On the subject of the NYT's statistical games-playing, Andrew Sullivan reveals the rigging holding up the Times' assertion (on June 16 and 24) that average Alaskan temperatures have risen 7 degrees (or 5.4, depending on whether you've read their "correction" or not). The University of Alaska's Climate Research Center, which disputed the Times' account from the beginning, provided a rebuttal stating,

We still find the [Times' corrected climate change] value of 5.4°F too great by a factor of 2 for the 1971 to 2000 period, the last 30 years. However, the possibility exists that the value of 5.4°F is in reference to a temperature change in some other earlier 30-year period.

Sullivan says, yes, indeed, such is the case:

The number used by the Times ... is not the last thirty years. It's based on a period between 1966 and 1995. By picking 1966 as the base-point, you can get that result. But 1966 is a freak year. It's one of the four coldest years in Alaska this century. And 1995 was one of the hottest.

Seems like the Times is getting an unwanted lesson in statistical analysis.

Coming out at the ballgame: Upon reading the latest of Sullivan's increasingly frequent "poseur watch"posts (is the Gallicized term in that title meant to be ironic?), my first reaction was to wonder what Sullivan was getting at. He hails, after all, from a country that prefers to play cricket, a game whose rules are longer than the EU guidelines on tropical insect importation and in which teams can win by absurd scores, like .01 wicket or 3,972.825555 runs, after playing for 45 hours, interspersed with tea breaks and the odd lunch. My theory has always been that the British obtained their empire for something to do until the match results came back.

Then I actually read the article Sullivan was talking about. God help the British; after that play closes, it'll be a wonder if they don't see every baseball player as a sexually-tortured hostile racist, or every catcher as a "malaprop-prone ignoramus with as much brainpower as a radish." After all, there's only one of the former in today's baseball, and John Rocker's got a triple-six ERA with the cellar-dweller Rangers. As for Yogi Berra: a brilliant man, no matter the Yogi-isms that characterize him to the baseball-illiterate (and New Yorker theatre critics). Not only was Berra one of the best at calling pitches, but he was a genius at managing his pitchers, tailoring his teaching and playing style to each pitcher's needs. Try doing that in game seven with a "radish" for a brain. And what to make of a statement like this?

[Baseball has] a kind of mathematical absoluteness that spills over into moral absoluteness, and explains why the fantasy of all-American wholesomeness goes with the game like sauerkraut with hot dogs.

Here's my fantasy: the proper place for this theatre critic to meet his public is Yankee Stadium. Center field. On "Free Battery Night."

 
Yesterday, Doxa, today, NRO: Byron York takes on yesterday's NYT poll, noting that today's WP polling data gives a completely different view of the situation; "the two papers' surveys seem to be the product of alternate universes in opinion polling."

As we saw yesterday (and as York -- who did not have access to the NYT/CBS poll data -- suggests), the NYT's polls showed substantially the same results as the Post, but their analysis wallpapered over inconvenient numbers, resulting in a story that, while never straying into pure falsity, was extremely misleading at best. York concludes that, as far as the Times's analysis goes, "you'll just have to trust them." Now it's their turn to earn back our trust.

 
Playing the odds. In the Frontpage article on a series of terrible murders, the author, Stephen Webster of the racist American Renaissance, says this:

Of one thing we can be certain: If whites had done something this horrible to blacks, it would be universally assumed the crime was motivated by racial hatred. From the outset, police and prosecutors would have investigated the friends, habits, reading matter, and life history of each defendant. If either had ever uttered the word "nigger," had a drink with a Klansman, or owned a copy of American Renaissance, this would be discovered and brandished as proof of racial hatred. In the Carr case, there appears to have been no investigation at all. Instead of searching for possible racial animus, the authorities have simply declared there was none.

Gee, y'know, this sure sounds reasonable, doesn't it? I mean, if a man kills eight black people, I know I'd go looking for racist motives. So if a man kills eight white people, shouldn't I do the same?

This is a great parlor game. We call it "false equivalence," and we'll show you how to refute it in the comfort of your own home.

Let's pretend that you've been given Ed McMahon's job with Publisher's Clearinghouse. However, due to recent market downturns, several positions have been consolidated, so that you not only deliver the check, but you also will randomly select eight winners. Also, the sweepstakes is limited to the environs of Wichita, Kansas, to save on advertising and media costs.

After a few weeks of junk mail, unsolicited phone calls, and door-to-door salesmanship (oh, yeah, we didn't tell you that you had to sell the magazines as well, did we?), you've distributed contest forms to all 545,220 residents. In addition, 42,060 have bought magazine subscriptions from you, even though you assured them that buying a subscription doesn't change the odds of their winning.

The big day comes, and the entire populace turns out to see who wins. Reaching into a giant wire tumbler, you pick out the first name ...

Okay, let's review. There are 545,220 people in the sweepstakes. 42,060 bought magazine subscriptions; that's 7.7% of the population. Roughly speaking, the odds are 1:13 that anyone you randomly select will have subscribed to a magazine (actually 1:12.96, if you're following along with a calculator, but close enough for demonstrative purposes. We're also going to ignore the fact that one person leaves the potential-winner population, since they can't win twice, but the skew is miniscule).

So you draw out the first name, and it turns out to be a woman who ordered 12 months of Martha Stewart's Prison Living. You give her a brand new KitchenAid and a gift certificate to TGI Friday's, and everyone applauds. At this point, as we mentioned, the odds are 1:13 that you would have selected 1 subscriber.

Moving on, you draw the next name, who is a man who bought not only Details, but Maxim, Playboy, and The American Prospect. Now, the chance of drawing another subscriber is still 1:13, but the odds of drawing a subscriber twice in a row are (1:13 * 1:13) 1:169. Much less likely, but luckily all the statisticians moved out of Kansas after creationism became an academic subject, so no one's done the math yet.

Next name, same game. Probability: (1:13 * 1:13 * 1:13) 1:2197. The natives are getting restless.

And so it goes, through all eight names. When the last name is called, you're sweating, because even the dullest person in the crowd has figured out that someone fixed the game. Maybe ... even ... you.

Final probability that eight randomly chosen names would all be subscribers (1:13 * 1:13 * 1:13 * 1:13 * 1:13 * 1:13 * 1:13 * 1:13) = 1:815730721. You can't even represent that as a percentage without using scientific notation (1.25423789814898e-07 %, in case you were wondering).

You won't be surprised to find out that the black population of Wichita was 42,060 in the 2000 census. Thus, if a serial killer were to randomly choose eight victims, and all were black, then the chances of him not deliberately choosing them by race or some other race-correlated criteria (for example, a mugger might choose primarily white victims because he believes that whites will, as a class, have more money on them then blacks) is infintesimal.

Now, in this case, there were actually three attacks involving eight people, so the probabilities would be 1:2197, as mentioned above. So, if all the victims were black, and assuming that any group of people will be ethnically homogenous, then if the killer selected completely randomly he would have a 0.045% chance of getting all black victims.

If we reverse the victims' ethnicities, the chance of randomly choosing a non-black victim from the population is a bit over 92%, which means that the chance of choosing eight random white victims is 54%, give or take. Given the three-choice assumption made above, there would be an 83% chance that a completely random selection would result in all white victims.

Police use these sorts of odds all the time to determine what kinds of patterns exist in criminal behavior. Since they have limited time and resources, it's not fruitful to look for a racial motive in the absence of any evidence* when totally random selection offers an 83% chance of the racial composition of the victims.

Horowitz has always been incautious when it comes to his allies, freely choosing from the most extreme fringes as well as from more mainstream venues. But his new associates, who deplore the "restrained coverage" of media outlets like The Wichita Eagle while speaking highly of such Internet sites as NewNation.org ("For a white minority in a colored world") and JeffsArchives.com ("Reporting on the Jewish war against Gentiles and the resulting destruction of White Western civilization") are further beyond the pale than any with whom he's dealt. The results of such a devil's deal will be dismal indeed.

 
"The Angry Whites." Read the article on "the Wichita massacre" at Horowitz's Frontpage, and you'll only get half the story. Read the the full article at American Renaissance, and you'll find something new: everything the author was afraid to say outside of the white-supremacist readership of AmRen.

The Frontpage article ends with these words:

The police and media reactions to these crimes-a refusal to think about race, draw larger conclusions, or even express outrage-are typical of today's whites, and in stark contrast to the sustained fury we could expect from blacks if the races were reversed.

Offensive to some, surely, but milquetoast in comparison to the ten paragraphs redacted from that version of the article, but preserved in the original. What Stephen Webster wrote for Frontpage was primarily an account of what happened, intermixed with the sort of sly racist insinuations that the more sophisticated brand of racists excel at. But the full article does not shy away from drawing conclusions that should appall Horowitz as much as anyone.

First, Webster attacks Christianity, intimating that it essentially emasculated the "five young whites" so they would not fight back against a black aggressor. (Like many other racist publications, AmRen advocates an "Identity Christianity" that mixes a kind of Christianity -- I hesitate to call it that -- with a vulgar Spenglerian national racism.)

To what extent does this turn-the-other-cheek mentality [of Christianity] explain why five whites failed to fight back against two attackers? Three of the whites were young men, surely capable of serious resistance, and there must have been several opportunities for it. ... Why ... did five young whites ... kneel obediently in the snow to be shot one by one? ... [H]ad they simply been denatured by the anti-white zeitgeist of guilt that implies whites deserve whatever they get? One does not wish to think ill of the dead, but these three men showed little manliness.

This obsession with a masculinity in decline is a staple of white supremacy; less-genteel racists might blame miscegenation, but the AmRen writers concentrate on (big-C) Culture, which is a necessary component of (big-R) Race. Dilute the Race, they say, and dilute the strength of Culture. These are the heirs of the late and not much-lamented Francis Parker Yockey, the American Nazi-sympathizer whose book Imperium (dedicated to Adolf Hitler, the "hero of the Second World War"), is published by Holocaust denier Willis Carto's Noontide Press, for whom Jared Taylor has also written. (White supremacists have cited American Renaissance as a source for ordering Imperium, but it is not currently available through their website.)

Imperium is the bible for intellectualist white supremacists, in which Yockey argues that blacks are "primitive and childlike ... Like all primitive races, the Negro race is fertile, and possessed of strong instincts" to breed; and calls Jews "[t]he most tragic example of Culture-parasitism for the West." To Yockey, Culture is the source of the white race's strength, but it is the nature of whites to have Culture, while blacks and Jews are condemned to primitive tribalism or "parasitism." And it is this latter argument that the article uses to back its critics into a corner: if the murders weren't hate crimes, then they were evidence that blacks are "so depraved they can commit on a whim" the most terrible crimes. They are, it is implied, barely human at all.

It is natural for whites to assume that behavior so vicious and odious must have been driven by consuming hatred. Most whites cannot imagine treating another human being the way the Carrs treated their victims unless there were some terrible underlying animus. ... However, it may be a mistake to project white sensibilities onto blacks. ... It may ... be that the Carr brothers are incapable of analyzing and describing their own motives with enough intelligence to make it possible for others to judge them.

The angry whites do not seem to realize that what happened on the night of Dec. 14 may be only a particularly brutal expression of the savagery that finds daily expression in American crime statistics and African tribal wars. It may very well be that the Carr brothers are so depraved they can commit on a whim brutalities that whites can imagine only as the culmination of the most profound and sustained hatred.

In the end, we need to say very little to condemn Horowitz's racist, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic allies. Their own words speak far more eloquently than we ever could. And it is these words, going back at least twelve years, that Horowitz should have heeded. When he says that Taylor is "a man who has surrendered to the multicultural miasma that has overtaken this nation and is busily building a movement devoted to white identity and community," he is being disingenuous if not entirely mendacious. Horowitz's old enemy, the ADL, traces Taylor's thought as far back as 1983. He did not "surrender," he marched bravely into the world of white supremacy with utmost confidence, ready to lead his followers into a Blake's Jerusalem cleansed of alien people and cultures alike.

After all, anything else would be ... well, un-white.

Correction: A rather serious typo has been fixed. See this post for more information.

 
We haven't tossed a bum out since ABSCAM, but the Ethics Committee today released a statement recommending that Jim Traficant be expelled from the House. I mean, one felony conviction, no problem. Five or six, we can overlook. Eight or nine, well, I mean, who doesn't make a mistake now and again? But ten federal felony counts? We've got to draw the line somewhere!

No more HoroScopes, at least not here. Future updates -- and there will be future updates, rest assured -- will be at HorowitzWatch, from The Rittenhouse Review. We'll see if Horowitz even acknowledges its existence from now on....

 
Want to see my Larry King impersonation? MaxSpeak argues that, to boost the economy, we need to "increase the deficit in the short run and decrease it in the long run, both at the same time." Seems like great economic advice, but will someone with the proper credentials convince me that we're not reliving the 1964 tax cut and Vietnam War deficit financing all over again? (By the way, if you aren't familiar with the Economic Policy Institute, you really should drop by their reading room.) ... Allen Barra takes on the baseball owners and their role in the latest season-imperiling brinkmanship (on the same topic, here's a story on the powerful players' union and how they came to exert such force) ... Rittenhouse notes that, contrary to pundits' beliefs, the current White House is as politically opportunistic and craven as the last (well, I added the bit about Clinton myself) ... How does Alexander Volokh feel about Ayn Rand? I don't know that, but he's not so impressed with her followers, especially when it comes to legal commentary ... Just one more day to get your tickets for the Janet Reno Dance Party at Level, in South Beach. No word yet if she's going to dance to "My Sharona" ....

TIPS and Dips IV: Attack of the Neocons! Bob Levy takes on TIPS at NRO, where he characterizes it as a program where "meddlers, busybodies, and snoops" will "report directly to the Justice Department, where [their statements] will be stored in a central database -- yet another database containing names of persons who have not been charged with any wrongdoing." Am I just completely missing this program description somewhere? Am I totally off-base as to what TIPS is supposed to be? If I'm missing the boat on this one, please, let me know.

 
CoulterWatch: Anti-feminism, now and then. Eagle Forum head Phyllis Schlafly has always been a lightning rod for controversy, but her opinions -- extremely conservative, grounded in a highly literal religious faith, and usually colored by her decades-long fight against all feminists, from the most moderate to the most radical -- are never trivial, nor easily dismissed. No doubt her enemies found it preferable to ignore rather than debate her, thus at least partially accounting for the amount of invective used against her by political opponents. (All of the rest can be accounted for by her own liberal use of invective, and a tendency, perhaps even her hallmark, to quite literally demonize her opponents.)

Schlafly is still very much a member of the mid-century conservative movement, when a great variety of thinkers were collectively sent into the wilderness by the postliberal consensus that characterized Great Society intellectuals of the time. Today, more than ever, it's amazing that so many people, whose only bond was the label "conservative," didn't end up in a fratricidal war, but somehow they maintained cohesion and managed to remake American society in the process. For me, the rigor of those days still exists in the remaining scions: Buckley, Safire, Kristol, Friedman and, yes, even Shlafly.

So Ann Coulter's most recent column, listing Shlafly's accomplishments, is not entirely wasted ink (or bytes), despite the usual preponderance of vicious attacks on anyone she disagrees with, and a particularly bizarre aside as to why women should not be allowed to work as firefighters ("A short list: their inability to pick up the hose, their tendency to cry and panic when confronted with dangerous situations, the effect on families whose homes are on fire when they open the door and see the female equivalent of Michael Dukakis in a tank"). As usual, Coulter can't even get through an encomium without resorting to the ad hominem.

This column highlights Coulter's place in the punditry: as much as Schlafly represents the conservative revulsion against postliberal leftism, Coulter is herself a postconservative, having substituted analysis for loyalty oaths and a checkbox conservatism in which one's fidelity to the right is measured by single issues and isolated votes. For Schlafly, everything is political; for Coulter, it's just politics.

 
Lies, damned lies, and New York Times opinion polls: Well, not quite that bad, but I couldn't resist. The Times fronts the word that "Americans worry that President Bush and his administration are too heavily influenced by big business, fear that Mr. Bush is hiding something about his own corporate past and judge the economy to be in its worst shape since 1994," according to the newspaper's poll results. If true, the news that "a third of Republicans" believe that "administration was more interested in protecting the interests of large companies than those of ordinary Americans," and that "[t]wo-thirds of all respondents, and slightly more than half of Republicans, said business interests had too much influence on the Republican Party" should worry GOPers as they move into the active stage of the midterm elections.

As is usual with newspapers, the poll data itself isn't provided, but CBS News is more forthcoming, providing the full question list with respondent crosstabs organized by party affiliation. Not as good as the raw data, of course, but a lot easier to read at nine AM on a Thursday.

A reader perusing the NYT story would come away with the impression that the poll consisted of ten questions on corporate accounting scandals, but in fact the hand-picked questions from the Times are a fraction of the 83 questions in the poll -- an important fraction, to be sure, but having spent some (thankfully limited) time in the minutae of political campaigning and consultancy, I can say that judging the electorate's mood on the basis of a single poll, let alone a decontextualized subset of a single poll, is a fool's game. The Times neither lies nor makes serious errors in its analysis, but the facts on the ground hardly justify going above the fold with the story.

Here's a blow-by-blow of some of the article's contentions (question numbers refer to the CBS polling data):

Assertion: "[T]he poll's respondents said the administration was more interested in protecting the interests of large companies than those of ordinary Americans."

Analysis: Q21, not printed in the Times, asks respondents if they "think members of the Bush Administration are more interested in protecting the interests of ordinary Americans or ... the interests of large corporations?" The aggregate response is corporations: 61%, Americans: 27%. Even the Republican respondents are split, with only a 44% plurality believing that the Administration is looking out for "ordinary Americans." GOP members also had the highest "equal" and DK/NA response rates, 8% and 12%, respectively.

Leaving aside the invidious distinction between corporate interests and those of "ordinary Americans," q16 asks the same question regarding the President, and the answers are rather more ambiguous, with a 42% split in aggregate responses, the Republicans believing "ordinary Americans" at 63%, and Independents split within the margin of error ("ordinary Americans," 38%, "large corporations," 40%).

The Times appears to use q29 ("When it comes to his proposals for reforming corporate accounting practices, do you think [Bush] is mostly looking out for the interests of ordinary Americans or mostly looking out for the interests of large corporations?") to bolster this assertion, as that's the most pertinent question they reprint in their article. In that, 50% of respondents answered, "looking out for corporations." The result was heavily skewed by Democrats, 74% of whom responded "corporations," but a small plurality (46%) of Independents agreed in that judgment.

Of more interest are the paired half-samples q36 ("Do you trust [Bush] to do the right thing when it comes to regulating business [to prevent criminal abuses]?"), and q37 ("Do you trust members of the Bush Administration to do the right thing when it comes to regulating business [to prevent criminal abuses]?") A 61% aggregate majority, including 39% of Democrats, trusted Bush to regulate business, while 53% in the aggregate trusted the Administration. This indicates a divide between Americans' abstract belief that the Bush administration (and possibly politicians in general) looks out for big business over ordinary Americans, and their concrete belief that Bush and his Administration can be trusted to look out for ordinary Americans when it comes to specific proposals.

Judgment: When the rubber hits the electoral road, it's concrete actions, not abstractions, that win the day. Unless Americans believe that Bush and the Administration are falling short in regulating business abuses, there's no hook for the Dems to hang their accusations on.

Assertion: "Two-thirds of all respondents ... said business interests had too much influence on the Republican Party."

Analysis: Q65, q66, and q67 are the critical questions here, asking if "big business has too much ... too little ... or the right amount of influence" on the Republicans and Democrats, respectively. In the former case, 67% of the aggregate said "too much," with 64% of Independents and 53% of Republicans in that majority. In the latter, clear pluralities in each political group said business has "too much influence" on the Democrats, so that 49% of all respondents, with 48% of Independents, fell in that response category.

Q54 and q55 measure aggregate views of both parties, with the two completely neck-in-neck, although the Dems have slightly less positive ratings amongst Independents. Q58, asking "[D]o you think the Republican party or the Democratic party is more likely to make sure the country is prosperous?" also sees the two parties completely equal in the aggregate and amongst Independents, although party identification indicates high partisanship.

Q56 and q57 measure who the electorate believes the parties are looking out for: 58% of respondents, including 57% of Independents, believe that the GOP looks out for corporations; 52% of respondents believed the Democrats put "ordinary Americans" first. When it comes to Democrats, Independents were split half-and-half (Americans, 39%; corporations, 40%) as, interestingly enough, were Republicans (Americans, 36%; corporations, 39%), though Republicans believed (55%) that their party was looking out for the interests of Americans first.

Judgment: The Times is correct, but with a caveat: the Democrats, though more secure than the GOP from the charge of looking out for business before the people (scare quotes implicit), don't appear to command the kind of numbers necessary to make a successful populist bid for the midterms, especially when the above analysis is taken into account. It's not enough for your opponent to be vulnerable; you've got to be able to take advantage of that vulnerability, and that advantage the Dems don't seem to have.

Assertion: "[T]he poll found a surge since the start of the year in the percentage of people who think the country is on the wrong track."

Analysis: Q2 is the question being referred to, but it should be considered in the light of several more detailed questions. Q4 and q5 measure the public's approval of Bush's foreign and economic policies, respectively, and show strong approval for the former, and slightly less approval for the latter (though Independents provide a plurality approval of 49%). Q7 asks how Congress is doing its job, with again a plurality in approval.

Q9 ("Do you think the economy is getting better, getting worse, or staying about the same?") provides a clue as to why Americans think America is "on the wrong track:" 85% of respondents believe that the lackluster economy is either "getting worse" or "staying about the same."

It should also be noted that the exact wording of q2 is "... do you feel things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track?" This is the sort of emotionalized statement that should be avoided in opinion polls, at the risk of creating an unconscious bias in the respondent.

Judgment: The Times doesn't provide any evidence that the electorate believes that the Administration is on the wrong track, a very different thing. The respondents' despair over the economy may suggest that they believe that economic forces are moving America down the wrong track, but that our elected officials are doing their best in a situation they can't fully control.

Assertion: "Many Americans also expressed concerns that Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney had not been sufficiently forthcoming about their own past business dealings."

Analysis: Here's where the raw data comes in handy, because even though a plurality of respondents had heard "not much" (and a majority had heard "not much" or "nothing at all") about Bush's tenure at Harken Energy, and a strong plurality had heard "nothing at all" about accounting irregularities during Cheney's time as CEO at Halliburton, all respondents were asked if they thought the two leaders were "hiding something."

However, we don't need extended crosstabs to criticize the Times' statement. First, slightly over three-quarters of all respondents believe that neither Bush nor Cheney "personally did anything unethical" in regards to those scandals.

Second, q41 and q45 were subquestions, so that respondents were first asked if Bush or Cheney "is telling the entire truth, is mostly telling the truth but hiding something, or is mostly lying" (q40, q44), and then those who answered "hiding something" or "lying" were asked if the leaders were "hiding something the public needs to know, or not?"

Although 57% and 53% thought Bush and Cheney, respectively, are either hiding something or lying about their past business dealings, the aggregate proportions of people who either thought Bush and Cheney were hiding things the public needed to know were roughly 35% for each person. Breaking down into crosstabs by political identification, we get:


Is Bush hiding something about his business dealings the public needs to know?
Total: 35%
Rep: 15%
Dem: 54%
Ind: 32%

Is Cheney hiding something about his business dealings the public needs to know?
Total: 34%
Rep: 17%
Dem: 48%
Ind: 34%


Judgment: "Many Americans" are indeed concerned that Bush and Cheney "had not been sufficiently forthcoming about their own past business dealings," but unremarked is that two thirds of respondents, including two-thirds of independents, believe that the two have either been completely forthcoming, or else are not hiding information of import to the American people.

 
HoroScope: "Hangin's too good for 'im! Burnin's too good for 'im!" And imprisonment's definitely too good for him:

[P]ersonally, I wish John Walker Lindh had been shot. Already. In my view, his case should never have been brought before a federal court. He should have been interrogated mercilessly, brought before a military tribunal and executed before he ever left Aghanistan. The problem is we haven't taken treason seriously in this country since the Rosenbergs were executed nearly fifty years ago and it's about time we did. ... The death penalty for treason is a sign of respect for the lives of all Americans and for the country which sustains them and gives them freedom. Thousands of Americans probably committed treason during the Vietnam War and the Cold War, and did so with impunity. Perhaps we could afford this treachery then.

Tough words from a guy who used to be in the Soviets' collectivist pocket.

Truth is, there's a perfectly respectable argument that Lindh could have been hauled in front of a military tribunal, but it's not the one that Horowitz is making, since he conflates Lindh (who was fighting on the side of a foreign power engaged in military actions against Americans, including the prison break near Mazar-e Sharif), and the Rosenbergs (who were spies enagaged in stealing military secrets for the Soviets). The former is arguably part of the military domain; the latter is unquestionably a matter for the civil courts. But such distinctions are lost on Horowitz, who wishes to punish the offenders of today while evading the responsibility of his own past.

 
Beam him up! In his Discourses, Machiavelli repeatedly returns to the question of whether or not a society that has lost its virtu can maintain a republic, or if mere laws are insufficient to keep passions and ambition in check. And in his works -- from the Discourses through the Histories, Castruccio Castracani, and the unjustly infamous Prince -- he makes the answer clear: such a society will inevitably come to be led by the most ambitious yet least principled men, dictators, fools, and knaves (or at least the de Medici family).

A modern example might have been found in a meeting room of the House Armed Forces Committee today, where Ohio Representative James Traficant made his last stand in front of his colleagues in the Ethics Committee. Nobody expected Traficant to go quietly, and he lived up to his reputation in full, by turns blustering, threatening, and cajoling his way through the meeting, at the end threatening to "go over and kick [opposing counsel] in the crotch." And that was still his prepared testimony.

After the meeting adjorned, Traficant kept up the pace, arguing with Joel Hefley as to when the committee would report their findings to the floor; refusing to disclose to the members where he was staying in Washington, for fear the that "the IRS [will] come knocking at my door;" warning them to "be very careful before you do this [vote on his removal]," since he might still be re-elected "from a prison cell in Leavenworth;" and sparring with Howard Berman, first asking the California Representative when he needed to appear again in front of the committee, since "I'm still a Democrat for another month," and then immediately snapping, "You don't tell me what to do anymore." When committee chair Hefley called Traficant back into the room to clarify tomorrow's meeting time and place (room 2237, 10:00 AM, in case you feel like skipping work), the embattled politician snarled, "I'm taking photographs with the people who want to impeach you guys."

In other words, it was just another day with Jim Traficant.

Traficant presents what might be charitably called a "folksy" front, with his denim suits, skinny ties, and attacks on his perpetual personal enemies in the DoJ and IRS (always be leery when a corrupt ex-lawman starts warning about corrupt lawmen). But make no mistake: he's a devastatingly effective populist demagogue who has been re-elected for ten terms by his district, despite persistent evidence of personal and professional corruption. (Being from N'Awlins, I know my populist demaogues.) In office, he has used his position to pursue personal vendettas against the federal agencies that sought to convict him when he was a sheriff, and now, we have seen the evidence that shows his use of Congressional office to personally enrich himself.

The great indictment is not that it took this long for Traficant to be convicted, and (soon) to be expelled from the House. It's that the people of Ohio permitted, and encouraged, this modern-day Piero de Medici to use their votes for his pleasure.

 
CoulterWatch: "There are lots of bad Republicans; there are no good Democrats." (I suppose I'm in the former category, according to Ms. Coulter's lights.) It's not a good sign when Comedy Central can effectively rip you apart in less than three minutes, but Jon Stewart did a respectable job of just that this evening. Second-best Coulterism of the night: when Stewart pressed her on the point if she thought all Democratic voters were enemies of the Republic, she replied, "Well, except for a few little old ladies who still [think they've voting for] FDR ... but of course I'm talking about the [party] leaders." Of course you are, Ms. Coulter, of course you are. (Thanks to Kenn for letting me know about the show!)

 
Once again to the windmills: Andrew Sullivan takes on Horowitz's contention that a Kansas black-on-white killing was a hate crime ... Malcolm Gladwell looks at the free-agent mindset of former dot-com wonder boys and Big Six ... err, Five ... err, Four consultants and ask just how stupid are smart people? ... The Atlantic Monthly says that it's not the DNA, stupid, it's the way interrogations are conducted that creates many convicted innocents (here's the post about Quinones, if you care to review the last major case about DNA evidence) ... Noam Scheiber toes the Austrian economic line, correctly pointing out that the Enrons and WorldComs will have one salutory effect: clearing the market of the undead telecom, dot-com, and new-econ companies who grew fat on inflated stock prices, and who, if not stopped now, could eventually drag us into an economic quagmire.

This deserves more than Don Quixote's lance. The Weekly Standard condemns the "belligerent selfishness" of the family in this autobiographical article in the New York Times Magazine.

As I've said before, I don't often do the weekly penance of reading the Sunday NYT, but if they keep providing targets like this, I'm going to have to renew my subscription. (As with any lapsed liberal, I do get the odd offer from them.) The anonymous author begins his tale with a friend of his telling a ribald story in front of his young children, and the article only gets worse, progressing to his younger daughter, 15, announcing she's pregnant:

According to the laws of my Bible-belt state, a minor needs her parents' permission to have an abortion, but her parents can't tell her not to have a baby. She thought she wanted to keep it and swore she'd be a good mother. My wife and I -- and my oldest daughter -- freaked, and not just because of our dashed aspirations for this girl. We were too old to want to raise another baby -- and we felt sure the raising would fall to us.

Of course there was a boy involved, and he hadn't fled. He lives with his grandparents, and they asked us all to come talk. The grandfather lectured the young couple on responsibility. The boy admitted he wasn't ready to be a father. The only person in the room who wanted the baby was my daughter, but in the face of family advice, she decided she couldn't go through with the pregnancy. My wife scheduled her for an abortion.

When his daughter changes her mind (evidently with the help of one of those pro-life/anti-abortion "counseling centers" -- though rest assured, I use scare quotes around Planned Parenthood "counseling centers," too), her family "decided to stage an intervention" and, when that didn't convince her to have an abortion, they "took her to a 'counseling appointment' at Planned Parenthood" (okay, the scare quotes are mine).

That night when we got home and my wife asked our daughter what she was going to do, she blurted out, ''I don't have a choice.'' The next day, she turned on Saturday-morning cartoons, as if she'd decided to be a kid again.

The moral purblindness of the above statement pales in comparison to the breathtaking audacity of the next:

We spent a week wondering if she'd change her mind, but she didn't. I realized later that I would have more to worry about if she had easily and immediately decided on an abortion. Ultimately, she did, but she struggled with her decision, and I hope she made the right one.

The author conveniently forgets that his daughter had made a choice: to keep her child, whereupon her family staged incessant "interventions" and "counseling sessions" until she made the choice they wished her to make. If an anti-abortion protestor had wished to write a piece of fifth-columnist propaganda, he could have done no better. (In fact, one is compelled to wonder if that's exactly what happened.)

The moral arguments for and against abortion deserve grave and resolute consideration. Pro-life advocates ignore the fact that what is at stake is the potential for human life, not necessarily human life in any recognizable form (the doctrine of generation at conception notwithstanding). Pro-choice advocates ignore the terrible moral weight that must be borne by anyone who nullifies that probability as it tends to certainty. The decision to have an abortion is never indefensible, but it is never manifestly correct, either. Like most issues of passion, there is a grey area of morality that is better plumbed by the individual, not the corporate, conscience. But that only makes it all the more crucial that we maintain our sensitivity to the moral issues involved.

This article, then, excites my disgust (I can use no other word) because, to the author, the demands of expediency become grounds of morality. The only justification the family needed to force their daughter into an abortion was the probability that they would be involved in the raising of the child -- and they did not "want to raise another baby." The only person in this family drama who seems to have any moral sense is the daughter herself, who found herself caught between opposing activists until she finally, and sensibly, abdicated. The author pronounces himself pleased that his daughter did not "easily and immediately decid[e] on an abortion," but she didn't have to: her parents did it for her.

 
TIPS and Dips, Part the Third: There's an online petition against ... well, just about everything, including television theme songs and people who think that pop singers shouldn't be given the same funeral arrangements as assassinated American presidents, but that's not important right now. Should you wish to demonstrate that you "refuse to participate in an American version of East Germany's Stasi," (um ... yeah) then you can do so here. However, be advised that if you sign, you give up your right to a really neat window sticker. (Link provided by Sassafrass)

TIPS has been getting increased play lately, with the Post Office deciding not to opt in, noting that they have already "established processes for our postal employees nationwide to report suspicious activity to the Postal Inspection Service and to local authorities." The best part of the article, however, is an evident typo in the middle (or else a great job of burying the lead):

Attorney General John Ashcroft's spokeswoman said that the program, still in the development stage, would set up people to spy upon one another in their homes and communities.

Huh. Maybe I should apologize to Sassafrass, after all ....

Thank you, James Capozzola, for buying out the blogspot ad space! I'm humbled and gratified by the kind attention from across the political spectrum. For those who keep score, Mr. Capozzola's act now makes us, "Doxagora, a political blog financed by liberal media interests."

 
I had to get in a dig at Gingrich's most recent op-ed, so if you're looking for the inaugural HoroScope (thanks to Rittenhouse for the kind reviews), either scroll past the next post, or go here. However, Scoobie Davis has even better goods on Taylor, well worth reading (even if he does shoehorn in a bit of needless GOP-bashing in the process). He's also got the now-infamous interview with Ann Coulter on his page, another bit of critical reading if you want to learn just how ossified some ideologues on my side of the fence can be.

Speaking of Rittenhouse (again), be sure to check out the post on Greenspan's testimony, fiscal policy, and the reasoned mendacity of the OMB. Once you're finished with that, head on over to the industrial-strength postliberal leftist economics at MaxSpeak, where economist Max Sawicky provides excellent data and a political worldview that is well-reasoned, well-argued, and diametrically opposed to mine. (At the very least, I'm going to have to dig out my copies of Kolakowski and the post-Keynesians if I intend to sally against him.)

 
A Rage For Objection: The AEI has some of the best conservative writing being published today. However, being a "big-tent" kind of think tank, it also has its share of discredited has-beens and intellectualists whose interest in promoting peculiar agendas overrides their academic rigor. Charles Murray may be the most egregious of those offenders (despite his excellent early work, such as In Pursuit of Happiness and Good Government, ever since The Bell Curve, he's become a crass curmudgeon, busy protecting his polemical positions), but former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich -- a former political science professor as well as politician, so no academic naif in his own right -- seems to have utterly abandoned any pretence of argument, instead taking advantage of that peculiarly American soapbox, the op-ed.

In his most recent editorial ("Pledging Our Sacred Honor," here) Gingrich makes a modest proposal that hasn't been entertained since the 19th century. Quoting Hamilton's Federalist 81 ("There can never be danger that the judges, by a series of deliberate usurpations on the authority of the legislature, would hazard the united resentment of [Congress], while this body was possessed of the means of punishing their presumption...."), the former politician says that the Congress he but recently headed should "educate the judiciary" by "vot[ing] to remove the two Ninth Circuit Court judges [in the Newdow majority] and settle the issue of 'one nation under God' once and for all."

(Lest you think I'm supporting the decision at the expense of Gingrich, see my take on Newdow here.)

What Gingrich presents is an exercise of legislative power that was last attempted when Thomas Jefferson's anti-federalists impeached Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase in 1804. Chase's acquittal signaled the end of Jefferson's, and all subsequent, attempts to yoke the judiciary to the whims of elected officials. As a result, each of the infrequent federal impeachments, up to and including the most recent, since 1805 has been the result of alleged illegalities. But Gingrich doesn't make even the slightest attempt to show that the Newdow majority was guilty of any misdeeds, other than "misunderstand[ing] the nature of America." If that were grounds for impeachment, then Gingrich and his ideological allies should thank God that members of the legislative branch have been immune from impeachment since the end of the 18th century.

The comparison with Jefferson and his anti-federalist forces is apt, given the argument of the article. Gingrich's quoting of Hamilton makes historical farce out of present politics, for his position is in truth much closer to that of Brutus, the pseudonymous author of the Anti-Federalist Papers, who engaged in a tit-for-tat debate with Hamilton in the New York newspapers. Were Hamilton, who wrote (in Federalist 78) that the "independence of judges is ... respite to guard the Constitution and the rights of individuals from the effects of those ill humors, which the arts of designing men, or the influence of particular conjectures, sometimes disseminate among the people themselves," to read Gingrich's call for impeachment without "treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors," he would no doubt diagnose the former Speaker as being afflicted, as Brutus was, with "the rage for objection, which disorders ... imaginatio[n] and judgments."

Gingrich, arguing that "[u]nder the Constitution the legislative branch can remove the two judges who voted the unconstitutionality of the Pledge of Allegiance," presents the following plan of action for the House:

The Congress can assert that the country was founded with a Declaration of Independence, which proclaims, "We are endowed by our Creator."

The Congress can then note that recognition of a Supreme Being has been central to our existence and from Washington's Farewell Address to Lincoln's second inaugural, the leaders of this nationa have asserted ... that a belief in God ... is at the heart of the American civic experience.

Given that understanding of America, it is clear that any judge who would drive recognition of God from the public arena so profoundly misunderstands the nature of America that they should not be allowed to stay on the bench.

Therefore, these two judges should be removed preferably before the August recess.

There is no question that, of Gingrich's first assertion, the first half is correct: judges are liable for impeachment. Indeed, the Constitution's implacable enemy, Brutus, acknowledges as much, saying (in Brutus 15) that "The only clause in the constitution which provides for the removal of the judges from office, is that which declares, that 'the president, vice-president, and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office, on impeachment for, and conviction of treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.' " Story's Commentaries, when discussing the British impeachment model that gave rise to the American, noted that "lord chancellors, and judges, and other magistrates" have all been impeached at one time or another.

For the second half of Gingrich's assertion, things are not so settled, for at no point does Gingrich attempt to show that the Newdow majority is guilty of public crimes, only that they "voted the unconstitutionality of the Pledge of Allegiance."

Our forefathers were very concerned that impeachment could result in subservience to the legislative branch, just as they worried that the lack of such laws could also result in an executive king. In the Federalist Papers, Hamilton went to great lengths to defend a judiciary whose independence would be maintained by a Constitutional wall. In Federalist 78, Hamilton wrote that "all judges who may be appointed by the United States are to hold their offices DURING GOOD BEHAVIOR. ... The standard of good behavior for the continuance in office of the judicial magistracy, is certainly one of the most valuable of the modern improvements in the practice of government. ... The complete independence of the courts of justice is peculiarly essential in a limited Consitution" for any legislative or executive act carried out under the Constitution which is "contrary to the tenor of the commission under which it is exercised, is void. No legislative act, therefore, contrary to the Constitution, can be valid." To determine if a law or act is invalid, the courts must engage in interpretation, and "[t]he interpretation of the laws is the proper and peculiar province of the courts. A constitution is, in fact, and must be regarded by the judges, as a fundamental law. It therefore belongs to them to ascertain its meaning, as well as the meaning of any particular act proceeding from the legislative body."

Now, it may be argued -- and Gingrich does in fact seem to argue -- that a judge who goes beyond what might be deemed his rightful bounds and begins to interpret the law in disfavored ways is liable to be impeached. Under an early draft of the Constitution, this argument might have held some strength; originally, one version of the impeachment clause carried forward a commonly-used term in state impeachment clauses, "maladministration." (See, for example, the 1776 constitutions of North Carolina, Delaware and Virginia.) However, during the Federal Convention, Madison raised the objection that the term would "be equivalent to a tenure [at the] pleasure of the Senate." The term was withdrawn, and "other high crimes & misdemeanors" was inserted in its stead.

Thereafter, impeachment was used solely in the context of criminal acts, as if generally understood to apply only in such cases. Federalist 65 states that "After having been sentenced to perpetual ostracism from the esteem and confidence ... of his country; [an impeached official] will still be liable to prosecution and punishment in the ordinary course of law." During the 1788 ratifying debate in North Carolina, one speaker noted of impeachment that "the party convicted shall ... be liable and subject to indictment, trial, judgment, and punishment, according to law." All these statements suggest that the drafters expected criminal trials to follow impeachment trials as inexorably as the dawn after the night.

For more positive statements, in the same North Carolina debate, another speaker said, "God forbid that a man ... should be liable to be punished for want of judgment. ... [I]f nothing could be objected against [an executive, legislative, or judicial act] but the difference of opinion between [the actors] and their constituents, they could not be justly obnoxious to punishment. ... A public officer ought not to act from a principle of fear. Were he punishable for want of judgment, he would continually be in drea; but when he knows that nothing but real guilt can disgrace him, he may do his duty firmly...."

Hamilton's rhetorical antagonist, Brutus, makes a similar point in AFP 15 (albeit in opposition to the Constitution), writing that "Errors in judgment, or want of capacity ... can never be supposed to be included in these words, high crimes and misdemeanors. A man may mistake a case in giving judgment, or manifest that he is incompetent ... and yet give no evidence of corruption or want of integrity, To support the charge, it will be necessary to give in evidence some facts that will shew, that the judges commited the error from wicked and corrupt motives."

In Federalist 79, after acknowledging that judges are only "liable to be impeached for malconduct" (a term which does not appear to hold the same general meaning as "maladministration," since that matter had already been disposed of), Hamilton responds to Brutus' objections: "The want of a provision for removing the judges on account of inability has been a subject of complaint. But all considerate men will be sensible that such a provision would either not be practiced upon or would be more liable to abuse than calculated to answer any good purpose. ... An attempt to fix the boundary between the regions of ability and inability, would much oftener give scope to personal and party attachments and enmities than advance the interests of justice or the public good. The result ... must for the most part be arbitrary ...."

It is true that impeachable offenses are nowhere near as fixed and easy to define as private criminal offenses. A later attempt to define impeachable offenses appears in Rawle's A View of the Consitution (1829), where the author notes that impeachable crimes include "political offences, growing out of personal misconduct, or gross neglect, or usurpation, or habitual disregard of the public interests, in the discharge of the duties of political office. ... [These charges] must be examined upon very broad and comprehensive principles of public policy and duty. They must be judged of by ... habits, and rules, and principles ... and in short, by a great variety of circumstances." Rawle therefore suggests that the question as to whether an act is impeachable also rests on prior art and activity in the particular branch of office. In the case of the judiciary, appeal must be made to the prior rulings and acts of the federal courts; as I, and others more qualified than I, have showed, whatever the demerits of Newdow as policy, the legal reasoning is, given the direction provided by the Supreme Court in past cases, quite sound. Even if one disagrees, as I do, with the court's testing of the school Pledge requirement (as opposed to the legislation inserting "under God" in the first place), that disagreement certainly does not mean that the majority violated the duties of their offices -- such a decision would directly violate the intent of the Founders, above.

Thus, the weight of evidence suggests that the Founders did not intend for impeachment to be brought against a civil servant for any reason other than a criminal violation of a political nature or, more controversially, for behavior that represented an utter disregard of the office's requirements.

Unfortunately, and perhaps fatally, for Gingrich's argument, he provides no evidence that the Newdow majority acted corruptly or in disergard of their duties and the public interest. He cites the Declaration of Independence (which is not legally controlling), and political speeches that contain references to God (which also have no legal standing), then argues that impeachment is justified on the basis that the judges "profoundly misunderstan[d] the nature of America." (Gingrich adroitly disregards the fact that a number of Founders, including Jefferson, Paine, and Franklin, also harbored such profound misunderstandings.)

One does not have to be a legal scholar to see that there is no charge contained within Gingrich's articles of impeachment. At best, we have a Congressional censure, which is hardly enough to drive a judge from public office. Furthermore, it is a completely unnecessary censure, as there are two more levels -- the circuit at large, and the Supreme Court -- that are left to review the decision, and reverse as necessary. Perhaps the former Speaker should have reserved this column in the event that the entire Ninth Circuit and the Supreme Court should be included in his articles of impeachment, as well.

So, what are we left with? One the one hand, a court decision that in truth will cause more problems then it will correct, and on the other, the former chief legislator of the House who sincerely believes that it's necessary to contravene two hundred years of jurisprudence and the stated will of the Founders to correct a court decision he disagrees with.

 
Iraq news roundup: making nukes, selling milk, killing Kurds. Just another day in the life of a Ba'athist dictator. Check 'er out. And, while you're there, be sure to read "Osama bin Laden Is My Hero", a chilling screed by one Muhammad Amin Salameh, whose views wouldn't be so shocking if they didn't come from (where else?) California. (Parenthetically, there was a man of the same name convicted in the WTC bombing case, but a quick check at the Bureau of Prisons inmate locator didn't turn up a location. Just keep in mind that this very, um, unpleasant individual may not be walking the streets right now.)

Doremus Jessup would be proud of the good folks, liberal and conservative, of Arcata, California, where a new McDonald's becomes a referendum on the limits of a free market, the police blotter is filled with haiku and short stories, and everyone seems to sing the blues, just because they can. (Thanks to World Wide Rant.)

 
HoroScope: Fruit of the Poisoned Tree. Well, that didn't take long at all. Today, Horowitz tried to explain away his use of an article from a white supremacist publication, describing its founder, Jared Taylor, as

a very smart and gutsy individualist, but ... also a man who has surrendered to the multicultural miasma that has overtaken this nation and is busily building a movement devoted to white identity and community. We do not share these agendas.

marking perhaps the first time that "white supremacy" has been identified as a particular instance of "multiculturalism." Multiculturalism is riddled with philosophical and practical flaws, but being the intellectual bulwark of the KKK isn't one of them.

Taylor is the same "smart and gutsy" individual who goes to white supremacist conferences and says things like, "most whites simply cannot bring themselves to say, `This is our culture, this is our nation and it belongs to us and no one else.' " Taylor also -- and perhaps Horowitz should vet the politics of those he supports more carefully -- has a history of anti-Semitic, anti-Israeli views; for a comparatively moderate presentation of his views, see this editorial in Pravda.

(Gratuitous criticism: If Horowitz can blame Stanley Fish for the the "staggeringly vulgar politics" of academics at institutions unaffiliated with UIC, shouldn't we also be able to blame Horowitz for the equally vulgar racism of a person whose institution Horowitz at least passingly supports?)

TIPS and dips: WaPo has a fairly uninteresting editorial on the (still largely unknown) TIPS program (hey, I thought only blogs were allowed to do that!). I'm not sure if the Times hasn't cited TIPS in one of its many civil liberties thumbsuckers because it doesn't want to comment prematurely, or because it doesn't want to be seen chasing the competition.

 
A double-barreled blast from the NY Times' editorial page takes on Bush's history with the ill-starred Texas Rangers, and the secretive University of Texas investment company UTIMCO.

Both editorials are worth reading, although, as usual, a competent editor's pen is sorely lacking (Krugman's attempts to extrapolate from the ethically questionable UTIMCO to a Department of Homeland Security, FERC, Social Security reform, and Pentagon purchasing contracts is priceless, if almost entirely unjustifiable). However, some caveats are required: Krugman's attempts to link Tom Hicks' purchase of the Rangers to his later chairmanship of UTIMCO fall flat, simply because Hicks is a Dallas sports magnate, having bought the Stars hockey team in 1995, three years before he took over the Rangers.While this doesn't entirely rule out a quid pro quo, it shows that Hicks had a demonstrable interest in purchasing the sports team.

Doin' the Cabinet Shuffle: Norm Ornstein has an article up at the American Enterprise Institute that provides a glimpse into just how difficult creating a Department of Homeland Security is going to be.

From the Sometimes-Slashdot's-Worth-Reading Dept.: Looks like the USPTO's doing its usual fine job of vetting patents, allowing beleagured company Liquid Audio to sue for infringement of a system that ... well, you have to read the patent to believe it.

Best quote: " 'We've invested significant time and resources to develop and implement our secure distribution technology,' Gerry Kearby, chief executive of Liquid Audio, said in a statement." (Actually, all the work was done by ARIN and the domain name developers; Liquid Audio just patented the idea of -- and I am not making this up -- using those services for what they are designed for. Yes, "whois" should count as prior art in this case.)

 
More missives from the front lines of blogdom as David Horowitz's favorite post-modern commie cum market analyst, James Capozzola of The Rittenhouse Review, sends some kind words in our direction. Parenthetically, they've started a HorowitzWatch blog that, given the former Stalinist pamphleteer's penchant for controversy, should prove to be a busy place. (Am I the only one who suspects that Horowitz is actually a fifth columnist sleeper engaged in "heightening the contradictions?" Maybe it's just me.) Not much up right now, but be sure to keep checkin' them out.

Ogg Vorbis has gone gold! No, it's not a new character from the next Star Wars film, it's a multimedia codec that serves as the primary open-source competition for the MPEG standards. The 1.0 release (see this Reg story for more) means that there's now a bulletproof, royalty-free audio format with better quality and compression relative to MP3.

If you're a Mac OS X user who's willing to sacrifice a little convenience for the sake of quality, here's how to use iTunes to play Ogg Vorbis files. (Hey, I'm a geek. Silly things excite me.)

 
It's a short rhetorical leap from "Bush Administration" to "Stasi," as judged by this article regarding the Administration's new Terrorism Information and Prevention System. (Article link courtesy Sassafrass Log.)

The Morning Herald charges that TIPS will create a Stasi-like police system in charge of recruiting "millions of United States citizens as domestic informants." However, such a charge, given the paucity of official information on the program, seems insupportable.

What we do know about TIPS is that the requested program funding is $8m for FY 2003, far too low to create a massive informant system involving "a minimum of 4 per cent" of the US population. Instead, TIPS appears to be an expedited route for reaching appropriate officials when reporting suspicious activity: "The toll-free hotline will route incoming calls to the proper local, state, or federal law enforcement agency or other responder organizations." TIPS participants also get lovely window stickers with a Citizen Corps' logo and the TIPS number -- not the best tactic were the government trying to create a police state of domestic spies and hooded judges.

The evidence so far points to TIPS being a toll-free replacement for carrying around the phone numbers of your local police department, fire department, FBI office, FEMA location, DoE regional RAP coordinator, and so on. Or, if you rather, it's a goverment-run 411. But Stasi? Not so much, no.

Ever wonder why lawyers are held in such low regard in America? Well, don't. The article doesn't mention if the bar disciplined him for his behavior [Insert obligatory joke here -ed.] .

 
An interesting letter to today's Times responds to a Kristof ed from last week by celebrating religious conflict:

In the end, the great world religions stand or fall on the validity of their truth claims. This is especially the case with Christianity and Islam, both of which stake their case on a claim of divine revelation. Furthermore, both faiths make a universal claim to truth and seek to convert nonbelievers.

An Islam that settles for religious pluralism is not authentic Islam, and Christianity without zeal for conversion is not true Christianity.

Once again, it's striking that Stanley Fish's arguments are closer to those of true Christians (or Muslims, etc.) then those of a typical secular liberal like Kristof.

Good news: Rittenhouse is back. Better news: Stalinist-turned ... well, what the hell is he, anyway? David Horowitz hates it.

For the record, even though I agree with Horowitz on many issues, I'm about as fond of him as I am of Coulter. For example, on the issue of reparations, we're on the same side, but I find his views on the subject deliberately incendiary. Here's a tip: when you're on the side of right (so to speak), you don't need to play the polemicist.

Still, Horowitz's blog should be a source of fruitful contention. I call first dibs on "Horoscope."

Speaking of Rittenhouse, in an note about a Massachusetts proposal to relax the Commonwealth's gun-control laws, they say this:

Toomey’s bill, if enacted, would allow ex-cons to apply for gun permits seven years after completing their sentences. Applications for licenses to carry handguns would require approval from the local police chief. However, the Globe reports, “those seeking permits to buy and possess rifles and shotguns would not be subject to any other review.”

Forgive us if the distinction is lost on us.

But there is a qualitative difference between, say, a Desert Eagle and a hunting rifle: rifles and shotguns are nowhere near as useful as handguns for street crime, given that long guns are harder to conceal, more difficult to snap-aim, and require more frequent reloading than handguns. In other words, you're not going to get mugged by a guy with a thirty-ought-six, which puts it -- in a functional sense -- in a different category for law enforcement officers.