While David Brooks' latest column begins with a wholly unconvincing argument that Dean would be an easy target for Republicans, he eventually abandons this partisan opening to write a somewhat-interesting piece about, well, partisanship.

Now, there is a Democratic liberal mountain and a Republican conservative mountain. Democrats and Republicans don't just disagree on policies — they don't see the same reality, and they rarely cross over and support individual candidates from the other side. As Gary Jacobson, a political scientist at the University of California at San Diego, has shown, split-ticket voting has declined steadily.

Brooks fails to point out, unsurprisingly, that this partisan shift is at least partially due to the heavy (and profoundly ideological) partisanship of legislators themselves, and that is due to a spectrum shift over the past 20 years, where Democrats have moved a little bit right and Republicans have moved a long way right, leaving a new "center" and the current divide. He also misses the fact that the anti-RINO movement is much stronger than the anti-DINO movement, by orders of magnitude.

The basic point is accurate, though, and he goes on:

The question is whether this evolution changes the way we should think about elections. The strategists in the Intensity School say yes. They argue that it no longer makes sense to worry overmuch about the swing voters who supposedly exist in the political center because the electorate's polarization has hollowed out the center. The number of actual swing voters — people who actually switch back and forth between parties — is down to about 7 percent of the electorate. Moreover, the people in this 7 percent group have nothing in common with one another. It doesn't make sense to try to win their support because there is no coherent set of messages that will do it.

Instead, it's better to play to the people on your own mountain and get them so excited they show up at the polls. According to this line of reasoning, Dean, Mr. Intensity, is an ideal Democratic candidate.

The members of the Inclusiveness School disagree. They argue that there still are many truly independent voters, with estimates ranging from 10 to 33 percent of the electorate. Moreover, the Inclusiveness folks continue, true independents do have a coherent approach to politics. Anti-ideological, the true independents do not even listen to candidates who are partisan, strident and negative. They are what the pollster David Winston calls "solutionists"; they respond to upbeat candidates who can deliver concrete benefits: the Family and Medical Leave Act, more cops in their neighborhoods, tax rebate checks.

By this line of thinking, Dean is a terrible candidate. His partisan style drives off the persuadable folks who rarely bother to vote in primaries but who do show up once every four years for general elections.

I agree with Brooks' description of the two "camps" (in general), but I think he (and the inclusionists) miss a few key points:

First: What the "intensity" school and the "inclusionary" school define as an "independent" can be and are very different things. Many (if not most) supposed "independents" are heavy "leaners"... although they can theoretically cross over, they're generally pretty loyal to one party or another, especially if their ideology or perceived interests makes it difficult for them to embrace the idea of voting for the "other party". It is possible to attract them, but at the cost of having to move either directly to the center or even over to the "other side". Even then, it's not a guarantee. The lower figure of 7-8%, I believe, better describes the number of true leaners.

Second: while it's certainly sexy within American political culture to describe oneself as "anti-ideological", it runs smack into the brick wall of reality: everybody holds an ideology. What one calls "ideological" usually refers to "ideology you don't support", and you're right back to the "heavy leaners" again. Brooks' advocacy of "solutionists" misses the point that almost every politician has a solution to whatever problem you care to name. The question is whether or not people will support that solution. Brooks' cited "solutions" are be unpalatable to those who don't share his ideological foundations, and their solutions would likely be unpalatable to him. (Arguing that "more cops in the neighbourhood" is a "solutionist" idea presupposes that the cops themselves aren't the problem. They can be, and often are. Just ask a few visible minorities.)

Third: Not all Americans vote. In fact, many don't vote. Brooks doesn't address the problem of the base "staying home", which is a serious danger when one is chasing swing votes. Ruy Teixeiras argued that trying to increase turnout isn't successful, and if one approaches it from such a global perspective, it may well be true; the idea is to increase turnout of groups that will vote for you, and the importance of that is undeniable. Coupled with the fact that the base pays attention to politics and swing voters often don't, this can make "chasing swing voters" a very poor decision; enough swing voters may be attracted to something as emphemeral as "personality" to make them a non-issue, but the attempt to attract them may alienate the base enough to have them stay home en masse.

Besides, Brooks forgets something: Dean's relatively centrist, and his supporters are fully aware of this. Brooks also forgets (or ignores) that Democrats can easily say that it is the Republicans that are acting partisan, not Democrats, and bring up a wealth of information to support the charge. Bush is more vulnerable now than he's ever been, and the mask of bi-partisan consensus that veiled Bush's partisan reaction to 9/11 is long dead.

Brooks' last mistake? Here:

The weight of the data, it seems to me, supports the Inclusiveness side. And the chief result of polarization is that the Democrats have become detached from antipolitical independent voters. George Bush makes many liberal Democrats froth at the mouth, but he does not have this effect on most independents. Democrats are behaving suicidally by not embracing what you might, even after yesterday's court decision, call the Schwarzenegger Option: supporting a candidate so ideologically amorphous that he can appeal to these swingers.

Aside from the fact that he doesn't explain what (if any) data "supports the Inclusiveness side", and the enormously questionable assumptions placed throughout this paragraph (again, unsupported by anything like proof), he managed to pull one enormous boner:

Schwarzenegger is losing.

Not much of an option, now, is it?

The California recall has been stayed by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Apparently, the decision (which I haven't read yet) references Bush v. Gore extensively, and really focuses on the voting rights problems posed by the use of voting machines declared "unfit" by the secretary of state's office.

This is incredible. According to Yahoo news, the U.S. is now demanding that Japan send troops to Iraq.

The U.S. is demanding Japan send its troops to Iraq early to help rebuild the war-torn country, a Japanese daily reported Sunday, the Kyodo news service reported.
Citing government sources, the Tokyo Shimbun said the U.S. is displeased with the uncertain outlook for sending the Self-Defense Forces (SDF) to Iraq as Japan plans to delay the dispatch until next year due to the worsening security situation there, Kyodo reported.

While the U.S. says Japan is an independent nation and it should make its own decision on dispatching the SDF, it has expressed discomfort with Japan's failure to meet U.S. requests in "sweat-inducing areas," the newspaper said.

Great. So now the U.S. is demanding (not requesting, demanding) levies of troops? Like the "American empire" argument needed any further boosting?

And honestly, this really, really isn't a good economic idea. Japan's economy looks like it's growing again, and I believe that once Japan gets itself sorted out, it may well be the final piece in the puzzle in returning East and Southeast Asia to its role as the fastest-growing economic region in the world. Despite the very real (and very understandable) historical concerns that China and Japan have about each other, the combination of Chinese manpower and Japanese technological skill is a natural one, and the trip across the Japan sea is a much shorter (and therefore, cheaper) one than across the pacific.

It's also likely that the Japanese will move away from the peace constitution and return to the role of a traditional power, as the U.S. military budget becomes more and more strained. While this will undoubtedly create friction with China and Korea, the Japanese culture of today is a different place than the Japan of 1939, and their desired military role will undoubtedly change as well. Japan may well worry about China, but China has too much trouble with internal stability to think about foreign adventurism... and while North Korea is a threat, it's not as much of one as many Americans seem to believe.

While I don't see this arrangement sorting itself out relatively quickly, I do see it having been sorted out by the time the ducks come home to roost on the remains of the American budget. Assuming that American consumers stop being the "buyer of last resort" sometime in the near future (which is likely), Japan will be in a position to tell the United States exactly what it will and will not do for any American imperial ambitions. I suspect that they will remember this (honestly) imperialist insult when dealing with Americans in the future. I know I would.

It looks like the Japanese economy is finally picking up again.

The government on Friday upgraded its assessment of the economy in September for the second month in a row, citing increased capital spending and a pickup in exports.
"The economy is showing movements toward incipient recovery," the Cabinet Office said in its monthly economy report, employing a more upbeat tone than in its August report, when it said the economy "remains roughly flat."

Economic and fiscal policy minister Heizo Takenaka said the economy, which has long remained flat, was finally entering a new phase.

...[t]he Cabinet Office attributed the September uptick to stronger capital spending, helped by an increase in exports, including exports to other Asian countries that had declined due to the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome...

According to the report, exports are "showing incipient recovery," an upgrade from the previous report, when the office said they were "weakening."

Corporate profits are continuing to improve, an upgrade from the previous report, which says they were gradually improving.

While the employment situation continues to be severe, evidence of an incipient recovery can be seen, the report says. In the August report, the office said there were signs of an incipient recovery only in some areas.

This is excellent news... a recovery in Japan will do a lot for the world economy and the East Asian regional economy, and may help the U.S. economy as well. The report also said that the U.S. economy is recovering, although there remains the question of whether it will either head back downward or, perhaps, remain the sort of "jobless recovery" that bedeviled Bush's father. Perhaps it won't, which would be a big boost for Bush.

It depends, I suppose, on whether the deficit really does have a drag effect on the U.S. economy.

While perusing the Toronto Star, I came across a link to the site of one of the candidates in the Ontario (Canada) election, Dalton McGuinty. I looked at the site and found, oddly enough,
Dalton's blog.

The problem, though, is the same as a number of other political blogs: it's sparsely updated (just once a week or so, from the looks of it), doesn't really have the kind of personal information that makes candidate blogs so interesting, a lot of it is just warmed over partisan talking points, and is linked at the bottom of the main page, making it unlikely that people are going to run across it.

It's too bad, because the hectic pace of the Ontario election (it's a month from beginning to end) could make for a very interesting blog, even more so than the Dean campaign blog.

It's a pity, but none too surprising. There's usually a gap time between adopting a new medium and figuring out what makes it work. Dean clued in; others will too.

I somehow doubt this will end well.

Israel's security Cabinet said Thursday it would work to "remove" Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat, a decision that could mean the Palestinian leader's expulsion from his Ramallah compound, the Israeli prime minister's office said.

Thousands of enraged Palestinians in Ramallah, Gaza City, Nablus, Tulkarem and Khan Younis took to the streets in protest.

In Gaza, throngs of Palestinians -- many of them firing rifles and pistols into the air -- marched through the city Thursday night chanting slogans such as "With our blood, with our lives, we sacrifice ourselves for you, Arafat" and "Listen, Sharon, Arafat is not going out."

I just finished seeing the throngs of people outside Arafat's headquarters on CNN, and I'm driven to wonder what, exactly, the Israelis plan to do. They can't simply bull their way into an armed mob... if they used nonviolent methods they'd get shot, and if they use lethal force it'll be seen as a massacre outside of the Israeli and American press. (Depending on the situation, they may even be right.)

Also, what do they plan to do with Arafat once they expel him? They pretty much have to let him go, and I'd argue that an Arafat who is free to travel outside the country is more dangerous than an Arafat still in the West Bank. At least now the U.S. and Israelis can keep tabs on him; if they choose to go through with this, he'll disappear and simply run the show from offstage. It certainly won't placate the Palestinians, who might well be willing to see the back of Arafat were it not in exchange for de-facto Israeli control. The American's can't be happy, as it'll make their job in muslim countries that much harder. Israel's painstaking attempts to gain the high ground, finally achieved with these latest attacks, will be also out the window with the expulsion of a man that is seen as unconnected with those attacks.

Plus, anybody that follows him up will lack perceived legitimacy, unless they are elected, and I can see elections ending up with Arafat winning on a write-in vote just as a symbol of Palestinian independence.

Yes, I was expecting a war. I've gotta say, though- this is one strange way to start it.

Well, it's the second anniversary of the attacks of Sept. 11. I'm not planning on spending a lot of time and verbiage on the occasion (although I remain as saddened and disturbed by it as I ever was), but I'd like to link to at least one ongoing consequence of the attacks: health problems.

Yes, as DailyKos and others have pointed out, it's extremely likely that
the WTC fires poisoned the air of New York and, by extension, the health of New Yorkers.

The burning ruins of the World Trade Center spewed toxic gases "like a chemical factory" for at least six weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks despite government assurances the air was safe, according to a study released on Wednesday.

The gases of toxic metals, acids and organics could penetrate deeply into the lungs of workers at Ground Zero, said the study by scientists at the University of California at Davis and released at a meeting of the American Chemical Society in New York.

Lead study author Thomas Cahill, a professor of physics and engineering, said conditions would have been "brutal" for workers at Ground Zero without respirators and slightly less so for those working or living in adjacent buildings.

"The debris pile acted like a chemical factory," Cahill said. "It cooked together the components and the buildings and their contents, including enormous numbers of computers, and gave off gases of toxic metals, acids and organics for at least six weeks."

That's not the problem. The problem is that it was covered up. The EPA got leaned on by (Kos says) the NSA to declare the "all clear", despite serious questions about whether or not New Yorkers would be affected by this. This essentially amounts to the U.S. government hiding the evidence of a chemical attack; and that's unconscionable. Bush (for where else could this policy have come from?) didn't want New Yorkers to panic and wanted the New York economy back up and running again as quickly as possible. For that, Bush needlessly put the lives of millions of New Yorkers at risk, and there's no justification for that whatsoever. (The economy was already hit, and would have recovered... and everybody would have understood had Bush stated what was really going on.)

Thing is, it wouldn't be so bad if the cover-up had only happened back when the attacks happened, but it's still going on now; the New York Post is trying to politicize it by (naturally) claiming that Hillary Clinton is politicizing it; the "project, project, project" tactic remains as popular as ever.

The Post also hauled out notorious "junk science debunker" Steven Milloy to claim that everything is fine, but Milloy's been so roundly contradicted and humiliated in the past as to be useless- his credibility is shot.

(The howlers on his website about DDT alone places him squarely in the "crank" category, with little hope from escape.)

Sadly, Milloy's case is singularly weak here as well. He claims that:

-the EPA has said things are safe, which begs the question when discussing a coverup;

-"there have been no credible reports that...the air quality has caused any... harm to the public", which not only raises the question of what Milloy knows about "credible" but is blasted in the face of the report linked in the Yahoo story;

-the inspector general's "criticism is absurd because such data are impossible to obtain and isn't necessary because there's no indicatino of health problems", which is not only ludicrous (has he heard of air and soil samples), but contains the huge assumption that there are no health problems (which is unsupported) and that they'd appear quickly and obviously (which is ludicrious);

-The president is perfectly justified in telling the EPA to fudge the numbers because it's a government agency, and (I kid you not) "is an agency that spends most of its time chasing imaginary or infinitesimal health risks from the everyday environment... it's arguably not equipped to operate without supervision in an emergency"... which is the most insane load of tendentious partisan horseshit in the guise of science that I've heard since...

...well...

...the last time I read Milloy.

Other than the desire to drop Milloy into a vat of PCBs, the only thing I can get out of this is that the wingers are really unequipped to deal with this problem. If they were, they'd get a real scientist. As it is, Milloy's presence is probably the best sign yet that something real bad almost certainly happened in New York, and it got covered up.

Were he not relying on a fearful public's desperate belief that their president is trying to do the right thing, this issue alone would get Bush a ride out of town on a rail. As it is, it just provides more reason why he needs to be removed before he does even more damage.

Via TalkLeft: why am I not surprised at the news that Rumsfeld is going hold the Gitmo guys indefinitely without trial?

Rumsfeld said the 660 or so men held at the Guantanamo Bay naval base are imprisoned not as punishment but "to keep them from going back and fighting again and killing people." He said most would be held until the global war on terrorism is over - a fight that Rumsfeld has said could last years, if not decades.

The defense secretary said he expects some suspects to be tried before military tribunals but prefers that most continue to be imprisoned indefinitely.

"Our interest is in not trying them and letting them out," he said in a question-and-answer session after a speech to the National Press Club. "Our interest is in - during this global war on terror - keeping them off the streets, and so that's what's taking place."

Off the streets... and out of their homes. In their own countries. Which isn't America, or Cuba. Sure, it's a good idea to not let terrorists free, but there's one slight problem with that... Rumsfeld doesn't want to prove they're terrorists.

Nice to see that the tactics of some South Americans in the late 20th century are turning into the tactics of some North Americans in the early 21st century.

I had mentioned Riverbend's "Baghdad Burning" in an earlier entry, but I haven't really given her enough credit- it's stunning. It's well written, insightful, uncompromising, and autobiographical enough to really make her points hit home. Points like this:

The one thing I agreed with [Bush's speech on] was this: there are terrorists in Iraq. It’s true. Ever since the occupation, they’ve been here by the hundreds and thousands. They are seeping in from neighboring countries through the borders the ‘Coalition of the Willing’ could not protect and would not let the Iraqi army protect. Some of them are even a part of the Governing Council now. Al-Daawa Party is responsible for some of the most terrible bombings in Iraq and other countries in the region.

Yes. I blame America for that. We never had Al-Qaeda or even links to Al-Qaeda. Ansar Al-Islam are supposed to be linked to Al-Qaeda, but they were functioning in the northern territory with the two Kurdish leaders’ knowledge and blessings.

Then there’s this:

“The attacks you have heard and read about in the last few weeks have occurred predominantly in the central region of Iraq, between Baghdad and Tikrit -- Saddam Hussein's former stronghold. The north of Iraq is generally stable and is moving forward with reconstruction and self-government. The same trends are evident in the south, despite recent attacks by terrorist groups.”

Is he serious? Only yesterday an American armored vehicle was burned in front of the University of Mosul in the north. There have been an increasing number of attacks on British troops in the south- we hear about them everyday. As for Baghdad… it has become a common occurrence. Baghdad Airport is constantly under missile attack and we hear of similar attacks all over Baghdad… or maybe the person who gave him that little fact is the same one who told him where to find the WMD…

“Since the end of major combat operations, we have conducted raids seizing many caches of enemy weapons and massive amounts of ammunition, and we have captured or killed hundreds of Saddam loyalists and terrorists.”

Yes, we know all about the ‘raids’. I wish I had statistics on the raids. The ‘loyalists and terrorists’ must include Mohammed Al-Kubeisi of Jihad Quarter in Baghdad who was 11. He went outside on the second floor balcony of his house to see what the commotion was all about in their garden. The commotion was an American raid. Mohammed was shot on the spot. I remember another little terrorist who was killed four days ago in Baquba, a province north-east of Baghdad. This terrorist was 10… no one knows why or how he was shot by one of the troops while they were raiding his family’s house. They found no weapons, they found no Ba’athists, they found no WMD. I hope America feels safer now.

On top of it all, the borders between Iraq and Iran have been given to Badir’s Brigade to guard. Badir’s Brigade. Unbelievable. I thought the borders needed guarding to prevent armed militias like Badir’s Brigade from entering the country. We have a proverb in Arabic: “Emin il bezooneh lahmeh” which means “Entrust a cat with meat.” Yes, give the Iranian borders to Badir’s Brigade. Right on.

Just a couple of days ago, two female school principals were ‘executed’ by Badir’s Brigade in Al-Belidiyat area in Baghdad. They were warned to resign their posts so that a ‘sympathetic’ principal could replace them. They ignored the threat, they were shot. It’s that simple these days. Of course, that’s not terrorism because the targets are Iraqi people. Terrorism is when the Coalition of the Willing are targeted.

I don't normally quote so extensively, but I could honestly quote the entire blog and not feel guilty about it in the slightest. It's amazing, and shows that far from being the ignorant savages that many Americans seem to see the Iraqis as, they're intelligent, modern human beings, not that much different from their American "liberators". It's important to remember that, and Baghdad Burning is one of the best reminders yet.

Rosie DiManno, of the Toronto Star, has been a big booster for the Iraqi adventure from the get-go. She bought into all the arguments, repeated the "flowers and kisses" arguments, and continues to say that dictatorship (she calls it "genocidal", but I don't necessarily share that interpretation) is a fine sole reason for American conquest.

Now, however, she appears tied up in knots. Faced with the reality that the U.S. is going pleading to the U.N. for help, what's her reaction?

Humble does not become America.

It's also a very bad message to send to the rest of the world — that the only nation on earth with sufficient bite to back up its bark can be reduced to the position of supplicant when asking for assistance in an hour of need.

It would therefore ill behoove the United Nations — by which we mean its more aggrieved, nose-out-of-joint members — to make exacting and punitive demands on the United States after finally getting what it ostensibly most covet: A piece of power in Iraq, dressed up as multilateralism. Oil revenues, reconstruction contracts, political currency, a slice of the profitable pie that will eventually be Iraq when it emerges from this current chaotic period, a difficult passage clearly underestimated in its complications by the White House and the Pentagon.

"Humble ill behooves America"? "It's a bad message"? I haven't heard this argument from freepers. It not only misses the point that Bush is not America and a goodly proportion of the American people wanted no part of his foreign adventure, but this (and the rest of the piece) completely misses the fact that both the U.N. and its Security Council members have a real interest in not playing clean-up for the U.S.

Rosie argues that the people of Iraq deserve the help. This is true- they do. The Americans appear to be making a hash of it, judging by, say, Riverbend's account of her experiences. The question is whether the people of Iran, Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, or any number of other potential U.S. targets for invasion deserve that, and the jury is most assuredly still out on that one. If the U.S. can be confident that the U.N. will come in to administrate (and most importantly fund) it's adventures, it has little to no reason not to put the neo-con's plans into action- it's politically and financially covered, and the costs to the U.S. itself can be easily backloaded until after Bush's second term. Foreign governments need to operate with the knowledge that Bush may get a second term, and has demonstrated that he's willing to tie any and all foreign adventures to the nebulous "war on terror" in order to get the American people onside. They can't afford this any more than America can, and certainly can't afford the instability that it will create in their regions and (in many cases) in their own populations.

(Rosie argues that the biggest and most important contributions would be from "India, Pakistan, and Turkey"- precisely the countries with the most to lose from inflamed Muslim anger. Just because it didn't happen for Saddam doesn't mean it won't- Saddam was a secularist running a divided country; Saudi or Iran would be an entirely different story.)

Honestly, though, I think she knows her argument is ludicrous:

It would have been far more preferable if Washington had gone to the U.N. in May, hard on the heels of its successful invasion, when Iraqi crowds were still cheering the troops' entry into Baghdad. That moment, when it appeared the U.S. didn't need the U.N., would have been the optimum time for multinationalizing the venture.

But potential allies squeezing America now for reasons vain and craven does no one any good and does Iraq a great deal of harm.

Rosie, the fact that they didn't do so has everything to do with this. When they thought it would be a cakewalk, everybody and his dog proclaimed the death of the U.N. Now that things are rougher, they come back to wheedle for money and help? I know what my response would be, and it would sure as hell not be overly diplomatic. The ambassador from "freedom" probably has loads to say about that. If the U.N. caves now, they're toadies- a rubber-stamp for the U.S. If they hold firm, however, then the modern necessity of reconstruction has just given the U.N. very real power. That's important, in the long run, and if the Iraqi people suffer because the U.S. put the U.N. in this position, it's on nobody's head but Bush.

Hate to remind people, but responsibility is kind of supposed to be his job.

Well, it looks like the RIAA has settled with Brianna. They didn't say what the settlement was for, but I can't imagine it being that much; her mother has to know that the suit would be a PR nightmare.

I wonder who's going to end up in their net next?

I'm watching Biden's speech on foreign policy on C-Span 2... pretty good, and hits most of the important points (necessity of multilateralism, problems of pre-emption, the conflict between the neo-con dream and cold reality, etc.)

Atrios asks:

I know this the standard line these days, as getting the Amurkan people behind spending $87 billion to help those poor Ay-rabs out for humanitarian reasons is damn near impossible, but do people really believe it? I know the conservative Borg will keep spouting it, but can they honestly believe that we are now in Iraq to fight terrorists?

Switch that wording around: "We are in Iraq now to fight terrorists", and you'll get the reasoning. Remember, the rationale doesn't have to be consistent (hence the switch from WMDs to humanitarianism) as long as it fits a plausible interpretation of the situation on the ground.

In other words, we're now enmeshed in full-bore mission creep. Yes, the Powell doctrine was specifically designed to prevent that. The Powell doctrine is dead.

Looks like the RIAA is following through with the prosecutions. They've brought down one of the meanest, nastiest, biggest pirates on the net, responsible for sharing thousands of megabytes of illegal music files.

This filthy pirate's name? Brianna LaHara, and she's twelve years old.

When not at the playground with her friends, "Biggie Brianna" is trading music files from her home in New York. The little girl received one of the 261 lawsuits filed by the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) on Monday, according to the New York Post. She may look like a sweet and innocent child, but the RIAA says it's only going after major copyright violators at the moment. So you make the call.

"I got really scared. My stomach is all turning," Brianna told the Post. "I thought it was OK to download music because my mom paid a service fee for it. Out of all people, why did they pick me?"

It turns out that Brianna's mum paid a $29.99 service charge to KaZaA for the company's music service. Brianna, however, thought this meant she could download songs at will. How naive!

When reporters charged into Brianna's home, she was helping her brother with some homework. She is an honors student at St. Gregory the Great school.

Brianna could face charges of up to $150,000 per infringed song, but we have a feeling this might be a tad unrealistic. We suggest the RIAA take all of her toys instead.

The Register is being a tad glib, as is their habit, but the basic sentiment is correct.

I don't think this is going to turn out well.

I can't believe I had missed this...JUSIPER is a group blog written by a set of PoliSci professors and academics with some very interesting and compelling material, including an excellent series on how Dean can win a general election (the latest entry is here- it's the third of four) and some other good stuff about payroll taxes and IR.

(Hat tip to electrolite.)

I was wondering what the media reaction would be to Bush's speech last night; from the looks of the reaction, it's not the reaction he's looking for- far from it. Even the Washington Times was downbeat, saying that "the speech comes amid growing doubts about America's ability to single handedly restore order in Iraq"... that's saying something.

No matter what happens to Bush, this is (paradoxically) becoming a huge boost for the United Nations. Bush and much of the American intelligentsia took a stand against the relevance and usefulness of the body, only to find themselves literally forced to return to the U.N. for help. Even if the U.N. security council does decide to assist them, people on both sides of the Atlantic will remember that the United States' unilateralist (if not imperial) rhetoric was blunted in the face of the cold, hard reality. It goes a long way to reaffirming the real, pragmatic necessity of multilateralism.

I doubt this is what Bush's compatriots wanted, but U.N. bashing is going to sound awfully hollow after this.

A while back I had guessed that the "unaccounted for WMDs" may be simple bookkeeping errors. It would appear that ex-weapons inspectors agree.

Ex-inspectors now say, five months after the U.S. invasion, that the notorious "unaccountables" may have been no more than paperwork glitches left behind when Iraq destroyed banned chemical and biological weapons years ago.

Some may represent miscounts, they say, and some may stem from Iraqi underlings' efforts to satisfy the boss by exaggerating reports on arms output in the 1980s.

"Under that sort of regime, you don't admit you got it wrong," said Ron Manley of Britain, a former chief UN adviser on chemical weapons.

His encounters with Iraqi scientists in the 1990s convinced him that at times, when told to produce "X amount" of a weapons agent, "they wrote down what their superiors wanted to hear instead of the reality," said Mr. Manley, who noted that producing VX nerve agent, for example, is a difficult process.

This is hardly a surprise to anybody that knows anything about dictatorial or totalitarian regimes, especially in the third world. Right wingers are constantly saying that this is proof that capitalist democracies are superior, so it's somewhat of a surprise that this sort of simple and consistent explanation has been nowhere to be found.

I'll leave with Blix:

Chief UN inspector Hans Blix, as he left his post this summer, became more open in discussing discrepancies.

After the mid-1990s, "hardly ever did (inspectors) find hidden weapons," Mr. Blix reminded one audience.

"What they found was bad accounting.

"It could be true they (Iraq) did destroy unilaterally in 1991 what they hid."

... and with an example of Iraqi "non-compliance":

The Iraqis had begun scientific soil sampling, for example, to try to confirm the amount of VX dumped long ago at a neutralization site, and had filed an initial report March 17.

Three days later, however, the U.S. invasion intervened.

. Incredible as it may seem to those who buy into the cartoonish caricature of Saddam that survives to this day, he (or his underlings) may have well decided that they were better off without. They probably figured that not actually being a threat to anybody would be a pretty good way to stave off foreign conquest.

Oops.

Ok, courtesy of Blog Matrix, I now have an RSS feed.

(This may be of limited usefulness, as I don't use titles, but then again it may not. I don't use RSS aggregators, actually, so I'm not quite sure as to how important that is or not.)

Although I hadn't commented in it, I do have to admit to being fascinated by this comments thread on Michael Totten's website about his latest "liberals vs. the left" post on which I commented earlier.

(By the by, one emailer charged me with equating Glenn Reynolds and Totten when I called them both "rightists" in the same sentence. Needless to say, I don't see them as equivalent; while I believe that Totten is hurting his own self-professed liberal/centrist position by doing the right's work for it, it's nothing like Glenn's out-and-out apologism for Bush and the Republicans.)

In any case, the dominant thread of this discussion was demands by right-wingers for liberals to abandon the supposed far left entirely; that they must do so, or lose any and all credibility for being associated with these people. There's one slight problem here, one of assumption: that one cannot be a leftist and remain a decent, caring person. I suppose that one can hold that position, but what's stunning is that they never provide a real reason for doing so!

Every time one reads an attack on the left in this thread (or, indeed, in much of the blogosphere), the attacks are based on the left's disagreement with certain ideas and concepts; the wisdom of unfettered capitalism, of pre-emptive warfare (or warfare as a tool of statecraft in general), of the structure and policy of the United States government, or any number of other conservative sacred cows. Thing is, any unbiased observer would figure out pretty quickly that most of these ideas are in contention, and that they are not by any means necessary to hold views about them that conservatives find acceptable to fit within commonly accepted ideas about morals and ethics.

So with that in mind, it raises the question: why should liberals distance themselves from the left? "Because conservatives think the left is wrong" isn't reason enough; conservatives shouldn't be allowed to define what is and isn't an acceptable political position- it grants them too much power. "because the left is immoral" simply raises more questions than it answers, and "because the left is anti-American" not only misses the distinction between criticizing the government as opposed to the people, but the distinction between attacking American culture as it is right now as unacceptable and attacking the American people as forever unacceptable. Saying "America sucks" could be perfectly legitimate, if there is a real reason why "America sucks".

Yes, that will make Americans, especially nationalistic Americans uncomfortable. There is no reason, however, why all political criticism and protest should make people feel comfortable, and rather a lot of reasons why it shouldn't. The problem is that being anti-American doesn't automagically make you wrong; America is at bottom a set of ideas, and ideas must exist in a constant state of contention or become stagnant and corrupt.

This is why I'm deeply bothered by this crusade by the right to try to divide up the left, even by those with only the best of intentions. The left is just as necessary to keep America strong as the right, and that left cannot be limited solely to those sections that conservatives are comfortable with. Even if they're America-hating socialists, it's been understood since John Stuart Mill that it's important that it is possible, however unlikely, that they might have a point, either by advocacy or example. For liberals like Michael Totten to allow conservatives to define what is or isn't acceptable is to watch America die by inches.

And that, friends, is unAmerican.

The blogosphere is a darker place with Dwight Meredith gone.

Well, at least his last piece was an excellent one, up to his usual standards, talking about the David Kay report and the various perspectives that Republican supporters and critics have on its likely contents. According to Dwight (and, originally, the Boston Globe), Kay is likely to announce that Saddam did not have WMDs, but had plans to reconstitute them on fairly short notice, "once freed of inspections and international sanctions".

Of course, that was about as likely as Bush selling the ranch and taking up modern dance.

Still, Dwight's piece hints at something that I wanted to bring out into the open- the relationship between Kay's report and Republican rhetoric. It's safe to say that the Republicans have known what Kay was going to bring out for a long time, and now that we have a pretty good idea what Kay is going to say, we finally have the explanation for the odd shift in rhetoric that has characterized Republicans lately.

I'm sure you've noticed it- everybody has. The shift from "WMDs" to "WMD programs" is something that's been noticed by Bush's critics and by the press corps. It's long been characterized as simply an attempt to bring down the bar, but the Kay report makes it pretty clear that the Republicans (and their media mouthpieces) haven't been simply lowering the bar, but setting a stage.

Although they've raised eyebrows with this shift, it's not going to automatically invalidate what they're saying in the eyes of the public, and those who believe they are liars anyway won't consider it anything new. (Bush true believers will simply go with it on the assumption that since he had WMDs, he obviously had WMD programs) It'll get filed away, and quickly forgotten or dismissed as "partisan bickering".

Then, of course, the Kay report comes out. That is the entire point of this "program" nonsense; it's so that Bush can claim that "he has the proof he needed all along". The press corps may not go along with it, but they'll be up against the Bush spin machine, that will trumpet Kay's report as true. And the thing is, Bush won't technically be incorrect- his latest claims were about "programs", and Kay's report will be about "programs", so he'll be immune to charges of falsehoods. Sure, people will point out that he's changed his tune, but that'll be old news, and too subtle a distinction to make it through the media gauntlet anyway.

The question, then, is whether it'll really matter. It'll probably give Bush one last boost, but then he has to deal with the situation now in Iraq chipping away at his popularity. I doubt he'll be able to so easily get away with fulfilling artificially lowered expectations in that case.

The Washington Post is being optimistic; it's claiming "Hopes for Peace Diminished in the wake of Abbas' resignation.

I don't share that view; I'm sadly of the opinion that they're pretty much over and done with. I was of that opinion when I heard that Abbas resigned, and it was only confirmed with the immediate (and unsuccessful) attack on Hamas founder Sheikh Yassin, which will be an unmistakable signal to all concerned of exactly how things are going to go. (Of course, the bus bombing of last week was a pretty clear signal itself.)

So, in the words of Bugs Bunny, "this means wah". Israel's talk about expelling Arafat will likely come to pass , and I have little faith that the Palestinian Authority will survive him with Abbas gone. Without the Authority, the Israelis will have little choice but to take over regional administration themselves; the West Bank will devolve into out-and-out chaos otherwise, unless Hamas takes control.

Israel's attempt to try to control the Palestinians will be difficult at best, more likely impossible; obedience is required for control, and there is little chance that the Palestinian population will be at all obedient to the Israeli army. The violence will get worse, rather than better, as Palestinians attack Israeli soldiers and civilians at every opportunity and the increasingly frustrated Israeli army cracks down to repress the violence. All the while, peacemakers will lose power, and extremists will gain it, pointing at the acts of "the other side" (while conveniently minimizing their own) in order to justify more and more radical responses.

I suspect I know where this is going. I don't like it. But I'm starting to wonder if it's even possible to stop it.

Well, blogger is back up again. That's good news, although I'm not sure when they finally fixed it.

(Now if only YACCS would manage to do the same.)

When confronted with two potential nuclear powers, (Iran and Iraq) the United States government can't be belligerent enough- many expect Iran to be a target for "regime change" when and if the Iraqi adventure ends.

When confronted with another nuclear power (North Korea), this time pretty much confirmed, Bush can't bend backwards enough to assure both the North Koreans and (inevitably) the Chinese that things will be solved peacefully. Oh, and let's not forget the Chinese's human rights record makes Saddam look like Jefferson. And they've got nukes.

Suspicious observers will ask what the difference is. Some would say oil. Some would say Islam. Some would say geostrategy. All may be true, but all miss the point: the difference is the difference between having nukes, and wanting nukes. Want them, and you're a target. Obtain them, and you're untouchable.

This is not going to do the cause of anti-proliferation much good.

I just received a fairly angry email from Michael Totten over an earlier piece of mine calling him a "rightist". He said that he defines himself several times as "center-left" and therefore, by definition, can't be right-wing.

Indeed, Michael, center-left is not "by definition" rightist. The question is who does the defining, and what that definition consists of.

While self-definition is an important part of placing someone's political views, it is by no means definitive. Many conservatives define themselves as "libertarians" by endlessly twisting the definition of that term, and there are many columnists and commentators who, like Mickey Kaus, call themselves "liberals"; yet they adopt positions that draw far more from libertarianism and soft conservatism than anything even remotely resembling liberalism as Locke, Rawls, or Mill would have understood the term.

Often enough, this is part of a tactic of "strategic redefinition". They usually serve Republican/conservative ends by doing so, as they can attack "the left" from "the center". By doing so, they move both- they move the definition of the "acceptable left" to the right, and move the definition of "centrist" to the right. This also ends up redefining what had been been defined as "fringe opinions" on the right much closer to supposed "centrism" and respectability.

Do this enough, and you can change the political discourse to a shocking degree. Supply side economics is one of these ideas moved to respectability, another is pre-emptive warfare... but there are multitudes of others, more than can be easily counted.

Using Michael's own words, "by definition" it is an act that serves conservative ends, and only the most naive of liberals would either misunderstand or truthfully deny this. Those that are not naive know they are serving conservative ends and are, therefore, supporters of conservatism, insofar as they are deliberately turning moderate conservatism into centrism, and extreme conservatism (if not right-wing buffoonery) into moderation.

(Yes, there is a way out of this- by rejecting the "right-center-left" spectrum entirely. You can't do that and retain the terminology, however, and Michael both retains the terminology and uses it to attack the left.)

Michael, you came into prominence attacking the "left" and no small number of your posts have been targeted at the faults of "the left". It has been used by prominent conservatives, such as Instapundit, in order to support the actions and the rhetoric of American conservatism and individual conservatives, including president Bush. So I'm only left, "by definition", with one question:

Are you naive, Michael?

LiP responded to my last entry about the "is Paul Krugman partisan or not" debate. Apparently I've hit home to some extent, as he does describe it as a "plausible case" that Krugman may simply be pointing out what others are afraid to, but points to other columnists such as Frank Rich and Michael Kinsley as being left-leaning but not nearly as partisan, willing to attack Democrats and Republicans alike. Leaving aside the actual worthiness of attacking both, one of the reasons that Krugman is considered so dangerous (and so interesting) is because he isn't a journalist, and therefore isn't overly worried about building the sort of superficial "fairness" between centrists and right-wing extremists that Eric Alterman aptly described as "working the ref".

It's also important to remember that Krugman's most powerful (and theoretically partisan) attacks are on economic issues, as economics is a subject that he knows much better than almost any of the other major newspaper columnists right now. His purely political articles are often considered somewhat weaker, although he's been getting better, and I personally believe it's because he's exploiting the liberal blogosphere's able work on such issues. (If his critics can do it, why not him?)

Getting back to LiP, though, it's more interesting looking at what wasn't discussed, which was my objections to his methods themselves (as opposed to questions of Krugman's partisanship.) It's not just about the environment in which the comments themselves are made, but about the very notion of trying to derive meaningful data from what amounts to word-counting. It's relatively simplistic: it merely counts the number of references in a column to a Democrat or a a Republican, assigns them a binary "plus or minus" for partisanship, and creates an eventual "partisanship index" derived from the numbers of "pluses and minuses".

As should be immediately obvious, this is woefully deficient. Operationalizing the concept of "partisanship" is tricky enough in the first place, but LiP's methodology systematically strips the inherently qualitative elements from columns. It misses the multiplying effects that things like sentence structure, tone, theme, and choice of words can have on the "partisanship" of a column. it punishes and rewards columnists based on merely the number of partisan references, leaving the severity of their references unremarked and untouched. This sort of methodology would be unacceptable when dealing with survey data, let alone the analysis of political texts; there's simply too much left out, and this raises serious questions as to the applicability of LiP's "index". It's like those income statistics that lump together people that make $100,000 a year and those who make $5 million when counting the number of "wealthy people" in the United States and the effects on them... it produces numbers that are simply untrustworthy.

(At the very least, there should be a weighted scale for the partisan remarks. The act of judging these things, however, is in-and-of itself such a qualitative act that it renders the whole quantification process pretty much useless.)

Politics isn't economics- it's hard to quantify, harder to quantify well, and extremely easy to quantify badly, leading to results that are either misleading, banal, or horrifically wrong. This is why the "Perestroikans" have been so bitterly criticizing the formalism in American political science, and why many of political theorists and researchers outside the United States tend to avoid quantification altogether. (Many Canadians tend to take a particularly dim view of the whole enterprise, for example.) Even your most doctrinaire APSA formalist, however, would likely look askance upon LiP. It simply leaves too much out.

This is, perhaps, beating a dead horse, but I'm still struck by the decline of both the relevance and creativity of rightist bloggers. Sure, nobody's surprised that Instapundit and Co. are reduced to hauling out pathetic strawmen, demonstrating intolerance of artistic expression that they disagree with, and ejaculating overwrought rhetoric about the "self-destruction" of the left, but weren't right-wing bloggers actually bringing up relevant news at one point? I realize I have my own biases here, but can anybody even make the comparsion anymore between Instapundit and, say, Atrios and the Atriettes?

(And, yes, he once again pulls out the "flypaper strategy" bit, the "irrelevant and inane comparison between Iraq and some unrelated part of the U.S." bit, and the "the U.N. is irrelevant because it won't do what America tells it" bit. Gawd. Sure, I harp on themes too, but at least I don't do it on a link blog where the point is to ferret out new things.)

Ok. So let me get this straight. The United States wants U.N. help in Iraq, but isn't going to give up military command or any control over the country.

What are they offering? Frosty chocolate milkshakes?

I doubt the ambassador from "Freedom" was overly impressed.

I'd really like to sneak into these negotiations. Watching Bush go, hat in hand, to the security council to negotiate authorization of an international force would be fun indeed. He mocked them, declared them useless, ignored their cautions, and treated some of the permanent members as "evildoers" because they were against his Iraqi adventure. And now he's asking for their help.

The French reaction alone would be worth the trouble.

The phrase "compassionate conservativism" has become even more of a cruel joke: Bush is "relaxing" the rules that require hospitals to treat emergency patients regardless of their ability to pay. It removes hospitals of any obligation to have specialists on call, or even to have doctors on call at all, and doctors that are on call can still do elective surgery (!) and can be simultaneously on call at two or more hospitals (!), meaning that it's incredibly unlikely that either a specialist or a generalist will be on call when people need them.

And people still plan to vote for this guy?

This is an interesting idea... carbonated milk?

Mary Ann Clark, a registered nurse, said she was pained to see children drinking cola and shunning milk when she worked in schools so she decided to do something about it.

...The Clarks combined water and powdered milk to create a slightly fizzy, mildly milky-tasting drink with the nutritional value of skim milk and 40 percent of the recommended daily amount of calcium.

Anybody tried this stuff?

Crap.
Car Bomb Explodes Near Baghdad Police Headquarters

A car bomb at Baghdad's police headquarters killed an Iraqi police officer and wounded about 15 others Tuesday in a suspected attempt to assassinate the police chief, a key ally of the U.S.-led occupying authorities.

The blast, which sent thick black smoke into the sky, went off as more than 100,000 mourners packed into the holy city of Najaf for the funeral of a top Shi'ite cleric slain in the most deadly of the attacks plaguing postwar Iraq.

Much of the violence has targeted U.S. forces, who lost two soldiers in a landmine explosion Monday to take the number killed in action since the official end of major combat to 67. But Iraqis cooperating with the occupiers are also at risk.

So does this imply "desperation"? Maybe, maybe not, but it does further show Iraqi attitudes towards these attacks:

"Why didn't you do this on Friday?" screamed one man pulled aside and searched by the Iraqi police who surrounded the Imam Ali shrine and kept cars from approaching it.

"The sayyid (Hakim) and all the Muslims who died would still be alive."

Many Shi'ites believe supporters of Saddam, a Sunni Muslim who repressed them, carried out the attack. But they also blame U.S. forces for postwar insecurity. The throng trailing Hakim's coffin as it entered the shrine screamed: "No, no to America!"

Great- so the "Saddam can go to hell and Bush can follow him" meme (saw it, I think, on Where is Raed, but can't find the specific link) is now conventional wisdom. "A pox on both their houses" isn't exactly the reaction ShrubCo and the rolling re-election squad was promising, hmm? Makes sense, sure, but doesn't smell of tossed flowers to me.

And it's still only been four months. Where this ends up after a year, I don't even want to know.

Well, this is poor strategy::

Israel may have to decide on Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's fate before year's end, Israel's Defence Minister said Tuesday, adding that expelling the Palestinian leader was the likely course.

Israel considers Mr. Arafat an obstacle to peace and has accused him of involvement in terrorism.

'Because this is the situation and because Arafat never wanted to reach an agreement with us ... I think that he has to disappear from the stage of history, and not be included in the ranks of the Palestinian leadership,' Defence Minister Shaul Mofaz told Israel Army Radio.

Mr. Mofaz said he favours expelling Mr. Arafat- at the right time.

'I believe that Israel made a historic mistake by not exiling him two years ago,' he said. 'With regard to the future, I think we will be compelled to deal with this issue within a relatively short period of time, very possibly even this year.'

I'm amazed at Mofaz's credulity and naivete- there are very good reasons why Israel has not exiled him. (I hope that I don't have to put quotes around "exile".)

As should be relatively obvious, he's not Israel's to exile. Like him or not (and many don't, to be sure), he was elected by the Palestinian people to be their president, and I haven't seen any significant challenges to the legitimacy of those votes. (Except perhaps that there hasn't been another election since, but there are some, um, extraordinary circumstances there.) He isn't as popular as he was, of course, but Abbas is neither popular nor elected. He may be more open to negotiation and that's both necessary and good, but it doesn't change things one whit.

If Israel removes him, any support that Abbas had will collapse, and the Palestinian people will move en masse to support of Hamas et al, and this is something nobody wants to see happen. Yes, Abbas and Arafat are definitely fighting it out for power right now, and Israel should take a role in ensuring that Abbas retains some- they still can't do it by threatening expulsion. Even the threat reconfirms Palestinian fears about the Israelis, and would work to ruin the goodwill and support that the Israelis derive from being the unquestionable non-cyclical "first target" after the ceasefire. It could even cause the already-embattled United States to distance itself somewhat, and that is something that Israel literally cannot afford.

I'm perhaps a little behind the times on this, but I hadn't linked to this and wanted to anyway:

The head of a company vying to sell voting machines in Ohio told Republicans in a recent fund-raising letter that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."

The Aug. 14 letter from Walden O'Dell, chief executive of Diebold Inc. - who has become active in the re-election effort of President Bush - prompted Democrats this week to question the propriety of allowing O'Dell's company to calculate votes in the 2004 presidential election.

....In his invitation letter, O'Dell asked guests to consider donating or raising up to $10,000 each for the federal account that the state GOP will use to help Bush and other federal candidates - money that legislative Democratic leaders charged could come back to benefit Blackwell.

They urged Blackwell to remove Diebold from the field of voting-machine companies eligible to sell to Ohio counties.

This is the second such request in as many months. State Sen. Jeff Jacobson, a Dayton-area Republican, asked Blackwell in July to disqualify Diebold after security concerns arose over its equipment.

The response from Diebold and the Republicans was simply bizarre:

Diebold spokeswoman Michelle Griggy said O'Dell - who was unavailable to comment personally - has held fund-raisers in his home for many causes, including the Columbus Zoo, Op era Columbus, Catholic Social Services and Ohio State University.

Ohio GOP spokesman Jason Mauk said the party approached O'Dell about hosting the event at his home, the historic Cotswold Manor, and not the other way around. Mauk said that under federal campaign finance rules, the party cannot use any money from its federal account for state- level candidates.

"To think that Diebold is somehow tainted because they have a couple folks on their board who support the president is just unfair," Mauk said.

They're equating the Republican party to the Columbus Zoo? Saying that it's all right because "the party approached him" and because they can only use the money for Bush? I'm inclined to think that they really were caught with their pants down- if they were prepared for this, there's no way that they'd have such an incredibly lame response.

(What kind of broken thought process could have possibly prompted that howler about "unfairness"?)

Were the parties reversed, the conservatives would be screaming themselves into unconsciousness. Since it's their guy, though, it's apparently "no harm done", with maybe just enough of a response to innoculate against criticism without actually changing anything. The only way that they can salve their credibility is to demand that Diebold be disallowed from producing voting machines for at least the 2004 election, and to insist upon a voter-verifiable paper trail. Now.

Not much that I can add to this. Take it away, Kevin Drum:

I know this is beating a dead horse, but what on earth are the Bushies thinking? They started a war no one else wanted, they treated anyone opposed to the war as virtual traitors to humanity, and they are still insisting that America needs to be 100% in charge of everything that goes on in Iraq.

But despite all that they're "puzzled" about how to get the rest of the world to pony up to help us out of our mess? Even though the rest of the world warned us repeatedly about the likely result of our adventure? What planet are they living on?

For chrissake, we told the rest of the world to go to hell before the war, and they haven't forgotten. They aren't going to bail us out unless we give them considerable authority over the reconstruction effort, and they might not help us even if we do. We're on our own.

The Bush administration has been incompetent and arrogant throughout this entire effort. Their prewar conduct seemed almost deliberately designed to make sure the rest of the world was against us, they were criminally negligent in their postwar planning, and George Bush personally has shown immense cowardice by consistently refusing to prepare Congress and the American public for the real cost and length of the war. He's paying the price for that cowardice now, as he watches support for the reconstruction dwindle because its expense, length, and cost in lives is taking most people by surprise.

It's pretty obvious why liberals should oppose George Bush's reelection, but the fact is that conservatives ought to oppose him too. His incompetence and cowardice have betrayed the very things they claim to stand for.

Many conservatives are criticizing him, although I suspect it's more for Iraq's inability to fit their expectations and their subsequent need to find someone to pin the blame on. (Excepting those few who were asking questions prior to the war, of course.)

In any case, this is precisely why myself and others were extremly wary of the United States going to war without international support via a U.N. resolution- the U.S. can't be sure that it won't need help, and thumbing its nose at the rest of the world puts the U.S. in a very dangerous position. Yes, things may go fine, and the help may be unnecessary. Like with insurance, the important thing to remember is that occasionally you do need it. Now they do, and they're up a creek.

An argument can be made that the international community should help anyway, because of the humanitarian crisis in Iraq. Were all other things equal, I'd agree; they aren't equal. If they aid now, there will be an expectation they will in the future, and the United States will be able to engage in whatever adventurism it wishes. That's a very dangerous road, and I can understand why, say, Russia and Japan would not want to go down it.

It's sad, because it only hurts the people of Iraq; that's Bush's responsibility, not anybody else's. If he wants to take the credit for the successes, he must take the blame for the failures. That's what he's paid for.

Ezra Klein wrote an interesting response to one of my earlier posts about attacking China. His contention (sorry for boiling it down, Ezra) is that the U.S. should do what it can, and there's no way it can attack China, so it shouldn't worry too much about not doing so. This is fair enough, and actually a point I acknowledge.

The point, however, was not to actually advocate doing something about China, it was to point out that the "Humanitarian angle" isn't really enough to justify the invasion of a functioning state by the United States. The humanitarian point is there, but due to a number of reasons, it needs to be accompanied by something else. That "something else" can be national security, it can be multilateral consensus (especially from collective agreements like the U.N. charter), it can be the need to create order in a failed or collapsed state, and, yes, it can even be oil. Humanitarianism is a factor, but barring extreme circumstances such as genocide (which are covered under the U.N. charter, and therefore fit into that "multilateral consensus" bit), it cannot be the only one.

One other thing. Ezra says "this is an unreasoning standard to hold a human being to". Ezra, we're not talking about human beings. We're talking about states. It is most emphatically not the same thing, and I truly dislike those sorts of analogies. Among other things, they were popular among South American "security states" as an excuse to liquidate dissidents. Considering the attitude towards dissent that still exists in the United States just now, I'd like to avoid bodily analogies wherever possible. Once that "dissent=cancer" meme starts flying around, really really bad things happen.

Jesse makes a good point in the comment section for Ezra's blog too- the Iraqi adventure has weakened American abilities to make a difference all around the globe, including areas like Western Africa which by and large make sanctions-era Iraq look like paradise. If the Liberians are driven further into chaos because of the "freeing of the Iraqis", then whose fault is that, exactly? Their own? Bush's? The American people's? The world's? Nobody's?

(For the record, though, I don't think Socrates should have drank the hemlock.)

By the way, comments are down because YACCS is down. They said it should be back up after the weekend.

Looks like one of the posts I wrote a while ago has attracted some attention... from Lying in Ponds, who was the subject of the post, and (oddly enough) from Good old Donald Luskin, who never misses an opportunity to take a shot at Krugman supporters.

(A.k.a. supporters of people who know economics against people who don't.)

Luskin's attack is relatively mild and incoherent, focusing mostly on how much he loves Lying in Ponds' work and the fact that Krugman likes the name of my blog. The substantive points comes from Lying in Pond's more reasoned response:

In the comments to that post, Demosthenes carries on the discussion with Markus, who had previously offered his opinion about Lying in Ponds on his own Dormouse Dreaming weblog (scroll down). Demosthenes reiterates the point that "Bush is a natural target because he's the president, and LiP ignores that aspect of Krugman's critique of his methods . .". Since that hypothesis comes up so frequently, I thought it would be useful to delve into it -- we can try to remove Mr. Krugman's treatment of George W. Bush from the data and see how that would change his partisanship score.

What he found was relatively predictable:

I'll be looking only at the Total Partisanship Index, which makes up half of the final Combined Partisanship Index, because recalculating the other half, the Median Partisanship Index is a lot more difficult, and shouldn't change the results much. The results are shown in the table below. If one removes every direct Bush reference from consideration ("Bush", "Bush administration", "George W. Bush", "President Bush", "George Bush", "Bushies", etc.), there still would be enough remaining negative references to the "administration", Dick Cheney, etc. so that Mr. Krugman's total partisanship score would drop only from 74 to 73, second only to Ann Coulter out of our 32 active pundits.

Well, what if we also remove all administration references which don't include the Bush name directly, such as "administration", "White House", "the president", and other members of the administration such as Dick Cheney and Karl Rove? Even then, there would be enough remaining negative references to Tom DeLay, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and generic references to "Republicans" so that Mr. Krugman's score would drop only to 53, still good enough for 8th place behind Mona Charen. In fact, even if every single Republican reference of any kind is ignored in Mr. Krugman's 2003 columns, his favorable treatment of Democrats alone would make his score 54, again earning him 8th place in total partisanship among the 32 active pundits!

As I've said before, the problem here is operationalizing the concept of "partisanship". The conflict between Jesse of Pandagon and Lying in Ponds was over the definition of the term, and the fact that the confusion between ideology and partisanship often exists shows how difficult it is to nail down exactly what "partisan" means, let alone how to translate it into numbers.

It's especially difficult now, because we've witness at least one party develop an increasingly ideological bent to its partisanship. It's pretty obvious that Republican partisanship is becoming intertwined with a particular ideology. This has actually become a source of difficulties for Bush, as he's actually having trouble with his Congressional brethren for being more wedded to that ideology than he is. While I suspect that at least part of that is a good cop/bad cop game, it's not something I'd bet the farm bill on.

That points to one of the weaknesses of LiP's technique, and of what Luskin calls LiP's "crusade against partisanship". LiP seems to acknowledge that the President is a natural target, and if one removes the president, things should balance out. Fine. Unfortunately, LiP is working with a woefully short and misleading data set. Congress has been dominated by Republicans since 1994, long before Krugman wrote his column, and a quick perusal of his other materials shows that he's perfectly willing to attack Democrats too. Right now, however, the Republicans are the ones with pretty much all the power, and it is with that recognition that Krugman has set his sights on the Republicans, rather than the Democrats. If the Democrats had controlled Congress and had passed the Farm Bill (which is a distinct possibility) rather than the Republicans, they would have been the targets. Indeed, the Republicans wield an unusual amount of power right now, thanks to their coordination and effective management of partisan and ideological propaganda. If LiP used its tools on the Slate columns, it may come up with a different answer.

Or, perhaps not. Krugman's initial response was quite simple and, as I've said before, quite devastating. He contends that the policies of the Republicans (both administrative and congressional) have been almost universally bad ones and that Democratic proposals are at least somewhat better. While that claim is debatable, it is not one that LiP's methodology is equipped to measure. It points to the problem of measuring innately qualitative data like political debate, critique, and commentary with quantitative methods. There are a huge number of interrelated factors that affect the legitimacy of a political critique- they either can't be measured easily with numbers, or require methodology much more complex than LiP's simple relative scoring system. As Krugman has said, and as I've said, if that system cannot take into account these factors, then it's dangerously misleading.

(You can't "control" Krugman with other columnists, either, because they aren't neutral. Indeed, if the contentions of myself and others (especially MWO) are correct, then they don't balance out to neutrality either... they trend towards pro-Bush, because of fears of loss of access and the reality of outside factors clouding their judgement. You also point at his being "pro-Democrat" by looking at the Dem's relatively positive treatment in the columns, as LiP tries to, because removing the Republicans as a variable doesn't remove their role as a factor in how he discusses Democrats and the relative attention provided to both.)

If you want to understand Krugman now, look at his past. The books and Slate columns were both equal opportunity criticism, and the NYT column was as well until Bush's bad policy and egregious lies to the American people began with his phony tax cut plans. Then he started criticizing Bush, and when Bush became president and continued to push bad policy and to (at the very least) mislead the American people, he continued to point out both, even when nobody else had the guts. Yes, he does criticize Bush and the Republicans a lot. The question is not whether that makes him partisan, but whether they deserve it. When Helen Thomas (a person in a position to know) calls Bush "the worst president in history", I think it's pretty justifiable, and unless one is preciously naive enough to believe that doesn't have something to do with Congressional Republicans, they're fair game too.

Sorry, LiP, but I don't buy it, or the "maybe he's partisan but he's right" bit that you ended the post with. His pre-NYT works don't support that, and pseudo-psychological attempts to explain the shift from all-around critic to anti-Republican critic are blasted in the face of one key fact: he didn't change, Washington changed. I, for one, hope that it'll change back, and that Paul can go back to criticizing those on all sides. Right now, though, the Repubs are the biggest threat, and I can understand his desire to train his guns on them.

Found on CalPundit, a quote from an LA Times article that I really liked:

"We were prisoners of our own beliefs," said a senior U.S. weapons expert who recently returned from a stint with the survey group. "We said Saddam Hussein was a master of denial and deception. Then when we couldn't find anything, we said that proved it, instead of questioning our own assumptions."

Hence the problem with the type of reasoning made for the war that I highlighted way back before the war started: arguing that Saddam is "breaking U.N. resolutions on WMD" by "deceiving inspectors to hide his weapons" requires you to assume that, um, he actually has the weapons in the first place.

Otherwise the only thing you've caught Saddam with is screwing up paperwork, and invasion based on that rationale is ludicrous. Might as well invade the DMV.

Thomas Friedman is almost making sense today.

He's talking about all the different elements necessary to build a new Iraq, and seems to finally be coming around on the question of Iraqi sovereignty:

And that leads to the third point: we need to get the 25-person Iraqi Governing Council to do three things — now. It must name a cabinet, so Iraqis are running every ministry; announce a 300,000-person jobs program, so people see some tangible benefits delivered by their own government; and offer to immediately rehire any Iraqi Army soldier who wants to serve in the new army, as long as he was not involved in Saddam's crimes. It was a huge — huge — mistake to disband the Iraqi Army and put all those unemployed soldiers on the streets, without enough U.S. troops to take their place.

Together, all of this would put much more of an Iraqi face on the government and security apparatus, and begin to reclaim the mantle of Iraqi nationalism for the new government, taking it away from Saddam loyalists — who are trying to make a comeback under the phony banner of liberating Iraq from foreign occupation.

Again, I have to repeat the dictum of Harvard's president, Larry Summers: "In the history of the world, no one has ever washed a rented car." Most Iraqis still feel they are renting their own country — first from Saddam and now from us. They have to be given ownership. If the Bush team is ready to put in the time, energy and money to make that happen — great. But if not, it's going to have to make the necessary compromises to bring in the U.N. and the international community to help.

There's a fundamental problem here, though. It's not about Iraqi faces, but Iraqi choices- not about the appearance of sovereignty, but the reality of it. What needs to happen is that the Americans must give the Iraqis the choice to do what they see fit, not just to do what the Americans say they "need to learn to do".

Yes, this isn't absolute. There should be allowances for the possibility of a relatively small or extremist group taking control of a more popular process (as happened when the theocrats took over after the Iranian revolution), and the United States should act to prevent that to the extent that Iraqi sovereignty allows.

The important thing here, however, is that Iraqi must find its own path There is absolutely no doubt that said path will not be the path America took or that Americans would take in their place. That doesn't matter. It is not a question of turning the Iraqis into Americans; that would be disasterous. It's about Iraq becoming that rarest of creatures: a state with a government of the people, by the people, for the people. Not for Americans. For Iraqis.

Kevin Drum noticed an interesting story in Bruce Schneier's Beyond Fear:

Nokia spends about a hundred times more money per phone on battery security than on communications security. The security system senses when a consumer uses a third-party battery and switches the phone into maximum power-consumption mode; the point is to ensure that consumers buy only Nokia batteries.

Figures.

Jesse and David Neiwert ask a relatively simple question... if we're attacking countries that brutalize their people, invade other countries, have WMDs and are big regional threats, then shouldn't the U.S. be invading China right now?

David points out that "the point of this exercise, of course, is not to actually argue for war with China. Rather, it's to point out the utter shallowness of the case being presented for our invasion of Iraq." This is entirely true, but it shows that absent the morally dubious "low hanging fruit" argument that both misrepresents Iraq and ignores even the even lower hanging fruit of the failed African states, the whole thing is built on a foundation of sand.

My point when addressing this issue was that it forces the United States to choose between countries to save and makes it morally responsible for the welfare of the people it didn't save, by definition. Jesse makes the critique just as well.

It'd also make one hell of a Socratic dialogue:

(Socrates and a Greek Student enter)

Socrates: It is inexcusable to allow people to suffer, is it not, if one has the power to prevent it?

Greek Student: Definitely, Socrates.

Socrates: And it is necessary to act to stop threats from the global peace, or the suffering will increase even further, as others fall under the sway of evil dictators. Is this not true?

Greek: It is true, Socrates.

Socrates: Indeed. Power implies responsibility, as those with power must use it to benefit the state, the people, and the world, and protect them from threats. Is this not true?

Greek: It is definitely true, Socrates.

Socrates: And one of these threats are the terrible doomsday weapons that plague humanity, that should not be allowed to fall in the hands of dictators.

Greek: They should definitely not, Socrates.

Socrates: And the United States is currently the most powerful state in the world?

Greek: Indubitably, Socrates.

Socrates: Thus it has this responsibility?

Greek: Absolutely, Socrates.

Socrates: Indeed. Americans are free and prosperous, and benefit from the best government in the world. Much better than, say, the people of China. They suffer terribly, do they not?

Greek: Terribly, Socrates. More than any other people.

Socrates: The government of China also threatens those around it with a powerful army and an array of these terrible doomsday weapons that resists any foe, even the Americans. It has conquered Tibet, and threatens to conquer others. The Americans, however, protect and aid their neighbours- like the Canadians and Mexicans, and have pledged to aid others if they should need it, like the Japanese. The United States is therefore much more suited for stewardship, is it not?

Greek: It is surely better, Socrates

Socrates: How much better it is that the United States exists, as it has pledged to protect the world from evil, which the oppressive Chinese would never do.

Greek: The world is indeed lucky, Socrates.

Socrates: Yet if this is the case, the United States is doomed, and the world must suffer! The Chinese are all the things that Americans abhor: a danger to its neighbours due to its army, a possessor of doomsday devices that could harm both Americans and the world, and a country that oppresses its people more than any other. For the United States, there is no higher calling than to immediately declare war on China, yet such a war would surely destroy the United States as much as China! Then the world would lose its steward and its guiding light, as the United States would have ceased to be! The world would be plunged into darkness! The United States cannot be the worlds steward, for such a role will doom both it and the world once the United States is forced to fight a war it cannot win!

This shows the hubris of trying to be the world's protector; it is an attempt to usurp the power of the Gods, as only the Gods are strong enough and wise enough to protect the world. Even the purest, noblest, more powerful earthly body will sooner or later fall under the weight of its nobility, for they are men, and not Gods.

Greek: You are indeed wise, Socrates. Now let's go score some Souvlaki.

Socrates: I am naught but a fool, but I'm a hungry fool. So let us go.

(Exeunt)

Need to tighten it up, but you get the idea.

Edit: Fixed spelling of "Exeunt". Credit goes out to Ed Fitzgerald for catching it.

Another Edit: Also closed HTML.

In response to the moderate left post mentioned below, Dwight Meredith has ferreted out an odd example of a right-wing commentator, Maggie Gallagher, unwittingly supporting his point:

While I agree that the threat of terrorism will be a large issue, the elephant in the room is that a conservative like Gallagher thinks that the politics of the Iraq war have shifted so far that it will not be a major political plus for the President.

It was not long ago that our Republican friends were assuring us that the war was the one and only issue that mattered for 2004. The war, the argument went, placed the Democrats against the views of the American people and assured Mr. Bush’s reelection.

Now a conservative partisan like Maggie Gallagher does not think the war is even on the short list of important issues.

Her parenthetical comment of “give it up, Dean” is remarkable. That comment suggests that Gallagher thinks that Dean, not Bush, is the political aggressor on the war. Thus, the question is whether Dean and not Bush can make political hay from the war. It is difficult to overstate the political importance of that shift.

On the issue of terrorism, who will be on offense and who on defense? Gallagher says that “we are vulnerable, and we know it.” Whose job has it been to eliminate the vulnerabilities? Who failed to provide funding for the first responders? Who plays footsie with the country that spawns, funds and supports the terrorists?

Well, first, I need to remind Dwight that publicly attacking Saudi Arabia is a bad idea. It ticks off the Saudis, for one, but worse than that is that makes them look even more like American clients to their neighbours. This makes it singularly unlikely to cause the House of Saud to back away from the policies that harm American interests in the first place, because they can't afford to look like clients or Osama will be able to exploit it to gain thousands of new followers. Their hands will be tied, whether they want to change or not. Saudi Arabia is a case where quiet diplomatic pressure must be the instrument of the day, unless one wants to spark a civil war in one of the most economically important countries in the world. Reform must happen, yes, but like many things in politics it must be a process of evolution, not revolution.

(Regular readers will no doubt remember the disdain I have for revolutions, both as rhetorical tools and political ones.)

This is why Saudi is a "tar baby" issue... attempts to attack the Republicans from the right will not only create instability, but lock the candidate into a position that is strategically and diplomatically foolish.

Anyway, on to the main point. Dwight's right that the war will likely be backburnered unless it turns around dramatically. The news out of Britain is extremely harsh and embarassing to Blair's government, and while Bush enjoys more power than Blair, attacks on Blair have already spilled over and will no doubt continue to do so. There is no foreseeable way that the troops will be pulled from Iraq before the next election, unless Bush is willing to risk the spectacle of a disintegrated Iraq as a backdrop to his election campaign. This is unlikely, as Afghanistan is probably going to present him with enough cries about America's very own
"failed state". Internationalization is unlikely in Iraq, so it's the U.S. or nothing, and the U.S. can't muster up enough troops to pacify the areas of the country whose stability weakens daily. Convenient theories aside, I honestly doubt it's the Iraqi attackers that are "desperate" here. Bush's best hope is that the news cycle focuses on something else besides Iraq, and will likely do so if Bush starts refocusing on the real war on terror. Considering his only remaining high scores are on the WoT, he'd be an idiot not to.

Thus we get to the unofficial campaign theme of Bush/Cheney 2004. Ready for it? Here it comes:

"Vote for me or die screaming".

That's what it comes down to. Many stories I've read around the net have emphasized that the "security moms" galvanized by 9/11 continue to support Bush because they're deathly afraid that if Bush isn't there they'll be horribly killed in a terrorist attack. Attempts to say "Bush has nothing to do with the lack of attacks, and is endangering the country" will be met with blank stares and insistence that the lack of attacks is precisely due to Bush's "effective fighting of the war on terror and protecting Americn security"-- even if they can't precisely figure out what it is that he's done. President as placebo.

Bush and his advisors know about American politics. They know that presidents get the credit and the blame for things out of their control unless they're very careful, know that even the least complex critiques against the president will be ignored by those who need to believe that they're safe, know how to exploit events for their own benefit, and (most importantly) know how to whitewash brutal claims such as the one above in more comforting terms, even if all involved know exactly what's going on. Bush and the rolling re-election squad would never say "support me or Osama will dance on your bones", but they will talk about Bush's "commitment to security", about "the fight to win the war on terror" and the Democrats' "inexperience in security issues" and "weakness on terrorism".

Look at how Bush speaks. Whenever he paints things in good vs. evil terms, it's intentionally chosen not simply because he sees the world in such terms (although he likely does), but because it's comforting and threatening at the same time: comforting because the side of "good" that supports him can feel confident that what they're doing and what he's doing for them is right, proper, and just... and threatening because although he promises victory, the act of painting the opposition as a primal, Satanic evil makes them seem more powerful, more dangerous, and more difficult to defeat than they would be otherwise. Good will triumph over evil; evil still must remain powerful, and can devour those who stray from the flock. Both America and its enemies become seemingly wiser, more dangerous, and more powerful than they really are.

This is how Bush thinks he will win... through fear.It's not new, and it's perhaps inevitable in the wake of 9/11, but it should be understood nonetheness.

Great Piece by Jeff Fecke:

Before the war, the righty blogs had all the mojo. Reading Insty or Lileks or Mitch Berg's site was fun, because they were so damn giddy. They knew they had the momentum, they knew the big issue of the day favored them, and they were joyous.

Meanwhile, the lefty blogs were either dispairing or furious or, in my case (and a few more notable cases, like TPM), circumspect. The left knew we were on the wrong side of the White House door, and while not all of us opposed the war outright, most all of us were leery, to say the least, at the way the war was sold and prosecuted.

Fast-forward six months, and look around. Kos is at the top of his game, Josh Marshall is witty as Hell, Pandagon has found his voice, Atrios rules, and...well, pretty much any lefty blog you stumble into is sweetness and light, while righty sites grumble about media coverage and why people don't see things like they do.

And I realize something: We've got the mojo now...

I had been noticing this too, although mostly in the context of increased liberal blog hit counts and the fact that Dean's campaign is at least partially blog-driven. He has a warning, though:

We must guard against hubris. I don't think that's going to be hard to do. If the ego hasn't been kicked out of the Democrats in the last four years, it never will be. We have to scrap and fight like the future of the world depends on how we do--because it does. We must never stop working, never stop trying, never stop doing.

But we have the advantage, my friends. If we move together, for once, we can leverage that advantage into victory in 2004, and whether the person being cheered is Howard Dean or Wesley Clark or Dennis Kucinich, I'll be cheering loud and proud.

I find Kucinich unlikely, but not the other two, and people are going to pay attention to the liberal blog scene more than they have before.

(Yeah, this conflicts with Max's post below. Maybe it's my own blog fatigue talking.)

(Thanks to Ezra Klein for pointing this out, and remember: Flood the Zone!)

Max is hit with some blogger fatigue:

IN THE VALLEY OF FATIGUE, blogospherically speaking, is where I've been. At work I've been busy trying to fry some bigger fish.

"A hurricane in a drop of water" is a memorable phrase used by an old and dead communist named Max Shachtman to describe arcane internecine squabbles within the relatively tiny American left. The so-called blogosphere looks a lot like that. Scores of pissing matches, some entertaining, some informative, and others not. But in general they are starting to bore me. I wonder if they matter at all.

The drop of water analogy seems apt, when you consider that the greatest blogger of them all -- Glenn Reynolds -- is utterly unknown outside his and our small corner of the Web. I'd be amazed if one person in my office, an otherwise literate and informed group, had ever heard of him. Political types in Washington know Josh Marshall and Mickey Kaus, but not because of their blogs. Whatever you think of them, they are real, professional journalists.

Writers who matter in politics are those who come from and publish in dead-tree media -- books, periodicals, newspaper op-ed pages. Scholars who matter publish peer-reviewed material in professional journals, and their work is germane to legislation. They may be involved in crafting legislation themselves. Blogs have little relevance for them....

Many blogs, from both left and right, are full of interesting, well-informed intellectual discussions. But my view is that for something to really count, it has to be on paper. It's still not quite real otherwise. The permanence of paper, and the implied cost of circulating it, lends such material a gravitas I suspect the web does not match at present. Web material is still not quite respectable.

I've been having the same problem recently, but I'm not quite convinced that it's the same thing. (I view Web stuff as far more respectable than Max does, for example, although I think he has a point.)

The problem I'm having blogging, recently, is the way in which it works... with that "sequential scrolling posts" aspect of it; there's a catch-22 at the center of it all. If one writes fairly long, well researched or well-thought-out or whatever posts, there is still a significant possibility (if not a likelihood) that the post will have no impact whatsoever. It'll just disappear into the archives, and once that's happened, it's gone. This creates a disincentive towards longer posts, unless you're absolutely sure that you'll get noticed. Even then, there's the problem of getting people to actually read through the thing, instead of skipping ahead to something more easily digestible.

The alternative is smaller, pithier postings, akin to Instapundit or Atrios. This does wonders for one's visitor numbers, because people come back often to see "what's new", but often there isn't much content to the post beyond the link itself. Atrios doesn't suffer from this that much, but Instapundit is notorious for this problem. It means that blogs themselves become less useful, as there are other, better ways of filtering information (such as Google News). Comments threads can help flesh things out, but they're a crapshoot too... length seems to depend more on the contentiousness of an issue, rather than any intrinsic worth.

Plus, since there's so many blogs nowadays, a "linker's blog" has that much more trouble standing out, and the mad hunt for visits and hits is at least partially due to the fear that one is simply typing into the ether, unknown and unread. (I've been hit with that somewhat lately, despite not being a "linker", and it's starting to affect my entire attitude towards blogging.)

Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Write long original stuff, and too soon it'll disappear, unread and unremarked, into the archive; all that time and effort is for naught. Write shorter link-based stuff, and you're just a links page with some pithy words attached, no different than literally thousands of other writers. Try to find a balance between the two, and length becomes the priority instead of content.

No matter how it works out, it seems like maybe weblogs really are best suited for the purpose that they were originally designed for: personal journals.

Well, Friedman is at it again, engaging in a bit of poorly examined wishful thinking. WitnessFriedman's "The Big One":

We are attracting all these opponents to Iraq because they understand this war is The Big One. They don't believe their own propaganda. They know this is not a war for oil. They know this is a war over ideas and values and governance. They know this war is about Western powers, helped by the U.N., coming into the heart of their world to promote more decent, open, tolerant, women-friendly, pluralistic governments by starting with Iraq- a country that contains all the main strands of the region: Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds.

Assumptions abound here, and some simply don't make sense. The big one here is that Tom's assertions actually reflect the understandings of those that are going into Iraq. It comes back to the same criticism that others have had about the theories of David Adesnik... it might conceivably be true, but why on earth should we believe it, and how can we trust an argument built on such fragile foundations? It is hardly settled that this is not a "war for oil" (far from it), and Tom conveniently ignores a major reason why Arabs would be pouring into Iraq: the fear that the Iraqi state will become a puppet government for a Western power, with an ineffective democracy with administration largely by corporations aligned with the U.S. Government and the Republican party.

This seems to be the elephant in the room. Nobody seems to talks about it, especially the hawkish liberals like Friedman. It's mostly discussed by leftists; they claim that Iraq is "imperialism". I don't buy that argument, not exactly, because there is some truth to the "Americans distrust empire" meme... but they are certainly looking for a client state, and the conflict between Iraqi and American interests is pretty obvious, especially when one considers the Turkish example. Realism rears its ugly head once again.

You'd think from listening to America's European and Arab critics that we'd upset some bucolic native culture and natural harmony in Iraq, as if the Baath Party were some colorful local tribe out of National Geographic. Alas, our opponents in Iraq, and their fellow travelers, know otherwise. They know they represent various forms of clan and gang rule, and various forms of religious and secular totalitarianism- from Talibanism to Baathism. And they know that they need external enemies to thrive and justify imposing their demented visions.

I'll leave aside that "external enemies" bit, because it's such an easy target when one is discussing Republican foreign policy.

The real problem with the assumptions here is that the critics of whatever stripe believe that Iraq was bucolic. This could be a strawman, and certainly smells of it, but Friedman may honestly believe this, and it's because he misunderstands the problem that Saddam presented and continues to present. Like most dictators, he treated his people with contempt and was an ineffective administrator (to put it mildly); unfortunately, like many dictators, he staved off internal strife and chaos precisely through the brutal repression that made him so hated. Hobbes pointed out that this is the most important role of a sovereign leader, democratic or otherwise, because he realized (and Tom forgets) that chaos is so very much worse that even a Saddam is preferable. (For proof, see most of Western Africa.) Iraqis and American critics worry that despite American efforts, Iraq will disintegrate, and become a black hole that will suck what stability exists out of the region.

Friedman also ignores an inevitable future event. Iraqi interests and American interests will diverge. Not "may"... will, and to an extent that makes the divide unbridgeable and the resolution of which will be intolerable to one side or another. There is no doubt about this. When that happens, one of two things may happen if the Americans run the show, or are allied with the Iraqis.

1)American interests will prevail, because they really rule the country (one could think of this as the "Shah scenario"):

Iraq will be hurt by this, perhaps deeply, and Iraqis will either begin to resent the United States or (more likely) will remove the American-controlled government. We'll get the Shah all over again, Iraq will descend into chaos and the Islamic theocrats will take over during the chaos, because they will present a proven alternative to U.S. alignment- Iran may not be pleasant, but at least it's certainly independent. Iran will probably snap up a big chunk of Iraq, and the United States will either have its interests hurt or go to war with Iran, a state that may well be nuclear very soon.

2)Iraqi interests will prevail, because they really do have sovereignty. (One could look at this as the "Turkish scenario"):

This will be the best result for the Iraqis, but it may hurt the stability of American security interests, and it will either cause the United States to tighten its grip or withdraw completely and engage in retaliatory measures. As the entire point of the Iraqi exercise is to have a U.S. friendly regime in the region in order to ensure its interests, this is a big problem, but it's inevitable. It will also create huge internal conflict for the United States, because it will force the U.S. to decide between its role as the "shining city on the hill" and its real security needs. I doubt the former will work, and the decision will may future U.S. nation building efforts extremely difficult, if not impossible. That's a problem, because although nation building is extremely difficult in Iraq, it's much more likely to work in failed or collapsed states, such as Liberia, where the U.S. would perceived as a creator of order instead of chaos.

(This is another factor that Friedman seems to never consider- the fact that Iraqis feel that the Americans are largely responsible for the mess they're in. The sanctions were at the behest of the Americans and the Americans were the invaders; without either, Iraq would still be a dictatorship but the last decade and the last few months would not have been remotely as bad as they were. Iraqis aren't going to forget that, even if they are glad that they Americans removed Saddam.)

Of course, this latter scenario could be reversed... the United States could value its symbolic and moral role more than its security interests, and give up some of the latter in the face of the former. That will likely work for most issues, but by definition it can't work for all... sooner or later, something will give, and the U.S. will attempt to exert control.

Finally, this:

In short, America's opponents know just what's at stake in the postwar struggle for Iraq, which is why they flock there: beat America's ideas in Iraq and you beat them out of the whole region; lose to America there, lose everywhere.

This is ludicrous. If Iraq goes democratic, they will be as fully aware of the inevitable conflict between American and Iraqi interests as I am. They'll hunker down and wait, and exploit the chaos when they can. If the Americans start exploiting Iraq to press their case for nation building and westernization, it would also be relatively simple to make the argument that Iraq is simply one particular case that is not exportable to other countries, and make the point that the United States is only giving Iraq its head as long as Iraq goes in the direction they want. The only way that the United States can really make this work is if they successfully "nation build" in several hetereogenous countries and allow them to make decisions that are seriously against American strategic interests. It's possible, but again, sooner or later something has to give, and the more countries get "built" the more likely it is that the type of issue I described above will emerge. This is why the "realists" have been consistently against this war... because they know what's going to happen.

Tom's a smart guy, but he's too busy spinning this story of a climactic war between goodness and light against darkness and evil to look at the situation honestly. It seems like he's been doing this for a while now, but at least before the war it was plausible that the U.S. would secure the country quickly and enjoy flowers and hosannas from the people. That isn't happening, and he needs to recognize it. He's attempting to alter reality to fit his theory, and that's not the mark of a journalist, but of a propagandist. Honestly, Tom, that's really not a good career choice. Just ask that Information Minister.

Just another note on the Greens, prompted by this earlier post

The problem, really, is that the Greens are setting their sights too high. They should be moving into state and national Congresses, not the Presidency. One is irreversibly tied to the two-party system; the other is not, and is more tied into local politics that the Greens could exploit. The Greens should be pouring their resources into challenging Democrats for more liberal congressional seats, and then making deals with the Dems to coordinate policymaking in Washington and in state capitols. They could build their influence and have a realistic shot at influencing policy. Yes, it means that the Greens wouldn't really have a shot at the presidency for about a decade or two, but that's the reality of the project- successful "invasion from the margin" is a very slow process.

Of course, this presumes that Green voters, activists, and politicians are actually interested in policymaking, and from that I think they "purity is the enemy of goodness" attack on the Greens may have some merit. I think the Greens think of themselves as a social movement, and social movements are near-sacrosanct within much of the left. Fine, they have their purpose, but successful social change requires a "grassroots and treetops" approach; you need a governmental branch as well as broad social movements. Even the IRA understood this, and they were far more extremist than the Greens would ever be.

The importance of an independent judiciary:

A federal judge in Manhattan told Fox News yesterday that it had to learn how to take a joke. Then he rejected the network's request for an injunction to block the satirist Al Franken from using the words "fair and balanced" on the cover of his book, "Lies, and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right."

Calling the motion "wholly without merit, both factually and legally," the judge, Denny Chin of United States District Court, said that a person would have to be "completely dense" not to realize the cover was a joke, and that trademark protection for the phrase "Fair and Balanced" was unrealistic because the words are so commonly used....

....[Fox's] arguments were met by laughter in the crowded courtroom, as Fox tried to defend its signature slogan. Part of the network's burden was to prove that Mr. Franken's use of the phrase "fair and balanced" would lead to consumer confusion.

One round of laughter was prompted when Judge Chin asked, "Do you think that the reasonable consumer, seeing the word `lies' over Mr. O'Reilly's face would believe Mr. O'Reilly is endorsing this book?"

The giggling continued as Dori Ann Hanswirth, a lawyer for Fox, replied, "To me, it's quite ambiguous as to what the message is here."

She continued, "It does not say `parody' or `satire.' "

Ms. Hanswirth said Fox's "signature slogan" was also blurred, because people who were not associated with the network, which owns the Fox News Channel, also appear on the cover with Mr. O'Reilly.

Judge Chin said, "The president and the vice president are also on the cover. Is someone going to consider that they are affiliated with Fox?"

The courtroom broke into laughter again.

One wonders what would have happened had there been a different Supreme Court back in 2000. In any case, it's good to see that the ongoing crusade to blunt every amendment except the 2nd has been delayed, at least this one time.

Atrios took a shot at the Greens, and they've responded in his comments thread with everything from "you can't expect Green votes when you insult them" to "the idea that Nader was saying Gore and Bush were identical was a lie".

Folks, those who are saying "we should be nice, or we'll lose the green vote!" are kind of missing the point, which is that the vote is, by definition, lost. Those who choose to vote Green in states that matter aren't going to vote for Democratic candidates who are centrist enough win the election. They'll go for their man Nader.

(Trying to attract them by changing policy will just encourage them to stay the course, in order to have the Dem candidate move more in their direction.)

And, yes, Bush=Gore was a theme of the Greens; trying to deny it is revisionism. There's nothing wrong with that from a partisan point of view: attacking centrists for being centrists is a logical way of getting outlier votes, and worked well enough for the Reform party in Canada. The problem is that just as Dem rhetoric is ticking off Greens now, Green rhetoric was incredibly insulting to Democrats back in 2000. Nobody's forgotten this.

Greens have also seemed to have not realized that trying to "pull" parties in one direction is useless when the political discourse is being pulled in the other direction. The U.S. right realized it long ago, and has been effectively using a "play the fringe vs. moderate" strategy to pull things rightward over the past ten to fifteen years. Greens have the fringe, but that doesn't work without coordination with the Dems, and they can't coordinate with the Dems without losing their relevance. As at least some of them are partisan more than they are ideological, that won't happen.

Finally, to those Greens (and others) who advocate different voting systems- even if it's constitutional (and I have my suspicions), there's no way that a Republican will enact such a thing, and if the Greens are ensuring Republican victories, it's empty rhetoric. It's academic, at least for the foreseeable future, and possibly forever if it'll require a constitutional amendment. Without it, though, the Greens will never own the presidency, and should stop trying. Some seats in Congress, sure, but not the presidency.

Wow... this is amazing news:

Just over two in five (43%) likely voters say they would choose President Bush over a Democratic candidate, and a like number (43%) preferred a Democrat if the election were held today, compared to July polling by Zogby International where 48% would choose Bush and 43% would favor any Democrat.

Jessequoted a few other things from this polls, but not this tidbit, and I thought it was the most significant of the bunch. After all, approval ratings are inherently unreliable due to the nature of the presidency itself- the president is an executive that represents the American people, and that tends to lead to a positive reaction no matter what. Just because they support their current leader doesn't mean they'll want to keep him for the next round. What matters there is their intention to actually re-elect the guy, and when he's even against a random Democrat... that says a lot.

A nasty little blogwar has broken out between Jesse of Pandagon and Lying in Ponds over the question of what "partisanship" actually means, and its relation to ideology. Jesse claims that the distinction is a false one, whereas Lying in Ponds argues that there's a strong difference.

I actually think he has a point on the difference between being ideological and partisan, because one can have a strong allegiance to a party and not be strongly ideological, and/or be strongly ideological but not attached to any particular party.

(Outside of the U.S. system of two ideologically based parties, it's actually quite common. Canadians have known about it for years; look at the NDP/Liberal or PC/Reform divide. Indeed, it's the close association between ideology and party that makes the Republicans so relatively unique.)

That being said, Lying in Ponds completely out to lunch on Paul Krugman; Krugman devastated the whole "partisanship" argument ages ago, driving a stake deep into the heart of LiP's methology that it has never truly recovered from. LiP's supposedly "quantitative" measurement of partisanship is entirely robbed of context, rendering it utterly useless, as (as Krugman noted) a supposed "partisan" could be an honest critic of a dishonest target. Partisanship isn't necessary for this and, because of this, is entirely unprovable by LiP's methodology. As the entire point of the exercise is to measure partisanship, it's rendered pointless, useless, and highly deceptive.

(Not surprising, as quantification of inherently qualitative media such as text is a tricky business at any time.)

So Jesse is wrong on this particular issue of definition, but the point remains that the entire Lying in Ponds exercise is just a sad joke. "Quantitatively", that'd even out... but in the qualitative real world, I'd say that Jesse comes out ahead.

Ok, I've gotta ask this:

Why on earth is Atrios continually linking to that Mischa thug? Even with Atrios' speedy and short style, he's gotta have better things to do.

Several commentators (including David Adesnik and Ralph Peters) are convinced that the attacks on civilian targets in Iraq indicate that guerillas/militants/terrorists/whatever in Iraq are getting "desperate". My reaction upon reading Adesnik's post on the subject was "nice theory; any particular reason I should believe it?"

Matthew Yglesias appears to agree:

Now I'm not going to say that Ralph or David are wrong about this -- they could be right. Maybe all the various attacks we've seen in Iraq were organized by a single, loosely-affiliated group of people. Maybe these people really are deeply unpopular Ba'ath Party remnants. Maybe they've started targeting infrastructure because they're on their last legs and no longer capable of targeting US soldiers. Honestly, though, I just don't see how anyone could know these things.

Exactly. It's a theory entirely unsupported by any evidence whatsoever, and what reasons Adesnik does bring to bear beg the question rather severely. It's like saying that the Iraqis would welcome the Americans with flowers and kisses, in that it's a theory that sounds good and makes America look good (always a growth industry), but dangerous to base analysis or policy on.

After all, according to the hawks, wasn't the U.S. supposed to be out of there by now?

(I'm not even going to get into Adesnik's attempt to berate the media for not agreeing with said theory. Why should they?)

Ezra Klein has a bold plan to use a little political Ju Jitsu on Bush:

George W. Bush has a new website up, and upon seeing it, you have to admit -- this is a campaign that "gets" the web. Their website consolidates many of the tools that the Democratic challengers and their supporters have been experimenting with, and they are well implemented. Particularly impressive is their Action Center, which has one the the coolest, most useful tools I've ever seen:

If you scroll about halfway down the page, you'll see a field where you can input your zip code -- once you do, you'll be given a large list of newspapers and radio shows in your area, complete with contact information for each of them. It's mighty impressive.

Well, George Bush might have some good tools, but we have the online organization -- and tools mean nothing without good, motivated activists. However, we can do a lot with those tools, and we mean to.

[H]ere is what we propose. We want to get a coalition together -- every influential and non-influential lefty site with the ability to direct readers and members over to the Bush action tools. And every Friday, we want to use those tools to write letters and make calls highlighting a different part of the Bush disaster. This Friday will be fiscal irresponsibility day -- where we blanket the media with calls and letters about Bush's absurd fiscal policies. We're even going to get you the info, for instance, behold the Bush Record (if you're not a Dean supporter, just ignore the stuff about Dean).

But this week, we have to pull together the players. That's where you all come in. This needs to move through the blogosphere in much the same way that the "Fair and Balanced" day did. Matt and I can get to a lot of people, but we don't know everybody and we don't have the manpower to do it on our own. So E-mail this around, or simply E-mail your favorite blog-owners and ask them to be part of "Flood the Zone" Fridays, brought to you by Karl Rove and the good folks running the Bush Campaign.

Come Friday, Matt or I will post up some talking points and sample letters, and then watch the fun begin. Lets show Rove who owns the 'net.

So there you have it: "Flood the Zone" Fridays, using Bush's own tools against him. I'm all for it.

Kos is asking a simple question: Can anybody name three good things that Bush has done? Most people cited topping the Taliban and Saddam... others responded to these by saying that the Taliban is far from gone and what will replace Saddam may, incredibly, be worse.

Thing is, these point to a big problem with asking these sorts of questions: it's really too early to tell whether what Bush has done has been "good" or "bad". The only way we can tell is if these countries and his own is in better shape after his presidency than it was before it, and whether the actions and events of that presidency were worth that change. Up until right now, it's possible to say that removing Saddam and the Taliban were good things, but we don't know right now if Iraq and Afghanistan will be completely ruined next year or in 2005.

With that in mind, though, I can't really think of much that Bush has done that has been an unqualified "good thing". Still, he's got a t least a year and a half left. If things don't start improving, though, it's more and more likely that a year and a half is all he's got left.

This has been a very bad day.

On the one side, we likely will see some kind of Palestinian civil war at this point:

Palestinian sources told CNN that Abbas began holding meetings with his ministers and heads of security after the bombing, and decided to break off talks with the two militant groups. The source said the Palestinian Authority blames Hamas and Islamic Jihad for severely damaging the interests of the Palestinian people.

The authority is also considering additional measures against the groups, details of which will be announced in a few days.

..and on the other side, it looks like Al Qaeda may intend to turn Iraq into America's Afghanistan, at least according to Peter Bergen:

"A half-dozen U.S. officials who investigate or analyze al Qaeda ... say that Iraq has become an important battleground for al Qaeda in the past several months," CNN terrorism analyst Peter Bergen said.

"The officials use words such as 'magnet' and 'super magnet' to describe the attraction that Iraq has for al Qaeda and other 'jihadists,' " said Bergen, author of "Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden."...

..."Let's face it, if you are a terrorist in the Middle East and you have a mission to kill Americans, Iraq is now the place you're going to want to go," said [former U.S. deputy secretary of state James] Rubin, speaking from London, England.

Once again, this doesn't mean the "flypaper" theory is validated; American cells aren't going to Iraq, but may well attack while American forces are distracted. Indeed, now may well be an ideal time, as National Guard units continue to be posted to Iraq. The fighters in Iraq may not be part of "Al Qaeda" per se, but simply independent cells under Al Qaeda's indirect control.

One of the bigger wrinkles here is the Saudi angle:

[Dr. Saad]... al-Faqih said Saudis make up about 85 percent of the foreign fighters in the country, but a few of them are Kuwaitis.

The Saudi fighters consider their actions jihad because they see coalition soldiers as unjustifiably occupying a Muslim country, al-Faqih said.

Another factor is that Saudi authorities have cracked down on al Qaeda since May, when terrorists attacked complexes housing Westerners in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, giving al Qaeda members an additional impulse to leave the kingdom.

There are still people who believe that it is Saddam loyalists at work: Ken Pollack and Paul Bremer both argued that it is likely to be loyalists rather than Al Qaeda. Still, it could well be that the United States is now embroiled in a war on three fronts: the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Saudis pouring into Iraq to fight the Americans there, and the continuing danger of terrorist attacks around the world.

Far from his claim of "mission accomplished", it looks like Bush's half-assed and inept foreign policy has only made things worse. Even Ronald "we launch in five minutes" Reagan couldn't have screwed it up this badly, and he started this whole damned mess with his ham-fisted Afghanistan policy back in the 80's. This time, though, there's no Gorbachev to save Bush's hide.

George Will remains blissfully mad.

The shah's "at least temporary control of the country" lasted just a bit more than half of these 50 years. The fact that his control crumbled in 1979 under the assault of Islamic fundamentalists responsive to the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini does not mean the coup was misguided or unavailing....

...The fact that the coup in some sense set in train events that led to today's highly unsatisfactory situation in Iran does not mean that the coup was not successful.

First, anybody who knows about the revolution knows that the fundamentalists took over only after the revolution had already happened... they were merely opportunists who filled the power vacuum left behind by the removal of a dictator. (Sound familiar to anybody?) Why is Will commenting on an event that he appears so grossly ignorant about?

Second, that "Second World War" bit in just insane. The entire point of the backing of the Shah was to place a U.S. friendly despot in the region, and that lasted, what, 30 years before he was swept away? The goal of the Second World war, on the other hand, was to defeat the Axis, and that was actually accomplished. it's not like the Nazis took Germany back in 1965. In what Bizarro world are these remotely similar? Saying "everything is temporary", as Will does, is absolutely no answer... that very attitude is what tends to lead to the ham-handedness of U.S. foreign policy and the irritation, annoyance, and hatred that said foreign policy tends to engender. Just because "to Americans, a hundred years is a long time" (as the saying goes) doesn't mean one should make policy for the short term.

Then again, it's not supposed to make sense. It's just supposed to create enough talking points to confound people long enough to get Bush re-elected and try to keep his dwindling popularity up. Rolling re-election squad stuff, nothing more.

Found in a Toronto Star editorial about the ruling Liberal party and same-sex marriage that mostly treads well-worn ground, there was one sentence paragraph that resonated well with me:

"Defending the right of others to march to a different, even discordant, drummer has never been easy. But it is the natural work of liberals."

John Stuart Mill would have been proud.

Edit: Link removed, as it was non-functional.

Found on CalPundit:

Hey, that big blackout makes it more important than ever to pass the president's energy bill, right? So important, in fact, that in order to get it passed George Bush has agreed to jettison the portions related to upgrading the power grid.

Unsurprising. Welcome to yet another Bush "Bait 'n Switch", where he uses one thing to accomplish something else, and neglects the initial (and usually critical) issue.

"Straight shooter", my fair and balanced ass.

Ok, I'm back. It wasn't related to the blackout, actually... there were different reasons, but I'm good to go now.

The blackout, oddly enough, was actually predicted by at least one man: Nathan Newman, who wrote a post about his 1998 Ph.D. dissertation that showed both how and why it happened:

While the exact cause of this year's blackouts are not established yet, it's clear that neglected infrastructure lay at the heart of the problem. "electricity demand has shot up by 25 percent since 1990, [while] construction of transmission systems has declined by 30 percent." People will point to why this regulation or that regulation was not in place, but the reality is that deregulation gave the key energy players self-interested incentives not to waste their own funds on maintenance.

The Dissertation is called "Net Loss: Government, Technology and the Political Economy of Community in the Age of the Internet". What I've seen reminds me of the work of Cass Sunstein and Lawrence Lessig (a compliment, to be sure); those two luminaries, however, can't really lay claim to playing the Cassandra here. Nathan can, and while it's a dubious honor, it shows why Nathan is a commentator and analyst to be taken seriously.