Charlie Wonderlic, Jr., president of Wonderlic Inc., told ESPN that "A score of 10 [out of 50] is literacy, that's about all we can say." The typical Wonderlic score is 21. The NFL average is 19.

One of the "star defensive lineman" in this draft, noted today's New York Times, scored a 7. A equally nameless NFL official told the Times that "this player comes from a household where little English was spoken, which could account for his low tally."

One of my regular correspondents comes back with this:

Didn't like that other guy's lack of logic ok, how about this:

I'm against incest laws simply because those people in incestous relationships are citizens, human beings, taxpayers etc. I don't have to dig everything they do to recognize this fact.

Assuming the incest is between Adults, you in favor of repealing incest laws? If your an 18 man/woman and consent to doing your mother/father or sister/brother or daugther/son...neiter of you are a victim. Since having sex with children is already illegal, should we allow brothers and sisters to have a go at it. Least you'd know what your children would look like.

My response: As a matter of logic this is a tougher one, I confess. First, I would say that whether legal or illegal, I think social stigma and expressions of disgust should still and always apply to incest. I also think that if we repealed the incest laws we wouldn't see a spike in brothers and sisters getting it one, precisely because those cultural controls are still there. I sincerely doubt that there many siblings out there cursing the government from keeping them apart with those tyrannical incest laws. Indeed, this is why I never thought it was all that necessary to fight sodomy laws -- they don't do much and are almost never enforced. Also, Incest is not a widespread vice. And if keeping the incest laws on the books keeps it that way, that's fine with me.

There are other factors. Incest can lead to horribly handicapped children. I'm opposed to cloning right now for among other reasons any human cloned child will undoubtedly be deformed. Something similar would apply to incest.

But ultimately, I'm not sure I have to be 100% consistent here. Cultures and values should be informed by reason but they don't have to be completely bound by it either. Many of our customs would seem highly irrational to outsiders and some of them may in fact be irrational. That doesn't mean that we should abandon them. Chesterton noted that the merely rational man will not marry and
the merely rational soldier will not fight. For example, I'm at a loss to tell you why exactly I favor laws forbidding consensual incest between homosexual brothers, but I am.

I will say the best pragmatic argument in favor of sodomy laws was from a Marine reader. He noted that sodomy laws are useful to prosecutors as "lesser included offenses." If you can't prove a guy did something really horrible, you can still get him on the lesser offense of sodomy (this is also one of the advantages of drug laws by the way. A lot of these poor "non-violent drug offenders" plead down to drug trafficking in order to avoid murder or assault charges). This is a perfectly legitimate practical point. But standing alone, I'm not sure I think it justifies keeping a law on the books which shouldn't be enforced by itself.

But look, it's Friday night and we're not in prison, so I don't have to think about sodomy any more if I don't want to. So I'm done with this for now.

Even more sodomy here! This reader nicely articulates a common objection to my last post:

Your answer in the Corner to the "I'm against murder" guy is a good answer, but I hope you notice that it's a different argument than your argument that initially prompted the "I'm against murder" response. The "I'm against murder" guy was pointing out that recognition that any category of person (such as "sodomite" or "murderer") is a taxpayer, citizen, etc. is perfectly irrelevant to any discussion of whether there ought be laws against persons joining the category.

Your response, that murderers are different from sodomites on the dimension of consent, is a valid distinction. However, your move to a new justification (consent) as opposed to the old justification (taxpaying citizen) implies that the "I'm against murder" guy was right, as far as his objection goes.

The question that your response begs, then, is whether everything that is consensual should be legal. A "yes" answer to this question seems to be the libertarian position, which I don't think you hold. (Gambling? Prostitution? Usury?) So the interesting question for you is, what's the rule for deciding whether a consensual action should be legal?

My response: Very fair point(s). I guess I would respond that the "murderers are taxpayers too" rejoinder removes my point from its original context. The relevance of my pointing out that homosexuals are taxpayers, humans and citizens is that implicit to all three are certain expectations of privacy and individual autonomy. Murderers violate these things and while they technically remain human beings they usually lose the prerogatives of citizenship when they are convicted. I think the full contexts of my earlier posts show what I'm talking about.

As for the harder question of whether everything consensual should be legal, my answer is absolutely not. It's very difficult to generalize about all consensual acts. But I think that one of the first principles should be that consensual acts in public deserve stricter scrutiny than consensual acts in private. I am against virtually all public sodomy -- hetero- or homosexual.

Rousseau argued that censorship was useful for preserving values but useless for restoring them. That's why I'm for strict censorship of, say, kiddie porn. Child pornography is still widely reviled and I would like to keep it that way. Prostitution is illegal de jure but quasi legal de facto. Look at the escort section in your yellow pages, for example. But keeping it illegal amounts to a form of regulatory censorship, limiting its effects.

Take gambling. I think we'd be better off if gambling were only legal in Atlantic City and Las Vegas -- legal enough to keep it relatively unprofitable for organized crime and illegal enough to discourage abuse. But I would never dream of saying the government should bust down doors to stop friendly poker games. Sodomy laws are on the books to do that sort of thing and I just think that's pointless these days because homosexuality is here to stay.

I've gotten a lot of thoughtful email about this whole Santorum thing. I've been surprised by how many people think I've walked into some sort of quagmire in my support for repealing sodomy laws. The email below isn't the most thoughtful by any stretch, but it does summarize succinctly my problem with the pro-sodomy law argument.
I wrote, "I'm against sodomy laws simply because homosexuals are citizens, human beings, taxpayers etc. I don't have to dig everything they do to recognize this fact." In response, this guy sarcastically writes:

I'm against murder laws simply because murderers are citizens, human beings, taxpayers etc. I don't have to dig everything they do to recognize this fact.

I'm against theft laws simply because thieves are citizens, human beings, taxpayers etc. I don't have to dig everything they do to recognize this fact.

I'm against child molestation laws simply because child molesters are citizens, human beings, taxpayers etc. I don't have to dig everything they do to recognize this fact.

Now, I hope everyone can see the glaring logical flaw here. Thieves, child molesters and murderers do things to other people they don't want done. That's why we call them "victims" of theft, murder and child abuse. If you are a non-consensual victim of sodomy, you've been raped. If you gave consent, you may or may not be making a mistake, but that's your business. We don't need sodomy laws to protect us from rape, we've got rape laws for that. Meanwhile if you are a consensual victim of theft, you haven't been robbed, you've merely shared your property. We don't need the State to teach us how to share, we need our parents to do that. In other words, consent changes everything in the equation. Except, of course, with children because they have a special status which does not allow them to give consent.

I didn't load the link and went to lunch with a bunch of fellow attorneys telling them O'Connor was retiring. We spent the entire lunch talking about likely candidates. Number One on the list was Ted Olson. Thanks again for the minor panic attack worrying about confirmation hearings before the election!

Did a quick Nexis on "George Galloway" in the "Transcripts" file. I see no mention this week on ABC, CBS, NBC, not even any CNN. No NPR. No Jim Lehrer. A blackout so far.

Yes to hits of some sort on Fox and MSNBC.
NYT seems more up to date than the WPost, who hit it just once, on Tuesday.

When the UN and International Community-worshipping canucks get in trouble with the World Health Organization, who do they come running to? The CDC down south. No links, just an observation.

Proof you're a Corner junkie: Someone reports that O'Connor is about to retire, and you immediately assume it's Sandra Dee, oops, Sandra Day.

How do you throw tomatoes at someone in The Corner? My mind started racing when I saw O'Connor was going to retire wondering how Bush was going to get a US Supreme Court judge when he can't get his others.

Subject: Adler, you a**! I'd told three or four people that Sandra Day was retiring in the time it took the CNN link to load!

Can we just decide to call the Palestinian Authority's new Prime Minister Abu Mazen or Mohammed Abas? This "sometimes known as Abu Mazen" thing is driving me nuts. Even worse is Mrs. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi's name. She, too, like Mohammed Abbas (sometimes, [grumble], known as Abu Mazen), should be given 48 hours to drop at least two of the components of her name or else we discontinue relations with her. The NYT invariably uses here full name in first reference and after that does us the favor of dropping the "Daw," which apparently is her first name and refers to her as Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi. I strongly recommend that she shorten her name to Daw Kyi. After all, in a country where U Nu got by with a headline writer's dream name, why can't Daw Aung San Suu Kyi make this slight accommodation? I'm sure the Prince of Liechstenstein could trot out a dozen middle names but he gets by in public and the press with, simply, "Hans-Adam." Ditto Queen Elizabeth, etc.

I missed an appointment to talk with students attending a meeting of the Council for National Policy. I've never missed anything like this before. It's rude and unprofessional and inexcusable. My apologies to the CNP and to any and all attendees who expected me. I'm so sorry. I've promised to do whatever I can in the future to make up for it.

While I don't have an excuse, my explanation is that the missus had emergency root canal this AM and I'm on Mr. Mom duty. (I'm typing this one handed while I hold lil' Lucy with the other). I completely spaced the appointment and diidn't check my calendar. I also just found out my IRS check bounced (I failed to move money into my checking account). So this may be the last time you hear from me for 1-5 years.

Anyway, to everyone at CNP, I'm so sorry.

Scott says:

To allow George Galloway to be silenced now, when his criticisms of British policy over Iraq have been shown to be fundamentally sound, would be a travesty of democracy. Rather than casting him aside, the British people should reconsider his statements in the light of the emerging reality that it is Blair and not Galloway who has been saying things worthy of investigation.

Come on people! This is serious stuff! The Christian Science Monitor has found even more incriminating documents. If these documents are true, Galloway should go to jail -- at least. If they are false this is a huge scandal because it would mean he's being framed by enemies in the West. Either way, it is a huge story and the American press should be all over it. Indeed, the American press should be looking for Americans in similar arrangements. Why would the Iraqis would have this policy for one man in the UK but for nobody in the US? It just doesn't make sense. Follow the money, follow the money, follow the money.

Yesterday on NPR I heard a correspondent talk about the capture of Tariq Aziz. Most of the usual stuff from his bio was covered: former foreign minister, Christian, no power-base, blah blah blah. One thing caught my ear though. The reporter, discussing how "Westernized" Aziz is, said "He was born with the name Michael." Well, no he wasn't. He was born with the name Mikhail. In fact, many Arabs of a certain age were given Sovietized/Russian names because so much of the Middle East was smitten with Communism. Now, I'm no expert on Arab names, so maybe Mikhail is just the Arab pronuciation of Michael, but I doubt it. Regardless, I got this sneaking suspicion that the NPR guy Anglofied (Americanized?) "Mikhail" because it sounded too Soviet if pronounced properly. It's a little thing but little things matter and it's been bugging me.

Turns himself in. On Fox News now

From the Media Research Center.

I'm still wearing my bathrobe.

In case you didn't know, Galloway is married to Yasser Arafat's niece, not that there's anything wrong with that.

Man do I love this story. It just keeps getting better and better. From the Telegraph:

A letter from Izzat Ibrahim, Saddam's deputy on the Ba'ath Party's Revolutionary Command Council, dated May 6, 2000 stated that: "It is better not to engage the Mukhabarat in the relationship with George Galloway, as he has been a well known politician since 1990, and discovery of his relationship with the Mukhabarat would damage him very much."

Warehouse filled with chemicals and a lab where dogs were experiemented on.

Most of the feedback to the latest G-File has been very positive. But a sizable number of skeptics have offered arguments along the lines of this reader's:

As a constant reader of your "stuff", I found myself waiting for the punchline of "Exporting Switzerland" and being amazed that it never came. I lived in the Middle East for 10 years and just returned here less than 2 years ago. If you honestly think you can compare the disparate groups that eventually became a united Switzerland with anything the Arab, Turkish, or Kurdish empires have produced, you prove yourself to be much more naive than I ever thought.

I am not an Arab or Islam basher but feel I do have a much deeper understanding of how these groups think and function in society. The concept of "armed pacifism" would be laughed out of any tent you chose there. Power, force, and honor are the stock in trade of these cultures and very little else speaks to them.

Alas, I fear we will never see an Iraqi Switzerland - or any other Western model.

Wishful thinking keeps us all going sometimes.

Sincerely,

[Name withheld]

My response: This is certainly a fair point and it's hardly as if I haven't made much the same argument about the Middle East many times before. However, I think there's a bit of revisionism going on. Lots of readers complain that Muslims --Shi'a and Sunni -- believe they adhere to the one true faith which would make a diverse tolerant society like Switzerland's impossible. Maybe so, but the notion that Europe and Christendom didn't have similar problems -- enforced at the sword -- is just fantasy. Even adorable Switzerland was a blood mess for centuries.

James Q. Wilson wrote a wonderful essay suggesting that European tolerance was simply the only option available after the bloodshed stopped working. Indeed, the very idea of tolerance as a political doctrine could arguably be the result of the fact that so many Europeans believed they were adherents of the one true faith and were willing to fight and die to uphold it. If it costs more to kill religious minorities than to tolerate them, monarchs learned, toleration became the best option.

Asked if the Iraqi people are better off now than they were under Saddam, Dean said, "We don't know that yet. We don't know that yet, Wolf. We still have a country whose city is mostly without electricity. We have tumultuous occasions in the south where there is no clear governance. We have a major city without clear governance."

Whatever our disagreements, I have sympathy for the guy. He's being exploited in the same way and by the same people who exploited the death of Matthew Shepherd. I do not see the comparison to Trent Lott at all for two reasons. First, Lott was defending a system -- Jim Crow -- which is dead and burried, rejected by the vast majority of Americans in countless elections, referenda, court cases and the like. Santorum was speaking to the laws of the land on the books right now. I think those laws should be repealed, but it seems to me that since they haven't been yet, Santorum is hardly a radical or crank, completely outside the mainstream of public and legal opinion.

Second, gays are not blacks and blacks are not gays. I spoke on a panel at the Human Rights Campaign not to long ago and I tried to make this point clear. This country's historical problem with race is simply different than its historical problem with homosexuality. We did not fight a civil war so that gays could be free. We did not have a March on Washington for gay rights. We have not amended the constitution to deal with the pressing issue of gays. This doesn't mean gays don't have legitimate grievances, complaints or arguments but they are of a different kind than those of black Americans. I think that the institutional discrimination against gays in this country is clearly greater than it is against blacks today. But the nature and rationale for that discrimination is different than racism. And simply insisting otherwise will not make it so.

I've gotten lots and lots of email asking, inquiring and demanding (I hate demands) that I say or do x or y in response to this Santorum mini-tempest. I pretty much ignored the story yesterday because I had to get the column done and go to Princeton and back. On the constitutional aspects, I have to say Ramesh is right (he very rarely isn't on the Contitutional front), as for the public policy I agree with Sullivan and the Libertarians. As do, it seems, plenty of conservatives. William F. Buckley included.

Because conservatives understand that the US Constitution is not the moral equivalent of Felix the Cat's magic bag, we recognize that something can be wrong and constitutional. One of the most annoying aspects of debating Supreme Court cases with liberals is dealing with an opponent who says "So you think people should burn crosses!?" -- simply because you recognize that it might not be unconstitutional to burn crosses.

To be honest I don't know or haven't decided if sodomy laws are unconstitutional. Though Andrew Sullivan makes a perfectly valid point when he notes that whether you agree or not with the constitutional "right to privacy" is fairly irrelevant because it exists as a matter of constitutional law today. And let's face it, it exists as fact in our political culture as well. But I do know that I'm against sodomy laws simply because homosexuals are citizens, human beings, taxpayers etc. I don't have to dig everything they do to recognize this fact. And whatever moral justification for sodomy laws there may be -- I don't see any, really, but I'm open to the idea there might be some -- are obviously outweighed by the moral costs of enforcing them. Kicking in doors, spying on people etc would not only be unfair to the "criminals" it would be destructive for the cops and the people who pay their salaries. I would love to hear from someone defending sodomy laws but opposing drug laws. (With the exception of marijuana, I support the drug laws).

Sullivan has chastised me in the past for waxing nostalgic for Victorian cultural norms which more or less forced everyone to act in a straight-laced way in public but allowed a let-your-freak-flag-fly lifestyle in private. He contends this is a past-that-never-was, but that's a debate for another day. The point is even in my ideal arrangement, you could get away with doing most anything you want in private so long as it was consensual, no one was hurt, and there were no kids or close relatives around.

Please remind everyone to remember Michael Ledeen's April 22nd article "Timing is Everything" when we see Iraqi Shiites making statements like the one you posted in the Corner Thursday 4/24 at 5:48am. Iranian puppets, that's what they are.

Mark the date: July 9. That’s when opponents of the Iranian regime have called a general strike that they hope will expand to topple the government there and bring freedom and democracy to the Iranian people.

The strike is being organized by profreedom student groups to coincide with the fourth anniversary of the last student uprising in Iran that saw thousands of students take to the streets against the Islamic Republic’s ruling mullahs.

The planned event — indeed, the Iranian freedom movement as a whole — could take on a new dimension now that Iran’s western neighbor, Iraq, is free from Saddam Hussein’s tyranny.

Andrew Sullivan has posted a partial response to my remarks regarding Rick Santorum. Part of his response makes me think that I was insufficiently clear earlier. To clarify a few points: 1) Sullivan asserted that Santorum wanted to see sodomy laws enforced. I said that there was no evidence for that contention. I wasn’t saying that it’s okay not to enforce laws on the books. 2) Nor did I comment on whether Santorum was right to deny the existence of a moral principle of sexual freedom on which governments may not transgress. I have not arrived at a solid conclusion on this subject, frankly, but I am inclined to think that any such right to sexual freedom cannot be absolute. I don’t think it is unjust for governments to ban prostitution or consensual adult incest, for example, and I would think that most opponents of anti-sodomy laws would want to rest their argument on a principle that would not imply that it is unjust. 3) I would respond to Sullivan’s charge that I contradicted myself in my earlier remarks, but I don’t understand what the alleged contradiction is. I do not “concede” that Santorum supports laws against sodomy; I assert it, I proclaim it, I shout it from the rooftops.

Sullivan also says that I, along with other conservatives who oppose sodomy laws, am at fault for not writing against those laws “except deep in a defense of someone” like Santorum. I think Sullivan has a good point here. All I can say in my defense is that it does seem to me that the facts that these laws are going away and are rarely enforced really do mitigate the urgency of arguing against them. But I recognize that that’s not a very good defense.

Finally, Sullivan expresses his disgust with the views he attributes to a hypothetical “genteel conservative.” Those views are certainly not my own (and I doubt that they are the views of many conservatives).

To read some stuff for my speech tonight and then catch a train for Princeton. I'm gonna be at someplace called "Whig Hall" at 7:30. Open to the public.

Writing my syndicated column on that U Chicago confab with Stan Fish.

On the one hand, Saddam Hussein's "regime brutalized women" with "rape, torture, even beheadings," but on the up side, reporter Mike Taibbi contended on Tuesday's NBC Nightly News, Hussein was a feminist pioneer in the Middle East since "his secular government also gave women more rights than their counterparts in many other Islamic countries."

Following the media habit in the early 1990s of lamenting the negative impact of the fall of communism on women because of the loss of the "safety net," including day care service and abortion access, NBC News seems to be first out of the box in fondly recalling the wonders Hussein bestowed upon women -- at least those he did not have raped, tortured or beheaded -- a feminist nirvana in the sand that could soon end thanks to Shiite religious fervor unleashed by the U.S. invasion.

Taibbi's story, based around the fears of a Western-dressed woman who runs an Iraqi telecommunications firm, also aired on MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann. Taibbi failed to address the wealthy woman's complicity or ties to the Ba'ath party, a connection or approval that must exist at some level given her high position and wealth.

NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw teased at the top of his April 22 program: "The women of Iraq: With Saddam out of power why are some worried a new government could set them back?"

Andrew Sullivan goes after Rick Santorum’s comments on homosexuality both on his website and in Salon. Sullivan, to his credit, ignores the bogus issue about Santorum’s having supposedly treated gays as morally equivalent to practitioners of incest, and instead gets to the deeper issue: Santorum’s opposition to the Supreme Court’s potential assertion of a constitutional right to sodomy (and to other sexual behaviors) and, what is not the same thing, his support for laws against sodomy.

Sullivan writes, “[Santorum] not only believes that sodomy laws should be constitutional. He believes they should exist. And if they exist, they should be enforced. Santorum is actually making a substantive and radical political point under the guise of a serious constitutional one. And that point is the government should have no restraint in enforcing sexual morality -- even if it means knocking on your bedroom door.”

This seems to me a misreading. First, I don’t see where Santorum came out for the active, or even not-so-active, enforcement of anti-sodomy laws. Second, Santorum is not saying that governments should show no restraint in policing sexual morality. He is denying the existence of two particular restraints: a constitutional right to sexual freedom and a valid moral principle that prohibits the governmental policing of consensual sexual behavior. There may be all kinds of other reasons, both prudential and principled, for state governments to show restraint.

Sullivan claims to venture no judgment on the constitutional point at issue, although he plainly makes one. He seems to believe that it is “radical,” “extremist,” and “theocratic” to believe that the federal government should allow state governments to prohibit consensual sex acts, subject to the approval of voters. (“Trying to drag the country back to the 1950s” is at one point equated with theocratic politics, which is a peculiar comment to make about Eisenhower’s America.) But this is in fact the status quo. Sodomy laws have been disappearing from the books precisely because they no longer command majority support. (Moreover, it’s hard to imagine that the Supreme Court would be willing to strike down sodomy laws across the board if public opinion had not already shifted.) Wrong, Santorum may be. I think he is wrong on the question of whether states should ban sodomy. If you believe that it’s the Supreme Court’s job to force state governments to conform to Millian political philosophy, you will naturally have a stronger objection to Santorum’s views. But the claim that Santorum is “radical,” etc., seems to me just silly.

Andrew- Of course you are correct. To say that I was French-bashing before French-bashing was cool would be like saying "I was using verbs before everyone else." French-bashing is eternal. As neo-Platonist Al Bundy said, "It is good to hate the French." This is a boundless, timeless, categorical imperative. What I meant to say was that I was doing good even when much of our society had, no dount temporarily, turned its back on such virture.

The faculty of Wesleyan speak out in protest of our government's policies, which we believe are profoundly misguided and dangerous, sowing destruction abroad and eroding civil liberties at home. We see innocent people of Iraq lying dead and the cultural institutions of the country laid to waste, observe the harassment of international students and colleagues, and note the chilling effect on open inquiry of the erosion of civil rights. We fear for the future.

The war that the United States is waging against Iraq has led to countless civilian deaths, the destruction of the libraries of Baghdad with their irreplaceable collections, the looting of museums, and the dismantling of hospitals. As citizens, scholars and teachers, we condemn these terrible events, and the war that has led to them. We also protest the war's destructive effects on American society. As libraries, museums, and hospitals are destroyed far away, money to fund education and health care here at home is diverted to the military. This war, prosecuted without the sanction of the United Nations and in violation of international law, is the most obviously violent instance of policies being pursued by our government. Legislation compromising basic civil liberties is another, as is the detention of prisoners outside the reach of any law. We protest the erosion of civil liberties that threatens the free expression of ideas and encourages the detention of innocent people. As educators, we see how these policies directly affect our students and colleagues. We must publicly dissent.

In the immortal words of Yosemite Sam, of course you know this means war. How did "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" beat my line as the most-quoted? I was the author of the words, "going to war without France is like going deer hunting without an accordion. You leave a lot of noisy useless baggage behind." (See "Mad COW and Steve Jobson", The American Prowler, 1/28/03. I repeated it on "Hardball with Chris Matthews a couple of nights later). It's gone around the world about twelve times. I've gotten "hooah" e-mails about it from carrier captains in the Persian Gulf, and it's now on t-shirts being sold at military exchanges.

That line has been mis-attributed to everyone from Schwartzkopf to Big Dog to Perot, but it belongs to moi.

As Glenn's instapundit site details, we have checked with our original source. Nevertheless, since I try (not always successfully) to shed light rather than heat on the gun issue, I think that in retrospect the adverb 'rabidly' shouldn't have been used. So I promise to avoid it in the future. I'm glad to know about your swimming pools piece, and I enjoyed reading it. I did check your publications page on the web before I submitted the article, but the pool piece wasn't there -- understandably, since your page just cites journal articles.

And, as the article said, whatever your views on guns, there's no dispute about your scholarly abilities. My forthcoming article "Lawyers, Guns, and Burglars: Why Mass Tort Litigation Fails to Account for Positive Externalities and the Network Effects of Controversial Products'" 43 Arizona Law Review (no 2, 2001) cites and discusses your excellent LoJack article.

I think that Levitt is mistaken in his belief that he has "never written anything even remotely anti-gun." In “The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime,” 116 Quarterly Journal of Economics (No. 2, May 2001): 379-420 (co-authored with John Donohue), Levitt wrote: "Elevated youth homicide rates in this period appear to be clearly linked to the rise of crack and the easy availability of guns." p. 395, note 21 ("this period" refers to the late 1980s and early 1990s).

In “Guns, Violence, and the Efficiency of Illegal Markets,” 1998 AEA Papers and Proceedings 88 (May): 463-67 (also co-authored with John Donohue), Levitt concluded that the presence of firearms lead to greater levels of violence. He argued that this effect stems not from the lethality of guns per se, but from how they make the outcomes of fights less predictable. A small person who knows he would very likely lose a fistfight to a larger person, will usually choose not to the fight. But if the smaller person has a gun, he may choose to fight: "Guns are an equalizing force that makes the outcome of any particular conflict difficult to predict. All else held constant, this increases the willingness to fight among weaker combatants, leading to greater levels of violence." p. 467.

I'm not arguing (at least not in this post), that Levitt's statements are incorrect, and they are certainly not "rabid." But if a person selecting panelists for the NAS study were looking for panelists who might be expected to see benefits from reducing "easy availability of guns," it would have been reasonable to pick Levitt. There is nothing logically inconsistent with a scholar favoring gun control to address the very large problem of criminal homicide with guns, while also recognizing that the magnitude of the problem of fatal gun accidents involving children is not nearly as large as the media imply.

The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations says that "Cheese-eating surrender monkeys" is the most memorable and oft-cited phrase from this war!

Obviously, the Simpsons deserves credit, but it would have been nice if the Times recognized my efforts. Regardless, it's not about the credit and the glory. It's about the French-bashing. I was doing it before French-bashing was cool and I'll be doing it long after the rest of the world has moved on to Lichtenstein-bashing or whatever.

I just finished an interview with a Japanese TV crew here at JG-HQ. It's for their Sunday news show. That's not the interesting part though. The big news is that Cosmo just might make his first TV appearance. They filmed an establishing shot of the interviewer coming to the front door where Cosmo and I greeted her. This is particularly exciting because it's entirely possible that Kim Il Jong watches Japanese TV, and we know how Coz feels about him

From a reader:

Jonah,

I am disappointed that I won’t be able to attend your talk at Princeton tomorrow night (I am not a student, I just live in the town) because I will be working a temp job in New York. I am especially disappointed because I have my own Tyranny of Diversity experience

I always thought that the Tyranny of Diversity ended after college and graduate school, when I no longer had to worry about my white maleness in the application process. No such luck. Twice in the past two months I have disappointed corporate recruiters who thought that they were getting an Hispanic. I am fluent in Portuguese, having worked in Brazil, and list this as a skill on my resume. Both recruiters actually asked me if I was Hispanic during telephone interviews, and both interviews ended abruptly when they realized that I was not.

It is really depressing. I guess I have some legal recourse, but I don’t want to be a professional malcontent. I just want to work.

Anyway, break a leg tomorrow.

Best regards,

[name withheld]

That's the title of my talk at Princeton tomorrow night. Whig Hall. Not sure what I'm gonna say yet, but should be fun.

He writes:

Jonah,

I am a dog lover, with a goofy yellow Lab I dearly love. I am also a firefighter. Regardless of property rights, the dog owner has no right to jeopardize firefighters. Sure, a rescue attempt for the owner could have resulted in a firefighter death or injury. But breaking a window could ventilate a fire and extend it within the building, trapping firefighters. I've seen it happen, and lived to tell the tale.

Yes, firefighters make calculated risks. Our dogma, at least at my department, is risk a lot to save a life, risk a little to save property, risk nothing to save nothing.

I commend the dog owner for his courage, and scold him for acting in a situation he knows little about. Brave as he is, he should apply with a volunteer fire department. He sounds like the kind of guy we need.

From a reader:

As a dog owner and lover myself I would guess that put in the same situation I would have done the same thing regardless of what the firefighters ordered.

My question to you is this: Is this not a property rights case? Just because the firefighters show up at your house do you still not have the right to do with it what you want, even if that means running into your own burning house or breaking your own window at peril to yourself.

The argument for arrest is that Martin might have put a firefighter's life in danger if he needed to be rescued. But noone would have faulted Martin if he was already in the house and a firefighter was injured trying to rescue him. Don't firefighters generally make calculations concerning their own safty when rescuing anyone? Wouldn't those calculations be the same if Martin as already in the house or entered later?

The Galloway story is awesome, if true. If you haven't heard, one of Britain's leading anti-war MPs has been accused of taking blood-for-oil money from Saddam Hussein. The Telegraph found documents suggesting he took hundreds of thousands of dollars in exchange for his anti-war activities. Galloway claims the documents were forged, which sounds awfully implausible to me. Regardless, if it turns out to be true, wouldn't it be interesting to find out that this was a full-fledged program of the Iraqi government? What if folks in the US have been taking money too? Wouldn't that be a humdinger of a story? I mean why should Britain have all the treasonous wankers?

If I was the commanding officer in charge of sifting through these Iraqi files, I would be barking out orders to find the "R" file -- for Ritter.

The reader is right. But so was the dog owner. The police need to enforce the rules, the guy needed to save his dog. He took the risk and he should face the consequences. Do I think he should go to jail? No, but I do think he should pay a fine or something. I have no problem with the idea that doing the right thing can be illegal from time to time.

Would you still give Mr. Martin a Cosmo T-Shirt if, instead of rescuing the dog, Mr. Martin's action resulted in the death of 1 or more Firefighters who had to run into the burning house after him? The cops did the right thing citing him.

The Dixie Chicks have taken a big hit lately for exercising their basic right to express themselves, To me, they're terrific American artists expressing American values by using their American right to free speech. For them to be banished wholesale from radio stations, and even entire radio networks, for speaking out is un-American.

From a reader:

Jonah,

This whole "secret plan" dispute with Josh Marshall reminds of the 80's when everyone was "shocked" to find out that Reagan liked the Contras. Sure there were legitimate questions about Ollie North's funding mechanism, but I remember asking at the time how anyone could possibly pretend to be surprised that Reagan was in favor of supporting anti-communist guerrillas in general and the Contras in particular.

This is Iran-Contra all over again only without any of the objectionable aspects.

1. Instead of passing Boland amendments Congress voted to support the President.
2. Instead of raising money by selling arms to Iran the administration used the defense budget and a supplemental appropriation.
3. We used the US military instead of just supporting the Kurds.

Women who carry guns and fight for their country do not voluntarily head back to the kitchen, says a leading member of Uganda's administration. This is one explanation for the change in female fortunes since the National Resistance Army seized power in 1986 with the help of women fighting and collaborating in other vital ways to military victory. Since then, women have achieved a status in Uganda unrivalled in much of Africa.

I just heard from a reader who saw my documentary "Gargoyles: Guardians of the Gate." Long time readers -- or to be more accurate, long time readers of my column -- may recall that I used to be a television producer. In 1994, I wrote and produced a documentary on Gargoyles on a budget that makes "shoe string" sound lavish (5 cities: Paris, Oxford, New York, Princeton, Washington DC for about 20 grand). It was something of a hit -- in a very narrow sense -- and has been bobbing around the world of public television for years. Still, I assumed it was long gone by now. But lo' and behold it's still being played. I wonder if the gnomes in the PBS world know it was written by a trogladytic National Review conservative.

Pretty cool.

From a reader:

Jonah, I've been following this whole "secret plan" debate between you, Marshall, and Taranto. I have to say that even though I don't find Marshall's original point very compelling, I find his defenses from your attacks even weaker. Marshall writes "the great majority of the American people have no concept of what kind of conflict the president is leading them into." But as you note, the administration hasn't exactly kept its plans a secret. Maybe it's because I read a lot of punditry, but I've known certain administration officials have wanted to democratize the Middle East for several years now. It would seem to me that if people don't realize this, it's because they're not reading about it, not because Bush is concealing it. An analogy: just because "the vast majority of the American public" doesn't know that Rod Paige is the Secretary of Education doesn't mean Bush's nomination of Paige was a secret, or that Bush is concealing Paige's service. Marshall somehow shifts the blame for the public's lack of interest from the actual people who don't care to the the White House.

"Today, however, the great majority of the American people have no concept of what kind of conflict the president is leading them into. The White House has presented this as a war to depose Saddam Hussein in order to keep him from acquiring weapons of mass destruction--a goal that the majority of Americans support. But the White House really has in mind an enterprise of a scale, cost, and scope that would be almost impossible to sell to the American public. The White House knows that. So it hasn't even tried. Instead, it's focused on getting us into Iraq with the hope of setting off a sequence of events that will draw us inexorably towards the agenda they have in mind.

"I think the whole argument that I'm wrong on the deception point actually collapses under the crushing weight of its own insubstantiality. The great need to refute this argument virtually confirms the impossibility of its refutation. Here's why. What if I said, 'The President passed a huge tax cut. But he kept from everyone that he thinks it'll spur economic growth!!' Or maybe, 'Sure the president wants to build a national missile defense, but he's not telling anyone that it's intended to knock down limited missile attacks from rogue states!!' No one would respond. And they certainly wouldn't get bent out of shape about it. They wouldn't even care. Why? Because no one feels accused if they're alleged not to have told people something that everyone actually already knows.

Patricia Ireland is on Fox right now talking about how this is a double homicide.

Whenever we get a murder case like this -- yes, yes, alleged murder case -- I can't help but think about how abstract anti-death penalty arguments are. The pro-death penalty people get to say "I think this guy should die." They have to say "the State shouldn't blah, blah, blah." They have to stipulate the actual facts of specific crimes, they have to stipulate that if he did the crime he's evil and maybe he does deserve to die, they have to stipulate everything so they can argue abstractions. I like abstractions, but arguments completely untethered to the facts on the ground are almost never satisfactory. It's like the anti-war arguments. The anti-war crowd would have to stipulate vasts swaths of factual territory in order to debate abstract and often bizarre formulations.

I'm perfectly happy to beat up the National Organization for Women. And I know that the job of journalists is to start fights from time to time. But Drudge's
headline: "NOW objects to murder charge for Laci's baby; case tied to Roe debate..." links to a report about the Morris County, New Jersey chapter of NOW. This is hardly the Vatican of feminism. I'm sure that many people at NOW HQ agree, but they aren't dumb enough to get caught in the swtiches this early in the feeding frenzy.

I don't know anything about Maryland's anti-childbirth laws, but it wouldn't surprise me. It sounds like an anti-midwife law. And anything involving midwifery should be avoided. Emotions run high. Logic runs low, and men "have no right to an opinion." Stay away. Denounce Headstart or gay marriage -- anything's safer.

To the tune of "The Real Slim Shady." Rated G, but office workers may want to turn down the volume.

From a reader:

Why aren’t you folks blogging on the NYT Judith Miller story this am about the Iraqi scientist who showed US troops wmd precursor material, told the US that Iraq had shipped wmd to Syria, coordinated with al Qaeda and focused on research and development that would be impervious to an inspections regime? The Times headline – focusing on the fact that the weapons might have been destroyed 6 days before the war – obscures the key elements of its own story: that the smoking gun was there, inspections couldn’t find it, the war forced it to be destroyed, and all the allegations that BushRumsfeldCheneyPowellRiceBlair have made (on Iraq/al Qaeda, Iraq/Syria, etc.) were true.

Kathryn did link to it, and I'm crashing on a double-secret deadline, which is now only secret because I've mentioned it exists. What everyone else's excuses might be is another matter.

Maureen Dowd takes off on Frankin (son of Billy) Graham's talk to soldiers, stating: "There's one God and one faith. There's no other way to God except through Christ." Now I may not be on the same page and Graham but, unlike Maureen, this hardly upsets me. What if the line were: "There's one God, Allah, and one faith. There's no other way to Allah except through the example of Muhammad and the Koran." And what if this admonition were shouted - not once, by a private individual - but five times a day by muezzin throughout Islam, supported by all Moslem governments? Would that outrage Maureen?

Just a question.

Krauthammer beat me to the punch. I was going to write about this today.

What an amazing article from the Saturday New York Times. It seems that the eggheads who say there are no truths, words have no meaning, sentences need not mean anything etc. have finally discovered their jargon is a brick wall which blocks them off from the rest of the world. I almost feel sorry for them.

Kathryn - I wrote a column about that. An excerpt:

If you want to keep the United Nations from condemning you for torturing your people, there's no better place to wield the monkey wrench then on the Human Rights Commission. "The greatest challenge for (the HRC) is going to be overcoming the tendencies of thugs to flock to it," Ken Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, told The Washington Times. "Their first instinct is to avoid condemnation, and now two dozen of the 53 are just abusers. It's reached a crisis point."

Beats a congressional leadership meeting:

The Official White House Easter Rabbit
Arthur
Dora the Explorer
Peter Rabbit
Angelina Ballerina
Clifford the Big Red Dog
Ord
Spot
Patchy Panda
Feathers the Duck
Terrance the Turtle
Woodrow the White House Mouse
Cotton the Bunny
Sagwa
Zoboomafoo
Leona
Caillou
Anne of Green Gables
Berenstain Bears
Bookworm
Nutbrown Hare
Maisy
Digit
George Shrinks
Zoe
Timothy
The Very Hungry Caterpillar
Bob and Larry from VeggieTales
Stanley
Olie
Zowie
Pinkerton
Madeline
Strawberry Shortcake
Winnie-the-Pooh
Dora the Explorer
Chuckie

on NRO you mention the redirection of jacques chirac's campaign website to the USO site, calling it a "hack". a hack is an act which requires a substantial amount of technical skill, cleverness, or both. the term for the action detailed at http://www.nationalreview.com/thecorner/03_04_20_corner-archive.asp#007760 is "domain hijacking." to accomplish it, you only need to look up when the domain name is scheduled to expire, then try to register it as soon as it does so. usually this results from inattentive system administrators forgetting which domains they need to worry about. but to re-iterate: there is no technical skill required to accomplish this, so it is not a "hack".

One former prisoner...Anwar Abdul Razak, remembers when a surgeon kissed him on each cheek, said he was sorry and cut his ears off. Razak, then 21 years old, had been swept up during one of Saddam Hussein’s periodic crackdowns on deserters from the Army. Razak says he was innocently on leave at the time, but no matter; he had been seized by some Baath Party members who earned bounties for catching Army deserters. At Basra Hospital, Razak’s ears were sliced off without painkillers. He said he was thrown into jail with 750 men, all with bloody stumps where their ears had been. “They called us Abu [Arabic for father] Earless,” recalls Razak, whose fiancee left him because of his disfigurement.

With the EU under more stress than in years, here’s a fascinating article from the London Spectator by Tim Congdon. Unlike some euroskeptics, Congdon is no little Englander pining for the days of splendid isolation, but a realist who recognizes that the existing EU structure may be too narrow and too rigid for the challenges of a changed world. So far as the UK is concerned, in this extract Congdon gets to the heart of the issue:

“The question has to be asked, ‘Why does the UK have to pay the costs of the CAP and suffer the indignities of the CFP in order to be associated with a group of nations which are both economically unsuccessful and will take a diminishing share of its exports over the next few decades?’ It cannot be because Britain wants to participate in a common European defence and foreign policy, as the diplomatic shambles of recent weeks has discredited that option; it cannot be because Britain wants to abandon its currency and introduce the euro, as opinion polls show a decisive majority in favour of keeping the pound; and it cannot be because Britain wants to be absorbed into a European political superstate, as European federalism has been and remains unpopular at all levels.

The message has to be that — putting sentiment and treaty obligations to one side — the case for continued British membership of the EU is weaker today than it has ever been.”

Indeed it is. Read the whole thing.

Tony Blair, on the other hand, still does not appear to get the message.

A San Francisco writer, ashamed of his country and full of spite at Republicans, Southerners and other troglodytes, wants the Bay Area to secede from the United States and form an independent nation. Here's his thumbnail sketch of his leftie utopia:

Think of the model social legislation that a Bay Nation could enact: bans on guns altogether, full legalization of same-sex unions, an expansion of public television and radio, complete decriminalization of marijuana, basic health care for all, environmental protections that would be the envy of North America. ...By the same token, undocumented Americans (a.k.a. "illegal aliens") could gain immediate citizenship in the Bay Nation. Bye-bye INS, hello multicultural justice.

Anybody have any other ideas about the benefits this leftie Big Rock Candy Mountain will be able to offer its citizens, once it becomes a heavenly city-state? Will Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon be its Rainier and Grace Kelly? Etc. Send suggestions to Rodindallas(at)aol(dot)com, and I'll post the best ones.