Shot In The Dark - Politics and Current Events in Minnesota and Beyond

Saturday, January 17, 2004

Bagpipes, Day 3 - OK. I'm not actually supposed to start playing the pipes for real for another five months; I have to pass two more tests before I'm up to that level yet.

But they just keep calling - and, like Ulyssys' sailors, I keep getting drawn to them. I pick them up, blow air into the bag, and start playing...

...and within half a song or so, my lips hurt, and I can't close them around the blowpipe, and I can't get air into the bag, and the whole thing dies off.

Dang, they're cool!

(Thanks to King for the pointer to the pic)

It's by far the hardest instrument I've ever learned (and I get around, in descending order of competence, on guitar, cello, bass, harmonica, drums, mandolin, keyboards, curan and pennywhistle). It's the hardest thing I've done since I was a beginner on the guitar, and I'd practice, as the song says, until my fingers bled. Which means you can expect me to come into work with bleeding lips and cheeks, I guess. Seriously - I think I pulled a muscle.

I love it!

(By the way - if you're interested, Minnesota Pipes and Drums offers a free instruction program for pipes as well as snare, tenor and bass drums. If you, like me, have always dreamed about playing bagpipes or anything of the sort, email them. Tell 'em Mitch sent you. It won't do you any good, but everyone'll get a good laugh...).
posted by Mitch Berg 1/17/2004 02:27:38 PM

Friday, January 16, 2004

Stupid Iowa Tricks - From Carol Moseley Braun's withdrawal speech:
"Governor Dean has the ability to break through the cocoon of fear that envelopes us..."
"Cocoon of Fear".

Good band name. Dumb statement.
posted by Mitch Berg 1/16/2004 07:13:56 AM

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz - I'm exhausted today. Work is going to be a bear.

Plenty to talk about - and I'll post more later today.
posted by Mitch Berg 1/16/2004 06:51:03 AM

My New Toy - Got a spectalar deal on a set of Pettigrew bagpipes yesterday.

I'm going to go wake the kids now.

Be right back.
posted by Mitch Berg 1/16/2004 06:50:07 AM

Predictions - As the Iowa caucuses loom, I'll make my predictions for Monday's contest:
Candidates will say monumentally stupid things, like this John Kerry speeh:
"'Do you like the surge?' he asked 160 people packed into a tiny auditorium in Sioux City, as they hollered in response. 'Are you ready to add more surge? Are you ready to make more surge? And are you ready to make more and more surge a surprise on Monday?'"
I feel a surge, all right.
The kinder, gentler Howard Dean will drop a few more points, and we'll see a return of the Angry Doc.
One of the ~~Nine~~ Eight Dwarves will win.
Jeff Fecke won't write something sarcastic and snarky about the President. He'd never do that, would he?
Whomever wins, conspiracy theorists for the other seven Dwarves will blame Halliburton that their guy didn't win.
"Emily's List" will be outraged, dammit, that the women are all out of the race.
Hillary Clinton will be spinning with joy in her coffin, waiting to rise when the full Election Moon rises in 2007.
Count on it.
posted by Mitch Berg 1/16/2004 06:47:30 AM

Adios, Campbell - It's been fun, Campbell Brown.

We first saw you you during the 2000 recount controversy. And oy, for a political reporter, you really were hot stuff - probably the best campaign-season eye candy any network ever put on the air. But since you went to "Weekend Today", it just hasn't been the same.

And I met someone else. Kelly O'Donnell. She's got all the political reporting chops you've got, and she's actually available, rather than working seven days a week. And she's a redhead - yowsah.

So so long, Campbell. We had some good times. But I'm with Kelly now.
posted by Mitch Berg 1/16/2004 06:21:28 AM

Trash Like Us - Alfred Fingulin - longtime dude Friday of Concealed Carry Reform Now - has a new blog, "Gunshow Trash". It's new, and it's getting rolling, but it'll be a great resource - especially with a new legislative season rolling around. I blogrolled and linked him yesterday - but there's more.

My favorite part of the blog so far? His "What Is Gunshow Trash" section:
"Gunshow Trash" describes the folks who enjoy gunshows.

We're not particularly cultured, but we know more about culture than you think. Where else but the gunshow books table can you buy E. A. Ritter's biography of Shaka Zulu? Catch our fancy and maybe we'll play some fiddle after the show closes (violins belong in orchestras). Or perhaps we'll recite Robert Service's The Cremation of Sam McGee. We liked it in high school and still like it now.

We lack social graces, are terribly blunt, and are sentimental to a fault. Life is too short and too rich to be restrained and proper. Lord knows we've lived full lives. Our memories are intense: love, sadness, and fondness; even for bad things that happened. Yet we like unusual people; we think everybody should be as eccentric as us.

Don't play us for ignorant rubes. Ignorant rubes get the short end of a gun deal. We don't get the short end of anything.

We like gadgets and gimcracks and geegaws; if it interests us, we collect it. But we don't need much. We're self-reliant, and can handle anything life throws at us with either a Leatherman tool, some duct tape, or a handgun.

Some think us "trailer trash." I'll own up to that. But many of us are professionals. We worked hard to rise in life, we've never forgotten our roots, and sometimes wonder what we've missed.

We take family, country, and God seriously, are very grateful for what they have given us, and hope you are grateful too.

"Gunshow Trash" is a point of view.
One you should read.

Stay tuned.
posted by Mitch Berg 1/16/2004 06:02:45 AM

Late Night TV Update - I watch very little TV. But some nights, after the kids are in bed, the housework's done, I've posted some blog to the next day, and there's nothing else going on (and there's never anything else going on), I'll pour myself a beer or two and indulge in some tube.

My current late-night fave? "Spike TV's" Most Extreme Elimination Challenge, an ingenious send-up of American sports TV, as well as a groaningly painful game to watch. The funniest thing on TV since "Mystery Science Theater 3000".

Carry on.
posted by Mitch Berg 1/16/2004 06:00:47 AM

Thursday, January 15, 2004

Technicality of Mass Distraction - Josh "Joshua Micah" Marsall is spinning the Dean "Screw the UN" letter.

Those who think the media and the left give Dean a walk on this issue because they're reflexively anti-Bush are wrong, says Marshall. Oh, no, not even close to Anti-American, nossir:
It's because the US has begun playing by very different rules in the last three years. It has moved from being a dominant power which most often works through a sort of informal consensus to one that increasingly seeks to act through dictation.
Josh - or shall I call you "Joshua Micah"? - you're splitting enough hairs to make the blond guy on "Queer Eye" jealous.

The difference between USA '98 and USA '03 isn't the lack of "informal consensus" - we had 30-plus nations on our side before we went into Iraq, and many more now that we've won it.

The difference is the venue - and, more important, the lack of acquiescence from France, Germany and Russia, nations with vested interests in keeping Hussein in power.
We've become impatient with the minimal restraints on our power created by our participation in various international institutions and agreements -- ones which actually serve to magnify our power.
So impatient were we, we left an ary sitting in the desert for four extra months while we "impatiently" "dictated" to the UN that we wanted a resolution that we never got.
In short, the issue is not so much whether you get sign off from the UN or NATO on every particular thing you do. It's a question of the totality of one's approach to allies and the rest of the nation's of the world. By that measure, the whole situation in the Balkans and the current one in Iraq could scarcely be more different.
Right. Because in the Balkans, the Germans and Russians didn't know where Milosevic had buried the bodies.

Actually, Josh has a small point - the situations were very different. Iraq was a vital national interest. Serbia was not.
This is a big issue and one that deserves more discussion. It's also worth noting that getting our key European allies on board in the Balkans did play a big role in the long-term success of those operations -- and the diplomatic isolation which eventually played a key role in Milosevic's fall.
As it should have! Kosovo was, and should have been, a European concern!
And perhaps Dean has himself made too much of a fetish out of the word 'unilateralism' without fleshing out the critique more fully. But basically this issue with Dean and 'unilateral' action in Bosnia just strikes me as more silly word-game gotcha. Nothing more than that.
That Dean was "gotcha'd" doesn't make it silly.

And it is more than that. Dean and his supporters will "dictate" (Marshall's word) to the UN when it suits them - but when a Republican president, after months of begging the UN to the detriment of US interests, acts without the approval of the UN on a matter of direct importance to the nation, they'll...well, look for silly word-game gotchas.

Like Marshall's post.
posted by Mitch Berg 1/15/2004 07:21:28 AM

For The Children - Others have descended on Dennis Perrin's riff on Lileks - the Commish and Fraters lay the smack down, and the Professor has a good synopsis of other links.

Perrin says about Lileks:
Here, Lileks was aping many of his warblogger brethren:
Lileks? A "warblogger"?

What is a "warblogger" in Perrin's world? The pejoratives abound throughout the piece: they "darkened the already unattractive side of the American character, namely its jingoism", "the enlightened few who pelt dissenters with the debris of the Twin Towers", and, with supreme authority, "the warbloggers, the creation of whom is yet another al Qaeda-sponsored crime."

Ouch. Perrin says:
Lileks, in concert with the rest of the "warbloggers", "reduces all lefties into an easily digestible stereotype, as if a starry-eyed teen PETA activist is the same as University of Michigan Professor Juan Cole (who writes an informative, increasingly popular blog of his own (www.juancole.com); and as if Rick the People's Poet from the old BBC sitcom The Young Ones represented the web-savvy anarchists at Infoshop.org.
Never mind that Cole's blog is routinely lit up for its own preening, academic sense of superiority (I suppose to Dennis Perrin, that's better than "jingoism"), and that Infoshop makes Rik Mayall's "Rick" look fairly balanced - Perrin says Lileks reduces the left to a stereotype?

Perrin notes:
Lileks, as mentioned earlier, also devotes a good portion of his Bleats to daughter Gnat, whose every move is recorded for web posterity, and through whom Lileks filters much of this increasingly cruel world. This type of writing has its place, and as a father I would never question Lileks's love for his child. Conversely, I would never go on and on about my kids when writing about imperial war and political corruption. But that's me. Lileks has a different take and agenda.
As if blogging about one's kids and the war we are in are mutually exclusive.

Perrin seems to object to Lileks acting like a "warblogger" and beating "dissenters" over the heads with pieces of the rubble from the World Trade Center on the one hand, and writing about his daughter on the other. He notes that he has two kids himself, and seems to imply that the two are best kept apart.

I have two kids, too. They're 10 and 12, so they're not as cute as Gnat anymore, but I'm still pretty attached to them. I suspect Perrin would call me a "Warblogger", too - and he'd probably be equally flummoxed by the way I juxtapose my kids and my firm belief in the War on Terror so far.

But there's no way to separate the two. And it involves a different pile of rubble altogether.

Perrin wraps himself in the mantel of New York. I grew up in North Dakota, like Lileks. And a few miles from where I grew up - between my Jamestown and Lileks' Fargo, in fact - the fields were liberally seeded with Minuteman III missile silos. I grew up with a constant, keen-yet-constantly-gnawing sense that everything I knew in this world could be erased on thirty minutes' notice if anyone in Washington or Moscow, or Beijing or Paris or New Delhi, for that matter, screwed up badly enough. I could stand at the shore of my little town and look across the sea of dirt and alfalfa and imagine fireballs blooming in the near distance long before "The Day After". And when I started confronting the notion of having kids and raising a family, my most fervent wish, prayer, and I thought forlorn hope was that my kids wouldn't ever have to grow up with that hanging over their heads.

In 1991 - as my daughter came into the world - it came true. Imperfectly so, but true enough for those of us who had driven by the missile silos and radar pyramids and seen the B-52s flaring out over the sugar beets.

The rubble that affected me first was seeing pictures of the wreckage of the Minuteman III silo nearest my hometown, as it was demolished. It wasn't needed any more. Mission accomplished. I held my kids a little closer that night, and thanked God for what I'd seen, and for what they'd never have to.

And while none of us who knew better really believed that all of our worries ended in the other other rubble - the Berlin Wall - still, it was a moment of some of the most profound hope and relief I've ever experienced in my life. I suppose if you never sensed the existence of the threat all that keenly in the first place (and I'll guess Perrin didn't), it's hard to explain. And yes, 9/11 yanked what little that gave us away.

So for me, reading Lileks' 9/11 bleat is, in its own way, more powerful than almost any of the mainstream journalism of the day:
Again, and again, and again: the Towers thundering down. Gnat happily playing with her books.

News reports dancing in the streets on West Bank. Saw TV reports of some little boys whooping it up. Note to self: do not teach daughter to exult when people die

10: 12 The World Trade Center is not America. Oh, in a way it is - a marvel of engineering, a hub of wealth creation, designed by a man of Japanese ancestry, constructed by hand by citizens whose people came from Europe, Asia, Africa. Men who prayed to one God, to many, to none. All colors and creeds constructed that building; like any skyscraper in any American city, the World Trade Center was the legend of Babel refuted in stone and glass...Went to the polling place with Gnat in the stroller, under the small American flag stuck in the door frame at the school. Lots of people voting - the lady who took my information said they had unusually heavy turnout for a mere city primary. ?I think voting means something more today,? I said. ?I think you?re right,? she said. I wore, for the first time, that little I VOTED sticker."
I've read the books, seen the documentaries, heard the friends and relatives who were in Manhattan that day. And very few documents of that day bring it back to me the way Lileks' piece does - because I also still see the day through my kids' eyes, and through wondering about the world they perceive as they grow up.

And I want to ask the Dennis Perrins of the world - how can one not recoil in horror at the world that Daryll and Sam Berg, and Gnat Lileks and, presumably, Sarah Jane and Wellstone Perrin are just becoming aware of? How can one not tie it into your expression about how that world is developing?

For some of us - Dennis Perrin, I'm guessing, and stop me if I'm wrong - the answer is to submerge that horror in pointillistic ideology ("Of all the Bleats I've read, I've yet to come across a hard critique of Israeli violence") and, presumably, a comfortingly compartmented fantasy view of the world (Perrin echoes the left's conceit that this is all just a big criminal case: "I supported the overthrow of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and continue to support, in concert with other countries, the dismantling of the al Qaeda network", he says, as if shipping every Al Quaeda member to The Hague would end Islamofascist terror).

And for some of us, the response is the same one we get when we find the house on fire: If we can't grab a fire extinguisher, at least we root for the firemen.

And while we root for the fireman, pardon us if we get a little impatient with those who say we deserved the fire anyway. As Perrin says:
But Lileks's conceit, which is widespread in the warblog domain, is that this particular moment is in fact unique.
In our lifetimes and those of our children, in this place, it is.
That because al Qaeda desires to impose a 7th-century theocracy on others means they have the power to do it to us (Lileks likes playing the It's Their Terms or Ours card, as if we're down to house-to-house fighting).
We are. In Israel. Think globally, act locally, as they say.

Not that it's irrelevant - the choice between a seventh-century theocracy and dying in a cloud of smuggled Sarin gas is a fairly moot one, isn't it?
That Saddam Hussein was a real and tangible threat to our very existence, or might've been down the road, or whenever.
"Or whatever". Sheesh.
In any case, we are presumably "safer" now that we're bogged down in Iraq.
Two paragraphs above, he says "Lileks' conceit...is that this moment is unique", riffing him and all warbloggers for not incorporating all of history into every posting (or not incorporating it Perrin's way, anyway). But Perrin considers the war in Iraq in a three-month-long slice of context - one that was out of date last summer, to boot!
And so on. To Lileks, it seems that 9/11 exists outside of history (except for World War II, images of which have adorned many a Lileks rant). Therefore those who try to view subsequent events differently are guilty of either liberal naivete or abject anti-Americanism.
Let's stick with the naivete. It's bad enough in these times.

UPDATE: The Infinite Monkeys explain Lileks as well as anyone.
posted by Mitch Berg 1/15/2004 02:41:07 AM

The Sword is Mightier than the Penn - Jay Reding notes Sean Penn's return to Iraq - and it's not what you'd think.

Penn is quoted saying:
For Iraqis, there was no pro-war or anti-war movement last spring when the United States invaded their country. That, in their view, was a predominantly Western debate. They're used to war; they're used to gunshots. What's new is this tiny seed and taste of freedom. It is a compelling experience to have been in Baghdad just one year ago, where not a single Iraqi expressed to me opinions outside Baathist party lines, and just one year later, when so many express their opinions and so many opinions compete for attention. Where the debate is similar to that in the United States is over the way in which the business of war will administer the opportunity for peace and freedom, and the reasonable expectation of Iraqi self-rule.
Reding says:
What's surprising about this piece is that it doesn't read like an anti-war polemic. If anything it reads like someone who is legitimately inquisitive about the situation in Baghdad and what the Iraqi people are thinking:
Jay's right.

Note to liberal bloggers (and Dennis Perrin) - there is nothing about "being a liberal" that precludes one from having a conscience, or having two working eyes and a functioning frontal lobe, for for that matter. Nothing about ones' politics enjoins one from intelligent comment about world events.

If Penn could do it, who knows - maybe Tim Robbins is next. Maybe even Nick Coleman...

...OK. That was just the beer talking. I'll stop now.
posted by Mitch Berg 1/15/2004 01:10:25 AM

Politics Via Gavel - A Minnesota Appeals court handed a victory of sorts to a church in posh Edina that wants to flout Minnesota's concealed carry law and ban legally-permitted guns in the church parking lot.

What kind of a victory? Alfred Fingulin - longtime majordomo at Concealed Carry Reform Now, has a long-overdue blog, and he discusses the subject.
It seems a great legal victory. But not if you attended the Appeals Court panel hearing. I did.

All during the oral arguments, I half-expected a judge to stand up, produce a gavel, start tapping David Lillehaug lightly upon the head, and say:

"Listen up, Lillehaug. The law has been in effect for a few months. There's no case law. There's no precedent. Heck, Lillehaug, your original lawsuits are still on the docket. Now you come and waste our time. Why should we do anything but return standing and send the case back?"

Which is exactly what they did. Many judicial rulings are mundane, the equivalent of telling an attorney to "Go do your job, dammit."

It's also "politics by other means." By filing an appeal, Mr Lillehaug stretches out the case, and gets a ruling three weeks before the legislature convenes. This puts pressure on the legislature to eviscerate the carry-law.

And it gets Mr Lillehaug notoriety for a possible political campaign. He's already run for Senate; just 'cause he lost doesn't mean he's going to give up.
Simple fact: Minnesota's shall-issue law didn't pass into law three years ago only because Roger Moe made sure it died in the Senate. The votes have been there since then, and haven't gone anywhere. Citizens for a ~~Supine~~ "Safer" Minnesota is deluding itself by thinking they can repeal the Minnesota Personal Protection Act in the legislature - which is why this case is in court.

Which is not to say it's time for concealed-carry supporters to let up.
posted by Mitch Berg 1/15/2004 01:00:39 AM

Wednesday, January 14, 2004

Picture Of The Day - Via Blackfive and the Professor:

Other possible badges:
"Here Until Those 150,000 Moderate Moslems Show Up"
Honk If You're Bogged Down in a Quagmire"
"My Other Car Is NOT a Peugeot"
More suggestions eagerly solicited.
posted by Mitch Berg 1/14/2004 07:31:55 AM

Policy Shift - Top-ranking members of the Ba'ath Party are denouncing terror and renouncing Hussein:
Former Ba�ath Party leaders in Northern Iraq denounced the party of Saddam Hussein Tuesday and exhorted the people of the region to work with the Coalition to build a free and unified Iraq.

More than 50 leaders who once supported The Ba�ath Party objectives met in the city hall of Ash Shurah, a small town 35 kilometers south of Mosul, to discuss their role in the future of Iraq.

During the meeting, ten 2nd, 3rd and 4th tier leaders of the party publicly denounced terrorism, violence, and voiced the need for all Iraqis to work together for the future of the new Iraq.
So - parts of the Ba'ath Party now agree by extension that the liberation of Iraq was a good thing.

In the meantime, Powerline reports that international donations to the terror-backing Palestinian Authority are down - way down:
Well, it's possible that after all these years, the "donor nations" have grown "fatigued" and "weary of the lack of progress toward peace." I suspect it's more likely, though, that supporting terrorism doesn't have quite the cachet it once did. I'd guess that the "donor nations" can see that the wind is not blowing the terrorists' way, and that aligning themselves with terrorists carries new and potentially unpleasant risks. Is it possible that the Bush Doctrine may be about to score another victory--the collapse of the Palestinian Authority?
Perhaps the Democrats will come around soon.

Probably when Clinton claims credit for it.
posted by Mitch Berg 1/14/2004 07:01:53 AM

Let's Get This Straight - According to Fraters (quoting a Strib article that is apparently not online yet), former Governor Ventura said on the occasion of getting hired by Harvard:
"I'm sick and tired of the fact that we're at war, and they're no protest going on. So I'm going to be the new Timothy Leary. I'm going to go out and fire up these young college kids so we can get some good protesting, like the '60s."
Former Governor Ventura: I've met you. And I've met the late Dr. Leary.

And let me say right now - you are no Timothy Leary.

That is all.
posted by Mitch Berg 1/14/2004 05:44:18 AM

"OK, He's Not *Hitler*, Per Se..." - Last week, MoveOn.org - a group founded in 1998 to protect a middle-aged lothario from the consequences of his actions. and which has morphed into an anti-Bush hate group - issued an apology for the Hitler Ad flap.
One ad mixed images of Hitler and Nazi militarism with Bush taking the oath of office and equated German war crimes of 1945 with Bush's foreign policy. The other quoted Hitler and Bush as saying they acted in God's name to vanquish their enemies.

After being roundly denounced by Jewish leaders and Republicans, MoveOn.org issued a mea culpa saying the two ads were in poor taste. But the group said they had been displayed in error as part of a contest inviting members of the public to create and send in their own ideas for anti-Bush television spots.
Except, according to one of Hewitt's guests last week, it was no error - the clips of the finalist ads were numbered sequentially, said the guest, and two of the numbers in the sequence of finalist spots were missing (anyone have a link to that guy?)

But - according to Drudge - while they may be apologizing formally, MoveOn is still unstinting in its hatred of the president. Monday night saw their award ceremony - which turned into (or was designed from the beginning as) a Bush hate fest.

For example - formerly-funny comedienne Margaret Cho:
MARGARET CHO (Comedian) --

* "Despite all of this stupid bullsh-- that the Republican National Committee, or whatever the f--- they call them, that they were saying that they're all angry about how two of these ads were comparing Bush to Hitler? I mean, out of thousands of submissions, they find two. They're like fu--ing looking for Hitler in a hawstack. You now? I mean, George Bush is not Hitler. He would be if he fu--ing applied himself." big, extended applause) "I mean he just isn't."
's OK, Margaret. If you apply yourself, you might be Lea DeLaria someday, too.

Against that backdrop, Al Franken was almost funny:
"I'm Al Franken. I'm here to present the funniest ad award. I'm a last-minute substitution, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill was supposed to be the presenter, but unfortunately he was murdered."
I said almost.

UPDATE: Doh! Captain Ed wrote almost the same piece, last night.

"Team Coverage", I guess...
posted by Mitch Berg 1/14/2004 05:37:52 AM

They're Planners. They Plan - In 1919, the US Army put together the most current version of its "Red Plan" - contingency plans for an invasion.

From our ally, Great Britain. Via Canada.

The plan called, among other things, for the military evacuation of the Dakotas and the rest of the upper Great Plains.

The military has a huge number of officers, per capita. Many of them are involved in planning wars.

Some of the plans are deadly serious: the plans for defending West Germany during the Cold War were as huge and involved as they are now obsolete.

Other plans are purely contingencies; what would we do in the unlikely event we had to launch a war in some out-of-the-way, thoroughly implausible place where we'd never find ourselves in action in a million years? Like say, Grenada, or Panama, or Afghanistan?

Other plans are purely intellectual exercises - things for planners to plan to stay in practice for planning real plans.

Other plans are national policy. For example, during the tail end of my liberal life - 20 or so years ago - I attended a "Nuclear Freeze" meeting. A breathless-looking older woman solemnly intoned "I've heard the US might have plans on file to use our nukes for a first strike!"

No Farging Schneikies, I thought. No kidding. And if you dig far enough through the files, you'll find plans to shoot the missiles at incoming asteroids, and flying saucers, and probaby a few files on invading the Netherlands or repelling an invasion from Mexico. Wake up and die right, you moron! I wasn't much longer for the liberal world.

Today, lefty pundits large and small have their panties in a bind over the Bush Administation's "admission" that they started planning the invasion of Iraq before 9/11.

No kidding. They inherited it from the previous resident at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue!
It turns out that former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill's so-called bombshell revelation that the Bush administration had a "secret plan" to depose Saddam Hussein before 9/11 wasn't such a secret after all.

In fact, not only did plans for "regime change" in Iraq NOT originate with the Bush White House, the "sinister plot" was actually ratified by Congress and signed into law by President Clinton a full three years before President Bush came to Washington.

According to Tuesday's Wall Street Journal, "The 1998 Iraqi Liberation Act was passed by an unanimous Senate and a near-unanimous House," after which Mr. Clinton certified it as the law of the land with his signature.
Leftyblogger Atrios notes:
The official, who asked not to be identified, was present in the same National Security Council meetings as O'Neill immediately after Bush's inauguration in January and February of 2001.

"The president told his Pentagon officials to explore the military options, including use of ground forces," the official told ABCNEWS. "That went beyond the Clinton administration's halfhearted attempts to overthrow Hussein without force."
Really?

But then this...
In January 1999, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright even appointed a special representative for transition in Iraq, Frank Ricciardone, who reportedly had "a mandate to coordinate opposition to Saddam."

Said Albright at the time: "He will be assisted by a team that will include both a military and a political adviser with extensive on-the-ground experience in the region.
...would have to have never happened, right?

Jeff Fecke says:
So...Paul O'Neill was telling the truth then?

Oh wait, no...Insty says it was all Bill Clinton! Clinton was actually planning a preemptive strike against Iraq! Of course, he didn't follow through on it because...

Because...
He was all talk?

Just a guess.

Watch as the Democrats continue to try to have their babaganoush ("Bush planned to invade all along!") and eat it too ("Look! Clinton wasn't completely feckless and worthless at foreign policy!").
posted by Mitch Berg 1/14/2004 04:55:29 AM

Get On The Train - Governor Pawlenty will push for funds for the Northstar Commuter Rail line:
The rail line would extend 40 miles from Minneapolis past Anoka, Fridley and Elk River. To meet federal approval the project was cut in half. It was originally proposed to extend to the St. Cloud- Rice area.
Pawlenty said he would consider support for an extension sometime if the future if the cost and ridership made sense.
The immediate challenge is getting the bonding proposal approved by the Legislature which convenes next month."
In this post-Lewis, Soucheray-dominated market for conservative opinion, we have to make one thing perfectly clear: Commuter Rail is not light rail. It uses existing tracks - the same ones that freight trains run on. It uses common, wide-gauge rollling stock - it can even be purchased used (although I'm sure it won't be).

Above all - it can be self-supporting, and quickly.

This is potentially a good thing on several fronts: it outflanks the Democrats on sensible mass transit (the Northstar will actually move people from where they are to where they want to be, unlike the Ventura Trolley), it will probably be capable of supporting itself before too terribly long, and it makes what could be an important step in providing a free-market-compliant transit solution that could work.

Not for everyone, of course - but for enough people to take some of the pressure off the road system, and for a fraction of the cost of building enough roads to handle the traffic.

Who knows? You might even be able to get through the Fish Lake Interchange without packing a lunch one of these days...
posted by Mitch Berg 1/14/2004 04:50:34 AM

Fire In The Hole - Powerline has had the O'Neill/Suskind flap completely dialed in - with the best coverage I've seen of those whole rhubarb.

Read here, and here, and here, and here and here and finally [as this is written] here.

Print them, take them to work.
posted by Mitch Berg 1/14/2004 04:47:03 AM

Situation in Iraq - This was in the paper Monday:
Freedoms, Money and Cheap Cars
(One) has to imagine an Iraqi who has been in a deep sleep for a year � suddenly his eyes open wide. On TV CNN, BBC or � more probably � the broadcaster banned under Saddam just as it is now, Al Jazeera, is running. His brother is talking to his cousin in Germany on the cell phone. Cell phones were banned under Saddam and families with relatives abroad were viewed with suspicion as a rule. � The brother earns 100 dollars a month, four times the average salary under Saddam. He works as a proof reader at one of the around 150 new, independent newspapers in Iraq in which everything can be written and said, other than calls to violence. �

From now on no more visits from the State Security trying to pressure the son to join the Fedayeen Saddam or threatening imprisonment if one didn�t betray what the neighbor was saying. And on top of it all: two more cousins are free who were locked up by Saddam for reasons that they and their families still can�t figure out.

In the courtyard of the house stands a gleaming Opel Astra station-wagon. Used and from Germany. It cost 2500 dollars, a lot for the family, everyone contributed to come up with the money. But the car is likely cheaper than anywhere else on the planet. The Americans have eliminated all taxes and import customs for eight months, more than a half million cars have rolled into the country since the war ended. Under Saddam it was a strictly regulated matter and to get a car one needed a lot of money along with good connections.
OK, so in what paper did this appear?

The conservative WashTimes? The CSM? Maybe the relatively right-wing London Times?

No! It's Der Berliner Morgenpost! According to David's Medienkritik - they got it!
posted by Mitch Berg 1/14/2004 04:39:26 AM

Ode To Tommy - I got my degree in English. I read my share of Kipling - it's a fascinating artifact of the Empire.

A Brit blog new to my acquaintance, "Free Market Fairy Tales", written by a Mr. Free Market (any relation to the Bemidji Free Markets?), has this update of Kipling's classic "Tommy" (note to Americans: "Tommy Atkins", or merely "Tommy", is the Brit equivalent of "GI" - the generic name for all British soldiers):
Regular reader of this blog will already be well acquainted with my love of Rudyard Kipling. In one better know poems ' Tommy', he talks about the soldiers life & societies attitudes to the ordinary soldier. Frankly, in 100 years, those attitudes haven't changed & yesterday, in The Daily Telegraph, Peter Pindar penned the following updated poem;

We aren�t made for cool Britannia; we leave boot marks on the floor.
We don�t walk like Peter Mandelson or talk like Jack Straw.
Call us �forces of conservatism� if it suits your turn
But we�re off like some world fire brigade when the flash-points start to burn.

Yes it�s Tommy this, an� Tommy that that, an�spend less on defence,
But who walks the streets of Basra when the air is getting tense?
When the air is getting tense, boys, from Kabul to Kosovo
Who�ll say goodbye to wife and kids, and shoulder pack and go?

The Queen, she�s sat in Windsor now for 50 years or more.
She�ll see this government depart like the other one before.
And Blair & Bush & Chirac make their plans to no avail
But who remains to serve the Crown when politicians fail?

O it�s Tommy change your values - now diversity�s the game;
But when Christmas leave is cancelled, then whose tyrants are to blame?
There�s tyrants in the mountains, boys, and tyrants in the sands,
So farewell to wives & risk your lives for them in foreign lands.
Flip through the rest of the blog for an interesting take on Brit current events.
posted by Mitch Berg 1/14/2004 04:37:55 AM

Tuesday, January 13, 2004

Infantilization Alert, Part MXVII- The Brady ~~Factory~~ Campaign is out with its annual report card on state firearms laws.

Minnesota gets a "C-".

I was hoping we'd do "worse":
This year, ten states received �Sensible Safety Star� awards for taking responsible steps to make children safer from gun violence, but nine other states, including Minnesota, were sent to the �Time-Out Chair� for irresponsibly weakening state gun laws.
Oh, dear. The "Time-Out Chair".

What's next - a note to our parents?

Oh - and what exactly did Minnesota do "wrong"? Well, according to Brady ~~Factory~~ Campaign:
Minnesota�s grade for gun laws dropped from a C+ to a C- and the state was put in the �Time Out Chair� for passing a dangerous new law that forces police to let people carry concealed handguns.
Get that? "Forces police..."? The Brady's assume their audience is too stupid to read the facts about the law - although for their members, they may know something I don't.
Gun violence in the state could increase because the federal assault weapon ban will expire this year if Congress does not reauthorize it
Huh-wha? That's not even Minnesota legislation!
...and Minnesota has no state law restricting assault weapons or high capacity ammunition magazines.
Because in the past 30 years, not one person has been shot with a legally-owned "assault weapon". Not one.

Now, I can excuse the Brady ~~Factory~~ Campaign for being factually-challenged - they, along with Citizens for a ~~Supine~~ "Safer" Minnesota, are lying pretty much any time they talk, type or print.

But this "go to your time-out chair" metaphor they use - oh, please, Brady ~~Factory~~ Campaign, keep it up! This is the type of thing you can't buy for love or money - if you're an NRA supporter! Americans - especially the majority that are in-between on gun issues - just love being condescended to!

Please, Brady - let's have more!
posted by Mitch Berg 1/13/2004 06:55:45 AM

36! - Ohio's governor Taft signs a shall-issue bill.
Lawmakers passed a bill Wednesday to allow Ohioans to carry concealed guns, and Gov. Bob Taft said he will sign it.

Those who apply for the permits would have to pay a fee, undergo background checks and be trained in the use of a weapon.

The bill also makes the names of permit holders available to reporters. Taft's insistence on this provision had derailed the bill late last year.

The Senate vote was 25-8, and the House vote was 69-24.

Taft, a Republican, said in a statement that the bill was a reasonable compromise that "balances the Second Amendment rights I have strongly supported with public safety and public records concerns."
The challenge, of course, is that bit about making names of permit holders available to the press. Enbanc asks about this provision:
What really bothers me is that it seems likely to me that the Cleveland Plain Dealer doesn't really care at all about "public access." I mean, what is the real benefit of such access? Would anyone exercise it? Even if a "public right to know" seems abstractly attractive as a principle, it seems minor and largely irrelevant in this case. And considering the paper's longstanding opposition to concealed carry, I have trouble believing that this is anything more than a thinly veiled attempt to dissuade Ohio citizens from exercising their rights as provided by the 2nd Amendment and the new Ohio statute. I consider that a cheap political ploy, and an abuse of journalistic power.

Of course, the newspaper probably doesn't know who they are messing with. Scroll down a couple stories at this site to see a representative reaction from the online firearm community:
As soon as they publish permit holders' names, we'll publish the names, phone numbers and home addresses of every single person on staff at the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
That's the first thing that would happen, and I have little doubt the reaction (via phone calls, emails, letters, etc.) would be tremendous. The second would be a quiet little bill next term which removed even journalist's access to the information.
I'll publish them here - and I urge any other bloggers who are interested in fighting this abuse of journalistic power to do it, too.

(Via Alphecca) and The Professor)
posted by Mitch Berg 1/13/2004 06:25:31 AM

With Failures Like These... - Yesterday, we discussed the Strib's declaration that "abstinence only" sex education is a "failure". I had a quibble or two with the conclusion.

So did Joe at Evangelical Outpost, who points out a British observation on the subject:
In the past decade, the number of teenage pregnancies in America has decreased by 30 per cent, with the past year's statistics indicating a historic low of just 43 births per 1,000 teenage girls.

[Promoting abstinence] has been acknowledged as a success, and we, on the other side of the Atlantic, look on in envy. In Britain, the Government has adopted a vastly different approach - that of dishing out condoms and morning-after pills, making sex education compulsory in secondary schools, and inundating our teenagers with explicit information on sex. Sex education in our schools is aimed at increasing sexual knowledge and encouraging contraception to combat teenage pregnancy, rather than condemning underage sex: preventing pregnancy rather than preventing sex is the Government's aim.

While it is a strategy that is lauded in liberal circles, it is also a strategy that has not worked. We have failed utterly to reduce the numbers of gymslip mothers. For the past 12 years Britain has been the pregnancy capital of Europe. According to Unicef's latest figures, in 2002 some 41,966 British girls under 18 became pregnant. Of those, 5,954 were 15; 2,011 were 14, and 450 were under 14.

Such has been the dismal failure in reducing these figures that there have been calls to ditch our "safe sex" schools programme and adopt the American abstinence approach.
Ah, but what do they know. The Strib has spoken!
posted by Mitch Berg 1/13/2004 06:03:39 AM

A Legal Matter - Mark at Classically Liberal comments on my post from over the weekend, about the Dems' propensity for frivolity at foreign policy. I said the Dems demonstrate a misguided urge to consider the War on Terror a law-enforcement operation, with one legitimate suspect - Bin Laden.

Mark comments:
To go after, say Boy Assad, or some other regime that supports terrorism the U.S. would need to suffer another attack that we could "prove" (yes, I use the sneer quotes on purpose) originated with that regime. (N.B. We could only initiate military conflict if France, China, Russia, Gambia and Chile approved via the UNSC.)

It's precisely because of these fantasies about the nature of this conflict over terrorism that I am going to vote for Bush in 2004, even though I think his big government spending (prescription drug program, agricultural subsidies, and space pork, I'm talking about you) has been reckless and dangerous.
As someone who supported Forbes until the 2000 convention, I agree. Bush has committed quite a few sins against conservative orthodoxy - but given the priorities that face our nation, there is only one real choice.
posted by Mitch Berg 1/13/2004 06:02:21 AM

That Objective European Media - Sullivan noted last week that the BBC actually let some balance slip:
How's this for a shocker? Here's how the BBC described the recent Carnegie Endowment criticism of the liberation of Iraq:
The left-leaning Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said US officials misrepresented the threat from Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
Just giving credit where it's due.
Not everyone is as forthcoming, according to David's Medienkritik:
The "Carnegie Endowment for International Peace" has published a report ("WMD IN IRAQ - Evidence and Implications"), written by Joseph Cirincione, Jessica T. Mathews, and George Perkovich. The main thesis: "Iraq not imminent danger before war, report concludes".

The media - as in this example from the Boston Globe - lend the study an aura of scientific knowledge and objective expertise:
"The study by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace states ... a private nonpartisan research organization ... Carnegie Endowment researchers ... one of the nation's oldest foreign affairs think tanks"
At least some media faintly hint at the foundation's political bias: "Carnegie is regarded as a moderately left-of-centre think-tank" (Financial Times). Others point to the fact that two (Jessica T. Mathews and George Perkovich) of the three authors of the study "served in the Clinton administration and opposed the Iraq war." (Boston Globe)
The third author, Joseph Cirincione, has proven himself to be a hardline Bush-hater and a foe of the "neo-conservatives". He bitterly opposed the 2003 Iraq war - before and after. His remarks on the subject were frequently polemic and condescending towards members of the Bush administration. Cirincione does not deserve to be presented as an "expert" or "researcher".
Read the whole thing.

posted by Mitch Berg 1/13/2004 06:00:54 AM

Priorities - Joshua "Micah" Marshall noted yesterday in re the O'Neill flap:
CNN's headline story on the O'Neill story reads: "Cabinet members defend Bush from O'Neill"

And then, when you click through, it turns out the cabinet members are Don Evans (the president's Texas crony and political fixer) and John Snow (O'Neill's tepidly respected successor at Treasury).

None of the bigs? That's all? No Colin? We're Rummyless?
Josh (can I call you Josh? Or is it Josh Micah?); I have a hunch Secretaries Powell and Rumsfeld might have bigger, better things to do than noodle around with whatever teapot-tempest that bitter, and probably duped, little pissant O'Neill is up to.

At least, they'd better.

Marshall also snarks that it took 74 days for the Plame affair to get an investigator, while it took only one day for the Administration to call for an investigation of the secret documents O'Neill flashed on "60 Minutes". OK, Josh - this one's fairly simple: While the Plame affair is, to say the least, murky, O'Neill was kind enough to flash documents marked "Secret" in front of the camera. Not unlike popping open a money bag and having the dye cartridge explode while on camera.

As you say - priceless.
posted by Mitch Berg 1/13/2004 06:00:18 AM

Poll Cat - Now that the Daily Kos's list of polls (see right margin) shows Bush's approval ratings beating his disapprovals by 6-29 points, with an average gap of 17 points among the eight he tracks...

...where is the obsessive coverage the polls got from Kos and his followers before Hussein got bagged?

I know. Rhetorical question.
posted by Mitch Berg 1/13/2004 05:53:31 AM

Monday, January 12, 2004

Follow the Bouncing Numbers - Back in the bad old days when I was office temping between careers, I worked in a litigation support office. We sorted, read, summarized and coded immense stacks of legal documents obtained through the discovery processes, in huge lawsuits (in my case, a suit against a nuclear power plant). Each document - as in, each piece of paper - is given a unique number, a "serial number" if you will. In more advanced discovery systems, the documents are fed into Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems, so that all of the text on each document can be put into a fully-searchable database.

I say this because when I read Powerline, and they wax legal, I frequently develop a raging headache (which is no reflection on the clarity of my writing, merely on my attention span). However, this bit on the O'Neil-Suskind flap rang a bell - it ties directly back to my wretched experience in the litigation support biz:
The CBS promo linked to above says that this document "includes a map of potential areas for exploration. 'It talks about contractors around the world from, you know, 30-40 countries. And which ones have what intentions,' says Suskind. 'On oil in Iraq.'"

True enough; there is a "map of potential areas for exploration" in Iraq here. But what Paul O'Neill and Ron Suskind don't tell you is that the very same set of documents that contain the Iraq map and the list of Iraqi oil projects contain the same maps and similar lists of projects for the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia! When documents are produced in litigation (in this case, the Judicial Watch lawsuit relating to Cheney's energy task force), they are numbered sequentially. The two-page "Iraqi Oil Suitors" document that Suskind breathlessly touts is numbered DOC044-0006 through DOC044-0007. The Iraq oil map comes right before the list of Iraqi projects; it is numbered DOC044-0005.

DOC044-0001 is a map of oil fields in the United Arab Emirates. DOC044-0002 is a list of oil and gas development projects then going on in the United Arab Emirates. DOC044-0003 is a map of oil fields in Saudi Arabia. DOC044-0004 is a list of oil and gas projects in Saudi Arabia. So the "smoking gun" documents that Suskind and O'Neill claim prove that the administration was planning to invade Iraq in March 2001 are part of a package that includes identical documents relating to the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. Does Paul O'Neill claim the administration was planning on invading them, too? Or, as Mylroie says, was this merely part of the administration's analysis of sources of energy in the 21st century?

There is only one possible conclusion: Paul O'Neill and Ron Suskind are attempting to perpetrate a massive hoax on the American people.
Read the whole thing - and ponder the implications of our apparently-impending invasions of Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

The Captain and Reding both comment .

The left desparately wants this to be a scandal [warning - the link is to "Kicking Ass". Take your Dramamine]. It might be - but it'll be held against them.
posted by Mitch Berg 1/12/2004 10:02:53 PM

Propaganda Only - Back in seventh grade, a couple of my friends and I went to see Rocky, the classic American underdog movie.

If you're one of the ten people that's never seen it - Rocky, a palooka club boxer from Philadelphia, fights Apollo Creed, the Heavyweight Champion of the World. Rocky has no chance - but he goes the distance.

Leaving the movie, most of us absorbed the lesson; the plucky underdog, through sheer perseverence, stayed in the fight, went the distance, against all odds...

But one of my friends - let's call him "Stupid Moron" - didn't get it. "But," he said, "Rocky lost".

"Yabbut, he met his goal - he went the distance! And he got the girl, and his respect, and..."

"...but he lost!"

The Strib's editorial last Sunday reminded me of that scene.

The piece - entitled "The threat of 'abstinence-only'" - starts with a bunch of gaping assumptions.
What do parents want from school sex ed? Surely they want their kids to come away with insight as well as knowledge -- with a sense of the profound power (and possible peril) of sexual intimacy.
No.

I want that to come from nearly anywhere but the public school. But that's splitting hairs in the context of this discussion.
But such abstractions are hard to measure, so researchers usually gauge sex-ed effectiveness by looking at facts: They assess how successful various programs are in delaying teen sex and averting teen pregnancy.

And of course it matters what works, because premature sexual activity can mar young lives and foreclose futures. That's why Minnesotans should worry about news that the state's $5 million "abstinence-only" sex education program -- taught to 45,000 of the state's students -- isn't working. The conclusion comes from a study underwritten by the state Health Department, which found that the five-year-old abstinence-only initiative -- which forbids any mention of contraception or safe sex -- has done little to encourage healthy behavior among teens exposed to it.
I worked wth a little fly-by-night consultant operation a few years ago. The group - mostly liberal women - tittered with similar glee at the word from the National Institutes of Health, that the programs didn't generate a lot of results. These women - or, in a few cases, womyn - had a vested interest in the failure of abstinence only. For some, it was about money - they were earning $1000 a day consulting with school districts to integrate new sex-ed programs. For others, it was purely ideological; they saw "abstinence" as a conservative bellwether - and a defeat to a conservative program is a defeat for conservatism.

The company's not around anymore, by the way.
This should surprise no one. Public-health experts have known for years that abstinence-only sex ed is a flop. Both the National Institutes ofHealth and the National Academy of Science have said so. A 2001 Surgeon General report found that the approach increases the chance that kids will neglect to use condoms or other contraceptives when they do become sexually active -- heightening their risk for disease and pregnancy. And a just-released study by the Alan Guttmacher Institute notes that, so far, "no education program focusing exclusively on abstinence has shown success in delaying sexual activity."
"But Rocky Didn't Win!"

There are three canards here.

First - of course "abstinence only" doesn't work in the public schools. It is delivered with the same sort of constrictions every public school program has - ergo, kids go up against two of the greatest forces in their lives - the hormone driven dementia of onrushing sexual awareness and the juggernauts of Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and a popular culture that oozes sex from every magazine stand - with a program and set of pamphlets that are, if anything, less compelling than the D.A.R.E. anti-drug program (which also fails, against the vastly lesser allure of drug abuse).

Second - abstinence only DOES work. It's all that is taught in Catholic schools; no contraception, no abortion, no sex. And students at Catholic schools have a lower rate of teenage pregnancy than public schools. That's because "sex ed" in the Catholic school doesn't divorce the physical and moral components of sexuality - something no public school in his day and age is allowed to do. The difference is especially noticeable in schools with the most troubled kids - kids that may have grown up without either the social motivations and moral education to have any perspective about sex other that what the mainstream of society teaches them.

Third - I challenge anyone to show me a program that has "worked" with students who are not fundamentally wired to accept the program's message - students who've inherited no moral background from their family upbringing. We'll touch on that later.

So to be perfectly accurate, the Strib should have said "Abstinence-only programs, when combined with the publicly-acceptable version of morality, fail".

But it's not about accuracy, is it?
The wiser alternative? Scientists know that, too: programs that urge teens to hold off on sex but stress contraceptive use for those who do become active. Despite the fussing of some abstinence-only fans, there's no evidence at all that such an open approach encourages earlier sexual experimentation. Quite the contrary: Scores of studies show that comprehensive sex ed helps to postpone initiation of sexual activity and increase contraceptive use.
But the Strib doesn't think you need to see the criteria of these "scores" of studies.

What programs are they comparing? What populations? Are the experiences of the "abstinence only" programs at faith-based schools considered? Do the studies control for factors like family religious, social, educational and economic backgrounds?
Pregnancy, birth and abortion rates among Minnesota teens have dropped dramatically in the last decade -- and now stand among the lowest in the nation. The reasons? A dip in teenage sexual activity explains some of it. But most of the decline -- 80 percent of it, researchers say -- is due to increased contraceptive use among teens who do have sex.
The Strib considers this a victory.
Despite its impressive overall ranking, Minnesota has one of the country's highest birth rates for African-American teens -- five times the rate for whites.
Exactly.

Now, why is that? Do the African-American kids get one-fifth the sex education white kids get? No, that's absurd. They do, however, face a dominant popular culture that glorifies irresponsible sex, that treats responsible fatherhood as expendable, and a welfare system that subsidizes teen preganancy and guts the family structures that, up until the 1950s, gave Afro and Anglo America nearly identical out of wedlock pregnancy rates.

What's the lesson, here?

It's not the program. It's the moral background in which the program is presented.
A thoughtful society can do a lot to steer teens away from early sex and unwanted pregnancy; sex ed is far from the only factor.
Right. But we don't have a thoughtful society. We have Hollywood, and pop music, "Bratz" dolls, TV, and even the Disney Channel starting to sexualize kids younger and younger. We have teeny idol Britney Spears playing cat-and-mouse with virginity while living with fellow teen idol Justin Timberlake. We have Christina Aguilera glamourizing sluttiness. We have President Clinton, glamourizing and legitimizing the Lothario. We have innumerable examples of sex as glamorous, powerful, fun, grown-up - and very few of pregnancy, of single parenthood, of the options that pregnancy closes down. And that popular culture, like the Strib, sniffs at the moral aspects of the question - which are the very ones that seem to actually connect with people.
But there's little question that sex ed can play a positive role in nudging teens along the right path -- and no question at all about what sort of sex ed works best.
"But Rocky lost the fight".

posted by Mitch Berg 1/12/2004 06:09:28 AM

Armchair Rocket Scientists - Geoffrey Forden and Theodore Postol take a long, elaborate whack at the administration in a Boston Glob op-ed last week.

They're concerned about airliner security. They have a shopping list of suggestions:
It is time for the Bush administration to abandon its look-good feel-good approach to air transport security. Its failure to do so leaves the country in grave danger.
That's become perhaps the most irritating of Democrat tropes; "the Administration hasn't solved everything, therefore they've solved nothing.

Forden and Postol, however, will:
The sensible course is to use already proven technologies and operational procedures to build a truly secure air transport security system. One element of this system would be aimed at greatly increasing the situational awareness of crews on aircraft in flight. The other element would be technical and procedural steps that could make it nearly impossible for an aircraft to be used as a weapon of mass destruction.
Sounds good! What's it involve?
Multiple tiny video cameras could be placed throughout a plane's passenger compartment to record initial actions that might leadto a takeover. Wireless videocams could even be worn on the clothing of flight attendants. The doors to the cockpit should not only be strengthened so terrorists cannot gain access from the passenger compartment; sensors could be placed in the barrier to record any attempts to breach it. Biometric devices could be added to the aircraft control system so only authorized individuals could fly the aircraft.
And there could be a control room at the back of the plane, like that found in every TV station, where a staff would monitor the phalanx of cameras?

At a time when flight crews are getting smaller due to automation and cost pressures (look for one-pilot planes in the next 30 years), who's watching all these cameras?
Aircraft could also be fitted with a control system that prevented it from flying into prohibited space. The control system could use the Global Positioning Satellite System to monitor the location of the airplane and an onboard computer that would store the locations of all excluded airspace.

This "airspace exclusion system" could be designed so the crew could override it in emergencies but only after obtaining a "release code" from the air traffic control system.
More on this later.
There could be an additional black box on large aircraft to record all data from the many sensors. If the airplane was lost, this black box could provide much information for forensic analysis by security experts. If an alarm was set off indicating a possible hijacking, information from the sensors collected by the security black box could immediately be broadcast from the airplane through satellites that could relay the information to the ground.

All of these measures could be designed to provide the cockpit crew with timely information that they were under attack so they could take actions to prevent a takeover of the cockpit.

A chilling but necessary additional objective must be to provide the information we would want if we needed to shoot a plane down. None of our fighter pilots should ever have to face such an awful task without the comfort that their actions were surely needed to prevent a greater loss of life.

In addition to on-plane measures, there must be substantial off-plane information gathering. Areas surrounding planes on the ground should be monitored continuously. Even if such surveillance data could be used only after the fact, it would provide critical information when an incident needed to be reconstructed later.
So how does this play in the flying Peoria?

Fighter Pilot Guy (a high school pal and itinerant fighter jock), who sent the link to the op-ed, writes:
This is a prime example of an (probably comfortably well off) idealist who is familiar with technology that was developed or purchased with someone else's money (MIT's money?) that probably cost just as much as the actual aircraft he would put it in. (and I'm not referring to a Cessna 172) He is correct in stating that another attack would likely be our own fault because the means to prevent it are out there, but who is going to pay? The answer is "us."...we could equip all of our aircraft with the devices mentioned in the article. The problems with that are: when do we down the fleet for the significant re-work required to implant all of the tech gear, who will be willing to pay three or more times as much to fly to pay for it(see impact on the economy when the airlines go in the crapper), and finally, who is going to make all of the foreign carriers implement the changes? If there are planes without the techno-stuff in them, do we really think it will be that hard to identify them and use them?
FPG is right - and this article is just a symptom of a much bigger problem.

Listening to the debates last weekend - still a depressing thought - the line that's still sticking with me is Howard Dean's "I'd have spent all the money that's been wasted in Iraq on finding Bin Laden". According to Dean, he's have "found Bin Laden" by now. Leave aside pusillanimous Democrat fiction that "the" enemy is Bin Laden - that if you get him, the war on terror is over.

No, the noxious conceit being flogged as a solution by so many who will never be called upon to "solve" anything is that focusing disproportionate effort on solving your last problem - hijacked airliners, Osama Bin Laden - is any sort of answer. From some people - technocrats like the authors of the Boston Glob piece - I can accept that it's the response of a technocrat speaking to what they know. From others, like Howard Dean, I can accept the fact that they have an agenda, and are also idiots.

But from so many on the left, I hear things like "We need to focus on Bin Laden - he's the person who caused all of this", as if the "war on terror" is a police case, and if we just "solve" it and find the Perp, like in a two-year-long "Law and Order" episode, it'll be all done (or worse - we have no business going beyond Bin Laden).
posted by Mitch Berg 1/12/2004 06:01:18 AM

Oh, The Humanity - RB Monkey, from Infinite Monkeys, has a theory:
Earlier today, a question was posed by Hugh Hewitt. He blogged and later wondered on the air about how long the Hindenburg remained in the air before... you know. What brought the thought on was the past week's campaign performance by Howard Dean...

The Hindenburg went into service on March 4th, 1936. It met its fiery end on May 6th, 1937, only 14 months later. About the same length as a political campaign.

As precipitous as the last week has been for Dean, I prefer to think of him not as the Hindenburg itself, but as the hydrogen that filled it...

Nominating the volatile Dean as the "lift gas" for the Democratic Party seems to be about as risky as pumping Hydrogen into an airship covered with a cellulose skin varnished with its own flammable mixture of chemicals and aluminum flecks while there's a storm a brewin'.
An interesting analogy.
On his website/blog, Hugh Hewitt has a slogan across the top: "Potestas Democraticorum delenda est!" (the power of the Democratic Party must be destroyed!) Perhaps after the seemingly inevitable Dean disaster it will have to be changed to "Oh, the humanity!"
It's still ten months and change until the election. I'd hate to make any predictions.

As cool as it sounds.
posted by Mitch Berg 1/12/2004 06:00:28 AM

Tolerant Liberal Alert! - Friday morning on the KQRS Morning Show, comedian Jim David was in the midst of a rant about the "stolen election" in 2000.

Tom Barnard asked him about how conservatives and liberals got along.

"Oh, Ann Coulter...", he hissed. "There's a woman that needs to have acid thrown in her face."

Can you imagine if a conservative had said any such thing on a top-rated radio show?
posted by Mitch Berg 1/12/2004 05:19:30 AM

Sunday, January 11, 2004

But Forget About The Mass Killings... The Sunday Strib features an op-ed by by Abbas S. Mehdi, a professor at St. Cloud State.

I once met a Russian who, while broadly admitting that the fall of communism was a Good Thing, held out a few philosophical clinkers. People didn't have the same sense of unity of purpose as they had under the USSR, he said wistfully. Being cast out on the stormy waters of the free market was unsettling to most Russians. Many of them craved order. I felt if I'd asked him if it was worth it, he'd have answered "I'll heff to sink about zat".

I thought about that fellow while reading Mr. Mehdi's piece:
This is what Iraq's liberation looks like to me right now: a woman bleeding to death on a public highway, unable to get help because coalition forces have blocked the road while looking for insurgents. A large room in a hospital where corpses are laid at random on a dirty floor, some of them uncovered, with nothing to identify them, a scene of horror for those trying to find the bodies of their loved ones.
Sounds terrible.

Mehdi elaborates:
The woman is my younger sister.
Aaaah, maaan. And now, I feel like an ass for fisking the guy. Truly, Mr. Mehdi, I am sorry for your loss. So please understand, I understand the grief at the loss of a sister - and that I'm not attacking your grief or loss, but the extrapolations it leads you to draw - and the editorial slant of the Star-Tribune that made them feel that this was news:
She was involved in a car accident on the road between Najaf and Baghdad, traveling home after visiting my parents. When she finally reached the hospital in Baghdad after being stuck on the road for more than six hours, no one could do much for her, and no one was able to get in touch with her family. The hospital was overwhelmed and disorganized, and telephone lines were down.
The Strib must not feel the need to point out that the road is a hotbed of Sunni, pro-Saddamite resistance - hardly a digressive fact, in the context of the story.

Mehdi continues:
It's 26 years since I last saw her, 26 years since I last saw my parents. For all of that time, I have been working for regime change in Iraq, hoping that Saddam Hussein would fall from power and that peace, democracy and stability would come to my country.
And yet...?
Yet I opposed last year's invasion. I feared what the cost might be for the Iraqi people of being subjected to yet another war, weakened as they were by the last Gulf War and the war with Iran, and by protracted economic sanctions. Now that scenario has played itself out and come home to me personally in a way that I never expected, fearful though I was for Iraq and for my family.
So while you "worked for regime change", no doubt knowing that it would never happen of its own volition, now that the regime has changed, you're depressed.

Let's come back to that thought later.
As I talk with the friends and relations who have gathered for my sister's burial, what I hear most plainly is hopelessness. Hopelessness, frustration and resignation.

"She was lucky," one person says bitterly. "It is as if we are all dead already," someone else says. Yet another is grateful that he has no money -- that is why the thieves have left him alone, he says.

Even those I remember as secular liberals murmur inshallah when speaking of my sister's death: "God willing."
Context, please, Dr. Mehdi?

I ask because, while I don't speak Arabic, I do know that Inshallah is a ubiquitous response to events in the languages of most Moslem peoples. In this context, are they saying your sister's tragic death was God's will? Or are they wishing for the same?

It may be a distinction lost on non-moslems, but nevertheless important.

Again - more later.
And people start to tell me stories of other pointless and needless deaths.
More than during the regime?

It's an important distinction. It's been speculated that fewer Iraqi citizens have died since the war than would have had Hussein been allowed to keep killing people at the rate he'd managed for the previous several decades.

That your sister died - and remember, she died because the activities of degenerate guerillas made it impossible to get an ambulance to her, not because we liberated the country - is a tragedy. But for every Iraqi that dies as a byproduct of the liberation, there is at least another, and probably more, that has not been fed into a plastic shredder, or otherwise destroyed by the state...

...whose demise you'd have delayed, probably permanently.
The Iraqi people I speak to are very frightened by the danger and random deaths they see all around them, at home, at work, in the street. They are also worn down by the hardships of their everyday lives.
Right. Life is insecure. Forty years of secure (albeit terrorized) existence changed overnight.
In The main reaction of many Americans to the Iraq war and its aftermath may simply be confusion, but for me, and the people of Iraq, it has meant suffering, destruction and pain. In fact, the latest war has been hugely costly to everyone concerned, to Iraq, to the United States and to the rest of the world, in material and nonmaterial ways. No one is safe there now, not U.N. staff, or Paul Bremer, or Paul Wolfowitz. Even when the president of the United States visited Baghdad, he arrived in a darkened plane, in utmost secrecy, and stayed for only a few hours. My sister would not have died from her injuries if she had not been in a country that is unbearably unstable, to the point of anarchy. In this situation, no one is a winner, and no one feels liberated.
No one?

I shoudn't ask, but since it sounds as if your family is from the predominantly Sunni region of Iraq - might that have something to do with the depression of everyone you seem to have contact with? On a more ecumenical level - you'd have...what? A return to "peaceful" means of overthrowing Hussein? With the apparatus of state oppression swallowing up people no less worthy, or beloved to their families, than was your sister?

Sorry for your loss, Prof. Mehdi. But I know other Iraqis in the Twin Cities who lost relatives and family members, not through the chaos that tragically killed your sister, but through the deliberate actions of the state. Nobody could claim the body, in an ordered morgue or anyplace else - because the person disappeared. Gone, like the dust.

Even with the news of the chaos in Iraq, the joy at the liberation vibrates the walls of their little shops.

Nobody from the Strib has called them yet.

UPDATE: Folsom James Phillips writes:
If you get bored, you may want to do a google search for Professor Abbas S. Mehdi.

He did the job I should have. Googling Dr. Mehdi tells us there are quite a few of them out there. Still, we find quite a few particles, including this one:It's easy to blame everything on a colorful baddie. Saddam Hussein is, undeniably, a tyrant, and 20 years of his military dictatorship has brought a once-prosperous country to its knees. But, tragically for the people of Iraq, current U.S. policy has exacerbated their suffering under Saddam Hussein to new and appalling levels; has made them more, not less dependent on his rule; and has diminished rather than increased the likelihood of his removal and a peaceful transition to democracy, stability and prosperity."
Phillips adds:
He goes on the demand an immediate end to sanctions. How about calling for an end to Saddam's palace building, Professor? How about a call for Saddam to allow the oil for food program to actually buy food and medicine and not golden toilet bowls for his palaces.

To his credit, he does say we should (this is back in 1999, remember) support Iraqi opposition groups. Interesting that what he called for back in 1999 is essentially what is happening now, except that the US military was the catalyst for regime change. Does he imagine that a US supported civil war to overthrow Saddam would have been less costly to the Iraqis? That seems to be the case, and it is an absurd position to take. We've already seen what Saddam did to rebels when he gassed thousands of his own people. Without the might of the US military, even a successful rebellion (and that is wishful thinking at best) would have resulting in an incredible loss of life.
More about Mehdi, from an SCSU website, which seems to avoid most of the politics and concentrates on Prof. Mehdi's stature in his field.
posted by Mitch Berg 1/11/2004 10:03:24 AM

House Latino? - Evangelical Outpost brings us this ugly, stupid flap from California:
First, there was singer and Democratic activist Harry Belafonte calling Colin Powell a �house slave.� Then we have Hillary Clinton making a really bad (and unfunny) joke about Ghandi and a gas station. Now we have a Dean supporter and official with the DNC getting in on the act:
Steven Ybarra, a Democratic National Committee official and regional coordinator of Latinos for Dean, called Rosario Marin the former U.S. treasurer under President Bush who is now seeking the GOP nomination to compete against California Sen. Barbara Boxer, a "house Mexican for the Republicans." The attack was sent out in a mass e-mail to political activists, community leaders and a number of journalists this week.
Marin responded in a statement:
Apparently, according to Mr. Ybarra and many of his fellow Democrats, if you are not a liberal Democrat, then you shouldn't be considered a legitimate minority. It doesn't matter that I'm an immigrant, the daughter of a janitor and a seamstress, or that I had to teach myself English because my first language was Spanish."

No Ms. Marin, for the Democratic Party it doesn�t. To them a "legitimate minority" is one that is sympathetic to their cause. The Democrats' idea of diversity is only skin deep.
< Vic Romano on > Right you are, Joe. < / Vic Romano off >

When it come to race relations, Democrats still flip off the odd smug glare - "we were the party of civil rights" - as if:
a forty-year-old piece of legislation gives the current generation of Democrats a hereditary claim to be racial-equality crusaders
the Voting Rights act would have passed at all, in those days when Southern Democrats still smelled the gunpowder from the Civil War - wthout massive Republican support (when in fact a higher percentage of Republicans voted for the VRA than did Democrats
Linda Chavez, in her book "An Unlikely Conservative", tells a fascinating story from her days as a liberal; Chavez grew up in a working-class, itinerant Hispanic family - but, born in America, she spoke English with no accent. When applying for a diversity scholarship in the sixties - one of the first - she found herself losing out to a woman from a very comfortable upper-middle-class background, but who spoke with a thick accent. Diversity, it seems, was best served by outward indicators.

Which brings us back to Joe's story. Party affiiliation is one of the most trivial outward indicators there is. But one can expect no less a performance of Mr. Ybarra - because scenarios like these are the ones that scare the Deocrats the worst. They know that:
Americans of hispanic descent are very predominantly socially-conservative Catholics.
Americans of Asian descent are the best examples of free-market idealism and hard, meritocratic work that exist in America today.
There are no bigger supporters of education reform, including vouchers and creeping privatization, than inner-city Afro-Americans.
So while all these groups vote Democrat, more and more of them are wondering why.

Every Republican I've ever met of African, Hispanic or Asian descent (or, for that matter, ever gay conservative) is in the GOP becuase, in addition to their belief in free markets, law and order and strong defense, they are tired of being treated as an entitlement. One acquaintance - an Hispanic Republican - told me "it's nice to have a party earn my support".

Details of policy changes aside, I hope we can do that.
posted by Mitch Berg 1/11/2004 09:01:42 AM