Do you know what would be worse than a known jihadist who is wanted on terrorism charges in Algeria, the United States, Belgium, Spain, France, Germany, Italy, and Jordan; who has been described as posing a “grave risk” to British national security by members of his own defense team; who was caught red-handed in 2001 holding £805 in an envelope labelled “For the Mujahedin in Chechnya”; and whose sermons were found on audio cassettes in the apartment of 9/11 bomber Mohamed Atta?

Ostensibly, the answer is: Calling him an “extremist.” 

The BBC, which can always be called upon to focus in on the real issues and sensibly spend the money they force all British television owners to hand over at gunpoint, held a meeting on Monday to discuss how Abu Quatada, “Osama bin Laden’s right-hand man in Europe,” would be portrayed in their news reports. And at that meeting, according to the London Telegraph, 

journalists were told: “Do not call him an extremist – we must call him a radical. Extremist implies a value judgment.”

Leaving aside that, by this logic, “radical” is arbitrarily deemed a neutral term by the BBC where “extremist” is not, one has to ask the question: If one cannot make “value judgements” about a man who is such an obvious threat to Western civilization that his own legal defense publicly acknowledges his danger, then who are we allowed to judge?

Moreover, the BBC was worried about hurting the feelings of Quatada, a man who spends his time concocting ever more interesting ways of killing the wives and children of Egyptian police and army officers, blowing up Jordanian tourists, and advising fun-loving terrorists such as al-Qaeda stalwarts Zacarias Moussaoui and Richard Reid. How? By suggesting that he is “overweight” by running out-of-date stock photographs. Again from the Telegraph:

BBC staff were also cautioned against using library images suggesting the cleric is overweight, because he has “lost a lot of weight”.

Oh, good. Perhaps the BBC could invite him in to discuss the “obesity crisis.”

The BBC insists that such an approach is an inevitable part of its “impartiality.” But Peter Sissons, who was the anchor of BBC News for twenty years disagrees:

At any given time there is a BBC line on everything of importance, a line usually adopted in the light of which way its senior echelons believe the political wind is ­blowing. This line is rarely spelled out explicitly, but percolates subtly throughout the organisation.

Whatever the United Nations is associated with is good — it is heresy to question any of its activities. The EU is also a good thing, but not quite as good as the UN. Soaking the rich is good, despite well-founded economic arguments that the more you tax, the less you get. And Government spending is a good thing, although most BBC ­people prefer to call it investment, in line with New Labour’s terminology.

All green and environmental groups are very good things. Al Gore is a saint. George Bush was a bad thing, and thick into the bargain. Obama was not just the Democratic Party’s candidate for the White House, he was the BBC’s. Blair was good, Brown bad, but the BBC has now lost interest in both.

Trade unions are mostly good things, especially when they are fighting BBC managers. Quangos are also mostly good, and the reports they produce are usually handled uncritically. The Royal Family is a bore. Islam must not be offended at any price, although ­Christians are fair game because they do nothing about it if they are offended.

Anthony Jay, who wrote the classic comedy Yes, Minister and worked in various capacities for the BBC from 1955 until the late 1980s, posed a question last year in the foreword to Christopher Booker’s book, The Real Global Warming Disaster: ” The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has a duty of impartiality, as we all know. But what exactly does ‘impartiality’ mean?” He answered his own question in scathing terms:

It would be astonishing if the BBC did not have its own orthodoxy. It has been around for 85 years, recruiting bright graduates, mostly with arts degrees, and deeply involved in current affairs issues and news reporting. And of course for all that time it has been supported by public money. One result of this has been an implicit belief in government funding and government regulation. Another is a remarkable lack of interest in industry and a deep hostility to business and commerce.

At this point I have to declare an interest, or at least admit to previous. I joined BBC television, my first job after university and National Service, in 1955, six months before the start of commercial television, and stayed for nine years as trainee, producer, editor and finally head of a production department. I absorbed and expressed all the accepted BBC attitudes: hostility to, or at least suspicion of, America, monarchy, government, capitalism, empire, banking and the defence establishment, and in favour of the Health Service, state welfare, the social sciences, the environment and state education.

Conservative MP James Clappison remarked in response to the BBC’s decision, “It makes you wonder what you have to do for the BBC to call you an extremist.” Given that a man such as Abu Quatada has fallen short of the mark, one can only hope that nobody ever finds out.

Although he didn’t mention Rick Santorum by name, Mitt Romney emphasized in his speech last night that he was the only candidate in the race who was not a Washington insider. Santorum was dismissive of Romney’s outsider claim this morning, reports The Hill:

“Gov. Romney, ‘Mr. Outsider,’ was for government takeover of healthcare, was for government takeover of the private sector in the Wall Street bailout, and was for the government takeover of industry and energy with cap-and-trade,” Santorum said on CNN. “So ‘Mr. Private Sector’ was ‘Mr. Big Government’ when he was out there running.”

…

Santorum blasted Romney for running as a Washington outsider, alleging that the circumstances that led Romney to leave government were different from how they have been portrayed.

“I ran for the U.S. Senate the same year Mitt Romney ran for the U.S. Senate, and I won,” Santorum said. “It’s not that Gov. Romney didn’t want to be Sen. Romney — he wanted to be Sen. Romney, but he ran as a very liberal Republican in Massachusetts who had just become a Republican, and he lost. He lost badly in a year when Republicans had one of the biggest Republican sweeps in history, when the Republican revolution occurred.”

And on Fox this morning, Santorum responded to the Romney campaign’s attacks on his earmark record. “He says I earmark. He’s for the biggest earmark in the history of the country — he’s for the Wall Street bailout,” Santorum said, per GOP12.

Moments ago, James Rosen of Fox News compared Rick Santorum’s underdog campaign to Rocky Balboa, the ultimate underdog pugilist. “With the knockouts he scored last night, Rick Santorum is the Rocky Balboa of the 2012 cycle. Ipso facto, that makes Mitt Romney Apollo Creed, and Newt Gingrich maybe Paulie or Clubber Lang.” Which leaves Ron Paul who, in my opinion, is the Mickey of the race.

“There’s been a lot of talk about the Obama administration’s attack on the Catholic church,” Newt Gingrich said last night, according to CBS News. “Well the fact is, Gov. Romney insisted that Catholic hospitals give out abortion pills against their religious belief when he was governor.” 

Rick Santorum made the same argument in an op-ed yesterday.

But as the Romney campaign has pointed out, Romney vetoed the bill that forced Catholic hospitals to give out emergency contraception. Then, the Massachusetts legislature overrode his veto. David French has a detailed explanation of what transpired here.

Mitt Romney’s campaign is well-funded and highly organized. It has attracted top endorsements, corralled key GOP donors and consultants, cultivated the conservative media, and won or tied in competitive contests such as Iowa, New Hampshire, Florida, and Nevada. But to be blunt, stumbles in South Carolina and now in Minnesota, Missouri, and Colorado call into question the planning and judgment of the campaign’s leaders, starting with the candidate himself.

Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum are talented politicians with strong followings. But they are also operating shoestring campaigns and have obvious liabilities. If the Romney team believed their own inevitability rhetoric, failing to invest for victory yesterday just as they did before South Carolina, that doesn’t auger well for their ability to make sound decisions later on. After all, two of the three states, Colorado and Missouri, will be battlegrounds in the general election. Investing in them with ad buys and organization could hardly have been considered a waste of resources. And if the Romney team did try to compete with Santorum yesterday but fell so woefully short, what does that say about their ability to compete with a far more resourceful adversary this fall?

Democrats are happier today than they were yesterday, and much happier than they were a month ago. They may be wrong, but they still see Romney as President Obama’s strongest challenger. So if Romney can’t even win in Colorado, a caucus Romney dominated four years ago against a stronger opponent, they’re liking the president’s chances in November. As for Republicans, well, there’s always the U.S. Senate . . .

Tyler Cowen links to a post in which William Gadea wonders why Arnold Bread offers so darn many products:

Is there really anyone in this world who loves the Arnold 10-grain, but can’t stand the 7-grain or 12-grain?

A slice of Arnold 12-grain has about 35 percent more calories and twice as much fat as a slice of Arnold 10-grain. I bet that might matter to some consumers. 

Gadea goes on with this:

More importantly in business terms, is the advantage of addressing these additional slivers of taste (if indeed people can make distinctions between the varieties – I can’t) really outweigh the additional expense of producing 40 separate packages, 40 separate categories of inventory, and 40 separate (at least slightly different) production processes?

My guess is no.

It’s not like this is the first time anybody has asked that question. There is a huge management discipline that focuses on this issue, and it attempts to evaluate product-line proliferation as the trade-off of incremental revenue versus increased complexity costs for production and distribution. But Gadea doesn’t have to bother with any knowledge of how the production economics of a bakery and its distribution network is affected by product count, or why different kinds of product proliferation might be more or less costly than others. He doesn’t have to bother with analyzing the elasticity of total product-line sales and margin to changes in product count. Or with doing any work at all, really. He can just guess the answer.

#more#Gadea continues:

The motivator here isn’t making the customer happier, it’s the oft-neglected fourth ‘P’ of marketing: placement. Even if the supermarket carries only half the varieties that Arnold offers, all of a sudden they are hogging a big part of the bread aisle.

Let me give you an example how a conversation between an Arnold account manager and the bakery department buyer at a major retailer normally does not go:

Arnold account manager: We’ve now doubled our SKU count by adding 20 new products.

Retailer buyer:  OK, then we’ll give you twice as much shelf space.  Never mind that huge space allocation model we built to assign space based on product space elasticities. Also, never mind all of those randomized experiments we ran to test the effect of adding space to the bakery category at the expense of canned goods. We won’t need to see any test market data on the sales of your new products, and we won’t try adding some of your products in a few stores to see if it helps our overall bakery department GMROI. Which of course reminds me to forget all of the slotting fees that other CPG companies are paying us for the shelf space that you want. I’ll give it to you because our space allocation rule is “always take half of the products offered by any major vendor.” Because we’re morons. 

Consumer package goods (CPG) vendors are in an endless war for retail shelf space. They will add products to try to “hog the shelf,” just as they will invest in joint promotions with the retailer, buy TV advertising, try new packaging ideas, and so on. They often will just cut to the chase, and pay the retailer cash money (slotting fees) for it. Similarly, the retailers are constantly trying to figure out how to range and merchandise departments, manage their overall shelf capacity and so on. They try to allocate shelf space to the products that will make them the most money. Sometimes they believe it to be in their interest, given the coordination costs and costs of maintaining expertise, to outsource some shelf decisions to CPG “category captains.”  The trade-offs here are multi-dimensional, constantly evolving, demand judgment, and are never made perfectly; but both sides are working hard to drive up their own economic profits, and nobody who stays in business is a child about them.

Determining what product to sell and how much space to give each product is extremely challenging, both analytically and organizationally. This is why retailers and CPGs are constantly undertaking line reviews, and are pretty much always either rationalizing SKUs (cutting products from the line) or adding products to meet perceived unmet needs. It is a much harder problem than just wandering into a supermarket and deciding “who could possibly want 40 kinds of bread?” without even bothering to read the labels.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has appointed a former legal-services attorney as its new “public advocate.” The point of the new position is to enable illegal aliens to complain directly to headquarters when ICE field agents refuse to implement the administration’s administrative amnesty. This has become a real problem for the White House; the NYT reported last month that the ICE union has refused to allow its members to undergo the re-education sessions organized by the DHS political appointees. In effect, they consider the Obama de facto amnesty directives to be unlawful orders which they are bound to disobey.

This puts the White House in a political bind because it’s promised the open-borders and ethnic-chauvinst groups that all non-violent illegal aliens would be permitted to stay as long as necessary until Congress votes them legal status. If regular illegal aliens continue to be deported, the enthusiasm of La Raza and its ilk for the president’s reelection may flag. Thus, this new public advocate, who can identify the malefactors (ICE agents refusing to violate their oaths) and enable the Eye of Sauron to turn upon them.

But some jujitsu is in order. Since this public advocate says “I hope you’ll reach out to me with your questions, comments and concerns,” those who have been affected by illegal immigration — especially victims of identity theft, drunk-driving, or other crimes — should give him a call. He’s at andrew.strait@dhs.gov or (202) 732-3999.

Next stop for Rick Santorum: Michigan.

We think Michigan’s a great place for us to plant our flag and talk about jobs and manufacturing and giving opportunities for everybody in America to rise,” Santorum said on Morning Joe today.

Arizona and Michigan are both holding their primaries February 28th. Romney currently has a huge, double-digit lead in both states, according to Rasmussen polls. And he has other advantages, including that Michigan, of course, is the state where his father, George Romney, governed. One factor that may be influencing Santorum’s decision to focus on Michigan rather than Arizona is Arizona is a winner-take-all primary, meaning that all delegates will go to the winning candidate. Santorum said he would attend the debates in Arizona, but was non-committal about campaigning there extensively.

His campaign is also kicking into high drive in preparation for March 6.

“Super Tuesday’s going to be a very, very big day for us,” Santorum said. “We’ve got organizations developing in every one of those states on Super Tuesday.”

Video:

Just about every pundit west of the River Indus has pointed out how Romney performed cataclysmically worse in last night’s batch of caucuses/primaries/“beauty contests” than he did in the same states in 2008. One thing I have not seen any of them mention — and pardon me if it seems obvious — is that despite blowing out McCain in Colorado in 2008, Mitt Romney did not in fact become the Republican nominee that year.

 The Winter 2011–12 issue of Claremont Review of Books is now in the mail, and the table of contents is up on their website.

The issue includes my portmanteau review of Andrew Ferguson’s Crazy U: One Dad’s Crash Course in Getting His Kids Into College and In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: Confessions of an Accidental Academic by the wisely anonymous “Professor X.”

From my review:

So here is Professor X flogging reluctant, work-weary evening classes through the basics of grammar, rhetoric, and composition. It reads to me like a vision of hell, though the author claims persuasively to find some satisfactions in it.

The wretched souls being tormented in that hell belong to the most oppressed, persecuted, and disadvantaged segment of our population: the un-bookish. Somehow we have arrived in the 21st century with a class of rulers so bereft of imagination they cannot conceive that anyone would wish to be less educated than themselves. When a politician addresses schoolchildren, it is to urge bookishness on them. Thus Barack Obama in his 2009 back-to-school address to the nation’s students: “You want to be a doctor, or a teacher, or a police officer? You want to be a nurse or an architect, a lawyer, or a member of our military? You’re going to need a good education for every single one of those careers.” So much for mechanics, gardeners, fishermen, glaziers, loggers, athletes, barbers, truckers, cooks, butchers, roofers, miners, crane operators, manicurists, linemen, dancers, cameramen, steel fixers, personal trainers, carpenters, brewers, florists, ranchers, masons, potters . . . The hell with them! “Ten thousand occupations are lowly; only book learning is exalted.” Thus the Chinese proverb: thus the attitude to useful, honest work in an imperial-bureaucratic despotism run by arrogant scholar-officials. How long can it be before our law-school elites begin sporting six-inch fingernails, like the Mandarins of old Peking?

Read the whole thing, and many other fine essays and reviews, in conservatism’s answer to . . . some other review of books, I forget the name . . .

Jonathan Last is having fun.

National Review is accepting applications for its 2012 summer internship. The intern will work in our New York headquarters and receive a modest but adequate salary. Duties will include sundry editorial and administrative tasks, and there will be occasional opportunities to write. The ideal candidate will be a rising college senior with an excellent academic record, some experience in student or professional journalism, and a reflective commitment to conservative principles. If you wish to apply, please send a cover letter, your résumé, and no more than three clips to editorial.applications@nationalreview.com.

In case you missed them: Santorum in Missouri, Romney in Colorado, and Paul in Minnesota. Gingrich was in Ohio, “hoping for an eventual payoff on Super Tuesday.”

The tendency of gay-marriage advocates to ridicule as alarmist or uninformed all of their opponents arguments is unmatched — by any relationship to reality on the ground.

A few years ago, gay-marriage advocates claimed conservatives were just fearmongering when we said a federal marriage amendment could be necessary.

When people argued that civil unions were not a compromise, but just part of a very slippery slope to same-sex marriage, they were poo-pooed.

Professor Eugene Volokh, a supporter of same-sex marriage as a policy matter, picks up the most radical part of the Ninth Circuit decision: Alliance Defense Fund was right. Civil Unions lead to gay marriage.

Okay, he doesn’t say that part about ADF, but Prof. Volokh does say:

Note that, if the decision is upheld, this means that the arguments that civil unions are a “slippery slope” to same-sex marriage were absolutely right: The recognition of civil unions changed the legal landscape in a way that made it more likely for courts to also conclude that same-sex marriage must be recognized, too.

This week on Uncommon Knowledge, columnist, scholar, and social media maven Jonah Goldberg discusses the unconstrained vision of the left, the problem with Romney, the reality of diversity, why vanilla is everyone’s second favorite flavor, and offers some wise but unpalatable advice to conservative voters. 

“I do not think they hate Romney that much… Vanilla is everyone’s second favorite flavor. And so they do not hate him, but they do not love him. And they really want to love someone. They want to be in love with a candidate. And they have had these sorts of tawdry affairs with everybody else, other than Romney, this entire primary season.”

Click the play button below to watch:

From Bloomberg:

Feb. 8 (Bloomberg) — Jim Messina, President Barack Obama’s campaign manager, assured a group of Democratic donors from the financial services industry that Obama won’t demonize Wall Street as he stresses populist appeals in his re-election campaign, according to two people at the meeting.

You might recall that a while back liberals were insisting that the “uncertainty” argument was total bunk. The bad economy had nothing to do with businesses sitting on their money because they were uncertain about the future of the tax code, government programs and so on coming down the pike and everything to do with a lack of demand. As Jonathan Chait put it, “Investment is lower because there’s not enough consumer demand. That’s the whole story.”

Well, here’s Ben Bernanke this week: “Is uncertainty about the future of the tax code, government programs and so on a negative for growth? I think it is.”

Video over at the Free Beacon (which seems to have one too many “E”s in its name).

Santorum’s Missouri sweep, via Conn Carroll:

Carroll notes: “In Missouri, Romney lost by 30 points and did not win a single county. In Minnesota, Romney finished third behind Ron Paul and did not win a single county. And in Colorado Romney kept his loss within five points, but finished 35-points behind his 60 percent 2008 total.”

Over on the home page, J.C. Watts, Bob Walker, Jackie Cushman, Frank Gregorsky, and other residents of Gingrich World discuss the former speaker. More here.

From Nate Silver:

Then there was Colorado, a state that has reasonably similar demographics to Nevada, which Mr. Romney carried easily on Saturday. Colorado has somewhat fewer Mormon voters than Nevada, which hurts Mr. Romney — but it has somewhat more wealthy ones, which favors him. The betting market Intrade gave Mr. Romney about a 97 percent chance of winning Colorado entering the evening. But he lost the state by 5 points to Mr. Santorum.