Megan McArdle, aka Jane Galt, has renamed and redesigned her blog, joined the Foreign Service and announced that she will accordingly be restricted from commenting on certain topics.
If such self-censorship really is required by her employment, I can't think of a more pressing problem for Congress to rectify in its lame-duck session.

Richard Just has an outstanding piece on why liberals should support an invasion of Iraq:

Anti-war liberals have derided the prospect of a liberated Iraq serving as a model for Arab democracy -- and starting a domino effect that could liberate the Muslim world from the grips of petty despots and theocratic lunatics -- as fanciful. But for all their talk about the "root causes" of terrorism, my fellow liberals have spoken very little about how they plan to remedy the situation. Deterrence is not going to address the "root causes" of terror. It will likely make them worse. At best it will leave a madman in check and leave much of the Muslim world in an ongoing mood of simmering disdain for America. At worst it will empower a madman to bide his time in manipulating the Muslim world's ongoing disdain for America. It is not a policy of hope; it is a policy of little imagination and puny moral spirit.
These arguments are almost all well-trodden territory at this advanced stage in the debate. But it is this last point -- the sudden puniness of the liberal worldview as embodied by its prescription for Iraq -- that saddens me most, and that liberals have grappled with least. Think of the major policy advances of the last century. The New Deal, the Great Society, the civil-rights movement -- all were fueled by a moralistic ambition and a faith in the power of humans to repair their world through action and ideas. There have never been any great liberal strains in American life that were fueled by a desire to just let things be. Think of the domestic causes championed by liberals at this magazine and elsewhere: public financing of campaigns, measures to conserve the environment, universal health care -- they are all ambitious in the great progressive tradition. No one at this magazine would ever say that corporate funding of campaigns is probably a detriment to American politics, but perhaps the best solution is to leave the system as is -- by meddling, we only risk making it worse. What's more, the American left has a rich tradition of ambition in the international arena. It was a liberal president who proposed the League of Nations and thus created an entire school of foreign-policy thought. It was a liberal president who stared down conservative isolationists and began preparing America -- years before Pearl Harbor -- to help rescue the Jews of Europe from genocide and the world from the greatest evil it had ever seen. It was a liberal president who invoked the lesson of that war to argue for intervention in countless conflicts during the 1990s. And it is liberals who have, over and over again, called attention to human-rights abuses, injustices, killings and torture throughout the world for decades upon decades -- and urged their government to do something, anything about them.
But here we are, on the brink of an attempt to remove one of recent history's most odious men from the world scene, and liberals have surveyed the situation and asked, "How can we find any rationale not to get involved?" They have noted that Saddam Hussein may be evil but that there are plenty of other evil people in the world. Or that conservatives are in it for the oil. Or that there are risks involved. Or that containment could prevent the dictator from ever using nuclear weapons.
All those arguments may well be true.
But not one of those arguments will lead to the liberation of a frighteningly Orwellian society based on fear and torture. Not one of them will protect the citizens of the Middle East's democratic nations against future attacks with weapons of mass destruction. Not one of them could lead to a beachhead -- however small -- of democracy in the Arab world. Not one of them will help resolve the Israeli-Palestinian standoff. Not one of them will allow America to take initial steps toward addressing the "root causes" of terror. Not one of them is worthy of the deeply moral traditions of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And not one of them will lead to progress in the Middle East -- yet these objections are apparently all most "progressives" have to offer.

There's more - read it.
First Ronald Brownstein's election post-mortem from yesterday, and now Just's piece - if tightly written and logically compelling articles continue to appear in TAP, bloggers like myself and Mickey Kaus may have to stop making fun of it so often! (Of course, given Just's track record of producing good articles - see here and here for examples - Robert Kuttner will probably force him out before too long.)

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...

David Frum discusses the UN resolution regarding Iraq and observes that President Bush's diplomacy follows a predictable pattern:

Step 1: Bush threatens to go it alone.
Step 2: Liberals and foreign allies holler.
Step 3: Threatened with irrelevance, Congress/the UN/the Arab League/the IMF offers to do 80% of what Bush wants.
Step 4: Bush reluctantly agrees to work with Congress/the UN/the Arab League/the IMF.
Step 5: Admiring articles about Colin Powell appear in the New York Times.
Step 6: Conservatives panic.
Step 7: Bush does precisely what he intended to do from the very beginning.

The United Nations may be the world's most hypocritical, wasteful, vexatious, and absurd organization. But there's no getting around the fact that a favorable Security Council resolution is a very useful thing to have.

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?

Hanna Rosin has an excellent piece on the prevalence of anti-Semitism within the movement to have universities divest from Israel:

The ultimate aim is to turn Israel into the South Africa of the '80s, the universal campus pariah.
In response, the Hillel crowd has gone "Dershowitz" (that's ballistic in Yiddish), one-upping the Palestinians by getting thousands more students and faculty to sign a counterpetition calling the divestment movement anti-Semitic, part of the toxic stew of Jew-baiting that's been brewing since Sept. 11. Harvard President Lawrence Summers called the protests "anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent."
Is Summers right? The divestment movement drifted over from Europe pretty tainted, and not by Muslim radicals. There, some of its lefty proponents are still naked in their bigotry, foaming against the Shylocks of their imagination. Take one M.L. Sinnott, a scientist at the University of Manchester who helped organize academic and scientific boycotts of Israeli scholars. Stephen Greenblatt, as head of the Modern Languages Association, wrote to one of Sinnott's colleagues objecting to their having fired two researchers merely because they were Israeli. And here is what Sinnott wrote back:
"From the 'claptrap' of your open letter," he began, "one would imagine Israel to be an inoffensive Mediterranean Sweden rather than a voelkisch polity whose atrocities surpass those of Milosevic's Yugoslavia." He then progresses to Zionism as the mirror image of Nazism, Jenin as Kristallnacht, the "breathtaking power" of the Jewish lobby, and, of course, the media, "either controlled by Jews or browbeaten by them."
Then, more depressingly, there's José Saramago, the Portuguese novelist and Nobel Prize winner who this year traveled to Ramallah with the Euro-Mumia crowd and found it a "crime comparable to Auschwitz." He then eloquently traced the state's "pathologically exclusivist racism" to "Deuteronomy" to the story of David and Goliath—in short, to the Torah itself.
Israel has its share of human rights violations and even a massacre or two in its history (Jenin not among them, as it turns out). But Kristallnacht? Auschwitz? That such outlandish analogies would pop into both of their heads independently can only mean the template of Scary Omnipotent Jew is already there, buried. Apparently, it takes only a divestment movement, or else four beers and a warm pub, to give it life.
In a 1987 Dissent essay, Paul Berman runs through all the possible explanations for the anti-Zionism of the intellectual left. With every one of the charges against Israel—"white settler colony," "weapons trader," mistreats minorities—you can name many other countries that are infinitely worse. So some part of the inordinately critical focus on Israel must be due, he concludes, to a certain hostility to Jews. Berman boils down the phenomenon to the "Anti-Imperialism of Fools," a takeoff on an August Bebel phrase particularly apt for this year's divestment movement: The radical left, who in this case are spillovers from the World Bank protests, boil their target down to one easy, ugly enemy that is in reality a tiny, relatively insignificant Mediterranean country instead of focusing on world-class imperialists like China and Russia or for that matter world-class human rights abusers.

It is hard to improve on Summers' denunciation of the divestiture movement. It should be noted, though, that the new president of Columbia University, Lee Bollinger, has followed Summers' example of properly prioritized candor:

As President of Columbia, however, I want to state clearly that I will not lend any support to this proposal. The petition alleges human rights abuses and compares Israel to South Africa at the time of apartheid, an analogy I believe is both grotesque and offensive.

This is a welcome development, especially for those of us who attended Columbia in the 1990s. The times they are a-changing...
Also, check out an example of "going Dershowitz," by Mr. Dershowitz himself.

There's one problem with the conclusion of Rosen's piece, though:

There even ought to be a legitimate way to object to Israel's very existence on purely political grounds. But so far, it seems, no one has managed to do it.

The usually sensible Eugene Volokh agrees:

For instance, the quick retort that "How can you oppose the existence of a Jewish state without being anti-Jewish?" has always struck me as odd -- one can oppose the existence of a Basque or Quebecois state without being anti-Basque or anti-Quebecois.
The sentiment expressed by Rosin and Volokh is untenable because it is anachronistic. Before the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, it was entirely possible to argue, free of anti-Semitism, that the Jews' sufferings did not warrant the establishment of a new state on geopolitical grounds. Once the state was established, opposing its existence is identical to desiring its destruction, with the guaranteed suffering accompanying that result (as Volokh notes in the same entry). The costs of not enacting a new state are necessarily more indeterminate than the costs of destroying a pre-existing one. It is possible to oppose the enactment of a new state for Basques or Quebecois without being anti-Basque or anti-Quebecois, but it is an altogether different matter to oppose the existence of such states after they are formed. An easy shorthand for such people would be "anti-Basque," "anti-Quebecois" - or "anti-Semitic."

I took the test, so it must be true:

Which Founding Father Are You?

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.

One word of advice to families planning a trip to Disney World: it is better for all involved when the child to whom the trip was primarily geared is not feverishly, barfingly sick for the entire trip. (If "barfingly" isn't a word, it should be.) It also helps when every other members of the family do not alternate being sick immediately before, during and after the trip.
For more controllable advice, the House of Manhattan officially recommends this book for use in planning a Disney vacation with kids.