Here's a letter to the editor which appeared in the San Antonio Express-News this week:

"Unfortunately, America has its neocons and the Islamic world has its bin Ladens," spews columnist Mansour O. El-Kikhia in his rant last Friday ("Support for U.S. growing thinner"). Later, he dismisses an Arab inferiority complex as nonsense, then goes to great lengths to explain why Arabs have an inferiority complex.

I'd like to attack his argument, but I can't find one. Yes, the Arab world is a sociopolitical mess. Western policies share some fault, but it's primarily because of that civilization's inability to modernize, secularize and adopt government structures based on principles of democracy and egalitarianism.

But I don't expect El-Kikhia to understand that.

Jonah Goldberg once wrote, "If I declare I have the Holy Grail in my pants, can bake 12-minute brownies in four minutes, eat kittens because vests have no sleeves and that aardvarks tend to split their infinitives, I may well be a brave dissenter from the bourgeois norms, but I'm (also) certainly a jabbering lunatic."

How applicable.

Chris Doremus, Lakehills

One of the fascinating things about the EU’s various governing bodies is the way that they manage to combine corruption and cant in roughly equal measures. Nowhere is this more true than in the relentlessly moralizing EU ‘parliament’. To take one example, the way in which many MEPs manipulate their expenses has long been an open secret. Now someone’s talking:

“A senior member of the European parliament yesterday exposed what he claimed was widespread corruption at the Strasbourg assembly by revealing that nearly 200 of his fellow Euro MPs had faked attendance at parliamentary sessions in order to pick up generous daily allowances. Hans-Peter Martin, an Austrian Social Democrat MEP, said he had seen scores of colleagues signing on for parliamentary sessions which they had missed, to claim a daily attendance allowance of €262 (£175).”

They'll get away with it, doubtless.

Here’s a review of a nasty little play now on the London stage. Read it while sitting down. Read it while calm. Read it with a gentle CD playing in the background. Read it with a soothing drink in your hand. Read it while wondering whether the anti-Americanism of certain sections of the European intelligentsia has now become pathological. That’s not a question that should take long to answer. And then notice when the reviewer writes this:

“In Beaton's view, only the West is wicked, bringing Armageddon down on its own head. The crimes of the Islamist fundamentalists are conveniently glossed over. Moral equivalence doesn't come much more poisonous than this.

“Almost equally distressing is the lameness of the jokes and the routine mocking of Blair and Bush's Christianity - we watch the pair of them singing a song called We're sending you a cluster bomb from Jesus.

“Of course, though Beaton evidently regards Christianity as fair game, he lacks the balls to satirise the far more malign fanaticism of the Muslim world. That after all would be really risky. Far safer to pander to the self-loathing of the liberal intelligentsia.”

The reviewer is right. In an open society there ought to be nothing wrong, or – and how I hate that word- “offensive” about debating, satirizing and even ridiculing the religious beliefs – or the lack of religious belief – of others. Islam, however, seems to be exempt from this exchange. Criticizing that faith is somehow defined as ‘Islamophobia, ’ a nonsense notion invented with only one purpose – to stifle the criticism of a religion that is long overdue a great deal of criticism. And soon. What a joke. What an insult.

The successes of multiculturalism, continued:

”A school yesterday banned children from wearing England soccer shirts in case they incited racial tension.

”Parents of pupils at Grange School in Stourbridge, West Midlands, were told their children could not wear anything with the England motif during a non-uniform day to mark the last day of term.

”The decision followed attacks on the school by vandals spraying graffiti offensive to white people and the school did not want to heighten tensions."

BLITZER: Well, John, I get the sense not only what Dr. Rice just said to you and other reporters at the White House, but what administration officials have been saying since the weekend, basically that Richard Clarke from their vantage point was a disgruntled former government official, angry because he didn't get a certain promotion. He's got a hot new book out now that he wants to promote. He wants to make a few bucks, and that his own personal life, they're also suggesting that there are some weird aspects in his life as well, that they don't know what made this guy come forward and make these accusations against the president. Is that the sense that you're getting, speaking to a wide range of officials?

KING: None of the senior officials I have spoken to here talked about Mr. Clarke's personal life in any way. But they offer a very mixed picture. They say that he was a very dedicated, a very smart member of the senior White House staff, that he was held over because of his expertise in the Clinton administration on terrorism issues and the Bush administration, these officials say, wanted a smooth transition. They also say, and many top Clinton administration officials support this, that Richard Clarke could be irritable. He could sometimes get angry at those who did not agree with him. That is an opinion shared in both administrations. And, in the end, of course, he did not get the No. 2 job at the Department of Homeland Security and he decided to move on.

Cosmo takes no offense whatsoever. Cosmo and I have looked at the issue several times. There was Cosmo's interview with the president of Pakistan, and my own meager efforts here , here and here.

From a reader:

Hello:

"The problem is that ... the black community simply cannot meet the demand for qualified students." Hmmm ... so, in this context (failure that can be placed at the foot of blacks) there is a black community. In other contexts (where the blame can be placed on whites or on our economic/social/political systems and institutions and blacks demand redress of that blame) we are Americans who should not be divided. Interesting.

As an American who happens to be black, I believe that we are one people, Americans, in all contexts. So, I think that ALL of our problems are the failure of ALL Americans and that ALL Americans bear a responsibility for fixing them. Now, I suppose that white conservatives cannot go into these homes where kids who happen to be black are doing so poorly in school and replace the absentee fathers and convince the mothers to stop having fatherless kids and turn off the television and rap music and put the basketballs and footballs away. Or then again maybe you can, we don't know because it isn't as if conservatives have tried ... not only have conservative charity efforts not made it a priority but conservatives tend to shun public education and social work professions, and conservative individuals are not nearly as noted for their willingness to adopt or serve as foster parents of black kids as are, say, gay individuals and couples. Still, it is mighty re vealing that inner city charter and private schools are being founded by a tiny minority of liberal rebels willing to buck the public education terrorists while wealthy conservatives and their foundations would rather give money to the Heritage Foundation and to research the backgrounds of prominent liberal politicians and activists. So, while it may be true that black kids underperform, what are conservatives doing about it? Absolutely nothing direct, on a large scale, or of consequence ... it is allowed to remain a black problem, and so long as that situation exists I don't want to hear you guys talk about how we blacks need to quit being so concerned with our racial inequities and grievances and start seeing ourselves as Americans.

Derb - The modern faith in the power of words on paper knows no bounds. Forget the Kellogg-Briand Pact. My favorite example was from NY Governor George Pataki. "It is conceivable," he said upon signing a hate-crimes bill a few years ago "that if this law had been in effect one hundred years ago, the greatest hate crime of all, the Holocaust, could have been avoided."

Ah, that's what would have stopped Hitler -- a law saying it was illegal to exterminate millions!

I know Steve already raised this point earlier this week, but I still don't understand why liberals are so angry about high gas prices. Okay, I guess I do understand, I'm just astounded. For example, Bill Clinton and Al Gore raided the Strategic Petroleum Reserve the last tine gas prices went through the roof. Now Gore is a longstanding champion of alternative fuels. The best way to get the market to pursue alternative fuels is for the current fuel in use to get more expensive. Indeed, Gore at the time was the nation's biggest champion of "lockboxes" -- well what is the SPR if not a lockbox? Since commodities are fungible, Gore could have just as easily come out in favor of raiding the Medicare trust fund to offset high gas prices.

Similarly, how many times have we heard Euro-envious liberals talk about how enlightened Europe's outrageously expensive gas prices are? But when the free market results in American gas prices rising to a third of what they are across the pond the same liberals are stunned by the regressive cruelty being done to the working man. I guess it's a classic example of how the State is sanctified in the eyes of liberals, and therefor harm inflicted by it is holy.

That was a remarkable statement they put out, Kathryn--and, I'm afraid, a foolish one. There have always been pro-lifers in the all-or-nothing camp: people who object to our trying to ban partial-birth abortions when all the other abortions are just as bad. The bishops' conference has thankfully not been among their number. Until now.

They object to the Kass council's recommendation of a time limit for embryo research. They say it's not good enough: There's no good reason to allow the destruction of a one-day-old embryo but to prohibit the destruction of a fifteen-day-old one. That limited point is, in my mind, wholly correct. But that's a reason to say that we should prohibit research past the fifteen-day mark while working toward a complete ban. It is not a reason to trash the idea of partial legislative action.

Keep in mind that what the council is proposing is not just an end to federal funding--it's making research on embryos past a certain age illegal. The president has not even called for this. Sam Brownback hasn't. The bishops themselves haven't in any significant way been trying to do this.

The bishops also object to the proposal to make it illegal to clone an embryo with the intention of implanting it in a woman's womb. They say this ban would not be enforceable--as of course it would not be, against a rogue scientist. It would, however, effectively prevent industries from arising out of certain kinds of biotechnological manipulation that the bishops themselves oppose.

In the interests of charity, let's come up with an argument for the bishops' position that they themselves do not articulate. Perhaps they are worried that the council's proposals will undercut the momentum for more sweeping alternatives that they favor. But that clearly cannot be their reason for coming out against the date-certain proposal: Nobody has a stronger alternative. Nor is there strong momentum behind a stronger and better ban on human cloning.

The whole thing strikes me as a failure of political judgment.

In the Manhattan courtroom, Casey also questioned Johnson about whether physicians warn women that a fetus is dismembered during an abortion.

``So you tell her the arms and legs are pulled off? I mean, that's what I want to know. Do you tell her?'' Casey asked.

``We tell her the baby, the fetus, is dismembered as part of the procedure, yes,'' answered Johnson, a University of Michigan professor and research scientist at the school's Center for Human Growth and Development.

Casey asked Johnson if doctors tell a woman that the abortion procedure they might use includes ``sucking the brain out of the skull.''

``I don't think we would use those terms,'' Johnson said. ``I think we would probably use a term like 'decompression of the skull' or 'reducing the contents of the skull.'''

The judge responded, ``Make it nice and palatable so that they wouldn't understand what it's all about?''

Johnson, though, said doctors merely want to be sensitive.

``We try to do it in a way that's not offensive or gruesome or overly graphic for patients,'' Johnson said.

I'm pleased that you all could be here for the first bill signing ceremony of the year 2004.

The Unborn Victims of Violence Act provides that, under federal law, any person who causes death or injury to a child in the womb shall be charged with a separate offense, in addition to any charges relating to the mother. As of today, the law of our nation will acknowledge the plain fact that crimes of violence against a pregnant woman often have two victims. And therefore, in those cases, there are two offenses to be punished. Under this law, those who direct violence toward a pregnant woman will answer for the full extent of the harm they have done, and for all the crimes they have committed.

I appreciate members of the United States Congress who have joined us today. Majority Leader Bill Frist is with us from the Senate. Thank you for coming. Majority Leader Tom DeLay of the House of Representatives -- Members from both political parties have joined us. I appreciate the members on stage here, House bill sponsor, Congresswoman Melissa Hart from Pennsylvania, is with us. Senate sponsor, Senator Mike DeWine from Ohio, is with us. And the Chairman of the Judiciary Committees, Senator Orrin Hatch and Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner, are with us, as well. Thank you all.

I appreciate those in attendance today from across the country who have worked hard to get this bill passed. I also want to thank Sharon Rocha and her husband, Ron Grantski, for joining us today.

This act of Congress addresses tragic losses such as Sharon and Ron have known. They have laid to rest their daughter, Laci, a beautiful young woman who was joyfully awaiting the arrival of a new son. They have also laid to rest that child, a boy named Conner, who was waiting to be born when his life, too, was taken. His little soul never saw light, but he was loved, and he is remembered. And his name is forever joined with that of his mom in this statute, which is also known as Laci and Conner's Law. All who knew Laci Peterson have mourned two deaths, and the law cannot look away and pretend there was just one.

Each of these families on this stage has lost a child, or a grandchild, or both. Carol and Buford Lyons, Tracy Marciniak-Seivers, Stephanie Alberts, Cynthia Warner -- I thank you all for your courage for coming today.

As these and the other families understand, any time an expectant mother is a victim of violence, two lives are in the balance, each deserving protection, and each deserving justice. If the crime is murder and the unborn child's life ends, justice demands a full accounting under the law.

Until today, the federal criminal code had been silent on the injury or death of a child in cases of violence against a pregnant woman. This omission in the law has led to clear injustices. The death of an innocent unborn child has too often been treated as a detail in one crime, but not a crime in itself. Police and prosecutors had been to crime scenes and have shared the grief of families, but have so often been unable to seek justice for the full offense. The American people, as well, have learned of these cases, and they urged action. The swift bipartisan passage of this bill through Congress this year indicates a strong consensus that the suffering of two victims can never equal only one offense.

The moral concern of humanity extends to those unborn children who are harmed or killed in crimes against their mothers. And now, the protection of federal law extends to those children, as well. With this action, we widen the circle of compassion and inclusion in our society, and we reaffirm that the United States of America is building a culture of life.

It is now my honor to sign the Unborn Victims of Violence Act of 2004.

Some months ago, the EU got into trouble when its 'racism and xenophobia' monitoring center tried to suppress findings that much of the rise in european anti-semitism is attributable to young Muslims. Now it seems like Brussels is up to its old tricks again. The Daily Telegraph has more:

"A study released by the EU's racism and xenophobia monitoring centre astounded experts by concluding that the wave of anti-Jewish persecution over the last two years stemmed from neo-Nazi or other racist groups.

"The largest group of the perpetrators of anti-Semitic activities appears to be young, disaffected white Europeans," said a summary released to the European Parliament . "A further source of anti-Semitism in some countries was young Muslims of North African or Asian extraction."

According to the Telegraph, the contents of the report tell a rather different story, however:

"The headline findings contradict the body of the report. This says most of the 193 violent attacks on synagogues, Jewish schools, kosher shops, cemeteries and rabbis in France in 2002 - up from 32 in 2001 - were "ascribed to youth from neighbourhoods sensitive to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, principally of North African descent. "The percentage attributable to the extreme Right was only nine per cent in 2002," it said. The report on Belgium said most of the fire-bomb and machine-gun attacks on Jewish targets were the result of a spillover from the Palestinian intifada. The European Jewish Congress accused the EU watchdog of twisting data from the 15 member states to suit its own ideological bias, describing the report as a catalogue of "enormous contradictions, errors and omissions."

Every time you think that the corrupt and authoritarian 'Union' has lost its ability to shock, it comes up with something else. So what's going on? The EU's bureaucracy is not, whatever people may say, riddled with anti-Semites, although there's no doubt that some of the criticism of Israel from Brussels has tipped over into an expression of that ancient hatred (some of which, interestingly, has been displaced into an anti-Americanism that has long since lost any connection with the rational). The real culprint, however, continues to be Europe's unwillingness to contemplate the nature of the challenge it now faces. It's not a challenge that's going away, but if the EU's establishment has to throw a few Jews to the wolves in order to preserve the multicultural illusion for a little bit longer, that's exactly what it will do.

"In coming days, the liberal media will be awash with spokesmen of the Muslim community voicing a predictable mixture of self-righteousness and theological platitudes about the benign nature of their religion."

Sound familiar?

And then there's this:

"An implacable scepticism among those who shape public opinion towards lame excuses for terrorism would also go some way to denying the perpetrators the moral justifications they still appear to need. Finally, instead of teaching a bland, rights-focused multiculturalism, let alone atheism, under the aegis of "religion" as irrelevantly proposed by Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, our educators should think hard about their failure to inculcate our values, be they religious or secular or a combination of the two, in the minds of Britain's very own generation of terrorists."

That's well said.

"Rich,I don't know about you, but I did things when I was a kid that I would never do now, such as shooting birds, woodchucks, etc ffor no good reason down on my Grandparent's farm. Never bothered me in the least. Could never figure out why Dad, after telling me that he used to do the same thing as a kid, would say, 'Yeah, I just kinda lost my taste for hunting at some point. I don't want to hurt them for no reason.'

Well, now I understand. Last summer I had to take care of a woodchuck that had taken up residence under my parent's deck. It had 'menaced' my Mom in the back yard, since she would by virtue of where it's hole was get between him and his home. I did what I had to do, but didn't feel good about it. In fact, I felt terrible for weeks.

The same change in attitude applies to so many things. I never was much of a bully, but used to 'let things happen' that now a days I would NEVER allow to happen. Somewhere in my late teens I broke away from the herd "impress others" mentality. I think most people do. It's called growing up.Maybe there is a chemical reason for this, maybe a psychological reason. Maybe adolecent boys can't immediately deal with the sudden spike in testosterone that comes at that age.

I think that, maybe not for all of them, but certainly for some, those boys will look back on their actions that day and cringe. I bet you at least a few of them, 20 years from now, will remember that day as one of the most shameful days of their lives, the day they burned to death an already mortally wounded man and then danced in the gore.

I hope they do at least."

WASHINGTON–The Cato Institute today announced that the winner of the second biennial Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty is internationally recognized economist and property rights activist Hernando de Soto.

"Mr Lowry,

You usually have good perspective but I think your assessment of our situation following the Fallujah atrocity is off base.

While, I share the rage I am confident that our response will be effective and appropriate and largely off camera.

I suspect some of what you describe as a lack of response to the atrocity can be explained as part of the CF that happens in a warzone. Also, your correspondent is likely correct that we did not want Marines shooting these animals in front of the TV cameras present at the site.

Still, I am confident that this will be the opposite of Mogadishu. We'll systematically kill and capture the people who did this using proven intelligence methods and harsh, focused tactics. The gloves remain off, but they were already, despite the failures we've experienced recently. Before they leave, the Marines are going to kill a lot of people who richly deserve it. We should thank God for their service every day.

The 'big picture' is that completing a 'long hard slog' is part of our strategy in that it demonstrates will and commitment that will make it easier in the future. By continuing in spite of this televised atrocity, we are reversing the lesson of Mogadishu and, to a degree Clinton's 'Legacy.' Sad to say, but this savage act may be seen as a 'bookend' in the historical narrative.

Today the President’s Council on Bioethics released a report on reproductive technologies that deserves attention from all concerned about technological abuse of human life.

Most welcome is the Council’s support for banning specific activities that demean human dignity: creating human/animal hybrids; placing human embryos in the bodies of animals, or in women’s wombs for purposes other than a live birth; buying, selling or patenting human embryos.

Also welcome are recommendations for monitoring in vitro fertilization (IVF) clinics, to prevent harm to women and children. These proposals should be strengthened by Congress.

Unfortunately, two Council recommendations raise serious questions.

First, the Council favors banning the use of embryos in research beyond a certain number of days in their development. Notably, members did not agree on the number of days, or on the reason for this policy. Some believe such a ban would be better than the current situation, in which federal law does not ban privately funded embryo research at any stage. Others want to use this policy to weaken current laws on federally funded research, which respect the human embryo at every stage. The decisive fact is that human life is a continuum from the one-celled stage onward. Any cutoff point after this event is arbitrary -- providing no principled reason not to extend the time limit for destructive research, once the precedent is established. We should not start down this road, but explore ways to discourage research that attacks any human life.

Second, the Council recommends a ban on “conceiving a child” using procedures such as cloning, or the use of eggs derived from fetal tissue or embryonic stem cells. However, “conceiving a child” according to the Council means only the act of creating an embryo “with the intent to transfer it to a woman’s body to initiate a pregnancy.” A cloning ban based on what a researcher may “intend” to do with an embryo after cloning occurs is, first of all, unenforceable. More importantly, it misstates where the wrong lies in such procedures. Human cloning is wrong because it treats human life as an object of manufacture – not because a researcher, having created the embryonic human, may “intend” to allow him or her to survive. These procedures should simply be banned.

The 9/11 hearings and the testimony of Richard Clarke remind me that Republicans have been here before, though it was before my time, and they were on the other side.

For years after Pearl Harbor, the right asked (and answered its own question): Had F.D.R. dropped the ball? Charles Beard, the liberal historian turned isolationist, made it an article of faith. Thomas Dewey accused Roosevelt of unpreparedness in 1944 when Dewey was the last Republican Presidential candidate to run against him. The sober form of the Republican case was that the American military was not up to snuff in December 1941, even though the Second World War had been going on for over two years. The harsher form was that the United States had intelligence of Japan’s intentions on the eve of Pearl Harbor and hadn’t acted on it. The paranoid form was that the White House had deliberately not acted on intelligence, knowing that a successful surprise attack would bring America into the war. (The Republican case against Roosevelt, then, was both bellicose and pacific: He ought to have done more, and he wanted to do too much.)

" As the victims lay burning, a crowd of around 150 men chanted "Long live Islam" and "Allahu Akbar" ("God is Greatest") while flashing victory signs for the television cameras."

"The small towns they lived in in southern, suburban and rural England are exactly where I grew up, which sends a shudder down my spine. Evil has come to the Shire! What this amounts to, I think, is theological, ideological terrorism that requires no state sponsor as such and no actual network like al Qaeda. And this is surely the trend. It certainly looks as if Madrid was a similarly loosely-connected operation. I'm not saying it means we should ignore state sponsors, like Iran. Au contraire. But I am saying that a policy that focuses entirely on state sponsors is going to miss an important part of the problem."

He's right to be worried, and in the point he is making. It will, to say the least, be very interesting to find out more about these individuals. If they (ethnic Pakistanis, apparently) were indeed brought up in the UK in, we should assume, reasonably mainstream families, where did the hatred come from? The usual 'acceptable' causes (racism, a sense of exclusion, economic deprivation and so on) will doubtless be blamed regardless of their actual relevance to the facts, but I wonder if there's something else. Over the last twenty or thirty years, British universities, the schools and the media have relentlessly focussed on the supposed evils of western civilization. Have some people actually been paying attention?

From a reader:

Carter's nuclear training consisted of six-months classroom training and six-months of hands-on training at a prototype (i.e., operated a land-bound Navy nuclear propulsion plant under supervision). The program produces excellent operators, but they are definitely NOT nuclear physicists. I say that as a guy who holds BS & ME degrees in nuclear engineering and has worked with a lot of ex-nukes.

From a reader:

Thorstein Veblen was a very eccentric economist that could not be bothered with things like collar stays so he used a safety pin to close his collar, those decorative gold pins in collars are called Veblen Bars.

Charles Murray -- who wrote a book with his lovely wife (she's very cool) on the Apollo program -- chimes in about engineers:

Catherine and I must have met a couple of hundred of them during our research for the Apollo book. And almost all of these were gov't engineers, not private sector. I met precisely one who was a liberal. Maybe others were too, but among everyone who even mentioned politics, being conservative was taken for granted. I think there is a distinction between the engineer mindset, which is definitely, "There's a way to fix that," and the impulse to extend that mindset to human problems, which seems to be a proclivity of intellectuals.

Whoops. That leads to one other thought: Apollo got almost none of its engineers from the Ivy League.

Charles

I seem to recall that when the bodies of Sadaam's sons were put on display, we were told this was 'un-Islamic'. Lets see what the mullahs, the imams and the other holy men have to say about this incident.

My buddy from CNN's American Morning has got the skinny on Kerry's shoulder. From the Borowitz Report:

FLIP-FLOPPING MAY HAVE INJURED KERRY’S SHOULDER

Doctor Advises Senator Not to Change Positions for Two Weeks

With Senator John F. Kerry (D-Mass) set for shoulder surgery in Boston today, an orthopedic surgeon familiar with the Senator’s condition said that Mr. Kerry’s penchant for flip-flopping may have caused the injury to his shoulder.

“Constant or repetitive flip-flopping can cause major orthopedic damage,” said Dr. Robert Claman of Massachusetts General Hospital. “If it goes unchecked, flip-flopping can injure a shoulder far more seriously than tennis or golf.”

Dr. Claman said that Mr. Kerry first felt a nagging pain in the tendon of his shoulder at the outset of his quest for the Democratic nomination, when he started flip-flopping on his vote to authorize military action in Iraq.

“At first he started favoring his right shoulder, but as [Former Vermont Governor] Howard Dean started gaining in the polls, he started favoring the left,” Dr. Claman said.

The orthopedic specialist added that once the surgery is completed, he would strongly urge Mr. Kerry not to change his positions for the next two weeks to give the damaged tendon time to heal.

“I told him that if he goes out there and starts flip-flopping on gay marriage or taxes, he’s going to wind up right back on the operating table,” Dr. Claman said. “He agreed with me at first, then disagreed, but then agreed with me again.”

In other news, the French lawyer who is defending Saddam Hussein said today that he was actively seeking the lone Tyco holdout juror to sit on the Iraqi madman's jury.

http://www.borowitzreport.com/

Make a cocktail with 4 ounces Nyquil, two ounces peyote, some eyedrops, a dab of tequilla and the ashes of a burnt Tito Puente album cover (preferably from his early work). Then drink it down as fast as you can and then just as fast smoke three unfiltered Camel cigarettes simultaneously. Then watch this and I all but guarantee you'll either go on a vision quest to another planet or on a three state killing spree.

From another angry engineer:

Jonah: STOP THIS MADNESS!!!! I have no way of contacting Steve Hayward, so I must rely upon you. Jimmy Carter is a farmer by trade, not an engineer. To the best of my knowledge, he merely attended Georgia Tech. He graduated from the US Naval Academy with a degree in nuclear physics. I, on the other hand, graduated from Georgia Tech (home of the Final-Four-bound Yellow Jackets) one helluva mechanical engineer. And I turned out OK (as evidenced by my incredibly unproductive engineering career made possible by my incessant monitoring of the Corner, archived G-files and old PBS documentaries about the history of gnomes).

I've gotten piles of email from, on and in response to engineers. Poppa Goldberg chimes in:

The most notorious and ingenious engineer of the last century was Howard Scott, who was at his peak influence in the 'thirties as the founder and leader of the Technocrats, a group - or party - of several thousand engineers who wanted to remake America according to the radical ideas of Howard Scott, who indeed was a genius, especially in energy strategies. He wanted to widen all the railways (allowing speeds of over 200 mph), link all parts of the country by linking all rivers and canals, redoing all housing into more energy-effricient units, and on and on, right through the economy. Engineeers would rule the country in a Technocracy. His followers would drive to their conventions in what was called the Grey Fleet, all their cars being gray. There is no question Scott was a genius and his ideas on remaking America were in many cases right on, still relevant and radical today, but his following always remained in the low thousands and although there probably are a few followers today the Technocrats and Howard Scott were on the narrow sidelines of 'thirties history, brushed aside by the New Deal. (Actually, he developed most of his programs in the '20's. This is a good example of how the most logical and most efficient solution may not be the best nor what people want.

Me I didn't know all that, but I am pretty sure that Thorstein Veblen was a leader in the Technocracy movement.

I'm getting lots more angry emails from engineers who don't want to smeared as liberals. I hear what you are all saying and that's why I posted that email from the engineer. But I should say two things:
1) I don't think Sanchez meant, literally, engineers so much as people who see problems and automatically set about solving them. Alec Guiness from Bridge on the Rive Kwai might be a good example or analogy. Guiness got it in his head that he should solve a problem, he didn't ask the larger question about what it would mean if he actually built the bridge. Anyway, I don't think engineers should get too bent out of shape about what Sanchez wrote. If you disagree, take it up with him.

2) Engineers have not always been conservatives. Back when socialism was considered "scientific" lots of engineers and other scientists were not merely liberals, but Marxists. As one reader (my Middle Eastern history guy) explains:

Jonah,

In the U.S. context, engineers may be politically conservative, but
historically, their predilection for viewing human nature, politics,
etc., as problems to be solved has led them to be over-represented in
various totalitarian movements. A wise friend of mine once said,
"America is run by lawyers; the Soviet Union was run by engineers."
("Social engineering" was originally a positive term.)

A more contemporary example might be the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt,
whose membership was so characterized by middle-class, disaffected
technocrats that Egyptian slang dubbed the Ikhwân al-Muslimîn (Muslim
Brotherhood) the Ikhwân al-Muhandisîn ("The Brotherhood of Engineers").

A reader makes an excellent point which applies to the sciences generally -- they are cumulative disciplines, much like conservatism:

Jonah, There is an immediate refutation of Julian Sanchez's theory is that liberals approach problems through an "engineering" mindset and that is that the majority of engineers are in fact very conservative in their views, both political and technical. Engineers don't approach each problem as a new, never-before encoutered problem as liberals seem to do. Instead, each new problem is viewed as a variation of a problem a previous engineer has surely encountered somewhere, so the problem is reduced to researching previous sucessful answers to homologous problems and adapting them to the new situation. Can you imagine if the Boeing engineers designed the next generation of jetliners the way liberals would design our next health-care system?

Julian Sanchez chimes in on my liberals-vs-conservatives love-of-lineage posts.

I think he's right when he says:

My own speculation is that contemporary liberalism is much more likely to be associated with an engineering or problem-solving mindset. What I mean is that I think libertarians and (maybe) conservatives are more prone to start with fairly abstract questions (what's the proper scope of government? how are we required to treat each other, in general? what are the preconditions of stable civil society?) and then tweak whatever broad conclusions they come up with to accomodate practical problems. It seems as though liberals more often form their views in a more bottom-up, pragmatic way, as a series of responses to practical problems. That is: People are poor and going without healthcare, how do we fix this? Our schools are in bad shape; how do we fix this? If you start out that way, you're going to care in the first instance about the empirical particulars of contemporary problems, about which historical liberal authors will have less to say, especially if they were more likely to have that same focus. The divide between theoretical and engineering dispositions is probably more likely than any general attitude toward change to explain the difference Goldberg's talking about. Academic liberals in, say, philsophy departments (which is to say, the most theoretically inclined) clearly do have their history down—Richard Rorty cites Dewey and Pierce at every opportunity.

In fact, I did write: "Ask a liberal about his tradition and he will talk about deeds and efforts to remedy injustice, not ideas. This is in keeping with the legacy of William James' preference for action over thought, though I doubt most liberals know or care that this is so..."

Again, I'm going to save a lot of this for my book, but I think James and pragmatism generally have a lot to answer for in terms of the problems created by a philosophical school which sees no principled justification for not trying to fix any problem in front of it before thinking about it first (yes, I know this is a bit of a distorting generalization).

On that note, I haven't looked for it myself yet, but does anybody know of an authoritative libertarian (preferably Hayekian) critique of James or pragmatism?

Kathryn, if I must share with this gig with the turnpike Comstock, here's my suggested split:

Jonah: Dewars, Johnnie Walker, and Chivas Regal; Andrew: Dalmore, Tormore, Glenmorangie, The Glenlivet, Glendronach, Talisker, Aberlour...

That looks fair and balanced to me.

Kathryn: The pro-research cloning members of the commission are trying to spin the latest recommendations as an effective endorsement of their position. But note that the recommendations were unanimous, earning the support of both supporters and opponents of research cloning. Opponents of embryonic stem-cell research are on much firmer ground in claiming a victory: The specific policies outlined in the report go beyond what we have previously sought.

The council now urges that Congress prohibit "the creation ex vivo of a human embryo with the intent to transfer it to a woman's body to initiate a pregnancy." That's not the same as what the pro-research cloning bills before Congress do. They make the transfer, not the creation, a crime, and thus effectively mandate the destruction of human embryos. This proposal would never require such destruction.

Second, the council unanimously agrees that Congress should set a limit past which embryo research will be illegal. It says that research that destroys human embryos older than fourteen days should not be allowed. Some council members would set the limit at ten days; others at zero.

In 2001, the president came out against federal funding of embryo destruction. The council has called for a moratorium on research cloning. These recommendations conflict with neither policy. Indeed they go further, setting limits on embryo research whether or not federally financed. The restriction on cloning is not completely enforceable, but it would do a lot to keep a reproductive cloning industry from springing up in America.

That the council made these recommendations, and did so unanimously, is a victory.

From my Playboy Guy (by which I mean, literally, he works for Playboy but on the business side, not the "how cool is it to work for Playboy?!?!" side:

Jonah,

I'm not sure where I fall out on this, but I guess I probably agree with you. I have a major problem with the whole "TV in the car" thing to begin with, so I guess it would be hypocritical of me (not that that matters, I know) to defend car porn. So I won't.

But a bigger issue you may want to consider along these lines is when porn is delivered to your cell phone or PDA. Short video clips for $0.99 (or whatever) are already widely available in Europe and the Far East and are coming to a small screen near you very soon. Then what do we do about the guy on the subway or in line at the bank or at the next table in the restaurant who's spending an awful lot of time "on the phone"?

Okay, first of all the story says you can watch while driving. That's crazy, hence the safety issue should trump the rest of this conversation. Two, as a supporter of locally crafted censorship, I don't see why we can't leave this up to local communities and the states. Some places allow drinking open containers while driving, some don't. Three, the comparison to Playboy is not good. Playboy is very different from, say, "The Adventures of Little Anal Annie." If I see a guy reading serious hardcore porn openly on a park bench near, say, my daughter's playground he's going to have some serious problems. I would certainly expect any decent cop to tell the guy to put it away (the magazine, I mean). Four, if all Andrew is in favor of is leaving sad dudes who need to go park somewhere out of the way to watch porn alone, I agree, leave them alone (which, recall, was my original position). However, having a law on the books would let cops exercise their judgement when necessary. If some dude's parked in the lot outside Kay Bee Toys watching "Naughty Cheerleaders Nine," I am perfectly comfortable with Johnnny Law telling the guy to move along.

As for all the emails from folks asking what I think about putting the TV up to the window of your house and other bizarre hypotheticals, I think common sense, decency and existing laws should apply. I don't think this is a subject worthy of crafting huge over-arching principles of liberty and privacy over.

I've read a few emails and I've changed my mind. Ban car porn (by which I mean human porn in cars not, say, films about AMC Pacers and El Caminos gettin' it on). I was taking the position that your car is an extension of your home, but it's really not. One: You can make a perfectly legit safety argument (porn is designed to be distracting unlike, say, Diane Rehm). Two: it is very easy to expose kids to it. Three: It's creepy. In short, the infringement is clearly minimal while the potential damage is considerable. If you must watch porn in your car, do it in your garage.

Coalition officials worry about the spread of misinformation or outright propaganda because it can lead to violence and undermine efforts to stabilize Iraq. This week, a Baghdad newspaper run by followers of Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr was shut down after coalition officials said the publication incited violence against the U.S.-led force occupying Iraq. Military officials say the newspaper, Al-Hawza, called on readers to take up arms against U.S. forces.

"It's one thing to call us pigs," one coalition official says. "But when you call on people to take up a rifle or take up a knife to slit the throat of the American pigs, that crosses the line. If we let this go on unchecked, people will die."

From a reader:

Jonah,

For the first time since the commies and NBC ruined the Olympics I am looking forward to the Games. The Iraqi team will be the perfect storm of message and media. The pure amateur athlete overcoming long odds (as opposed to steroid laden pro's brought about by the CCCP) meeting with those endless NBC personality profiles.

The stories about Iraqi athletes competing for the first time in years without fear of torture if they do not meet the expectations of the Hussein family should run endlessly. I am expecting numerous interviews of victims of the Iraqi torture machine on network television. This is something that has been conspicuously absent from any of the liberation coverage.

Nothing gets American blood pumping like tortured athletes. Call your friends at the RNC and get them to sponsor the Iraqi water polo team.

I'm not the Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu waza Banga I'd hoped, but I did get this nice note from the Sun:

Jonah,

I saw your comments about the headline switch on Susan Reimer's column. While you are truly a media power to behold, in this case the explanation for the switch was something simpler.

When stories -- especially columns -- come over in the automatic feed to the web site overnight, sometimes the headline from the jump page gets incorrectly inserted as the main headline. The first headline ("In a grassroots movement, moms of all political persuasions organize to oust Bush") ran today on page 5E, and spanned all six columns. The main headline ("Moms with a goal: unseat Bush") spans two columns on the "Today" section front, 1E.

An online producer here noticed it and fixed it this morning.

Regards,

Tim Windsor
Deputy General Manager
baltimoresun.com

Dear Ms Lopez

having worked in Kosovo (99 - 2001) in the Media Affairs Dept of the OSCE, we faced similar issues while trying to help establish an "independent" media that would help defend and support the establishment of democratic institutions in the region. To put it bluntly, it was not an easy task. When various newspapers and radio stations attempted to exact justice through their "news" reporting, the UN's SRSG (B. Kouchner) and the OSCE agreed that a regulating agency had to be established to control this dangerous behavior. Thus the Temporary Media Commissioner's office was established. Below is a paragraph from an OSCE report explaining why this was needed.

"On 27 April 2000, Dita published an article along with a photograph of Topoljski, a Serb employee of UNMIK, accusing him of criminal activities against Albanians during the NATO action. On 15 May, Topoljski was found dead. The Special Representative of the Secretary General (SRSG) Bernard Kouchner passed an executive order on 3 June 2000, closing the newspaper’s offices, and effectively shutting it down for 8 days. Immediately afterwards UNMIK established the TMC and promulgated the Media Regulations."

Of course our department thought this office was in conflict with our mandate as I stated above. But we also realized that it was a necessary evil that had to deal with a concrete danger. If we had left the Kosovar media free to broadcast or print what they wished, we would have had daily attacks on people identified as criminals and terrorists. One reason we could defend the TMC was that we did not have a functioning judiciary. There were no effective libel or slander laws in place, but, again, even if there had been the court system was not able to prosecute such cases. So the TMC was an expedient to deal with a real danger emerging in Kosovo.

I reiterate, our department was not happy with the institution of the TMC, but we needed a means to maintain discipline within the media until they understood what the principles and role of an independent media were in a civil society and what responsibilities were involved with the power that these media outlets possessed. We had a conflict in the application of human rights - defending the rights of individuals from unsubstantiated attacks in the media that could lead to physical attacks, while at the same time we tried to encourage the development of an independent media that would help defend the principles of human rights in Kosovo.

Not easy.

I sympathize with the people in Iraq trying to maintain the same balance.

I hope that helps explains the problems they face.

Sincerely,

Arvo Marits

(From Bloomberg News):

Peter Clarke, head of the Anti-Terrorist Branch of London's Metropolitan Police, "said the police had consulted local and national Muslim leaders in connection with the arrests ``to address any concerns they may have.''

LONDON — Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, al Qaeda's purported operations chief, has told U.S. interrogators that the group had been planning attacks on the Library Tower in Los Angeles and the Sears Tower in Chicago on the heels of the September 11, 2001, terror strikes. Those plans were aborted mainly because of the decisive U.S. response to the New York and Washington attacks, which disrupted the terrorist organization's plans so thoroughly that it could not proceed, according to transcripts of his conversations with interrogators.

In a grassroots movement, moms of all political persuasions organize to oust Bush.

Kevin Drum echoes a point made by a great many readers regarding my post about the liberal tendency to ignore their own intellectual tradition compared to the conservative tendency to embrace theirs. And since I won't be around for a chunk of the morning (hence all those posts with my name on them), I figured I'd write one long post in response to everyone who made that point using Drum as my foil. Drum writes:

But isn't the answer to this pretty obvious? Conservatives, almost by definition, are absorbed by the past. What's more, their message doesn't change much over time (tradition is good, stable society is good, the masses should get back to work and stop complaining) so it makes perfect sense to keep reading them. In fact, if you take the conservative reverence for tradition seriously, it almost demands that you have considerable respect for your forebears.

Liberalism is precisely the opposite. We don't wonder what Charles Beard would think of something? Of course not. The whole point of liberalism is change, so who cares what Beard would have thought? By now he's just an old fuddy duddy.

Those with a reverence for the past read long dead authors and feel at home. Those who disdain the past and relish cultural change won't give them the time of day. Right?

In one sense Drum is absolutely correct. That is obvious -- which is why I didn't mention it. But I'm not talking about run-of-the-mill liberals, I'm talking about professional liberals, liberals who take ideas seriously for a living. I think Drum is one of those people, but his cavalier disdain for his own intellectual tradition is disappointing (I'm more accustomed to his disdain for my intellectual tradition). There are liberals who do take their intellectual pedigrees very seriously: John Judis, Michael Sandel, Peter Beinart and, as much as it pains me, Michael Lind and Eric Alterman come immediately to mind (though Alterman's not a liberal, but a Leftist). More important, I know lots of liberals who take history seriously.

However, I'm frankly at a loss as to how a serious liberal can disdain his movement's history while taking general history seriously. I know it happens, of course. The level of ignorance among liberals in their own complicity in what they consider to be dark chapters of our past constantly astounds, from the "Red Scare" during WWI to the American eugenics movement (Margaret Sanger anyone?) to that pesky conflict in Vietnam -- which John Kerry incessantly describes as Richard Nixon's fault, as if to two liberal presidents and many liberal Congresses did not precede it. Besides, if liberals want to concede that they are not only enamored with every new idea that comes down the pike, but that they don't even know or care whether these ideas have been tried before, great! That will make debating them all the easier (and/or frustrating).

Secondly, it's just a lot of garbage that conservatives are dismissive of new ideas. It wasn't too long ago that the late Pat Moynihan noted that Lionel Trilling's much-repeated observations about liberalism's dominance had been reveresed. In the last two or three decades it is very difficult to think of a serious body of new liberal public policy ideas. This is not my observation, I can't tell you how many think tank panels I've watched or TV shows I've produced on this point. I mean that's why the DLC and the Center for American Progress exist, right?

Third, the far left and the racial left is far less enamored of change than the right these days. Not to say the right loves change (cozy up to the Postrellians for that), but the Left despises it. It is anti-science, anti-globalization and anti-modern. It wants to keep Third World culture frozen in amber and, along with most liberals, opposes any meaningful changes in governmental institutions in favor of individual liberty. The GOP (flawed vessal that it is) wants to reform social security, medicare and the tax code, creating a shareholder society. The Democratic Party rejects entitlement reforms if they are defined as anything other than throwing another trinket on the back of an already overburned mule. During the campaign, Al Gore's biggest idea was a "lock box" and his favorite word was "stop" -- but yeah, right, liberals love change. When Florida tried to change its education policies away from affirmative action and in favor of a system which would send more minority kids to college, the activists stormed the governor's office and sang "we shall overcome." Talk about being saddled with nostalgia.

And lastly, hasn't The Washington Monthly and Drum himself spent much of the last couple years moaning about how "radical" conservative foreign policy has become? Josh Marshall had that cover story about the Bush plan to export democratic revolution around the world and all that, remember? I mean, that's not quite yet an too "old" an idea for liberals to care about, is it?

Advisory from a reader:

In the next week, Turner Classic Movies will be showing the two films that most spurred the HUAC investigation into Reds in Hollywood. Both films are out of print (unavailable on tape or DVD), so this is a relatively rare opportunity to see future "Fifth Amendment Communists" (as Ronald Reagan later called them) in action (but you will need to set the VCR or Tivo in all likelihood).

On March 31 at 2am (ET), we get Song of Russia (1943). See New England-style townhall democracy in the Soviet Union, as well as the free exercise of religion under Stalin!

Even better, on April 6 at 3pm (ET), is Mission to Moscow (1943). This one is truly mind-boggling, as it presents the Great Purge show trials as legitimate exercises in jurisprudence, and actually has a portrayal of Stalin explaining why he HAD TO enter into the Nazi/Soviet nonaggression pact of 1939 (which sealed Poland's fate).

Grab these two while you can.

The great trilogy of paeans to Uncle Joe can be completed by buying The North Star (1943), which lapsed in the public domain, and is thus available very cheaply. This one was written by Lillian Hellman--do you need to know more?

After seeing these three, Joe McCarthy begins to look a whole lot better!

From a reader:

Hey Jonah!

If 'tis any consolation, I wore my "Striking terror into the hearts of CESMs everywhere" T-shirt this past weekend. The liquor store clerk recognized you, and before long we flew by your mother and Linda Tripp, and were doing bad Bill Clinton impersonations together. Several other people encountered during the day asked about what a CESM was. God, it's good to live in red state America!

And to think I almost bought a "Pop Culture is Filth" shirt instead. Oh well; maybe next time. I'm still waiting for the Ramesh Ponnuru collection of Federalist slogan shirts.

Best,

Cody L. Stanford
(Use the name, if thou wishest.)

From a reader:

Jonah-

I think this is my new favorite Kerry quote to torment my Democratic friends with. Fortunately, they're playing it repeatedly on MTV as a promo for one of their asinine get-out-the-vote charges.

Some young guy on the street: "What would be the principal difference between the foreign policy of your administration and that of the Bush administration?"

Kerry: "The principal difference would be just about everything."

No kidding.

From a reader:

Jonah, Being a Jurassic Park fan, the following is scary but neat: From the Sun-Sentinal: "Another safeguard scientists are designing to provide total control over artificial cells is to make their lives dependent on chemicals that do not exist in the environment. Withdrawing the critical chemicals would result in the death of the cells, particularly if they should escape into the environment."

Evil Laugh.

Best
pj

From one of my academic moles:

From her speech, "Undoing Gender," presented at Ohio State March 29, 2004, Judith Butler's words of wisdom: "Challenge the assumption that a natural dimorphism should be maintained at all costs." "...the epistomological question of what sex can be perceived at all outside the cultural matrix" On accepting DSM-IV trans-gender diagnoses to get funding for The Operation: "One exercises this right only by submitting to a pathologizing discourse." "We must be undone in order to do ourselves." At this point, the whole audience ought to have suspected she just did us.

From a reader:

(Yeah, he wishes.)

Seriously, Howard Dean's on Maria Bartiromo's SPECIAL REPORT on CNBC right
now, and he actually said that he'd prefer a president with combat
experience over one without.

I don't recall him saying this during his campaign.

I've edited out Harris' very kind comments to me, for the record:

Dear Mr. Goldberg,

You make an excellent point about the American tradition of "If at first you don't succeed, try, try, try again," and I am in complete agreement with you about how important this has been to our long run success. Henry Ford is a wonderful example. However, I would like to make the following point, with which I think you will agree.

This attitude of "try, try, try again" is natural to the entrepreneur, who by definition is a risk-taker, and hence is fully aware that there is a necessary connection between high risk and high profit, just as economist Frank H. Knight argued.

But this same attitude will not be found in those for whom it never makes any sense to take a risk: academicians and those moving up the corporate ladder. For them, routine is the path to success, and not risk--though, of course, we are now talking about two quite different notions of success.

The pertinent question, however, is this: Which model is the appropriate one to guide our political leaders? The risk model or the routine model?

To me, and I suspect to you, the answer is obvious: The risk model. The risk-taker is not surprised that his risk hasn't paid off, and immediately goes back and begins to meditate, "Where did I go wrong?" For Henry Ford, it was the realization that the future of the automobile was not the high price luxury yacht model, but the inexpensive bicycle model.

Alas, those people who have been following the routine, and who go wrong, are apt to look around for someone else to blame. Hey, we did everything by the book...so how could we have messed up? Certainly, the book couldn't have been wrong.

At which point they start holding hearings, to find out who didn't follow the correct procedure. (Sound familiar?)....

Your fan,

Lee Harris

"Rich,

You make a very good case today re how the substance of much of Clarke's testimony is being overlooked due to the spin. But you end up buying into an interesting error he makes when you argue the following:

Clarke apparently agrees that law enforcement is an inappropriate paradigm for fighting. He noted the problem with accepting the rules of evidence that apply to criminal cases when it comes to terrorism. He was, for instance, frustrated when the Clinton administration called in the FBI to confirm Iraqi involvement in the attempted assassination of the first President Bush in early 1993, creating an unnecessary delay. He explained, 'And that took from February of '93 through the end of May. And it was done in a way that was reminiscent of a criminal process. At least the FBI case was. The CIA case was an intelligence case and had different sources of information, different standards for what was admissible, and a more lenient standard for making a determination. But I think beginning then, I was frustrated by that kind of evidentiary process.'

I am the first person to agree that terrorism is primarily a national security rather than a criminal justice problem. BUT, in this particular, Clarke is hallucinating. The attempt on Bush 41 took place in mid-April 1993. The intelligence did not suggest Iraqi terrorism until late April. Clinton promptly dispatched the Feebs in May, the interviews and forensics were completed by early June and the cruise missile strikes were on June 26. .) With an accurate timeline, the law enforcement performance is not nearly as bad as Clarke suggests.

Interesting, though, is why Clarke is probably confused here. What happened in February 1993 was the bombing of the WTC. Clarke, of course, is now hellbent on closing his eyes to any suggestion of an Iraq/Qaeda connection. While he was still couterterror czar, though, years after the Bush assassination attempt, Clarke wrote an internal memo explaining that when the WTC was first bombed, he immediately thought Iraq because of the Bush assassination attempt. Obviously, that can't be since the assassination hadn't happened yet. FYI: Paul Wolfowitz described this incident in his Commission testimony when Roemer asked him a direct question about Clarke. Here's the reponse:

WOLFOWITZ:. . . By the way, I know of at least one other instance of Mr. Clark's creative memory. Shortly after September 11th, as part of his assertion that he had vigorously pursued the possibility of Iraqi involvement in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, he wrote in a memo that, and I am quoting here, 'When the bombing happened, he focused on Iraq as the possible culprit because of Iraqi involvement in the attempted assassination of President Bush in Kuwait the same month,' unquote. In fact, the attempted assassination of President Bush happened two months later. It just seems to be another instance where Mr. Clarke's memory is playing tricks.

Again this isn't a debate. But herewith is an attempt at equal time. For the record, I don't mean to be so grumpy about this, but posts about religion always generate scads of email. That's great, but sometimes I really don't have the time to be the traffic cop for some of these debates. And as of right now, we don't have a better system for dealing with this sort of thing. Anyway, a few representative emails:

Jonah:

Regarding your corner post "I'm not starting a debate," I have a few bones to pick.

As a good Lutheran, I am compelled to offer that your catholic friend fails to understand that protestant religions are fundamentally different. I would even go so far as to say that they are as different from each other as each is from Catholicism. It would stand to reason, then, that discussing the works of Calvin for example with, say, a Lutheran would be as absurd as discussing them with a Catholic.

And...

I know, I know . . . You're not trying to start a debate.

Nevertheless, let me just say that your e-mailer (Catholic vs. Protestant thing) was off-base. The reason Protestants don't have to defend the statements of their forebears to the same extent is precisely because the leaders of Protestant denominations have not been declared "infallible" by their respective denominations. Catholics have only themselves to blame by setting themselves up as "the one, true church" and proclaiming that the words of their Popes come straight from God himself.

As far as I know, Conservatives do not make such grandiose claims.

And...

Protestant epistemology puts Scripture on the level of infallibility and everyone else pays cash. This explains why the Protestant gladly falls back to scripture.

Catholic epistemology puts the Scripture and Tradition (Nicea, etc and
Popes, etc) on the level of infallibility, etc.

When the Catholic quotes Luther, Calvin, etc. The Protestant can say,
"anybody can have a bad day. He goofed." But the Catholic has to argue
around the infallibility thing.

MARY MCCORMACK (‘K STREET’) MOVES UP TO PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE WHEN SHE GUEST-STARS ON NBC’S ‘THE WEST WING’ AS PRESIDENT’S NEW DEPUTY NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER

BURBANK - March 29, 2004 - Mary McCormack (“K Street,” “Private Parts”) will guest-star on a four episode arc on NBC’s Emmy Award-winning “The West Wing” (Wednesdays, 9-10 p.m. ET) as the President’s (Martin Sheen) new deputy National Security Adviser whose first encounter with the Chief Executive proves to be more brusque than she expected.

McCormack’s first episode, “The Promise,” will be broadcast later this spring. In the storyline, she plays Kate Harper, a U.S. Naval Academy graduate and military prodigy who is not afraid to stay true to her advice and convictions.

But I thought some folks might find this email interesting:

Jonah:
Can't wait for your "Fascism" book.

Your Corner post today on "Liberal Roots" recalls a similar phenomenon in
Catholic/Protestant discussions.

Protestant apologists will often put Catholics on the defensive with some
stupid/incendiary/un-P.C. (pick one) statement by a pope or a saint. This
requires Catholics to defend, explain, or minimize the significance of the
statement. Catholics, OTOH, can't easily do this to Protestants, most of
whom do not have a sense of heritage outside of Scripture itself.

RC: Calvin said . . .
Prot: I'm not a Calvinist.

RC: Luther said . . .
Prot: I'm not Lutheran.

RC: Jerry Falwell said . . .
Prot: I'm not a Southern Baptist.

etc. Of course, there are exceptions. But still, the sense of heritage is
much larger for Catholics than it is for any Protestants. For example, a
Catholic could be put on the defensive by any nasty statement attributed to
any Catholic figure; a Lutheran, however, though presumably interested in
what Luther wrote, wouldn't feel at all responsible (I think) for what John
Knox or Wycliffe might have said.

Don't know if that helps or is interesting. But I thought of it immediately
when I read your post.

Lee Harris has a very interesting piece on America's "pagan" love of success. I think it's very interesting because it is, but I think at a basic level he's wrong. My own reading of America's business culture and even its culture generally is that we are amazingly forgiving of failure. Business men run two, three, five companies into the ground before they come up with a winner. In America, unlike say Japan or Europe, a guy who makes a lot of mistakes is "experienced." A man who's run five businesses into the ground and succeeds with the sixth is an "entrepreneur." In the broader culture I think we forgive failure so long as it comes with contrition of some kind -- we call them "second acts" and the list of famous people who've had them is endless.

I should also say that one could even define conservatism as the persistent faith in the possibility of human failure.

Where I think Harris is right is that we expect success from people who claim to demand success. The Bush team, for example, gets a very hard time for its perceived arrogance. We tend to judge people by the standards they set for themselves. That's why, by the way, I set my public standards so low -- so that I seem to achieve excellence with such stunning regularity!

From a reader:

Jonah,

In 1993 I attended a luncheon at the West Coast Petroleum Refiners' Association. The speaker was an LA county prosecutor. She told a room of 1000 mid-level refining execs and managers that LA County and CAL-OSHA, CAL-EPA, USEPA, and USOSHA had agreed to co-ordinate their prosecution of first line and second line supervisors for any violations of the vat of alphabet soup environmental and safety regulations. She further announced that they had agreed to go after these people, PERSONALLY. She said, inn so many words, violate CAL or US OSHA or EPA and we'll take your house! And we won't let your employer repay you!

The room was pretty quiet. Appetites seemed suppressed. When she asked for questions at the end of her little talk, the gaping group was silent. Being from the Midwest and not within the LA prosecutor's grasp, I did venture a couple: Has your office considered the impact on the cost and benefits of this approach? Won't this approach make it hard to find people who will work at refineries? Her crisp response: "Sir, if California were a country we would have the fourth largest GNP in the world. I don't think anything the LA Prosecutors' Office does will affect that."

Ha ha.

Oh so you want to build a refinery in California. Don't even think about it.
Dan Hirsch
Waukegan IL
Flyoverlandia

PS. I also asked her if they would prosecute an injured worker who contributed to his injury by violating regulations. Her not so crisp response, "Oh, we'd handle that on a case by case basis." Heh heh.

Re the search case, although I haven't read this or the 1994 opinion and I don't handle criminal matters, based on the facts in the article, it doesn't sound like a huge expansion. There has always been a "plain view" exception to the need for a warrant. Basically, if police are there for a lawful purpose, any contraband that is in plain view can be used against the defendant.

This opinion simply allows use of contraband found while the police are checking areas a potentially dangerous subject may be hiding. The police still have to be there lawfully and their actions have to be for a valid, articulable reason, that is unrelated to searching for illicit material. I'm sure that if the police weren't given permission to enter the room or they checked the defendants sock drawer and found a gun, that evidence would be tossed, because they weren't there lawfully and checking a sock drawer in no way adds to law enforcement safety.

In short, the court recognized that conduct such as looking in a closet or under a bed, is motivated solely by genuine concerns for the safety of law enforcement and innocent civilians. Finding contraband while looking in a closet for this valid reason, (which, remember, is completely unrelated to a search aimed at finding contraband), is, in essence, the same as seeing contraband upon entering the room.

These requirements and limitations amount to a probable cause or reasonable belief standard. For this exception to apply, the subject has to be potentially dangerous and the contraband is found while law enforcement is looking in the limited places where the subject could be hiding. There would be no argument if they looked in the closet because of a noise or if they heard cries for help. So, why should there be any less of a reasonable belief the subject is in the closet simply because he is quiet?

The reason we have the Exclusionary Rule is to deter unconstitutional conduct by law enforcement. If a police officer's conduct is solely motivated by an immediate and present concern for safety, then it cannot be said their actions are unconstitutional.

I'm trying very hard not to dilute the impact of my book by reporting on every (mind-blowingly fascinating and book-buyingly compelling) factoid I uncover while researching and w-r-i-t-i-n-g my book (the dashes are intended to communicate what a laborious process the actual writing is). But one thing that really does fascinate me -- and which doesn't divulge too much about my book -- is the generalized ignorance or silence of mainstream liberals about their own intellectual history. Obviously this is a sweeping -- and therefore unfair -- generalization. But I read a lot of liberal stuff and have attended more than a few college confabs with liberal speakers speaking on the subject of liberalism itself. And it seems to me that liberals are intellectually deracinated. Read conservative publications or attend conservative conferences and there will almost always be at least some mention of our intellectual forefathers and often a spirited debate about them. The same goes for Libertarians, at least that branch which can be called a part or partner of the conservative movement.

Just look at the conservative blogosphere. There's all sorts of stuff about Burke, Hayek, von Mises, Oakeshott, Kirk, Buckley, Strauss, Meyer, the Southern Agrarians, et al. I can't think of a single editor or contributing editor of National Review who can't speak intelligently about the intellectual titans of conservatism going back generations. I'm not saying everybody's an expert, but I think everybody's made at least the minimal effort to understand their intellectual lineage and I think that's reflected in conservative writing, for good and for ill. I would guess that the same hold true about the gang over at Reason.

I just don't get the sense that's true of most liberal journalists. When was the last time you saw more than a passing reference to Herbert Croly? When was the last time you read an article or blog posting where a liberal asked "What would Charles Beard think of this?" This is a little less true of the far left press because, I think, their alienation from mainstream politics is a bit similar to conservative alienation and so they remember their grievances and martyrs better. But for mainstream Democratic Party liberals one gets the sense that the history of their movement is all about action and emotion and very little about ideas. Some of this can be explained away by the nature of liberalism as opposed to the nature of conservatism. Conservatives (and Hayekians) must believe that knowledge is cumulative but progress isn't chronological. Liberals are under much less of an obligation to remember old lessons and stay loyal to the permanent things. For liberals John Kenneth Galbraith's legacy, for example, are not his now largely discredited economic ideas, but his still revered intentions for using the government to fix problems. Ask a liberal about his tradition and he will talk about deeds and efforts to remedy injustice, not ideas. This is in keeping with the legacy of William James' preference for action over thought, though I doubt most liberals know or care that this is so (while I can think of no conservative who wouldn't be jazzed to be told his idea was "Hayekian" or "Burkean"). This is a huge tactical advantage for liberals in political battles because they can disown old ideas in ways we cannot.

I bring this up because A) I think it's interesting and B) because I've been reading a lot of the "founders" of modern liberalism and I've generally been stunned by how alien their ideas would seem to contemporary liberals. I'll save much of that for the book, but I'll give you one example of the left's tactical advantages. In the last year the "neocons" have been skewered by a host of critics, most recently Tim Robbins, for their alleged allegiance to Leo Strauss. It is asserted by a great many of Strauss' critics on the Left that he advocated lying to the public if it is in the interest of the State or of virtue etc. This is all very tendentious and invariably unfair to Strauss. But since Strauss' fans are generally conservatives they won't abandon him, even though he's dead. Now, even if it were true that Strauss advocated "lying for Justice" or some such, it is laughable in the extreme for the left to be particularly outraged at the idea given the incredibily old pedigree this notion has on the left. Whole schools of Marxist and Leftist scholars endorsed this notion as a doctrine. Georges Sorel's and others concepts of the "vital lie" animated far more than a few bookish Straussians, it lit fires in the breasts of whole movements. But most liberals probably don't even know who Sorel was. Rather they inherited the logic and traditions of leftist politics without having to take responsibility for leftist ideas.

Just thinking out loud.

Steve - I knew you knew more about this stuff that I did. But I have a very minor quibble. You write "...but by far the biggest reason is simply a shortage of refining capacity for California-specific gas." I think that "but" distorts the picture. Is the lack of California-specific refineries really a different issue than the environmental regulations and additives? Isn't it really a sympton of that issue?

The reason I bring it up is that I think the "but" clouds the free-market argument. Whenever the state imposes regulations there will be ripple effects and unintended consequences. If California had never passed those laws, the lack of those refineries wouldn't be an issue. I'm sure there are liberals who think the problem isn't the law but the lack of refineries and if "we" only built more refineries the law would work properly. But that would create new ripples and new costs down the road. In short, your point about the refineries is a great one but it's not a different factor from those regulations it is a consequence of those regulations. I know you understand this better than me, but in this case the semantic point is a substantive one too, I think.

All that really needs to be said of STET, Damnit! is to reiterate that it contains the complete “Misanthrope's Corner,” and, hence, is a required purchase. It is a tour de force, a book to be saved for the grandkids. You will find, once you own it, that it is a particularly useful chronicle of the Boy Clinton years, though it is a bit surprising in retrospect how little fun King actually had at his particular expense. One would have thought Clinton was exactly the yeasty sort of material for which her scalpel had been whetted, and occasionally it flashes: “I knew there was something familiar about Bill Clinton. The moment Paula Jones said 'hotel' and 'convention' my youth came back to me. The Prez reminds me of the Man on the Plane, the ubiquitous middle-aged businessman with husband written all over him who lives for out-of-town flings.”

From a reader:

Jonah,

You owe me lunch. I thought of an Arab nation that CAN
and DOES launch investigations against its rulers:
France!

Your friendly research assistant

From a reader:

Jonah,

I agree it would be nice for the media to explain the privilege - but don't you think there's some memory of Clinton's bogus privilege claim and that has poisoned the waters somewhat? I think Rich would agree that Clinton set the presidency back a whole lot in terms of respect for the office.

While I'd love to hear Condi myself, Katy Couric (I think) was just interviewing the head of the 9/11 commission who was stating HE'd like Condi to testify in public. He stated her closed-door testimony cleared many things up and that there are no smoking guns, but he'd like the public to hear her testimony, too. Although this is noble, to want the teaming masses to hear Condi directly, why is her availablity in public, in spite of her availability to the investigators, so important? The head of the commission further quoted someone who said something like, "some things are more important than standing on principle".

SO.. Condi has "nothing to hide" and her testimony "cleared many things up". CNN made it sound like her testimony wasn't under oath and the commissioner stated he'd like her "sworn public testimony" so the people could hear her.

...implying if her testimony were sworn and she was in public... what? It wasn't truthful before?

Bias?

Best,

Dave

The AARP is running these ads for the Medicare drug benefit which play off the drug war. After showing footage of drug busts and the like they switch to some oldsters sitting in front of the TV watching drugwar footage. The voiceover explains there's "another drug war in America" and then the ads close with the tagline about how winning cheaper prescription medicine "is a drug war we can win."

Is this some veiled attempt to rally younger folks to their cause? It just seems like a pretty tendentious comparison and one that in the abstract isn't all that helpful to their case.

He passed away.

A Bloomberg-style smoking ban (that’s mean-spirited, scientifically illiterate and thuggish, in case you’ve forgotten) comes in force tomorrow in Ireland. In Ireland! The Daily Telegraph has more:

“Further along the bar, Declan Cotter, a 28-year-old sales representative for a drinks company, is smoking his sorrows away with long, intense drags. "Our culture is based around pubs. That's where we meet," he says. "Irish people class the pub as an extension of their parlour, of their house. Now it's being changed.

"We're expecting a 25 to 33 per cent downturn in sales because people will start drinking at home. But it's not just about the facts and figures, it's about our culture." The facts and figures do, nonetheless, make uncomfortable reading. In Ireland, the first country in Europe to impose such a ban, it is estimated that 65,000 jobs will be lost through a decrease in trade. Many smaller, rural pubs are expected to close altogether.”

For vandalism, this new law takes some beating.

For a hint of more civilized times, however, check out the description of James Joyce and his pub lunch of “a glass of burgundy, a gorgonzola sandwich and a cigarette.”

Perfect.

Representatives. Tom Osborne (R-NE), Frank Wolf (R-VA) and Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-CA). They are calling on the NCAA and its member schools to end all alcohol advertising during radio and television broadcasts of collegiate sporting events.

The fanatics at the Center for Science in the Public Interest approve, needless to say.

Historian David McCullough on the state of historical knowledge in America’s universities:

Further evidence of "something that's eating away at the national memory," Mr. McCullough says, is a survey last year of seniors at 50 top colleges and universities by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. "It's astonishing. More than half didn't know George Washington was the commanding general of the Continental Army during the American Revolution who accepted Brig. Gen. Charles Cornwallis' surrender at Yorktown.”

"Thirty-six percent thought it was Ulysses S. Grant," commander of the Union Army during the U.S. Civil War. "Six percent said it was Douglas MacArthur," U.S. commander during the Korean War. "Thirty-two percent said Washington. It was a multiple-choice question. They were winging it.

"If you don't know what Yorktown was all about, and that Washington was the commander, you don't know ... a lot about American history that you ought to know."

No, you don’t.