problems between those countries and the U.S.?

Like all good cynical beliefs, the Grand Unified Theory has a lot of truth to it: it is not as if too many congressional Democrats would support Bush�s re-election regardless of what he did between now and then, and it seems clear that France would have been obstreperous on Iraq even if Bush had given his September 12th speech to the UN in French.
This theory is so obvious to me that I�m surprised more people in the mainstream media haven�t put it this way yet. I think media-types may not see it because it potentially implicates the their treatment of George H.W. Bush in the 1992 election cycle (and, by implication, how they�ll treat his son in 2004). What do you think?

Dick Gephardt announced his candidacy for President today.
The sidebar picture accompanying the Times article (by Kenneth Dickerman) must be one of the most unflattering pictures of a Presidential candidate ever published.
It is reminiscent of Henrik Hertzberg's classic 1988 comment in The New Republic that Gephardt, in his initial candidacy, resembled "someone whose body has been taken over by space aliens...from the planet Bryan."
See for yourselves:

UPDATE: The article on the Times' website now shows a somewhat more flattering picture. (I didn't get a chance to see which picture made the print version.) Perhaps the Gephardt people complained. I certainly would have.

Today's New York Times discusses potential differences between the commission that investigated the Challenger explosion and the one that will investigate the loss of the Columbia:

General Kutyna also noted that there was far more politics surrounding the Challenger investigation than surrounds this investigation. The chairman of the commission, former Secretary of State William P. Rogers, was told by the White House that whatever he did, he should make sure that NASA emerged in one piece, and that the shuttle program went on.
Mr. Rogers, who died early last year, did exactly that, but his mastery of the ways of Washington — from handling Congress to the art of the news leak — meant that he also made sure NASA was forced to clean house.

I am probably the least qualified person in the blogosphere to talk about the space shuttle, but people far more knowledgable than I argue that NASA did no such housecleaning in the wake of the Challenger's destruction:

Will NASA whitewash problems as it did after Challenger? The haunting fact of Challenger was that engineers who knew about the booster-joint problem begged NASA not to launch that day and were ignored. Later the Rogers Commission, ordered to get to the bottom of things, essentially recommended that nothing change. No NASA manager was fired; no safety systems were added to the solid rocket boosters whose explosion destroyed Challenger; no escape-capsule system was added to get astronauts out in a calamity, which might have helped Columbia. In return for failure, the shuttle program got a big budget increase. Post-Challenger "reforms" were left up to the very old-boy network that had created the problem in the first place and that benefited from continuing high costs.

Perhaps Rogers' "mastery of the ways of Washington" included the ability to make everyone think that NASA had in fact cleaned house, regardless of the facts...

I join what should be all Americans in wishing Senator John Kerrya speedy and complete recovery from cancer surgery.
I was going to post my guess as to what Mickey Kaus calls Kerry's "mysterious loathsomeness" as a presidential candidate, but that will wait until he returns to campaigning.
But those interested in some non-political acid on the subject should check out Robert Musil. Words fail me.

Remember the stories told about how Enron executives like Ken Lay were encouraging their employees to buy stock in the company, even as those executives were supposedly unloading their own stock? It sounded like a clear case of plutocrats hypocritically fleecing the little guy, with insider trading thrown in. A story that launched a thousand Paul Krugman columns.
Well, the New York Times now explains that with respect to Ken Lay, the story is a little more complicated:

It has become an indelible moment of the recent corporate scandals: Kenneth L. Lay, then chairman and chief executive of Enron, encouraging employees in the summer of 2001 to buy company stock, even as he was secretly unloading much of his own stake.
Mr. Lay's representatives have always denied that he had any ill intent, arguing that the sales resulted from margin calls on his collapsing portfolio. But his critics remain unmoved.
Enron employees accused him of betrayal. Members of Congress demanded his indictment on insider trading charges. The event even figured in a recent television movie about Enron as evidence of corruption at the company's very top.
But this story of a hypocrite unmasked suffers from one significant flaw: it appears to be untrue.
A review of previously undisclosed personal records — including years of trading, accounting and other documents — as well as interviews with Mr. Lay's financial advisers and other witnesses in the government's investigation indicates that Mr. Lay retained his faith in the company virtually until its collapse.
Ultimately, people involved in the investigation say, the records — many of which were provided by people sympathetic to Mr. Lay — have transformed what appeared to be an open-and-shut case of criminal insider trading into a more complex mosaic of hubris and financial recklessness. Indeed, outside experts who were told of the data said, the case seems far less likely to support charges of the type once imagined.
"This would be a case that the government would normally shy away from," said John C. Coffee Jr., a securities law expert at Columbia University.

The Times even fesses up to its own role in promulgating the now-discredited version of the story:

All told, experts said, the records indicate that Mr. Lay believed what he said when he told employees the stock was a good buy in August 2001.
"That trading pattern is consistent with Ken Lay sincerely believing that Enron stock had reached a trough and had nowhere to go but up," said Kevin J. Murphy, who specializes in executive compensation at the Marshall School of Business of the University of Southern California.
That differs sharply from the story put forward early last year, after many news organizations, including The New York Times, reported that Mr. Lay had sold large numbers of shares as he urged others to buy. Many people seized on those facts as evidence of duplicity, not accounting for other possible explanations.
(Emphasis added.)

Good for the Times. The angle of "plutocrat-fleecing-the-little-guy-while-protecting-his-own-millions" is a popular one, and certainly exists in reality. But I think that the picture painted of Ken Lay - a true believer in his own company, to the extent of ignoring all guidelines of diversification and bad news - is probably at least as common among founders of successful companies, especially those that pride themselves on being "pioneers" or "visionaries." When you consider the amount of self-confidence and committment required to develop a successful business, people who have those qualities seem as likely to develop fanatical, delusionary confidence as the cold-blooded rationality necessary to fleece their employees and stockholders in the hypocritical fashion described above. (There's a reason they call it "drinking the Kool-Aid" - it's not just an Apple phenomenon.)
UPDATE: A warm welcome to all Andrew Sullivan and Kausfiles visitors. Come back often.
This old Michael Lewis article has a good description of the founder personality I discuss above:

The job of the entrepreneur isn't to act prudently, to err on the side of caution. It's to err on the side of reckless ambition. It is to take the risk that the market allows him to take. What distinguishes a robust market economy like ours from a less robust one like, say, France's, is that it encourages energetic, ambitious people to take a flier -- and that they respond to that encouragement. It encourages nerve, and that is a beautiful thing. As the business writer George Anders puts it, ''The personality that allows you to be Jeff Bezos in the first place does not have a shutoff valve.'' If it did, Amazon.com wouldn't exist.

The Lewis piece is a great contrarian defense of the Internet boom and its excesses.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Donald Luskin isn't as forgiving of the Times as I am. Neither is Robert Musil.

Mona Charen reminds us of how the Cold War was no time of consensus (contra the claims of certain liberals who would like everyone to forget that many of them were on the wrong side of most of the important questions of the time). David Frum endorses her arguments.

In honor of the recent slowdown by New Jersey doctors in response to crushing malpractice insurance rates, I recommend three articles (and the comments thereof) by Mindles H. Dreck regarding the relationship between insurance companies' investments and malpractice rates. Click here, here and here.

Last week, I pointed to a special drive sponsored by Manhattan's Libertarian Party to collect and distribute free toy guns to underpriviliged NY children, before the New York City Council bans the sale of such guns.
The efforts of the valiant Libertarians were not well received.
The New York Times opined (and not in the editorial pages): "The stunt turned out to be more of a dramatization of how to shoot yourself in the foot."

The Times elaborated on the reaction:

Few were amused. From City Hall to the streets of East Harlem, whose residents are predominantly Hispanic, the Libertarians were branded racists and accused of exploiting an issue and a neighborhood where the toll of gun violence is far from child's play.
"I'm livid that the Libertarian Party would have the racist nerve to come into a community of color just to get some attention," Councilman Charles Barron of Brooklyn said as the hearing opened, "to give toy guns to our children, knowing that these toy guns have led to deaths. This is not a game for media attention."
..."Get out of Harlem," protesters shouted as the two men tried to hand out the guns, many of them from donors across the country. "Go to your own neighborhood." The confrontation ended without any arrests and only a handful of the guns distributed, several to pupils who smashed them in protest.
Ydanis Rodriguez, 38, a teacher at Gregorio Luperon High School in Washington Heights, was among the parents and protesters alerted to the Libertarians' plan by a letter from Maria Diaz, the P.S. 72 principal.
"They wouldn't go to Stuyvesant or Bronx Science to do this," Mr. Rodriguez said. "They thought that in a Latino community the parents wouldn't mobilize."

That reaction seems bad enough. But the Times does not report the worst of it. For that, check out the NY Daily News' report:

Earlier, at a City Council hearing on the proposed toy-gun ban, lawmakers wondered why the party was making its point in a largely black and Latino neighborhood.
"If you want to give out toy guns, go and give it out in your neighborhood," Councilman Robert Jackson, an African-American legislator from Washington Heights, shouted at Libertarian Joseph Dobrian.
When Dobrian, who is white, protested, Jackson got livid.
"You go and give it out where you live at. Okay? Don't come up here in the 'hood and give out toy guns!" he said. "Don't come uptown with that bull."
"Speak respectfully to me, if you please," Dobrian urged.
"Listen, don't tell me how to talk to you," Jackson retorted. "If you don't like it, you pull out a toy gun and squirt me with it."
Party spokesman Jim Lesczynski said the Libertarians targeted Harlem because they believe that's where the crackdown will happen if a ban on imitation guns that "substantially duplicate" real weapons is passed.

I heard Jackson's diatribe on the radio this morning, and the News' account is accurate. (I liked his final zinger, though.)
Just wondering...what would the reaction be if a white politician (especially a Republican) told a black protestor to stay in his own neighborhood?
Would the Times find that worthy of reporting?
(Although, given the Times' sloth on the Trent Lott story, I suppose it is more complicated than that...)

"U.S. Economy in Worst Hiring Slump in 20 Years"
The economy has fallen into its worst hiring slump in almost 20 years, and many business executives say they remain unsure when it will end.

- David Leonhardt of the New York Times, February 6, 2002

"Unemployment Rate Falls in January"
The nation's unemployment rate dropped to 5.7 percent in January as businesses added 143,000 new jobs, a shot of good news for an ailing economy.
The increase in payroll jobs, mostly in the retail area, was the largest since November 2000, said Friday's Labor Department report. The overall rate dropped by 0.3 percentage point from the 6 percent rate in December that matched an 8-year high.
Analysts had expected the unemployment rate to hold steady at 6 percent for a third straight month, with a more modest increase in payrolls.

- David Leonhardt of the New York Times, February 6, 2002
(Link via Robert Musil, who has much more.)

After their latest election debacle, Heather Hurlburt detailed the Democrats' long-term unseriousness regarding national security. Rather than learn from the mistakes described by Hurlburt, top Democrats seem determined to repeat them. Tom Daschle and John Kerry should never again be taken seriously on matters relating to national security.

I recommend that everyone participate in this project.
The location also happens to be where last month's Blogger Bash took place, so the project gets a double endorsement.

Tom Wolfe celebrates the 25th anniversary of the Manhattan Institute:

The matter is perhaps summed up by a comment attributed to Henry Kissinger after a long, Byzantine discussion of why a certain controversial position of his had in the end prevailed: "Also, it helped that we were right."

Anyone who wonders why public-school systems in many American metropolitan areas are in such bad shape must read this article. And make sure you're sitting down.
(Link via the Corner.)

I finally read Glenn Reynolds' article on nanotechnology and regulatory policy, and have a couple of comments, which I'd like to share with everyone rather than do the decent thing and give Prof. Reynolds the chance to respond first.

1) When discussing potential regulatory risks, I think he leaves out one that may become a big deal as the technology becomes more viable - entaglement with health-care politics. Specifically, the history of most new technologies - also applicable to new medical treatments - is that they start out hideously expensive and as such are only available to the rich, and become mass-market as the price drops (with the two reinforcing each other in a virtuous circle). I assume (correct me if you feel this is incorrect) that nanotech medical treatments would also be pretty expensive in their initial phases, even as they really work.
What happens in the interval between demonstrated effectiveness and price reduction? If such treatments are initially covered by insurance (as may be mandated by Congress) then that would place another sever stress on the system, maybe a back-breaking one. If it is not initially covered by insurance, what will happen when such treatments of demonstrated effectiveness are only available to the rich (even for a short time)? Will there be price controls? (If so, that would be an efficient way to destroy the research in the U.S.).
The caterwauling over the "digital divide" of Internet access has fortunately died down without producing any truly harmful policies. Would the same be true when the selectively-available resource is one that is directly live-saving? I'm not sure.
An excellent example of the mindset behind such potential reactions was set forth by Paul Krugman in a 1997 piece for the NY Times Magazine, discussing the potential future of health care. (Click here, then on the "American Economy" sidebar. Scroll down to and click on the 3/9/97 article.)

Some might then say ... we must abandon the idea that everyone is entitled to state-of-the-art medical care. (That is the hidden subtext of politicians who insist that Medicare is not being cut -- that all that they are doing is slowing its growth.) But are we really prepared to face up to the implications of such an abandonment?
We have come to take it for granted that in advanced nations almost everyone can at least afford the essentials of life. Ordinary people may not dine in three-star restaurants, but they have enough to eat; they may not wear Bruno Maglis, but they do not go barefoot; they may not live in Malibu, but they have a roof over their head. Yet it was not always thus. In the past, the elite were physically superior to the masses, because only they had adequate nutrition: in the England of Charles Dickens, the adolescent sons of the upper class towered an average of four inches above their working-class contemporaries. What has happened since represents a literal leveling of the human condition, in a way that mere comparisons of the distribution of money income cannot capture.
There is really only one essential that is not within easy reach of the ordinary American family, and that is medical care. But the rising cost of that essential -- that is, the rising cost of buying the ever-growing list of useful things that doctors can now do for us -- threatens to restore that ancient inequality with a vengeance.
Suppose that Lyndon Johnson had not signed Medicare into law in 1965. Even now there would be a radical inequality in the prospects of the elderly rich and the ordinary older citizen; the affluent would receive artificial hip replacements and coronary bypasses, while the rest would (like the elderly poor in less fortunate nations) limp along painfully -- or die.
The current conventional wisdom is that the budget burden of health care will be cured with rationing -- the Federal Government will simply decline to pay for many of the expensive procedures that medical science makes available. But what if, as seems likely, those procedures really work -- if there comes a time when those who can afford it can expect to be vigorous centenarians, and perhaps even buy themselves smarter children, while those who cannot can look forward only to the biblical threescore and ten. Is this really a tolerable prospect?
...For all we know, the future may belong to the medical welfare state, a state whose slogan might be "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."

I think that Congress would feel intense pressure to meddle with the distribution of nanotechnological medical treatments in the early stages of availability, and I doubt the consequences would be beneficial.

2) As an aside, Reynolds alludes to Cass Sunstein's arguments that requiring "best available practices" stifles innovation. Why? In the private sector, wouldn't such a requirement create an incentive to innovate, as the first to discover the new "best practice" would gain a competitive advantage over its rivals who need to catch up?
The reason I fixate on this point is that one of the Official Regulatory Policy Consultants to Blissful Knowledge, Prof. Charles Sabel of Columbia Law School (who is as yet unaware of his position), uses it as one of the bases for his ideas for saving the world, or at least U.S. regulatory policy. He argues that such pressure to innovate can be harnessed for use in the public sector. For those who are interested, check out just about any of his papers or specifically, this Columbia Law Review article (warning: it is NOT easy reading).

A few points on what will probably be my last thimerosal-related post for a while.
1) Notwithstanding my P.P.S. below, I'm not going to do a major discussion of the merits of the existing studies on the link between thimerosal and autism. Even though I think the existing studies may be less flawed than Dwight Meredith or Wampum do, the scope of the disagreement is ultimately marginal: I don't think the existing evidence provides conclusive disproof of a link, and they do not argue that the existing evidence provides conclusive proof of a link.
2) Professor Mark Kleiman is threatening to dethrone Prof. Reynolds as Most-Favored Professor of Blissful Knowledge. (All that's lacking is the ability to generate a few thousand more hits with each link, a spot on his permalinks and a 50% rightward correction in political views, and the deal is sealed.).
Regarding the screwups identified in the Tax Notes piece noted below, Kleiman notes:

This is exactly the reason that complicated legislation shouldn't be pushed through without hearings. And these two mistakes suggest that Dr. Frist, the sponsor of the original amendment, Dick Armey, who has sorta-kinda acknowledged that he was responsible for pasting it into the Homeland Security bill, and the still-anonymous-but-widely-believed-to-be-Mitch-Daniels White House gnome who passed the word to Armey all failed to perform due diligence. (Unless, that is, it was their intention to deprive the families of the right to sue and "accidentally" leave them with no recourse whatever.) If you're going to short-cut the process, you ought to be certain you've got the substance right.

There's nothing that keeps the new Congress from fixing these problems. But the Lilly lobbyists, and their friends on the Hill, including the new Majority Leader, now have the huge advantage of the status quo. And Frist may not regard himself as being bound by the promises to undo the damage that Trent Lott made (and immediately started to back away from) to hold on to the Republican moderate votes he needed to pass the bill last session. The families and their friends are now in the position of begging the other side for whatever concessions it might deign to offer. Not a pretty picture.

I agree with most of Kleiman's first paragraph. I'm less cynical than Kleiman about the likelihood that the errors will go uncorrected and even more doubtful that the result was some sort of conspiracy to leave affected families no recourse. Bill Frist's original bill (PDF link) on the subject contained the appropriate conforming amendments to the Internal Revenue Code (click here and here). With that precedent, it does not seem likely (to me, at least) that passage of the appropriate conforming amendments would meet with much difficulty on the merits. It's further argument against sloppy, slapdash lawmaking, but not proof of some conspiracy to wholly eliminate families' recourse.

3) Does anyone know how long of a lag there is in the collection and reporting of figures on autism incidence? We have had almost three years of largely thimerosal-free vaccinations being administered to children in the U.S., and I would expect that the resulting data on autism incidence should begin showing up soon. But I don't know for sure how long it takes for the information to be collected and reported. If any of my new readers knows the answer, please let me know.

UPDATE: Dwight Meredith writes in response to the above question:

While we do not know how long it will take for the �natural experiment� to help us know whether or not thimerosal used in infant vaccines is is related to autism, we suspect that it will be a while. Although thimerosal was removed from infant vaccines in 1999, there are a number of reasons why the question will not be immediately answered.
First, autistic behaviors often do not present themselves until 15-24 months of age. Accurate diagnosis can take additional time once autisic behaviors are present.
Secondly, although thimerosal was removed from infant vaccines in 1999, as we understand it, the vaccines were not recalled and we do not know how many kids were vaccinated from multiple dose vials containing thimerosal after 1999.
Third, the best studies of incidence, (like the UC-Davis study) deal with school system and government program data. It takes a while for changes in incidence to filter upwards to those programs and it takes a while to collect and report the data. The U.C.-Davis study looked at data from 1987 through 1998. The final report was issued this year.
The collection and analysis of the data is tricky. States that have good autism programs are likely to attract families with autistic kids. Thus, the studies have to control for migration. They also have to control for severity of the problems so as to avoid reporting an expansion of the spectrum as an increase in incidence. Those factors add to the lag time.
We do not know when the results of the �natural experiment� will be available. Anecdotal evidence is likely to surface soon. Definitive data may take a while longer.

Meredith also has some other observations on the nature of autism that are worth checking out.

My post below has drawn a lot of attention, and many good comments, all of which I appreciate. Most notably, Dwight Meredith has responded in both the comments section and in a post on his own blog. Mr. Meredith's posts are models of how to rigorously argue a viewpoint on an emotional topic without allowing (justifiable) emotion to usurp reason. I regret not having followed his blog earlier, and a place will be made for his site in my permalinks in their next reorganization (which will occur sometime prior to the second Bill Frist administration).
As a tribute to Mr. Meredith's skills, I will not allow my own reasoning to unjustifiably succumb to his. Specifically, I want to address a few of the points he made in his post.

Mr. Meredith argues that I am "quick to declare that no link between thimerosal and autism has been shown and that there is no such link." I don't agree, at least with the second part. I do not think that the current evidence shows a convincing link between thimerosal and autism, but that does not mean that no such link exists. It just means it hasn't been shown yet. I'm glad that several studies are currently being done to explore the issue further.
Mr. Meredith then reads my post as implying that "the entire issue is driven by greedy lawyers eager to bankrupt Eli Lilly." Not the entire issue, but part of it. More specifically, that is an excellent summary of why I think the recent amendment to the Homeland Security bill was substantively appropriate in its own right. I don't argue that the lawyers created the concerns regarding thimerosal, though I wouldn't be surprised if they try to fan the flames of such concerns even if convincing scientific evidence emerges against such a link.
Mr. Meredith also refers me to Wampum, another interesting read. She notes that, in apparent contradiction to the CDC's officially sanguine view of thimerosal, the Bush administration has agreed to release certain documents in connection with the issue, including internal CDC documents which purportedly state that "mercury in children's vaccines is a potential source of neurological damage in children including ADD/ADHD, speech and language delays and other neurological disorders including autism."
We should all look forward to the revelation of whatever evidence is found in those documents. We should note, though, that the CDC documents referred to in the release are apparently the ones obtained by Safe Minds, an autism activist group, via the Freedom of Information Act. The New York Times Magazine article about the thimerosal issue notes in an aside that those CDC documents were "far from conclusive evidence" of a link. (Again - it's not proof of no link; just not clear proof of a link (assuming the Times' report is accurate).)
Finally, Mr. Meredith concludes:
We have been fighting battles in the area of autism for some time now. So far, money and politics has always trumped science and kids. For once, we should forget about politics, blame, potential liabilities, campaign contributions and other factors. Put all that stuff aside. Forget which side wins and which side loses. Sides suck. We should simply provide the scientists with all available information and plenty of money so that they can save our children.
I couldn't agree more.
And I assume one of my correspondents agrees as well. He identifies himself as a "parent of an autistic child and an active fundraiser for biomedical research into autism." He e-mailed me to describe "how angry I was that this group of trial lawyers was so active at trying to suck resources away from the research and into their pockets in the name of a phony connection between thimerosal and autism. Frankly, I wish whoever added that provision to the Homeland Security bill would come forward so I could express my appreciation."
Unfortunately, resources are never infinite. We should certainly pursue whatever leads appear promising, but not be afraid to reallocate scarce resources if those leads fail to deliver on their promise.
P.S. A tax lawyer friend e-mailed me an interesting article about the amendment that appeared in Tax Notes. Unfortunately, the article is only available by subscription.
The author is openly hostile to the amendment on both procedural and substantive grounds. Nothing new there. But then he adds a kicker:

But a funny thing happened on the way to the forum. Our lawmakers forgot a lot of law. Without amending the Internal Revenue Code, it is not possible for the vaccine-injury amendments to tap revenues from the fund to serve their intended purposes. Internal Revenue Code section 9510 establishes and provides the rules for operation of the Vaccine Injury Compensation Trust Fund. Sections 4131 and 4132 describe the 75-cents-per-dose excise tax that feeds the fund.
Specifically, there appear to be at least three drafting problems. First, section 9510(c)(1)(A) requires that any money disbursed from the trust fund must be in accordance with the Public Health Service Act as in effect on October 18, 2000. Because the Homeland Security Act did not amend that section, no funds can be distributed for the thimerosal cases or any cases newly covered by the amendments made by the Homeland Security Act.
Second, under section 9510(b)(3) if any amounts in the trust fund are used for ineligible purposes, the Treasury Department must cease paying funds (from excise tax revenues) into the trust fund. That is a poison pill. If any funds were paid to thimerosal victims, transfers for all vaccine-injury cases would be cut off.
Third, the Homeland Security Act does not alter the definition of taxable vaccine in code section 4132(a). That does not affect the disbursement of funds under section 9510, but it does raise the question of linking trust fund costs with trust fund benefits. If the fund's purposes are expanded to include cases against manufacturers of vaccine components, should the trust fund tax base be expanded to include separate taxation of components? (If so, that could be problematic given that the current taxable unit for the excise tax is "per dose." How would a shipment of vaccine preservative be taxed?) Or could it be ! argued that components are already effectively taxed under the current law's levy on the final product?
If Congress gets around to making code changes to amend the VICP as intended by the Homeland Security Act, it will have to consider those issues.

Oops! As the author concludes: "[T]his is a great case study in how Washington works . . . and how it doesn't." (Ellipses in original.)

P.P.S. I hope to respond to Meredith's and Wampum's criticisms of the existing studies soon.

The number of children with autism seemingly has increased dramatically in recent years. Many people have speculated that vaccinations - specifically the MMR vaccine - are causing the increase, but that allegation has not held up to scrutiny.
Recently, there has been much publicity given to allegations of a more specific link between vaccines and autism - specifically, the preservative thimerosal, which contained mercury in excess of the EPA standards for exposure and was included in vaccines given to children until 1999.
In the recently-passed Homeland Security bill, someone (Bill Frist, speculates Hesiod) inserted a provision at the last minute insulating makers of thimerosal from most of the lawsuits.
This last-minute insertion into the law has drawn much ire. Aside from general good-government concerns, the caricature of evil Republicans protecting big corporations such as Eli Lilly from the consequences of causing autism in children is far too tempting to pass up.
TAPPED has a short post on the subject which perfectly encapsulates that view, noting as an aside that the subject involves "medicines that apparently gave children autism."
There's only one problem: the caricature is probably wrong.
1) I would never want to be in the position of Dwight Meredith, father of an autistic child who wonders if sheer idiocy on the part of vaccine manufacturers and the medical establishment is responsible for his son's autism. I could certainly never deal with the topic with the level head that Mr. Meredith displays. But even Mr. Meredith is careful to note:

It is important, however, to stay focused on what is actually known about the relationship, if any, between mercury in vaccines and autism. There have been no studies of which we are aware that demonstrate that thimerosal in vaccines causes autism. Thus, it would be wrong, or at least premature, to conclude that vaccines have caused autism in any child.
Some, however, have suggested that there is no evidence of a link between thimerasol and autism. That is also not true. The increase in the incidence of autism in California coincides with the increased exposure of children to mercury in the form of thimerasol in vaccines. Mercury is known to cause brain damage to some kids at some level of exposure. That is evidence of a link but it is in no way conclusive evidence of causation.

I'm no expert, but it seems that Mr. Meredith may be too generous to the evidence of a link between thimerosal and autism. The CDC hasn't heard about it yet, and an unnamed friend of Mark Kleiman cites other evidence. Chemist Derek Lowe argues against the plausibility of a link between thimerosal and autism (click here and scroll up for more). Here's a study from The Lancet (free registration required) which reaches the following conclusions:

Overall, the results of this study show that amounts of mercury in the blood of infants receiving vaccines formulated with thiomersal are well below concentrations potentially associated with toxic effects. Coupled with 60 years of experience with administration of thiomersal-containing vaccines, we conclude that the thiomersal in routine vaccines poses very little risk to full-term infants, but that thiomersal-containing vaccines should not be administered at birth to very low birthweight premature infants.

At the very least, TAPPED's offhand statement that the thimerosal-preserved vaccines in question "apparently gave children autism" is a massive overstatement, which doesn't stand up to even a cursory reading of the evidence. A stronger link may be proven (especially since, as Meredith notes, a test will occur naturally based on the fact that thimerosal was eliminated from vaccines after 1999), but the current evidence doesn't seem to provide anything close to a reliable link.
2) As Mark Kleiman's friend notes:

When Congress established the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program in 1986, it was a rare legislative acknowledgment that the tort system is incapable of serving the public interest. At the time, you may recall, vaccine manufacturers were leaving the industry, vaccine prices were skyrocketing, and vaccination rates were falling sharply. VICP created a no-fault system for vaccine-related injuries. The system is inevitably imperfect, but it's clearly served the public interest. Vaccine prices and availability improved; the number of lawsuits plummeted; program costs have been modest ($110 million a year for pre-1988 injuries; an excise tax of 75 cents per dose for post-1988 injuries); and compensation to genuine victims has been non-trivial (VICP has paid over 1500 claims averaging just under $1 million per).
But of course the trial lawyers despise no-fault systems, and in thimerosal they see an opportunity to bypass and undermine VICP. They claim that thimerosal-related injuries (if there are such things) should not be covered under VICP because the injuries don't stem from the vaccine proper but from a "contaminant." They're suing the thimerosal manufacturers, who are not covered under VICP. They're aggregating millions of claims of $1000 or less because VICP precludes suits for > $1000. And so on.
Undermining VICP can't possibly serve the public interest. Thimerosal has already been phased out of childhood vaccines. There's an effective system in place for dealing with vaccine injuries; if there is credible evidence of thimerosal-related damage, then victims should fight to have the relevant adverse events added to the VICP vaccine injury table.
There's no reason to be believe that courts can deal with this. Juries routinely accept junk science when faced with heart-rending individual cases. (E.g., epidemiological evidence does not support a link between silicone breast implants and autoimmune disease. Some solace to the bankrupt manufacturers.) The threat of huge awards and litigation costs leads to settlement of meritless cases. (Last year, the vast majority of asbestos settlements were paid to unimpaired claimants.) Plaintiffs shop for judges that have been elected by the trial lawyers and for jurisdictions (in, e.g., WV, MS, and TX) that have absurdly pro-plaintiff rules. The record shows that in mass tort situations, legal costs typically absorb 50% - 80% of judgment and settlement dollars. And the 20% - 50% that trickles down to victims and "victims" is distributed in arbitrary and unequal fashion.

I have little to add to this. Even Kleiman admits: " That the tort system does a miserable job of handling medical injuries is too clear to be worth arguing about."
Even if you believe that pharmaceutical companies are profiteering, heartless entities which deserve to be humbled - and worse, heavily regulated (I think that's a fair summation of the editorial line at The American Prospect ), wouldn't it be proper to have evidence of truly harmful malfeasance before subjecting the companies to "bet-the-company" litigation? (No one remotely familiar with the history of mass torts can deny that lawsuits such as the thimerosal-vaccine claims have the potential to destroy any company, regardless of size. Ask Dow Corning, W.R. Grace, etc.) "Due process" and all that stuff.
I agree that it was sleazy to amend the law in the last-minute, anonymous fashion at issue. But the ideas behind the amendment were perfectly defensible - and its sponsors should not have been afraid to defend those ideas. That fear was the true scandal.

UPDATE: Thanks to TAPPED for the kind words. And they do paraphrase the issue correctly, though they should say that thimerosal "was" often added to vaccines, as it has been mostly removed due to the concerns raised about potential mercury poisoning (which formed the basis for the lawsuits at issue).
A couple of notes, as long as I'm revisiting the topic. First, I was struck by the following observation in the New York Times piece about the controversy:

On July 7, 1999, at Halsey's urging, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Public Health Service released a statement urging vaccine manufacturers to remove thimerosal as quickly as possible and advising pediatricians to postpone giving most newborns the birth dose of the hepatitis B vaccine. The decision, which helped to create vaccine shortages and led some babies to become infected with hepatitis B... (Emphasis added)

That consequence helps show that the removal of thimerosal was not a costless decision. I do not know if there have been any good studies done to estimate the number of babies who contracted hepatitis B but would not have done so if thimerosal-preserved vaccine had been administered. But in theory, if further studies show no link between thimerosal and mental incapacitation, the costs of removing thiremosal from vaccines may be shown to have outweighed the benefits.
Second, TAPPED reiterates:

The real scandal here, such as it is, is that that someone friendly to Eli Lilly stuck a provision in the homeland security bill to exempt Lilly from tort lawsuits just in case there turns out to be such a link.

If that was indeed the expected progression of events - i.e., if lawsuits would follow evidence of a link - I'd agree. But in reality, the lawsuits have been filed by the dozen long before any such link had been established (check out this search result for an indication). This is not atypical for the mass-tort context, either. With that in mind, it's harder to see the amendment as illegitimately depriving legitimate claimants of recourse; I'd even argue it's closer to an attempt to maintain neutrality while studies are performed to establish whether or not the link exists. (I'd argue that if studies show such a link, Congress may well repeal the amendment. But that's a different argument.)

The New York Sun has an interesting retort to those who argue that New York City government is too lean to cut.

While I was away, Harvey Pitt finally resigned as chairman of the SEC.
I had not bought into the criticism of Pitt for a long time. It seemed like a good idea to have possibly the nation's leading authority on securities law as SEC chair. The idea that Pitt was somehow to blame for the last year's accounting scandals was always risible - after all, almost all of the scandals concerned fraud which occurred before he took office. (See here for a quick summary, and click here and here for descriptions of why Pitt's predecessor, Arthur Levitt, should receive more blame than he has for those scandals.) And as Josh Marshall noted over the summer, the calls for Pitt's resignation at the time didn't "seem to have much to do with anything he's actually done" since his confirmation. Call me naive, but I think judgment of a man's job performance should have something to do with what he's actually done in that job.
But once he actually did something - i.e., botch the appointment of William Webster to the new accounting board badly enough to have the SEC investigate the decisions of its own chairman - his eviction was richly deserved.
I have followed this story with great interest. For those of my readers who don't already know, I am a relatively junior corporate lawyer at a law firm in New York. Harvey Pitt, who has forgotten more about the securities laws than I can ever hope to learn, is the type of figure that someone in my position would consider a role model. And yet I - or just about any junior, unknowledgable peon at a firm who would be quaking at the thought of a meeting in Pitt's office (in his previous life as a lawyer) - could have told him that it wasn't a great idea to ask Congress for a raise when most of its members are calling for his resignation, or that maybe, given the corporate scandals and the resulting sensitivity surrounding the acounting board (I'm leaving aside the issue of whether Webster was the right choice in the first place for the appointment), he should've mentioned to the rest of the commission that Webster was the director of a company that was embroiled in an accounting scandal. Seriously - what does that say about this supposed paragon's professional judgment, which is every bit as important to a lawyer as knowing the black-letter law?
I think Pitt has been, or should be, kicked off the role-model pedestal for such lack of judgment.
Daniel Gross has more on why Pitt's background as a corporate lawyer led to his downfall:

He has stumbled because he is behaving like a corporate lawyer in a political job, and because he still suffers from a major occupational illness of corporate lawyers: deep insecurity about his place in the business world.
...The dirty secret about corporate lawyers is that they are essentially high-paid servants: on call, beholden to clients, fungible, solicitous, and yet privately jealous of the people who pay their bills. Bit players in corporate dramas, they operate on the clock and in the shadows. The covers of Fortune and Forbes and the glories of stock options are foreign to them. Even the most accomplished lawyers lack the public respect, power, and compensation of CEOs. As chairman of the accounting board, Biggs would easily have outshined Pitt.
Pitt's larger disinclination to speak truth to power might also be traced to his profession. Levitt never hesitated to stick it to his former colleagues on Wall Street. But as a rule, partners at law firms don't tell their clients to stuff it—it's bad business. After he assumed office, when former clients like KPMG Chairman Eugene O'Kelley asked to meet with him, Pitt agreed, despite the appearance problem it created.

While I'm not yet in a high-powered position comparable to Pitt's, Gross' points sound pretty plausible. I still think that such incentives could and should have been overcome by better judgment on Pitt's part.
The most stunning thing in Gross' piece was the following:

Pitt lacks the attribute most beneficial to a businessperson turned government official: go-to-hell money. In the private sector, having enough cash in the bank tends to liberate you to speak your mind. Levitt has go-to-hell money. Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Sen. Jon Corzine have it. So do Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, the two most free-speaking Cabinet members of the current administration. Sure, Pitt may have made $3 million a year as a partner at his old law firm. But that's not big money. Like most senior attorneys, if Pitt wants to grow old and prosper, he needs to maintain his viability in the system.

Let's get this straight. A pre-appointment $3 million salary isn't enough money to give the head of the SEC enough standing in the system to be a proper regulator? Gross doesn't define what would be enough, but it seems that you need at least in excess of eight figures in the bank to stand up to the accountants and CEOs. So practically speaking, there's a fairly massive wealth test for a job like SEC chair.
Sounds like a job for McCain-Feingold! Seriously, why aren't campaign-finance reform types up in arms about this? It's not as if Harvey Pitt has the option to get donations from any legal source to make up for his comparative poverty...

For some reason, it's always more fun to watch Democrats tear themselves apart after electoral losses than Republicans. This is the third cycle in my politically aware lifetime that the Democrats have torn themselves up after losing elections they expected to win (1988 and 1994 being the other two - there weren't too many fun recriminations after 2000, as Gore's popular vote victory and the Florida controversy fed denial).
Here are two outstanding examples of such Democratic circular firing squads in action.
First, Heather Hurlburt (a former Democratic speechwriter who worked in the Clinton administration) eviscerates the Democrats' aversion to issues relating to national security, and describes how they risk consistent electoral defeat unless they overcome that aversion. I had never been impressed with the Clinton administration's record on foreign affairs, but I was shocked (no sarcasm) at the Clintonites' disinterest in the hard questions of foreign policy and national security described by Hurlburt.
Second, Ronald Brownstein has an outstanding sober-yet-pessimistic overview of the Democrats' problems in last week's election and their implications for 2004.

Also, check out this excellent description of the maneuverings in Minnesota after Paul Wellstone's untimely death - especially of the impact the tasteless memorial service had on the election:

Everyone expects Kahn to speak about his 30-year friendship with Wellstone, dating from a professor-student relationship at Carleton College. A few minutes into the speech, it becomes so political that those in the rows reserved for Wellstone and Mondale staff members start exchanging nervous sidelong glances. As the speech ventures deeper and deeper into "we are begging you to help us win this election for Paul Wellstone," the glances intensify.
When Kahn explicitly calls on Jim Ramstad, the Republican congressman, to help the Democrats win the election out of his affection for Wellstone, there are audible gasps.
But perhaps being political people themselves, the Wellstone-Mondale group is slow to grasp just how big a deal it is. Everyone recognizes that Kahn has crossed the line of what was appropriate at a memorial service -- one being broadcast nationally -- but what could anyone possibly do?
Before Kahn finishes, Gov. Jesse Ventura walks out in protest.
Calls from irate viewers deluge TV stations, newspapers and state GOP headquarters.
...DFL pollster Paul Harstad is completing an overnight survey. Harstad finds that 73 percent of those interviewed agree that the memorial service went overboard -- and 52 percent agree strongly. Furthermore, they are taking it out on Mondale.
Mondale, who led Coleman by 52-39 percent in Harstad's Sunday night poll, is tied 43-43 on Wednesday night. The percentage who feel positively toward Mondale has dropped 10 points, to 51 percent. And the percentage who say they feel positively toward Coleman has risen six points, to 50.

Finally, the conservative side provides the usual Mark Steyn serious laughs:

At such moments, the duty of responsible conservatives is to step to the side and try not to weep with laughter as the party turns on itself in vicious recrimination. I note that already several powerful voices are saying Democrats should have opposed the President more directly: Chris Lehane, the political consultant who did such a grand job for Al Gore in 2000, said in The New York Times yesterday that the party needed to go on the offensive about "the billion-pound elephant in the room -- the Bush tax boon for the wealthy." All I can say is I hope the party's crazy enough to fall for this analysis: Anyone who thinks that being more anti-war and pro-tax would have helped in Florida, Georgia or Missouri should have the privilege of testing this theory in November '04. The only good news for the Dems was a handful of pick-ups in the gubernatorial races and in a significant number -- Alabama, Oklahoma, Oregon, Wisconsin -- it was anti-tax Libertarian candidates siphoning off enough votes from the GOP to deliver the state to the Democrat. When a Dem runs on an explicit high-tax platform -- as the gubernatorial candidate did in New Hampshire, with his proposal to introduce an income tax -- voters abandon the Libertarians and come home to the Republicans.
Whether the Democrats understand any of this is difficult to know: To their cheerleaders in the press, Bush is still too dumb to be President: He's "Shrub," the idiot Dauphin, the pampered frat-boy. Even I underestimated the guy: In this column on Monday, I figured he'd blown it. As usual, I was wrong! And I couldn't be happier! The Dems are beginning to look like the cunning predator in a Looney Tunes campaign, standing there charred and bewildered having mistaken their tail for the dynamite fuse. If Bush is too dumb to be President, how dumb do you have to be to be consistently outwitted by him?

As some of you may have noticed, there was an election last week. I don't have any earth-shattering insights to add a week after the fact. I recommend, among others, William Saletan's coverage. I also generally agreed with this Charles Krauthammer piece about the impact of 9/11 on the election:

The Sept. 11 effect was far more subtle and far more profound. It returned America to a world of danger, a world we thought we had escaped, perhaps for good, with the end of the cold war. For two generations after the late 1930s, Americans faced one great existential threat after another — world war, cold war, the threat of nuclear war. During the age of anxiety, anyone aspiring to serious national office had to pass the elementary test: seriousness on national security.
...This election was the first 9/11 election. The Democrats lost it badly. And they will continue to lose elections until they can pass that old cold war threshold test: trust on fundamental national security. Yes, Democrats need a message. Yes, they need coherence. But if they conclude from this election that they need to move left on foreign policy — becoming coherently softer on national security — they are ensuring themselves even greater defeats.
We are at war. It doesn't feel like it in our everyday life, but it didn't always feel that way day to day during the cold war either. Nonetheless, during the cold war we knew at the deepest level that there were implacable enemies out there arming and organizing against us. Sept. 11 brought back that feeling, however unacknowledged, however subconscious. Until this war, like the cold war, is won, all elections will be 9/11 elections — elections that those who ignore this unhappy truth will continue to lose.

Finally, even though the elections are over, let's hope that ABC's The Note returns soon. Some tidbits from its final post-election edition, regarding things they'd like to analyze further:

How the Republican National Committee opposition research team has no room to store all of the Nexis material on Pelosi and Frost they already have dug up.
... The ongoing mismatch that exists between the two parties in terms of day-to-day combat because the Republicans have all their best players on the field, while the the most experienced generation of Democratic operatives (from the Clinton-Gore years) continue to mostly get involved only when they feel like it — and sometimes that hinders more than helps.
...How silly the Chattering Class is to muse about how the Bush Administration might now make the mistakes of 41 and/or the Gingrich Revolution. For despite the great affection that the president and Karl Rove have for both 41 and Newt Gingrich, and despite (or maybe, because of) how often they talk to both of them, there is nothing they have more clearly exhibited than the ability to learn from past GOP mistakes, and to use that knowledge to keep aggregating power for a conservative agenda, using centrist and inclusive rhetoric (and some policies) to stay in the mainstream.

If you were wondering about the identity of a powerful political operative in New York, you might speculate that he was a bureaucrat who wields immense power over the workings of government beneath the elected or senior appointed level. Or, you might speculate that she was a political reporter who knows everyone.
You probably wouldn't guess that he is a 55-year-old Hasidic (from the Satmar sect) Jew whose exact day job is a mystery. This is one of the most entertaining stories I've read in a long time.

Today's Washington Post has a wonderfully tongue-in-cheek story about the U.S. Civil Rights Commission:

It's safe to say that Thernstrom and Berry are not the best of buddies.
Several clues point to this conclusion. First, there was the 2001 "Nightline" show in which the two commissioners kept interrupting each other until you thought they might start biting each other's ears off. A few months later, they called each other liars at a Senate hearing. Then Thernstrom had these choice words to say about the chairwoman:
"Mary Frances Berry is a totalitarian. She's a book burner and she constantly lies."
Hey, Abigail, don't be bashful! Tell us what you really think.
But Berry and Thernstrom aren't the only commissioners who trade insults. At one meeting, Cruz Reynoso, the commission's vice chairman, berated Thernstrom for her "lack of veracity." Commissioner Jennifer Braceras once called Berry a "left-wing provocateur." Commissioner Christopher Edley once described one of Thernstrom's books as a "crime against humanity." And . . . well, you get the idea.
Obviously the civil rights commission, created by an act of Congress in the 1950s, is a hotbed of nasty feuds and personal attacks. But it's more than that. It's also a hotbed of petty squabbling and bickering.

For another nasty, partisan and fun account of the Commission and its chairwoman, Ms. Berry, check out this George Will column:

The commission has no serious function, other than to illustrate how far things have evolved. Its head is a black woman, Mary Frances Berry, who, like many antebellum plantation owners and today's civil rights lobby, believes blacks cannot cope with life in predominantly white America, that they are comprehensively victimized and must be perpetual wards of paternalistic government.

The author of today's piece, Peter Carlson, also points out the following:

Most of the commissioners -- part-timers paid $35,000 a year -- are college professors. Many are lawyers. Four -- Berry, Reynoso, Braceras and Edley -- are both college professors and lawyers. This cross-training enables the commission to combine the petty infighting of academia with the nitpicking and hair-splitting of the legal profession.

By that logic, the worst job in America should be that of a law professor. Are you going to take this insult lying down, Professors Reynolds and Volokh?

I missed this Wasington Post editorial over the weekend regarding facile comparisons between Iraq and North Korea. An outstanding piece which should be read in its entirety.

A few interesting items in the blogosphere today.
First, Mickey Kaus argues that the recent parity of the Democrats and Republicans is no coincidence, but instead results from the parties' moving towards a competitive equilibrium:

Imagine that we have a two party system, and each party is a collection of status-seeking individuals looking for power by winning a greater "market share" of the vote. Imagine that they each have their ideological principles --one is more to the left, one more to the right -- but these principles are quite flexible in the face of imminent or repeated failure at the polls. Over time, as each party crafts its message to maximize its appeal -- and adjusts its message after each election to regain any lost share of the votes -- wouldn't one expect the system to reach a roughly 50-50 equilibrium, in which every election was a cliffhanger?

Jacob Levy expands on Kaus' theory. (Levy's specific link is broken; scroll down to the post that begins "Mickey Kaus argues".) He expands on the ramifications of the dead-locked country at great length.
It appears obvious that we're going to see more Floridas, with so many races being so close and control of Congress at stake.
I thought of one other ramification. In the wake of the substitution of Frank Lautenberg for Bob Torricelli in New Jersey, a number of commentators argued that the move was unlikely to have much precedential value. In the words of Josh Marshall:

Can anyone who makes this argument have ever spent any time around elected politicians? Not a chance. Especially these days with weak parties there's really no institutional force capable of knocking a candidate out of a race. And people who run for office just don't have egos that work that way. To put it mildly.

All true. But that argument doesn't fully account for two aspects of the "Kaus theorem" (not to be confused with the Coase theorem):
1) With the high stakes of each race, the parties now have added incentive to try harder than ever to force hopeless candidates out of the race. While it is true that such withdrawals have been historically rare, I'm not sure the numbers wouldn't rise if parties tried really hard.
While parties may have been stronger in the past, they may have been less willing to pressure candidates to withdraw, because...
2) Campaigning and predicting elections were much less scientific in the past. By contrast, today's polling & focus-grouping - maligned by many - actually does its job fairly well. Kaus' strongest point is his argument that the obsessive use of polling and focus groups are a major factor in creating today's political equilibrium.
In the past, a Bob Torricelli may have been able to convince himself and party leaders into thinking he could overcome the hole he'd dug for himself. (The name "Harry Truman" would probably come up - and as that example shows, it may even be true.) With present polling technology, that scenario seems less applicable. With the better information provided by today's polls, it is arguable that even an elected politician's confidence would be dented, and it seems likely that party leaders would be more confident in telling such a candidate that he was in an unwinnable position. Couple that with the added stakes of each race in an equilibrium, and I think you may see more Torricellis in the years to come. (God help us all.)

Senator Paul Wellstone has been killed in a plane crash along with his wife, daughter and some of his campaign workers.
Prof. Reynolds has some links on the possible repercussions for control of the Senate, but it seems obscene to spend too much time on the subject today, even with the election so close. I agreed with very few of Sen. Wellstone's positions, but all that pales before today's news. Condolences and prayers to his family and friends.
One other thing - notwithstanding what I just wrote, I hope that both sides in Minnesota handle whatever arrangements need to be made for the upcoming election with dignity and propriety, and folow the relevant statutes without protest (and I have no idea what the relevant statutes mandate). It would do no honor to Sen. Wellstone's memory to have a Bush-Gore-style fight over the ballot, despite the stakes.

The current issue of the Harvard Law Bulletin has some interesting quotes from certain of Harvard Law School's alumni who went on to prominent political careers.
Here are some thoughts from Casper Weinberger:

"People keep saying, 'But what is enough and how much is enough [in the military budget]?' And the only answer to that is, 'If you don't have enough, you'll never know it until it's too late to do anything about it.'"
..."You have to recognize that there are just some things that you can't do. The trouble with Americans is, they simply can't believe anybody is evil. And there are evil people, and they have to be dealt with."
"When President Reagan talked about the Evil Empire, it was attacked by people who said he'd undone years of patient diplomatic effort. And he said he would like to see what years of patient diplomatic effort had secured for us--not much."

Now, here is a quote from Michael Dukakis:

"If I had become president? I think there'd be peace in the Middle East. I'd like to think we would have universal health care in this country. We'd certainly have a national rail passenger system that would knock your socks off."

(According to the profile, Dukakis is vice-chairman of Amtrak, whose performance does not exactly reflect well on his promises about a high-speed train system.)

Thanks to Dan McLaughlin for the link.

Andrew Sullivan cites a Charles Krauthammer column from 1994 on the accord with North Korea:

(1) The NPT is dead. North Korea broke it and got a huge payoff from the United States not for returning to it but for pretending to. Its nuclear program proceeds unmolested. In Tehran and Tripoli and Baghdad the message is received: Nonproliferation means nothing. (2) The IAEA, if it goes along with this sham, is corrupted beyond redemption. It is supposed to be an impartial referee blowing the whistle on proliferators. Yet if Washington does not want to hear the whistle, the IAEA can be bullied into silence. (3) American credibility - not very high after Clinton's about-faces in Bosnia, Somalia and Haiti - sinks to a new low. This is a president easily cowed and dangerously weak. Said one government official to the New York Times, "It's one of these cases where the administration was huffing and puffing and backed down." Better though, said another, than "falling on our own sword over phony principle." If nonproliferation, so earnestly trumpeted by this president, is a phony principle, then where do we look for this president's real principles? This administration would not recognize a foreign policy principle, phony or otherwise, if it tripped over one in the street. The State Department, mixing cravenness with cynicism, calls this capitulation "very good news." For Kim Il Sung, certainly. For us, the deal is worse than dangerous. It is shameful.

On the other hand, Sullivan also cites an interview Jim Lehrer conducted earlier this year with the hapless Wendy Sherman (the coordinator for North Korean policy in the Clinton administration, cited below). Regarding the inclusion of North Korea in Bush's "axis of evil" formulation, Ms. Sherman said:

It was very understandable as a rhetorical device to rally the American people to cause against terrorism and to the cause against weapons of mass destruction, which none of us want. What I think was wrong about it in terms of North Korea is North Korea has negotiated successfully with us. We have a 1994 framework agreement that stops the production of fissile material, which is the plutonium, the kind of plutonium needed to build nuclear weapons. They agreed to that framework agreement. They have principally kept to that agreement and taken the steps that were necessary for it to take. It's not finished yet. We still have a ways to go, but they do and can follow through. We need to hold them to it. Our agreements have to be verifiable. They need to be tough but it can be done.

Read that again - "They have principally kept to that agreement and taken the steps that were necessary for it to take." I have nothing to add.

Via InstaPundit, James Lileks has it all figured out regarding the Bali bombing. I especially liked this bit:

[I]n retrospect, Indonesia looks quite wise. If they had bowed to U.S. pressure, al-Qaida would think they'd joined Bush's mad crusade. Now they have a chance -- a precious, rare chance -- to show that wiser heads know best what to do: nothing. But we're not counseling rash inaction -- no, Indonesia must proceed with care, consulting friends and neighbors, before deciding which form their inaction should take. (After a suitable debate, that is.)

You think that's funny? Read the last sentence in this New York Times article, quoting Wendy Sherman, the Clinton administration's North Korea policy coordinator (time for Ms. Sherman to edit that part of her resume):

"One has to be careful, or you may end up in a circumstance that could be more precarious than you began with," Ms. Sherman said. "The administration ought to be multilateral, deliberative and very thoughtful about how we proceed here, because it is serious."

Life imitates Lileks...

Lots of embarrassing things were written several years ago regarding the accord which has now been blown to bits (pun not intended, hopefully). TNR's blog has one. More excruciating is a NYT editorial unearthed by Jonah Goldberg, which I will reproduce in full.

Diplomacy with North Korea has scored a resounding triumph. Monday's draft agreement freezing and then dismantling North Korea's nuclear program should bring to an end two years of international anxiety and put to rest widespread fears that an unpredictable nation might provoke nuclear disaster.
The U.S. negotiator Robert Gallucci and his North Korean interlocutors have drawn up a detailed road map of reciprocal steps that both sides accepted despite deep mutual suspicion. In so doing they have defied impatient hawks and other skeptics who accused the Clinton Administration of gullibility and urged swifter, stronger action. The North has agreed first to freeze its nuclear program in return for U.S. diplomatic recognition and oil from Japan and other countries to meet its energy needs. Pyongyang will then begin to roll back that program as an American-led consortium replaces the North's nuclear reactors with two new ones that are much less able to be used for bomb-making. At that time, the North will also allow special inspections of its nuclear waste sites, which could help determine how much plutonium it had extracted from spent fuel in the past.
A last-minute snag, North Korea's refusal to resume its suspended talks with neighboring South Korea, was resolved to Seoul's satisfaction. If Washington and Pyongyang approve the agreement, and if the North fulfills its commitments, this negotiation could become a textbook case on how to curb the spread of nuclear arms.
Hawks, arguing that the North was simply stalling while it built more bombs, had called for economic sanctions or attacks on the North's nuclear installations. The Administration muted the war talk and pursued determined diplomacy.
Reassuring the North paid off in the end. Given the residual mistrust between the two sides, the U.S. will now sensibly provide more tangible reassurance. It is moving toward diplomatic recognition, in the form of an exchange of liaison offices, and economic cooperation, in the form of heavy fuel oil from others in the U.S.-led consortium and the start of construction of new nuclear reactors.
In return, the North will put its nuclear program in a deep freeze by not refueling its nuclear reactor, arranging temporary safe storage of the spent fuel rods removed from that reactor and sealing its reprocessing facility to prevent the extraction of plutonium from those fuel rods. Implementing the freeze and allowing it to be verified are important tests of the North's good faith.
Then, in elaborately choreographed stages detailed in a confidential note, nuclear dismantling will proceed step-by-step with reactor replacement. That gives both sides leverage against reneging. At the end of stage one, with construction of the first reactor well under way but before key nuclear components have been supplied, the North will allow special inspections of its nuclear waste sites.
In stage two, as construction proceeds on the two reactors, the North will gradually ship its 8,000 spent fuel rods abroad for reprocessing. In stage three, as the second replacement reactor nears completion, the North will dismantle all its bomb-making facilities, including its old graphite reactors and reprocessing plant.
Critics say the U.S. is in effect bribing North Korea to comply with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Yet Washington has previously provided inducements to others, including South Korea, to refrain from bomb-making. It has gotten the North to do a lot more than the treaty requires, like dismantle its nuclear installations.
From the start, the hawks' alternative to diplomacy was full of danger. Their solution -- economic sanctions and bombing runs -- might have disarmed North Korea, but only at the risk of war. President Clinton, former President Carter and Mr. Gallucci deserve warm praise for charting a less costly and more successful course.

Those "hawks" look a little smarter now, don't they? At least Josh Marshall has enough intellectual integrity to admit that on many of the big foreign-policy questions over the last couple of decades, the "hawks" were right.
This John McCain quote cited by Rod Dreher holds up a little better:

On at least eight previous occasions, North Korea has lied to the Clinton Administration. With this agreement, Administration officials have willingly acquiesced in Pyongyang's almost certain further deception. Yet again, the Administration has mistaken resolving the North Korean nuclear crisis with merely postponing its apogee.
...I suspect that the Administration's willlingness to delay the resolution of this crisis is premised on their presumption that the bankrupt North Korean economy will force the regime's collapse before they violate the agreement. Unfortunately, their economy may be salvaged during the interim period by the hallf a billion tons of oil they will receive annually, the opening of trade relations with the U.S., and greater trade with its Asian neighbors, which the agreement [provides for]. Thus, the Administration has accomplished the remarkable feat of allowing the North Koreans to have their carrot cake and eat it too.

A couple of thoughts:
1) How ironic - and predictable - is it that not long after winning the Nobel Peace Prize, one of Jimmy Carter's signature accomplishments - the 1994 accord with North Korea - has been publicly revealed as a fraud? Geitner Simmons has more in a wide-ranging post.
2) Andrew Sullivan is right. I'm not sure that the Clinton administration had a better option, but the effect is the same; a foreign policy turns out to have been a short-term palliative at best, with the Bush administration left to clean up the mess.

VodkaPundit has an excellent summary of the record that warranted Jimmy Carter's Nobel Peace Prize. And Richard Cohen napalms the political considerations of the Nobel committee:

In their official announcement, the Norwegians -- the Peace Prize is the only one not awarded by the Swedish academy -- contrasted Carter's approach to the Iraq crisis to Bush's and then, as if no one got the point, its chairman, Gunnar Berge, told a reporter he was "unequivocally right" when he asked if the prize represented "a kick in the leg" to Bush. Unequivocally wrong! The kick was aimed a bit higher than that.
I have some questions for Berge. What if Bush is right on Iraq and Carter is wrong? What if the president's seemingly steadfast march to war mobilizes the rest of the world to finally do something about Saddam Hussein's concurrent march to acquire weapons of mass destruction? What if Bush actually gets the United Nations to enforce resolutions demanding that Iraq abide by the agreements it has signed? Who then will deserve the Peace Prize?
Or, to put it another way, what would you say, Mr. Berge, if the United States and its allies did nothing and Hussein got his hands on a nuclear weapon? What if he was then able to intimidate his neighbors or obliterate Israel, a nation where most of the population lives in two metropolitan areas? What would you say then, Mr. Berge?
In honoring Carter, the committee evoked the smugness of little powers -- the many nations whose role is to carp from the sidelines while America does the necessary business of protecting them from their own folly. In this regard, it will be a minor miracle if next year's prize does not go to French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, who criticized the United States last week for its "simplistic vision of the war of good against evil."
"Young countries," Raffarin told the National Assembly, "have the tendency to underestimate the history of old countries." Oui! But old countries are sometimes world-weary and cynical, urging a "realism" that is sometimes a misnomer for the moral corruption they know so very well. I will take the idealism of the young any day.

I saw the movie Three Kings when it was released to rapturous reviews in 1999. It was a very good movie (albeit not quite as great as some of the reviews made it sound, in my opinion). There was one particular disconnect between the reviews I'd read and the actual movie. It had been billed as an antiwar movie, and David Russell certainly had nothing good to say about the Gulf War. The most specific criticism made by the movie, though, was that the U.S. should have supported the rebels after the official end of hostilities and not allowed Saddam's forces to massacre them. A very good critique. But the implication of the ostensibly antiwar film was that we stopped killing people too soon! It's a unique antiwar movie whose moral is that we didn't kill enough people. And if you put it to the director in those terms, he'd probably recoil. But that's what the message was.
I've been reminded of that inconsistency a lot lately. A while ago I linked to this post, which crudely and effectively made a point that I'd been noticing for a while: that critics of American foreign policy generally, and of the war on terrorism and/or Iraq specifically, often make arguments whose logical implications are exactly the opposite of what they intend.
A good example of this phenomenon is the debate over what to do with Iraq after we've effected "regime change." Josh Marshall speaks for many administration skeptics when he argues:

Everyone who's thought this through believes that success will require a long-term committment of a robust and quite American peace-keeping force. The phrase peace-keeping really doesn't quite do it justice. What you're talking about is really an army of occupation and reconstruction -- more on the order of post-war Germany or Japan, than Bosnia or Kosovo. Ideally a substantial number of these troops would come from NATO and other well-situated Muslim countries. But a dominant US presence would be required to make the whole thing work.
Unfortunately, it is very difficult to suppose that the Bush administration has the stomach for an operation of such scope or duration. Very difficult.
This is a reasonable point, and the logical next step would be to agitate for a post-WWII-style occupaton and nation-building of Iraq after the war (and take credit for recent reports that the Bush administration is planning precisely that.) And, as reporters such as Bill Keller point out, it is Paul Wolfowitz and his fellow "velociraptors" who are the administration's foremost advocates for such an approach. Those people should be the greatest allies of advocates of nation-building such as Marshall.
Elsewhere, though, Marshall argues for deferring to Colin Powell's judgment in planning for war in Iraq:

Getting rid of Saddam really is necessary. But it has to be done right. So, Mr. President, when the time comes for you to make a decision about Iraq, talk with Paul Wolfowitz and let him tell you what the goal should be. Escort him to the door and lock it behind you. Then sit down for a serious talk with Colin Powell.

(The article doesn't say anything about bringing Wolfowitz back into the room for postwar planning. Perhaps it was cut for space reasons.)
There's only one problem. The "nation-building" advocated by Marshall, among others, violates several of the rules in the "Powell Doctrine." Within the group of senior administration officials, Powell is as unenthusiastic as anyone else about undertaking the effort Marshall calls for. Ask Bill Keller:

This is a notion regarded with deep skepticism at the State Department, where Powell and others tend to see the aftermath of an invasion as a long, world-class headache administered by an American general. Not only within the State Department but elsewhere where foreign policy is discussed and formulated -- including the Capitol Hill offices of leading senators of both parties -- there reigns the view that Iraqi democracy is a utopian fantasy, that the country will fragment like a grenade into ethnic enclaves, that American garrisons will be targets for an eruption of Arab fury, that oil supplies will be endangered, that Americans lack the patience and generosity to midwife a free and pro-Western Iraq.

Marshall's beliefs about what to do in Iraq and his distaste for Richard Perle & Co. are pulling him in opposite directions.

This assessment of Frank Lautenberg is one of the best New Jersey disses I've seen:

Lautenberg, despite his grandfatherly reputation, is scrappy, sometimes mean, unpopular, occasionally nasty, and insecure. In short, he's New Jersey.
...As a legislator, Lautenberg became known for two things: nursing New Jersey with the bottle of federal largesse, and making sure the rest of America didn't stay out past curfew. He pushed laws that banned smoking on domestic airline flights, raised the national drinking age to 21, and nationalized legal intoxication for drunken driving at .08 blood-alcohol content. His instincts are reliably liberal�he's willing to federalize anything, he's liked by the Sierra Club, and he's loathed by the National Rifle Association. A 1996 amendment to the 1968 Gun Control Act bears his name: The Lautenberg Amendment prohibits anyone convicted of domestic violence, even a misdemeanor, from owning a gun. For that, the NRA dubbed him "an unprecedented danger to civil liberties."
Fortunately for Lautenberg, and unfortunately for his opponent, Doug Forrester, that's the kind of talk that gets you elected in New Jersey.

Andrew Stuttaford has an interesting observation in The Corner.

The Washington Post's lead editorial today mostly does so, as it advocates Congressional approval of the resolution giving the President the power to attack Iraq.

President Bush is correct in his assessment of the dangers in a world where Saddam Hussein is permitted, in long-standing defiance of United Nations demands, to assemble arsenals of chemical, biological and, in time, nuclear weapons. As even Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, a critic of administration policy, has acknowledged: "There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein's regime is a serious danger, that he is a tyrant, and that his pursuit of lethal weapons of mass destruction cannot be tolerated. He must be disarmed." But we also believe that the congressional vote will be a step in a continuing diplomatic process, not a concluding declaration of war. As Mr. Bush said in his speech Monday evening, the course of U.S. policy is not yet set.
Both chambers of Congress this week have been conducting a serious and useful debate. Critics have emphasized risks that the administration had skated over and have urged an effort to build alliances, to which the administration had not always seemed committed. What the critics have not done is offer a cogent alternative policy. One could make a case that the risks of disarming Saddam Hussein outweigh the risks of living with his regime -- that he can be contained and deterred, that he will eventually die in his sleep or at an assassin's hand, that the unpredictability of war poses greater dangers than the threat of his regime. We would not be persuaded, but the argument is respectable; the dispute is a matter of judgment, with evidence carrying you only so far.
For the most part, though, the critics have not taken this tack. They have, rather, like Mr. Kennedy, acknowledged that Saddam Hussein is an unacceptable danger but then objected that Mr. Bush is responding too quickly or too aggressively. Or they have tried to have things more than one way, as in this statement from Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.): "Let there be no doubt or confusion as to where I stand: I will support a multilateral effort to disarm Iraq by force, if we have exhausted all other options. But I cannot -- and will not -- support a unilateral, U.S. war against Iraq unless the threat is imminent and no multilateral effort is possible." But if Saddam Hussein is dangerous now, he will grow only more so as he rearms without the restraint of international inspectors or meaningful trade sanctions. And if the threat is so great as to justify a war, can it really be safe not to act just because U.S. allies won't go along?

I agree with just about every word. The only possible slip-up in the editorial is the following:
In the end, much of the criticism can be understood as unease with the Bush administration's approach rather than disagreement with its assessment of Saddam Hussein.
That sentence glosses over the real reason - the Democrats' political difficulties with the issue; they fear getting killed with their base if they support the war and getting killed by the voters if they don't.

James Lileks expertly dissects those in Congress who consider alliances to be ends rather than means:

Would these people have supported the Vietnam war if the US had a pocketful of UN resolutions saying �go get �em, lads� and we had a multinational coalition spewing defoliants over the jungle canopy? Would they have cast a solemn YEA in favor of funding the Contras if the UN had passed a dozen resolutions condemning the Sandinistas, and sanctioned a multilateral force made up of armies from El Salvador and Guatemala? Sweet smoking jumped-up Judas on a Vespa, GIVE IT A REST! If the US cannot act without UN approval, then pass a resolution that gives command of the Armed Forces to Kofi Annan and start whistling �Hail to the Chiefs� when the Syrian delegation take their seats.
The more these people whine about the need for UN blessing, the more I wonder whether they wouldn�t vote yes to a UN-levied tax on American paychecks - why, our �go-it-alone� tax policy must be enflaming the world, to say nothing of our �go-it-alone� highway system. And of our �go-it-alone� Apollo program in the 60s, well, the less said the better. Did we get a permission slip to leave earth and plant a unilateral boot on the Moon�s virgin soil? I don�t remember.
...In either case: if any of my local Senators had bitched and moaned that the US was giving in to One-World Government and insisted that the US never work in concert with allies or coalitions, I would have thought they were flaming sacks of bat crap. These were instances that required remedies, and if the task fell to us - for whatever reason - the greater good that came our action outweighed any silly paranoia about the UN, and whether our participation in a coalition would lead to detention camps in South Dakota guarded by blue-hatted Dutchmen. Coalitions are fine, if they attend to the danger at hand. If they do not, then the entire idea of a �coalition� can be tossed out the window without a moment�s thought. It�s nice to have allies. But it�s not necessary. If you believe that coalitions are always necessary, then the worst thing about the JFK assassination wasn�t the president�s death, but the possibility that Lee Harvey Oswald was acting alone.
The Senators insisting on a coalition above all else are the left�s equivalent of the nutlog right-wing UN conspiracy crowd. The only difference is that Wellstone starts to worry if he doesn�t hear the black helicopters.

Peter Beinart argues that a successful war in Iraq can help the war against terrorism rather than hurting it, as has been argued by Al Gore, among others.

State Department officials say no country has even privately threatened to cut off anti-terrorism cooperation over an Iraq war. In fact, the German government, fearful that its vocal antiwar stance makes it look like an unreliable ally, has actually increased its antiterrorism assistance--allowing an Al Qaeda suspect to be extradited from Pakistan to the U.S. even though Germany has legal jurisdiction and promising to expand its role in Afghan peacekeeping.
Germany is acting rationally. Few governments want to incur Washington's wrath, and those that oppose America's war against Saddam are unlikely to compound the diplomatic damage by simultaneously stiffing us on the war on terrorism. That's especially true because shared intelligence flows both ways, and governments in places like Russia, Egypt, and Pakistan are at least as threatened by Islamist terrorism as the United States. Some dovish commentators worry that even if those governments want to maintain cooperation, public opinion will force them to cut it off. But intelligence cooperation is almost by definition covert; virtually no government policy is less subject to public opinion. If Hosni Mubarak really feels pressure to throw Egypt's anti-American masses a bone in the wake of a U.S. invasion of Iraq, it's more likely he'll announce a boycott of U.S. products or publicly spurn a meeting with President Bush than stop his regime's clandestine cooperation with CIA personnel tracking Al Qaeda fanatics in Egypt.
The third way a war in Iraq could undermine the war on terrorism, according to Kennedy, is by "swell[ing] the ranks of Al Qaeda sympathizers and trigger[ing] an escalation in terrorist acts." But while Al Qaeda might be stronger during a war with Iraq, it would probably be weaker after one. Take the war in Afghanistan as a model. U.S. bombing sparked anti-American protests in much of the Muslim world. But once the U.S. toppled the Taliban, the protests diminished dramatically. For one thing, would-be Al Qaeda recruits saw the hopelessness of confronting American power. For another, they saw that the people of Kabul weren't on their side.
An American victory in Iraq would probably have a similar effect. Once we win--which pretty much everyone concedes we will--the anti-American protests will end. The image of the United States as a paper tiger, which animated Islamists in the 1990s, will be dealt another blow. And the image of the United States suffocating the Iraqi people through sanctions, long a staple of Al Qaeda propaganda, will likely be replaced by images of American GIs being welcomed as liberators. It's true that over time the euphoria might dissipate, and an American peacekeeping force in Iraq could generate Arab resentment. But with Saddam out of power, the United States might be able to withdraw its troops from another part of the Middle East: Saudi Arabia. And given that it is the presence of U.S. troops near Mecca and Medina that led bin Laden to turn against the United States in the first place, an American withdrawal from Saudi Arabia would probably do more to undermine Islamist recruiting than an American occupation of Iraq would do to fuel it.

I think Beinart is right. More generally, I think that the assumption that a war with Iraq will hurt the war on terrorism is usually exactly that - an assumption, with little evidence cited. As Jonah Goldberg points out:

Taking America's side in a war is a very public act; cooperating with America's law and intelligence services is a very private affair. The ability to publicly snub America on Iraq while privately earning America's gratitude in the war on terror may seem like a boon to many world leaders. Pakistan's Musharaf would probably leap at the opportunity to denounce a war on a Muslim country — with a wink and a nod from the U.S. — while quietly rounding up members of al Qaeda and currying favor with America. Indeed, this is pretty much what Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria, Indonesia, Russia, and France have been doing for most of the last year — denouncing American belligerence toward Iraq while cooperating fully with the U.S. in the fight against al Qaeda.
Sure, if the U.S. went to war with Iraq, some nations might stop cooperating in the fight against al Qaeda. But you can't simply assert that this is so. Because the counter-argument is at least as compelling.
As for the second leg of the argument, I just don't get it. The war on terrorism/al Qaeda is not an intensively military war, at least outside Afghanistan. The numbers of military troops dedicated to the fight against al Qaeda inside Afghanistan is between four and five thousand. Roughly the same number of troops are spread out throughout the rest of the region, as well as in places like Yemen. The current military was built up on the assumption that the United States might have to wage and win two full-blown wars simultaneously, i.e., fight North Korea and Iraq at the same time. Now that the Taliban has been deposed, the war on terrorism doesn't use many tanks, aircraft carriers, artillery batteries, etc. The idea that a war against Iraq would drain the war on terrorism is simply not true if you're talking about materiel and troops.
Now, it is likely that a war on Iraq would divert some special forces and intelligence assets from Afghanistan to the Persian Gulf. Fair enough. But do we really want to make the argument that we cannot go to war because a few hundred men are stretched thin? We have an active-duty military of about 1.4 million people, and you're telling me they might as well stay in the barracks if a subgroup smaller than a softball league is busy? And if it's a matter of too few spy drones and cruise missiles, the answer is pretty simple: Buy more.

The New Republic has published an editorial critical of Al Gore - specifically, regarding his speech on Iraq:

[T]he former vice president's speech almost perfectly encapsulated the evasions that have characterized the Democratic Party's response to President Bush's proposed war in Iraq. In typical Democratic style, Gore didn't say he opposed the war. In fact, he endorsed the goal of regime change--before presenting a series of qualifications that would likely make that goal impossible.
First, Gore said that war with Iraq would undermine America's primary mission: fighting terrorism. This mission, he explained, requires ongoing international cooperation. And he suggested that "our ability to secure this kind of cooperation can be severely damaged by unilateral action against Iraq. If the administration has reason to believe otherwise, it ought to share those reasons with the Congress." But surely Gore also has an obligation to share his reasons for believing that war with Iraq will "severely damage" the war on terrorism. The argument, after all, is not self-evident: Germany, the U.S. ally most vocally opposed to attacking Iraq, has simultaneously intensified its assistance in the war on terrorism--signaling that it will take over the international peacekeeping force in Afghanistan. In fact, Gore provides no evidence to support his claim. And thus he fails the very evidentiary standard that he calls on Bush to meet.
Gore's second complaint concerns the timing of the administration's push on Iraq. "President George H.W. Bush," Gore noted approvingly, "purposely waited until after the midterm elections of 1990 to push for a vote. ... President George W. Bush, by contrast, is pushing for a vote in this Congress immediately before the election." But as we argued two weeks ago, it is far better, in a democracy, for legislators to vote on critical issues before an election--so citizens know where they stand when they go to the polls--than to delay such votes until after an election and thus shield legislators from accountability for their views. Gore went on to pronounce "a burden on the shoulders of President Bush to dispel the doubts many have expressed about the role that politics might be playing in the calculations of some in the administration," before adding, "I have not raised those doubts, but many have." But, of course, that is exactly what Gore was doing. And he should have taken responsibility for raising those doubts himself.
Gore's final critique of the administration's preparations for war is that they are proceeding without sufficient regard to international opinion. "[I]n the immediate aftermath of September Eleventh," Gore said, "we had an enormous reservoir of goodwill and sympathy and shared resolve all over the world. That has been squandered in a year's time and replaced with great anxiety all around the world, not primarily about what the terrorist networks are going to do but about what we're going to do." But this ignores the fact that there is not now, nor will there likely be in the foreseeable future, broad international support for regime change in Baghdad. The two honest ways to resolve this problem are to privilege regime change above international consensus--while trying, as the Bush administration has, to pressure and cajole as many allies as possible to go along--or to forego regime change in the name of solidarity without our allies. Instead, Gore swore fealty to both regime change and international consensus, while refusing to acknowledge the conflict between the two. The closest he came was a suggestion that "if the [Security] Council will not provide such language [authorizing force], then other choices remain open." But would Gore support those "other choices," i.e., war? From his San Francisco speech, you wouldn't know.
...[H]is speech--which included, as a two-sentence aside, the charge that on the domestic front the administration was conducting an "attack on fundamental constitutional rights"--consisted of neither honest criticism nor honest opposition. Rather, it sounded like a political broadside against a president who Gore no doubt feels occupies a post that he himself deserves. But bitterness is not a policy position.

I guess Martin Peretz really isn't in charge of TNR anymore!
UPDATE: Jonah Goldberg has a better headline for this development.

On the Gore speech, check out Donald Sensing's lengthy demolition and Dan Drezner's concise dismissal. Drezner, who was an adviser to Condoleeza Rice during the 2000 campaign, says:

[D]uring the campaign, I pored over a lot of what Gore was saying about foreign policy during the campaign. I obviously disagreed with some of it, but certainly not all of it. I thought it was competent.
Gore's speech on Iraq, however, is not competent. Or coherent. Or consistent with Gore's previous musings on the topic. It's a grab-bag of objections, none of which has a great deal of substance (it also looks like it was drafted three weeks ago and no one bothered to update it in light of recent developments). My personal favorite, for example, is the claim that, "Great nations persevere and then prevail. They do not jump from one unfinished task to another. We should remain focused on the war against terrorism." Gee, I thought great powers were capable of doing more than one thing at a time. That's why they're called great powers. As for the facts, funny how in the same week that Bush promoted dealing with Iraq, significant progress was made on breaking Al-Qaida's back. Great powers can walk and chew gum at the same time.
...I disagreed with Gore before, but I did think he was serious. Not now.

For sheer over-the-top, delightful nastiness, you can't top Michael Kelly:

This speech, an attack on the Bush policy on Iraq, was Gore's big effort to distinguish himself from the Democratic pack in advance of another possible presidential run. It served: It distinguished Gore, now and forever, as someone who cannot be considered a responsible aspirant to power. Politics are allowed in politics, but there are limits, and there is a pale, and Gore has now shown himself to be ignorant of those limits, and he has now placed himself beyond that pale.
Gore's speech was one no decent politician could have delivered. It was dishonest, cheap, low. It was hollow. It was bereft of policy, of solutions, of constructive ideas, very nearly of facts -- bereft of anything other than taunts and jibes and embarrassingly obvious lies. It was breathtakingly hypocritical, a naked political assault delivered in tones of moral condescension from a man pretending to be superior to mere politics. It was wretched. It was vile. It was contemptible. But I understate.

Not wanting to be upstaged, Tom Daschle has attacked President Bush for allegedly "politicizing the war" (based on a misinterpretation of a line delivered by the President at a campign appearance). Drezner also explains why Daschle's speech was a disaster for the Democrats.

I just found this old Peter Beinart piece, where he argues convincingly that if a regime wants nuclear weapons badly enough, international non-proliferation agreements are unable to stop it, while such agreements are irrelevant to a regime that doesn't want them. His argument is based on the cases of India, Pakistan and South Africa.
This is why Saddam must be overthrown ASAP, as inspections are unlikely to work and Saddam has proven over the last decade that he will not be dissuaded from attempting to pursue such weapons.

The Transportation Security Agency has banned the old Transformer toys from airplanes.
As a commenter writes in the Corner (which provided the link):
It's also significant that Megatron and Shockwave are singled out and banned from airplanes -- "Toy transformer robots (this toy forms a toy gun)". What about the rest of the Decepticons? What about Starscream, who turns into a fighter jet with missles?
We eagerly await clarification from the TSA.

Al Gore is criticizing the impending war with Iraq.
The NYT argues that Gore's address:
...suggested a shift in positioning by Mr. Gore, who has for 10 years portrayed himself as a moderate, particularly when it comes to issues of foreign policy, and repeatedly invoked his 1991 vote on the gulf war resolution as a way of distinguishing himself from the rest of his party.
Many people are too stubborn to learn from their mistakes, but Gore is exceptional: he refuses to learn from his correct decisions!
In response to Mr. Gore's speech, VodkaPundit has an open letter to Gore that must be read in its entirety. Also, Andrew Sullivan points out:
As to the coalition argument, Gore, of course, spent eight years assembling a wonderful international coalition on Iraq, which agreed enthusiastically to do nothing effective at all. Now he wants us to wait even further, claiming that the administration has abandoned Afghanistan, while vast sums of U.S. money are being expended on rebuilding the country. And then he reiterates the bizarre notion that undermining one of the chief sponsors of terrorism in the world will somehow hurt the war against terrorism. Huh?
More damningly, Sullivan and Henry Hanks both point out that seven months ago, Gore was calling for a "final reckoning with Iraq."

Meanwhile, Jason Rylander has been looking for Democrats to make good arguments against the war, and recently praised this op-ed by Democratic congressional candidate Hank Perritt. Mr. Perritt deserves credit for stating his views with such forthrightness (unlike most of the rest of his party) and enabling voters to consider such information in making their choice. Regardless of party affiliation, any candidate deserves credit for submitting to the accountability of the voters. Personally, I wouldn't vote for Hillary R. Clinton if my flesh was being flayed with metal combs (sorry, the Yom Kippur liturgy is still on my mind) but she deserves credit for putting herself on the electoral line, while eminences such as Colin Powell prefer to cling to a reputation of eminence from unelected positions via leaks to sympathetic journalists.
However, Mr. Perritt's bravery and integrity does not make his arguments any smarter.
He has a summary list of reasons for oppposing the war, each of which deserve consideration:
[N]o justification exists; an attack would cause a reaction that would threaten Israel's existence; it would undermine America's ability to lead international opinion; it would violate international law; it could mire the United States in a nasty, prolonged conflict; it would profoundly destabilize international relations to the detriment of U.S. interests because it would stimulate a rush to develop weapons of mass destruction to deter future U.S. action.
In turn:
1) [N]o justification exists;
The editors who published Mr. Perritt's piece do not agree:
Two decades ago, having consolidated his Iraqi dictatorship with blood baths and traded billions of petrodollars for modern weapons, Saddam Hussein set out to make himself master of the Middle East and its oil fields. He launched successive wars of aggression against Iran and Kuwait, amassed a large arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, and raced to acquire nuclear arms. On his orders, his army committed some of the most horrific war crimes since World War II, gassing whole villages and massacring tens of thousands of innocent civilians at a time. Even after his crushing defeat in the Persian Gulf War, the dictator refused to give up his ambitions. He boldly preserved and even sought to expand his chemical and biological arsenal in defiance of numerous U.N. Security Council resolutions; even as his own people starved, he proudly awarded stipends to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. President Bush's assertion that the Iraqi regime remains a deadly menace to the region and a challenge to international order is not new; President Clinton made the same claim throughout his eight years in office, and the Security Council repeatedly agreed with him. Nor is Mr. Bush's insistence on ending Saddam Hussein's dictatorship a leap; Congress passed a law four years ago endorsing regime change as U.S. policy. For years the central question facing both the United States and the United Nations has been whether they are prepared to follow through on their own decisions.
Mr. Bush's choice to fully confront this challenge has been precipitated by two developments since his election. First came the crumbling of the containment policy that Mr. Clinton relied on to manage the Iraqi threat; then came 9/11. The administration's attempts to explain the implications of these events have been awkward and sometimes confused. It has asserted that Saddam Hussein has connections to the al Qaeda network but has provided no public evidence that this is so. It also has suggested that terrorists could strike the United States with chemical or biological arms supplied by Saddam Hussein; though this is plausible, again there is no evidence that the dictator has adopted such a strategy. The real case for acting now on Iraq is more intangible: It is that the breakdown of containment, and the new flow of resources that breakdown has provided to Saddam Hussein, has decisively raised the cost of postponing a confrontation; and the shock of 9/11 has given this country the lesson that, in an era in which enormous harm can be done by seemingly weak adversaries, threats such as that posed by Iraq must not just be managed but treated aggressively.
Alternatively, the Economist recently editorialized:

The danger Mr Hussein poses cannot be overstated. He is no tinpot despot, singled out for arbitrary American punishment. Nor is Iraq a banana republic. With the possible exception of North Korea, but perhaps not even then, Mr Hussein is the world's most monstrous dictator, who by the promiscuous use of violence has seized unfettered control of a technologically advanced country with vast oil reserves. He has murdered all his political opponents, sometimes squeezing the trigger in person. He has subdued his Kurdish minority by razing their villages and spraying them with poison gas. In 1979 he invaded Iran, thus setting off an eight-year war that squandered more than 1m lives. In 1990 he invaded and annexed Kuwait, pronouncing it his “19th province”. When an American-led coalition started to push him out, and though knowing Israel to be a nuclear power, he fired ballistic missiles into Tel Aviv, in the hope of provoking a general Arab-Israeli conflagration. Next time you hear someone ask why, in a world full of bad men, it is Mr Hussein who is being picked on, please bear all of the above in mind. He may very well be the worst.
And yet it is not simply in his record of aggression, cruelty and recklessness that the peril to the wider world resides. If that were all the story, the danger might be easily contained. The unique danger in Iraq is that this country's advanced technology and potential oil wealth could very soon give this aggressive, cruel and reckless man an atomic bomb.
The unique danger in Iraq is that its advanced technology and potential oil wealth could soon give this aggressive, cruel and reckless man an atomic bomb
How dangerous would that be? To judge by the reaction of Mr Bush's foreign critics, the magnitude of the threat is in the eye of the beholder. But it is not difficult to see why, after September 11th, Americans in particular find it hard to be sanguine about the prospect of a sworn enemy equipping himself with weapons of mass destruction (WMD). In the worst case, these might one day be used against the United States, either directly by Iraq itself or by some non-state group to whom Mr Hussein had transferred his lethal technology. At a minimum, a nuclear-armed Mr Hussein could be counted on to revive his earlier ambitions to intimidate his neighbours and dominate the Gulf. Prophesying is difficult, especially about the past. But if Mr Hussein had already had nuclear weapons when he invaded Kuwait 11 years ago, he might still be there.
Finally, to quote Peter Beinart:
...Saddam is prone to recklessly underestimating America's resolve--which is part of the reason he wasn't deterred from invading Kuwait. ... [W]hile deterrence "worked" vis-�-vis the Soviet Union, there's no guarantee it would have continued to work had the USSR endured for another 50 years. (Even during the cold war, after all, there were some very close calls.) The United States relied on deterrence against the Soviet Union not because deterrence was foolproof but because we had no other choice: We could never have preemptively attacked the USSR; the costs would simply have been too great. But the United States can preemptively attack Iraq. Deterrence is no longer our only option, and it isn't our safest one.

Next is Mr. Perritt's contention that
an attack would cause a reaction that would threaten Israel's existence;
Then why are the Israelis so strongly supportive of the impending attack? They are usually pretty good at judging threats to their existence- after all, they've survived for over 50 years while surrounded by enemies pledged to their destruction.
Also, what about the risks of leaving Saddam in power? Even if it was stipulated that renewed inspections could prevent or substantially delay Saddam's ability to obtain nuclear weapons (which is a pretty big stretch), Saddam has still been underwriting suicide bombers and training terrorists to attack Israel. The UN has not been known for its efficacy (or intentions) at stopping such activities.
Next,
it would undermine America's ability to lead international opinion;
It's amazing what showing conviction on the one hand, while throwing the "dogs of peace" a UN-flavored biscuit on the other, can do to lead international opinion.
Next try:
it would violate international law;
Never mind the innumerable UN resolutions of which Iraq is in defiance. More importantly, in the words of the Economist's editors:
[W]ith all due respect to the Security Council, the legal arguments its members deploy to justify their prior political choices are not especially gripping. The issue here is not Jarndyce v Jarndyce, a quarrel about small print. It is the danger Mr Hussein poses to the world, and whether that danger is big enough to justify the risks of a war.
If you believe that the danger posed by Iraq is truly great enough to justify a war, than international law proscribing such war (assuming it exists, which is a big assumption) is irrelevant. If you believe the danger is not so great, it is unnecessary.
Let's try again:
it could mire the United States in a nasty, prolonged conflict;
It could. On the other hand, this is a country whose troops surrendered wholesale in 1991, and whose military has been much degraded since then. Why is that outcome the likelier one?
If Mr. Perritt is not elected to Congress, he should have an easy time obtaining employment as a writer for the New York Times. All he needs to do is insert the word "quagmire" into the above.
Finally,
it would profoundly destabilize international relations to the detriment of U.S. interests because it would stimulate a rush to develop weapons of mass destruction to deter future U.S. action.
This is the point Perritt spends the most time on. Unfortunately, he again fails to consider the costs of not acting. If Saddam gets nuclear weapons, then that will do far more to incentivize other countries to do so than the U.S. failing to attack now, beacuse: 1) his neighbors will justifiably feel threatened, and 2) he will be able to deter us from interfering with his next plans to control the Persian Gulf, an example which other undesirables will wish to follow. Making an example of Saddam, by contrast, may help deter some other undesirables. Failing to do will provide a massive contrary incentive.

Mr. Rylander: if this is the best the Democrats can do, give it up.

Paul Krugman bravely criticizes 19th-century imperialism, and concludes with the following:
It's hard not to suspect that the Bush doctrine is also a diversion — a diversion from the real issues of dysfunctional security agencies, a sinking economy, a devastated budget and a tattered relationship with our allies.
The upcoming war with Iraq may have imperialist bases, but ones which have more in common with the Japan occupation after WWII than any 19th-century Kiplingesque adventures. Much more on that to follow.

Brad DeLong cites to a (subscription only) Wall street Journal article wondering why pharmaceutical companies get such bad press, and gives blame where it is due:
"I think this is a place where you have to blame Democratic politicians, so eager to grab for an issue with traction that they have forgotten what their jobs really are."

A MODEST PROPOSAL FOR ELECTION REFORM: Dave Barry has the last word on the latest election disaster in Florida.

THE NEW YORK TIMES' CRONY CAPITALISM: It's been discussed before, but Jonathan Rauch writes beautifully about how the New York Times is using the state's power of eminent domain to its own ends - just like they (justly) excoriate George W. Bush for having done when he owned the Texas Rangers.
And if that's not enough NYT hypocrisy for you, check out this Jack Shafer piece pointing out, gently, that Bill (Pardoner of Mark Rich) Clinton may not be the best source to denounce corporate turpitude:

[W]here does Bill Clinton get off slagging the Republicans for thwarting his proposed laws when he shredded the laws on the books by giving a complete pardon to accused financial felon and fugitive Marc Rich? And where does the New York Times get off giving Clinton a soapbox to lecture the GOP without once mentioning the Rich case?

HARKEN SUMMER RERUNS: Byron York has republished an old article detailing Bush's checkered business career. Few new facts have emerged since then, it seems. The New York Times certainly has no right to complain, though it will.
Also, Daniel Gross describes in Slate how Congress' last good idea based on hatred of CEOs helped create the current scandals. He's absolutely right.
The incomparable Jonah Goldberg draws some appropriate lessons.

"LABORATORIES OF..." WHAT, EXACTLY? Vegard Valberg, everyone's favorite Norweigian blogger, explains how the European Union is actually a "union of innovation and progress."

HARKEN HERE: Byron York summarizes the case for why Bush's Harken scandal is a non-event, or should be. The Center for Public Integrity has posted a number of the SEC documents relating to the investigation of Bush. I think it is difficult to read this this SEC memo (in PDF form) and think that there's much of a scandal there.
I may have much more to say on the topic soon.

SELF-REGULATING LAZINESS CORRECTOR: Michael Lewis outlines the benefits of today's corporate scandals.

HOUSING PERVERSITIES IN NEW YORK AND SAN JOSE: Here's another aspect of what's wrong with rent control. (Via Megan McArdle.)

SNARKINESS HALL OF FAME NOMINEE: Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz recently published Globalization and its Discontents, a book-long screed against the IMF.
(Here's an article setting forth his basic views.) The IMF has now responded to Stiglitz's book in a manner which should be admired and emulated throughout public life.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: I may not be able to post much over the next couple of days. Here's a thought recently expressed by Joe Klein, who recently demolished the political essays of Joan Didion in the New Republic:

Didion's political essays seem very dated now. They are artifacts of the most placid and prosperous moment in American history, a time when allegedly serious news organizations and journals of opinion turned to cynics and stylists--people who knew little about politics and nothing at all about policy--to make pronouncements about public life. These people practiced a form of theater criticism, assuming and sometimes even asserting that politics was a lesser branch of show business, that politicians were merely actors reading lines, that political performance consisted only of public speaking and image-making; while the quiet work of governance, the true work of elected officials, was largely ignored. This was, almost by definition, a flagrantly superficial conceit. It is probably finished now. When reality visits, there is no need for political fictions.

I think this is absolutely true. Writers like Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich have seemed 98% anachronistic since the pop-culture-ignoramus George W. Bush took office. Since September 11, it's been 100%.

THE ANTI-DEMOCRAT: Slate recently had a wonderful piece on the profoundly anti-democratic activities of Jimmy Carter.

MY BELATED ADVICE TO THE PRESIDENT: Just in case he's reading this blog (and why shouldn't he be?).
When President Bush appointed Tom Ridge as Director of Homeland Security, I was under the mistaken impression that Ridge would use his special connection to the President to recommend and help implement sweeping changes to the government bureaucracies and organization. In the cruelly accurate words of Josh Marshall, Ridge has "been reduced to something between administration roadkill and the bloody chum that saltwater fisherman put into the water to get the big fish biting." I modestly submit that it's time to consider an idea that occurred to me right after September 11.
Have the President appoint a bipartisan commission, with a very short time-frame (no more than 3 months), to recommend a sweeping reorganization of the federal government to deal with the War on Terrorism, which would be presented to Congress in a package for a vote. (If Congress authorizes this commission, then they can also mandate restricted debate or amendment power regarding the commission's recommendations - similar to military base closings. I'm optimistic that if this project is undertaken with the requisite seriousness, it won't be necessary to have any such restrictions.)
Who would lead this commission? I think the ideal candidate would be someone who:
1) Possesses a vast knowledge of the federal government's minutia;
2) Is a Democrat - the more noteworthy the better, so as to enhance the bipartisan credibility of the enterprise;
3) Doesn't have too many strong allies, counterproductive as that may seem (if he or she is a bit of an outsider within Congress and the bureaucracies, the risk of capture is lessened); and
4) Doesn't have anything better to do right now.
Who meets those criteria? I submit...Al "Reinventing Government" Gore. It would be perfect politics and great for the country. Why not put his wonkiness to good use?
Other members of this commission could be:
Tom Ridge - as a consolation prize; he can give a steak's-eye view of the hunters in the various bureaucracies to be reorganized.
Justice Stephen Breyer - his regulatory expertise would be useful.
Dr. Richard Carmona - the unconventional Surgeon General nominee.
Professor Lawrence Gostin, a law professor at Georgetown who has drafted a model public health statute for all 50 states.
James Kallstrom, former top counter-terrorism investigator of the FBI and now director of NY State Public Security.
Experts (preferably sensible ones) on immigration, customs and transportation are also needed - not to mention the CIA. If anyone has any other nominees, please e-mail them to me and I will post the best choices.
This commission should have been appointed immediately after 9/11. Unfortunately, the Administration will probably get another chance.

SOMETHING NEW: Derek Lowe, a chemist employed by a major drug company (and who shares a name with the best pitcher in the American League this year) has an outstanding blog on science and society. Check out this post on cancer treatments.

ETHANOL FUMES: For everything you never wanted to know about Iowa politics and media, check out Cornfield Commentary.

A LIBERAL GETS LIBERTARIAN: Michelle Cottle is appropriately outraged that the government is apparently going to decide whether Americans should get vaccinated against smallpox:

I'm sorry, but if a well-informed, tax-paying, mentally competent adult wants a smallpox vaccine, she should be allowed to have it. If the government is worried about costs, make people pay for the shots--and pad the price enough to subsidize shots for poor folk. If we're worried about supply, then let's have a debate about what it will take to procure enough vaccine to go around. But don't babble on about how the government must weigh the risks to individuals and make this decision for us as though we were small children. Tell people the odds and let them take their chances.
...Yes, there would be some education issues and practical challenges to address. If at all possible, we want to avoid outraged citizens suffering ill side effects and suing the government, whining that no one told them the risks. Of particular concern would be people with compromised immune systems, who face a much higher danger of severe side effects. They might want to opt out of inoculation entirely, as well as take precautions around friends who had just been vaccinated. But these are details that could and should be worked through so that the individuals can be given a choice.
Hey, maybe we'll be lucky. Maybe all remaining traces of the lethal virus are in the hands of safe, sane, responsible, pro-U.S. scientists. Or if there is an outbreak, maybe the ever-vigilant, always-efficient public sector will be able to contain and swiftly vaccinate every single infected person. Maybe. But it sounds like a sucker bet to me.