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November 30, 2004

Indianapolis Police Increase Firepower

It's about time that local police be allowed to carry around the same firepower that criminals use. Although I would say that the police shouldn't be the ones playing catch up. The men in blue should always have superior weaponry to anything that the scum of this world can bring to street battles.

From the Indianapolis Star:

In an era when officers find themselves up against criminals toting heavy firepower, 20 Indianapolis police officers are training this week to level the playing field.

By Friday, the military-style M-16 rifles will be in the hands of patrol officers and available for them to use in situations when there is no time to wait for backup.

I can find plenty of neighborhoods in Indianapolis where a sitting tank would do some good.

Whether it's terrorists or good ol' American violent criminals, we can't have enough force to beat them down.

Posted by PunchTheBag at 06:18 PM | Comments (6)

Fighting fire with fire?

Over at the World Wide Rant, I learned about a new screensaver program devloped by Lycos which aims to give spammers a major headache by automatically making hits on web sites advertised in spam, driving up their bandwidth costs.

The effort is bound to be controversial. The screensaver (which is supposed to be available at this site, which has been hacked and not yet restored as of this posting) is essentially a form of a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, although Lycos claims they are fine-tuning it so that no server is completely shut down by the traffic generated by computers running the screensaver. I'm curious about the legality of running this software on one's computer. Theoretically, a person might at least run afoul of their ISP's service agreement, but I don't think spammers are likely to bring any accusations.

Posted by Eric Seymour at 01:42 PM | Comments (1)

Historians after email

"Former President Bill Clinton was no fan of email, in part because his lawyers said it could be subpoenaed. But privacy concerns didn't scare former Vice President Al Gore, who emailed with abandon while in office," says Washington Whispers. "And now historians are eager to check out his notes, stored at the National Archives. Archivists say that a vice president's papers often mirror the president's and can shed light on internal debates that Clinton didn't discuss in emails or notes."

Posted by Joshua Claybourn at 10:41 AM | Comments (7)

A Knightly Request

The Knights Templar, an ancient order of which I'm a fourth generation member, has submitted a formal request for reconciliation to the Vatican for persecution of the order in the 14th century. The Knights Templar order was formed in 1118 at the end of the First Crusade to protect Christian pilgrims en route to the Holy Land.

Posted by Joshua Claybourn at 10:27 AM | Comments (19)

Memorials

Over at Mode for Caleb, Caleb McDaniel thinks about the new World War II memorial on the Mall. His reflections challenge the way modern American thinking about the war has become too shallow to understand the horror, the cost and the outcome of the conflict.

The conclusion he reaches that war is always a crime, though, is perhaps overdrawn. War is not a "swath of death and destruction that sweeps away both good and evil"; that characterization denies the agency of the people who make and fight wars, and treats war like some sort of inexplicable force like a hurricane or an earthquake. The intentions that force countries to go to war do matter: Had Britain and France stood with Czechoslovakia and gone to war in 1938, there would have been death and destruction, but the war would have been just--and would have swept away far more evil than good.

Posted by Paul Musgrave at 09:44 AM | Comments (3)

November 29, 2004

The Quiet Beatle

Today marks the third anniversary of George Harrison's death. Prof. Cooper has a nice tribute up to a guitarist in the greatest band the world has known.

Posted by Joshua Claybourn at 11:59 PM | Comments (1)

The Pepsi-Cola High School Fighting Bottlers

Tomorrow's Christian Science Monitor editorializes about a Philadelphia school district's decision to allow companies to bid for naming rights on a new high school.

I am a Republican, a free-trader and a pro-business sort of guy. But before those things I am a citizen who believes there is more to government and civic participation than money and utilitarian calculations--that, ultimately, civic virtue trumps monetary
considerations.

In other words: You have got to be kidding me.

Such a move betrays an absolute and unthinking rejection of the schools' purpose to serve the public by educating the citizenry. Either that, or a craven and calculating rejection of that purpose, one designed to provoke a debate over public funding of the public schools. Maybe we should spend more on classrooms. Of course, we could accomplish that end by spending less on administrative overhead--if memory serves, something like fifty cents on the school funding dollar goes to administrative overhead in Philadelphia.

But money alone won't solve school problems. At some point, the attitude and competence of school administrators have to be an issue. And if these Philly administrators believe it's okay to send children to McDonald's High School, and if they're not competent to find alternatives to that, then they should be replaced. In the meantime, schools should be kept as free as possible from commercial influences. (Yes, I know that they're tainted already.)

Posted by Paul Musgrave at 06:34 PM | Comments (6)

The Dollar and The Dragon

China may be becoming increasingly assertive in its diplomacy (as Dan Drezner and I write), but it stands to lose a lot of money--perhaps a tenth of GDP--because of its substantial reserve holdings in dollars, Brad Setser says.

In the Financial Times this weekend, one writer suggested that if the dollar falls too fast too far, we could be looking at a global deflationary depression--in which both prices and aggregate demand fall. What does that mean for the average Joe on the street? Let me put it this way: The last time we had a deflationary depression (Japan not included), bands were playing "Happy Days Are Here Again."

By the way, let me mention an article in the New York Times from this weekend about one country where the dollar is--or was--hard currency: Cuba, where Castro has just reversed a decade-old policy of allowing American money to serve as legal Cuban tender.

Posted by Paul Musgrave at 04:48 PM | Comments (0)

St. Louis to Casey, Illinois

Mrs. PTB and I along with some friends traveled to St. Louis over the weekend to walk about 25,000 steps in and out of antique shops (one in the group was wearing a digital pedometer and I always asked for updates to give me a sense that indeed walking into a pub was a form of exercise).

If you like architecture and some wonderful old homes with lots of character from the 1800s and early 1900s, then it's worth the trip. However, Indianapolis feels like Chicago compared to the nightlife in downtown St. Louis. We walked from our hotel to Laclede's Landing, a historic area along the Mississippi River that has been converted to restaurants, but not even the ghosts of the early settlers haunt that area any more. The fact that Laclede's is not in the center of the city probably hurts it. I'm not sure downtown workers even have time to walk over there at lunch hour.

We spent a chunk of time along Cherokee Antique Row, near the Budweiser plant (the locals say it's the King of Beers). If you're a radio fan like me, then visit Jasper's Antique Radio Museum; it seems every celebrity from Bill Murray to Jay Leno has checked out the radios that brought a country closer together.

The famous Gateway Arch has a moon glow at night that gives the city a ghostly feel.

Speaking of large monuments that you can see for miles, you can't miss this one as you're riding along I-70 in southern Illinois. Not too far from that towering Cross is the small town of Casey that sits on the Historic National Road. As you come into town, you'll see lampposts and fastened to each one is the name of a Casey resident serving in the military. There must have been 20-25 of these placards. A yellow ribbon is next to each name except for Charles Lamb who has a black wreath next to his.

I know the big cities send plenty of young men and women overseas but you really feel the war's intensity when you travel through a village. You know you're in a small town when you hesitate to ask the Pizza Hut waitress about a fallen soldier for fear that she could be a relative, sister, or even a mom of the U.S. Army Specialist.

Daniel Henninger writes about the grass roots efforts to rally around our troops. Give it a read and then pick at least one charity to send a check to before Christmas.

Posted by PunchTheBag at 03:04 PM | Comments (2)

Realpolitik Still Matters!

At Hoosier Review, Zach Wendling comments on the unfolding crisis in Ukraine by noting the research speciality of Dr. Condoleeza Rice, U.S. Secretary of State-designate. Given the involvement of Russia in the presidential election between Yanukovich and Yushchenko, and Moscow's clear desire to bring back a measure of control within the sphere of former Soviet states, maybe it's a very good thing that Condi spent her career studying the Soviet Union. Everything old is new again.

I never quite accepted that after September 11, everything in foreign policy was different. Many of the people who say that, and believe that, say and believe that because they weren't paying attention beforehand, and because they are only watching the news that they think is important now. That sounds harsh, but it isn't: If your introduction to foreign affairs is a major crisis, then your desire to learn about that crisis is wholly rational. I know, for instance, that my understanding of Ukraine's politics is dreadfully warped by the fact that the only time I hear about Kiev's politics it's because some journalist or politician has been murdered.

The distinctiveness of 9/11, then, has shaped the discourse of American foreign policy to a much greater degree than the event has reshaped the world's power structures.

Let's face it: States may not be the only actors on the world stage, and some states may be less important than some non-governmental actors (e.g., Tuvalu vs. the Red Cross), but the structure of the world's politics and, to a lesser extent, economics is still dictated by state actors. The United States is not an NGO, and the EU is a supra-state or a coalition of states, not an independent actor like Amnesty International. And China, India, Brazil and Iran are very happy with their statehood, and are resentful and suspicious of efforts to pare away their sovereignty.

The nuclear revolution has worked its way through the world, and now we are faced with something that is new for the modern age: The ability of a non-state actor to deploy an astonishing amount of force against states. But the threat of nuclear terrorism is not something new, and neither are the best methods for dealing with it. Since uranium and plutonium require large-scale facilities to create, and because the world's stocks of uranium and plutonium are in the possession of governments, efforts to block nuclear terrorism are going to require the U.S. and the West to work with state actors.

This should be an easy sell: Only a suicidal or a deranged regime--or one totally disconnected from the global political and economic system--will be willing to use nuclear weapons aggressively, or provide them to groups that will do so. And no regime could ever want its weapons to fall into the hands of terrorists through theft or carelessness. There are many measures that even countries outside the framework of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty could be persuaded to take (ending the hair-trigger on Indo-Pakistani nuclear weapons, for instance, and giving better command and control systems to both New Delhi and Islamabad).

I've written here about weapons of mass destruction because that is really the most obvious threat from terrorists, who--thus far--do not seem to have the resources, talents or understanding to go after critical infrastructure or revert to a policy of terror bombing (imagine, for instance, a suicide bomber on the Manhattan subway system). My intention is to remind you that states form a critical part of the problem, and ignoring our policy toward governments (and even factions within governments) in favor of a paradigm in which only non-state actors matter is foolish, short-sighted and probably actively harmful. A quick glance at the current security headlines reveals that states are still the major movers in global affairs: Iran's uranium enrichment program, China's territorial disputes with Japan, Sino-Taiwanese relations, the Ukrainian election, and, of course, North Korea. Non-state actors are important. But they are not the most important threats the U.S. faces, and we should not focus our attention on them to the exclusion of our enduring national interests, which are affected most by the actions of other states.

Posted by Paul Musgrave at 02:53 PM | Comments (7)

Burning Bridges

Over at LOOSEWire, Jeremy Wagstaff (a columnist I started reading back when the Far Eastern Economic Review was a weekly newsmagazine) alerts readers to one way bridges can fall down. A bridge in Indonesia is sloping to one side. Why?

Upon further inspection officials noted that, in the words of the Post, "one of the reasons for the apparent structural deterioration was due to the frequency of people urinating on one of the steel pillars of the bridge, causing it weaken due to the corrosive forces of human urine.

Posted by Paul Musgrave at 02:47 PM | Comments (2)

The Commerce Clause and the Wicked Weed

Over at Positive Liberty, history graduate student Jason Kuznicki subjects to scrutiny the Supreme Court case over whether the federal government can block the use of medical marijiuana in a wide-ranging essay.

Kuznicki's research specialty is eighteenth-century France, and his blog's mission is the philosophical defense of liberty; the two missions have a natural relationship. Though I do not accept the ideology of the French Revolution--as a Burkean conservative, how on earth could I?--and I suspect that Kuznicki is, at heart, one of the philosophes, still I am constantly impressed by the breadth, variety and penetrating insight of Kuznicki's blog. His essay should be required reading for those who are interested in the drug wars, in how jurisprudence and economic nostrums have intersected, and in how government regulation binds liberty.

Interestingly, I am currently working through a couple of historical topics that have served to remind me of how the anonymity and impartiality of regulation can, in certain cases (both actual and theoretical), serve to promote liberty. But Kuznicki makes a very good case that such is -- ahem -- hardly the case with the current applications of the commerce clause, including the restrictions on the growth and use of medicinal marijuana.

Posted by Paul Musgrave at 02:38 PM | Comments (2)

Color blind

In his piece in the Times Online, Andrew Sullivan argues that the "upright, moral, traditional red America" leads a much more sinful, or at least hypocritical, life than the "dissolute, liberal blue states." He writes:

Take two iconic states: Texas and Massachusetts. In some ways they were the two states competing in the last election. One is the home of Harvard, gay marriage, high taxes and social permissiveness.

The other is Bush country, solidly Republican, traditional and gun-toting. Massachusetts voted for John Kerry over George W Bush 62% to 37%; Texas voted for Bush over Kerry 61% to 38%.

Ask yourself a simple question: which state has the highest divorce rate? Marriage was a key issue in the last election, with Massachusetts’ gay marriages becoming a symbol of alleged blue state decadence and moral decay. But in fact Massachusetts has the lowest divorce rate in the country at 2.4 divorces per 1,000 inhabitants. Texas, which until recently made private gay sex a crime, has a divorce rate of 4.1.

Based on this and other similar evidence, Sullivan argues, among other things, hypocracy:

Those parts of America that most fiercely uphold what they believe are traditional values are not those parts where traditional values are healthiest. Hypocrisy? Perhaps. A more insightful explanation is that socially troubled communities cling to absolutes in the abstract because they cannot live up to them in practice.

But there are a number of problems with his read, based on statistics from Maggie Gallagher's recent piece examining the same statistics. In short, people from "red states" marry much more often than those in "blue states." To put it another way, Massachusetts couples will simply break up rather than divorce because they often don't get married in the first place. In Massachusetts there were 6.4 marriages per 1,000 people in 2001 and in Texas there were 9.1 marriages per 1,000 that same year. But Sullivan makes another error when he turns to another social ill:

Teenage births? Again, the contrast is striking. In a state such as Texas where the religious right is strong and the rhetoric against teenage sex is gale-force strong, teenage births as a percentage of all births are 16.1%. In liberal, secular Massachusetts they are 7.4%, less than half.

For starters, Texas has more people 18 and under (28% to 23.6%). But the most important and unfortunate reason for the discrepancy is that Massachusetts residents have more abortions, so of course teen pregnancy will be lower. Mass. has 333 per 1,000 to Texas' 209. Does all of this completely undermine Sullivan's thesis? No, but it does show that the evidence supporting it is much more dubious than his column suggests.

Posted by Joshua Claybourn at 07:25 AM | Comments (12)

November 28, 2004

Career Advice

What if they had a strike and nobody noticed?

Toll collectors for the Pennsylvania Turnpike went on strike Wednesday, and this has certainly caused some inconveniences--for the turnpike administration if not for turnpike travelers. (For some, the flat toll of $2 will be a holiday bonanza. It usually costs me well over $10 to traverse most of the state on the turnpike.) I can't say whether the toll collectors deserve a better contract than what they've been offered, but there's an 800-pound gorilla lurking behind the scenes in this labor dispute.

In today's world, stopping one's car to hand a paper ticket and cash out the window is nearly as anachronistic as the horse-drawn buggies of Lancaster County. Even though I travel the turnpike rather infrequently, I jumped at the chance several years ago to install an EZ-pass device in my car. Currently, I'm supposed to slow down to 5 MPH to drive through an EZ-pass tollbooth lane, but I expect in 10 years I'll be able to enter and exit the turnpike just like any other interstate highway, and only out-of-staters and luddite types will queue up to hand cash to a human being.

So, given this inevitable obsolescence of the tollbooth worker, it is ironic that union officials are saying that concerns about job losses are the main reason for the strike. The article linked above cites Eric Glass, a 23-year-old toll collector, as stating "This isn't about the money, it's about job security." My young friend, you need to get into a career that has a future.

Posted by Eric Seymour at 10:42 PM | Comments (8)

The blogging community

Wonkette was just on C-SPAN talking about blogging, and on the whole I'd give her speech to the Online News Association a passing grade. She stressed that one of the big draws to blogging is the community that often arises. In that vein I'd like to point out a few developments with friends in the blogosphere.

First, Joel Fuhrmann's father passed away at 3am today. The pain of losing a parent is not one that is easily communicated. Second, Mark Shea is taking a leave of absence from blogging in order to finish up on a book and some other projects. Finally, I'll be guest blogging at Radley Balko's Agitator for the next month or so. Much of what I post will also be posted here, but there will also be original material, so consider adding it to your bookmarks.

Posted by Joshua Claybourn at 06:57 PM | Comments (1)

The Revolution Is Being Blogged

TulipGirl and Le Sabot Post-Moderne are blogging from Kiev, where the presidential election crisis is still going.

I'm just returned from Prague; while there, I ran into Ukrainian demonstrators demanding an end to Yanukovich. (Pictures plus text at that link.)

Posted by Paul Musgrave at 06:38 PM | Comments (0)

SCOTUS Happenings

There are rumblings in some legal corners to create a mandatory retirement age for Supreme Court Justices. An Associated Press poll found that six in ten Americans support the idea. Earlier this year, the Virginia Law Review published an article titled "Saving this Honorable Court: A proposal to replace life tenure on the Supreme Court with staggered, nonrenewable eighteen-year terms."

Meanwhile Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist will be absent for the December session. That means he won't be hearing oral arguments from blogger Randy Barnett, who is arguing for the first time before the US Supreme Court tomorrow in the marijuana cases, "taking the liberal, libertarian pro-drug rights position."

Posted by Joshua Claybourn at 02:16 PM | Comments (1)

November 27, 2004

Good news across the pond

The European Wind Energy Association held its annual meeting in London this week and projected that offshore "wind farms" covering an area the size of Greece could meet Europe's electricity needs with no greenhouse gas emissions. The biggest hurdle, besides suspected harm to birds, is the "visual pollution" caused by the turbines.

Posted by Joshua Claybourn at 02:46 PM | Comments (3)

The Ukraine is Weak

We've covered the mess (to put it lightly) raging in Ukraine in several posts, this being one example, but surprisingly the most audacious development may just now be unfolding. The popular pro-Western opposition leader, Yushchenko, has contracted a mysterious appearance-altering illness. Yushchenko was widely complimented for his dashing good looks, pictured in the left frame, but contrast it with the monstrous image of him now on the right. The cause is not yet known, but one of the physicians handling the matter asked for help from "a specialist in military operations and biological weapons."

It is too soon to point the finger at the controlling party, and by extension Putin's Russia. But if the culprits turn out to be Putin or his cronies, democracy and the rule of law in former Soviet states may be even further behind than we previously thought.

Update: Daniel Drezner has more links here, here, and here.

Posted by Joshua Claybourn at 02:34 PM | Comments (2)

Boeing's 737 Gets a New Role

Via Wired: Boeing has won a contract to convert its 737 passenger aircraft design into a replacement for the U.S. Navy's P-3 Orion anti-sub planes. In its new military role (which will begin about ten years from now -- I love the nimbleness of the Pentagon), the 737 will look something like this.

Posted by Paul Musgrave at 08:28 AM | Comments (0)

The dollar, the dollar

I really, really don't want to disturb anybody this holiday season, but I do want to remind everyone that the dollar has already fallen off the hill and is dangling, cartoon-like, from a vine growing out of the cliff face. As I blog from an Internet cafe here in a Central European country that favors consonants over vowels, I can feel my wallet getting lighter and lighter and lighter....

This is good news, of course, if you happen to be an American who lives in America and works in a job that ships American goods overseas. It is not so good if you like, say, French wine or Japanese electronics--or if you are an American who does not live in America.

Posted by Paul Musgrave at 08:19 AM | Comments (5)

November 26, 2004

Sightings

As I was walking down the concourse to my gate at the Philadelphia airport on Wednesday, I noticed that left-wing intellectual Cornel West was walking about 10 feet in front of me. Seeing in person someone you've seen on TV is always a bit exciting, and as I followed West past the gift shops and eateries, it was interesting to watch other people's reactions and see who recognized him.

But, really, if I were going to come across someone who appeared in the Matrix sequels, why couldn't it have been Monica Bellucci?

In other news, I'm enjoying every moment of my holiday retreat in idyllic small-town Indiana. I hope all our ITA readers are having an equally enjoyable Thanksgiving weekend.

Posted by Eric Seymour at 01:16 PM | Comments (4)

Holiday Pork

Zach Wendling begins his latest column quite nicely:

Among fiscal conservatives, it is almost cliche now to bemoan how Republicans have abandoned limited government. To paraphrase Bill Clinton, George W. Bush should walk out into the Rose Garden and proclaim, "The era of small government is over."

But in spite of it being cliche, I can't resist noting some of the more shameful provisions in Congress' $15.78 billion spending bill, courtesy of Radley Balko. Click below to read them in full, but be sure to have tissues nearby for the crying.

--$8 million to rehabilitate a "historic cafeteria building" in Oregon's Crater Lake National Park.

--$100 million in grants to study berries in Alaska, wine in Washington, hydroponic tomatoes in Ohio, and maple syrup in Vermont.

--$300,000 for a parking garage in Auburn, Maine.

--$25,000 for schools in Las Vegas to study the development of mariachi music.

--$300,000 to Missoula, Mont., for the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation.

--$1.1 million for research into the development of baby food and other products made from salmon.

--$1 million to Texas for the World Birding Center.

--$250,000 to Nashville, Tenn., for the Country Music Hall of Fame.

--$100,000 to Punxsutawney, Pa., for a weather museum.

--Thousands of dollars to protect sunflowers in North Dakota.

--$2 million to buy a "presidential yacht."

--Alaska alone gets $950,000 for a recreation center, $150,000 for a botanical garden, $300,000 for a senior center, $1 million for housing upgrades, $900,000 for an aquarium, and $525,000 for a quarry upgrade. And that's no a complete list. Because of their powerful senator, whom no one else in the GOP will stand up to, the federal government spends $12,000 on every Alaskan, double the national average.

Posted by Joshua Claybourn at 10:32 AM | Comments (0)

November 25, 2004

Thanks be to, er. . .

Educators who willfully omit the theory of evolution from scientific teaching are doing students a sad disfavor, but there are equally disappointing antics on the flip side. Charles Ridgell, Maryland St. Mary's County Public Schools curriculum and instruction director, forbids discussion of the Pilgrims' thanks to God on Thanksgiving because the school aims to "teach about Thanksgiving from a purely historical perspective, not from a religious perspective." A "purely historical perspective," of course, would call for a study of religious events.

Posted by Joshua Claybourn at 08:47 PM | Comments (6)

Defending Target and Free Enterprise

Radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt's obsession with hassling Target over its decision to order the Salvation Army to do an about face is an example of post-election hubris.

I'm typical of most Catholics who don't wear religion on our sleeves. Maybe we should, I don't know. I'm certainly thankful for the Evangelicals who probably handed the President his victory (helped also by an increased pro-Bush Catholic turnout). But now Hewitt wants to deploy that same political force against the Target Empire.

Hewitt must be suffering from the post election blues where he needs another fight and with the Democrats still in their own world of Ohio conspiracy theories, Generalissimo Hewitt has decided to take on free enterprise. Ok, I thought our side was kind of, sort of in favor of a corporation exercising its prerogative as long as it wasn't pulling an Enron. It's one of the reasons I voted a straight Republican ticket.

Do we really need to be putting our energy into punishing Target and its employees? Is it smart for conservatives to do the Jesse Jackson whine and boycott dance?

Well for the record, I shopped at Target yesterday and bought $75.59 worth of goods including a Christmas tree stand, detergent, paper towels (the big 8-pack), and other odds and ends. I love that place. It's neat, orderly, with snazzy designer lines from kitchen gadgets to soap. It allows Starbucks to sell its addicting brew and who doesn't like its hip commercials with Target Dog.

Target is classy middle class inexpensive materialism at its best. That's the deal Target makes with its customers. I will be more than happy to spend like a member of Congress as long as I get products to my liking in return. Golly, did I just stumble on to the meaning of capitalism?

So what if Target doesn't want to do business with the Salvation Army? How many of you are being inundated with requests from charities right now via the phone, snail mail, e-mail, and doorknocker-ers? I'll bet a lot of you are. Do you fund each and every one of them? Or do you pick and choose?

Isn't that what Target is doing? Take a look at Target's Web site and decide for yourself if it's giving humanity a helping hand.

Speaking of Congress, I don't see words of protest on Hewitt's blog devoted to the boondoggling and pork barreling of our Republican Congress last week. Hewitt bashes Target, a company creating jobs, but gives a pass to his "conservative" buddies in Congress who are spending our tax dollars on projects laden with lard like one million dollars for the Norwegian American Foundation.

Private charity would have more to help the needy if we could shield our income from Capitol Hill's greedy.

Why isn't Hewitt complaining about that?

Another battle that Hewitt could've picked with Corporate USA is outsourcing overseas. It really can't be stopped by government fiat, but he might have directed his moral bullets just to tweak them. If more of these jobs stayed on our soil, maybe then the Salvation Army wouldn't have to ring the bells so loudly.

Let's choose our battles more carefully and give Target Dog and his friendly employees a break this Christmas season.

(Disclaimer: PunchTheBag did work for Target for a couple of summers in 1981 and 1982, before graduating from Hillsdale College that great bastion of free enterprise and private property).

Posted by PunchTheBag at 10:56 AM | Comments (7)

Thanksgiving Seder

When my friends gathered for Thanksgiving dinner in college, we would often deliver remarks inspired by Peter Marshall's The Light and the Glory. Click the link below to read them.

On the first Thanksgiving, the Pilgrims were brimming over with gratitude – not only to the ninety Indians who had surprisingly joined them, but to their God. In Him they had trusted, and He had honored their obedience beyond their dreams. So, Governor Bradford declared a day of public Thanksgiving, to be held in October.

Because of the unexpectedly high numbers in attendance, the Pilgrims prayed that they'd be able to feed such a large crowd without cutting too deeply into their winter food supply. As it turned out, the Indians did not arrive empty-handed. The Indian chief had commanded his braves to hunt for the occasion, and they arrived with no less than five dressed deer, and more than a dozen fat wild turkeys! [Present the turkey.]

The Indians helped with the preparations, teaching the Pilgrim women how to make hoecakes and a tasty pudding out of cornmeal and maple syrup. [Present cornbread and other such stuff.] Then they showed them an Indian delicacy: how to roast corn kernels in an earthen pot until they popped into something fluffy and white. It was the first popcorn ever eaten by Westerners. [Present popcorn.]

The Pilgrims in turn provided many vegetables from their household gardens: carrots, onions, turnips, parsnips, cucumbers, radishes, beets, and cabbages. Also, using some of their precious flour, they took summer fruits which the Indians had dried and introduced them to the likes of blueberry, apple, and cherry pie. [Present pie.] It was all washed down with sweet wine made from the wild grapes. [Present alcohol.]

Posted by Joshua Claybourn at 02:42 AM | Comments (2)

Skip Alexander

Last night I saw Alexander, Oliver Stone's movie about the Macedonian conqueror which stirred mild controversy over historical interpretations. Although the previews offered some foreshadowing of its failure, a great story and a star studded cast offered the promise of a holiday blockbuster. The three hour film feaures Colin Farrell, Val Kilmer, Angelina Jolie, Anthony Hopkins, and many more.

The script for the movie, penned by Oliver Stone, Christopher Kyle and Laeta Kalogridis, is downright awful. The dialogue features continuous speeches that are tedious, pedestrian and, well, much too long. Images and scenes get repeated and at times the viewer has no idea what's going on. The atrocious script and poor editing were enough to give the movie a thumbs down, but the acting somehow made it worse. Aside from Angelie Jolie, who took a bad role and made it worthwhile, all of the central characters never found their groove. The New York Times said it well:

Certainly it's brought out the worst in terms of the puerile writing, confused plotting, shockingly off-note performances and storytelling that lacks either of the two necessary ingredients for films of this type, pop or gravitas.

The movie ends with Ptolemy rambling about his time with Alexander. The speech, like so many in the movie, made me want to pull my hair out. Then I finally found someone I could connect with. As Ptolemy pauses, he realizes he had been blathering and asks a scribe writing down his thoughts to throw that part away, only to start rambling once again. The scribe looked bored and trapped, and that's exactly how I felt watching the movie unfold. Truly, I walked out of the theatre upset that I had just lost three hours of my life that I would never get back. The historical controversy surrounding the film threatens to overshadow an equally important point - the film is simply bad.

Posted by Joshua Claybourn at 02:40 AM | Comments (8)

ITA Update

Late last night, just over a week after ITA's launch, we passed the 22,000 hit mark. Thanks to everyone stopping by. We hope you continue to find the agora a worthwhile stop.

I'll also take this moment to note that In the Agora is offering very cheap advertising rates in the first few weeks. Be sure to take advantage of the good deals while you can.

Posted by Joshua Claybourn at 02:36 AM | Comments (3)

November 24, 2004

Posner Returns

I sent this to Paul across the hallway at ITA Command and Control Center, but before he could post it he took off running and jumping with happiness. So it's left to me to report that Seventh Circuit Judge Richard A. Posner, ITA's pick to fill the next SCOTUS vacancy, will be officially entering the blogosphere soon as co-author of a new blog. His partner in crime is Univ. of Chicago economist Gary Becker and the residence will be called "The Becker-Posner Blog."

Posted by Joshua Claybourn at 03:21 PM | Comments (0)

Rather Late

Everyone knows this, and the story's over a day old, but we were waiting for Dan Rather to scramble and confirm the story. Rather "will relinquish his role as anchor and managing editor of the CBS Evening News in March. He will remain on at CBS as a 60 Minutes correspondent."

Meanwhile Reuters reports that CNN has hired Jonathan Klein, former executive director of CBS News, as its new president for U.S. news. In September, Klein defended Rather with this ridiculous quote: "You couldn't have a starker contrast between the multiple layers of checks and balances [at '60 Minutes'] and a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing." Is CNN trying to lose ratings?

Posted by Joshua Claybourn at 02:45 PM | Comments (7)

Ukraine: The End of the Reporting, Not The Story

My final update about Ukraine this week:

First, Dan Drezner discusses the issues involves, and reminds us that positive change is hard to come by in the regime. Good men don't always triumph.

Associated Press says that the official Ukraine elections commission declared PM Viktor Yanukovich the winner of the presidential election. New York Times writes that Secretary of State Powell has said that the United States does not accept as legitimate that declaration. The announcement sparked some fistfights between parliamentarians. The crowds of protesters remained in the center of Ukraine's capital Kiev--as many as 200,000, according to the Washington Post. (New York Times has additional coverage on the opposition demonstrators.) Yushchenko has so far refused to order his supporters to obey the advice of hardline opposition members, who want to seize state television and other facilities. Wall Street Journal mentions that yesterday Yushchenko took a symbolic oath of office. Several city councils throughout Ukraine have recognized him as president.

International condemnation swelled over the past twenty-four hours. According to the Journal, White House criticism was blunt: "The United States is deeply concerned by extensive and credible indications of fraud," said White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan. According to the International Herald Tribune, Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Richard Lugar of Indiana was even blunter: He promised "consequences for those who beat up journalists and who threw people down the stairs." Lugar said that employers had in many instances told employees how to vote, and said following a trip to Berlin to meet Chancellor Gerhard Schroder that he was confident that Germany will support any U.S.-led actions to punish Ukraine. Associated Press and others quoted European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso as warning of "consequences" for the EU's relationship with Ukraine. Ironically, of course, shutting down links between Ukraine and the West (i.e., the EU and the U.S.) is exactly why Putin wanted Yanukovich to win.

New York Times reports that Russian observers and President Putin have declared the elections "open and honest."

Postmodern Clog is blogging from the site of the protests.

Posted by Paul Musgrave at 01:57 PM | Comments (0)

Europe: Postmodern no more?

Back in the Seventies, Henry Kissinger famously asked "If I want to call Europe, whom do I call?" He didn't have an answer back then. He would kind of have an answer now (Javier Solana would be the best bet). But instead of making international relations more tractable, by getting the Germans and the French and the Italians and the Benel..ourgers? and the Portuguese and the Scandinavians (most of them) and the Greeks and the everyone else to stop talking and make some damn foreign policy already....instead, we've got the Europeans blathering on about being a "normative power" and a "postmodern state."

Okay, so to political science graduate students those terms mean something, or at least I pretend they do when I'm asked about them in class. But in reality all they mean is that "Europe"--the EU--is a nag and a scold that doesn't have an army. Still less do those terms mean that Europe is a "unitary actor," which is polisci-speak for "an organization that can make a decision."

So what are the Europeans up to? Let's take a look.

The key insight to understanding the European Union is to realize that the EU isn't a union of Europeans, but of European governments. A very popular and somewhat dry topic to discuss these days is European identity; appropriately for the continent that produced the existentialists, apparently a large number of European elites wake up every morning and say "Who the hell am I anyway?" Lileks' encounter with the Spaniard who says she's European (but would probably call herself Castillian or Catalan or Valencian in Spain) is typical of the confusion that the postmodern state produces.

Because the EU is composed of governments first and people second, EU policies often promote rather odd but usually slightly crooked results. Take, for instance, this Wall Street Journal article from November 16, which discusses how the ten new members of the EU (who joined on May 1 of this year) "doubled their government aid to struggling industries in the years before joining the bloc." This presumably falls against EU rules promoting "competitiveness" within the Union, but checking it out is going to be a bear.

That investigation is going to be carried out through the EU's European Commission, the real executive and day-to-day power within the Union. The EU does have an elected European Parliament, but even after MEPs (Members of the European Parliament) managed to force the incoming European Commission to reshuffle itself (comparable to Congress forcing a Cabinet reshuffle, but unprecedented in EU history), the Parliament remains cloutless, as the Wall Street Journal reported on 18 November. Most grievously, Parliament can only force the entire Commission to resign--it can't impeach and remove individual commissioners. That's a major block to the use of one of its powers. Parliament does have control over the EU's budget, but at only 110bn euros (about $140 to $145 bn, depending), that's not really a major threat.

Therefore, the European Commission will continue running the show, more or less. The Commission is a twenty-five member body, including the President, with representatives nominated by the government of each member state. The European Parliament had rejected the earlier lineup of commissioners for the coming five-year term largely because of the nomination by Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi of Rocco Buttiglione, a staunch Catholic who viewed homosexuality as a sin, to the justice and security portfolio. (Berlusconi has a history of choosing interesting allies: According to New York Times, his new foreign minister once called Mussolini "the greatest statesman of the century.") Buttiglione wasn't the only commissioner-designate who faced criticism, but he was the symbol of the Commission slate's troubles.

Buttiglione's name was withdrawn, Parliament assented to the new slate, and the Commission took office. And just in time, because it looks like time for the postmodern state to adapt to the challenges of the contemporary world. Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, secretary-general of NATO, told the New York Times in an interview that Europeans would have to move closer to the American view of the seriousness of the threat from terrorism. Among his concerns:

The experience of Iraq had taught him two lessons as a European and an Atlanticist, he said.

"The first is that if Europe sees its integration process as one directed against the United States, it will not work because the result will be a split in Europe, and that is an ambition that no European should have,'' he said.

"The second is that if you want to have a trans-Atlantic dialogue between grownups, I know that any president and any American administration is willing to listen to the European voice as long as it is one European voice. If it is five different voices, they will not take the trouble to listen and they will wonder what is Europe."

After more than thirty years of building the postmodern state, in other words, Henry Kissinger is still waiting for someone from "Europe" to call him back.

Posted by Paul Musgrave at 11:35 AM | Comments (4)

Bunker Busters Busted

DefenseTech.Org updates with the very welcome news that plans to create a small-yield nuclear weapon that its proponents said would have allowed the U.S. to nuke targets buried underground. The program was killed by a Republican Congressman from Ohio.

I wrote about the bunker buster proposal last year and covered the numerous disadvantages that adding this weapon to the U.S. arsenal. Essentially, the proponents were wrong on the science and probably wrong on the strategy. And in the wake of the intelligence failures of 9/11, Iraq, and now--possibly--Iran, are we going to use nuclear weapons when the intelligence is doubtful and the costs are high?

Well, yes, and I agree with that posture. But the analysis behind the bunker-buster idea never really worked out, for the reasons I outline in the link above.

I should also note James Wolcott's invocation of the concept of 4th Generation Warfare. (Reading Wolcott and finding a reference to 4GW is like reading Econometrica and finding a review of How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb by Alan Greenspan.) 4GW, or "maneuver warfare," is a paradigm of interpreting how contemporary, asymmetrical, non-state-centric warfare has reshaped how conflicts are fought. Wolcott puts it in perspective, and his piece helps make the case for why nuclear weapons--a product of an earlier generation of warfare--simply won't do the job today.

Posted by Paul Musgrave at 09:10 AM | Comments (1)

November 23, 2004

Heart to God, Hand to Man

One of the best traditions of the holiday season is sharing of our abundance with those who are less fortunate. So as Thanksgiving approaches, I offer my endorsement of the following charitable efforts:

I have personally enjoyed being involved with the Boxes of Love outreach by Here's Life Inner City (a ministry of Campus Crusade for Christ). As a college student, I had the opportunity to help deliver these boxes to needy inner-city families. Each box contains the ingredients of a holiday dinner with enough food to feed a family of 6, as well as a New Testament and Christian children's literature, and costs only $36.71.

This past Sunday, my church hosted the director of Hope International Ministries, a missionary organization that is raising funds to purchase an ocean liner and convert it to a hospital ship. The ship will dock in ports around the world and bring free medical care and other humanitarian relief to people in need. I was intrigued to learn that volunteers who travel with the hospital ship (for anywhere from 2 weeks to a year or more) will only need to raise $15 for each day of their term of service. Imagine raising a mere $5475 (plus, I assume, travel expenses to the ship's home port) then spending a year sailing around the globe doing missionary work!

Last, I would be amiss not to mention the organization whose motto I have borrowed for the title of this post. The Salvation Army was rated by Forbes Magazine in 2003 as one of the top 10 charities in America. As Josh noted below, they have been snubbed by Target this year, which will no longer allow volunteers to raise funds outside their stores. I'm sure they would appreciate any generous ITA readers stopping by online to drop a donation in the virtual red kettle.

Posted by Eric Seymour at 11:20 PM | Comments (0)

Yes, Virginia, There's Still Another Asian Power

It's fashionable to talk about China, but what about that other Asian power, Japan? Under PM Junichiro Koizumi, Tokyo has taken a more assertive role and pursued a closer alignment with the United States, and those trends seem to be continuing.

According to Japan Times, Tokyo is rationalizing its command-and-control procedures so it can participate in a missile-defense system with the United States. Associated Press says Japan is also calling on North Korea to come back to the bargaining table; Tokyo's public request came after Chinese President Hu assured Bush that Beijing would make a similar request. Japan Times reports, though, that bilateral Japanese-Chinese relations remain under stress because of Koizumi's symbolic visits to Yasukuni shrine, where memorials to thousands of Japanese war dead--including some "A"-class war criminals--are housed. China sees the visits as an affront, as do others throughout Asia.

Finally, Japan Times carries a brief report about Japan's plan to start negotiating a bilateral free-trade agreement. Peru announced earlier that Lima would start bilateral FTA talks with Beijing next year.

Posted by Paul Musgrave at 08:16 PM | Comments (0)

Amazon Theatre

Interesting sideshow at Amazon. (Hat Tip: Instapundit)

Fox 24 is going to the small screen too.

Just wait till political campaigns start pumping propaganda through your cell phone.

Posted by PunchTheBag at 06:35 PM | Comments (2)

Phony News Cycle

News cycle is boring right now. I'm sick of the Artest brawl and how everyone, including myself, huffed and puffed about it in the immediate aftermath. Now I'm starting to think let's fine the guilty players $200,000 - $1,000,000 each (and you know who gets the $1 mil bill) and $5,000,000 against the team organizations and leave it at that. If fans want to sue players and vice versa, then take it to the courts but not the basketball court. Let 'em play!

The other tedious issue is all the Washingtonians having a hissy fit over Bush directing his presidency. John Podhoretz comments:

There's no question that "healthy debate" is an important part of every serious enterprise. But let's not beat around the Bush. When these characters talk about the need for "debate," they mean one thing and one thing only: They fear Bush won't be forced to take account of opinions and judgments they like and will instead fall back on opinions and judgments he likes.

Here's the thing: We Americans elected him because we want him to exercise his judgment. We elected him to serve as the steward of our interests and the representative of our views. What we Americans know, based on his campaign for re-election, is what he stands for, what he believes, what he's done and what he says he'll do.

Indeed.

Posted by PunchTheBag at 01:10 PM | Comments (13)

Heading the DNC

On the heels of Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack's announcement that he will not seek to become the next chairman of the Democratic National Committee, the New York Times reports that former Clinton administration Labor Secretary Alexis Herman is not interested either.

"Several Democrats held open the possibility that the decisions by Ms. Herman and Mr. Vilsack would encourage others to run." Howard Dean "is by far the best known, but his close identification with the left wing and the collapse of his presidential campaign are almost certain to prompt a challenge from moderates already concerned about the task in unseating Republicans, party officials said."

But the New York Sun says Dean "is stepping up his lobbying effort" to head the party. "Dean has touted his success at grassroots politics and his fund-raising prowess as reasons why he should be elected to the post, arguing that he can lift the party out of the doldrums." According to the Des Moines Register, Dean leads other candidates in a new National Journal poll of Democratic party leaders.

Posted by Joshua Claybourn at 01:01 PM | Comments (9)

Britain foils Al-Qaeda?

Sydney Morning Herald reports from London that the British government has stopped al-Qaeda attacks to crash passenger airliners into the skyscrapers at Canary Wharf and into Heathrow Airport.

Posted by Paul Musgrave at 11:13 AM | Comments (0)

Laguna Beach and the Schullers

I have this bad habit of channel surfing and getting caught watching reality TV, no matter what kind or on what station. My favorite might be The Apprentice, but I'm an equal opportunity viewer. Yesterday I found myself watching Laguna Beach, a ridiculous MTV reality show of "one of the wealthiest beach communities in the world" with "unlimited access to the tight-knit power clique of eight rich, beautiful teens who live there." For what it aims to do, the show is very well done. It even took me a while to believe that it was in fact reality TV; it seemed so much like a professionally written teen soap opera.

Yesterday I watched "Episode 108" and for the first time realized that one of the show's characters, Christina, is actually the granddaughter of famed minister Dr. Robert H. Schuller and daughter to Dr. Robert H. Schuller II, also a well known minister. The two are ministers at Crystal Cathedral, which has a congregation of over 10,000 members and plays host to the internationally televised "Hour of Power."

Posted by Joshua Claybourn at 11:10 AM | Comments (31)

Down on the Manor Farm

Associated Press reports that Wal-Mart is to allow its workers to unionize...

...in China, as long as the workers join the "official Communist Party-controlled union." In other words, China will soon be renamed "Manor Farm."

Christian Science Monitor discusses rising discontent in China. Ethnic clashes between Han Chinese (the country's majority ethnic group) and minorities are more and more frequent; a clash involving thousands in central China's Henan province killed at least seven, and possibly 148. Fights between the rich and poor have grown increasingly intense; CSM details some of the more important ones, including a situation wherein a BMW driver (the article doesn't mention it, but she got her license through her husband's connections, not for passing a driving test) ran over an onion seller and got off with a fine. The Monitor says there have been at least eight "major incidents of violence and rioting" over the past few weeks, but says that these are spontaneous incidents arising without central direction or leadership.

Chinese President Hu Jintao, continuing his now three-week-long tour of Latin America, met with Fidel Castro Monday, AP reports.

Posted by Paul Musgrave at 11:07 AM | Comments (0)

Still More on Ukraine

This is an important story and it's still developing.

New York Times focuses on the demonstrators who have gathered in Kiev's central square--tens of thousands of them who have heeded opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko's call. NYT notes that the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, called Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich from Brazil to congratulate Yanukovich on his apparent victory; as we've discussed before, Putin favors Yanukovich because the prime minister will lead Ukraine into Russia's arms (or its free-trade area, at least).

Associated Press writes that 200,000 demonstrators have met in Kiev, and reports that Yushchenko has claimed victory, calling official ballot totals that show him with about 46 percent of the vote to Yanukovich's 49 percent crooked. Yushchenko has issued a public statement to "the parliaments and nations of the world" to recognize his victory, according to a separate AP report. Ukraine's own parliament, however, appears hung, with neither Yushchenko nor Yanukovich able to muster the 226 votes (of 450) to force a decision.

One point I want to address is the thesis advanced in comments here by "June" that Russia and Ukraine both need an authoritarian leader to build the rule of law, and that only then Ukraine and Russia can enjoy democracy. I won't discuss Russia here because that's a separate issue. But there are several flaws with that argument:

• First, there's the supposition that authoritarian regimes build the rule of law. This is not automatically invalid, but it should certainly be suspect. An authoritarian regime puts neither tradition nor legalism at the foundation of its legitimacy, but rather force and charisma--usually tending over time to favor the former. Ukraine's own experience over the past few years demonstrates that "Who watches the watchers?" is a real problem for authoritarian-esque states: When the president is credibly accused of killing journalists, and when opposition figures have a habit of dying in car accidents, then the government may be acting against the rule of law itself.

• Yanukovich's victory, because that is what the official government tallies are showing, has been based on theft of an election. How can someone who steals elections be trusted to build the rule of law?

• Ukraine had seventy years of authoritarian rule under the Soviets. If authoritarianism does lead to the rule of law, then Ukraine's been led far enough down that path.

Posted by Paul Musgrave at 10:48 AM | Comments (4)

November 22, 2004

More on Ukraine's Presidential Election

Let me begin this by oversimplifying the contest in Ukraine between Prime Minister Yanukovich and opposition candidate Yushchenko--both are named "Viktor"--into a Manichean, black-and-white, morally-tinged model of the sort I usually despise.

Yanukovich: Bad. Yushchenko: Good. You should want Yushchenko to win like France wanted Kerry.

And with about as much influence, as it turns out. The Russia-leaning, authoriarian-lite Yanukovich may very well have stolen the election, making this at least the second of the major presidential elections this year to have been tinged with very serious accusations of foul play (the others being Taiwan's and, possibly but less likely, Venezuela's recall election).

Christian Science Monitor says that Yushchenko--who was leading mightily in exit poll surveys--has won about 46.7 percent of the ballots (99% reporting), with Yanukovich getting 49.4 percent. So, remember: That means Bad is beating Good. Independent observers, including OSCE representatives and U.S. Senator Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), say that the voting was tainted and failed to meet international standards. Lugar--a man not given to exaggeration--is pretty harsh: ""It is now apparent that a concerted and forceful program of election-day fraud and abuse was enacted with either the leadership or cooperation of governmental authorities."

Would Yanukovich steal the election? Put it this way: Bad is the candidate of President Leonid Kuchma, whose government--according to the Duelfer report--was "one of the countries involved in illicit military-related procurement with Iraq" during the sanctions period. How deep was this involvement? Motors for an Iraqi spy plane (UAV) were shipped to Baghdad from Ukraine via diplomatic pouch.

Why is Russia's support for Yanukovich--Bad--dismaying? Because Putin has been moving very steadily over the past four years to reassert Russia's dominance in the "near abroad"--the former Soviet sphere, more or less not including the Baltics--and Ukraine, as one of the most (if not the most) important states in the former Soviet sphere is a linchpin to that goal. There's a real danger that Ukraine, which once seemed to be on the road to Westernization, could become little more than "Belarus II," a quasi-satellite (again!) of Moscow.

Washington Post writes that Ukraine is in an uproar, and that Kiev may soon be thrown into violence. The Kiev city council "asked parliament not to recognize the [vote] count," and city councils in other parts of the country said "they recognized only Yushchenko as the legally elected president." Meanwhile, in Donetsk, turnout was--ahem--heavily in favor of Yanukovich [Bad]: "96.31 percent of all voters turned up at the polls in Donetsk, where Yanukovych was governor before he became prime minister. By comparison, turnout in the region in a first round of voting three weeks ago was 65.8 percent."

Posted by Paul Musgrave at 07:26 PM | Comments (6)

Bush and Latin America

So nuestro presidente y jefe Jorge W. Bush went down south for a spell, and unlike Vice President Quayle, managed not to imply that the residents of Latin America were Latins.

It seems to have been a disastrous trip. Wall Street Journal says that Bush was in Santiago, Chile, "to generate support for some of his top second-term priorities," like halting proliferation in Iran and North Korea and creating a Gastarbeiter program for "Hispanics," as Journal puts it. But the Journal says the Europeans--basking in the glow of having "stopped" Tehran's nuclear program--aren't going to toughen up with Iran, nor are the other four countries (South Korea, Japan, China and Russia) going to take a harder line with North Korea. And the guest-worker program will have to go through Congress.

Instead, what Bush got at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum was a lecture from the German Foreign Ministry about Secretary Powell's charge that Iran is working on a nuclear warhead, and a reassurance from Chinese President Hu Jintao that Beijing would ask North Korea nicely to come back to the bargaining table (for more on Hu's wheelling and dealing in LatAm, see this post--plus this AP article says Beijing and Peru will start negotiating a free trade deal next year ).

We don't know what Mexican President Vicente Fox said when Bush told him about the guest-worker program; probably something like "It's about damn time," given that Bush was supposed to do this years ago. Washington Post notes that Congress, and particularly Republicans in Congress, are skeptical of "concessions" to illegal immigrants.

Besides the chilly reception from foreign leaders, let's not forget about the fight between the Secret Service and the Chilean security forces. What--you thought fights only happened in basketball?

The Associated Press led its Saturday despatch with this gripping story:

President Bush stepped into the middle of a confrontation and pulled his lead Secret Service agent away from Chilean security officials who barred his bodyguards from entering an elegant dinner for 21 world leaders Saturday night.

Several Chilean and American agents got into a pushing and shoving match outside the cultural center where the dinner was held.

Bush, no stranger to interventions, did what he did best: Bush noticed the fracas and turned back. He reached through the dispute and pulled his agent from the scrum and into the building. The president, looking irritated, straightened his shirt cuffs as he went into the dinner."

It gets worse: On Sunday, New York Times reports, the Secret Service actually caused a dinner to be canceled. Why? Because the Treasury men (Homeland Security men?) wanted to put up metal detectors for the heads of state and others (230 in all) attending the dinner. Understandably, "The Chileans told Mr. Bush's delegation that the practice was humiliating."

"It clearly took part of the glow off a trip that Chilean officials had hoped would highlight their status as Washington's best friend and closest ally in South America," NYT noted. Yes, indeed: What kind of a message is that? We trust you--but, you know, not really.

Reuters reports that the Saturday night scuffle "dominated news coverage of the summit," knocking aside such minor issues as free trade and terrorism. " Chileans, living in a remote South American country untouched by global terror, were appalled by the unsightly scuffle that highlighted the difference in approach to security issues between the two countries," Reuters' reporter wrote. The Chileans were predisposed to think the worse of Bush, though: Associated Press wrote on Friday that at least 20,000 people marched to protest Bush's visit.

Security was better during Bush's visit Monday to Colombia, Associated Press reports: "[W]arplanes, battleships and 15,000 troops"--including "U.S. Navy commandoes" in rubber boats--guarded Bush's visit to Cartagena. Bush and Colombian President Alvaro Uribe--a good friend to the U.S.--said that Colombia is making great strides in destroying coca fields. Bush reaffirmed that the U.S. will continue a five-year, $3.3bn plan for Colombian counter-narcotics efforts begun under the Clinton administration.

In other news, Reuters notes that Vladimir Putin had a productive week, seeing both his candidate for the presidency of Ukraine elected, one way or another, and pledging his support for Brazil's bid to join the UN Security Council as a permanent member during a visit Monday, the first-ever visit by a Russian leader to the Latin American giant. Russia is trying to get Brazil to buy $700m worth of Sukhoi-35 jets.

Posted by Paul Musgrave at 06:47 PM | Comments (3)

Artest must go

Who's the bigger blemish on the storied history of basketball in the state of Indiana--former Indiana University coach Bob Knight or once-again-suspended Indiana Pacers player Ron Artest?

When I first moved out east after graduating from Indiana University and mentioned to people that IU was my alma mater, I would often be asked my opinion of Coach Knight. (My response, then as now, was that I think he's a great coach who has a big temper problem--a problem made worse by the fact that members of the media are often the recipients of his outbursts.) Since I've been living here, I haven't kept up with the Pacers much, but for the last few years I've heard disturbing bits of news about Artest.

Artest has the sort of bad-boy habits one would expect from a player in Chicago, New York, or Philadelphia, but not Indianapolis. It's a mystery to me that Hoosiers (typically more mild-mannered folk than their big-city counterparts) can support this guy.

Scott Tibbs argues in Hoosier Review that NBA fans must be held accountable for their behavior, and I agree. However, no amount of provocation justifies Artest's actions in Detroit. In one night, he exhibited worse behavior than the entirety of Bob Knight's tenure at Indiana U. It's time for Ron to go.

Posted by Eric Seymour at 02:01 PM | Comments (28)

Quick Security Update

Three quick notes:

Saturday's Washington Post carried this must-read investigation of corrupt buying practices in the U.S. Air Force. As I have discussed previously on my personal site, the scandal, which involved the leasing by USAF of Boeing tankers for in-flight refueling, had been portrayed as the rogue actions by former acquisitions official Darleen Druyun. The Post story shows that the taint in this contract went all the way up to the Air Force's secretary (the civilian head of the service). The secretary, a Bush administration official, has since resigned.

Post reports separately that the Pentagon is planning to increase force levels in Iraq during the runup to the elections scheduled for 30 January next year.

DefenseTech.Org lists the reasons why Iran's nuclear pause could be a very bad deal for the West.

Posted by Paul Musgrave at 11:31 AM | Comments (3)

Success for Mr. Baker

Dan Drezner notes that Bush family confidante and former Secretary of State James Baker has persuaded France, Russia, Germany and other creditors to the Hussein regime to forgive 80% of the Iraqi debt held by those governments.

Posted by Paul Musgrave at 11:30 AM | Comments (0)

Ukraine's Flawed Democracy

Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich is set to defeat opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko as results from yesterday's presidential runoff elections come in. Associated Press reports "Yanukovych leads the presidential race with 49.58% to Viktor Yushchenko's 46.57%, with 98.24% of precincts counted. Earlier partial results showed Mr. Yanukovych less than one percentage point ahead." Exit polls had shown Yushchenko with a lead of four to ten percentage points going in to the runoff.

Yanukovich has received support from Ukraine's president Leonid Kuchma, who has served two five-year terms in Kiev, and Russia's president Vladimir Putin. Yushchenko's supporters claimed widespread fraud and intimidation; New York Times has more. Washington Post writes that the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) has said that there were gross and pervasive flaws in the accountability of the results. What's more:

U.S. Senator Richard Lugar, monitoring the election for the White House, said the Ukrainian authorities had supported concerted fraud.

"It is now apparent that there was a concerted and forceful programme of election day fraud and abuse enacted with the leadership or cooperation of authorities," said Lugar, Republican head of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Lugar was instrumental in the mid-80s in persuading Ronald Reagan to withdraw support for the Marcos government in the Philippines. He is -- as an ITAR/TASS profile from the mid-80s described him -- a "black" (conservative, as in rouge and noir) Republican and not someone given to exaggeration.

Posted by Paul Musgrave at 11:24 AM | Comments (2)

The Deaths of '63

As many people will likely remember, today is the anniversary of President John F. Kennedy's assassination. But another giant of the 20th century died that day on 1963 - C.S. Lewis. Last year Jared at Thinklings summed it up nicely:

C.S. Lewis's influence on modern Christianity is unmatched to this day. No other Christian has come close to rivaling his place at the summit of Christian literature. No other Christian has come close to influencing Christian thought in the 20th and 21st centuries more than he. That is why I believe Lewis has been the single most influential Christian of the 20th century. No one -- not even Billy Graham -- has left such a indelible mark on Christian culture. Graham may win the souls, but Lewis builds them up. You might not be able to get an atheist to read Graham's How to be Born Again, but I bet you could get him to read Lewis's The Abolition of Man. And he'd be better off for it.

Posted by Joshua Claybourn at 08:28 AM | Comments (14)

November 21, 2004

Real Life Irony

New York Times has an article about the most recent common ancestors of great apes and humans. That discovery comes just a few weeks after the discovery of Flores Man, the small, apparently highly-intelligent and separately-evolved cousin to Homo sapiens that lived as recently as 18,000 years ago in an island that is today part of Indonesia. Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, a school district has stopped teaching evolution.

Although natural resources are finite, mankind will always be able to mine rich veins of irony.

Posted by Paul Musgrave at 05:33 PM | Comments (13)

Falluja Reading Assignment

Realizing how much time our pop culture puts into stories like Anna Nicole Smith's whacked out performance at the American Music Awards, Nicollette Sheridan on Monday Night Football, and now the Throwdown in Motown fight, it leaves us precious little time to ponder what our Marines go through in Falluja.

Take some time to read this NY TIMES story and put your life into perspective as the Christmas Season approaches on Thursday, if it's not here already.

Posted by PunchTheBag at 04:06 PM | Comments (0)

Churchill's Perseverance

Some conservatives are overly fond of quoting Churchill without reading him, and drawing only those lessons from his wartime leadership that reflect glory on Churchill and those political figures who are thought to be Churchillian. No Western leader has the breadth of experience, depth of knowledge or length of service that could match Churchill's; and that none in at least a generation has had the rhetorical skills to approach his is painfully obvious.

Here, then, is an apposite quotation that writers anxious to invoke Churchill's name should bear in mind. From Winston Churchill, Step By Step 1936-1939 (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1939) 206-207:

One must recognise [the attack upon the Panay as a very serious disappointment for the great democracies of the Western world. Evidently we should not lose heart. On the contrary, we should persevere, but we may have to persevere along a somewhat different path.

Posted by Paul Musgrave at 03:15 PM | Comments (3)

Your money hard at work

"Kuwait is considering giving each of its citizens a (200 dinar) 680 dollar handout as oil revenues soar thanks to record prices, a parliament deputy said." If only we could connect those potential handouts to our gas prices a little clearer to the public, the push for renewable energy may be a bit more sucessful.

Posted by Joshua Claybourn at 10:09 AM | Comments (0)

For the scholars among us

Google has released a scholarly search page, which lets you search through "scholarly" sites. But as Eugene Volokh points out, "it's hard to tell how good (i.e., suitably broad yet suitably narrow) the search function is." Daniel Drezner also points to ResourceShelf's DocuTicker, "a blog that started up about six months ago and is devoted solely to linking to recent government and think tank research." That site, incidentally, also offers a librarian's review of the Google scholar search.

Posted by Joshua Claybourn at 09:56 AM | Comments (0)

Alexander the Gay?

Warner Brother's new movie Alexander is set to be one of the holiday season's biggest blockbusters, but its already stirring up controversy, especially among Greeks, for portraying Alexander as homosexual. A group of Greek lawyers are even threatening to sue the film studios and Oliver Stone over the matter. Given this blog's inherent Greek references, I can think of no better place to explore the truth behind such claims.

To begin with, we can be sure that Alexander loved women. He married a woman named Roxane who bore him a son. Although that relationship was arguably politically motivated, he had an earlier relationship with Barsine, who also bore him a son. Other authors suggest he also had a relationship with another woman named Thais. There seems to be little doubt, then, that Alexander enjoyed women and certainly had sexual relations with them.

But was Alexander bisexual? Given the social and moral norms at the time, it wouldn't be out of the question. However, aside from those permissible norms, there is virtually no evidence to suggest Alexander had relations with them. Some have recently advocated that Alexander had sex with a Persian boy named Bagoas, but there is no evidence to support the claim. The most common same-sex relationship tied to Alexander is with Hephaiston, his life-long friend. But once again, other than the possibility given Greek culture, there is simply no evidence to support the claim.

In sum, same-sex relationships were not uncommon for someone like Alexander in his day, so it's entirely possible that he was in fact bisexual. But direct and explicit proof of his sexuality is nonexistent. For a more complete and scholarly look at Alexander's sexuality, click here.

Posted by Joshua Claybourn at 01:31 AM | Comments (16)

November 20, 2004

Brawl, Continued

For those of you like PunchTheBag who haven't seen the Pacers-Pistons brawl, which some are labeling as the biggest sports fight of all time (a label I disagree with), you may watch the video here. More videos of it may be found here. The fallout of all this? Thus far Artest, O'Neil, Jackson, and Wallace have been suspended 'indefinitely' by the NBA. Lucas Sayre offers his opinion here of other actions to be taken.

Posted by Joshua Claybourn at 04:18 PM | Comments (17)

Pacers-Pistons Brawl

I missed the fireworks and haven't seen the videotape either. But Chris Mannix of SI.com probably put it best:

"It's not the players for whom the NBA should feel sorry. It's not the angry fans, either, whose behavior was both disgusting and completely inexcusable. Who the NBA should feel sorry for is the father in the crowd huddled over his daughter, desperately trying to prevent her from being hit by the debris falling from the crowd. Those are the fans the NBA is targeting in its media campaigns, and they are part of the constituency the NBA continues to lose."

Bob Kravitz of the Indianapolis Star has his opinion too.

I already think Ron Artest is a knucklehead. At least this knocks the Monday Night Football nudity story off the front topic burner.

Posted by PunchTheBag at 03:48 PM | Comments (4)

The Good News Behind the Delay Controversy

In the movie Patton, George C. Scott turns to Karl Malden who plays General Omar Bradley and says something like, "Look Brad, I know I'm a primadonna. I admit it. My problem with Monty is that he won't admit it."

Patton couldn't stand British Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery for his arrogance, and I feel the same about liberals and their inability to discipline like-minded public figures.

When news of Ted Kennedy and Chappaquiddick, Dan Rostenkowski, Jim Wright and the last vestiges of a corrupt Democrat Majority in the House of Representatives, and Bill Clinton and you know what hit the public airwaves, liberals were either checking their shoe shines or mounting a spirited defense of these iffy public servants.

On the other hand, conservatives threw overboard Richard Nixon, a few Reagan appointees, Newt Gingrich who was beginning to ooze with hypocrisy after the Clinton Impeachment, Gingrich's successor-in-waiting Robert Livingston, and Trent Lott.

Conservatives tend to haul its own before the public square for stoning. The political corpse is then offered to the media as proof of repentance. Liberals snicker.

While this exercise is humiliating when the other side is as innocent as a whorehouse, it has paid off for Republicans given their victories on the national and state levels over the last ten years.

So I take heart when I read John Podhoretz, David Brooks, and many conservative blogs who are criticizing Delay. Right-wing blogs have proven that we can dish it out as Dan Rather and John Kerry would agree, but we can also take it. We're not giving an inch to the House Republicans who voted in support of the Majority Leader.

While we haven't ousted Delay yet, I'm convinced that the power of the blogs will create a backlash against Delay and that he will have to step down from his leadership position before the "06 elections.

It's important though that House Republicans get in front of the story, show some initiative, and dispense with Delay. There is still time.

Posted by PunchTheBag at 12:38 PM | Comments (9)

Speculating Specter

Being the C-SPAN junkie that I am, I watched the Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans hold their press conference on Thursday to support Arlen Specter in his bid to chair the committtee. Among the committeemen supporting Specter was Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the man whose 1986 judicial nomination Specter helped kill. In spite of this and numerous other question marks, every Republican Senator on the committee came out with a strong and glowing endorsement, leading many to wonder if they had used their endorsements for concessions in other areas. The focus of the press conference was a written statement that Specter crafted, after conferring with his fellow committeemen, which attempted to quell some concerns:

I have assured the president that I would give his nominees quick committee hearings and early committee votes so floor action could be promptly scheduled...

I... will use my best efforts to stop any future filibusters... If a rule change is necessary to avoid filibusters, there are relevant recent precedents to secure rule changes with 51 votes.

But the Repubilcans may be able to operate under current fllibuster rules. There are 16 Democratic Senators from states that Bush carried in November, and the reminder of Tom Daschle's loss - which was at least partially due to Senate obstruction - may make them think twice about bottling things up. Further, the likely Democrat majority leader is Harry Reid of Nevada, who many argue is pro-life. Reid also supported the Clarence Thomas nomination until Anita Hill's accusations came forward. With the probable elevation of Specter to the chairmanship, many conservatives are nervous, but the political realities favor them more than any time in the last 10 years.

Posted by Joshua Claybourn at 11:55 AM | Comments (0)

The Dragon Blows Smoke Rings

China has had an assertive fortnight, what with negotiating oil deals with Iran, "accidentally" trespassing in Japan's territorial waters, and sending its president to network all across Latin America. Supporting this international profile is China's booming economy. But for all its success in delivering wealth and prestige to the government, the regime has been less concerned with promoting the rights of ordinary Chinese.

"Technical errors" led a Chinese nuclear submarine to travel Japan's territorial waters--"accidentally" following a narrow channel between two islands, Japan Times reports. The Washington Post has more details, and notes that the Japanese navy (properly, the Maritime Self-Defense Force) gave chase for two days after the submarine refused to identify itself. The submarine was 400km distant from Okinawa, site of a major U.S. military facility, and near the disputed Diaoyu (Chinese name) / Senkaku (Japanese names) islands. More critically,

[The submarine] was operating in waters near where Chinese vessels earlier this year began exploring for gas deposits along the median line of overlapping exclusive economic zones claimed by both countries. In response to Japanese demands, the Chinese and Japanese governments last month held a round of talks over the Chinese exploration, after which Japanese officials complained they had been stonewalled.

The Japanese trade minister, Shoichi Nakagawa, told reporters in Tokyo last week that the submarine incident could intensify Japan's doubts about the gas exploration and China's intentions in the disputed economic zones.

The Post notes that China's massive increase in energy needs has led the Beijing government to aggressively pursue deals to import foreign oil and gas. One of the key players in this strategy is Iran, and the article draws a link between oil and gas talks between Tehran and Beijing and Beijing's public blocking of efforts by the U.S. to refer Iran's nuclear quest to the Security Council. Not only is this a direct challenge to the U.S., but the development of markets in China for Iran has the effect of weakening the effect of the sanctions the U.S. has imposed on Iran since the country's Islamic revolution.

And, as always, there are issues over Taiwan.

A U.S. undersecretary of defense warned Taiwan recently that China was developing technical means with which to shut down Taiwan's utilities and communications. "Taiwan could be electronically blockaded, isolated from the world, creating a kind of perfect storm in which the U.S. could not communicate with Taiwan or Taiwan with the world," Richard Lawless told Taiwanese officials, according to the Associated Press. China has pressed ahead with its military modernization plans, including developing indigenous Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) planes. At the same time, a plurality of Taiwanese think that the government's plans to spend additional hundreds of millions of dollars on defense technology to be bought in the U.S. is too expensive. Indeed, the best news for Taiwan recently was the European Parliament's decision not to lift an EU ban on arms sales to china.

The basis of China's power, though, isn't military but economic. Christian Science Monitor discusses Chinese President Hu Jintao's two-week-long trip through Latin America ahead of a summit this week. Hu comes bearing gifts, including business deals to increase trade between China and resource-rich countries like Chile and investment deals for Argentina, where China will invest billions over the next decade. Particularly important is Brazil, New York Times writes, where the world's best iron reserves are located. Brazil and China have publicly flirted with the idea of a free trade agreement.

William Ratliff, a fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institute, says in the CSM article that China is scoring a PR coup with Hu's journey: "It is telling that Hu is spending more time in South America over this fortnight than Bush has in the past four years...Hu will come over as much more interested in Latin American people," he suggests. "His sweet, soft-power vibes leave Bush sounding like a foghorn."

Back in China, though, it's still hard for Chinese to get accountability from the Party or the government. Washington Post looks at how the bureaucracy blocked one group of Chinese cab drivers from even pursuing redress.

Posted by Paul Musgrave at 07:18 AM | Comments (0)

Brief notes

• Wired reports that the UN has opted to stop considering a proposed cloning ban, going instead for a nonbinding resolution asking member states to stop cloning pretty please. New York Times frames the result as another diplomatic disappointment for the United States, which has been "pitted" against Britain and other close allies over the issue. In a perfect example of the moral clarity produced by committees, the nonbinding declaration protects human life, but not human beings:

  Research advocates prefer the phrase "human being" rather than "human life," because most people agree that an early embryo is a human life, but not necessarily that it is a human being. Therefore, substituting the term "human being" would leave the declaration open to an interpretation allowing cloning for research.

  Frankly, no matter which side of the debate you're on, this should strike you as an exercise in mushiness that's almost repulsive. Either a blastocyst is a human being, or it does not possess a human life.

• Mark A.R. Kleiman reminds us of the other moral of the story of the boy who cried wolf: Sometimes there really is a wolf. Kleiman lays out the case for why Powell might be speaking his mind, not the administration line, and why Iran's nuclear ambitions need to be addressed more squarely by the West.

• Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party is considering changes to Japan's constitution, Japan Times reports. Among the proposed changes:
  • Letting a female succeed to the Chrysanthemum Throne;
    
  • Making the Emperor head of state, instead of the "symbol of state" the throne currently serves as;
    
  • Creating a new right to privacy, among other new rights (if you listen closely, you can hear Edmund Burke whispering "The little catechism of the rights of men is soon learned..."); and
    
  • Legalizing Japan's military.
  It's this last which may come as a surprise to some readers, who may not know that, as GlobalSecurity.Org puts it, " Japan's military outstrips Britain's in total spending and manpower."

Posted by Paul Musgrave at 07:01 AM | Comments (3)

November 19, 2004

Iraq $$$

The Pengtagon has been projecting that the Iraq war would cost $4 billion a month. Now, though, the military's top officials inform us that the true price tag is closer to $5.8 billion a month. Since 2003, the Pentagon has received over $160 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in supplemental funding, which is over and above its annual budget. (Hat tip Balta)

Posted by Joshua Claybourn at 09:41 PM | Comments (0)

Vlad the President

Aside from Russia's President Vladimir Putin's promising to fund new missile research, there have been two major Russian stories in the news this week.

The first is the announcement today of the final preparations for the auction of the assets of Russian oil giant Yukos. New York Times says that Moscow has levied tax claims of $24bn against the energy company, and plans for the auction to generate at least $8.65bn to pay off those claims. But that price tag is well below the fair market value of the company, appraised by JP Morgan at $16bn to $22bn. Even an adviser to Putin, the quotable Andrei Illarionov, says the auction amounts to "daylight robbery." It is likely that the oil company's assets will end up in the hands of close allies of the Kremlin.

Meanwhile, Russia is extending its influence abroad, particularly in Ukraine. Stephen Sestanovich, of the Council on Foreign Relations and Columbia University, editorializes in today's Washington Post that Ukraine has developed a nascent democracy. Unlike most elections in former Soviet states, Sestanovich writes of this weekend's runoff presidential election, "Sunday's winner is not known in advance."

Ukraine has a choice between Prime Minister Victor Yanukovich and opposition candidate Victor Yushchenko. Yanukovich is pro-Russia and the chosen successor of current Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma; Yushchenko is usually described in the Western media as being pro-West. Indeed, most Western accounts of the election have painted Yanukovich as the bad guy and Yushchenko as the man in the white hat.

Certainly Russia knows which candidate it wants to support. Putin has campaigned openly on behalf of Yanukovich, and Christian Science Monitor reported yesterday that the Russian president has been frank about what he wants.

"We would like to restore what was lost with the Soviet Union's disintegration," Putin told a meeting of post-Soviet leaders last June. "We must steer toward integration ... concerted action is the only way to survive in conditions of [global] competition."

To that end, Moscow has been seeking to establish a Russian, Kazakh, Belarussian and Ukrainian joint market. To achieve that, Moscow wants to ensure Yanukovich's victory. And some Ukrainians see their choice in stark terms:

"With Yushchenko, we will have a chance for democracy and independence; with Yanukovich it's Russia's embrace and probable dictatorship," says Oleksandr Shuhko, director of the independent Center for Peace, Conversion, and Foreign Policy in Kiev. "For the first, and possibly the last time, Ukrainians have a real, clearly-defined choice."

It's been an eventful year for elections, with major contests in the United States, Taiwan, Indonesia, Spain, and India. Ukraine is the last major poll on the calendar. It's going to be close.

Posted by Paul Musgrave at 09:00 PM | Comments (4)

Sigh

"A federal jury awarded as much as $434,000 to a Ukrainian woman who sued the Internet matchmaking service that set her up with the man who allegedly abused her after they wed." The woman married the man three months after meeting him through the service. Need I say more?

Posted by Joshua Claybourn at 06:56 PM | Comments (2)

Bush Campaign Think

Ken Mehlman, Bush campaign manager, revealed some of the thinking behind the voter identification program.

From the New York Times:

Rather than dispatching troops to knock on doors in neighborhoods known to be heavily Republican, Mr. Mehlman said, the Bush campaign studied consumer habits in trying to predict whom people would vote for in a presidential election.

"We did what Visa did," Mr. Mehlman said. "We acquired a lot of consumer data. What magazine do you subscribe to? Do you own a gun? How often do the folks go to church? Where do you send your kids to school? Are you married?

"Based on that, we were able to develop an exact kind of consumer model that corporate America does every day to predict how people vote - not based on where they live but how they live," he said. "That was critically important to our success."

Kudos to Mehlman and the rest of his staff for this kin