JustOneMinute

Hillarity At The Debate

Per the Times, or Nedra Pickler of the AP, it sounds as if Hillary was assaulted at the Dem debate last night by six Democratic rivals, two moderators, and an angry usher.  What, no cabbie complaining about his tip?  One wonders whether Hillary can turn this into a "bunch of mean men ganging up on the poor little woman" scenario.  As if.

The Politico adds this:

PHILADELPHIA - - We now know something that we did not know before: When Hillary Clinton  has a bad night, she really has a bad night.

In a debate against six Democratic opponents at Drexel University here Tuesday, Clinton gave the worst performance of her entire campaign.

It was not just that her answer about whether illegal immigrants should be issued drivers’ licenses was at best incomprehensible and at worst misleading.

It was that for two hours she dodged and weaved, parsed and stonewalled.

Let's ignore space constraints and go to the transcript for the fateful exchange on licenses for illegal not-yet-documented immigrants:

MR. RUSSERT:  Thank you, Brian.   

Senator Clinton, Governor of New York Eliot Spitzer has proposed  giving driver's licenses to illegal immigrants.  You told the Nashua, New Hampshire editorial board it makes a lot of sense.  Why does it make a lot of sense to give an illegal immigrant a driver's license?

SEN. CLINTON:  Well, what Governor Spitzer is trying to do is fill the vacuum left by the failure of this administration to bring about comprehensive immigration reform.  We know in New York we have several million at any one time who are in New York illegally.  They are undocumented workers.  They are driving on our roads.  The possibility of them having an accident that harms themselves or others is just a matter of the odds.  It's probability.  So what Governor Spitzer is trying to do is to fill the vacuum.

I believe we need to get back to comprehensive immigration reform because no state, no matter how well-intentioned, can fill this gap.

There needs to be federal action on immigration reform.                  

MR. RUSSERT:  Does anyone here believe an illegal immigrant should not have a driver's license?

REP. KUCINICH:  Believe what?

MR. RUSSERT:  An illegal immigrant should not have a driver's license.               

SEN. DODD:  This is a privilege.  And look, I'm as forthright and  progressive on immigration policy as anyone here, but we're dealing with a serious problem here, we need to have people come forward.  The idea that we're going to extend this privilege here of a driver's license, I think, is troublesome.  And I think the American people are reacting to it.

We need to deal with security on our borders, we need to deal with the attraction that draws people here, we need to deal fairly with those who are here; but this is a privilege.  Talk about health care, I have a different opinion.  That affects the public health of all of us.  But a license is a privilege, and that ought not to be extended, in my view.

MR. WILLIAMS:  Who else?  Senator --

SEN. CLINTON:  I just want to add, I did not say that it should be done, but I certainly recognize why Governor Spitzer is trying to    do it.  And we have failed --

SEN. DODD:  Wait a minute.  No, no, no.  You said yes, you thought it made sense to do it.

SEN. CLINTON:  No, I didn't, Chris.  But the point is, what are we  going to do with all these illegal immigrants who are (driving ?)    -- (inaudible)?

SEN. DODD:  Well, that's a legitimate issue.  But driver's license goes too far, in my view.

SEN. CLINTON:  Well, you may say that, but what is the identification if somebody runs into you today who is an undocumented worker --

SEN. DODD:  There's ways of dealing with that.

SEN. CLINTON:  Well, but --

SEN. DODD:  This is a privilege, not a right.

SEN. CLINTON:  Well, what Governor Spitzer has agreed to do is to have three different licenses; one that provides identification for actually going onto airplanes and other kinds of security issues, another which is an ordinary driver's license, and then a special card that identifies the people who would be on the road.

SEN. DODD:  That's a bureaucratic nightmare.

SEN. CLINTON:  So it's not the full privilege.

MR. RUSSERT:  Senator Clinton, I just want to make sure what I heard.  Do you, the New York Senator Hillary Clinton, support the New    York governor's plan to give illegal immigrants a driver's license?  You told the Nashua, New Hampshire, paper it made a lot of sense.

SEN. CLINTON:  It --

MR. RUSSERT:  Do you support his plan?

SEN. CLINTON:  You know, Tim, this is where everybody plays gotcha.  It makes a lot of sense.  What is the governor supposed to do?  He is dealing with a serious problem.  We have failed, and George Bush has failed.

Do I think this is the best thing for any governor to do?  No.  But do I understand the sense of real desperation, trying to get a handle on this?  Remember, in New York we want to know who's in New York.  We want people to come out of the shadows.  He's making an honest effort to do it.  We should have passed immigration reform.

MR. WILLIAMS:  New subject.

Senator Edwards, you have young children.  As you know, the Internet can be a bit of a cultural Wild West.  Assuming a lot of homes don't have parental support, would you be in favor of any government guidelines on Internet content?                     

MR. EDWARDS:  For children and try to protect children and using technology to protect children?  I would.

I want to add something that Chris Dodd just said a minute ago, because I don't want it to go unnoticed.  Unless I missed something, Senator Clinton said two different things in the course of about two minutes just a few minutes ago, and I think this is a real issue for the country.

I mean, America is looking for a president who will say the same thing, who will be consistent, who will be straight with them. Because what we've had for seven years is double-talk from Bush and from Cheney, and I think America deserves us to be straight.

MR. WILLIAMS: Senator Obama, why are you nodding your head?

SEN. OBAMA: Well, I was confused on Senator Clinton's answer. I can't tell whether she was for it or against it, and I do think that is important. You know, one of the things that we have to do in this country is to be honest about the challenges that we face.

Immigration is a difficult issue. But part of leadership is not just looking backwards and seeing what's popular, or trying to gauge popular sentiment. It's about setting a direction for the country, and that's what I intend to do as president.

MR. WILLIAMS: Are you for it or against it?

SEN. OBAMA: I think that it is a -- the right idea. And I disagree with Chris, because there is a public safety concern. We can make sure that drivers who are illegal come out of the shadows, that they can be tracked, that they are properly trained, and that will make our roads safer. That doesn't negate the need for us to reform illegal immigration.

Hillary does mention that Gov. Spitzer, under pressure from many including Mr. Chertoff of the Department of Homeland Security, announced last Saturday a complicated three-tiered plan which has itself come under criticism.  First, the plan, as described by Nick Confessore of the Times:

Under the revised plan, New York will offer a new, highly secure state driver’s license, known as Real ID. It would be available only to citizens and legal immigrants and comply with new federal rules, and it could be used to board domestic flights and enter federal buildings. Two other types of licenses would be offered: an enhanced driver’s license that New Yorkers who are citizens could use to cross the Canadian border without a passport, and a less expensive, limited license available to illegal immigrants and others that would not be a valid federal identification.

And some criticisms, also found in the Times:

One criticism that has been raised is that the personal information will be entered in databases that will be shared by every state, raising questions about how the data will be secured and how safe its storage will be.

“That’s an identity thief’s dream,” said Christopher Calabrese, counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union’s technology and liberty program.

Mr. Calabrese said that Mr. Spitzer’s proposal to create a driver’s license that would appeal largely to undocumented immigrants presents “a much more dangerous condition” for them.

“What we’re going to have,” he said, “is a list of undocumented aliens, and there’s no way New York will be able to keep the federal government’s hands off this list and protect the people whose names are on the list.

And this, from a Times editorial:

As outlined, the new agreement between New York and Washington would create three licenses. One would comply with the still-undecided federal standards for the Real ID Act, and another would be for those who want to go to Canada without using a passport. The third license would not be valid as identification to board airplanes or enter federal buildings.

It is license No. 3 — the cheapest and easiest to get — that would be offered to all New York residents, including the undocumented. The Spitzer people say that they would not share information about the immigration status of any of these third-tier drivers. But as immigrant advocates have already pointed out, who else would really want this license except those who cannot qualify for anything else? As other states have learned, a separate but unequal license for immigrants does not work. Undocumented workers would not come out of the shadows to apply for a driving permit that they believe would make them a target for any official on a crusade against illegal immigrants.

So let's see - Spitzer's new plan is to create a list of undocumented aliens and share that with the Feds; he will also hand out Third Tier licenses that strongly imply the holder is an undocumented alien.  And Hillary supports this?  Is this plan really better than doing nothing?  Are the undocumented really going to emerge from the shadows to get this restricted and potentially embarrassing license, or is Spitzer simply proposing an expensive waste of time?

And just what does Sen. Obama support here - the new Spitzer Three Tiered approach, or Spitzer's initial plan to offer licenses to all?  Fortunately it was Hilloween Eve, so that question went unasked.

OLD TIMES:  Apropos of nothing other than nostalgia for the glory days of the Right Wing Attack Machine, this old post united Nick Confessore and Nedra Pickler, for the first and only time.

Krugman, Living In His Own World

Paul Krugman is not reality-based on the subject of the Iran:

...Iran had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11 — in fact, the Iranian regime was quite helpful to the United States when it went after Al Qaeda and its Taliban allies in Afghanistan.

Quick, alert the 9/11 Commisison - they will want to revise this part of their report:

Intelligence indicates the persistence of contacts between Iranian security officials and senior al Qaeda figures after Bin Ladin's return to Afghanistan. Khallad has said that Iran made a concerted effort to strengthen relations with al Qaeda after the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole, but was rebuffed because Bin Ladin did not want to alienate his supporters in Saudi Arabia. Khallad and other detainees have described the willingness of Iranian officials to facilitate the travel of al Qaeda members through Iran, on their way to and from Afghanistan. For example, Iranian border inspectors would be told not to place telltale stamps in the passports of these travelers. Such arrangements were particularly beneficial to Saudi members of al Qaeda.¹²⁰

Our knowledge of the international travels of the al Qaeda operatives selected for the 9/11 operation remains fragmentary. But we now have evidence suggesting that 8 to 10 of the 14 Saudi "muscle" operatives traveled into or out of Iran between October 2000 and February 2001.¹²¹

...We have found no evidence that Iran or Hezbollah was aware of the planning for what later became the 9/11 attack. At the time of their travel through Iran, the al Qaeda operatives themselves were probably not aware of the specific details of their future operation.

After 9/11, Iran and Hezbollah wished to conceal any past evidence of cooperation with Sunni terrorists associated with al Qaeda.

The Iranian attempts to conceal their presumably unwitting involvement seem to have met with some success, at least on Planet Krugman.

UPDATE:  Jon Henke is similarly struck by Krugman's claim of Iranian non-involvement.

   

Fox News Revisionism

Think Progress (Achieve Nothing) calls our attention to this Fox World Series montage which preceded last night's broadcast:

Fox heralds Bush as a World Series ‘hero.’

Last night, Fox aired a montage prior its airing of the Red Sox/Rockies game that celebrated great moments in World Series history.

I deplore the revisionism at Fox, which included their highlighting, via a Hollywood re-enactment, of Babe Ruth's legendary called home run against the Cubs in 1932.

Back in reality, as covered at Wikipedia, it is a mater of controversy and confusion whether the Babe actually called that shot, or whether his gesturing meant something else.  Allow me to reprise a key passage from the Wiki version and then repeat my attempt to contribute to Wiki-history.  ZFrom the Wikipedia:

Ruth's second home run in game 3 probably would have been merely an exclamation point for the 1932 World Series and for Ruth's career, had it not been for reporter Joe Williams. Williams was a respected but opinionated sports editor for the Scripps-Howard newspapers. In a late edition the same day of the game, Williams wrote this headline that appeared in the New York World-Telegram: "RUTH CALLS SHOT AS HE PUTS HOME RUN NO. 2 IN SIDE POCKET." Williams' summary of the story included, "In the fifth, with the Cubs riding him unmercifully from the bench, Ruth pointed to center and punched a screaming liner to a spot where no ball had been hit before." Apparently Williams' article was the only one written the day of the game that made a reference to Ruth pointing to center field. It was probably due to the wide circulation of the Scripps-Howard newspapers that gave the story life, as many read Williams' article and assumed it was accurate. A couple of days later, other stories started to appear stating that Ruth had called his shot, a few even written by reporters who were not at the game.

Hmm.  The Times archive includes this contemporaneous account, which does not specifically cite a gesture to centerfield but is otherwise clear:

But it seems decidedly unhealthy for anyone to taunt the great man Ruth too much and very soon the crowd was to learn its lesson.  A single lemon rolled out to the plate as Ruth came up in the fifth and in no mistaken motions the Babe notified the crowd that the nature of his retaliation would be a wallop right out of the confines of the park.

And while we are sifting their archives let's toss in some coverage of Bush's night at the World Series.  The Think Progress folks would do well to remember that not everyone hated Bush in October 2001, nor was everyone certain that baseball could continue as usual.

How He Got The Bicycle Into Court I'll Never Know

A baffler from Britain:

Man who had sex with bike in court

Folks who read the story will find my question answered but a new one raised -  doesn't Britain have any privacy rights protecting what happens between a man and his bicycle in the intimacy of their own garage?

Someone ask the Queen.

MORE:  Good point from a reader of a Daily Tel blog - was the bicycle above the age of consent?

Obama To Be More Offensive

The current Anybody But Hillary promises to tackle Hillary, finally:

Obama Promises a Forceful Stand Against Clinton

COLUMBUS, Ohio, Oct. 27 — Senator Barack Obama said he would start confronting Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton more forcefully, asserting Friday that she had not been candid in describing her views on critical issues, as he tries to address mounting alarm among supporters that his lack of assertiveness has allowed her to dominate the presidential race.

Andrew Sullivan presents the case for Al Gore Barack Hussein Il-Jong Obama:

There are, to me, three core issues in this election: the Constitution, the war and the environment. All three are urgent, and the need for deep, radical change overwhelming. It's vital that the next president not assume and inherit the kind of extra-legal powers that Bush and Cheney have acquired as part of what amounts to a protectorate, not a presidency. The rule of law must be clearly re-established. Only Obama has the integrity to be trusted on that matter. Clinton will never have it. It's vital also that the next president be committed to withdrawal from Iraq as swiftly and as cleanly as possible. Again: the difference between a triangulating shell of a politician and an actual human being who was right about this war in the first place is completely clear. And we need someone in the administration - Al Gore obviously springs to mind - who can marshall the country's resources to tackle climate change and the urgent necessity for new energy sources. Gore loathes the Clintons as much as anyone, because he saw them close-up, and knows what their cynical, ruthless machine is really about: them. On those three issues, Obama is vastly superior to Clinton, whose history of executive secrecy and privilege, whose constant triangulation on the war and whose polarization of the country would make difficult and real change impossible.

Time is running out for Big Al - surely someone somewhere can convince him that this is not about Al Gore, it is about all of humanity present and unborn?  Geez, what kind of a man is he if an  over-the-top appeal to his ego won't work?

Slate Futures has Al languishing in third place among Dems with Hillarity at 70%, Barack at 15%, and Gore at 8%.

JUST A THOUGHT:  If Obama wants to be more offensive maybe he can get in Hillary's face for her shameless pandering during the national anthem.  Any politician can put their hand over their heart and pretend to be a patriot; it takes a new kind of Democrat to ignore our nation's symbols while all about him people are paying respect.

Or, to be fair and balanced, let's note that maybe it takes a new kind of Republican.

MAYBE NOT THAT FORCEFUL: I am struck by the juxtaposition of the current top two headlines on Drudge -

"Obama Promises a Forceful Stand Against Clinton"

and

Human race will 'split into two different species'"

Can't we all just get along?

Hire Carla Babb! (Fire John Edwards)

Does the John Edwards campaign have a death wish?  To the litany which includes the 28,000 square foot home, his job with a hedge fund (to learn about poverty!) and the $400 haircuts we can now add a story about the decision by the Edwards campaign to locate their campaign headquarters in the poshest part of posh Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

And the death wish?  Well, the location of his campaign headquarters was a non-story until the Edwards people got a bit heavy-handed with a UNC professor.  Let's cut to the Times:

A journalism professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is accusing aides of  John Edwards, a former senator from North Carolina, of demanding that he remove from YouTube a student report critical of Mr. Edwards’s Democratic presidential campaign — and of threatening to block the university’s access to Mr. Edwards and the campaign headquarters near campus.

Mr. Edwards’s campaign officials said they did not level any such threat during what were clearly heated discussions with the professor and the student over her approach and over the central question in her report: Why has a campaign focused on poverty based its headquarters in an affluent part of Chapel Hill?

In addition to Times coverage there is a Matt Drudge link to Breitbart, which includes the video; Fox News and the AP also have coverage.

The video in question features Carla Babb, a graduate student in journalism at UNC.  Ms. Babb has an impressive background - she ran the 400 and 800 meters on the NC State track team, was President of the Senior Class Council,  interned in Washington for Dem Congressman Bob Etheridge of North Carolina, and helped produce a talk-radio show in DC.  Beyond that, based on her video I would offer the thought that Ms. Babb meets the basic requirements of an MSNBC news-bunny (and I mean that in a good way!).

And after we have secured a job for Ms. Babb, let's get someone to hire senior James Edward Dillard (three names - like an assassin!), whose UNC column last September sparked this latest outrage.  Here is his blog, and his posting on the Edwards attempt to suppress the truth.  Others can judge whether he can write - he has certainly proven an ability to spot a story and make some news.

MORE:  The quotable Carla Bab - "“We are here today proving this falsehood inaccurate. Does it look like we could care less?”

BY WAY OF COMPARISON:  What about Bill Clinton in Harlem (after being chased from midtown)?

FULL DISCLOSURE:  Subtle hints that I am not now nor have ever been a John Edwards fan.

NONE SO BLIND...:  The Edwards campaign "does kind of resemble deaf people walking on freeways".

KICKING A MAN WHEN HE IS DOWN AND OUT:  "This would be devastating news if he had a snowball’s chance in hell".

SHIVER HIS TIMBERS:  "This demonstrates why Edwards won't win any election, ever."

Ignorance Is Bliss

David Brooks has no idea where he is going or even what music he likes, but he loves it.

Happy Birthday Hillary

In a fawning front-pager the Times gets all gooey about Hillary's many, many virtues as a leader and manager.  However, they do hit one spped bump:

Over the years, Mrs. Clinton has won a reputation as a good boss. She is diligent about remembering birthdays and doing things like calling her Senate scheduler, Lona Valmoro, to offer condolences after her dachshund, Largo, was run over by a car.

Mrs. Clinton has also become more willing to delegate responsibility. “I’m not second-guessing the people I entrust to manage because I think I make good decisions on personnel,” she said.

In return, Mrs. Clinton has won the loyalty of her Senate and campaign staffs, a point underscored by the rarity of leaks and absence of kiss-and-tell memoirs from her camp. Of the seven participants in the Clinton campaign’s 7:30 a.m. conference call, most go back at least a decade with her.

Mrs. Clinton’s campaign manager, Patti Solis Doyle, began working as her scheduler in Little Rock, Ark., during Mr. Clinton’s first campaign for the presidency. Only one of the group — Mike Henry, deputy campaign manager — is a relative newcomer.

Now, who does that sound like?  Does anyone care to recall when Karen Hughes, Karl Rove and Dan Bartlett first fell in with George Bush?

To their credit the Times tackles this odious comparison head-on:

Mrs. Clinton’s orbit is known by the now-clichéd “Hillaryland,” suggesting a carefree atmosphere. In fact, she presides over an office of intense and focused workaholics, protective of their patron and wary of outsiders, a trait that has drawn comparisons to the leadership team of George W. Bush. The president surrounded himself with advisers who went back to his Texas days and were similarly lauded for loyalty and criticized for insularity.

“The Clinton campaign seems to be dominated by the same old people,” said William Mayer, a Northeastern University professor who is an expert on presidential campaigns.

Having a tight inner circle can cut both ways, Professor Mayer said. With Mr. Bush, he said, “it looked fine to have this group of loyal Texans in there, until his approval ratings went under 40 percent and there were no fresh eyes to see the mistakes.”

Mrs. Clinton, not surprisingly, bristles at such comparisons. She contrasts what she calls the “echo chamber” around the president with her own willingness to expand her own circle, hear disputes and solicit opposing views.

“I’m very interested in how you reach and implement decisions in a very efficient way,” she said.

Bush wrong, Hillary right - that was easy.

And let's reassure the critics who experienced Hillary's health care debacle first hand - she has grown since 1993:

Friends and advisers say Mrs. Clinton has been a diligent student of her own mistakes, and her style has evolved over the years from a tendency to micromanage to a greater willingness to delegate; from a bent toward perfectionism to one closer to pragmatism; from a go-for-broke mentality to one more willing to compromise.

Mrs. Clinton, for her part, draws a distinction between leadership and management, and her style and that of Mr. Clinton.

“My husband has extraordinary leadership ability,” Mrs. Clinton said in an interview. “But he was also not as interested in the day-to-day management. He was much more focused on our goals and objectives: how you do the politics, how you do the persuasion. I’m trying to meld leadership and management in a way that really suits me.”

It's all good in TimesWorld.

Bye, Bye Biden

Maybe his latest black moment will be enough to make Biden go away and leave the rest of us to contemplate a manageably smaller Dem field:

In an interview with The Washington Post's editorial board, Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) asserted that he is more prepared to be president than any other candidate, disputed the notion that governors are better suited for the White House than senators and warned that Pakistan is a potentially bigger threat than Iran.

Biden also stumbled through a discourse on race and education, leaving the impression that he believes one reason that so many District of Columbia schools fail is the city's high minority population. His campaign quickly issued a statement saying he meant to indicate that the disadvantages were based on economic status, not race.

After a lengthy critique of Bush administration education policies, Biden attempted to explain why some schools perform better than others -- in Iowa, for instance, compared with the District. "There's less than 1 percent of the population of Iowa that is African American. There is probably less than 4 or 5 percent that are minorities. What is in Washington? So look, it goes back to what you start off with, what you're dealing with," Biden said. He went on to discuss the importance of parental involvement in reading to children and how "half this education gap exists before the kid steps foot in the classroom."

Kidding?  And this guy is an experienced politician?  Eventually his staffers attempted yet another podia-oral extraction:

The Biden campaign moved quickly to clarify the senator's remarks in a statement: "This was not a race-based distinction, but a discussion of the problems kids face who don't have the same socio-economic support system (and all that implies -- nutrition, pre K, etc.) entering grade school and the impact of those disadvantages on outcomes."

Biden may be articulate and bright and clean and a bit of a Civil War buff, but when is enough enough?

Rudy Redcoat, Turncoat

Rudy Giuliani betrays Yankeeland in a shameless act of political pandering:

CONCORD, N.H. - Pigs flew, lions slept with lambs - and No. 1 Yankee fan Rudy Giuliani miraculously transformed himself into a Red Sox fan on the eve of the World Series.

"I'm rooting for the Red Sox," the Republican presidential contender Tuesday told a Boston audience, just a few T stops from Fenway Park.

"I'm an American League fan, and I go with the American League team, maybe with the exception of the Mets. Maybe that would be the one time I wouldn't because I'm loyal to New York."

Later in New Hampshire - a loyal dominion within New England's Red Sox Nation and, more importantly to Giuliani, home of the first primary in 2008 - the former mayor expanded on his heresy.

"Somehow it makes me feel better if the team that was ahead of the Yankees wins the World Series," he told a group of mostly local reporters in explaining his sudden backing of the Red Sox, "because then I feel like, well, we're not that bad."

Grr.  In normal situations, rooting for one's own league or even for the team that beat you is OK, but I don't think that flies when it is Red Sox - Yankees.  And I can't believe anyone in Red Sox Nation will admire his flexible allegiance, either, although having said that, this Boston Herald editorial seems to be welcoming him aboard.

The WaPo Caucus has pics of the NY Post and NY Daily News front covers, where Rudy is a "Traitor" and a "Red Coat".  One of the tabloids also calls him a "Mass-kisser".

Well.  Since the NY Times is in the tank for him let me offer some tangentially related Rudy-bashing.  Via Glenn we come to this Times piece about the relationship between leaded gasoline and crime:

Has the Clean Air Act done more to fight crime than any other policy in American history? That is the claim of a new environmental theory of criminal behavior.

In the early 1990s, a surge in the number of teenagers threatened a crime wave of unprecedented proportions. But to the surprise of some experts, crime fell steadily instead. Many explanations have been offered in hindsight, including economic growth, the expansion of police forces, the rise of prison populations and the end of the crack epidemic. But no one knows exactly why crime declined so steeply.

The answer, according to Jessica Wolpaw Reyes, an economist at Amherst College, lies in the cleanup of a toxic chemical that affected nearly everyone in the United States for most of the last century. After moving out of an old townhouse in Boston when her first child was born in 2000, Reyes started looking into the effects of lead poisoning. She learned that even low levels of lead can cause brain damage that makes children less intelligent and, in some cases, more impulsive and aggressive. She also discovered that the main source of lead in the air and water had not been paint but rather leaded gasoline — until it was phased out in the 1970s and ’80s by the Clean Air Act, which took blood levels of lead for all Americans down to a fraction of what they had been. “Putting the two together,” she says, “it seemed that this big change in people’s exposure to lead might have led to some big changes in behavior.”

All well and good but the WaPo had the same story last July and, perhaps sensing his impending flip-flop to the Sox, managed to frame it as a Rudy-basher:

Research Links Lead Exposure, Criminal Activity
Data May Undermine Giuliani's Claims

By Shankar Vedantam
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 8, 2007; A02

Rudy Giuliani never misses an opportunity to remind people about his track record in fighting crime as mayor of New York City from 1994 to 2001.

"I began with the city that was the crime capital of America," Giuliani, now a candidate for president, recently told Fox's Chris Wallace. "When I left, it was the safest large city in America. I reduced homicides by 67 percent. I reduced overall crime by 57 percent."

Although crime did fall dramatically in New York during Giuliani's tenure, a broad range of scientific research has emerged in recent years to show that the mayor deserves only a fraction of the credit that he claims. The most compelling information has come from an economist in Fairfax who has argued in a series of little-noticed papers that the "New York miracle" was caused by local and federal efforts decades earlier to reduce lead poisoning.

The theory offered by the economist, Rick Nevin, is that lead poisoning accounts for much of the variation in violent crime in the United States. It offers a unifying new neurochemical theory for fluctuations in the crime rate, and it is based on studies linking children's exposure to lead with violent behavior later in their lives.

What makes Nevin's work persuasive is that he has shown an identical, decades-long association between lead poisoning and crime rates in nine countries.

I scarcely want to start a fight about intellectual precedence but the Times story features Jessica Wolpaw Reyes, who apparently did a state-by-state comparison within the US; late in the Times story we learn about Rick Nevin, who seems to have preceded Ms. Reyes with his international work.  The WaPo also includes this:

Other evidence has accumulated in recent years that lead is a neurotoxin that causes impulsivity and aggression, but these studies have also drawn little attention. In 2001, sociologist Paul B. Stretesky and criminologist Michael Lynch showed that U.S. counties with high lead levels had four times the murder rate of counties with low lead levels, after controlling for multiple environmental and socioeconomic factors.

In 2002, Herbert Needleman, a psychiatrist at the University of Pittsburgh, compared lead levels of 194 adolescents arrested in Pittsburgh with lead levels of 146 high school adolescents: The arrested youths had lead levels that were four times higher.

"Impulsivity means you ignore the consequences of what you do," said Needleman, one of the country's foremost experts on lead poisoning, explaining why Nevin's theory is plausible. Lead decreases the ability to tell yourself, "If I do this, I will go to jail."

By comparison, the Times does not mention Stretesky and Lynch and only notes Needleman in their closing paragraph.

The impulse control point is interesting.  One objection to the Reyes and Nevin studies is that they correlate a drop in violent crime but not property crime.  From the Times:

The magnitude of these claims has been met with a fair amount of skepticism. Jeffrey Miron, a Harvard economist, wonders how lead could have had such a strong effect on violent crime while, according to Reyes, it showed almost no effect on property crimes like theft. He also doubts that the hypothesis could explain the plunge in the U.S. murder rate from the 1930s through the 1950s.

Off the top of my head, the obvious response is that property crimes may tend to be more pre-meditated and less a matter of impulse control.

"Fair Game" By Valerie Plame - Based On A True Story

I am paging through Valerie Plame's bio, which hit the bookstores today.  Time does not permit a full assessment, but a few points have caught my eye so far:

1.  Was Valerie at the fateful breakfast in May 2003 when Joe discussed his classified trip with Nick Kristof?  Don't ask, and she won't tell.

2.  Was Joe working for the Kerry campaign in the summer of 2003 when he penned his NY Times op-ed?  The Boston Globe said so, and Joe admitted as much on NBC News, but that factoid eluded Ms. Plame and her publisher.

3.  Didn't the State Dept. and the Pentagon chime in asking for the CIA stance on the Feb 12 2002 Pentagon report that caught Cheney's eye and eventually led to a fateful phone call to Ms. Plame's unit of the CIA?  Weren't the wheels set in motion for the Wilson trip even before Cheney was briefed on the new DIA report on Niger and yellowcake?  Again, don't ask - in Ms. Plame's telling, the only interest in Niger and yellowcake was coming from the Vice President's office, and she is standing by her "Walking-By Guy" story - some underling nominated Joe to her as a candidate for the Niger trip, she and the underling then suggested Joe to her boss, and therefore she was not involved in suggesting Joe.  I have no doubt that explanation will work for her audience.

4.  Trouble In Paradise - apparently, Valerie forgot to mention to Old Joe that she had written a memo promoting him for the trip; when the Senate Intel report panned Wilson in July 2004 he was furious and felt (somewhat understandably) that the memo undercut his claim that his wife had no involvement in his Niger trip.  Oops!

The skimming continues!  Among other trivia points I very much want to see how she explains her leave of absence in June 2004, and I can't wait to learn whether Joe, never affiliated with the Kerry campaign in her telling, somehow becomes unaffiliated.

Rendition Myths

Via Glenn we come to this WaPo guest piece by Daniel Benjamin, Clinton NSC member, recounting "Five Myths About Rendition."

Myth 1 invloves a bit of a history lesson:

1. Rendition is something the Bush administration cooked up.

Nope. George W. Bush was still struggling to coax oil out of the ground when the United States "rendered to justice" its first suspect from abroad. In 1987, President Ronald Reagan authorized an operation that lured Lebanese hijacker Fawaz Younis to a boat off the coast of Cyprus, where FBI agents arrested him. (Younis had participated in the 1985 hijacking of a Jordanian plane and was implicated in the hijacking of TWA Flight 847, which left a U.S. Navy diver dead.) President George H.W. Bush approved the kidnapping in 1990 of Mexican physician Humberto Alvarez Machain, who was believed to be involved in the torture and killing of a Drug Enforcement Administration official. Nothing says that renditions can involve only suspected terrorists; Israel's abduction of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Argentina in 1960 could be called a rendition, though the term was not yet in use.

Beginning in 1995, the Clinton administration turned up the speed with a full-fledged program to use rendition to disrupt terrorist plotting abroad. According to former director of central intelligence George J. Tenet, about 70 renditions were carried out before Sept. 11, 2001, most of them during the Clinton years.

Let's add to that an excerpt from the Richard Clarke book highlighting the reverence for international law exhibited by then-VP, now once and future President Al Gore:

'extraordinary renditions', were operations to apprehend terrorists abroad, usually without the knowledge of and almost always without public acknowledgement of the host government…. The first time I proposed a snatch, in 1993, the White House Counsel, Lloyd Cutler, demanded a meeting with the President to explain how it violated international law. Clinton had seemed to be siding with Cutler until Al Gore belatedly joined the meeting, having just flown overnight from South Africa. Clinton recapped the arguments on both sides for Gore: Lloyd says this. Dick says that. Gore laughed and said, 'That's a no-brainer. Of course it's a violation of international law, that's why it's a covert action. The guy is a terrorist. Go grab his ass.'

Dr. Watson's A Knucklehead, I Presume

Nobel laureate and DNA co-discoverer Dr. James Watson is promoting his new book, "Avoid Boring People", by tossing a few bombs:

One of the world's most eminent scientists was embroiled in an extraordinary row last night after he claimed that black people were less intelligent than white people and the idea that "equal powers of reason" were shared across racial groups was a delusion.

  James Watson, a Nobel Prize winner for his part in the unravelling of DNA   who now runs one of America's leading scientific research institutions, drew   widespread condemnation for comments he made ahead of his arrival in Britain   today for a speaking tour at venues including the Science Museum in London.

  The 79-year-old geneticist reopened the explosive debate about race and   science in a newspaper interview in which he said Western policies towards   African countries were wrongly based on an assumption that black people were   as clever as their white counterparts when "testing" suggested the   contrary. He claimed genes responsible for creating differences in human   intelligence could be found within a decade.

His remarks are almost as politically incorrect in the original article:

He says that he is “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really”, and I know that this “hot potato” is going to be difficult to address. His hope is that everyone is equal, but he counters that “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true”. He says that you should not discriminate on the basis of colour, because “there are many people of colour who are very talented, but don’t promote them when they haven’t succeeded at the lower level”. He writes that “there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so”.

When asked how long it might take for the key genes in affecting differences in human intelligence to be found, his “back-of-the-envelope answer” is 15 years. However, he wonders if even 10 years will pass. In his mission to make children more DNA-literate, the geneticist explains that he has opened a DNA learning centre on the borders of Harlem in New York. He is also recruiting minorities at the lab and, he tells me, has just accepted a black girl “but,” he comments, “there’s no one to recruit.”

Watson will no doubt enthusiastically counter the inevitable criticisms that will arise. He once commented to a fellow scientist – perhaps optimistically – that “the time was surely not far off when academia would have no choice but to hand political correctness back to the politicians”. Even after a year at the lab, I am still unnerved by his devil-may-care compulsion to say what he believes. Critics may see his acceptance of “softer-science” studies – that attempt to link IQ with specific genes, but remove society and other factors from the equation – as a dangerously flippant approach to a complex issue. His comments, however, although seemingly unguarded, are always calculated. Not maliciously, but with the mischievous air of a great mind hoping to be challenged. I ask him how he placates those he offends. “I try to use humour or whatever I can to indicate that I understand other people having other views,” he explains.

It does not appear that he will be laughing his way past this one, but maybe he should cite (or hide behind) this 2005 American Psychological Association paper by J. Philippe Rushton of The University of Western Ontario and Arthur R. Jensen of University of California, Berkeley.  From their intro:

The new evidence reviewed here points to some genetic component in Black–White differences in mean IQ. The implication for public policy is that the discrimination model (i.e., Black–White differences in socially valued outcomes will be equal barring discrimination) must be tempered by a distributional model (i.e., Black–White outcomes reflect underlying group characteristics).

I assume that conclusion is bitterly controversial; I have one reply from Robert Sternberg of Yale below.

For a much better example of the proper way to approach this controversial intersection of race and intelligence let's turn to David Leonhardt, who wrote about affirmative action recently in the NY Times Magazine:

Other recent studies have looked at intelligence testing. There have long been two uncomfortable facts in this area: Intelligence, indisputably, is in part genetic; and every intelligence test shows a gap between black Americans and others. For a long time, scientific research wasn’t very good at explaining this gap. But it has gotten better lately. For one thing, the gap between white and black adults has narrowed significantly since 1970, according to work by the noted researchers William Dickens and James Flynn. Four decades is too short a time period for the gene pool to change, but it’s not too short for environment to improve. Most intriguing, Roland Fryer and Steven D. Levitt, two economists (the latter is one of this magazine’s Freakonomics columnists), have found there to be essentially no gap between 1-year-old white and black children of the same socioeconomic status.

Mr. Leonhardt adopts the posture of every right-thinking person - the early results pointed in an unpleasant direction so scientists have been trying to come up with the proper set of tests that will deliver the truth, or anyway, the right answer.  Here is his wrap-up:

There are still vigorous debates about all this work — intelligence tests of 1-year-olds are iffy, for instance — but it points in one direction. Innate intelligence may be partly genetic, but it doesn’t seem to vary by race.

"It doesn't seem to vary by race"?  This stands his first bit of info, "every intelligence test shows a gap between black Americans and others", directly on its head.  But no one will criticize Leonhardt for writing what we all hope is true, even if the science is not quite there yet.

Ronald Bailey at Reason closes with this exhortation:

No matter who turns out to be right in the nature versus nurture debate over why there is a gap in black/white IQ scores, the idea that we must strive to treat every person as an individual, not as a representative of some group or other, seems right to me.

Well, yes, but in that case, a lot of affirmative action would go by the boards, since the campus quest for "diversity" (other than political diversity) is all about group identities.

Prometheus makes a related point:

What James Watson doesn't understand is that "all of our social policies" are expressly not "based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours." 

Almost none of our social policies are based on intelligence, and they would smack of absurdity if they were. Many of our social policies are based on the protection of individiually held and eventually satisfied or thwarted preferences, which are somehow interpreted as indications of individual welfare; or, and this is a big 'or', respect for persons; both of which have little to do with intelligence. Respect for persons applies to all people, regardless of intelligence -- precisely because intelligence, like height, eye color, hair length, gender, and so on, is irrelevant to the overarching moral concern of human dignity.

OK.  Offhand, other than challenging the premise of affirmative action that representation by race at colleges ought to mirror racial proportions in the general population, I can't think of a social policy that would illustrate Watson's point.

MORE:  Questions I can't answer - do Japanese and Chinese test better than white Americans on IQ tests and are researchers lying awake nights straining to disprove that as well?

And is the 2005 Harpending-Cochran-Hardy theory about the rise in IQs of Ashkenazi Jews over 900 years of economic oppression (they were allowed to be clerks but not farmers, so bookish young men were more marriageable than burly farmboys) holding up well, or at all? (Times, FuturePundit, Gene Expression).

And since I am Googling a bit, what is the status of this 2005 Rushton-Jensen paper surveying "30 Years of Research On Race Differences In Cognitive Ability", which concluded that East Asians outrank Europeans, who in turn outrank blacks.  From their summary, which seems to be the sort of science Watson had on his mind:

The new evidence reviewed here points to some genetic component in Black–White differences in mean IQ. The implication for public policy is that the discrimination model (i.e., Black–White differences in socially valued outcomes will be equal barring discrimination) must be tempered by a distributional model (i.e., Black–White outcomes reflect underlying group characteristics).

A reply from Robert Sternberg of Yale gives the flavor of another side:

The quest to show that one socially defined racial, ethnic, or other group is inferior to another in some important way, such that “the public must accept the pragmatic reality that some groups will be overrepresented and other groups underrepresented in various socially valued outcomes” (Rushton & Jensen, 2005, p. 283), has what I believe to be a long, sad history. Since ancient times, cynical political, religious, and other leaders have used such arguments to justify discriminatory ideological positions. Does science want to provide them the ammunition?

And from his conclusion:

The quality of science is determined not only by the quality of problem solving but also by taste in the selection of problems to solve. Readers will have to decide for themselves whether the problem addressed in Rushton and Jensen’s (2005) article represents good taste in the selection of the problems. Would that
Rushton and Jensen had devoted their penetrating intellects to other more scientifically and socially productive problems!

Or, it is bad form even to ask these questions, let alone state, as Watson did, the wrong answer.

 

Barack Related To Bush, Cheney

Everything new is old again - Lynne Cheney caused a stir at Think Progress and The Swamp with her announcement that Barack Obama and Dick Cheney are eighth cousins.

Maybe their subscriptions to Google have expired, or maybe it is a Chicago rivalry - The Chi Trib Swampers may be coy about promoting a story by the Chicago Sun-Times - but these family ties were outed last September.  Turns out Obama is also related to the two George Bushs and (exhale, Dems) Harry Truman.

In hopes of sparking a bitter controversy, let's flag the point that the Sun-Times claims that Cheney and Obama are "ninth cousins once removed", which gets right up in the face of the unsupported claim by Ms. Cheney that they are eighth cousins.  One must ask - what other phony genealogical intel are they pushing?

CNN also covered this but managed to unearth the Sun-Times connection, as did RedState (one of Lynn Cheney's favorite blogs, IIRC).

Hold Me Closer Tiny Dancer

Doc Drezner and Kevin Drum can (with effort) see things turning either to the right or to the left, as can I.  How about you?

Folks who stuck are may get some help from Drum's update.

Krugman Hearts Big Al (Now, Anyway)

Paul Krugman, in his biweekly burst of disingenuity, sings a song of love to Al Gore, incidentally bashing conservatives in the process:

Gore Derangement Syndrome

By PAUL KRUGMAN

On the day after Al Gore shared the Nobel Peace Prize, The Wall Street Journal’s editors couldn’t even bring themselves to mention Mr. Gore’s name. Instead, they devoted their editorial to a long list of people they thought deserved the prize more.

And at National Review Online, Iain Murray suggested that the prize should have been shared with “that well-known peace campaigner Osama bin Laden, who implicitly endorsed Gore’s stance.” You see, bin Laden once said something about climate change — therefore, anyone who talks about climate change is a friend of the terrorists.

What is it about Mr. Gore that drives right-wingers insane?

Oh, maybe we just don't like the guy.  But Krugman has a theory!

Partly it’s a reaction to what happened in 2000, when the American people chose Mr. Gore but his opponent somehow ended up in the White House. Both the personality cult the right tried to build around President Bush and the often hysterical denigration of Mr. Gore were, I believe, largely motivated by the desire to expunge the stain of illegitimacy from the Bush administration.

And now that Mr. Bush has proved himself utterly the wrong man for the job — to be, in fact, the best president Al Qaeda’s recruiters could have hoped for — the symptoms of Gore derangement syndrome have grown even more extreme.

The worst thing about Mr. Gore, from the conservative point of view, is that he keeps being right. In 1992, George H. W. Bush mocked him as the “ozone man,” but three years later the scientists who discovered the threat to the ozone layer won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 2002 he warned that if we invaded Iraq, “the resulting chaos could easily pose a far greater danger to the United States than we presently face from Saddam.” And so it has proved.

2000?  C'mon, we loathed Mr. "No Controlling Legal Authority" long before Florida.  But let's move on to Krugman's disingenuous intellectual history of the environmental movement (emphasis added):

Consider the policy implications of taking climate change seriously.

“We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals,” said F.D.R. “We know now that it is bad economics.” These words apply perfectly to climate change. It’s in the interest of most people (and especially their descendants) that somebody do something to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, but each individual would like that somebody to be somebody else. Leave it up to the free market, and in a few generations Florida will be underwater.

The solution to such conflicts between self-interest and the common good is to provide individuals with an incentive to do the right thing. In this case, people have to be given a reason to cut back on greenhouse gas emissions, either by requiring that they pay a tax on emissions or by requiring that they buy emission permits, which has pretty much the same effects as an emissions tax. We know that such policies work: the U.S. “cap and trade” system of emission permits on sulfur dioxide has been highly successful at reducing acid rain.

Krugman then proposes two simple market-oriented solutions - taxes, or cap-and-trade schemes.  However, in my world the environmental movement was hijacked in the 1970's by the statists and socialists who loathed business, disliked markets, and wanted to make the government the center of all economic activity.  In my world, taxes and cap-and trade were anathema for quite some time - the accepted solution to every economic problem was government regulation.

Support for my position (as well as some lovely Gore-bashing) can be found in the writings of that distinguished Princeton economist Paul Krugman.   From Slate, circa 1997, in a discussion of market-oriented approaches to environmentalism:

It used to be that the big problem in formulating a sensible environmental policy came from the left--from people who insisted that since pollution is evil, it is immoral to put a price on it. These days, however, the main problem comes from the right--from conservatives who, unlike most economists, really do think that the free market is always right--to such an extent that they refuse to believe even the most overwhelming scientific evidence if it seems to suggest a justification for government action.

1990 was a good year for that left-right transition, or so we infer from this Gore bashing appraisal of "Earth in the Balance" (1998):

The book contains a chapter, lamentably titled "Eco-nomics," that perpetuates the oddly popular myth that conventional economic theory is constitutionally incapable of dealing with environmental problems. "Many popular textbooks on economic theory fail even to address subjects as basic to our economic choices as pollution or the depletion of natural resources," Gore declares. Actually, I have all the leading introductory texts on my shelf (I'm writing one myself and am trying to steal my competitors' ideas), and every one has an extensive section on environmental issues. One looks in vain in Gore's book for even a mention of the fundamentals of standard environmental economics: pollution as the prime example of an "externality" (a social cost that the market does not properly value), and the standard recommendation that externalities be corrected with pollution taxes or tradable emission permits. (I wrote about the economics of environmentalism in Slate last year, in "'Earth in the Balance Sheet.") Since these concepts have actually made their way from theory into practice, one wonders how he missed them. The introduction of tradable permits was an important feature of the 1990 revision of the Clean Air Act, for example, and both fees and permits have been crucial in efforts to protect the ozone layer.

That doesn't seem quite fair - Al did push for the BTU tax in 1993, although a nominally Dem-controlled Senate spurned it.  And the Kyoto Protocol did have provisions for carbon trading although memory, that uncertain servant, tells me Europeans dropped their objections to the Clean Development Mechanism after the US had dropped out under Bush in 2001.

But let me not stray from my point - right or wrong, back in 1998 Krugman thought Al Gore's intersection of economics and environmentalism was comical.  So did I, then and now - let's hand the mike to Bjorn Lomborg, the Skeptical Environmentalist himself, who wrote this in response to Gore's Nobel Prize:

The number of hungry people depends much less on climate than on demographics and income. Extremely expensive cuts in carbon emissions could mean more malnourished people. If our goal is to fight malnutrition, policies like getting nutrients to those who need them are 5,000 times more effective at saving lives than spending billions of dollars cutting carbon emissions.

Likewise, global warming will probably slightly increase malaria, but CO2 reductions will be far less effective at fighting this disease than mosquito nets and medication, which can cheaply save 850,000 lives every year. By contrast, the expensive Kyoto Protocol will prevent just 1,400 deaths from malaria each year.

While we worry about the far-off effects of climate change, we do nothing to deal with issues facing the planet today. This year, malnutrition will kill almost 4 million people. About 3 million lives will be lost to HIV/AIDS, and 2 1/2 million people will die because of indoor and outdoor air pollution. A lack of micronutrients and clean drinking water will claim 2 million lives each.

With attention and money in scarce supply, we should first tackle the problems with the best solutions, doing the most good throughout the century. If we focus on solving today's problems, we will leave communities strengthened, economies more vibrant, and infrastructures more robust. This will enable these societies to deal much better with future problems - including global warming. Committing to massive cuts in carbon emissions will leave future generations poorer and less able to adapt to challenges.

Let me display my commitment to ecology by recycling some old links - Lomborg on global priorities from 2006; his Copenhagen Consensus.

And just to state the ought-to-be-obvious - Lomborg has parted company (as have I) with the folks who argue that humans have not contributed to global warming.  His position is that, to whatever extent we have, global warming is just one of many problems and that making it a top priority would be a major mis-allocation of resources.

Let me note again - folks who hide behind Lomborg this may be establishing the best as the enemy of the good.  It's all very well to say that the world's money would be better spent on malaria prevention and third-world water treatment than on global warming, but if, at day's end, no money is spent on either, well, then... maybe it's Mission Accomplished!

OK, as I trail off here, let me revert to Krugman's original column:

Everything I’ve just said should be uncontroversial — but imagine the reception a Republican candidate for president would receive if he acknowledged these truths at the next debate. Today, being a good Republican means believing that taxes should always be cut, never raised.  It also means believing that we should bomb and bully foreigners, not negotiate with them.

Hmm- was it only a few weeks ago that Greg Mankiw, currently advising Mitt Romney, advocated for a revenue-neutral carbon tax as a blunt instrument with which to bludgeon global warming into submission as if it were a helpless baby seal (or a Frenchman)?  Not exactly - the baby seal extrapolation was my own Republo-speak, in a mad attempt to create some appeal.  But Mankiw did write the rest! 

Meanwhile, back in the Senate multiple bipartisan greenhouse gas cap-and-trade bills languish, or something - Presidential candidate John McCain has one (with Joe Lieberman), and I bet he has mentioned it at a Presidential debate (volunteer research help welcome)- he has certainly talked it up in Green New Hampshire.

So let me recap - at one time Krugman thought Gore's grasp of economics was dismal, yet he now derides those who still think so.  And, contra Krugman, the Republican ice cap on global warming is breaking up.  How about that.

MORE - CAN I SUBSTITUTE MITT ROMNEY? 

From the Oct 9 Republican debate starring Chris Matthews, here is Mitt Romney:

MR. ROMNEY: ...But with regards to energy -- and that's really the heart of what we're describing here -- one side of this is, of course, the fear; the fear of the fact that we face global warming, that we face serious competitive challenges globally unless we become serious with getting prices of energy down. But the other is the opportunity. It's a great opportunity for America to develop technology to lead the world in energy efficiency as well as energy production. And whether it's nuclear or liquefied coal, where we sequester the CO2, far more fuel- efficient automobiles -- by the way, where bureaucrats don't write the rules, but where business people come together and say let's find a way to make sure that the American -- the domestic industry can thrive. These are some of the incentives that have to be behind our policies with regards to our investments --

MS. BARTIROMO: Thank you.

MR. ROMNEY: -- in new technologies like ethanol.

Church And State

I find this shocking:

[A Presidential candidate] said Sunday that the separation of church and state should not force the people of the United States to "leave [their] religion at the door before entering the public square" and that, indirectly, faith informs politics.

"Our faith informs our values, and I think we'd all agree that our values inform our politics more than they have over the last six years," the [candidate] said at an interfaith forum in downtown Des Moines.

After years of being told that Bush is a theocrat and decades of hearing politicians such as Mario Cuomo and John Kerry explain that some of their values, such as that for human life, don't actually count in the political arena because they have a religious foundation, this is quite a Pandora's Box being opened.

MORE:  I love this headline:

Noted Christianist: God wants us to offset our carbon emissions

 

Rudy On Taxes

My roving New Hampshire correspondent has provided YouTube video of Rudy Giuliani at a New Hampshire town hall meeting making the supply-side case for lower taxes.

The first video is two minutes and the second is about three minutes.  For a quick flavor, come in at the 1:15 mark (it is counting down) of the second video for some Hillarity at Ms. Clinton's expense. Let's try for some links:

Video 1

Video 2

My overall impression is that this is a more relaxed and charismatic Rudy than people may be expecting.  As to his message of lower taxes, well, fine, what New Hampshire Republican could object?  I encourage the critical listener to set aside any reservations about the applicability of the Laffer curve at current federal levels and focus on the broad themes - at one point, Rudy explains that the Federal government is raising $500 billion more with the new, lower Bush tax rates than it was raising a few years ago at higher rates.  Of course, one may be left wondering whether the growth in the economy could have occurred without those tax cuts and whether current federal revenues would be even higher if we were collecting at the old rates applied to the newly grown economy.  But Rudy doesn't seem to be worrying about that, so I won't either.  In any case, at other points he clearly talks about the importance of cutting the right taxes, so I suspect he has a reasonably firm grasp of the issues here.

MORE: Greg Mankiw on An Inconvenient Tax Cut.

Rudy Adds Advisors

Rudy Giuliani has expanded his FoPo advisory team:

The Rudy Giuliani Presidential Committee today announced additional members of Mayor Giuliani’s foreign policy team, including Dr. Ruth Wedgwood, an internationally-renowned legal and United Nations expert, as a member of the International Law and Organizations Advisory Board, and Adm. Robert Natter, Ret., as Senior Military Advisor.

In a perfect world Dr. Wedgwood would be the advisor on China.  Oh, well.  It turns out that she and Rudy worked together back in his Manhattan DA days.  For a flavor of her thinking, here is a paper she prepared on the habeas corpus issue brought to the Supreme Court by Rasul; she saw no basis for the court to extend habeas corpus to Guantanamo as it had done.

By way of contrast, Dan Drezner rounded up reaction to the Rasul decision in 2004, including the Times coverage.

I Feel A Song Coming On

Gail Collins of the Times irked me with her assessment of the Republican Presidential candidates yesterday and a day later I am still fuming, evidently:

When you watch a bunch of presidential candidates on a stage, you are almost invariably looking at a bunch of very rich people. Some of them were born into privilege, like Mitt Romney and John McCain.

McCain's father and grandfather were Admirals in the US Navy, not the natural lair of the "very rich".  Now I have no doubt that Sen. McCain would declare himself privileged to have had the opportunity to serve our country in the Navy and in the Hanoi Hilton, but that is not what Ms. Collins is getting at with her "very rich" phrasing.  It appears that McCain's second wife, Cindy, provides the financial wealth in their marriage; whether McCain's father and/or grandfather also married money I can't say, but Wikipedia tells us that McCain's mom, Roberta, was the daughter of a Los Angeles oilman.

Well, I promised a song, so dust off the vinyl and spin "Lucky Man" by Emerson, Lake and Palmer.

Run, Al Run

Al Gore wins the Nobel Peace Prize; presumably, his contribution to our understanding of climate change did not quite meet the standards of the Nobel science prizes.

So, is Al Gore the next Dem nominee for the White House?  From Mike Allen, or perhaps a fortune cookie from last night's Chinese, we get this:

Sources say Gore will resist entreaties, but will continue to tease by not ruling it out.

Christopher Hitchens nailed it when he wondered about Gore's belly and the fire therein back in a recent column now being re-run at Slate:

Should he make up his mind not to run, he would retrospectively abolish all the credit he has acquired so far. It would mean in effect that he never had the stuff to do the job and that those who worked and voted for him were wasting their time. Given his age and his stature, can he really want that to be the conclusion that history draws?

If Gore thought he was qualified, the best man for the job, and able to contribute to a better America and world back in 2000, surely it must be painfully apparent to anyone attempting to stoke his ego that Big Al can become convinced that America and the world need him now more than ever in 2008.

And it does not appear that either Obama or Edwards have slaked the thirst of many Dems for a sustainable Anybody But Hillary candidate.

FWIW, at InTrade Al Gore leads the Most Active contracts and has gotten a bump up from 10% to 13% as the probability of being the next Dem nominee, although Hillary's 68% seems unchanged; at the Slate Futures compendium, Gore and Obama are essentially tied as the leading Hillary Alternative.

Our Team, Our Time; Your Season Has Come... sorry, The Man, The Moment, The Movement.  Away we go.

Nancy Pelosi, Compassionate Anti-War Lib

Jiminy, did Nancy Pelosi really say that?

But [Ms. Pelosi's] spirits soured instantly when somebody asked about the anger of the Democratic "base" over her failure to end the war in Iraq.

"Look," she said, the chicken breast on her plate untouched. "I had, for five months, people sitting outside my home, going into my garden in San Francisco, angering neighbors, hanging their clothes from trees, building all kinds of things -- Buddhas? I don't know what they were -- couches, sofas, chairs, permanent living facilities on my front sidewalk."

Unsmilingly, she continued: "If they were poor and they were sleeping on my sidewalk, they would be arrested for loitering, but because they have 'Impeach Bush' across their chest, it's the First Amendment."

If they were poor they would have been arrested?  What's next - if they were illegal aliens she would have had them deported?  Or at least, put them to work doing the lawn and laundry?

I am experiencing shock and awe.

MORE:  Or, I guess I just don't know Libs, or San Fran:

San Francisco - the liberal, left-coast city conservatives love to mock - could be undergoing a transformation when it comes to homeless people. Although the city would still be a poor choice for a pep rally for the war in Iraq, indications are that residents have had it with aggressive panhandlers, street squatters and drug users.

"Maybe there has been an epiphany," says David Latterman, president of Fall Line Analytics, a local market research firm. "People have realized they can hate George Bush but still not want people crapping in their doorway."

Consider the case of David Kiely, who has lived in the South of Market area for 18 years. He bought a home when prices were low and now lives there with his wife, Jenny, and their three boys, ages 7, 4 and 1. Kiely insists "we're not some white, yuppie parents saying we can't take this." In fact, he says, they donate to programs for homeless people at Glide Memorial Methodist Church and the food bank at St. Anthony Dining Room. But he's finally saying "enough is enough."

"I don't expect it to be Cow Hollow or Pacific Heights," he says. "But the other day Jenny is bringing the kids back from the park, and some guy is standing on the corner throwing up on himself."

What's the old saying - a conservative is a liberal who has been thrown up on by reality?

Back Patrick On Traffic

Patrick Ruffini identified an intriguing puzzle that leads Sitemeter to inflate traffic statistics for high-traffic sites.

Briefly, Sitemeter claims that each unique visiting IP address is tracked for half an hour.  But what Patrick deduced is that Sitemeter has a second, hidden constraint - its Basic service only stores the last 100 visitors.  On a low traffic site, that constraint means little.  However, the Daily Kos draws about 30,000 visitors per hour during prime time, which is roughly one hundred visitors every twelve seconds. 

So, if Patrick is right, if I go to the Kos site I will be recorded as a unique visitor; if I then hit a second Kos page twenty seconds later I will be recorded as another unique visitor, despite Sitemeter's protestations about a half-hour rule.  Due to the 100 visitor hidden constraint, Sitemeter will correctly record page views but overstate unique visitors.

I have tried a simple test to check the Ruffini Hypothesis - I set up three near-duplicate web pages presenting the details (including IP addresses) for the Kos site and refreshed them roughly twenty seconds apart.  I then copy/pasted the three hundred visitors into Excel and sorted by IP address.

I then dropped a lot of the visitors because Sitemeter reported the ISP, such as "Comcast", but not a unique IP Address.

However, of the remaining 188 ostensibly unique visitors with a specific IP address, twelve were duplicates.

So I am declaring Patrick the winner here.  Good catch.

On a better day I would have saved screen captures for the test pages, but I expect this experiment is easily replicated and I have exhausted my tech skills and time.

MORE:  On a great day I would go to a low traffic site and check that there are no duplicates, which is what we would expect if a tracked visitor opened multiple pages within a half-hour.  Developing...

Count Every Vote! Or, Democrats v. DNC

The Democratic National Committee will be sued by Florida Congressguys Bill Nelson of the Senate and Alcee Hastings of the House for violating the Voting Rights Act.  This is in response to the DNC plan to refuse to seat the Florida delegation to the Democratic National Convention  if the delegates are selected in a too-early primary.

Here is the Times:

Senator Suing Own Party Over Discord on Florida

By ABBY GOODNOUGH

MIAMI, Oct. 3 — Senator Bill Nelson of Florida is to file a federal lawsuit Thursday accusing the Democratic National Committee of violating the constitutional rights of four million of the state’s voters by refusing to seat its delegates at the party’s national convention next summer.

The suit also accuses the committee of violating the Voting Rights Act, which protects voters from racial discrimination.

The committee decided in August to strip Florida of its delegates to the Democratic convention unless the Florida Democratic Party obeyed national party rules by delaying its 2008 presidential nominating contest. The Republican-controlled Florida Legislature had voted in May to schedule primaries for Jan. 29, even though Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire and South Carolina are the only states that the national parties allow to hold primaries or caucuses earlier than Feb. 5.

Mr. Nelson will file the suit in federal court in Tallahassee along with another Florida Democrat, Representative Alcee L. Hastings, according to a draft obtained by The New York Times. The suit also names as a defendant Kurt S. Browning, Florida’s secretary of state.

I am hardly an expert in this area but I am doubtful that this suit will do much other than embarrass the Democrats.  But let's cut to the Times expert, blogger Rick Hasen:

Richard L. Hasen, who specializes in election law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, said Mr. Nelson’s case faced substantial hurdles, because courts had been reluctant to tell political parties whom they could seat at conventions.

“They have a First Amendment right to run their internal affairs as they wish,” Professor Hasen said. “There is certainly a strong policy argument against excluding so many Democratic voters, but that does not translate into a constitutional violation.”

The Hill had coverage on Sept 26, and here is the AP.

 

 

War On Terror Distorted By War On Drugs

Jonah Goldberg wrote about a few of his problems with the war on drugs earlier today.  By uncanny coincidence, the NY Times, in a lengthy story about the evolution of the Bush Administration policies on enhanced interrogation, has this:

Interrogators were worried that even approved techniques had such a painful, multiplying effect when combined that they might cross the legal line, Mr. Kelbaugh said. He recalled agency officers asking: “These approved techniques, say, withholding food, and 50-degree temperature — can they be combined?” Or “Do I have to do the less extreme before the more extreme?”

The questions came more frequently, Mr. Kelbaugh said, as word spread about a C.I.A. inspector general inquiry unrelated to the war on terrorism. Some veteran C.I.A. officers came under scrutiny because they were advisers to Peruvian officers who in early 2001 shot down a missionary flight they had mistaken for a drug-running aircraft. The Americans were not charged with crimes, but they endured three years of investigation, saw their careers derailed and ran up big legal bills.

That experience shook the Qaeda interrogation team, Mr. Kelbaugh said. “You think you’re making a difference and maybe saving 3,000 American lives from the next attack. And someone tells you, ‘Well, that guidance was a little vague, and the inspector general wants to talk to you,’” he recalled. “We couldn’t tell them, ‘Do the best you can,’ because the people who did the best they could in Peru were looking at a grand jury.”

Who knew?  One of my great unrealized hopes was that 9-11 would prompt a drastic rethinking of the war on drugs for one obvious reason - the drug trade has led to a huge infrastructure oriented to moving people, money and material (i.e. drugs) clandestinely, and terrorist organizations were likely to piggy-back off of that infrastructure.  As one example - why, one might wonder, would a flight school in South Florida train pilots on a cash basis with no questions asked?  Boy, that is a toughie - my guess was that South Florida flight schools have gotten fat quietly training pilots for the drug cartels and have not developed a culture that includes active liaison with law enforcement authorities.

And today we learn that CIA interrogators were worried because of a drug war debacle in Peru.  Grr.

Times - Limbaugh A "Victim", Like MoveOn

Carl Hulse and the NY Times finally (and belatedly) sidle up to the phony Rush Limbaugh "phony soldiers" story, adopting a moral equivalence pose and explaining nothing:

October 3, 2007
Congressional Memo

Limbaugh Latest Victim in War of Condemnation

By CARL HULSE

WASHINGTON, Oct. 2 — Having abandoned for now their effort to force President Bush to withdraw troops from Iraq, Democrats are not giving ground against a lesser nemesis: Rush Limbaugh.

With the help of liberal advocacy groups, the Democrats in Congress are turning Mr. Limbaugh’s insinuation that members of the military who question the Iraq war are “phony soldiers” into the latest war of words over the war.

A resolution introduced by 20 Democrats urges the House to condemn the “unwarranted slur” made by Mr. Limbaugh, though it does not condemn the broadcaster himself.

Their push, not coincidentally, comes after House and Senate Republicans maneuvered some Democrats into voting to condemn an advertisement by MoveOn.org in The New York Times last month that referred to Gen. David H. Petraeus as “General Betray Us.”

“What’s good for the goose is good for the gander,” Representative Steny H. Hoyer, Democrat of Maryland and the House majority leader, said Tuesday.

The back and forth on the Petraeus advertisement and, now, over Mr. Limbaugh’s remarks, illustrates how both parties are turning miscues into fodder in the run up to the 2008 elections, particularly in the absence of serious legislative accomplishment when it comes to the war.

Republicans used to be considered superior at drumming up a quick controversy over some actual or perceived Democratic outrage. But Democrats and sympathetic advocacy groups are catching up fast. And the political exchanges are being amplified by the reach and power of the Internet and the repetition of the 24-hour news cycle.

“Maybe Rush got away with smears like this in the past, but he’s not going to on our watch,” said Jon Soltz, an Iraq veteran and chairman of VoteVets.org, a group closely aligned with Congressional Democrats that is behind a new advertisement taking on Mr. Limbaugh.

Eight paragraphs in and no real bacground on the phony controversy.  Instead, this is presented as simply the flip side of the MoveOn coin - MoveOn annoyed Republicans, Limbaugh annoyed Democrats, and here we are.

Just to inspire in Times editors the belief that this controversy can be summarized briskly, let's cut to the AP story of Sept 28 by Holly Ramer:

CLAREMONT, N.H. -- Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards criticized Rush Limbaugh on Friday for referring to some members of the military as "phony soldiers."

For his part, Limbaugh said he was referring only to one soldier recently convicted of lying about his service.

See how easy that was?  The allegation and the response, in the first two paragraphs.  But nothing is easy in Times world if conservatives are under attack - in their story the allegation is presented in the second paragraph as "Mr. Limbaugh’s insinuation that members of the military who question the Iraq war are “phony soldiers”, but Limbaugh's defense is still MIA after eight paragraphs.  Of course, Times editors have the option to pretend that "insinuation" was meant to soften the charge, but that is absurd - by itself, "insinuation" does not carry the connotation that this is simply a misunderstanding, and plenty of righties know that there are truly phony soldiers out there (even ABC News knows it.) and presumably took Limbaugh's intended meaning the first time around.

The Times eventually provides a bit of background in paragraphs ten to twelve:

The broadcaster has accused critics of distorting remarks he made last Wednesday when a caller said the news media liked to focus on antiwar views raised by soldiers. Mr. Limbaugh then said, to the caller’s approval: “The phony soldiers.”

After the liberal media watchdog organization Media Matters sounded the alarm about his comments, Mr. Limbaugh said on subsequent shows that he was talking about only one discredited man who claimed to be a wounded veteran. “I was not talking about antiwar, active duty troops,” he insisted.

Yet analysts for Media Matters noted that Mr. Limbaugh’s first reference to the discredited man came nearly two minutes after his plural reference to phony soldiers. That group and like-minded Democrats have refused to back off. More than 40 Democratic senators signed a letter sent Tuesday to the company that syndicates the radio show, asking that Mr. Limbaugh’s remarks be repudiated.

That is quite a misleading summary of the exchange.  Here is a bit more context, with emphasis for the benefit of the Times researchers:

CALLER: No, it's not. And what's really funny is they never talk to real soldiers. They pull these soldiers that come up out of the blue and spout to the media.

RUSH:  The phony soldiers.

CALLER: Phony soldiers. If you talk to any real soldier and they're proud to serve, they want to be over in Iraq, they understand their sacrifice and they're willing to sacrifice for the country.

Was it really the case, as described by the Times, that the caller's remarks could be characterized as "the news media liked to focus on antiwar views raised by soldiers", and that it was Limbaugh who volunteered the concept of "phony soldiers"?  In that case, how does the Times interpret the callers mention of "these soldiers that come up out of the blue"? 

ABC News had a piece about what they called "phony heroes", headlined at their website as "phony war vets", which ran two days prior to the controversial Limbaugh segment.  Yet Limbaugh's critics are certain that he could not possibly have had that in mind when he mentioned "phony soldiers", even though the caller was alluding to soldiers that "come up out of the blue" and even though Limbaugh went on to cite a specific phony soldier, Jesse MacBeth, two minutes later?  Further, if we understand the Limbaugh explanation, he had previously noted Macbeth in a "Morning Update", which I infer is emailed to subscribers [ but see UPDATE].  Yet Limbaugh's critics are certain he could not have meant what he says he meant; geez, if they would only use these vast psychic powers to tell us who is going to win the Series I could be spared a lot of agita.

Eventually the diligent reader has the moral equivalence spelled out:

The Limbaugh furor is just the latest episode in how each side has sought to paint the other as unpatriotic or unsympathetic to the military by focusing public attention on various comments that lawmakers might wish they had phrased differently or could take back.

...There is certainly nothing new in trying to use political opponents’ words against them. But in the current environment, efforts to out-condemn one another are becoming a proxy for a more substantive fight over the war and cannot be dismissed as one factor in the low public approval ratings for Congress.

Left unmentioned - although the Times credits Media Matters with promoting the Limbaugh story their investigative effort apparently flagged once they decided that Media Matters is a "liberal media watchdog organization"; apparently, the claim of the leading Democratic candidate for the Presidency that she helped to establish it is not newsworthy (Newsbusters, Newsday).

UPDATE:  Byron York chats with Rush Limbaugh and lays out the timeline.  Apparently the Morning Commentary in which Limbaugh first mentioned Macbeth is is taped for later broadcast.