This letter distills down exactly why Ann Coulter is frustrated.

Rarely does a letter in a newspaper cut to the quick as well as one that appeared in today's Arizona Republic (particularly the paragraph just before the end). The writer was responding to a letter earlier in the week in which another writer was attempting to excuse the inexcusable Ann Coulter by comparing her to famed eighteenth century satirist Jonathan Swift. The writer writes here (the link should be, based on past experiences with the Republic, good for about a week, so I will cut and paste the entire letter).

Regarding "Coulter's satire goes unrecognized" (Letters, Sunday):

The letter writer chides syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts for his "ignorance" in "failing to recognize (Ann) Coulter as a satirist, in the mode of Jonathan Swift." Oh? Let us compare and contrast:

Swift is perhaps the finest of all satirists for his deft touch in the use of playfulness and fairy tale to devastating effect (Gulliver's Travels). The irony of A Modest Proposal has seldom been equaled, and is timeless.

Ann Coulter, on the other hand, is beyond shrill, and would never allow nuance or indirection to get in the way of a blunt, even crude, frontal assault ad hominid. Satire is the humor of Swift, never Coulter's unrelieved fury; it is Swift's understatement, never Coulter's bombast.

Largely unnoticed, moreover, is Coulter's propensity for missing her own point. She has lately been on tour to explain her grotesque attack upon the four "9/11 widows" for certain of their political positions. What infuriates Coulter is that these "broads," as she calls them, are in her opinion using their personal tragedies to shield themselves from rebuttal. But here, in one of her many failings, Coulter confuses the message with the messenger.

Rebuttal on the merits of the message - where it belongs - is never out of bounds. Coulter's nature, however, is to claw at the widows personally, and she does so in the only way she knows how, by demeaning the tragedy of 9/11 itself.

No, in Ann Coulter there is nothing in the least Swiftian.

-Robert R. Anderson.
Scottsdale

Good for you, Mr. Anderson. I've never met you but if I ever do I'll be sure to thank you personally for writing such a good letter.

That next to last paragraph highlights the quandry of the right. No one has suggested that there is anything wrong with rebutting anything that the 9/11 widows (or others who have spoken out against Bush policy after suffering personal tragedy) say. For example if one of the 9/11 widows (or Cindy Sheehan, or Mary Tillman, or whoever else) quotes a statistic, anyone is welcome to dispute it, challenge it or rebut it with appropriate data. Coulter's frustration (and the frustration on the part of many on the right) is a product of the fact that it is difficult to find a way to attack people like this personally. Personal smears have long been a staple of the right wing attack machine, and Coulter stands out as one who simply is incapable of debating any other way. To ask her to seriously debate issues without resorting to some sort of personal attack is like asking Jay Leno to deliver his monologue without telling any jokes, or asking Mark Cuban not to talk about basketball. Coulter just isn't capable of debating issues seriously, so she has to resort to personal attacks. Maybe the 9/11 widows or the others will force her to actually consider how to debate issues on the issues (or at least expose how vacuous she is, once you take away her attack bludgeon).

Well, it made for good rhetoric anyway.

At the President's 2006 Dinner on Monday, he made (at the end of paragraph 18 of the news release) the following statement:

It is important to have members of the United States Congress who will not wave the white flag of surrender in this war on terror.

Matt Lauer of NBC asked White House consel Dan Bartlett about it on Wednesday and asked him to name ONE member of Congress who had advocated that we 'wave the white flag of surrender.' Bartlett couldn't name one. Because none have.

There are a growing number in Congress who believe, as I do, that there is nothing at all to be gained by our remaining in Iraq, and that sooner or later the country created by colonial powers and made up of Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds who have little in common and were only held together forcibly by a dictator, is likely to divide into three smaller countries and that fighting the inevitable is as futile as the attempts a decade ago to try and hold the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia together by force. These members of Congress have not simply suggested that we lay down our weapons and leave, but rather that we set a deadline which would give the Iraqi army, (though fighting a futile cause as it is) time to take over for us (lest anyone think they are serious about this without a deadline, they give their members a week of vacation per month-- something our troops could scarecely dream of-- because they know as long as the Bush policy is in place, when things get tough, the Americans will do all their fighting for them.)

What I see is a plan for withdrawal from being stuck in a civil war that we can stay in until the cows come home without winning, not a surrender. I had hoped that Bush would take the opportunity presented by the death of Zarqawi to announce a withdrawal (declare victory and get out) but apparently he was not willing to do so. This does not involve surrendering to anyone, and it is interesting that when you hear this sort of rhetoric, asking people to name names seems to calm it down right away. They accuse in general, but they can't find a specific individual who fits the accusation.

Nice to see that they have their priorities in order

Congress today voted to pass another estate tax cut. Although the measure falls short of the complete abolition of estate taxes that had been urged by conservatives, led by the Wal-Mart heirs (who apparently feel they were gypped by only receiving in the neighborhood of $20 billion apiece from the estate of their late father), it does actually do one reasonable thing-- increasing the exemption level (the amount of an estate not subject to taxes) up to $5 million for individuals and $10 million for couples. This is reasonable inasmuch as the previous limits of $1 million and $2 million had not been indexed to inflation, and so in fact there had been a handful of cases where successful family businesses or farms that had been subject to the tax were sold. And the new limit won't get rid of this problem in some cases-- for example the O'Malley family had to sell the Dodgers and the Yawkey family had to sell the Red Sox. So I guess if you own a major league baseball team, maybe you should sell it and run for Governor of Texas or something like that. However, the whole 'family run small business or farm' routine is largely a dodge, because in almost all cases the old limit (and certainly the new limit) covers it. If your business has grown to the size where you end up paying substantial estate taxes (like Sam Walton's remaining share of Wal-Mart), then I question whether it is a 'small' business anymore.

They had in fact wanted to eliminate the tax entirely, but were prevented from doing it last year because the vote was to be taken just as the Katrina images were coming out of New Orleans and Americans would have been outraged by a tax cut for dead rich people when the bodies of dead poor people were being collected on sidewalks. And this year, there is an election coming and the Republicans are reading the poll numbers. So, there is only one year there will be no estate taxes at all-- in 2010 due to old legislation passed during the earlier rounds of Bush tax cuts. But it will still be back in 2011 (Wonder, in the event that they don't get a permanent repeal passed, whether in December of 2010 we will see a bunch of billionaires move to Oregon and get themselves declared terminally ill and get lethal injections?) and that is a good thing. With the new limits, any further estate tax cut would be clearly a tax cut aimed at plutocrats (which there are many of in Congress, and many more in Congress who have been wined, dined and given airplane rides by plutocrats). The case can be made that this cut was as well, but luckily it stopped short of going all the way.

What makes this particularly galling is that Congress just this week voted (again) against raising the minimum wage. Of course, taking inflation into account, the minimum wage is less than half of what it was in the 1950's, but they like to continue to argue that somehow it protects 'jobs.' Hmmmm... that is what they said the last time it actually did go up in 1997, and that was followed by an economic boom and the creation of millions of jobs. It's not hard to figure that one out either-- when poor people have more money, they spend more, creating more need to provide the goods and services they buy. In contrast, when rich people have more, they probably don't spend it because they are already spending whatever they want to (isn't that what it means to be rich?). So given the obvious results of the last time we hiked minimum wages, why are the conservatives still making the tired old, and demonstably false, argument that raising them costs jobs?

And one other thing that got lost in the shuffle of all this-- Congress itself quietly accepted a $3,300 pay raise for themselves. That is despite the fact that they have a health care system that should be a model for the nation-- universal coverage that in most cases is free to members of Congress and their families, even as they refuse to do the same for us. And their retirement benefits are among the best in the land too-- yet it was only a year ago that they were talking about cutting your Social Security benefits.

So they pass a tax cut to favor a bunch of rich dead people (and only don't pass a bigger one because they are afraid of the voters), they pocket a nice raise, but they refuse to stimulate the economy with a minimum wage increase.

Isn't it great to see how well their priorities are in place?

If government is always less efficient than private industry, why didn't private companies build these big, overarching projects?

Good to be back from vacation. If you read my last post, you know that I was gone on vacation.

My girls did the Arizona Cinderella pageant. I say, ‘did’ rather than ‘compete’ because it is far more than a pageant (if that were all it was, we would not be interested.) It is a youth development program that has really helped mine develop and gain confidence and grow in many, many ways, while at the same time having a lot of fun (and I do mean a LOT of fun—sure leaves dad tired though from all those parties.) Then we went hiking in Yosemite.

All week though little things kept reminding me of the successes of government, and contradicting the claims of those who claim that private industry can do things better. In fact, the great and visionary things often are done not by private industry, but by government. And often private entrepreneurs benefit as a result. Let me list a few examples that occurred to me (in italics, the benefits to private entrepreneurs):

1. The National Parks System. President Theodore Roosevelt had a vision, and he put it together, often over the strenuous objections of those who believed that there were no uses for wilderness other than trapping, logging and mining. Of course, millions of square miles of America—about 98% of it in fact, is outside of these preserves, and so are still available for industrial use, but President Roosevelt’s vision has guaranteed that the beauty of certain places in nature, like Yosemite, will remain for future generations. As an example, my daughters and I were hiking along a stream, and they saw some bright yellow flashes in the sandy mud on the bottom. Having once been an amateur geologist, I can tell the difference between gold and pyrite, and I could tell right away that it was gold (remember where we were too—in the Sierra Nevada, not so far from Sutter’s Mill). Of course, we did not have the equipment to pan for gold, and even if we had, we would not have done so—my daughters understand the need to not take anything from a National Park, and leave it as they found it, so that perhaps one day their kids can see it as they saw it. Many people today make their living working in and around national parks—and tourism is a much larger source of revenue than mining, and unlike mining it is renewable—there will always be more tourists.

2. The electric grid On May 11, 1935, Franklin Roosevelt created the Rural Electrification Agency. His vision was of a country on a power grid, so that even small places (which then had no electricity) could receive power even if it was from an electric plant several states away. Further, while large cities had electricity, prior to the creation of the grid, there was no way that, for example, surplus electricity generated in, for example, Chicago, could be sent to Detroit if Detroit was running short. With the grid, that happens routinely. Despite aging equipment, electric shortages are today far less common than they were in the 1920’s and 1930’s before the grid was in place. Try doing business in today's world without electricity. Probably impossible for most businesses. And units of energy are routinely bought and sold on the market. Other than abuses in this system, most notably Enron-- which could have been avoided with stricter oversight from Federal and state regulators-- the system has worked pretty well.

3. The Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation. This corporation was also a creation of the Roosevelt administration, as part of the National Housing Act of 1934. In fact, it is not itself a Federal Agency, but a private entity. It however had the implied backing of the Federal government (the only time this was tested was during the Savings and Loan crisis of 1986-1987, when the Federal Government bailed out the FSLIC). The FSLIC underwrites loans that banks make to small businesses and individuals. Want to start a business? Chances are that you will need a bank loan to get started. Without the FSLIC, banks would be on their own to cover bad loans, and so it would be much harder to get that loan (especially given the failure rate of small businesses) and the rates would be much, much higher. With the FSLIC (and ultimately, as 1987 showed, the Federal Government) underwriting your loan, if you have good credit and a sound business plan, you can probably get that loan.

4. The splitting of the atom. A few years ago, a panel of scientists voted this the most important scientific achievement of the twentieth century. And again, it would not have been done without the government. In fact, the Manhattan project was so secret that it was 100% done by the government, and only those private businesses who absolutely had to know that anything at all was being done, knew it. And say what you will about Hiroshima, but let’s not forget that in those days there were people like Hitler and Stalin in the world who, had they developed nukes, would have had no compunction at all about laying waste to entire countries to further their evil plans. Today, nuclear energy provides 21% of the electricity in the United States, and over 90% in countries like France. Of course, it has its drawbacks and may be a dubious benefit, but to claim that the Manhattan Project was somehow a failure or inefficient because it was done by the government instead of private industry is ridiculous.

5. The eradication of smallpox worldwide, and of malaria and polio in America. This was a vision during the 1950’s and 1960’s, and became a reality, thanks to government. There was no profit in going into small, impoverished villages in India to give expensive smallpox vaccines to the children there, so if this was the purview of private industry, it likely never would have been done. But governments from around the world, assisted by some lesser amounts raised by charities, paid to have this done. Unfortunately, the eradication campaigns against polio and malaria ended with those diseases still present in parts of the third world. Today, most people in developed countries have no longer been vaccinated against them anymore so polio and malaria are starting to re-emerge. But that is a result of not doing what was done with smallpox (largely because it was considered too expensive), rather than because of inefficiency. The government was efficient in doing what it wanted done in America. Do I even have to point out how not having smallpox, polio and malaria in America benefits entrepreneurs? Health care costs and productivity benefits aside, not having these deadly diseases in America anymore benefits everybody.

6. The Interstate Highway System. In the 1950’s, President Eisenhower had a vision of an America linked together strategically (remember this was during the Cold War) and commercially by a series of high speed, direct highways linking major commercial and population centers while bypassing smaller ones and replacing the patchwork of two lane highways that then allowed people to drive across the country in about a week. On the interstate, it can be done in half that time. True, it has been devastating to the economy of small towns that used to line many of the two lane highways that are now no longer in use, but ”Anything you’ve got, a trucker brought it”. The impact of the Interstate on commerce and business has been enormous, and well worth not only the initial investment to build it, but the ongoing taxes paid to maintain, improve and expand it. In fact, in most states as well as in the case of the Federal Government, gasoline taxes mostly are earmarked for the construction and maintenance of highways and other roads. Yet, with the high price of gasoline, I’ve heard some people propose getting rid of gasoline taxes. I wonder whether they would complain if this happened and then the roads started to fall apart under them. Some people still expect that they can get something for nothing.

7. The Space Program. In the 1960’s, President Kennedy had a vision. He said that by the end of that decade, America would land a man on the moon. And so it was. But since that date, despite budget cuts in the 1970’s and after that led to a series of failed missions and the space shuttle being relegated to doing eighth grade science experiments, NASA has still had its share of successes, the most spectacular being the Hubble orbiting telescope that has allowed us to peer deep into space, witnessing events billions of light-years away (and so billions of years into the past). Forget liquid crystals and tang. The space program has brought us satellites, allowing communication by cell phones, televisions and now wireless internet instantaneously all over the world—with enormous commercial benefits. We can even use GPS systems to find a lost hiker in Colorado or track a stolen vehicle and lead police to it. And private industry? Well, after finally making it into orbit last year, there are plans to open a private spaceport in Southern New Mexico to take tourists into space at up to $200,000 a pop. In other words, to do what astronauts were doing in the early 1960’s.

8. The Internet. That’s right, this one you are on right now. Of course, as early as the 1970’s, there were small groups of research institutions and government agencies that were linked together via computer, but only for specific sharing of research or information (and these by the way were also generally public institutions.) In 1988, Al Gore wrote and shepherded through Congress the specific piece of legislation, the National High-Performance Computing Act, that established the infrastructure and the process to link universities and research institutions together on a national level via a shared network. Then in 1992, he co-sponsored the Information Infrastructure and Technology Act, which opened the network to private traffic. Also that year, as a candidate for Vice President, Al Gore introduced the term, ‘information superhighway.’ His vision consisted of an international ‘trunk’ which would link potentially billions of individual computers together to participate in a free and open exchange of information. In 1993, Gore, then a member of the Clinton administration, got the administration to implement a tax of a few cents a month on local phone bills to finance the construction of this network.. Within a couple of years, the internet was up and running (though in a form somewhat different from Gore’s original vision) and has grown exponentially since. Let me ask you? Do you even notice the tax on your phone bill? And if you do, would you trade the internet for those few cents a month? The commercial and proven business power of the internet is enormous. Many people earn a very good living strictly online. Of course, many entrepreneurs make money as local points of access (internet service providers). Unfortunately for Gore, he misspoke in the 2000 campaign when he said he 'invented the internet.' In fact, he no more invented the internet than Henry Ford invented the automobile, but like Ford, he deserves credit (which he will likely not get for many years, if ever) for making it available to more than the select few.

9. The Human Genome Project I recently wrote a complete post on this one: May 18, 2006: Human Genome Project Complete; A Triumph for Public Research Funding. Without going through that entire post again, I made the points that 1) Governments (this was an international project though led by the British) had taken the lead in funding this research, though they had and benefited from partnerships with private industry, 2) private industry (Celera) had tried to beat them to the end and failed, in fact given up because the undertaking was so huge, 3) this could be a win-win situation for the government and the drug companies, and most importantly: 4)

the genome, now completed, is free and accessible to anyone who wants to look at it. Suppose for a moment, that a private company had in fact carried out this project and sequenced the entire genome. Do you suppose they would simply open it up to free inspection, and tell potential competitors, 'Here?' They would have guarded it like Colonel Sanders guarded his secret recipe, and if they let any of it out at all, you can be sure that it would have only been in pieces, and at a hefty price. In the long run, research into applications would be limited only to that company, and to those who they chose to give the information to. And to compound matters, competitors, not willing to allow that situation to continue permanently, would have certainly begun their own DNA sequencing project. So, the same research would probably be done half a dozen, a dozen or even more times, resulting in a tremendous waste of academic resources. But now, none of them will have to do that, they can go to the public database of the project, and go get anything and everything they want either for free or for a nominal fee.

That is the end of the quote, but let me be clear (the following italics) about the benefit to private industry: With this research now done and accessible to all, it helps all of the companies looking for the miracle cures for diseases that this promises to open up. They can still compete with each other, but the Genome project is like a card that tells everyone in a game to move ahead ten spaces. The path to the new cures will be shorter and more direct, for everybody. If anything, the ones it really helps the most are the smallest players, the startups and other pharmaceutical companies with limited resources who now have the same background genetic information available as the large manufacturers.

Vacation time-- and a live-wire topic to chew on

I'll be gone for just a bit over a week. My girls are competing in a pageant in Nevada, after which I plan to take them hiking in Yosemite, and maybe fit in a trip to Knott's Berry farm before heading back.

Before leaving, though, I want to address an issue that seems to have come up this week.

It has been the plan of the right to criticize those of us on the left as 'unpatriotic' ever since the early days of the Cold War (after all, I think they reasoned that because communism was an ideology which originally had its roots on the left of the political spectrum, therefore liberals must harbor some sort of secret sympathy for Josef Stalin or something ridiculous like that). Through decades of red baiting the right learned how to win elections with these sorts of things (taught by none other than the master red baiter of them all, Richard Nixon, who got elected to congress by accusing Congressman Jerry Voorhees of being a closet communist.) An example of what they preached went like this: if you wanted the US out of Vietnam, it might have been simply because you couldn't see any rational reason to continue to lose troops fighting an endless war, but the right could (and did) claim that you must actually have some sort of secret line to Hanoi or Moscow and were really working not for peace for America, but for victory for the reds. Later on, Newt Gingrich and a couple of his friends helped set the tone for their attacks against Congress by standing in the well and making speeches that were televised by cable all over the country, actually asking where 'anyone of the Democrat side of he aisle' would stand to dispute their contention that they were all anti-American and wanted to change America into a communist country by doing everything they could to help the Soviet Union defeat America in battle. Of course the house chamber was empty during these speeches, but their audience wasn't other congressmen, it was rubes listening all over the land, and it was great dramatic theatre. And that fit their black and white view of the world perfectly: either you were for every warlike move that America made, or you were actively working for the communists.

One wonders whether some on the right actually miss the days of the Cold War and how easy it was to crucify Liberals as 'anti-American.'

But not to fear, they have a new tool to attack the left as unpatriotic and anti-American. It was on full display this week after Zarqawi was nailed by an American surgical strike. For example, on Fox News' the Big Story, host John Gibson and guest Ed Rollins

suggested that attendees at the "big convention" for the "far-left-wing Daily Kos" weblog were "demoralized" by the death of Al Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi....

On the June 8 edition of Fox News' The Big Story, host John Gibson suggested that attendees at the "big convention" for the "far-left-wing Daily Kos" weblog -- at which he noted Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean and Sens. Harry Reid (D-NV) and John Kerry (D-MA) were scheduled to speak -- were "demoralized" by the death of Al Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Republican strategist Ed Rollins agreed, adding: "Well, they'll claim it's a conspiracy theory. That we knew their meeting was going on and that's why we did it [killed Zarqawi now]." Gibson replied: "Well, they are claiming that. They are claiming at this moment that they were saving Zarqawi to kill at an important moment."

As Media Matters For America has noted, MSNBC host Don Imus and CNN political analyst Bill Bennett have also suggested that liberals were saddened by Zarqawi's death. And we hear that sort of thing from people like Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage on a daily basis, pretty much interrupted only by commercial breaks.

Uh, go ahead and read the comments that day on the front page of Kos. An example of one (requoted in the quotes after the Media Matters article) reads like this:

"CHEERS to finding a really evil needle in a really big haystack. U.S. forces rocked terrorist Abu Musab "Dick" al-Zarqawi's world last night when they tossed a thousand pounds of explosive whupass down his gullet. They found his body in the bedroom. And the kitchen. And the den. And the garage. And the neighbor's apartment. And I think I found an eyebrow in my Cocoa Puffs this morning. My only regret: he didn't know what hit him." - Bill in Portland Maine, front page of DailyKos (this was written before we learned that he actually did have a few moments of life left, during which he did learn what hit him.)

As I wrote in my own post about Zarqawi:

And it is a good thing that he is dead. Zarqawi was a murdering monster who won't be mourned by anyone except for a handful of fanatics.

And I don't feel any differently about it today. And it isn't even logical that anyone on the left could feel any sympathy for a guy like Zarqawi even if he wasn't a murderer-- if he or those who think like him ever did succeed, they would create a feudal society where men are absolutely in control and girls have to drop out of school before junior high school so they can get married, where people are forced to pray several times per day and even the smallest moral transgression is punishable by such things as public flogging, amputation, or being stoned to death. Why would any of us Liberals feel sympathy for a guy who wants to create that kind of a society?

What this shows is that regardless of what those of us on the left may feel, the right has decided that they can pull out the old Cold War red baiting gimmick, paint it green (the color of Islam) and go about their old tricks. The truth doesn't matter.

Heck, they may even find some malcontent somewhere on the left who actually does miss Zarqawi. And if they do, expect them to display him or her in front of a fifty-thousand watt searchlight as an example of a 'typical' liberal. Of course if they do find one, he or she won't be any more typical than that church that protests against gay people at soldiers' funerals is typical of conservatives. My only response to that would be to reread my comment from above:

And it is a good thing that he is dead. Zarqawi was a murdering monster who won't be mourned by anyone except for a handful of fanatics.

Nowhere did I say that all the fanatics would be radical Islamicists. But don't presume to assume if you find one that that is what Liberals think, because it isn't true.

cross-posted at Night Bird's Fountain

If you are from Alabama, give yourself a pat on the back...

There are politicians who are serious about solving the public's problems, and politicians who will demogogue any issue in order to get themselves elected.

For example, I was very impressed with the voters of both parties in Alabama this week.

On Tuesday, Republican voters in Alabama renominated incumbent Governor Bob Riley in his race against Judge Roy Moore, while Democratic voters chose Lucy Baxter, a newcomer to statewide races, over former Governor Don Siegelman. Both Moore and Siegelman would have been very poor choices, men who were apparently willing to do whatever it took to get elected.

Moore, you may recall, willingly and knowingly violated his oath of office in not only failing to uphold the decisions made by higher courts, all the way up to the Supreme Court, but himself having a big stone image engraved with the ten commandments placed inside the rotunda of his courthouse (the irony of the fact that his 'weapon of choice' in the culture war was a graven image which contained right there on it a prohibition against graven images was apparently lost on Moore). He then demogogued the issue until the ten commandments were forcibly removed from the building at very nearly the same time as Moore was forcibly removed from his judicial position. That didn't stop his demogoguing though as he went on tour with the stone monument as he ran for Governor. Luckily, Alabama Republicans, despite Riley's reversal on a 'no-new-taxes' pledge he made the last time he ran (once he saw the real state budget, reality trumped ideology) renominated him and by a margin wide enough that perhaps Moore realizes now how he made (shall I say it?) a monumental miscalculation.

On the Democratic side, the issue was Siegelman. As the Democratic governor who lost narrowly to Riley in 2002, and in a Democratic year, Siegelman might have had a chance, had he put the interests of the people of Alabama first. But he did not. First, as some of you may recall, Siegelman refused to concede the election in 2002, despite the fact that the margin, though close, was wide enough that it was certain that he had lost. As long as there is a realistic chance that an election could still turn, it makes sense to withhold a concession. But once it is clear who will take the oath of office, (including in rare cases when the courts have decided it) then to continue to fight it is futile, and to do so only makes most voters consider you to be desperate and classless. That is why Al Gore is listened to today and respected (he in the end realized when it was time to concede and did so with class) while Dino Rossi is a joke. Siegelman made himself a joke by refusing to concede a race that he had clearly lost. But that pales beside what came next. Siegelman was indicted on multiple counts of corruption while in the statehouse. So his concern about losing the election was not for the people of Alabama at all. It was about his 1) losing a reliable source of income, and I don't mean just the Governor's salary, and 2) suddenly no longer being in a position where he could cover up his own misdeeds. During the campaign, Siegelman attended his Federal corruption trial during the day and campaigned at night. He was actually not even trying to win, just to make it into a runoff, where he might be able to tear down his opponent and squeak out a nomination, then try to come up with some rabbit-out-of-the-hat to beat Riley (or Moore, who he must have been hoping would be the Republican nominee). Fortunately Alabama Democrats rejected the whole sad, sick Siegelman spectacle and coalesced around another candidate, giving Baxter the outright majority she needed to avoid a runoff.

In no state was the choice as clearly this week between candidates who had their own self-interest in mind, and candidates who took the term, 'public servant' seriously. And Alabama voters-- of both parties-- made the right decision.

...But not if you are from Oklahoma or South Carolina.

Politicians in South Carolina and Oklahoma also made news this week. They became the fourth and fifth states (the first three are Louisiana, Montana and Florida) to pass laws calling for the death penalty for people convicted of certain particularly heinous sex crimes.

OKLAHOMA CITY, Oklahoma (AP) -- Oklahoma on Friday became the fifth state to allow the death penalty for certain sex crimes, although legal scholars questioned the constitutionality of the new state law.

Under the measure signed by Gov. Brad Henry, anyone convicted twice for rape, sodomy or lewd molestation involving children under 14 can face the death penalty.

Right now, there is one person on death row for a sex crime, a man on death row in Louisiana for raping an eight year old girl in 2003.

What could be more pleasing and more just, than to execute child molesters, right? Well, no actually. I know, it's tough to make any argument against doing something to a child molester, but I will make it here.

Begin with the gut reaction. Yes, what child molesters have done is horrible. And we have to protect our children ahead of any other consideration (one reason I recently added the Code Amber Alert ticker at the top of my screen). But is executing them the answer? It is true, after all, that child molesters are that way by nature, and that they can't be truly 'cured,' even if they want to be (there is ample scientific as well as criminal evidence to back that up.) However, let me make some points why executing them is not the answer.

Start with a bald fact that I have to state anyway and which overshadows the rest of the discussion: It won't hold up in court. That is pretty much conceded by nearly all legal scholars. No one has been executed for a crime other than murder in the U.S. since the Rosenbergs were executed for a 1950 conviction for treason, for giving nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. No one has been executed for a sex crime in the U.S. since the early part of the last century (and then child molestation wasn't even an issue, and the people executed were invariably black men convicted rightly or wrongly or raping white women.) So the courts will virtually certainly strike this down as 'cruel and unusual punishment' not proportional to the crime, and what is really infuriating is that the politicians know it better than anyone, but they are doing this to be popular. It will certainly cost millions in legal fees for their states before the courts throw this one out. Further, the death penalty itself is something of a home for political demogogues; even if every person on death row today were lined up and shot tomorrow morning, it would scarcely make a dent in the prison population, which would be back at today's level within a few weeks.

A second reason this is a bad idea is because of the number of people who have gone to death row for murder but have since been exonerated (I'm not talking about the thousands who have been taken off due to technicalities here either, but of the 123 in 25 states who have been actually exonerated and found to have not committed the crime they went to death row for.) Given the significantly high number of people already sent to death row for murder and who then are exonerated, to expand the number of people without fixing the system first is like discovering you have a natural gas leak and then immediately turning the furnace up.

A third reason this is a bad idea is that given that sexual predators don't seem able to change their sexual orientation, it opens up the door to when anyone with what (who decides?) is an 'abnormal' sexual orientation could face the same thing. I know, someone will say I'm being paranoid, but with people like Michael Savage on the radio publically advocating the death of homosexuals, am I really all that paranoid? What about people who are found guilty of raping an adult? OK, what about people who are found guilty of attempted rape or molestation? OK, what about peole who are found guilty of exposing themselves or flashing other people? What about people found guilty of prostitution (or of soliciting prostitutes, or of pimping?) Not that I would advocate any of these things, but I certainly don't see how the death penalty applies, or where 100% of people would agree to draw the line.

A fourth reason is given in the article:

David Brook, a law professor at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, said the measure might actually put a child rape victim's life at risk.

"The last message you want to give an offender who has the life of a child in his hands is you might as well kill the child because he's already got the death penalty," said Brook, who runs the Virginia Capital Case Clearing House, which assists lawyers in death penalty cases. "This is a very stupid message." Some child molesters already kill their victims in order to minimize their chances of being caught. But most do not. Do we really want to increase the percentage who do kill them? The only way one could argue against this is if you don't believe that the death penalty would ever be a deterrent, and if you believe that, then what exactly is it good for?

'nuff said about that.

So what should we do, given the need to protect our children from these monsters?

I wrote a post about that a few months ago. The main cogent points I made then (and still propose) are:

1. People convicted of child molestation or rape should serve their full term in prison.

2. Ideally, if we are serious about keeping them away from children, we should create an institution (similar to the old mental institutions but more humane) which would offer more freedom than a prison (freedom on the grounds, freedom to have visits from family members regularly, and perhaps some supervised group activities on the outside) but would remain secure (of course, it being better than a prison, prison would still remain as the place to send someone who committed a crime inside.)

3. Until we can implement such a plan, put on tracking devices similar to the one Martha Stewart wore (which of course she never should have had to wear, but it does make sense for sex offenders.)

But one thing we don't need is spineless politicians who give mobs what they want even when they know very well that it won't fly in court, and will accomplish nothing.

You're doing a heckuva job, Brownie-- at stopping the buck.

In a story out today, we learn the real reason why President Bush thought that Michael Brown was doing a 'heckuva job' after Katrina.

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The former emergency management chief who quit amid widespread criticism over his handling of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina said he received an e-mail before his resignation stating President Bush was glad to see the Oval Office had dodged most of the criticism....

The e-mail stated that Bush was relieved that Brown -- and not Bush or Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff -- was bearing the brunt of the flak over the government's handling of Katrina.

Yup, be glad that someone else further down the chain is taking the heat. That's leadership for you. I guess George Bush is no Harry Truman.

Zarqawi Dead. Now, will Bush take the opportunity to get out?

Yesterday, an American airstrike in Baqouba, Iraq, killed al-Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

And it is a good thing that he is dead. Zarqawi was a murdering monster who won't be mourned by anyone except for a handful of fanatics. It is also a good thing that they captured computer hard drives in the house that contain lists of al-Qaeda members in Iraq including where they are, and maybe including information about how they are getting into Iraq, and about al-Qaeda in other countries (killing all the people in the house without damaging the computer-- now that's precision bombing.) Of course this 'fixes' a mistake that the President made before the war in Iraq even began.

The second news story that heaves more burdens on the president comes from an NBC News broadcast by Jim Miklaszewski on March 2. Apparently, Bush had three opportunities, long before the war, to destroy a terrorist camp in northern Iraq run by Abu Musab Zarqawi, the al-Qaida associate who recently cut off the head of Nicholas Berg. But the White House decided not to carry out the attack because, as the story puts it:

[T]he administration feared [that] destroying the terrorist camp in Iraq could undercut its case for war against Saddam.

All of which should make it abundantly clear, if it ever was not, that the reason the President wanted to invade Iraq had nothing to do with Zarqawi or al-Qaeda (the terrorist camp noted, as I have pointed out many times, was in fact behind Kurdish lines, a long way from anywhere that Saddam's army controlled.) However, today's news is at least something of an erasure of the big error that the administration committed in not going after Zarqawi when they had the opportunity to do so before the war.

The question becomes whether our President will take the opportunity that this presents and take the opportunity to announce a withdrawal from Iraq. What is left as soon as we (as I'm sure we are doing now) take action on the information contained in the computer drive is essentially a sectarian war between Shias (who pretty much control the government) and Sunnis (who are primarily the insurgents). For us to remain in the middle of that is pointless, so this will be a great opportunity to leave.

Some conservatives have also objected to leaving Iraq because they claim that if we announced a withdrawal, there would be some who claimed we were 'chased' out by terrorists. But if we announced it this week, that claim would ring hollow, if anyone tried to make it. So, this is the ideal time for President Bush to declare victory with the end of Zarqawi, and announce a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq.

UPDATE: It turns out that Zarqawi was actually barely alive but died shortly after the bombing (not significant). Also, in case any of you encounter a conservative who listened to Rush this morning, he 'took on' this whole argument by creating a couple of straw men, together with at least one outright matter of speculation stated as truth, and one important omission of information. He claims that we on the left are contradicting our position that 'there were no terrorists in Iraq pre-invasion.' No, it has been public knowlege that the Ansar al-Islam camp existed. Rush then said that Saddam's agents were up there working with Zarqawi. In fact, there is no evidence at all that this is true. Rush also omitted the fact that the camp was in Kurdish occupied Iraq, so Saddam had nothing to do with it (couldn't have, even if he wanted to). It was in a part of Iraq that he had no control over whatsoever. Further, the argument that we on the left are contradicting ourselves is a strawman (if you're not familiar with debate terms, it is rephrasing something differently and with a different meaning, in order to set up a rebuttal). What we have pointed out is that unlike pre-invasion Iraq, when al-Qaeda (except for a few individual members like Zarqawi, and their camp in Kurdish occupied Iraq) didn't exist there, since we invaded, they have flooded into the country to fight us. Hopefully this will make a dent in that, but ultimately al-Qaeda entered Iraq in large numbers for one reason: to kill Americans. Clearly Limbaugh is worried that the truth on this will get out, which is why he is so desperate to rebut it that he has resorted to cheap debate tricks (then again, it's not the first time I've heard him resort to them.)

Latin American elections demonstrate the failure of free market conservatism.

In the Peruvian election today, Socialist candidate (and former President) Alan Garcia was, despite allegations of corruption, leading Ollanta Humala, a protege of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

The story is not, despite how some on the right might spin it, that the leftist wave sweeping over Latin America is running out of steam. Quite conversely, the fact that the choice in the end was between two different brands of socialists points out emphatically how powerful it is. Conservative candidates couldn't even muster the support to make it into the final round of balloting.

This follows socialists being elected in Bolivia and Chile, as well as making big gains or taking control of the parliamentary bodies in Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina.
The only large South American country where they have not done well is Colombia, where there is still an open insurgency being fought. Heck, in Venezuela, things have moved so far to the left that not only is Chavez a prohibitive favorite to win another term later this year, but the most serious opponent he has is a guy who is even farther to the left than he is.

Central America has had much the same story. Earlier this year a socialist came very close to winning the Presidency in Costa Rica, traditionally the most conservative country in the region. And in Nicaragua, former Sandanista leader and Reagan administration bogeyman Daniel Ortega has a good chance to reclaim his old job in elections later this year. Even in Mexico, polls had showed Socialist Manuel López Obrador in the lead earlier this year. Since then, his two opponents have hired American political consultants to begin running an American style negative smear campaign against López Obrador (a style not before seen in Mexico) and current President Vicente Fox, no friend of Obrador's, made an adroit move in inviting rebel leader Subcommante Marcos to go on a speaking tour of Mexico. Marcos' line is that all three candidates are the same so voters shold boycott the election (Fox believes, probably correctly, that anyone who heeds Marcos' call for a boycott would otherwise be more likely to vote for Obrador than either of the other candidates.) Despite all this, recent polls have shown Obrador tied for first with PAN candidate Felipe Calderón.

So what is going on? It would be easy to blame George Bush, and some bloggers have done that, pointing out that Latin Americans are almost unanimous in their dislike of the U.S. leader. But let's be honest-- if we do that then we give ourselves entirely too much credit. Though relations with the U.S. are certainly an issue in any Latin American election, they are not what the vote is likely to depend on. Those issues tend to be the same as they are here-- economic.

So why would Latin American voters choose socialism?

Simple. Look at the model that Latin America has struggled under for years. The very wealthy, who have controlled the government and suppressed dissent-- by force if necessary, have had a very nice world of low taxes, a government which outside of the military does very little, little regulation (none at all if you grease the right palm), and a relatively small middle class, mostly consisting of professionals to service the needs of the wealthy elite. On the other end of the scale, you have the impoverished masses, for whom low taxes mean little, and who get the brunt of the lack of government services while still living in a capitalist society where they have to pay for everything they can't afford. Those who are in competition with each other for jobs, where labor standards are almost nonexistent, and they can be hired at whatever price the market will bear. Legally they have always had every opportunity to achieve, just they have to be the one in a hundred who through a combination of skill, hard work and good fortune, manages to break out of the slum. Meanwhile businesses, both multinational and domestic, can run up huge profits and pay very little in taxes. In other words, pretty much a conservative Utopia.

What has changed to produce this revolution at the ballot box? Well, the first of these conditions-- that the wealthy suppress dissent by force. Maybe not 100%, but by and large that has changed. Yes, we do now have democracy throughout almost all of Latin America. And what has been the opinion of the voters about their old system? That for most people, living in that kind of society sucks. So bad that they are electing socialists all over the place who pledge to raise taxes, increase services and have the government provide basic necessities to all.

People in Latin American don't have to experiment with conservatism. They've been living under it for generations. And now that they aren't staring down the barrel of a gun, we can see what they really think about it.

Cross posted at Night Bird's Fountain

Homeland Security cuts highlight why we need to rethink the paradigm.

The biggest news locally has been about how Phoenix and Arizona (despite having the nation's largest nuclear plant and a 400 mile long international border which as we have been reminded continually lately, is porous) will suffer deep cuts-- as much as 60%-- from Homeland Security funding. Other cities, including New York will also suffer significant cuts, up to 40%. These cuts are to be offset by increases in funding to cities like Los Angeles and a number of cities in the south, which are more susceptible to natural disasters. Atlanta, the home of the Center for Disease Control, is getting quite a bit of new money.

Of course, we should be spending more time preparing for natural disasters, as last year's horrible events showed. The disastrous consequences of putting FEMA under the Homeland Security umbrella, admitted widely even by those who have supported it last year, have not been fixed (apparently this is another case where ideology, which was behind the demotion and downsizing of FEMA, trumps common sense even in the face of demonstrated failure).

But the real problem is this: Congress and the President are looking at it as a zero-sum game. Given the need to increase preparation for combatting natural disasters, the increases in funding to places like Los Angeles and the south make sense. However, it is not like we are less at risk for terrorism than we were last year. If anything, our failure to catch bin Laden, and the continuing anti-American fervor in the Middle East which we feed daily in Iraq, makes us more vulnerable to terrorism. What we see here is the classic military mistake of redeploying to fight last year's war. Only this time the redeployment is in terms of government resources, rather than military assets. Corporate America sometimes is guilty of the same sort of thinking, looking at the short term exigencies instead of the long term requirements. I suspect that this is the sort of thinking that is pervading our government here.

This is a product of the dominant paradigm that exists today in government: the urge to 'hold the line on spending' while cutting taxes further and downsizing government at all costs. Leave aside the enormous deficits that this type of thinking has plunged us into, as well as the trillions of dollars in corporate welfare that have made a joke out of the whole 'hold the line on spending' routine (and as we well know by now, Republicans can allow the wasteful spending of government funds much better than any Democrat ever did); The 'all costs' have proven phenomenal. I blogged yesterday about Iraq, and made the point (as I've made before) that the 'Rumsfeld doctrine,' that we could fight a war on the cheap with a smaller (meaning lest costly) force, has in fact cost us far more since ignoring Eric Shinseki's advice about how to handle the early stages of the occupation directly contributed to the development of the insurgency and the situation we find ourselves stuck in today. The budget cuts which were made in New Orleans flood levee protection (over a period which precedes the Bush administration, to be sure) are by now well documented, and one can only hope that the kind of fiscal recklessness that we have seen balloon the deficit to historic proportions won't lead to the ruin of our entire economy.

What we need is a new paradigm in Washington. A paradigm that where a need is identified, we put together the necessary resources to deal with it, without borrowing from other places where the resources are also needed. Where wasteful spending is identified, we should obviously get rid of it, and we should audit spending regularly to make sure that it is being done with as little waste as possible. However, if it is necessary to increase the available resources to deal with an emergency or potential emergency then we should not hesitate to do so. And yes, we have to pay for it. Keep in mind that we had a surplus only six years ago, and that that surplus was wiped out (even before 9/11) by the Bush tax cuts. The good news is that in order for the unprecedented trillions of dollars in cuts to get passed, even the conservatives who then controlled Congress had to put sunset clauses on them, as the amount of the cuts was breathtaking (and yes, the deficits that have occurred since have collectively taken our breath away). What we have to do is demand a government that is accountable, but is adequately funded so that we can put more money where it is needed without taking it away from other places where it is also needed. Then we have to have a tax structure to pay for it, which should be the case after the sunset clauses end over the next few years. We will need to hold the feet of Congress to the fire over this though, especially since there will be people who will intentionally have short memories and claim that the expiration of the tax cuts at the sunset date is the equivalent of 'raising taxes.' Nothing of the sort, in fact to suggest it is would be disingenuous, but you can be sure that is what they will claim.

So in summary, we have a choice between a government that is perenially being starved and as such is ineffective, as we have now, or one that is a tool of the citizens and is accountable, adequately funded (without running a deficit) and effective.

99.99% of our soldiers are not accused of anything.

All day long it seems we have been hearing more and more of a drumbeat about American soldiers accused of atrocities in Iraq. In one case that we heard about today, all the allegations were investigated and determined to be false, while the investigation continues into the Haditha incident that started all of this, and which a preliminary report out last Wednesday concluded that the underlying allegations were true. Then today we hear that a pregnant woman and her cousin were shot to death on the way to the maternity ward to deliver her baby.

To begin with, I would like to state for the record that all allegations must be fully investigated, and if it is determined that anyone (including those in a position of responsibility for making sure that events are reported accurately) is found to be involved in atrocities, then they should be tried and subject to the full degree of punishment that their actions warrant. And as readers of this blog are aware, I have been consistently opposed to George Bush's war in Iraq, believing that we were railroaded into it by means of cherry picked intelligence reports, that the mission our troops were supposed to carry out has changed as often as the White House has decided it would be politically convenient to redefine it, that the war has been poorly planned from day one, and that the incompetent leadership at the top (meaning from Don Rumsfeld on up) has continued to screw things up at every opportunity and that the price for their ineptitude has been and is continuing every day to be paid in blood.

That said, I have received a number of disturbing correspondences in my mailbox, in which the tone ranges from a smug sense of self-righteous indignation, to outright glee about all these reports. Most disturbing is the overall thread that seems to be running through them that what is happening in these incidents is typical of what is happening in Iraq and that somehow most or all of our troops are in some way involved.

I would like to say that any such suggestion that this is typical, is a lie. In fact, it is a damnable lie. I have had friends and family who have been deployed to Iraq, and I know friends, family or comrades in arms of at least four of the Americans who have died in Iraq. And what we have been hearing on the news is absolutely not what our army has been doing there.

Let's begin with numbers. Over half a million Americans have served in Iraq since the start of the war (in fact, that number is a bit dated.) It's not surprising that if there were a few such incidents, once one came out and started the ball rolling, we would hear about others, but even if they are all true (and as one of the stories out today shows, they may very well be mostly not true), it would involve at most a few hundred individuals. If you took any group of over a half million Americans (the population of a good sized city), the chances are that you would find a few bad apples, or at least a few who under a great deal of stress might become bad apples. The number of Americans who now stand accused of these actions is about fifty total, which represents less than 0.01% of all the Americans who have been deployed to Iraq since the start of the war. Any number greater than zero is of course unacceptable, but realistically, this is a very small number and the rest of our troops should not be judged by the actions of one out of ten thousand (because that is what this number represents), but rather by their own record of selfless commitment and sacrifice.

That isn't to make an excuse for them. But just as classroom teachers, who put in a great deal of dedication and effort for not very much pay, should not be judged because of the occasional child molester who is found in a school, or police officers, who do a dangerous job, also for not very much pay, should not be judged because of an occasional rogue cop, our military men and women in uniform, who do a job that is at least as dangerous as any police officer's, and which requires at least as much dedication as any teacher, and also for not enough money, should not be judged because of the actions of a few. The few should face justice, absolutely, if they did what is alleged. Then we must focus on the larger problems at hand, starting with how as a nation to extricate ourselves from this whole bloody mess we are in.

Let's also consider the situation. As I've said, it's a situation they are in due to the incompetence of George Bush and Don Rumsfeld, but it is also a daily struggle with life and death. In fact, I believe that the soldiers who shot the two women today, though it is a tragedy and will certainly be perceived very badly in Iraq, will be cleared. The reason why is that while the women were in a hurry to get to the hospital (for obvious reasons), they failed to stop at a checkpoint. Why does this matter? Because in Iraq there have been many hundreds of suicide car bombings. A device to read brain waves has not been invented yet, so it is impossible for a soldier to know whether the car running the checkpoint is trying to get to the maternity ward, or has a trunk packed with a thousand pounds of high explosives headed for either the soldiers themselves, or for a civilian target later on. And several of these car bombs have been driven by women. It would be wonderful if our soldiers could always make the right call, but sometimes they have been blown up by bombers who they did not shoot. I thank God I'm not in their shoes, but to blame the soldiers is disingenuous. To blame those whose decisions have brought about this situation three years after what was supposed to be a weeks long war, is fair.

As I've blogged before, the root of this problem is not anything that the soldiers themselves (many of whom are nineteen and twenty year olds who would be turned away as too young if they wanted to buy a beer) have done, but Don Rumsfeld's decision to ignore Eric Shinseki's advice about having needing four hundred thousand soldiers pre-invasion to prevent an insurgency (and then make a public example of Shinseki to prevent any other general from giving him similar advice). So now we have the insurgency that Shinseki sought to prevent from getting started. Under the circumstances, I believe that our soldiers have done everything we have asked of them remarkably well. But rightly or wrongly, the few soldiers involved in the events we've been hearing about will more and more become the face of Americans for the people who live there (and don't blame American media for that, they have their own media and other communications networks, and the religious ones-- which is most of them-- still consider us infidels, lest we forget that). The battle is not even for hearts and minds anymore, even many of the Iraqis who supported us now consider us to be part of the problem. The thing that would endear us the most to Iraqis anymore would be a withdrawal announcement.

Like a person who sticks their hands into a beehive and continues to get stung with or without the honey, we have to as a nation recognize that it is time to get out. What we could possibly accomplish at this point is hard to see. Iraq has a government up and running, but it is fighting anti-government insurgents, just like in dozens of other conflicts around the globe. The number of foreign terrorists in Iraq is small, and anymore, our presence their feeds their recruiting and training effort as much as it damages it. We are pouring more lives and money after the lives and money we have already poured in there, and even if we stayed there for a decade or more, I doubt if things would change very much.

And to the 99.99% of American servicemen and women who have served in Iraq without violating the Geneva convention, I would only add that we must recognize them as the heroes they are. No matter in what circumstances they come home from Iraq, we must remember that they did their best, and it was on our behalf.

The Maginot Lie.

Remember the Maginot Line? The 'impregnable' wall of fortresses that the French built all along their border with Germany following World War One, at a cost of billions of francs, with the single goal of stopping a German invasion at the border, should there ever be another, after the end of the 'Great War'? The wall was designed to be able to fight World War One-- largely a static war with great masses of men engaged in futile efforts to take heavily fortified positions, and with tremendous losses on each side-- again. Marshal Foch was one of the few Frenchmen who had anything right after the end of World War One, when he said that the treaty of Versailles, which levied enormous damage payments upon a Germany already bled dry by the war, was 'not peace, but a twenty year truce.'

Of course, when World War II came, the Germans simply went around the Maginot Line.

Today, in the United States, the influx of immigrants-- people coming into the United States in search of work, in many cases, illegally-- has been likened to an 'invasion.' Personally, I reject this comparison. An invasion is an organized military action taken with the explicit goal of gaining territory or overthrowing or forcing some action upon the government of the country being invaded. There is no way that this flow of people looking for work meets that definition.

So, there are those who propose to build a wall along the border. Some proposals envision a wall only in some areas with heavy border patrol concentration along the rest of the border, while other scenarios envision a wall along the entire 2,000 mile long border from the Pacific coast of San Diego (where there is already a seven mile wall) to South Padre Island along the south Texas coast.

If this wall is built, will it stop illegal immigration? No, of course it won't, and even its supporters acknowlege that nothing is 100% effective but argue that it would change the millions who have been crossing illegally to perhaps dozens or at most hundreds per year, as they would have to climb, blast, dig, hang-glide or otherwise find a way over, under or through the wall.

But will it? Only if you have the one dimensional imagination of the French planners who assumed that any German invasion would come directly across the border.

Consider this:

The 9/11 commission, mostly concerned with the possibility that terrorists could sneak into the country hidden in cargo containers, or perhaps that they could smuggle in explosives, weapons or maybe even something more sinister, noted that only 2% of the millions of cargo containers entering our ports are inspected. They recommended inspecting 100% of the containers.

To date, the Bush administration has done absolutely nothing meaningful about this recommendation, and the inspection rate remains at 2%.

Very few of the thousands of Chinese and other Asians here illegally came across the Mexican border. In fact, one of the main ways they get in is-- yup, hidden in those very same cargo containers that the Bush administration doesn't think is worth spending the money to inspect, and which aren't even on the radar screen of anti-immigration groups.

There are also many millions of cargo containers that are shipped from Latin American ports to the United States (particularly if your target market is the eastern United States, driving cargo up through Mexico and the central U.S. is not as economically feasible as shipping it.) If we built that wall, who honestly believes that undocumented immigrants from Latin America wouldn't start hiding out in shipping containers?

For that matter, there are may ways to come through the border we have now. Every day millions of private vehicles, railroad cars and trucks cross the border and it's not practical to inspect every one of them. Smuggling in trucks is already quite common, and a border wall will do nothing to prevent this mode of transportation into the U.S.

So what should we do? The answer is complex. First, we have to realize that the 'legal' immigration numbers are unrealistically low and a guest worker program has to reflect realistic numbers, not what Congress has been deciding it should be (a fraction of what the labor market requires.) Second, we should demand that there be no more 'Wal-Mart' solutions (the world's largest retailer reached a negotiated agreement with the government a couple of years ago to 'donate' $11 million to anti-illegal immigration programs while not admitting guilt for the hiring of undocumented workers by subcontractors who all ran the night cleaning crews and which occurred simultaneously in more than twenty states). Instead, how about serious prison time for executives and employers who are found to either by intent, or by intentional negligence, have hired or have authorized the hiring of undocumented immigrants. Once a few have gone to prison, you wouldn't have much more hiring of undocumented immigrants, and with no jobs available, their incentive to come would be gone, and the word that the well had run dry would get back very quickly.

In fact, Republicans and conservatives are trapped by their own dogma on this one. There is a way to end illegal immigration, but it involves targetting employers which they are loathe to do. So they prefer to target the individual workers. But no matter how difficult we make it for workers to get here, or how difficult we try to make life for them once they are here, for someone who has little or nothing before heading north, this is not much of a deterrent (since a job here under any circumstances is still an improvement over what they have now.) So they propose quixotic solutions like a wall, which is doomed to fail.

AMBER alert ticker

I found this on Chuck's new blog, Bushmerika, Part II.

You will probably notice a line up at the top of the page showing if there is an active AMBER Alert. If you don't know what that is, it is a notification put out by local police agencies indicating that a child has been abducted and may be in physical danger, along with any information available about the abductor, the location and if applicable, vehicle description. If the background is yellow, then it means that there is an active alert at this time.

Dealing with pedophiles is a complex issue, and I've blogged on it several times in the past. I may soon put together another more comprehensive post on it. But the first and most important priority has to be protecting America's children, and the AMBER alert system has already resulted in the capture of dozens of suspects and the rescue of dozens of children.

Journalists in a dangerous place.

The biggest story today, of course, is about the car bombing in Iraq that killed four people, including two CBS cameramen, an American soldier and an Iraqi translator, and critically wounded CBS foreign correspondent Kimberly Dozier.

This brings to total number of journalists or others working to get the news out of Iraq killed there to just shy of six dozen.

It also clearly exposes the fallacy that some on the right are always repeating about how Iraq is safer than America, because it isn't (the right likes to compare specific American cities to all of Iraq, because that is the only way they can get the numbers to look favorable to them, despite the fact that comparing a whole country to a specific trouble spot is comparing apples to oranges). Journalists are certainly paid to go where the stories are, but let's face it-- you don't hear much about journalists (even local reporters) being killed while reporting on crime in Detroit or New York or Los Angeles. Not saying it's never happened, but it certainly doesn't happen often. For that matter, most national journalists work every day downtown in cities like New York, Washington and Atlanta. And it is very, very rare that you hear about any of them even getting mugged, much less murdered, except when they are specifically targetted (for example, by the zetas, who make a point of killing any reporters who report on them). But random events rarely kill journalists in America.

One could argue of course that for some reason the insurgents are targetting reporters for death (perhaps not wanting any coverage of themselves) but even if that were true, it would not explain cases like this or that of Woodruff-- reporters who are working closesly with U.S. troops (who are unlikely to publish where they will be or when). Either what happened to them is more typical in Iraq than some would have you believe, or journalists have just had an incredible run of bad luck, or we have a major security breach which has allowed the enemy to know exactly where our journalists are and prepare bombs specifically to kill them.

Not believing this third possibility, and with the law of averages starting to make the second less likely as the number of dead journalists in Iraq edges past seventy, I am inclined to believe the first possibility. Those on the right, either wilfully or because they are chronically stuck in the pre-war rose colored glasses that the Bush administration was then handing out, are having trouble even admitting that this war has not gone as planned, and are having even more admitting the plain truth that it is causing more deaths all the time while in effect leading us nowhere.

Either the Strength of Samson, or the Deception of Delilah

Hat tip to Dude at Blue Republic for this one.

I have to admit a mild level of surprise. The surprise is that last week when Pat Robertson made his comment about the tsunami that he predicts might hit the Pacific Northwest (Pat was due to say something stupid again) I pointed out how in cycle he is. Pat is usually so faithfully on cue every three or four months or so, that you could practically set your clock by him (for change of the seasons anyway). It had been since January that he had made the comment about Ariel Sharon's stroke being divine retribution for the Gaza pullout, so when he predicted that storms and a tsunami 'might' hit the U.S., I almost thought about not blogging about it, it being one of Pat's milder idiocies (though that 'might' caught my attention-- he seems to have learned from some of his previous mistakes). So, I figured that Pat would return to his grotto and hibernate until late summer or early fall before he would come out and say something stupid again.

But it was only this week that he did. Actually not in person, but via his website, where he claimed to have leg-pressed 2000 pounds.

I wonder if someone contacted the Guiness Book, because the present record for a leg press is 1,335 pounds by former Florida State University Quarterback Dan Kendra.

Leaving aside the question of how many phone calls the 73 year old televangelist is undoubtedly now fielding from major university football programs wanting to see if he has used up his NCAA eligibility, if this claim is true, it should certainly convince doubters that Robertson is indeed the elect man of God.

After all, to not only break a world strength record at his age, but to shatter it by leg lifting 50% more weight than anyone has ever lifted this way, could only be possible if he indeed received the strength of Samson.

And if that is true, then we clearly have the wrong strategy in Iraq. Instead of sending mere mortals to fight, we should send Pat. The Bible after all says that the original Samson slew a thousand Philistines with the jawbone of an ass. Now, Pat gets to regularly exercise the jawbone of an ass (every time he opens his mouth, in fact) but just imagine what Pat could do with all the arms we could give him? And if faced with hand to hand combat, he obviously has the leg strength that he could just drop kick a foeman over the next block.

It is inconceivable to believe that God would give Pat such superhuman strength just so he could do a simple leg-press, he must want him to use it to perform some amazing miracle. Perhaps next week you will hear of Pat lifting a car off of a trapped victim, or jumping up to the second floor of a building to rescue a child from a fire, or perhaps kicking down a tree to help clear a break ahead of an approaching forest fire. We will have to wait and see what he will do.

Memorial Day

This is, and has always been, a day to honor the nation's war dead, and to remember those who are now serving in the uniform of the armed forces of the United States.

As many who read this blog know, I have vociferously disagreed with our policy in Iraq, even when I can figure out exactly what it is. However, we should not in any way blame those men and women who are there, for whatever political mistakes have been made by the leadership in this war. They are doing what they are asked to do, and doing it well, and at great risk and loss, doing it successfully. Often they are doing this despite the periodically re-defined mission, an enemy that no one at the top planned to be fighting, and the by now notorious lack of adequate body and vehicle armor. They deserve our respect and our honor, and we should reserve whatever criticism we have for those at the top who have made mistakes, not for the ordinary people who wear the uniform of our armed forces. Even when they do something that is wrong-- and all week we've been hearing about the Haditha incident (and whoever is guilty of misconduct there-- including a cover-up-- should absolutely be held responsible for their actions), we should not let that specific instance reflect on the basic commitment to getting it done the right way that almost all of those in our armed forces share (and I've had both friends and family deployed to Iraq).

Let's also remember that most of them are still nineteen or twenty year old kids who would be turned away as too young if they tried to buy a beer at circle K, and who instead of sitting in a comfortable chair on a college campus, threatened only by their math assignment, or instead of doing their job and only having to pay attention to the bills when they get home, or instead of devoting their time to their families, have instead chosen to risk their lives, do the work they are asked to do on behalf of their country, and often sacrifice important time with their families.

We must also not forget the 'other war.' We are also fighting in Afghanistan. Maybe it is because we have less troops there and less casualties, or more probably it is because of the lack of controversy (no one seriously argues either the justification or the purpose of the war in Afghanistan, and the press probably finds agreement to be boring) but Afghanistan is hardly ever mentioned, and if so then it is invariably preceded by 'Iraq and...' But Afghanistan is much more than the 'other war.' It is the war that we were thrust quite literally into on September 11, and a place where Americans are fighting just as hard every day as in Iraq.

It is important on this day to remember the war dead, not only to honor them, but also to remind us that a decision to go to war should never be taken lightly or undertaken if there is any other option. War is a terrible thing, and no amount of flag-waving or patriotic sloganeering should be allowed to obscure that fact. Some wars are necessary (and as I've just pointed out, Afghanistan is a prime example), but to quote former President Jimmy Carter as he said last year when he was awarded a Nobel Prize for a quarter century of hard work in the interest of promoting peace and Democracy, 'War may sometimes be a necessary evil, but it is always evil.'

Separation of Powers in the Balance.

Today, Justice Department officials, including Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty and FBI Director Robert Mueller, threatened to resign en masse if documents seized this week by the FBI from the offices of Representative William Jefferson (D-LA) were returned. Congress, led by Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) have demanded that the materials taken in the raid be returned unopened. President Bush has frozen them for forty-five days.

First of all, I would like to make it very clear that I believe that there is ample evidence (even in the absence of the raid) that Representative Jefferson is guilty as sin of accepting bribes while in office (that $90,000 found stashed in the freezer at the Representative's home gives a whole new meaning to the term, 'cold, hard cash') using his paid congressional staff to perform personal business and various other violations both of the law and congressional ethics. He is one of two Democrats who showed up last year on a list of the thirteen most ethically-challenged members of Congress. I don't care that William Jefferson is a Democrat. He's corrupt and he needs to go. If I lived in his district I would vote Republican just to get rid of him, unless the Justice Department does it sooner, which I hope they do. There should be no place in Washington for people with these kinds of ethics, and I hope he spends the next several years as Duke Cunningham's cellmate.

That said, the separation of powers makes it clear that while a Congressman is engaged in his official duties (and Speaker Hastert is right about this), he is exempt from being subject to the Justice Department or any other extension of the Executive branch. That is why Congress has their own rules to police themselves. Often those rules have been ineffective (hence the Abramoff scandal and other problems that I have been very critical of) and the most severe penalties-- expulsion of a member-- are virtually never even considered. Nevertheless, the Constitution sets out clearly that the Congress and the Executive branch are co-equal branches of government. That does not mean that Congressmen are above the law, but rather that whatever investigation occurs must be done while respecting the limits of their official duties. In that context, the Congressman's office, where he conducts his official business, must be respected. On the other hand, his home (including his freezer) is outside of those duties and is subject to search (and other than William Jefferson himself, no one has objected to that part of the investigation. That doesn't mean not to go after him either. The Justice Department was able to collect the evidence needed to prosecute Duke Cunningham and send him to prison, as well as they did to former Ways and Means Chairman Dan Rostenkowski (D-IL) a few years ago when he went to prison.

It is worth noting that Congress itself has respected the separation of powers. In both the Nixon and Clinton impeachments, the focus of the impeachment debate dealt with accusations of abuses of power or illegal activities, not with policy decisions. And that is why I have not jumped on the 'impeach Bush' bandwagon over Iraq that some on the left have pushed. Leaving aside the obvious (1. that this Congress won't impeach Bush and 2. if they did, then Dick Cheney would be President, with pretty much identical results), the main reason I don't support it is that as much as I detest the President's decisions on Iraq, and as much as I detest the selective cherry picking of information to butress a policy decision that had been made months earlier while pretending to engage in 'diplomacy,' these were policy decisions and it is up to the voters (who unfortunately failed to do so in 2004) to hold the President and Congress accountable for policy decisions, no matter how bad those decisions are. And perhaps ironically, Vice President Cheney, himself a proponent of stronger executive power but also a former member of Congress, criticized the Justice Department for overreaching in the case and advised the President that the documents should be returned.

The real threat here is that if it is established that the Executive Branch (through any arm) has jurisdiction over Congress, then it opens the door for the Executive Branch to gain supremacy over Congress. And that way leads, sooner or later to dictatorship. Should someone who was truly evil gain the Presidency (and remember that Hitler rose to power in a Republic, not by a coup or a revolution), they could then in theory use this power to threaten or silence the Congress into complacency or cooperation. The Founding Fathers envisioned this which is why they wrote the Constitution to prohibit it.

I believe that the Justice Department can get the goods on William Jefferson with or without raiding his office (as they did get the goods on Cunningham and Rostenkowski), and I hope they do. But in the long term scheme of things, a corrupt Congressman, as odious as it is, is less of a threat to the United States than to erode the separation of powers and make Congress subject to any part of the Executive Branch.

What is a dream worth?

Think about this real hard.

You have a once-in-a-lifetime dream to achieve something you have always dreamed of, trained for, and sacrificed a great deal to get the opportunity to achieve. And it's not cheap-- it cost you a lot of money-- maybe even as much as $75,000.

Is achieving it worth a man's life?

Apparently it is, for forty mountain climbers who walked past a dying man on Mount Everest in order to reach the summit.

The first man to the summit of Mt Everest cannot understand how New Zealand climber Mark Inglis and others on the mountain left British mountaineer David Sharp to die.

"All I can say is that in our expedition there was never any likelihood whatsoever if one member of the party was incapacitated that we would just leave him to die," Sir Edmund Hillary [the first man to climb the mountain, in 1953] said yesterday.

The renowned adventurer was reacting to the decision by double-amputee Inglis, who was one of many who passed the dying Briton near the summit without trying to rescue him....


"[Inglis] radioed and [expedition manager] Russ said, 'Mate, you can't do anything. He's been there x number of hours without oxygen. He's effectively dead'. So we carried on.

"Of those 40 people who went past, no one helped him except for people from our expedition."

But Sir Edmund was in no doubt.

"On my expedition there was no way that you would have left a man under a rock to die.

"It simply would not have happened. It would have been a disaster from our point of view."

I will say that Inglis is only one of forty, and they all failed.

The argument is that he couldn't have been saved, and at high altitude a rescue would have been difficult. But Sir Edmund has an answer for that, too:

"You can try, can't you? This is the whole thing," Sir Edmund said.

"You are in a dangerous situation, there's no question about that.

"But at least you can try to rescue the life of a man who is obviously in a distressful condition."...

"I think the whole attitude towards climbing Mt Everest has become rather horrifying. The people just want to get to the top.

"They don't give a damn for anybody else who may be in distress and it doesn't impress me at all that they leave someone lying under a rock to die," Sir Edmund said.

And as to the assertion that Mr. Sharp's life could not have been saved? Well, a researcher isn't so sure:

A scientist who has studied oxygen use on Mt Everest believes British climber David Sharp could have been saved.

University of Otago scientist and mountaineer Dr Phil Ainslie said it might have been possible to revive the climber with bottled oxygen and even get him down to safety.

What might have determined Sharp's fate was the intense commercial pressure on Everest climbers, who generally had one very expensive shot at the peak, Dr Ainslie said.

At least 40 climbers passed Sharp, who was identified as being in difficulty and later died on the mountain.

Dr Ainslie, a lecturer in Otago's physiology department, said had Sharp been given oxygen by another climber he could have recovered something like 80 per cent of his capacity.

The line of 40-plus climbers that day probably had one shot at the summit: "There would have been a line like at the supermarket."

Maybe David Sharp could have been saved, maybe he could not. And I know how important a dream is. But no dream is worth a man's life.

And I will say one thing in defense of Mark Inglis. At least he radioed. Most of the other climbers apparently didn't even do that.

It's just too bad that Sir Edmund Hillary wasn't going back for a nostalgia climb, or to try and become the oldest, or something like that. Because then maybe David Sharp would have lived. Or maybe he still would have died. But he wouldn't have been passed by.

Justice served and justice not served.

Today a Houston jury convicted Enron Founder Ken Lay and former C.E.O. Jeffrey Skilling of conspiracy and fraud in the biggest corporate financial scandal in American history.

The jury found that Lay and Skilling lied to cover up financial irregularities and business failures. The collapse in late 2001 caused the loss of over $60 billion in the stock market, including $2.1 billion in pension plans, much of it in the pension plans of Enron employees who were forbidden to sell their shares even as Lay, Skilling and other executives were dumping millions of dollars worth of their own shares. The collapse cost the jobs of thousands of Enron employees, as well as the employees of the accounting firm Arthur Anderson, which also went under as a direct result of the Enron scandal.

Four and a half years later, Lay and Skilling were convicted. But each is still free, pending appeals after posting a five million dollar bond. They will be formally sentenced on September 11 (ironically, not only the five year anniversary of the attack on America, but also very nearly the five year anniversary of when Ken Lay dumped more than $15 million worth of Enron stock, for which he was convicted of insider trading). Although today's verdict will certainly be appealed (these guys have the money to hire lawyers until the cows come home) it is likely that they will be sentenced at that time to quite a long time in jail.

So, finally, in that case, justice has been served.

But what of those for whom justice has been denied?

What of the thousands of Enron employees (as well as Arthur Anderson employees), at least some of who are still unemployed or because of their age are having trouble finding work (and are now subject to the tender mercies of a social safety net that has been shredded by Republican cuts)? People who did nothing other than go to work every day and work their tails off trying to make Enron successful. Will they receive justice in this case? Maybe satisfaction, if they watch Lay and Skilling go to jail, but the daily diet of sidewalk concrete and bill collectors isn't going to change.

What of the former employees who lost billions in the collapse as the stock price imploded? Many of those employees were essentially paid in Enron stock as a part of their salary-- and when they were prohibited from selling it, they were stuck with a worthless piece of paper. Any time you buy stock, you are advised that it is entails a risk. But what if that stock is part of your employment package? Should simply accepting a job entail a similar risk with money that you rightfully earn? I will agree that some of the employees who put more than the required proportion of their pension -- in some cases, 100% -- of their pension plan into Enron stock were foolish, but let's face it-- not everyone is an educated investor and it is not fair for us to assume that people will all be smart investors. This is one reason why the President's Social Security plan failed to catch hold with the public-- the purpose of Social Security is not to be an investment portfolio that carries any sort of risk at all, but to guarantee that people too old to work will at least have food to eat and a roof over their head. If they want more, then they need to provide it themselves, but it guarantees survival when wages are no longer coming in. A pension plan is similar, except that the expectation is that instead of having a subsistence level retirement as Social Security is designed to provide, a person who works for years at a job and earns a pension should reasonably expect to have a better-than-subsistence level retirement. But the Enron workers were in essence to watch daily in late 2001 as their own graves were dug and they could do nothing at all about it. But will they ever recover that loss? Not bloody likely.

What about the other investors in Enron who believed what they were told about the company? Everyone from individual investors to corporations to public pension plans? They lost tens of billions of dollars simply because they believed what they were given to read. Even the smartest investor is only as good as the information they have available. Anyone who is investing in the stock market has a right to feel confident that they are being told the truth. Again, the investors who lost money in Enron may have some satisfaction at seeing Lay and Skilling convicted, and they may also be feeling a little more confident after the shock of what happened by seeing some of the reforms that have since been made, but it is unlikely that they will ever see even a fraction of what they invested in full faith and trust restored.

What about the consumers and California and other states who paid millions in higher energy bills due to what we now know was an artificially manipulated market that Enron created when things started to get desperate for them? By creating energy shortages, they drove bills higher, caused many people there to suffer from rolling blackouts on the hottest days of summer, and put the change in the bank (which only delayed the inevitable).

What about the millions in contributions that Enron gave to campaigns? Obviously, the most visible beneficiary of this is none other than President Bush. The Center for Public Integrity, a Washington-based nonprofit group, said Ken Lay and his wife had given $139,500 to Bush's political campaigns over the years. Other Enron employees had given another $460,000. But it isn't just Bush. Many other politicians-- mostly Republicans but a few Democrats as well-- were beneficiaries of Lay's and Enron's largesse over the years. This raises a number of disturbing questions. First, do we have people in office today who were essentially put there by Enron? Considering the closeness of the 2000 election, the case can be made the President may very well only be there because of the small (in the general scheme of the election) but not insignificant edge given him by Enron. And there are others who the same question could be asked about. Second, how much influence does a C.E.O. or other boss have over political donations? I am an advocate of open records on campaign financing (and sometimes visit sites such as fund race and open secrets which give you information on who gave how much political money and to whom) and would never suggest that we do anything to limit access to this information. But everything has a price, and the price here is that it opens the door for an unscrupulous employer to pressure employees (even if just by means of subtle rewards) for giving money to a candidate, or perhaps in other cases, not giving money to a candidate. And even if the boss says nothing on the subject, those employees who want to 'suck up' to the boss and stroke his (her?) ego are more likely to donate money to candidates the boss approves of than disapproves of. A third disturbing question is this: Enron itself donated a ton of cash, not only to political causes but to all sorts of causes, even to the extent of buying naming rights to the Houston Astros' new baseball stadium. What business does a company in as much trouble as Enron have giving away that much money?

Justice was done today in the trial of Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling. But it almost certainly will never be done in the lives of all those who they destroyed.