"We believe it is fair to ask whether those Democrat senators now criticizing the way the public case for war was made, have themselves met the standard to which they seek to hold administration officials on the 'use' of intelligence," wrote Sens. Jon Kyl of Arizona and Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania. The two senators, both members of the Republican leadership team, sent the letter to Sen. Pat Roberts, Kansas Republican and chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

Several economists have written me nice notes. Here's one from our friend Steve Horwitz of St. Lawrence University:

Not sure who your email correspondent was, but I just read your piece and don't see any obvious glaring errors. I could nitpick a few things, but that would only add to the boredom of my already horrifically boring life as an economist. Plus it would confirm the belief of millions that economists are pedantic, anal-compulsive, boring, nerdy, and overly flatulent, not to mention arrogant. As a fellow economist, I can provide only one theoretical and professional response to your critic:

Lighten up, Francis.

Steve (as always, you may publish)

And another from a longtime reader:

Hey Jonah I'm an economist too and I thought today's column was pretty good. You got a lot of the basic facts (and analysis) right, without mentioning the dreaded term "Ricardian equivalence." If you really want to generate some economic wonk e-mail, launch that phrase into cyberspace. Just one suggestion - if you ever want to boil the whole deficits/size of government tangle down to one pithy phrase, just remember "the real tax is government spending." Keep hope alive

I have read many hysterical, and many sober, criticisms of the movie. Many of the criticisms have suggested that the movie is, in some way or other, anti-Semitic. Krauthammer comes up with two suggestions that are new to me. The first is that because half of Satan's four appearances in the movie have him inciting the Jewish crowd, the movie is saying that these are Satan's people. This is, depending on your view, either evidence that Krauthammer has found a very devious anti-Semitic ploy of Gibson's that almost nobody else was able to see, or evidence that Krauthammer is looking extremely hard to find anti-Semitism in the movie.

The second is that the scourging scene is anti-Semitic too. Now many people have argued that the scene is far too long, and I think there's a reasonable case to be made for that view. While many of the commentators who believe this also believe the movie to be anti-Semitic, they have not generally said that the scene itself was anti-Semitic, for the simple reason that the Romans and not the Jews were doing the scourging. Krauthammer thinks it anti-Semitic because it has "the high priest Caiaphas stand there with his cruel, impassive fellow priests witnessing the scourging." Another point for originality, to be evaluated in either of the above ways.

Krauthammer refers several times to Vatican II. Now there is no reason for a non-Catholic to be familiar with what Vatican II did and did not do; there is no shame in Krauthammer's not knowing much about it. But perhaps if you don't know much about it you should refrain from writing columns that refer so frequently to the subject.

Says he's coming back.

This guy doesn't agree with me entirely either:

In today's [syndicated] column on deficits, you remark:

"By which I mean it is an astoundingly boring and complicated subject that unfortunately allows people to sound righteous on a subject they don't know much about."

Apparently, this sentiment applies to you as well, because your discussion makes it clear you understand nothing at all about the economics of budget deficits. Of course, as seems to be universally true of journalists, ignorance never gets in the way of sounding off, so you sound off ignorantly. I could give you a couple quick examples to show some of the fundamentals of deficit economics, but then I am an economist, a group you causally dismiss elsewhere in your article. Given that you so casually dismiss us economists and our profession, and so evidently never have learned any economics, I won't waste any more time trying to educate you. You clearly are willfully self-ignorant with desire to change that state of affairs. So I'll leave you to wallow in your self-imposed, willful ignorance. Just be aware that you are indeed ignorant and virtually everything you said in your column was elementary gibberish.

Firefighters were among the earliest and most ubiquitous backers of Democrat nominee John Kerry. At cities across the United States, the yellow-shirted firefighters were at every rally, helping organize and raise money for the Massachusetts senator.

Kerry has reciprocated and promised to help first responders who say they will lose $700 million in next year's Homeland Security budget.

"We should not be opening firehouses in Baghdad and shutting them down in the U.S.,'' Kerry says often, most recently in Florida, the day after he clinched the nomination.

In my column today I write "Too bad we won't have another Y2K issue to occupy them until Y3K." Alas, this has sparked an unexpected deluge from computer geeks. Here are two representative examples. Note: This is not an issue I care very much about.

Ahem, Geek alert:

"Too bad we won't have another Y2K issue to occupy them until Y3K."

Actually, there won't be a Y3K issue (will still need, and already have, a
4 digit year field), rather, we're only 7,997 years away from the Y10K
problem

And...

Hey, Jonah!

I've been reading your syndicated and NR columns for a couple of years now and love them.

In your most recent syndicated column about the federal deficit, you say as an aside: "Too bad we won't have another Y2K issue to occupy them until Y3K."

Well, my friend, if you're looking for another computer date crisis, you're in luck. The next time bomb is set to go off in 2038 -- right about the time that you and I will be ready to retire -- and promises to be significantly more difficult to solve than the Y2K problem. It's also more difficult to explain to non-geeks.

It's detailed here http://maul.deepsky.com/%7Emerovech/2038.html
and here
http://computer.howstuffworks.com/question75.htm

In summary, Unix and Unix-like systems mark time as a number of seconds since midnight on January 1, 1970. These systems set aside a data structure for storing the date that can hold only 2,147,483,647 seconds. Add that to January 1, 1970 and Unix runs out of space to store its dates on January 19, 2038. What might happen then is anybody's guess because different systems will likely behave differently when confronted with an overflow. My best guess is that most software that relies on date calculations will simply stop running.

The 2038 problem is significantly worse than the Y2K problem because it occurs at the operating system level rather than the application level and because the problematic way of storing dates has worked its way into the base libraries for the C language on which most modern operating systems are based. A couple of years ago, I ran some tests with Windows 2000 and managed to crash the operating system when I advanced the date.

If you're looking for an expert who can describe this in more detail, you'll need to find a real computer scientist, not a mere application developer like me.

K-Lo already posted that before. Sorry.

You gotta love this: (Link via Drudge):

North Korea's state-controlled media are well known for reverential reporting about Kim Jong-il, the country's dictatorial leader. Advertisement

But the Dear Leader is not the only one getting deferential treatment from the communist state's propaganda machine: John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic candidate, is also getting good play in Pyongyang.

In the past few weeks, speeches by the Massachusetts senator have been broadcast on Radio Pyongyang and reported in glowing terms by the Korea Central News Agency (KCNA), the official mouthpiece of Mr Kim's communist regime.

The apparent enthusiasm for Mr Kerry may reflect little more than a "better the devil you don't know" mentality among the North Korean apparatchiks. Rather than dealing with President George W. Bush and hawkish officials in his administration, Pyongyang seems to hope victory for the Democratic candidate on November 2 would lead to a softening in US policy towards the country's nuclear weapons programme.

“I have a classically conservative take on gay marriage: I see no reason to mainstream a good old-fashioned perversion."

"On the new Princess Diana tapes, she says that she threw herself down the stairs even though she knew she was carrying a child. She wasn't just carrying a child, she was carrying England. As soon as the baby was born she should have been beheaded for treason."

"The Kobe Bryant rape victim is starting to sound like Caroline of Brunswick, consort of George IV, who boasted, "I change my drawers twice a year whether they're dirty or not."

I don't know one percent of what Diane McWhorter or (my boss) William F. Buckley Jr. know about Westbrook Pegler, so I'm not going to get in the middle of this dispute. McWhorter's use of the word "demagogues" in the following passage is, however, a bit rich given what comes before and after it: "At his peak in the 1930s and 1940s, Pegler was a leading popularizer of one of the most concerted antidemocratic crusades in this country's history: the vicious backlash against the New Deal and the labor movement to which it gave legal protection. This anti-Roosevelt front included the country's major industrialists, anti-Semitic, red-baiting pamphleteers, Congressman Martin Dies' Committee on Un-American Activities, and an assortment of Depression-era demagogues (and men on horseback who conspired with Hitler's agents in this country).

"Although Pegler did not turn against Roosevelt until the president's second term, he quickly became a shrill cheerleader for the right's campaign to paint the New Deal's democratic advances as an internationalist Communist plot."

On second thought, the use of the word "democratic" may be even better. Diane McWhorter: the Sid Blumenthal of the New Deal.

I did notice, but forgot to mention, that they got Deal Hudson's name wrong in that AFP piece as well.

A reader just sent me an Agence France Press stroy from last year about the then-premature controversy about The Passion.
Here's how the article ends:

"The film is going to be a classic," said Dean Hudson, editor of the Catholic magazine Crisis.

"It is going to be the 'go-to' film for Christians of all denominations who want to see the best movie made about the passion of Christ."

The harsh criticism reminds many of the Martin Scorsese's "The Last Temptation of Christ" (1988) which many considered blasphemous.

Why such controversy?

"The crime in question is a big one: the killing of God," wrote National Review Online editor Jonathan Golberg.

Now, never mind calling me "Jonathan" -- than happens all the time. And forget about dropping the "d" from my name. What bothers me is that I never spoke to anyone from AFP about the movie so I can only assume they're quoting my syndicated column from last August. Am I wrong to complain that the quote was not only edited but also changes the tone if not the context of what I wrote at least a little bit? Here's the passage from which they get the quote:

This has got to be one of the strangest controversies in a long time. A movie that won't be released for months is being denounced by people who haven't seen it. Why? Because they claim the film assigns blame for a crime to a handful of people who have been dead for 2,000 years.

Now, to be sure, the crime in question is a big one: deicide, the killing of God. And the handful of people are a pretty controversial bunch: "The Jews" - scourge of history to some, heroes of history to others, ethnicity of accountants, borscht-belt comics and deli sandwich makers to most.

Nevertheless, I still find the controversy over Mel Gibson's yet-to-be-released film, "The Passion," too rich in irony to take at face value.

From a reader:

The thing is, it’s not just rock music that’s been pre-empted by the left. There’s an automatic assumption in classical music circles that everyone’s a liberal. What I find particularly frustrating about that is that much of the funding for local symphonies, opera companies, etc. comes from very successful conservatives (at least, in my part of the world, where conservatives rule). I was performing as a chorus member with the local symphony when I saw a bumper sticker on a string bass case that said “Vote Republican—it beats thinking.” The irony there is that this particular organization had gone belly up last year, and was reforming with the very generous support of several Republican Party stalwarts.

It makes me crazy.

From a reader:

Thanks for the bit about the (no-relation) Goldberg book and smashing the idea that popular music and lefty social rebellion go hand-in-hand. It’s maddening for me, a young conservative and rabid music fan, to be repeatedly told that liking the newest underground band automatically means you’re a left-wing fanatic. I can’t read Rolling Stone anymore without my blood pressure going through the roof—I used to be able to ignore the asinine political commentary in search for actual music reviews (which are increasingly crap these days anyway), but putting Howard Dean on the cover was truly gag-worthy. The day they elevated Dean to rock god status was pretty much the end for me. It’s really pathetic that a magazine that used to have some independent musical clout is now just another drooling lackey for the political left. And they think the *right* is lame...

I have a better problem for Mr. D's erudition (and his real-life knowledge would help, too). Please make him available to develop a new Federal Tax Function (FTF), one which would keep track of the way each citizen's representative and senators vote on spending bills. In general, if the politician votes for bill that doubles spending, his Spending Quotient (SQ: the output of Derb's FTF) is 2.000. If he votes to cut spending in half, his SQ=0.500. The Derb FTF would have to formulate a way to arrive at a Total SQ for the year for each of the three members of Congress.

At tax time, as a last step, when we calculate our taxes, we'd take our total fed tax owed and multiply it by the SQ's of your reps. That way, if our Congressmen are big spenders, then we are big spenders, too.

Oh, and make Election Day April 16.

What do you say?

Has anyone at NRO -- or anywhere else to your knowledge -- attempted to put the Democratic primary votes into a mathematical/demographic context? That is, to calculate and compare the Democrat turnout in each primary and caucus state to 1.) the number of registered Democrats in each state and 2.) its total population. I can't recall the number, but I remember being astonished at how few votes it took for Dennis Kucinich to register 37% of the vote in Hawaii.

All the stuff we've been fed by the media about an energized base and record turnouts sounds like so much hooey to me given the lack of enthusiasm for John Kerry I see among my Democratic acquaintances. It would be interesting to quantify and at least see then, by state and in the aggregate, just how few votes had to be scored by a "runaway" nominee in a truncated primary season.

From a reader:

Apparently Katie Couric was attacking Karen Hughes about the 9/11 ad this morning. I really wish Hughes would have asked Couric, if it was appropriate for NBC to use 9/11 images in their promos.

I'm sorry, but while I have a great deal of sympathy for the families of 9/11 victims, I think these complaints are nonsense squared. A lot more people died during Vietnam than on 9/11 and John Kerry has been running ads with footage from there for months. These families may have a unique relationship to 9/11 but they do not have ownership of that day, politically, culturally or otherwise and it would be absurd if this administration caved on this point, even though I'm sure the media will be delighted to exploit the personal tragedies of these families.

Reason's David Weigel has a good
review of Daniel Goldberg's book Dispatches From the Culture Wars: How the Left Lost Teen Spirit. I haven't read the book and unless I get paid to (or need to for my book), it's a metaphysical certainty I never will. But I've listened to Goldberg (no relation) in a couple long interviews and think he sounds like a crystalized liberal cliché. Weigel confirms my suspicions. He writes:

As "save the Democrats" messages go, Goldberg’s thesis is more fun than a prescription drug plan. And it definitely comes from the gut. But in the end, Dispatches From the Culture Wars fundamentally misunderstands politics, pop culture, and the connections between them. By equating aesthetics with ideology, Goldberg makes a common but serious mistake: He thinks you can tell a person’s politics from the music she listens to.

My favorite bit -- which I first heard Goldberg discuss in a radio interview -- is the Danny Goldberg's shock that in 2000 Chuck Schumer has never heard of Eminem. "Eminem. Goldberg can't believe that "one of New York’s most progressive congressmen" didn't know about the white hip-hopster.

Now, it may be shocking that someone hadn't heard of Eminem, but what on earth does it matter that Schumer's a "progressive"? Moreover maybe Goldberg doesn't understand that just because young people, particularly young black people, like something doesn't make it "progressive." While I'm sure there's all sorts of uplifting liberal claptrap in rap music, there's also piles and piles of nastiness in it.

Babyboomer liberals seem incapable of grasping that just because music, drugs, whatever were major themes of their own comfy rebellious phases that these props are not universal constants for "progressive" movements, or movements at all. Get over yourselves already.

My old "colleague" Norman Ornstein said something very odd on public radio yesterday (I use quotation marks because Norm was (and is) a major scholar at AEI when I was a mere policy gnome). In a conversation about John Kerry's potential veeps, Norm suggested that a very good pick might be....Donna Shalala, the current president of the University of Miami and former HHS Secretary in the Clinton White House. Now, I think Shalala's sharp and all that, but what the hell is Norm thinking? We're on the verge of a major culture war conflict in this presidential campaign and he thinks picking an aging feminist -- who looks like an aging feminist -- who is ferociously pro-choice and who is widely rumored to live an alternative lifestyle is the best move for a very liberal Senator from Massachusetts? I wouldn't traffic in the rumor except for the fact that she was kinda-sorta outed by Andrew Sullivan in the New York Times a few years ago and there's no doubt whatsoever that her orientation would come up again. Norm Ornstein knows a lot about politics, but I've got literally know idea what he could be thinking.

Remember him? Well, he sent me a new email. I'd responded to the last "F*** you" email by saying "you're all class Tommy." Here's his response:

You're a right wing loser. What do you know about business or Vermont? Your a sniveling little employee for an extreme neo-fascist magazine. The whale had no choice but to spit your ugly butt back into the sea, Jonah! Enjoy your pathetic little life. Next time get your facts straight.

Yeah, he's really the guy to "change the tone"

Last week I post this item about The New Republic running an article by John R. Bradley formerly of the Arab News. Bradley's articles have in the past featured some fairly nasty comments about Israel and The New Republic. I'm not quite sure if I stepped in the middle of something or if I started something or a little of both. But my friend Peter Beinart said they took all of this very seriously and he sent me the following by way of an explanation, clarification, etc. It works for me since I trust The New Republic to be a better defender of its own honor than anyone else. That said, their explanation does make Arab journalistic outlets sound even more dicey than I thought:

From the New Republic:

We have decided to continue using John Bradley's articles because we are convinced that he did not write the phrases in the article posted by AlJazeerahinfo.org (which incidentally is not related to the TV network Al Jazeera.) Bradley says that he did not write the phrases identifying the New Republic as an "ultra-right campaigning American political journal that has long been defined by its crude Zionist agenda" and comparing Nazism to Zionism, but that they were inserted by the AlJazeerah website. He has complained many times to the site, and finally has written to the site and forecefully asked them to remove the article, which they have done. He also has compiled a record of writing fairly about the Middle East, and has published his pieces in a number of prestigious journals, including Prospect, the London Telegraph, the Washington Times, the Economist, Salon, and others. In fact , he resigned from Arab News because the publication published an article that compared yarmulkes to Nazi flags.

From one of several readers telling me the same thing:

Jonah -- Pat Toomey was interviewed yesterday morning on an Allentown radio station and was asked about the Specter / Les Sheaffer ad. He vehemently denied the accusation, and was prepared to present evidence (letters, etc.) of a longstanding relationship he'd had with the Sheaffer family ("beginning with my first year in the House"), including copies of legislation into which he'd inserted language that would help people with MPS.

I checked Toomey's website today but it had nothing on this subject (www.pattoomey.org).

Still, might be worth following if Toomey produces the evidence. Somebody is lying, and I don't think it's the challenger...

Continuation of this large immigration...could divide the United States into a country of two languages and two cultures....such as Canada and Belgium....The transformation of the United States into a country like these would not necessarily be the end of the world; it would, however be the end of the America we have known for more than three centuries. Americans should not let that change happen unless that are convinced that this new nation would be a better one.