The folks at Crooked Timber are having themselves a giggle fest over my alleged hypocrisy at criticizing Matt Yglesias for asserting bad motives on those he disagress with. I'm a hypocrite, they allege, because in my current London Times column I criticize those who are currently blaming "the Jews" for the problems in Iraq. It's behind a registration wall, but it borrows much from the syndicated column I wrote on Hollings and includes Gen. Zinni's new comments about pro-Israel neocons. Cited as proof of my hypocrisy is my lead:

"HERE we go again. It is time to blame the Jews. That seems to be this month’s explanation for the Iraq war. Obviously, this is hardly a new idea on either side of the Atlantic, particularly for readers of, say, The Guardian or Le Monde. But in America, the emphasis on the theory has reached almost French proportions."

Now it's probably unfortunate that the editors at the Times cut the sentence where I explictly said I don't think Zinni is anti-Semitic, but even so I don't say that Zinni is anti-Semitic and, as in my syndicated column, I say that Hollings is a buffoon, not a bigot. As for Matt Yglesias, I really do respect the guy but he is increasingly asserting bad motives without evidence these days, a point I made last week when he suggested my lack of an opinion on Achmed Chalabi was attributable to my desire to "come out on top in the end" and not to, say, my intellectual honesty or even my ignorance.

Even so, Crooked Timber's point is still just a hypocrisy charge and not a defense of Yglesias. Saying I'm a hypocrite for attacking motives while criticizing others who do the same doesn't excuse Yglesias for doing it and it doesn't rebut my charge either. It's a non-defense defense.

“A hospital has banned McDonald's from sending staff to hand out free burgers and fries on a children's ward after parents complained.”

The sad thing about this was that it was some parents and one obnoxious-sounding grandmother who complained, smug, self-righteous zealots so wrapped up in their puritan indignation and scientific illiteracy that they would deny a sick child a small treat. They are the sort of ghastly, crabbed individuals who would have told the repentant Scrooge to send the Cratchits broccoli for that famous Christmas meal. It would have been so much better for them, you see, than turkey.

Pathetic.

Step forward the latest bone-headed big government Republicans. Their names? Mike DeWine (a senator, amazingly) and Tom Davis (a congressman, astonishingly). In alliance with Ted Kennedy and the appalling Henry Waxman, these know-nothings are promoting a bill to give the FDA authority over tobacco products. That’s a bad idea to start with, but, interestingly, the bill also includes specific provisions banning certain types of flavored cigarettes (strangely, no flavors manufactured by Philip Morris are prohibited…). The whys and wherefores of this latest piece of legislative excess are discussed by Jacob Sullum in an excellent piece on Reason’s website, but this treacle-flavored phrase oozing out of Davis should tell you all that you need to know (and, yes, you can guess what’s coming):

"This bill will help keep our children away from tobacco products and protect them from being targeted by the tobacco industry."

Ah, ‘the children’, the tiny, gap-toothed, tow-headed hallmark of worthless legislation everywhere.

Davis and DeWine should go and look for work somewhere more worthy of their talents. I believe that Burger King is hiring.

Those with a taste for the truly bizarre should also follow Sullum’s link to a remarkable assertion made last year by the hyperbolic National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse: “Girls and young women who drink coffee are significantly likelier than girls and young women who do not to be smokers (23.2 percent vs. 5.1 percent) and drink alcohol (69.8 percent vs. 29.5 percent). Young women who drink coffee began smoking and drinking at earlier ages.”

That's probably true, but so what? Is there something about the difference between correlation and causation that those folks don’t understand?

Interestingly, Florida First Lady Columba Bush sits on CASA’s board. She, along with other people who should know better, makes a fool of herself by associating with such charlatans.

Interesting points from a reader:

I'd be inclined to take Green's state-level findings with a grain of salt.

Let's put it this way: 3,500 is a terrific sample size that allows you to confidently draw conclusions with a very low error -- for the sample as a whole. But let's say he divided (i.e., stratified) that sample across the 50 states. That would leave just 70 interviews per state. Then let's say he further stratified this by, say, the six religious segments mentioned in the article.* Prof. Green would then average only 12 people in each sub-sample.

So, he could then be 95% certain of the following:

That his overall voter preference estimate is accurate to within +/- 2 pct pts

That his religion-level voter preference estimate is accurate to within +/- 4 pct pts

That his state-level voter preference estimate is accurate to within +/- 12 pct pts

That his state-level AND religion-level voter preference estimate is accurate to within +/- 28 pct pts

In other words, Professor Green can very credibly say “Kerry beats Bush” overall among the survey respondents (I’d hope he screened for likely voters). But he’s skating on thin ice when he says, “Kerry is beating Bush among Centrist Catholics 45 percent to 41 percent,” since it’s statistically a wash. And he’s really, really out on a limb making any claim whatsoever about, say, white evangelicals in Missouri.

Now, he would probably respond to this in two ways:

1. That he is making statistical claims for the religion sub groups only, and drawing statewide conclusions based on their known representation in the state. This would assume that religious affiliation is the only thing that drives voting behavior, not geography... and that’s a stretch.
2. That he didn’t divide all 50 states equally, and instead gave more weight to states with larger populations. This strengthens the results for California, but makes the sample sizes for states like Iowa even smaller. Unless he had the foresight to disproportionately weight the sample sizes of the contested states, which I doubt.

My overall point: Professor Green’s study certainly raises questions for Rove and company about their strategy. But let’s not get carried away with the statistics just yet.

Interesting article in the Daily Telegraph by Charles Moore looking at the basis of the (hopelessly biased) perspective that has colored many Brits’ view of America for decades, at least among the chattering classes, and on how it works today:

“Today, we are presented with a similar narrative - so powerful that I find that 90 per cent of people here believe it, even those who think of themselves as conservative. The narrative is that America is bullying and naive about the outside world. It is very keen on killing people. George W Bush is taken to embody these characteristics, since he wears cowboy boots and is inarticulate and prays a lot. (Fine for Muslims to pray, not for Christians.)

“There are good Americans who, again, come from the north-east and never talk about religion. You can tell they are good because they are not "unilateralist". Senator John Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee, is, ex officio, a good American. But the bad Americans, with guns and money and a white God, are in charge. To show the strength of the narrative, take two stories out of Iraq.

“Suppose that the reports accusing UN officials of corruption in the oil-for-food programme had been made against America. Suppose that it was Halliburton, the company for whom Vice-President Dick Cheney once worked, which had taken 10 per cent off the oil-for-food contracts. Suppose that America were accused of the sort of behaviour that has been alleged, on the basis of Iraqi official documents, against France and Russia. I think we would have heard of little else. As it is, though, the oil-for-food story has somehow drifted away in a muddle about who's going to run the next bit of the investigation.”

Too true.

Over in the UK, Polly Toynbee is a prominent left-wing columnist whose columns are normally good for hours of harmless merriment. Here she is on the obesity ‘epidemic’:

”The inequality/obesity link is mirrored internationally. America has by far the most unequal society and by far the fattest. Britain and Australia come next. Europe is better and the Scandinavian countries best of all. No doubt there are also social policy reasons for this: the best social democracies pick up family problems earliest and offer most support, putting people back on their feet, preventing social exclusion. But the narrower the status and income gap between high and low, the narrower the waistbands.”

Oh really? Blogger Scott Burgess, ahem, weighs in and concludes as follows:”Unfortunately, no statistics are available as to the obesity rate in Belarus, which leads the world in income equality, and therefore represents Polly Toynbee's vision of heaven on earth. Polly is correct about one thing, though. As she puts it: "This obesity debate is full of humbug and denial."“ I couldn't have said it any better.”

Ha ha ha.

Matt Yglesias employs an odd new version of argument ad Hitlerum in a column for the advocacy group the Center for American Progress titled "The Return of the 'Stab in the Back.'" He says the critics of the press's one-sided coverage of American setbacks in Iraq are laying the groundwork for "a new version of the 'stab in the back' myth that helped destroy Weimar Germany":

No matter how far south things go in Iraq, the blame will be laid not at the feet of the president who initiated and conducted the war, but rather on those who had the temerity to note that it wasn't working. Rather than the critics having been proven right, or so the story goes, the critics are to blame for the failure of the very policy they were criticizing. It's an ugly tactic, and as you go down the journalistic food chain, it grows uglier still.

Talk about ugly tactics. Who, exactly, employed the "stabbed in the back" theory to such success? Hmmm, let's see. Oh, I know: The Nazis. Hitler rose to power through his harrangues against the "Traitors of 1918" who denied Germany its rightful victory. He was more closely associated with this peerspective in the 1920s than he was any other, including perhaps anti-Semitism. But Yglesias certainly knows this, why else draw the analogy? And in order to make his ludicrous analogy work he needs to flesh out a few more similarities. So, in that spirit, he conjures a bizarre and unfair suggestion that media critics like Glenn Reynolds (aka Instapundit) will unleash their Brownshirts and foment mob violence against the new Traitors of 2004 if they don't support this great patriotic war. Reynolds ably defends himself here. Obviously the comparison is sloppy history at best and atypically cheap shot at worst. Hitler wasn't scapegoating the press, not even the "Jew-run press." He was blaming the men who signed onto a bad peace deal and ended the war without honor. He was certainly right that it was a bad peace deal, if for no other reason than it created the conditions for his rise to power. But that's all too complicated and inconvenient for Yglesias' shoddy analogy.

Yglesias offers some other strange points in his essay, including his suggestion that it was the press' excess of patriotic fervor which drove the faulty coverage leading up to the war. But it's his -- granted, novel -- invocation of the "our enemies are Nazis" nonsense that is so disappointing and perhaps revealing. At least the Vietnam analogy, so flawed in so many ways, would be far more apt here. Yes, many of us are blaming the media for a host of transgressions. But we are not plotting a Nazi coup and Yglesias would improve his arguments if he stopped his recent habit of increasingly asserting bad motives on anyone he disagrees with.

Sorry: JunkYardBlog's new Gore remix has a serious Warriors soundtrack feel to it and I got nostalgic for Cyrus' speech.

Alter writes: "Someday, when Iraq is peaceful again (and that day will come), tourists will want to see the square where the Saddam statue toppled, the spider hole he hid in and, of course, Abu Ghraib Prison."

Isn't this a lovely encapsulation of the "give peace a chance" crowd's definition of "peace"? When does Alter think Iraq was peaceful? When the hundreds of thousands of Saddam's victims weren't on TV and so therefore weren't being killed?

Just to be clear (as numerous readers have noted), the relevant "supposed consequence" of the Madrid bombing, from Bin Laden's perspective, wasn't the reshuffling of partisan chairs within the Spanish government, it was the reshuffling of Spanish troops out of Iraq and out of the coalition. This is what prompted Bin Laden to offer Europe a truce if it broke from America. And this is why Ashcroft noted the need to protect both the Democratic and Republican conventions.

From a reader:

I am black, and I found Rivers' article both insulting and head-swimmingly stupid. I presume he was a slave for all those years he played for the Broncos because he was expected to actually suit up and play.

This is especially depressing because Rivers' father served in the Air Force. Was his dad a slave too? Sheesh!

Amnesty International is not a bad organization, it really isn’t, but this is just dumb:

“Earlier this week, Irene Khan, Amnesty International's secretary-general, said of America: "Not since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted in 1948 has there been such a sustained attack on its values and principles."

Oh no?

Well, the Daily Telegraph has a question for Ms Khan:

”Erm, what about the Russian gulag, Pol Pot's Cambodia, the Great Leap Forward and mass starvation in China, the Hutu slaughter of Tutsis in Rwanda, Ne Win's Burma, North Korea under the Kims, the Argentinian disappearances, French colonialism in Algeria, Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe, Idi Amin's Uganda, Jean-Bedel Bokassa's Central African Republic, Slobodan Milosevic's quest for Greater Serbia. We could go on.”

I’ve always suspected that the fact that kids these days (“kids these days”, have I really just written that?) drink so much soda and so little milk is partly a legacy of the half-understood fat scares of two decades or so ago. Milk ceased to be quite so much ‘the’ childhood drink as parents began to ask themselves whether cow juice was, you know, sort of dangerous. Well, a recent fatwa from the health mullahs (sorry, Josh!) over at the Center for ‘Science’ in the Public Interest is just the sort of nonsense that will perpetuate those attitudes. They are trying to drive 2% or whole milk, the milk that kids actually, well, like out of schools. CSPI’s press release is here and, unsurprisingly, it comes with a junk statistic or two:

“A girl who drinks one cup of 1% milk instead of 2% milk each school day would cut 47,000 calories and 11 pounds of fat from her diet during her 13 years in school…”

Leaving aside the fact that calories are not really ‘cumulative’ in that way, let’s do the math. 47,000 calories over 13 years is 47,000 calories over 4,745 days. In other words, less than ten calories a day.

Oh, the horror.

Via blogger Sasha Castel.

From a reader:

Mr. Rivers should realize that analogies can work in reverse. My son just got out of the Marines. Given the amount of partying, drinking, chasing women, and such that he and his fellow Marines were doing during their free time, I guess that means that the lives of slaves on southern plantations must have been a lot of fun -- hard work for the master during the day, partying all night.

The column is so remarkably stupid, I don't know why you should bother putting together a rational argument against it.

From a reader:

If I read Drum correctly, it's wrong for a politician to note that the preferred outcomes of terrorists may align with the political interests of one side of the aisle.

Funny.

I kinda remember a certain politician who suggested that the Oklahoma City Bombing was attributable to talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh and other "purveyors of hatred and division."

Of course, I never expect to hear Drum denounce such utterly baseless and blantantly self-serving remarks of Bill Clinton.

American soldiers are slaves, according to one of the dumbest columns I've read in years:

Our military is one of the last bastions of slavery in the United States. At the moment, our slaves are stuck in a combat zone, getting killed and maimed, and there's nothing they can do about it except hunker down and pray.

Yes, our slaves signed up of their own free will, but most of them were as misled about their job as the rest of us were about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

And I don't think "slave" is too strong a word to describe someone who is not permitted to quit his job no matter how dangerous it becomes or how much he hates it. For most of us, the 13th Amendment abolished slavery and guaranteed that we have the right to withhold our labor. It doesn't protect soldiers.

Me Unless I'm in the dark about why this isn't moronic, I'll just let it speak for itself. But if for some reason people think this guy's onto something we can have a nice long conversation in here about why joining the army of your own free will in order to serve your country in exchange for A) money B) education C) experience D) training E) a lifetime of benefits and the respect of your country is ever-so-slightly different than slavery.

Indeed, blacks should be deeply offended by this nonsense since it erodes the moral horror that actual slavery is in the same way that PETA's comparison of factory farming to the Holocaust is offensive. And, obviously, veterans and soldiers alike should be upset because it suggests they are nothing more than buffoons. Shame on Reggie Rivers and shame on the Denver Post.

The Olympic Games have always brought out the worst in politicians. Just ask Adolf. Now here’s Britain’s ‘Culture’ minister (why is there such a person?) attacking those Brits (the majority, apparently) who are, quite rightly, horrified at the prospect of the whole ghastly spectacle showing up in London in 2012.

“Whingeing pessimism and hostility will not stop our campaign but it will hand votes to the cities against which we are competing. It is whingers who will weaken our national will. At this moment, optimism, self-confidence and ambition is what we need. Let that win, not the whingers.”

“National will”?

Blimey.

While we’re on the topic, here’s hoping that New York doesn’t “win” either. Send ‘em to Paris.

Kevin Drum writes:

ASHCROFT ON AL-QAEDA....Gallimaufry catches this contemptible quote from John Ashcroft yesterday when he announced the possibility of an al-Qaeda attack in the United States this summer:

The Madrid railway bombings were perceived by Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda to have advanced their cause. Al Qaeda may perceive that a large-scale attack in the United States this summer or fall would lead to similar consequences.

The supposed "consequence" of the Madrid attack, of course, was a victory by the opposition party. So Ashcroft is rather unsubtly saying that al-Qaeda would consider a John Kerry victory to have "advanced their cause."

What a despicable worm. What a revolting, loathsome, toad.

ME: This is the sort of thing which really demonstrates how unhinged many liberals become on the subject of John Ashcroft. Maybe his statement could have been phrased better, though I think it's just fine as it is. But if I used a statement like that to justify calling Clinton "a revolting, loathsome, toad" I would be deluged with email from Drummian liberals calling me an irrational Clinton-hater too blinded by hatred to speak intelligently about the man.

Are we to believe that any mention of the Madrid bombings and their consequences are now out-of-bounds for the administration? If not, how would Drum rewrite the statement so as to preclude any such inference? If this statement elicits this silly "revolting toad" nonsense, surely even a more restrained mention of Madrid would still result in critics saying Ashcroft is implying the terrorists want Kerry to win.

Oh, and for the record: I know my wife didn't write Ashcroft's comments (she's his speechwriter) because she was in London with me when the press conference came on.

From a reader:

To date there have been about 673 soldier fatalities (all coalition forces) from hostile action. Although there were about 300,000 coalition forces at the beginning of the war in Iraq, the number has averaged conservatively somewhere around 150,000 since. If you do the math, the fatality rate due to hostile action is less than 1/2 of 1%. I dare say, that had the Pentagon and George Bush guaranteed that rate to the New York Times in March 2003, reporters would have proclaimed them conquering heros and named their first born George. So why the disconnect in today's reporting?. Well, do I really need to ask.

It's because of pieces like this one that I never feel like I know enough to speak intelligently at length about Chalabi.

From a reader:

Dear Jonah:

Fox is popular because Fox is populist. Just so. I’m amazed that CNN et al don’t get it. In the not too distant past, some stuffed shirts at Columbia had a great money making idea: let’s pretend that journalism is a profession and that objectivity is both possible and preferable to good old fashioned reporting.

The results aren’t pretty. Mike Wallace pretends that he worships at the altar of objectivity when everyone knows that he’s famous because he’s fantastically rude. No one expects objectivity. I think we only want honesty, and of course a decent respect for the truth will generally lead a reporter toward some semblance of balance, but let’s drop the objectivity charade.

Fox sells because Fox is unabashedly American. We red state knuckle draggers like that. The New York Times, and much of the main stream media are struggling now because they believe their own bull shit. Ernie Pyle labored under no such foolishness. He got into the thick of things and told great stories about real Americans for real Americans. Can you imagine Maureen Dowd in camo?

The new media, especially the blogoshphere, represents a populist revolt. Poor Modo’s locked in her penthouse while the barbarians take to the streets. Let her eat Spam.

Interestingly several readers have made similar points already:

One of the more successful adult religious programs to come out of the School of Theology of the University of the South is "remedial Sunday School". I posit from the polls which claim that self-identified Roman Catholics display little familiarity with Church teachings that the Roman Catholic Sunday Schools have been about as effective as those of the Episcopal Church in teaching what the Church and Christianity are about. The Roman Catholic Missals I've seen are kind of light in the catechism department — are there even catechists left? Root rot.

Me Of course, I'm not throwing stones here as plenty of Jews have similar problems, including me.

More Americans would prefer to have a BBQ with George Bush than John Kerry. What is shocking is that 39% of Americans would want to grill-out with Kerry. I would have put the number much lower. Still, there's plenty of time for Kerry to introduce himself to the American people and get that number down into the single digits.

It figures that the liberal roots brouhaha I started would really get going while I was out of town. It looks like lots of folks have chimed in, some with very interesting arguments and objections. I can't spend the day wading through all of them -- just look at how long this one from Crooked Timber is. But I will try at some point soon to have a coherent response.

That said, there seem to be a few points people are confused about -- which is probably my fault. Of course, there is a philosophy called liberalism. Actually there are several. One of them -- the classical variety -- is one that most conservatives adhere to or at least admire. There is also a philosophy of the modern, or "progressive" sort, which includes Rawls and Dworkin and all those cats. I was not trying to say that there's no such thing as liberal philosophy so much as that "liberals" -- i.e. the folks who pound the pavement and write regularly in favor of "social change" or other treacle -- don't have much use for it. Moreover, I've found, they don't have much use for their own history as a philosophical tradition. And by use I mean use. They do not invoke their thinkers to justify their policy positions with much regularity or conviction. They invoke men and women of action. I still stand by that and nothing I've seen has really persuaded me otherwise.

A lot of smart liberal bloggers, however, have gone to their metaphorical book shelves to quote a bunch of Rawls to prove they know their stuff -- and many do. But, in all likelihood, they won't be mentioning him again for quite some time because -- again -- that's not how liberals debate today. The conspicuousness of the name-dropping, I think, helps demonstrate that point.

That said, I should also say I've been very impressed with the fluency a lot of these folks do have with their intellectual traditions (though invoking a bunch of living or very recently deceased philosophers really isn't the same as invoking a tradition). That said, all of this kind of reminds of when Nixon declared that it was obvious to him the world is overpopulated because wherever he went he saw huge crowds. Those who've responded most forcefully to my suggestion that liberals don't know their roots are the liberals who know their roots. But as lots of these folks concede with their nods to "grains" and "kernels" of truth in my argument, they are the exceptions. I meet with the editors of student newspapers and leaders of campus political groups pretty often and the differences between conservatives and liberals are simply too obvious.

She writes:

Was making public my desire to adopt the oxblog kid necessary? Really?

A reader responds to today's column:

Hi Jonah,

I’m a big fan. (as opposed to a little air conditioner J) I have a thought on your piece today:
[You wrote]
In 1987, for example, Peter Jennings and CBS's Mike Wallace explained on a PBS show that they wouldn't warn American troops they were about to be ambushed. When Wallace was asked if saving American lives might be a higher duty than getting 30 seconds of videotape, he snapped back: "No. You don't have a higher duty. No. No. You're a reporter!"

I wonder if you replaced “American troops” with “a group of journalists”, if they would have the same opinion. Also, if they would want a colleague to follow their advice if they were in that group.

Jessica and I had drinks with Josh Chafetz of OxBlog fame. He's a very smart, very nice guy. My wife expected some 40 year old comic book guy from "The Simpsons" and for some reason I expected to meet a young Hasid or something. I don't where she got that impression, or I got mine, but it turns out he looks like a college sophomore (he's actually getting his PhD.) with good manners. My wife was deeply smitten, declaring "I would love to have a son like him!" -- which I'm sure will embarrass them both.

Fourth, for reasons I can only assume are coincidental I saw more people with broken arms around London over a few days than I have in the preceding couple years. Is there a reason so many Brits are busting their wings?

Third, apparently not only is thong underwear in -- it's out. Women -- many of whom would not be wearing thongs were I the bureaucrat in charge of such things -- seem to think that the world shuld know you're wearing such a garment, so they wear very low-cut jeans and hike the "waistbands" high so you get full view of their anal floss. We were having lunch at Fortnum and Mason -- a place where well-dressed grandmothers should take their granddaughters for proper tea or desert -- and we saw one young lady showing more plumber butt than a fat guy looking for a lost screw in the back of the dishwasher.

I'm no prude, and I understand the complaints from Brits that they can't be frozen in time for the entertainment of nostalgic Americans, but is it so unreasonable that to lament their mad rush to a cool Brittania defined by slattern-chic?

Second, I think I'm going to do a longer piece on London, so I'll save some of my ammo, but I can't shake the feeling that England is at a crossroads between becoming a post-historical theme park (like Belgium) where people care about shopping, pretty-boy soccer players and, um, shopping and staying true to its traditional role as an engine of historical progress. Reading the papers, watching British news, talking to folks all gave me the sense that the Brits are weary of being special and making people angry and want to be a normal country where the rules of the vast continental college campus across the channel apply. That seems to me to be what's at stake with Britain's choice to join the EU.

First of all we had a grand trip, even though it was un-Godly expensive. Picture going to New York City with pesos. If we didn't have frequent-flier miles I'd still be doing dishes at some Indian restaurant.

Speaking of which, in response to many requests, I'll post a list of suggested restaurants in a little bit.

Boston Herald opens a can of whup-ass on Al Gore. Here's the kicker:

Gore even had the audacity to defend the perpetrators of the prison abuse - by name - while denouncing President Bush [related, bio] for ``humiliating'' our nation. How dare he. How dare a former vice president of the United States go beyond disagreeing with the current president's policies - a right of anyone in this free country - and denounce Bush as ``incompetent.'' How dare Gore say that Americans have an ``innate vulnerability to temptation... to use power to abuse others.'' And that our own ``internal system of checks and balances cannot be relied upon'' to curb such abuse. And this man - who apparently has so much disdain for the nature of the American people - wanted to be elected to lead it? It is Gore who has brought dishonor to his party and to his party's nominee. The real disgrace is that this repugnant human being once held the second highest office in this great land.

"After pursuing a restrictive monetary policy early in 1980, Volcker [Carter's Fed chairman]...reversed himself in the spring, engaging in one of th emost rapid expansions of the money supply since World War II--an expansion that would timulate the economy in time for the presidential election that autumn. 'Volcker was playing games,' says Milton Friedman, whose classic Monetary History of the United States remains the authoritative text in the field. 'He was trying to re-elect Carter."

[Iraq Body Count’s] claim: "[c]asualty figures are derived solely from a comprehensive survey of online media reports. Where these sources report differing figures, the range (a minimum and a maximum) are given. All results are independently reviewed and error-checked by at least three members of the Iraq Body Count project team before publication."

Stating that "[t]he project relies on the professional rigour of the approved reporting agencies," they assume "that any agency that has attained a respected international status operates its own rigorous checks before publishing items (including, where possible, eye-witness and confidential sources)."

Sounds OK so far. However, the "approved reporting agencies" include al-Jazeera and Commondreams.org….They do not provide hyperlinks to their sources, but during the invasion I had "googled" their then-largest Iraq civilian casualty figures, 30 in Babel and 50-77 in Basra on March 23, 2003, based on the name of the sources that they provided. In these cases, every one of the casualty numbers they used to set their minima and maxima was reported by the news agencies as an unverified claim of the Iraqi regime….In other words, 2-3 media sources report an unsubstantiated claim, almost always noting that the claim is uncorroborated. "Iraq Body Count" then takes the claimed numbers, ignoring the sources' own caveats, and deems these numbers reliable for setting the casualty range….The system seems deliberately designed to inflate civilian casualties.

In 2000 we actually had "A Day Without A Cuban" in Miami. As a protest against the repatriation of Elian Gonzalez, Cuban leaders in Miami called for a one-day work stoppage by all Cubans in the city. Even six Florida Marlins, including Mike Lowell, sat out that night's game.

It was by far the smoothest running business day in Miami in the past 25 years.

But the cost of KPMG's services [accounting firm] is hardly the real issue. The crucial effect has been to greatly delay any professional investigation in Baghdad, home of abundant documentation kept by Saddam on Oil-for-Food. The KPMG team was due to issue a preliminary report by early June. That won't happen. Instead, as outlined in a draft U.N. resolution now being sent around by the U.S. and U.K., Iraq's public money, including funds to cover relief contracts leftover from Oil-for-Food, will be handed back on June 30 to an interim Iraqi government now being assembled by U.N. special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi. In other words, the still-uninvestigated U.N. will again have a hand in deciding who oversees the remains of Oil-for-Food. If Annan is serious about his claims of U.N. transparency, he ought to provide his man in Iraq, Brahimi, with a business card that reads: Conflicts-of-Interest-R-Us.

I humbly suggest that moments such as these, when a politician demonstrates, through ranting and raving in front of supporters, that he is too unhinged, unstable, and just plain nuts to run a hot dog cart (let alone a nation) be known as "YEAGH! Moments," after Howard Dean's famous meltdown speech.

The plain meaning of what Brooks said is not just that all people, in all times and places, should be governed by consent, as Schramm would have it, but that they actually can govern themselves democratically. What else would it mean to be able to function as democratic citizens? And that claim seems to me to be nearly obviously false. Schramm does not, himself, try to maintain its truth.

Schramm says that Brooks's formulation is "close enough for a column" and that I should not criticize a "relatively thoughtful columnist who happens to support both the President’s actions in Iraq [and] the final reason for that action." I cannot agree. I think that the political thought of the Founders is important, and deserves more careful attention than "close enough for a column"--and it is hardly a compliment to Brooks to defend him in such terms.

But I do agree with Schramm that the comments to his post are worth reading.

Question: "You did contribute to [Bush's] campaign?"

Chetwynd: "Yeah, the limit was $1,000... Would it make a better film if I'd given $1,000 to Gore?"

Question: "Yes."

Chetwynd: "Why?"

Question: "Because it would show less potential bias."

NYT recants, corrects, apologizes etc it's Iraq coverage:

Over the last year this newspaper has shone the bright light of hindsight on decisions that led the United States into Iraq. We have examined the failings of American and allied intelligence, especially on the issue of Iraq's weapons and possible Iraqi connections to international terrorists. We have studied the allegations of official gullibility and hype. It is past time we turned the same light on ourselves.

In doing so — reviewing hundreds of articles written during the prelude to war and into the early stages of the occupation — we found an enormous amount of journalism that we are proud of. In most cases, what we reported was an accurate reflection of the state of our knowledge at the time, much of it painstakingly extracted from intelligence agencies that were themselves dependent on sketchy information. And where those articles included incomplete information or pointed in a wrong direction, they were later overtaken by more and stronger information. That is how news coverage normally unfolds.

But we have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been. In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged — or failed to emerge.

He comes out with some criticism for the Iraq war. I stopped reading Clancy a long time ago (not good enough a writer to simultaneously become an industry and deal with the end of the Cold War), but he's still got a lot of fans and they are a natural Bush constituenciy. Instapundit has more.

Shoot (by accident!) a member of the mob invading your home and you'll probably get chagred with murder:

A white farmer has allegedly shot dead one of President Robert Mugabe's supporters during an attack on his property.

Spiro Landos, 48, a farmer of Greek descent who grew vegetables for British supermarkets, was seriously wounded before being detained by police in hospital in Mutare, 160 miles south east of Harare.

During the attack he was pinned down by a 30-strong mob. He apparently drew a gun and fired a warning shot in the air. But one man was hit and died.

Mr Landos is recovering from surgery and is unable to walk.

His relatives fear he will be charged with murdering one of Mr Mugabe's "war veterans" who fought for independence from Britain in 1980.

The senator chuckled at the criticism. "Once again, the Republicans don't know history, and they don't know facts," he said. "The truth is that it used to be that the convention, after nomination, traveled to the home or the state of the nominee to inform them they've been nominated. Woodrow Wilson was at his house in Princeton, N.J.; Harry Truman was in Independence," Mo., he said.

THE PARTAY [Jonah Goldberg ]

News of the happeningest shindig on the conservative calendar is going to be held at KOB's pad this September. As I am on the other side of the Atlantiic and it's past midnight here in London, I haven't had a chance to clear this date with Cosmo. His social itinerary is quite full, but for this we can probably work something out.

We just did a little tour of Parliament. I've done it before -- and recommend it highly -- and now I'm wrapping up the syndicated column. The tour guide claimed that the verb "lobby" -- as in lobby your congressman -- comes from the lobby outside the House of Commons. But I've read and heard several times that it comes from America. The story I'd heard is that comes from the lobby of the Willard Hotel in Washington -- where presidents traditionally stayed before their inauguration. Favor-seekers allegedly waited to press their case with the new president in the lobby and some president supposedly said "get these lobbyists" away from me or some such. I'll get the answer when I get home (PLEASE: don't bombard me with email while I'm in London as I am having a very hard time with email, thanks).

Kathryn –

Re: Your recent Corner posting

Again with the “P” word. While I understand you’re trying to convey the relatively recent increase of Republican and conservative skittishness inside the Beltway, the rest of America appears to understand that war is hell. We know that snafus will occur. We know that battles are lost and won. We know that victory is the end of a journey paved with death and sacrifice.

It amazes me how the Beltway crowd – including some otherwise steadfast conservative journalists – are easily made wobbly (wobbled?) by relatively short periods of setbacks.

Perhaps it has something to do with the very conservative and slow-moving nature of our Jeffersonian democracy. The best and brightest that want to really make a change in life start small businesses, enter corporate management or small non-profit organizations, or even just start a family.

That’s where change is fast and furious, and certain arduous times are expected along the way to achieving successes both tiny and monumental.

Those who prefer the glacial speed of government, where change measured by micrometers are considered radical shifts in policy, go to Washington. Now that big changes are afoot in DC, and battles with terrorists in Iraq are scaring the you-know-what out of certain policymakers and wonks, these policy conservatives are out of their element, and scared.

It’s a good thing the rest of America, historically where change and adversity have led us to better lives, understand. I just hope you folks in DC did, too, sometimes.

Following up on Rod's last post: To go into our remaining disagreements--which of us is accurately characterizing that Dallas Morning News editorial, etc.--would be tedious. I think there are several points where you and I agree: 1) Denny Hastert is a less than ideal Speaker of the House. 2) His comments about McCain were dumb. 3) It would be nice if Republicans cut, or at least restrained, spending. 4) Some Republicans go too far in their criticisms of John McCain.

But--to get back to our disagreements--a lot of that criticism is deserved. The man has moved left in recent years on everything from embryonic stem-cell research to Internet taxes to guns to health care. One increasingly finds him voting with Chafee, Snowe, and the Democrats. (Or are conservatives supposed to eschew the RINO label for Chafee, too?) He is prone to displaying a preening moral vanity that his admirers seem incapable of seeing. He does seem awfully eager to pander to the media. One can disagree with his conservative critics, but let's not pretend there's no reason for them to be dismayed by his recent behavior.

We've been here for a couple days now. Having a great time. The weather has been fantastic. Cool, high 60s to low 70s. Everything is astoundingly expensive because A) it's London and B) the dollar is worthless. I blame Stuttaford.

Anyway, I'll check-in more in a bit. I'm meeting Josh Chafetz of OxBlog fame for drinks in a couple hours and I have to do some work. Tomorrow we're doing a special tour of the parliament with my mother-in-law and two of my sisters-in-law who are arriving in London today.

Air America is falling apart and so far it's all the GOP's fault-- by lame implication:

Papantonio and others attributed the company's troubles thus far to mismanagement by Cohen, a former Republican political operative in Guam.

From today’s New York Times:

“After a four-year drop, apprehensions — which the Border Patrol uses to measure human smuggling — are up 30 percent over last year along the entire southern border, with 660,390 people detained from Oct. 1 through the end of April, federal officials said.”

Is this anything to do with the President’s proposed immigration ‘reform’? Well, judge for yourself. Here’s more:

“My feet hurt and I'm thirsty, but I will try again after a rest," said Edmundo Saënz García, 28, who was apprehended on the reservation one morning near the end of his journey. His toes were swollen and blistered. He walked in cowboy boots. After being fingerprinted for security, he will be sent back to Mexico, agents said.

“Mr. García said he had heard that the new Bush immigration plan, which would grant work visas to millions of illegal immigrants inside the United States and to others who can prove they have a job, was "amnesty," and he wondered why he was arrested. He said he would try to cross again in a few days…Agents and groups opposed to open borders say the spike in crossings and deaths are the fault of the Bush proposal, which is stalled in Congress and unlikely to be acted on this year. But it has created a stir in Mexico, they say.

"They've dangled this carrot, and as a result apprehensions in Arizona are just spiking beyond belief," said T. J. Bonner, president of the National Border Patrol Council, which represents about 9,000 agents. "The average field agent is just mystified by the administration's throwing in the towel on this."

”Mr. Bonner, who is not related to the border commissioner, said the people were crossing in huge numbers, even at the high risk of dying in the desert, because "they're trying to get in line for the big lottery we've offered them."

Was anyone in the administration even thinking when they dreamt up their big idea to sort out the immigration mess?

There’s an interesting piece by Mark Steyn in today’s Chicago Sun-Times, advocating a more localized approach to giving the Iraqis more say over their affairs. Here’s an extract:

“In the Shia province of Dhi Qar, a couple hundred miles southeast of Baghdad, 16 of the biggest 20 cities plus many smaller towns will have elected councils by June. These were the first free elections in Dhi Qar's history and ''in almost every case, secular independents and representatives of nonreligious parties did better than the Islamists.'' That assessment is from the anti-war anti-Bush anti-Blair Euro-lefties at the Guardian, by the way…

“We need more of that. The best bulwark against tyranny is a population that knows the benefits of freedom, as the Iraqi Kurds do. Don't make the mistake of turning Iraq into a dysfunctional American public school, where the smart guys get held down to the low standards of the misfits and in the end they all get the same social promotion anyway. Let's get on with giving the Kurdish and Shia areas elected governors and practical sovereignty, province by province.”

If it’s doable (which is a big ‘if’, but with the Kurds, at least, it seems undeniable that it is), there’s a lot to Steyn’s argument. Read the whole thing.

Over at the always readable Oxblog, Josh Chafetz is very, very upset about the term ‘health mullah’. “Disgusting moral equivalence,’ he calls it, analogous to American leftists describing this country’s religious right as ‘the American taliban.’ He wants an explanation. Well, with the striking exception of his views on salmon, Josh is (usually!) a sensible guy, and the subject he raises is an interesting one, not only for the point he makes, but also for what it reveals about the sometimes too anodyne nature of contemporary political debate, so here goes…

Let’s start with those mullahs. The term ‘mullah’ is an English translation of a word widely used throughout the Middle East denoting a man who is (very roughly speaking indeed) a cleric. There are mullahs in, for example, Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Afghanistan and, for that matter, all over the Western world. Well, Josh, in my view and (for what little it’s worth) as I’ve written before, health has become the new holiness, a secular religion that, for far too many of its adherents, comes with many of the weaknesses displayed by the followers of other faiths, secular or otherwise, intolerance, bigotry, superstition and the insistence on compulsion. Of course, there’s a touch of exaggeration about it, but comparing some of its adherents with “mullahs”, a word that, thanks to Iran and elsewhere, now comes freighted with notions of oppression seems entirely appropriate within the context of debate over the increasingly aggressive tactics of the anti-tobacco fanatics, the anti-obesity warriors, the anti-alcohol crusaders, well, you get the point...

As for comparing America’s 'religious right' with the Taliban (a specific regime, remember, with specific policies), that’s silly, and, with the principal exception, say, (from what I understand of them) of Christian Reconstructionists (hardly the most significant of groups) it doesn’t stand up to much examination, but as a debating tactic by the Gulag-nostalgic commies of the American Left, it doesn’t worry me, and it shouldn’t worry Josh.

‘Health mullahs’ it is.

After a long period in which it seemed that Russia would, quite rightly, have nothing to do with the appalling Kyoto Treaty, it looks as if Putin might sign up after all. In terms of the perception over here of an “isolated” US, that’s bad news, as that is likely to increase domestic pressure on this country to sign up for this suicide pact as well. So, there are two points, for now, to make about Moscow’s new stance. Firstly, it appears to have nothing to do with the environment (Russian scientists have been scathing about the ‘science’ of Kyoto) and everything to do with Moscow’s attempt to win EU support for Russia’s admission to the WTO. Secondly, because Russian heavy industrial production is currently far lower (all those hopeless Soviet factories inefficiently producing goods that no-one wanted or needed) than it was in 1990 (the base year for Kyoto purposes) the restrictions on carbon emissions imposed by the treaty will have no effect on Russian economic development.

For now.

UPDATE: There's some useful commentary on Russia's move here.

She has an op-ed in the Washington Post on communion that displays a very common misunderstanding, one relevant to non-Catholics as well as Catholics. (That is to say: This specific mistake comes in her thinking about abortion, not her thinking about communion.) She writes, "Essentially, proponents of this harsh penalty make the flawed and intellectually dishonest argument that a vote not to criminalize abortion is the moral and church law equivalent of the act of abortion itself. Then, building on that mischaracterization, they erroneously conclude that pro-choice politicians are 'obstinately persevering' in the 'manifest grave sin' of abortion and must therefore be denied the Eucharist."

Leave aside the question of whether the denial of communion is properly understood as a "harsh penalty." Kennedy seems to think that the communion-deniers are acting as though a legislator who votes to legalize adultery is himself guilty of adultery. But abortion presents a different kind of issue. The act of abortion is wrong. But so is the act of withholding justice from the unborn by denying them a right to life. It is, so to speak, a separate injustice. Even if there were no abortions in America, the legality of abortion would remain an injustice. A legislator who votes to reduce legal protections for the unborn (or votes against efforts to provide them with protections) is himself guilty of an injustice even if he himself is "personally opposed" to abortion. If he voted to make it legal to kill Italians, he would be guilty of injustice even if he himself did not go on to kill any Italians himself. These things are true, obviously, for non-Catholics as well as Catholics.

Kennedy makes the same dumb death-penalty argument that everyone else on her side of the communion argument is making. But in her case, the aforementioned misunderstanding does the key work. It is held to be worse for legislators to vote for the death penalty than for them to vote for legal abortion because their responsibility is more direct in the former case. But their responsibility for the denial of justice to the unborn is direct when they vote to deny it. Add in the fact that the church does not teach that the death penalty is gravely unjust, as abortion is, and her argument collapses. I won't bother to go into her take on canon law, which isn't worth anyone's time.

Well, it seems that the health mullahs (credit to who thought of that phrase, I’ve just forgotten who he/she is) down at Bondi Beach are not alone in using ‘the fish’ as the latest argument for banning smoking on beaches. The London Observer has more:

”Smokers are turning Britain's coastline into a giant deathtrap for marine wildlife, prompting calls for smoking bans on beaches similar to measures being introduced in the US and Australia.

“An authoritative survey of the nation's beaches reveals that over the past year there has been a sharp rise in the number of cigarette butts being discarded, with potentially fatal consequences for birds, mammals and fish.

“Wildlife groups say the butts, containing a form of plastic called cellulose acetate, can last for up to 100 years and pose serious risks to animals. Figures published by the Marine Conservation Society show that last year there was a 25 per cent rise in the number of discarded butts collected by its volunteers, an increase that has alarmed the charity. During one weekend last September volunteers collected 14,659 butts from 244 beaches - the equivalent of 109 stubs every kilometre. The previous year the society collected around 11,000 butts, or 86.7 every kilometre, suggesting more and more smokers are failing to clean up their litter.”

Oh, where to begin?

Well, it is, of course, highly counter-intuitive to think that the Brits have suddenly started chucking away dramatically larger numbers of cigarette butts over the course of just one year - especially as smoking is on the decline. It’s much more likely that this year’s crop was the result of a more thorough search, but the Observer doesn’t give us data comparing the work (number of volunteers etc.) that went into this year’s “authoritative” survey as compared with the last effort. Funny, that.

More to the point, nasty though it is to throw away cigarette ends on the beach like that, an accretion of 14,659 over the course of one year is hardly a dramatic total, even if it only represents a smallish fraction (does it?) of the butts munched by seagulls or swept out to sea to be swallowed by, er, halibut, flounder and jellyfish.

The only thing that this survey shows is that the anti-tobacco jihadists will clutch at anything, anything , however dubious, to justify their assault on smokers. It would be nice, for once, if they could be held to the same standards of honesty which, quite rightly, we insist on from the cigarette companies.

How about it?