Based on the recent terror alert, Metropolitan Transit Authority police have announced that they will begin spot-checking passengers and their baggage on commuter trains heading into Manhattan.
Atrios thinks this is shocking. (Archives are fouled up; scroll down to the item titled "Spot Searches on Trains.") I agree. I'm shocked they didn't do this earlier. It's about time. As a twice-daily Metro North commuter, I've always thought the commuter trains were an ideal place for a terrorist attack - either a bomb or a chemical/biological attack. (The commuter trains go underground and are plunged into darkness as they approach Manhattan, presenting close-to-ideal conditions for such an attack.)
I'm amazed at the unwillingess of some of the people on Atrios' comment board to concede that: 1) there just might be a reason to be concerned about security on the trains, especially given that the reports which spawned the latest alert apparently specified attacks to occur "underground" (see above re: why that could apply to commuter trains and not just subways), or 2) if the threat exists, maybe the authorities should actually do something about it.
Actually, there is an argument for concentrating investigative & enforcement resources in the population sectors most likely to contain suspects. A one-word summary of that policy is "profiling." Somehow, I don't assume Atrios' commenters are endorsing that policy.
I don't want to give the impression that I think profiling is a cure-all or completely unproblematic; is is neither. But that doesn't justify a nihilistic attitude aimed at pointing out all the flaws in all available options, while refusing to engage any questions of cost-benefit balancing that might lead to concrete recommendations - and don't forget, anything bad that happens is Bush's fault.

Here's the early entry for best newspaper front page of the year.

Last week, I linked to a Eugene Volokh article criticizing a New York Sun editorial that basically equated antiwar protestors with traitors. (I think I have the link chain right.)
Diane has been on the case, and argues that the protestors in question were making little secret of their desire to turn their planned gathering into a violent riot, and that the city was right to prevent them from marching. Here's her latest piece on the subject.

I don't agree with the viewpoint behind this cartoon, but it's very, very funny.

The Onion has another foreign policy scoop.

(Link via Daniel Drezner.)

Patrick Ruffini has an elaborate outline of a conservative equivalent of "The West Wing." It's wonderful. I'd never miss an episode.

Lots of people have noticed this Newsweek piece about the country's terror threat level has been raised to "orange" based on reports that al-Qaeda is mobilizing to attack Jews:

The FBI did appear to focus on one area: to identify hotels that are owned by Jews. The issue of possible attacks on Jewish-owned hotels was specifically raised by senior FBI officials with field-office chiefs during a 90-minute conference call on Friday, officials said. During the conference call, a senior official cited the recent Al Qaeda attack on a Bali nightclub that killed nearly 200 people last October, saying that the bureau now believes the facility was targeted because the owner was Jewish. NEWSWEEK could not independently confirm that assertion. Another recent Al Qaeda attack in Mombasa, Kenya, was aimed at a hotel that was frequented by Israelis.

Most Newsweek readers, and probably the FBI as well probably had the following reaction to these reports: "Hotels? What the @#@%@#&%?"
That was my initial reaction as well. Then a couple of thoughts followed, which seem all-too-plausible.

In a couple of months, thousands of Jews will be in hotels to celebrate Passover. Many large, well-known hotels have programs for Passover that attract hundreds of Jewish families. Those in NY can pick up a copy of the Jewish Week to see an amazing array of advertisements for such programs.
The schedules are known well in advance; it's not like Passover's scheduling can be changed, and the Seder ritual feast is always held the first two nights of the holiday (outside of Israel) after sundown. and the Seder is long enough that its conclusion on the East Coast can overlap with its commencement on the West Coast - which makes it easier to plan multiple attacks in different places.
Since 9/11, what has been the most "successful" episode of Jew-killing? Last year's "Passover Massacre" in Israel. That atrocity was perpetrated by Hamas, but al-Qaeda has been willing to crib techniques and tactics from other terrorist groups.
Security at hotels in Israel for this Passover is likely to be unbelievably strict after last year's attack. I am not sure the same can be said for such hotels in America, which in any case have far less experience of being terrorist targets as do Israeli establishments.
We thus have an upcoming situation which seems to fit the warning, a situation that gives terrorists opportunity to prepare and precedent on which to base such preparations.
I would be very scared if I was scheduled to got to a hotel this Passover.
I hope that the FBI has already thought along similar lines. Just in case they haven't, if anyone reading this entry knows someone in any position to do anything about this terrible possibility, please alert them.
I know that this post has been pure speculation. But we need to engage in more of it, in order to overcome the terrorists' advantages in the learning curve against reactive bureaucracies.

This morning, WCBS-880 radio reported that Rep. Jane Harman (D-Ca.), who sits on the House Intelligence Committee, had advised her daughter to avoid the New York City subways. The radio report also cited a nonconvincing denial by Harman that the warning was based on intelligence regarding potential terrorist attacks.
(I have not been able to find other verification of the report.)
I had lunch today with a client, who knows a captain in the NYPD. According to my client, this captain had advised his family to avoid the NYC subways "for the next ten days."
Rod Dreher describes nervousness in the NYC subway system. This is why.

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...

Here's a great interview with Mark Steyn:

John Hawkins: There is a profound difference in the way that most Americans and most Europeans seem to view the conflict in Israel. What do you think accounts for that difference?
Mark Steyn: You have to differentiate between the British and the Continent. The British aren't anti-Semitic, but they're hot for Arabs. The British ruling class looks at the Arab and sees a desert version of his own most cherished myths: look at the Prince of Wales all togged out in his Lawrence of Arabia get-up just to have dinner with one of bin Laden's brothers. The Continentals are something else. Some just don't like Jews and resent having been unable to express that opinion honestly these last 50 years. But with the others the psychology's a little more complicated. Almost every European country was tainted by the Holocaust and Nazi occupation, but for the sake of the post-war settlement the world agreed to pretend only Germany was to blame. Not so. In France and Holland, the locals eagerly herded Jews onto those eastbound trains. In Belgium, industrial production went up under the Nazis. After half-a-century, the Continentals are sick of this guilt trip. They need to see Israel as the aggressor for their own psychological health. That's why that wacky Dutch broad who's married to the big Eurobanker keeps comparing Sharon to Hitler and Likud to the Nazis. It's a way of evening the score - "Sure, we had Hitler, you have Sharon; we have Auschwitz, you have Jenin." It's their way of belatedly taking a moral shower, a way of saying, "See, the score's one-one now. You're as bad as us. Let's just call it a draw and move on."

Read the whole thing.

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.

The Yankees' pitchers and catchers report to spring training today.

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.

Here's a speech he recently gave at a security conference in Munich.
Some excerpts:

The French and German objection, for reasons of calculated self-interest -- a very flawed calculation, I fear - to a routine American request to the North Atlantic Council to upgrade Turkey's defenses against the military threat from Iraq was a terrible injury to an Alliance that has served their broader interests well. For nearly three weeks, the United States, with fourteen of our eighteen European allies in the North Atlantic Council, has supported this necessary action, but has confronted a new unilateralism conceived in Paris and Berlin, a unilateralism that exposed the sneering in those capitals about the impulsive cowboy in the White House for the vacuous posturing and obvious misdirection it is. Whatever NATO decides, Franco-German unilateralism will have a lasting impact on trans-Atlantic security calculations. If this minority French-German obstruction is not overcome by NATO's deadline of Monday, France and Germany will have to answer to those who argue that Iraq could be to NATO what Abyssinia was to the League of Nations.
The United Nations Security Council risks that same fate should it not hold Iraq to account for its defiance. Patient American and British diplomacy at the U.N. delivered a unanimous vote in favor of Council Resolution 1441. France played a key role in negotiating the resolution and knew what they were voting for; Germany was fully aware1 of the debate as it prepared to assume the Council presidency in January. Americans, and many Europeans, were therefore astonished when France and Germany announced in advance of further consideration of the problem of Iraq that under no circumstances would they support enforcing the resolution's terms against Iraq.
...Foreign Minister Fischer recently warned against "primitive anti-Americanism." I thank and commend him for his statement. But I am concerned, we should all be concerned, not only with the "primitive" anti-Americanism of the street that resents America's successes, exults in our misfortunes, and ascribes to us motives that one must be a fool or delusional to believe. We should also be concerned with the "sophisticated" anti-Americanism, or perhaps more aptly, the "cynical" anti-Americanism of political leaders who exploit for their own ends the disinformed, "primitive" hostility to America voiced in some quarters of their societies; to further their ambitions to govern or to inflate perceptions of their international influence.
Just as some Arab governments fuel anti-American sentiment among their people to divert them from problems at home, so a distinct minority of Western European leaders appears to engage in America- bashing to rally their people and other European elites to the call of European unity. Some European politicians speak of pressure from their "street" for peaceful solutions to international conflict and for resisting American power regardless of its purpose. But statements emanating from Europe that seem to endorse pacifism in the face of evil, and anti-Semitic recidivism in some quarters, provoke an equal and opposite reaction in America.
There is an American "street," too, and it strongly supports disarming Iraq, accepts the necessity of an expansive American role in the world to ensure we never wake up to another September 11th, is perplexed that nations with whom we have long enjoyed common cause do not share our urgency and sense of threat in time of war, and that considers reflexive hostility toward Israel as the root of all problems in the Middle East as irrational as it is morally offensive.

Glenn Reynolds has a thought experiment about what the world would look like if America truly acted like the empire its critics accuse it of being:

An Imperial America would probably join with nascent superpower India to divide up and conquer the region. India could have Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran; we’d take Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Egypt.
What about the “Arab street?” The answer would be machine guns, labor camps, and bulldozed mosques. (Replaced, perhaps, by new mosques with pliable mullahs). Really troublesome populations would be relocated, a la Stalin and the Crimean Tartars. (If the task proved too ugly for American troops, we’d hire mercenaries — excuse me, “Foreign Legion troops” — from sub-Saharan Africa, East Timor, and other places whose populations dislike Muslims. There would be atrocities and brutality, of course, but that would be part of the plan.) The response to people who said the war was just about oil? “You’re right. And if you’re nice to us, we’ll sell you some.” To keep the Russians happy, they’d get a cut of the action so long as they played ball.

As Reynolds notes:

...I’m getting kind of tired hearing the United States accused of behaving like an imperial power when it isn’t. And I worry that these false accusations, repeated over and over, may actually make genuine American imperialism more likely, as the “American street” decides that if we’re going to be called an empire, we might as well act like one. What, after all, could Robert Fisk or his ilk say about America in reponse to the above that they haven’t already said anyway?

Read the whole thing.

Andrew Sullivan argues that resentment is at the heart of European anti-Americanism:

From any rational point of view, the end of the Saddam regime in Baghdad cannot be a huge blow to European interests. In fact, it's pretty much a no-brainer, a necessary international police action to remove an obvious potential threat from terrorists and weapons of mass destruction. Saddam is the easy case, not the hard one. So why the intensity of the opposition - even to the point of wrecking NATO and splitting Europe in two? Resentment, I posit. Resentment. And that resentment - which is not manufactured by European leaders, merely tolerated by them - is bound to have a deep effect on the future of international relations. This current crisis is just the beginning of a realignment that could be profound.

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.