Archive for August, 2006

KATE O’BEIRNE: “For almost three years, at every minor twist or turn of Plamegate, there were media stakeouts at the offices and homes of of the suspected leakers that invariably made the evening news and played in constant loops on cable. So who’s on Armitage driveway duty? Richard Armitage isn’t being hounded to answer questions about his role in Plamegate because the media wishes he had no role.”

UPDATE: “The Armitage revelation and way he and Colin Powell handled it—in the most self-serving way possible, with maximum damage inflicted on the administration—demonstrates what the real cabal in the first Bush administration was.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: More here.

SHADES OF JOHN BARNES’ MOTHER OF STORMS: A Pacific Category V “Super Typhoon” threatens to scrub Wake Island clean:

Classified as a Category 5 “super typhoon,” Ioke is expected to extensively damage the U.S. territory when it hits Wednesday with 155-mph winds, said Jeff Powell, lead forecaster for the National Weather Service in Honolulu.

“This is going to roll up a storm surge that will probably submerge the island and destroy everything that’s not made of concrete,” Powell said.

Ouch. Glad I’m missing it. (Via Brendan Loy).

porkbustersnewsm.jpgPORKBUSTERS UPDATE: “Secret Senator” smoked out:

After much speculation, a staffer to Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, admitted to Cox Newspapers today that the senator is the lawmaker who placed a “secret hold” on legislation that would open up the obscure world of government contracting to public scrutiny.

Until now, it was a political whodunnit as to who quietly blocked legislation introduced by Sens. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., and Barack Obama, D-Ill., that would create a searchable database of government contracts, grants, insurance, loans and financial assistance, worth $2.5 trillion last year.

Shockingly, Saunders takes a dig at the blogosphere.

As for Stevens’ claim that he just wants a cost-benefit analysis, Mark Tapscott comments: “If that obvious BS doesn’t get Stevens hooted out the U.S. Senate …. How about we do a cost-benefit analysis of Stevens’ tenure in the nation’s capitol?”

I think he’ll want to put a hold on that . . .

AN A.P. HATCHET JOB ON RUMSFELD? The QandO blog does a side by side comparison of the speech and the AP story. Shockingly, the two are a less-than-perfect match. “I’m not sure why I felt compelled to compare the speech with the story, but for some reason the story just didn’t sound right. And, as you can see, it wasn’t. . . . CNN repeats the story unedited and obviously, unchecked. Forbes as well. Ditto for ABC and Fox. And you wonder how myths and memes get started?”

Wonder? No.

GREEN HELMETS ALL AROUND! CBS confesses to Katie Couric photo-slimming.

UPDATE: Best take yet, from Scott Lemieux: “Christ. DO they alter pictures of Chris Matthews?”

I’m not sure which answer to that question is more frightening. Well, yes I am, actually.

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: “Patrick Fitzgerald’s three-year manhunt to track down who blew Valerie Plame’s CIA ‘cover’ has been exposed as a costly sham. He apparently knew all along that his man was not Scooter Libby. . . . From top to bottom, this has been one of the most disgraceful abuses of prosecutorial power in this country’s history. That it’s taking place at a time of war only magnifies its sordidness.”

UPDATE: Tom Maguire: “Oh, stop. I yield to no one in my enthusiasm for belittling the investigatory ineptitude that allowed Fitzgerald to overlook the leak to Bob Woodward by Richard Armitage. (And I want to copyright ‘What else did Fitzgerald not know, and when did he not know it?’) I suppose that is a ‘lie’ in the ‘Bush lied’ sense, but I don’t think anyone can argue that Fitzgerald knew the statement was false when he made it, or intended to deceive others, or made it with reckless disregard for the truth. Fitzgerald was wrong, but it was not a lie.”

ALEX BEAM WRITES that dissent is being crushed at MIT.

I blame John Ashcroft!

UPDATE: Okay, I should clarify — it’s not MIT that’s doing the crushing, it’s where the crushee works. Read the article.

THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY: A Katrina video retrospective, at Hot Air.

IN THE MAIL: Obery Hendricks’ The Politics of Jesus : Rediscovering the True Revolutionary Nature of Jesus’ Teachings and How They Have Been Corrupted. Just in case you doubted that there’s a Religious Left as well as a Religious Right. I expect that Amazon discussion board to heat up now that the book’s out.

UPDATE: Telford Work emails: “Glenn, whatever the other merits or the demerits of Hendricks’ book, I find it hard to believe that he and Doubleday used the same title as John Howard Yoder’s classic The Politics of Jesus (Eerdmans 1972, rev ed 1994). Surely Hendricks has encountered it studying at Princeton Seminary or at New York Seminary where he now teaches; it is the seminal work on which many of the worthier voices in the ‘Christian left’ now draw. If is as if John Stossel wrote The Wealth of Nations or Stephen Jay Gould wrote The Origin of Species.”

Yes, even I noticed that. It does seem a bit presumptuous.

UPDATE: Some very different thoughts on religion from Richard Fernandez of The Belmont Club.

porkbustersnewsm.jpgPORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Daniel Glover has more on the secret hold:

Every August, lawmakers leave Washington for relaxing summer vacations, taxpayer-funded junkets abroad, low-key field hearings and high-dollar fundraisers. In even-numbered years, the few incumbents whose jobs are threatened have more hectic campaign schedules, but for the most part, lawmakers don’t have to answer tough questions in the month whose name is linked to external triumph and internal peace in the Roman Empire.

Not so this August — at least not for the 100 unfortunate souls who happen to hold U.S. Senate seats when bloggers across the political spectrum are in a feisty mood. Those bloggers are hot and bothered not by the temperature and summer humidity but instead by the time-honored Senate tradition known as the “secret hold,” and they are doing their best to break that hold against policymaking accountability.

The procedural hold in this case is on a bill that would create a public, searchable Web site of all federal grants and contracts in an effort to deter pork-barrel spending in lawmakers’ states and districts. Senate tradition allows senators to place such holds anonymously as a way to delay or prevent floor action.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Ted Stevens?

ANOTHER UPDATE: William Beutler has much more on this.

MORE: Dave Weigel: “If earmarking was a 1970s adult film loop, Stevens would be John Holmes. (Robert Byrd could be Harry Reems.)”

So what, does that make Trent Lott Johnny Wadd?

MORE STILL: Reader Bill Gardner writes: “Under the heading of ’embarrassing trivia I shouldn’t know,’ JW and John Holmes are the same person.”

You’re right, Bill. About all of it! And various other readers sent variations on “Please! No posts that cause us to imagine members of the United States Senate naked!” Good point.

MORE ON FAKE NEWS: My TCS Daily column is up.

CRUSHING OF DISSENT, IN CANADA:

I saw the satirical website www.HezboLiberal.com and laughed pretty hard (my favourite line: "MP searches Middle-East for terrorism, finds Israel). But they weren’t laughing over at Liberal headquarters. The party’s in a bit of a snit right now over the issue of Israel and terrorism and they’ve lost their sense of humour.

The grown-up answer to a satirical website like that is to laugh it off. But the Liberal party is hurting right now, so it lashed out against the pranksters — pressuring their internet service provider (ISP) to censor the site.

That’s been their pattern, I believe. It only makes the satirist’s point, of course.

STUART TAYLOR on the Duke Lacrosse case — and the New York Times’ coverage thereof. “The Times still seems bent on advancing its race-sex-class ideological agenda, even at the cost of ruining the lives of three young men who it has reason to know are very probably innocent.”

HITCHENS ON THE PLAME SCANDAL — which turns out to be scandalous, but not in the way we were told for the past several years:

It turns out that the person who put Valerie Plame’s identity into circulation was a staunch foe of regime change in Iraq. Oh, that’s all right, then. But you have to laugh at the way Corn now so neutrally describes his own initial delusion as one that was “seized on by administration critics.”

What does emerge from Hubris is further confirmation of what we knew all along: the extraordinary venom of the interdepartmental rivalry that has characterized this administration. In particular, the bureaucracy at the State Department and the CIA appear to have used the indiscretion of Armitage to revenge themselves on the “neoconservatives” who had been advocating the removal of Saddam Hussein. Armitage identified himself to Colin Powell as Novak’s source before the Fitzgerald inquiry had even been set on foot. The whole thing could—and should—have ended right there. . . .

And can one imagine anybody with a stronger motive to change the subject from CIA incompetence and to present a widely discredited agency as, instead, a victim, than Tenet himself? The man who kept the knowledge of the Minnesota flight schools to himself and who was facing every kind of investigation and obloquy finally saw a chance to change the subject. If there is any “irony” in the absurd and expensive and pointless brouhaha that followed, it is that he was abetted in this by so many who consider themselves “radical.”

Yes. And some of us were skeptical a long time ago. But this only makes Bush look bad for his failure to fire Tenet — and to roll some other heads at the CIA — shortly after 9/11.

PORKBUSTERS AND THE “SECRET SENATOR” STORY were on CNN tonight. Hot Air has the video.

THE FEC CRACKS DOWN ON CAMPAIGN SPEECH: Mark Tapscott thinks it’s a serious blow to McCain’s campaign.

I agree. Despite his efforts to court bloggers, this will remind ’em that he got us into this mess.

And the whole campaign finance “reform” thing was astroturfed, anyway.

A HIT-AND-RUN SPREE in San Francisco:

As many as 14 people were injured this afternoon by a motorist who drove around San Francisco running them down before he was arrested, authorities said.

Seven of those injured were in critical condition, police and firefighters said.

Authorities have identified the man who was arrested as Omeed Aziz Popal, who has addresses in Ceres (Stanislaus County) and Fremont.

We need car-control. But anybody can buy one of those things, without even a background check or a waiting period. (Via LGF).

UPDATE: A terrorist attack? It does seem a bit reminiscent of the “Jeep jihadi.” Well, to look on the bright side, better crashing cars into people than planes into buildings, I guess.

MORE: Gateway Pundit has a roundup. Reportedly, three other people have been taken in for questioning.

And Bill Quick warns people not to get carried away with speculation in advance of the data. Good advice, as always — especially since, as Dan Riehl notes, Popal seems to have had traffic-court problems before.

Meanwhile, a few readers say that we do require licenses for cars. Not exactly. As Dave Kopel notes, licensing for cars is much, much looser than the regulation surrounding guns. People who think otherwise are mistaken.

CATHY YOUNG COUNTS THE WAYS that welfare-reform critics turned out to be wrong.

Plus, Mickey Kaus comments:

The purpose of welfare reform wasn’t to lower the poverty rate. It was to move people from welfare to work–out of an isolated, non-working subculture that had all sorts of bad social effects (fatherless families, crime, segregation, etc.). If welfare reform could have done that with a small increase in the poverty rate, that would have been a price worth paying. If reform had accomplished this goal–a near-60% reduction in the families getting welfare**–with no increase in the poverty rate, that would be a victory. That the poverty rate has actually fallen a full point from 1996 (13.7% then to 12.6% now–an 8% reduction) is a significant success. … P.S.: The black poverty rate has fallen from 28.4% in 1996 to 24.9% in 2005, a 12% drop. In 1993, when Clinton took office, it was 33.1%. Since then it has dropped by almost 25%. …

Sounds like a success.

SOME THOUGHTS ON DISPROPORTIONATE RESPONSE, from Steven den Beste.

AMERICA’S MUSLIMS: “Not as assimilated as you think.”

UPDATE: Aziz Poonawalla says “yes we are!”

ANOTHER UPDATE: I got several emails from American Muslim readers, along the lines of this one:

You’ve probably gotten a lot of responses like this, but I feel I must add to the chorus. American muslims are definitely integrated and as fully American as any other ethnic group. More so than many groups, in fact. The blindingly obvious difference with European muslims is that American muslims have not had the same job and class racism as exists in Europe and are for the most part have been able to reach the middle or upper classes. In fact, about 60% of all Americans of middle-eastern descent are college educated, compared to about 40% of all immigrants, and 25.9% of all U.S. citizens … My own ethnic group, Americans of Egyptian descent, have about 80% college graduation rates. Hardly a poor, uneducated, unassimilated underclass.

This seems right to me, and I hope it is.

posnercov.jpg
With the fifth anniversary of the September 11th attacks coming up, we thought we’d talk to law professor and U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Richard Posner, whose latest book, Not a Suicide Pact: The Constitution in a Time of National Emergency looks at terrorism, the Constitution, and issues of surveillance, civil liberties, and history. One quote: “Civil libertarians are in a state of denial.” Despite this sound-bite, though, his overall views are rather moderate even if not politically correct.

You can listen directly — no messy downloading — by going here and clicking on the gray Flash player. Or you can download the file directly by clicking right here. There’s a lo-fi version here, and you can subscribe via iTunes here.

Surveillance-themed music by The Nevers.

UPDATE: Some comments here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A summary of the main points here.

MORE: Glenn Greenwald says that Posner is being un-conservative by advocating “drastically expanded police powers.” Some things that Posner advocates in his book might fall within that category, though generally I think that’s something of an overstatement. As I note in the podcast, what’s interesting is that Posner’s advocating a “more European” approach to national security powers, which produces a left/right role reversal. Posner also makes the point that it’s interesting that the Supreme Court’s foreign-law enthusiasts don’t look to Europe as a model in these areas, as they do in the case of capital punishment.

Meanwhile, Allah characterizes this as an interview with God. Posner’s a god on the legal scene, but I wouldn’t call him God. Then again, who am I to argue about this stuff with a guy named Allah?

There’s also this depressing note: “There is something seriously wrong with this country when I have to download a random podcast to listen to an eminent scholar like Posner while cranks like Walt & Mearsheimer are hosting their talk at the National Press Club, televised on C-SPAN.” And JonBenet stories trump all!

But by “random podcast” I believe he meant “first-rate Internet audio production” . . . .