Also from the London Spectator, an interesting article on how, by narrowing the definition of what is considered ‘legitimate’ opinion, the BBC is contributing to the erosion of free debate within the UK. The article is, naturally, focused on Britain, but some of it will sound a little, well, familiar to viewers of CBS, ABC and NBC news programming, such as this comment, for example:

“The BBC’s world view starts in the liberal centre and condemns alternative perspectives as mad. The BBC… treats the rigid new orthodoxy of the militant centre as an absolute, not an average. More peculiarly, it characterises it as moderate and fails to perceive that this, too, is a form of intolerant extremism, shorn of ideology but not of menace. “

The New York Observer notes that ‘urban shaman’ Donna Henes will be hosting a ‘drumming circle’ in honor of the full moon tonight. Ms. Henes is quoted in the paper as explaining that, “the ceremony is about drumming up energy and our spirit for inner healing. We’ll drum and, of course, there will be howling at the moon. It’s a very charging experience. People fly out of the door when it’s over.”

Hmmm, well, I saw the moon over Manhattan myself the other night, a great white globe suspended, it seemed, between skyscrapers. It was nice, but, no, I didn’t want to howl.

There’s growing unease that New York City may be in danger of returning to its bad old ways. This report from the London Independent notes that Nurse Bloomberg is saying that he is staking his reputation on school reform, an important enough goal, the writer agrees, but then goes on to make the point that matters:

“It seems [Bloomberg] also needs to pay more attention…to rising crime or – correction – the perception of rising crime. Keeping up the number of cops might be a first step.”

Indeed it is.

In a recent speech Saddam Hussein has drawn comparisons between the US and the Mongol army that sacked Baghdad in 1258. Saddam is, of course, hoping for a different conclusion this time around, but he does us all a service in refreshing memories of the Mongol horde that once ravaged large portions of Eurasia. Western leaders are, these days, continually expected to apologize for the deeds of their country’s imperial pasts, so shouldn’t we expect the same from the heirs of the Horde?

End the shameful silence in Ulan Bator! The world needs an apology – or at least a few muttered words of remorse. Natsag Bagabandi, we’re waiting…

If there’s a political figure more irritating than a tobacco-banning clown from North Dakota, it’s a preachy left-wing windbag who has, it appears, been given delusions of grandeur by his role in a fading soap opera set in the White House.

The London Independent, needless to say, does not agree. In an oleaginous ‘profile’ of Martin Sheen, writer Andrew Gumbel notes the supposed irony of the “continuing success” of the West Wing and its fictional President ‘Bartlett’ (one t, actually, but never mind) in a country allegedly in the grip of "war fever and right-wing resurgence".

Gumbel tells us that Sheen, somebody who has always been predictably orthodox in his choice of liberal causes, is “a rebel, a non-conformist, a man who delights in challenging authority at the highest levels by standing four-square on his unshakeable moral sense.”

Oh, please…

Speaking of bossy public officials, over at Reason’s blog Jacob Sullum has a post on one Michael Grosz. He's the legislator from North Dakota responsible for introducing a bill that would criminalize the sale and possession of tobacco within the borders of that unfortunate state unless, it would seem, it is used for “religious purposes”.

Grosz is, distressingly, a Republican. He should be laughed out of office.

The Financial Times is reporting that a study by an ‘NGO’ ('the International Baby Food Action Network') has concluded that Nestle and Danone breached World Health Organization codes governing the promotion of their products in both Togo and Burkina Faso”. The FT notes claims in the NGO report that “the companies broke the rules by providing mothers with free samples of milk powder, contravening labeling standards, and distributing gifts such as pens, stethoscopes and notepads branded with company names.”

What arrogant and patronizing nonsense – and it’s not confined to Togo and Burkina Faso or powdered milk. WHO is, for example, also active in efforts to restrict tobacco advertising worldwide.

Message from international bureaucrats to the rest of humanity:

“You are all too stupid to think for yourselves”.

TYPEFACE EXHIBITION UNVEILED AT UN HEADQUARTERS IN NEW YORK New York, Jan 17 2003 6:00PM The 100 best typeface designs used in global written communication over the past five years are on display at the United Nations Headquarters in New York, the winners of a global competition organized as part of the UN Year of Dialogue among Civilizations in 2001.

I do read all of my email. Or to be more honest, I open all of my email. I do not owe it to hate-mailers, for example, to read every line of bile they send. And, by now I've become quite expert at skimming past arguments I've heard for the fiftieth time. Also, in terms of not responding to everybody, that's simply a necessity. It particularly pains me when readers send me brilliant but very long essays on a given subject, ofen interwoven with numerous complex and nuanced questions for me to answer. Responding thoughtfully to more than a tiny fraction of these would mean never writing anything for publication ever again. Also, some readers -- especially high school and college kids -- can make astoundingly onerous requests for help with research. Some of these kids are clearly smart and sincere, but I just can't spend an hour combing through my bookshelves to answer a question about Orwell or the warp drive. Nevertheless, I often feel guilty about not responding to those either. But my favorite is when people assume that the responses I do send are auto-responses or written by my "staff" -- as if Cosmo or the Couch could be trusted with that kind of responsibility. I could go on and on about this and I'm sure that other NRniks could as well. But the point is, everyone I know spends a great deal of time reading email and thinking about how to respond to it.

When I read this, I feel the need to smash their guitar against the wall of the Delta House.

A reader responding to my syndicated column on human shields:

Mr. Goldberg: The only comment I would make is that the reason that North Americans and Europeans make themselves human shields mostly against their own governments is that their governments profess to "have a conscience" and these human shields try to hold their governments to their own professed constitutions and agreements.

Most of the African, Chinese governments and Saddam Hussein's regime do not have a tradition of constitutional human rights. Besides, these last regimes have never acted in a vacuum anyway; they have all been colonized by "the west" at one time or another and have learned brutal ways from their western masters who committed genocide against them while at the same time preaching love. Start with the Spanish conquistadors who soon brought along the priests and the European colonists of our countries who massacred the people they found and then
stole their land.

And the human shields are not "objectively in favour" of Saddam Hussein. They are subjectively in favour of the civilians - innocent men, women and children who will be slaughtered (U.N. estimates are as high as .5 million) if the U.S. goes to war against Iraq. And you use the word "liberation" of Afghanistan in the same way it was used in Vietnam - to liberate a village was to destroy it and that's what your government did to up to 5 thousand innocent Afghanis who had never even heard of the World Trade Centre.

When will you consider that it is war itself that is our enemy? It matters little from where it comes. The Bush regime is making your country the most dangerous nation on the planet to the survival of our species. I am glad there are human shields coming from it.

Some of these are funny. Not all of them alas.

Interesting article.

Andrew Sullivan’s quote of the day, is a real whopper:

"There is on the one hand the America of the New Deal, of Jimmy Carter, and even, more or less, of George Herbert Bush [sic] ... But there exists today as well … a second America… a troubled and disturbing America, where pluralism is above all a mask for special interests, a Christian America (Ashcroft), bursting with revolvers (Cheney), arrogant (Rumsfeld), imperial (William Kristol), racist (Trent Lott), opportunist (Condi Rice), partisan (Karl Rove), the America of spying and denunciation (Poindexter), of conspiracy (Elliot Abrams) ... of a rotten Enron-style capitalism, of the unlimited death penalty — the America, in a word, of George W. Bush. This symbolically Texan and overweeningly aggressive America wants war, cheap oil, and, incidentally, the crushing and total humiliation of the Palestinians: in a word imperial domination in its purest form. A short-sighted nationalism and capitalism, which scorn the have-nots, are its raison d’être ... Europe, sooner or later, will have to separate itself from the new America ... The fact that America, the eldest daughter of the Enlightenment, has become 'a threat to itself and the entire world,' as Anatol Lieven explained a few weeks ago in an article for The London Review of Books, is a very worrisome reversal of affairs." - Patrice Higgonet, professor of French history at Harvard University, quoted in the French paper, Liberation, January 3.

It kind of reminds you that the most zealous ideologues often live far from the object of their devotions because they feel the need to prove their allegiance more acutely. It was true of Nazis in France or Romania and of Stalinists in America and just about everywhere else. And, it seems, it’s true of anti-American Euro-boobs.

A great story.

READER A:

Jonah,
I am not a dog person but I understand that some people are dog people the way that I understand some people are liberals - blind, deaf and uncritical of the destructive forces they embrace. The use of dogs in ads and in columns such as yours is weak, juvenile and a sign that you weren't really ready to do good work. I find it is a good indicator that trash will follow. Therefore, I usually ignore whatever content is being carried by the dogness of the piece (bush beans are boycotted by our house), but I have been conditioned by you to expect excellence and occasional brilliance in your writing and so overcame my usual principled reaction and read your article. Imagine my surprise, as the father of an adopted Korean daughter, to find that you had indeed provided trash. I think the piece was entirely tasteless and well beneath you and I can only attribute this to a chemical imbalance due to excessive soy consumption. In the future, please remember my dog rule, if you have to revert to using a dog to carry your message, it will be delivered as a wrecked, sodden mess that was not worth your effort to create and certainly not worth my effort to read.

Reader B:

As a person of Korean ancestry I must warn you of some of the emails you are going to get. Don't listen to them!! As always your files are informative and and hilarious.

From the North Koreans statement:

"the US loudmouthed supply of energy and food aid are like a painted cake pie in the sky, as they are possible only after [North Korea] is totally disarmed."

The New York Times profiles Glenn Reynolds AKA Instapundit. It's a well-deserved semi-suck-up piece. Turn away from the light Glenn!

The Washington Post continues to demonstrate.
that its editorial board is more serious than the Times'.

I hope this makes up for my reference to Waco yesterday, which seemed to bother a few people.

Paul Craig Roberts? Come on dude. What exactly is he saying? In one sentence or less what is his argument?

By the way, I've tackled the 10 guilty men thing too. Although I do not dispute that Volokh's piece is brilliant.

An NRO reader who followed the link below writes:

My blood boils when I read stories like this. It is certainly embarrassing and saddening to me as a Turk who truly believes and also knows the Turkish people and their desire to be part of the European community of nations. Stories like this give plenty of ammunition to groups who want nothing but to see Turkey sidelined and excluded from the block of civilized nations.

For all it's progressiveness in many areas, Turkey has a long way to go when it comes to respecting and enforcing religious freedoms.

A reader sends along the following story from the Onion:

Humane Society Worker Secretly Glad To See Nippy Dachshund Put Down

MARYSVILLE, OH-Union County Humane Society volunteer Catherine Moncrief, 23, admitted Monday that a small part of her was glad to see Oscar, a nippy, hyperactive dachshund, put to sleep. "I feel really guilty, but when they euthanized him, I was kind of like, 'Ha, ha-serves you right, you obnoxious little shit,'" Moncrief said. "I went through a whole bottle of hydrogen peroxide in two weeks from feeding and washing him." Moncrief then privately mused that the incessantly whimpering cocker in Cage 12 could go next for all she cares.

The reader added: "Replace 'nippy dachsund' with, say, 'Beltway Sniper,' and you pretty much get a sense of the self-contradictory (or ambivalent) feelings of this avowed 'anti-death penalty' Catholic." I hear you, man, I hear you.

Rod, I think you misconstrued my point, or maybe I miscommunicated it. When you say cops need guns because that is a matter of necessity, I agree with you. But it's still a matter of making choices. Police could use non-lethal weapons to stop criminals which would work 95% of the time. This would guarantee no suspects were accidentally killed or deliberately murdered by police. A good thing to be sure. The problem is that in a few cases more cops would die (and the numbers of dead cops would rise as more criminals learned that owning and using a gun was the best insurance against arrest). We decide to err on the side of allowing cops to protect themselves with lethal weapons for these and other reasons.

These sorts of cost-benefit analyses come up in every aspect of life. We spend only so much on hospitals or free drugs when we know that if we doubled that amount thousands of lives might be saved. We implement regulations which say a rollover rate of 1 in a million is acceptable, when we could say 1 in a billion is better, even though that might bankrupt the auto industry. It's not just budgetary economics, it's making choices about who lives and who dies. You might respond -- as many readers have -- that the government doesn't intentionally kill X person with AIDS or Y person who bought a Montero. That's true. But we also don't willingly kill any innocent people on death row either. In fact, we try very very very hard to make sure we only execute people who deserve it. We try so hard, in fact, that we don't know of a single innocent person who's ever been executed. And we have lots of names of real people who died because the government chose a rollover rate of one in a million versus one in a billion or who would have lived if a doctor made it to them quicker or if a hospital had been a little closer to home. You say it's a reasonable alternative to put murderers away for life. Well that takes money from saving more deserving lives too.

Lastly, I think people who make Ryan's "demon of error" argument against the death penalty make a fundamental mistake of logic. If I have a batch of cookies and I discover that a piece of broken glass ended up in the batter, I have to throw away the whole batch because I don't know which cookie the glass might be in. That's Ryan's argument against the death penalty. He says we don't know who might be innocent, therefor we have to let everyone off. Well, that's absurd. Just it's okay to eat a cookie if we know there's no glass in it, we can execute someone if we know he is guilty. We may not know for sure that everyone is guilty, but we know for damn sure that some of them are -- and those are the one we can execute with a clear conscience if we believe in the death penalty. The guy who was caught with a knife to the throat of a little girl after raping her sisters and murdering her brother was guilty. He even said so. But Ryan let him off because he wasn't sure whether other people on Death Row might have been innocent. If you believe in the death penalty, that's moronic. If you don't believe in the death penalty it doesn't matter what the guy did, you're against executing people period.

So, the ultimate test is a simple one: Are you in favor of executing the people we know are guilty or not? The rest is commentary.

Derb, you write:

(1): if GWB is willing to go to war without UN approval, why didn't he do so yesterday? or last month? or a year ago?

This strikes me as a pretty unpersuasive argument. I'm with you that things don't look as good or as certain as they did a few months ago. But it seems to me obvious that Bush is willing to go to war without UN approval given the right circumstances. After all if Saddam launched scuds on American bases in Saudi Arabia tomorrow, Bush wouldn't wait for UN approval. The question is where Bush's tipping point is. He threw the dice on getting UN approval and he may be regretting it now, I don't know. But it seems to me an odd argument to say that just because he hasn't gone to war yet without UN approval, he'll therefor never go to war without UN approval.

Sorry I'm late getting to this, Jonah. I think the "acceptable risk" analogy re: the death penalty doesn't persuade. We don't have a reasonable alternative to arming the police and giving them the authority to use deadly force. So we have to allow for the fact that mistakes will happen. Same with cars: the social good (by now a necessity) brought about by the existence of automobiles outweighs the inevitable deaths brought about by same. With the death penalty, we do have a reasonable alternative to putting convicted killers to death. We could incarcerate them for life, without benefit of parole, in a supermax prison (by the way, an NRO reader who has spent years doing lay prison ministry on death row at Angola tells me that most people don't realize how hard life on death row really is). Is the social good accomplished by executing convicted murderers that much better than imprisoning them for life? Is it so good that it's worth risking the state-sanctioned murder of an innocent man? I don't see that it is.

Ramesh's questions, though, are forcing me to examine my anti-d.p. thinking, and leading me to see that I probably buy more of the moral argument against the d.p. than I'd like to admit to myself. I think one reason I resist the argument made by the Pope and others [that the d.p. violates the sacredness of human life] is that I can't stand to see these people go on and on about the poor prisoner, but have very little evident concern for the pain their victim(s) and the victims' loved ones feel. That's not a reason, I admit, but it's what's in my gut, and I struggle with it.

Entertainment Weekly music writer Chris Willman has a pretty great list of what was wrong with the American Music Awards on Sunday night. The first one stood out:

1) Missy Elliott has a huge hit, ''Work It,'' that in more prudish times would've been classified as soft porn. Love it or hate it, the song is an unabashed celebration of sex, with its blatant lyrical references to oral sex, penis size, female genitalia, shaving pubic hair, sexual positions, and so forth. So how best to illustrate this raunchy number for millions of ABC viewers? Have some little girls come out and breakdance while Missy does her rap. On the very day that Pete Townshend was arrested, you'd think someone would have better sense than to associate prepubescents with the nasty.

Want to see what he's talking about? Check out the lyric sheet. I was particularly moved by Elliott's charming couplet linking The Little Drummer Boy to freaky sex. A music journalist friend of mine tells me that "Work It" is probably the most popular song with 11-year-old girls right now. Great, just great.

When my wife, the Fair Jessica, was having her background check for her DOJ job, the FBI talked to almost every person she ever made eye contact with. They interviewed friends, co-workers, dental hygienists; everyone. The only person they didn't talk to even once was, well, me. Now I understand that spouses are sometimes left out -- even though Jess and I were only engaged at the time -- because it's assumed we'll "cover" for our wives or husbands. But what if I spent my days polishing shotguns with my "Remember Waco" T-Shirt? You'd think the FBI would want to know that before okaying my wife to work in the top echelons of the Justice Department.

I asked Kellyanne Conway of the polling company what she makes of the latest presidential-poll news. Here’s her take:

The latest musings by non-pollsters about why the president's poll numbers, according to one survey, have dipped below 60% for the first time since 9/11 offers an important lesson to political observers.

It is tempting but dangerous to confuse causation with coincidence. Folks gaze at the results and offer their own biased view as to why this must be. "He's giving tax breaks to the rich"; "He's too conservative"; "He's not conservative enough"; "Americans don't want to go to war with Iraq"; "Americans wonder why we haven't already gone to war with Iraq" are among the formulaic comments uttered by the chattering class. Musings they are, since the classic approve/disapprove question is generic, asking nothing about policy, or anything particularly helpful for that matter.

The charge that these poll numbers reflect something more severe to the president's political fortunes than the relative unease about the economy and war felt by many Americans is as misplaced as the belief that approval ratings exceeding 70% insulates one from political or electoral vulnerability. Mr. Bush's father's approval rating were stratospheric during his confrontation with Saddam Hussein in 1991, only to have them cut in half as he lost reelection to Bill Clinton a short time later. Additionally, when Congress passed the president's first tax-reduction package (pre-9/11) the president's job performance was at 52%.

That same poll revealed more-specific, and therefore more-relevant, assessments of the public's opinion about President Bush, which have not received as much coverage as the approval rating. Americans told the pollsters at CNN/USA Today that they regard Mr. Bush as a strong and decisive leader (76%) who is willing to make hard decisions (83%) and who has a vision for the country's future (68%).

President Bush should lose no sleep over the latest ratings, but the parade of Democratic benchwarmers who seek to unseat him in '04, might. At 58%, Mr. Bush's approval rating is identical to that of President Reagan on the eve of his landslide reelection in 1984."

I'm off the soy.

I want to be as truthful as possible. But, when you look at the reasons behind why Christ came, why he was crucified, he died for all mankind and he suffered for all mankind, so that, really, anybody who transgresses has to look at their own part or look at their own culpability.
It's time to sort of get back to a basic message, the message that was given. At this time, the world has gone nuts, I think. And this film speaks -- well, Christ spoke of faith, hope, love and forgiveness. And these are things I think we need to be reminded of again. He forgave as he was tortured and killed. And we could do with a little of that behavior.

Every so often you read something that stops you in your tracks. A week ago, The Boston Globe ran a 10,000-word profile of Ted Kennedy by Charles Pierce. For the first gazillion paragraphs or so, it chugged along in familiar Boston Globe snoozefest mode, and then:
"If she had lived, Mary Jo Kopechne would be 62 years old. Through his tireless work as a legislator, Edward Kennedy would have brought comfort to her in her old age."

Because I believe that we should only be executing deserving people, I've long supported free DNA tests for anybody on death row who wants them. If they prove innocence, that's great news. But the fact is lots of people on death row don't want DNA tests -- because they would confirm guilt, not prove innocence. The media has been particularly bad when it comes to reporting about DNA exonerations because it would be so easy to point out that the people not exonerated deserve the death penalty. Anyway, Ron Bailey -- who originally convinced me on this point -- has written about DNA tests here: .

Okay, I've sent off my syndicated column. And, yes, I made those paragaphs less clunky. Now, assuming this isn't a private argument I'd like to make a quick point.

Rod, when you say the death penalty must be error free it seems to me you make yourself operationally anti-death penalty. I see a parallel with NR's position on the drug war. I've asked both Ramesh and Rich if NR would be in favor of the drug war if NR's editors thought the war was winnable. They both said, more or less, "I don't know, maybe." In other words, theirs is not so much a moral objection to the drug war as a practical one. The obviously high costs of prohibition, in their minds, exceed the benefits. (If I'm mischaracterizing their positions I await their clarifications).

If you think the cost of a single innocent life is too high to justify capital punishment, in other words if you think it must be perfect in every respect, then you might as well come out against the death penalty because otherwise you'll have to argue for a perfect government program and that is an untenable position.

But keep in mind government finds acceptable rates of accidental deaths in all sorts of areas. From friendly fire in the military to deaths on our highways to extremely rare and fatal drug side effects. Surely even one child's death is a tragedy, but we know for a fact that roughly 50 young children die every year from drowning in 5 gallon buckets, mostly in their back yards. But we don't ban buckets. And that's roughly the same number as the number of cases of accidental gun deaths among small children, and we do not require child-safe bucket locks (Note to parents: You can childproof your bucket by putting a hole in the bottom).

If you take it as a matter of principle that the death penalty is a social good, then you must be willing to accept some level of error to achieve that social good. It would be tragic if we executed an innocent man -- hasn't happened yet -- but I would still take a mend it don't end it approach in response (unless I was the one executed). There's nothing wrong with working very hard to keep that level as low as conceivably possible, but the only way to guarantee no errors is to abolish capital punishment entirely.

A reader writes:

"Mr. Dreher,

You missed Ramesh Ponnuru's rebuttle to his own pro-death penalty argument. In the Corner today, he argues that juries can't be trusted to decide personal injury cases:

"As Walter Olson notes in his new book The Rule of Lawyers, trial lawyers are forever talking about how representative the jury is--and then working hard to stack juries so they're as unrepresentative as possible. As Olson notes in an excerpt published in Reason, the same folks who say the jury box is like the ballot box are the most avid to keep out people who might vote the wrong way."

"Substitute 'prosecutor' for 'trial lawyer' and Ramesh has made the case against himself.

"I know it's a cliche, but if juries can't be trusted to set damages for medical malpractice and other personal injury cases, they can't be trusted to decide whether to impose the death penalty."