BURGER WARS....Does Los Angeles have the best burgers in the world? Charles Perry investigates.

SADR'S POPULARITY GROWING?....I hope this isn't true, but I have a feeling it probably is:

After months of losing hundreds, if not thousands, of men in battles with the U.S. military, firebrand cleric Muqtada al-Sadr appears to be more popular than ever in Iraq.

American coalition leaders were optimistic that last week's truce calling for al-Sadr to move his men out of the holy cities of Najaf and Kufa was a sign of a weakened leader.

But many Iraqi religious and political leaders say al-Sadr's public appeal is higher than ever and that he and his followers seem poised to gain ground in Iraq's political arena, threatening America's plans for the country.

The story goes on to suggest that it was a mistake to exclude him from the interim government, something that echoes Juan Cole's comment this morning:

Bremer's action in excluding the Sadrists from parliament is one final piece of stupidity to cap all the other moronic things he has done in Iraq. The whole beauty of parliamentary governance is that it can hope to draw off the energies of groups like the Sadrists. Look at how parliamentary bargaining moderated the Shiite AMAL party in Lebanon, which had a phase as a terrorist group in the 1980s but gradually outgrew it. AMAL is now a pillar of the Lebanese establishment and a big supporter of a separation of religion and state. The only hope for dealing with the Sadrists nonviolently was to entice them into civil politics, as well. Now that they have been excluded from the political process and made outlaws in the near to medium term, we may expect them to act like outlaws and to be spoilers in the new Iraq.

I'm not entirely sure I buy this, but it's food for thought.

HOOPS UPDATE....Jeez, the Lakers sure know how to make it a nailbiter, don't they?

GEORGE BUSH: THE NEXT REAGAN OR THE NEXT LBJ?....The best liberal defense of Ronald Reagan's presidency is probably a simple acknowledgment that after the Great Society excesses of the 60s and 70s a conservative backlash was inevitable sooner or later. In the event, Reagan turned out to be the leader of the backlash, but if it hadn't been him it would have been someone else. Reagan at least carried it off with more style than most.

Of course, backlashes work in both directions, something that occurred to me as I read a story in the LA Times this morning about George Bush's efforts to assume Reagan's mantle:

Officially, GOP leaders said it would be unseemly to talk about the political impact of Reagan's death. "We just want to make sure that Ronald Reagan's legacy is honored," Republican Party national chairman Ed Gillespie said.

But unofficially, several Republican strategists said the nation's outpouring of nostalgia and respect for Reagan may have offered Bush an opportunity to improve his flagging popularity....

The problem with comparing Bush to Reagan is that Bush comes off as a mediocre painter trying to emulate Picasso. He sees the brushstrokes on the surface and knows how to copy them, but because he doesn't understand their underlying purpose he ends up being only a clumsy and ultimately damaging imitation when he tries to craft a painting of his own.

No analogy is perfect, but in a lot of ways Bush strikes me as being to Reagan what LBJ was to Roosevelt. It's true that LBJ made some powerful and original contributions to the country, particularly in the area of civil rights, but in the end his legacy has been overshadowed by a pair of signature failures. The Great Society and the Vietnam War, consciously modeled on FDR's New Deal and his leadership during World War II, adopted the surface characteristics of FDR's great achievements but ended up as failures because LBJ didn't have Roosevelt's instinctive feel for public opinion or his grasp of why some things worked and some didn't.

Much the same can be said of George Bush. He learned Reagan's lesson that tax cuts could be powerful political symbols, but then turned that lesson into a blind rule that tax cuts are the answer to every economic problem. Likewise, on foreign policy he saw that Reagan was admired for his steadfast anticommunism, but failed to learn when and where to turn down the volume. As a result, he's a man with only one gear, overreliant on military solutions whether they're appropriate or not.

Like LBJ, Bush is a man who knows the notes but not the song. He learned the surface lessons of Reagan's presidency — tax cuts, hawkishness, unyielding rhetoric — but because he doesn't have the political sensitivity to understand what to do with them he has no choice except to simply offer more tax cuts and more hawkishness, whatever the problem. As a result, he overreaches in a way Reagan never did and will likely be the prime cause of the one thing he most fears: a liberal backlash. Welcome to the club.

UPDATE: I see that not everyone is buying this. That's OK. Let it sink in for a little while and see how it sounds tomorrow.

Remember, the analogy here isn't between everything LBJ and Bush have ever done, it's only an analogy about overreach caused by a superficial understanding of a predecessor's accomplishments. Starting in the mid-60s, liberals pushed their agenda farther and faster than the country could tolerate and the result was Ronald Reagan. Starting in the mid-90s and culminating with Bush, conservatives are doing the same. We have yet to see the result, of course.

BUSH v. GORE....This is weird. Via Unfogged, here's a chart showing that the fatter you are the more likely you were to vote for Bush in 2000. What's more, aside from a set of outliers in the mountain states (which is peculiar all by itself) the correlation looks pretty good for a set of social science data.

Yes, yes, I know there's an underlying cause. Probably income, or socioeconomic level, or something. But still. Weird.

THERE WERE SOME WHO SAID....The UN approved a resolution on the transfer of power in Iraq today. President Bush commented thusly:

There were some who said we'd never get one.

Is this his new favorite phrase? It seems like "There were some who said" keeps popping up all over the place.

But who was it that said this? A commenter at DU? An op-ed writer in the Guardian? I mean, it's a nice way of pretending that he's triumphed over enormous odds and all, but getting a Security Council resolution isn't exactly unprecedented. And maybe my memory is faulty, but I don't remember a huge chorus of naysayers suggesting it could never happen.

Who is this mysterious "some," anyway? Donald Rumsfeld?

REAGAN'S HERITAGE....Virginia Postrel on Reagan:

George Will, in his excellent obituary column, tries to claim Reagan for the Midwest, but Dan Walters knows better: "Millions of words are being spoken and written about Ronald Reagan in the aftermath of his death Saturday, but just four capture his essence: He was a Californian."

Yes, but....

At the risk of being pedantic, it's hard to overstate just how profoundly the Midwest informs everything that is California. Migration from the Midwest made up the bulk of California's population in the first part of the 20th century, and the biggest contribution of all came from Iowa and Reagan's home state of Illinois. (In fact, his hometown of Dixon is about a hundred miles from Cerro Gordo, birthplace of my own grandfather.)

Everybody knows about California's flakiness, but its true character — and the source of its astonishing success — comes from a combination of its famously vibrant openness to new ideas with the down-to-earth heritage of its Midwestern roots. In that sense, Reagan really is the perfect Californian, but it's his Illinois upbringing that's the key to that.

So yes, he was a Californian. But there's a lot of history packed into those four little words.

RUMSFELD ON TERROR....A few days ago Donald Rumsfeld was asked a question about the war on terror and he answered (in part) that "It's quite clear to me that we do not have a coherent approach to this." Was this an admission that the Bush administration's policies have failed?

It's always good to be skeptical about things like this, since it's wildly unlikely that a smart, experienced political professional like Rumsfeld would accidentally make such an admission. And sure enough, the full transcript makes it pretty clear that he was actually saying the entire world lacks a coherent approach, not that he thinks the United States has failed. Robert Tagorda has the details.

WINNING NEOLOGISMS....I don't really have an opinion one way or the other about Howell Raines, but I do like Megan McArdle's invention of the word "autohagiography" to describe his most recent writings. It would fit very nicely between autograph and autoharp in the dictionary, I think....

UPDATE: OK, OK, other people have thought of this word before. But it was the first time I had seen it!

TORTURE....The Washington Post reports today about yet another administration memo regarding torture of enemy prisoners. This one is from August 2002 and makes a total of four (so far):

• January 9, 2002: Justice Department lawyers John Yoo and Robert J. Delahunty argue that "customary international law of armed conflict in no way binds...the President or the U.S. Armed Forces." Despite this "anything goes" argument, they go on to say that President Bush could still put Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters on trial as war criminals if they violate international laws.

• January 25, 2002: White House counsel Alberto Gonzales warns that treatment of Taliban prisoners could be interpreted as war crimes. To avoid this possibility, he recommends that President Bush exempt captured Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters from the Geneva Conventions.

• August 2002: A Justice Department memo about torture says that "necessity and self-defense could provide justifications that would eliminate any criminal liability." Translation: torture is OK if we really, really think we need to do it.

• April 2003: The Department of Defense says that "(the prohibition against torture) must be construed as inapplicable to interrogations undertaken pursuant to his commander-in chief authority." In other words, as long as the president approves it, torture is OK.
  

The administration says that despite this rather chilling obsession with torture, all prisoners — with the unfortunate exception of a few at Abu Ghraib — have been treated humanely. Maybe. But surely I'm not the only one who finds it disturbing that the topic of torture came up almost immediately after 9/11 and continued to be a subject of conversation on such a regular basis after that? They have an almost Nixonian penchant for trying to figure out how far they can go, how much they can get away with, and how best to protect themselves from future prosecution for war crimes.

I've got something simpler for the plain spoken President Bush: "We don't torture prisoners. Not on my watch." Why didn't he say that instead and just put the whole subject to rest?

THE GAZA PULLOUT....Is Ariel Sharon going to succeed in unilaterally withdrawing from the Gaza Strip? Jim Henley thinks not:

Like the Road Map, Taba and Oslo before it, the Gaza disengagement is heading for the wastebasket of big mideast plans. If I had any doubts that the whole thing was a show, the Someday Someway timetable (requiring further cabinet approval to actually implement!) confirms it. We can't say what precise combination of timely suicide attacks on one side and targetted killings on the other will scuttle the putative disengagement, but we've been here before.

Sadly, this is probably accurate. Extremists on both sides know perfectly well how to stage outrages designed to scuttle any forward progress in the Middle East, and neither side has shown the backbone to stand up to its own extremists for the past two decades.

Someday that may change, but probably not soon. Ariel Sharon, Yasser Arafat, and George Bush just aren't the right cast of characters to do it.

CHILD ABUSE?....Can you be arrested for child abuse if you take your kid off Ritalin? Maybe. Suburban Guerilla links to an ABC News segment about a man who did just that, and then tells her own story of ADD and Ritalin:

When they first put me on Ritalin, I was thrilled. For the first time in my life, I felt focused and productive.

Until, after a few years, the tics started....

Read both stories and leave your thoughts in comments. Feedback from teachers would be especially interesting.

THE LUCK OF THE GIPPER....It's hard to avoid blogging about Ronald Reagan this week, so I guess I'll just give in and do it.

I have to admit that I flip back and forth on Reagan a lot. On the one hand, I can read something like this and be instantly reminded of everything I hated about him — welfare queens, AIDS, Iran-contra, James Watt, El Salvador, Ed Meese, his confusion of movies with reality, and on and on. On the other hand, sometimes those things recede in my memory and I also remember his sunny optimism, his eventual willingness to negotiate with the Soviets, the fact that he never really made good on his social conservatism, his final victory against communism, and, as my mother put it, the fact that "we came out the other end OK after all."

But there's another aspect of Reagan that doesn't get much attention: he was extraordinarily lucky. I don't especially intend to demean his accomplishments by saying this, since it's surely true that people often make their own luck, but nonetheless: Reagan was a very lucky guy. Here are some examples:

1. The Iranians decided to let the hostages go on the precise day of Reagan's inauguration. There are dark theories that this was prearranged by Reagan's people during the campaign, and equally suspect theories that it was because the Iranians were deathly afraid to deal with Reagan the gunslinger. More likely, the hostages had accomplished their purpose and the Iranians just didn't want to risk having to reopen lengthy negotiations with a new administration.

   But whatever the case, the timing was fortuitious. Not only did Reagan not have to deal with the hostages, but his first days in office coincided with a gigantic national celebration over their return. It really did seem like a new era.

2. One of Reagan's signature early moments came when he fired the air traffic controllers who had gone on strike in August 1981. He won that battle and cemented his reputation as a firm leader who wouldn't allow himself to be extorted by a bunch of hooligans.

   But what if a couple of 747s had collided a week after he broke the strike? What would his legacy have been then?

3. The 1981 recession ended just in the nick of time, didn't it? One more year and we'd be writing about President Mondale's legacy right about now.

4. Reagan eventually agreed to arms reductions with the Soviet Union, but that became possible only when two Soviet leaders in succession died after little more than a year in office and the reforming Mikhail Gorbachev came to power.

   It's obviously to Reagan's credit that he seized the opportunity to work with Gorbachev, but he was still lucky to get the chance. If Konstantin Chernenko had remained in power for a few more years, that chance probably never would have come.

5. It's easy to forget now, but in 1987 the folks around Reagan were genuinely afraid that the Iran-contra scandal might lead to his impeachment. In the end, though, no smoking gun was found, John Poindexter took the ultimate fall, and the entire affair slowly drifted into the haze of history.

   But no one seriously believes that Reagan was entirely unaware of either the deal to trade arms for hostages or of the deal to covertly supply the contras with weapons. All it would have taken was the leak of one unambiguous memo and Reagan would have been toast. It was a lucky break that no such memo ever became public.

6. And finally there's the biggest piece of luck of all: the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, just a few months after Reagan left office. This is surely the iconic emblem of Reagan's victory over communism, and the timing is etched indelibly in our national consciousness.

   But regardless of how you feel about Reagan's contribution to toppling the Soviet Union, it was only coincidence that the Wall fell when it did. It could just as easily have fallen, say, in 1993 when Bill Clinton was president. If it had, would it still be remembered as Reagan's victory? Fairly or not, there's little doubt that the passing of a few years would have made an enormous difference in the public mind.
   

And there's one more thing: Reagan was even lucky in choosing his predecessor well. It's not just that it was easy to look good compared to Jimmy Carter, it's that Carter laid an awful lot of the groundwork for Reagan's accomplishments. For all the contempt that conservatives shower on him today, the fact is that it was Carter who first used human rights as a serious cudgel to bash the Soviet Union; it was Carter who began the deregulation movement; it was Carter who first approved the secret war in Afghanistan; it was Carter who formed a "Management Strike Contingency Force" — scabs — to prepare for the air traffic controller strike; and it was Carter who appointed inflation hawk Paul Volcker to the Fed — someone who surely had far more to do with fixing the ailing economy than Reagan himself did.

So what to say? It's true that every president has a mix of good and bad luck. And it's true that there are different kinds of luck: in the case of the air traffic controller strike Reagan rolled the dice and won, while in the case of Gorbachev he was presented with a lucky opportunity and had the wit to take advantage of it. Making the best of your chances is sometimes the truest mark of a winner.

But still: Ronald Reagan was an exceptionally lucky man during his eight years in the White House. We haven't seen its equal since JFK won his bet with Khrushchev and emerged into history as a steely eyed cold warrior instead of the man who started World War III.

THE OSAMA FACTOR....A conservative trope that's currently skyrocketing up the charts argues that Osama bin Laden wants you to vote for John Kerry. Dick Morris is the latest to play this game, saying — without any particular evidence — that it's "obvious that Osama and his allies all want Bush out." Matt Yglesias has the right response:

Obvious how? Was the attack on the U.S.S. Cole an effort to get Bush in office?

Morris's peculiar historiography aside — he can't seem to make up his mind whether terrorists prefer appeasers or hardliners when they're cleverly pulling electoral strings — it's not clear to me that Osama really cares one way or another who wins. Satan is Satan, after all.

On the other hand, if you were Osama in late 2001, what would you be hoping for?

• You'd like to see the pressure taken off of Afghanistan, since that's where you and most of your fighters are.

• But U.S. troops are bound to be somewhere, and if not Afghanistan then where? Iraq would be nice, since none of your guys are there and you've never really seen eye to eye with Saddam Hussein anyway.

• Hmmm, yes, Iraq. Instead of killing al-Qaeda terrorists, something that would retain public support for a long time regardless of cost, American troops will instead be dying at the hands of Baathist insurgents, something the American public will probably soon tire of since it's pretty clear that Iraq poses no actual threat to the United States at all.

• And what a great recruiting tool! Americans in the heart of the Muslim world! Stealing our oil! Building a Christian empire!
  

And then Osama would have awakened from his dream and realized that this would never happen. No American president would ever be so witless. Better get cracking on finding a new cave.

But it did happen, and since it turned out that Osama got exactly the American president of his dreams, surely he doesn't want to take a chance of switching horses now? John Kerry might actually take terrorism seriously, after all.

My guess: Osama knows perfectly well that a terrorist attack in the United States would help George Bush's reelection chances since Americans always rally around their president in times of crisis. He's probably been planning one for the last couple of years.

BETTER THAN GOOGLE?....After hearing Bill Gates' recent comments about Microsoft's new search engine, Brad DeLong writes:

The computer scientists I know are overwhelmingly of the opinion that Gates is either (a) using mirrors and smoke to confuse his audience, or (b) genuinely has no clue how hard the problems of "natural language and contextual semantic approaches" are. Amazon has a lot of information about my taste in books. It has proven unable to use it effectively even in its own limited scope.

Bill Gates is a very smart man and he knows more about computers than practically any human alive. I would say that (a) is almost overwhelmingly certain to be the correct answer here. Judging from the title of his post, Brad seems to agree.