CALIFORNIA POLITICS....When it comes to the California recall, Hugh Hewitt sure does like blogs:

The blogs continue to outperform print and electronic media, with Kausfiles and Dan Weintraub having set a standard of relevance and timeliness that the dinosaurs can't begin to hope to match....[Blogs] provide everything the interested reader needs to know, and do so hours if not days before AM catches up. (AM = ancient media.)

Can we get serious, Hugh? I like blogs too, but with the exception of the 1977 Oui interview — hardly the shining high point of recall reporting — practically everything reported by blogs is taken from the much maligned AM in the first place. Hugh may feel that the mainstream media isn't paying enough attention to the issues he wants them to pay attention to, but everyone feels that way, don't they? Bottom line: blogs can serve an excellent role in highlighting issues and rounding up news on a topic, but if you want to know the basics of what's going on, AM has the story hours if not days before the blogs do.

(And anyway, if you're going to be a blog triumphalist, shouldn't you at least have permalinks and archives?)

On the other hand — and this may seem a bit odd — I think he's got a point with this:

The underlying story of the recall remains largely unexplored by all media, new and old. That story turns on these questions: Is the California legislature churning out a large number of new and very radical statutes, judging by the standards at work in the other 49 states? Does the California legislature appear to have even a minimal grasp on economics, or does it seem to act as though there is no such thing as a business climate? Do special interests dominate Sacramento to an extent unparalled in other state legislatures, with the result that enormously unbalanced legislation is arriving on Gray's desk (and has been for five years) without the ordinary moderations enforced by two-party rule?

Now, I'm not sure this is actually the underlying story of the recall, but it is one of the underlying stories of the state and it deserves attention. However, the problem is not, as Hugh seems to imply, that California is a monoculture Democratic state — lots of states have governors and legislatures of the same party — and it's not a problem that suddenly cropped up five years ago when Gray Davis got elected. It's a problem caused by too many inexperienced, highly ideological legislators on both sides of the aisle who have no reason to ever compromise on anything.

We could do two things that would go a long way toward solving this problem:

• Extend term limits from 6 years to 12. This would still prevent people from making careers out of politics but would provide a more experienced legislature that understands the issues better, understands the legislative process better, is less dependent on lobbyists and staff, and builds better relationships across party lines.

• Provide for nonpartisan redistricting based on some fairly stringent rules that prevent gerrymandering. This might or might not change the balance of the legislature (it would still be heavily Democratic no matter what), but it would eliminate many of the non-compromising extremists from both parties who are currently electable only because they live in ultra-safe, highly gerrymandered districts.
  

Back to you, Hugh.

SHAKESPEARE FOR DUMMIES....While the Cornerites are generally little more than annoying and childish, they do have their moments. Read this post first, and then scroll up to John Derbyshire's response here. It's a pretty good laugh.

MORALITY AND FOREIGN POLICY....Tacitus, commenting on Howard Dean's policy changes, says that maintaining the American embargo on Cuba is a "moral litmus test of American foreign policy." I've got a couple of questions about that.

First, which regime would you consider more odious, Cuba's or China's? Cuba's or Saudi Arabia's? Cuba's or Vietnam's? Should we have trade embargoes with all those other countries, or just with Cuba? Why?

Second, does the actual effect of a policy make any difference at all? Not only has the embargo against Cuba been rather obviously unsuccessful, there's considerable evidence that it's actually helped Castro stay in power.

Foreign policy should have a moral component. Unfortunately, post-9/11 conservatives have developed the idea that U.S. foreign policy should be based solely on a moral component, with the result, I suppose, that eventually our entire foreign policy will be as dysfunctional and contrary to American interests as our Cuba policy is today.

Even JFK admitted that the rest of the world found our Cuba obsession "slightly demented," and the rest of the world was right. The world does not exist on a unidimensional moral line, and after 40+ years it's time to try something different, something that might actually work and might actually improve the lives of Cubans. That's the moral thing to do.

"PUZZLED"....From the LA Times this morning:

After months of appeals from U.S. and U.N. leaders, key foreign governments including Russia, China, France and Germany remain adamant that they will not contribute in those areas, U.S. officials say.

The issue has taken on new urgency in recent days as the Bush administration has begun preparing a supplemental budget request that officials say could reach as much as $3 billion. U.S. officials had expected that renewed Iraqi oil exports would help finance reconstruction, but exports have rebounded more slowly than expected, at least in part due to looting and sabotage.

The anticipated budget request is alarming lawmakers, who see it as evidence that the burden on U.S. taxpayers will far outstrip expectations.

...."We are really puzzled on how to get more aid from these countries, when they have been refusing now for such a long time," the official said.

I know this is beating a dead horse, but what on earth are the Bushies thinking? They started a war no one else wanted, they treated anyone opposed to the war as virtual traitors to humanity, and they are still insisting that America needs to be 100% in charge of everything that goes on in Iraq.

But despite all that they're "puzzled" about how to get the rest of the world to pony up to help us out of our mess? Even though the rest of the world warned us repeatedly about the likely result of our adventure? What planet are they living on?

For chrissake, we told the rest of the world to go to hell before the war, and they haven't forgotten. They aren't going to bail us out unless we give them considerable authority over the reconstruction effort, and they might not help us even if we do. We're on our own.

The Bush administration has been incompetent and arrogant throughout this entire effort. Their prewar conduct seemed almost deliberately designed to make sure the rest of the world was against us, they were criminally negligent in their postwar planning, and George Bush personally has shown immense cowardice by consistently refusing to prepare Congress and the American public for the real cost and length of the war. He's paying the price for that cowardice now, as he watches support for the reconstruction dwindle because its expense, length, and cost in lives is taking most people by surprise.

It's pretty obvious why liberals should oppose George Bush's reelection, but the fact is that conservatives ought to oppose him too. His incompetence and cowardice have betrayed the very things they claim to stand for.

TESTING, TESTING....What the heck is this?

FOOTBALL UPDATE....Wow. Either USC deserved better than #8 or else Auburn deserved worse than #6. I'm not sure which it is — maybe both? — but that was certainly one fine opening game for the men of Troy.

BROODING TEENAGERS....Via The Daily Rant, here's a Newsweek story about Brian Robertson, a high school senior who wrote a story featuring masked teenage commandos, a group of students that sets bombs around the building, and rooftop snipers firing at cops and bystanders below. Unfortunately, it turns out that excercising your literary 2nd amendment rights can get you thrown into jail in Oklahoma:

Prosecutors concede there’s no evidence that Robertson’s work was anything but a disturbing burst of creativity. But they say criminal intent isn’t required to prosecute someone under the “planning a violent act” law, which was enacted by the state legislature in June 2001 following school shootings at Colorado’s Columbine High School and elsewhere.

Nope, no censorship based on content there. Still, it's not porn, it's not wartime sedition, and it doesn't present a clear and present danger, so with the ACLU on the case it seems unlikely that Oklahoma's law will pass constitutional muster. I doubt Robertson will spend a day in prison.

Given that, here's the part that really bugs me:

Oklahoma isn’t the only place where authorities have started scrutinizing students’ writing for signs of trouble. In the past four years, juveniles have been suspended, expelled and arrested—though not prosecuted—in Virginia, Wyoming, Arkansas, California and Texas, among other states, for penning dark poems, short stories and essays. School administrators say they’re simply trying to prevent a repeat of the Columbine scenario.

This is absurd. Brooding teenagers are a dime a dozen, and trying to rid our schools of them is a ridiculous overreaction that doesn't do a thing to make anyone safer.

Everywhere you look, it's either overreaction or underreaction. Is it just the curse of humanity never to get things right?

EXILE UPDATE....Last week the LA Times ran a story suggesting that before the war the CIA and the Pentagon had been duped by phony WMD stories from Iraqi exiles, especially exiles associated with Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress. Today, Josh Marshall dredges through his memory banks to bring us the backstory to the whole CIA/Pentagon/INC relationship.

It's worth reading, but I have to love his concluding paragraph:

A real investigation into this long sordid history is what we need. Not just one into the White House's handling of the lead-up to war, but everything. The CIA, the INC, the Clinton administration, the defectors, the WMD evidence or lack thereof. Everything. We've got many of the big players in custody now and lots of the former regime's archives. They may not be telling us what we want to hear about weapons of mass destruction. But there are any number of other questions and mysteries they should be able to clear up. The point wouldn't be to find bad-acting, mistakes or incompetence (though I'm sure we'll find plenty of each), but to get as close as we can get to a reliable understanding of our Iraq policy since the close of the Gulf War. No agency involved in this history is going to be capable of the objectivity and distance required to do the job right.

Unfortunately, a real investigation would almost certainly reveal a "deeply flawed culture" within the entire administration, and we can't have that, can we? Why, people might start to get ideas....

WHITHER THE SHUTTLE?....The LA Times has a good story about the shuttle report today. It makes a couple of points that I think have been overlooked in the rush to condemn NASA's "broken culture." First, there's the problem with the very nature of the shuttle itself:

"I believe the shuttle is inherently unsafe," retired NASA mathematician and rocket engine expert Jud Lovingood said this week. "We have proven that and there are more problems waiting to jump out. It is too complex. It is 1970s technology."

Lovingood's view was widely endorsed in interviews with members of Congress, space policy experts and space engineers.

Second, blaming culture is something of a cop-out:

Some outside critics also take sharp exception to the board's emphasis on NASA's culture as a cause of the accident. Blaming the agency's culture casts responsibility on a vague concept rather than on the errors of individuals, the lack of technological expertise in the space agency and the failure by Congress to provide funds after NASA leaders warned that safety was deteriorating.

"Culture is amorphous," said John Pike, executive director of the think tank GlobalSecurity.org. "Nobody owns a culture. Culture is the easy way out."

It's a cliche — but true nonetheless — that engineering projects can be fast, cheap, or good. You can have any two, but not all three, and the shuttle is no exception. If you want high reliability (good) and frequent launches (fast), it's going to be expensive. Unfortunately, the people who are really responsible are in denial about this:

[Rep. Dana] Rohrabacher also takes a dimmer view of the shuttle's safety than the board does, but he praised Gehman's work and said he believes NASA's deeply flawed culture, rather than inadequate funding by Congress, was at the root of the Columbia tragedy.

Sure, Dana. Congress has been consistently warned about inadequate shuttle funding for the past two decades and has ignored it the same way that NASA managers ignored safety warnings from their line engineers. Apparently NASA isn't the only government body with a flawed culture.

I don't doubt that NASA has management problems that need to be addressed, but trying to pin the blame solely on that is delusionary. Contrary to the mantra of the 80s, quality and safety aren't free, and that's nowhere more true than with a fundamentally rickety, complex, and ancient vehicle like the shuttle. We should either acknowledge the risks of the shuttle program and fund it adequately given its age and complexity, or we should dump it. Anything else is just asking for another disaster.

TIME TRAVEL....Over at Crooked Timber, Brian Weatherson starts his most recent post this way:

I’m teaching a freshman seminar on time travel at Brown this year....

Hot damn! When I was in school they taught Newtonian mechanics to us freshmen, and even at that we struggled with it. But today they teach the frosh time travel? I mean, you'd think it would at least be a graduate seminar, wouldn't you?

Then he continues:

....so I’ve been watching a lot of time travel movies as ‘preparation’.

Um, time travel movies? Is that why today's kids are so much more advanced than my generation? Because they watch movies instead of reading textbooks with all those hard to understand equations and things?

What's that? It's a philosophy class? Oh.

But let's help Brian out anyway. What's your favorite time travel book/story/movie etc? I'm very fond of Robert Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps," a perfect little gem of time travel paradoxes. And of course, RAH also wrote The Door Into Summer, notable because the hero is so dedicated to his cat that he makes sure to take him along into the future. How can you lose with a combination of time travel and feline adoration?

Other recommendations?

EMULEX....The Likely Story says that "Emulex is Arnold’s Enron." Say what? What's an Emulex?

Well, whatever else it is, it's the company that employed both my wife and me from 1984 to 1992, and we still have friends who work there. Beyond that, however, these days Emulex is apparently also a hotbed of contributions to Arnold's campaign. Is this because they're hoping Arnold will be more sympathetic to their request for favorable tax treatment than the current administration?

Beats me. But I hope that I won't someday have to tell people that I used to work for the Enron of California....

FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING....Are we ready for our closeups? Of course we are! Now, can we please get back to sleep?

BONUS CAT FACTOID: David Bernstein says, "It's hard to be a cat lover in Israel." He blames it on weak civil society. Sort of.

UPDATE: And be sure to click here to read about (and see pictures of!) the Sjostrom family's new 10-day-old kitten, rescued a day before it would have starved and died. Professor Sjostrom obviously has a much softer spot in his heart for cats than he likes to let on. Mazal Tov to you, Bill.

YET MORE UNFAIRNESS IN THE WORLD....This is for my friend, Professor Marc:

Recently Mr. Hamermesh, a labor economist at the University of Texas at Austin who has long studied beauty and labor markets, wrote a paper with an undergraduate economics major, Amy Parker, that investigates the effect of beauty on a particular measure of performance: teaching evaluations for college professors.

....They asked six undergraduate students to rate the photographs of the professors on a 10-point scale and used the average measure as a beauty score. The student ratings on the beauty scale were highly correlated with one another, suggesting that they were measuring the same aspects of appearance.

According to the economists' statistical analysis, good-looking professors got significantly higher teaching scores. The average teaching evaluation was 4.2 on a 5-point scale. Those at the bottom end of the attractiveness scale received, on average, a teaching evaluation of about 3.5, while those on the top end received about 4.5.

Perhaps universities should start adding bonus points to student evals for professors who don't measure up on the hunk/babe scale.

UPDATE: Invisible Adjunct and her commenters have more to say about this.

BOMBING IN IRAQ....A bomb exploded in a mosque in Iraq today, killing 75 people, including Ayatollah Mohammad Baqir al-Hakim, a moderate Shiite leader who has been cooperative with U.S. forces. al-Hakim's brother is part of the 25-member governing council.

Juan Cole says it is "clear that this bombing was the work of Saddam loyalists." I wish we had a better idea of just how strong these remnants of the Baathist movement are these days. For all the talk about how we're making progress, they sure seem like they're still able to cause an awful lot of damage.

DON'T CALL ME, I'LL CALL YOU....Warning! Sunday is the deadline to sign up for the telemarketing Do-Not-Call list. If you don't register, you have to wait until next year before you can get your calls blocked.

To register, either call 888-382-1222 or surf over to www.donotcall.gov.

So far 41 million households have registered to have calls blocked. That's about 16% of all the phone numbers in America, or nearly 40% of all households, which is probably a better way of looking at it. That's one popular program.

Curious to see how your state is doing? Click here.

TIME TO SAY GOODBYE....This weekend, BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan was removed from his reporting duties so that he could spend 100% of his time preparing for possible testimony in front of the Hutton inquiry. Today, Tony Blair's press secretary, Alastair Campbell, resigned due to the stress that his job puts on his family.

Needless to say, neither action had anything to do with the "sexed up" controversy. Nope, nothing at all.

IN DEFENSE OF BIAS....I don't really want to pick on David Adesnik, but, um, I guess I'm going to anyway. Today he writes that Howard Dean is the victim of liberal bias at the New York Times, and as happens so often when I hear charges like this, I think that David is paying too little attention to a key point.

The story in question is a profile of Howard Dean, and aside from making the common mistake of thinking that the reporter also wrote the story's headline (this never happens — headlines are written by the copy desk), David objects to her use of the word "rabid" to describe Dean's supporters, the phrase "Birkenstock liberals" in another place, and several other instances where the reporter made some judgments about the nature of depth of Dean's support.

But here's the thing: this is a feature story, not a piece of hard news. Stories like this are supposed to rely on the reporter's personal observations and on the colorful — and necessarily subjective — details that they record. Sure, this means their point of view comes across, but that's deliberate. It makes the story more lively and readable, and without it feature writing would be dull indeed.

What's more, I think that hypersensitivity to wording choices in a story like this does a real disservice to readers because it reinforces the cult of objectivity that has such a stranglehold on American journalism. It punishes reporters for trying to tell us what they really think is going on, instead rewarding a lifeless who-what-where-when-why-AP-style-quotes-from-both-sides style of writing that does no one any good. Top reporters are supposed to be smart and savvy, and we should encourage them to make more use of their sharp eyes and good instincts, not less.

Besides, liberal bias is the least of the problems in our major media. Al Franken put it pretty well yesterday:

"There are so many other biases in all the mainstream media: pack mentality. Sensationalism. Sex. Conflict. Getting it cheap. Getting it first instead of getting it right." To ask whether the establishment press has a liberal bias "is like asking whether al Qaeda uses too much oil in their hummus."

This is exactly right. What reporters really want is their byline on the front page above the fold. Everything else is secondary.

BOOTS ON THE GROUND....The headline in today's New York Times is "General in Iraq Says More G.I.'s Are Not Needed," but if you read closely that's not exactly what General John Abizaid really said:

"You can't underestimate the public perception both within Iraq and within the Arab world about the percentage of the force being so heavily American," the general said in an interview here at his headquarters.

....Rather than increasing the American force, General Abizaid said the priority should be to increase the size of the reconstituted Iraqi security services — now at about 60,000 people....

So it's not that we don't need more troops — as Donald Rumsfeld keeps insisting — it's that we don't need more American troops. An All-American occupying force, you see, lacks the legitimacy that it needs in the Arab world.

That sounds familiar, doesn't it? Of course, Iraqi security services aren't the only way to internationalize the force, and General Abizaid, not being a stupid man, knows it. Let's pick up that paragraph where we left off:

....the priority should be to increase the size of the reconstituted Iraqi security services — now at about 60,000 people — and to persuade other nations, particularly Muslim countries, to contribute military forces like military police, special operations forces and civil affairs specialists.

...."A campaign plan exists, but what we need to do is sharpen it up," the general said. "There's a need for a synchronization of effort, not only by the United States, but the international community and coalition forces."

....General Abizaid said any sticking points were likely political rather than military, saying, "There are innovative ways of working the chain of command that are acceptable from a military point of view and a unity of command point of view."

This is rather plainly stated, isn't it? We do need more troops, we ought to have a multinational force, and the military has no problem with this. All it takes is for George Bush to get over those "political" sticking points and do his job. Now would be a good time to start.

POSTSCRIPT: The more I think about Rumsfeld's recent comments, the more they piss me off. Here's what he said three days ago:

There are some recommending that more U.S. forces go in. I can tell you that if Gen. Abizaid recommended it, it would happen in a minute. But he has not recommended it.

Technically that's true: Abizaid doesn't want more U.S. forces. But he does want more forces.

Crikey. Can you trust a thing these guys say without parsing every single phoneme to within an inch of its life?

RAZORS AND BLADES....A couple of years ago I bought a Minolta Magicolor 2200 color laser printer. It's a monster that draws so much power the lights dim when I turn it on (literally), but for a thousand bucks I can't really complain too much.

Anyway, a few weeks ago I ran out of magenta toner, so I replaced it. Then, no surprise, the black, yellow, and cyan cartridges needed to be replaced. Then the fuser oil roller and the OPC drum kit. Holy cow! Over the course of three weeks I spent $686 on consumables. Still, expensive though it might have been, at least it was cheaper than buying a new printer.

Now even that cold comfort has been denied me. I was in my local CompUSA the other day and discovered that the Magicolor 2200 is now available for only $699 (after rebate), so for $13 more I could have simply purchased a whole new printer. In fact, since there wouldn't have been any shipping charge for the printer (the only way to get all the consumables is directly from Minolta), a single complete replacement of the consumables actually cost more than buying a brand new printer.

I know these guys make most of their money from consumables, but this is ridiculous.

POSTSCRIPT: I was also amused — or perhaps something stronger — to note that "automatic color matching" was one of the selling points pasted onto the front of the printer that I saw in the store. I can't really complain much about the printer considering its rock bottom price, but color matching is not its strong point. This is really noticable when printing black and white photos, which come out with a distinct blue tint half the time, a distinct red tint half the time, and no tint at all once in a blue moon. The choice seems to be random, and the fact that every once in a while it prints neutrally proves that it can do it if it's so inclined. Sadly, calls to tech support have been of no avail. (Big surprise, that, eh?)

UPDATE: Oh hell, Amazon sells it for $599. Sheesh.

NORTH KOREA UPDATE....So, um, I guess the negotiations with North Korea aren't going too well:

North Korea told a six-nation conference that it has nuclear weapons and has plans to test one, a U.S. official said Thursday.

....The remarks by North Korean Deputy Foreign Minister Kim Yong Il set a negative tone at the conference and raised questions about the success of the negotiations, which were scheduled to conclude Friday morning.

Kim at one point accused delegates from Russia and Japan of lying at the instruction of the United States when they tried to point out positive aspects of the American presentation, according to a U.S. official in Washington, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The United States has always talked about a "red line," a point beyond which it can't allow North Korea to go. This line has shifted considerably, but it's hard to imagine that testing a nuclear bomb wouldn't go way over it. Unlike Stanley Kurtz, however, my guess is that if they do test a nuclear weapon, we won't go to war. We'll just move the red line once again to, say, exploding a nuclear weapon in someone else's country.

Then again, it wouldn't surprise me if this was just more bluster and the North Koreans don't actually have anything at all. Our own intelligence agencies don't seem to have much of a clue about what's really going on, so how can I?

CAESAR'S WIFE AND ALL THAT....The head of Diebold, a company that makes voting machines, is apparently a diehard Republican:

Wally O'Dell, CEO of Diebold Inc., this week sent out letters to central Ohio Republicans asking them to raise $10,000 in donations in time for a Sept. 26 Ohio Republican Party event at his home.

....In his invitation O'Dell states his support for the Republican Party and notes he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President next year."

That's an unfortunate choice of words, isn't it?

You know, I don't actually think O'Dell has any intention of trying to rig Diebold's voting machines in George Bush's favor, but you'd think the CEO of a voting machine company might profitably decide that being nonpolitical was the better part of valor.

"I HAVE A DREAM"....Allen Brill of The Right Christians reminds us that today is the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream" speech, given on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. To commemorate, Rev. Brill, who is dedicated to reminding us that Pat Robertson and his ilk don't represent all — or even most — Christians, has an annotated version showing the source of many of Dr. King's images and phrases. Go read it.

WAR AND GROWTH....Matt Yglesias links approvingly to the revised GDP growth figures for Q2, but notes that part of the growth was due to a big increase in defense spending and wonders if this is sustainable. That's a good question, and the answer is no.

In fact, it might be worse than it appears. I touched on this subject a few weeks ago, and I want to touch on it again with some back-of-the-envelope figures. Here's what the official GDP figures look like:

• Q1 GDP = $9,552 billion.
  

• Q2 GDP: $9,625 billion.
  

• That's an increase of $73 billion, or .76%, or 3.1% per year.
  

But here's the thing: we spent $40 billion on the Iraq war last quarter, and a best guess is that $24 billion of that showed up as increased GDP. In other words, aside from the one-time war expenditure, core GDP growth was only $49 billion.

If we use this $49 billion figure and assume that Q3 growth will be about the same as Q2, here's what the revised "non-war" GDP trendline would look like:

• Q1: $9,552 billion.
  

• Q2: $9,601 billion.
  

• Q3: $9,650 billion.
  

Basically, the war was just a blip, and one that didn't really have any permanent effect on the rest of the economy. Thus, in Q3 we should expect to return to the baseline "non-war" trendline, which means a GDP figure of $9,650 billion.

Unfortunately, the official comparison will be to the artificially high Q2 figure of $9,625 billion. That produces a growth rate of .26%, or about 1.0% per year.

Now, this almost certainly overstates the problem, since war spending won't stop instantly. What's more, core GDP growth might be higher than it was in Q2, and the ever increasing federal deficit will provide some stimulus too. Still, given the statistical anomaly here, it seems as though next quarter's growth figures could be more anemic than people are predicting.

Since I'm not an economist, I might be all wet about this. But even so I'm surprised this hasn't gotten any attention at all. Shouldn't something like this have an impact on GDP projections?

Would any real economists care to jump in and explain whether there's anything to this?

GET OUT OF MY FACE....The state of California has finally passed a sorely needed financial privacy bill:

The new law will enable consumers to block the sale of their personal financial information by banks, credit card companies and other businesses. Consumer groups praised the measure by state Sen. Jackie Speier (D-Hillsborough) as a landmark victory in the fight to safeguard such information and deter identity theft.

Huzzah! It's only a small step, but at least it's a step in the right direction. You see, it's not the unending collection of personal information that's really the main threat to privacy in the United States, it's the ability to amalgamate it all in one place and sell it to the highest bidder that's the real danger. This bill puts a few roadblocks in place to keep that from happening.

Unfortunately, we're not out of the woods yet. The Bush administration, anti-federalist to its core whenever its corporate donors tell it to be, is all set to override the will of the people here in California:

House Resolution 2622 — approved last month by the House Financial Services Committee and supported by the Bush administration and business groups — would bar any financial privacy controls that are tougher than those established by Congress under the Fair Credit Reporting Act.

Needless to say, barring any rules "tougher" than the FCRA is like barring all paper products tougher then a Kleenex. How about if the feds adopt our rules instead?

(The California bill, by the way, does serve to show the occasional virtues of the ballot initiative. Gray Davis vetoed a similar bill last year, and signed it this time only because supporters were threatening to make an initiative out of it. Sometimes a little fear can go a long way.)

WESLEY CLARK UPDATE....In the New York Times today, Michael Janofsky reports that Wesley Clark is going to run:

"It's safe to say he wants to run," said a longtime friend who has had frequent political conversations with General Clark. "But he approaches this like a military man. He wants to know, Can I win the battle? He doesn't want to have a situation where he could embarrass himself, but I'm absolutely certain he wants to run."

...."He is going to do it," said another of General Clark's friends. "He's just going back and forth as to when" to announce.

In an interview from his office in Little Rock, Ark., General Clark said today that he intended to announce his decision whether he would run in two weeks or so.

....A possible date for an announcement is Sept. 19, when General Clark, who has been highly critical of Bush administration foreign policy, is scheduled to deliver a speech at the University of Iowa. The subject is "The American Leadership Role in a Changing World."

The clock is ticking....

WMD? WHAT WMD?....Was the Pentagon duped by all those Iraqi defectors turned over to us by Ahmed Chalabi? Maybe so:

Although senior CIA officials insist defectors were only partly responsible for the intelligence that triggered the decision to invade Iraq last March, other intelligence officials now fear that key portions of the pre-war intelligence may have been flawed.

As evidence, officials say former Iraqi intelligence operatives have confirmed since the war that Saddam's regime sent "double agents" disguised as defectors to the West to plant fabricated intelligence. In other cases, Baghdad apparently tricked legitimate defectors into funneling phony tips about weapons production and storage sites.

....There is growing concern, said another U.S. intelligence official, that "people were just telling us what we wanted to hear."

...."We were prisoners of our own beliefs," said a senior U.S. weapons expert who recently returned from a stint with the survey group. "We said Saddam Hussein was a master of denial and deception. Then when we couldn't find anything, we said that proved it, instead of questioning our own assumptions."

These defectors were a key part of the WMD case made by the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, despite warnings from conventional intelligence sources — i.e., people who actually had significant experience with real intelligence — that Chalabi and the defectors were not reliable. In fact, as we now know, the "dot connecting" done by the OSP was almost completely useless.

This leads to an interesting question: Does the OSP still exist? If so, why?

And one unrelated observation: this may seem like mere hometown boostering, but a few times a month the LA Times produces a really good Iraq-related story like this that nobody else has. Their reporting from Liberia has been first rate too. I know the registration is a pain, but if you really want to follow the news from a variety of sources, you ought to go ahead and register. You're missing out if you don't. (And you can always enter phony information on the registration form, just like I did....)

ARITHMETIC....Here's something that happened to me over a decade ago. It happened so long ago that I've halfway convinced myself it didn't actually happen, but I'm curious to see if it rings any bells with anyone else.

I was chatting with the 3-year-old daughter of some friends, and we got to talking about numbers. Could she count? Oh yes: she got all the way up to 20, which I thought was pretty good for a 3-year-old. Could she add? It turned out that she could. 2+2: no problem. 3+5: sure. 8+6: you betcha. This didn't qualify her as the next Isaac Newton, to be sure, but it still seemed startlingly good for such a young girl.

Then a couple of years later I was talking to her again. Could she count? Sure, she could still count. How about addition? No dice. Oh, she could do 2+2, but that was about it. On the higher numbers she couldn't do a thing. She was a typical pre-kindergartner.

This has puzzled me ever since. Did I imagine it? Or was she genuinely able to do more arithmetic at age 3 than at age 5? Has anyone else ever run into something like this?

WHAT DID YOU DO DURING THE WAR, DADDY?....Mark Kleiman reviews the bad news coming out of Iraq and says:

For now, I'm holding on to my view that war was the least bad option, but I have to admit I'm now holding on by my fingernails. A year from now, I may well remember having been against the whole business from its inception.

I have a feeling he might not be alone.

The real shame is that it's possible — not a certainty, by any means, but possible — that if the president had been someone more patient, more open to accepting facts at odds with his worldview, and more willing to insist on realistic plans and straight talk from his subordinates, that an invasion of Iraq would have worked out for the best.

Instead we got George Bush, a man who considers his eighth grade history class to be all he needs to know about how the world works. Sigh.

LYING LIARS....Are presidents all a bunch of lying sacks? According to Washington Monthly, yes they are.

But what you really want to know is which one is the biggest lying sack, right? Here's a hint: the winner, with a combined score of 3.6, scored worse than his father.

(By the way, they also allow you to rate the presidents yourself. Have fun!)

STILL SOME WORK TO DO....Racism? A thing of the past. And everybody loves Martin Luther King these days, right?

Apparently not quite everybody. South Knox Bubba explains.

PAKISTAN: NUKE SUPPLIER TO THE WORLD....This is comforting news:

Iran has admitted for the first time that it received substantial foreign help in building a secret nuclear facility south of Tehran that is now beginning to enrich uranium....

While Iran has not yet identified the source of the foreign help, evidence collected in Iran by the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency implicates Pakistani companies as suppliers of critical technology and parts, officials familiar with a U.N. investigation of Iran's program said yesterday. Pakistan is believed by many proliferation experts to have passed important nuclear secrets to both Iran and North Korea. Pakistan has denied providing such assistance.

...."The notion that Pakistan wasn't involved is getting less and less tenable," said Henry D. Sokolski, a top nonproliferation official in the Pentagon during the George H.W. Bush administration. "Some might make the claim that this was something that happened in the past. But it wasn't all that long ago."

So, um, what exactly does "not all that long ago mean"? September 10, 2001?

PLEASE FEEL SORRY FOR ME....Poor Gray Davis. I guess at some level you have to feel sorry for the guy if he's reduced to this:

"I have plenty of regrets," Davis said. "But you know leadership is being positive and optimistic and always seeing the glass half full. Even if you have doubts you can't convey those doubts because you can't lead."

Davis added, "I regret deeply that people are out of work. I feel very badly about that. I don't think I caused it, but I know that I get the blame because I'm the leader. I regret deeply that people are paying more for electricity now than they were three or four years ago. But we had a lot of obstacles. I won't run through those again, but at least our lights have stayed on.

"I regret that in some cases, bills I signed didn't turn out as well as I thought they would. But at the time I thought I was doing the right thing. But it didn't work as well. But as a leader, I can't just say I'm full of doubt and regret. Then no one will rally behind you when you say we have to go in this direction."

....Pressed further, he finally said: "I take responsibility. Just blame me. Blame me. I'm captain of the ship."

Translation: yes, I suck, but I don't think I suck quite badly enough to be recalled.

On the other hand, Davis has collected $2.4 million in the past few weeks for the anti-recall campaign, compared to $418,000 for the pro-recall campaign, so I guess we can all dry our tears.

Here are the fundraising numbers for the rest of the wannabes. Note that these numbers include only contributions over $1000:

• Cruz Bustamante: $526,000
  

• Arianna Huffington: $222,000
  

• Tom McClintock: $325,000
  

• Arnold Schwarzenegger: $3.2 million
  

• Peter Ueberroth: $2.4 million
  

The only surprise here (for me, anyway) is Ueberroth's healthy fundraising number. He may not be doing too well in the polls — a mere 7% in the most recent survey — but with money like that he's likely to stay in the race and continue to be a factor.

ARAB DEMOCRACY....Greg at Begging to Differ has an example today of democracy at work in the Arab world. It's real democracy too: the winner won by a vote of 52% to 48%.

Now all we have to do is get them to expand the concept a bit.

YEP, THAT'S HOW WE DO IT....Kieran Healy says he's a sociologist, but apparently he knows a bit about high tech marketing too....

CONFERENCE ATTENDING ADVICE....Dan Drezner offers some advice today on attending political science conferences, and then asks:

Does this apply to non-poli sci conferences?--ed. My hunch is yes, but having never attended other ones, I won't swear to it.

Well, I've attended plenty of tech conferences and I'd say his advice holds up pretty well. The main change I'd make is to move his point #5 up to #1 and then bold it and put it in italics.

Oh, and on point #2, I'd say just the opposite: drink lots of fluids so that you have to go to the bathroom frequently. At least it gets you off the floor once in a while.

So, um, anyway, it's true that I never thought much of all those tech conferences I had to go to. How could you tell?

PAYING FOR IRAQ....Donald Rumsfeld may be sticking to his story that we don't need more troops in Iraq, but Paul Bremer says we sure do need more money:

Iraq will need "several tens of billions" of dollars from abroad in the next year to rebuild its rickety infrastructure and revive its moribund economy, and American taxpayers and foreign governments will be asked to contribute substantial sums, U.S. occupation coordinator L. Paul Bremer said yesterday.

....A State Department official said the Bush administration is preparing to seek a "huge" supplemental spending bill from Congress. Administration sources also said the U.S.-controlled Coalition Provisional Authority is running so low on funds that the White House is considering seeking an emergency infusion next month to cover the organization's bills.

I note that there's no mention of exactly how we're planning to get foreign governments to chip in for this enterprise. Time to get out the checkbook credit card.

POSTWAR IRAQ....Max Sawicky has taken a pledge to "avoid trivia, partisan invective, and inter-blog backbiting." What's more, he says, "I really mean it."

Sure, Max. My guess is that he cracks before the month is up. The rest of you can record your guesses in comments.

All of which is neither here nor there, really, except to say that while the New Max™ may be serious, nonpartisan, and sober, he's also now a bit more circuitous than us loyal readers are used to. I was puzzled about what prompted this post, for example — a lesson in always following links, I suppose, or else a lesson in not writing posts that depend on following links in order to make sense — until I read Fred Hiatt's column in the Washington Post this afternoon. He's talking about Howard Dean's views on the Iraqi occupation:

"Now that we're there, we're stuck," he said. Bush took an "enormous risk" that through war the United States could replace Saddam Hussein and the "small danger" he presented to the United States with something better and safer. The gamble was "foolish" and "wrong." But whoever will be elected in 2004 has to live with it. "We have no choice. It's a matter of national security. If we leave and we don't get a democracy in Iraq, the result is very significant danger to the United States."

Max suggests that this makes no sense. If it wasn't worth it to go to war in the first place, why is it worth it to continue the occupation? You're either opposed to the whole neocon nation-building agenda or you're not.

This is something worth writing more about, but for now I just want to point out that Dean's position is hardly unreasonable. You might, for example, think that shoring up the foundation of a house is not worth the cost or the risk, but once the shoring is in place and the house is resting on it, you'd better not take it out. The risk of withdrawl is dramatically higher than the risk of leaving things alone in the first place.

In the same way, opposing the original invasion of Iraq probably posed only minor dangers. Our freedom of action would have remained, and we could have removed Saddam from power later if he ever became a serious threat. However, now that we've removed the Iraqi government and committed the U.S. to rebuilding the country, the danger of pulling out is arguably quite a bit greater. For starters, it would leave a vacuum that might very well be filled by a regime even more dangerous than Saddam Hussein's.

There are some good and serious arguments to be made on both sides of this question. But to suggest that the rationale for a candidacy like Dean's "nearly crumbles" unless he agrees to bug out of Iraq is sophistry. Fair or not, he has to play the hand he's dealt, and the reason to vote for him — as with any candidate — is if you think his overall judgment going forward will be better than Bush's.

Of course, that's a bit of a low bar, isn't it?

VALERIE PLAME UPDATE....Who was it that outed Joseph Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, as a CIA agent? Robert Novak said only that it was two "senior administration officials," but Joseph Wilson himself hasn't pointed a specific finger.

Until now. I didn't notice the significance of this last week (sorry, Natasha!), but last night Mark Kleiman linked to Pacific Views, which has a snippet from a public panel in Washington last Thursday in which Wilson participated. Here's what he said:

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Assuming what Robert Novak said about your wife was true....can we expect the FBI to give a complete unhindered investigation into that?

WILSON: [Long statement in which he says, basically, they're professionals and will do a professional investigation. Then:] At the end of the day, it's of keen interest to me to see whether or not we can get Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs. And trust me, when I use that name, I measure my words.

"Senior administration official" is a term of art, and Karl Rove is certainly a member of that elite group. Will the FBI be knocking on his door soon?

NOTE: Wilson's quote has been corrected fom Natasha's handwritten notes via a video of the event here.

WAR! WAR! WAR!....Noted gay marriage expert Stanley Kurtz turns his eyes away from the bedroom and opines today on what we can expect from this week's negotiations with North Korea. He says there are only three options:

We can try to pressure the Chinese to force regime change, but the Chinese will not act unless they are convinced that America will otherwise go to war with North Korea. We can interdict North Korean shipping and trade in hopes of reducing their exports of nuclear materials. But...the interdiction itself, if it is reasonably effective, may lead to war. Finally, we can go to war with North Korea.

Translation: We can threaten to go to war, we can goad the other guys into war, or we can simply go to war.

Well, hell, if those are the only options, why screw around? Let's just go to war, and the sooner the better.

Of course, if building nuclear bombs is sufficient reason for the United States to go to war, then we'd better invade Iran while we're at it. And since Pakistan's government isn't likely to be friendly toward us forever we might as well clobber them too. No point in leaving this mess for our grandchildren to clean up.

Question for Stanley: should these three invasions be done conventionally? With what troops? Or should we minimize American casualties by first softening up Pyongyang, Tehran, and Islamabad with nuclear strikes?

Just curious.

BAD MANAGEMENT AT NASA?....The final report on the space shuttle tragedy was released today. Here's the Washington Post headline:

NASA Culture Blamed For Columbia Disaster

Jeez, I could swear that this is exactly the same headline used for stories about the Challenger explosion two decades ago. Sure enough, it is:

In a report that cited disturbing "echoes" of the shuttle Challenger disaster of 1986, investigators said, "NASA's organizational culture had as much to do with this accident as foam did."

....At a news conference, some of the board members referred to the Challenger disaster and subsequent calls for increased emphasis on safety at the space agency. "It didn't get fixed last time," said Steven B. Wallace. "There has to be a different approach."

...."These repeating patterns mean that flawed practices embedded in NASA's organizational system continued for 20 years and made substantial contributions to both accidents."

This has now happened twice, and both times the investigating commissions have come to the same conclusion, so obviously there's something to this. And yet, there's a tiny niggle in the back of my mind that can't help but wonder if NASA is really any worse than any other large bureaucracy, the main difference being that their failures are considerably more spectacular than most. After all, how many organizations wouldn't end up looking awfully bad if they were put under the same kind of microscope as NASA? How about yours?

In the end, maybe space flight is just inherently dangerous, and we should get used to the fact that we're simply not willing to spend the kind of money it would take to avoid disasters altogether. As Maj. Gen. John Barry said, "NASA had conflicting goals of cost, schedule and safety," but this is hardly something unique to the space program. It's just a fact of life.

I'm just musing here, not really expressing any opinions. But I'd sure want to know more about how NASA's record stacks up against similar organizations before I went too far overboard in joining the piling on. Has anyone ever done such a comparison?

BBC BASHING UPDATE....Instapundit happily quotes the Guardian today, which suggests that today's testimony in the Hutton inquiry shows that BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan was full of shit:

The claim that Iraq could deploy "chemical and biological munitions" within 45 minutes was made in a classified email issued by a member of the joint intelligence committee (JIC) - but with both sender and recipient blacked out for security reasons.

....That revelation, presented on day nine of the inquiry by Sir John Scarlett, the chairman of the JIC, appears to blow out of the water the original suggestion by BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan that the claim was made up.

Now think what you will about Gilligan and the BBC, but this is just plain wrong. Here's what Gilligan said on BBC radio on May 29:

The information which I'm told was dubious did come from the information agencies, but they were unhappy about it because they didn't think it should have been in there. They thought it was not corroborated sufficiently and they actually thought it was wrong. They thought the informant concerned had got it wrong.

And here's what he said in his Mail on Sunday column a couple of days later:

I asked [David Kelly] how this transformation happened. The answer was a single word, 'Campbell.'

What? Campbell made it up? 'No, it was real information. But it was included against our wishes because it wasn't reliable.'

How much clearer can things be? Gilligan never suggested the claim was "made up," and he specifically acknowledged that it came from British intelligence. And despite the fact that Scarlett is swearing up and down that nobody — nobody! — raised any objections to the material in the dossier, we already know that's not true. The Hutton inquiry found out on its very first day that two senior intelligence officers had grave doubts about some of the material in the dossier. What's more, the 45-minute claim was single sourced, it was added at the last minute, and it turned out to be completely wrong.

Crikey.

TAX CUTS WITHOUT DEFICITS....Brad DeLong links today to an article by Martin Feldstein in which he tries to outline ways to stimulate the economy without increasing the long-term deficit. If I've read it correctly, this is the relevant sentence:

[A] temporary rise in the tax depreciation rate and the resulting tax cut are automatically offset by lower depreciation and therefore high tax liabilities in later years.

OK, I'll buy that. Allow United Airlines to depreciate 80% of the cost of their new airplanes right away and it amounts to a stimulative tax cut. But if they depreciate 80% now, they'll have only 20% to depreciate in the future and that automatically leads to higher taxes in years to come. Very good.

But are there other similar proposals that have this kind of automatic balance built in? Feldstein mentions some revenue-neutral tax jiggering that could be stimulative, but that sounds like fairly ordinary tax policy stuff to me.

The reason I ask is that I often read articles where the author says "We need to do X" and then gives an example of how to accomplish this — an example that's frequently very clever indeed. Unfortunately, it often turns out that the example given is the only one the author knows about, and it's obviously not enough to solve the entire problem. In this case, to create a broad-based stimulus package that doesn't lead to persistent deficits we'll need more ideas than just the depreciation proposal. What are they?

On a slightly different topic, Feldstein also mentions something else that I guess I knew but had never quite put my arms around:

The current relatively low rates of inflation and correspondingly low nominal interest rates restrict the ability of central banks to stimulate the economy.

I guess this is yet another reason that mildly high inflation is a good thing. If inflation is running at, say, 4%, then an interest rate of 1% translates into a real rate of -3%. Highly stimulative. But if inflation is running at 2%, then the real interest rate is only -1%. Nice, but maybe not enough to really kickstart the economy.

It's funny, but after all those years of worrying about inflation, it really does seem as if there are an awful lot of good reasons to try and target an inflation rate of 4% or perhaps even a bit higher. The question is, once you let the 4% genie out of the bottle, can you keep it under control? There's the rub....

FUNNY BOOKS....I'm not sure why this was on my mind today, but I got to thinking about funny books. I think the funniest book I read in the 90s was Al Franken's Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot, and my pick for the 70s would be Hunter Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

I'm pretty hard pressed to remember a really funny book from the 80s, though. Maybe it just wasn't a funny decade.

At any rate, I like funny books. Who doesn't? So how about some suggestions? Not amusing books, or wry books, or books that gave you a good chuckle. Real laugh-out-loud books that can still make you giggle just by thinking about them.

Let's hear it.

MUSING ABOUT CLARK....Josh Marshall examines the possibility of a Wesley Clark candidacy and tries to answer the question, "Why?" I think he gets it about right:

By the normal laws of political gravitation, [Howard] Dean's sustained surge should have forced a coalescence around one of the several more-centrist-minded establishment candidates....But that clearly has not happened.

....Now, why hasn't that coalescence taken place? I think the answer is elementary. None of the current candidates has passed the audition for the job. Lieberman's campaign is generally believed to be moribund (and I like the guy). Edwards has gone absolutely nowhere. Gephardt has bet everything on getting the support of organized labor. But if he gets it, it'll basically be a mercy ... well, I don't want to be off-color. But, you know what I mean. Kerry is basically the establishment front-runner at the moment. But it's an extremely anemic frontrunnerdom. He's basically the front-runner by default because all the other potential frontrunners who haven't caught fire are doing even worse than he is.

Compare this to Eric Alterman's impression of John Kerry from a recent fund-raising breakfast:

I came away with the strong impression that he’d make a first-rate president in every way but I have trouble imagining how he’s going to get there. He is articulate, intelligent, well-prepared, thoughtful and has some really good ideas, particularly on health care. But he has zero personal charisma and jes’ folks communication skills, which Bush has in abundance.

Now, I think you can make a pretty good case that it's way too early for an "Anybody But Dean" campaign to start up. That kind of thing doesn't usually get rolling until someone's won at least a primary or two.

But the rest of it rings true. The hard truth, I think, is that Lieberman and Gephardt are known quantities who have lost before and don't inspire confidence that they won't lose again if they go up against Bush. Kerry probably deserves better, but fairly or not he comes across as wobbly and a bit too self-conscious about fine-tuning his positions. Edwards has charisma, but just hasn't caught on — I'm not entirely sure why.

So if you're a pro, what choice do you have? Either Dean — whose national security weakness scares a lot of people — or a candidate who seems unlikely to catch on with the electorate. It's Hobson's choice.

Enter Clark, the Arnold Schwarzenegger of the national scene. He's a bit of a cipher, which means he doesn't have any serious political baggage. He's got charisma and can compete well with Bush in reaching out to Middle America. He's apparently got good liberal cred. And he's got the contacts to put together a pretty good national security team.

Is it too late? I don't think so. Sure, the other candidates have been raising money for a while, but if Clark entered the race he'd get a lot of good press for free, especially since the Dean story has now been done and the press corps is looking for something new to write about. If he could convert that into some decent poll numbers he'd start to attract both money and endorsements. It's doable.

And there's one more thing. As we all know, Clark is only the second most famous Arkansas native on the national scene, and the real wildcard is whether he could wangle the endorsement of the #1 Arkansan. If he could manage that, I'll bet the nomination would be his in a walk.

GEORGY FOR GOVERNOR....Expanding the limits of blogs once again, Priorities & Frivolities interviews one of the, um, longshot candidates for governor, Georgy Russell. Money quote:

It's an interesting commentary that the media chose to focus on the thong, when there was so much else on [my] website! They put me between Mary Carey and Angelyne in Newsweek. :-)

Gotta work on those soundbites, Georgy!

Like Arnold, it turns out Georgy didn't vote in the last election. I smell a scandal here....

PROTECTING YOU FROM YOURSELF....Security expert Bruce Schneier recently sent me a copy of his new book, Beyond Fear, no doubt hoping I would review it on my site and thus send it rocketing onto the bestseller list. No luck on that, since I haven't finished it yet, but I just have to share this paragraph about cell phone "security":

Nokia spends about a hundred times more money per phone on battery security than on communications security. The security system senses when a consumer uses a third-party battery and switches the phone into maximum power-consumption mode; the point is to ensure that consumers buy only Nokia batteries.

Don't you just love that? And what kind of pseudoscience doubletalk do you suppose they trot out to explain this policy?

Anyway, I don't know yet if the book is any good, but this anecdote itself has been worth the price.

UPDATE: OK, one more excerpt:

Did you ever wonder why tweezers were confiscated at security checkpoints, but matches and cigarette lighters — actual combustible materials — were not? It's because the tobacco lobby interjected its agenda into the negotiations by pressuring the government. If the tweezers lobby had more power, I'm sure they would have been allowed on board, as well.

I don't know about the book as a whole yet, but the anecdotes are pretty good so far.

FIXING CALIFORNIA....California is a mess. The LA Times ran a pretty sensible editorial on Sunday suggesting some needed changes, but unfortunately it didn't pander enough to dreamland