TAXING CAPITAL....Max Sawicky ripped off his blogging cape today and adopted the guise of mild mannered serious economist in order to hold a debate with Tyler Cowen about the recommendations of the president's tax reform panel. Very quickly, though, the debate turned to the subject of capital gains taxes — specifically whether Max was willing to raise his hand and say: "I want to in essence double the real rate of taxation on capital income. I don't think the growth rate will fall." Here's how Tyler put it:

Max, are you willing to raise your hand and say: "I want to in essence double the real rate of taxation on capital income. I don't think the growth rate will fall"?

Sadly, the results were unedifying. I demand a rematch.

Basically, I'm on Max's side: I think taxation of capital should be at roughly the same level as taxation of labor income. However, I believe this mostly for reasons of social justice, and it would certainly be handy to have some rigorous economic evidence to back up my noneconomic instincts on this matter. Something juicy and simple for winning lunchtime debates with conservative friends would be best. Unfortunately, Max punts, saying only, "As you know, empirical research seldom settles arguments."

Tyler then accuses of Max of obscurantism and asserts without evidence that "I am asking you to believe that low rates of capital taxation are good for an economy; this accords with most empirics and with most theory."

Perhaps so. But on a question this messy I have little faith in theory. I'd like to hear more about those empirics. Max makes the point that U.S. tax rates on capital are higher than in most countries, and yet our economy is one of the best performing in the world. What's more, we've had higher rates in the past, and have had booming economies regardless. These are good points.

And yet, surely there is some serious comparative research on this matter? Perhaps a consensus within the economics profession? Or not? Inquiring minds want to know.

WIKIPEDIA....I use Wikipedia a lot, and I've noticed lately that when I Google something the Wikipedia entry is often one of the top four or five results. It's a genuinely valuable resource.

But don't believe everything you read there. John Seigenthaler tells you why.

(Via Cliopatria.)

DON'T BOMB US....In the ever expanding blogosphere, the latest entry is a blog from several Al Jazeera staffers titled, appropriately, "Don't Bomb Us." Here are five things they would like you to know:

1. Al Jazeera was the first Arab station to ever broadcast interviews with Israeli officials.
   

2. Al Jazeera has never broadcast a beheading.
   

3. George W. Bush has recieved approximately 500 hours of airtime, while Bin Laden has received about 5 hours of airtime.
   

4. Over 50 million people across the world watch Al Jazeera.
   

5. The Al Jazeera websites are http://www.aljazeera.net (Arabic) and http://english.aljazeera.net (English). AlJazeera.com, AlJazeerah.info and all other variations have nothing to do with us.
   

For what it's worth, item #4 is really the only one that matters. After all, whatever war it is that we're fighting, it's obvious that it's primarily a war of ideas — and the only way to win that war is via persuasion. Al Jazeera's 50 million viewers are our core audience for our ideas, and bombing their headquarters sure isn't going to do anything to get those viewers on our side.

In any case, "Don't Bomb Us" is your one stop shop for all news about George Bush's alleged desire to reduce Al Jazeera's headquarters to rubble. Check it out.

FOXES AND HEDGEHOGS....In a New Yorker piece put online a few days ago, Louis Menand reviews Philip Tetlock's new book, Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? His conclusion:

People who make prediction their business — people who appear as experts on television, get quoted in newspaper articles, advise governments and businesses, and participate in punditry roundtables — are no better than the rest of us....Tetlock claims that the better known and more frequently quoted they are, the less reliable their guesses about the future are likely to be. The accuracy of an expert’s predictions actually has an inverse relationship to his or her self-confidence, renown, and, beyond a certain point, depth of knowledge. People who follow current events by reading the papers and newsmagazines regularly can guess what is likely to happen about as accurately as the specialists whom the papers quote.

Still, some people score higher when it comes to predicting the political future and some score lower. What accounts for the difference? According to Tetlock:

Low scorers look like hedgehogs: thinkers who “know one big thing,” aggressively extend the explanatory reach of that one big thing into new domains, display bristly impatience with those who “do not get it,” and express considerable confidence that they are already pretty proficient forecasters, at least in the long term. High scorers look like foxes: thinkers who know many small things (tricks of their trade), are skeptical of grand schemes, see explanation and prediction not as deductive exercises but rather as exercises in flexible “ad hocery” that require stitching together diverse sources of information, and are rather diffident about their own forecasting prowess.

Menand points out that Tetlock's hedgehogs are wrong more often than his foxes, but that's not the end of the story. "The upside of being a hedgehog, though, is that when you’re right you can be really and spectacularly right." Which explains why Time magazine named Power Line their blog of the year for 2004.

So there's your lesson for the day. Avoid ideologues on both left and right. Stay away from people who have unshakable faith in their convictions. The more confident someone sounds, the more likely they are to be wrong. Steer clear of cranks with big theories. Pay more attention to statistical and actuarial formulas than to expert opinion. And ignore the folks at Power Line. They aren't due to be right again for a long time.

THE MARCH OF THE BLOGOSPHERE....Instapundit on politicians and the hawkosphere:

THE WHITE HOUSE has released its Iraq strategy document. I think it owes a bit of a debt to Steven Den Beste.

Jim Henley on the same subject:

I felt safer when the freelance shills took their cues from our rulers than I do now that our rulers have started taking their cues from the shills.

I think I'm with Henley on this. Though only barely.

OUR BOOMING ECONOMY....Ann Althouse takes the New York Times to task for suggesting that there might be a gray lining to today's news of healthy economic growth. Her commenters heartily agree. The droopy old Times is just trying to bring us all down even though the economy is obviously in dandy shape.

But that depends on who you are, doesn't it? Here's the LA Times on Tuesday:

For the second year in a row, wage and salary increases will average around 3.5% in 2006, several compensation experts predict.

The good news is that the average paycheck — in theory — should keep up with inflation, which is expected to be about 3% next year.

The bad news is that most employees will get less than 3.5%. That average is driven up by very high raises — as much as 9% — expected in a few fields with acute staff shortages, including nursing and financial services.

"If you're not in a high-demand position or covered by a union agreement, maybe you'll get 1% or 2%, if anything at all," said John Putzier, president of FirStep Inc., a Pittsburgh-area human resources firm. "It's going to be spotty."

So in an economy that's allegedly in terrific shape, workers will see an average pay increase that....barely matches inflation. And that's the good news! Most of them will actually see a decrease compared to inflation. Hooray!

A good economy is one in which lots of people make lots of money, not one in which Donald Trump's investments do better than last year. Guess which kind of economy we're in right now?

RUMSFELD AND PACE....Via Tim Dunlop, Dana Milbank of the Washington Post reports on a recent exchange between Donald Rumsfeld and General Peter Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The subject was torture:

When UPI's Pam Hess asked about torture by Iraqi authorities, Rumsfeld replied that "obviously, the United States does not have a responsibility" other than to voice disapproval.

But Pace had a different view. "It is the absolute responsibility of every U.S. service member, if they see inhumane treatment being conducted, to intervene, to stop it," the general said.

Rumsfeld interjected: "I don't think you mean they have an obligation to physically stop it; it's to report it."

But Pace meant what he said. "If they are physically present when inhumane treatment is taking place, sir, they have an obligation to try to stop it," he said, firmly.

This is why Abu Ghraib happened: because of people like Rumsfeld, who insisted on cutting corners, using clever circumlocutions in place of plain language, and refusing to take a firm stand on doing the right thing. Pace is having none of it, and good for him.

The military may not always live up to its ideals, but at least they insist on having some. Rumsfeld should have been fired long ago for not understanding this.

FEAR OF FLYING....Via Talkleft, we learn that Air New Zealand and Qantas have official policies that ban men from occupying seats next to unaccompanied children.

Question: who should be more offended by this? Men or women?

PLANNING FOR WITHDRAWAL....With all the scuttlebutt pointing toward a presidential announcement that we'll start withdrawing troops from Iraq soon, Fred Kaplan asks the right questions:

President Bush is going to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq. That no longer seems in doubt. The question is: How does he plan to do it? Which troops will come out first? How quickly? Where will they go? Under what circumstances will they be put back in? Which troops will remain, and what will they do?

....More to the point, does the president have a plan for all this?

If Bush is serious about starting a phased withdrawal from Iraq, then good for him whatever his reasons. But given the history of this war, I hope his political team is kept far, far away from both the planning and the timing of the withdrawal. For that matter, I hope Donald Rumsfeld keeps his opinions to himself too. This time, let's set some serious military goals and then let the military figure out the rest, midterms be damned. Karl Rove and his pollsters should not be invited to this party.

SCISSORS ON AIRPLANES....The Washington Post reports that TSA is considering new rules that would allow passengers to carry small knives and scissors on board airplanes. This sounds fine to me, and TSA's reasoning also sounds fine: they want screeners to spend less time searching for scissors and more time looking for explosives, and hardened cockpit doors prevent terrorists from taking over an airplane with small knives anyway.

Still, even though I recognize that reasonable people can disagree about this, surely this assessment from Corey Caldwell, spokeswoman for the Association of Flight Attendants, is a wee bit over the top:

When weapons are allowed back on board an aircraft, the pilots will be able to land the plane safety but the aisles will be running with blood.

Well, no, they won't. Without the possibility of hijacking the airplane, there's not much point in threatening passengers, is there? And in a post-9/11 world, a pair of scissors or a small knife really won't get you very far anyway.

Let's leave the histrionic fearmongering to local new anchors, where it belongs, shall we?

THE TIMES AND THE LAPTOP....A couple of weeks ago the New York Times ran an article about a stolen Iranian laptop that it said contained "more than a thousand pages of Iranian computer simulations and accounts of experiments [that] showed a long effort to design a nuclear warhead." Surprisingly, though, readers learned very little about what was on the laptop. In fact, in a 3,000 word article there were exactly three actual facts about the contents of the laptop, summarized in a single paragraph:

One major revelation was work done on a sphere of detonators meant to ignite conventional explosives that, in turn, compress the radioactive fuel to start the nuclear chain reaction. The documents also wrestled with how to position a heavy ball — presumably of nuclear fuel — inside the warhead to ensure stability and accuracy during the fiery plunge toward a target. And a bomb exploding at a height of about 2,000 feet, as envisioned by the documents, suggests a nuclear weapon, analysts said, since that altitude is unsuitable for conventional, chemical or biological arms.

Question: was it accurate to refer to this as a "nuclear warhead," as the Times article does repeatedly? Or should the reporters have said that Iranian missile engineers appeared to be "modifying or designing a reentry vehicle able to hold a spherical object that looks to be a nuclear warhead"?

David Albright of the Institute for Science and International Security says that this is not merely a trivial distinction. And there's more. In a series of emails to the Times, he argues that the story was misleading in at least three different ways:

• To a layman, "nuclear warhead" is loaded language that implies an actual design for an atomic bomb. In fact, the laptop contains no evidence of a bomb program.

• Using this language obscures the importance of an obvious question: does Iran really have a bomb program, or did these plans come from an overenthusiastic missile engineering team unconnected with the political leadership of the country? As it stands, the Times story mentions this possibility only in passing.

• The Times article quotes no one from outside the Bush administration who is skeptical about whether the information on the laptop represents a genuinely sophisticated program, despite the fact that a number of technical reservations exist. See the email exchange for more. (The Times quotes several people who question whether the entire thing was faked or not, but no one who questions the laptop's information on a technical basis.)
  

Taken together, all of these things serve to paint a grimmer picture than the evidence supports, and via email, Albright says the New York Times, of all papers, should have taken extra pains not to hype intelligence from the Bush administration:

The NYT should have not used loaded language in order to avoid hyping the Iranian nuclear threat. Such language belies the Times’ commitment to be more careful about its reporting and the use of its sources after its faulty reporting on Iraq’s presumed reconstituted nuclear weapon program.

....I do not want to give the impression that I am trying to downplay the significance of the information on the laptop. I believe this information is very troubling and should be fully assessed and investigated. However, I believe that the best party to conduct an independent, credible investigation is the IAEA. It has started its own investigation. However, the IAEA will need more time, and it will need more information declassified by the United States.

I think Albright has a good point. Unfortunately, given the Bush administration's track record, there's good reason to be skeptical that they're telling us the whole story here. The Times should have been more careful.

BOB WOODWARD'S REPORTING....Franklin Foer passes on the following anecdote about Bob Woodward's reporting style:

This is what I'm reliably told: Colin Powell has been aggressively jockeying to manage Woodward's current book project on the Iraq War. He has been especially irate that Cheney — the Newman to his Seinfeld — has managed to successfully outmaneuver him by currying favor with Woodward. But has Cheney really secured Woodward's ear? Or is he just making it seem that way, so that Powell preemptively gives him all the goods? We can be sure that Woodward's footnotes will never tell.

And thus the great mystery of Bob Woodward. After all, the whipsawing technique he uses is itself morally neutral. It can be a force for good or a force for evil. But which is it in Woodward's case?

BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS...Last week I met Henry Farrell during a trip to Washington DC and learned, among other things, what an IPA is, drinkwise. (India Pale Ale, for those of you as ignorant of alcohol as I am.) Today he proves his worth again by praising Charles Palliser's "wonderful historical novel," The Quincunx. This comes as a passing reference in a long colloquium about the even greater wonderfulness of Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, which I haven't read. Sounds like they'd both be great Christmas presents.

Just thought I'd pass that along, this being the shopping season and all.

CONGRESSIONAL CORRUPTION....Jeffrey Birnbaum has a story in today's Washington Post about the growing wave of corruption in Congress. Over at Josh's place, reader TC cries foul.

TC's complaint is that Birnbaum makes the recent corruption scandals sound like a bipartisan affair, when in fact it's almost exclusively Republicans who are under investigation. However, although TC is technically acurate, I think his criticism of Birnbaum is fundamentally misplaced.

Here's the thing: the evidence indicates that Birnbaum is basically right: most voters don't pay much attention to politics and don't understand that it's mostly Republicans who have been gaming the system in unprecedented numbers in recent years. Hell, most people don't even know that Republicans control Congress. [UPDATE: Apparently that's not true. See below.]

Now, it's fair to say that this is partly due to reporting like Birnbaum's in the first place, but it's naive to think that's the whole story. Take a look at this instructive chart from the Wall Street Journal, which shows approval ratings for various people and institutions over the past four years:

Sure, George Bush's approval ratings are at record lows, and Dick Cheney's are even lower. But guess what? The lowest approval ratings of all are for Democrats in Congress.

Unfair? Sure. The fault of pathologically "balanced" reporters like Birnbaum? Partially. But if you play in the big leagues, you have to learn to play in the big leagues. If Democrats want to get credit for being a cleaner party than Republicans, they need to make some splashy proposals that make their differences crystal clear.

A couple of months ago I suggested a list of items Democrats could all sign up to on the subject of congressional "accountability," but that's a dry subject. Norm Ornstein is interested, but probably not too many other people. So maybe instead the focus should be purely on graft and corruption and K Street largesse. But not just criticism of Republicans. It has to be accompanied by a set of firm pledges from Democrats about how they're going to clean the place up. And the pledges better be simple and compelling.

If Dems don't do this, they have no one to blame but themselves. Birnbaum isn't the true villain here. He's merely a symptom of how the world works.

UPDATE: Hmmm. According to the latest polling from Democracy Corps, 81% of Americans correctly identified Republicans as the party in control of Congress. It seems like I've seen much lower figures for this before, but I guess I was imagining it. Another factoid bites the dust.

SHIITE DEATH SQUADS?....It looks like everyone is now reporting that Iraq's security forces have been heavily infiltrated by Shiite "death squads" that are carrying out hundreds of executions in predominantly Sunni neighborhoods. The New York Times version of this story is here. A longer and more detailed Los Angeles Times story is here. Here's an excerpt from the LAT story by Solomon Moore:

An Aug. 18 police operations report addressed to Interior Minister Bayan Jabr, who has ties to the [Shiite] Badr militia, listed the names of 14 Sunni Arab men arrested during a predawn sweep in the Baghdad neighborhood of Iskaan.

Six weeks later, their bodies were discovered near the Iranian border, badly decomposed. All of the corpses showed signs of torture, and each still wore handcuffs and had been shot three times in the back of the head, Baghdad morgue officials said.

A Western diplomat in Baghdad who spoke on condition of anonymity said that "we hear repeated stories" of police raids on houses and indiscriminate arrests of Iraqi civilians — many of them Sunni Arab Muslims.

"And they disappear, but the bodies show up maybe two or three governorates away," the diplomat said.

As you may recall, Knight Ridder's Tom Lasseter reported the same thing over a month ago, suggesting that crack units within the Iraqi army have essentially become Shiite militias that take orders from local Shiite clerics. In other words, "infiltrated" probably isn't really the right word. It's been the plan all along.

LATEST PLAME GOSSIP....As we all know, Karl Rove's lawyer, Robert Luskin, had a meeting with Patrick Fitzgerald shortly before Fitzgerald announced the indictment of Scooter Libby last month. Scuttlebutt at the time suggested that Fitzgerald had been ready to indict Rove, but got information at the meeting that made him hold off.

What kind of information? Nobody knows, but apparently it had something to do with a conversation between Luskin and Time reporter Viveca Novak (no relation to Robert Novak). From the Washington Post:

It's not clear why Luskin believes [Viveca] Novak's deposition could help Rove, President Bush's deputy chief of staff, who remains under investigation into whether he provided false statements in the case. But a person familiar with the matter said Luskin cited his conversations with Novak in persuading Fitzgerald not to indict Rove in late October.

....It could not be learned what Luskin and Novak, who are friends, discussed that could help prove Rove did nothing illegal in the leaking of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity to reporters and the subsequent investigation of it.

In other news, Raw Story reports that Fitzgerald has reinterviewed Rove's assistant, Susan Ralston, who testified last August about Rove's conversation with Time reporter Matt Cooper, in which Plame was discussed. (This is the famous conversation that ended with Rove murmuring, "I've already said too much.") Ralston didn't log the call, and told Fitzgerald it was because it came in through the White House switchboard:

But those close to the probe tell Raw Story that Fitzgerald obtained documentary evidence showing that other unrelated calls transferred to Rove’s office by the switchboard were logged. He then called Ralston back to testify.

Earlier this month, attorneys say Fitzgerald received additional testimony from Ralston — who said that Rove instructed her not to log a phone call Rove had with Cooper about Plame in July 2003.

Ralston also provided Fitzgerald with more information and “clarification” about several telephone calls Rove allegedly made to a few reporters, including syndicated columnist Robert Novak, the lawyers said.

I'm not even going to try to speculate about what all this means. There's just not enough data. But one thing is clear: whatever's going on here, it sure doesn't appear to be good news for Karl Rove.

REPEAT ABORTIONS....Garance Franke-Ruta writes in the New Republic about Amy, a woman who had an abortion at age 18 and then had a second one at age 24:

"Oh well, that's over," she recalls thinking immediately afterward. "And then I didn't think about it very much." She didn't talk about it very much either, and, even today, she is loath to reveal it. "I rarely talk about the second abortion because of society's judgments about women who have a second abortion," she says. "It's like, 'Oh, you're allowed one mistake.'" But not two.

....Despite its prevalence, repeat abortion is the least discussed or researched aspect of abortion in the United States....Yet the reluctance of liberals and pro-choice advocates to shine a spotlight on the troubling repeat-abortion phenomenon has obscured a growing public health issue. Studies suggest that women having repeat abortions as compared with those having first-time abortions are more likely to be minorities, poor, and victims of sexual abuse — in short, among society's most vulnerable.

It doesn't really surprise me to learn that women who get multiple abortions tend on average to be the poor and vulnerable. As Garance notes, there have been tremendous advances in contraception over the past three decades, and it's not surprising that those at the bottom of society's heap are the least likely to take advantage of them.

But I was surprised to learn that the subject of repeat abortions is apparently so taboo that NARAL refuses to even comment on it. Garance's main policy proposal is that "post-abortion care and counseling services ought to be made available domestically as a routine part of women's health care," and this sure doesn't sound very controversial to me. Is NARAL really unwilling to even discuss this in public?

Liberals are in favor of safe access to abortion, but surely we're also in favor of helping people get control over their lives too. If the evidence shows that post-abortion counseling helps poor women, cuts down on sexual abuse, and reduces the rate of abortion, what's not to like?

IS PRESIDENT BUSH CLUELESS?....Over at Obsidian Wings, Hilzoy notes that conservative bloggers were predictably scathing toward Joe Biden's op-ed in the Washington Post calling for "specific goals and a timetable for achieving each one" in Iraq. Comments ranged from "clueless" to "fundamentally wrong" to bits of random kindergarten name calling (from Hugh, natch).

But then, surprise! The White House released a statement saying that "Sen. Biden described a plan remarkably similar to the administration's plan to fight and win the war on terror."

Does this mean that President Bush is also "clueless" and "fundamentally wrong"? There is a strange silence from the conservo-sphere. Just goes to show how dangerous it is when you blog before you know the talking points.

READING BOOKS....In the LA Times today, Naomi Baron, a linguistics professor at American University, complains that Google and the internet are undermining the printed word:

Much as automobiles discourage walking, with undeniable consequences for our health and girth, textual snippets-on-demand threaten our need for the larger works from which they are extracted. Why read "Bowling Alone" — or even the shorter article upon which it builds — when you can lift a page that contains some key words?

....Will effortless random access erode our collective respect for writing as a logical, linear process? Such respect matters because it undergirds modern education, which is premised on thought, evidence and analysis rather than memorization and dogma. Reading successive pages and chapters teaches us how to follow a sustained line of reasoning.

Now, Baron clearly gets at least one thing wrong in her op-ed, when she suggests that old-school library stack browsing promoted serendipity while "today's snippet literacy efficiently keeps us on the straight and narrow path, with little opportunity for fortuitous side trips." No one who has browsed the internet and followed a long string of hyperlinks just out of curiosity can possibly believe this.

And yet, I suspect that Baron's main point has something to it. As Jeanne d'Arc writes today:

I find that the more I read online, the less I read off. I don't think it's even a matter of using up my reading time. It actually destroys brain cells or something, because if I've been doing too much online reading, I lose the patience for following a sustained or subtle argument, or reading a complex novel.

The same is true of me. It's not just that I spend less time reading books, it's that I find my mind wandering when I do read. After a few paragraphs, or maybe a page or two, I'll run into a sentence that suddenly reminds me of something — and then spend the next minute staring into space thinking of something entirely unrelated to the book at hand. Eventually I snap back, but obviously this behavior reduces both my reading rate and my reading comprehension.

Is this really because of blogging? I don't know for sure, but it feels like it's related to blogging, and it's a real problem. As wonderful as blogs, magazines, and newspapers are, there's simply no way to really learn about a subject except by reading a book — and the less I do that, the less I understand about the broader, deeper issues that go beyond merely the outrage of the day.

Then again, maybe it's just Jeanne and me. Anyone else feel this way?

ART BLOGGING....This is kind of cool. Kriston Capps is now the official blogger for the Smithsonian American Art Museum's new blog, Eye Level:

So what's this museum blog all about? Here's the short version: Eye Level investigates American art—its history, evolution, and currents. The hope is that this blog hosts a vital conversation among artists, curators, collectors, and enthusiasts on a broad range of subjects related to American art.

Not bad for a UT fan! Check it out.

COLUMN FODDER....From The Corner:

CLARK NEWS NETWORK [Jonah Goldberg]
CNN is giving Ramsey Clark a lot of play from Baghdad. It annoys me.

It annoys you? Hell, Ramsey Clark is a godsend for conservative writers looking for column fodder. I'm the one who ought to be annoyed.

SHARON AND BARGHOUTI....Over at Democracy Arsenal, Suzanne Nossel reminds us that Iraq isn't the only place in the Middle East that has an election coming up. On January 25, Palestinians will vote in parliamentary elections, and the winner may be the late Yasser Arafat's Fatah party:

In an interesting wrinkle, in Fatah primaries held in Ramallah over the weekend, the overwhelming victor was Marwan Barghouti, a long-time leader who is currently serving five successive life sentences in an Israeli prison for his involvement in terrorist activities.

The results have fueled speculation that a (long-discussed) pardon for Barghouti may be in the works. Barghouti, 46 years old, represents a new generation of Palestinian leadership who commands the loyalty of radical youths to a degree Abbas never has. A former leader of the notorious al Aqsa Martyr's Brigade, Barghouti has "street cred" among Palestinians who believe they have no choice but to stand up to Israel through any means possible.

Suzanne speculates that this has the potential to be a "Nixon in China" moment: "For both the Israelis and the Palestinians it's become clear that at this point, with hopes dashed so often, only tested, trusted hard-liners will be given a mandate to compromise." Perhaps Sharon on one side and Barghouti on the other could be the pair of Nixons to make this happen?

I don't have any real expertise of my own to bring to bear here, but it's an interesting thought. Stay tuned.

IDENTITY THEFT....Since I wrote an article about identity theft in the latest issue of the Monthly, I was interested in Saturday's Wall Street Journal article about the latest attempts to pass identity theft legislation. It turns out that even in the wake of the ChoicePoint debacle earlier this year, in which personal data on 145,000 people was sold to criminals, Congress still can't manage to pass even weak new regulations:

Many privacy advocates, casting a suspicious eye on companies that fail to secure personal information, want legislative language in federal legislation similar to the seminal California law that requires disclosure of security lapses regardless of the potential for harm. Businesses say that poses too big a cost burden for them and say notification should be limited to breaches that threaten a "significant risk" of identity theft.

Companies say notification is expensive — and so is replacing debit and credit cards. America's Community Bankers, a trade association representing community banks, told a House panel this month that legislation should require those responsible for a data breach to pick up the tab for notifying customers and reissuing cards. It figured that reissuing debit or credit cards can cost as much as $15 each.

....The conflict over consumer notification isn't the only one stalling legislation. Three Senate committees are divided over a provision in a bill approved by the Commerce Committee during the summer that would let consumers "freeze" their credit reports, blocking access and preventing criminals from opening new accounts under their names.

Several states already allow consumers to do just that, and proponents view the freeze as a main weapon in the fight against identity theft. But credit bureaus, banks and other financial institutions argue that freezes slow down electronic commerce and hurt consumers when they really do need credit.

This is pathetic. There are some genuinely tricky regulatory issues when it comes to identity theft, but requiring disclosure of lost data is a no-brainer. The fact that the credit industry is fighting even a feeble measure like this just shows how unseriously they take the whole issue of identity theft.

The same is true of credit freezes. Basically, a credit freeze prevents credit reporting agencies from revealing your credit history without first getting your express permission. This makes it nearly impossible for thieves to acquire phony credit cards in your name, since card issuers won't issue new cards without first requesting your credit score from a credit reporting agency. If you've frozen your report, you'll be notified when the request is made and can shut it down immediately.

The downside is that if you apply for new credit, you can't get it until the credit reporting agency has contacted you first. In other words, no more same-day credit. It might take two or three days instead.

That's not much of a downside, is it? In fact, for my money, all credit reports ought to be frozen by default. If you prefer to have your report unfrozen — that is, you're willing to run the risk of ID theft in return for slightly faster approval of your credit applications — then you can unfreeze it.

There's simply no reason for consumers not to have this choice, and the credit industry opposes it solely because the slight delay it introduces might make people think twice about applying for new credit — and that's bad for business. Who cares about identity theft when there's same-day credit to be extended?

The fact is, both of these measures should be no-brainers. The cost is low and the benefit is high. But the credit industry opposes them because they simply don't care about identity theft. After all, they don't pay the price when your credit report is wrecked. You do.

That's why the credit industry should be made responsible for identity theft. If they had to pay damages whenever they lost personal data or falsely issued credit to ID thieves, they wouldn't be opposing measures like this. They'd be begging for them.

ROUTE IRISH....For the time being, I think I'm going to assume that this isn't true. I don't have any good reason for disbelieving it, but I really need a break from news of depraved behavior, and for now that's a good enough motive.

Besides, I suppose it's possible that it really isn't true. You never know.

MISCELLANEOUS EZRA BLOGGING....I've always pronounced "banal" so that it rhymes with "anal." Thus I'm crushed to find out from Ezra that I'm in the minority: among the experts on the American Heritage Usage Panel, only 38% prefer that pronunciation, compared to 46% who prefer the pronunciation that rhymes with "canal." I've always considered that hopelessly pretentious. I wonder if it's an East coast/West coast thing?

But I still have a question for Ezra: how could you and a friend have gotten into even a "meaningless dispute" over this? It only takes a few seconds to look it up.

On a related Ezra note, sign me up as a Christmas carol lover. Actually, that's an unrelated note, isn't it? Either way, I love Christmas carols, especially classic tunes — anything written after 1900 is suspect in my book. For the perfect rendition of a classic carol, check out Amy Grant's version of "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing." Great stuff.

IMMIGRATION....In a few days I'll go to the polls to vote in a special election for the congressional seat vacated by Chris Cox, who was confirmed as head of the SEC last July. We've got the usual Republican and Democratic candidates on the ballot, of course, but we've also got an American Independent candidate: Jim Gilchrist, founder of The Minutemen, a group that became briefly famous earlier this year by heading down to the Arizona border with lawn chairs in tow to prevent the United States from being "devoured and plundered by the menace of tens of millions of invading illegal aliens."

Did it work? As a PR exercise it worked great, and although the Minutemen themselves didn't accomplish much, the pressure they've put on the Border Patrol for the past year seems to have paid off: vegetable growers say they're likely to get only 22,000 workers for their fields this year, compared to the 54,000 they need. Tom Nassif, president of the Western Growers Association, explains why:

"There are just some jobs people don't want to do," Nassif said. "It's the most developed nation in the world using a foreign workforce, and people need to recognize that. We need to make them legal."

Jack Vessey [who runs a vegetable farm near El Centro] said he listed openings for 300 laborers at the state office of employment last week to prepare the lettuce fields for harvest. "We got one person," he said. "He showed up and said, 'I'm not going to do that.' "

Now that's an odd thing, isn't it? Immigration foes like Gilchrist insist that if we only cut down on the supply of Mexican farm workers, wages and benefits would go up and plenty of Americans would be available for harvesting our leafy greens. And yet, despite this year's severe shortage of Mexican labor, Vessey is apparently offering the same backbreaking work, brutal conditions, low pay, and nonexistent benefits that he always has. Likewise, Ed Curry, a chili farmer who has given up on employing legal workers because the H2A program has "too many snafus," says only that he would be willing to pay legal workers "a bit more" than he does now.

Is this reluctance to increase wages caused by a fear that higher labor costs would make their produce too expensive to sell? On its face, that seems unlikely. Even a whopping 40% increase in farm wages would increase the wholesale cost of produce by only about 10%. But a shortage caused by letting crops go unharvested would surely have the same effect — and supermarkets would continue to buy.

That's not to say that foreign competition isn't a real issue for California farmers. It is. Still, the lesson from this natural experiment along the Arizona border seems pretty clear: farmers are flatly unwilling to pay their workers more. Whether that's because it would price their produce out of the market or because even a big wage increase wouldn't attract enough legal workers hardly matters. The evidence indicates that farmers would rather let their crops rot in the field than pay ten bucks an hour.

In other words, Gilchrist and his nativist ilk are barking up the wrong tree. What we need isn't a bunch of yahoos dotting the border with their lawn chairs and cell phones. Instead, we need to recognize that — like it or not — Americans very clearly want and rely on immigrant labor. The key, then, is not to eliminate it, but to figure out a rational way of limiting illegal immigration without simultaneously demonizing immigrants themselves. This might include programs that make it harder to cross the border illegally, but only if we also provide legal status to many more immigrants than we do now.

This combination — easier legal immigration paired with tougher illegal immigration — would provide immigrants with a greater incentive to try the legal route instead of the all-too-deadly "season of death" route. It would also provide us with the pool of immigrant labor we obviously want, increase immigrant wages, and cut down on the abuse they suffer from employers who know how easily they can be blackmailed.

Seems like it would be worth a try.

COMPARE AND CONTRAST....So how are things going in Iraq? First up, let's hear from Ayad Allawi, formerly prime minister in the interim government:

In a damning and wide-ranging indictment of Iraq's escalating human rights catastrophe, Allawi accused fellow Shias in the government of being responsible for death squads and secret torture centres. The brutality of elements in the new security forces rivals that of Saddam's secret police, he said.

....'We are hearing about secret police, secret bunkers where people are being interrogated,' he added. 'A lot of Iraqis are being tortured or killed in the course of interrogations. We are even witnessing Sharia courts based on Islamic law that are trying people and executing them.'

He said that immediate action was needed to dismantle militias that continue to operate with impunity. If nothing is done, 'the disease infecting [the Ministry of the Interior] will become contagious and spread to all ministries and structures of Iraq's government', he said.

Next up is Abdul Aziz Hakim, one of the "fellow Shias" Allawi was warning about. Hakim, who heads the Shiite Muslim religious party that leads the current government, oversees the party's widely feared Badr Brigade, ground zero for "death squads and secret torture centres." However, not only does Hakim flatly deny Allawi's allegations, he suggests the real problem is exactly the opposite:

The leader of Iraq's most powerful political party has called on the United States to let Iraqi fighters take a more aggressive role against insurgents, saying his country will only be able to defeat the insurgency when the United States lets Iraqis get tough.

....Hakim gave few details of what getting tough would entail, other than making clear it would require more weapons, with more firepower, than the United States is currently supplying.

....In Iraq, "there are plans to confront terrorists, approved by security agencies, but the Americans reject that," Hakim said. "Because of that mistaken policy, we have lost a lot. One of the victims was my brother Mohammad Bakir, because of American policies."

"For instance, the ministries of Interior and Defense want to carry out some operations to clean out some areas" in Baghdad and around the country, including volatile Anbar province, in the west, he said.

There is domestic politics involved in all this, of course, but the bottom line is that Ayad Allawi, who is no shrinking violet, is already horrified by the activities of the current Iraqi government. The most powerful unofficial member of the current government, however, says you ain't seen nothing yet.

This does not sound good.

VOCABULARY QUIZ....Bret Chenkin, a social studies and English teacher at Mount Anthony Union High School in Vermont, is in hot water for giving his students a politically loaded vocabulary quiz. AP's much-quoted story provides this example:

I wish Bush would be (coherent, eschewed) for once during a speech, but there are theories that his everyday diction charms the below-average mind, hence insuring him Republican votes.

Well, that seems funny enough to me. But let's test this. Suppose Chenkin were a conservative and had asked this question instead:

I wish Kerry would be (forthright, eschewed) for once during a speech, but there are theories that his interminable nuance charms the pretentious mind, hence insuring him Democratic votes.

Hmmm. It still seems kind of funny. I say, leave the poor guy alone. After all, if you can't make jokes about George Bush's diction even in Vermont, the terrorists have won.

BLACK FRIDAY....This morning's breakfast table conversation:

MARIAN: Did you hear about all those people who got trampled at a Wal-Mart?

ME: Ah, the annual Christmas trampling story.

Lance Mannion has the goods, so to speak. On a related note, Digby airs a different pet peeve about "Black Friday Kabuki" here.

For myself, I note that a Nexis search shows that in the four days prior to Friday the nation's news outlets ran 348 stories that mentioned "Black Friday." Last year the count was 185 o