September 2003 Archives

Remember this? Just something to keep in mind over the next few days when we're all thinking about the press and the White House.

In the wake of Seymour Hersh's open statements about the way the White House treats the press, I feel compelled to relate a personal story that illustrates how both the White House and the press have allowed manipulation of the printed word in Washington to get out of hand. This is a bit of a confession as well as an appeal to the White House and my fellow reporters to rethink the way journalism is practiced these days.

Recently, I was working on a profile of the now-departed chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, R. Glenn Hubbard. I dutifully went through the White House press office to talk to an administration economist about Hubbard's tenure, and a press office aide helpfully got me in touch with just the person I wanted. The catch was this: The interview would be off the record. Any quotes I wanted to put into the newspaper would have to be e-mailed to the press office. If approved, the quotation could be attributed to a White House official. (This has become fairly standard practice.)

Since the profile focused on Hubbard's efforts to translate relatively arcane macroeconomic theory into public policy, the quote I wanted referenced the president's effort to end the double taxation of dividends: "This is probably the most academic proposal ever to come out of an administration." The press office said it was fine, but the official wanted a little change. Instead, the quote was to read, "This is probably the purest, most far reaching economic proposal ever to come out of an administration." I protested that the point of the quote was the word "academic," so the quote was again amended to state, "This is probably the purest, most academic, most far reaching economic proposal ever to come out of an administration."

What appeared in the Washington Post was, "This is probably the purest, most academic ... economic proposal ever to come out of an administration." What followed was an angry denunciation by the White House press official, telling me I had broken my word and violated journalistic ethics.

I had, of course, violated journalistic ethics, by placing into quotation marks a phrase that was never uttered by the source, ellipses or no ellipses. I had also played ball with the White House using rules that neither I nor any other reporter should be assenting to. I think it is time for all of us to reconsider the way we cover the White House. If administration officials want to speak off the record, they are off the record. If they are on background as an administration official, I suppose that's the best we can expect. But the notion that reporters are routinely submitting quotations for approval, and allowing those quotes to be manipulated to get that approval, strikes me as a step beyond business as usual.

Oh the humanity!

Hussein's Weapons May Have Been Bluff

With no chemical or biological weapons yet found in Iraq, the U.S. official in charge of the search for Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction is pursuing the possibility that the Iraqi leader was bluffing, pretending he had distributed them to his most loyal commanders to deter the United States from invading.

N. Korea Nixes Further Nuke Talks

"We are taking concrete measures to keep and further strengthen our nuclear deterrent force as self-defense aimed at preventing a nuclear pre-emptive strike by the U.S. and guarantee peace and security on the Korean Peninsula," the North Korean spokesman said.

"We have lost any interest in or expectations for talks when it has been proved that the U.S. has no willingness to build peaceful coexistence with us but spares no efforts to use the six-way talks to completely disarm us."

North Korea already said it was no longer interested in further talks when the Beijing meeting ended a month ago without setting a date for the new round of talks.

The North since has said it would strengthen its nuclear weapons program as a "deterrent."

Soooooooooooooooooon.

(cue rustling leaves).

BTW, I just love this piece. The line "Trying to destroy Bill Clinton or Robert Bork or any of the innumerable public figures savaged during peacetime is one thing. It is quite another to do so during war." is truly priceless. Just priceless.

From Stratfor.

The problem is this. The administration has held to the WMD line for so long that it has become a separate dogma that can be neither defended nor abandoned. Regardless of whether Rove blew the agent's cover, adhering to a disproved claim in the hopes that no one will notice is not only a bad idea -- it isn't working. At some point the White House must come to grips with the fact that its WMD strategy just isn't flying. There was a reason for invading Iraq. It wasn't WMD. Get on with the war.

On the other side, Washington has become so used to government-by-scandal that even wartime necessities can't stop it. Trying to destroy Bill Clinton or Robert Bork or any of the innumerable public figures savaged during peacetime is one thing. It is quite another to do so during war. It seems to us that if Karl Rove is guilty, then he should be hung from a tree. His action is unforgivable. But -- and this is the crucial point -- discrediting a sitting president during war is very risky. Even Pearl Harbor wasn't investigated until the war was under control.

In other words (we would apologize for editorializing, but we aren't journalists, so no apology needed) -- this is a wonderful time for both sides to cut it out. The White House should admit what we all know -- they screwed up on the WMD issue, or lied. It's one or the other, and the Bush administration is not getting out of this without paying a price. The Democrats should bear in mind that the United States is at war and that there is a difference between winning the White House and destroying it. There is a war on, dammit.

The only winner in all of this is Osama bin Laden. It's beginning to look like his analysis of the United States was shrewder than it might originally have appeared. The United States is self-destructive. Just give it a little push, and Washington will tear itself apart.

Re-reading the Stratfor piece really drives home the priorities on the "right". Defense, defense, defense.

Pity we don't recognize our domestic problems as a similar crisis and that - say - teacher salaries were forced to soar in order to attract people from the private sector.

I guess I'm forced to admit that our schools aren't in such dire straights that we need to unleash vouchers on our once public school system.

Brad bangs his head against the wall.

Manifestly cheesy, I must say, but I'm going to do it any way.

From Stratfor.

We suspect that Rumsfeld and his people are aware of this issue. The problem is that the Bush administration is in an election year, and increasing the force by 50 percent or doubling it is not something officials want to do now. It cannot be done by conscription. Not only are the mechanisms for large-scale conscriptions missing, but a conscript army is the last thing needed: The U.S. military requires a level of technical proficiency and commitment that draftees don't bring to bear.

To keep the force at its current size, Congress must allocate a large amount of money for personnel retention. A father of three with a mortgage payment based on his civilian income cannot live on military pay. Military pay must not be permitted to rise; it must be forced to soar. This is not only to retain the current force size but to increase it. In addition to bringing in raw recruits and training them, this also means, as in World War II, bringing back trained personnel who have left the service and -- something the military will gag over -- bringing in trained professionals from outside, directly into the chain of command and not just as civilian employees.

Thinking out of the box is something Washington always talks about but usually does by putting a box of corn flakes on top of their heads. That's all right in peacetime -- but this is war, and war is a matter of life and death. In the end, this is the problem: While American men and women fight and die on foreign land, the Pentagon's personnel officers are acting like this is peacetime. The fault lies with a series of unexpected events and Rumsfeld's tendency to behave as if nothing comes as a surprise.

The defense secretary needs to understand that in war, being surprised is not a failure -- it is the natural commission. The measure of a good command is not that one anticipates everything, but that one quickly adjusts and responds to the unexpected. No one expected this type of guerrilla war in Iraq, although perhaps in retrospect, everyone should have. But it is here, and next year will bring even more surprises. The Army speaks of "A Force of One." We prefer "The Force Ready for the Unexpected." The current U.S. force is not.

<sigh>

Ari Fleischer is one of the "Top Administration Officials" that shopped the Plame affair around to reporters.

I've got a nickle on the table. You know where to reach me.

[btw, when you have "Fleischer" added to your spell checker dictionary, you know you are far, far too far down the road to perdition.]

US paid $1m for 'useless intelligence' from CAzaelabi

Well, that's not the real total. You see, this one million dollars directly led to the several hundred billion dollar adventure we call the Iraq occupation.

Just so this is straight, we - the United States of America Tax Payer - just spent 1 million dollars [ed. - that we know of] for information that was critical to the decision that Iraq posed an imminent threat by virtue of their possession of WMDs.

Think about the irony here. We were the one's who paid for the information that justified our actions in our eyes. I mean, really. You couldn't have written a screenplay that would be more unbelievable.

Information from Iraqi defectors made available by Ahmed CAzaelabi and the Iraqi National Congress before the US invasion was of little or no use, a Pentagon intelligence review shows.

The Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) said defectors introduced to US intelligence agents by the organisation invented or exaggerated their claims to have personal knowledge of the regime and its alleged weapons of mass destruction. The US paid more than $1m for such information.

And get this special bit of irony! This is truly a bonus for those of you who relish the small detail touches that mark the work of a true master.

Ahmed CAzaelabi was the dude sitting behind the "Iraq" plaque at the UN when Bush was shilling for a new "War on the Terror Sex Trade" a while back.

You remember? When the entire UN just yawned and said that they really were strapped with the global economy in the state it's in, and could you call back in a year?

Geeeessssshhhhh.

Again, I simply have to say YOU GUYS ROCK!

I'm just astounded that there are people - otherwise intelligent - who are simply blind to the obvious crap that's going on here. I mean, they're not even trying to hide it.

Ahmed CAzaelabi.

You just got to give faith credit here. I would have broken down laughing in front of Don Rumsfeld a hell of a long time ago.

I don't care if I was carted off to a terror camp for "questioning" right after it. I would just straight out laugh if I was a reporter at a Washington press conference these days. I'd be just simply rolling over in the aisles after some of the stuff going on these days.

It's like watching the bizarre dance of some strange amazon life form. You know, something that is completely alien in its mating rituals.

So, like the dance of the seven veils, we get teased and pulled - tempted to spend our dollars for a bit more... uh... information about this terribly interesting strip tease we're witnessing.

Unfortunately, with these blokes, once they've stripped they have nothing to reveal - they really have no souls. Their only goal is to win politically.

Just to win the next game any way they can.

Every time I hear the right-wing punditry wail about how Iraq isn't as bad as it looks and pleading that it's only been 6 months, just give us some time to do it right, I'm reminded of Afghanistan.

If I recall correctly, we still have a shit hole over there. Hmmm... Let me just check up on the news.

Tribal leaders have allowed Pakistani soldiers unprecedented access to their land, proof, they say, that they are willing to cooperate. But tribesmen told The Associated Press during a rare journey to their autonomous homeland that they are deeply mistrustful of the government and turning over men they see as Muslim holy warriors to infidel Americans would be unconscionable.

"I would sacrifice my own life, but I would never turn bin Laden over," said the 20-year-old Khan, flower tucked behind his ear — as is local custom.

The large U.S. bounty on the al-Qaida leader's head means nothing to him, he added: "What is $25 million? If your faith is strong, then $100 million cannot buy you. If your faith is weak you can be bought for 10 rupees (15 cents)."

Bin Laden and his chief deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, are believed to be hiding somewhere in the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan, leaning on the support of tribesmen like Khan to elude the largest dragnet in history.

Update: It just simply freaks me out that both Bin Laden and Saddam Husein are still fugitives in the very countries that we overthrew the regime in order to get them.

Amazing that anyone thinks this administration's strategy is anything but ineffective (at the most generous).

Yea, you guys ROCK!

<heh>

Andrew Northrup pretty much sums up the whole nonsense with a perfect image (and links).

Why would master do this? Why he tricks us, and betrays us?

I think the right's collective head is simply going to explode with this issue. So, like going to a Gallagher show, everyone in the front 10 rows should make sure they're wearing plastic and get ready for a very big mess soon.

Church-and-state standoffs spread over USA

Much of the debate comes down to this: Many Americans — perhaps a majority — disagree with federal court decisions that consistently have barred prayer in school and the presence of religious monuments in government buildings when the displays seem designed to promote a religious message.

"An awful lot of Americans don't understand why they can't use their government to promote or celebrate their religion," says Douglas Laycock, a First Amendment specialist at the University of Texas School of Law.

"It's kind of silly to me," says Father Thomas Reese, editor of the Catholic weekly American Magazine. "Displaying the Ten Commandments in a courtroom is something I think should be permitted, but it's not something I would go to war over."

But the issue is unlikely to fade anytime soon. Moore's supporters are in the midst of a "Save the Commandments Caravan," which is transporting a replica of the Alabama monument from Montgomery to Washington.

Americans who say such monuments in the public square are unconstitutional won't back down either.

"We are very slowly becoming aware of the huge number of denominations in the country," says Marci Hamilton, an expert on church-state separation at Cardozo Law School in New York. "It is a pro-religious society. But the majority believes in the right to believe whatever one decides to believe."

Been thinking about the incessant screaming from some on the right that the situation in Iraq isn't really as bad as the media makes it appear. There's a lot of stuff being put up by military families, and from various people who've been over in Iraq. There's even a couple of new polls out regarding how Iraqis feel about the whole occupation thing.

One of the main things that bothers me about this whole situation is that 40% of the Iraqi population is 14 and below. The median age is 19. Now, I don't know about everyone else out there, but I don't have the highest confidence in a bunch of 19 year olds to bring democracy to the troubled land of Iraq.

And, if the numbers from the poll are to believed, "62 percent of Baghdad residents believe the ousting of Saddam Hussein justified 'any hardships they might have personally suffered'". This means that 38% of a population where Azaelf of people 19 years old and younger think that it hasn't been worth it. They prefer Hussein.

Think about that for a moment and then think about how many guerrillas it actually takes to keep Iraq in chaos. Think long and hard.

Anyone else notice that Robert Novak and Richard Perle look like they could have been separated at birth?

And has anyone heard from Perle lately? Anyone know where the guy is hiding out?

Notice how you never see Perle and Novak in the same room together?

Stumbling Into War

What went wrong? Why, when the leader of the free world went to war with a brutal and hated dictator, did so many countries refuse to take America's side? How much collateral damage was caused in the process? And what lessons can be learned from this debacle? After extensive debriefings of key participants in Europe and at the United Nations, as well as of a number of informed American diplomats, some important lessons from the recent crisis are starting to emerge.

First, the fact that Washington's justification for war seemed to shift as occasion demanded led many outside observers to question the Bush administration's motives and to doubt it would ever accept Iraq's peaceful disarmament. Second, the United States failed to synchronize its military and diplomatic tracks. The deployment of American forces in the Middle East seemed to determine American policy, not the other way around, and diplomatic imperatives were given short shrift. Third, the failure to anticipate Saddam's decision to comply partially with UN demands proved disastrous to Washington's strategy. Fourth, the belated effort to achieve a second Security Council resolution could still have succeeded, had the United States been willing to compromise by extending the deadline by just a few weeks. But such a compromise was not forthcoming, which leads to the last lesson: the Bush administration's rhetoric and style alienated rather than persuaded key officials and foreign constituencies, especially in light of Washington's two-year history of scorn for international institutions and agreements.

Thanks to Dr. S for pointing it out to me.

Juan Cole has an interesting post up regarding the recently touted poll results from Iraq.

The situation is even worse than Pincus suggests. For instance, on Sept. 14 on Meet the Press, US Vice President Dick Cheney alleged that Iraqis "including the Shia population" reject an Islamic government by a two-to-one margin. This finding was based on the four-city poll. But only one of the four cities was largely Shiite (Basra), which in my view skewed the results. (Basra has a relatively secular political tradition). The 2 or 3 million poor, relatively theocratic Shiites of East Baghdad were left out of the picture altogether, along with pious Shiites in Najaf and Karbala. If you add them in, the support for an Islamic Republic would go way up. And, it is not clear if the pollsters made the distinction between implementing Islamic law and rule by Muslim clerics. Probably only a third of Iraqis would want the latter. But a lot more probably want Islamic law. Pincus notes that 50% of Iraqis think US-style democracy would not work very well. The US administration shouldn't become convinced by this kind of shaky data that Iraqis are happy with the US occupation or want the kind of government that the US intends to impose.

Everything they do is like this. Everything.

I swear, we are being ruled by schizophrenics. And their followers who keep insisting that we have to hold true to the faith are even more terrifying.

Faith based on delusional beliefs.

What a great way to plow forward into the 21st century.

Iraq, 9/11 Still Linked By Cheney

I just got to say. The longer this goes on, the more I start to believe in the "flypaper" theory. Except that it's not terrorists we're trying to catch, but all the REALLY STUPID PEOPLE who keep believing this crap. It must be a system designed to tag all the real buffoons out there who simply cannot process information correctly and analyze it critically. People who believe that loyalty trumps facts. People who believe that faith trumps critical reasoning.

You know, the people with the real tinfoil hats on.

From Stratfor.

This brings us back to the intelligence failure. One way or another, there was either a massive intelligence failure, or the WMD are still out there with the guerrillas. We think that to be marginally possible. But barring that, the fact is, someone was dead wrong. We don't think anyone lied, because that would be too stupid and unnecessary. Eventually they would wind up where they are now, and there was no need for that.

Therefore, there was an intelligence failure, and if the origins of that failure were not in a fixed, unexamined set of assumptions, then it is time for Powell, Rice and the intelligence community to cough up another explanation. While they're at it, they might explain whether the CIA predicted the guerrilla war that the United States currently has on its hands, or whether this was another intelligence failure.

Intelligence failures happen. Alternatively, intelligence estimates are sometimes overruled by customers who order up something more suitable to their political needs. All of this is understandable and part of the business. But the Bush administration's unending attempts to shoot down plausible explanations for intelligence failures without offering its own is bizarre.

If we are to believe the administration, the intelligence process worked perfectly. The mere fact that it came up with the wrong answer should not be permitted to undermine the perfection of the process.

Gee, we wish we could get away with that.

A particular curse of MT blogs as they have XML/RPC interfaces.

Adrian is keeping an IP blacklist of the bastards. You can pull the list every 24 hours for update.

Social insects point to non-genetic origins of societies

From her work studying social insects, Arizona State University biologist Jennifer Fewell believes that these remarkable animals suggest a an alternate cause behind the development of complex societies. In a viewpoint essay in the September 26 issue of the journal Science, Fewell argues that complex social structures like those seen in social insect communities can arise initially from the nature of group interactions -- the inherent dynamics of networks.

The ability of certain animals to form complex social systems -- particularly humans and social insects like bees, ants and termites -- is considered by many biologists to be one of the pinnacles of biological adaptation and complexity. Social organization allows organisms to share labor, to specialize in tasks and to coordinate efforts. Through organization, social animals accomplish remarkable things - they build colonies supporting millions of individuals, maintain multi-layered social systems, manage complex farming and food production systems, and build elaborate designs and constructions, from giant self-cooling termite towers to skyscrapers.

The development of social systems is often assumed to be driven by species modifications arrived at through natural selection. Social characteristics such as caste systems and complex behaviors have been thought to be traits programmed by genes, created through evolutionary processes. Though insect social systems are in many ways as complex as human societies, Fewell contends that the relative simplicity of the insects themselves argues against the systems being created solely by the evolutionary development of biocomplexity in the individual organisms.

(Captain Queeg removes the steel balls from his pocket and he spins them in his palm insistently as he speaks.)

Queeg: No, I, I don't see any need of that. Now that I recall, he might have said something about messboys and then again he might not -- I questioned so many men and Harding was not the most reliable officer.
Lt. Greenwald (Jose Ferrer): I'm afraid the defense has no other recourse than to produce Lt. Harding.
Queeg: Now there's no need for that I know exactly what hell tell you. Lies! He was no different than any officer in the wardroom -- they were all disloyal, I tried to run the ship properly by the book but they fought me at every turn. If the crew wanted to walk around with their shirttails hanging out that's all right let them take the tow line. Defective equipment no more no less, but they encouraged the crew to go around scoffing at me and spreading wild rumors about steaming and circles. And then old yellow stain. I was to blame for Lt. Merrick's incompetence and poor seamanship. Lt. Merrick was the perfect officer but not Captain Queeg.
Ah, but the strawberries! That's where I had them. They laughed at me and made jokes, but I proved beyond the shadow of a doubt, and with geometric logic, that a duplicate key to the wardroom icebox did exist! And I'd have produced that key if they hadn't pulled Caine out of action! I-I-I know now they were only trying to protect some fellow officer and!......(realizes he has been ranting, babbling)
Naturally, I can only cover these things from memory if I've left anything out, why, just ask me specific questions and I'll be glad to answer them...one-by-one..(Captain Queeg removes the steel balls from his pocket and he spins them in his palm insistently as he speaks.)

Queeg: No, I, I don't see any need of that. Now that I recall, he might have said something about messboys and then again he might not -- I questioned so many men and Harding was not the most reliable officer.
Lt. Greenwald (Jose Ferrer): I'm afraid the defense has no other recourse than to produce Lt. Harding.
Queeg: Now there's no need for that I know exactly what hell tell you. Lies! He was no different than any officer in the wardroom -- they were all disloyal, I tried to run the ship properly by the book but they fought me at every turn. If the crew wanted to walk around with their shirttails hanging out that's all right let them take the tow line. Defective equipment no more no less, but they encouraged the crew to go around scoffing at me and spreading wild rumors about steaming and circles. And then old yellow stain. I was to blame for Lt. Merrick's incompetence and poor seamanship. Lt. Merrick was the perfect officer but not Captain Queeg.
Ah, but the strawberries! That's where I had them. They laughed at me and made jokes, but I proved beyond the shadow of a doubt, and with geometric logic, that a duplicate key to the wardroom icebox did exist! And I'd have produced that key if they hadn't pulled Caine out of action! I-I-I know now they were only trying to protect some fellow officer and!......(realizes he has been ranting, babbling)
Naturally, I can only cover these things from memory if I've left anything out, why, just ask me specific questions and I'll be glad to answer them...one-by-one..

Supply lines failure leaves Italy in the dark

Almost all of Italy's 57m citizens were left without electricity on Sunday when supply lines from France and Switzerland were knocked out, adding to a string of blackouts across Europe and North America this summer.

The power failure raised new questions about the fragility of electricity grids in even the most developed economies, and highlighted Italy's growing dependence upon cross-border supplies of electricity.

Italian, French and Swiss electricity officials quickly attempted to lay the blame on each other, but it appeared last night that a unique combination of violent storms and human error or delay caused the blackout.

Thousands around the world protest Iraq occupation

Considering the locations involved. . .

Turks Rally to Protest US, Israeli Policies

This despite dangling 8.5 Billion in loan guarantees in front of them.

Thousands of Turks took to the streets in two separate demonstrations yesterday to denounce the US-led occupation of neighboring Iraq and Israel’s policies against the Palestinians, the Anatolia news agency reported.

Nearly 3,000 people — from trade unions and non-governmental organizations — turned up for the protest in Istanbul, which passed peacefully, the agency said. “Freedom to Palestine, long live the global intifada,” chanted the demonstrators.

In the capital Ankara, meanwhile, members of trade unions, minor left-wing parties, environmental groups and human rights organizations gathered in the downtown Sihhiye square for a three-hour protest.

A press statement from the organizing committee criticized the United States for attacking Iraq without a valid reason and called on the Turkish government to say no to a US request to send soldiers to Iraq.

“We will not send soldiers to Iraq, we will not let our sovereignty be trampled on, we will not become an accomplice to the occupation,” said the statement, carried by Anatolia. More than 3,500 police were called on duty for the protest, which ended without incident.

Lisa Mullins was interviewing Emin Shirin, deputy chairman of the Turkish Foreign Relations Committee. She was querying him as to why Turkey was against having troops in their country for this war we're having. After all, wasn't he a bad guy that should be eliminated? His answer was profound. He said, "Why should we violate our constitution just to get this guy? Don't you think that following our constitution is more important that getting rid of one evil man?".

Look at the Dean Bat on the left. Just a few hours ago the goal was 5 Million in 10 days. Last time I checked, there was something like 2.3 Million in donations, something like 29K donors.

At this point the goal is 15 Million, with 12.5 Million in donations with something like 145K donors.

Can't say they don't know how to manipulate the press. This was beautiful. Why it was simply yesterday that I was reading that Dean may be overreaching with his 5 Million mark.

I'd say they hit the ball right out of the park.

<heh>

<heh>

Maybe you haven't heard yet, but the Valerie Plame affair is becoming something of a pain for the administration. Go and read if you're not familiar with the whole sordid affair and then come back.

The narrative that may take hold in the Military and Intelligence community could be something straight from a Tom Clancy novel. Where Ambassador Wilson is playing the Jack Ryan part and the added bonus of a 90's style wife being played by a real live CIA agent, Valerie Plame - WMD Expert. Think "Clear and Present Danger". I mean, isn't this simply begging for the comparison and framing?

In the hands of some people with a talent for propaganda [ed. - the good kind] and a decent budget, this alone could have Bush leaving in shame before the next election. The CIA doesn't seem like it's going to back down. They wouldn't have come forward with this allegation unless they're were going to see it through - why take the risk?

And the CIA isn't exactly known for playing by the rules, so I'm sure there's a lot of dirty tricks already being prepared. I don't think people who've calmly instigated entire coups as well as selling opium and cocaine to fund their efforts around the globe aren't going to have any problem at all resorting to Karl Rove's level - if it comes to that. I guess that will be up to Rove.

Just my opinion, but RoveCo really screwed the wrong pooch here and this issue is going to be the one pop the grape. It's a sharp, simple issue that can not be prevented from piercing the curtain. Their only hope is to delay, delay, delay, but that has a heck of a lot of downside to doing so. If RoveCo was riding in the mid 50's, they'd likely be able to shrug it off.

But now, the shear weight of their mendacity is precariously stressed against the strict discipline this administration maintains. A friendly press is the main thing these guys need. Not a press slobbering at the possibility of the spectacle of a full blown Tom Clancy novel being played out before the election.

I'm sure Powell could get a good part in the psycho-drama if he plays his cards right. Save his career. After all, the entire state department can be cast as the good guys here - trying to oppose the misguided DOD headed by the evil Rummy. Wolfowitz already looks like Frank Langella. Turning Richard Perle into an evil Jabba the Hut will be child's play.

If this is all over the Sunday news shows, these guys are toast. Just the mere act of this single allegation will spill so much crap on the floor that Rove will be as busy as a one legged man in an ass kicking contest.

Update: That's all she wrote, folks. Somebody is toast.

From Stratfor.

Washington's goal is deniable accommodation with Tehran. This is driven by U.S. political needs, not strategic reality. From a strategic standpoint, whether overt or covert, the U.S.-Iranian deal will result in an Iran-dominated Iraq. There are strategic problems with that from the U.S. point of view, but they have nothing to do with secrecy.

The secrecy has to do with electoral politics, as well as with an internal split in the Bush administration. Some view the Iraq situation as requiring rapid, radical solution. If that means working with Iran, so be it. This faction includes the president's political advisers as well as the State Department. In contrast, Defense Department leaders regards an accommodation with Iran as an instance of the cure being worse than the disease.

Leaving aside the interesting question of which side is right, the whole issue points to a very strange policymaking style. We have reached a point where policy disputes do not result in clear-cut decisions. Rather, policies are implemented in such complex and creeping ways that no one wants to acknowledge that policies actually are being implemented -- no one seems to own them. Not only does the administration, as a whole, want deniability -- individual factions want it too.

So there are hundreds of little facts on the ground indicating accommodation between the United States and Iran. The Iranians are positively jovial these days when speaking of the Americans. The Americans send CAzaelabi to speak to the Iranians and senior commanders to work with the Shiites. All of this is going on without any clear acknowledgment of the obvious by anyone.

It is a fascinating style for foreign policy-makers. We wonder if it can possibly work.

Once more for the cheap seats.

Weapons and the war

Amid all the official inquiries, political recriminations and postwar claims and counter-claims, one basic fact about Iraq now appears incontrovertible. The fact is, at the time the war was launched, Iraq did not possess the non-conventional weapons capability that the US and Britain alleged. It did not, therefore, pose the "serious and current threat" to the UK national interest, to the Middle East region and to the US that was officially claimed. The US-British decision to prevent further UN weapons inspections, override a UN security council majority, and plunge into a letAzael, open-ended and expensive conflict was thus rash, unnecessary and mistaken.

This may be seen, generously, as an enormous miscalculation based on erroneous information; or as the inevitable result of a decision that George Bush had already taken, for less creditable motives, that had very little to do with Iraq's weaponry. Either way, it is beyond question that more time could safely have been allowed for inspections, diplomacy and voluntary Iraqi disarmament. The moment of last resort, meaning urgent, unavoidable use of military force, had not remotely been reached.

I was thinking about school vouchers as I was having a continuing conversation with a friend of mine who is very pro-voucher. To me, if the school is using the public funds for the same basic education, then that's cool - even if they teach fairy tales. They just can't pay for that activity with public funds. People can pay for whatever other things they want to learn themselves. The problem is how to regulate the teaching of things like science.

School testing seems perfectly fit for this function (No Child Left Behind, for example). If the school's students don't meet science standards, they lose funding - i.e., they can't accept vouchers. A big problem with this is, of course, that the biggest religion in the US is adamantly against the teaching of evolution purely on religious grounds. This is very, very bad. I can't see giving these guys public money without them pushing back with crap like teaching creationism or Intelligent Design instead of evolution. Yes, you could test for knowledge of evolution with standardized tests, but the problem is they'll lobby hard for this change in standards, and Republicans are their best buds. So it becomes a political as well as a religious issue instead of a science issue.

Condom supply to Africa hit by US abortion policy

The Bush administration's ban on funds to family planning clinics which offer abortion counselling is adversely affecting the supply of condoms to countries hit by HIV/Aids, it was claimed yesterday.
Clinics have had to close in a number of African countries because the family planning organisations running them refuse to sign a declaration that they will not offer abortions or even discuss them.

Many healthcare workers consider it unethical to refuse help to a pregnant woman who may endanger her life by seeking a backstreet abortion if she is turned away.

Yesterday the biggest international organisations affected by the so-called Mexico City policy, or Global Gag as the activists call it, launched a report quantifying the disaster they say it is visiting on the developing world.

Amy Coen, president of Population Action International, the lead sponsor of the study said: "The policy significantly reduces access to vital family planning and health-related services for some of the world's poorest women and weakens vital HIV/Aids prevention efforts." The rule was "another example of how the Bush administration is allowing political ideology to trump science".

The report documented the closure of many clinics which are often the only provider of sexual healthcare in their areas because of a cutoff of funds from USAid, the US agency which is the world's biggest source of development funding. About $430m (£259m) which the administration earmarks for family planning in poor countries can only go to organisations that have signed the anti-abortion pledge.

The policy was introduced by Ronald Reagan, thrown out by Bill Clinton and reinstated on George Bush's second day in office.

Family planning groups say the policy is damaging the cause that Mr Bush has espoused in a bid to show the compassionate side of his administration, that of HIV/Aids.

USAid is the most important single donor of condoms to the developing world, procuring and delivering more than a third of all donated supplies, worth about $75m a year.

The report said that by 2002, the policy had ended shipments of USAid-donated condoms to 16 developing countries whose family planning associations are affiliated to the International Planned Parenthood Federation and who refused to sign the pledge. They include Swaziland, which has one of the highest HIV rates in the world, Burundi, Chad, Gambia and Mauritius.

USAid's condom supplies to a further 13 countries have been cut because the main, although not the only, family planning organisation will not sign. They include some with the worst HIV problems in Africa: Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

Stock market traders show signs of zero intelligence

Market traders are not mindless. But if they were we might not notice the difference, claim J. Doyne Farmer, of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, and co-workers.

Their theoretical model assumes that traders place orders at random rather than on the basis of shrewd calculation and observation of economic trends. It reproduces some of the statistical features of financial markets1. Traders, it suggests, are rather like ants swarming chaotically through the guts of a great clock, barely affecting its ability to tick.

The findings further undermine one of the most cherished notions of economic theory. Since the nineteenth century, economists have imagined traders as omniscient and coldly logical beings, who aim always to maximize their profits based on complete knowledge about what the entire market is doing.

Modern economists recognize that people aren't fully informed or rational. Much recent theory has been devoted to understanding how we cope with imperfect information, and how our behaviour is interdependent and sometimes irrational. Irrationality leads to the herding that can drive market crashes.

All the same, by dispensing with even a restricted form of rationality, the new model is daring. Farmer and colleagues don't imply that anyone really does make decisions by flipping a coin, simply that economic decision-making is so varied and complex that it is hard to distinguish it from random choices.

"The concept of the full-information rational maximizer is one which economics finds very hard to abandon," said economist Paul Ormerod of Volterra Consulting, UK, at this month's conference of the Economic Society of Australia, held in Canberra. "But much of the world is much closer to the random paradigm."

From Stratfor.

It is becoming clear that prudence requires a major expansion of the Army and possibly Marine Corps. The one thing the war against al Qaeda has demonstrated is that comfortable assumptions about requirements for the war are untenable. Moreover, Rumsfeld's views about new technologies, while wholly appropriate to offensive warfare, are not really relevant to defensive warfare, in which manpower is still the key. Since no one knows the course of Afghanistan or Iraq, the United States must plan for the worst -- an extended stay requiring major reinforcements. Moreover, since no one can predict whether other theaters of operation will heat up, forces must be available for deployment elsewhere. The basic principle is that, in war, it is permissible to hope for the best, but it is unacceptable to plan for anything other than the worst.

The essential problem here is that the United States is trying to run a global war using a peacetime force. This is not the war Rumsfeld expected to fight, but that's life. As much as Rumsfeld hates the concept, he needs boots on the ground. Those boots will mostly belong to the Army, but the Army doesn't have enough boots. That means that -- given the fact that conscript armies are not a good idea -- Congress needs to consider how to expand the force by recruiting more volunteers. That means money from Congress, which it hates. It means Rumsfeld admitting he was wrong, which he hates. And it means creating a wartime personnel plan in the military, rather than the current, unworkable policy of using a peacetime force to wage a global war.

The United States has never done it before, and it won't do it now. The only thing that this policy will do is actually reduce the force in the long run by convincing reservists and National Guardsmen to bail out at the first possible moment. The current policy is not only untenable, it will create a huge manpower crisis in about a year. Meaning that a new policy must be in place yesterday. This is not politically easy. Expanding a volunteer force raises serious political concerns, not the least of which is explaining why it isn't already in place. Nevertheless, the choice appears to be a profound change in the force or severe limits on operations.

I can't say I am surprised, but I can say I am very disapointed. This is not going to be a very happy Christmas for the troops. And a heck of a lot of disruption of the national guard's and reserve's lives.

All I got to say is I hope this "control" we're refusing to give up is worth it. This is a HUGE investment we're making here. And it looks like we're on our own.

Bush Fails to Gain Pledges on Troops Or Funds for Iraq

Bush's empty-handed departure after two days at the United Nations, combined with warnings from the military that it will soon need fresh U.S. troops to relieve those in Iraq, makes it increasingly likely that the U.S. military will have to rely on its own reservists to do the job -- a politically dicey move for Bush, whose domestic support already has declined because of the continuing instability in Iraq.

Compounding the pressure, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan is considering ordering the total withdrawal of U.N. personnel from Iraq, a step recommended by his top political and security advisers after two bombing attacks against the world body in Baghdad over the past month, according to U.N. and U.S. officials. A U.N. pullout would seriously undercut efforts to assign the United Nations a broader role in overseeing Iraq's political transition.

The White House, when it decided earlier this month to seek a new U.N. resolution, was hoping to quickly pass a measure that would encourage countries such as India, Pakistan and Turkey to send troops and others to provide money to support Iraq's reconstruction. But the administration discovered that other countries are not willing to commit the needed military power and funding unless the United States relinquishes more control than it is willing to give to the United Nations or the Iraqis.

Affleck, Lopez 'together'

But the pair, who had planned to wed at a star-studded ceremony in Santa Barbara on September 14, thanked officials for protecting them - and Affleck bought a shotgun permit.

Kind of a metaphore for their relationship.

A better perspective on these things. Fun facts to remember during these days.

89% of all Americans reported that they get most their news from television. 87% of internet users report the same thing. In fact, only 17% of internet users reported that they get most of their news from the internet. 64% of those who got any of their news from the internet believed it was about the same as the news they got elsewhere. 76% said they got their news from American network sites, newspaper sites or US government sites. Only 18% reported that they regularly visited foreign and alternative sites.

6% said they got news from sites opposed to the war. 4% visited blogs.

In the days before the Iraq war, internet users supported the war by a 3 – 1 margin. They were more likely than non-internet users to think that the war was going well and that president Bush had made the right decision.

54% of internet users had said they sent or received patriotic e-mails or prayer requests with respect to the war. 10% received information from an organization opposed to the war. 5% communicated with an elected representative about the issue.

By the same token, while it seems terribly impressive that an estimated 70.1 million watched the first night of the Baghdad bombing on the eight major news networks: ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC, CNBC, CNN, Fox News Channel and MSNBC, it should be noted that the January 2001 Super Bowl attracted 79.5 million viewers.

Just the top 10 rated TV shows on prime time gain a weekly audience of about 200 million viewers, on average.

The fact is that most Americans are going to vote on the basis of what they see in the mainstream media and a large amount of that through advertising and quick cuts of news images. They are going to make a decision based less on specific issues and more on an emotional reaction to the candidate and the party. They are not going to be largely motivated by the internet, no matter how much we news junkies and bloggers would like to see that happen. That just isn’t the world most Americans live in.

Well, the image of the U.S. President & Naval Aviator is indeed manufactured in China.

As an aside, the "full naval aviator flight equipment" that GW has on is pretty darn complex. I mean, it's like a fetishist's dream. Zippers all over the place. Complicated straps and belts that can be pulled up nice and tight. Heck, if I was the President, I'd do the same thing - just to wear the gear.

So I certainly don't begrudge the man for the whole affair. I mean, what's the use of being the Alpha Male of the entire planet if you can't do the cool stuff.

I do think he's pretty much going to regret it, though.

Mission Accomplished is not going to be a great tag line unless a miracle occurs in Iraq. But weird things happen.

Maybe it'll be his best picture since 9/11.

In Senate, Kennedy Fuels Sharp Debate

To bolster the senator's assertion that the administration could not account for billions of dollars and was "bribing" nations to send troops to Iraq, his office this week released a list of approved loans, expenditures and spending proposals, beginning with a new $8.5 billion loan package for Turkey.

While the United States has been pressing Turkey to provide 10,000 peacekeeping troops to help stabilize Iraq, Treasury Secretary John W. Snow said Monday the loans were designed to help Turkey recover from economic losses due to the war in Iraq and are not contingent on Turkey's provision of soldiers. The $8.5 billion in loans for Turkey, according to Kennedy's spending list, comes on top of $1 billion in economic support funds previously approved in the current fiscal year for that nation.

Jordan, a key Middle East ally that allowed U.S. Special Operations forces to stage operations from its soil, received $700 million in U.S. economic support funds this fiscal year, Kennedy said. Egypt received $300 million in economic support funds plus $2 billion in loan guarantees.

Kennedy's list included $200 million spent by the administration in airlift and support costs for a multinational division under Polish command that recently replaced a U.S. Marine contingent south of Baghdad. In addition, it said the Bush administration has spent $800 million in the current fiscal year to "reimburse key cooperating nations for providing logistical and military support."

Finally, Kennedy cited a number of spending initiatives included in the administration's recent $87 billion supplemental spending request to support military operations and reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan, including $1.4 billion to reimburse Jordan, Pakistan and other cooperating nations for logistical, military and other support to U.S. military operations and $200 million in economic support funds for Pakistani debt forgiveness.

Search For WMD Slows To Crawl

"I was supposed to find weapons of mass destruction," said Shumaker, of Clarksville, Tenn. Instead, they made him an accountant, "because I was doing nothing."

The only thing the team had been able to find in its searches around Mosul, 250 miles north of the capital, Baghdad, was a mobile lab that initially was suspected to have been part of Saddam's forbidden weapons program.

"After that, things really slowed down. We weren't as busy," said Shumaker.

Until then, Shumaker's job was to monitor intelligence that came in and check out tips about possible WMD sites. "There are still people doing it. We still get some reports. ... But it has slowed down," he said.

By two weeks after arriving in Baghdad, the team had realized might not be any weapons of mass destruction, he said.

"At that time it was up in the air," said Shumaker. They thought "even if we don't find anything, we got rid of a bad dude and freed these people."

Shumaker had just come out of school, inexperienced, when he was sent to Iraq. The only thing on his mind were finding the prohibited weapons, which he was sure were here.

"That's all we thought about," he said. "We were going to be put on the spot. We were going to be tested and it was going to be the real thing.

"What we expected was nasty stuff. Exactly the pictures they painted on CNN and all the networks - nerve agents. ... I had just come out of school. I was inexperienced, if we found the weapons, it would have been good to be part of the group that found the evidence," he said.

Does he believe there still may weapons of mass destruction hidden in the country?

"I don't know what to think anymore," he said. Some days, he says, he is convinced there may be, and other times he's not too sure. "It just goes back and forth."

No sign of Iraq's WMD

'No WMD in Iraq', source claims

No weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq by the group tasked with looking for them, according to a Bush administration source who has spoken to the BBC.

Wind Power Is Now Cheaper than Coal in the U.S.

Wind power is now cheaper than coal in the U.S., according to a study published in the journal Science. The study’s researchers, two Stanford engineers, priced wind power at 3 to 4 cents per kilowatt hour, already competitive with the market price for coal power. After factoring in health and environmental costs, they put the true price for coal power at 5.5 to 8.3 cents per kilowatt hour. For wind power to take off, however, the researchers say that lawmakers will need to give the industry the same investment opportunities and tax breaks historically given to fossil fuel industries. The researchers propose this bargain-basement deal: eliminating nearly two-thirds of coal-generated electricity and single- handedly dropping the country’s greenhouse gas emission levels below 1990 levels by building 225,000 wind turbines -- at an initial cost of $338 billion.

I just have a question. Is a Syrian spy automatically working with/for Al Qaeda? Is there a Syrian/Al Qaeda connection? Not saying either way, but I am wondering. . .

From Stratfor.

We do not have a solution. But we would all be lying if we said that there isn't a problem. As we said before, all Muslims are not al Qaeda, but all al Qaeda are Muslim. It is improper to focus on a Muslim simply because of his religion. On the other hand, it would be idiocy to go hunting al Qaeda among Swedish Lutherans or Argentine Catholics.

In an airline check-in, when the bags of an 80-year-old African American woman are opened to search for al Qaeda, the results are merely irritating and stupid, but that is a small price to pay for the right to claim that Muslims are of no greater interest to airline security than any other citizen. However, given the limited resources of military and intelligence security personnel, being forced to pretend that the Muslims are not the locus of al Qaeda -- even if 99 percent of Muslims reject the group entirely -- squanders resources and thereby decreases security.

We don't know what is going on at Guantanamo. We do know that even if Guantanamo hadn't happened, al Qaeda would try to infiltrate the U.S. military and intelligence communities. We also know that the United States is at war with al Qaeda -- and it would be delighted to see a witch hunt for traitors within those communities, since it would increase the likelihood of support. Al Qaeda also would be delighted to see a dissipation of U.S. counterintelligence based on a random search for threats.

The head of German intelligence service BND warned Sept. 24 that Iraq is a potential haven for Islamist terrorists, IRNA reported Sept. 24. "Iraq could develop into a center for Islamist extremism," BND President August Hanning was quoted as saying. "We are experiencing now that Iraq has become the crystallization point of jihad."

Airman Is Charged as Spy for Syria at Guantánamo Camp

Potentially, more to come.

A US airman stationed at Guantanamo Bay has been charged with espionage following a military investigation into a potential radical Muslim cell among its servicemen at the Cuban prison.

This is eery.

Scientists See Antarctic Vortex as Drought Maker

Australia may be facing a permanent drought because of an accelerating vortex of winds whipping around the Antarctic that threatens to disrupt rainfall, scientists said on Tuesday.

Spinning faster and tighter, the 100 mile an hour jetstream is pulling climate bands south and dragging rain from Australia into the Southern Ocean, they say.

They attribute the phenomenon to global warming (news - web sites) and loss of the ozone layer over Antarctica.

"This is a very serious situation that we're probably not confronting as full-on as we should," Dr James Risbey of the Center for Dynamical Meteorology and Oceanography at Melbourne's Monash University told Reuters on Tuesday.

"There has been real added impetus here in Australia to try to study (the wind vortex) because we've been faced with an almost precipitous rainfall decline, particularly in the southwest of Western Australia," Risbey said.

Australia, one of the world's top agricultural supply nations, has just been through its worst drought in 100 years.

Officials to Get Update on Iraq WMD Hunt

The man in charge of the hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (news - web sites) is briefing senior intelligence officials in Washington this week but the public may not be told of his findings right away.

CIA (news - web sites) adviser David Kay is expected to complete his progress report to agency Director George J. Tenet soon, U.S. officials said.

National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice (news - web sites) suggested there are no plans to release Kay's findings immediately. There had been expectations in Washington that the report would come out this month.

You just got to read this. Three Days in NYC Jails. Thanks to Atrios for pointing this out.

It's simply amazing. And terrifying.

From Stratfor.

These frontier conflicts divide into a number of separate theaters of operation. There is, of course, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in which Jews confront Muslims. There is the conflict in Kashmir between Hindu India and Islamists. There is Chechnya, where Muslims confront Orthodox Christian Russians, and the Philippines, where Catholics confront Muslims. There is a range of smaller theaters in Africa. However it is divided, it is useful to think of three dimensions to the war, which is occurring in various theaters.

One theater of operations to which our attention has been drawn is the Balkans. U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Richard Myers visited the region last week, reminding us not only that U.S. troops are still deployed there, but also that the Balkans is one of the points where the Islamic world interfaces with the rest of the globe. It also reminds us of a critical antecedent of the current war and of an important fact that has been forgotten: The first major conflict between the Islamic world and its surroundings took place in the Balkans, and the United States intervened in that war on the side of the Muslims.

I used to have a Direct Merchants credit card. I happen to be lucky and can pay what I charge on the CC off each month, so the interest rate isn't something I normally think about.

An open invitation to election fraud

It's basically a joke at this point. Anyone who has a passing knowledge of security, and perhaps more importantly CORRECT SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT PROCESS, and who can read Tadayochi Kohno's Analysis of an Electronic Voting System has a very queasy feeling in the pit of their stomach.

I mean, the software business is a bit of a joke - just look at the quality of Software out there. But voting machines are not word processors - they're not web browsers. They're not video games.

They are the critical link in our democratic system. And when something is this wrong with the systems these jokers are providing to us, then you have to ask yourself what's going on. Is is simply incompetence, or is there any conspiratorial malice that must be inferred?

Harris has discovered that Diebold's voting software is so flawed that anyone with access to the system's computer can change the votes without leaving any record. On top of that, she's uncovered internal Diebold memos in which employees seem to suggest that the vulnerabilities are no big deal. The memos appear to be authentic -- Diebold even sent Harris a notice warning her that by posting the documents on the Web, she was infringing upon the company's intellectual property. Diebold did not return several calls for comment.

The problems Harris uncovered are not all that surprising; technologists have been warning of the potential for serious flaws in electronic voting systems -- especially touch-screen systems -- for years. In July, scientists at Johns Hopkins and Rice found that security in Diebold's voting software fell "far below even the most minimal security standards applicable in other contexts." The report prompted Maryland Gov. Robert Ehrlich to order a review of the Diebold systems used in his state. Many of the world's most highly regarded computer scientists have called on voting companies to build touch-screen systems that print a paper ballot -- a "paper trail" -- in order to reduce the risk of electronic tampering.

Via Atrios.

From Stratfor.

Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf has cautioned the world not to equate terrorism with Islam. Speaking at a terrorism conference in New York, Musharraf said the "most deadly" form of terrorism was state terrorism, which targets people seeking freedom from foreign occupation, citing Indian-controlled Kashmir as a key example. Musharraf's said little new, but his comments did represent his attempts to balance his commitments to the United States in the war against terrorism against domestic pressures on his government. More directly, Musharraf used the opportunity to prelude his talks with U.S. President George W. Bush, in which he will raise the inequalities of military hardware between India and Pakistan, and likely seek assistance in restoring the balance of power.

Seeing Ahmed CAzaelabi behind the Iraq plaque at the UN. And then hearing the Iraqi commentator on NPR say that she was swelling up with pride at the sight. I can understand the pride at seeing an Iraqi seated there that wasn't appointed by Saddam. But CAzaelabi? Oh well...

That CAzaelabi is one slick customer.

From Stratfor.

The conflicting reports and rumors, though, indicate that all sides are growing convinced that Hamas is in risk of dissolution. The group claimed responsibility for back-to-back suicide bombings on Sept. 9, one southeast of Tel Aviv near the Tzrifin army base in Rishon Letzion and the other at a coffee shop in Jerusalem.

Two weeks later, the Israeli Defense Force is letting Palestinians return to their jobs inside Israel. Hamas might not be beaten, but it is beginning to look that way -- and for many supporters, that amounts to the same thing. What happens in the next few days, then, will be telling. Another spate of suicide bombings by Hamas might be the group's only hope of maintaining its unity and popular support.

Islam sees itself as target: Pakistan

Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf has warned that the US-led war against terrorism, including the occupation of Iraq, has helped fuel the perception of Muslims that "Islam, as a religion, is being targeted and pilloried".

The remarks by General Musharraf, one of the Bush Administration's closest Muslim allies in the war on terrorism, comes as Pakistan resists US appeals to send troops to Iraq to help stabilise the country.

The Musharraf Government has cited the need for greater political support in the Islamic world for the US-led occupation.

General Musharraf told more than 20 world leaders and foreign ministers attending a counter-terrorism conference that the Islamic world had an obligation to reform the religious schools, or madrassahs, that "preach hatred" and to "shun militancy and extremism". But he said this would only "be feasible if the West joins us by helping to resolve all political disputes involving Muslims with justice".

Judges Rule to Hold California Recall Election as Scheduled

First hurdle of my bold prediction comes off as planned.

Henry has some thoughts regarding what massively multi-player online role-playing games and what they can perhaps tell us about certain theories of social interaction, such as "the argument that easing restrictions on weapons and their use will lead to a drop in violent crime."

It's just a fanciful line of thought (these are fantasy role playing games after all), but you just got to admire someone who can weave John Lott and fantasy role playing into a thought provoking and highly entertaining post.

A very substantial majority of players seem to prefer that a Hobbesian Leviathan step in to prevent people from using their weapons against each other, so that they can carry out their trades in peace. They prefer a system in which the sovereign authority (in this case the game designers) rule out interpersonal violence by diktat, to the nasty anarchy which otherwise prevails. And I believe (I’m happy to be corrected if I’m wrong) that this is true to a greater or lesser extent of all MMORPGs; all of them have peaceful zones where inter-player violence is ruled out by fiat, so that people can just get on with their activities.

As I’ve hinted, I don’t think that this analogy can be pushed too far - the circumstances of online games don’t map very well onto real life. But it’s still suggestive. Experience from MMORPGs suggests that self-help only goes so far in answering the threat of violence. The threat of armed retaliation from individuals doesn’t necessarily work to deter violent crime (especially where the bad guys have the bigger guns). But perhaps I’m wrong: I’m Azaelf expecting John Lott to come up with figures proving that more broadswords (or crossbows or fireball scrolls or magic wands) do lead to less crime. Certainly, he’s shown a quite extraordinary flair for fantasy statistics in the past.

Well, just the doll that looks like him.

I got my GW Bush, Naval Aviator and Commander in Chief action figure today. It's actually pretty cool. Darn high quality. And plenty of cool little stuff to play with.

Strange, though. Not a single US flag anywhere to be seen.

Click on the picture for a larger image.

Can you imagine GW saying this? Didn't think so. Even if you could imagine it, can you imagine him saying this without sneering while he did it? Didn't think so.

Clark Calls for a 'New American Patriotism'

Gen. Wesley K. Clark called today for "a new American patriotism" that would encourage broader public service, respect domestic dissent even in wartime and embrace international organizations like the United Nations.

General Clark, a former NATO commander and Army officer who last week announced his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination, accused the Bush administration of neglecting economic problems and of pursuing a dangerous go-it-alone foreign policy.

But he also used the setting of the Citadel, the military college here, to appeal to about 150 cadets and civilians on the parade grounds to help restore something loftier, a sense of national spirit that he suggested that the administration's campaign against terror had corroded.

"We've got to have a new kind of patriotism that recognizes that in times of war or peace democracy requires dialogue, disagreement and the courage to speak out," General Clark said. "And those who do it should not be condemned, but be praised."

Annan cAzaellenges US on force

The UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, will openly cAzaellenge the White House doctrine of preemptive military intervention today, arguing that it could lead to the unjustified "lawless use of force" and posed a "fundamental cAzaellenge" to world peace and stability.

In a speech to be delivered shortly before George Bush addresses the UN general assembly, Mr Annan will declare that the Iraq crisis brought the UN to a "fork in the road" as decisive as 1945 when the world body was formally established.

Arctic ice shelf breakup reported

Only 100 years ago the whole northern coast of Ellesmere Island, which is the northernmost land mass of North America, was edged by a continuous ice shelf. About 90 percent of it is now gone, Vincent’s team wrote.

The area has been getting warmer, they said. A similar trend in the Antarctic has caused the break-up of huge ice shelves there.

“There’s a regional trend in warming that cycles back 150 years,” Mueller said in a telephone interview. “I am not comfortable linking it to global warming. It is difficult to tease out what is due to global warming and what is due to regional warming.”

If you haven't yet, you really should try to balance the budget with the National Budget Simulation. It's a really difficult task. Policy isn't really a one year process after all. Rates of growth and impact of fiscal stimulus on the next year's tax income base add to the complexity.

But simply trying to find the money is a rather interesting exercise. Going through a couple of iterations on my fantasy budgets I cut $266.97 billion, leaving a $90 billion dollar deficit. But that is a pure fantasy. I wouldn't be elected on this kind of a platform. But I only rolled back the tax cuts on the top 4% and above, keeping everything else in the tax cuts. I made other cuts as well, eliminating stuff like capital gains tax, offshore corporations, ag subsidies (I think), etc.

But it was kind of frustrating. One of the major questions I have is where is the money that I hear about? For example, there is theoretically something like 10 Billion dollars a year we give to Israel. Where's does this funding show up in the various line items of this budget? Whether you want to cut the Israeli funding or not, the issue is that you don't really have a feel for where the money is. So you don't know if you cut our ally Israel out with your cuts. More information is needed.

Anyways, I found the process very interesting and I would really love to see this simulation expand. Run some time simulations and see the iterative outcome of the policy according to various economic models (hopefully simplified) that are used by economists and agencies like the CBO.

Educational, in any event. You may enjoy it.

One of the things that confused me greatly Christianity was the fact that Jesus was a hippy. Running around with robes, feeding the poor and undeserving. Spending his time with thieves, prostitutes and other undesirables. Living in other people's houses, crashing on their sofas. Begging for food and stuff.

I mean, to my young brain, the guy seemed like pretty much every hippy I'd met at the time. Well, except for the miracles and son o' god thing.

And why was it that god fearing conservative types seemed to hate hippies so much?

Oh wait. I know the answer to that one. Never mind.

From Stratfor.

This attack likely was orchestrated by forces within Iraq that understand the significance of U.S. efforts to bring in additional troops to help with security and reconstruction. The United States is trying to pass a new U.N. resolution -- which most countries have set as the prerequisite to sending forces to Iraq. While this latest attack will not prevent a vote on the resolution, it will provide grounds for many countries to stall on actually deploying troops. The bombing even has given the United Nations pause over the nature of its presence in Iraq.

Following the attack, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said, "We are assessing the situation ... and we will decide as we move forward what our posture should be. Obviously, I am shocked and distressed by this latest attack. There are discussions about a second resolution which may affect the U.N. mandate and the role of the U.N., and we would obviously need to know what that new role will be for us to determine how we organize ourselves to tackle that."

Via a commenter in this post over @ Matt's I found this very cool site: The National Budget Simulation.

This simulation asks you to adjust spending and tax expenditures in the the 2004 budget proposed by the White House in order to achieve either a balanced budget or any other target deficit. In order to make the choices we face in the budget clearer, we assume that you make the adjustments all in one year. According to the White House, the 2004 fiscal deficit is projected to be $307 billion. This does not include the costs of the Iraq War, so it has been increased by a base estimate of $50 billion for those costs in this simulation (which can be increased, lowered or eliminated depending on peoples views of the costs or likelihood of the war.).

The Simulation also allows you to adjust the costs of the 2001 and proposed 2003 tax cuts, either cutting or canceling them to raise revenue, or increasing them to create larger tax cuts. It also allows you to increase or decrease tax expenditures, also known as tax deductions, credits or "loopholes."

If you can't make it work here, then you can't make it work in reality. And the reality of the situation is far more difficult than any Republican I've ever seen admit to.

Easy to say "Cut The Waste!".

Show me where.

Tom Burka has an amusing little bit on the war between the Clarks and the Deans.

The revolution will be Video Gamed.

Check out the Salon article on The Crisis of the Pro War Liberals. Extremely good.

Then go over to the Poison Kitchen for a fantastic little bit. (picture deep linked here because it just cracks me up so much).

From Stratfor.

The Sunday Mirror, one of the less reputable newspapers in Britain -- and that's saying quite a lot -- published a story today claiming that the United States has been negotiating for nine days with representatives of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein about Hussein's wish to go into exile in Belarus. The story, with its confused and confusing details, normally would be of little interest -- except for the manner in which the United States denied it.

The only denial we could find today came from Lt. Col. William McDonald of the 4th Infantry Division. When queried about the story, McDonald said, "The 4th Infantry Division has not had any contact with any former regime members regarding Saddam Hussein's disposition." That's pretty reasonable. We wouldn't think that the disposition of Hussein and his money would be handled at the divisional level. McDonald clearly stated the truth, but didn't answer the question. In fact, he wouldn't know the answer to the question.

The story appeared around midnight Sept. 20, Washington, D.C., time. By morning, Agence France-Presse and other wire services around the world had picked it up. A story published by the Sunday Mirror can be ignored. But when the story starts circulating on the wires, it's time to put a bullet in its head. However, by late Sept. 21, no one in Washington had said that this was the stupidest idea that they'd ever heard and that only a nitwit would believe something published in a London tabloid. They could have. They should have. They didn't.

Weird.

Last American Combat Troops Quit Saudi Arabia

The withdrawal signaled the end of a long strategic arrangement, mutually beneficial until it fell victim to tensions resulting from the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, in which 15 of 19 hijackers were Saudi citizens. Since then, the countries' fragile diplomatic relations have undergone considerable strain — only worsened in recent months by the American military presence in the kingdom, American and Saudi officials said here this week.

As one American diplomatic official based in the region put it, "on both sides, actually, the alliance had become a little bit of poison, and both sides were glad to see it end."

Nearly 500 advisers now constitute the only American military presence left in a country that during the 1991 Persian Gulf war had as many as 550,000 American troops at several sites. The advisers are helping to train the Saudi National Guard.

The Prince Sultan base, which at the height of the war this spring housed 10,000 American troops and 200 planes, has now been supplanted as the Middle East's main American military air operations center by Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar.

This last phase of the American departure from the base occurred with almost no fanfare, attracting only minor mention in the Saudi press. "It was as if they were never here," a senior Saudi official said. "They left very quietly."

The drastically reduced American profile could simplify the government's position among Saudis who espouse Osama bin Laden's contention that the American military foothold was an affront to the kingdom's sovereignty. For years, the American presence not far from Islam's two holiest sites, at Mecca and Medina, has provided Al Qaeda with an important rallying cry.

This is a pretty darn entertaining post.

The best thing of all about this thread was watching FB try, and fail, to prove his identity on internal evidence alone. Sitting in a room together, or even on a phone line, all of the participants in the thread would have know immediately the man was telling the truth. But on the Internet, it's just text, baby. It would have been interesting to see if FB could have proven his identity just by discussing lyrics, or talking about life on the road. A kind of celebrity Turing test.

And if Frank Black has this much trouble, imagine how hard it would be for poor Britney if she ever decided to head over to IRC chat. Or for good old Jesus to send a mass e-mail, announcing his return.

"Dear friend, you don't know Me, but I am writing to share exciting news..."

From Bad Attitudes, I'm directed to this letter to the editor from Ann-Marie Murphy (2nd letter).

This meme was in full force before the war with Iraq. Basically, the assertion was "You can't just say it's a bad idea, you have to provide an alternative". Essentially, we weren't allowed to "Just Say No" to the war with Iraq. After all, Iraq was an imminent threat to the US. Anyone who didn't have an alternative plan for Saddam was obviously an idiot.

Sometimes doing nothing is actually the best thing to do. Better to do nothing and remain where you are than to do something truly stupid, digging yourself so far into a hole that you have no good options as to getting out.

Most solutions have a narrow window in which they can be successfully applied. For example, after the patient has died from poisoning, it's of little help to give him an antidote.

In the beginning of things, the leverage you have is extremely large. This leverage works against you as time progresses. This means that what could have worked in the past, when the problems were just beginning, may be completely and utterly useless when the problems become as big as they are in Iraq now.

Having the UN behind us when we overthrew Saddam would have been a huge advantage. Having a force that at least resembled a police force and not an army that is trained to use overwhelming force in its objectives would have been a big plus in the effort to rebuild Iraq.

But now I don't think even the UN can pull the fat out of the fire. Even if we lived in the parallel reality where the UN suddenly and overwhelmingly helped us out with Iraq. The truth of the matter is, the situation has metastasized to the point where I don't think there is any way out of the situation at all. None.

In every direction, there is razor wire as far as the eye can see. There is no way out that won't be extremely painful and cost a whole lot of blood and money.

And to this, I just got to say thanks to people like Anne-Marie Murphy. It's the supremely fine logic that you folks adhere to that got us into this mess in the first place. It's you that pushed this war for whatever bizarre reason you feel you can justify at this point - all your others have been pretty much shattered on the hard rock of reality.

And so it begins. GW is going to the UN Tuesday to smack the general assembly around a bit more. They aren't buying the sack of shit that the administration wants to sell them, and so they are increasing the pressure. Like a bunch of Mob racketeers, they're leaning on the international community to pony up 10 Billion dollars to help us dig this hole deeper. They want their sons and daughters to come over to Iraq and join the death and injury lottery so they can decrease the chances of our own troops coming up with snake eyes.

There are plenty of situations where you can easily get yourself into trouble, but there is no way to get yourself out of it. Sometimes there are no alternatives. The only thing you can do is just ride it out.

Especially when you insist on continuing to dig yourself deeper and deeper.

'Cause the President had the opportunity to go to the UN a long time ago. According to some reports, even the French were begging the US to let them help out. But of course, that was back in the heady days before the reality of the situation couldn't be ignored.

Oh well. That's why sometimes you just should do nothing. Doing something for the sake of doing something is rarely a good choice. Sometimes you just got to sit tight and think.

Worried Optimism on Iraq

Although the situation in Iraq is FUBAR and the US must pull out of the country immediately, I will become an overflowing optimist when Iraqis start publicly spouting the same clap trap that I have been spouting.
________
With apologies to B³ and D²

Bush to CAzaellenge U.N. to Help in Iraq

Somehow, I just don't think this is going to have the effect he thinks it will.

Bush, addressing the General Assembly on Tuesday, will argue -- just as he did last year -- that the United Nations needs to meet its global responsibilities or risk being irrelevant.

Bush will make the case that an institution such as the United Nations has to show it is ``actually capable of acting, and really willing to act, and not just debating,'' said Condoleezza Rice, his national security adviser.

Gee, I'm so glad everyone thought it was a trivial and silly question when a reporter asked then candidate George Bush if he could name the leader of Pakistan. Ha Ha Ha. Those pointy headed liberals are so full of it with their geography and such.

Pakistan through the US looking glass

From these documents, it is clear that the DIA knew of the role of the ISI in the sponsorship of not only the Taliban, but also al-Qaeda. And yet the Bush administration has for over two years chosen to close its eyes to the complicity of Pakistan and to project Musharraf to its own public opinion as well as to the international community as a frontline ally in the war against terrorism. Why? A question to which there has been no convincing answer.

Oh, and there's that whole Military Coup thing.

Shoot! I forgot that Pakistan actually has nuclear weapons. No need to spin a yarn about that.

Didn't I hear some rumors of Pakistan actually testing the nuclear bomb designs for N. Korea?

Pakistan has behaved extremely irresponsibly with respect to nuclear weapons. American experts believe it may have helped both North Korea and Iran develop nuclear weapons technology. Pakistan's own nuclear weapons are thought to be under General Musharraf's control, but in a country whose history has been scarred by repeated military coups, that is not totally reassuring. Democracy remains a distant mirage.

Republicans are so great with national security, and democrats are just so dumb.

Andrew Sullivan on why you should vote Democratic next year.

THE MESS IN IRAQ: All the signs are pointing to a serious screw-up. Patience is one thing. But the reporting from the country, including this devastating account from a pro-war writer, suggests that the state of affairs there is spiraling out of control. Even if the voters won't punish Bush for finding no WMDs, they sure as hell will hold him responsible if Iraq collapses into chaos or civil war. And they should.

The Daily Kos thinks Clark is off to a good start. I'm with Kevin on this one. It's pretty darn impressive to see someone leap to the lead like this.

Clark — 14%
Dean — 12%
Lieberman — 12%
Kerry — 10%
Gephardt — 8%
Sharpton — 7%
Edwards — 6%
Graham — 4%
Braun — 2%
Kucinich — 2%
Don't Know — 19%

November 2004 is a hell of a long way off, and given the fact that we're living the in the most surreal political climate that I've ever heard about. 9/11, 2 wars, two occupations from hell, a Azaelf trillion dollar deficit, 2.7 million job loss, no WMDs.

And then there's always the dramas playing out state by state with Texas redistricting, Moore's ten commandments. And one can never forget the CA recall three ring circus that never seems to end. Who knows what next year could bring (don't forget about SARS).

I mean, really. I wouldn't be surprised at all if Hillary Clinton was running as the democratic nominee in 2004 at this point and George was walking the "beaches" somewhere in shame after resigning. Just like Nixon, only at the Walker Ranch.

Things are getting kind o' weird, don't cha think?

I haven't had this much fun since I argued with Nader voters in 2000. (Oh, and did I mention that I'm a Democrat who, nonetheless, believes that George W. Bush is the messiah?)

Joan figures Clark's toast. One day in and it's over. He's just another Schwarzenegger -- nothing but a lazy, Austrian, weightlifting moron without the women problems (although the day is young....)

But, at least we won't have to endure that nasty campaign we are convinced he must have been planning with those horrible Clinton people.

Seeing Josh MarsAzaell defend Clark and try to take Dean a notch or two brought a tear to my eye, I tell ya.

As Atrios says, "God, they really are going to succeed in creating a military with a 'hollow middle.'"

I ask again how anyone could doubt my thesis. It's the only rational explanation for what's going on.

Well, that or they are incredible boneheads. I'm betting on the alien colonization explanation, though.

Kevin Drum already gave his tax proposal. Oliver Willis is running as the 11th democratic primary candidate. Here's my contribution to the political season.

Let's roll back the tax cuts on the upper 0.1% and give it all to the military as a pay raise. At the same time, we'll increase the pension of the military families using the rollback of the tax cuts for the rest of the upper 1% income earners. That way, the money that the military gets will be directly used to increase their standard of living. The increase in pension will give them less incentive to save the money for a rainy day, so the money will be spent. Thus increasing demand.

Anyways, I was just lying about the "no small merit" part. This is just a transparent political ploy designed to garner the military votes in the 2004 election. Silly, really.

Kevin has a good one on why liberal values might actually be good for the economy. It's not like there's any real proof here, but it's a really good counter argument to help sway the Libertarians over to the liberal side.

Via the always dark Gorrilla a go go (sorry, no perma links it seems) I found this great blog Baghdad Burning. Give it a read.

The electrical situation is bizarre. For every 6 hours of electricity, three hours of darkness. I wish they would give us electricity all night and cut it off during the day. During the day it's hotter, but at least you can keep busy with something like housework or a book. At night the darkness brings along all the fears, the doubts and… the mosquitoes. All the sounds are amplified. It's strange how when you can see, you can't hear so many things… or maybe you just stop listening.

Everyone is worried about raids lately. We hear about them from friends and relatives, we watch them on tv, outraged, and try to guess where the next set of raids are going to occur.

Anything can happen. Some raids are no more than seemingly standard weapons checks. Three or four troops knock on the door and march in. One of them keeps an eye of the 'family' while the rest take a look around the house. They check bedrooms, kitchens, bathrooms and gardens. They look under beds, behind curtains, inside closets and cupboards. All you have to do is stifle your feelings of humiliation, anger and resentment at having foreign troops from an occupying army search your home.

Some raids are, quite simply, raids. The door is broken down in the middle of the night, troops swarm in by the dozens. Families are marched outside, hands behind their backs and bags upon their heads. Fathers and sons are pushed down on to the ground, a booted foot on their head or back.

Other raids go horribly wrong. We constantly hear about families who are raided in the small hours of the morning. The father, or son, picks up a weapon- thinking they are being attacked by looters- and all hell breaks loose. Family members are shot, others are detained and often women and children are left behind wailing.

Last night I was wandering through my list of Right wing blogs and came across this entry by Lee of Right-Thinking from the Left Coast. It's a post about Tim Predmore's open letter regarding his reading of the Iraq war and what's going on.

Lee first came to my attention when I found him linked from the Liberal Oasis. He had congratulated the LO for being one of the first blogs that actually got some real news on their own - a real interview! It's old hat now, but it was pretty cool at the time.

FBI checks out library records of terrorist suspects

But the University of Illinois conducted a survey of 1,020 public libraries in January and February and found that 85 libraries had been asked by federal or local law enforcement officers for information about patrons related to Sept. 11, said Ed Lakner, assistant director of research at the school's Library Research Center.

The libraries that reported FBI contacts were nearly all in large urban areas.

In a memo to FBI Director Robert Mueller obtained Wednesday by The Associated Press, Ashcroft said he decided to disclose the previously classified information to "counter the troubling amount of public distortion and misinformation" surrounding section 215 of the anti-terrorism law.

"Public confidence in law enforcement is of paramount importance," Ashcroft wrote to Mueller.

"The number of times section 215 has been used to date is zero," the memo says.

Update: Via Atrios, a very good post with more evidence put forth by the librarians on the Liquid List

Liberal Oasis has an excellent post up about Clark's first few days and the first volley by the right.

Personally, I'm really starting to like the guy. Still need to know a heck of a lot more about him. But I agree with LO that it's refreshing to see a candidate that really doesn't have any skeletons in his closet. I don't agree with LO about

But to demean a military achievement, any military achievement, is walking on thin ice -- as the Right loves to remind the Left.

They are not playing by any rules and to assume they even understand the concept of thin ice is a very dangerous one. I don't believe there is any depth they're not willing to sink to.

The current attacks are just the warm up to judge range.

We are facing death in Iraq for no reason

A letter from Tim Predmore is a US soldier on active duty with the 101st Airborne Division, based near Mosul in northern Iraq.

Read it. It's particularly distressing, isn't it?

Oh, and note the guy is toast. Speaking out like this is a death sentence for your military career. It took a lot of guts.

From Digby, who rips Tom "I'm an Arab kinsman" Friedman a new one.

And we know this because we’ve already seen how cowed terrorists are by our magnificent military might and democratic motivations in both Afghanistan and Iraq. The entire Arab world is trembling in fear and yet are simultaneously terribly impressed with our benevolence, kindness and generosity; they are particularly moved by the competence we’ve shown thus far in the post-war aftermath. Needless to say, like everyone else in the world, they are very likely bowled over by the expertise and skill of our intelligence services with their preternatural gifts for knowing if they’ve been bad or good (so be good for goodness sake!)

Just today we hear reports that Saudi Arabia is thinking of putting out feelers to buy a small nuclear bomb or two from our other close ally Pakistan.

Oh yes. The plan is working perfectly.
...
...
Nobody believes a fucking thing we say anymore, whether it’s about WMD or civil liberties or transforming Iraq into a non-drinking version of Tennessee. This is not France’s fault and it isn’t the EU’s fault and it isn’t the UN’s fault. It is the Bush administration’s fault and whether or not the French “want us to fail” is of little consequence. We are the one’s who are failing.

Capping Pay Of CEOs Is the Way to Go

More important, the temporary caps would wring out of the corporate culture the set of norms and expectations that developed over 20 years, and got us to the point where $5 million a year was considered the minimum wage and it was common for chief executives to be paid 1,000 times the average American worker.

'It's like an eye for a tooth, or an ear'

The Guardian asked 11 people from the world of arts, science, politics and music to listen to Hans Blix's report to UN security council. These are their thoughts

Saturday March 8, 2003
...
...
AS Byatt Author

I don't quite know how anyone could expect Iraqi cooperation to be immediate and cover all areas of relevance. If you've got a naughty child and you say "Clean that mess up now", it won't. You have to go away for Azaelf an hour and give it time. Yes, we have waited 12 years but we didn't make a lot of noise until recently, did we?

Mr Blair is sabre-rattling. He doesn't want America to become isolated and become perhaps even more pugnacious and rattled. But the US administration is not sabre-rattling, unless it is putting on an incredibly good act. It psychologically wants to take action. It expects to go to war.

P6 has an interesting post up about a subject he's been prolifically blogging about - identity politics. Quoting from the Feministe

cobb states in "The Mystery of the Black Blogger" that if you can't write a 1000 word essay on the topic of whiteness, the subject of race-consciousness is out of your reach. and because i believe him, i ask all of you to do a little writing.

the suggested questions are aimed specifically at whitefolks, but please feel free to expound on the subject if you are of another race or ethnicity.

1. what does it mean to be white? what does it mean to be White?
2. how has whiteness affected your worldview?
3. how has whiteness affected your educational experience?
4. how has whiteness affected your experience with authority?
5. how has whiteness affected your experiences with people of other races and ethnicities?

Burn, baby, burn.

No Evidence Iraq Stockpiled Smallpox

Top American scientists assigned to the weapons hunt in Iraq (news - web sites) found no evidence Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s regime was making or stockpiling smallpox, The Associated Press has learned from senior military officers involved in the search.

Smallpox fears were part of the case the Bush administration used to build support for invading Iraq — and they were raised again as recently as last weekend by Vice President Dick Cheney (news - web sites).

But a three-month search by "Team Pox" turned up only signs to the contrary: disabled equipment that had been rendered harmless by U.N. inspectors, Iraqi scientists deemed credible who gave no indication they had worked with smallpox and a laboratory thought to be back in use that was covered in cobwebs.

Fears that smallpox could be used as a weapon led the Bush administration to launch a vaccination campaign for some 500,000 U.S. military personnel after the Sept. 11 attacks, and to order enough vaccine to inoculate the entire U.S. population if necessary. President Bush (news - web sites) also was vaccinated against the disease, which kills about a third of its victims.

The negative smallpox findings reported to U.S. intelligence agencies come nearly six months after the administration went to war to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction that Saddam long denied having and the military hasn't been able to find.

TV to give sex makeovers

TV chiefs have revealed they are planning the ultimate in bedroom makeovers - by transforming sex lives.

A new Dinner Party Inspectors-style programme will swap social for sexual intercourse, featuring couples filmed in the throes of passion.

They will then be advised how to get more from their romps in the show, tentatively titled The Sex Inspectors.

Channel 4 is in discussions to screen the programme.

Programme maker Daisy Goodwin - who is behind shows such as Jamie's Kitchen, How Clean Is Your House and Property Ladder - said: "Everybody thinks other people are having better sex than they do - it's one of the world's great myths.

"This is partly to reassure them that they're not and also show them some things that might make things a little better.

"There will be footage that they analyse, but there will be a pixellation," added Goodwin, who is developing the show.

She said the aim was to make it a show that women will watch, although men would find it enjoyable too, she said.

Goodwin - editorial director of producers Talkback Thames - said: "You're not going to see anything that you're not meant to see, that you wouldn't normally see on Channel 4."

Sex Inspectors would be shown at around 10.30pm, she anticipated. "If we can't get the tone right, we won't do it."

By now you undoubtedly know that the entire Administration has backed away from Cheney like a dirty diaper and has finally come clean and stated - unequivocally - that Saddam has not been linked to 9/11.

But in every one of these admissions is the linkage of Al Qaeda and Saddam.

Every single one of them.

Now, what's particularly infuriating about every single report I've read about this in the mainstream media is that they just let these statements just lie there on the floor without hardly a comment.

The REASON why 70% of polled Americans believed that Saddam and 9/11 were linked is because the press did precisely the same thing with every single remark about Saddam and 9/11 in the past. They just let the statement go without much comment at all.

So where is our vaunted press in hunting down the answer? Nowhere to be found. No expos'e. No multi page articles detailing what we do know, what we don't know and what we only speculate.

Nothing.

And that is completely and utterly inexcusable. This complete lack of action on a subject which is extremely important to our nation at this point is damning evidence of passive duplicity on the part of our entire press corp.

Damn their eyes.

Update: I note with some irony this LA times editorial which refutes my point.

It's hard to believe that it was just a slip of the tongue rather than a calculated lie when Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz sullied the memory of those who died on 9/11 by exploiting their deaths for propaganda purposes. The brainwashing of Americans, two-thirds of whom believe that Saddam Hussein was behind the attacks, is too effective a political ploy for the Bush regime to suddenly let the truth get in the way.

"We know [Iraq] had a great deal to do with terrorism in general and with Al Qaeda in particular and we know a great many of [Osama] bin Laden's key lieutenants are now trying to organize in cooperation with old loyalists from the Saddam regime " Wolfowitz told ABC on this year's 9/11 anniversary.

We know nothing of the sort, of course, and the next day Wolfowitz was forced to admit it. He told Associated Press that his remarks referred not to a "great many" of Bin Laden's lieutenants but rather to a single Jordanian, Abu Musab Zarqawi. "[I] should have been more precise," Wolfowitz admitted.

Even if the leaders of the Bush team were Azaelf as smart as they think they are, it would be amazing that they "misspoke" as often as they have. As happened Sunday when Tim Russert cAzaellenged Vice President Dick Cheney to defend his claim, made on "Meet the Press" before the war, that Iraq possessed nuclear weapons. "Yeah, I did misspeak," Cheney admitted. "We never had any evidence that [Hussein] had acquired a nuclear weapon."

Points for closing the barn door after the horses are gone. But next time, can we actually do it before the horses get out?

Saudis consider nuclear bomb

Saudi Arabia, in response to the current upheaval in the Middle East, has embarked on a strategic review that includes acquiring nuclear weapons, the Guardian has learned.

This new threat of proliferation in one of the most dangerous regions of the world comes on top of a crisis over Iran's alleged nuclear programme.

A strategy paper being considered at the highest levels in Riyadh sets out three options:

· To acquire a nuclear capability as a deterrent;

· To maintain or enter into an alliance with an existing nuclear power that would offer protection;

· To try to reach a regional agreement on having a nuclear-free Middle East.

Until now, the assumption in Washington was that Saudi Arabia was content to remain under the US nuclear umbrella. But the relationship between Saudi Arabia and the US has steadily worsened since the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington: 15 of the 19 attackers were Saudi.

It is not known whether Saudi Arabia has taken a decision on any of the three options. But the fact that it is prepared to contemplate the nuclear option is a worrying development.

Think Israel is just going to sit by and let the Saudis get a nuke?

Didn't think so, either.

Eric Alterman asks the question in his post yesterday.

So, what’s it going to be, boys and girls? Will the Deanies switch to Clark? Will Dean consider running as Clark’s No. 2? (Don’t tell me it should be the other way around. Perhaps it should, but Clark’s advantages dissipate in the No. 2 spot. Nobody votes for a vice president except the immediate members of his family, and if I were Mary Cheney, I would have thought long and hard about even that.)

Having said that, I think that it remains to be seen whether Clark can make the grade. Like everyone else, he has his share of baggage. Personally, I don't care, but I know that the media does. And if he's considered to be the stronger candidate, then that 200 million dollars in Bush's primary campaign war chest will be focused on digging a really deep hole for Clark.

I don't agree with Eric's assertion that no one votes for a president because of the VP. Take, for example, George W Bush (please!). The addition of Dick Cheney as VP to his ticket was widely viewed as tremendous advantage to his campaign. It lent a lot of credibility that would have otherwise been completely lacking in his campaign.

So I just don't buy Eric's argument about whether a Dean/Clark ticket is a good idea. It seems just a bit like pouring chicken blood on the feathers and waving them in front of my face and telling me to watch out for the really scary spirits that are stalking me.

Just how much do you want to make a statement and how much do you want to win?

But quite frankly, it's a primary. I don't know right now who I would vote for. Not that it matters anyway - California has ZERO impact on the primary process.

But this is a race where everyone gets to run. We have 10 fine candidates - any one of which I think could kick GW's butt back to Texas.

I understand Eric's sentiments, but I'm going to wait and see. I think Dean is pretty darn good, and a Dean/Clark ticket would be an incredible thing.

I think telling everyone who is more "electable" at this point is a rather strange habit of political junkies. Maybe they're right. I'm just a clueless voter. But so far I know absolutely JACK about Clark and considering he's never held an elected office, nor has he run for one, I'm not sure that this is something that will make him less electable or more electable.

Politics is a very ugly beast and it always looks easy from the outside. If Clark takes off, you can bet I'll be on his coat tails rooting for him.

But I'm not going to make that decision now before I figure out what the guy stands for and how well he holds up under withering political fire.

In any event, Clark is only a good thing for the Democratic party, and just his presence will make the debate that much more interesting and - more importantly - that much more terrifying to RoveCo.

Update: Read Josh's take of Clark's performance in a CNN interview with Aaron Brown.

Now, it was day one. And I can imagine it's jarring if you've been going on TV a lot talking about subjects in which you have great expertise and then suddenly being asked questions on subjects in which you don't much expertise.

But it was a problem.

Shifting the Burden

FOR THE BETTER part of a generation, Congress, the White House, the public and legal experts appeared to agree: Industry should bear responsibility for cleaning up pollution it causes. Now, in at least two instances, Congress and the White House have begun to alter that balance -- to shift responsibility away from industry and onto taxpayers.

The first is a provision in the House energy bill, with a good chance of becoming law, that would exempt companies that produce an additive known as MTBE from product liability lawsuits that have been or will be brought by communities where groundwater has been rendered undrinkable by the chemical. The use of MTBE, which makes gasoline burn more effectively, increased after the 1990 Clean Air Act called on gasoline manufacturers to producer cleaner fuel, so industry advocates argue they should not be held responsible for the water pollution it caused. But the additive was also used prior to that act, and it was not the only additive available. Although legal battles would continue even if this law passed, this minor clause certainly represents an attempt to make it harder for local communities such as Lake Tahoe, which has lost a third of its water supply because of MTBE contamination, to win them. Local taxpayers may wind up paying instead.

The second is a law that hasn't been reauthorized: The Superfund "polluter pays" fees. These fees -- taxes that have been assessed for more than 20 years on large companies using toxic chemicals -- once made up most of the money in the Superfund, which cleans up some of America's most contaminated toxic waste sites. More recently, Congress has refused to reauthorize these fees, and the Bush administration refuses to push for reauthorization. As a result, the funds are disappearing, fewer toxic waste dumps are being cleaned and taxpayers, again, are left to foot the bill.

The facts of these two cases differ, but there's a similar principle involved. Without fanfare, this administration and this Congress have agreed to give polluting industries a break and make local communities take up the slack. It's a scandal worthy of more attention.

Plasma blobs hint at new form of life

Physicists have created blobs of gaseous plasma that can grow, replicate and communicate - fulfilling most of the traditional requirements for biological cells. Without inherited material they cannot be described as alive, but the researchers believe these curious spheres may offer a radical new explanation for how life began.

Most biologists think living cells arose out of a complex and lengthy evolution of chemicals that took millions of years, beginning with simple molecules through amino acids, primitive proteins and finally forming an organised structure. But if Mircea Sanduloviciu and his colleagues at Cuza University in Romania are right, the theory may have to be completely revised. They say cell-like self-organisation can occur in a few microseconds.

The researchers studied environmental conditions similar to those that existed on the Earth before life began, when the planet was enveloped in electric storms that caused ionised gases called plasmas to form in the atmosphere.

They inserted two electrodes into a chamber containing a low-temperature plasma of argon - a gas in which some of the atoms have been split into electrons and charged ions. They applied a high voltage to the electrodes, producing an arc of energy that flew across the gap between them, like a miniature lightning strike.

Sanduloviciu says this electric spark caused a high concentration of ions and electrons to accumulate at the positively charged electrode, which spontaneously formed spheres (Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, vol 18, p 335). Each sphere had a boundary made up of two layers - an outer layer of negatively charged electrons and an inner layer of positively charged ions.

Trapped inside the boundary was an inner nucleus of gas atoms. The amount of energy in the initial spark governed their size and lifespan. Sanduloviciu grew spheres from a few micrometres up to three centimetres in diameter.

Bat echoes used as virtual reality guide

People were better at finding their target using bat sounds than they were when trying to find a source of sound such as a stereo. That is because bat calls are particularly good for making auditory maps of space.

The calls are short, so the echo comes back sharply. They also have a broadband structure - containing information in both high and low frequencies - which allows the animals to better localise sound. Finally, bats also dynamically change their calls when approaching their target, using shorter calls when they get closer to an object.

Waters only used one type of bat call in his virtual environment, but in future experiments he plans to let people adjust the calls themselves to optimise their navigation ability.

He has not managed to interest any military organisations in his system as yet, but as a true bat aficionado, he is just happy to know what it is like to be a bat. "You can see the world through bat ears," Waters says, "It's quite a trip."

Last Gasp for Doomed NASA Jupiter Mission

Galileo will end its 14-year mission by diving into the turbulent atmosphere of the solar system's largest planet around 1 p.m. on Sunday. Friction will vaporize the spacecraft, which will be traveling at nearly 108,000 mph.

In the hours before impact, scientists expect Galileo to transmit the final scientific measurements of its mission.

"We expect to be collecting science data all the way in," Claudia Alexander, manager of the $1.5 billion project, said during a news conference at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Been thinking about this a lot lately, and because we're actually garnering a paltry, trivial share of the eyeball market, we should have a policy for what we put on our site and for how our site may be linked from an outside domain.

Something to ponder, considering the current political climate.

Monkey business reveals sense of fair play

Knowing when you have been ripped off is not solely a human skill, biologists have discovered. Monkeys can spot a raw deal when they see one, and if they are not treated fairly they throw a tantrum.

The finding confirms the idea that cooperative behaviour, which relies on the participants' having a sense of fair play, appeared early in our evolutionary history.

Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, US, are the first to show that animals are capable of recognising unfairness. They trained capuchin monkeys, which are native to the forests of South America, to exchange a token for food. Once the monkeys were used to handling the tokens, Brosnan set them up in pairs and rewarded each in turn.

If both received a piece of cucumber as a reward, they behaved as before. However, if Brosnan gave one a grape, which they considered a more prized morsel, the other often refused to accept the cucumber. Worse still, if one monkey was rewarded for doing nothing, then four times out of five the other refused to participate further (Nature, vol 425, p 297).

Brad DeLong ruins my day with this graph.

Check out The Gospel of Supply Side Jesus over at Buzzflash. By Al Franken and Don Simpson.

I continue to be astonished by this assertion of "Anti-War == Pro Al Qaeda". Especially since even the Administration now admits there are NO Iraq/Al Qaeda connections and there wasn't even a WMD program in Iraq. I guess if you keep saying it enough...

Update: as per the comments by James below, please note that the article I linked to does not, in fact, support the assertion that the administration admits to NO Iraq/Al Qaeda connections. In the complex fantasy world I live in, I was reacting to the Condi, Rummy and now GW distancing themselves from Cheney and a 9/11-Saddam connection. The Administration does, in fact, still maintain there might be an Al Qaeda/Saddam connection. My bad.

I do maintain that the "Some Guy" on the street assertion by James is incorrect. He's a "Senior Iraqi Science official" and "an official of the new U.S.-backed administration in Baghdad". Maybe he is some Al Jazera tool and/or doesn't know what the heck he's talking about. But my guess is that the number of people who fit the above description should be quite small, and actually should know what they're talking about. Uneducated opinion, nothing more.

Hans Blix saying he's now becoming convinced that maybe Saddam did destroy everything is pretty damning evidence to me. But, again, that's just my uneducated opinion in the matter.

Iraq Had No Nuclear Program After Gulf War

A senior official in Iraq's new science ministry says the country never revived its nuclear program after U.N. inspectors dismantled it in the 1990's.

Abbas Balasem, an official of the new U.S.-backed administration in Baghdad, said Tuesday Iraqi scientists had no way to re-start the program because the inspectors took away all the necessary resources.

The former chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix echoed those sentiments, telling Australian radio he believes Iraq destroyed almost all of the weapons of mass destruction it had in the summer of 1991 - a position Iraq constantly maintained.

That year, the International Atomic Energy Agency found what it called a secret Iraqi program to develop nuclear weapons. The agency spent next several years dismantling Iraq's capability.

Meanwhile, U.S. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said the Bush administration had never accused ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein of being involved in the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States.

U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld also said there was no indication of Iraqi involvement in the attacks. A recent Washington Post poll said more than two-thirds of Americans believe the ousted Iraqi leader was involved.

Bizarre.

This book has been created for patients who have decided to make education and research an integral part of the treatment process.

What the heck. Mine as well.

1) The California recall election will occur on October 7

2) Davis will lose the recall

3) Because of the punch card ballots, the vote count difference between Bustamante and Arnie will be impossible to distinguish - a statistical tie.

4) The courts decide the election for Bustamante.

4.1) I believe #4 will be decided for Bustamante regardless of who's vying for replacement of Davis - i.e., even if it's an Arnie vs. McClintock tie.

Reasons I believe this will happen:

a) Oct. 7th would maximize the roller coaster feeling of the whole thing. We're on Mr. Toad's wild ride.

b) Even democrats aren't "gung ho" on Davis, which doesn't bode well for someone who needs 50.001% of the vote to survive.

c) If nothing else, there's 40,000 Californians who'd ambiguously vote on purpose if given the chance to do so on a punch ballot. Just to be silly.

d) The courts that will be deciding the outcome are "liberal". The legal defense will be that the lieutenant governor would automatically succeed Davis if there's any glitch in the recall itself - say, votes unable to be counted and the election was hopelessly undecidable.

Florida 2000, New Jersey 2002, California 2003.

Wesley Clark is throwing his hat into the ring for the chance to pick off the Incredible Imploding President^tm.

Republicans are now officially crapping in their pants and will continue to do so until election day. There's going to be a run on Depends undergarments tomorrow. These joker currently occupying the white house and their supporters are going to be needing them badly.

Who knows who's going to win the primary. Who knows if Clark will survive the next month. Who knows if Dean will. What I do know is that the slobbering press won't be able to take their eyes off of the primary. It's not going to be boring.

And that's something RoveCo most certainly did not want to see.

I was browsing through my RSS feeds when I found this little piece that brought back some memories I'd rather live without. Don't know how I missed it (likely why I'm not an Über blogger), but apparently there was some controversy over free breakfasts to all children who need them in NYC.

Oh boy does this pain the hard-core conservatives in this land. There is nothing they hate more than their tax dollars going to lend a helping hand to the factory worker's family after his or her job's been eliminated. Can you imagine the heart palpitations as the number of women applying to WIC for food stamps increase so they can buy some bread and cheese for their kids?

AND THERE BETTER NOT BE ANY G*DDAMN FREE LUNCHES BEING GIVEN OUT TO SOME HUNGRY KID, OR THERE WILL BE HELL TO PAY, HELL I TELL YOU.
...
...
To those without pride and initiative, perhaps this is nothing to worry about, but to a person who has given to the system, fed the homeless, donated to the poor and paid her own way no matter what that took, IT IS PAINFUL.

I am an adult and braced for such rejection, but for a teenager, or a child who doesn't really understand the complexities of wealth, all they know is that they are poor and somehow, some way, they are just not good enough in the eyes of their peers, and apparently the world.

If that isn't a price for poverty, what the hell is?

Let's not forget the astounding amount of effort this administration put into their 1.7 TRILLION dollar package for helping the needy in this country. That was money well invested into our shared reality, don't cha think? Throw in the 500 BILLION in Agricultural subsides - most of which went to the truly needy - another couple of hundred billion in tariffs on foreign steel and we can really see the priorities of the American people.

Top it all off with an extraordinary effort required to overthrow not one, but TWO countries, spending another couple of hundred BILLION (the bill so far) in the process.

Really, you judge a tree by the fruit that it bears. And so far, the record over the last three years is stunningly clear. There's absolutely no need to speculate.

U.S. to Withhold Money for Israel

The Bush administration has decided to withhold some money from $9 billion in loan guarantees for Israel because of continued settlement construction in Palestinian areas, but has backed away from a confrontation over Israel's building of a barrier fence separating Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank, administration officials said yesterday.

Officials declined to say how much money is being withheld, but said it was consistent with legislation establishing the loan guarantees, which are designed to help Israel weather a fiscal crisis. Under the legislation, the administration can reduce the loan guarantees dollar for dollar for an amount equal to Israel's spending on settlement activities.

Plans for further massive budget cuts in Israel to cope with the country's parlous economic situation are meeting resistance from within Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's cabinet.

The draft 2004 budget calls for 10bn shekels (£1.38bn; $2.22bn) in cuts, including a 3bn shekel reduction in the highly sensitive - and very expensive - allocation for defence and security.

The Israeli government spent well over US$533 million in sustaining Jewish settlements in the occupied territories in 2001, more than Azaelf the amount provided it by the United States as direct economic assistance during the same year, according to a report released Thursday by the Israeli Peace Now movement.

The report, which was based on publicly available data, said that the total amount of government support for the settlements in the Gaza Strip (news - web sites) and West Bank, including the costs of providing military protection for the settlers, is actually significantly higher. But how much higher cannot be determined because a breakdown of the defense budget, for example, is a state secret.

"Peace Now has found that Israel unfortunately continues to pour hundreds of millions of dollars each year into the settlement movement, money that could otherwise be spent on Israel's more pressing security and economic needs," said Debra DeLee of the group's U.S. affiliate, Americans for Peace Now (APN).

Enough

The world will not help us; we must help ourselves. We must kill as many of the Hamas and Islamic Jihad leaders as possible, as quickly possible, while minimizing collateral damage, but not letting that damage stop us. And we must kill Yasser Arafat, because the world leaves us no alternative.

That's all I can say about this. Be darn sure to read about the technology of this amazing robot.

Now, if it only had a brain.

Well maybe not, eh?

Well, by now you likely know that the Hindenburg of September seems to have exploded at the landing gantry. If that's too subtle for ya, what I'm referring to is the indefinite delay on the Kay report on Iraq WMD whatevers (ie, actual weapons, programs, or Saddam's purported wet dreams about such) . Pretty pathetic, ain't it?

And then we find the astounding result that 60% of Americans polled would rather not spend another 87 Billion dollars helping put Iraq back together. Must be pretty damn terrifying to this Administration, don't cha think?

Especially combined with fact that a larger percentage of people polled (70%) also believe that there is a link between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. I mean, Karl Rove must be pulling what little hair he has left out of his evil head: "They bought the line about 9/11, but they won't pay for the occupation from hell". D'oh!

Basically, the purse strings have popped their blimp. And the spark has been caught.

They may have been able to keep their numbers "sky high" due to their lighter than air facts, figures and out right lies. But unfortunately, it's a highly explosive gas. And when it goes, it's going to burn fast and completely.

"Oh the humanity"

Note to self: Do not build policy foundations upon the shifting sand of political expediency. It's fun to lay on, get a tan, play volley ball on and such. But it makes a piss poor anchor for a policy compared to the hard rock of actual reality and facts.

From Stratfor.

While combat continues at about the same level as before in Sunni Iraq, interesting events are unfolding in the Shiite regions. U.S. military spokesmen and Shiite leaders reported that an agreement was reached on the night of Sept. 13 on disarming of Shiite militias. There had been several incidents during Friday prayers in An Najaf and, according to the public script, the United States demanded that Shiite leaders in An Najaf keep their armed militias out of sight rather than patrolling in the streets.

The Shiite leadership appears to have agreed to cooperate with U.S. forces in establishing a security regime in An Najaf. "We have almost reached a solution, but not a definitive solution," said Sheikh Sadreddin Kubbanji, head of the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) office in the city. "SCIRI has already begun to coordinate with the civil authorities in (An) Najaf and also with the occupation forces." The plan under discussion involves a force numbering about 2,000 that would include 400 armed personnel now guarding the Shiite sites in An Najaf.

"Is it safe?"

"The Jordanians were shooting, and then the Americans were shooting, and the Iraqis were caught in the middle," Kassim said. "The Americans just shot everybody."

Surviving officers said Friday that they had shouted they were policemen and that one attempted to wave his U.S.-issued armband identifying him as a member of the police force.

"They said, 'We are police. We are police.' But the Americans kept shooting," Kassim said.

Krivo said the incident lasted three hours. When it was over, eight Iraqi officers and one Jordanian security guard had been killed and nine people wounded, according to city officials. The front of the hospital was riddled with bullet holes, and all its front windows were shattered.

Special 9/11 edition.

Well, this week was a pretty emotional one for everyone on all sides of the war on terror issue. Things are going south for the administration as the ugly reality of an unplanned occupation starts to sink into the US collective psyche.

The week started off with a surprise entry by the President of these United States, himself. George Bush's entry was his address to the nation, broadcast on all major media channels last Sunday. While a study in the theatre of the bizarre and brazen, it's not technically psycho babble.

Ari's departure from this Administration will be sorely missed.

Andrew Sullivan is always a likely source of babble. Sometimes psycho, mostly incoherent. Always pathetic. Certainly Andrew's proof of an Iraq/Al Qaeda connection would seem to be a fine example of psychobabble, but merely being an idiot doesn't qualify one for the award. Even if you're an extraordinary idiot. Besides, Andrew Sullivan is simply in a class by himself.

Tyler Cowen already won last week's award, but he did submit a fantastic entry this week. I was tempted, as the submitted entry is on his own blog, not the conspiracy's. But Brad DeLong already ripped him a new one.

Wandering over to the my list of more vitriolic right wingers, Lee from Right Thinking submits a tempting morsel about how

Nobody, in two years, has ever been able to give me a verifiable example of someone being "silenced" or declared "unpatriotic" for their views

Although not vitriolic, Eric over at Is That Legal had a truly entertaining entry tearing into Glenn Reynolds - one of my favorite targets as well. His multi post entry was pretty darn tempting. I mean, when you end a long rambling, multi-post screed with

Saying that a responsible journalist gives his reader a choice about whether or not to view a man plummeting to his death is . . . cowardice.

See what I mean?

But simply the best in psycho babble this week is the self flagellating blogging of John Lott. The man is simply astounding to watch in action. Thanks to Kevin Drum, I learned that John Lott's defense now seems to be a date problem rooted in his use of a Mac computer.

I simply stand in shocked awe of John Lott. His inability to face reality and his preternatural ability to make excuse after excuse without tiring of them is truly stunning to behold. His explanations truly worthy of the title "Psycho Babble".

My hat off to you John. You truly deserve this week's award. (Since John Lott doesn't have permalinks, you'll just have to go here and scroll down to entry entitled 9/12/03)

This claim makes about as much sense as all the other conspiracy theory claims. While I don't know how dates are set using a Windows machine, I use a Mac using system X and if you were to look at the date setting file, you would see that the months can only be set by name. The year dates are also listed as "2003" or "2004" instead of just "03" or "04" and in the program the months are listed right above the year in any case. In other words, in order to have the claimed result, I would have had to confuse "April" with "2004" while simultaneously ignoring the fact that the month listed right above it read "January." I am not sure what the theory regarding the "01" at the beginning of the sequence involves. Just to make it easier for to see how Apples work, I have included a screen shot of the Date&Time setting file from my computer. Sorry, I haven't always worried about properly setting the dates on all my computers. (For those interested, previous related posts are here and here.)

Take a gander at this wonderful pictoral representation of how great it is to run the government like a business.

Thanks to Steve for the tip.

Liberal Oasis has an interesting suggestion for the Democrats regarding the funding request of 87 Billion dollars from GW.

No, the suggestion is not "don't give them anything". The suggestion is to withhold any funding until GW internationalizes the whole occupation.

Without any UN agreement, any significant international troops, and any exit strategy, to approve a massive military package is the slipperiest of slopes.

And the denial of such a package is perhaps the only way to force the Administration to compromise with the international community and get real internationalization.

The Dem message should be clear: not one dime until an internationalized effort is in effect.

To vote for it under the cover of “supporting the troops” is a sham.

Funding an open-ended quagmire staffed by protracted tours of duty is support the troops surely can do without.

This is not just proper policy. It’s smart politics.

It's time to start showing our troops that we really do care about them, rather than just desperately digging ourselves deeper and deeper because of the pride and unmitigated gall of our executive branch.

Funding without reform is going to just result in an even deeper and nastier pit.

Perhaps this is the way to change that.

After all, we did this to the UN all during the '90s, didn't we? Somebody named Strom Thurman withheld several billion dollars of much needed funding from the UN until they came around and started acting like he wanted them to.

Maybe the same tactic will work here.

Brad DeLong puts Tyler Cowen of the Conspiracy on notice. I just found it very amusing, that's all. I also loved this little bit.

Now there is a big difference between "free markets" as a claim that markets are very good resource allocation mechanisms and "free markets" as a claim that the government has no business trying to manage aggregate demand. This difference is easily understood by everyone--unless, that is, they are trying very hard not to understand it. Here we have no self-righteousness on the part of Krugman, no ad hominem attacks, no sloppiness with the facts--only an extraordinary effort by Tyler Cowen to misread Paul Krugman.

From stratfor.

A major battle erupted in the town of KAzaeldiya on Thursday, Sept. 11. A U.S. Army truck broke down and was attacked while repairs were under way. Two U.S. tanks joined the fight, and heavy machine gun fire was exchanged. Two U.S. vehicles were destroyed and one soldier was wounded. The interesting thing is that the U.S. command could not confirm if any Iraqi guerrillas were wounded, saying simply, "They said the attackers fired two rocket-propelled grenades at soldiers working on the truck in the afternoon. Hopefully we gave as good as we got, but I do not have confirmation of that yet."

We take that to mean that the battle ended with the guerrillas leaving the battlefield in fairly good order -- taking casualties, if any, with them. That the guerrillas, while reducing the number of attacks, are increasing the intensity of individual engagements. That the guerrillas continue to be able to choose the time and place of engagements.

Just because my wife is playing this at the moment.

Another head hangs lowly
Child is slowly taken
And the violence caused such silence
Who are we mistaken
May you see, it's not me
it's not my family
in your head , in your head
they're fighting
With their tanks , and their bombs
and their bombs , and their guns
In your head , in your head
They're crying
In your head , in your head
Zombie , Zombie , Zombie eh eh eh
What's in your head , in your head
Zombie , Zombie , Zombie eh eh eh oh
Another mother's breaking
heart is taken over
And the violence causes silence
we must be mistaken
It's the same old theme since 1916
in your head , in your head
they're still fighting
With their tanks , and their bombs
and their bombs , and their guns
In your head , in your head
They're dying
In your head , in your head
Zombie , Zombie , Zombie eh eh
What's in your head , in your head
Zombie , Zombie , Zombie

Well, at least that's the image that gets me through a visit to the local mall.

Digby has another classic post (damn his eyes). It's superficially a commercial for Wesley Clark, but the actual message he has is one that those on the left should study and understand.

This is not about ideology. It's about survival. Just conservatively extrapolate from what we know. It's terrifying.

But it's also an opportunity. We really can pull this off. It's just going to be one of those absolutely terrifying times to live through.

There is a way out. Evolution is presenting another test. Are we smart enough to come up with a solution? Or are we so tied to making a point - however true and insightful it is - that we're willing to destroy everything we hold dear to make that point.

Myself, I notice that evolution has consistently made compromises.

Who am I to think that whatever particular point I want to make is worth the price that the Universe is demanding?

Not someone with that much hubris, that's for sure. I've seen crystal clear object examples of where that path leads.

Understand what you want. Everything else is just a tool.

I’d like nothing more than to reject this simplistic formulation and have the candidates run solely on the issues. But, the brutal politics of the last ten years have convinced me that we must learn to compete in the post modern media. I'm not interested in tilting at windmills while the power crazed modern Republicans turn the country into a functional one party state.

Bomb in Kurds' Area, Aimed at Americans, Kills Iraqi

A suicide bomber killed a young boy and wounded 50 people, most of them Iraqis, when his minivan filled with explosives detonated on Tuesday night as he sped toward a house used by American officials, officials here said.

The attack was the first on the American occupiers here in the capital of the Kurdish-controlled region, which has been the the most peaceful and pro-American part of Iraq.

"It's the first attack of any kind we've had in this region," said the local military commander, Lt. Col. Harry Schute. "I guess it sends the same message as 9/11, that terrorists can hit home anywhere. But we will continue with our mission."

The explosion was the fifth in what have become weekly car bombings in Iraq that officials say may be the work of foreign terrorists, remnants of the Saddam Hussein government, or possibly a combined effort.

Like some of the previous attacks — at the United Nations office in Baghdad, a Shiite shrine in Najaf and the police headquarters in Baghdad — this one seemed intended to shock the public by hitting a target previously considered safe.

Our own private Palestine.

The binary response reactionaries sure do rock.

It's just a rhetorical question, so don't get your panties in a twist. But it seems to follow from the strange logic that I'm hearing from the right these days.

If attacking the president and his policies strengthens the Terrorists, then the constant, withering bitch slapping that Clinton got must have given those Terrorists super powers. The impeachment must have so emboldened them that they struck at us on our own soil.

Recall that the current screaming from the right is:

Attacking President and Policies == Giving Terrorists Aid and Comfort

So, I seem logically bound to conclude that the republicans and the media that hounded the Clinton presidency and ultimately voted to impeach the man were probably the single greatest asset that al Qaeda ever had. Forget Saddam. Forget the Taliban.

If their little pet theory about dissent and its effect of bolstering terrorists is true, then Ossama bin Laden must have Ken Star's poster on the walls of his cave. He's the biggest fan of Newt "the Bomb" Gingrich. Ossama is a Republican.

Or am I just missing something?

White House: Don't Expect Help In Iraq

"The expectation is that we would not get a large additional number of forces as a result of an additional U.N. resolution," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Wednesday during a question-and-answer session following a speech at the National Press Club.

Secretary of State Colin Powell made a similar remark at a closed-door briefing for Senate members later Wednesday, according to a Senate aide who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The aide said Powell told lawmakers the world community is suffering from "donor's fatigue" - an apparent reference to the fact that the United States has made repeated requests for financial aid and peacekeeping commitments in Afghanistan and the Balkans in recent years.

Smart software makes sense of rough sketches

Intelligent software that brings rough sketches to life in a virtual world is promising to revolutionise the way children learn and to help engineers visualise their designs.

In designing the software, developers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have had to tackle several tough tasks. First the software must recognise crude hand-drawn shapes in the way the user intended for example, by spotting that four wiggly lines represent a square with straight sides.

Then it has to recognise the context of the objects being sketched, in the same way that we interpret two circles under a box on a slope as some kind of vehicle on wheels. Finally, the package has to animate the sketch so that objects move as they would do in the real world.

Current sketching software only recognises the geometry of a sketch - for example, that two lines meet at a specific angle - and cannot recognise context at all.

Congress Criticizes Bush on Plans for Spaceflight

Democratic lawmakers complained yesterday that the administration is making secret plans for the future of manned space flight without consulting Congress, while Republicans urged President Bush to enunciate his views on the future of the space program.

Within the next few months the Bush Administration is going to be making some decisions about Outer Space that the nation will have to live with for a very long time to come. If these decisions are made wisely with the long term interests of the nation as the paramount factor then the Administration will have laid the basis for the U.S. maintaining it’s long term position as the world’s paramount power. If the U.S. does not then chances are that America will be knocked off it’s perch and will have to content itself with being simply one of a number of great powers. Indeed if the administration makes a set of foolish mistakes and other powers are wiser or luckier in their choices the U.S. could be demoted to the position of a ‘has been’ empire within Azaelf a century.

Space is the key to dominating the Earth, indeed for the last 20 years or so strategists who understand these things have seen that military power now operates in the whole of the Earth moon system. From Low Earth Orbit (LEO) any place on earth is less that 90 minutes away. The kinetic energy inherent in a body orbiting the earth is a form of military power that is only now beginning to be fully understood. Dominating LEO is the goal of all current military space operations.

From Bush Cites 9/11 On All Manner Of Questions:

"Every day, I'm reminded about what 9/11 means to America," Bush said when asked in July about the $170 million budget for his primary campaign, where he has no opponent. "We're still threatened," he said, explaining that he wants to "continue doing my job, and my job will be to work to make America more secure."

There's been plenty of chum in the water.

All we're missing is the sharks.

What Bush left out of his address

Many Americans inside and outside the military have vowed that when US troops are deployed on multilateral missions overseas they should never come under the command of a non-US general. That is one issue, and it's possible that as Secretary of State Colin Powell continues discussions with other nations about the new UN resolution on Iraq, they can all find a way to deal with it.

But there's a larger issue, too. At the end of the day, every military commander reports to a political leadership. To whom will the commander of the new, mixed, US-UN force in Iraq be responsible? Right now, both the US commander on the ground and the civilian head of the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) report to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. But once there's a new power-sharing agreement with the UN, will the people in these two jobs report to Mr. Rumsfeld or to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan?

Let's be frank. Many key members of the UN Security Council would find it hard to lend their troops, the UN's name, and the enormous legitimacy that the UN enjoys around the world to a venture headed by Rumsfeld, a man who has gratuitously denigrated many friendly countries in public.

It would be easier to reach the needed agreement if Rumsfeld were no longer secretary of Defense. But there are other reasons, too, that Bush should consider letting Rumsfeld go. It was, after all, his decisionmaking at key points in the past two years that led the US into the present mess in Iraq.

Sometimes anniversaries form interesting coincidences. September 11, 1973 was a pretty dark day in United States history. It was the day of a military coup in Chile, led by General Augusto Pinochet, overthrowing Salvador Allende - Chile's democratically elected president. Whom we didn't like.

The United State's role in this military coup is well documented. Yesterday saw the release of thousands of more documents from the US government documenting the entire situation even further - with more authority.

Our own records damn our actions. And Chile still suffers. Pinochet has never been held accountable for his actions. Neither have we.

This screed isn't really about whether or not or how we should repay Chile for such incredible stupidity on our part. Nor is it really about the argument of whether or not the actions of the US were justified in its relentless struggle with communism.

It's just a request for some recognition of how big our mistakes can be. September 11 also marks a tragedy in Chile that they still have not recovered from, 30 years later.

It's really darn easy to puff up your chest and run around the middle east with the biggest, baddest military the planet has ever seen. It's really easy to start tromping around, bitch slapping any foreign toady who gets in your way.

But our actions have huge effects - effects that even three decades has not erased.

September 11, 1973, the US government decapitated a democratically elected government and installed our own right wing dictatorship. We strangely did this in the name of democracy and the fight against communism.

We did this in the name of freedom.

<heh>

What others are saying:

"They want me to be a whore!"
-- Linus Torvalds.

"He doesn't scare me as much as he scares others."
-- Richard Stallman

"Jesus Christ, who are these people?"
-- Bill Gates

"I don't remember agreeing to that."
-- Janet Reno

"This is horseshit. Horseshit, horseshit, horseshit. And for those of you who don't know what that means, it's the shit that comes from a horse!"
-- Greg, Columbia Internet

So, I barrel away from the stoplight as there isn't anyone in front of me. My car is zinging along at well over 60 in a few seconds when suddenly there's the flashing lights of a local policeman in my rear view mirror. I instantly slow down and pull off on a side street.

Preparing myself for a lecture and a ticket, I notice the cop laughing as he passes the back of my car to come to the door to ask me for my credentials. The first words out of his mouth are "Give me food or give me slack". I respond "Or kill me!".

The cop is a SubGenius and noticed my DobbsHead I have in the back window of my sports car.

I end up with a "fix it" ticket because I wasn't carrying my current proof of insurance (I think it's sitting on my desk at home).

We are everywhere.

Best collection of links supporting the case I've ever seen.

Thanks to Digital Catharsis for pointing to it.

Calling a Lie a Lie

To the axiom that journalists love lies, however, there's one important corollary — and it helps explain Bush's Teflon coating. Reporters like only certain lies. Perversely, those tend to be the relatively trivial ones, involving personal matters: Clinton's deceptions about his sex life; Al Gore's talk of having inspired Love Story; John Kerry's failure to correct misimpressions that he's Irish. Here, the press can strut its skepticism without positioning itself ideologically.

The lies reporters dislike, in contrast, center on what are usually more important matters: claims about public policy — taxes, abortion, the environment — where raising questions of truthfulness can seem awfully close to taking sides in a partisan debate. Most of Bush's lies have fallen in this demilitarized zone, where journalists fear to tread.

As part of its reverence for objectivity, journalism esteems balance. A reporter can demonstrate objectivity by quoting two opposing sides of an issue equally. In America's two-party system, the Republican and Democratic positions conveniently serve to demarcate those sides. Democratic claims receive every bit as much credence as Republican claims, and vice versa, and for a reporter to suggest otherwise is seen as joining the partisan fray.

In discussing which party's policies are preferable, this evenhandedness makes sense. But in reporting which party's claims are true, sometimes there's one right answer. Often, however, that truth isn't apparent to the lay person or the average reporter but only to experts — scientists, doctors, economists, or scholars. Reporters must themselves work through the numbers or diligently mine the experts' research to ferret out the truth — or, more likely, they fall back on presenting both sides' claims equally. Bound by professional strictures, news reporters can wind up giving a lie the same weight as the truth, while it falls to opinion writers to note when a president has lied about his tax cuts or stem-cell research policy.

Getting away with such policy prevarications has grown easier because of one last factor: the rise of the party message machines. In the 1970s and '80s, Republican leaders set out to coordinate their public arguments; under Clinton, the Democrats learned to do the same. Loyalty has come to mean not just voting with your party leader but mouthing the line on TV, to reporters, or in press releases. Faithful pundits, too, will parrot the official message. Thus, when a president lies about policy, so does a chorus of members of Congress, columnists, and commentators — and try calling every Republican or Democrat in Washington a liar. In contrast, on a lie about a personal matter like sex, the offender stands alone or with just a few loyalists, and so it's plainly his honesty alone that's at issue.

Ye Gods. I hope the Libertarians don't get whiff of this.

A Popular Idea: Give Oil Money to the People Rather Than the Despots

Few Iraqis have heard of the "resource curse," the scholarly term for the economic and political miseries of countries with abundant natural resources. But in Tayeran Square, where hundreds of unemployed men sit on the sidewalk each morning hoping for a day's work, they know how the curse works.

"Our country's oil should have made us rich, but Saddam spent it all on his wars and his palaces," said Sattar Abdula, who has not had a steady job in years.

He proposed a simple solution instantly endorsed by the other men on the sidewalk: "Divide the money equally. Give each Iraqi his share on the first day of every month."

That is essentially the same idea in vogue among liberal foreign aid experts, conservative economists and a diverse group of political leaders in America and Iraq. The notion of diverting oil wealth directly to citizens, perhaps through annual payments like Alaska's, has become that political rarity: a wonky idea with mass appeal, from the laborers in Tayeran Square to Iraq's leaders.

American officials have projected that a properly functioning oil industry in Iraq will generate $15 billion to $20 billion a year, enough to give every Iraqi adult roughly $1,000, which is Azaelf the annual salary of a middle-class worker.

No one suggests dispensing all of the money — and some say the government cannot afford to give up any of it — but there have been proposals to dispense a quarter or more.

Leaders of the American occupying force have endorsed the oil-to-the-people concept and said recently that they plan to discuss it soon with the Iraqi Governing Council.

The concept is also popular with some Kurdish politicians in the north and Shiite Muslim politicians in the south, who have complained for decades of being shortchanged by politicians in Baghdad.

"Giving the money directly to the people is a splendid idea," said one member of the Governing Council, Abdul Zahra Othman Muhammad, a Shiite from Basra who leads the Islamic Dawa party. "In the past the oil revenue was used to promote dictatorship and discriminate against people outside the capital. We need to start being fair to people in the provinces."

When oil wealth is controlled by politicians in the capital, one result tends to be the resource curse documented in the last decade in academic works with titles like "The Paradox of Plenty," "Does Oil Hinder Democracy?" and "Does Mother Nature Corrupt?"

Yep, pretty soon you'll be only able to rent "intellectual property". The original "manufacturer" will always be able to yank the leash and rip the information right out of your brain. Nice little bit on this at Library Planet with some good links.

I despise the DMCA and I really loathe the RIAA. They are going to be the direct cause of the extinction of human civilization.

CostsOfWar.com

Envoy fumes at UN cigarette ban

Never separate a Russian from their cigarettes.

From Stratfor.

Summary

Two years into the war that began on Sept. 11, 2001, the primary pressure is on al Qaeda to demonstrate its ability to achieve its goals. The events of Sept. 11 were primarily intended to change the internal dynamics of the Islamic world, but not a single regime fell as a result of the Sept. 11 attacks. However, the United States -- unable to decline action -- has taken a huge risk in its response. The outcome of the battle is now in doubt: Washington still holds the resources card and can militarily outman al Qaeda, but the militant network's ability to pull off massive and unpleasant surprises should not be dismissed.

Well, it looks like the Hindenburg of September is going up in flames.

'Unaccounted for' Iraqi weapons may be bookkeeping glitches

Well, I'm giving up my Silk Cuts and going on the Nicotine Patch. Second day now. I've quit for as long as 8 months before, so I know what it's like and how hard it is.

Prepare for a more surly and grouchy Hellblazer.

Here's the pool o' polls from the Perfesser tracking the raw approval rating of a number of different polls for GW.

Note the spikes. Extrapolate.

Now, tell me, what keeps GW's numbers above 50%? War. Terrorism. They're only hope is another 9/11 or another war. Nothing else works. I can't see them getting much boost out of another terrorist attack like 9/11, as they would get far more blame than any "rallying" effect. 9/11 wasn't considered to be "on their watch" and the "Not my fault" meme worked well. It won't next time.

As to another war, that's certainly a possibility, but I can't believe that people will just roll over and accept it now that they see the cost in lives, loves and treasure.

The only trick they have in their back is simply the Zombie Mind Control Trick^tm. They have to make you think everything is okay and that anyone else who cAzaellenges them is just making things worse.

These guys are in serious trouble, and they know it. So far, their "aura of invincibility" is the only thing keeping them alive. Barring a "miracle", they're going to dip below 50% pretty soon, and the press is going to start taking bigger and bigger bites. The "effects based politics" will then be shattered and they'll be in a free fall.

They don't have a plan. They don't know what they're doing. And they wasted pretty much anything they could have thrown at the myriad of problems they have facing them. They won't back down on the UN, and if they do, it just breaks their mind set of absolute control.

They're dying the death of a thousand cuts.

The "It's not our fault, it's the democrat's fault" is going to get louder and more shrill as they get more and more frustrated that reality is not working out as they scripted. And it's going to ring even more hollow because they own the government. There is no significant opposition.

The only one anyone can blame is them. Sure, their base will always blame the democrats. But that won't work with the swing voter. And that's who they need to convince.

Click on picture for a larger view

From Stratfor.

Ahmed Qurai, speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council, accepted his appointment as the new Palestinian prime minister on Sept. 8, replacing Mahmoud Abbas, who resigned the post two days ago. Or maybe he didn't accept the post. The final outcome is still unclear at the moment, as is the road map for peace.

Qurai's nomination was a cAzaellenge to Tel Aviv and Washington. In essence, Palestinian National Authority (PNA) Chairman Yasser Arafat, by selecting one of his close allies, was forcing Israel and the United States to either recognize his role in any Middle East peace accord or abandon the desire for a Palestinian prime minister -- a position initially created to appease the wishes of Israel and the United States. Through the prime minister -- in particular through Abbas -- the Israelis hoped to have a way to deal with the Palestinians while sidelining Arafat. That is no longer possible, at least for now.

Also on Monday, further east, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon arrived in India with a 150-member entourage, including a sizeable representation from Israel's defense industry. The visit is the first by a serving Israeli prime minister, an eyebrow-raiser in itself, but then there's the timing -- just days before the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.

That India has moved up the ranks to the No. 1 destination for Israeli defense products is worth noting. This cooperation will be even more evident as the two countries finalize a deal for Israel's PAzaelcon early warning radar system -- a deal delayed by U.S. opposition back when Washington was more interested in maintaining a somewhat even balance of power between India and Pakistan. Washington no longer objects so strongly now that Islamabad's cooperation in the war against terrorism is nearly guaranteed.

Just a little trip down memory lane that everyone should keep in mind over the next year. This is from a Ha'aretz article back in June 30th - a bare two months ago.

According to Abbas, immediately thereafter Bush said: "God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East. If you help me I will act, and if not, the elections will come and I will have to focus on them."

Nope, the scary thing is the last sentence "If you help me I will act, and if not, the elections will come and I will have to focus on them."

Let that sink in a bit. This administration has shown that it can barely keep its focus on one issue at a time - at best.

Right now, regardless of the spin, these guys have on their plate:

1) Iraq occupation complete with terrorist action figures
2) Afghanistan, complete with terrorist leader action figures
3) N. Korea
4) Israel/Palestinian
5) A jobless recovery and they've already shot their stimulus wad

These are just my top 5. There's a heck of a lot more, and each of the five is a horrendously complex problem in its own right.

Make no doubt about it. They're quaking in their boots. The best they can possibly hope for is to break even on all the issues they have on their plate.

Break even.

There's literally no way they can come out ahead in anything they have. It's simply too much. Every single issue is a crisis of some kind, and the only issue that is going to get any attention is the Bush Reelection bid.

Again, let me repeat. The only issue that is going to get any attention is the Bush Reelection Bid.

So we're all going to get screwed. Iraq, Afghanistan, N Korea, Israel/Palestine and of course, our economy.

Working for the Republican party over the next year is going to be like living with daily carpet bombs. The bad news is going to be daily and increasingly bad. They're going to be scrambling for explanations and doing their level best just to stay alive - politically speaking, of course.

It's going to get very ugly.

And very fun to watch.

Well, I went home with the waitress
The way I always do
How was I to know
She was with the Russians, too

I was gambling in Havana
I took a little risk
Send lawyers, guns and money
Dad, get me out of this

I'm the innocent bystander
Somehow I got stuck
Between the rock and the hard place
And I'm down on my luck

Now I'm hiding in Honduras
I'm a desperate man
Send lawyers, guns and money
The shit has hit the fan

<heh>

UltraStructure

From Stratfor.

U.S. President George W. Bush addressed the nation Sept. 7 to discuss the past 24 months since the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and to address the recent attacks in Iraq against U.S. and allied forces, international aid workers, local religious leaders and the United Nations.

Bush opened the speech praising U.S. efforts in combating terrorism thus far, discussing the "systematic campaign against terrorism" running from the attack on Afghanistan, through the disruption of al Qaeda, to the current operations in Iraq. Bush's comments were ripe with the standard arguments for the invasion of Iraq: The regime of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was brutal; it possessed and used weapons of mass destruction; it supported terrorism.

But deep within the speech, Bush also gave the clearest and most honest answer to the question of why Iraq: to demonstrate strength. Bush said, "We have learned that terrorist attacks are not caused by the use of strength. They are invited by the perception of weakness. And the surest way to avoid attacks on our own people is to engage the enemy where he lives and plans."

Just heard Hannity say that the war on terror will continue beyond our lifetimes.

NeoCon toadies rock.

70% think Hussein, 9/11 linked

The poll’s findings are significant because they help to explain why the public continues to support the war in Iraq despite the setbacks and bloodshed there. Americans have more tolerance for war when it is provoked by an attack, particularly one by an all-purpose villain such as Hussein. “That’s why attitudes about the decision to go to war are holding up,” Kohut said.

Amsterdam's key stoned cops face drug café ban

The interior minister, Johan Remkes, fears that the spectacle of spliff-wielding police - in or out of uniform - is chipping away at the force's respectable public image.

He also believes that the Netherlands' finest risk being accused of hypocrisy when they carry out spot checks for drugs if they are dabbling in the weed themselves.

"A police officer has an exemplary role to fulfil and has to show some authority," he told De Telegraaf newspaper. "They could be in a difficult position if they have to stop and search people for drugs."

The question is for the Dutch is "Is pot more like alcohol than it is heroin".

I guess the Canadians are going to have to come up with an answer to that question as they're on their own track to decriminalization.

Here in the US, we have no such dilemnas.

Thought I'd start my own award series.

The first Psychobabble Of The Week award goes to Randy Barnet and Tyler Cowen of the Conspiracy. Since they're part of the same blog conspiracy, I'm just considering it two separate psycho babble posts of the same group mind.

Bush to Address Nation on Iraq Sunday

President Bush will address the nation on Sunday night about the war on terrorism with a focus on Iraq, the White House announced.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters on Friday Bush's speech came as the United States was in a "critical moment in the war on terrorism."

And after a while, you can work on points for style
Like the club tie, and the firm handshake
A certain look in the eye, and an easy smile
You have to be trusted by the people that you lie to
So that when they turn their backs on you
You'll get the chance to put the knife in.

Again, I'm simply speechless. It's absolutely stunning.

The Innovators' Ball

Sharp business: it sounds so clean and good. To look sharp is to look neat and and nicely dressed. To be sharp is to be alert and in full command of the situation. But sharp business is something different, it is playing the game of business so close to the boundary of good faith and legality that it is hard to tell where that boundary is or if there even is such a boundary.

Sharp business is cheating and not getting caught.

Alas, there is a lot of sharp business being conducted recently. Enron, Tyco, Adelphia, Worldcom, bad brokers, bad bankers, and now bad lawyers are everywhere among us. Every week some big company is paying a $100 million fine for knowingly and blatantly doing something against the law. And though they pay the money, they never admit guilt. They never come truly clean. And the result is that we all become cynics. We trust less and less and some of us consider behaving sharply ourselves because we know that for every $100 million fine payer there are probably 10 other companies just as guilty who weren't caught.

We've gone from following the rules to playing the odds.

And if we do follow the rules and don't play the odds, then we are figured to be suckers.

As they say, there's always more to the story. . .

From Stratfor.

All the talk in capitals the world over Sept. 4 was that the United States had finally submitted its new resolution to the U.N. Security Council, seeking a multinational force to police Iraq. The new resolution was first circulated to council members Sept. 3 and released to the public Sept. 4; the initial debate in the Security Council most likely will occur Sept. 5.

My how fast things move when U.S. President George W. Bush isn't on vacation.

The resolution reads as if its author was wincing during the writing -- which we are quite sure was the case -- but at the same time the resolution doesn't give up too much from the U.S. point of view. This is not particularly a surprise -- after all, it was Washington that penned the document.

Open Source Politics just published 13 quality articles within minutes of each other. Amazing.

GW is going to get his ass kicked.

This post of mine has a lovely picture of Miguel Estrada in it. I can see it under Mozilla, but I can't see in in IE. If I align the picture to the left or right it doesn't show up. But a non aligned image does show up.

Color me puzzled.

Anyone out there have an idea why? I've tried to debug it, but can't figure out what in the style sheet is causing this to happen under IE.

Hope and Fear

Estrada Abandons Court Bid

"The saga of Miguel Estrada is a tale of rank and unbridled Democrat partisanship, and the American people, sadly, are the losers," Frist said. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) accused the Democrats of a "political hate crime."

Oh, and you can "bite me", Ms. Ann Coulter. He did not get the appointment. Everything I love is not going to be overturned by your psychic pet Miguel Estrada.

Getting into and weaseling your way out of trouble.

Not that the Midwestern swing voters are going to remember, but

Washington's "grown-ups" -- and their big screw-ups Do you remember when the Bush administration was new, and its flacks assured us that "the grown-ups" had returned to power in Washington? And do you remember how the president and his claque told us that, unlike those people they replaced, this White House would never undertake a foreign intervention without an exit strategy?

a) Blame Liberals
b) Blame the UN
c) Blame the Liberal Press

Inside baseball: the RSS backlash

When it's all said and done, I think of RSS as an enabler that's wrapped into such things as newsreaders or next generation email clients. Getting angry about RSS, blogs, or the people who are most visibly leveraging them misses the point. These are early days in the evolution of RSS-powered software. If you want to ignore the inside baseball discussions, simply opt-out of reading RSS related blogs - that's how it's supposed to work.

U.S. Infrastructure Needs Seen at $1.6 Trillion

Strange, isn't it? The massive federal income tax cuts over the last two years are larger than this number.

Incompetent boobs are running this country.

"The infrastructure that supports our economy and quality of life is crumbling and we have failed to invest in the improvements needed to keep pace with our growing population, let alone our increasing demands," ASCE President Tom Jackson told a news briefing, adding that America risked falling behind other nations.

"Quite simply, we're behaving like the rabbit in the old fable, napping while everyone else catches up."

2 years and we're now back to the Clinton strategy.

Well, except they have nuclear weapons, now. Thanks to this brilliant, petulant strategy of moral clarity.

U.S. May Give Incentives to North Korea Before Full Disarmament

The U.S. told North Korea it was willing to offer incentives, including addressing the reclusive country's security concerns, before North Korea must completely and verifiably dismantle its nuclear arms program, a top State Department official told reporters.

The account of the discussions held last week in Beijing contradicted reports the U.S. demanded North Korea abandon its arms program before the U.S. would offer any security guarantees or economic aid.

The official, who spoke in Washington on condition he not be named, didn't want to detail what incentives the U.S. was willing to offer North Korea, or how those enticements could be sequenced in relation to North Korean steps. He said all the participants in the talks -- including Russia, China, Japan and South Korea -- said they were committed to a nuclear-free Korean peninsula.

At the same time, North Korea did threaten to perform a nuclear test or some other method to prove it had such arms, the official confirmed. All the participants told the North Korean envoy such an action would be detrimental for the Stalinist state.

Why the ACLU Is Right To CAzaellenge The FBI's Access to Library, Bookstore, and Business Records Under the USA PATRIOT Act

Read this excellent dissection of section 215 of the PATRIOT Act.

After reading this it's entertaining to go back just a few weeks and read all the "Everyone hates it but no one has any specifics, so they're all just lefty whiners" articles by the media (and blog) punditry.

It's amazing that the person most directly charged with protecting our constitution is out running about on a magical mystery tour trying to drum up support for this crap.

I repeat again for those in the cheap seats: Congress cannot change the constitution. No laws passed by anyone, nor presidential proclamations, nor regulations can change the constitution.

You actually have to go through the process of changing the constitution - which itself defines - in order to change the constitution.

Anyone who doesn't understand this fundamental aspect of our law shouldn't be in the position Ashcroft is in.

Geesh.

Chinese Researchers Confirm SARS Came from Animals

In the animals they found antibodies to a coronavirus similar to SARS and the virus itself.

"Since we detected SARS-like coronavirus in several different species of animals from the market, it suggests that markets may be an important source of human SARS," Guan said in an interview conducted by e-mail.

Guan said it is too early to say whether the civet or some other animal was the primary source of the epidemic.

"This paper doesn't prove that the animal host is a palm civet. It says they also could be infected with related virus. They could have gotten it from eating a mouse or something like that," said Holmes, who helped confirm the findings.

Guan's team also found that many of the workers had antibodies to the virus but had never been sick. None of the hospital patients tested for SARS had any evidence of exposure to the virus.

Having antibodies to a virus suggests that a person was exposed but the immune system fought it off.

Holmes said an important question is whether the antibodies were to human SARS or to the slightly different animal virus. "Was it mutated or not mutated?" she asked. "Had it received the mutations that allowed it to transmit to humans or not?"

Writing in the journal Science, Guan and colleagues said they found an important clue. The human version of the coronavirus was missing a genetic sequence -- a long one -- that suggest what changes were needed to make the virus infect humans.

One human patient was infected with an intact virus, but most of the others were missing this sequence, they reported.

Guan said it was not clear what this genetic sequence might do -- whether it affected the ability of the virus to infect, or its virulence.

Report Blasts American Infrastructure

America's infrastructure is full of cracks, leaks and holes and is getting worse, according to an analysis by civil engineers that concludes the nation's transportation, water and energy systems have shown little improvement since they were given an overall grade of D-plus in 2001.

A report by the American Society of Civil Engineers released Thursday assessed trends over the last two years in the condition of 12 categories of infrastructure, including roadways, bridges, drinking water and energy.

The report blamed the deteriorating infrastructure on a weak economy, limited federal programs, population growth and the threat of terrorism, which diverted money to security.

"Americans' concerns about security threats are real, but so are the threats posed by crumbling infrastructure," Thomas Jackson, ASCE president, said in a statement. "It doesn't matter if the dam fails because cracks have never been repaired or if it fails at the hands of a terrorist. The towns below the dam will still be devastated."

Bad loans may pop China’s bubble

Looming through the gray smog of every big Chinese city these days, high above the incessant rattle of jackhammers, are the construction cranes, slowly swinging back and forth over huge steel and concrete boxes wrapped with fine lattices of bamboo scaffolding.

The question here and across the country, though, is how much longer the cranes will stay busy, and with them an economy that is powering a large portion of the world's growth, as well as terrifying trading partners from Tokyo to Washington to Brussels.

Interesting times.

From Stratfor.

Summary

A recent upsurge in attacks against U.S. and Afghan forces in southeastern Afghanistan spurred U.S. and Afghan troops to strike back with a bombing campaign in Zabul on Aug. 25. The United States likely will temporarily dislodge the alliance of Taliban, Hizb i-Islami and al Qaeda elements -- even with U.S. resources focused on Iraq and stretched thin across the globe. This recurring pattern of attacks followed by U.S. counterinsurgency operations underscores the stalemate in Afghanistan. Though the jihadist alliance cannot overthrow the government of President Hamid Karzai because of the ground presence of U.S. military, it has endured -- impeding stability and thwarting reconstruction efforts.

Henry has an interesting post up about the economics of abundance, and the interesting people you meet and hear at science fiction conventions.

Long ago, like all geeks, I figured it was inevitable that we'd soon move to an insect like robotic state where we blurred the lines between organisms and robots such that the cities become human engineered quasi-living entities. It was just a matter of when. Nano tech. Bio tech. Materials science and a host of other fields are converging to give us unlimited, cheap manufacturing and production 'bots. Yada yada yada.

So, all it really costs is raw material to build anything. The price in human labor is zero, and the system - eventually - will simply be recursive and take care of and produce itself. Initial bootstrapping costs will quickly be recovered in such a system.

Asteroids and other planets provide an effectively infinite supply of raw material. Remember, there's a moon of one of our outer planets that has oceans of petroleum and methane rain. There are asteroids composed of vast amounts of valuable metals.

In the 2,900 cubic kms of Eros, there is more aluminium, gold, silver, zinc and other base and precious metals than have ever been excavated in history or indeed, could ever be excavated from the upper layers of the Earth's crust

So the question is, how do we compete when everything is effectively free? Or do we even compete?

It's an interesting question. Does my liver compete with my heart? I guess, in some sort of an abstract game, they "compete" for nutrients. But they really aren't "competing" to get everything they can. They simply require a certain amount of nutrients. If they don't get their requirements, they don't work correctly and the whole system fails. If they start consuming more and more nutrients, then we start considering them cancerous.

So perhaps we'll evolve into the Libertarian's worst nightmare. A sort of Borg collective where what we consider "us" becomes far larger than the individual, familial or even tribal collective.

I just think that our adaptation and our future is very cloudy at this point. I'm reasonably sure there isn't another species that has experienced this within several hundred light years. Maybe even thousands.

But if I were to venture to guess at the near term, it's going to look an awful lot like what the RIAA envisions it to be. Here's an organization that is selling something that has no tangible substance: intellectual property. A melody. A song. Lyrics. Production. All captured and moved around as bits. Copied with almost zero cost. Ideas overheard at cocktail parties.

And we still pay through the nose for it. They shut down everything that even sniffed of providing copying service for free.

Call me cynical, but the current trend is a totally artificial market. One where the costs are purely enforced by the rule of law - i.e. force. Thank you DMCA, Sony Bono and whatever the second Bush term will bring. An economy determined entirely by intellectual property lobbyists.

Again, a Libertarian's worst nightmare.

Hellblazer.com was offline for a good five hours. Our host is ixwebhosting.com, which was also offline for the same five hours. P6 told me that Earthlink, Cox Communication and MSN were also affected.

So what up? This kind o' shit don't just happen without a reason. If it wasn't for the UK power outage that came right after the huge US power outage, I'd probably be less tinfoil hat-ish.

But I can't find a peep about it on the news sites or other tech haunts. Maybe I just haven't looked hard enough. Maybe it was no big deal.

But 5 hours across multiple non-trivial domains is reasonably eyebrow raising. Someone should at least mention it and put it all down to a spilled Coke on a key router or something.

If nothing else it shows the illusion daemons are seriously slacking off on their jobs. I'd like to see some productivity increases in that cost center.

Arnie, that is. Not the egg thrower.

Arnold Schwarzenegger was a no-show at the initial debate of California's recall election Wednesday and delivered what was billed as his first major campaign speech, getting pelted with an egg as he waded through a crowd at a college campus.

"You have such a fantastic life, Arnold, you make millions of dollars to do movies and all those kinds of things, why do you want to do this?" Schwarzenegger asked rhetorically in his address.

"And you know something, because everything that I've gotten my career, my money, my family everything that I've gotten and achieved is because of California," he said to cheers at California State University, Long Beach.

As Schwarzenegger worked the crowd, the egg splattered on the back of his left shoulder. An aide tried to wipe it off, but he simply peeled off his coat and went ahead with his speech.

"This guy owes me bacon now," he joked later. "I mean there's no two ways about it because, I mean, you can't just have eggs without bacon. But this is all part of, you know, the free speech."

But ducking out of a debate was pretty sleazy. Sure, it may work for him - what we don't know won't affect our votes, right? But it shows a certain gaming of the whole election system which pretty much leaves the same taste in my mouth as I'm sure Arnie felt when he was hit by the egg.

Well, kind of. It's actually a post of mine from back in April. But it's still one of my favorites.

In any event, go see the Big Picnic and grab a bite to eat while you're over there. The hosts are very nice and there's hardly any ants at all. Oh, and the food is great.

This next 9/11 anniversary is coming up and these words are important to remember.

Fear is driving our life. Unjustified terror.

It's well past time that we stopped this nonsense and started acting like 21st century humans.

Fear is our enemy.

Bring 'Em On!

Somebody once said I had a personality like Ender. As silly as that remark is, there is a grain of truth in it.

There reaches a point where you simply have to grind them into political dust and bury one Azaelf of the dust on one side of a river, and the rest on the other side. Both parcels of dust must be mixed throughly with 2 parts of sea salt and garlic. By 40 virgins.

Then you nuke the site.

Look, I know we're going to lose. But JHCORFC, let's at least take some political casualties. Do you want to live forever? These guys are f*cking us all over royally.

A conservative game when you're the vastly underrated underdog is simply the worst strategy possible.

I say unleash the dogs. Take no prisoners.

No Republican gets re-elected.

Consider the following scenario: a series of TV ads begin to appear nightly immediately after the Republican convention is over next year. They will be negative ads. They will promote no Democratic candidate. They will therefore not be under the tight restrictions of the Federal Election Commission.

Each ad will begin with a video clip of President Bush's "Bring 'em on!" cAzaellenge. Then the screen will shift rapidly to the burned-out remains of a building or a Humvee. Underneath will be these words: a date, a location, and a death count.

Then a black screen with white print will announce: America needs a new policy.

There will be an ID of some kind: "Citizens for a Lasting Peace" or "Mothers to Stop the Bloodshed."

There will be no bodies on screen. There will be only bombed-out buildings and equipment.

Each ad will last no longer than 15 seconds.

There will be a new ad every night – same time, same station.

Every night. Same time, same station.

On three networks. But not Fox.

The Republican National Committee will scream bloody murder. That, of course, is precisely the problem: bloody murder. Every night. Same time, same station.

People will tell pollsters that they don't want to see these ads. But they will watch them in remote-clicking paralysis, no matter what they say to pollsters. If it bleeds, it leads.

Night by night, the message will be repeated: America needs a new policy.

You probably already heard about it, but go check out Open Source Politics. Just the list of writers alone is worth checking it out. Love the formatting (damn their eyes!) and the content - well, that goes along with having great writers, don't it.

Fisking after the fact.

Revisiting the Case for War

In an effort to quell the controversy over the “16 words” in U.S. President George W. Bush’s State of the Union address, the White House declassified and released intelligence documents on July 18, 2003 to prove there was ample evidence that Saddam Hussein had a continuing and expanding nuclear weapons program. Yet those same documents indicate that some senior officials had serious doubts about the threat of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and the regime’s links to al Qaeda. A look back at President Bush’s October 7, 2002 speech in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he made a detailed case for war against Iraq, reveals that what the president said did not always reflect what U.S. intelligence analysts believed at that time.

Only one problem. YOU SHOULD DO THIS BEFORE THE PROBLEM, NOT AFTER THE PROBLEM.

Geesh.

Global warming's sooty smokescreen revealed

Smoke is clouding our view of global warming, protecting the planet from perhaps three-quarters of the greenhouse effect. That might sound like good news, but experts say that as the cover diminishes in coming decades, we are in for a dramatic escalation of warming that could be two or even three times as great as official best guesses.

This was the dramatic conclusion reached last week at a workshop in Dahlem, Berlin, where top atmospheric scientists got together, including Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen and Swedish meteorologist Bert Bolin, former chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

IPCC scientists have suspected for a decade that aerosols of smoke and other particles from burning rainforest, crop waste and fossil fuels are blocking sunlight and counteracting the warming effect of carbon dioxide emissions. Until now, they reckoned that aerosols reduced greenhouse warming by perhaps a quarter, cutting increases by 0.2 °C. So the 0.6 °C of warming over the past century would have been 0.8 °C without aerosols.

But the Berlin workshop concluded that the real figure is even higher - aerosols may have reduced global warming by as much as three-quarters, cutting increases by 1.8 °C. If so, the good news is that aerosols have prevented the world getting almost two degrees warmer than it is now. But the bad news is that the climate system is much more sensitive to greenhouse gases than previously guessed.

As those gases are expected to continue accumulating in the atmosphere while aerosols stabilise or fall, that means "dramatic consequences for estimates of future climate change", the scientists agreed in a draft report from the workshop.

Potentially Hazardous Asteroid given Torino 1 rating

From Stratfor.

Summary

Several humanitarian aid organizations have pulled up stakes in Iraq, and others have scaled back to minimal staffing following the recent attack on U.N. headquarters in Baghdad. Because the assistance non-governmental and international organizations provide is integral to U.S. plans to rebuild and stabilize Iraq, the coalition -- particularly the United States -- may need to relinquish some control over Iraq to the international community in order to bridge the growing NGO gap.

From Stratfor.

Former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has allegedly denied responsibility for the Aug. 28 bombing that killed Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) leader Mohammad Bakr al-Hakim and nearly 100 others. In a recorded message aired on Al Jazeera television Sept. 1, a person identified as Hussein said the "infidel invaders are accusing, without proof, the followers of Saddam Hussein after the killing of Shia leader al-Hakim." Continuing in the third person, the man added, "This is not what Saddam attributes to himself."

So George, how do you feel about your mom and dad?

Most fundamentalist Christians have authoritarian personalities. Two core beliefs separate fundamentalists from mere evangelists ("happy-clappy" Christians) or the mainstream Presbyterians among whom Bush first learned religion every Sunday with his parents: fundamentalists take the Bible absolutely literally as the word of God and believe that human history will come to an end in the near future, preceded by a terrible, apocalyptic battle on Earth between the forces of good and evil, which only the righteous sAzaell survive. According to Frum when Bush talks of an "axis of evil" he is identifying his enemies as literally satanic, possessed by the devil. Whether he specifically sees the battle with Iraq and other "evil" nations as being part of the end-time, the apocalypse preceding the day of judgment, is not known. Nor is it known whether Tony Blair shares these particular religious ideas.

However, it is certain that however much Bush may sometimes seem like a buffoon, he is also powered by massive, suppressed anger towards anyone who cAzaellenges the extreme, fanatical beliefs shared by him and a significant slice of his citizens - in surveys, Azaelf of them also agree with the statement "the Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word".

Cause of SARS must be found to prevent future outbreaks, UN agency says

The threat of future outbreaks of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS ) remains real as long as its source is unknown, the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) warned today, calling for more research on the disease.

"To date there is no evidence that farm animal species have been infected with SARS coronavirus found in humans," the UN agency said in a statement, which was based on the report of Laurie Gleeson, a senior Australian veterinarian who recently returned from a three-week UN mission to China aimed at reviewing data collected from animal sources.

"Based on preliminary laboratory testing, a number of animal species is under investigation as a possible source for the virus, including the palm civet, racoon dog, a species of fruit bat, and one species of snake, yet we still don't know the original source," Dr. Gleeson said, adding that those animals could have been exposed to the virus in the markets.

She recommended targeted surveillance studies of animal populations considered to be at high risk of exposure to SARS

Looks Like a Recovery, Feels Like a Recession

ven though the recession ended nearly two years ago, polls show that American workers are feeling stressed and shaky this Labor Day because the nation continues to register month after month of job losses and wages are rising more slowly than inflation.

One factor above all has fueled the insecurity: the nation has lost 2.7 million jobs over the last three years. The recovery has been so weak since the recession ended in November 2001 that the nation's payrolls are down one million jobs from when economic growth resumed.

Indeed, the current economic expansion is the worst on record in terms of job growth. The average length of unemployment, more than 19 weeks, spiked this summer to its highest level in two decades.

"American workers are doing very badly," said Carl Van Horn, director of the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University. "All the trends are in the negative direction. There's high turnover, high instability, a reduction in benefits and a declining loyalty on the part of employers. At the same time, expectations for productivity and quality are going up. It's a bad situation from a worker's standpoint."

In August, a Gallup poll found that 81 percent of Americans thought now was a bad time to find a quality job, tying March for the highest percentage since Gallup began regularly asking the question two years ago.

A new survey by the University of Michigan found that while workers were showing somewhat less fear about unemployment, they were voicing concern that their wage increases were shrinking.

"Most workers expect the economy to improve, but at the same time they don't expect to have their income or their wages increase," said Richard Curtin, director of surveys at the University of Michigan. "It's a very untypical environment."

Political Parties Shift Emphasis to Core Voters

"There's a realization, having looked at the past few elections, that the party that motivates their base — that makes their base emotional and turn out — has a much higher likelihood of success on Election Day," Matthew Dowd, a senior adviser to Mr. Bush's re-election campaign, said in an interview.

Stanley Greenberg, the Democratic pollster who advised Bill Clinton when he won by appealing to swing voters 11 years ago, said: "Things have changed over the decade since 1992. The partisans are much more polarized. And turnout has actually gone up because the partisans have turned out in much greater numbers and in greater unity."

"I don't see a decline in independents," Mr. Greenberg added. "But what has happened is the partisans have dominated because their turnout is higher and they vote with greater and greater unity."

This shift signals that the 2004 election will have a much greater reliance on identifying supporters and getting them to the polls. That would tip the balance away from the emphasis on developing nuanced messages aimed at swing voters, who make up 10 percent to 20 percent of the electorate, pollsters said.

The change has the potential, several strategists said, of encouraging the presidential candidates to make the kind of unvarnished partisan appeals that they once tried to avoid out of concern of pushing away independent-minded voters. "If both sides are concerned about motivating their base, the agenda difference between the two is much more dramatic," Mr. Dowd said. "I actually think it could make for a much more interesting election."

I love it! It's about time people started paying attention to their party base instead of the faux centrists who are just in love with the fantasy that they're middle of the road, but then consistently vote for one party.

And it's going to be simply enjoyable to see RoveCo run towards their Christian Right base. It's going to piss off every libertarian in existence.

For Calif. GOP, It's Principles vs. Potential

I just love it when Republicans rip off the mask and show us what they're really like.

Principles, morality. They're thrown overboard because the most important thing on earth to them is beating Democrats.

Pretty cool, guys.