THREE RIGHTS....I figure that if a country guarantees the following three rights, it's probably a pretty decent place:

1. The right to free speech
   

2. The right to a fair trial
   

3. The right to vote
   

Now, we can argue forever over just what "free" and "fair" really mean, but I think we all have a pretty good idea of what I'm talking about here. There are plenty of other highly desirable rights, but these are the three cornerstones that define a decent liberal society.

So here's a question: Do you think convicted felons who have served their time should be prohibited from speaking freely? Do you think they should lose the right to a fair trial?

No? Then why do they lose the right to vote in 20 states?

THE CONSULTANT RACKET....It's a blogosphere truism these days that Democrats are too reliant on a tired bunch of Beltway consultants who are out of touch with the liberal base, reflexively recommend poll-driven caution and mushiness, and have losing streaks that make the '62 Mets look good. But you would have heard about this more than two years ago if you'd been subscribing to the Washington Monthly back then. Amy Sullivan told the whole story in "Fire the Consultants," in our January 2005 issue:

[Joe] Hansen is part of a clique of Washington consultants who, through their insider ties, continue to get rewarded with business even after losing continually. Pollster Mark Mellman is popular among Democrats because he tells them what they so desperately want to hear: Their policies are sound, Americans really agree with them more than with Republicans, and if they just repeat their mantras loud enough, voters will eventually embrace the party....Hansen and Mellman are joined by the poster boy of Democratic social promotion, Bob Shrum. Over his 30-year career, Shrum has worked on the campaigns of seven losing presidential candidates--from George McGovern to Bob Kerrey--capping his record with a leading role in the disaster that was the Gore campaign. Yet, instead of abiding by the "seven strikes and you're out" rule, Democrats have continued to pay top dollar for his services.

I've been reading the Monthly for nearly three decades now, and it's because stories like this pop up in virtually every issue. It's great stuff, and it's stuff you won't find anywhere else. You really, really ought to be reading it every month.

So subscribe today. It's only 30 bucks and it just takes a minute. You can subscribe for yourself here. Or order a gift subscription here.

THE PURGE....Why did the Justice Department fire a bunch of U.S. Attorneys recently? Because they were too zealous in prosecuting Republican politicians? Maybe. Because the Bush administration wanted to reward one of Karl Rove's ex-aides? Definitely. Because they were insufficiently gung-ho about indicting Democrats before last year's midterm elections? That's what one of them said today:

David Iglesias said two members of Congress separately called in mid October to inquire about the timing of an ongoing probe of a kickback scheme and appeared eager for an indictment to be issued on the eve of the elections in order to benefit the Republicans. He refused to name the members of Congress because he said he feared retaliation.

....Iglesias, who received a positive performance review before he was fired, said he suspected he was forced out because of his refusal to be pressured to hand down an indictment in the ongoing probe.

"I believe that because I didn't play ball, so to speak, I was asked to resign," said Iglesias, who officially stepped down Wednesday.

This scandal started out slowly, but it's really been picking up steam as time goes by. Expect hearings soon.

SETTING THE TABLE....This is not exactly the kind of thing one expects to find at The Corner, but Andrew Stuttaford makes an unusually crisp point today about the "all options on the table" crowd:

Speaking more widely, it strikes me as thoroughly perverse that those who like to argue that "nothing" should be off the table when it comes to Iran and Syria find a little diplomatic conversation as something too ghastly to contemplate.

Now, Stuttaford's version of "diplomatic conversation" is pretty typically British (circa the good old days of Empire) and world-weary, but I guess that's excusable since, um, he's British. It's a good point anyway.

WEB ANNOYANCE ALERT....I didn't know this, but Matt informs me that if you doubleclick on a word in a New York Times story, a contextual dictionary pops up to define the word. Handy! But apparently Gen Y doesn't like it. Kriston is pissed:

When I'm reading something on the screen, I click, double-click, drag, and highlight words. Any and all words, whole blocs of text, I don't care....If I want to just nervously click on words, that's what I do.

....Now, the double-clicking that happens accidentally and incidentally when I read the NYT online produces an endless, intolerable string of pop-up windows, each presenting dumb definitions for words I already know -- words like "to" and "seven" and "November". It's enough to make a body read washingtonpost.com.

Kriston's commenters all seem to have the same reaction. But I say: think of the good this might do for the country. For example, say you're a congress critter reading about a cache of bomb components uncovered in Iraq and you come across a statement that the stuff was bound for "armed Shiite groups here." You shake your head: what the hell's a Shiite? Just doubleclick!

smaller of two branches of Islam; defining belief is that succession of Islamic leaders should descend from Ali, son-in-law of the prophet Muhammad (Isl.)

And if you really want to go to town, there are two more definitions plus a 500-word mini-encyclopedia entry. It won't help you pass ABC's "Sunni or Shiite?" quiz, but it's a start!

Besides, for real annoyance try reading Outside the Beltway these days. You don't even have to doubleclick: an annoying gigantic box (Powered by Snap!) pops up every time you run your mouse over a link. Ugh.

PUNCTURING GASBAGS....No trip down the Washington Monthly's memory lane would be complete without a link to "The Bookie of Virtue," Josh Green's story in our June 2003 issue about moralizing conservative windbag William Bennett. Bennett had built a lucrative career based on hectoring others about leading a vice-free life, but there was one particular vice he was oddly silent about: high-stakes gambling. Turns out there was good reason for that:

The Washington Monthly and Newsweek have learned that over the last decade Bennett has made dozens of trips to casinos in Atlantic City and Las Vegas, where he is a "preferred customer" at several of them, and sources and documents provided to The Washington Monthly put his total losses at more than $8 million.

....Bennett likes to be discreet. "He'll usually call a host and let us know when he's coming," says one source. "We can limo him in. He prefers the high-limit room, where he's less likely to be seen and where he can play the $500-a-pull slots. He usually plays very late at night or early in the morning--usually between midnight and 6 a.m." The documents show that in one two-month period, Bennett wired more than $1.4 million to cover losses. His desire for privacy is evident in his customer profile at one casino, which lists as his residence the address for Empower.org (the Web site of Empower America, the non-profit group Bennett co-chairs). Typed across the form are the words: "NO CONTACT AT RES OR BIZ!!!"

Don't you just love the smell of napalm in the morning? But you know what I'm going to say next, don't you? If you enjoy watching us deflate pompous right-wing gasbags like Bennett, you have to subscribe to the print magazine. You don't want to miss the next puncturing, do you?

So subscribe! Do it today. It's only 30 bucks! You can subscribe for yourself here. Or order a gift subscription here.

QUOTE OF THE DAY....From transplant surgeon Timothy Pruett, president-elect of the United Network for Organ Sharing:

"We have to guarantee to the public that we're not going to go out and kill people to get their organs."

Yes, that sounds like a reasonable PR goal to me.

(Pruett was responding to a case in which a transplant surgeon in California may have "ordered excessive doses of powerful pain medication to speed the death" of an accident victim. It's under investigation.)

IMMIGRATION: NOT THE SOURCE OF ALL OUR PROBLEMS AFTER ALL....Some new data on the immigration front:

A study released Tuesday by the Public Policy Institute of California found that immigrants who arrived in the state between 1990 and 2004 increased wages for native workers by an average 4%.

UC Davis economist Giovanni Peri, who conducted the study, said the benefits were shared by all native-born workers, from high school dropouts to college graduates....

Another study released Monday by the Washington-based Immigration Policy Center showed that immigrant men ages 18 to 39 had an incarceration rate five times lower than native-born citizens in every ethnic group examined. Among men of Mexican descent, for instance, 0.7% of those foreign-born were incarcerated compared to 5.9% of native-born, according to the study, co-written by UC Irvine sociologist Ruben G. Rumbaut.

So are these studies legit? I can't say for sure, but the objections offered up by the immigration hawks at the Center for Immigration Studies were so transparently lame that it suggests they don't actually have any credible criticisms of the methodology. They just don't like the results. But perhaps they'll be able to come up with something better after they've cogitated on the matter for while.

STATE DEPT. BACKS ACTUAL DIPLOMACY....NEWS AT 11....Direct talks with Syria and Iran are still verboten, but Condoleezza Rice has agreed to attend a regional meeting set up by the Iraqi government:

The first meeting, at the ambassadorial level, will be held next month. Then Rice herself will sit down at the table with the foreign ministers from Damascus and Tehran at a second meeting in April elsewhere in the region, possibly in Istanbul.

....Yesterday, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack repeatedly declined to rule out the possibility of bilateral discussions between Rice and her Iranian and Syrian counterparts, except to note that the dispute over Iran's nuclear program is already being handled on a separate diplomatic track. "I'm not going to exclude any particular interaction at this point . . . on issues that are important to us, but the focus will be on Iraq," he said.

It's a start.

EFP UPDATE....On Monday the U.S. Army discovered a new cache of components in Iraq for the manufacture of EFPs. So did the stuff come from Iran? Here's what the Los Angeles Times says:

[Maj. Martin Weber] said that technical expertise was required to cut, stamp and mill the copper plates, as well as to arm and trigger the EFPs. Iran has the necessary expertise, he said....Referring to the C-4 explosives, rockets and mortar rounds, Weber said, "You can establish the country of origin, and that is a fact."

But here's the New York Times:

Among the confusing elements were cardboard boxes of the gray plastic PVC tubes used to make the canisters. The boxes appeared to contain shipments of tubes directly from factories in the Middle East, none of them in Iran. One box said in English that the tubes inside had been made in the United Arab Emirates and another said, in Arabic, "plastic made in Haditha," a restive Sunni town on the Euphrates River in Iraq.

This find...is forcing U.S. officials to reassess their belief that such bombs were being built in Iran and smuggled fully assembled into Iraq...."We originally thought these came into Iraq already created, and now that intelligence has been totally relooked," said Capt. Clayton Combs, who led the raid. "It's like a playground kit you get in the mail: You can plot the instructions and start putting it together on-site, and that's what we have here."

Put it all together, along with the report last week that Iraqi insurgents already have the ability to manufacture the copper disks that form the core of EFPs themselves, and you end up with....mush. Iraqis are making the disks, various countries are supplying the PVC tubing, Iran may be supplying the explosives, and the final assembly is done locally. And since C-4 is practically like currency in the Middle East, who knows what circuitous route it took before making its way into the hands of Iraqi insurgents?

I dunno. I can be pretty easily convinced that Iran -- or some faction in Iran -- is helping out one or more of the factions in Iraq, but it's going to take more than this. In addition, I'd like to know who this stuff was intended for. It was found in Diyala province, which is a mixed Sunni-Shia battleground at the moment, and none of the published reports provides a hint about which side we think cached these components. Stay tuned.

THE K STREET PROJECT....In 2002 and 2003 the Washington press corps finally began taking note of the K Street Project, a Republican plan designed to cement their long-term hold on power. But coverage was sporadic and light. The first serious examination of the project and what it meant came in "Welcome to the Machine," a terrific cover story by Nick Confessore in the July 2003 issue of the Washington Monthly:

Over the last few years, Republicans have brought about a revolutionary change: They've begun to capture and, consequently, discipline K Street....The corporate lobbyists who once ran the show, loyal only to the parochial interests of their employer, are being replaced by party activists who are loyal first and foremost to the GOP. Through them, Republican leaders can now marshal armies of lobbyists, lawyers, and public relations experts -- not to mention enormous amounts of money -- to meet the party's goals. Ten years ago, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, the political donations of 19 key industry sectors -- including accounting, pharmaceuticals, defense, and commercial banks -- were split about evenly between the parties. Today, the GOP holds a two-to-one advantage in corporate cash.

I can't tell you how many times I read and linked to this piece between the time it was published and the 2006 midterms, when the K Street Project finally crashed and burned. It was a genuinely seminal article explaining how the modern GOP was reshaping politics in its image, and understanding how it worked was also one of the keys to understanding the Republican defeat last year. But you only see stuff like this when it first comes out if you subscribe to the magazine.

So subscribe! The magazine is fun, it's provocative, and it contains great stories like Nick's that you don't see anywhere else. And it's only 30 bucks! And it helps pay my salary! You can subscribe for yourself here. Order a gift subscription here.

A CONSERVATIVE BROOKINGS....The Pew Charitable Trust plans to forge a "bipartisan" consensus about social mobility in America by bringing together analysts from both liberal and conservative think tanks. Ezra Klein has the right comment:

This bespeaks a certain political naivete on Pew's part. It is certainly true that Brookings and Urban are more liberal than AEI and Heritage, but they are not proportionately liberal. Brookings...is a centrist, establishment think tank, while Urban is just a few ticks to the left of it. AEI and Heritage, conversely, are hard right, movement conservative organizations....A wiser study would have tapped the Economic Policy Institute and the Center for American Progress.

I don't know that I'd insult EPI and CAP by putting them in the company of AEI and Heritage, but I'll let Max Sawicky beat up Ezra over that. Instead I have a different question: are there any conservative versions of Brookings? That is, big, well regarded, and centrist conservative in background but still fundamentally dedicated to honest research rather than simply advancing a partisan agenda. Nothing really comes to mind. Ideas?

TRYING TOO HARD....Hmmm. John Solomon has another front-page story in the Washington Post today about financial skullduggery by Democrats. Turns out that, um....what? Hillary Clinton is more generous than she admits publicly? The Clintons' staff sometimes makes mistakes? I dunno.

Long story short, the Clintons have a family charitable foundation that they've put $5 million into. Hillary is treasurer and secretary of the foundation (Bill is president, Chelsea is a director), but she failed to disclose this in her Senate ethics filing.

This is pretty meager stuff, but my guess is that the whole thing was an excuse to get in the following lick:

Among the institutions receiving grants [was] a charity connected to the Arkansas businessman who helped Hillary Clinton make $100,000 on a commodities trade that stirred controversy a decade ago, Internal Revenue Service reports show.

....One Arkansas recipient was the Diane Blair Foundation. Diane Blair is the late wife of James Blair, the businessman who helped Hillary Clinton with controversial commodities trades in the late 1970s that netted her about $100,000. There are two foundations in Diane Blair's name. One is a private family charity; the other funds a center for the study of Southern politics at the University of Arkansas.

The Clintons' tax form indicates the money went to the private charity, but James Blair said in an interview yesterday that the Clintons "miscoded" the entry. The check actually went to the university fund, he said.

"She was Hillary's closest friend," Blair said of his wife, who died in June 2000.

Gotcha! "Miscoded" money going to an AU foundation named for the wife of a guy who was associated with one of the endless number of bogus Clinton "scandals" from days past, this particular one dating from 30 years ago. But who cares? Any excuse to revive a Clinton scandal is a good excuse!

Solomon's last front-page scoop (John Edwards sold his house to some guy) was bad enough that even the Post obudsman declared that "It seemed like a 'gotcha' without the gotcha." It was, she said, "more of an item for the Reliable Source or In the Loop -- and not worth Page 1." That seems to be a pretty fair description of Solomon's latest effort too.

SILENT DICK....From a Newsweek report on Dick Cheney's current travels around the world:

Just after dawn on Tuesday morning, reporters were taken to the mess hall, where Cheney was dining with the troops. "How was breakfast?" a reporter yelled to the VP. "Breakfast was excellent," Cheney replied, in what were his first three words to the press pool traveling with him on the trip, now in its eighth day.

Does he think he gets charged by the word or something? Jeebus.

DECONSTRUCTING DICK....It's hard to remember now, but during the first few years of the Bush administration Dick Cheney was widely viewed as a wise old man, the steady hand at the Bush tiller. As we've been reminded repeatedly in the past few weeks, that conventional wisdom is laughable now -- but if you had been subscribing to the Washington Monthly back in 2002, you would have read Josh Marshall's "Vice Grip" and you would have known just how laughable it was even back then:

Why, though, has the press failed to grasp Cheney's ineptitude? The answer seems to lie in the power of political assumptions....It doesn't take long for a given politician to get pegged with his or her own brief story line. And those facts and stories that get attention tend to be those that conform to the established narrative. In much the same way, Cheney's reputation as the steady hand at the helm of the Bush administration -- the CEO to Bush's chairman -- is so potent as to blind Beltway commentators to the examples of vice presidential incompetence accumulating, literally, under their noses. Though far less egregious, Cheney's bad judgment is akin to Trent Lott's ugly history on race: Everyone sort of knew it was there, only no one ever really took notice until it was pointed out in a way that was difficult to ignore. Cheney is lucky; as vice president, he can't be fired. But his terrible judgment will, at some point, become impossible even for the Beltway crowd not to see.

Josh has since gone on to build a blog empire over at TPM Cafe, but you can still read this kind of reporting ten times a year in the Washington Monthly. So subscribe and stay ahead of the curve! The stuff we publish today won't be in the New York Times until next year.

And it's only 30 bucks. It helps support the cause of good liberal journalism and it helps keep this blog in business too. You can subscribe for yourself here. Order a gift subscription here.

GLOBAL WARMING WATCH....More good news on the global warming front:

Seeking to shape legislation before Congress, three major energy trade associations have shifted their stances and decided to back mandatory federal curbs on carbon dioxide and other man-made emissions that could accelerate climate change.

Or is it?

The groups say they now plan to use their lobbying clout to stake out positions that favor modest, economy-wide regulations, in hopes of minimizing anticipated energy-price increases and pre-empting state efforts that could result in a patchwork of differing state and regional regulations.

....Institute chairman James E. Rogers described the lengthy, closed meeting as "crossing a bridge" for members of the group, which previously supported only voluntary reductions. He added that his group wants a "safety valve" that would require the government to intervene as needed to keep the price of credits stable and low.

For now, call it a wash. From a public opinion standpoint, it's good news to see even industry groups acknowledging the need for carbon caps of some kind. From a substantive standpoint, however, this is mostly just tacking with the wind. With a Democratic Congress in power, a flat opposition to carbon caps would have left them completely sidelined. Today's announcement, they figure, at least gets them a place "at the table," and that place will be used to lobby for the weakest possible national standards. And, of course, preemption of tougher state standards.

But at least it's a start.

BAD TEACHERS, CONT'D....I'm still sort of agnostic on the whole issue of teacher firing (see here), but Mark Kleiman points out today that down in the anti-union South we can run a natural experiment on whether the ability to easily fire teachers is a good thing:

Ignore the rhetoric for the moment and concentrate on the fact: The tyranny of the teachers' unions is not universal! There are places where it's as easy for a principal to fire a bad teacher (or, of course, a good one) as it is for a Wal-Mart manager to dump a union organizer.

No coddling teachers: that must be the reason the South leads the country in educational attainment, and in particular why Georgia's students so outperform students from union-ridden Massachusetts and New York.

In an update, he also delivers the peculiar news that although the South provides the raw material for a study of whether unionization affects school performance, apparently such a study has never been done. "That seems odd," he says, and I'm not sure I can add anything to that.

INTEMPERATE LANGUAGE WATCH....Steve Benen comments on the Edwards blogger kerfuffle of a couple of weeks ago:

A Democratic candidate hired a couple of fairly low-level staffers who'd written some intemperate blog posts about religious fundamentalists, and outrage was everywhere for a week. A Republican presidential candidate gives a high-level position to a man who once publicly announced his belief that Buddhists and Muslims should be "screwed" and "killed," and it's barely noticed.

Now, it's true that the Republican presidential candidate in question was D-lister Duncan Hunter. But still. Read the whole thing if you're wondering if Steve took those two words out of context. (Hint: he didn't.) As he says, "it's further evidence that there's literally nothing a conservative can say that will get him or her shunned by the GOP establishment."

IT'S SUBSCRIPTION WEEK!....Yep, it's that time of year again. In the past I've always struggled to figure out how to convince more of you to subscribe to the print magazine, so this time I'm going to take the direct route: the reason you should subscribe is because we break a lot of stories before they hit other people's radar screens. If you read them, you'll be ahead of the curve and probably a hit at cocktail parties as well. Here's the kind of thing I'm talking about:

"The object of our policy has to be to get our little white asses out of there as soon as possible," another working-group participant told me. To do that, he said, Baker must confront the president "like the way a family confronts an alcoholic. You bring everyone in, and you say, 'Look, my friend, it's time to change.'"

The "working group" in question was the Baker-Hamilton group, and it was the subject of "A Higher Power," a piece that Bob Dreyfuss wrote for us back in the summer of 2006. At the time it had gotten a couple of brief mentions in the back pages of the Washington Post and that was about it. But if you had subscribed to the Monthly you would have known all about it months before it became the topic ju jour in the blogosphere.

So subscribe! It's only 30 bucks. It helps support the cause of good liberal journalism and it helps keep this blog in business too. You can subscribe for yourself here. Order a gift subscription here. In fact, order two: one for a liberal friend who will appreciate it, and one for a conservative friend just to drive him crazy.

THE BEGINNING OF THE END OF COAL?....A private equity group that's purchasing TXU Corporation, a Texas utility firm, has agreed to drop plans to build 8 of its 11 proposed new coal plants. It's part of a broad array of environmental measures they've agreed to in order to smooth the way for the deal to go through:

The roster of commitments came through an unusual process in which the equity firms asked two prominent environmental groups what measures could be taken to win their support....Environmentalists said they hoped that the TXU deal would represent a turning point in the attitude of energy businesses as they adjust to what many anticipate will be a new regulatory and public-relations landscape in an era of climate change.

Over at Grist, David Roberts is ecstatic: "The 'tipping point' concept is cheap from overuse these days, but to me this is the clearest sign yet that we have entered a fundamentally new stage in the fight against global warming." He also can't resist throwing a few intramural punches:

Who did the equity firms approach about making the project environmentally acceptable? NRDC and Environmental Defense. Green groups like these get grief from hardcore enviros because they work closely with business and favor market-based solutions. They get grief from the Reaper crowd because they're stodgy and technocratic and not hip to the new Apollo Alliance-style "framing." But who's making things happen?

This is good news. Still, I'm going to wait a bit and see what kind of plans TXU proposes to make up for those eight aborted coal plants. Let's hope the alternatives are as green as we'd like them to be.

SMOKE-FILLED ROOMS....As I've mentioned before, California is on the verge of moving its presidential primary date to February 5. But it turns out there's more than presidential politics involved in the move. We're also going to have a pair of initiatives on the primary ballot: one that allows an independent commission to draw legislative districts and one that extends the length of term limits from 6 years to 12. Scott Schmidt explains the timing:

If you wonder why these measures cannot be on the regular June 2008 ballot, you're missing the point of the whole early primary exercise. The deadline to file for office for the June election falls in March. Sitting incumbents whose terms are scheduled to end in 2008, like [Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez], need a ballot measure approved and certified before that March deadline. Thus, we get an early presidential primary with a ballot initiative attached.

....But the redistricting measure under discussion wouldn't go into effect until the first election cycle after the next census, which is, coincidentally, four years after the November 2008 election.

Essentially, California would have no real elections over the next four years, because we would have the same people running in the same districts where there is no competition.

Clever! But I have to say that this doesn't bother me all that much. Offering longer term limits in exchange for redistricting reform has pretty much always been the deal on the table, so this is hardly unexpected. In fact, allowing it to apply to current officeholders, with only a few weeks to spare, might give it just the sense of urgency needed to actually get it passed.

And what if it doesn't pass? Sure, the old doofuses will get termed out, but we'll just end up with new doofuses in the same old noncompetitive districts. Frankly, four more years of the old doofuses doesn't really seem like all that big a price to pay in the grand scheme of things if we get a decent anti-gerrymandering bill in return. And I'm in favor of the longer term limits anyway.

Still, you have to admire the behind-the-scenes shenanigans.

THE ENEMY OF MY ENEMY....Over at the New Yorker, Seymour Hersh says the Bush administration is honing its plans to attack Iran. Meanwhile, the London Times reports that if Bush actually goes through with an attack, "up to five generals and admirals are willing to resign rather than approve what they consider would be a reckless attack."

I have a limited interest in both stories. Contingency plans are a dime a dozen, and breathless British press reports are about a dime a thousand. I hope the Times is right, but I'm not holding my breath.

In any case, Hersh's story has far more of interest than its throwaway lines about military planning. The gist of his piece is that the Bush administration has essentially decided to redirect its attention away from radical Sunni jihadists -- i.e., the folks who attacked us on 9/11 -- and instead take sides in the brewing Sunni-Shiite civil war in the Middle East. In fact, he says we've pretty much decided to throw in our lot with the Saudis and buddy up with the al-Qaeda wannabes:

This time, [a] U.S. government consultant told me, Bandar and other Saudis have assured the White House that "they will keep a very close eye on the religious fundamentalists. Their message to us was 'We've created this movement, and we can control it.' It's not that we don't want the Salafis to throw bombs; it's who they throw them at -- Hezbollah, Moqtada al-Sadr, Iran, and at the Syrians, if they continue to work with Hezbollah and Iran."

....During a conversation with me, [a] former Saudi diplomat...objected to the Lebanese and Saudi sponsorship of Sunni jihadists in Lebanon. "Salafis are sick and hateful, and I'm very much against the idea of flirting with them," he said. "They hate the Shiites, but they hate Americans more. If you try to outsmart them, they will outsmart us. It will be ugly."

....In an interview in Beirut, a senior official in the Siniora government acknowledged that there were Sunni jihadists operating inside Lebanon. "We have a liberal attitude that allows Al Qaeda types to have a presence here," he said. He related this to concerns that Iran or Syria might decide to turn Lebanon into a "theatre of conflict."

Is this true? Who knows, since the sources mostly seem to be Hersh's usual anonymous cast of ex-spies, ex-consultants, and ex-diplomats. But the story is plausible. Having never really believed in the threat of non-state terrorist groups like al-Qaeda in the first place, the Bush administration may now have come full circle from 9/11, tacitly teaming up with Sunni jihadists in the hope that they'll help us take out the state-based terrorist threat of Iran -- after which, presumably, the jihadis will all go home to watch TV and raise their families. Just like they did after the Afghanistan war.

Lovely, no? And one more thing: Hersh says the covert side of this plan is being run by the vice president's office. Which means, of course, that it will be handled with the same finesse in international relationships and grounding in reality that Dick Cheney is famous for.

Read the whole thing for more. And buckle your seat belts.

THE EXCEPTION THAT PROVES THE RULE....A reader takes Andrew Sullivan to task today for using the expression "the exception that proves the rule." As this link explains, there are at least two possible ways in which modern day usage has corrupted the original meaning of the phrase:

It has often been suggested in reference works that prove here is really being used in the sense of "test" (as it does in terms like "proving ground")....It is said that the real idea behind the saying is that the presence of what looks like an exception tests whether a rule is really valid or not.

....[But] it's not a false sense of proof that causes the problem, but exception....The true origin of the phrase lies in a medieval Latin legal principle: exceptio probat regulam in casibus non exceptis, which may be translated as "the exception confirms the rule in the cases not excepted"....A sign on a museum door which says "Entry free today" leads to the implication that entry is not free on other days.

This is good stuff for us pedant types. I've always bought into the "proving ground" explanation myself, but the second explanation really does sound more plausible. This is the first time I've heard it.

But here's a question: how did the phrase get corrupted in the first place? I think it must satisfy a deep human desire to avoid admitting error. After all, its current usage is so obviously absurd (an exception to a rule proves the rule is true?) that it wouldn't manage to stick around unless it satisfied some highly desirable rhetorical market niche. And it does: even in the face of indisputable evidence of error ("Actually, George Bush was shorter than John Kerry and he won anyway") it provides a snappy comeback ("He's the exception that proves the rule!") that leaves your average know-it-all windbag gasping ("Huh?"). Victory is yours! Nonsensical or not, that makes it a pretty handy handy phrase to have around, doesn't it?

THEN AND NOW....February 2003:

While diplomatic maneuvering continues over Turkish bases and a new United Nations resolution, inside Iraq, U.N. arms inspectors are privately complaining about the quality of U.S. intelligence and accusing the United States of sending them on wild-goose chases....So frustrated have the inspectors become that one source has referred to the U.S. intelligence they've been getting as "garbage after garbage after garbage."

February 2007:

Diplomats [in Vienna] say most U.S. intelligence shared with the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency has proved inaccurate and none has led to significant discoveries inside Iran...."Since 2002, pretty much all the intelligence that's come to us has proved to be wrong," a senior diplomat at the IAEA said. Another official here described the agency's intelligence stream as "very cold now" because "so little panned out."

Noted without comment.

MATTER vs. ANTI-MATTER....Presidential polls taken this far ahead of the primaries don't mean anything. Unlike most people I actually take that seriously, and so far I've put my money where my mouth is by refusing to blog about them. Still, it's faintly unnerving to see just how far ahead of the field Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani are right now.

That would be a hell of a campaign, wouldn't it? Two New Yorkers, playing out the unfinished grudge match of their 2000 Senate race. A mayor vs. a senator. The first major party female candidate in history. And just possibly the two toughest, most polarizing, most single-mindedly ambitious politicians on the national stage today. I hope we all survive.

KIDS' BOOKS....For some reason the subject of kids' book series popped into my head the other day. Which ones did you read?

In our family, we started reading with the Oz books. We owned a complete set. My mother read them aloud to us at first, but let us kids (in turn) choose which title to read. (Mom preferred the earlier volumes, which were truer to the spirit of the first book, but soldiered on manfully even when we kids got hooked on the later installments, which got increasingly outre and science fictiony. Not exactly Jack Pumpkinhead in space, or anything, but you get the idea.) Later, when we learned to read ourselves, we were allowed to read the books on our own, but only in the presence of a parent. The books were too fragile to be allowed out of sight of an adult.

Next up was the Happy Hollisters. Our local library had a complete set, and when I was a kid (in the mid-60s) I always wondered if they had been written by the basketball player. (Answer: No, and even as a child I sort of figured that a famous Laker was unlikely to be writing children's books in the offseason. Sharp thinking, no?)

Next up was Tom Swift. Or, more accurately, Tom Swift Jr. The titles of the books alone are worth the price of admission. Later I discovered that we owned a few of the original Tom Swift books from my father's childhood, but they proved disappointing. A floating airport? Please. If there were no atomic ray guns, I wasn't interested.

And then there was Brains Benton, the red-headed scientific sleuth of Crestwood. Sadly, there were only six books in this series, but I got them all. I'm not sure where they are now, but I think they finished their career in my mother's fourth grade classroom. An honorable and worthy retirement home.

APOLOGIES....This story here is being taken as evidence of the take-no-prisoners zealotry of the gun rights movement, and I suppose it is. But it's evidence of something else too: the utter futility of the apology in modern day America.

The guy in question, Jim Zumbo, has been a gun advocate for decades. Last week he wrote a single ill-considered blog post, and after a flurry of complaints he followed it up 36 hours later with the most abject apology imaginable. His blog has since been taken down, but trust me on this: he told his readers that it had been late and he was tired; that he had written in ignorance; that what he said was stupid; that he apologized; and that he was going to make an effort to learn more about the subject in question (AR platforms for hunting). He practically got down on his knees and begged forgiveness.

As usual these days, it did no good. The slavering hordes were unappeased and he's now out of a job, has lost his sponsorships and his TV show, and might as well move to a desert island to live out the rest of his years now. He's a pariah.

There are, obviously, some apologies that are meaningless and shouldn't be accepted. But this wasn't one of them. Zumbo was plainly sincere and was plainly apologizing for a hastily written remark that didn't reflect his long history of gun advocacy. All it did was make his critics madder. The moral of this story is: don't ever bother apologizing. It won't do you any good.

I have a feeling Hillary is well aware of this.

PATENT ABUSE....You may or may not be aware of this, but pretty much everything in the high-tech world is patented. If you watch a movie on cable TV, for example, it's delivered in a format called MPEG-2, a standard that's composed of over 600 different patented technologies from 20 different companies. If you want to build a device that uses MPEG-2, you have to pay a licensing fee to the MPEG Licensing Authority, which controls the patent pool for MPEG-2.

That makes MPEG LA a pretty handy organization to have around. After all, who wants to diddle around trying to locate every single relevant patent and negotiating terms with every single patent holder? And what if you screw up your patent search? That's what happened with the GIF image format, which everyone thought was in the public domain until 1994, when Unisys suddenly announced that it contained patented Unisys technology. Chaos ensued.

So how about MP3, the ubiquitous music encoding standard? Who holds the patents on that? Answer: the MP3 standard was developed in the early 90s and the patent pool was originally controlled by Fraunhofer IIS. Microsoft paid Fraunhofer $16 million for the right to use MP3 in its Windows Media Player and hundreds of other companies have done the same over the past decade. During that time, everyone in the world assumed that Fraunhofer was the legitimate patent holder.

Until now. In 2003 Alcatel-Lucent suddenly announced that they owned some of the underlying patents on MP3, and on Thursday a jury decided they were right. The result was a $1.52 billion patent infringement verdict against Microsoft. And just in case you hate Microsoft enough to cheer for this, allow Rob Pegoraro to set you straight. As he says, "Alcatel-Lucent's patent payday has all the things that patent-abuse critics hate":

• "Submarine" patents, invoked years after a contested invention has hit the market? Check
  

• Claiming ownership of a media format most people use all the time? Check
  

• A plaintiff that's failed to commercialize its own alleged invention? Check
  

• Extortionate royalty demands? Check
  

The prospect of charging Microsoft $1.52 billion for the use of two minor patents over the course of 30 months (mid-2003 through 2005) is further evidence that the abuse of software patents has become nearly pathological in recent years. And it's not just software. More here on the wider breakdown of the patent system in the United States.

THE NEW NEW REPUBLIC....The New Republic has been sold to a Canadian media company and plans to re-launch itself as a "thicker, glossier" magazine with a more robust website. It's also going to become a biweekly. And there's this:

"We've become more liberal," Foer said, pointing out that he used his first issue to embrace universal healthcare and "retract" a famous 1994 piece that helped bring down Bill Clinton's 1994 heathcare reform plan.

....Under Foer, the magazine has also cut its remaining editorial support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The magazine's editorial voice supported the invasion at the time, though some writers dissented, and in the summer of 2004, the New Republic published a famous cover package of essays under the heading "Were We Wrong?"

"The question mark is gone," Foer said.

And Marty Peretz? Still editor-in-chief, at least for now. But we can hope.

FRIDAY DOG BLOGGING....As promised earlier this week, today is equal opportunity pet blogging day. The fine looking critter below is Mischa, my brother's new dog. Mischa is a 9-week-old applehead teacup chihuahua.

On the left, Mischa is checking out Gabbro, my brother's cat. I'm told that moments after this picture was taken Gabbro headed for the hills. On the right is Mischa on a visit to our house a couple of days ago. As you can see, Inkblot is on the landing in the background looking on suspiciously. Mischa was a little too hyperactive for our cats, who kept a safe distance the whole time.

Speaking of cats, everyone is doing fine around here. Domino has finally figured out that jumping up on my desk while I'm blogging is a reliable way of getting some attention. That's fine, but unfortunately she has a tendency to scratch herself on the corner of the keyboard, which is where the sleep button sits. One wrong move and my computer is locked. This is not a problem except that even after I revive the machine the internet connection remains dead. So far, I haven't been able to figure out how to revive the internet connection except by rebooting the PC. Stupid cat.

BAD TEACHERS....Over at bloggingheads.tv, Mickey Kaus and my boss are talking about whether it should be easier to fire bad teachers. Naturally this turns into an argument about union busting (Mickey's all for it) vs. figuring out a way to work with unions on this (Paul's position).

Unfortunately, the conversation never really got to the key issue (though it cropped up momentarily): how do you decide who the bad teachers are? My background is all private sector, and it's certainly true that private sector managers have a lot m