Jim Miller on Politics

Happy Easter!  To all those who celebrate it today.


And for those who want more thoughts on Easter, see these posts by Marty Mazur and Chris Mazur

(And a happy Passover to my Jewish friends,)

How Would The New York Times Cover The Passover Story?  Yehudit has the spoof, beginning with this paragraph:

The cycle of violence between the Jews and the Egyptians continues with no end in sight in Egypt.   After eight previous plagues that have destroyed the Egyptian infrastructure and disrupted the lives of ordinary Egyptian citizens, the Jews launched a new offensive this week in the form of the plague of darkness.

You can probably guess how the rest goes, but it's still fun to read.

Do "Mainstream" Journalists Want The US To Lose?  That's what Michael Barone says in a post complimenting bloggers for their corrections of "mainstream" stories..

In World War II American media wanted us to win; it's hard to avoid the conclusion that major parts of today's mainstream media want us to lose.

That's goes farther than I would — although I am sure that it is true of at least a few "mainstream" ` journalists.

"AMac" comes closer to my own views in this must-read post, which uses Time magazine's man in Iraq, Michael Ware, to make general points.

When I think of wartime reporting, I'm drawn to the standard set by Ernie Pyle in World War II.  Get past the grit in one of his dispatches, and you realize that you're reading a partisan account.   There's no doubt about it, Pyle wants his guys--the Allies--to win.

Journalism hadn't always been that way, and it didn't stay like that.  The Cold War and Viet Nam swung the pendulum away from "patriotism" and towards neutrality.  Aspirations of objectivity can reward in their own way—such as by exposing malfeasance, groupthink, and incompetence among our own leaders and civil servants.

And that desire to be "objective" means that a reporter will want to cover both sides, as Ware has.   Unfortunately, as "AMac" explains, covering anti-US forces has a high price.

In other words, Ware has entered into a contract with his hosts.  You agree to spare my life, and to keep giving me access to exciting material.  In return, I agree to write reports that portray you in favorable terms.  Terms that make you look good even after my sophisticated readers have taken my precarious situation into account.

In other words, Ware's efforts to be "objective" have turned him into a propaganda mouthpiece for terrorists.  That would be ironic, if the result were not so terrifying.  (And Ware may have swallowed some of that propaganda himself, judging by what I heard from him on the Hugh Hewitt talk show.)

A similar desire to be "objective" may have let the Associated Press ignore the strong likelihood that one of its stringers in Iraq, photographer Bilal Hussein, was a tool of the terrorists.  Michelle Malkin has that story, which includes this crucial, but unverified claim:

According to my tipster, Hussein was captured earlier today by American forces in a building in Ramadi, Iraq, with a cache of weapons.

I am still awaiting a response from the DOD's Combined Press Information Center and a Public Affairs Officer in Ramadi.

How can reporters avoid what has happened to Ware?  By not trading soft stories for access.   In most cases, that will mean giving up the direct contacts with the terrorists that Ware is so proud of — the direct contacts that have been traded for biased stories, as Ware admits.   Ware may gain fame from these stories, but he misleads his readers, making his reporting worse than useless to them.

And how can AP, and other news organizations, avoid hiring the Bilal Husseins?  By listening to their critics, especially in the American military.

Now back to Barone's claim.  Do I think that "major parts" of the "mainstream" media want us to lose?  No, but they are acting as if they did.  (For at least a few, seeing President Bush lose overrides any other consideration.  They would be supporting the war if Bill Clinton were still in office.)

Fifty Years Of Decline:  For a social trend, any social trend, that's impressive continuity.  But that's what has happened to the fertility rate in Europe, according to Ben Wattenberg, who is promoting his new book, Fewer.   That would mean that the decline started in 1955, and has continued every single year since.  Every single year.

Wattenberg was on the Michael Medved program with Robert Engelman of Population Action International, who is, on the whole, quite pleased with the decline.  Their debate was interesting and civil, but never touched on some of the more sensitive issues.

Wattenberg would disappoint those who have a single explanation for the decline in fertility.  He has, he said, twelve of them.  (And one cause of higher birth rates, the improvements in treating infertility.)

(Here are the numbers for the United States, for the 20th century.

If you have any doubt about how controversial this issue is, look at the Publisher's Weekly review of Wattenberg's book at Amazon.  And you may be amused to see who else reviewed the book, a former Speaker of the US House of Representatives, who had a different assessment of the book.)

MS Windows Is Weird:  At least it seems weird to those of us who use a different operating system for our work.  This morning, knowing that there were some security updates available for Windows, I rebooted into Windows from Linux to install them.  When I ran the update program, I got a refusal to display a page and this error number: 0x8024001D.  Which did not seem to have any explanation when I searched for it, in the places Microsoft provided.  (Maybe, since it is a hexadecimal, or base 16, number, I should have converted it to decimal and tried that number, too.)  What is the point of supplying an error number if you don't give the user a way to look up errors by number?

Then, having fooled around trying to find an explanation for the error, I noticed that Microsoft was offering free help for Windows updates.  But when I got part way into that process, they began asking for money.  Presumably, I stepped off the free path somewhere.  Or perhaps I misunderstood the offer.

I then went back to other work.  This afternoon, I decided to take a little break and play some games, which I mostly do in Windows.  When I finished and started the reboot, Windows offered to do the updates I had wanted, but only if I would let them be done before turning the PC off.  I followed the directions and the updates were installed correctly, as far as I can tell, leaving me baffled on several points, but with an up-to-date version of Windows — I think.  Tomorrow, I'll put up a screen shot showing how this same process works under the version of Linux that I use.

(For the curious who have missed previous posts on this subject:  I run Linux for most of my work, and for nearly everything I do on line.  Right now I am using the SUSE distribution, version 10.0, though I have used Red Hat more in the past.  I do NOT recommend Linux for everyone, or even dual boot systems with Windows and Linux for everyone, but I can recommend it for more people than I could have just a few years ago.)

More:  Click here to see what the SUSE update process looks like.  You'll notice that I get descriptions of each update, along with a rating of its importance, and much more.  I could skip this process, and have the system updated automatically, but I prefer to watch what is happening to the system.  And the whole update can be done manually with just five mouse clicks.

Do Campaign Contributions Determine Votes In Legislatures?  Those who favor restrictions on those contributions are convinced that the answer to that question is yes.  They might be surprised to learn that academic studies have generally found little effect on legislative votes from campaign contributions.  Here's how Bradley Smith (who opposes most restrictions on contributions) summarizes the research in Unfree Speech.

It should not be surprising, therefore, that empirical studies show that the influence of contributions is dwarfed by that of party agenda, personal ideology, and constituent desires, as the latter is revealed in polls, letters, calls, and conversations with voters.  Common sense and experience tell us that money matters, but they also tell us that people who are attracted to public office generally do have strong personal views on issues.

And often those contributions follow votes, rather than precede them, a point made in this generally sensible article on the growing relationship between Corning and Hillary Clinton.

Corning Inc., one of upstate New York's largest and oldest employers, has supported Republican candidates for so long that its chairman once joked that it had not raised money for a Democrat since 1812.

But since Hillary Rodham Clinton was elected to the Senate in 2000, Corning and its mainly Republican executives have become one of her largest sources of campaign contributions.  And in that time, Mrs. Clinton has become one of the company's leading champions, delivering for it like no other Democratic lawmaker.
. . .
Indeed, her work on behalf of Corning began even before company officials had made a single contribution to her as a senator.

So Clinton helped Corning, and now Corning is helping Clinton.  Is there something wrong with that?

It would depend on what kind of help each gave the other.  If Clinton was working to ensure that Corning was treated fairly, then I would have no objection to her actions.  But she would be cheating others if she worked to give Corning special advantages.  The line between the two is not always easy to draw, but the principle is simple enough.

But there are times when campaign contributions do buy votes.  Most often, I believe, that happens on measures that are of great interest to a few, but of little interest to everyone else.  Mickey Kaus has found a likely example.  A billionaire, Ron Burkle, who had gone through a messy divorce, made large contributions to Democrats and Republicans and, shortly thereafter, this happened:

In early 2004, according to [Michael] Hiltzik, after Burkle failed to convince a judge to seal parts of the divorce record, the state legislature within months mysteriously

enacted — hastily, unanimously and without a single hearing — a law requiring judges in divorce court to seal in their entirety (upon a party's motion) any documents that mention the party's assets or other financial details even in passing.

Burkle then applied to seal weeks of trial transcripts, 22 exhibits and 28 other documents.

Maybe you think Kaus is just too suspicious.  I don't.  Not when a law like this one is passed without a hearing.

(Would the New York Times find this alliance between a New York senator and Corning suspicious if the senator were a Republican?  Some of this journalists there would.)

Want To See One Of George W. Bush's Fancy Homes?  Here's a picture.  And here's a description.

A part of the American epic will be unveiled Tuesday when Midland opens to the public a small home of 1,547 square feet at 1412 W. Ohio Ave.

In many ways this small house is the symbol of America's story.  After all, from this small home arose two presidents, two governors and a first lady.  If that doesn't represent the American dream, nothing does.

At 2:30 p.m. Tuesday the house will be dedicated as the George W. Bush Childhood Home.  George H. W. Bush, who back in the 1950s was a Little League coach and volunteer for the YMCA and Community Chest, and his wife, Barbara, who was a stay-at-home mom involved in Cub Scouts and Girl Scouts, will be present for the dedication ceremonies.

Their first residence in Texas was even more modest — half of a "shotgun" house, the other half occupied by a pair of prostitutes.

When We Distribute Jobs, School Places, and other desirable things by race, we must expect that some people will react by trying to change their official race.  When whites were given advantages because of their race, non-whites sometimes tried to "pass" as whites.  (One of the more amusing examples was longtime Harlem Congresman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr..   According to a story I read some time ago, Powell posed as white when he first went to Colgate.  He was not detected until a fraternity, which he was trying to join, did some checking.)

Now that those advantages often go to blacks, or to Indians, some people who have been officially white are beginning to check for helpful minority ancestors.

Alan Moldawer's adopted twins, Matt and Andrew, had always thought of themselves as white.  But when it came time for them to apply to college last year, Mr. Moldawer thought it might be worth investigating the origins of their slightly tan-tinted skin, with a new DNA kit that he had heard could determine an individual's genetic ancestry.

The results, designating the boys 9 percent Native American and 11 percent northern African, arrived too late for the admissions process.  But Mr. Moldawer, a business executive in Silver Spring, Md., says they could be useful in obtaining financial aid.

"Naturally when you're applying to college you're looking at how your genetic status might help you," said Mr. Moldawer, who knows that the twins' birth parents are white, but has little information about their extended family.  "I have three kids going now, and you can bet that any advantage we can take we will."

Naturally.  If you aren't overburdened with scruples.  Those who are might think that the children of a "business executive in Silver Springs, Md." are not especially disadvantaged.

As you have probably guessed, the money from Indian casinos has inspired many people to check for Indian ancestors.  Others hope for Indian ancestors for more romantic reasons; they hope they are descended from an Indian princess.  (This is a motivation I can understand; when I was growing up in rural Washington state, the boys I knew mostly thought that a little Indian ancestry was desirable, giving you courage.)  And the article goes on to mention a few even stranger cases.

There are still some idealists like myself, who would rather not distribute valuable things by race.  Perhaps these strange cases will help others see why we feel that way, why we think people should be judged by the "content of their character".

(One of the odder cases of changing one's official race occurred in Los Angeles some years ago.   The Los Angeles school system wanted its teachers to be more evenly distributed by race.  This meant moving black teachers from mostly black schools and white teachers from mostly white schools.   Many of the teachers, black and white, didn't want to move.  So some of them began claiming to be of the opposite race so they could stay where they were.  The administrators reacted, naturally, by setting up an official race classification board, not realizing that the precedents for such boards are not entirely admirable.

The article is in error on one point.  Amy Harmon says that: "DNA tests cannot pinpoint to which tribe an individual's ancestor belonged."  That may be true of the simple commercial tests that the article discusses.  But it isn't true of more sophisticated tests.  For example, some DNA tests are good enough to establish paternity, so they must be good enough to establish membership in a tribe.)

Inspiring:  This BBC photo essay showing Afghan schoolchildren.   Here's what one of them had to say:

My name is Ahmed and I am in the third grade.

I am scared and my family is not happy about me going to school.  I keep telling them that if I don't go to school I will not be an educated man.  We are very poor people and I want to improve our lives.

I don't know who is attacking the schools.  But they are very cruel as there are no soldiers in the schools.

Here's an example of the kind of attack he fears.

At least seven children have been killed and 34 injured after a rocket hit their school in the eastern Afghan province of Kunar, officials say.

The rocket landed in the grounds of a mosque where the school was located near Asadabad, the provincial capital.

As you probably know, the Taliban have made a point of targeting schools that educate girls.   Now they seem to be attacking all schools.

(By the way, if you have a whiney kid, you may want to show them these stories, for perspective.)

Senator Joseph Lieberman Isn't Leftist Enough For Some Democrats:  Including, interestingly enough, Howard Dean's brother.

At the Connecticut Democratic Party's annual Jefferson Jackson Bailey fund-raising dinner last month, James H. Dean was among the guests invited to sit at the table of Ned Lamont, a Greenwich cable television executive who is planning a primary challenge to Senator Joseph I. Lieberman over the senator's support for the war in Iraq.

"The reason I went and sat at his table is I personally think Ned is a terrific candidate and I want to support him," said Mr. Dean, one of 1,700 guests at the political event.  "I think not only is it a good race for the voters because he's bringing the war back, I think his campaign will benefit candidates up and down the Democratic ticket."

Mr. Dean lives in Fairfield, near Greenwich, and he has known Mr. Lamont for years.  But what makes his support for Mr. Lamont notable are his deeper, familial ties: He is the brother of Howard Dean, now the chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

Lieberman raised the stakes by saying he might run as an independent, if he were to lose the Democratic nomination.

How far left is Senator Lieberman?  In 2004, the liberal ADA gave him a rating of 75.  In the same year, the American Conservative Union gave him a 0.  And the National Journal, which separates votes into three categories, gave him 62, 82, and 55, for his votes on economic, social, and foreign policy issues, respectively.  I would give high odds that it is that last score, and the record it summarizes, that has drawn Lamont into this race.  On foreign policy, Lieberman is a genuine moderate — and that's no longer acceptable to a large fraction of the Democratic party.

Here's An Amusing Election Result:  Unless you happen to be Italian.

Romano Prodi has claimed a knife-edge victory of less than one per cent in Italy's general election, but allies of Silvio Berlusconi have disputed the result and called for a review of the count.

Official data showed Mr Prodi had taken 49.81 per cent of the vote in the lower house to Mr Berlusconi's 49.74 per cent.  The winning margin was around 25,224 votes, a tiny fraction of Italy's 47 million eligible electors.

But centre-Right politicians said the vote was still too close to call with up to half a million ballots reportedly spoilt and counting in the senate not yet complete.

The Italians do have my sympathies, because it is unlikely that this will end well.  But I did have to smile a bit first.

More:  Here's the latest on the Italian election results from the BBC.  (One curiosity: The candidate of the center-left alliance and apparent winner, Romano Prodi, said the Bush-Kerry election was just "even closer" than this election.  That would be true if several million were less than tens of thousands.)  Silvio Berlusconi wants to have the ballots checked, which is reasonable, given how the close the election was.  Michael Barone has a fine preliminary analysis of the results.  And for comic relief, you may want to compare what Barone says about Berlusconi and the Italian media with what Professor Henry Farrell says at Crooked Timber.  Barone knows what he is writing about.  And I'll just stop there, because academics can be so sensitive.

The French Are Misinformed About Basic Economics:  (Or, perhaps I should say, even more misinformed than Americans.  We don't do that well on basic economic facts, ourselves.  And that's true even of those who have taken an introductory economics class in college, I learned years ago from an economics professor, who immediately softened her point by noting that students could not go on to learn more without taking that introductory course.)

This article from the International Herald Tribune begins with an amusing (and dismaying) story:

Danielle Scache tries to avoid using the term "capitalism" in her economics class because it has negative connotations in France.

Instead, she teaches her high school students about the market economy, a slightly less controversial term she started using last year after a two-month internship at the dairy giant Danone.  That was an experience that did away with more than one of her own prejudices, she said.

"I was surprised to see that people actually enjoyed working in a company," said Scache, who is 59. "Some of them were more enthusiastic than many teachers I know."

"You know," she confided with a laugh, "in France we often think of companies, especially multinationals, as a place of constant conflict between employees and management."

Scache is 59, and has just learned that some employees of large companies like their jobs.  That's amusing.  She has been teaching economics for 37 years, and is this misinformed.  That's dismaying.

She is a typical French citizen — and quite different from the average person in China.

It is a world that many people here still prefer to live in.  In a 22-country survey published in January, France was the only nation disagreeing with the premise that the best system is "the free-market economy."  In the poll, conducted by the University of Maryland, only 36 percent of French respondents agreed, compared with 65 percent in Germany, 66 percent in Britain, 71 percent in the United States and 74 percent in China.

Here's a mischievous thought:  New York Times columnist (and Princeton professor) Paul Krugman despises President Bush, but he does know (or did know) basic economics.  Let's send him to France to help them revise their economics courses.  His hatred of Bush will ensure that he is welcomed in France, and perhaps even heard, as he explains, for instance, why free trade is (mostly) a good thing.  (And Professor Krugman may learn something himself, after he has some more direct encounters with the French economy.)

Worth Reading:  Christopher Hitchens delivers a message that many "mainstream" journalists and leftwing Democrats will find unpleasant.

In the late 1980s, the Iraqi representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency—Iraq's senior public envoy for nuclear matters, in effect—was a man named Wissam al-Zahawie.  After the Kuwait war in 1991, when Rolf Ekeus arrived in Baghdad to begin the inspection and disarmament work of UNSCOM, he was greeted by Zahawie, who told him in a bitter manner that "now that you have come to take away our assets," the two men could no longer be friends.  (They had known each other in earlier incarnations at the United Nations in New York.)

At a later 1995 U.N. special session on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Zahawie was the Iraqi delegate and spoke heatedly about the urgent need to counterbalance Israel's nuclear capacity.  At the time, most democratic countries did not have full diplomatic relations with Saddam's regime, and there were few fully accredited Iraqi ambassadors overseas, Iraq's interests often being represented by the genocidal Islamist government of Sudan (incidentally, yet another example of collusion between "secular" Baathists and the fundamentalists who were sheltering Osama Bin Laden).  There was one exception—an Iraqi "window" into the world of open diplomacy—namely the mutual recognition between the Baathist regime and the Vatican.  To this very important and sensitive post in Rome, Zahawie was appointed in 1997, holding the job of Saddam's ambassador to the Holy See until 2000.   Those who knew him at that time remember a man much given to anti-Jewish tirades, with a standing ticket for Wagner performances at Bayreuth.  (Actually, as a fan of Das Rheingold and Götterdämmerung in particular, I find I can live with this.  Hitler secretly preferred sickly kitsch like Franz Lehar.)

In February 1999, Zahawie left his Vatican office for a few days and paid an official visit to Niger, a country known for absolutely nothing except its vast deposits of uranium ore.  It was from Niger that Iraq had originally acquired uranium in 1981, as confirmed in the Duelfer Report.  In order to take the Joseph Wilson view of this Baathist ambassadorial initiative, you have to be able to believe that Saddam Hussein's long-term main man on nuclear issues was in Niger to talk about something other than the obvious.  Italian intelligence (which first noticed the Zahawie trip from Rome) found it difficult to take this view and alerted French intelligence (which has better contacts in West Africa and a stronger interest in nuclear questions).  In due time, the French tipped off the British, who in their cousinly way conveyed the suggestive information to Washington.  As everyone now knows, the disclosure appeared in watered-down and secondhand form in the president's State of the Union address in January 2003.

In short, a reasonable reading of the evidence shows that British intelligence was right when they concluded that Saddam was trying to buy uranium in Africa — just as Bush said in his State of the Union speech.  (And that's just the public evidence.)  Which means that Joseph Wilson was, at the very least, wrong on this point.  At the very least.  More likely, he was willing to say anything that he thought journalists might accept, in order to attack President Bush.  And many journalists have been suckers enough to believe what he tells them.

(Hitchens has more on how this simple matter became so muddled.)

Chivalry is still dead.

Mayvis Coyle, 82, was shuffling with her cane across busy Foothill Boulevard while a traffic police officer watched and waited.

And watched and waited.

Even before Coyle finished crossing the intersection at Woodward Avenue, he had scribbled a $114 ticket for crossing against a don't-walk signal.  "I entered the crosswalk, it was green," said Coyle, of Sunland, who is fighting the infraction issued Feb. 15.  "It turned red before I could get over.  There he was, waiting, the motorcycle cop.

The officer needs training from the Boy Scouts, apparently.  He should have escorted Coyle, not ticketed her.

In the Seattle suburb where I live, Kirkland, drivers are relatively good about watching out for pedestrians.  But an older woman was killed in a crosswalk several years ago, and I saw one almost get hit just a few months ago.

(Some years ago, I saw a study that found that the "free right turn on red" rule, which was established to help save gas, had resulted in more pedestrian deaths.  And those who died from that change were likely to be the inattentive, as small children often are, and the slow, as the elderly often are.)

One Of My Minor Vices is an inordinate interest in the Joseph Wilson-Valerie Plame "scandal".  (It is inordinate because the whole thing is, by now, so trivial (except to Lewis Libby), and so silly.  I should probably ignore the whole thing and concentrate on more important matters, but I haven't been able to.)  If you share my vice, you should get your fixes from Tom Maguire, who knows more about the subject than anyone else, perhaps more than anyone should.

There is one legitimate reason to pay close attention to the "scandal"; it reveals, like an X-ray, the attitude many in the "mainstream" media have toward President Bush.

Cet animal est très méchant,
Quand on l'attaque il se défend.
(This animal is very wicked,
When attacked, it defends itself.)

And they really do feel that way.

This Is Disturbing:  In Britain, "cautions" for rape have doubled in the last ten years.  And that's not even the worst part of the news.

Forty rapists a year are being cautioned and released instead of facing jail terms, it has emerged.

Home Office documents reveal that the number of people cautioned for rape has more than doubled in the past decade, while the conviction rate has fallen steeply.

In 2004, 40 people were cautioned for rape, up from 19 in 1994, according to The Times.
. . .
Although the number of rape convictions has remained stable, the number of rapes reported to the police is increasing year on year.

As a result the proportion resulting in a conviction has declined from about one in three in 1977, to one in 20 cases in 2004.

One would think that the advances in DNA technology would make it easier to find rapists — and easier to prosecute them successfully.

What is a "caution"?  Just what it sounds like, a warning.  Here's an explanation from an article on their greater use:

A caution counts as a criminal record but means the offender does not face a court appearance which would be likely to end in a fine, a community punishment or jail.

Over the last thirty years, Britain has decreased punishments for crimes — and seen crime rates soar.  Americans should not be smug because we did much the same thing, starting in the 1960s.

(Americans may not remember when Labour took over from the Conservatives.  It was 1997, so most of this enormous increase in rapes has occurred while Tony Blair and company have been in charge.  And there was an aspect of his victory that now may seem just a little ironic, in view of this enormous increase in rapes: Blair brought in a great number of women MPs, who were jocularly referred to as "Blair's Babes"   Many then believed that Blair's Babes would bring more attention to women's issues.

Could some of this increase in rapes come from the growing Muslim population in Britain?   Almost certainly, judging by the experience of other European countries.)

More:  Hal Colebatch has much more on British crime, beginning with these paragraphs:

American and British criminologists have long been puzzled and angered by the fact that Britain seems to have learnt nothing from the experience of New York in successfully reducing crime.

The big drop in virtually all types of crime in New York has generally been attributed to the zero-tolerance policy associated with Mayor Guiliani.  Now Britain, far from adopting zero-tolerance, looks like it's adopting a policy of not prosecuting many serious crimes at all.  This is the subject of an official Home Office directive to all British police forces.  British police have now been told that instead of arresting a range of serious criminals, they can be let off with a caution.

One great advantage the United States has over Britain in fighting crime is our less centralized government.  States and cities can try different strategies for fighting crime; the states and cities that succeed are (often) imitated by other states and cities.  And, of course, in some states, citizens can force changes on legislatures through intitiatives; some of our "three strikes" laws were citizen initiatives.

Saddam Planned Terrorist Attacks On American Interests:  Ed Morrisey has the document and the translations to prove it.

You will note that all three translations of this document -- performed by three different people working independently of each other -- all translate this section almost identically.  All three explicitly show that the Iraqi military had ordered a call for volunteers to carry out suicide attacks on American interests, six months before 9/11 and two years almost to the day prior to our invasion.

This confirms that Saddam Hussein and his regime had every intention of attacking the US, either here or abroad or both, using members of their own military for terrorist attacks.  That puts an end to all of the arguments about whether we should have attacked Iraq, we now know that Saddam and his military planned to attack us.  This one document demonstrates that had we not acted to topple Saddam Hussein, he would have acted to kill Americans around the world.

Our intelligence agencies may well have overestimated Saddam's efforts to obtain WMDs, but, as these documents are translated, it becomes more and more obvious that the same agencies underestimated his willingness to use terror against us, directly and indirectly.

(Kudos to "Captain Ed" for this fine piece of work.)

Couric And Conservatives:  It is no secret that conservatives don't care much for the new CBS anchor.  Some are contemptuous toward her.  Some despise her.   And all conservatives think that she is hopelessly biased, as you can see here and here.  I even made my own small contribution to this conservatism criticism after the 2004 election:

Just saw Katie Couric.  I didn't expect the election results to make her happy, but I was still taken aback by the angry, bitter woman I saw on TV.  She was wearing a black dress that would not be out of place at a funeral, and she looked as if she had lost a child to a brutal murderer.   Peter Jennings was fun to watch last night, but Couric was more than a little disturbing this morning.

At least it is no secret to anyone who follows conservatives.  But it is a secret, or perhaps a matter of no importance, to our "mainstream" media.  I haven't seen a single article in the New York Times that mentioned how conservatives feel about Couric.

Consider, for example, this article, which wonders whether Couric will "revive" the news at night, but never asks whether being despised by conservatives — who outnumber self-identified liberals by a large margin — will be a handicap for Couric.  (And, of course, many moderates, who also outnumber liberals, share some of the conservative distrust for people with Couric's views.)

I honestly do not know why the New York Times, and other "mainstream" new organizations, have not mentioned conservatives when they covered the Couric story.  You would think they would be interested in this part of the story, for the most practical of reasons.  Ignorance?   Prejudice?  Both?  I'm really not sure.

Are Leftists More Likely To Have Servants Than Conservatives?  First, an amusing John Kerry story.

Responding to criticism that he had a laundry list of demands when he stayed in luxury hotels on the campaign trail, Sen. John Kerry said yesterday that he recently took a trip where he slept every night in his truck - accompanied only by his motorcycle, a friend and his butler, "Marvin."
. . .
Kerry didn't explain who "Teddy" was - or why, if he wanted to rough it, he brought his manservant, Marvin Nicholson, along for the ride.

The 2004 Democratic nominee, like the socialites described in Tom Wolfe's "Radical Chic", apparently believes that having a servant is a "psychological necessity".  Kerry can give up regular beds, but not having a personal servant with him at all times.

Are those socialites and Kerry typical of wealthy leftists?  Do they preach inequality, but require servants for themselves?  Are they, in fact, more likely to have servants than wealthy conservatives?

I don't know of any survey data on that question, though it is easy to find examples of famous leftists with servants.  There is, for example, Karl Marx, who had servants most of his life, and may have fathered an illegitimate child by one.  And it would probably be hard to find a wealthy Hollywood leftist who did not have servants.

These examples don't tell us whether leftists are more likely to have servants than conservatives.   But there is just a little bit from "Radical Chic" that suggests that they may.

[Seymour Martin] Lipset speaks of the wealthy Jewish family with the "right-wing life style" (e.g., a majority of Americans outside of the South who have full time servants are Jewish, according to a study by Lipset, [Nathan] Glazer, and Herbert Hyman) and the "left-wing outlook."

Let's clarify that a bit.  (Sometimes Wolfe's Ph.D. in American Studies keeps him from writing as clearly as he might.)  When Wolfe wrote "Radical Chic", a majority of those outside the South with full time servants were Jewish.  Then, as now, Jews were a very small proportion of the total population (though larger then, than now).  Then, as now, Jews were far more likely to be on the left than the average American.  So, it is likely that when Wolfe wrote "Radical Chic", the majority of American servants outside the South worked for leftists — and leftists who strongly supported ideals of equality, at that.

Is that still true?  I suspect that it is.  And there may even be a connection between having servants and supporting radical causes, as Wolfe suggested, ever so slyly.  Let us suppose that you have servants and feel a little guilty about that — as anyone who believes in American ideals of equality might.  You can mask that guilt and keep those servants — who you see as psychologically necessary — by supporting leftist causes.  And if the causes are fashionable, so that you can get favorable publicity, so much the better.

Perhaps Lipset had it backward.  Having servants may be, not a "right-wing life style", but a left-wing life style.  If, that is, we go by what people do, not what they say.  (At least in the United States.  Conservatives elsewhere often have very different traditions, and are much more likely to accept a certain amount of stratification in society.)

When I saw this story:

A screaming intruder made it onto the front lawn of the White House Sunday while President Bush was at home before being apprehended by Secret Service officers.

I wondered, just for a second, where Howard Dean was yesterday.  (Was that a little unfair?   Probably, but I'll bet I'm not the only one who had that thought.)

The "Gospel of Judas" Got Much Attention From Journalists In The Past Few Days:   That's because journalists know little about Christian history.  Reverend Sensing, who is better informed on the subject, explains why the "Gospel" is a "yawner".

The reason being that this text is not a gospel - just writing something about Jesus doesn't make the work a gospel.

That's not too complicated, is it?

Worth Study:  If you live in the Utah or a Plains state, you are much more likely to be religious than if you live on the West Coast.  That's no surprise, but it is a surprise to see that the South is not as uniformly religious as most would think.  Or that West Virginia has a lower proportion of religious adherents than many other states.  You can see those patterns, and many more, in these maps, showing religious affiliation by counties.

(There are, I suspect, some systematic problems with the maps, since different religions, and even different denominations, have such different membership rules.  It would be interesting to see similar maps showing religious observance for comparison.)